Throughout his life, author and journalist Neil Strauss had always felt self-conscious and awkward around the opposite sex—which led to rejection, creating a vicious cycle. Neil assumed that it took natural charisma and confidence to pick up women, and that he simply didn’t have it.
Then, in the early 2000s, when Neil was in his early 30s, he got the opportunity to write a book modeled after The How-to-Lay-Girls Guide, a guide to picking up women that had been circulating in an online community of men who exchanged tips and advice in the art of seduction.
When Neil plunged into the seduction community’s online world of websites and message boards, he discovered an entire subculture. Members of the community wrote posts sharing strategies, divulging details of their exploits, or asking for advice—and, in the real world, men in cities around the world gathered weekly to share techniques and then go to clubs together to put the tactics to use.
In The Game, Neil chronicles the two years he spent in the seduction community, the characters he met there, and their various hijinks. Along the way, he exposes readers to many of the methods that pickup artists (PUAs) use, as well as the history and context of this underground community.
The seduction community’s leaders were a handful of PUAs who were considered gurus. Each guru taught disciples his distinct set of rules and techniques—including psychology, magic tricks, and hypnosis—to seduce women.
Neil wanted to meet all the gurus, and he planned to integrate techniques from each. The first guru he met was a Canadian magician named Mystery, who had just started offering workshops for PUAs-in-training.
The workshop consisted of three nights of lessons and in-the-field practice in bars and clubs. As students practiced the techniques, Mystery and his wing (aka wingman) critiqued and coached them.
Neil somewhat stumbled through pickups during the workshop, but Mystery saw huge potential in Neil as a PUA.
When Mystery was 21 and still a virgin, he began studying how women reacted when he hit on them. Over 10 years, Mystery pieced together the principles of social interaction and the patterns of male-female dynamics, which he called the Mystery Method.
The Mystery Method was designed to be a subtle, indirect approach. If Mystery’s technique was executed correctly, a woman wouldn’t know that she was being hit on, but she would want to be.
The keys to the Mystery Method were:
The next guru that Neil met was Ross Jeffries, who was considered the godfather of the seduction community since he’d introduced Speed Seduction in 1988.
Jeffries’s Speed Seduction method was based on a technique called neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which blended psychology and hypnosis. NLP was based on the concept that words, movements, and suggestions could tap into a person’s subconscious to affect her thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Using NLP, a PUA would steer his conversations with a woman toward the subjects of attraction and arousal. Then, he would use questions and suggestions to connect those feelings of attraction with a physical sensation, in order to make the woman subconsciously associate the PUA with those feelings and sensations.
During Jeffries’s first meeting with Neil, Jeffries demonstrated NLP on their waitress. First, he asked the waitress what she felt physically when she was really attracted to someone, and she said that she got butterflies in her stomach.
Then, he suggested that, as she got more attracted to someone, her butterflies probably rose higher and made her blush. As he said this, Jeffries put his hand near his stomach, palm up, and raised it toward his chest.
The motion created an association between the gesture and the feeling of attraction and blushing. Throughout the rest of the conversation, every time Jeffries raised his hand from his stomach to his chest, the waitress blushed.
Just a month after Neil entered the seduction community, Mystery asked him to be his wing in Mystery’s upcoming workshops. Neil accepted, and Mystery dubbed him with his pickup alias: Style.
Style had just six weeks before the next workshop, so he started training rigorously to improve his game. He read books on a range of related subjects, including body language, social dynamics, NLP, magic, and mind-reading.
Style also worked on his appearance and presentation:
Style constantly went out sarging (hitting on women) with other men in the community so that he could study their sarging techniques in order to emulate them.
Style began to discover that confidence was a critical part of the game: PUAs needed it to complete successful pickups, and they gained it from their successes. Many newcomers to the community had spent so many years failing with women that they had no confidence.
It was the first night of Mystery’s workshop, and, as Mystery and Style prepared to take their students into the club for some on-the-ground training, Style felt intense pressure to prove himself in front of Mystery and the students.
Style had a chance to put his skills to the test when a pair of gorgeous, confident-looking women walked into the bar. Style was nervous, but he knew all of the strategies—now he just had to use them with confidence, or else the women would see right through him.
Style thought strategically. A successful pickup was a multistep process:
Style’s performance demonstrated not only his credibility, but the credibility of the Mystery Method, giving the workshop students hope that, with some training, they could achieve the same.
Style had mastered how to pick up women, but he struggled to go any further; he was too nervous to attempt a kiss.
He posted to the seduction message boards, asking for advice—and he received an array of tips, from holding the woman’s gaze for three seconds to instructing her to take her pants off in order to give her a leg massage. Style took pieces of the advice and developed his own strategy; it worked flawlessly every time.
Style had cleared another seduction hurdle, and his confidence was growing. However, he began to realize that he was increasingly objectifying women. Men in the seduction community constantly rated women’s attractiveness, and each man’s status in the community was measured by the quantity and the attractiveness of the women they could pick up.
Style had begun to view women as benchmarks of his pickup ability, and his interactions with women had become scripted and strategic, substituting for genuine connection.
As Style refined his seduction skills, he continued meeting the various gurus and integrating their teachings into his skill set:
By this point, Style was far beyond merely observing the community for his writing assignment—he was a full-fledged member and a well-respected pickup artist (PUA).
He was enjoying his new powers—especially after so many years of feeling completely inadequate around women. But the better Style got at the game, the more automatic his interactions with women became. Learning to seduce women didn’t teach Style how to connect with them.
One day, Style got an unexpected visit from his college friend, Dustin, who had always been comfortable, confident, and successful at picking up women—but now, Dustin informed Style that he was living in a yeshiva and abiding by a vow of celibacy. Dustin had recently realized that he’d been basing his self-worth on his success with women, so he turned to a life of God. Dustin had come to ask Style’s forgiveness for glamorizing a corrupt womanizing lifestyle.
However, Style didn’t see Dustin’s lifestyle or the seduction game in general as corrupt. Style argued that the game hadn’t just helped him pickup women, but it also had made him a better person: He’d begun exercising, improved his diet, become more confident, and learned how to interact with people more effectively.
Style wasn’t alone—just about every student who took Mystery’s workshop started dressing better and carrying himself with more confidence.
The seduction game was based on the premise that everything standing between you and picking up a woman was within your control. Being successful with women had nothing to do with good looks or innate ability—men simply had to correct bad habits and learn new ones, from their posture to their clothes.
However, as Style and Mystery gave their students the same tips, techniques, and lines—workshop after workshop—they didn’t realize that they were inadvertently creating clones of themselves, instead of coaching men to be their best selves and helping them develop an inner confidence.
Style began to notice that many of the men in the community had become addicted to picking up women, and they were constantly determined to improve their game. Some men had left their jobs and quit school in order to spend more time sarging.
Style was no exception: He’d all but stopped taking writing assignments, and he was neglecting his family and friends outside of the community.
While Style’s life balance was far off-kilter, all the time and energy he’d dedicated to the game hadn’t been in vain: Style had inadvertently become a guru. Flocks of eager young men—some still in high school—were constantly joining the community. Many of them had read Style’s posts religiously and looked up to him as an idol.
These young, new members didn’t just want seduction technique, but also day-to-day advice, such as where to apply to college. In every aspect of life, they wanted to be like Style and other top PUAs.
Among the young, aspiring PUAs was a 22-year-old college student with the alias Tyler Durden. Tyler had read thousands of pages of archived posts on the seduction message boards, and he relentlessly emailed Style for tips.
Tyler was also active posting on the message boards, proposing that new members of the community get over their shyness with women by physically running into women or playfully hitting them with something soft. Tyler’s brazenness and constant presence on the seduction message boards helped him become well-known within the community.
When Style was unavailable to wing Mystery’s upcoming workshops, Mystery asked Tyler and another young PUA, named Papa, to step in as his wings. They eagerly accepted Mystery’s invitation.
Mystery brought Tyler and Papa to Europe for several workshops Mystery had scheduled there. The demand for the workshops was growing so much that, when Mystery had to fly home, he left Tyler and Papa in Europe to lead a few more workshops in his absence.
Papa and Tyler were supposed to simply continue teaching the Mystery Method, but, one night, they went off-script and invented a new technique, called AMOGing (AMOG is an acronym for alpha male of the group).
Tyler posted about AMOGing on the message boards, and the tactic took off. Soon, Tyler and Papa launched a company and offered their own in-field workshops. They called their company Real Social Dynamics—which was just one word off from the name of Mystery’s seminars, Social Dynamics.
Mystery felt betrayed: Not only had Tyler and Papa used his workshops as a platform to develop and promote AMOGing, but they’d also created a competing business with a nearly identical name.
Style began to realize that he’d been focusing too much on memorizing pickup routines and simply picking up women at clubs. He now saw that the real purpose of the game was in creating a lifestyle that was interesting, exciting, and fulfilling. Men with that lifestyle exuded confidence and vibrancy that naturally attracted women.
Style was ready to graduate from sarging and build this lifestyle. He decided it was time for him and Mystery to create Project Hollywood, which would be a seduction headquarters.
Style and Mystery found a mansion in Hollywood—Dean Martin’s former home—and they planned to use it as a home base for PUAs, a venue for parties and seminars, and a meeting place for Mystery’s workshops. Since they didn’t want to take on the risk of putting their names on the lease for a massive party house, they got Papa to sign the lease (despite the fact that he’d recently betrayed Mystery).
Papa immediately took on the role of manager of Project Hollywood. He had ambitions of renting the mansion out for movie premieres, after-parties, and corporate events. Instead of using his game to pick up women, Papa began using it to network for Project Hollywood.
Project Hollywood hit the ground running: The first party drew 500 people. Soon, similar seduction venues were popping up around the world—in Austin, San Francisco, Sydney, and Perth.
Without approval from the rest of the housemates, Papa invited Tyler Durden to move into Project Hollywood.
Style had a gut instinct that Tyler couldn’t be trusted—and he soon found out he was right:
Style saw Stylemogging as a symptom of a larger problem within the community: Men were becoming robotic pickup clones who were obsessed with the game. They developed no real interests or hobbies outside the community, and, as a result, they had no real substance beneath the rote pickup lines and routines.
The irony was that the purpose of the techniques were to make men appear interesting, but their obsession with the game prevented them from being interesting, which was the most effective way of attracting women.
Tension was building at Project Hollywood.
Tyler Durden and Papa were still running their business, Real Social Dynamics, and now they were using Papa’s room as the business headquarters. Papa had an unknown number of people sleeping on the floor in his room, bathroom, and closet—and they were all part of the Real Social Dynamics team.
At the same time, Mystery was still operating his own seduction business. As a result, the house became split between the two competing businesses.
Additionally, Mystery quickly became serious with a woman named Katya, and she moved into the house. However, when their relationship fell apart, Katya got involved with another housemate. The love triangle caused constant drama in the house.
Style reflected on the optimism he’d had when they started Project Hollywood, that it would be a place where the men in the community could come together for self-improvement and life enrichment beyond sex and romance. That dream was now shattered by the harsh reality that the house dynamics were breeding instability and dysfunction.
The very concept of Project Hollywood—as a place for men who dedicated their lives to chasing women to coexist peacefully—had been flawed all along. It was overly optimistic to assume that they wouldn’t fight over women, their competing businesses, or their egos.
The tensions of living with business competitors and with his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend ultimately pushed Mystery to move out of Project Hollywood. Despite the dysfunction at Project Hollywood, he planned to move to Las Vegas and launch Project Vegas.
As more new people moved in to join the Real Social Dynamics team, more of the original Project Hollywood housemates began to move out. Style found himself living with strangers—and, oddly, they all blatantly ignored him.
Style eventually discovered that Papa and Tyler Durden had instructed everyone in the house to freeze Style out, in order to push him to move out. Papa and Tyler had twisted the principles of social dynamics that they’d learned for seduction in order to manipulate people to do what they wanted. In this case, they wanted to make Project Hollywood a headquarters and dormitory for Real Social Dynamics.
Style had known it was time for him to get out of Project Hollywood’s toxic environment, and this was the final straw.
During Style’s two years in the seduction community, he’d learned pickup techniques from top gurus, enjoyed unprecedented success with women, and—most importantly—developed inner confidence.
Style’s newfound confidence had helped him get into a relationship with Lisa, with whom he felt a deeper connection than he’d ever had with a woman.
Lisa was so confident that none of Style’s seduction techniques had worked on her—in fact, they’d almost ruined his chances with her. Ultimately, he had to toss his lines and routines out the window and be himself in order to win Lisa over.
However, even though Style’s pickup tactics had pushed Lisa away, Style recognized that, before joining the community, he wouldn’t have had the confidence he needed to pursue her.
So much of the game was artificial—the scripted routines, the peacocking outfits, even the aliases—but mastering the game had helped Style develop the inner confidence to be himself. Style could now graduate from the community.
Neil Strauss, a journalist and the author of The Game, always struggled with women. Since he was a teenager, he felt self-conscious and awkward around the opposite sex, which led to rejection, creating a vicious cycle.
Despite years of failure, Neil still wanted to date and have sex with women—he just couldn’t figure out how. Neil assumed that it took natural charisma and confidence to pick up women, and that he simply didn’t have it.
Then, in the early 2000s, when Neil was in his early 30s, he got a call from a book editor who wanted him to write a book modeled after The How-to-Lay-Girls Guide, a manual for picking up women. The guide sourced advice from dozens of pickup artists (PUAs), and it had been circulating in an online community of men who exchanged tips and advice in the art of seduction.
Neil took the assignment and began a two-year journey, during which he became a member—and then a guru—in the world of PUAs and wannabes. This book chronicles the two years Neil spent in the seduction community, the characters he met there, and their various hijinks. Along the way, he exposes readers to many of the methods that pickup artists (PUAs) use, as well as the history and context of this underground community.
When Neil plunged into the seduction community’s online world of websites and message boards, he discovered an entire subculture. People used aliases—Neil’s would become Style—and they used a jargon that included terms such as:
Members of the community wrote posts sharing strategies, divulging details of their exploits, or asking for advice. Beyond the virtual world, men in cities around the world gathered weekly to share techniques and then go to clubs together to put the tactics to use.
The community’s leaders were a handful of PUAs who had reached guru status, each of whom taught disciples his distinct set of rules and principles of the pickup game. The gurus used a combination of psychology, magic tricks, and hypnosis to seduce women.
Neil decided he wanted to meet all the gurus, and he planned to integrate techniques from each. The first guru he met was a Canadian magician named Mystery.
Mystery was a celebrated PUA who had written more than 3,000 posts on the community message boards. Mystery started offering workshops for PUAs-in-training shortly after Neil joined the community; naturally, Neil had to sign up.
For $500, attendees would get a four-night basic training that included:
Mystery was only the second guru to offer workshops—the first was Ross Jeffries, a pickup pioneer who we’ll talk about shortly. However, while Jeffries led seminars, Mystery was the first to bring trainees into clubs for real-time coaching.
Although Neil was investigating the community for his book assignment, he also earnestly wanted to learn from the PUAs. He hoped that this could signal the end of his struggles with women. However, Neil was also embarrassed to admit that he was so bad with women that he was now paying for advice from self-proclaimed experts.
From an early age, Mystery had wanted to be a famous magician. He spent his teenage years honing his craft, but, when he turned 21 and was still a virgin, he realized that his obsessive focus on magic had kept him from meeting women.
Mystery didn’t know that the seduction community existed, so he conducted his own research. He studied women and their reactions when he tried to hit on them. Over 10 years, Mystery pieced together the principles of social interaction and the patterns of male-female dynamics.
Mystery developed techniques that incorporated magic with the lessons he’d learned. His strategy—which he dubbed the Mystery Method—broke down into these steps:
Mystery’s whole strategy was designed to pick up women subtly. Rather than coming on directly and forcefully, Mystery instructed men to take their time and build the anticipation so that the woman would want to be hit on.
Mystery had developed countless theories and principles that dictated his tactics while sarging in the field (while hitting on women). The strategies were all meant to make the PUA seem like the most interesting person in the room, while simultaneously appearing disinterested in the woman he was hitting on, so that she would essentially pursue him.
The primary rule of the game was that PUAs don’t do what everyone else does. For example, if every man in the club was gawking at a particularly beautiful woman, the PUA practically ignored her. When the PUA did approach the woman, he never acknowledged her beauty—he may have even subtly downplayed it. The effect was that the PUA stood out among the crowd.
Two dominant theories balanced the goals of standing out and laying back:
Per cat string theory, Mystery advocated an indirect approach. He advised students to:
Mystery taught these concepts, as well as scripted pickup lines and routines, to his workshop students, and then he set them loose to practice.
On the first night of Mystery’s workshop, Neil met Mystery and his wing (aka wingman), Sin, in a hotel lobby.
As they waited for the other trainees to arrive, the men compared the number of women they’d each slept with. Neil had been with six women, Sin with sixty-something women, and Mystery with hundreds. As proof of his credentials, Mystery gave Neil a manila folder containing photos of several of the women he’d had sex with.
When the rest of the trainees had arrived, Mystery gave the men a few instructions for picking up women in the clubs:
On the first night out, Neil clumsily tried the Mystery Method. As Neil approached and spoke to a woman, Sin whispered tips and instructions into Neil’s ear. For example, Sin told Neil to use kino (short for kinesthesia, which meant to incorporate physical touch) and put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. Neil’s execution was awkward and flawed, but he still got a kiss on the cheek, which gave him a boost of confidence in himself and in Mystery’s tactics.
By the final night of the workshop, Neil had made progress. He approached a group using one of Mystery’s pickup lines: “If I wasn’t gay, you’d be so mine.” Although he felt ridiculous delivering the line and using Mystery’s other strategies—such as wearing an over-the-top hat, per peacock theory—it seemed to be working.
Neil managed to charm the woman, and the two of them walked out of the club together. Neil suddenly remembered Sin’s advice to use kino, so he put his arm around her—but she pulled away.
As Neil debriefed with Mystery and Sin, the PUAs explained that Neil had violated cat string theory and come on too strong. When Neil put his arm around the woman, he’d taken away the thrill of the chase. It was the same logic behind ignoring a woman when first approaching her group of friends, talking to her over your shoulder, and consistently acting somewhat disinterested. Successful PUAs behaved as if they were the prize, not predators.
Although Neil felt a bit discouraged about his misstep, Mystery and Sin told him he had great potential.
Neil had lessons from one guru under his belt. Now that he had a foundation, he wanted to integrate techniques from other gurus, as well. Coincidentally, the next guru that Neil met was Mystery’s business competition, Ross Jeffries.
Jeffries was considered the godfather of the seduction community ever since he introduced Speed Seduction in 1988. Tens of thousands of disciples followed Jeffries’s method of seduction, which blended psychology and hypnosis.
Specifically, Jeffries used a technique called neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). NLP was based on the concept that words, movements, and suggestions could tap into a person’s subconscious to affect her thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Using NLP, a PUA would steer his conversations with a woman toward the subjects of attraction and arousal. Then, he would use questions and suggestions to connect those feelings of attraction with a physical sensation, in order to make the woman subconsciously associate the PUA with those feelings and sensations.
Neil met Jeffries for lunch, along with two PUAs named Grimble and Twotimer, who were students of Jeffries.
Jeffries—a not-particularly-attractive man in his 40s—demonstrated NLP on their 20-something waitress:
1) He asked the waitress what she felt physically when she was really attracted to someone. His question was designed to make her associate attraction with him. The waitress responded that she got butterflies in her stomach.
2) He suggested that, as she got more attracted to someone, her butterflies probably rose higher and made her blush. As he said this, Jeffries put his hand near his stomach, palm up, and raised it toward his chest.
This was anchoring: The motion created an association between the gesture and the feeling of attraction that caused butterflies and blushing. Throughout the rest of the conversation, every time Jeffries raised his hand from his stomach to his chest, the waitress blushed. The waitress seemed entranced, and she gave Jeffries her number.
3) As the conversation wrapped up, Jeffries rubbed his hand on a sugar packet. He told the waitress he was transferring all the good feelings she was having into that packet, so that she could keep them with her all day. This was called “condiment anchoring.”
Throughout their meeting, Jeffries had been prying Neil for information about Mystery’s workshop and criticizing Mystery’s strategies. As the only two PUAs offering any form of training, there was an obvious competition between Mystery and Jeffries.
By the end of the afternoon, Jeffries invited Neil to come to his upcoming seminar for free. However, his offer seemed to come with a condition: Jeffries told Neil that he would be Neil’s guru—not Mystery.
Neil was not willing to pledge his loyalty, so he simply thanked him for the invite.
While most people don’t become students of seduction, many have heard general advice that overlaps with PUA strategies.
What are some rules of the game that you’ve heard (for example, be coy)? Which have you abided by, if any?
The last time that you approached a stranger you were attracted to, how did you open the conversation? Or, the last time someone approached you, how did she open the conversation?
During the conversation, what strategy did you use to engage the other person? For example, did you play hard-to-get, or were you completely transparent?
How did you show your interest?
How do you think following—or disregarding—certain rules of the game would’ve changed the outcome of the conversation (for example, whether you exchanged phone numbers or planned a date)?
Neil had been frequenting bars and clubs, practicing his craft with other men from the community. Between his practice and his posts to the online message boards, Neil was quickly moving up in the seduction community.
When Sin—Mystery’s wing from his workshop—decided to leave the community to join the Air Force, Mystery wanted Neil to step in and wing his upcoming workshops.
Neil was so eager to take the opportunity that he agreed, even though the next scheduled workshop conflicted with a trip he’d planned to visit Belgrade to see his old friend, Marko. Neil refused to miss out on this chance to apprentice with a guru, so he convinced Mystery to hold his next workshop in Belgrade.
But if Neil was going to wing the workshop, he’d need an alias—nearly everyone in the seduction community had one. Mystery dubbed him Style.
It had only been a month since Style’s pickup education began while attending Mystery’s workshop—and soon he’d be helping Mystery lead a workshop. Style began training rigorously to improve his game in the six weeks before the next workshop.
Style read books on a range of related subjects, including:
Based on what he read, Style also:
Style went out constantly with Grimble, his wing Twotimer, and Jeffries. Style studied their sarging techniques, and he tried to emulate them.
One day, Style nervously approached a woman in Office Depot. Following the prescribed routine, he negged her, showed her an ESP trick, and made up a false time constraint.
Style asked the woman how they could continue their conversation, and, to his surprise, she offered her phone number and email address. PUAs never give their phone numbers and never ask for a woman’s number directly—they must get the woman to offer her number.
The woman had claimed to be a model, so when Style got home, he looked her up online. He discovered that he’d just scored the Playmate of the Year’s phone number.
Although Style was thrilled, he felt unworthy. He’d learned the strategies, but hadn’t yet built the confidence to back them up. He never called.
Confidence was a critical part of the game: PUAs needed it to complete successful pickups, and they gained it from their successes. Many newcomers to the community had spent so many years failing with women, that they had no confidence.
The first step to feeling more confident was looking good. When Mystery and Style arrived in Belgrade for the workshop, Mystery gave Style a laundry list of changes he needed to make to his appearance to improve his seduction game:
When Style’s childhood friend, Marko, picked them up from the airport, their first stop was a barbershop—and the second was a tanning salon. Style was surprised how much better he looked from such simple changes.
On the first night of Mystery’s workshop, Style felt intense pressure to prove himself in front of Mystery and the students. He’d been training for months.
Each of the three workshop students had different challenges: One was trying too hard, one seemed boring, and one was socially awkward. When they got to the club, Mystery and Style gave them pickup assignments and critiqued their performances after each one.
Then, they came across a gorgeous, confident-looking woman in a two-set (a group of two in a bar or club; there can be sets of any number of people). Mystery and Style sent in the socially awkward student, a 22-year-old named Sasha.
As the two women sat at the bar, Sasha walked up to them from behind. It took several attempts to get their attention—and when he did, he had nothing engaging to say.
At Mystery’s insistence, Style stepped in to rescue Sasha and show the students a PUA in action. Style was nervous, but he knew the strategies—now he just had to use them with confidence.
As Style approached the two-set and Sasha, he was fighting what Mystery dubbed social homeostasis, which is the push-and-pull men feel between wanting to pick up women and fearing rejection. Still, he knew that he had to emanate confidence—if he didn’t, the women would see right through his charade.
Style thought strategically. A successful pickup was a multistep process:
1) Approach: Since the women were facing the bar, Style approached on the left side of the so-called obstacle, who sat between him and the woman he wanted to pick up. By contrast, Sasha’s approach from behind had meant the women had to turn 180 degrees to see and respond to him, and they simply had to turn back around if they wanted to ignore him.
2) Get in position: Style recited an opening line about magic spells, and, meanwhile, he thought about how he would maneuver around the obstacle to get next to his target. When the women responded well to his opener, Style said that he wanted to show his target something, which was a ploy to move next to her.
3) Join the set: Now Style was on his target’s right side, but he needed to find a way to sit down, in order to make himself part of the set. Style knew that if he spent too much time standing over the women, they would start to feel uncomfortable. There were no open stools at the bar, so Style instructed his target to stand up so he could perform a trick—and, as soon as she did, he sat in her seat.
4) Develop rapport: To smooth things over, Style joked with his target that he’d stolen her seat. She joked back, signaling that he hadn’t overstepped. Style told the woman he had to leave soon (creating a time constraint), but he said that he had another trick to show her first.
5) Distract obstacle: Sasha was still hanging around, so Mystery whispered to him that he needed to entertain the other woman—the obstacle—so that she wouldn’t take Style’s target away. This would normally be the wing’s responsibility.
6) Number-close: When Style’s artificial time constraint was up, he simply told the woman he’d like to see her again while he was in town. With no further prodding, the woman wrote down her number and handed it to Style.
Style encouraged Sasha to attempt an e-mail-close with the obstacle, and it worked. Sasha was floored.
Style’s performance demonstrated not only his credibility, but the credibility of the Mystery Method. His success gave the workshop students hope that, with some training, they could achieve the same.
While Style was having more success with women, he realized that mastering the pickup game had an unintended consequence: He was constantly objectifying women.
In the seduction community, the way that men bonded and related to each other reinforced this way of thinking about women. They constantly rated women’s attractiveness, and their status in the community was measured by the quantity and the attractiveness of the women they could pick up.
Style had started to view women as benchmarks of his pickup ability, and his interactions with women had become scripted and strategic, substituting for genuine connection.
Even after witnessing the power of pickup during Mystery’s workshop, Style’s childhood friend Marko was skeptical of Mystery and the game.
Growing up, Marko and Style had both struggled with girls. But now Marko was a few months into a relationship with a woman named Goca, whom he wanted to marry.
Marko was suffering from what PUAs called one-itis—when men get overly attached to women, and, ultimately, push them away with neediness. PUAs’ prescription for one-itis was to sleep with several other women. But Marko wasn’t interested in this cure.
One night, Style, Mystery, Marko, and Goca all went out together. During dinner, Marko and Goca seemed uncomfortable and awkwardly formal. Eventually, Style couldn’t help but jump in.
Style took photos of the couple with his digital camera. For the last photo, he insisted that they kiss. It turned out to be the pair’s first kiss, and it was as awkward as the rest of their interactions.
During dinner, Style thought Goca was eyeing him—and his suspicion was confirmed that night, when she crawled into bed with him while Marko was in the shower. Style was tempted, but he refused, despite Goca’s insistence that Marko was just a friend.
When Marko got out of the shower, he and Goca got into a fight and she stormed out. Marko told Style he was ready to try learning the game.
Heartbroken and discouraged, Marko decided to take a road trip to Moldova, a small country that broke off from Russia, where the most beautiful women in Eastern Europe supposedly lived. Style and Mystery agreed to join Marko on his adventure.
The trip was a flop. However, during their travels, Style learned about Mystery’s upbringing and how it had molded him into an attention-hungry magician-PUA.
Growing up, Mystery and his brother were physically and verbally abused by their father. As a child, when he was depressed, Mystery fantasized about killing his father with a shovel, and then killing himself.
In an effort to balance out the abuse, their mother was extremely loving with Mystery’s 14-year-older brother—but when the older brother came out as gay, their mother blamed herself and the excessive affection she’d showered on him. Consequently, Mystery’s mother was emotionally distant from Mystery, in order to prevent the same fate.
Ironically, Mystery had questioned whether he might be gay when he was in his early 20s and still a virgin. When Mystery determined that he wasn’t gay, he started researching social dynamics and developing the Mystery Method.
Prior to Mystery’s workshop, Style had gone out every night to practice seduction. He’d mastered a routine that consistently helped him number-close—but his pickups never went any further.
Style had to get out of his head and get over his nerves in order to attempt a kiss-close.
Style’s impressive success on the first night of the workshop gave him a confidence boost. But when he met the woman at a cafe a few days later, he couldn’t shake his anxiety. Despite her indicators of interest (IOIs), Style couldn’t bring himself to kiss-close.
As Style watched Mystery’s pickups, Style realized what he was missing: He had to be willing to lose a woman in order to make moves bold enough to get her.
Mystery had made a strategically impressive pickup on the first night of the workshop, and now he was sitting with the woman at a cafe and trying to figure out how he could get her to have sex with him.
Mystery claimed he’d had a haircut earlier in the day and that he needed to take a bath, offering for the woman to come and help him wash up. The woman, who had a boyfriend, declined.
Seemingly unperturbed, Mystery said goodbye and bluffed as if he was about to leave. The woman looked deflated.
Mystery took a few steps, then turned and told her he was going to take a bath at a nearby hotel instead of going back to Marko’s apartment. He repeated his offer for her to join him—if not, he said, he’d email her in a couple weeks when he was back home in Canada.
The woman paused briefly, and then she joined him.
After returning home from Belgrade, Style posted a call for advice on how to kiss-close on Mystery’s Lounge, an invite-only online seduction message board. Top pickup artists (PUAs) logged onto Mystery’s Lounge to exchange stories, strategies, and sometimes photos and videos.
Style got a range of responses:
Style took pieces of advice from the various posts and developed his own, fool-proof routine:
Just one successful night with his new kiss-close routine pushed Style past his mental block.
Mystery had another workshop coming up in two months, in Miami. Style set a goal to meet all the top pickup artists (PUAs) before then.
The seduction community had several pickup gurus, each pedaling a different seduction strategy. For example, Ross Jeffries’s Speed Seduction was based on subliminal messaging through sequences of scripted lines, while David DeAngelo’s Double Your Dating strategy used a hybrid of arrogance and humor, called cocky funny.
The gurus competed for disciples, discrediting each other in the process. However, most men in the seduction community didn’t want to commit to just one guru—like Style, they wanted to pick up as many strategies from as many sources as they could.
The first PUA Style contacted was Juggler.
Juggler advocated tactics that were bold and unorthodox. For example, he told his students to get over their fear of picking up women by calling random numbers from the phone book and asking for movie recommendations, or by convincing a homeless person to give them a quarter. Juggler also encouraged PUAs-in-training to make their pickups more challenging by telling women that they worked as garbage men or drove old cars.
Style attended one of Juggler’s free workshops in San Francisco.
Before Style reached out, Juggler already knew of Style from seeing his posts in the online seduction community. When they met, Juggler was impressed by Style’s innate likability, eloquence, and ability to put people at ease.
When Juggler saw Style in action, he admired Style’s skill at using seduction techniques. Combined with Style’s unassuming appearance, Juggler mused that Style could be an ideal sidekick for a rising seduction guru.
Juggler could see that Style was lacking confidence, but that self-doubt disappeared when Style was sarging (picking up women).
Growing up, Juggler loved taking things apart—from toys to home appliances. As he got older, Juggler remained curious about how things worked, but his focus changed from appliances to human interaction.
Juggler became a street performer, juggler, and comedian. In these roles, he studied social dynamics and, consequently, improved his game with women. By 23, he’d had sex with just one woman, but by 28, he could pick up any woman.
Juggler felt like he’d found his tribe when he discovered the online seduction community, because the game was based on the knowledge and strengths he’d developed.
After Style’s trip to San Francisco, Jeffries called to invite Style to attend a seminar he was hosting that weekend. However, Style didn’t know that Jeffries had invited him as a pawn in the competition among the gurus.
Style had become well-known in the community as Mystery’s new wing, and he’d gained respect since his impressive performance at Mystery’s Belgrade workshop. Jeffries knew that he’d gain clout if he could claim Style as his follower.
In the middle of the seminar, Jeffries spotted Style in the audience and pushed him to declare Jeffries as his guru. However, Style deflected. When the two were alone later, Style explained that he didn’t feel he needed to choose among different methods—he wanted to learn from all gurus.
Jeffries had created the foundation for the entire community, so he was very defensive of his position as a top guru in the community. Jeffries chafed when other PUAs rose to prominence, spewing insults and greedily claiming his followers.
Jeffries had been raised by intelligent, good-natured Jewish parents who relentlessly teased him and his two brothers. Their teasing and high expectations beat down on Jeffries and his siblings.
As an adult, Jeffries was angry and lonely. He tried performing stand-up comedy and screenwriting, but he struggled and gave up. One day, as Jeffries was browsing self-help books, he happened to pick up a book about neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), titled Frogs Into Princes.
As soon as he read it, Jeffries was hooked. He read everything he could find on NLP, and then he used his new knowledge to seduce a woman who applied to work at his office. After years of feeling powerless, Jeffries finally felt in control of his life.
Jeffries kick-started his career as a PUA when he self-published a short book, titled How to Get the Women You Desire Into Bed: A Down and Dirty Guide to Dating and Seduction for the Man Who’s Fed Up With Being Mr. Nice Guy. Initially, he faced ridicule and backlash.
But when Jeffries started offering seminars, a community began to form. One of his followers created an online message board—and the worldwide seduction community was born.
David DeAngelo had entered the seduction community as a student of Jeffries, but he broke out on his own after Jeffries allegedly hypnotized and seduced DeAngelo’s girlfriend.
DeAngelo developed and promoted a strategy called cocky funny, which was a hybrid of arrogance and humor.
DeAngelo wrote a manifesto on cocky funny and distributed it through an online seduction newsletter called Cliff’s List. It was so well-received, that Cliff—who operated Cliff’s List—convinced DeAngelo to turn the 15-page guide into an e-book, which DeAngelo titled Double Your Dating. He went on to build a business by the same name.
DeAngelo was unique among the gurus in several ways:
DeAngelo had been an unsuccessful real estate agent in Oregon when he decided to move to San Diego for a fresh start. DeAngelo was lonely in his new city, so he started teaching himself seduction tactics through online research and befriending men who were successful with women.
Along the way, DeAngelo met Riker, who was a student of Jeffries. Riker encouraged DeAngelo to practice seduction online, because facing rejection via instant messaging was less intimidating than face-to-face. DeAngelo took his advice and developed a strategy based on how women responded to his approaches.
DeAngelo discovered that women were actually more receptive to his pickup when he relentlessly teased them in a playful way, which he dubbed cocky funny.
One of DeAngelo’s followers, named Zan, was a master of cocky funny.
Zan appeared to be genuinely cocky, playing up his seduction skills and touting his stories of conquest. Zan always assumed every woman was interested in him, and he insisted that if he believed it with enough conviction, the woman would, too.
If a woman tried to reject Zan, he played dumb and acted as if the woman wasn’t making any sense.
One day, Zan posted to Mystery’s Lounge about the cocky funny routine he used to pick up waitresses:
Zan wrote that not only had he used the same routine on the other waitresses in the restaurant, but he also expected them to tell each other about what he’d said. He said that it was actually strategic that the waitresses knew he’d hit on all of them, because it created social proof—the idea that someone is more desirable if others are interested in him.
DeAngelo’s seminar also featured a session with guest speakers Steve P. and Rasputin, who worked together as a hypnotist duo. Each had impressive credentials within the seduction community.
Steve P. got women to pay him up to a thousand dollars to have sex with him because he claimed he could:
Rasputin performed hypnotic sexual engineering, in which he framed sex as a privilege for the woman. For example, if a woman gave him oral sex, he might limit her to three sucks the first time, and then grant her five sucks the next time.
According to Rasputin and Steve P., nerves and emotions only hindered PUAs. To be successful, they said, you had to live in your own reality, making you impervious to rejection and humiliation.
Style got a taste of the duo’s hypnosis powers when he first met them: Rasputin saw that Style was nervous, so Steve P. did a quick hypnosis to get rid of Style’s anxiety.
First, Steve P. had Style say his phone number backward. Then, Steve P. snapped his fingers and told Style to breathe deeply and exhale forcefully. Finally, Steve P. ran his fingers up Style’s torso and said, “Be gone!” Style wasn’t entirely sure it had worked, but he’d felt something.
Steve P. gave Style his card and offered to teach him inner-circle techniques—but Style had to vow not to share them with anyone else. The pair’s hypnosis tactics were so powerful that they could only be trusted to certain people.
Style agreed to the conditions, and he began visiting Steve P. and Rasputin every weekend, in hopes of acquiring inner game in time for Mystery’s workshop in Miami. Through hypnosis, Style hoped he could:
Style’s weekends were spent reading Steve P.’s NLP books and undergoing hypnosis. Rasputin and Steve P. used a variety of tactics when they hypnotized Style:
After Style had apprenticed for a while, Steve P. told him he wanted to make Style a trainer for Steve P.’s and Rasputin’s methods. But he had to turn it down—Style had already disconnected from much of his regular life, and he knew if he accepted their offer, he’d be completely consumed in the world of seduction.
Steve P. was just in first grade when an older girl gave him oral sex. From then on, he was obsessed.
As a teenager, he worked at a Catholic girls’ school, but he was fired for giving students oral sex (school administrators caught on from the girls’ confessions).
As an adult, Steve P.’s life was centered around sexuality and spirituality. He’d learned secret magic from shamans and applied it to seduction.
Steve P.’s spiritually-based sexual tactics—which he taught to Style—included:
Two PUAs, Rick H. and David X, had fairly simple strategies.
Rick H. was arguably the best PUA in the community. His seduction philosophy centered around two rules:
David X was a relatively recent PUA discovery. He was a former biker who now worked in construction.
Despite being one of the ugliest PUAs, David X oozed alpha male confidence. His rules for seduction were:
David X flipped women’s words to corner them into going out with him. For example, he’d lead a woman to say she was spontaneous. Later, if he asked her out and she was hesitant, he’d challenge her about being spontaneous.
David X was known for dating multiple women—the seduction community called it harem management—without lying to any of the women about it.
Style’s time with the gurus had taught him about hypnosis, cocky funny, and sheer brazenness.
He also picked up some universal lessons, which would serve him in the world beyond seduction:
Style felt he’d met enough gurus. He’d picked up plenty of philosophies and strategies—now he simply needed to practice using them.
Pickup tactics range from arrogant humor to hypnosis, and the effectiveness of each one depends on the conviction of the person using it.
Which of the strategies sounds most effective? Why?
Which strategy would you consider using?
If applicable, describe a time when you or someone you know used—or were on the receiving end of—one of these strategies, or something similar. Did the strategy work? Why or why not?
Which strategy would you absolutely never use, and why not?
By the time Mystery’s Miami workshop approached, Style was far beyond merely observing the community for his writing assignment—he was a full-fledged member and well-respected pickup artist (PUA).
Style’s relationships with the other men now existed in the real world, not just on message boards. He had forged friendships with some of the men, and they went out sarging together regularly. Other men in the community constantly called and emailed, looking for advice and asking to be Style’s wing.
At the same time, the community was growing. Local seduction communities were popping up and flourishing around the world.
Style was enjoying his new powers—especially after so many years of feeling completely inadequate around women. But Style’s motivation for picking up women was no longer for sex or romance as much as it was to impress the other sargers and PUAs.
Despite—or possibly because of—Style’s success in Belgrade and his status in the community, he felt tremendous pressure to prove himself at the next workshop in Miami. As it turned out, his months of preparation, meetings with gurus, and hypnosis training paid off.
Mystery, Style, and the workshop students were at a Miami club when two gorgeous, confident women walked in. They were 10s, as PUAs would say—in fact, one of the women was an 11.
Style was after the 11:
Style was victorious—not only because he’d kiss-closed an 11, but because he’d perfectly executed a difficult pickup. He was hooked on the game.
The better Style got at the game, the more his love and respect for women dwindled. Learning to seduce women didn’t teach Style how to connect with them.
Seduction became a competition—literally. One night, Grimble invited Style to meet a former madam and recent inmate named Heidi Fleiss, who he’d been talking to about the pickup game.
When Style arrived, Fleiss challenged him to a pickup competition. They approached women together to see whether Style had a better chance of seducing them or Fleiss of recruiting them as escorts (though it was just for competition, since she was retired).
The two more-or-less tied—though Fleiss was convinced she’d won—but Style’s biggest takeaway was how similar seduction and exploitation could be.
One day, Style got an unexpected visit from his college friend, Dustin. Dustin had been the first man Style knew who was comfortable, confident, and successful at picking up women. Dustin was truly a natural.
Style had been thinking of Dustin constantly since he joined the community. After having been such a misfit with women for most of his life, Style was excited to finally connect with Dustin over techniques, watch Dustin’s approaches, and incorporate Dustin’s strategies into his own game.
As Style began to tell Dustin about the game and the seduction community, Dustin stopped him. Dustin had left that life behind. Now, he was living at a yeshiva in Jerusalem and abiding by a vow of celibacy.
Dustin explained that he’d gotten tired of just having sex with women and he’d begun to crave an emotional connection. Eventually, Dustin recognized that he’d been basing his self-worth in his success with women. That’s when he turned to a life of God.
Far from wanting to compare pickup techniques, Dustin had come to ask Style’s forgiveness for glamorizing a corrupt lifestyle. Dustin felt his example had influenced Style to get into the game, and he felt guilty for contributing to Style’s corruption.
However, Style didn’t see Dustin’s lifestyle or the seduction game in general as corrupt. Style countered that the game hadn’t just helped him pick up women, but it also had made him a better person. In his effort to become more attractive to women, Style had:
Dustin didn’t disagree, but he wasn’t convinced. He simply said he’d always be there if Style needed him.
Not long after, Style got a postcard from Dustin, dubbing him with the Hebrew name Tuvia. The postcard explained that the name meant that Style was driven to seek out good things in life, but sometimes got caught in bad things in the process.
Style wasn’t the only one who’d undergone a transformation—just about every student who took a workshop with Mystery started dressing better and carrying himself with more confidence.
The seduction game was based on the premise that everything standing between you and picking up a woman was within your control. Mystery and Style felt that they could help men reach their full potential.
The workshops made such a profound impact because Style and Mystery were brutally honest. Being successful with women had nothing to do with good looks or innate ability—men simply had to correct bad habits and learn new ones, from their posture to their clothes.
Typically, their workshop students fell into one of three categories:
Papa—a college student who paid Mystery $1,500 for a private workshop, instead of the standard $600 fee for a group lesson—was the third type. When he first met Style and Mystery, he asked to record their conversation so that he could study the information later.
Papa was an excellent student, immediately correcting every error and applying the lesson to his next pickup. Style was impressed at Papa’s progress throughout the three-day workshop, and he reflected on the transformational effect that just a handful of scripted lines could have.
However, Mystery and Style didn’t realize that there were some drawbacks to teaching the same lines and routines to student after student:
Later, Style would discover the full consequences of training an army of pickup clones—and Papa would be a leader of the clones.
On the last night of Papa’s workshop, Style sarged a woman named Caroline, while Mystery sarged her friend, Carly. The four left the club for a diner, in what Mystery and Style called an instant date.
An instant date—taking a woman on a date immediately after picking her up—was now the goal when they sarged, because changing locations made the woman feel like they’d known each other longer than a few hours. The time distortion accelerated their rapport and familiarity with a woman, which increased the chance of getting her into bed sooner.
From the diner, Carly invited everyone to her nearby apartment (another location change), where Style and Caroline fooled around a bit but stopped short of having sex. Style realized that he was more interested in Caroline than he had been in any other woman since he’d joined the seduction community—despite the fact that she was just 19 and she was a single mom with a baby, and Style was in his early 30s.
When Style and Mystery first started talking to Carly and Caroline at the club, Mystery had pulled out his video camera and started recording their conversation, which hadn’t appeared to bother the women. The next day, Style and Mystery watched the video and analyzed it, the way that athletes analyze game footage, noting what they’d done well and where they could improve.
When Style saw Caroline again that night, they had sex—but immediately after, Caroline began crying. She worried that they shouldn’t have moved so quickly, and that Style wouldn’t be interested anymore. Style reassured Caroline that he wanted to see her again.
Within a couple days, the pair went out to dinner with Mystery, and then Caroline brought Style back to her house, where she lived with her son, mother, sister, and brother. Style considered Caroline his girlfriend, and he began spending more time with her and her son.
After being together at Caroline’s for several days straight, both Caroline and Style started getting weary of the relationship. Style was becoming stir crazy from spending so much time in the house, and he could tell he was pulling Caroline’s attention away from her son.
Style had felt a genuine connection with Caroline, but now it was waning. It was well-known in the seduction community that love could come and go quickly, and sargers and PUAs accepted that fact as an occupational hazard.
Style thought of something he’d read about love: Contrary to most people’s beliefs, love doesn’t need to last forever—sometimes love lasts just a few minutes, days, or weeks. He felt his and Caroline’s brief love had reached its end.
Meanwhile, Mystery was struggling.
Despite his pickup career, he’d had a longtime girlfriend, named Patricia. Initially, Patricia had accepted Mystery’s lifestyle, but now she was ready to settle down. She told Mystery that if they didn’t start moving toward marriage and kids, their relationship was over—so they broke up.
Mystery referred to love as “pairbonding,” which he viewed as an evolutionary mechanism that was meant solely to motivate people to survive and procreate. Still, he was reeling from his breakup. Mystery was now falling victim to his own cat string theory: He’d taken Patricia for granted until they broke up, and, once she was inaccessible, he could think of nothing else.
The breakup was keeping Mystery up at night. One night, he took several Tylenol pills with codeine. However, they weren’t strong enough to knock him out, and he spent the whole night posting on Mystery’s Lounge.
On his codeine high, Mystery gushed about how much he loved the seduction community and the friends he’d made there. Mystery wrote about how he wanted the community to be a place where the men could share more than just seduction tips—he wanted them to help each other achieve their life goals.
Mystery put out a request for help in achieving his goal of becoming a professional magician (which he talked about constantly). He wanted to convince a broadcast network to give him a one-hour magic special, which he planned to parlay into an ongoing show in Las Vegas.
In his codeine ramblings, Mystery wrote that doing daily performances would feed his need for constant attention. This acknowledgment offered some insight into why Mystery loved the pickup game—because he fed off the attention from women.
A couple days later, Mystery emailed Style about an argument he had with his sister. His sister had punched him, and Mystery reacted by taking her by the throat and flipping her onto the floor.
In a followup email, Mystery confessed that he was going crazy, having trouble sleeping, and physically aching. Mystery said that he was close to suicidal.
Not long after, Mystery posted a message online titled “Mystery’s Last Post.” In the post, he thanked the seduction community for everything it had done for him, and he said that he wouldn’t be posting anymore.
Style couldn’t let Mystery—his friend and mentor—drift off into the abyss without trying to save him. Style turned to the community to find help.
He sought advice from one of Mystery’s former students, named Doc, who was a psychologist. Doc gave Style a list of questions to ask Mystery, which Style asked the next time he visited Mystery:
After going through the questions, Style called Mystery’s father—but his father hung up as soon as Style mentioned Mystery’s name (his real name, Erik). Then, Style tried calling Patricia.
Despite their breakup, Patricia was concerned about Mystery when Style told her about his behavior. Patricia told Style that Mystery had attempted suicide in the past, and she suggested that Style call Mystery’s mother and sister.
Just then, Mystery walked toward the front door, telling Style that he was doing to kill his father and then himself. He’d taken more sleeping pills.
Style managed to coax Mystery back into the house and call Mystery’s mother, who arrived with his sister within half an hour. Mystery’s mother and sister took him to a hospital and checked him into the psychiatric ward.
Mystery wasn’t the only one in the community floundering. Many of the men had become addicted to picking up women, constantly determined to improve their game.
Their obsession was more potent because most of the men had struggled to pick up women all their lives, which was what drew them to the seduction community in the first place. Not only were they enjoying unprecedented success, but they had a built-in community they could brag to. Some men had left their jobs and quit school in order to spend more time sarging.
Papa—the college student who’d done a one-on-one workshop with Mystery and Style—told Style that he’d become consumed in the game. He was failing school and his father was worried about him.
Style was no exception: He’d all but stopped taking writing assignments, and he was neglecting his family and friends outside of the community.
Style, Papa, and several other members of the community decided to take a step back from seduction and regain control of their lives—but it wouldn’t last long.
While Style’s life balance was far off-kilter, all the time and energy he’d dedicated to the game hadn’t been in vain.
Through Style’s constant sarging, his performances in Mystery’s workshops, and the field reports and tips he shared on the online message boards, he’d inadvertently become a guru. While Mystery was recovering from his mental breakdown, his absence further cemented Style’s position as a top pickup artist.
The community was expanding rapidly with young members—some still in high school—who wanted to emulate the master pickup artists (PUAs). The new members wanted not only seduction technique, but also day-to-day advice, such as where to apply to college. Many of the young, new sargers that were constantly joining the community looked up to Style and studied his posts.
A year after joining the community, Style had become a true master of the game. He’d internalized the techniques, developed his own routines—which many members now used, word for word—and slept with countless women.
One post on the message board had even named Style the best PUA. The post lauded Style’s subtlety and powers of manipulation, calling him “sneaky” and “evil.”
As Style felt the pressure of his new status, his motivation for pickups further shifted from impressing women to impressing the men in the community. Style constantly felt the need to execute difficult sarges in front of the other men, in order to prove himself and justify the praise he received. Things that used to thrill him—like having a conversation with a woman—were now grossly inadequate.
The key to Style’s success was figuring out that all the routines and pickup tactics were designed to make women feel comfortable enough to let their guards down:
Although Style knew he was manipulating women with routines and techniques, he felt that, overall, his interactions with women were more honest now than they had been before he was a PUA. Before learning the game, he’d lie or deceive women into thinking that he wanted commitment, just so that he could have sex.
But the game had taught him that women don’t necessarily want commitment—they just want to feel comfortable and they don’t want to be perceived as promiscuous. Now, Style was upfront with women about what he expected and what he offered.
When Mystery got out of the hospital, he was manic and buzzing with ideas.
Mystery had determined that he became depressed only when he was alone, so he wanted to create a headquarters where people would always be around; he called it Project Hollywood.
Mystery also wanted to book three months’ worth of workshops all over the world, but Style couldn’t commit to three months of winging Mystery’s workshops. Style had been neglecting the rest of his life for over a year, and he couldn’t stay off the grid any longer.
Mystery didn’t skip a beat. Mystery invited Papa and Tyler Durden, who were more than happy to wing the workshops.
Tyler Durden was a 22-year-old college student who dove head-first into the seduction community, reading thousands of pages of archived posts on the message boards and relentlessly emailing Style for tips.
Growing up, Tyler had been physically and intellectually behind his peers, and his father had measured him against standards that Tyler couldn’t achieve. Out of that constant feeling of inadequacy grew someone who spoke and acted strategically in an effort to make everyone think he was powerful. Over time, Tyler had come to think that all human interactions could be both calculated and manipulated—which primed him for the rules and tactics of the pickup game—to the extent that he lacked human empathy.
Tyler proposed that new members of the community get over their shyness by physically running into women or hitting them with something soft, in a way that was meant to be playful. His approach to seduction was abrasive, shameless, and totally different from traditional methods that required more studying and memorizing techniques.
However, for all Tyler’s bravado, he seemed to be more focused on sarging (hitting on women) than closing. One day, he posted a field report about how he’d leaned over the counter and kissed the cashier at a juice bar—but when she invited him into the back room, he froze.
Nonetheless, Tyler’s brazenness and constant presence on the seduction message boards helped him become well-known within the community, and soon he became Papa’s wing.
As green as Tyler Durden was, the seduction message boards were full of impressive reviews of Tyler’s work in Mystery’s workshops. In fact, students were so enthusiastic about the workshops that there was a demand for more.
After teaching his workshops in England and Amsterdam, Mystery flew home and left Tyler Durden and Papa behind to run a few more workshops to meet the demand. Papa and Tyler were supposed to simply continue teaching the Mystery Method, but, one night, they went off-script and invented AMOGing.
AMOGs—the alpha males of the group—are obstacles to PUAs. While most PUAs were nerds and outcasts in high school, most AMOGs were popular jocks. When a PUA tried picking up a girl in a group, the AMOG usually cut him down with insults. Tyler and Papa created the tactic they called AMOGing in order to deflate AMOGs who stood in their way.
Tyler Durden described the steps of AMOGing in an online post:
Tyler went on to write that it’s key to smile confidently when confronting an AMOG, because a confident smile is emblematic of AMOGs. Essentially, you want to out-AMOG the AMOG.
Tyler Durden and Papa didn’t stop at inventing the AMOG strategy—they built a company around it. Their company was called Real Social Dynamics, and it offered a website and in-field workshops.
For Mystery, this was adding insult to injury: Not only did Tyler and Papa use his workshops as a platform to develop and promote AMOGing, but the name of their competing business was one word off from the name of Mystery’s seminars, Social Dynamics.
In addition, the format of Real Social Dynamics workshops mirrored Mystery’s setup:
The primary difference between the two workshops—besides the techniques—was that Mystery only allowed six students per workshop, while Tyler and Papa had dozens. The pair was making money hand over fist.
Tyler and Papa’s company set off a spark of entrepreneurship in the community. Other sargers and PUAs realized that they could just as easily start their own seduction business, because:
Throughout the community, men were offering workshops, creating websites, marketing products, selling DVDs, and writing e-books about seduction. Many of the entrepreneurs were far from experts: Several of the men were fairly new to the community, and one had lost his virginity just a month before offering workshops.
Style saw how the community was changing and growing, and he realized that he had to publish his article about the world of seduction before another writer caught wind of it and scooped him. He worked with his editors at The New York Times, who could hardly believe that the details about the seduction community were real.
No one in the community knew Neil, the writer—they only knew Style, the PUA. Hardly anyone even knew what Neil did for work. Neil worried that the article would destroy Style, and that he’d lose the friendships he’d formed as Style.
However, when the article ran, there was no backlash. Style had become such an integral part of the seduction community that his peers saw him as Style first, and Neil second. No one in the community saw Style as a traitor—rather, they gave him kudos for being featured in the Times.
Neil found himself wanting to remain active in the community; not only had he learned how to pick up women, but he’d found friends and a sense of community that he’d never known before.
Ultimately, the article benefited both Style and Neil:
With his article on the seduction community and his new assignment to interview Tom Cruise, Neil was reclaiming some of his old life—but he was keeping one foot firmly planted in the community.
Neil couldn’t have gotten a better assignment: Tom Cruise was a model for the seduction community. He was effortlessly confident—a quintessential AMOG. In fact, most of the men in the community studied Cruise’s characters to improve their body language.
In the film Magnolia, Cruise even played Frank T.J. Mackey, a seduction guru that Ross Jeffries claims to have inspired. However, Cruise told Neil that his character was not inspired by anyone in particular; rather, Cruise and the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, had developed Mackey’s character. (Shortform note: In the movie, Mackey instructs his seduction students to “respect the cock” and “tame the cunt,” while a banner that says “Seduce and Destroy” hangs behind him.)
Cruise lamented that a guru like the fictional Mackey could seduce men into thinking that seduction tactics are the best way to approach women and initiate relationships. To Neil, it felt reminiscent of how Dustin had warned him about the corruption of the seduction lifestyle.
Neil stayed silent, but, internally, he pushed back against the attack on his community. Neil didn’t see anything wrong with learning the game; how was learning the game of seduction any different from studying and practicing other skills, such as writing or driving a car?
On the other hand, Neil was getting tired of regurgitating the same lines for every pickup. He wanted to be authentic and he wanted that to be enough to attract women.
As Neil talked to Cruise, he found Cruise to be centered, grounded, and comfortable with who he was. Cruise also encouraged Neil to embrace himself. Cruise was inadvertently helping Neil gain the inner game—confidence and self-worth—that he’d been missing.
For Style’s birthday, his friends in the community threw him a party at a Hollywood club. Between friends, PUAs, and former lovers, about 300 people showed up.
Style dominated the club all night. People were constantly pulling him aside to talk to him, and women were handing him their phone numbers—and he hadn’t recited a single line of game.
Style realized that he’d been too myopic: He and the other sargers had been focusing on mastering the game simply to pick up women at clubs. But, the real purpose of the game was in creating a lifestyle that was interesting, exciting, and fulfilling. Men with that lifestyle exuded confidence and vibrancy that naturally attracted women.
Style was ready to graduate from sarging and build this lifestyle. He decided it was time for him and Mystery to create Project Hollywood, the seduction headquarters Mystery had described when he came out of the hospital.
Project Hollywood would be a home base for PUAs, a venue for parties and seminars, and a meeting place for Mystery’s workshops. It had to be spacious, impressive, and outfitted for massive events.
Mystery and Style started planning:
First, Style and Mystery determined that the perfect candidate to put his name on the lease was Papa.
Two main factors made Papa the first choice to put his name on the lease for Project Hollywood:
As soon as Papa came on board, he also became a self-appointed manager. Papa had been a neurotic seduction student at Mystery’s workshop, recording Mystery’s and Style’s advice, taking notes, and robotically applying corrections to his technique. He’d taken the same approach to running Real Social Dynamics with Tyler Durden.
Papa wasn’t just going to be a name on the lease—he was also bringing his networking and business skills to Project Hollywood.
First, Papa convinced a real estate agent to help them find a mansion to rent in exchange for teaching him the game. They ended up leasing the former home of Dean Martin, where the Rat Pack had hung out. The home boasted:
To add to the party atmosphere, Papa bid on eBay for pool tables, movie projectors, tanning beds, and stripper poles. He had ambitions of renting the mansion out for movie premieres, after-parties, and corporate events.
Now, instead of using his game to pick up women, Papa began using it to make connections with celebrities and promoters who could use Project Hollywood as a venue.
After Papa, Mystery, and Style signed the lease on the Project Hollywood mansion, they posted on Mystery’s Lounge that they were looking for roommates to fill the remaining two rooms. The response was overwhelming.
They ended up bringing in three eager pickup artists (PUAs):
The roommates laid out the ground rules for the house:
Project Hollywood hit the ground running. Playboy threw the first Project Hollywood party, and the turnout was 500 people.
Similar seduction venues started popping up around the world—in Austin, San Francisco, Sydney, and Perth.
As a master PUA, Style could effortlessly approach any set (group of women), deliver his lines, perform his routines, and take his target home. But, after moving into Project Hollywood, Style reached a new level of seduction prowess: He learned how to initiate threesomes.
Style was simultaneously dating 10 different women—multiple long-term relationships (MLTRs), as the pickup community called them. All the women knew that Style was seeing other women, and only one woman, named Isabel, was bothered by it.
One day, a woman named Hea was visiting Style at Project Hollywood, when Isabel dropped by for a surprise visit. Style didn’t want to turn Isabel away, but he panicked that the only jealous woman out of his 10 MLTRs would now be face-to-face with another woman he was seeing.
Style escorted Isabel in, introduced her to Hea, and then ducked out for a minute to ask Mystery for advice. Instead of getting one of the women to leave, Mystery told Style to try to start a threesome. He suggested that Style start by suggesting a wholesome three-way massage, and then try to escalate from there.
Style decided to take the gamble. He invited both women to his bedroom under the pretense of watching a funny video. By design, he had no chairs in his bedroom, so they were all laying on the bed.
After the video, Style told the women that he’d heard about something called a dual-induction massage, in which two people massage someone at the same time, moving their hands in synchronicity. The women agreed to try it, so Style told Isabel to lay on her stomach; since she was inclined to be jealous, it was a strategic choice to make her the first to receive a massage.
Style went next. As the women massaged him, he felt the tension between them changing. Incredulously, he thought that his scheme could actually work.
After Hea’s massage, she remained lying down. This was the pivotal moment: Style began kissing Isabel, and they slowly moved down toward Hea. Style switched to kissing Hea, and then brought Isabel into the kiss. It had worked—both women were on board.
But it didn’t last. When Hea started giving Style oral sex, it snapped Isabel out of the moment. Style recognized that Isabel was uncomfortable, and he thought about a fellow guru’s advice that threesomes only work if the man makes it a priority to keep the women comfortable.
Style pulled back, and the three didn’t go any further. Still, he was amazed that he’d gotten that far.
The following night, Style tried the three-way massage technique with two different women—one of his MLTRs, Nadia, and her friend, Barbara—and it worked.
Style had perfected a new routine. Naturally, he shared the technique on the message boards. The innovative strategy secured him recognition as being the top PUA for the second year in a row.
The techniques Style learned in the community were not just useful for picking up women—the principles were about how to read people and make them feel comfortable.
As a journalist, these skills vastly improved Neil’s interviewing skills.
After Neil’s feature on Tom Cruise, he got another assignment from Rolling Stone. His editor wanted him to interview Courtney Love; it was the early 2000s, and she was all over the news for her outlandish behavior and pending drug charges.
Early in the interview, Love’s answers were abrasive and somewhat antagonistic. Neil realized that he, as a reporter, represented the media, which had exposed and mocked Love’s outbursts and mistakes. Neil recognized that Love was using a bitch shield—as PUAs call it—which was merely a defense mechanism.
Neil had to use his pickup techniques to break through her bitch shield and build a rapport, which would be the only way she’d provide authentic, interesting answers for his article. Neil knew the formula: trust + comfort = rapport.
First, Neil followed up on a comment Love made about her grandmother with a memory of his own grandmother. This created an opportunity for brief small talk about their families, and Love revealed that she didn’t get along with her family, which gave him something personal and authentic to build on.
As the interview went on, Neil gently widened the crack in her bitch shield to create a larger opening into Love’s genuine self. Finally, Love began to cry and told Neil that she needed saving—in fact, she said that Neil had to save her.
Neil had created a rapport. At Love’s request, they exchanged phone numbers.
Love called Neil later that night, asking him to come over to her place. Style ended up staying at Love’s apartment for three days straight. They talked, ate takeout, watched movies, and performed amateur acupuncture—but they never had sex.
For another assignment, Neil had to interview Britney Spears, who was still riding the peak of her late 1990s-early 2000s fame.
At first, Spears was giving few-word answers and hardly paying attention to the questions. Again, Neil had to use his pickup skills to build rapport.
First, Neil had to engage her. He did some cold-reading, making fairly obvious observations that Spears took as uncannily perceptive. Then, he created a yes-ladder, a series of questions that all elicit a “yes” answer, designed to keep the other person’s attention.
Next, Neil performed a value-demonstrating routine, which was meant to make him stand out—in this case, among other journalists. For his routine, Neil explained to Spears that people’s eye movements revealed which parts of their brains were engaged.
Finally, he wrote a number between one and 10 on a piece of paper, and he encouraged Spears to guess it. Neil had written down the number seven, because he knew people almost always chose seven—and that’s what she guessed. Spears was amazed at herself for supposedly intuiting the right number, and she was amazed at Neil for showing her this ability she possessed.
Neil’s techniques worked, and Spears not only opened up and gave a better interview, but she also suggested that they exchange phone numbers.
The impact that Style’s pickup expertise on his life wasn’t all positive.
While on a trip to New York, Style met up with several old friends from college. Style’s friends hadn’t seen him since before he joined the seduction community, and they were amazed that their formerly awkward friend had transformed into a PUA.
But when the conversation shifted to other things—such as their work and interests—Style was disconnected. Style didn’t have much to add to the conversation if it wasn’t about the game, and he felt that he didn’t have anything in common with his friends anymore. His whole life had centered around seduction for the past year-and-a-half.
As soon as Style had the chance, he sarged a woman and spent the rest of the night talking with her. When he left the bar with her, Style realized he’d neglected his friends all night.
One day, Tyler Durden moved into Project Hollywood. Papa had given him an (unapproved) invitation to live in his bathroom closet.
Tyler and Papa were still running Real Social Dynamics together. Plus, Tyler and Style would be winging Mystery’s workshop together that weekend in Las Vegas. Mystery didn’t explain his decision to invite Tyler to wing his workshop, but right after Tyler and Papa had launched Real Social Dynamics, Mystery had vowed to keep his friends close and his enemies closer.
Although Style had gotten a bad impression of Tyler during their last meeting, Tyler’s skill and reputation had vastly increased since then. Tyler had been leading workshops regularly and gaining respect in the online seduction community. Everyone else seemed to like Tyler, so Style decided to give him another chance.
When Tyler arrived, he praised Style for being a big influence on him. Tyler then revealed that he’d sometimes told women that he was Neil Strauss, a Rolling Stones writer, which alarmed Style.
That weekend, Style found out just how influential he’d been to Tyler.
On the first night of the workshop in Las Vegas, Style overheard Tyler belittling Style and Mystery to Tyler’s targets, in order to undercut their pickups. For example, Tyler told one set that Mystery loved attention and that he liked to make rude comments to people. If Mystery were to approach that set after, his negs would be useless.
When Style called Tyler out, Tyler explained that several of his new techniques involved tearing down Mystery and Style—and he quickly offered for Style to do the same to him.
Style couldn’t believe that Tyler was effectively AMOGing other PUAs. This confirmed Style’s initial impression that Tyler approached the game with no human compassion.
Tyler shamelessly lurked around Style for the rest of the weekend, observing and analyzing Style’s game so that he could emulate it.
On the last night of the Vegas trip, Tyler picked up a woman named Stacy. However, shortly afterward, Stacy approached Style.
Community etiquette dictated that the first PUA to approach a target had exclusive access to her until the PUA either succeeded and slept with her or gave up and moved on. But as Style thought of Tyler AMOGing him, he decided to forego etiquette.
Style kissed Stacy. All of a sudden, Tyler angrily pulled her away. Style immediately felt guilty—but he was quickly soothed by Stacy’s roommate, Tammy, who spent the rest of the night with him.
Although Stacy was with Tyler the rest of the night, Tyler was still mad at Style for taking his target.
For Tyler, the game was just about competition. Tyler never followed through with women—rather, it seemed like he just enjoyed the challenge of picking them up.
One day, Tyler told Style two things that were revealing about him as a person and a PUA:
Tyler also seemed to thrive on his growing influence within the community, and he’d been using pickup tactics that tore down the top PUAs. Tyler was clawing his way to the top of the seduction community.
Most of the men who found the seduction community had struggled with women their entire lives, and those failures had damaged their confidence and self-esteem.
In many cases, the game gave the men tools to be successful with women, which created a virtuous cycle: The success boosted their confidence and inspired self-improvements that affected all areas of their lives, which increased their inner game and made them more attractive to women.
However, in other cases, instead of learning from the pickup gurus and using their techniques to develop their own skills, many men in the community were simply mimicking the gurus and becoming pickup clones. Nearly every weekend, men arrived at Project Hollywood to take workshops from Mystery and Tyler Durden. They were all learning the same scripts, practicing the same routines, and buying the same gaudy clothes and accessories (per peacock theory). As a result:
When Project Hollywood put on the first annual Pickup Artist Summit, community members from around the world attended. One night during the summit, Style learned that Tyler Durden had been teaching a technique he developed, called Stylemogging.
Since Style was the top PUA in the community, Tyler had studied all of Style’s phrases, mannerisms, and habits, and he’d broken them down into, essentially, a how-to guide for becoming a Style pickup clone.
Style had already shared most of his lines and routines on the seduction message boards, but Tyler was observing and teaching everything else Style did, including many things that weren’t conscious or strategic. Tyler had turned Style’s entire personality into a formula that could be copied.
Many of the men at the summit had shaved their heads, like Style’s. They had read Style’s posts on the message boards, they used his lines—they wanted to be him. One man even made his pickup alias Stylechild. Now the clubs that Style frequented on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip were full of these robotic pickup clones. Style was stunned and alarmed.
One day, Style put up a post on Mystery’s Lounge, warning the community of the dangers of becoming a pickup robot.
Style wrote that a social robot:
Young sargers—those who found the community while in high school or college—were most at risk of becoming a robot, because they were still developing their identities. For these men, the rules of the game that dictated how they interacted with women became interwoven with their overall social development, which had negative effects:
Tension was building at Project Hollywood.
Since the inception of Project Hollywood, Papa’s focus had shifted. First, Papa spent every night working on Real Social Dynamics, and he seldom went out sarging.
Second, when they had moved in, Papa had fantasized about turning his bedroom into a luxurious sexual sanctuary—but nearly two months into living there, the room was a mess, still unfurnished, and completely devoid of women.
An unknown number of unapproved houseguests were sleeping on the floor in Papa’s bedroom, closet, and bathroom, which broke house rules and incited an argument between Papa and Mystery. Papa and his guests not only ignored Style and Mystery, but they also constantly observed Style from a distance, so that they could take notes for their Stylemogging lessons.
After Mystery and Papa’s argument, the house became split between the two competing businesses in the house: Mystery’s workshops, Mystery Method, and Tyler Durden’s, Real Social Dynamics.
Style was becoming eager to move out of Project Hollywood.
The benefits and drawbacks that Style experienced and witnessed in the pickup world aren’t unique to the seduction community.
What is one way you could be more effective in your life—personal or professional—by using seduction tactics and principles of social interactions?
What is one way that using those tactics could become problematic in your life?
Think of an instance when you had to mentor someone at work or in another context. How did you teach your mentee the skills and principles she needed to know without simply teaching her to do everything exactly the way you do it?
What is an example of a different kind of community (such as a religious group or work environment) where members become robotic or clone-like? What are the consequences?
Amidst growing problems in Project Hollywood, two new roommates moved in—both of them female.
One was Courtney Love. Love still had Style’s phone number from when he’d interviewed her for Rolling Stone and had subsequently spent the following three days in her apartment. Love texted Style one night, telling him that she was overwhelmed with bills and the task of keeping her life in order without a manager. She asked Style if she could stay at Project Hollywood for a little while.
Love made herself right at home in the house. Love was a messy house guest—she left open jars of peanut butter and jelly scattered around the kitchen, with sticky smears streaking the counters—but she quickly endeared herself to everyone in Project Hollywood.
The other new roommate would also become well-liked among many of the housemates, but she would also lead to the breakup of the original Project Hollywood housemates. Her name was Katya.
Mystery met Katya—a chipper Russian woman in her early 20s—during a workshop. A couple days later, Mystery invited her to come by the mansion to hang out. Within a couple weeks, Katya and her dog had moved into Project Hollywood and she had ingratiated herself with everyone in the house.
Three weeks after they met, Katya and Mystery bought rings and told everyone they had eloped. Mystery and Katya weren’t legally married—it was just a hoax—but their relationship shifted nonetheless. Mystery stopped going out to clubs, and he began staying in bed all day. For all his expertise in picking women up, he knew little about how to have a healthy relationship.
Katya still wanted to go out, and she grew frustrated that her fake-husband had suddenly become so idle. Katya started getting drunk regularly, and the two began resenting each other. Soon, Katya was coming onto the other Project Hollywood housemates, including Style—but when Style told Mystery about it, Mystery seemed unaffected.
The tension and resentment between Mystery and Katya were reaching a peak.
As Mystery and Katya’s cold war continued—Mystery freezing her out, and Katya hitting on the other housemates—Katya and Herbal began developing feelings for each other.
Style advised Herbal to talk to Mystery about it; Mystery had given Herbal permission to pursue his ex once before, and Mystery didn’t appear to care about his relationship with Katya anymore. After Mystery had another fight with Katya that evening, he gave Herbal his blessing to act on his feelings for Katya.
Just hours later, Katya and Herbal were together, and Mystery immediately regretted what he’d said. The feelings of rejection called up the emotional neglect he’d suffered as a child, and he broke down, insisting that he loved Katya.
The next day, Mystery was still a wreck. The last time Style saw him depressed—before Mystery’s mom and sister checked him into a psychiatric ward—Mystery had been catatonic. This time was different: Rather than being void of emotions, Mystery was overcome by them, to the point of convulsing.
Style determined that he should get Katya and Herbal out of Mystery’s sight:
Still, Mystery began talking about suicide, which prompted Style to take him to a mental health center, where Mystery got prescriptions for Xanax and a sleep aid.
Many men in the community had allowed seduction to consume their lives. As a result, they had nothing else—family relationships, outside friendships, professional success—to cushion their self-esteem, so rejection from women rocked their whole world.
A pickup artist (PUA) is only a PUA if he successfully picks up women, which means that his entire value within the community is based on how women respond to him. Of course, basing your self-worth on another person is inherently risky because, no matter how good your technique, you can’t control how she’ll react.
Many men in the community developed a hard shell of misogyny to protect their egos when women rejected them.
Additionally, the act of sarging turned human interaction into a game, which inevitably objectified women:
Finally, PUAs almost surely slept with their share of women with boyfriends and husbands. Over time, seeing so many women cheat so often and easily degraded the men’s trust in and respect for the female sex.
The same skills and knowledge that the men were using to pick up women were inhibiting them from developing and maintaining a healthy relationship with the women.
Three weeks after Mystery’s visit to the mental health center, he seemed to be getting better. Mystery resumed leading pickup seminars, but now he used his experience with Katya as part of his lesson—although it seemed to be more for his own catharsis than for his students’ benefit. Mystery claimed that his fake-marriage to Katya was a brilliant pickup scheme, because it was the ultimate maneuver to make a woman attached to you.
Mystery said that his fake-marriage with Katya went awry only because she’d known it was fake. Next time, he would create an entire fake wedding ceremony, with an actor for an officiant and everyone in the know except for the woman and her parents.
As Mystery was recovering from his breakup with Katya and his mental health breakdown, he became entwined in a love triangle. More accurately, Mystery created the love triangle in order to feed his ego.
First, there was Gabby. Just like Mystery, Gabby was narcissistic and talked incessantly. Surprisingly, she and Mystery hit it off—they each fed each other’s need to have someone around to listen to them talk. Soon, Gabby believed that she lived at Project Hollywood, though none of the other housemates were aware of or approved of this move.
Then, there was Twyla. Twyla was friends with a woman who Mystery dated years prior. When Mystery offered to help the woman with a bout of depression she was going through, she showed up at Project Hollywood with Twyla. Twyla and Mystery ended up getting together, and then Mystery hired Twyla to be his personal assistant.
The love triangle caused constant drama that centered around Mystery’s affection. He didn’t appear to genuinely care for Gabby or Twyla, but he thrived on the attention.
One day, two of Courtney Love’s bandmates, Sam and Lisa, showed up at Project Hollywood, looking for Love. Love was not around, so Style sat and talked with them.
Style had met them once before, but this time he was struck by Lisa, Love’s guitarist. Lisa absolutely oozed confidence—so much so that she was impenetrable to Style’s seduction tactics.
Society teaches women to be submissive, which causes many women to make themselves seem less imposing and even less intelligent in an effort to appear more attractive to men. This was part of the reason negs worked in seduction, because it played up this power hierarchy between men and women.
But some women rejected that model—and Lisa was one of them. Lisa had inner confidence that didn’t rely on validation from anyone else. Negs bounced right off of Lisa because she could dismiss them without a moment of doubt about who she was or how awesome she was; if the guy negging her didn’t see that, it was his problem.
Soon, Style and Lisa began spending more time together. They had common interests and great chemistry, but even after spending multiple nights together, talking in bed, Lisa wouldn’t let Style kiss her.
Negging didn’t work. None of his routines worked. Freezing her out didn’t help. She was adamant.
Style began to doubt himself. He prided himself on his ability to kiss-close women within a half-hour of meeting them. Style wondered if Lisa saw through his techniques to the man he’d been before he joined the community, the man who was insecure and afraid of women’s power to reject him.
When Lisa went out of town to play with the band, she asked Style if they could have dinner together when she was back in town. Still relying on his seduction strategies, Style gave a cocky-funny response—but it backfired, and Lisa was turned off by Style’s obnoxious reply.
Style managed to salvage dinner plans, and he eagerly prepared for the night Lisa was scheduled to return to LA. Style waited at the airport, but Lisa never showed up. He called, but she didn’t pick up the phone or return his messages.
Style found out later from Love that Lisa had come in on an earlier flight. He was still confused as to why Lisa had stood him up.
A couple days later, Lisa called Style to say she was back in town. She offered no explanation or apology. Style felt sure that things were over between the two of them—she clearly wasn’t interested.
Style was on his way to Miami with another PUA, so he spent his trip sarging and sleeping with women in an effort to get over Lisa. He used the massage routine to instigate another threesome, and, for a moment, he was on top of the world. But as soon as it was over, he felt empty. Style realized that he had no real connection with any of the women he’d spent the last two years sleeping with.
Style returned from Miami to more drama in Project Hollywood.
Katya had been out of town for six weeks, during which Mystery had called her constantly, trying to get her back. Meanwhile, Herbal was also calling Katya regularly, and Katya’s feelings for Herbal were growing stronger.
When Katya returned to LA, she went straight to Project Hollywood and told Mystery that she wanted to date Herbal. Mystery acquiesced and agreed to back off—but, as soon as he saw Katya and Herbal kiss, it made him crazy.
One night, Katya was out late helping Papa with a Real Social Dynamics workshop, so Papa suggested that Katya sleep in Herbal’s room, though Herbal was out of town. Hours later, Katya woke up to Mystery, who kicked down Herbal’s door and started throwing things. Mystery screamed at Katya that she was merely a guest in the house, and the next time she was there without Herbal, he would attack Herbal.
One day, while grabbing lunch at a nearby restaurant, Style ran into Extramask, who’d been a student with Style in Mystery’s workshop. Although Extramask lived at Project Hollywood, he was part of the Real Social Dynamics team, all of whom spent most of the time secluded in Papa’s room.
Extramask revealed that Style’s post about social robots had struck a chord, and he’d decided to stop sarging and pursue spirituality. He was planning to go to an ashram in India, where he would stay indefinitely.
Style was astounded: When they’d met, Extramask had been extremely naive. But Extramask’s pivot from seduction to spirituality reminded Style of his old friend’s Dustin’s conversion from being a womanizer to a celibate living in a yeshiva. Both Extramask and Dustin had been trying to fill a void with women and sex, and, when they realized they couldn’t, they tried to do it with God.
Style reflected on the optimism he’d had when they started Project Hollywood, that it would be a headquarters for self-improvement and life enrichment beyond sex and romance. That dream was now shattered by the harsh reality that the house dynamics were breeding instability and dysfunction.
The very concept of Project Hollywood—as a place for men who dedicated their lives to chasing women to coexist peacefully—had been flawed all along. It was overly optimistic to assume that they wouldn’t fight over women, their competing businesses (Mystery’s Mystery Method and Papa and Tyler Durden’s Real Social Dynamics), or their egos.
Seduction techniques taught men to be alpha males to attract women. Most of these men had spent their lives being pushed around by other alpha males, so when they started to embody alpha traits themselves, it could be intoxicating. Many members of the community became so focused on flexing their alpha strength that they sabotaged their friendships in the process.
The cracks had started to show almost immediately, and, by now, the residents of Project Hollywood were split by fault lines.
Style, Papa, Xaneus, and Playboy called a house meeting with Mystery and Herbal to resolve their issues. It appeared that someone had to move out:
The housemates appointed Style as a mediator. He came up with a compromise: Katya wasn’t allowed in Project Hollywood for two months, during which Mystery had to get over Katya, pull himself together, and stop destroying property and threatening people.
Mystery pushed back, saying that Style and the housemates were choosing Katya over him. At that, Style’s frustration with Mystery that had been mounting for months came to a head.
Style told Mystery that he was self-sabotaging by:
Mystery broke down, and he acknowledged that he’d made a mess of his life. He said that he was broken, and that he didn’t know what to do.
Mystery posted on Mystery’s Lounge that he planned to move out of Project Hollywood the following month. His high hopes for Project Hollywood had fallen flat, because:
Soon after, he followed up his post with an update: While on a trip to Chicago, Mystery had met the woman he believed he wanted to marry. She was coming to LA to visit him, during which time his mom and sister would also come visit in order to meet her.
Mystery's supposed future wife was named Ania. She was quiet and passive, which complemented Mystery’s manic narcissism.
While Mystery’s mom and sister were in town to meet Ania, Style talked with them about Mystery’s mental health. Style spoke openly with them about Mystery’s troubling behavioral patterns—in particular, since his last bout of depression, he’d been resorting to violence and destruction, as he did when he kicked down the door to Herbal’s room.
Mystery’s sister, Martina, explained that each time Mystery had a bout of depression, it was worse than the last. Furthermore, she speculated that their father’s death had caused changes in Mystery.
First, Mystery was looking for a new target and scapegoat for the anger and resentment he’d long harbored for his father. Mystery had always blamed his depressions and emotional outbursts on his father and the dysfunction he’d caused. Recently, Katya had filled his father’s role.
Second, Mystery had begun to act more like his father. The two had been so similar that they constantly butted heads, and, when they did, his father would explode with rage and violence. Now, Mystery was beginning to emulate that violence. On top of that, he’d begun drinking, as his father had done excessively.
Style had been worried about Mystery’s emotional stability, and he asked Mystery’s mother and sister what they could do to help. They determined that the best course was not to interfere in his life decisions—even the wildly ill-advised—and simply to be there to support him when things came crashing down.
When Mystery moved out of Project Hollywood, he decided he and Ania would move to Las Vegas. Mystery reasoned that he could find work doing magic performances there, and he planned to start Project Vegas.
Mystery asked Style to help him build Project Vegas—promising that they’d learn from the mistakes of Project Hollywood—but Style refused. Style was working on disentangling himself from the community, not embedding himself even deeper.
Mystery understood. Despite Style’s concern and frustration over Mystery’s erratic behavior, the two agreed that the bond they’d formed transcended sarging and Project Hollywood drama. They would remain friends even if Style left the community.
(Shortform note: Style wrote the foreword for Mystery’s book, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed, which was published a couple years later.)
One day, as Style was leaving the mansion, Lisa came driving up. She and Sam—Courtney Love’s other bandmate—were on their way to a bar, and they were on their way to Project Hollywood to invite Style to join them.
Style went back to the house to change, and then hurried to the bar to meet them. He was eager to find out why Lisa had stood him up after her trip to Atlanta, but when he got to the bar, Lisa and Sam were sitting with two men.
The men were intimidating, not just because of their tattoos and rock-and-roll style, but also because they were exactly the type of men Style assumed Lisa would date. Style felt invisible next to the men.
Disappointed that he couldn’t talk with Lisa, Style got up from the table and sarged to make himself feel better. He wanted a jolt of positive feedback from a woman to ease his feeling of rejection.
However, as he approached one set (group of women) after another, he discovered that they all knew his routines already. Project Hollywood had been pumping out so many PUAs-in-training that all the women who went to the clubs in that area had already heard all of the same lines and routines. The same thing was happening in other seduction hubs—from New York to San Francisco to Montreal.
Now doubly discouraged, Style told Lisa and Sam that he was heading home.
When Style got back to Project Hollywood, Isabel—one of the many women he’d been casually dating, whose jealousy impeded Style’s first threesome attempt—was there waiting for him.
There was nothing wrong with Isabel, but Style’s feelings for her paled in comparison to how he felt about Lisa. Nonetheless, they had sex and she spent that night with Style.
The next morning, Isabel pressed Style about whether he was still dating other women. He confessed that not only had he started seeing Lisa, but that he had feelings for her.
Isabel gave Style an ultimatum: leave Lisa or lose Isabel. There was no question in Style’s mind—he chose Lisa.
For all the difficulty Style was having trying to break through Lisa’s tough exterior, he wondered why he kept coming back.
Style wanted to take a leap with Lisa. He put his PUA moves to the side and asked Lisa out for a traditional dinner date. She hesitated, but agreed.
The date was harder than any pickup. Style had already tried all his routines on Lisa—and they didn’t work anyway—so he was on his own. No techniques. No scripts. Just Style.
Style mustered the courage to ask Lisa why she’d stood him up after her trip to Atlanta. Lisa told Style that he’d been rude and aloof, and it had turned her off. Again, Style’s seduction strategies had backfired with Lisa.
Style wanted more clarification on what had happened between them. He wanted to know if she was really running game on him, as he’d suspected.
The reality was that, although Lisa thought Style had acted rudely, she had missed him when he was in Miami. Lisa was hoping to catch up with Style when she invited him to the bar, but she was frustrated when Style had immediately clammed up around the two men and then promptly left.
Making matters worse, the following day, Lisa’s bandmate Sam had used Style’s bathroom and seen the condom he’d used with Isabel on their final night together. Sam told Lisa, and Lisa assumed things with Style were over.
When Style asked Lisa to dinner, she had hesitated because she was fed up with his mixed signals. The only reason that she ultimately agreed was because he was asking her on a real date—and because he seemed nervous, which she took as a sign that he genuinely liked her.
Finally, Style and Lisa had stopped playing the game: Style wasn’t using lines, and they were both being up-front about their feelings for each other. They shared their first kiss, and then they spent the next few hours talking and kissing.
After that night, Style broke things off with all the women he’d been seeing casually.
When Style had sex with Lisa, he discovered a new kind of intimacy. For the past two years, he’d been using sex as a form of entertainment and a validation. But Style had such a deep connection with Lisa that it felt like the whole world stopped when they had sex.
One night, Style told Lisa everything about the community—the PUAs, the tactics, even the acronyms. Lisa told Style that everything she liked about him was already part of him before joining the community; in fact, the game almost ruined their chances of getting together.
Style knew that Lisa was right, but he also recognized that, before joining the community, he wouldn’t have had the confidence to pursue Lisa. So much of the game was artificial—the scripted routines, the peacocking outfits, even the aliases—but mastering the game had helped Style develop the inner confidence to be himself. Style could now graduate from the community.
Project Hollywood was falling apart. Physically, the house needed a deep cleaning and some serious repairs—but the social fabric was in even worse shape.
Mystery and Herbal made up just in time for Mystery’s move-out. Then Herbal moved back to Austin with Katya. Style was alone in the house with Papa, Tyler Durden, and their Real Social Dynamics minions.
Papa and the rest of the Real Social Dynamics crew—including former students, junior PUAs, and the steady stream of newcomers that Papa kept moving in—completely ignored Style.
One day, Style asked Tyler Durden about everyone’s strange behavior. Tyler said that everyone in the house hated Style, and that they blamed him for much of the drama in the house. Tyler pointed to examples of people Style had been friends with who’d suddenly turned cold toward Style.
Style was blindsided. Although he’d become disillusioned with the community, he thought he’d remained friendly to everyone in the house.
One of the last of the original Project Hollywood residents to move out was a PUA named Playboy, who’d moved in with Herbal and Xaneus.
Before Playboy left, he pulled Style aside to tell him that Papa and Tyler Durden had schemed to push Mystery out of the house, and now they were trying to do the same to Style. Ultimately, they wanted to turn Project Hollywood into a headquarters and dormitory for their workshop business, Real Social Dynamics.
Papa and Tyler had taken the social principles from seduction and twisted them to use in all areas of life. For example, they had routines to get their workshop students to give the business better reviews, and they had routines to make everyone in the house do what they wanted.
Papa and Tyler had instructed everyone who moved into the house to freeze Style out. This explained why all the housemates had been ignoring Style, and why Tyler had told Style that everyone hated him—it was all a strategy.
Style already knew it was time for him to get out of the toxic environment in Project Hollywood, and this was the icing on the cake.
Before Style left the community, he met with one last guru, named Eric Weber. While Ross Jeffries earned the title of godfather of the seduction community in the 1980s, Weber had laid the foundation for future PUAs with his 1970 book, How to Pick Up Girls.
Weber had since gotten married, had kids, and left the game. Style sought his advice on how to get out of the community.
Weber told Style that the primary tool to get out of the community was confidence. Weber warned that men who don’t attain that inner confidence become obsessed with the game, in a futile attempt to fill their psychological holes.
On the other hand, men who developed enough confidence and self-worth no longer needed validation from women—although, Weber admitted, even he still had moments of self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy every now and then.
During Style’s two years in the pickup world, he had:
The game had helped Style recognize the assets that he already possessed, which built his inner confidence.
Like Weber—and everyone—Style would probably have moments of self-doubt. However, he would always know that he had within him the traits and abilities that he previously believed were out of his reach.
(Shortform note: In the years after this book's publication, Neil was treated for sex addiction, among other mental and emotional conditions. While in rehab for this addiction, a doctor told him that his years in the seduction game had deeply ingrained his dysfunctional behaviors.
After receiving treatment, Neil got married in 2013 (not to Lisa) and had a son. In 2015, he published another book about his recovery from the seduction community, titled The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships. He no longer leads seminars on seduction techniques, but rather on how to be happier and more confident.)