THE SEDUCTION BIBLE

A John McLean Experience...

THE SEDUCTION BIBLE by

John McLean For

Ken Blackman Michelle Wright Rachael Hemsi Hannah Abend Angelika Beguidjanova Who brought me to a boil... Because only when you're boilin' Can you make steam!

THE SEDUCTION BIBLE by John McLean

Also by the bookwright… NON-FICTION The Low Carb Revolution Real Artists Ship FABLES Dancing With The Hunger You Are NOT Destined For Greatness… But You Can Still Find It FICTION Zen And The Art of Stripping

Discover more… TheJohnMcLeanExperience.com

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WARNING: This book is... Thoroughly Wicked Pointlessly Vulgar Exceedingly Naughty Only for Men If you are none of these, please don't read it. Seriously.

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THE INVITATION This is an adventure for men who love women...of all shapes, sizes, ages and colors. For men who love turning women on. Who dream of dancing passionately with the Divine Feminine long into the chaotic night. For men who love their own bodies and who love themselves. Ambitious men. Dreamers. Empire Builders. Lovers. Poets. Even Pirates. Especially Pirates. If that's you, this may be one of your most magical journeys ever.

On the other hand, you might not believe in magic. Lots of people don't. Or you might be hiding from the big, bad world. Tons of folks are. 4


Perhaps your perception of women is tainted by lingering bitterness, shame, blame or pain. Well, get in line. If any of these apply, you probably won't enjoy the adventure ahead. Every step will seem like sandpapery torture as you find your rawest buttons pushed and your comfort zone repeatedly trampled. Maybe this isn’t the ideal time for you to go through this singular experience. And that's okay, too. If you need to heal first, go heal first. Come back any time—you'll be welcomed with open arms. Whether coming or going, sir, you are loved and you are deserving of all the greatness you've ever dreamt about. Either way, I want to share a secret with you. It's the bestest secret of all, because once you truly grasp it, you'll grasp everything. It's the secret of why you're here. As a man, I mean. Something you may have wondered about a time or two. Are you ready to learn the secret of being a man? Here goes... You’re here to transform yourself into the superhero you were born to become. That's it. It may not sound like a lot, becoming a superhero. But it’s kind of a lot. Not least since once you step fully into your superhero5


ness, you'll forevermore have a responsibility to fight Evil in the world--in whatever form it manifests for you. I know the book’s cover promises that you’ll finally learn how to understand and seduce women. And so you shall. So you absolutely shall. You really have no idea of the epic wins awaiting you in the Land of Women. But...maybe our odyssey is also a little more than that. Maybe this is also an instruction manual for superheroes. Disguised as a book on seduction...so the Bad Guys won't see us coming...and also to keep mere mortals out. So if you are one of the select few who's finally ready to step into your full potential as a man, a lover and a superhero, then consider this your personal invitation. Welcome inside!

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LEVEL I A NEW MODEL of THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

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1: From Scarcity to Abundance

Let's

cut right to the chase, my man. You deserve MORE. More recognition. More money. And, naturally, more opportunities to express your sexuality with the fairer sex. Together we shall banish all trace of scarcity to your distant past and deliver you to a land of hot- and cold-running abundance--where you'll feel confident that you can connect with any woman you like, and turn her on just the way she likes. You already have the ability to do this...you just don't know it yet. To tease your potential out into the light of day, you'll first need to make some fundamental shifts in how you understand the world, yourself and the whole of the human experience. As luck would have it. that's exactly where we'll be focusing our energies during Level I of our heroic trek. Along the way, you'll be exposed to secrets you never knew existed, and you’ll discover the real truth behind some of the most deeply held and utterly mistaken myths about life. Starting with the most ridiculous misrepresentation ever foisted upon humankind: the one where men supposedly possess all the appetite for sex, while women have little or none. 8


As is so often the case with myths, the truth is exactly the opposite. Here’s how the story really goes... Men enjoy splashing around in a bathtub filled to the brim with our sexual desire--criss-crossing the sudsy waves with our mighty fleet of colorful plastic boats, led into battle by our yellow ducky with his amazing submersible powers, all in all quite thrilled at the extent of our watery empire. But no matter how large or grand our bathtub, the seas of a woman's sexual cravings swamp our own. While we men are fiercely proud to be Lord High Potentate of our bathtuby domain of desire, it turns out that a woman's sexual hunger rivals the depth and breadth of the ocean itself. I want to share another secret with you. It's a secret that some women still won’t admit to, but that doesn’t make it any less true... Women don't just have more sexual desire than men...for all practical purposes they have infinitely more. Her desire is so vast and deep that you can think of it as her Infinite Desire. A woman’s Infinite Desire is both her joy and her burden. Her pleasure and her pain. It's also a large reason why seducing a woman is so much easier than you may currently suspect. And since seduction is so very easy, we’re not going to stop there. Why would we?! 9


Our greater goal is to deliver you to the doorstep of your own greatness, because if your ultimate goal isn't to become a Great Man, then what's the point of any of this? For that matter, until you step fully into your Greatness, sir, what's the point of you?! There's no value or virtue in figuring out how to understand and seduce women just so you can squander the remainder of your time punching the clock as another soulless cog in the corporate hamster wheel. Let's get real honest with one another real quick, my friend... You and I are both know there have been times in your life when you’ve set the bar for yourself ridiculously low. Times when you were sleepwalking through your job and your sexings alike. When you made no art, created no lasting wealth and built no empires in your image. Lazy days that stretched into months...and even years. You know exactly what I'm talking about, don't you?! And you know deep down that this has got to change. And if not right now with me, then when?! Seriously, when?! Lazy is easy. I should know, I did it for a looooooong time. It’s always easier to keep doing what you’re already doing than to do something different. As you might imagine, we’re gonna do things different around here. 10


I want you to feel like you're already getting your money's worth, so here's another secret to sink your teeth into... Seduction isn't something you do...it's someone you become. And when you become that someone, you get a reward. That reward, of course, is women. Beautiful, passionate, naughty women. But becoming a lover in the tradition of Casanova or, for that matter, your notso-humble narrator, is not for everybody. Nor should it be. If playing this game ain't your thing, don't do it. Go play some other game. But if you choose to keep playing on this field, then you gotta play hard. The powerful and turnedon women of the world want nothing less from you than your best. They want you to show up with the full force of your presence and desire. They want you to open up and reveal yourself to the core. Most of all, the women want you to stop apologizing for being a man and finally own your greatness. Only then will they open up to you in return. Only then will they allow you to see them for who they really are. You want to start mixing it up with the best women? Then you need to figure out how to bring out the best in yourself every single day. Women expect nothing less of you. And YOU, of all people, should expect nothing less of yourself. 11


Now you know the game we're playing here. If I haven't managed to scare you off yet, my man, then I invite you to skip directly to Chapter 3. I sorta need to take a moment for a meeting of the minds with any stray visitors of the female persuasion who might've inadvertently stumbled into our Boys Only clubhouse. See ya on the other side!

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2: A Note To The Ladies

Huuuuuuullo

there, sweet cheeks! If you’re a lady and you're reading this now, let's have a little heartto-heart. Look deeply into my greenest of green eyes. Feel the weight of my full, undivided attention on you. Scoot closer, until our knees touch and our limbic systems get all cuddly and oxytocin-y with one another. Feel me feeling you as we lovingly connect. Are we there? Good, now let's talk... Dude, you are freakin' killing me here! What are you doing, anyway—all hanging around here and getting in our man bidness?! This is supersecret guy stuff! C'mon, you know the drill... NO GIRLS ALLOWED! Baby, I adore you. I know your heart's in the right place, but, frankly, I did not create this journey for you. I made it for the men in your life. Or, more precisely, the kind of men you want in your life. They're the ones who need this, but never knew how to ask for it before. Jeez, men aren't even allowed to ask for directions, so we're sure as heck not gonna run around asking anybody to 'splain us the inner workings of the most complicated system in the 13


history of the universe—the human female! You ladies are always complaining about how men don't get the rules of you, but how in the world would they?! Nobody ever took my brothers aside to explain how the interplay between the sexes works. Nobody ever bothered to mention that the Masculine and Feminine forces in the universe are locked in an intricate, ancient, chaotic dance. Instead, the bus just dumped them at the entrance to the milonga—the dance party—and they were somehow expected to wondrously know all the complexities of the human tango. There remain so many decent men out there who keep making the same mistakes with women over and over again simply because they were never taught the jizzity-jazzity turns, steps or even etiquette of the milonga. Still, they try. Oh, how men try. But every fellow has his breaking point. If he's unable to figure out the dance on his own, he’ll eventually quit trying. And then, finally, he stops coming to the milonga altogether. When a good man stops showing up at the dance, everybody loses. I've come to teach these men how to tango with you. But to accomplish that I first need to lead them deep within and show them how they can--and, indeed, must--transform themselves from the inside out. They've got to discover how to feel into their deepest ambitions and how to ask the world for what they want with boldness and confidence. 14


Behind the facade of discovering an original model of seduction, they’ll evolve into men who know how to fully show up, and then remain present with you regardless of how stormy and difficult your seas may become. Because a man who can hold you literally and figuratively in his arms without reacting emotionally to your upsets--that's a man you want at your side. Yet for him to arrive at that station in life, he first needs to mine the depths of his own emotions and insecurities. He's going to have to do something rarely asked of men anymore... Become vulnerable. I'm going to take him by the hand and show him how to open up to that vulnerability. To you, for starters...but ultimately, and most importantly, to himself. And, lemme tell ya, there's no harder thing for a man to do than open up. None. And that raw vulnerability and openness is exactly why he can't have you hanging around, looking over his shoulder and second-guessing his best efforts. Even your most heartfelt displays of support and encouragement could make him feel awkward and self-conscious to the point where he abandons his quest to learn the steps of the dance altogether. And you don't want that. You of all people know how sensitive men can be in the face of even a whiff of what they perceive to be judgment or ridicule, right?! 15


This is the road less traveled for men. I'm calling them “men” because that's what they look like on the outside, but you and I both know they're mostly boys. Their bodies grew up, but their insides didn't. Sure, now they have deeper voices and more hair (well, some do!) but on the inside they remain Little Boys putting on a brave front--trying their best in an already scary world that happens to be half-filled with even scarier creatures called women. Every one of those “boys” has the capability of becoming the dashing, confident man of action you've soooooooo longed to meet. A man who can seduce you and seduce the world. A man who knows what he wants and goes after it without excuses. Look, I know you wanna help. That's your nature. You want to give the men your love and support. And you can, you most definitely can... By staying the hell out of our way! In any case, why waste your valuable time on this wicked little book about the long lost art of seduction when there are approximately 10,000 million-trillion other self-help tomes written by, for and about your fellow Sister Goddesses of the Traveling Pants? I'm sure they're all quite lovely and I highly recommend reading every last one of them. Twice. If not thrice. On the flip side, your average man will quite contentedly go through his entire life without cracking open a single volume on personal development--much less one about how to become a “better man”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. 16


THE SEDUCTION BIBLE may well be the only book of its kind that many men read in their whole life, so why not let them have this unique experience to themselves? Hey, I absolutely adore women. I love playing with women in bed and out. However, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I did not write this for you. If you have any issues—and who doesn't have issues?--then the frank nature of the conversation that the men and I will be having about sexuality might make you a little uncomfortable. And by a “little”, I mean a “lot”. As will the language itself, which becomes increasingly raw--and, frankly, downright vulgar—as we gain momentum. Take another glance at the title, my love. Notice it's not called How To Be A Good Lil’ Boyfriend, or EZ Guide to Monogamy. This is not a book about relationship advice. Relationship is a totally different game than the one we’re playing here. Besides, you don’t want them getting relationship advice from me anyway. I am the quintessential playboy. I travel the globe full-time with a VIP pass to an all-you-can-eat buffet of pure hedonism. As I write these words, I'm spending the summer in the exceedingly naughty village of London, England. I currently have six lovers from as many different countries, with new candidates for my affection appearing on a daily basis. For me, threesomes and moresomes are what I call, “Tuesday”. It’s not like I’m hiding anything here... I am a wolf in wolves clothing. 17


That said, I'm not recruiting the men to my playboy lifestyle—frankly, most of them couldn't handle living this way for more than a day or two before their head exploded like a Gremlin in a microwave. But I also never once stop for the slightest judgments, apologies or recommendations about the “best” way for the men to express their sexuality. Still, having read ahead, I can assure that you not a single syllable of traditional relationship advice ever once emerges from my pen. Instead I fit out our little Icarus with curvy wings of feathers, held together with wax and string, and direct him to fly as close to the sun of his brightly burning lusts as he dares. And if you should dare to follow, you may end up flying too near to the sun of your own deeply buried passions, such that wax may melt and feathers may burn and the roaring Beast within you may awaken-hungry and unfulfilled and more than a little upset at its long imprisonment in the heavy iron cage deep in the hold of your Great Ship. And the crewmembers of your ship will point fingers at one another about who’s to blame until finally they unite in finding the cause of the Beast’s agitation. That would be me. From then on, for page after inflammatory page, the blaze within you will grow--until finally you'll want to take it out on the hapless men already in your life, or you'll want to make me wrong for teaching them how to fly. Except there's just one little catch... 18


I'm not wrong. Terminally arrogant, yes. Wrong, no. So, let’s make a deal, you and I. If you'll take the next exit for Splitsville, then I'll share a little secret with you. A secret that would utterly ruin my reputation if the men were ever to find out. Fair enough? Okay, here goes... I just pretend to be a Playboy...actually, I fall in love every time. Every. Single. Time. That's the truth. That’s my dirty little secret, just between me and you. Don’t tell nobody. And...scene!

Okay, sister, if you're still reading this it means you still haven't gone away--even though I asked you super-duper nicely. More than once. And I even shared a secret with you. I thought we had a thing, you and I. A thing. But noooooooooooooooo. So now I'll have to get a little firmer with you. It's time for a heavier stroke. Do you really think I don't know what your 19


problem is, lady?! Do you actually imagine I haven't figured out the game you're playing?! That little game called, Ooooh Look How Enigmatic Women Are?! You enjoy dismissing men for not getting you...even when on occasion they kinda sorta accidentally DO get you. You go around pissed off at the boys because they never learned the Kafka-esque choreography of the milonga...and you're about to get even more pissed off at me for shining a bright light into the mirrors and fog of the dancehall until they finally do begin to understand and you lose your advantage. By continuing to hang around you've made me kinda angry, little missy, so I'm going to rub your nose in this a little... I promise you that by the end of this book—hell, by the end of Level I!--not only will the “boys” finally grasp how you really work, they'll know a great deal more about how you really work than you do. And that's a guarantee! Let the implications of that sink in. I bet you don't like that one bit, do you, baby?! Hey, everybody wants to be the Great & Powerful Oz...until the curtain's pulled aside, right?! My theory is that you’re sticking your nose in our business because you don't want me revealing all these secrets about how you truly operate. And why would you? One of the greatest weapons in your everlasting “battle” with men is your mystery, your unknowingness, your complicated-osity. Except 20


for one little thing, love. It's another secret that nobody ever explained to you before... This thing between the sexes is not a battle. Never was, never will be. It's a dance. A dance where the Masculine leads and the Feminine follows. It could as easily have been the other way around. But it's not. It's this way around. Yet there's a part of you that wants to deny that it’s not a battle, to keep things just they way they are, no matter what the cost. Do you even know why? Actually, you do know why, I'm just going to say it out loud and bring it into Mutual Knowledge so you can no longer deny it. There's a part of you that’s afraid that if the men in your life fully step into their Masculine Ideal, then you're going to have work that much harder to keep them. Both to keep them and keep up with them. Sweetie, I get that you want to continue thinking this is a battle that you’ve gotta win at all costs. But you and I both know that you don't want to always win. You secretly, quietly, never-admit-this-toanyone-ly want the men to at least have a chance to win. You just don't want to make it easy for them. You want them to earn it. You want them to earn you. 21


Fair enough. So maybe it's not just a dance. Maybe it's a dance competition, where there are winners and losers. But the thing you've been doing wrong all this time is trying to win by making sure the men lose. Let this secret sink in... You only truly win when the men also have a chance to win. Until that happens, everybody loses. Dude, I bet you are crushin' on me so hard right now, aren't you?! I can feel it. I can totally feel you. I can feel your loneliness. Here’s a parting secret for you... As beautiful as you are, inside and out, you’re also lonely. Not just lonely, but Lonely. Deeply and profoundly Lonely. Your Loneliness is the dark secret you silently suffer from every day of your life, isn’t it? I’m trying to help you by creating men who are worthy of you. And you can help me by staying out of our damn way while we get this all sorted out. We'll let you know when we're done. In fact, we'll come find you when we're done. We’ll come and penetrate your Loneliness like it’s never been penetrated before...all the way to your Deep Spot. And I know that you know what I’m talking about. And I know that you know it’s worth waiting for. So let us go. Let us fly off to the sun, wax wings and all! Now am-scray, aby-bay! 22


3: What Do Women Want?

Welcome

back, young man--and whether you're 20 or 120, you are still a young man! Sorry about that little interruption. While you were away I charmed the ladies. They agreed to go back to doing what they do best--being fabulous!-while you and I set off on our heroic adventure of tilting at windmills and slaying monstrous, firebreathing dragons! With the dames out of the way, let's get down to business. A few years back, some foreign dude named Sigmund Freud who poked around in people's brains for a living famously asked, “What do women want?” A poignant question, indeed...yet one which Herr Freud himself proved embarrassingly unable to answer. Well, my friend, we’re about to untangle his legendary query. Mind you, our focus here is deliberately narrow. We're principally exploring what women want in the sexual arena. And while women are exceedingly sexual creatures, their sexuality is merely one miniscule part of the totality of who they are...as we shall also explore. Now to better understand both women and men, let's first make an important distinction... 23


There are sexual genders and then there are sexual energies. On the one hand, there are humans with male anatomy, genes and hormones...as well as female versions of all that same stuff. Meanwhile beneath the surface, there are forces that propel us through the world, influencing what experiences we focus on and what actions we take. One of these drives is the Masculine--linear, logical, analytical, goal-oriented, always moving. The late, great Earl Nightingale described the Masculine as being like a ship at sea. Without a purpose and direction, he said, it flounders about, utterly useless to all concerned. Yet point that same ship at a distant port and raise the sails, and there's no limit to what the masculine can achieve...or at least perish nobly in attempting. The opposing force is the Feminine—empathetic, nurturing, social, unpredictable. Contrary to the masculine, the feminine isn't trying to get anywhere because there’s nowhere for it to go. It already is exactly where it wants and needs to be. The feminine just IS. David Deida describes the feminine as being like the ocean--vast and complete unto itself, already touching every shore. On the surface it's raging, while beneath the waves everything is calm...or, more often, the other way around! Neither masculine nor feminine are better or more powerful or more anything than the other. Imagine if your body were a car--and I’m seeing 24


you as a Jeep, my friend!--and under the hood you had a motor that powered you through life. At times, your masculine motor would engage, driving you forward to a specific destination, while at others the feminine would be turned on and your engine would purr with satisfaction in the lap of the present moment. When you (or a woman) are playing the game called Building An Empire, you are necessarily in your turbo-charged masculine energy. And when either of you play the game called Relationship, you’ll find yourself in your warm sticky feminine energy. Regardless of our anatomy, all people are driven at different times by EACH of these forces, which, in their most inspired incarnations you might think of as the Divine Feminine and the Masculine Ideal. As a general rule, women embody more of the feminine essence and men more of the masculine. Of course, that's far from always true. There are plenty of women invested almost entirely in their masculine, just as there are many men overwhelmed by their feminine. Much of our capacity as men to enjoy the actual experience of sex depends on our ability to access our feminine essence. (The reason why we frequently become so gushy and lovey with a woman after even a single sexual escapade is because our feminine aspect has opened up and we've rediscovered our longings for intimacy and connection.) For our purposes here, however, we're going to pretend as if the menfolk are the primary keepers of the masculine fires while the womenfolk tend to the 25


feminine flame. Armed with that understanding, we can rephrase Herr Doktor Freud's question into something we can actually work with. Rather than confining the question to anatomical gender alone, let's instead ask, “What does the Feminine want?” The answer, like so many truths, appears simple. Yet grasping the implications of this simple truth is the task of a lifetime. Without further ado... The feminine wants to experience sensation. Sensation means physiological stimulation from our many senses. Although our supposed computerbrains get all the credit for understanding the world thanks to the universal monopoly of the Standard Dogma, in truth the vast majority of our perception and processing of what's happening around us takes place through our bodily senses—well outside our conscious awareness. While our brains can (barely) do one thing at a time, our bodies are capable of taking in and making sense of billions of bits of data per second--a staggering feat of multitasking. While the masculine essence seeks to measure and define the surface of the world, the feminine desires to know life at a deeper level through sensation in the body. The feminine usually prefers to experience positive stimuli...but what it interprets as positive can vary greatly according to the situation. (Which is why many a turned-on woman relishes a smart spanking!) The feminine impulse to connect with sensation-tapping into and feeling sensory stimulation in every 26


cell of her body--is, to borrow Dylan Thomas' electric phrase, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. A man living in his masculine energy can scarcely fathom the amount of physical sensation that a woman fully invested in her feminine can hold in her body, nor the profound depth at which she can feel it. Whenever we men have enough sensations in our bodies to actually notice it, our masculine inclination is to try to make that feeling go away as soon as possible, if not sooner. If a man feels the urge to pee, for instance, he has about a three-minute window of opportunity to make a mad dash to the nearest toilet before experiencing a full-blown panic attack. Meanwhile, a woman with the same impetus might make a mental note to remind herself to use the bathroom at some point in time before she goes to bed that night! The feminine is not only able to sit in negative or positive stimulations for longer without trying to fix them, it can also expand in the direction of that sensation in order to perceive those feelings more intensely. Which is why the female body has such a prodigious capacity to enjoy physiological contact during sex, allowing it build and build, surging back and forth like powerful waves racing to crash deliciously upon the far shores of her body. Again... The feminine wants to experience sensation. And not merely experience sensation, but feel it as profoundly and deeply as possible. A turned-on 27


woman's capacity to relish the physical charge in her body is well-nigh inexhaustible. So we can refer to it as her Infinite Desire. Here's another one of those secrets that some women will simply never admit to, but which they know in their hearts to be true... A woman's ability to awaken and feel into her Infinite Desire during her sexual expression is limited only by her schedule and the talents of herself or her partner(s). Women are often genuinely frightened by the genuinely infinite depths of their desire. And quite justifiably. They fear that if they get sucked into the black hole of giving themselves permission to feel everything they could possibly feel, they'll never be able to return. They're afraid of falling into their internal Singularity—where they could be pulled apart from the inside out by their insatiable hunger for ever more stimulation. These fears are so palpable that women sometimes defend themselves against this dire possibility by shutting down their sex entirely...or at the least keeping it locked away behind heavily barred doors, with a muscular Bodyguard posted just outside as yet another line of defense. If you cannot create and maintain a safe container around a woman's limitless capacity for sensation, then you shouldn’t be engaging with her Infinite Desire in the first place. Let's do that one again...it is that important. If your masculine energy can’t handle the Infinite Desire of the feminine within a woman, then you have no business turning her on in the first place. 28


Only a fool would douse a bonfire with jet fuel and then saunter up to light it with a kitchen match.

And you, sir, are no fool. Or...at least you won't be for much longer!

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4: What Are Men For?

We

shall return again (and again!) to the Infinite Desire of the feminine, since it's that insatiable craving to experience physiological sensation that makes our womanly partners in crime so eager to be seduced. But next let's discover our own role in the dance by asking the question that Lil Siggy Freud never got around to posing, “What's the point of men?!” Imma tell you, right now... Whereas the feminine wants to sensation, the masculine wants to seek it.

experience

At first blush these seem quite similar. They're not. Same planet, different worlds. Put another way, the masculine is about hunting down food in the first place, while the feminine is about savoring every sensuous bite of it once it’s been caught. This deep craving for the hunt is expressed through our limitless lust—our incessant masculine hunger for more. And more. And more. And more. 30


For all practical purposes, the masculine can never be satisfied of its desire to hunt, and so we are driven by our Infinite Lust. The fiery winds of our Infinite Lust rage day and night, filling the heavy canvas sails of our personal pirate ship as we criss-cross the treacherous seas from one port to the next. Our lust takes many forms. We can scour the world in search of monuments to build, riches to earn or women to conquer. Yet, no sooner have we reached a new destination, bedded another woman or made one more million, then we're itching to set off on the next quest. While our Infinite Lust drives us to hunt down and capture prey, sometimes we merely go through the motions of consuming our catch. Because, unlike the feminine, the eating of it was never our true desire. We were always in it for the hunting. Uncle Abe Lincoln neatly summed up our enduring enchantment with the hunt: “With the catching ends the pleasure of the chase.” Indeed. Here's a little secret they've studiously left out of the sexless placebo-speak being preached from the bully pulpits of Big Self Help seminars everywhere... Our success as men is directly connected to our Infinite Lust—our masculine compulsion to roam the world on a ceaseless quest for more. And a bonus secret for you... The more we hide, suppress or deny our lust, the fewer 31


our accomplishments will be. Back when Tiger Woods let his super-heated, loinjarring passions burn like a wildfire across a parched forest, he won virtually every tournament he entered. Even Majors were the merest speed bumps in his path. Then his truly magnificent lust was publicly exposed and hosed down with the waters of a thousand holier-than-thou gossip columnists, unfulfilled housewives and smirking, late-night TV comics. Almost immediately his heroic deeds waned. Nowadays he's no longer a shoe-in to win every tournament he enters. Indeed, he seldom wins anymore at all...and it’s no longer even a surprise when he misses the Cut altogether. Tiger Woods reigned in his lust in order to keep his millions in endorsement deals, but at the cost of his legacy in the game of golf. Here's a secret they'll never, ever teach at Harvard Business School... Great men are driven by great lusts. “The men of greatest achievement are men with highly developed sex natures,” wrote Napoleon Hill, a fellow who threw down with world leaders and business tycoons alike. “The men who have accumulated great fortunes and achieved outstanding recognition in literature, art, industry and architecture were motivated by the influence of women.” In a phrase... Great men are great hunters. 32


And the first step to becoming a great hunter? Well, you gotta actually leave the house. This may sound incredibly obvious, but you'd be surprised how many men—good men, qualified men-overlook this step entirely. They squander their prime years locked behind closed doors, pining away for more women, more money and more tributes rather than daring to walk through that door and hunt them down in the first place. You might say, “But hunting is not easy.” And I might answer, “It's not supposed to be easy.” If you don't hunt, you don't eat. If you want to embody your Masculine Ideal and finally step into your greatness, know this... Within every man is a lion—and that lion must hunt. Ceaselessly. A lion can survive for extended stretches without actually feeding, but it cannot flourish unless it hunts. If your lion doesn't hunt regularly, if he isn't “worked” like one of those multi-million dollar thoroughbred racehorses, then he'll eventually fall into a deep slumber. And when your lion sleeps, very little in your life will go as you desire. One of the great tragedies of our modern society is that so many high-value men have stopped hunting--with the result that their lion has fallen completely asleep. Over time, these men forget that the hunt is even part of their nature. They become weak and soft, from 33


the inside out. When you forget to hunt for women, you also forget to hunt for art and for wealth and for the other spectacular rewards that are the birthright of the masculine. And once you've forgotten these things, then what's the point of you? No, buddy boy, I'm really asking you this... If you forget to hunt, what is the point of you? The answer, as I'm sure you've already guessed, is none. A man who doesn't hunt has no point at all. “Sex desire,” Napoleon Hill added, “is the most powerful of human desires. When driven by this desire, men develop keenness of imagination, courage, will-power, persistence and creative ability unknown to them at other times.” To which I can only add, “Preach it, Napoleon!” (I wonder what his pals called him? “Nappy?” “The Napster?” “Ol' Nappenheimer?”) Movie stars, celebrity athletes and captains of industry all have something in common--towering achievements fueled by towering lusts, both sexual and otherwise...but especially sexual. There currently exist hundreds of “celebrity blogs” on the Internet, whose singular goal is to chronicle and lay bare this exact phenomenon: the uncommon lusts of uncommonly successful people. Great men don't lock themselves up in their room. 34


They bust out of their cage to hunt—again, whether for money, art, women or empires does not matter. No prey is more worthy than any other. As Penn Gillette puts it, “It's all one show business!” You and I were born to prowl, to hunt for what we desire, and to reshape the world in our own image. The hunt keeps us young. No pill, no surgery can rejuvenate a man like hunting. Every lesson you still need to learn to transmogrify yourself into the superhero you were born to become can be found in the hunt... Desire. Persistence. Vulnerability. Presence. Triumph. Failure. Most especially, failure. Because if you're not failing every now again, you're doing it wrong. Even armed with the all-new model of seduction I'll lay out for you Levels III and IV of THE SEDUCTION BIBLE, even I don’t succeed with every woman I attempt to seduce. And when I fail, ohhhhhh, I fail spectacularly. And not just with women, but in all my empire-building endeavors. But the important thing is that I never stop 35


hunting. I never even think about stopping. Why would I?! There’d no longer be any point to me if I did. Haven't you ever wondered why even the wealthiest and most successful men on the globe still go to the “office” every single day and hunt like their lives depended on it?! Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Sir Richard Branson, Elon Musk and their equals couldn't begin to spend the merest fraction of the wealth they've already accumulated, yet they go to work day after day and toil away as if they were pimply-faced interns desperate to land an entry-level position at their firm. These men have built up spectacular fortunes and a stellar body of noteworthy accomplishments, yet they still hunt every day. Why?! Why do they do keep hunting?! Why do they continue to work when they no longer need to?! Because great men cannot do otherwise. Great men never stop hunting—that's the largest part of what makes them great. Whatever they’re currently hunting for is an Epic Quest that gives their lives meaning and purpose. Even now, after all his enormous success, Stephen King continues to sit down at his desk and write his two thousand words every single day of the year— including Christmas, the 4th of July and his own damn 36


birthday. As I write these words, Warren Buffett, closing in on his mid-EIGHTIES and already worth umpteen billions of dollars, just closed a deal to buy Pittsburgh-based Heinz Foods for the princely sum of $28 billion. Can you guess what Mr. Buffett said in the press conference to announce this happy news? After the merest of acknowledgements for pulling off the deal-which just so happened to be the largest food industry acquisition in the history of the world!--the lively old coot announced that he's still got another $20 billion or so in cash and he's “actively hunting for another deal”. Those were Warren Buffett’s words precisely... “Actively hunting.” A billionaire in his '80s. Not resting on his laurels, not lounging on the beach reminiscing over his past successes, not getting stoned with his buddies or reading a novel by the pool. Actively hunting. Here's a pop quiz for you... What did YOU hunt today? Great men hunt, my friend. And they keep hunting...quite often til the day they die. Two words: Steve Jobs.

For a final celebration of the Infinite Lust of the 37


masculine, I’d like to trot out one of those proverbial men who “need no introduction”. This fellow is the living embodiment of a modernday Casanova, and he’s yet another exceedingly wealthy man in his '80s. He's a legendary record producer and jazz arranger--credited on over 400 albums. He's won 27 Grammies on more than 70 nominations. In his spare time, he’s composed the music for 35 feature film scores, founded Vibe magazine and produced two of the most successful songs in history--“Thriller” and “We Are The World” His name, of course, is Mr. Quincy Jones. But all that's just the back story. I don't want to shame you, but... In 2013 alone, Quincy Jones has launched the careers of six new artists by producing their first albums. Currently he’s developing four separate Broadway shows, including a musical recounting his life story. He's got nine different movies in various stages of production. Oh, and he's composing an original musical on the evolution of his greatest passion—jazz! By the way, I was just kidding earlier. I DO want to shame you here. Seriously, what have you accomplished so far this year? Be honest...wouldn't you be content if you'd pulled off the feat of producing a single album or developing 38


one Broadway show in the past twelve months?! Some men's entire New Year's Resolution list consists of a lone, modest ambition such as “get a girlfriend” or “find a new job” or “buy a house”. Any fool can get a girlfriend, a job or a house. That's not why you are here. You're here to stand up and be counted. Whereas the feminine is hungry for stimulus—both physical touch and emotional intimacy--the masculine is hungry for recognition— being acknowledged as unique and important in the world. The masculine doesn't just want to build monuments, it also needs to make sure everybody knows damn well who's responsible for 'em. Our craving for recognition from others is why men so often name their creations after themselves...witness hoteliers Trump, Wynn, Hilton and Marriott, just to name a few. And once you start getting the recognition you desire and deserve for your creations, you'll want more and more of it. That's the beautiful nature of this beast, baby! I know the secrets are coming fast and furious, but here's another one to add to your To Do list... Great men are never content. Never. Content. But, wait, as they say on late-night TV, there's more. There's even more to the Quincy Jones 39


experience, and I personally believe it's the best part of all. On top of every other one of his current creative and business endeavors, Quincy Jones still—at 81!!!-makes time in his crazy schedule to hunt women as well. He openly brags about having a “masters degree in partying” and boasts that he's currently juggling 22 separate girlfriends. Why does he (or Charlie Sheen or the manformerly-known-as-Tiger Woods) want or need upwards of two dozen lovers in his life? Because his vast masculine essence wants and needs the recognition that comes from being that popular. The ladies might not like this about us--our insatiable hunger for recognition and acknowledgement from others--but we're not living our lives for them. (And if you are, you're doing it wrong, buster!) To be fair, we also cannot fully comprehend the insatiable yearning for sensation of the feminine, so that leaves everybody nicely confused about the other side! Again, sir, what are YOU hunting in your life right now?! It can be money, art or empires. You can hunt for truth, influence, wisdom or peace. You can hunt for absolutely anything you desire. But you cannot hunt nothing. You can either play this game and enjoy the bounty of ladies and wealth and recognition for yourself—or you can watch other, lesser men take what should properly have been yours. To be sure, women also experience sexual lust and 40


a desire to hunt, but that's their masculine drive revealing itself. When their feminine nature returns, their lust wanes. Whereas the feminine is fulfilled by feeling deeply into the present experience, the masculine must always hunt for new and different experiences. Our masculine lust sometimes frightens women. And you know what frightens them most about it? The fact that the incendiary fires of our Infinite Lust quite often turns them on. The more you connect with your own Infinite Lust, owning it without reservation or excuses, the closer you’ll come to stepping into your greatness. If you stay with me on this heroic journey, I’ll teach you how to become a far more powerful hunter—most especially of women. But I cannot make you hunt. That's all on you. Of course, if you're not going to hunt, then why bother getting out of bed each morning?! To hijack Samuel Johnson's classic quote about London: “When a man tires of the Hunt, he tires of life.”

41


5: The Rise & Rise of The Standard Dogma

If

you’ve ever struggled to understand or communicate with women, you may find some grim comfort in discovering that the origins of your confusion can be traced back to a single historical event that you may never even have heard about. Although, in your defense, nobody else has either...since this fateful day isn’t marked on any calendar nor celebrated each year with a smug champagne toast like the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins. It took place a balmy July day, barely two years after the end of WWII, when a parade of generals, politicians and scientists with top secret security clearances filed into an nondescript building on a U.S. Army base in Maryland, passed through a heavily guarded blast door and found themselves face-to-face with the most ungainly machine they’d ever set eyes upon. The behemoth measured one hundred feet in length, and weighed in excess of thirty tons. Its thousands of vacuum tubes, flashing lights, relays and capacitors--held together by over five million hand-soldered joints--represented the highest technology of the day. A bespectacled scientist with a froth of white hair explained to the buzzing visitors that the machine 42


didn’t come with an on-off switch. Instead it would be powered up by an Initiating Unit, itself the size of an industrial refrigerator. At this, a bevy of young women tucked into slim pencil skirts--the newest post-war fashion craze from French designer Christian Dior--ran hither and yon, turning dials and flicking switches. The distinguished visitors pressed closer as the gargantuan machine wheezed and whirred like an old man waking up from a nap. It was called ENIAC, and it was the world’s first digital, programmable, general purpose computer--which Life magazine later fondly dubbed, “The Giant Brain”. You can probably guess where this is going because the planet totally changed with the introduction of the first computer since it led directly to that whole digital revolution thing everybody keeps talking about and all the cool computery stuff we got today, but, what’s the big deal anyway, because frankly your little niece’s Easy-Bake Oven has more processing power than the entire freakin’ ENIAC and yadda yadda and if you’ll just give me a second here I want to interject that the birth of the computer era was only the SECOND-most interesting thing that happened in that room on that fateful day of July 29th, 1947. Now can I go on?! So, by a string of coincidences that rivaled the collapse of the Bridge of St. Louis Rey, to one side of the room were gathered a dozen gentlemen who were previously known to each other by reputation alone. None of them stood out--because nobody really stood 43


out back then...it was shoulder-to-shoulder charcoal suits, white shirts and narrow ties--but they represented a Who’s Who of academics, psychiatrists and medical doctors. They’d separately made long pilgrimages by train and motor car to be present on this day because they, too, had a problem. Theirs didn’t involve calculating artillery shell trajectories or plotting the blast radius of a thermonuclear explosion. Instead, it was something much closer to home. In just a few short generations, the world had become so...complicated. People previously understood themselves and their role in the unfolding drama of the universe through the colorful stories told by the great religions and the great philosophers. But after the horrific onslaught of wars, pandemics, revolutions and genocides that had marred much of the 20th Century, it had become increasingly apparent that the old stories and fanciful myths were no longer up to the task of guiding humanity into the brave new world ahead. The man on the street had become skittish and afraid; he no longer even trusted himself to make the right decisions anymore. Something needed to be done. A completely new philosophy of mind was required to fill the void. But the learned gentlemen, still weary from the war effort, were fresh out of ideas. At last the vacuum tubes of the Initiating Unit were fully warmed up. A relay switch noisily 44


snapped open, and kicked a staggering 150 Kw directly into ENIAC--a jolt so powerful that it caused the lights to dim noticeably in Philadelphia. Or so the story went. The preeminent calculating machine in history had barely creaked to life when something abruptly went wrong and it ground to a halt with an inelegant sigh. The pencil skirts flittered in a panic--zeroing dials and swapping out ring counters and double-checking accumulators--until finally a saucy redhead emerged from behind the contraption, holding tweezers fixed around a plus-size moth with the poor luck to have crispified itself between a pair of scalding vacuum tubes. “I found a bug!” she announced to the bemused room as ENIAC sputtered back to life. Within moments the massive machine was solving partial differential equations...sparing the rest of us the bother of having to solve those stupid things forevermore. Slowly the esteemed gentlemen turned to face each other, the dawn of a bold new idea lighting up their faces. One of their number spoke for the rest, “It appears that machine and man have become one, gentlemen.” The lone economist of the bunch added, “I think we found what we were looking for...what everyone was looking for.” A week later, the gentlemen reconvened at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City under the 45


watchful eye of the management’s legendary hotel cat, Hamlet, and set to work codifying a new model of the human experience based on the example of ENIAC. Piece by piece, they built a structure of the mind that could be examined in a laboratory like any other science--measured, studied and quantized. It was based on the then-revolutionary premise that the brain functioned precisely like a high-speed computer. To change the output of our thinking and actions, they argued, we merely needed to change the input of our “programming”. Once you start comparing the human mind to a computer, one conclusion follows another with an almost mathematical inevitability. RAM. Hard drive. Debugging. Sub-routines. Chunking. It was all there. The gentlemen worked around the clock for the rest of the summer, culminating in a manuscript as imposing as the machine that inspired it--fully 1000 pages long and more a quarter of a million words in length. The cover page bore the rather cumbersome title, The Official Doctrine of Human Mind-Machine. A famous photograph from Life magazine showed the gentlemen--by now household names, one and all--shaking hands across the towering pile of typewritten pages of the original manuscript, featuring the caption, “The geniuses responsible for the new Standard Dogma”--and ultimately this was the name that stuck. In short order, the Standard Dogma proved to be a “category killer”. It was such an accessible and 46


expandable model of the brain--every situation a human could possibly face had an exact corollary in the realm of computing--that soon all the competing philosophies of mind drifted into obsolescence or ridicule. Look magazine praised the Standard Dogma as, “A modern machine-model of the mind for the modern machine-man”. The influence of the Standard Dogma on all aspects of psychology, medicine, the social sciences and the entire Fourth Estate cannot be overstated. To this day, the machine-model of the mind dominates every aspect of our society and culture with an irongrip that even the Roman Catholic Church didn’t enjoy during its best days in the good ol’ Dark Ages. It’s now an indisputable, universally appreciated fact that the only valid method of changing your life is by first changing the operating instructions of your computer-brain--a worthy message repeated in every book and seminar emerging from Big Self Help today. And it would be a happy future for all concerned except for one thing. It’s just a little thing. Really, it’s so trivial that I almost hesitate to mention it. But since our ultimate goal is to truly understand both ourselves and the fairer sex, I’m thinking it might ultimately prove worth mentioning, so let’s just get it out of the way, shall we? Sooooo, there's just one teeny, tiny, itty, bitty problem with this whole high-tech, computerized, George Jetson-y take on personal development by the 47


Standard Dogma-teers. In a word... It’s completely and totally wrong. Okay, five words. But, still...wrong!

48


6: Out With The Old

C’mon, someone’s gotta point out that the Emperor’s wearing no clothes here...

Human beings are nothing like computers. Our brains cannot be programmed...much less reprogrammed. You cannot defrag your mind, erase all limiting thoughts or neuro-anything yourself to a better, brighter future. Still, we’re told that success is merely a small matter of re-engineering our beliefs in order to get on the fast track to incredible success, riches and a slender waistline. Attempting to change our lives through masculine logic and the “technology” of transformation is not only ineffective, it's just plain silly. Think about it, my friend... If we actually could simply program our own success---like we’re told repeatedly by glossy magazines and cloying Think-Positive social media memes--why wouldn't 100% of humanity go to bed tonight with our computer brains focused on all the right programming so we’d wake up tomorrow morning on a sunny Caribbean beach, with millions in the bank, a set of washboard abs and the partner of our dreams lounging in the soft sand beside us?! 49


Riddle me this... If the Standard Dogma really works, how come we're not all driving Ferraris?! Seriously, how come virtually all of the Ferrari driving is done by the people who package and repackage the Standard Dogma, rather than by the earnest, hard-working people who are trying so valiantly to reprogram themselves according to their operating instructions? And it’s not like our lives have been improved by this thing. By every measure, people today are unhappier, unhealthier and unwealthier than they were when we first started down this road in the late 1940’s. Despite getting virtually 100% of the airtime for sixty years and counting, the Standard Dogma has still never been able to successfully answer any of the central questions facing modern mankind... Why do we do the things we do? More to the point... Why don’t we do the things we don’t do? Or even... Despite equal amounts of desire starting out, how come so damn few of us achieve greatness, while such a great many of us do not? Finally... How come most people not only never get what they want in life, they never even come close? 50


Nobel laureate Richard Feynman put it succinctly, “If your model of the world disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. Period.” And the experiment doesn’t seem to be working out so well, does it? Even the academics and psychologists charged with infecting the Standard Dogma upon successive generations know full well it’s wrong, they just have too much invested to stop now. When the experiments of our lives disagree with the results of their laboratory predictions, they merely point the finger of blame at someone else... Us. Or, more accurately, our faulty programming. They insist that our success is merely a small matter of reconditioning our internal computer. If we can’t quite get the punch cards in the right order, they’ll happily set to work “debugging” us with pills and therapy and other activities conducive to paying off their vacation homes in Costa Rica. But perhaps the most grievous offense of the Standard Dogma is how much damage it has done to our ability to genuinely connect with our female counterparts. It’s almost like one of the original gentlemen behind the Standard Dogma was secretly an Evil Scientist who charged with causing men to Mentally Castrate themselves so that our best efforts to communicate with women would become almost laughably ineffective. (Of course, given the era in which this philosophy of the mind sprang up, this 51


may well have been a built-in design feature from the beginning.) Bottom line, the old stuff doesn’t work, so we’re gonna do something different. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. --Buckminster Fuller So let’s do that. Together, let’s build a new model of the mind. And if you like it, you can use it to do cool things like understanding your own drives and motivations better than ever before. Or getting stuff done that you’ve been putting off for...well, your whole life. But mostly we’re gonna use it to get girls. Because...why wouldn’t we?!

52


7: You Are Not Who You Think You Are

Wow, thanks for still being here. Seriously, I know you've got a kazillion other pressing things to do and I deeply appreciate you spending your valuable time on what I hope you’ll eventually come to see as a heroic journey. (Not to give away the punchline or anything, but the Hero here is YOU!) I also want to thank you for being open to the idea of considering the world from a different perspective. We men are used to being right all the time...heck we’re supposed to already know how everything works. So it takes a real man to admit that his old way of approaching the world and the lovely ladies in it may have been, if not entirely wrong, then possibly skewed and certainly incomplete. And just so there's no surprises, I should warn you ahead of time that the singular model of the mind I’m going to share with you is--what’s the word? oh yeah: weird. It’s very weird stuff. But you know what else is weird? Life. Life is weird. 53


Life is incorrigibly weird. People are weird. Quantum physics is weird. And women--they are quite possibly the weirdest things ever invented. But you know what's not at all weird? That oldfashioned, computer-controlled paradigm of how we operate called the Standard Dogma. That’s not weird at all. It makes perfect sense. Which itself is weird, when you think about it. Here’s a secret that the Keepers of the Standard Dogma definitely don’t want you to find out... No explanation of the human experience that isn’t weird can possibly be true.

Speaking of the Standard Dogma, you ever go to one of those motivational seminars with the rest of your office or on your own where they get you all pumped up and screamy?! Where the word “Mastery” or “Destiny” or “Greatness” appears somewhere in the title? Where you're glad-handing the other hyperexcited attendees and swapping earnest promises to become multi-millionaires by the end of the calendar year? Where you diligently fill in the blanks of the workbook that shows you the precise path to 54


“recalibrating your mind-map to ultimate success” or whatever? Then by the end of the day or weekend, the hubbub dies down and life returns to normal. Weeks pass. Months. And nothing. You don't become a multi-millionaire. In fact, you don't change at all. So what was that all about? How could you be so intoxicated with upbeat emotions and certainty for your future at the seminar...and ultimately have so little to show for it down the road? Seriously, what was that all about?! Well, it turns out that the “you” who was at the seminar—the you making new friends who dress nicer than your old friends, or the you so enthusiastically writing down the 13 Action Steps to Mastery/Destiny/Greatness—is not at all the same “you” that has to actually show up day-in and dayout and put in the work to get wherever you're going, now is it?! Or maybe you never attended a personal development seminar, but instead went to one of those weekend Pick-Up Artist bootcamps. The same paradigm applies--the you getting bold and chatty with the dames while being egged on by your peacocked pickup guru isn't the same you sitting next to some sweet thing at a Starbucks a few weeks later....and so not a single one of the “gains” you made during that intense weekend shows up to help you start a conversation with her, much less seduce her into your bed. 55


Or maybe you simply went on vacation and noticed yourself acting quite differently in this new environment surrounded by a bunch of crazy strangers. The reason what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas is because whatever happened there didn't even happen to “us” in the first place—it happened to a totally different side of us, our Vacation Self, if you will. Of course, the Standard Dogma doesn't account for any of this. According to their model, there’s just One monolithic of you. Everything Big Self Help teaches depends upon the “fact” that the gal who shows up for the firewalk and the gal who later sits down to create a new online empire are one and the same. Except...they're not. But you don’t need me to tell you that. You already know there’s not just “one” of you, don’t you? It's more like there's a bunch of “you's” hiding out behind your Name. After all... To your mom, you're a son. To your boss, you're an employee. To your minister, you're a believer. To your teacher, you're a student. To your doctor, you're a machine that needs debugging. 56


To your cat, you're its personal servant. And on and on through the many roles you cycle through each day in the course of being “You”. Most people in your life glimpse only one narrow aspect of who you are...and label you accordingly. Your coworkers never see your musical side, and your musical friends might be appalled by your spiritual side. We instinctively compartmentalize and label others according to the one specific arena of life from which we know them. Perhaps you’ve experienced the awkwardness of running into a former school teacher at a grocery store and realizing she’s an actual person with appetites and needs just like you?! All this time you thought she was “merely” your 4th Grade teacher. But it turns out someone married her! And then apparently had sex with her because she has kids! And now she’s out buying food for those kids! The horror...the horror. Or maybe’ve gone to a party and saw this creepy schlubb whom you absolutely cannot stand, and he turns out to have a side of himself that’s a virtuoso cello player, and all the pretty women at the party are ooing and awing over him and you're like, “Noooooo way! That guy's a total loser. He cannot be good at anything, dammit!” But he is good at something. He has a part that’s really good at playing the cello. Yup, that happened to me, once! 57


Damn that guy! Despite the world's insistence on putting labels on us—Republican, gay, Libra, egghead, playboy, etc.— no one of us is just one thing. Here’s the starting point for our radically new model of seduction that just might change your life forever... You, me and everybody else you'll ever meet in your entire life is made up of parts...and each of these parts is responsible for a different aspect of how we interact with the world. That straight-as-an-arrow financial analyst who does your taxes on the side might also have another side to him in which he and his trophy wife are enthusiastic, same-room swingers with other couples on the weekends. That leggy Vegas showgirl might have a quiet, bookish part of her that loves nothing more than staying home on a Friday night, curled up with a tragic Russian novel. Myself, I am an author, playboy, globetrotter, hypnotist, juggler, father, shaman and more. Much more. All of these are legitimate sides of me, yet none are fully me.

The aspect of me that you experience depends entirely on the game you and I are playing together. Right now I'm connecting with you through the 58


“writer” side of me. If you were to plop down at the table next to me at the Starbucks in London directly across the street from the British Library where I'm working right this very second, I wouldn't be able to talk to you at all...at least not while I'm still writing. My writer only knows how to play the game called writing. He (quite literally) doesn't know how to talk. On the other hand, if you and I met while I was out dancing like a madman, which I often do, you wouldn't begin to guess that any part of me could ever sit still long enough to put pen to paper and fashion a single sentence, much less an entire book. And so on. The reason people get upset when we “label” them is because they realize they’re way more than just that one side of themselves. Although they get bent out of shape when they're being labeled, of course they turn around and do the exact same thing to everybody else they meet. They “label” their mechanic as a mechanic. It wouldn't occur to them that he might also be a caring dad, a middling lover and a bad-ass heavy metal bass player. Society puts labels on us. Our friends put labels on us. But, mostly, we put labels on us. None of those labels are true. Or, at best, they are only a little bit true...and even then only in a narrow 59


context. Yet we all do it... “She's just a dumb blonde.” “Trevor's a jock.” “Bob's a Libertarian.” “Peggy is lazy.” “Amanda's a prostitute.” “My dad is a jerk.” Here's a rather significant secret that the Keepers of the Standard Dogma “accidentally” left out of their manual... No one person is just one thing--we’re all made up of different parts that take turns playing different games for us. Now it sometimes happens that we become so invested in a single part of who we are that we begin to identify ourselves AS that part—especially if that part causes a disproportionate amount of uproar in our life. People who've smoked cigarettes for many loooong years will readily refer to themselves as smokers, as if a “smoker” is actually Who They Are. In truth, nobody is a smoker. Sure, some people have a part of themselves that smokes, but that's not “who” they are. Smoking is just a game that part of them plays some of the time. (Or a 60


lot of the time, if they’re a super-heavy smoker like I used to be!)

All of humanity share various Major Parts that can be found in each of us--corresponding to our sexual side, our creative side and so on. In addition, any individual can develop an unlimited number of Minor Parts that are unique to them. Now these sides are minor in name only, since their benefit or detriment to someone's life can be quite profound. These aspects of ourselves can learn to play big or small games such as smoking cigarettes or flying a plane or even being afraid of flying. I cannot play a single musical instrument, so I don't have a musical instrument playing “side” of me. But you might have one, and yours might even be able to play more than one instrument. On the flipside, I speak several languages fluently and so I have a robust aspect of myself that knows how to learn, recall and communicate via foreign languages--while yours may be less well-developed or even absent altogether, especially if you're a typical American! When an employer posts a job notice requesting applicants “with experience”, what they're really saying is that they're looking for somebody who has already developed a part of themselves that knows how to play the game called Barista or Stripper or Mini-Boss on an aircraft carrier. 61


A significant reason why homo sapiens triumphed over the competing human-esque species during the past three million years of evolution is because of our innate ability to generate new parts to respond to new stimulation from our environment. A new minor part can emerge at any time in our lives. The great American poet Maya Angelou took up the piano— thus creating a brand new aspect of herself in the process—at the delicious age of 65! I didn't have a “smoking side” of me until I was already 22 years old and already graduated from college. But this new part of me took to its game with such a vengeance that within a decade I was smoking five (5!) packs of cigarettes per day...and it subsequently took me more than two years of dedicated labor in full-blown Mad Scientist mode to figure out how to get this “little” part of me to stop and play some other game instead.. The culmination of my journey to persuade my former smoking part to finally quit depended on my giving it another game to play that seemed at least as large and important as smoking all those cigarettes had previously been. If our minor parts couldn't change, then nobody in history (myself included) would ever have quit smoking, nobody would have ever gotten over their shark phobia and not a single former Nice Guy would ever have turned into the kind of Bad Boy that women find so irresistible. Criminals also have lots of different sides, just like the rest of us. Often only a single part of a criminal is demonstrably bad, while the rest are quite normal and even boring. (This, by the way, is why 99% of the 62


neighbors of heinous criminals later tell newspaper reporters, “I never saw this coming...the side of him I saw every day was so sweet and helpful...what a charming young man he was!”) The nicest guys you'll ever met are gangsters...until you cross them, of course, and then their “little” gangsta side comes out to play—with a gun and stuff. If that happens, hopefully you’ve got a part that can run real fast! The realization that we are made up of inner characters, if you will, that take turns “being” us comes as quite a shock to some people...in part because it seems almost inconceivable that this take on the human experience never once came up in a lifetime of schooling, corporate training and PBS documentaries. Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity. --Marshall McLuhan Yet as soon as most people hear about it, the whole thing makes perfect sense--and even helps explain many of the previously inexplicable conflicts in their life. Think back to a recent crossroads, where you felt uncertain about a big decision. Perhaps one side of you desired one outcome, while another side wanted something completely different. Recently my friend Becky said to me, “A part of me wants to put everything in storage and move to Paris to become a painter, while another part of me wants to make an offer on a house and put down roots right here.” “Of course they do,” I told her. “These are 63


different parts of you, each with completely different agendas. Everybody has lots of sides that compete aginst one another to get their own needs met.” “Oh,” she said, “I thought it was just me. I figured maybe I was crazy or something.” “You're still crazy, Becky, just not because of that!” Since the fact that we're made of major and minor parts taking turns being who we are is largely kept hidden from us, people can deeply guilty and shamed about a previous bad decision without ever realizing it wasn't “them” who erred, but rather one small part of them that briefly got the upper hand. I once knew a Okie who was (mostly) a very good girl. So much so that the only way for her naughty side to come out was to drink an outrageous amount of tequila. And that did the trick. Tequila invariably brought out her sexual side to play. But her tequila-fueled side was not what you might call “picky”, and she sometimes woke up next to some of the most heinous men in town--highly embarrassed and confused by her experience.

The knowledge that we consist of various, often competing parts, is hardly breaking news. It’s been known since the dawn of civilization by every practicing Medicine Man, Witch, Kahuna, Shaman and Wisdom Keeper. In more “civilized” circles, pop culture favorite Carl Jung explored this very same turf in the 1950's, 64


calling the many sides of us Archetypes. The Keepers of the Standard Dogma praised Jung for his imagination (he gave the parts delightfully poetic names such as Shadow, Animus and Trickster), but they were too entrenched in promulgating their own brain-as-badly-programmed-computer model to pay much attention to him and his work never achieved its due. A decade later, a rogue psychiatrist named Eric Berne reduced Jung's small army of archetypes to just three parts, which he referred to as Ego States and awarded the most utilitarian of names: Parent, Adult and Child. Berne called his model of the human experience Transactional Analysis (TA), based on his belief that each interaction between two people constituted a single transaction between them. Dr. Berne drily described ego states as a “coherent set of beliefs with related behavior patterns”. But in his lighter moments he likened an ego state to a game that one part of us learns how to play. This game could involve doing theoretical physics, gambling or any human activity whatsoever. Transactional Analysis enjoyed a surge of public popularity in the sixties and seventies, where it briefly put New City intellectuals and community college dropouts on the same footing. Yet Prof. Berne never particularly intended TA to be a working system for laypeople to understand themselves and improve their lives, not least since he never got around to exploring the most important human transactions of them all—the ones between 65


the separate ego states within a person that occur out of sight of the rest of the world. Because, as we shall soon discover... The real game’s on the inside.

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8: Meeting The Crew

Just so you can pack for the trip ahead, here’s where we’re ultimately going with all this...

Only when your sexual side is out can you successfully seduce a woman. And only when her sexual side is out-and playing nicely with yours--will she respond to your seduction. There is no other way to seduce a woman. Period. The place where so many men go so very wrong is spending days, sometimes years, trying--and inevitably failing--to use the “wrong” part of themselves to seduce the “wrong” part of what may actually have been the right woman. That’s a lot that went wrong and very little that went right...no wonder so many men are so very frustrated. Nothing about the human existence takes place in a vacuum. And that includes seduction. Although your sexual side is the key to seducing a woman, there will always be other parts of you waiting in the wings for their two-hour trot upon the stage of your life. Some of these ego states play larger roles than others, but ultimately all of them make significant 67


contributions to the experience of being You. These parts can greatly assist you in your seductions when they have a little direction...or they can utterly muck up the works if left to their own devices. In short, it’s a team effort. We’re about to meet a few of our major parts-which, again, means they’re factory-installed in all of humanity as opposed to our optional, after-market minor parts... LOVER: our sexual side and a major player in the story ahead INNER ARTIST: our once and future creative side INNER CHILD: the often scared little boy within every man COMMUNICATOR: made up of two aspects, our Talker and our Writer (Contrary to expectation, they often have poor communication with one another...which is how it’s possible to learn to read and write excellent French, for example, without also learning how to speak it above a pedestrian level.) WISDOM KEEPER: our healer...as well as the Keeper of the Ancient Wisdom since the dawn of civilization--a part referred to by Dr. Carl Jung as “the two-million year old man that is in us all” HEAD LIBRARIAN: tasked with storing longterm knowledge and retrieving it with blinding efficiency as needed CONSISTENCY MONSTER: a ferocious aspect of us that often bullies our other parts into remaining 68


“consistent” with past decisions and choices PUPPY BODY: the ego state of our physical body-arguably our most important and yet often most neglected side There are a few other big parts, but they won’t factor into our conversation ahead. Once more, you have a potentially unlimited number of smaller parts that are unique to you--bearing in mind, of course, that there are no small parts, only small actors! Next we'll get up close and personal with the guest of honor, your sexual side...followed immediately by a formal introduction to its counterpart within the ladies. A WARNING... The further we get from shore, the saltier our language shall become. After all, you and I are pirates. And pirates don't sugarcoat what they say to one another on the high seas. As Thomas Jefferson sagely put it, “If you're not offended twice a day, you're not living in a free society.” Besides, if explicit talk and frank discussion of sexuality offends you, I gotta wonder how the hell you got this far in the first place. This is a journey about discovering how to connect the naughtiest part of yourself with the naughtiest part of a woman in order to do deliciously naughty things together. How the hell did you think this was all gonna go down?! 69


It was never going to be anything less than an Xrated show, baby. So if you come across anything in the pages ahead that shocks you, good! In the immortal words of Mae West, “Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.”

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9: Your Sexual Side--Lover

The leading face of your sexuality is something like the oversexed wolf character played by Jim Carey in the Mask—or even the oogah-oogah, eyes-bulging, heart-pounding Lotharios of so many lecherous cartoons of the 1930’s. This is your Lover. It should come as no surprise that he’s a very naughty boy, indeed. He thinks about sex all the time. After all, sex is the game he plays—so why wouldn't he?! Your Lover wants to have sex with as many different women from as many different denominations as humanly possible. He feels some amount of desire for virtually every non-heinous, adult woman who crosses his path. And, to be fair, even the heinous ones have a chance on days when he's feeling particularly amorous. Here’s a secret most men would flatly--and quite hotly--deny to their female friends... Our Lover is pretty much down to fuck just about any adult female who’s willing. Now before you get any crazy notions about plummeting into a Technicolor Jessica Rabbit-land of 71


hyper-sexosity, it should be noted that Lover boy's eyes are definitely bigger than his stomach. He's not remotely capable of handling even a fraction of the women he so adamantly desires. However, your Lover probably is capable of handling more women than he currently gets to play with. I meet very, very few men whose problem is too much fucking...and one helluva lot whose problem is too little. And, frankly, that goes double for women. Although your Lover plays THE crucial role in seducing women into your bed, he’s still rough around the edges and needs a fair bit of polishing before we can set him loose on the fairer sex. To our--and his--good fortune, the whole of Level II is designed as a sort of Finishing School for your Lover, an opportunity for him to get cleaned up, build up his stats and find the compass he’s been lacking. Since he will be our boon companion for the remainder of this adventure, let’s move on to the next character in our show--and what a feisty nugget of sensuality she is!

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10: Her Sexual Side--Naughty Girl

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, you're still here! Seriously, every chapter that passes without you making a person-shaped hole in the wall in a mad dash to escape, the prouder of you I become. As you know, most people never read past the first few chapters of the books they pick up. Or they dip in here and skim there, reading in exactly the same manner they live the rest of their lives—halfassed. But you, sir, are not most people. You, sir, are awesome! Next I want to introduce your awesome self to a woman's sexual persona--her Naughty Girl. Now remember all of this is just a metaphor. Except, not really. As you'll discover once we start putting everything into play with real, live women (eeeeek!) in Level IV, every turned on woman speaks and acts as if her Naughty Girl was a real, live person inside her--someone who emerges from time to time to take over her body completely when sexy-times are in the offing. She genuinely conceives of her Naughty Girl as 73


being like a completely different person—someone who’s ready, willing and able to do the oh-so-naughty things she’d never give “herself” permission to do. Unlike our Lover, who tries to get “out” every chance he gets–except when you most need him, like when you’re face-to-face with a woman...but (much) more on this later--a woman's Naughty Girl is generally kept well out of sight and under lock and key. Make no mistake, a woman wants to let her Naughty Girl out to play. You have no idea how much she wants that. But in no culture of the world is it safe for her Naughty Girl to run around like the town trollop. In fact, overt displays of sexuality can often get a woman stoned...whether with real rocks in fundamentalist conclaves or with Twitter stones in the United States of Slut-Shaming. So unless a woman’s actually at an orgy, she doesn’t normally walk around with her Naughty Girl in charge. The true Art of Seduction depends on your Lover--not you, your Lover--gracefully coaxing this sometimes skittish part of her out to play. But even that’s just the beginning of the dance. Your Lover and a woman’s Naughty Girl are merely the leading edges of your vast sexuality. The deeper you venture within, the more primal the experience...as the searing winds of your passions and the aching wings of her darkest desires yearn to take flight and explore the depths--an ancient pas-dedeux that awakens your respective Beasts. 74


You could almost say these primal, rarely discussed aspects of the human experience are hungry to make your acquaintance.

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11: The Beast Within

While your other parts mostly present themselves to your imagination as human-esque avatars, the deepest level of your sexuality prefers to reveal itself in the form of a totem—an animal representation of itself. The first 200,000 years of art homework handed out at Caveman College consisted exclusively of chiseling animal totems into or out of cave walls or rocks. The particular totem that embodies the most primal aspect of our masculine desire is, no surprise, our Lion. The Lion prowls our lowest, darkest depths. A great number of men never once in their lives allow their Lion to reach the harsh light of day. Instead they devote great angst and energy to ignoring, suppressing and denying its very existence. And for good reason. Your Lion is powerful and he is hungry. He could potentially devour your other parts, large or small. He is, both literally and metaphorically, your internal Beast. Ravenous. Fierce. Deadly. 76


Starving. The Beast within is what forms the beating heart of the “monster” in all horror novels and motion pictures. No matter what form it takes on page or screen, the monster in every scary story is a thinly veiled representation of the deepest level of our own primitive sexuality. Attempting to slay the sexual beast within us is a right of passage that all civilized societies anticipate. This is why the primary audience for horror stories in every generation is the latest crop of teenagers, who are being ripped apart by the tug-ofwar between their raging hormones of beastly desire and the immovable forces of polite culture that want them to curb and repress those appetites. It will come as no surprise that our journey together will take us in exactly the opposite direction as the one endorsed by the Standard Dogma—which rarely acknowledges that we even possess a sexual nature, much less such a dark and dangerous side to us. Yet rather than keep our Lion pent up in the murky bowels of our ship, we're going to set him free so he can exercise his true desire—roaming the earth in search of prey. Remember the bits about your masculine compulsion to always keep hunting? Well, can you now guess which of your ego states actually does that hunting?! If you said, “Lion”, you are absolutely right--and you get 1000 points! (Good job, by the way!) 77


In order to stand up and be counted among other Great Men. your Lion must hunt. If you will but let your Lion out to hunt, then you, too, can live forever—celebrated for empires and monuments to rival Kubla Khan. Or, you can continue to keep your Lion firmly locked away and hidden from sight, while lesser men than you with more boldness in their step share the spoils of recognition, money and pussy that rightfully should have gone to you. Your Lion is the fullest incarnation of your masculine sexual energy...and it settles for nothing less than total submission from the world and complete surrender from the feminine. Complete surrender. Mark those words, my friend... Complete. Surrender. Those words are the keys to the kingdom. But you're not quite ready to possess these keys just yet. We'll get there soon enough...but first let's take a peek at what doors these magical keys can open up for you.

Not every man can access the deepest layer of his sexuality. Not every man learns to bring his Lion to life and let him out to hunt. But when he does, he soon discovers that his Lion requires a worthy playmate. 78


Your Lion can devour an average woman's Naughty Girl in just a few bites. And that's no fun at all. Seriously. Only when you learn how open up a woman and create a safe space where she can surrender to you completely can you release a woman's Beast—her inner Tigress. Not only is her Tigress a worthy adversary, she's actually a little more than your Lion can handle. Which is just the way we want it. Something we know that many women don’t... The tussle between the sexes would hardly be worth the effort if we knew we were going to win every time, now would it?! Win or lose, the game’s worth playing and the rewards are great. Lemme let you in on another hotly contested secret... A woman’s Tigress is a complete and total slut. Whoa, did I just feel you cringe when I used that word? I sure hope so! That was my intention. To push your buttons. Slut, slut, slut! Slut’s a very charged word...but it exactly describes the Tigress. “Slut” is a word no decent woman wants any part 79


of. Almost universally, it's the worst-est label you can put on any female on the planet. If you ever call a stripper, a streetwalker or even the most ghetto-ass ho you'll ever meet in the hood a “slut”, be prepared to run. 'Cause that bitch will cut a bitch—with angry words or a real knife or both. By the way, before you ask...sluts are not whores. Whores these days have been thoroughly sugarcoated and romanticized on stage and screen alike. If they're not quite the girl next door, they're at least the girl who lives next door to the girl next door. But here's the rub: whores charge money for sex. A slut will fuck you for free. And your buddies, too. In every hole She doesn’t care...she’s a slut. Oh, and for the record, I adore sluts. Women crave men who know how to awaken and handle her slutty Tigress. However, a man who just charges into the lair of the Beast without knowing what the hell he's doing will be mauled at best and devoured at worst. No, “devoured” is too genteel a term. Sending in your Lover, for example, to tangle with a woman's Tigress will inevitably result in her ripping him a new asshole, fucking it lubelessly with a huge purple strap-on and then sending him weeping into the arms of mommy. Only a brave man and a fool would rouse a sleeping Beast. Only a brave man and a fool would 80


think his Lion is any match for her Tigress. And only a brave man and a fool could hope to take on a woman's inner slut directly. Make no mistake... A woman's Tigress is not just sluttier than you suppose, she's sluttier than you can suppose. Yessir, you read that correctly. I just paraphrased Nobel-prize winning biologist J.B.S. Haldane's legendary quote about Quantum physics--“the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”--to make a point about the infinite sluttiness of a woman's Tigress. If I wasn’t going to Hell before, I certainly am now. And if you can’t figure out a way to join me there, you’re doing it wrong! Seriously, though, a woman's Tigress is really, really, really, really, really (that's five really’s, in case you wondered!) slutty. A turned on woman yearns to let her Tigress loose from its heavily barred cage deep in the bowels of the ship. She wants your Lion to come for her, to challenge her, to engage in the eternal death struggle. She wants your Lion to overwhelm her Tigress until she submits. She wants your Lion to be so fully invested in his masculine energy that her Tigress can surrender completely into her feminine. And yet... 81


As powerful as your Lion is, he can never really tame a woman's Tigress. If her Tigress submits, it's always because she's playing the game she wants to be playing. She could always play a different game— the game of killing her play partner, your Lion. In the natural world, every species of Tigress is larger, fiercer and deadlier than Lions. The same is true in the dangerous, sensual, messy dance between the masculine and the feminine. Every time your Lion bursts into the lair to tangle with a woman's Tigress, he risks death. And when you're willing to die trying to tame a woman’s inner Beast, that’s when you know you're doing it exactly right!

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12: Special Bonus Love Note to The Dames

Whoa, lady, you're STILL here?! What's it with you not being able to follow directions?! I'm sooooo going to put you across my knees and spank your bare bottom for not heeding my one simple request: Don't Read My Book! But since you're right here, let's visit. (Nobody visits anymore. People used to visit. Let's bring that back, shall we?) How are you? You having a good day? My day's going well, thanks for asking. Okay, enough chittychat, let's get down to brass tacks... You need to stop thinking so loud, sweetheart! Seriously, you’re thinking so loud that all the other patrons at the quaint, historic coffeehouse in London where I'm presently writing this (don't you believe it—it's a fucking Starbucks!) are looking around wondering where the hell all those loud thoughts are coming from. And I wanna tell them, “It's not me, it's her!” But that's not even the worst of it. You're thinking too loud AND you're thinking that much of this doesn't apply to you. Baby, it exactly applies to you...just maybe not the “you” that's reading this right now. 83


The you it applies to, naturally, is your Tigress and it's about a 100% certainty that she's not out right now or else you'd off fucking instead of reading this and, frankly, my dear, you have no idea what your Tigress is genuinely capable of. I mean you do, but you don't. And you don't really want to know. Not really. Not at all, actually. And there's nothing wrong with a little plausible deniability, baby. (You do realize that I never call women “baby” in real life? I’m just doing it here to annoy you.) The other parts of you shouldn't have to be burdened with the dark, decadent desires of your Naughty Girl, much less your slutty Tigress. So the Moral of the Story is... Seriously, I go all the way to London—the city where coffeehouses were invented in the mid-1600s— and I'm frequenting a goddamn Starbucks?! Sheesh, can I get any more Ugly American?! Okay, baby, if you're gonna willfully disobey me and keep sticking around, at least have the decency to think quieter! We cool?

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13: The Steam-Powered Man

Sorry

about that, my man. As David Deida puts it, “You can never escape the tussle with the feminine.” Sometimes you gotta stop in the middle of whatever you're doing and handle the woman you're with. You don't complain about it or get emotional. Just handle her and get back to being awesome. Say, do you remember that classy, pristine blonde you saw the other day at Whole Food$ or the bookstore or wherever? What a sweet, innocent angel she was, right? Guess again. Do you know what she's truly capable of? The nastiest, filthiest, most gonzo behaviors in the bedroom you can possibly imagine—and quite a few you can't! But if you just straight up floated the idea of getting all Rocco Siffredi on her ass, she’d be genuinely disgusted by the very thought of it, and quite likely disgusted at you for even mentioning it. However in the right context, the Tigress inside that sweet angel would willingly and eagerly get filthier than the filthiest porn star on the planet...and love every second of it. 85


Later, she might even be disgusted by what she’d done. But what would disgust her most is the utter lack of disgust her supremely slutty Tigress would feel about it. You want to know the real kicker? Nobody ever told her any of this. That lovely young lady is going through life under the impression that, deep inside, she's the nastiest slut ever invented. She genuinely thinks she's the only woman on the planet who wants to be commanded to crawl on her knees across the floor to beg you to shove your cock down her throat. Most women feel alone in their depravity. Sure women talk about sex with one another plenty—far more than men ever do and in ways that would make you and I blush. But they don't talk about this. They talk about the “wild” experiences their Naughty Girl had with some mans's Lover. “He boned me until I couldn't walk straight” is a little bit hot. But it's a whole different galaxy--and a couple of parsecs, to boot--from the nasty games her Tigress is willing to play when your Lion shows up with the full force of his passion and desire. Women want to express the full extent of their own power and glory in every other arena of life— from the living room to the boardroom to the gym. But once a woman reaches the bedroom, she wants you to take control. 86


She wants you to take charge and stay in charge, even as you maintain a safe container around her. She wants you to stand firm against the fury of her attachments to her own masculine essence—until she reaches a place where she no longer wants or needs to worry about deciding what to do next...and then finally lets go. Her deepest desire is to surrender completely into her submissive feminine energy and wait for your loving commands—which can be as naughty as your imagination. I'm not remotely suggesting that every woman wants it up the ass, for example, or for you to pull out of her pussy and cum in her mouth. But lots do. Lots. Rather I'm saying that a woman's Tigress genuinely enjoys those rare opportunities when she gets to play harder and rougher than usual. Women are sick to death of the current generation of men who are little more than chicks-with-dicks. They’re sick of weak men who don't know how to dominate a woman and bring out her slutty side. They’re tired of men who sex a woman as if the last one to cum is a rotten egg, so they can hurry back to watching The Game. They’re finished with men who don't even know how to slap a woman's ass! This British guy (of course!) once asked me, “Doesn't it hurt when you slap her ass?!” “Absolutely,” I told him, “that's the fucking 87


point!” Now you should always, always, always negotiate boundaries and comfort zones beforehand, of course. I mean—of course. That said, there's virtually no act of depravity a woman's Tigress won't sign up for once she knows you're fully present and she feels completely safe with you. Women love to do taboo things, precisely because they are taboo. Doing something you're not supposed to do makes the experience infinitely hotter. A woman not only wants you to lead her into the taboo territories she's longed to explore, she also wants you to make a big fuss about it. Explicitly talking about the nasty things you're doing with a woman as you do them turns her on even more.

All of this is just a preview of what we're building towards over the course of our journey together. Women want to get down and dirty...and it pains them so very few men exist today who can give them what they desire. Stay with me on this journey, my friend, and by the end you’ll know how to be that guy we’re talking about here who can give a woman what she fucking craves. Just know up front that pleasuring a woman with the side of you we're calling your Lover doesn't begin to satisfy a woman's appetite. 88


If anything, it only makes her hungrier. Your Lover is for seducing a woman. Your Lion is for fucking her the way she desires and deserves to be fucked. Women dream of being handled by a man like the one you are becoming. They fantasize about being fucked by your inner Lion. Your animal side. A Beast with no fears...not of the world and especially not of her. Only your Lion can coax a woman's Tigress out and make her feel safe and contained enough to surrender freely to her Infinite Desire. And that's where the magic happens. That's where the fucking transcends fucking...and becomes healing for both of you. Where your combined masculine and feminine energies heat up so much that your mutual icebergs of hidden and repressed sexuality begin to soften and melt--until eventually they vaporize and turn to steam. Here's a secret for you... That steam can power the best sex of your life. And another secret... That very same sexual steam builds empires, creates art and amasses fortunes. And another... 89


All great men are steam-powered. And finally... Only when you become steam-powered can you ascend to the greatness that is your natural state and your birthright.

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14: Your Inner Child--The Little Prince

You'd think that would be the end of the story... Seduce woman with swashbuckling Lover—check. Fuck her from stem to stern with ferocious Lion— check. Except... That's not the end of the story. There's yet another side of you that plays a largerthan-life role in the eternal dance between the Divine Feminine and the Masculine Ideal. In fact, I'm about to make a bold statement--as if I could make any other kind!--and suggest that the part we’re about to meet has single-handedly cost you more pussy than every other cause combined. No doubt, this side of you is sweet and wellintentioned. He just keeps mucking the works at the worst time. You can either learn how to handle him and get his needs met—or resign yourself to a life of frustration and semi-celibacy. Because this part of you ain’t getting nobody laid ever. Nor should it, since he's just a little boy. He’s the darling little boy inside you. Your baby-faced Inner Child of 5 or 7 or however old he feels to you. 91


I like to think of him as your Little Prince, because that's just what he is—a precious, sweet, very important side of yourself. A Little Prince, just like in the book, just like in real life. So that's what we're going to call him, your Little Prince. And he’s lots of things... Charming Innocent Vulnerable Caring Scared Lost Overwhelmed Indeed, our Little Prince almost seems to be the repository for all those “un-manly” traits we aren't supposed to ever allow ourselves to feel or acknowledge, right?! But that's the point of the Little Prince. He's the gateway to the endearing boyish qualities that make our life more enjoyable. Now an explicit goal of the heroic journey we’re undertaking is to reconnect you with your most masculine qualities. But transforming yourself into an Alpha male does NOT mean simultaneously becoming an asshole. Instead, being strong, confident and NICE—now there's a winning combination. And our Little Prince is the Keeper of Nice. That's the game he plays. 92


Now you may be reluctant to admit you have a younger version of yourself who's a little bit scared and lonely and could really use a hug. But I know that you know that he’s in there. However, you also “know” that apparently you’re not supposed to talk about the little fellow, because nobody else fucking does. Not one of your guy friends ever sees you at the bar and asks, “How’s the little boy inside you doing today?” Right now, say how old your little boy is! Just say it. Out loud. What’d you say? 5? 7? Maybe a little more or a little less?! But you didn’t say nothing. Even if you’ve never paid any attention to this part of you before in your entire life, you’ve always known he was there. You can feel him, no less than he can feel you. And you’re not alone. Every man has a Little Prince inside him...just as every woman has a corresponding inner child within her, which we’ll get to in due course, never fear. Even Isaac Newton, the cornerstone upon which the entire rational, scientific model is built (after all, dude created calculus, invented reflecting telescopes and fucking discovered gravity) left behind this uncharacteristically charming description of himself: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore.” 93


Or take one of our most popular motion picture stars, George Clooney. Rugged and manly. Definitely a leader. But with an engaging boyish charm about him. His little boy is never far from the surface. I like to refer to the boy within every man as our Little Prince in no small part because it makes him feel special. And he should feel special. Because he is special. Even if we men don't always acknowledge the little boy within us, our female counterparts know him all too well. One of the primary complaints women level against men is that we never grow up. They grumble that we're “childish”. They dislike our unabashed Southpark-ian enjoyment of burping, farting, cussing, playing video games and telling the same lame jokes over and over again. And they're especially annoyed by our preferred arguing strategy of turning our backs, freezing them out and staying completely silent. In other words, exactly the characteristics you'd expect from a little boy who never grew--and never will. Peter Pan wasn’t just a story. So we want to keep our Little Prince close, but not too close. As I say, it's a good bet that one of your biggest problems in the past was that you let your Little Prince out too often and at the most inopportune moments with women. Understanding where your inner child fits into 94


your seductions--whether of women, riches or anything else--is paramount to your future success. As is knowing where he doesn’t fit in. So let’s flip the script for a moment and come at this from a different angle. Let’s keep talking about your Little Prince, but let’s use a name for him that’s may be more familiar to you so you really understand how he’s been geting in your way, and ultimately what you can do about it. For the next while we’re gonna stop referring to him as your Little Prince and use the name he’s perhaps better known by: your Nice Guy. Ohhhhhhhhh, now you get it, right?! Now you understand the part of you I'm talking about? Even if you were resistant to the whole concept of having a little boy within, you absolutely know there’s a Nice Guy in there, right?! And, boy howdy, is he nice. People don't always seem to recognize just how damn nice he is. Your Nice Guy almost never gets the appreciation and approval he deserves, does he?

Your poor, poor Nice Guy! He has so few real friends left these days. He's been widely demonized-often by women, and most especially by strong, intelligent women who are sickened by otherwise fine men who drag out their Nice Guy at the exact wrong times. If you ever wondered why you don't get laid as much as you desire and deserve, it's probably because of your Nice Guy. 95


Here’s a secret that shouldn’t be a secret to anyone... Nice doesn't get you laid. The distant shores of the dating world are awash with Nice Guys--each of them dying a frustrating, lonely death just out of reach of the Sea-of-AbsoluteFucking-Plenty! Nice Guys think nothing of pouring attention and money into a woman without expecting anything in return. Your standard-issue Nice Guy brings the ladies sweets and he writes her lovely poems with the same satisfying ABABCC rhyme scheme he learnt in middle school. Nice Guys love women. For their part, women don't love Nice Guys, but they sure as hell like them and can never get enough of them. From a woman's point of view, finding a Nice Guy is like winning the New Gay Best Friend Lottery! Only better—because her Nice Guy isn't going to run off with steamy Spanish cabana boy she's panting over. Indeed, her Nice Guy will cheerfully provide a shoulder to cry on when she crashes and burns with other men. And, let's be clear here... There will be Other Men. There will be nothing but Other Men. There will never be your Nice Guy. 96


When you're in Nice Guy mode, women think of you as gender neutral; in other words, they lump you into the same category as if you were British! I kid, I kid! (Actually...no I don’t!) Your Nice Guy is just soooooooo giving! Women enjoy your Nice Guy’s infinite supply of shoulder rubs (if you get nothing out of this entire book, pal, get this: rubbing the shoulders of a woman you’re not already fucking is a stepping stone to one thing only--another man fucking her) and free doubleshot-choco-lattes from Starbucks (“No, baby, I got this!”) and all his big boy help around the house (“Ohhh, you're my Prince Charming for spending your whole Saturday afternoon unclogging my bathtub—now go away so I can get ready for my hot date with Quasimodo's understudy!”). Most women don't go around looking for Nice Guys to exploit. But they're also not stupid--when one comes their way they take full advantage, in precisely the same way you or I wouldn't hesitate to pocket a $20 bill we found laying on the street. A woman will enjoy this free ride for as long as possible, until the inevitable day--sometimes years later--when your Nice Guy gets all liquored up and slurringly confesses that his dearest wish in the world is to insert his penis into her vagina—upon which she will launch the I-Don’t-Like-You-In-THAT-Way app and let him slink off to find another woman to Nice Guy to death. If you question 100 women who’ve snuck in to read this book against my wishes and ask what they want in a man, 99 of them will mention “Nice Guy” 97


somewhere in the response. But that’s a fucking lie. They’re lying to you and they’re lying to themselves. Women don't want Nice Guys. They are sick to fucking death of Nice Guys. If you took all the Nice Guys in the world, locked them in a giant sports arena and threw away the key, the greater part of womenkind would be pleased as punch. Sure, there'd be fewer eligible men around, and the competition for them would be fierce, but at least the remaining men would be capable of stepping up to the plate and knocking it out of the park on any given pitch. One of the great tragedies of our world is that so many good men only reveal their Nice Guy to the world. They’re afraid to go deeper into their sexual nature...or they simply don't know how to get there. Some modern men even hate their own Nice Guy, because they fully grasp everything this part has cost them. But you cannot hate this part of you. For one thing, it's a part of you—and it ain't going nowhere! For another, it's your sweet, precious little boy. It's your Little Prince. And when you get angry and upset and all pissy about being taken advantage of by women, your Little Prince feels your anger. And that makes him very sad. And scared. And 98


isolated. Which is not good. In fact, it's exceedingly nongood. So let's discover how to fix it by rolling out a little owner's manual for your Little Prince! Because this is important shit, my friend. The road to Fucking-More-Women-ville runs right through here.

99


15: On The Care & Feeding of Your Little Prince “So are you ready to learn how to take care of your Little Prince...or Nice Guy...or whatever name he goes by in your neck of the woods?” “Wait--are you talking to me?” “Yes, you.” “Oh, then yes.” “But you gotta do it the way I tell you.” “Whatd'ya mean?” “You can either take care of your Little Prince like I describe—and it’ll make a significant impact on your life and the women in it. Or...” “Or...what?” “Or you can dismiss all this as some kind of weirdass, touchy feely crap and continue meandering through life like a Trekkie at a Civil War reenactment.” “Isn't that a little dramatic?” “Dude, you’re right. I'm so sorry. Being a little dramatic was the opposite of my intention. I meant to come across as completely, over-the-top dramatic-because no single part of you is more important to 100


your future success and happiness in life than your Little Prince.” “Got ya, I’m listening.” “It’s important to keep in mind your inner child is always going to be a child. No matter how long you live, he’ll remain the same age he is right now. How old was your little guy?” “Six years old.” “Great. So your six year-old Little Prince has three primary needs.” “Lay 'em on me.” “He needs to feel Safe.” “Safe?” “Yes, safe. More than likely there was a lot of uproar in his young life. He saw and heard things he wasn't meant to be exposed to. Situations that frightened him. Maybe one terrible event, maybe one too many lesser events–either way, he got hurt. He experienced the Big Wound that just about every kid runs into sooner or later--an emotional injury that left him scarred and scared. He needs to know that everything’s okay, that the worst is over and another Big Wound can’t happen to him.” “How do I–? Okay, this is really weird.” “You think this is weird? Wait ‘til we get to Level III and explore our all-new model of seduction— there's some seriously weird shit going on there. Now what's so weird about this?” 101


“I just don't understand how to do what you're asking. How do I let my...Little Prince--do I call him that?” “Call him anything you want.” “Alright, Little Prince, that’s fine--how do I let him know he's safe?” “Talk to him.” “Talk to him?” “Yes, talk to him.” “How...do I talk to him?” “You go inside and you--” “What do you mean, 'go inside'?” “I mean, close your eyes and pretend to go inside yourself and connect with your Little Prince. And when you find him, take him in your arms and tell him that he's safe.” “Like that?” “Just like that!” “Oooooooookay.” “There's more.” “I figured.” “Your Little Prince also needs to feel loved.” “And I do that by...going inside and finding him again and telling him that I love him?” 102


“Dude, you should be the one writing this book!” “Lol!” “Did you just say, 'Lol'?” “No!” “But it's right there--I can see it.” “Can't you just edit it out or something?” “I could, but I won't. Now I’ve got leverage on you, Mr. Lol Guy. Anyhow, let's cover his third need.” “Seriously, just hit the Backspace button and delete the fucking 'lol' and nobody will be the wiser!” “Shhhhh! So he needs to feel loved.” “Hey, we all need approval.” “That's so true. We do all need approval. And the magic of what I'm asking you to do is to give that approval to yourself--” “By giving it to my Little Prince?” “Seriously, dude, you’re awesome. You get another 1000 points!” “Really?! Now I’ve got 2000 points--sweet!” “I’ve got another secret for you. And this one’s a Bunker Buster.” “That sounds big.” “It is big.” 103


“Drop it on me.” “Your need for approval is very rarely your need for approval. It usually belongs to your Little Prince. Sure, the other parts of you need upstrokes, as well-but, only when they’ve done something amazing, not every minute of every day. But your Little Prince, he needs it non-stop, at least in the beginning, when he’s not used to it. And, again, the person he most needs to hear it from is you.” “Wow...I actually get it.” “Of course you do--because you’re fucking awesome! And, finally, your Little Prince needs to hear that he‘s...handsome.” “What? Seriously?!” “Yes, seriously.” “Why handsome?” “I honestly don't know why, he just does. And our female counterparts are the same, their Little Princess—although she's no princess, believe me!-also needs to feel Safe, Loved and Pretty.” “So I do something?”

all

this

through

meditation

or

“Not even. Listen, the next time you're by yourself, sitting in your room or walking around the lake or anything, simply place your attention within and connect with your little man—no differently than you'd connect with a real child if you were his Dad.” “And then?” 104


“And then hang out with your Little Prince. Find out what's going on with him. If you talk to him, he’ll talk back. Let him know what's going on with you. Not all the grown-uppy details, just enough to let him know you're living a full and productive life. And find out what he’d like more of. One thing, for sure, is swimming. He loves when you take him swimming.” “I used to go swimming all the time.” “And now?” “I wouldn’t even know where to go swimming now.” “Find out.” “Okay. But first, I still don't get how I communicate that he’s all those things--safe and loved and handsome.” “You simply imagine telling him. Have you ever imagined a conversation before you actually had it?” “Like when I imagine that I’m telling my girlfriend I want to break up with her?” “Yes, or asking your boss for a raise or asking a chick you just met for a threesome--” “You do that? You ask chicks you just met for threesome.” “Yes, every time.” “Wow!” “Can I go on?” 105


“No, I’m still processing that.” “Now?” “Yes, now.” “--or whatever kind of thing you imagine having a conversation about in advance, and then just do the same thing with your Little Prince...except imagine it so vividly that he hears you.” “You make it sound so simple.” “All the coolest things are simple. Say to your Little Prince, often and enthusiastically, almost like a mantra, 'You are Safe. You are Loved. You are Handsome.' Say this over and over until you feel it...until he feels it.” “Like every day?” “Why not? When you’re walking from your car to the entrance of the grocery store, check in with him. By the way, you ever get cravings for chocolate?” “Sure, who doesn’t?!” “They’re his cravings, not yours.” “So this isn’t a metaphor...this is like a real thing you’re talking about.” “That’s a great way to put it. It’s like a real thing. Do you remember that quote by Newton I shared with you, where he said, 'To myself, I seem to have only been like a boy playing on the seashore'? He went on to say, 'amusing myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before 106


me.'” “That's beautiful! So how long do I keep telling my Little Prince guy all this?” “Until he believes you. Until he starts to settle down a bit. Until he retreats back inside you, feeling safe and loved and handsome. But you should still visit him from time to time. Bring him pretend books to read and an imaginary kitty to play with. Your Little Prince loves nothing more than having a kitten or a puppy to take care of.” “This all sounds so...” “Crazy?” “That's more charitably than I would have put it, but--yes!” “Hey, I warned you this weird...even Quantum weird.”

was

gonna

get

“And Quantum weird is as weird as it gets!” “I love that you know that! And I love you.” “Uhhhh...am I...supposed to say it back?” “No, you’re good. Now go talk to your Little Prince. Don’t skip this step--I’m gonna be checking up on you!” “Alright. Oh, hey...” “Yeah?” “About that ‘Lol’?” 107


“No.” “Dammit!”

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16: Her Inner Child--Alice

If

the ladies were allowed to pick one chapter they definitely didn’t want you to read, this would be it by a landslide. That’s because we’re about to pull the motherfucking curtain all the way back...and I think everybody’s gonna be a little surprised by who’s on the other side. Let’s just say your understanding of women is about to change. So, the ladies have their own version of a ‘Nice Guy’--and hers is known far and wide as her Good Girl. While our Nice Guy is nice to a fault, a woman's Good Girl isn’t particularly nice at all. The reason she's “good” has nothing to do with niceness and everything to do with virtue. In a word, her Good Girl is chaste. That means she's morally pure both in conduct (the pretty actions she takes) and in thought (the pretty thoughts she thinks.) A woman’s Good Girl wants to be virtuous. But even more than that--much more than that--her Good Girl wants to be known as virtuous. The success of your future interactions with women rests on grasping the implications of this. A woman strongly believes her Good Girl is “better” than the wantonly sexual parts of her Naughty Girl or Tigress. This deeply entrenched 109


belief is why strippers, whores and outright sluts rarely think of themselves as, well, slutty. They think of themselves as Good Girls who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive. Never forget that no man or woman is a monolith. We're not the labels that others try so recklessly to slap on us. Even female porn stars think (and act) like Good Girls most of the time. When you first meet a woman, you can never go wrong by assuming the ego state you're interacting with initially is her Good Girl—who naturally deserves to be treated with decorum and respect.

So that's how the world, and women themselves, tend to think of this ego state known as her “Good Girl”. But now let’s get all M. Narcissus Shymalamading-dong and add our own unexpected Twist Ending to the concept of a woman’s Good Girl. For the first time ever, you’re going to learn the real & true name and nature of this part of a woman. And knowing its real name and true nature will give you tremendous insight in interacting with women from this point forward. Just as ‘Nice Guy’ is a popular nickname for the little boy within us, so, too, ‘Good Girl’ is merely another way of referring to her inner child. And since our inner child is so charming, boyish and eager to be liked, you might reasonably expect that a woman's little girl would similarly be the very 110


model of Miss Congeniality. But...nope. As it turns out, her inner child is a nasty piece of work, indeed. Without further ado, the real & true name of the little girl within every woman is: Alice. As in the one from Wonderland. From those books by that slightly creepy English dude. You may know Alice from any number of colorful film adaptations, in which she's played by a comely lass ranging from mid-teens to her early twenties. However, in the original books by Lewis Carroll-itself just a stage name for the slightly creepy Charles Dodgson--the heroine of the Alice stories is only seven years old in the original and exactly seven and one half in the sequel. As with our Little Prince, this part of a woman may feel a couple of years older or younger to her, depending on when she experienced her own Big Wound--but, in any case, she will be as petulant, moody and demanding as only a 7 year-old girl can be. Alice is happy when she's getting her way. Otherwise, she’s beastly little tyrant and not to be trifled with. Oh, she has her moments of surprising sweetness, for sure. She can display a precious twinkle in her eye and a girlish lilt of her voice. Her laughter can remind 111


you of the ringing of miniature bells. Don’t you believe it. Her greatest weapons is her very unpredictability. You never know which Alice will show up—an adorable little angel...or one of Hell's Little Angels. Your Little Prince has a game to play: he adds charm, niceness and vulnerability to the experience you bring to the world. And a woman's Alice has her own game to play: she's the shit-detector, the tantrum-thrower and the “Inner Bitch” that women are so justifiably proud of. She's Scarface with a lollipop. You can't predict whether she'll offer you a lick of it or else bust it over your damn head. Just as with our Little Prince, a woman's Alice requires her own special care and feeding. To be sure, her needs resemble ours—her inner child desires to feel loved...and safe...and pretty. How they get these needs met is an altogether different story. Our Little Prince is so desperate for approval and recognition that he'll believe absolutely any kind word tossed his way. Simply tell a man he's sweet or helpful or noble...and his Little Prince will glow with pride for days. Yet tell a woman she possesses any of these same delightful characteristics and her Alice will instantly perk up, wondering what the hell kind of con you're trying to pull on her. 112


Just so you know, Alice doesn't trust grown ups in general and men in particular. She especially doesn’t trust any of those over-the-top compliments and expressions of enthusiasm that Nice Guys tend to shower on a woman they’ve just met. A man can sit there jibber-jabbering about how “pretty” and “amazing” a woman is, and the on the outside she’s smiling and nodding, but on the inside her Alice is getting more and more pissed...clearly you're trying to trick her in some way, shape or form that she hasn't yet figured out and she’s not going to stand for it. Don’t you know that seven year old girls are not to be trifled with?! That's about the time the woman excuses herself to go powder her nose at the club and you're thinking Big Daddy's getting himself some tonight except she keeps on powdering her nose and keeps on powdering it and finally you realize she's not coming back and you have no clue why. Well, sir, I'm telling you why. A woman's Alice wants and needs to hear that she's safe and loved and pretty—but she needs to hear it from the inside, not the outside. The very fact you're saying lots of nice stuff to her when you don’t even know her yet freaks her the hell out. Of course, the reason we men are so compelled to heap flattery upon a woman we’ve just met is because those are exactly the positive upstrokes that our poor, underappreciated Little Prince so desperately wants 113


to hear in return. The less you praise a woman's looks or tell her how much you ‘really like her’ upon first meeting her, the better. Because, in the end, Alice can only be nourished by hearing how safe, loved and pretty she is from within. One of the great tragedies in the lives of so many of the best and brightest women today is they never take time out of their busy schedules to water the secret garden inside them where Alice lives—and so she's in a perpetual state of being a little grumpy and starved for affection. But that’s not a problem you can fix. So stop trying. Besides, you’ve got a bigger problem to deal with... Your sweet, defenseless Little Prince has to play in the same sandbox as that precious spawn of Satan called Alice every single day from now on.

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17: The Universal Disconnect

Whenever

you're playing a specific game—whether that game is firefighter, gangsta or underwater contortionist in the new Cirque du Soleil show—the only way you can actually play it is when the appropriate part of you is “out” and doing its thing. You cannot give a talk to a youth group using the part of you that knows how to play tennis—even if your talk is about tennis. The side of you that knows how to play tennis doesn't also know how to give talks. That's a completely different aspect of you. (The reason why so many experts are laughably awful at teaching others what they know is because the side of them that's expert in something and the side that can communicate that expertise to others are two different sides...and these two parts are not typically in communication with one another--why would they be?!--so the part giving the talk often has no more how idea how the expert part operates than the people in the audience.) Whenever we’re not actively playing a game, we’re in Down Time. During Down Time--which can occur during our commute home, waiting for an elevator, during intermission of a Broadway musical and every other slice of free time we get--other parts of us can come 115


out. Sometimes a specific since emerges because it has an itch that needs scratching. It might only surface for a few moments—long enough to light a cigarette, say—before fading from sight for the next few minutes or hours. Or your horny Lover might emerge during your lunch break with such a vengeance that you're practically forced to duck into someplace private and rub one out in order to appease him. In theory, during Down Time any one of ego states can come out and play. In practice, most of them don't. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, as the “boyish” Isaac Newton taught us. Unless one of our parts has a burning desire that needs fulfilling–“I have GOT to stop procrastinating and get out there and serial-kill somebody today!”-during the cumulative hours-ish of our daily Down Time we tend to operate from a Default State during which one or two regulars from our cast of characters emerge. Uniquely, men have two possible default states: our old friend the Lover or our new friend the Little Prince. So when we’re not actively in astronaut mode or whatever, we move through the world either as a sexstarved, life-support-system for a penis...or else as an awkward, approval-seeking little boy. 116


Women have no fucking clue how confusing it is be a man! Meanwhile, a woman’s default state is customarily her little girl—her grinning, cherub-cheeked Alice who will cut you...and then tap her foot impatiently as she waits for you to bleed out. As Hamlet found out the hard way, “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” Often as not, when a man meets a woman, it's not an actual man meeting an actual woman. Instead it's more like our little boy meeting her little girl. Which leads directly to what I think of as the Universal Disconnect--which states that people tend to be both oblivious to which part of themselves is currently out...as well as oblivious to which part is out in the person they're communicating with. The Universal Disconnect would be almost comical if it weren't so damn tragical. She’s thinking one part of you is out and you’re thinking another part of her is out and nobody knows what the fuck’s going on and people still have the temerity to wonder aloud, “How come women and men can’t communicate?” Because we’re not even talking to each other is why. Our inner fucking children have taken over the asylum. It’s like Mentos hanging out with Diet Coke-you know something’s gonna go wrong somewhere! In the 1990's, John Gray said pretty much the same motherfucking thing using a completely different (and completely delightful, I should add) grand metaphor that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From 117


Venus. Despite selling more than 50 trillion-azoid copies-meaning it clearly resonated with a vast number of men and women, regardless of their planet of origin-Dr. Gray's work continues to be studiously disregarded by the Keepers of the Standard Dogma, who have seriously penned dozens of academic articles and even book-length diatribes arguing that his insights don't square up with their “superior, scientific understanding of the mind”...which itself is drawn largely from performing the same kinds of studies on the same, homogenous crop of incoming MIT psychology students each new school year. The vaunted War Between The Sexes is more accurately understood as two children—one shy and sensitive; the other petulant and moody—playing side-by-side in the same sandbox. Not even playing together, but side-by-side. Finally, after hours and years of longing looks, our bashful little boy sometimes tries to make friends with her. And the instant a woman senses that we're approaching her with our Nice Guy out, she's thinking, “Oh goody, a new Gay Best Friend!” (Noooooooot that there's anything wrong with that!) Indeed, the very best practice for connecting with a woman if your “plan” is to go on expensive dates and give her lots of free meals, gifts, compliments and shoulder rubs without getting anything in return except The Speech--“Oh, Roger, you know I don't like you in that way, but I still want to be best friends foreverrrrrrr!”--is to approach her with your Little Prince in the driver's seat. 118


Just don't do that if fucking her is your goal. Of course, actually talking a woman when your Little Prince is out isn’t usually going to be a problem, since this side of you is so hesitant and sensitive that he’s mostly waiting around for a pretty girl to come talk to him first. No shit, there are grown men wandering through pubs and tourist sights and networking mixers totally locked into their Little Prince--feeling self-conscious and shy, wondering why nobody’s paying any attention to them, desperate for a positive stroke or the slightest sign of recognition, from someone...anyone. Seriously, there are actually men who wait for women to approach them, who expect women to take all the risk of breaking the ice. You wanna know how I know this to be true?! Because I was that guy. I was him for a looooooooong time. Every time I left the house I took on the persona of my good little boy. I didn't know any better. Nobody ever bothered to tell me that I even had a Little Prince, much less that his insecurities and timidity thoroughly disqualified him from being the part of me that should be talking to women. I cannot tell you how many evenings I prowled the world without speaking to a single woman. I just looked at them, really earnestly, hoping they got the message that I “liked” them and would come up and put me out of my solitary misery. 119


Except they never did. Except when they did. And, believe me, having a woman finally come up and talk to you first is the worst thing that can happen to you...because now you believe that it's possible...now you imagine that if it happened once it can happen again...and so you try even less than you did before...you talk to even fewer women than ever...you retreat further and further inside yourself until it seems like you're looking through someone else's eyes at a wild party going on all around you where everybody already knows everybody else but somehow you're invisible and nobody notices or cares whether you come or go. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve cried myself to sleep. More than once.

Listen, that little guy inside us is a wonderful, sweet and vital part of who we are. But he's illequipped to drive an army tank, manage a nuclear reactor during a meltdown or seduce a woman. There are other parts of you that know how—or can fucking learn—to do those jobs. But it was never his fault. We inadvertently set up our Little Prince for failure. He’s a good boy. A very good boy. He’s part of us. We want and need to keep him close. Our Little 120


Prince represents our vulnerability and our kindness-which are attributes we always want to cultivate. Listen, a lot of the men who came before us , hunting fortunes, immortality and pussy, were not men of honor or integrity. They were not the smartest men in the room. But that's changing. You and I are redefining what it means to be a great man. You can be great and still be decent. A great man could, and should, also be a nice man. If what I’m telling you about the Universal Disconnect is true, that means many of the people you cross paths with every day are little boys and little girls walking around in in their big boy and big girl bodies. If you could see just beneath the surface of that rough-looking man with tats on his neck or that hot babe with the ice queen demeanor, you'd see a 7something year old hanging on for dear life, trying to navigate through the world without crashing into anything. So, be nice to other people. Realize you're often dealing with children, regardless of what they look like on the outside. More than two thousand years ago, Plato noted, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” And you know where that starts? 121


You know who you should especially start being nicer to? That adorable boy within you. You've been asking way too much of him, holding him to too high of a standard, treating him shabbily for the crime of being himself--being a Nice Guy. He's just a little kid, doing the best he can in a pretty damn complicated world. What if you started giving him a break? Giving yourself a break? Showing him--and you--some love? If you gain nothing else from our entire journey together other than a renewed appreciation and respect and love for yourself and that handsome little lad within you, then you will have gained much, my beautiful friend—so very much!

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IN PRAISE of NAUGHTY GIRLS

Last

night I was in bed with a lissome British lass whom I'd just met at a dance. As I peeled away the remaining layers of her clothing, she rested a willowy hand on my forearm and said, “I'm really attracted to you, but...there's a part of me that thinks I'm bad for doing this so soon.” “No, you are a good girl,” I reassured her, because she was. “And...that good girl part of you only likes playing the games that good girls play, right?!” “Right,” she agreed. “But you also have a naughty girl inside you, don't you?!” The merest of pauses, while she checked inside herself and found a match, and then, “Yes.” “And your naughty girl wants to come out and play with me now, doesn't she?!” “Yes.” “That's right. And your naughty girl has a secret, doesn't she?!” “She does?” “Yes, she does.” I brought my lips close to her ear. 123


“The secret is that your naughty girl is very, very naughty, isn't she?!” “Oh, yesssssssssssss!” We did not speak again for the next hour.

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18: All Aboard!

Next

we’re going to add another layer to our expanding model of the mind that will ultimately help us become masters of the long, lost art of seduction. And to do that let's put on our Imagining Caps the way Dr. Seuss used to do when he started a new book--he had a whole steamer trunk full of outlandish hats, don’t ya know–and imagine that the various parts of us are like crewmembers on a big ship. And the ship is a metaphor for the whole package of Who We Are. The outside of our ship is what others see when they look at us--the shape, size and color of our body, how much hair we have or don't have, the kinds of clothes we usually wear, all that external stuff. And, of course, everything we've explored so far concerns the inside of our ship—since that’s where the Party is! As long as we've got our imagining caps on, let's get crazy and pretend our ship is an old-timey wooden sailing ship, with lots of masts and jibs (whatever those are?) and ropes and heavy canvas sails to furl and unfurl. And there’s also a thing on ships called a Poop Deck--and I don’t even know what it’s for, but it’s a motherfucking poop deck, so we’re keepin’ it! So let's merge our newfound knowledge about 125


ourselves with our sailing vessel... We’ve got lots of different parts that make up our crew, and they take turns behind the big wooden steering wheel of our ship. Sometimes they take over for just a few minutes—long enough to place “one last bet” or do one “little line of coke”--and, at others, they might take over the wheel and all but refuse to let any other parts steer. This might be our workaholic ego state, hell-bent on leveling up to the next raise or promotion...or maybe our mad scientist obsessively searching for the Truth. At other times (lots of other times, as it turns out!), one of our internal crewmembers finds himself at the wheel with no earthly idea of where the ship is supposed to be headed. Often this part of us cavalierly pretends to be confident and certain of our intended direction, even while he's secretly terrified that he's doing it all wrong—as, indeed, he often is. Thus do we become lost at sea for days at a time or longer. Much longer. Years, sometimes. Then there are other times when none of our parts want to take over the helm at all because they don't feel they have the skills or experience to handle the situation we’re in. If you find yourself walking down a dark alley in a strange city, it's liable to dawn on your entire crew that not one of them ever bothered to learn, say, a martial art...and if your ship gets attacked now it'll be defenseless. 126


Substitute dark alley for approaching a darkhaired woman in a strange city, and you can only imagine the miserable plight of the crew as they realize that nobody ever took the time to figure out how to turn on and seduce a woman...well, until now! (Yay!) Still other situations might result in more than one member of your crew jostling for control of the wheel—with none of them willing to back down gracefully. This can happen when you go on vacation. Often your ego state that knows how to do your current job will keep showing up every morning at work-thirty, huffing and puffing because you’re “wasting time” digging your toes into the luxurious sands of an expansive beach laden with semi-naked beauties, when you should be working on that new PowerPoint presentation for the regional director. Finally, after a few peevish days of not getting his turn at the helm, the job part of you finally gets the game, upon which he repairs below decks to take a “little nap”. A week later, when you're back at work, it might take a day or longer to wake the sleepy bastard up so he can take his usual, weekday 9-5 turn behind the wheel of your ship.

As we’ve touched on before, communication between our crewmembers is usually quite poor. Our crew regularly don’t talk...and often don’t even like one another. The sexual side of many women (and some men) is a source of much embarrassment and discomfort to the rest of the crew—who will even try to lock that 127


part away in the brig of the ship if they can get away with it. (Which is why it sometimes takes a few shots of tequila to bust the sexual part out--and then all hell breaks loose, leaving various other crewmembers to clean up the ensuing mess for days to come.) Other unpopular members of our crew include any that play addictive games--whether cigarettes, gambling, drugs or collecting stamps. Especially collecting stamps. A great many of the problems that people believe they are plagued with actually boil down to faulty communication between members of their crew. For example, since time immemorial, professional writers have complained about a mythical entity called “writer's block” that supposedly keeps them from being able to do their work. Of course, writer's block doesn't actually exist. Writer's block simply means that another crewmember is at the wheel of the ship and doesn't want to relinquish control. Once you send this other part of you packing and install your writer behind wheel of the ship, writing cannot help but ensue.

Dude, it’s been fucking forever since I’ve shared a secret with you, so let’s do that now and let’s make it a good one. As in: the secret to succeeding at life. That's kinda important, right?! 128


Now I’m going to tell you this secret, but I do not want you to share this—or any of our other supersecret man business—with the ladies. They've got their own lady clubs, lady groups, lady gatherings, lady gurus and lady cults to keep them busy. (Plus, although they keep denying it, they also get together every Friday evening for lingerie-clad pillow fights AND nude oil wrestling--and they NEVER send us pics, so fuck them!) Without further ado... The secret to succeeding at life is to have the right crew member steering your ship at the right time—while your other parts either actively support it or at least stay the hell out of the way. And that's truly it. No matter what game you're playing, there's a part of you that knows how to play that game...and that part should be—indeed, must be—manning the helm until you decide to play some different game. Last year, when I first began digging the foundations for the work now before you, I lived for three neon-electric months in Las Vegas. During the day my writer would scribble furiously on scraps of paper, notebooks and the backs of napkins while the other parts of me looked on silently...and even a little dubiously. The other parts of me didn't even know what the hell my writer was doing—after all, they don't know what the game of writing entails, why would they?!-but they did know that if they stayed out of his motherfucking way, then later on they’d get their 129


turn. Sure enough, every evening around 9 pm I’d slip on my skinny jeans and cowboy boots, get all peacocked up, and walk from my apartment two blocks behind the MGM Grand to the legendary Las Vegas Strip. Then the other parts of me would get their turn to play the games they liked to play. And everybody was happy.

Since that time my ship has sailed from port to port, visiting San Francisco, Chiang Mai, Thailand and now London for months at a time. By the time you read these words, I’ll be embarked upon new adventures in some exotic corner of the world...and my ship will also be pointed in the direction of whatever new book I end up writing next. Depending on the time of day or night, my writer, my lover, my healer, my puppy body or some other part of me, whether large or small, will be taking the appropriate turn behind the wheel of my ship. Because that's how we operate on the inside. And, just for the record, these aren't just any ships. These mighty vessels of yours and mine are more than a little dark and dangerous. Indeed, we are boldly sailing into our futures aboard Pirate Ships. Because why the fuck wouldn't they be Pirate Ships, right?! 130


19: The Game Inside

Great job getting here, young man! As a reward for all the valuable time and energy you've put in so far, we shall wrap a big, sparkly bow around your new understanding of yourself and your fellow humanoids. We're about to roll out the Grand Metaphor we've been building towards since we first set sail together. The Grand Metaphor we’re fixin’ to mess with will dramatically help you improve your ability to play any game you choose--but mostly especially the game of seducing any available-ish woman into your bed. (And, for the record, just about every woman is available-ish.) Of course, you’re the Boss of You and always will be. So you can try out this new Grand Metaphor on the ladies, or you can continue thinking about your life the way everybody else does it—using the good old-fashioned, state-approved monopoly on human understanding known as the Standard Dogma. To recap, the Standard-Dogma dictates that our brains function precisely like wetwired computers, and in order to make any changes in our life we simply need to upload and run new software. In short, we are merely machines and they just so happen to have the “technology” to fix us. 131


Of course, despite all the weekend workshops, bestselling self-help books and You-Can-Do-It! magazine articles to the contrary, humans are not actually organized like machines. We don't run on an operating system that can be updated, debugged or reinstalled. People cannot program their thoughts to achieve success in the same way we can program a piece of software to mindlessly run a spreadsheet or whatnot. Our brain is not like a computer’s hard drive where permanent, unerasable memories live. Nor is our short-term memory akin to RAM. Not only is this a laughably false model of how homo sapiens really perceive ourselves and the world around us, it's not even remotely poetic—which is arguably the worst crime of all! All you need to know about the Standard Dogma is that it fails the Magic Test... lie.

If a piece of wisdom ain't got no Magic, it’s probably a

Selling people the myth that changing our “programming” will result in the life of our dreams has done more damage to collective human happiness than any movement since Barney the Dinosaur! I wish it were otherwise. Really I do. I wasted years of my life trying to fit the square peg of the Standard Dogma into my the round hole of my life. I figured that I must've been doing it wrong. You know, User Error. 132


I bought into every new and improved “technology” of the mind in a fruitless effort to jumpstart some of the changes I so desperately needed to make in my life. But...nothing. User Error. In the end, I realized there was no method to this madness, it was much ado about nothing and all's well didn't end well. My advice to you, the next time someone tries to sell you on a brain-based, upgradeyour-operating-system-to-change-your-life system: run! Run, sir! Run as fast as you can in the opposite direction! Escape before they rob you of your money. Or, worse still, rob you of your dreams. The human experience is far more complicated, infinitely darker and one helluva lot more magical than the sponsors of the big-data, computer-powered Standard Dogma want you to know. It's also a great deal more fun—as we're about to find out!

By the time Billy Shakespeare was penning such bewitching shows as The Tempest—which, I'll have you know, I'm going to see next week at the Globe Theatre here in London!--the dramatic arts had already enjoyed a two-thousand year reign as the 133


undisputed, undefeated heavyweight champion of mass entertainment. Then right around 1600, something happened that threw a wrench into the works. Instead of waiting around for a besotted playwright to finish scribbling a new play--which would then need to be laboriously memorized and faithfully performed--a group of semi-employed actors in Italy created a whole new genre of drama called Commedia dell-arte...which took the highly dramatic step of dispensing with scripts altogether. Instead the players donned masks and played roles representing various types of people: star-crossed lovers, bumbling servants, misers and the like. They performed their shows ex tempore—literally, “out of the moment”, which is just a fancy way of saying they made up their dialogue as they went along. The electric experience of an actor extemporaneously playing a role, rather than portraying a specific, unchanging character in a scripted play, was so wildly popular with audiences that even four centuries later it continues to cast a long shadow across the human imagination-culminating in a modern-day version of Commedia dell'arte in which the players don virtual masks and assume the guise of wizards, elves, warriors and so on in order to venture out on pretend adventures in an experience lasting anywhere from an hour to a month. Since Commedia dell'arte proved wickedly difficult for non-Italians to spell, this newest 134


evolution of the artform was dubbed a Role-Playing Game, or an RPG. RPGs allowed “ordinary” (as if!) people the chance to create endless--and endlessly satisfying-entertainments on their own without waiting for a traveling band of unwashed, improvisational actors from Italy to show up in their living rooms. In the 1970's, the first commercially available RPG hit the market in the form of Dungeons & Dragons, which dominated the imaginations of teenagers of all ages for a decade or more until RPGs also began to appear on the new-fangled video game consoles and primitive desktop computers which, when totally souped up and turbo-charged, boasted about half the computing power of a modern-day Crock pot. The way Role-Playing Games work is that you pick a character to play—an avatar to represent you in the game environment. This could be a man or a woman, a soldier or courtesan, good or evil, or any of dozens, if not hundreds, of variations on that theme. Depending on your intentions in the game, you equip your avatar with appropriate clothes, weapons and magic potions...and then you initially set out on a series of small, achievable Quests. As you go along, the Quests become more challenging, and you need to continually improve your “stats”--strength, experience, ability to heal, etc.-in order to continue succeeding. The gaming environment of an RPG also teems with Non-Player Characters—which basically means everybody who's not under the direct control of you 135


or another player. These so-called NPCs are typically “run” by the gaming environment itself to sell you weapons or give you clues about which direction you should venture next, or sometimes even to actively thwart your success...which, come to think of it, is no different from the real world, since it's effectively made up of you--the Player Character and hero of your own life--and 7 billion NPCs, most of whom are for you, while a few jealous bitches are against you! In addition, RPG features monsters of various shape and size. These “monsters” range from annoying Non-Player Characters who want to tag along with you on your Quests all the way up to Boss Monsters—the beating of which takes a non-trivial amount of preparation and effort, such that you can be truly said to have achieved an Epic Win when you triumph over these bastards! With the popularization of the Internet in the '90s, RPGs naturally also went online, allowing you to play with (and against) other players being controlled in real time by real people from every corner of the globe. Since it’s against the Rules for there to be a single innovation in the gaming world without an attendant acronym to describe it, the experience of playing RPGs online with a shitload of other peeps eventually became known as an MMORPG—for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, often referred to casually as an MMO. One of the first great success in the new MMO genre came from the seminal game, Ultima Online, 136


which emerged in the late '90s from the legendary, Austin, Texas gaming company Origin Systems— where your friend and humble narrator also put in 80-hour weeks of my own, albeit working as an Associate Producer on a completely different product line (Wing Commander, baby!) just down the hall from Richard Garriott's filthy, in-bred Ultima crew. The current zenith of MMO's is World of Warcraft, or WOW. With over 8 million monthly subscribers, WOW enjoys an ongoing success of staggering proportions that dwarves any other single artistic property in the world. (By way of contrast, a book might reach the New York Times Bestseller List selling as few as 20,000 copies in a month, and maintain a position on the list for years on end by selling merely a few thousand more per month. And that’s for a BEST seller!) The ubiquitously blonde Game Pimp, Dr. Jane McGonigal, has calculated that the world collectively spends billions of hours every week deeply immersed in MMOs--online Role-Playing Games. In addition, a sizable number of these people maintain multiple accounts—meaning they control a variety of different avatars, each representing a different aspect of themselves, you might say. In one account they might be a bad-ass fighter, in another a powerful wizard and healer, and so on. Or they might just have the one account, but seek out other, uniquely skilled human-controlled players to befriend in the gaming environment and then go on Quests with them. Banding together into a Questing Party has been a 137


prominent feature of RPGs even since the era of Dungeons & Dragons, but it's becoming ever more pronounced in our massively multiplayer online world. These days all the cool kids (who are utterly redefining what it means to be “cool”!) join a party of other cool kids with different abilities so they can be better prepared for whatever unforeseen obstacles show up in their path. (According to Jane McGonigal, who’s become something of a celebrity spokesmodel for MMOs, the very definition of playing computer games is “volunteering to tackle unnecessary obstacles”!) Whether assembling a little Party of their own through multiple accounts, or joining a larger Questing Party of real-life players, role-playing gamers clearly prefer to band together in groups in order to seek fame and fortune in the Game World. Now stay with me, baby--this has EVERYTHING to do with seducing women!

I'd like to suggest there's a very good reason for the Rise and Rise of online Role-Playing Games...and it's because everything about the experience seems so, well, familiar. And the reason it seems so familiar is because RPGs just accidentally happen to be (you know, in case you believe in coincidence and shit) exactly how we ourselves are organized on the inside. At any given instant, we have an avatar who’s “out”--and therefore representing us--and he’s 138


teaching chemistry or scaling the sheer face of K-2 or whatever he's doing...and, when he's done, another member of our internal crew takes over and it takes us past the next obstacle of cooking dinner or writing a new joke for our stand-up set tonight or the like. In practice, each side of us generally pursues its own solitary Quest. But while our parts mostly work in isolation, that’s not a rule or anything. Indeed, on those rare occasions when you get two (or more) parts of you to team together, that's where some serious magic can happen. Your ego state that's responsible for money could not be more different from your artistic side. But if your Inner Accountant and your Inner Artist can become friends and even collaborators, that's when it becomes possible to achieve a dream held by a nontrivial percentage of the human population: making a living as a full-time artist. And just like their virtual doppelgangers in the Game World, our internal avatars in the “Real World” (much more on this conceit later) are also always seeking to Level Up. Our parts want to get better at the games they play, until they achieve Mastery—and then they want to get even better still.

Let’s bring it home... For all practical purposes, the internal experience of being human is indistinguishable from playing a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. In both cases, there's a complete “world” to navigate through. In the ridiculously popular space139


faring MMO called Eve Online, for example, that world consists of an incredible 5000+ explorable star systems...while here on Planet Earth we've also got hundreds of countries and umpteen thousand cities to explore. Our experience in a Game--or in Life--is almost entirely dependent on how well we play...how much time and energy we put into reaching mastery in the endeavors that are important to us. And, in both cases, we are ultimately the Hero of the game. Is this shit crazy?! Yurp, most definitely! But you know what else is crazy? Life. Dat shit is serious crazy. So to explain crazy, you need to be crazy. Or at least think crazy. And proposing a theory of mind that says our inner world IS a Role-Playing Game, well, it's hard to imagine anything much crazier than that. On top of that, we're positing that our RealWorld Gaming Environment (a phrase I just this second made up to signify “reality”) is a vast, watery world where we sail about in pirate ships while unseen monsters lurk just beneath the surface of the waves as we sail from port to port in search of loot, plunder and wenches! And now we can finally affix a crazy name to this crazy-cakes model of the human experience that I’m 140


offering you. Let's call it the Inner RPG Theory of Mind, because that's precisely what it is. Now if you want to know who the really cool kids are these days, just look for the ones like Gabe Zichermann who talking about Gamification—the practice of modeling game design elements and applying them to the work-a-day world of customer retention, employee motivation and the like. What you and I are doing is standing Gamification completely on its head and taking it to its logical (okay, “logical” might be the worst possible word choice ever, but you know what I mean!) conclusion by applying Gamification to the inside of us. Computer games are fun...and bringing the elements of computer gaming to business and art is also fun. all.

But real life--that the fucking funnest thing of them

And I’ve come along to suggest that if your intention is genuinely to succeed at playing the game of real life, then there's a concept I’d encourage you to integrate into every cell of your body... The Real Game's on the Inside! Learning to play the Game Inside is the master key to understanding yourself. The Game Inside holds every secret to the money and recognition that's your due...every secret to fucking more women than ever before in your 141


life...and every secret to transmogrifying yourself into the motherfucking superhero that is your ultimate destiny. So now you know the game we’re playing, my friend.

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20: Actual Reality versus Game Reality

While

this colorful world of questing parties, adventure and leveling up is taking place inside us, what passes for “reality” continues its inexorable forward march on the outside. Let’s pour a tall, frosty pitcher of one of the bestkept secrets of them all... The reality that humans universally-ish agree to be true—the observable, measurable reality “out there”--and the reality that each and every one of us actually lives in— the one “in here”--have virtually nothing to do with one another. Big Education, which delivers us from toddlerness to adultification, and Big Self Help, the pay-as-you-go continuing education program for the rest of our life, both champion Actual Reality--a no-nonsense, masculine understanding of a world that is fundamentally made up of lots of 0's and 1's. Actual Reality concerns itself with the dates that a certain historical personage lived and died, the height of the Eiffel Tower in both feet and meters, and even all the arcane, Scrabble-icious names of all the dozens of protoplasmic parts of the 65 trillion odd cells that make up your beautiful body. Setting aside upwards of three millennia of philosophical hair-splitting, we can safely say that Actual Reality is whatever most people agree that it 143


is. Whether you've ever personally been to the Taj Mahal or not, lots of other fine folks have and they've taken so many methodically identical pictures of themselves standing in front of the damn thing that you'd be a fool to argue it ain't really there. The Taj Mahal is a real building somewhere in India or Antarctica or one of those places, and if you hop on enough planes, trains and tri-shaws, sooner or later your actual physical body will arrive at the actual physical structure of the palace and, oh, while you're there, remember to get your picture taken out front! At the same time, think of the scores of celebrities, movie stars, rock stars and elite athletes you're aware of. You “know” hundreds and hundreds of them by name, face and reputation. You may know a great deal about their background, what college they played football at, what other movie stars they married or fucked, the name of their soon-to-bereleased album—and yet chances are good that you will never, ever actually meet most of them in person. You know them only from movies and television and tabloids. In other words, you know them mostly, if not entirely, through your mind, not in actual reality, ya dig?! Same with Beethoven, Einstein and Hitler. We're not gonna meet any of these fellows in the flesh and blood, but they are no less real to us inside the pretend-iness of our minds. This is not to take anything away from actual reality—which we all agree is quite lovely. 144


Actual Reality is where they keep the flowers and mountains and lakes. That's also the reality we fuck in. It's the reality you want the subcontractors laying in the electrical wiring for your new house to be rooted in. And should your house should ever catch fire, you want actual firefighters to show up with lots and lots of actual water to put it out. (Metaphors are all well and good until your house is burning down, right?!) And yet... If your aim is to understand others—or yourself, most especially—then actual reality just gets in the way. The reality that you and I genuinely live in during the vast majority of our daily existence is a parallel, Matrix-y construct that I refer to as our Game Reality. Game Reality depends on a feminine knowing of the magical realm within us…which stands in direct contrast to the relentless rush toward masculine understanding in the nuts & bolts world of Actual Reality, Our search for understanding never ends. Meanwhile, knowing has no beginning, middle or end...it just is.

Actual Reality makes up what goes into history books, whereas Game Reality is what's made up in our imaginations. 145


It so happens that our personal, internal Game Reality “in here” trumps the well-documented, exhaustively footnoted Actual Reality “out there” approximately 100% of the time. The ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. --Morpheus Try this thought on for size... Actual Reality is merely a pretend reality about the world that everybody “agrees” to be true...whereas Game Reality turns out to be the actual reality in which each of us really lives—not least since it’s the reality where we make every large and small decision that adds up to our life experience. Most of us spend far less time in Actual Reality than we do in our Game Reality. In no way is this meant to knock concepts that don't actually exist. Some of the most important stuff in our lives doesn't exist. Take math. (Please!) Alone amongst the hard sciences, mathematics lacks an empirical component. Math doesn't exist independently of humans. There is no math Out There...it's all In Here. Math is just another model that helps us understand the world. But simply because it doesn't exist outside of our ability to think about it doesn't make math any less useful; if you're building a bridge 146


or a pyramid or a stairway to heaven, all them numbers and calculations and shit are indispensable. On the flipside, if some unborn genius invents a better model for understanding the height of a hypotenuse in a conical rhombus or whatnot, then we'll switch over to their model...and math as we currently know it will cease to exist in either Actual Reality or Game Reality. All of the ego states that we've been exploring— the various major and minor parts being us—dwell primarily in our Game Reality. But, like mathematics, they cast a long shadow across Actual Reality as well.

As I’ve mentioned, I currently live in London, home to the West End and some of the best theatre in the world. But the only theatre that truly counts for any of us is the one within. Inside of me, there's a charming, bouncy cast of characters that put on the show called The John McLean Experience (TM) every day of the year, rain or shine. It's the longest-running show in my body. If you are lucky enough to get a ticket, it's guaranteed to move you. You'll laugh, you'll cry, it's better than Cats...but not as good as Starlight Express. (Though, seriously, what is?!) Here's a secret you already knew, but perhaps 147


forgot that you knew... Other people mostly see you in the shared hallucination out here called the Universe...whereas you mostly see yourself in the private realm of your singular Multiverse. And here's the most profound takeaway from that... Arguably the most grievous error men make during a seduction is confusing our perceptions of a woman in the Universe—rooted in observable facts and measurable by our methodically analytical masculine minds—with the “reality” of her Multiverse—a tale charged with feminine magic played out by her inner crewmembers Once you fully grasp this, everything changes. Every. Thing. For some reason this appreciation of our internal world often surprises men, but rarely women. Perhaps the ladies already know they live on in a realm that operates under a completely different set of rules...a world where even the laws of physics can bend and change when appropriate. From your comfy seat in the front row of the show called Actual Reality, that sweet, black-haired Eastern Euro babe named Riza you met earlier at the street fair is a slender hottie with a super-sharp mind and an exceedingly naughty girl lurking just beneath the surface. Over on Planet Riza, however, she's chubby in all 148


the wrong places, of barely average intelligence, and thinks of herself as introverted, shy and even prudish. Here's a Pop Quiz for ya: Q: Which version of reality is the “true” one?! A: Hers. Period. This should no longer be a secret to you... In life, seduction and everything else...Game Reality trumps Actual Reality every time. The reason the Masculine is so often alone is because the Feminine finds it difficult to breathe in the analytical, sterile, airless laboratory of Universe. The reason the Feminine is so often unfulfilled is because the Masculine won't make the effort to explore the weird, unpredictable and frequently messy realm of her Multiverse. Let's briefly explore the strange case of British screen legend Audrey Hepburn. Most normal-thinking people would agree that this classic, doe-eyed beauty was a veritable paragon of feminine charms. But, of course, that's just our shared Actual Reality take on Audrey Hepburn. What of her Game Reality...which, again, for her is the only reality that counted? The world within Ms. Hepburn could not have been more distorted and different from our own. She believed herself to be plain on her best days, and 149


borderline ugly on her worst—with feet and nose too big and breasts too small, amongst numerous other physical short- (and long-) comings! Hepburn thought of her acting talents as middling, and never fully got over the public embarrassment of having the entirety of her singing in her signature role as Eliza Dolittle in the musical picture My Fair Lady secretly over-dubbed over by American playback singer Marni Nixon. Indeed, the deep insecurities of her “distorted” (by our standards, not hers) Multiverse led Hepburn to flee Hollywood completely by the age of 34 while still at the height of her popularity. Unable to reconcile the vast differences between the overwhelming positive appreciation of her adoring fans and her largely negative take within, she defaulted into her own personal Game Reality and all but retired from the public eye for the remainder of her life. It's easy to decry Audrey Hepburn's absurdly low opinion of herself as having nothing to do with reality as we know it, but that's precisely our point here... Reality as you and I know it has NOTHING to do with reality as Audrey Hepburn knew it. Or anybody else, for matter. Including Greta Garbo. The swedish bombshell was certainly the greatest of the prestige silent/talkie film stars. She similarly fled Tinseltown in just her mid-thirties over insecurities that her beauty had faded and that she would be exposed as a talentless hack...and lived for the next fifty years in a state of melancholy and reclusion. 150


Or, finally, consider the highest paid and most revered star of his era, Richard Burton. You can open the mammoth Richard Burton Diaries almost at random--and your glimpse into his Multiverse will reveal almost laughable insecurities and an utter bewilderment about how he ever became so successful. Indeed, you will never in your life meet anyone whose Game Reality of themselves exactly matches your Actual Reality appreciation (or contempt) for them.

Art springs forth from the Multiverse. Although Harry Potter doesn't “exist” in a Universe that scientists can measure, he sure as hell exists in the imaginations of the tens—if not hundreds—of millions of “kids” who read the books, watched the movies, went to the theme park and ate Sugar-Dusted Wizard Flakes for breakfast this morning. Ditto Buffy, Bugs and Spongebob. Not real...but still real. Again, like mathematics--the ultimate Fictionalism...a model of the world that is technically “make believe” and yet which is inordinately useful if we mutually pretend it's not. (Special Totally Not-Made-Up Bonus Fact: When aspiring mathwrights first join the Mathwright's Union, they are required to “clap if they believe in maths” and sternly warned that if they ever stop clapping then mathematics will cease to exist...just 151


like Tinker Bell.) So here's the big secret we've been driving towards... You do not seduce a woman in any world you can observe and measure--you seduce her in the Technicolor, Surround Sound world of her inner theatre. Even though we’ll never fully understand the Multiverse of a woman we’re seducing, we most certainly can learn to navigate the beguiling seas within her well enough to play many fun and exceedingly naughty games. And that leads us to– Wait, hold the fuck on for a moment! I just realized we're missing something here. There's a big fucking piece of the puzzle we haven't yet accounted for. You already know what it is, don’t you? I bet the second I mention what it is, you’ll be like, “Dude, I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while now--I was trying to tell you, but I didn’t know how!” Hey, next time do what the ladies do: THINK LOUDER! Externally we live in the Real-World Gaming Environment, while internally we function according to the Inner RPG Theory of Mind. But here’s the question--here’s the missing piece we’ve overlooked-how do our various crewmembers know when it’s their turn at the wheel...and how do they know where they’re supposed to be going? 152


In other words... Who the fuck's in charge around here?!

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21: So...Who's In Charge?

Perhaps most people lead lives of quiet desperation, in Thoreau’s oft-quoted take on the Universe, however, down in their Multiverse it’s a fucking loud, madcap carnival where sometimes one crewmember’s at the helm steering one way and another one comes along and steers in a different direction and there’s yet a third who keeps lowering the sails because he just wants to chill where they already are, and still another has a stomach ache but everyone’s ignoring him because it’s always something with him--and, through it all, nobody know who--if anybody--in charge inside us. Which seems like it would be kind of a useful thing to know, don’t ya think?! So let's put on our Sherlock Holmes hat and bust out our meerschaum pipe as we set off to discover who’s calling the shots around here, shall we?! The first and most obvious candidates for the position would come from the ranks of our Major and Minor parts...except for the inconvenient fact that each of them already has a game of their own to play. In any case, none of the individual parts we’ve met so far has the perspective to make global decisions about the overall direction in which we're headed. And even if they did have some kind of “master plan”, it's not likely they'd ever get much buy-in from 154


the rest of the crew. In a phrase... Our parts don't play well together. There's often a quite a bit of finger-pointing, namecalling and back-turning going on in there—you'd think they were ALL five to seven year-olds the way they act sometimes! Which is a bit of a problem since—well, lemme share with you another secret... Our decisions are never made in isolation. Or, better still... All our decisions are group decisions. Whether we're deciding to eat an ice cream cone or move in with our girlfriend, some of crew members are gonna be for it and others against it. Every decision we make—big or little, it don't matter—is the result of one of our ego states wanting something and then either getting (sometimes reluctant) acceptance from the principal members of the questing party within us all...or else railroading it through over the objections of others--often with hell to pay for their boorishness just down the road. If one part of you really wants to eat that entire box of chocolate donuts, it can always bum rush the steering wheel and gobble them little bitches down, but it's gonna hear about it for the rest of the fucking week as your other ego states berate it soundly for its ninety seconds of stolen glory. 155


Oh, by the way, I've got another little secret for you that some motherfucker sure as shit should've mentioned to you earlier rather than let you go through life wondering if you're fucking nuts or something... You know those voices in your head--that nearly constant, mostly negative chatter going on between your ears which nobody ever fucking talks about? Yeah, those voices! Have you ever wondered what that is? Like, who the fuck is in there yakking and yakking all the time? Most of that chatter—approximately 85% of it—is comprised of our various ego states talking to one another, usually in most uncivilized and uncharitable of tones! And like any good dysfunctional family, they're not even really listening to one another. Their idea of “negotiation” consists of more than one side talking at the same time while saying the exact same thing over and over again...which is why they usually repeat themselves ad nauseum. We'll circle back and explore the (possibly quite surprising) source of the remaining 15% of your internal voices—a totally made-up number, by the way, just in case you wondered where I got this or any other fact-like nugget that might inadvertently find its way into the Big Top of the 3-Ring Circus of Prosody that passes for my writing style--in due course. As long as a few parts of us resolutely want to do something like, say, abruptly quit our job as an attorney and become a full-time artist (a career track, 156


by the way, that I heartily endorse!) then our other ego states are occasionally willing to go along for the ride—as long as they get to keep playing their own games Of course, it’s also possible for a particularly insistent ego state to get all Dark Lord of Mordor on its fellow crewmembers and unilaterally dictate its iron will, upon which a heavy pall can fall over the ship for interminable stretches. Maybe that’s happened to you before...it certainly happened to me. The part of me that used to smoke became so strong that it eventually overwhelmed my other crewmembers completely--ultimately reaching a point where it smoked fully five entire packs of cigarettes every single day. This was a vast drain on the rest of the crew's available time, money and goodwill...and its reign of terror lasted for years and years. The rest of the crew didn't at all appreciate how Lil’ Smokey had taken over, but he was so powerful and intransigent in pursuit of his own game that they were powerless to resist him. Except...you want to know what they did? My other crewmembers met secretly below decks and talked in hushed tones about their upset with this one overbearing part of me. Although Lil' Smokey wasn't the boss of the ship (the only thing he was truly in charge of was smoking more cigarettes each day than any human alive), the crew essentially treated their upset as a mutiny. So they banded together to create a plan, and then 157


they carried out that plan. They recruited a little-used part of me whom we might call the Hypnotist, since that's precisely what he was. He was “born” years earlier when I happened to study the art of hypnosis with the late Gil Boyne—at that time widely considered the finest hypnotist in the land—but this part gradually faded into near-oblivion as other aspects of my life rose and fell in importance. The other members of my inner questing party woke up my Inner Hypnotist and put him on a training regime that rivaled Rocky IV. For realz, day and night, day and motherfucking night for more than two full years of my life did the Hypnotist repair to his laboratory like a Mad Scientist to prepare for his planned showdown with Lil' Smokey. He read every available book on psychology and alternate states of consciousness and shamanistic healing ever written. He absorbed thousands of hours of videos, podcasts and webcasts on topics ranging from motivation to cellular biology to Quantum mechanics. Along the way he successfully hypnotized scores of people for scores of problems until he himself became one of the finest hypnotists in the land. Upon which he finally came after Lil' Smokey with guns a-blazing. But their first encounter was disastrous. Lil' Smokey had pretended to be oblivious to all this frenzy of activity going on “behind the scenes”, but 158


he knew exactly what the other parts were up to. He’d watched the Hypnotist's years of training with bemusement, but also some wariness. Lil' Smokey knew precisely what was in store, and he wasn't about to back down from the fight. During their initial battle, the Hypnotist raged-and yet Lil' Smokey clung to the wheel of the ship for dear life. And when the storm ended, Lil' Smokey had prevailed. Immediately, gloatingly, he lit up another cigarette...and then another and another, to his customary tune of 100 per day. The crew huddled together in a panic. What to do now? For two long years they had set aside many of their own needs—my Puppy Body was fat and bloated, some 80 lbs. overweight, while my Lover hadn't gotten laid once during the past twenty-four months. They’d given the Hypnotist as much available bandwidth as possible, but it still wasn’t enough. Yet, they remained determined to regain control of the ship, and they continued to back the Hypnotist's ongoing efforts to increase his stats and experience points, if you will. Finally, nearly a year later, came another Big Showdown, and this time the Hypnotist handily defeated the smoking avatar that had lorded it over the others for so long. So complete was his defeat that Lil' Smokey went out with a whimper rather than a bang. 159


Overnight, this part of me went from five packs of cigarettes per day to ZERO without the slightest withdrawal symptom or upset. He agreed to forever stop playing the game of smoking and instead play a new and different game—one that better served the needs of the rest of the crew. True story, by the way. The moral, of course, is that just because one part of us can dominate our lives for years through smoking, drugs, alcohol or the like, doesn't make it “in charge”. Hell, a certain percentage of people, either through cultural grooming or watching one too many animal cruelty documentaries, develop a Vegetarian side of themselves...which itself can wield a Mussolini-esque level of power over their eating and (and even accessory) choices. When know-it-alls come along and try to “explain” to a person why being a vegetarian isn't normal or healthy or something, it has the same impact as warning someone not to smoke cigarettes. Look, not eating animals IS the motherfucking game the Vegetarian part plays. It's not going to stop playing its game because some Paleo jackass comes along and says they really oughta eat more beast. And it doesn't remotely matter to this part whether following a Paleo lifestyle actually is both a True and Useful eating strategy for health and weight maintenance. Here’s the thing... All our parts think the game they're already playing is 160


the best of all possible games. And our other parts just have to live with the consequences. Either we all eat steak...or nobody eats steak. You want to know why smokers get soooooooo annoyed when you lecture them about the evils of cigarettes? It's because as soon as you start telling them how awful it is, their smoking part scurries belowdecks and hides, while the other slower-moving crewmembers who happened to be hanging around have to endure yet another person’s tirade about a game they don't even fucking play. Our parts only care their own game. Whereas being in charge means looking out for the greater good of the community as a whole--because that's exactly what we are on the inside, a community. As our search for someone in charge continues, let’s return now to the other voicces in our head. You remember, the totally made up number of 20%?! (Sure, it was 15%, but...you know, inflation!) First of all, who the hell's voices are these if they're NOT the voices of our own crewmembers?! Well, my man, there's no easy way to break this to you so I'm just gonna blurt it out-You got Stowaways! Yup, there are peeps hitching rides on your boat-some hiding belowdecks and others walking around 161


in plain sight like Andy Warhol’s Slovokian mother living with him full-time at The Factory. These aren’t “real” people, mind you--they couldn’t exactly fit in your head, could they?!--but rather are virtual, 3D holographic versions. You might even think of them as holo-people. They include folks who’ve made a strong impression on you—good, bad or ugly—at some point in your life. These stowaways can include (but are by no means limited to) such holo-visitors as... Your mom Your dad Mentors Childhood teachers Religious figures—both historical or from your actual past Comic book heroes Playboy playmates from years gone by And an assemblage of celebrities, crushes and characters from literature or motion pictures These days every 12-14 year old girl in the Western world has at least one member of the British boy band, One Direction, as a stowaway on their ship...and, believe me, her “relationship” with Lil’ Ringo or Groucho or whatever their little Limey names are is probably more significant than any relationship she currently has with any real boys in her life. 162


Your stowaways can be like the Retirees from Hell! They don't pull their own weight; mostly they just sit around complaining about the direction you're headed, the service on board the ship and/or the weather. (Always the weather!) On the rare occasions these days when I play the game called Hypnosis, by far the #1 request I get from women is, “Can you hypnotize my MOTHER to...[move to another city / leave me alone / support my dreams for a change instead of hers/etc.]?” And I tell them, yes, I CAN hypnotize their mother to achieve any of those objectives—but only if that's what their mother actually wants...and if she comes to me personally. In any case, I explain, the problem isn't even their mother--whom they may only see or talk to once every month or three. The problem is their stowaway holo-mom, who lives inside them all the fucking time and offers an endless stream of unsolicited and undesired suggestions on “appropriate” choices in men, career, clothing, friends and so on. Pablo Picasso, meanwhile, was lorded over by his domineering father, who was never satisfied with his son's output--both in Actual Reality or in his Game Reality. Picasso’s holo-dad would stomp about the great ship, exhorting junior to use his considerable talents to finally become a “serious” artist and stop frittering away his life doing goddaman cubist paintings or worse. Characteristically, Picasso ignored him and did whatever the hell he wanted anyway. 163


What distinguishes a scratch golfer from one with a Q card and a viable career on the PGA Tour has far less to do with their skills at swinging a club than it does with their ability to manage and/or tune out the noisy crowd of doubters, nay-sayers and troublemakers stowed away within them who take the relative silence of the golf course as a green light to remind the hapless duffer how much he sucks at...well, everything. You wanna see what happens when the stowaways run amok and commandeer a ship in midcourse so they can gleefully run it aground like the Costa Concordia? Just watch the tape of any one of Phil Mickelson's slow-train-wreck-can't-look-away losses at a Major near you. It's a straightforward task to require any of your stowaways to walk the plank and rid them from your ship forevermore, but that's well outside the investigation you and I are currently conducting. Although several of our stowaways would relish the chance to be in charge of everything—and, indeed, often think they already are—in the end, these are not the droids we are looking for.

So what about Jesus--can He be the one in charge of us?! And the answer, without a doubt, is yes. Yes, indeed, Jesus (or any representative of one of God's wholly owned subsidiaries such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Rastafarianism) can be your Game Master. And you can have quite a happy and 164


even productive life with Jesus & Co. calling the shots—so long as sign up for them to oversee every aspect of your entire existence. You can't do this halfway. For it to really work, you've have to go all in like Saint Fucking Augustine or else you can just forget the whole thing. (Actual True Fact: Saint Augustine's job title was, “Bishop of Hippo”...that’s not relevant to anything, it’s just funny.) What I'm saying is that God cannot be your copilot. God—or Karl Marx or the leader of your local, neighborhood sex cult—has got to be flying the motherfucking plane day and night while you hang on for the ride. If that's the case with you, then keep on flying the friendly skies, baby! A full-fledged religion or even a full-time, sleepaway cult can and does serve as the Game Master for a good many people...however, if that's the case with you, then shame on you for reading such a wicked book as this! I'm totally telling on you the next time I have a conversation with God!

The more we run out of candidates for someone to be in charge of your ship’s crew, the closer we’re getting to the truth. With that in mind, here's a fun game you can play... Pick a friend. Any friend. Invite them for coffee or tea or yak's milk or whatever they drink in your neck of the woods. 165


Sit them down and after a polite preamble, throw this out there: “What's it like inside you? Is it...a little crazy? Chaotic sometimes? Maybe lots of times? As if nobody really knows what the hell's going on? As if nobody knows for sure if they're doing the right thing or not. Should they keep doing what they're doing...or do some other thing? There’s...there’s nobody in charge, is there?!” In just about every case, your friend will stare at look at you like they've just seen a ghost, and they’ll ask, just above a whisper, “How the hell do you know that?!” And you can smile and say, “Lucky guess?” Here’s the truth... Your average person simply doesn't know the hell's happening—or even supposed to be happening—inside themselves. As mythologist Joseph Campbell nimbly put it, “Life is like arriving late for a movie and having to figure out what's going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions.” Now, sure, if the friend you ask is Sir Richard Branson or any other bad-ass playing at the very top of their game, then their mileage may vary. But for 99.99999999999999999999999999% of the other people you come across in your daily lives, there's currently nobody within them—no part, no stowaway, no nothing—that's demonstrably and definitively in charge. Here’s the real secret of our own personal Game Master... 166


Within most people, there’s nobody in charge. Instead they drift from environment to environment, controlled by others and doing what they're told while there. At work, their boss tells them what to do during the workaday hours. Around the house, either their partner bosses them around or else the TV and Internet tell them what to believe about the world. The majority of people drift through their seven or eight decades of life doing whatever others outside of them tell them to do...others, by the way, who also don't have anybody in charge within them and so also don’t know what the fuck’s going on. Now this is through absolutely no fault of their own. Nobody ever sat these people down and said, “Oh, you ought to know there should be a Game Master”-or whatever term you wanna use–“inside you to direct your various crewmembers, because it will make succeeding at life about 10,000 FUCKING TIMES EASIER!” By sheer coincidence (again, if you believe in that sort of thing), the prevailing theory of mind known as the Standard Dogma leaves out this conversation entirely...because they want to be the ones in charge. Well, fuck dem bitches—we're doing it differently, me and you. You DO have a part of you that’s in charge. But--and this is the biggest fucking but of them 167


all!--that ego state isn't acting like it’s in charge because it's super-duper busy doing something else. And what, you may ask, is this side of you so busy doing that it doesn't have time to perform what you would think would be its most important job—being in charge of all the other parts of you by performing the good offices of being the Captain of your motherfucking Ship?! Do you really want to know what your Captain is busy doing instead of playing the only game he’s supposed to playing? 'Cause I gotta warn you, the answer ain't pretty! This next secret might be the biggest one of them all—and lemme tell ya, we got some whoppers to come!--and it goes like this... Your Captain is asleep. Yup, the Captain of your Ship is fucking sound asleep with a hastily scrawled “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging on his cabin door. I don't know about you, but I think maybe it's high time we got the crew together and started figuring out a way to wake his ass up?!

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22: Your Reluctant Hero

One of the reasons why humans tell each other the particular stories we tell is because we’re trying to understand ourselves better. So it should come as no surprise that perhaps the most common hero in the entire arc of poetry, literature and drama since the dawn of civilization is the Reluctant Hero. The reluctant hero is a Captain who doesn’t want to be a Captain if he can possibly help it--a figure plenty capable of greatness, but whose strong preference is to do a whole lot of nothing instead. Like a lot of us, right?! This character is so pervasive that mythologist Joseph Campbell built an entire career around identifying examples of the reluctant hero in the writing and story-telling traditions of every culture that ever existed. By splendid coincidence (again, if you believe in all that), the quintessential contemporary exemplar of the reluctant hero just so happens to be my own namesake-ish pal, John McClane, portrayed by Mr. Bruce Willis in the delightfully enduring Die Hard franchise. As a rule, John McClane is drawn into each story decidedly against his will—commonly arriving unshaven, sleep-deprived and still half-drunk from the night before. (Which explains why he can’t even 169


fucking spell “McLean” right!) Our own inner Captain is also the consummate reluctant hero, and can be a damn sight harder to recruit into the plotline of our life story than a New York City cop on semi-perpetual suspension for some misdeed or another. In the movies, there's always a big, splashy Nakatomi Tower that wants saving...but our day-to-day lives are decidedly less dramatic. Even in my own high-energy lifestyle as a bestselling author, playboy & globetrotter, there are long stretches where nothing of even passing interest takes place as I immerse myself in completing my latest book. But, honestly, it's in these quiet moments that we need our Captain most of all.

So what does he do, this Captain of ours? Or what could he do if he were to be awakened from his heavy slumbers? Big picture--he makes sure your vessel is always sailing in the direction of your current Epic Quest. Little picture, he directs your other crewmembers to perform their appropriate jobs at the appropriate times. Suppose you're an automobile mechanic by profession. If, instead of sending in the part of you that knows how to fix cars, your Captain mistakenly summons the wildly creative side of you that likes to dress in drag and sing show tunes, then you may lose all of your customers in short order. (Of course, you may also find fame and fortune as the “Cross170


Dressing Singing Mechanic”, so maybe it's worth a go!) Each of your crewmembers is always on its own, individual Mini-Quest of improving its ability to play the game it plays–whether that means lowering your handicap in golf or handicapping the horses--and one of your Captain's duties is to make sure they stay on top of their games, as well as get the resources they need to play them. (It does no good for your Captain to give your Inner Artist space to play and permission to play there, but not provide him with canvases, brushes and a sexy French beret. Your Captain also helps your crewmembers plan ahead. Once upon a time the part of you responsible for earning your bread and butter had to learn but one role in a lifetime. A man might be a tinker, sailor, soldier or spy...but very rarely all of them. Nowadays it's common for people to change careers—not jobs, but totally separate career paths— three or more times. Which means their job part needs almost constant training and retraining to stay on top of the demands that are put on it. And it's the Captain who can take the long view and plan ahead for such eventualities. It can be unusually difficult—nay, borderline impossible—to lose substantial weight or undergo any radical habit change while your Captain's still in drowsy-land. One of the great values of Alcoholics Anonymous is they successfully wake up the Captain of any drinker who shows up on their doorstep—and a rude awakening that often is! And the whole point of 171


continuing to attend AA meetings is to keep the Captain awake, since, if he nods off again, a person's ability to resist the siren song of booze can dwindle rapidly. Naturally, AA refers to the Captain as “God”-which is perfectly fine with both the Captain and God. Additionally, your Captain knows he can't just order your ego states around willy nilly. Like all pirate crews everywhere, your inner gang needs to be wined and dined every step of the way. Here's a secret that will serve you well the rest of your days, if you’ll take it to heart... All seduction starts from within. The path to greatness requires that you seduce your crewmembers first and everyone else a distant second. And you need your Captain for that.

Wow--just like that, you’ve reached the end of Level I! I’m so fucking proud of you! While I sincerely hope you like what we’ve covered so far, I promise you it just gets better and better as we go along. And the best shit’s still ahead. Next up we’re gonna build your personal stats all the way through Level II--culminating with showing you exactly how to wake up your Captain and keep his lazy ass awake from now on. 172


And waking your Captain up is worth the price of admission alone, my friend...so you do not wanna miss it! Here’s a preview of your journey, just down the road... Not too long from now, when all is going well and your crewmembers are progressing on their separate Mini-Quests, and you’re sailing to the port of your next Epic Quest, and your little boy is happily tucked away below decks, feeling safe and loved and handsome, and your Captain stands with strong legs planted firmly on the deck of your stately pirate ship, with the great canvas sails above almost buckling under the wind, and you can say, loud and confident, “I love being me!” and mean it--that's when you know that you’re well and truly on the path to greatness.

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CONGRATULATIONS—YOU HAVE COMPLETED LEVEL I!

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Cooked by Magic “Hang on a sec, I've got a question.” “Sure. Wait—what?! You're interrupting the flow of my book to ask me questions?” “It's not just your book. I'm part of the experience now, right?!” “Okay, yeah, fair enough.” “So isn't it really our book?” “I like it. Hey, look at you all takin’ charge and gettin' Captain-y and shit!” “Ha, maybe a little. Baby steps. So my question is...ummmmmm...” “Yesssssssss?” “I'm just gonna say it--dude, are you kidding me with your name? You are seriously named after the Die Hard guy?!” “No, I’m not named after him, but yes, that's my real name!” “Hold on a sec, your Actual Reality name...or your Game Reality name?” “Nice...both. It's really the name on my birth certificate. Even stranger is that I sorta look a little like him.” 175


“Uhhhhhh, no, you don't.” “What?! There's a passing resemblance.” “Not really.” “We're both all muscle-y and have shaved heads.” “But...he's handsome.” “I'm handsome.” “Uhhhh, okay, but you're writer-handsome...he's movie-star-handsome.” “I’ll accept that.” “But I'll pretend like you totally look like Bruce Willis if you'll say it.” “It?” “Yes, it. You know exactly what I’m talking about, tough guy.” “I'm not gonna say it.” “Oh, c'mon, just say it!” “Noooooo!” “You want me to keep reading your book, right?!” “Of course I do. More than anything in the world.” “Well, I'm going to stop reading right now unless you say it.” “I don't believe you.” 176


“Pinky swear I will.” “Ugh, okay, okay, I'll say it: 'Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!'” “That was fucking awesome! One more time--one more time!” “No--that’s it!” “Alright, I got another question.” “Shoot.” “It's more serious.” “I should fucking hope so.” “What you've been sharing up until now is so completely...different...from anything I've ever heard before that sometimes I can't help wondering, how the hell do you know all this?” “That's funny, the question I keep asking myself is, how the hell does everybody else NOT already know all this! Lemme ask you a question. How much do you know about Isaac Newton...a little or a lot?” “I know some. I know Newton was one of the most famous scientists who ever lived. I know he invented calculus, because I had to take two semesters of it in high school and I wanted to know who to blame for that black hole in my life. I know there's talk he might’ve had Asperger's because he had no friends, no social skills and rarely left the house—he just got up every morning and solved problems in physics and optics and mathematics for 18 hours straight and then went to bed and then got up the next day and did the same thing every day for his entire life without even the distraction of checking his FaceBook 177


status because it wouldn't be invented for another 300 years.” “Wow, you know a lot about Sir Isaac!” “I watch a lot of PBS.” “Duly noted. There's just one important distinction you left out—it wasn't merely scientific problems Isaac Newton was solving every day. There was another subject he was equally passionate about.” “What's that?” “Magic.” “Magic?” “Well, not magic-magic. Not sawing a woman in half magic.” “What other kind of magic is there?” “Real magic. Alchemical magic.” “As in turning lead into gold?” “Yes, that’s right.” “I read a lot of Dan Brown, too.” “Gotcha. So the fabled search for the Philosopher's Stone required Isaac Newton to become intimately familiar with the many mystical and unseen forces of nature.” “That doesn't sound like Newton. Isn't he the guy who invented the scientific method? I thought he was supposed to be the most logical and rational person human of all time?” 178


“That he was. And...he also devoted more than two decades of his life to an intense, even obsessive, study of the dark, forbidden alchemical arts. Night after night he pored over secret texts banned by the Church and performed arcane magical rituals that could’ve led to his excommunication or even execution. He worked feverishly around the clock, distilling compounds, melting metals and pronouncing forbidden incantations in cryptic languages.” “This is crazy!” “Sir Isaac famously said that to create his body of work he had to “stand on the shoulders of giants”, but he wasn't talking about any of his scientific contemporaries—whom he regarded as a sorry lot of weak-minded dunderheads, in any case. Instead, Newton referred to the revered alchemical masters who'd preceded him, blazing trails into the most esoteric and magical of the scientific arts. However, after 25 years of laboring, he ultimately broke off his alchemical studies.” “Do we know why?” “Newton was nothing if not a practical man. He finally managed to prove to himself that the Philosopher's Stone did not—indeed, could not—exist, and that was the end of that. But while he didn't figure out how to turn base metals into gold, as a direct result of putting in his requisite 10,000 hours into alchemy, the part of him that played the game called Science within him had reached such an unusual level of Mastery that he was able to discover something much larger and more important.” “There's something Philosopher's Stone?”

more

“Yes, it's called gravity.” 179

important

than

the


“Oh. They didn't have gravity back then?” “Well, they had it, but nobody knew about it.” “That makes more sense.” “It would simply never have occurred to a rational man of science that a magical force of nature might exist that-through no visible or physical means that we can discover-could influence other objects at a distance, whether that distance was just a few microns or across the entire expanse of the universe.” “I guess gravity's a big deal.” “It's the biggest deal of them all. Gravity not only holds the solar system in place, but it binds the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way together, along with several hundred billion other galaxies in the universe. And that's just the Observable Universe. The sparkly bits that we can actually see make up less than 5% of the mass of universe. Fully 25% of the universe is Dark Matter and the remaining 70% is Dark Energy.” “Are those more totally made-up numbers?” “No, not at all.” “Not even a little?!” “Okay, maybe I rounded them up a little!” “Ha, I knew it! Doesn't it feel good to be honest for a change?” “Not really, no.” “You'll get used to it.” 180


“I hope not. Anyhow, what I'm saying is that no rational person from the halls of science or academia with ever have come up with such a ridiculous notion as postulating that every atom in the universe was almost supernaturally bound to every other through some titanic and yet inexplicable phenomenon known as gravitation unless they'd first been cooked by magic!” “Cooked by—what?!” “Magic. Isaac Newton was cooked by magic.” “What does that even mean?” “All those long years of exposure to bewitchments, divinations and the black arts cooked Isaac Newton's brain through and through. As a result of being cooked by magic, Newton was able to make the leap to a whole new level of thinking about the universe being held together by a vast, mysterious and unknowable phenomenon of nature.” “Hold on, gravitation's not unknowable. We know all about it.” “Actually, we don't know all about it. To this very day nobody totally understands the exact mechanisms through which gravity works. You've heard of Richard Feynman?” “Sure, the kooky, Nobel Prize-winning physicist?” “The same. He said, 'Today we do not understand gravity in terms of anything else like electricity or magnetism. Gravity is independent and different—it sticks out like a kind of sore thumb.'” “So you're saying gravity is magic?” “No. Fuck gravity. I'm saying Isaac Newton was magical—he was cooked by magic.” 181


“And alchemy’s the way to get there...to become cooked by magic?” “It’s a way to get there. You can also can do it through the arts. The deeper and deeper you go into any artistic pursuit, the more you get cooked by magic.” “We can't all be artists.” “Maybe not, but we can all be artistic. Besides, even 'real' artists like Dali and Picasso aren't so much artists as they are chefs, cooking up magic for the rest of the class. Richard Feynman, no lie, did his best physics in the dark, sensual world of strip clubs, furiously scribbling complex equations on paper napkins while his brain was being cooked by over-loud music and the press of sweaty, halfnaked female flesh all around him. His fellow physicists— ultra smart dudes like Hans Bethe and Robert Oppenheimer—regularly referred to Feynman as The Magician.” “Somehow that doesn't surprise me. I heard he also loved to pound the bongos whenever possible.” “Indeed! You can also get cooked through travel or mystic pursuits. In the early '70s, an unknown geek named Steve Jobs went to India. His experience was equal parts beautiful, horrendous, spiritual and pedestrian. But India cooked Jobs to a crisp. He came back and almost immediately founded Apple Computer...while remaining a lifelong Buddhist and vegetarian, keeping his finger on the pulse of the magic that had cooked him.” “India cooked the Beatles, too, right?!” “Indeed it did. India has cooked many a great man.” “So you're saying magic is the answer?” 182


“No, I'm saying magic is the question. Magic can teach you to ask questions nobody else would even think of asking.” “How do you get cooked by magic, then?” “It doesn't matter how you do it—just find a way to explore the crazy. Past life regressions, psychedelic drugs, mystical religions, tantric sexuality or dolphin energy healing are all magical in their own right. I'm not making the case that specific wisdom can be found IN these arts, I'm suggesting that the path to fundamentally new and original thinking passes THROUGH them. When you start believing that some crazy shit might actually be true is when you can also start really coloring outside the lines in business or health or software design. I've played around for years in alternative healing modalities like hypnosis and chakra balancing and shamanism and more. They're all fucking nutty. None of them are true...except when they are true, which is most of the time. But the deep study of them changes you--” “It cooks you?” “Yes, it does. Listen, some of the best and brightest minds today are in the business world. But many of them are utterly incapable of truly original innovation or quantum leaps in thought such as Newton and others have made. Why do you think that is?” “Because...they haven't been cooked by magic?” “Exactly, exactly, exactly. You're familiar with Thomas Edison?” “Fucking duh.” “Did you know that one of the most eagerly anticipated 183


inventions during his lifetime—and one he talked about obsessively with friends, colleagues and even the press--was his Spirit Phone, which would enable people to communicate with the dead.” “For real?” “Yup, that bitch's brain was cooked all the way through!” “I'll say! What happened to his Spirit Phone?” “Edison died before he could finish it, but he actually hoped to continue working on it in the Beyond. Even his great scientific rival and arch-nemesis, Nikola Tesla—a man now widely considered to be Edison's intellectual superior—was guided by intense mystic experiences and religious visions from his earliest childhood all the way through his life.” “So what you are telling me is that, besides all the awesome stuff I'm going to learn about turning women on and seducing them, that I should go off on my own and also dive headlong into the study of some utterly bizarre and potentially useless field of knowledge or pursue outlandish artistic endeavors or travel to distant, exotic lands simply because these will somehow magically cook my appreciation of the world so much that I can eventually make quantum leaps of thought that will lead to even greater accomplishments in my life.” “Holy shit, perfect--wish I'd said that!” “You'll get there, young man. Maybe you just need to be Cooked by Magic a little more.” “Don't we all, baby, don't we all?” 184


“By the way, has anybody ever told you look like Bruce Willis?” “Nope, never.” “Didn't think so.”

185


GOOD JOB—YOU HAVE REACHED LEVEL II!

186


LEVEL II A NEW MODEL of YOU

187


23: Discovering The Secret Sauce of Greatness

Congratulations on arriving at Level II! What a badass you are! You've earned yourself another 5000 points--bringing your running total to a sexy 7000 points. Look, I realize that I've been throwing an awful lot at you. If you've come this far and your head hasn't exploded, give yourself a hearty pat on the back. You deserve it. And if your head has exploded...then grab some damn tissues, clean up the mess and let's get back to business! Meanwhile, many lesser men (and all the women, duh!) have long since stopped reading. Because they know better. They're way smarter than that. They're smarter than me and they're smarter than you. They know this Inner RPG theory of mind—seriously, we're organized like a fucking role-playing game?!--cannot possibly be true since it's never been measured by any of the great measuring devices or studied in any of the great studies undertaken by the Keepers of the Standard Dogma who are duly charged with measuring and studying exactly these kinds of things and then letting us know what they find out. And since nobody ever let us know about it, then the Inner RPG model cannot possibly be true. 188


Quod erat demonstrandum! (That's Latin for, “In yo face, bitch!”, in case you wondered.) Of course, they have a great point. It's entirely possible that not one concept, one secret or one distinction that I've shared with you so far--or that I'm gonna share with you if you continue this adventure-is True. Well, you know what I say? I say... Fuck the Truth! (Although it's gonna have to get in line behind gravity and “dem bitches” for its scheduled fucking!) What matters far more than if something (a theory of mind, the existence of God, the “spooky” theory of Quantum Entanglement) is True or not is...if it's Useful. And it turns out that my Inner RPG model is exceedingly Useful—but only if you want to do things like turn on more women than ever before and fuck them in the way they so deeply desire and deserve. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we just lost every academic in the world with that last pronouncement! But fuck academics! (We might even move them to the very front of the line!) Here's the only question you need to ask yourself as we go forward... 189


Do you wanna get laid like a pirate...or like an academic? Then choose accordingly.

Now that you've leveled up and are possessed of a hard-won understanding of how all humans operate on the inside, we're going to spend time focusing our energies on one specific iteration of homo sapiens: You. To that end, we're first going to get all N=1 on your ass, building your “stats” to improve your ability to attract higher caliber women through helping you get a handle on your beautiful body and present yourself with greater style. After all, you wouldn't go up against a Boss Monster in an online RPG without having sufficient strength, weapons and battle points to make it likely you'd prevail, would you?! In exactly the same way, this whole section of THE SEDUCTION BIBLE is designed to level you up to the point where you're prepared to hunt even the hottest of the hotties out in the Real-World Gaming Environment. Additionally, we're gonna gamify you in earnest as we delve into the Game Reality within you to discover how improving the quality of play of a few key members of your crew can make you that much more shag-alicious. And, finally, we’re gonna keep moving you in the direction of our ultimate goal. 190


You DO remember our ultimate goal together, right?! (And your answer better not be: “Get more pussy”!) Our ultimate goal is for you to fully and completely step into your greatness. Steve Jobs often noted that rival hardware and software companies shipped so much “shit work” because they failed to understand “how much craftsmanship goes into turning a great idea into a great product.” Anybody can have a great idea. Very few of those great ideas ever become great products. That's why Sturgeon's Law postulates that “90% of everything is crap”. Craftsmanship was behind everything great that Steve Jobs accomplished at Apple. Here’s a burning secret to keep you warm during the long Winter of Discontent we each must endure... Craftsmanship is the secret sauce of greatness. You, sir, are a great idea. But we need to apply some craftsmanship to transform you from that great idea into the “insanely great” man you've always been destined to become. So that's what we're doing here. You know, in case you wondered. This is fun, right?! Seriously, are you having a good time? 'Cause I'm having a fucking blast! 191


I thoroughly enjoy your willingness to keep playing this crazy game with me. I hope we get a chance to meet one day so I can hear wild, sordid tales of your success with women and with life—and maybe we'll even have a chance to go out and create some new, naughty adventures together. Maybe we'll meet twins. Conjoined twins. Would that be sick or what?!

192


24: Awakening Your Questing Party

In the absence of a Captain, our inner crewmembers grow complacent and lazy—even to the point of falling asleep. At any given moment, several of our major and minor parts might be totally asleep, and so aren’t able to perform their jobs. Which can put us in a bit of a sticky wicket, as the Brits supposedly say, if a particular part is required to help us achieve our goals. If your current dream is to join the US Foreign Service and the part of you that was once upon a time adept at the Russian language is dormant, then your chances of getting in would be diminished. In that case, during the weeks and months leading up to the arduous tests and interviews required for admittance into the Foreign Service you’d want to wake up your inner Rusky by reviewing your hardwon knowledge of the language and using it as much as possible. If there was no boss at your job, some of the employees would half-asses it around the joint, others wouldn’t bothered to show up at all. Similarly, our parts can stop coming into the office...until we once more begin insisting that they do. As a teenager, I taught myself to juggle as a teenager and became fairly adept at it. When I went 193


off to university, I stopped juggling and ultimately forgot about that side of me entirely. As a natural result of disinterest and disuse, the part of me that had learned this art fell asleep...all through my twenties and half of my thirties. Fast forward to about three years ago, when I woke up one day and realized I hadn't juggled since my teens. I'd forgotten that I even knew how. So I found some balls and started playing the game called Juggling again. I still remembered the basics, of course, but my skills had deteriorated during all those Rip Van Winkle-y years, and it took many hours of practice over the ensuing months to fully reawaken this part to its former glory. And now I’m a much better juggler than ever before. Waking up a sleeping crewmember is easy... Simply start playing the game it plays and it will eventually awaken; it doesn't really have a choice, since no other part of you knows how to play that game. Three years ago, when I decided to juggle again, there was an initial period when I had three balls in hand and then I started throwing them in the air. If you'd been there in Actual Reality with me, you would have seen one ball after another being launched into the air and then caught by the opposite hand until pretty soon I failed to catch one or all of them. Life can often be pretty ho-hum on the outside...but it’s almost always a madcap, door-slamming farce on the inside. 194


So if you'd been able to enter my Game Reality during that first juggling session in some fifteen years, it would’ve been rather entertaining... At the moment when I threw the first ball in the air, every one of my crewmembers then on deck would've scrambled for cover, since not a one of them had the first clue how to play this game called Juggling. Much chaos, yelling and frenetic running would have ensued. Eventually the brouhaha would've caused the juggling part of me to stir...and he would have made his way sleepily to the deck to discover the haps. Instantly he would've grasped the situation—the first ball that I'd thrown had arced towards my opposite hand and it was about to be time to catch it and then throw it again. Although surprised and still drowsy, my juggling part would've shouted something like, “Oh, I got this!” as he dashed to the steering wheel and took charge—catching that first ball and throwing it in the air again, and so on with the infinite game called juggling. The Universe operates according to Real Time...as determined by whoever the fuck decides that shit. Meanwhile, our Multiverse runs on its own internal system of time we can call the Game Clock. In the second or so it took the first ball to reach its apogee and begin descending towards my opposite hand, the brouhaha within me took several minutes to unfold according to the Game Clock. So that's how I woke up my juggling part. 195


You can wake up any of your dormant crewmembers by following the same path of giving that part of you space to place and permission to play there. If you want to awaken your spiritual side, duck into one of the great cathedrals of the world and that part of you will figure it the fuck out. Any part of us, whether major or minor, can fall asleep—and they regularly do. In the course of your seductions, you will encounter women whose sexuality has fallen asleep for one reason or another. Now it’s certainly possible to rouse a woman's Naughty Girl from her slumbers-if only for an evening--however that requires pouring a considerable amount of energy and passion into your seduction in order to jump start that sleeping side of her...which, if this is something a woman truly desires--and it sometimes is--can be a fantastic use of your abundant masculine energy and passion.

Of course, sometimes a part isn't asleep, it simply doesn't exist. Imagine you're walking down the mean streets and some thugs steps out of the shadows to mumble something about having some crack for sale. You do a quick check-in with your crew and if you do not find a side of yourself that plays the game called Smoking Crack, then you politely decline. (Of course, if one of your crewmembers happens to be playing the game called Undercover Cop, then your response may vary!) I never developed an ego state that gambles. I 196


lived in Las Vegas for three entire months last year without spending a single nickel on a game of chance. When I walked through casinos, I was as unimpressed as a lesbian at a Chippendale's show! I wasn't resisting temptation...I was simply devoid of it. In the same way, it would never occur to you to spend the afternoon practicing the violin unless you already had an ego state which at some point in time had learned to play the damn thing. You cannot play a game unless you already have a member of your crew that knows how to play it—or is at least willing to learn. Which is, of course, why we don’t already know how to do everything. It's possible to create a new side of ourselves at absolutely any point during life, but the older we get the more ZING we need to apply to creating this new part if we want it to survive the birthing process. You can generate a new ego state that scuba dives, speaks Hindi or bends it like Beckham at 50 or 90, but you better bring some motherfucking juice, baby. One of the tasks facing your Captain is to waking up and assembling the appropriate crewmembers to successfully reach your next Epic Quest, whatever that may be. Usually this entails rounding up the Usual Suspects--but one of the great charms of the human race is that we can set out to accomplish things we've never done before. 197


If your current dream is to write a novel, then you're gonna need a side of your that plays the game called Writing in order to realize that ambition. And that's the purpose behind reading a book on becoming a writer or attending writing seminars and conferences, etc.--to help you give birth to this new part of you and nurture it until it can survive on its own.

Once formed, each of our parts possesses a burning desire to get gooder and gooder at playing their game. Our inner clothing designer loves nothing more than evolving into the second coming of Jean Paul Gaultier. The part of us that plays the game called Healing is driven to improve its ability to help us recover from big and little medical setbacks—and grows frustrated when the aging process finally outstrips its ability to level up and maintain the body in perfect health. This innate drive to become better, stronger and faster explains why smokers tend to smoke more cigarettes with each passing year. Despite the smoldering disdain from the rest of the crew, the part of us that smokes takes great pride in playing its game and enjoys leveling up to 3 packs per day or 4 or the Mt. Everest of Smoking that my Lil' Smokey once scaled of 5 full packs of cigarettes each and every day. If a crewmember keeps playing the same game long enough it can reach prodigious levels of accomplishment. In his book-length TED talk, Outliers, Canadian 198


journalist and bon vivant, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 Hour Rule—which proposes that if we put in enough thousands of hours of dedicated practice, any one of us can become a badass in any conceivable human endeavor, whether it's hockey, card-playing or ventriloquism. More recently, a clever chap named Robert Greene wrote a book called Mastery, in which he gamely explores the preternatural abilities of masters who've reached the lofty perch of 15,000 or even 20,000 of focused practice in a discipline. I’d like to add an important, but widely overlooked, distinction here... This mastery process only applies to a single member of our inner crew at a time. If I give my juggling side the gift of 10,000 hours of practice over the next few years, I would be one of the top jugglers on the planet. We interrupt this program with Breaking News... There are only so many hours in the day. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Obviously, if my juggler hogs all 10,000 of those hours, then the rest of my questing party will suffer. Which is fine IF my current Epic Quest is run away and join the circus. However, if my ambition is to make a living as a concert pianist, then perhaps tickling the ivories would be a better use of my free time than throwing some stupid balls in the air and 199


catching them again. In the vocabulary of MMOs... Our stats are non-transferrable. In an actual online Role-Playing Game, if a lone member of my questing party defeats a Boss Monster, his experience points will increase. But, unless the rest of us were active participants in the skirmish, his victory has no bearing on our stats. Being seriously good at telling stories doesn't automatically also make Joss Whedon an expert linguist or world-class chess player. Those members of his crew—if he even has them—have to develop and enhance their abilities on their own. That said, it's also true that like attracts like. As one side of you becomes more of a bad-ass by marching inexorably in the direction of 10,000 of focused practice, it naturally prefers hanging out with other bad-asses—in the same way that millionaires like to hang out with other millionaires and celebrities with other celebrities. When one crewmember levels up, others may become inspired to join the first one. This is why badass people are often bad-ass in several different areas of life. Gary Vaynerchuk isn't just a social media expert, he's also a world-class authority on wine AND he's working on putting in his 10,000 hours to become an Awesome Dad. And, yes, being a Dad is a part of us that must be generated ex nihilo--from nothing--like any new part. 200


Except it’s the exact opposite of nothing...if you've ever experienced that electric moment of looking at a pregnancy urine test-strip and seeing the + sign appear, that bubbling, whirling, churning feeling in your gut is the birth of a new crewmember that will henceforth be known as Dad. When a part of us attains the level of mastery, the payoffs can be many. Becoming “10,000 hours good” in almost any artistic endeavor—even something as “lowly” as juggling—can usually be parlayed into a handsome living. Similarly, becoming a master at computer programming, plumbing or cartography (they still have that, right?!) will earn society's unending appreciation in the form of a regular paycheck and all the admiration that accrues to that profession. At the same time, folks frequently develop parts of themselves that become really, really good at behaviors that are not well-rewarded or wellregarded by others. If you become a master at writing hour-long television shows, people will line up to throw money at you. But if you become a master at watching hour-long television shows--and people do--nobody takes much notice...except your beleaguered wife on her way out the door. But that's just on the outside of you. On the inside...well, you already know that everything happening on the inside goes down in its own 201


separate reality. In the razzle-dazzle realm within you, no part is any better or more worthy than any other. In Richard Feynman’s Multiverse, the part of him that played the game called Bongos was just as legitimate as the part of him that played the game called Theoretical Physics. Here’s one of the most important lessons we can ever learn about ourselves or others... Regardless of the “value” placed upon a game in Actual Reality, any game one of our crewmembers plays is equally worthy in the domain of our Game Reality. We all have one or more ego states that play games that may be considered “worthless” out in the Universe, but we still like playing them. Within our Multiverse, a crewmember that plays the game called Pothead is as legitimate as one playing the game called Medical Student. Yet, while that may be true on the inside of us, it's not always the most useful strategy in the grand scheme of things. Apropos which, you have two distinct crewmembers that may be suffering from some level of sleep-inducing neglect, and I’d like to have a go at seducing you (what else?!) into waking them up and getting them back on track in their own pursuit of 10,000 hours of Hoopity-Doo. So let’s quickly examine each in turn.

202


25: Letting Your Puppy Body Out to Play

Your

success in any of the games you like playing depends upon the crewmembers within you getting juicy opportunities to play those games on your behalf. We've already made the acquaintance of our Lover, who can seduce women for us, our Little Prince, who can make himself a charming ally of the people we meet, and our Captain, who can increasingly awaken from his slumbers and steer the entire ship of you into the brightest of all possible futures. And now I'd like to offer you a totally different way of thinking about your body than you've perhaps ever been exposed to before. Big Medicine (a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Dogma, Inc.) insists that your body is a mechanical contraption made up of many thousands of moving parts, a fair number of which can be replaced or repaired when they break—rather like you'd replace the rear window of your car if those pesky kids down the street “accidentally” break it with their damn ball-playing and tomfoolery. Indeed, whenever your body faces a real crisis, the mechanistic model proves to be both True and Useful. A couple of summers ago when I crashed my bicycle in downtown Austin and broke my collarbone, I sure 203


as fuck went to the hospital to let the good doctors have a go at fixing it. However, Big Medicine's model of the body has a fatal flaw. By insisting that humans are only an assemblage of parts, they've painted themselves into a corner from which they can never ever escape. Here's the big secret that Big Medicine will never endorse, but which every adult already knows to be true... Your body possesses a consciousness and intelligence of its own. Not only that, but your body even has its own ego state to represent it amongst the colorful panoply of characters inside you, and it answers to the deliberately bouncy moniker of Puppy Body—but that's only because the name Tigger was already taken! Not only is your Puppy Body a full-fledged member of your inner crew, but it's also arguably the “smartest” part of them all—responsible for a great many of the functions that scientists and psychologists who have never been cooked by magic misattribute to our brains. Just to offer you a single example out of many...besides the other delightful games it plays, your Puppy Body also happens to be the primary repository of your traumas. Now holding onto a trauma might not seem to you or me like a very enjoyable game to play, but we're not the ones playing it, now are we? 204


Our crewmembers take their games quite seriously. In any case, just because something is a game doesn't inherently mean it has to be fun. Smoking cigarettes is not a remotely enjoyable game to play, but that doesn't deter the very determined part of us that smokes from “playing” it with great earnestness and at every opportunity. Just to be as clear as an unmuddied lake, our physical body has an avatar amongst the members of the questing party within us. Our Puppy Body can look like what we imagine ourselves to look like-which is usually a far cry from what everybody else thinks we look like--or it can even look exactly like a real puppy. Either way, this part possesses the unique distinction of existing both in the Multiverse Game inside us, and in our physical flesh and blood version out here in the Universe. Which leads us straight to...juggling.

Whenever I go to juggle, various crewmembers and stowaways watch with wary bemusement for a couple of moments and then, unable to restrain themselves, one or more of them finally busts out with something like, “What's the point of this, exactly?” On the one hand, they DO have a point. There is no real point to juggling. It's just a swell example of what the People In Charge of Naming Things call an Infinite Game—a game without a distinct starting or stopping point, and whose only goal is to continue playing. 205


Hunting, of course, is the quintessential infinite game...which is precisely why there is no conceivable end to the amount of monuments to build, wealth to amass or women to seduce. We don't do these things to win...we do them so we can keep playing the game. So when I'm juggling, each time I catch the ball my “only” reward is that I get to keep playing the game called juggling for one more throw. I throw the ball back in the air, and if I successfully catch it again, then the fun continues. Most of our inner crewmembers don’t understand infinite games. They prefers Finite Games, in which there's a beginning, middle and end, along with a demonstrable winner and one or more losers at the conclusion. So the first time I miss a ball when juggling, one of my parts goes, “Ha, ha, you lose! Okay, now that you've lost that game, let's go do something else!” Upon which my Captain tells them, “Uhhhh, we’re not playing this game for you. We’re playing it because it's the game the Puppy Body wants to play right now. Why don’t you go hang out in the Ready Room with the rest of the gang—and when we're all done here we'll let you know.” Well, they can’t argue with that. So they trundle off and I'm left alone to juggle. Except, I'm not alone at all. I'm there with one of my best friends in the world... 206


My Puppy Body. Our Puppy Body is the most authentic physical expression of who we are in the world. On the outside, it's made up of muscles and bones and squishy bits that are animated by undistilled puppy energy. At its best, it leaps and gambols and cavorts about the Real-World Gaming Environment, unrestrained by traditional thoughts. When I'm juggling and miss a catch, my Puppy Body doesn't judge or criticize itself for missing. Instead it breathlessly says, “Pick the ball up! Throw it again! Throw it again! Wheeeeeeee!” When you're fully in Puppy Body, you are in a state of pure being. No thoughts. No judgments. No story about what's happening around you and no plan about what's coming next. You’re just fully present and alert. Of course, you don't have to juggle to connect with your Puppy Body. Dancing like a fool, splashing around in a body of water or even good, oldfashioned walking around for hours at time are perfectly legit ways to let your Puppy Body out to play. One of the outcomes of our j0urney together is that you'll discover how to create more opportunities in your life to fuck. And you know who loves to fuck? 207


Your Puppy Body. And you know who loves to fuck even more than your Puppy Body? A woman's Puppy Body. Because it can tolerate even more stimulus and hold onto more sensation than ours. Forget Boy Meets Girl...when Puppy Body meets Puppy Body, now that’s a fucking party!

As a boy, being in your Puppy Body was your natural state. You moved through the world completely connected with your arms and legs and fingers and “feet-fingers”, as the Polish say, since, no lie, they don't have a fucking separate word for toes. If you caught the first whiff of a desire to climb the nearest tree, before you knew it you were thirty feet off the ground, precariously balanced on the thinning branches near the top, the wind in your hair and a smile on your face, with no thought at all about the “point” of climbing a tree. Having a relationship with your Puppy Body isn't a relic of your long-gone youth, it is your natural state and your birthright. I could write an entire book on helping you reconnect and fall back in love with your Puppy Body. Oh, wait...as it turns out, I already did. Although the Low Carb Revolution looks like a weight-loss book, it's really a love story. 208


A love story about rekindling your affair with your beautiful body. And regardless of the shape and size of your body, it is beautiful. Here’s the only secret to falling back in love with your body that you need to know... Your body is beautiful exactly the way it is right now. That said, if you start letting your Puppy Body out to play more, a natural result is that your body can become leaner, fitter and happier. You've no doubt heard that women are not nearly as attached to the outside of the package—our height, weight and looks—as are men. Women often say they don’t care what men look like, because it’s their insides that matter most. But here's of womenhood's most closely guarded secrets... Women are not nearly as unattached to the outside of a man as they pretend. All things being equal, a woman will select a fit, stylish man over an overweight schlubb decked out in XXL warmups and an ill-fitting t-shirt that makes him look 8 1/2 months pregnant basically 100 times out of 100. Yet it has become firmly entrenched in the modern male psyche that women “don't care what we look like”...and as a direct result we've let ourselves sink into Jabba-the-Hut-esque levels of gluttony and sloth. Along the way, we’ve become more and more 209


disconnected from our beautiful bodies. We've taken refuge inside our heads, self-imprisoned in our own personal Matrix—plugged into the digital chaos of computer screens, televisions, newspapers, magazines and, by most recent counts, more than 10,000 separate advertising messages each day. The real party is in your body. Your Puppy Body craves touch, connection and intimacy with others and with yourself. And, frankly, your Puppy Body misses you. It misses the attention you paid to it when you were a wee lad. It misses how connected your brain and your physical body once were. How you used to move through the world like a puppy—with boundless energy and enthusiasm. You really want to attract more women? Fall back in love with your body and they'll find you. No lie. Because when you love your body, you feed it real food instead of carb-age and processed Krap. When you love your body, you let it out to play every day. When you love your body, it shows. As a lovely byproduct of rekindling the long-lost love affair with your Puppy Body, the deeper you go in this relationship, the less you'll weigh and the more spring you'll have in your step. Men who are well connected with their beautiful 210


bodies are regularly given the same social value “points” as men ten or even twenty years their junior. Again... This isn't about getting INTO shape...it's about get OUT of your head and back into your body. The Low Carb Revolution is a sweeping adventure of some 460 pages, the final third of which also introduces an entirely new model of Habits--how our habits are formed and how we can change them more easily than we ever thought possible--that we simply won’t have the space to address here. I want you to get it and read it, my man, because it’ll jump start your relationship with your Puppy Body. And you already know you’ll like it since I fucking wrote it, so what else is there to think about?!

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26: Releasing Your Inner Artist

Sometimes

it's fun to build slowly up to a big reveal...while at others it can be a treat to just kick things off with the punchline, so let's try it that way around this time. Here’s another secret to getting more women in your bed... Make more art. The more you open up to your creative expression, the more attractive women will find you. If you're living a creative life, a woman can smell it from a mile away, she can sense the art coursing through your veins...and it really turns her on. And it turns the rest of the universe on. Everybody’s favorite psychedelic madman & mystic, Terrence McKenna, liked to say: “The universe is an art-making machine--an engine for the production of ever more novel forms of connectedness.” The “art” you make can be absolutely anything. It can be what we traditionally think of as art, such as writing epic poems, painting frescoes or sculpting figures out of mammoth blocks of marble. Or it can be gardening, knitting, building musical instruments, playing musical instruments or even something as humble as banging on bongo drums. 212


It can be tagging, poi spinning, decoupaging, busking or dancing. In fact, if you want the most artistic bang for your buck combined with a built-in audience of women to bang, make it dancing. You wanna know where the hottest women in your town hang out? Dance classes. But whatever it is, do something creative. Make some kind of art. Not even for the money, but for the experience of it. Besides, all the cool kids make art. Think about it... In most cultures, the people with the greatest social value are ALL artists to a greater or lesser degree. We're talking actors, comedians, filmmakers and rockstars. Even professional athletes are merely artists whose bodies are the brushes and the playing fields are the canvases. Successful artists of every stripe often make the most money, command the highest status and enjoy a practically unlimited selection of willing sexual partners. Women feel there's something enticing about a man who's connected to his creative urges. As the giddy psychonaut Terrence McKenna reminds us, “We emerge out of nature as its finest work of art.” Look, I'm not suggesting you quit your job, grow 213


your hair long and hit the road to travel and make art full time. (But if you do, look me up and let's hang! I’ve got Buenos Aires, Paris and Reykjavik, Iceland on my itinerary for next year.) But whatever you do, don't give me any of that, “I am not creative” crap. Of course YOU are not creative. That’s because you are not even “you.” You’re just pretending to be “you”. All the parts of you are really you--and you definitely have a creative part since every other human being alive also has one--and you’re special, but you’re not that special that you don’t get a creative part. You wouldn't necessarily suspect it by glancing around at the sleepwalking zombies you rub shoulders with every day, but all humans have the capacity for nearly infinite creative expression if they would just let their Inner Artist out to play more. Imagine being a fly on the wall at a meeting of a Fortune 500 company's board of directors. No duller, more conventional collection of tight-asses could possibly be assembled in a single space. Now rewind them back 60-odd years to when they were all bouncy, pouncy Kindergarteners. Slap a piece of construction paper and some crayons in front of them. These adorable little creatures with their cow licks and chapped lips were capable of producing crazy, colorful art to rival Andy Warhol and his sometime partner in crime, Jean-Michel Basquiat, put together! The only difference between the Kindergartener 214


selves and the current selves of the old fogies in the boardroom is that their creative sides have fallen sound asleep over the years—as any part can do if it doesn't get enough opportunities to play the game it likes to play. It's not just our Captain who falls asleep. Any of our inner crew members can fall asleep...and they often do.

I want to suggest a tried and true method for waking up your creative side. First, find a traditionally licensed and credentialed therapist, preferably one with lots of extra letters after their name. Next, sign up for a package of expensive sessions to just talk about becoming more creative. If after five years you are still not more creative, it's perfectly acceptable to switch to another therapists and start all over again. And then—okay, I can’t continue this any longer with a straight fucking face! Fuck traditional therapists—AND the Trojan horse they snuck in on! (Both of which are warmly invited to proceed directly to the head of the line in front of the other hallowed institutions awaiting their turn to be rogered to within an inch of their life!) I'm about to save you years of therapy for getting back in touch with your inner creativity. Here's the secret to waking up your creative side--or any side of you, major or minor... Use it. 215


If you a plop down a sketch pad and some colored markers on the table in front of you, your Inner Artist will happily emerge, seize control of the markers and fashion a masterpiece. (By definition, each and every creative expression is a masterpiece.) The moment you step on the dance floor for your first Tango lesson is the moment your creative side comes sliding down the brass firehouse pole within you and lands squarely in your shoes, reading for some fancy dancing. Waking up your creative (or any) avatar boils down to our tried and true formula of: Giving it a space to play And... Permission to play there. If you want to explore your creative side in greater depth, especially as it pertains to writing a book of your own, find your way to Amazon.com and pick up a copy of my book, Real Artists Ship.

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Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. --Kurt Vonnegut

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27: Dressing For The Hunt

As long as you're gonna dabble (maybe...hopefully...a little?!) in being more artistic, it's not that much of a leap to suggest you might similarly become a little more creative in your dress and grooming. Most men pay way too little attention to how they present themselves. It's not so much that men have bad style as they have no style at all. Which is great news for you and me, because they've set the bar so low for the rest of us that if we make even a few modest changes in gussying up our pirate ship, we will quickly outclass them! Here's one of those secrets that's only a secret to men who don't get laid very often... Women notice and appreciate a man with a sense of style. We're talking about the overall presentation of the experience of you: clothing, jewelry and grooming. Just as with possessing a trim, healthy body, you gain serious “social value points” when you present yourself with more pizzazz. An ordinary-looking guy in his forties or even sixties with obvious style can still turn women's heads. You’re putting on a fucking show here, act like it! 218


I'm not even talking about going super-overboard. While dressing like a metrosexual GQ model would be a fantastic (and almost necessary) strategy in many European capitals, it's overkill for most other cities in the world. Just take a little extra time to polish up the outside of your ship so that it positively gleams with perceived value. Despite all their lip service about not caring about the outside of you, women genuinely appreciate it when you take the time to look nice for them. If you made just one paradigm shift in how you present yourself to the world, it could be summed up in this phrase... Fish eat worms. Now you may personally prefer eating broccoli or lamb or Macadamia nuts. But when you go fishing, you don't put any of these fine foodstuffs on your hook, do you? Fish don't eat that shit. They eat other shit. Such as worms. And what do chicks like? Style. It doesn’t matter what you like, it matters what she likes. So when you get dressed to go out, rather than ask yourself what easy, loose-fitting, semi-clean crap you 219


can throw on, instead ask what the woman you will be seducing would prefer to see you wearing. If you live a little more like an artist, then you'll naturally dress a little more like an artist. And, for the love of Zeus, if you're older than 35 or so you ought to be dressing Age Inappropriate. The absolute last thing you want to do is dress like the other defunct men in your age range. Instead, dress like the guys who are the same age as the women you're hunting. If you're in your sixties and you wanna play with women in their forties, pay attention to what men in their forties are wearing these days—which, I hasten to add, is completely different from what’s already in your closet. I'm in my late thirties and in principle I'm open to the idea of seducing a woman of any age. But as a practical matter, very few women past their midthirties have the energy or vitality to keep up with me, and so my lovers tend to range from 25 – 35. (That said, of all my lovers in London, the most accomplished in bed is a smoky Croatian pushing 50!) I naturally attract women in their late twenties and very early thirties because I dress and carry my body more like the guys their age than the ones my age. And for all you guys who are stuck in your head about your age, here’s a secret the women asked me to make sure to share with you... Women older than twenty one or so don’t give a fuck about your age. 220


I almost never get asked my age, and certainly never up front. Sometimes, after we're already fucking, a woman might ask how old I am with all the casualness she’d ask me if I had any brothers or sisters. When she does ask, regardless of her age, I tell her straight up I'm 38—or however old I am at that moment. (I was born November 12, 1974--in case any ladies are reading this a thousand years in the future and wondering if I’m still available...and, who knows, maybe I will be!) Now I don't particularly pursue 18 or 19 year olds, but now again they drop magically out of the sky and land nakedly in my bed. I never hesitate to tell them my real age if they ask...which, again, they almost never do until after we've already fucked. On the topic of age, however, there is one exception worth mentioning... If you attempt to seduce a woman older than you, she will quite commonly ask how old you are right up front. Here's all you need to know... Older women aren't asking your age to find out how old you are...they also don't give a fuck how old you are...instead they're asking to discover if you think they are too old for you. In other words, their query is entirely intended to find out if they have a chance with you. Whenever a woman in her forties or older asks how old you are, instead of answering directly, smile and say something like, “Awwwww, you like me!” Because that's exactly what it means. It means she likes you. 221


And why awesome?!

wouldn’t

she--you

are

fucking

Now in truth, you may well be closer to her age than she realizes, but because of the youthful way you carry your body and present it to the world, you give every appearance of being younger than you really are—and that's definitely a First World Problem worth having, my man. You don't have to make any of this into a full-time job. Start by putting a dollop of your attention on how you decorate your ship when you go out to hunt, and then make incremental improvements in your style as you go along. Or don't. Everything I'm offering you—everything--is up to you. You're the boss of you. Connect with your body, don't connect with it, fuck more women, don't fuck them...really you're gonna do what you wanna do anyway, and I'm gonna love you either way. So, respect.

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28: Awakening Your Captain

Some

years ago, never mind how long precisely, I made the acquaintance of an adorable, curly haired girl with a PhD in ESL—English as a Second Language. (It had never occurred to me you could seriously get a doctoral degree in that kind of thing...but you can, and she did!) Now all this happened back when I still believed the only way to seduce a woman into bed was to go on x number of dates with her over x number of days while gradually escalating the intimacy until we reached some random mystical moment when there was nothing left to do but “it”. So, having gotten two or three talky, here's-theentire-history-of-my-life-until-now dates out of the way with the curly-haired Ph.D., one evening we ended up back at her charming bungalow, sipping vodka on the rocks while playing slap & tickle and getting a little kissy. I anxiously prayed that it was “on”, that maybe daddy was gonna get hisself some tonight! And for a time it looked very much like my novel strategy of simply “hoping I got lucky” would actually pan out. Then disaster struck. Apropos of nothing, my lady friend asked me a question that would ultimately change my life. But more to the point, it would first change the course of 223


that fateful evening. “What's your dream?” was her simple, direct and thoroughly unexpected question. I mean, who the hell interrupts kissing to ask that kind of thing? (As I later found out, women do, that's who!) As soon as she put the question out there, I froze. She'd caught me at an unguarded moment--which, I came to understand, was precisely her intention...because she wanted to know the truth. She wanted to know my truth. There was just one problem, I didn't know my truth in those days. Sitting there, trying to formulate a response, two thoughts emerged in the leisurely Game Clock of my inner world. The first thought was the realization that I didn't have a Dream at that point in my life. My previous several years had been spent acting in the theatre and writing plays and living the decadent bohemian life of a starving artist. Much fun was had, a great number of cigarettes smoked, and a fair amount of art made, but I'd grown weary of being broke all the time and had a glimmer of a desire to find a new career path, preferably one that involved earning money that wasn't a stage prop for a change. The second thought was that I wasn't going to get laid that night. 224


From a woman's vantage point, a man without a dream has significantly lower social value than a man who knows what he's supposed to be doing with his life.

We’ve already explored how it is the purpose of the masculine to dream and aspire to greatness. The distinction I’d like to offer you now is that manifests itself in the form of an Epic Quest--an all-consuming dream to achieve a specific goal. The Epic Quest is our personal mission to the moon, our Manhattan Project and our sub 4-minute mile all rolled into one. Except not rolled into one. Actually, more like one after the other. In fact, exactly like one after the other. Fuck that other thing I said. During the era when I was courting the curlyhaired girl, my ship wasn't sailing towards any specific port of call and so I had no dream. From her point of view, there was no point to me. Sometimes you do need to have a point to have a point. All of this took several minutes to work out in the drippy, trippy, Dali-esque Game Clock realm within me, while outside of me, in the Real-World Gaming Environment, only the blink of an eye had passed and then I answered something. I hemmed, hawed and stammered out some kind of response, but my 225


ladyfriend saw right through my faltering words. I'd been exposed as a man with no plan of what to do next in my life. And there's no recovering from that. Predictably enough, the evening came to an untimely and awkward end. I never did bed that lovely, curly haired creature—not that night or any other. By the time I'd gone off and actually figured out what my next Epic Quest would be and returned to her doorstep ready to share it, another guy (whose dream it was to become a champion salsa dancer...you cannot make this shit up!) had already moved in. Sic transit gloria mundi, eh?!

In the interim, though, I'd figured a few things out. Originally, I labored under the common--and yet absolutely wrong--impression that my Epic Quest was some huge, monolithic Life Path that I was supposed to have figured out as a boy and then never swerved from again for the rest of my days. Except I just wasn't one of those kids who asked for a ventriloquist doll for his fifth birthday and was a semi-professional ventriloquist by the time I was in middle school and then grew up to sport the “World's Greatest Ventriloquist” label while appearing nightly at a top Vegas casino and reading Ventriloquist Monthly (you know them fuckers gotta have a magazine!) in my spare time and thinking about 226


nothing, day and night, except for sticking my hand up some doll's ass and making it talk while pretending it's not me making it talk. That simply wasn't me. Nor was I Shaun White, snowboarding at four, Mozart, composing symphonies at six, nor was I even Steven Spielberg, who’d already written and directed his first feature film (a sci-fi adventure of over two hours in length) by the time he was sixteen. Like most people, I had lots of different interests, not just one all-consuming passion. And that's okay, too. A very, very few of us are meant to do the exact same thing for their entire lives, and they like it that way. If Bill Gates or Michael Dell, billionaires both, had any yearning to do something other than play the game called computer software and hardware, they'd already be doing it. But they're not. And if you were like them, you’d already be doing that one thing. The rest of us—the most of us--prefer to mix it up and do lots of things. Instead of only carrying whiskey from one port to the next for our entire careers, we're the kinds of pirates who will gladly sell our entire supply of whiskey at the first port, then use that money to buy rifles, and run those to the next port and trade them 227


for rum, and so on. To shamelessly rip off Stanislavky's classic quip about acting: “There are no small dreams, only small dreamers.” Here’s a secret that all them motherfuckers who make a handsome living writing books and shit about how to find your One True Dream (TM) don’t want you to know... You do not need to figure out the overall story arc of your entire life from here till the day you die...all that matters is your current Epic Quest.

A few years ago I lived with a porn star. (By the way, I wasn’t being cute earlier when I mentioned adoring sluts! I absolutely love sluts and prefer them for lovers whenever possible...although hard-core Christians come a close second!) And my porn star girlfriend and I were totally into one another. At that time, I was feverishly creating a huge information product that I intended to sell online through a five video sales-funnel, with all the attendant autoresponders and shopping carts you'd expect from such an endeavor--it was a huge endeavor, an Epic Quest that consumed nearly a year of my life of long days and longer nights--and one morning I awoke to find a note from my live-in porn star girlfriend and it said tersely... “I think you love your project more than you love me.” 228


And I thought about it for a moment and I came to the conclusion... She was right. I DID love my big Internet project more than I loved her. Then I thought... Wait--one day this project will end! But then I realized... There’ll be another project right after that one, and another beyond that. There's no end to the number of Epic Quests the Masculine can embark upon. So in short order I packed up my shit and moved out of the porn star’s house. But I got to keep our dog. Another true story.

Big Self Help is forever urging us to decide on our One True Dream(TM)—as if we were allowed just the one, and if we pick wrong then all our efforts are in vain. But, of course, that never quite works out the way they tell us it will. Instead, we run around 1000 hours into this pursuit and 500 in some other and 2000 in the next, but we never actually get anywhere--we never become a professional flutist or certified hot air balloon pilot or whatnot. Oh, wait, let’s go join Doctors Without Borders! 229


You get the idea. Here’s something that isn’t a fucking secret to anybody except the Big Self Help gurus... There is NO One True Dream (TM). Instead, there are a series of Epic Quests—each of which is a milestone in our life representing the focusing of our efforts in order to achieve some laudable goal. If you consider Steve Jobs' life, it seems like he was always doing the same thing. But he wasn't always doing the same thing. In fact, he was always doing something different. Each of these products involved its own unique Epic Quest... Apple, Inc Apple II Father Macintosh NEXT Pixar Apple, Inc.--the Sequel iPod iTunes Father--the sequel 230


iPhone iPad The day you ship, your current Epic Quest ends...and it’s time to discover your next destination. During the more than two long, dark years I spent rewiring my appreciation of the Human Experience from the ground up, that ultimately led to my discovery of how to go from smoking five motherfucking packs of cigarettes per day to zero overnight, quitting smoking was my all-consuming Epic Quest. I had to slay many dragons and defeat many boss monsters within me to complete that Epic Quest. But I finally did. And you know what I did the next day? I started a new Epic Quest. Because that's what the Masculine does. Again, yes, there do seem to be a few people in the world who grow up wanting only to play chess or the piano or with their little willies for their whole lives...just as there are plenty of people who are born in some little shithole in the middle of nowhere and they seem content to live and die in that town without ever exploring the rest of the world—or even venturing to the next county over. But that's not me and it's not definitely not you--or you wouldn’t still be here. Instead, we're on a more interesting, convoluted journey that takes us from one port to the next with each new Epic Quest. 231


And that’s the game our Captain plays. Helping to select your next Epic Quest is his game. Assembling the Questing Party to achieve your goal is his game. If sleepy parts need to be strengthened in order to achieve an Epic Quest, the Captain takes charge of that. If new parts have to be created to perform specialized jobs along the way, he figures that shit out. Your Captain’s like motherfucking Jake & Elwood Blues--getting the band together to go on a mission from God. If you do not currently have an Epic Quest, if you don't have a plan for where you’re headed next, this might be a good time to stop and figure that shit out. Put this next secret on heavy rotation in your iPod... Creating and pursuing an Epic Quest is HOW you wake up your Captain and it's how you KEEP him awake...and it’s the ONLY fucking way to do either one. Look, “average” dudes don't have dreams. They go to a job and they go home and eat some krap and take their 2.5 dumps a day and they watch TV. They get laid once in a blue moon by women who are themselves average and their timid, monotonous love-making lasts an average of six minutes. Great men don't do average. They are goal-oriented and unswerving in their passion to reach the next port of call. Great men never stand still. 232


They're always on an Epic Quest—the more outlandish, the better. One of the richest and most powerful men in my briefly adopted hometown of Las Vegas is Steve Wynn. He has some legendary accomplishments under his belt, including having his name splashed all over the finest hotel-casino in town. But dude's not lounging around by the pool, counting his money or his blessings. I guarantee you Mr. Wynn's always got something new up his sleeve. He's working furiously on an Epic Quest right now. Maybe it's to build the world's largest Ferris wheel or to construct an underwater casino or rename Macao as Wynn Island or somesuch. Once more... Your Epic Quest can be about anything...but it cannot be about nothing. At certain junctures of your life, your current mission might be focused on job or career. If your dream is to make a living at sales, then landing a good sales job is a worthy goal. If your Epic Quest is to become a doctor, then getting into (and, ultimately, out of) medical school will occupy you full time for a good many years. But once you've established yourself in sales or hung up your shingle as an MD, then it's time to discover the next leg of your journey and begin moving in that direction. Your next Epic Quest might be to become a father or climb Mt. Everest or perfecting the world's first brain transplant—all are worthy undertakings for 233


your inner Questing Party. The picking of an Epic Quest, the living it, the accomplishing it, is what wakes up and invigorates the Reluctant Hero within you. Great men have a Captain who's in charge. And the game your Captain plays is deciding upon your next Epic Quest and then leading the troops into battle. Which, by great coincidence (if you believe in that sorta thing!) just so happens to be our next destination!

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29: Leading Your Crew Into Battle

Men

do shit. Sometimes it's some mega-awesome, insanely great shit...and at others it's more of a head nod to ourselves, “Yeah, I did that!” kinda shit. Either way, we did it and we should be proud. While your Epic Quest is the primary destination you're currently sailing toward in your great pirate ship, each of your crewmembers also have their own Mini-Quests--smaller, discrete games they enjoy playing. Seducing a woman into your bed is an example of a Mini-Quest. It’s an inner high five and get back to business kind of thing--nothing to build an entire life around. On the other hand, awakening your Captain and leveling up your Lover again and again until he becomes the living embodiment of a Casanova--with the potential to seduce any available-ish woman he encounters--is an example of an Epic Quest. Now whether the enterprise in front of you is big or little, at a certain point your Captain has to stop planning your adventures and actually send your troops into battle. I say “battle”, but I mean it in the most playful possible way. 235


Being a man is the awesomest fucking thing ever invented. We get to get to seduce beautiful women and build impressive monuments and conquer sprawling empires. But to accomplish any of these endeavors, there’s a precise moment when we must needs make a transition from the Thinkingness of our Game Reality to the Doingness of Actual Reality. And this transition from our inner Multiverse into the outer Universe is the place where many fine men stumble and fall on their way to success. Sometimes one of our crewmembers will balk in the face of the Sensory Overload that comes during this period of transition. And so it becomes even more important to have a Captain who’s wide awake and on the job, because he’s ideally situated to encourage our ego states to keep going in the face of difficulty. We already know that whereas women can tolerate shitloads of sensations in their bodies because of their capacity for Infinite Desire, the instant that men feel too much charge, we’ll do just about fucking anything we can to get rid of it—even if it means turning around and running in the opposite direction from our current goal.

Imagine the biggest, baddest, strongest sum-bitch ever built. Maybe he's in Special Forces or a Hell's Angel or a professional cage fighter. Now take him to a bar and have him pick out a woman he wants to meet. For convenience, let's go with that big titty blonde in the short red skirt slit halfway up her thighs sitting just across the crowded room. 236


Next let's wind our guy up with a passion to approach this sultry vixen, and launch him from his bar stool like a fighter jet roaring off the deck of an aircraft carrier. And now let's follow him in sloooooooooooooooooooooooow motion, plugging into his Game Clock as certain tactile experiences arise in his body. Likely as not, before our champion has even taken the first step in the direction of the big titty blonde, his body has already become flooded with sensations— butterflies in his stomach, a lump in his throat, a tightening in his chest. He takes another step or two, and now his knees are feeling weak. Worse still, he's becoming increasingly conscious of all these tactile experiences going on within him and he's wondering if other people can tell how damn nervous he is just by looking at him. Either way, our hero does not like this flood of uncomfortable feelings in his body. Not one bit. He forces himself to take another step. His target still hasn't even looked in his direction yet, and he's already at his limit of being able to tolerate the charge coursing through him. He's now officially in Sensory Overload. His eyes are burning and he feels short of breath. A moment ago his goal was to meet the hot blonde, but he’s suddenly envisioning a new and different goal that supersedes the old one because it's more visceral and physical to him... His new goal is to get OUT of Sensory Overload, 237


to make the overwhelming sensations cascading through his body disappear, and the sooner the better. From that moment forward, our champion no longer cares about the blonde, he no longer cares about getting laid tonight, he only cares about making the charge in his body go the fuck away. And the easiest, fastest, best-est—indeed, only-est--way to do that is to pull the plug, to wave off the landing, abort the mission, run away in defeat. In a word: Eject. Out of sheer momentum, he takes one last step toward the blonde as her head finally turns in his direction. From her perspective, as she notices his ruggedly handsome jaw and sexy biceps, a smile is already starting to form on her face when his path suddenly veers off at a steep angle and he passes her by with the grim look of a Dead Man Walking and she feels a pang in her stomach as she realizes he's just as much of a pussy as every other guy who doesn't have the balls to walk up and talk to her. She glances frustratedly around the room, wondering if tonight is the night an actual man might show up and seduce her the way she so desperately yearns for. Meanwhile back in our putative champion, the downward spiral of negative sensations lasted only a few seconds in real time before he reached a state of complete Overwhelm and made the choice that men so commonly make in that situation: Ejecting. 238


Of course, our hero is thoroughly unaware that his actions were based entirely on escaping from Sensory Overload. If you asked him to tell us what happened, why he didn't talk to the big titty blonde after he seemed so excited about meeting her, he would have a story, for sure. Because we always have a story. Predictably enough, his story would involve some combination of disqualifying himself or disqualifying her such that one or both fails the Narcissus Test. “I'm not good enough for her.” “I don't deserve her. “I'm too old (ugly, uneducated, whatevz) for her.” “She's too pretty (young, classy) for me.” “She's probably stuck up.” “She looks frigid, etc.” Lest we forget, out in Actual Reality our imaginary hero is verily a bad-ass. He has every bit as much social value as the blonde he was approaching, and he could've easily seduced her if he hadn't ejected when he became overwhelmed by the charge he felt in his body. Meanwhile in the Game Reality of his mind, various crewmembers and stowaways are now giving him all kinds of grief--calling him a pussy and a loser and offering their unsolicited opinions that he might never get laid again for the rest of his life. And none of them are aware that the real reason 239


our hero didn't approach the big titty blonde has nothing to do with confidence, deservability, selfesteem or any similar clumps of lead that Big Self Help is so adept at alchemizing into gold in their pockets. Nope, nope, nope. The real reason is because our boy couldn’t tolerate the physical distress—the flood of heightened sensations zinging through his body. So he chose the fastest way he could think of to make them go away. He Ejected. And by “hero”, I also mean me. And by “me”, I also mean you. Buckle your seatbelt, my friend, because I'm about to lay the biggest, baddest secret of them all on you right now... Most of the best times you could've ever experienced in your life never actually took place because you got caught up in Sensory Overload and you EJECTED before they happened. Lots of men say they want a threesome, but when they finally stumble upon one they often can't even get it up. Later they explain it away by saying, “Oh, I guess that isn't what I really wanted. Maybe I'm just a onewoman kind of guy after all.” And maybe they are. They'd be the first...but there always has to be a first at everything, right?! 240


Or... Maybe what happened on the night of the ill-fated menage-a-trois was that the visceral excitement of suddenly having four breasts and two of everything else to play with simply overwhelmed his system and he couldn't handle feeling that powerful, electric charge AND work up an erection at the same time. Hell, every other guy on the planet thinks he can what male porn stars do. They believe that porno dudes get paid to fuck chicks in the ass and bust a nut on their face. But that's not what male porn stars get paid to do at all. They get paid for developing the unique ability to step into a room crowded with people, surrounded by photographic gear and hot lights, and take a camera-friendly position next to a naked, brain-dead, silicon-tittied woman they're not in the least bit attracted to—and manage all the heightened tactile sensations from everything going on AND get AND maintain a motherfucking erection through the entire experience AND cum on cue when the director counts down from “5”. In short, male porn stars get paid for NOT going into Sensory Overload when the director says, “Action!” And, just in case you wondered, they’re performing well outside the Viagra Zone! Getting the job done—whether the “job” is as straightforward as popping a boner on a busy film set or as sensational as quarterbacking a team to a Super Bowl victory—without getting overwhelmed by the massive amounts of stimulation coursing through 241


your body is the fucking game. Here’s the second-saddest secret I’ll share with you during our entire journey together... Your average man would rather feel no charge in his body and not get what he wants, than sit in the eye of the storm of overwhelming sensation for long enough to achieve what he truly desires. The implications of this are profound. The reason most men don't fulfill their destiny isn't because they aren't smart enough, determined enough, confident enough or anything enough. No, the reason that most men's lives don't turn out the way they hoped and planned is because, at the moment of taking action, they felt a bunch of sensations in their body which they identified as unpleasant and undesirable and so they were driven to do whatever it took to make these physical feelings go away. And so they Ejected. My big worry here is that you'll think this is some kind of theoretical construct. Fuck theoretical constructs. We’re talking about a real charge in your real body influencing your real decisions here. You ever go to buy something...and maybe it was the right product you needed at the best possible price, but when it was time to make the buying decision you told the saleswright, “Ahhhh, I need to think about it”? 242


Well, you and I know that no man in history ever went off and actually “thought about it” after Ejecting from a situation in which he was about to buy something. In fact, their most immediate goal is to “forget all about it” because that's the most expedient means of banishing the flood of unwanted tactile feelings from their body. The reason we don't pull the trigger in these situations is because we’re overwhelmed by the stimuli of the moment. On the other side, you have a man like Warren Buffet. During his acquisition of Heinz Foods, there would have been a certain point where he would've had to pick up a pen and sign a contract to make a commitment worth TWENTY-EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS. Can you even begin to imagine the charge that Mr. Buffet must've felt in his body at that instant of signing the paperwork? But you know what he did? He did something that separates him from lesser men. He did something that truly makes the difference between being a broke-ass bitch and a billionaire. What he did was NOT allow himself to become overwhelmed by the tactile experiences rushing through his body. He felt them, but didn't try to fix them or correct them or make them go away. Instead, he signed the contract. 243


Keep this mind next time you’re “afraid” to approach a woman... Great men sign...average men Eject. Here's a secret that invariably gets left off the How To Be A Man flyer we're all given at puberty. No, check that, here's three secrets, back to back to back... Men often choose the path of least resistance. The path of least resistance is always the path of least sensation. Following the path of least sensation has been keeping you from your Greatness. Now what do you say we fix it?!

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This one, too (You seemed like you needed a breather!)

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30: Following The Path of Greater Sensation

While

your Captain was away, your crewmembers picked up some bad habits... They didn't finish what they started. They only played their games as long as it felt good—and when the going got rough, they got going. Seemingly every time one of your crewmembers was on the verge of greatness... They Ejected. Remember that model-hot French chick you fucked in the ass? Or that mind-bending online information product you shipped? How 'bout that screenplay you sold for seven figures? Oh, wait, you don't remember any of that, do you? Because none of that shit happened. Oh, there was a spectacular French babe, but not one of your parts even spoke to her. And you did have a great idea for an online product, but your crew stayed up late for weeks on end talking about it—Quick Tip: never talk about the shit you’re gonna do, just fucking do it!--and nothing came of it. 247


If it's any consolation, though, you did write half of that screenplay. Half. Here’s a secret every bartender in Hollywood knows... Any moron can finish the first half of a script--it's the last half that counts. Every time a side of you was on the verge of taking a bold step in the direction of your greatness, they reached their Sensation Threshold and then did a bad thing. A very bad thing. The worst possible thing. They changed course when the ship was already going in the best of all possible directions. If they'd just kept going in the same direction they might've completed a lovely Mini-Quest and leveled up...or else been that much closer to arriving at the port of the current Epic Quest. Instead, they chose the Path of Least Sensation. They Ejected.

You've heard the phrase, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link? Well...that. If you actually happen to be a genuine bad-ass—a cage fighter, Hell's Angel or Special Forces soldier, as 248


in our example above—then you know very well that at least one member of your crew is a tough motherfucker. He's the guy to send into battle when you're enduring the pain of throwing heavy weights around the gym or about to rumble with a rival gang or going into actual battle. These parts of you have developed Sensation Thresholds that put mere mortals to shame. But that's just a single part--and its strengths have nothing to do with the strengths of any other members of your crew. Now if we really were the mono-bots the Standard Dogma needs us to be for their pay-per-stitch Franken-model of the human experience to work, then of course the baddest of all dudes would also have the least fears when confronting other potentially scary situations—like speaking in public or approaching a stone-cold German hottie with shimmering blonde hair cascading halfway down her tanned back. But they don't. Our parts don’t get to share their stats. If one of your crewmembers puts in its 10,000 hours—or a good resemblance thereof—then an attendant aspect of their Mastery is the ability to sit in the fire and withstand tremendous amounts of pressure and stress—which is to say, lots of sensation in the body—while still playing their game at a very high level. Vanessa-Mae, the Hong Kong-born, Londonraised violin virtuoso, doesn't just play the violin 249


much better than you, but she can also handle the jillion kilowatt onslaught of charge in her body that comes from playing it in front of a critical, expectant, paying audience much better than you. Any member of your inner questing party can expand its capacity to feel sensation by going past the point where it feels comfortable and easy. It's the principle of Supercompensation...and it's how we grow any muscle. Whenever a part starts to notice uncomfortable sensations in the body, it will often want to stop playing its game in order to make the charge go away as soon as possible. Your Captain's job is to keep them on their job. To help that side hang on just a little longer--write one more page, make one more presentation to an angel investor, stay with a seduction through another Stroke. Sure, notice your body's going to be in distress, at first. But just because the ocean gets a little choppy doesn't mean a crewmember should turn the ship in the direction of calmer seas. When the seas grow rough, you don't change your destination, you sail through the turbulence. Our parts spend a great deal of time and energy trying to avoid ever feeling overwhelmed by too much sensation in the body. Which is to say, avoiding feeling altogether. Know this: the more sensation—whether “good” 250


or “bad”--a part can learn to sustain, the more powerfully and confidently it will be able to navigate the oceans of possibility inside and outside of us. Everybody knows about “No Pain, No Gain” when it comes to working out at the gym. I've just come along to remind you that the same principle applies to the rest of you. Your crewmembers grow by being pushed to the limits of their endurance...and then pushed a little more. Upon which they supercompensate and become stronger. And then you push them again. Your Lover probably has a tendency to Eject in the face of the first whiff of a “No”. Hey, nobody likes hearing “No”. It's natural to turn and run. But what if you didn't? What if your Captain stood tall and proud with you, supporting you while you stood in the breach and talked to some sexy mama like you owned the damn joint despite feeling super uncomfortable in every quivering cell of your body?! Overcoming your fears doesn't mean not feeling afraid. It means realizing that taking a certain action will take you to the edge (or beyond) of your Sensation Threshold—but doing it anyway. Here’s another secret to success that every great man already knows... Never Eject unless it's a genuine emergency. 251


Except that isn’t really the secret yet. THIS is the actual secret that separates average men from men of greatness... There are no genuine emergencies.

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CONGRATULATIONS—YOU HAVE COMPLETED LEVEL II!

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The Game of Waking Up “Guess who just leveled up, young man? You just leveled up!” “Check me all leveling up and shiz!” “Now we have an entire world to play in—with game environments on the outside and inside, and all the pieces in place to play any game we desire.” “Well, I desire to play the game called having more women in my life.” “And what’ll you do with more women in your life?” “You know, have sex and stuff.” “No! There's no 'and stuff' when it comes to your desires! Remember when we talked about how the Masculine always needs to have a plan?” “Mmmmmm, sounds kinda familiar.” “Le sigh. Before you get more women, you need to know what you intend to do with more women.” “Naughty things.” “More specific.” “Very naughty things.” “That’s all you got?” 254


“I've been in a bit of a slump lately. Anything will be better than nothing.” “No, no it's not. That's one of the biggest mistakes men make. Anything is not better than nothing. Ready-fire-aim is no way to go through life. Taking action is not better than not taking action unless it's moving you closer to your true desires. Sailing your ship hither and yon does not offer you more value than just dropping anchor and staying in one place until you and your Captain can settle upon a specific destination.” “And by 'ship' you mean my 'whole life', I'm guessing?” “No, I just meant ship...but I like yours better, let’s go with that! So when it comes to women, your Captain needs to know precisely what games you want to play with them so he can rig the ship and the rest of the crew for your success, does that make sense?” “It does, yes. But...can't I just fuck a few chicks—hell, one would be a nice start—while I'm figuring out my desires?” “Yes, yes, absolutely do that—but please don't call women 'chicks'!” “What...seriously?!” “Of course not seriously! They're chicks, why the fuck wouldn't we call them that?!” “Whew! I'm beginning to see why you didn't want any chicks reading this.” “Right! All I'm suggesting is that while you're enjoying the experience of having more abundance with 255


women you might also start thinking about what games you truly desire playing with them. Do you want to have a primary lover and a few other lovers on the side--the way I usually do it? Do you want to fuck a different woman every night--and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that if you do...follow your desires, not what anybody else tries to fucking sell you. Or maybe you want to be monotonous with the same woman?” “You mean monogamous?” “No, I meant monotonous...and we're staying with mine. Or how about anal--do you like that?” “Hold on...are you asking me?” “I'm asking you to think about it.” “Oh, right. Wait...giving or receiving?” “That's exactly what I'm inviting you to think about. If you've never had a finger up your ass, why not? Whatever you’re most afraid to try, put that at the top of your Activities To Try List. Bondage, cosplay, swingers, fisting, threesomes with another woman, threesomes with another man, squirting, orgies...there are entire books—entire libraries of books even—about the limitless variety of naughty games people can play together. Go off on your own and spend time researching the possibilities. Dig deep into your desires and figure out what appeals to you, then start inviting the women you seduce to play those games with you. Again, because the Feminine wants you to have a plan.” “Just because I have a plan doesn't mean she'll want to follow it.” “That's for fucking sure. If a woman doesn't want you 256


to fuck her in the ass, she'll let you know. But she still wants you to ask. Women admire the hell out of a man who knows what he wants and has the balls to ask for it. And, besides—I don't think I've told you this yet—I've got a surprise for you later.” “I love surprises! What is it?” “Well it wouldn't be fucking surprise if I told you, now would it?!” “Oh, I guess not.” “But I'm gonna tell you anyway. Because it's really more of a present than a surprise anyway.” “Sweet!” “Later on--at the very, very end of the book, actually— I'm going to teach you the Secret to Asking For (And Getting) Anything You Want.” “Does it work?” “It works better than it doesn't work.” “I actually understand that.” “It doesn't lead to an automatic, 'Yes'--nothing does. But it does lead to a helluva lot more 'Yeses' than otherwise.” “Sounds dope.” “It is dope. It's doper than dope.” “That's pretty dope.” “As dope as it gets. Man, I'm gonna miss you when all 257


this is over.” “Yup, same.” “Where were we?” “Something about desire.” “Right, right...instead of taking a long, and possibly terrifying, look within themselves, most men flitter across the surface of their desires.” “Flitter? That's a word?” “Who cares? Just because the Standard Dogma says there's only one approved way of thinking and the dictionary tells us we can only used certain agreed-upon words doesn't make it so. What's the #1 message I've been banging you over the head with since the very beginning?” “That...I'm the boss of me?” “OhmyGod, yes—exactly that! I love it! You are the boss of you. Which means you get to make the rules of you, and break the rules of you. It's easy—okay, not easy, but you know what I mean—to color outside the lines in the Real-World Gaming Environment. To paint an upsidedown painting or legally change your name to Malcolm X John Lennon. It's hard—but only hard because we never think to try—to get a little crazier in the Game Reality within you. Hard for your Captain to do crazy things like sign up for Epic Quests that nobody ever thought of before and which require a combination of crewmembers and talents never seen before in the history of humanity.” “I want that. That is what I want. But I still don't know how to get there. I believe you that I have a Captain. I believe you that he's been asleep. I've felt it for a long time. 258


A very long time. I knew a big part of me was asleep, I just didn't know which part, or how important it was. But I still don't get how to wake up my Captain.” “I've already told you.” “You have?” “And you're already doing it.” “I am?” “Tell me, how do you wake up any part of you that's fallen asleep?” “Oh, I know this one! Call on me--call on me!” “Yessssssss?” “You start playing the game that only that crewmember knows how to play.” “Fantastic! You're such a quick study!” “That's why I keep leveling up!” “And it's why you're gonna keep leveling up—long after the game you and I are playing has ended.” “Whoa—this is a game, too?” “Everything is a game. Our journey together is a subset of Everything. So, yes, this book is also a game. Now can you guess what game we're playing?” “The game of learning how to seduce women, of course.” “No.” 259


“No?” “No.” “How can it be no?” “Go deeper.” “Okay, gimme a sec. It's...a game of discovering that the real game is inside us.” “Better. You're getting warmer.” “It's...it's got something to do with my Captain?” “Yes. Warmer still.” “Hold on. I have a thought. But it's crazy.” “Is it crazy enough to be true?” “Maybe.” “Try me.” “Figuring out the playing field, putting the right pieces into play, deciding which Epic Quest to go on next--and everything else we've been talking about IS the game my Captain plays.” “Hot, hot, hot! You're there...you're right there!” “Soooooooooooo, that's what we're really doing. This whole journey is really just a game you've created. A game designed to wake up my Captain if I just keep playing to the end.” “And then?” “And then it's my responsibility to keep my Captain 260


awake—to go on one Epic Quest after another that challenges him so much that he never wants to go back to sleep again.” “Wow, that’s exactly, exactly, exactly it. Again, I love you.” “I love me, too.” “I think my work here is done.” “Really?” “No, not really. Your Captain is just now waking up— and he's really excited to start training your crewmembers in the true art of seduction so you can all get some pussy.” “Either we all eat steak or nobody eats steak.” “A-fucking-men.”

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NICE WORK—YOU HAVE REACHED LEVEL III!

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LEVEL III A NEW MODEL of SEDUCTION

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30: All The World's A Game

Holy

Smackeral, you've just earned another 10,000 points for reaching Level III—bringing your running total to a heady 17,000 points! Now stop your gloating (frankly, it's unseemly) and let's get back to work. Until this point we've been exploring the cool-ass Inner Role-Playing Game we've all got going on within us—populated by its merry band of semidysfunctional characters each playing their own separate games and led by a swashbuckling Captain who grows increasingly awake and alive the more we pursue each new Epic Quest...and meanwhile the whole gang's backed up by a mess of loud-mouthed stowaways who like nothing better than to bust our balls for putting on our pants the wrong leg at a time. Now let's direct our attention outside of ourselves. Which is comprised of—wait for it!--still more games to play. There's such a crush of games going on at any given moment that figuring out which ones to play and which ones not to play has become one of our most stressful, synapse-tiring endeavors. Which job to take, city to live in, person to date, faith to believe in, bad habit to give up next? So many games, so little time. 264


What's a girl to do?!

Every human activity that involves activity is a game. Hell, even sitting there and doing nothing whatsoever can be turned into a game. A game called Meditation. There's a surprising number of flavors of sitting around doing nothing, including Vipassana, Zen, Kundalini and Transcendental Meditation--each with their own rules, objectives, week-long seminars and, no doubt, cigar-smoking gurus running around in saffron-colored togas shagging their followers and loudly denouncing their rivals in the meditation community. Now meditation might not be your cuppa, but it's no less legitimate a pursuit than any other game that humans play. Still... Can you begin to imagine the internal negotiation that goes down when someone decides to take up meditation?! The entire crew are gathered together on the deck of the great ship and here's this earnest new avatar clad in all-white yoga attire and waving around a stick of Nag Champa incense, earnestly explaining how the game of meditation is played. And the other parts are asking, “Wait, we're supposed to just sit around and do nothing for twenty minutes?” 265


“Well, that's just at the start. When we get better at playing the game of Meditation we'll be doing it for up to sixty minutes at a time.” “It's possible to get better at doing nothing?” “Yes, it is—exciting, huh?” “Not the word we'd use, but...whatever.” And, true enough, just like with any other game, we can get better at playing the game of sitting around doing nothing. People actually speak with great pride about how many years they've been meditating, and how much their practice has “grown” and “deepened”. And it actually has--because they got better at playing that game. 10,000 hours is 10,000 hours, no matter what game you choose to spend them on. Instead of meditation, the game could've been snowboarding or safecracking or alchemy, a la Newton. Games provide the gravity that holds the human experience together...no less than gravity is the game that holds the universe together. Every moment of our waking hours is taken up with playing games. And not just our waking hours-there are actually folks who play a game called Lucid Dreaming while they sleep which allows them to continue playing games around the clock. Becoming a parent is a game. In my estimation, it's the greatest game of them all. No creative or personal achievement in my entire life will ever be more 266


important to me than fathering my 2.5 children. (Long story!) Of course, parenting is a time-consuming game to play, especially during the early years. (If you think golf is a slow game, trying raising a child—each round lasts 18 years!) But being time-consuming is not a detriment for any game. Quite the opposite. Humans live practically forever these days and we've got a lot of time to kill...and so we welcome just about any game that will get us through the night or day. The most time-consuming game humans usually play is our occupation. Although we certainly need the paycheck in order to survive, the primary reason people play the game called Work is not for the money. Corporations have known for decades that employees are not particularly motivated by money, but they got so buried under the steaming pile of techno-jargon (intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, anybody?!) dumped on them by the Keepers of the Standard Dogma that they lost sight of the simple truth in front of them. You want to know the secret of why people really show up at their jobs every day—even though they may seemingly dislike every aspect of whatever their job entails? I mean, if it's not for the money—and it's not for the money—then why the fuck else would people get all dressed up and drag themselves into work? Here’s The Man’s best-kept secret... 267


Most people dutifully report to their job each day because they don't know what the fuck else to do with their time. That’s not a very romantic reason, is it? But the Truth sometimes isn’t. In most people, their Captain’s fast asleep and they have no current Epic Quest into which to channel their considerable energies...and so the part of them that once upon a time learned to do a specific job wearily takes the wheel for another shift of lawyering or accountancy or insurance claim processing because how else are they supposed to spend their day? Showing up at the office gives them a 40 or more hour per week respite from one of the most confounding problems facing humanity: “What the hell are we supposed to do with ourselves all day long now that we no longer have to hunt and/or gather in order to survive?!” People work because it's a non-stop game that somebody else made up--and here’s a fucking secret that can change your life if you ever decide to jump all over it... It's always easier to play somebody else's game than to create a whole new game of your own. Once we start playing the game called Work, it requires far less effort to keep playing it than to stop and have to figure out some other job-like game to play. As funnyman John Cleese puts it, “It's easier to do the little things we know we can do than start in on 268


big things we're not so sure about.” The more urgent we make the trivial tasks in our lives, the less urgency we are left with to accomplish anything of importance. The fact that most of us don't like the game called our job is irrelevant. Good people will stick with a job or relationship or bad habit long past the point of enjoying it because it's a game they already know how to play and they're getting better at playing it all the time. The miserableness of working that job, staying in a relationship with that woman or smoking that next cigarette is outweighed by the even more miserable thought that if we did abruptly stop playing one of those games we wouldn't know what other game to play in its place. And it’s sapping the energy right out of us. No fucking wonder our Captain and many of our crewmembers keep falling asleep whenever possible. Here's a blood-curdling secret that’ll help you better appreciate why we do the things they do and why we don't do the things we don't do... Faced with playing a game that totally sucks versus having no game at all to play, people will do everything possible to hang on to the sucky game. How the fuck else do you think that demonstrably evil outfits like Monsanto or Big Tobacco still have so many thousands of employees who dutifully—if not necessarily cheerfully—show up for work at their manicured, befountained, Prisoner-esque places of business?! 269


We have such an insatiable hunger for the Structure that these organized diversions bring to our day that we willingly play the game called a Job for our entire lives even though it means largely giving up our own dreams and quests. When we get hired on at Cogswell Cogs we willingly stop being players in our own game and give over control of our actions to someone else. We effectively become what's known in the computer gaming world as Non-Playing Characters or NPCs— restricted to a narrow list of duties known as a “job description” rather than just being able to run around saying and doing anything we please. Apple employees love the challenges of their job and willingly sign up to play on teams creating the latest insanely great new products, but virtually no Apple veteran--former or current--would ever use the word “fun” to describe the experience of working there. Apple-bots are expected to check their identities at the door and toil days, night and weekends without any complaints or any additional perks like the foot rubs and little juice boxes those bastards over at Google get. Hell, if you're ever thinking about creating your own start-up business someday, here's a counterintuitive secret that will help you build a hyperproductive team... The more you ask of other people, the more they’ll sign up for it because that means the less they have to ask of themselves. People will tirelessly help you pursue your Epic 270


Quest rather than go through the considerable bother of planning and executing out an Epic Quest of their own. One of the reasons that troubled, clueless young people (as if there were any other kind!) are drawn to the Armed Forces is because it's all structure, all the time. The military is a game that takes over their whole life. They won't have to worry about make the wrong decision—or any decision at all--for the next three or four years. Shut up, stop fidgeting, do what you're told, shoot that guy over there...the military is just Kindergarten with guns. And just because a game isn't fun doesn't mean we won't keep playing it. Three-quarters of employees in America admit to anything from mild dislike to active loathing of their occupation. But three-quarters of the workforce doesn't quit their job each year. They show up day after tedious day. Joseph Campbell liked to say, “The secure way is really the insecure way.” Indeed. The very thought of giving up the daily safety net of structure that playing the game called work gives their life is, quite frankly, terrifying. Like Prisoner of Second Avenue terrifying. And that's yet another reason why you should be as gentle as possible with the people you encounter on your journeys. 271


Almost everybody is struggling. They wish they were playing a different game— but don't know which other game to play or how to start playing it. They're having a hard time, while doing their utmost not to show it. Here's a secret that's both sad and true... Most people's lives are a simmering kettle of miserable that never quite comes to a boil. So be nice. Please. To everybody. Most especially yourself.

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31: Getting In The Game

Look, I know there are parts of you that think I’m a complete fucking idiot. What they don’t know is I got my motherfucking eye on them in turn. Even now, as your Lover smacks his lips and rubs his hands gleefully together in anticipation of learning the all-new model of seduction we’ll explore throughout Level III, there are other sides of you who are not happy that I’ve been putting all these licentious thoughts into your Lover’s head to begin with. At the end of the day, it’s not “people” who find it easier to keep doing what they’re already doing, it’s the crewmembers who make them up. (Ha--I like that unintended turn of phrase–“the crewmembers who make them up”...as if we wouldn’t even be here if our crew didn’t constantly keep pretending us into existence.) Pardon my Existentialism. Just because one part of you is bringing a newfound enthusiasm to the study and practice of seducing women doesn’t automatically guarantee him Telescope Time in the great Observatory of your Life. The other astronomers in the observatory are some jealous little bitches--as only astronomers can be--and your Lover might not get much buy in from them in the beginning. Or ever...if you let them have their way. 273


Remember, whatever game they are currently playing is just as important to them as the game your Lover wants to play. And the other parts of you can so entirely monopolize the available inner resources that no one else can get a word in edgewise--much less get a turn at training the telescope on some distant star clusterfuck or whatever passes for shit to look at in outer space these days. So it would be a very good use of our time indeed to spend the rest of his short chapter by going behind the scenes to discover how even a single part of you can get so good at playing its game--no matter how stupid that game may seem to the rest of the class-that forward progress in other areas can grind to a complete fucking halt. Bottom line, there’s no point in learning any of this if we can’t also get your Lover some much-needed Telescope Time. Which naturally leads us directly to the neonelectric world of big-time gambling. And more specifically, the slots.

Twenty or so years ago slot machines were the Lepers of the gaming world. No self-respecting gambler would go near the one-armed bandits— which accounted for a mere pittance of total casino revenues. Fast forward a couple of decades...those old-timey, Rube Goldbergian contraptions with actual handles to pull have been replaced by a high-tech altar to graphics, electronics and computational horse-power that looks like a joint venture between the Jet 274


Propulsion Laboratory Imagineering.

and

Walt

Disney

Along with its fraternal twin of video poker, the modern-day slot machine has turned the casino business upside down. Gambling revenue has unexpectedly flippity-flopped, with Machine Gambling now accounting for upwards of 90% of all proceeds. This is a big deal because the part of us that plays machine games is a completely different part than the one that plays table games. The ego state who learns to plays live-action table games is often a larger-than-life version of ourselves—just that much more courageous, dashing and outgoing than we normally give ourselves permission to be. What's more, the table gaming side of us is rewarded with higher social status by casinos and onlookers alike because of its daring exploits at the green felt tables--along with all the attendant limos, palatial suites and top-of-the-line hookers that come with the territory. And then there's the quiet, humble crewmember that plays machines. On the surface, slots and video machines are even more flashy and sparkly than table games—and its their Blade Runner-y sensory appeal that entice gamblers to sit down in the first place and give these devices a whirl. But, as with everything, there's an outside and an inside. Beneath the surface of actually PLAYING these glittery machines is an isolated, lonely world that's been variously described by its denizens as... 275


Being in a trance A way to erase yourself Hanging in suspended animation On autopilot Nowhere When people play machine games, they are dead to the world...even dead to themselves, really. Now table games are Finite Games. Each turn of the dice, spin of the ball or flip of the cards is a separate game, with winners and losers and all the attendant celebration or despondency. Players will regularly march up to the roulette wheel or craps table to make a single outlandish bet of many hundreds or thousands of dollars, lose it within a few seconds, and then hustle off to tilt at another windmill on the other side of the casino. Meanwhile, machine games are Infinite Games. Machine players regularly report that they’re not playing to win. They play solely to keep playing...to stay in the Machine Void. And stay they do, for hour after numbing hour. While the corporations that run casinos are delighted by the rise and rise of the machine, the officials who regulate them are growing somewhat alarmed by the “mindlessness” of this flavor of gaming. Which, of course, entirely misses the point of how and why people play the games we do. 276


Every one of our crewmembers seeks to get better at the game they play. Our smoking part wants to improve its ability to play the game called Smoking no less than the part of us that plays Slots wants to get better. And get better it does. You can put in your 10,000 hours on becoming a ballerina or you can put in the hours on getting better at pushing buttons on a machine. An outside observer would complain that gamblers aren't getting better at playing these games. The outside observer would be wrong. Players ARE getting better at playing machines games. They're getting better at playing them out in the Real-World Gaming Environment--where players have been known to increase their ability to play video poker, from 300 hands per hour up to 600 hands and even, in the case of Mastery, 900 hands. Per hour. Which, by any measure, is a staggering feat of mental and manual dexterity. Machine gamblers are just as legitimately in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi much ballyhooed state of Flow as more “productive” members of society who playing culturally approved games like chess or painting an Italian fresco. But here's our big takeaway we’ve been playing for... Our crewmembers don’t just improve their ability to 277


play a game on the outside of us, but also on the inside. For a crewmember to play any game it first has to get control of our ship's wheel—which can be no mean feat, since the steering wheel is quite commonly already overbooked. And then to keep playing its game this side of us has to keep hanging onto the wheel—meaning it has to learn how to negotiate for more time with the other parts. Here's our big takeaway, somewhat restated... Learning to master the game on the inside is as important to a part's ultimate success than anything that happens on the outside. Getting better at kickstarting a new business is a combination of discrete actions you take in the Universe AND the ability of your Entrepreneurial side to successfully negotiate with the other parts of you to get the resources it needs to create the next Instagram or some shit. Until and unless your Lover can figure out how to get a whole bunch of turns at the helm--despite the opposition of other parts of you--then he’s not going to get better at playing his game. It all boils down to playing time, my man. And the way you get playing time is you keep scooting one player up the bench until you’re sitting right next to your Captain and you say, “Put me in the game!” Then you keep on saying, “Put me in the game!” 278


over and over again until your Captain finally relents and puts you in the motherfucking game. And then...play hard.

279


32: Playing The Relationship Game

Even the most rapturously pro-kink, pan-sexual, slutshameless Sex Bloggers of the world STILL cannot go through an entire day without dropping the “R” word. So this one’s for them...however, they’re probably not gonna like my contrarian take on Relationships. Well, unless they also conceive of them as something we do primarily because we’re bored. Think about it... While the workplace dominates our lives, in truth even a full-time, forty-hour-per-week gig still leaves us with 128 unstructured hours each week for to fill with still more games. Even if we allow ourselves a generous eight hours per night to play the game called Sleeping—which nobody actually does, but whatever—there remains 72 unaccounted for hours. So maybe we take up golf. Okay, that's four additional hours down, just 68 left. What other games can we play? Hmmmmm, a man's gotta eat...so let's say an hour per day of combined preparing, chewing and swallowing our cud for another, hell, that's only seven total hours per week, still leaving us with 61. Oh, oh, oh, I forgot about brushing our teeth! 280


One minute per session times twice per day and there's another 14 minutes we don't have to think about. Shit! You know what? We need something here. Something big. Big as in an ongoing, larger-than-life experience to keep us occupied when we're not busy playing the game called being at work. My man... We're gonna need a bigger boat! Hold on, hold on, I've got an idea. I've got THE idea! What's a game we can play that has the potential to utilize every free minute between leaving the office at the end of the day and showing up again the next morning? A truly Infinite Game that only requires one other person—and it can be anybody, it literally doesn’t matter--to play it with? How about a little game called... Being In A Relationship?! How perfect is that?! In one fell swoop we've solved our Sisyphean drive for structure in our life...for, well, the rest of our life. A relationship is like a vacuum cleaner that sucks up all those annoying extra hours left over while we're not busy playing the game called work. Suddenly we no longer have any time left over to 281


worry about doing anything else...meaning we no longer have to do anything else...meaning our worries are over, my friend! Our motherfucking worries are over! Wow, you'd think just about everybody would want to get into a relationship! Oh, wait. Never mind. Here's a secret you'll never read about in any of those grimly cheerful books on relationship advice with their clever titles spelled out in wispy cursive and a velvety red heart instead of a dot over the “i” often written by a married couple where the role of the woman is played by the man and you can just imagine the number of nights he's sat numbly on the edge of their marital bed apologizing for not being able to get hard yet again as she lightly strokes his arm and reassures him that it's no big deal while she furtively counts the hours til Mandingo comes over the next afternoon to fuck every hole in her body exactly the way she needs to get fucked or she's gonna go postal here and k-k-kill...sorry where were we oh yeah another shhhhhh-don’t-tell-anybody-buteverybody-already-knows secret... All the love songs and romantic comedies notwithstanding, the goal of playing the game called Relationship is not to find your best match in the entire world--it's to find any match whatsoever who's willing to play the Relationship game with you. Which is why pretty much nobody under the age of 65 is strictly monogamous anymore. The proper definition of monogamy is having only 282


one partner during your whole lifetime—which is how our grandparents used to play the game. These days we (and by tend to be serial monogamists. When things don't work out with our current partner, we often prefer to find someone new to play the game with rather than throwing ourselves onto the fiery funeral pyre of our dearly departed loved one. The Relationship game as it's currently played in the real world is Identity-Independent. If things don't work out with Eduardo, a woman will gladly play the exact same game with Cedric or Bartholomew or whoever else shows up. The identity of the person she plays Relationship with is little more than a random element introduced to make game all the more unpredictable and engaging. Here's a secret that absolutely NOBODY will ever admit to... We enjoy playing the game of Relationship on its own merits—who we play it with is incidental. Hey, don't shoot the messenger here. I didn't invent this game. This is what people do. This is what you do. This is what some English chick I seduced a few weeks ago did. First, she told me I was the Most Amazing Man Ever Invented! Then I explained that I didn't want to play Relationship with her--my preferred game being 283


Lovers, meaning she would share me with other women, just as I would share her with other men— upon which she tearfully, yet swiftly, broke things off with me. A week later I introduced her to a friend of mine, an extraordinary man in his own right. The English chick soon pronounced HIM to be the Most Amazing Man Ever Invented. Until he, in turn, explained that although he did have a desire to play Relationship, he was in the middle of an Epic Quest and simply couldn't spare the time at the moment to do so...and again she summarily and tearfully and swiftly broke it off. But her tears weren't for him, just as they hadn't been for me. Her tears were for her. She was crying because she really, really wanted to play the Relationship game and we weren't letting her play and that made her sad, angry and upset. Her desire to play the game itself was much larger than her desire to be with either one of us as individuals— otherwise she would've been with us in whatever way we were available for her. And a girl should get what she wants--no argument from me there. Relationship is a fun game to play if you've got the time to play it. I've played it several times before and I may well play it again. It's super easy to start playing. Like all good things in life, it starts by doing what so many of us can forget to do for years at a time: 284


leaving the house. Let's say you go to a birthday party... You’re not even there ten minutes before you meet a plain but likable woman. That same night you have plain but likable sex with her. You're not doing anything the next night so you see her again. And then once more the following Friday night, because, you know, it's Friday night. By Saturday it dawns on you that all the grief and embarrassment and overpowering sensations that come from being rejected and (even worse) ignored by women you are trying to meet might be behind you. Is it possible that you’ve miraculously stumbled upon the Holy Grail sought by every exemplar of the male species: a regular and limitless source of pussy?! You're so relieved about no longer having to face the slings and arrows of negativity from other ladies out there that your emotions swell within your body. Being a man, and therefore scarcely able to tolerate much sensation in your body, you seek to dissipate that excess emotion by expressing it to your new ladyfriend. You say something like: “I think I could fall in love with you.” She doesn't answer you...yet. She just smiles knowingly. At this point, you've known her for one week. What follows are the four most exciting years of your life. 285


You're never bored. How could you be? You now have three times as many troubles as you did before. Seriously, you have three times the troubles to distract you. You've still got all of your old problems, they surely haven't gone anywhere. And now you also have her problems. And then you have YOUR problems—the combined problems the two of you have by virtue of being a couple. Like the problem of deciding whether you move into her place or she moves into yours or you get a new place together. Problems, problems everywhere...and nary a moment to think. Meanwhile you're not following your dreams. You're not going on any Epic Quests. Hell, many of your crewmembers aren't even getting to pursue their Mini-Quests. How could they? Between all those crushing deadlines at work, and going to her sister’s wedding, and visiting her family twice a year in Houston—really, they couldn't live in some more...civilized place?!--you don't have a moment free. Gone is playing poker with your buddies and fishing through the weekend. You have sex less and less, so you sneak into the bathroom to spank it to Donkey Show porn more and more. Sure, the pilot light of your desire to undertake an Epic Quest still flickers in your rare quiet moments, but you don't have time to turn up the heat just now. 286


Once things “settle down” you'll write the Great American Novel. Of course things never settle down...that's not what things do. Until one day you come home and she's moved all her shit out. Like, she’s just fucking gone. You are justifiably outraged. How could she do this to you? You're pissed off, and well you should be. Not because you particularly miss her—oh, sure, you grew fond of her as a person, yet let's be honest here, another Best Available Option is just a mouse click away—but because according to the rules you're not even allowed to play the Relationship game again for a long while. If you don't spend the requisite year or so grieving over—uhhhhh, whatever her name was—then it would be way too obvious to others and to you that playing the Relationship game itself was the source of your enjoyment, while who you played it with was, shall we say, negotiable. There's even a strict-ish formula to follow about how soon you can start playing the Relationship game again: the longer you were “in”, the longer you gotta stay “out” to prove to everybody (i.e., again, including you) how “meaningful” it all was.

Meanwhile, if we enjoy playing the game called Tennis, we're allowed to play it as often or seldom as 287


we like with any of our tennis-playing friends. Or, if they're not available, we can play with their roommate. Or their mom. Or anybody at a skill level comparable enough to our own such that we'd both enjoy the experience. Yet we're not supposed to want to play the Relationship game in the same way that a person likes to play the game of tennis or travel. Relationships are “supposed” to be different. They're supposed to be about the other person, not about the experience. Mind you, that's now how most of us actually play the game, it's just how we pretend to play the game. Again, according to all the songings and poesy and romanticals, we're not supposed to play Relationship at all unless we also make a big show of pretending that the person we're playing it with is our One True Soulmate (TM). Lest you think that finding your One True Soulmate (TM) sounds like a daunting, insurmountable barrier to entry in order to play this popular game, it just so happens that our next One True Soulmate (TM) lives directly across the street from us. We know this to be true because it's always been true. Since the dawn of civilization, our romantic relationships have largely been determined by propinquity--a fifteen-dollar word signifying the happy, happy accident that of all the kabillions of people in all the kamillions of cities on all the kajillions of planets in the universe, the odds that the 288


person you're destined...destined, mind you!...to spend the rest of your life with just so happens to live directly across the street from you are pretty much 100%! Well, if not directly across the street, then no further than around the corner. Statistically, virtually everybody settles down to play Happy Families with someone who lives less than 2.1 miles away. This is as true today as it was in the Middle Ages and earlier. How cool and totally not a bizarre, inexplicable, unfathomable, and nonbelievable coincidence that every human on planet Earth fortuitously happens to be born and raised almost exactly right next to the person that the stars up above and the love songs on the radio and all the astrologers laid end-to-end always predicted they would meet and get to spend the rest of their days with—their One True Soulmate (TM)?! (Which sounds so much more romantic in official Orwellian Double-Speak rather than its true moniker of Best Available Option, right?!) So you serve out your mandatory sentence of Grieving for your long lost love (with time off for bad behavior, oh la la!) and eventually you are pardoned and allowed to play the Relationship game again, with the stern warning to make sure this time around you play it with your real One True Soulmate (TM) and not a false, fake, evil one like last time--wink, wink! 289


Thus do you finally leave the house again. Lo and behold, at the very first party you attend, there she is—a human female with an impish laugh and two breasts and one pussy who's shyly looking for somebody to play the Relationship game with. However, this time it is different. She's just come out of a several year relationship that ended badly. Yeah, you know all about that. And now she's got Trust Issues. Wow, you've also got some of those. She seems to like you. But...what she needs right now is someone who can be understanding, who will “take it slow.” And you're like, “Ohmgod, me too!” Adding, “People are always rushing into things.” “Right,” she agrees, “what's the hurry?” Turns out she enjoys hiking, too. And the ocean. And cooking together. All the things you like. Oh, and this one time, she and her friends saw a platypus. Sheesh, how perfect and how perfectly lucky that you and her would happen to meet like this. “Holy shit”, you're already thinking, “she might really be my One True Soulmate (TM)!” 290


At this point, you've known her for 20 minutes.

Well now you know why I dismissed the ladies at the very beginning--because I knew this day was coming! If they were still hanging around their little Alice would be throwing the biggest fucking hissy fit East of the Mississippi right about now, ya dig?! That's 'cause they don’t like hearing that playing Relationship is no different than playing Politics or Religion. These are all bewitching diversions, if that's your bag, but the participants often take the experience sooooooooooo seriously they forget to ever have any fun playing 'em. Despite my unorthodox take on the Relationship game—i.e., that we play it more because of our love of the game itself than for the love of the current incarnation of our One True Soulmate (TM) that we happen to be playing it with—I'm not remotely suggesting you shouldn't indulge in playing that game now and again if that's your desire. True Love still happens. It's happened to me. More than once. And it'll probably happen again. But if it also one ends, that doesn't make it NonTrue Love. I have no problem with people who choose to play Relationship. In any case, as I keep saying, no game is any better or worse than any other from the 291


perspective of the player. A crewmember that enjoys playing Serial Killer may be unpopular both inside and outside a person, but a game is a fucking game. Many great men get (re-)married...to women they typically meet AFTER they’ve completed one of more of the Epic Quests for which they earned their fame and fortune....and quite often to women so young they were barely even born during the time of their man's greatest accomplishments! I simply want to encourage you, my friend, to be ever mindful that jumping into such a potentially intense and intensive game as Relationship can come at the expense of you playing other games—most particularly your current Epic Quest. Because every day we wake up and face the same daunting choice... Should we continue to play other people's games? Or... Is it finally time for us to make up a game of our own? Do we create our own TV show...or watch one somebody else created? Shall we keep working for the Man...or become the motherfucking Man? And there really aren't simple answers to these questions. Except that it's always going to be much easier NOT to start that business or NOT write that book than it is to do so. It will always requires infinitely less effort to keep playing the game we're currently playing, whether we like it or not, than to 292


become a Mystical Journeyer--travelling into a world unseen by others and then returning to tell them of it. Hell, maybe not everybody has an Epic Quest in them. Some people's lot in life might truly be to play supporting Non-Player Character roles in the absurdly epic dreams and ambitions of Business Titans, Rebels, Iconoclasts and other great men...and great women, to be sure. But how can we know we aren't meant to succeed at one or more Epic Quests of our own unless we try? And how can we know what our Captain is even capable of if we never wake him up? Meanwhile the game of Relationship isn't going anywhere, believe me. You can come back to it any time. Just ship something first, fair enough?!

293


33: Your Boarding Party

Games

aren’t just determined by their rules and players, but also by the spaces in which they’re played. Even if you've mastered the rules of yachting, you still need to find your way to a large enough body of water to play that particular game. The finest yachtsman in the world stuck in the middle of the desert is what vultures refer to as “a side of fries”. Some games are played on boards, some on fields, and still others in outer space—the latter including astronomy, astrology, theology and the floaty game of being an astronaut. Once in a while a would-be Lothario manages on his own merits to figure out enough of the rules to gain some purchase on the true art of seduction...but then subsequently flounders because he cannot quite figure out where the game itself is supposed to be played. And that’s a critical question: where is the game called Seduction played? Obviously, not knowing the answer would cripple every aspect of our approach and strategy--no less than bringing our mad water polo skillz to a proper polo pitch with horses and shit wouldn’t likely result in us scoring a goal or whatever the fuck they have. The glossy magazines tell us seduction is played over an unhurried meal at the type of classy 294


restaurants that, quite conveniently, also happen to advertise in their pages. The pick up gurus insist seduction is played at bars and nightclubs over drinks, preferably ones that the “target” paid for. Dumb-asses believe it's played at strip clubs. (“No way, dude, that chick totally digs me for who I am, not 'cause I gave her all my money to hang out with me!”) Floundering middle-aged men feverishly hope it's played online at Match, OK Cupid or RussianBrides2Go dot com. And on and on. In point of fact, seduction is not played anywhere in the world. At least anywhere in the world as we know it— this measurable, phenomenological embrace of matter we call home. Instead, it's played exclusively in Game Reality. More specifically, her Game Reality. Welcome to the Weird, my friend!

The game of Seduction is played on board a woman's ship as she sails about the watery bits of the world. That is to say... 295


The playing field of seduction is INSIDE the woman you are seducing. The imminent psychologist Carl Rogers noted, “The best vantage point for understanding behavior is from the internal frame of reference of the individual.” Now don’t worry your pretty little head just yet about how you’re going to actually pull off any of the following in the “real” world. You already knew this was going to be different from anything you’ve ever been exposed to before. And you ought to know by now that I wouldn’t introduce you to any of this if I didn’t also have a plan to get you there. So for now, just lean back, relax and enjoy the ride. Besides, as Picasso put it, “Everything you can imagine is real.” So imagine along with me... To initiate the game of seduction, you first notice the pleasing aspect of a woman's ship looming in the distance and your Captain makes the command decision to board her. You trim your sails and set the rudder on a course to intercept her—cheekily drawing your great ship right up to hers, while in the meantime summoning your Lover and Little Prince to the top deck. Together with the Captain, these three make up the complete boarding party required to seduce any woman. 296


Notice who is NOT among the boarding party... to:

Every other part of you! Including, but not limited,

That super-informed side that knows the complete history of the Knights Templar. The ego state that follows hockey, cricket, team handball or any other sport. Any of your mouthy, grumbly stowaways. Your Inner Writer who's responsible for those florid, fiendishly clever, book-length missives to the ladies on dating sites that result in two-word responses from below-average chicks whom you almost never ultimately meet in real life anyway. Or any of your know-it-all avatars with their esoteric knowledge about the world that you've trotted out before in a failed attempt to jump the shark over a woman and “impress” her into your bed with your superior data. Here's a secret that will single-handedly cut your reading list in half.... A woman won't fuck you because you know a bunch of esoteric information about the world--she'll only fuck you for knowing a few simple truths about her. No amount of data in the world will ever get you laid unless you actually are Data from Star Trek--and if you are, Hi, love your work! Your entire boarding party consists of your Lover, Little Prince and Captain. If any other side of you shows up wanting to help, 297


thank them politely for their offer and then get rid of them. Seriously, they can only get in the way. Similarly, if any parts of the woman you're seducing, besides the specific ones we'll meet below, try to commandeer the wheel of her ship, simply pat them on the head smilingly and send them back to their cabins with all due dispatch. Later we'll explore the exact structure of how to play this beauteous game—when to alternate between your steamy Lover and the sweet, vulnerable Little Prince, all under the watchful eye of your dashing Captain. And later still, when you reach the Bonus Round of Fucking that comes at the end of the game, your Captain's final task will be to release the hungry, primal Lion within you from its heavily barred cage so it can get all rough and tumble with some lucky lady's Tigress.

298


34: Her Welcoming Party

Speaking of the lucky lady, let's meet her parts. Her parts...her parts...her lovely lady parts! Keep in mind that even though you are boarding a woman's ship, her crewmembers are not the enemy. Quite the opposite. They very much want you to succeed. That said, she does have a couple of ego states whose jobs include preventing her from yielding to your temptations too quickly. A crucial aspect of seduction is wooing or otherwise handling each of these characters in turn— no less than you'd have to work your way through several layers of defense to reach any worthwhile treasure in an actual Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Let's do a quick meet 'n' greet of her troops, armed with the foreknowledge that we'll do our primary Training on specifically how to play with them once we arrive at the 22 Strokes. Our three crewmembers will normally be met by five of hers. Her Naughty Girl and her charming, deadly Alice will “face off” against your Lover and your awkward, nice-to-a-fault Little Prince—and this is where the 299


bulk of our seductive energy will be applied. At the same time, her Captain and your Captain may go head to head—often with sparks and witty banter a-flying that rivals the epic sword battle between Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride--the clever quoting from which is the ONLY time you’re allowed to trot out any esoteric knowledge when seducing a lady. Alas, alack, oh potato sack...opportunities for urbane, screwball comedy banter between your Captain and hers are far more common in motion pictures than out of them. Chances are good that her Captain will still be asleep—the way yours probably was before you set out on this journey in earnest. A woman can still be seduced if her Captain's not around. If anything, her Captain's absence makes it that much easier. But... But... BUT...do I have your attention yet? I want you to a come to a Dead Stop for this next bit! If a woman's Captain isn't present, then she will have less access to her inner moral compass and can more easily stumble into doing things that might prove inappropriate for her lifestyle and dreams. Print this one out and put it on your bedstand... Just because a woman will fuck you doesn't mean that's the right or best decision for her in the moment. It's okay for you to say, “No” if you perceive that 300


it’s not in a woman’s best interests to fuck you. There's an infinite supply of women. If it's not the right place or time for any one of them, throw her back. I throw back far more than women than I ever bed. Not because I don't like them, but because it would be unecological to play with her in whatever circumstance I've encountered her. On the same note, if a woman becomes overintoxicated, you must end the seduction immediately. You must stop and take care of her--delivering her to her friends or a place of safety. If you're not playing this game with absolute integrity and the self-possession of a gentleman—if your Captain isn't stepping into the leadership void and conducting himself with all due nobility when a woman is going through a tough time—then you're playing the game wrong. Listen, I know you don't need me to tell you any of this. The kind of man that you'd have to be to have come this far on our journey together is also the kind of man who does not need to be schooled about how to treat others with honor and decency. Still, it never hurts to be reminded of the fundamentals, right? After all, that's why they're called the fundamentals!

On top of that, one or more of her crewmembers might not be very good at playing their designated game. 301


Not to put too fine a point on it, but they sometimes suck. And not through any fault of their own. They suck at at playing their game for the simple reason that they haven't spent enough time playing it to become any good yet. A woman's Naughty Girl, for example, might make some over-the-top lascivious remark and then immediately regret it and make awkward attempts to take it back. Don't pounce on a woman if a part of her makes a basic mistake. Instead remain patient and kind. Here's a secret that can help you win more friends and influence more people than any other... Every part in every human is just trying to get a little better at the game it plays. And that includes Alice, who will ALWAYS be present during a seduction. She may almost seem to be hiding for long stretches. But she's not hiding. Not yet. That comes later. For now, she's watching and watching some more. Never forget about Alice and never overlook her. Little Alice may test you by throwing little or big tantrums. If you react poorly or emotionally or if you make her feel stupid by trying to “fix” her Upset, she will press the little red button and you'll have to go bye-bye thank you for playing please don't bother us again. When Alice's test comes—and it will come—the 302


only way to “pass” it is by doing nothing. Stay present and unemotional in the face of her tantrum. Simply smile and say to her, not out loud with words, but silently with your eyes: “You are beautiful. You are safe. And you are loved.” The same words your Little Prince wants and needs to hear. When Alice’s upset comes, often it will be so quick that if you blinked you'd miss it...and it can go away just as quickly. Simply smile at her lovingly and she will back down soonishly. The key to every seduction is staying utterly present with the woman you are seducing, giving her the full force of your attention and intention. Once Alice realizes you cannot be moved off your center by her storm, she will take her finger off the little red button that would instantly abort the seduction. For now. But she'll go back to watching you intently and taking your measure—noticing what you do and how you do it.

This isn't random. There's a reason Alice is doing all this. She's asking herself if she can trust you. She's trying to figure out if you can protect her. She wants to know that you have the strength to be there for her later on in case the big scary Tigress comes out to play. Because Alice is afraid of the Tigress and doesn't 303


want it to eat her. (Hey, all life is about self-preservation—and our individual parts are no exception.) Here's what I want you realize about the little girl inside of every woman... Even though she's only a little girl, she knows about sex. Not everything about it. But plenty. Enough to know it's ugly and messy and she doesn't like it. She doesn't understand the point and doesn't want to find out. She also knows she can prevent it from happening sometimes. If she throws a big enough tantrum, the man might get frightened and run away, or else do something stupid and lose his chance to come in and play. So she looks for a chance to create an upset whenever possible. If making a racket doesn't work, if sex becomes unavoidable, then she has to go hide. She has to go far, far away, because she's terrified of being eaten by the Beast. So Alice runs and hides. Sometimes she crawls all the way down one leg and hides in the narrow space behind the knee...a tight squeeze where the Tigress cannot reach her with its mangly teeth and hot, roarish breath. Alice hides and closes her eyes and her ears and 304


her nose. The soured milk smell of sex makes her sick to her stomach. During the sex act is when she feels most isolated. That’s when she most wishes she had a friend to play with or a stuffed animal to cling to. Or even a hug. A hug would make her feel so much better. When the Tigress roars especially loud, Alice inches down even further inside the woman’s leg, as far as she can go. There she stays, rocking and singing softly to herself...until the ugly thumping ends, until the Beast is spent and the danger passes. Slowly, ever so slowly, Alice emerges from her hiding place and makes the lonely trudge back to where she usually stays, up near the heart, as she awaits the first opportunity to take the helm and play the game she needs to play—the game of Upset. If possible, she throws a tantrum directed at the man who caused all this trouble. She wants him to react badly. She wants him to get scared or angry so he'll run away. Far, far away. Except that's not what she really wants. She doesn't want him to leave at all. She wants him to stay and be gentle and sweet and play with her for a while. Nobody ever plays with her. She wants him to take her in his arms and hold her tight--hugging her so deeply that she feels totally safe. 305


And loved. And pretty. That's what Alice wants. I just wanted you to know that underneath her harsh, bossy-pants exterior she is soft and sweet and lonely and scared and shy. So whenever you encounter Alice, you might consider giving her a loving hug and playing with her for a while.

There are two final crewmembers waiting for us when we descend upon a woman's ship in her Game Reality during a seduction. One them you may be expecting, the other you may not. In both cases, the less you have to do with them, the better. Each member of a woman’s welcoming party has the ability to abort a seduction at any moment, no questions asked. Other parts of her may object to playing sexy time in general or to you in particular, but they don't have the ability to unilaterally pull the plug. At best they could try to find an ally from within the ranks of a woman's welcoming party and whisper in their ear like Claudius dripping poison in the ear of Hamlet's father, the soon-to-be-late King— but any one of the Big Five can push the little red button such that a Dr. Evil-esque trap door snaps open up directly underneath you and you’re...gone. You don’t have to make friends with every member of 306


her welcoming party, but you must also not make any enemies. The next crewmember we'll meet is her Bodyguard, whose job description is exactly what you would think it to be, guarding her body. In the (quite likely) event that a woman's Captain is still asleep, her Bodyguard serves as the last line of defense and customarily takes its game very, very seriously—positively relishing any opportunity to be a Grade A Cockblocker. The Keepers of the Standard Dogma, with their slavish, Renfield-esque devotion to the mechanization of mankind, refer to a woman's Bodyguard by the militaristic jargon-speak of Center of Vigilance—as if it were the command & control center buried deep within an aircraft carrier, lined with banks of glowy radar screens and missile defense systems connected by miles of wiring and cooled with liquid nitrogen. Look, I greatly adore this high-tech-apalooza world of ours, but it usually does not truthfully nor usefully nor beautifully explain how the human endeavor unfolds within us. Our inner Game Reality is decidedly low tech... A timeless sailing ship rather than a state-of-theart nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. A flesh and blood Bodyguard with bulging biceps and pirate tats instead of a computer-controlled, laserguided Center of Vigilance. And a sword. 307


Her Bodyguard also has a sword. Because why the fuck wouldn't it have a sword? Of course, if you wanna get all neuroscience-y and Greekish about it, this ego state is technically called the Amygdala, but Bodyguard seems ever so much more poetic and mysterical, so let's go with that! In any event, her Bodyguard's marching orders are to err on the side of being overly cautious about letting her Naughty Girl out to play. If the Bodyguard says “yes” too often or to the wrong type of men (i.e., those who fail the Narcissus Test by light of day), then the woman's Captain is liable to rouse himself from its uneasy slumbers, assemble the entire crew on deck and give this bumbling fool a most public and humiliating dressing down. You--not you, your crew, duh!--will never need to interact directly with her Bodyguard. There's no action for you to take in relation to this part other than to be mindful that it's there and then treat every lady with the respect she's entitled to. Oh, and for the love of Vishnu don't ever, ever, ever try to knock out a woman's Bodyguard by plying it with drink or drugs. That's what weak men and assholes do. If you simply follow the 22 Strokes as they're laid out in the Level IV, when it comes time to advance to the Bonus Round of Fucking, her Bodyguard will personally congratulate you with a head nod and a half-smile that says, “Job well done!” 308


Finally, the final member of a woman's Welcoming Party is the one that may surprise you. At the very least, discovering how you should handle this part of her will shake up some of your core believings about how you're “supposed” to woo a woman. Once more, don't shoot the fucking messenger here--I hate to always be the one bearing bad news, yet nobody else out there was willing to step up to the plate and tell you any of this—but you've been interacting with this crewmember exactly wrong your entire life. Exactly wrong. You've been trying to make friends with this side of a woman. But it doesn't want to be your friend. It's not even friends with the woman you're seducing, so why the fuck would it want to become friends with you?!

309


35: How (Not) To Compliment A Woman

Just because a woman looks like a triathlete (or even IS a triathlete) doesn't automatically mean she loves her body. Anybody can punish and starve their body into looking “good” without enjoying a healthy or loving relationship with it. A woman's Puppy Body is the final, and undoubtedly the most sensitive, member of a woman's Welcoming Party. Many women are not exactly in love with their Puppy Body—the inner avatar that reflects how they feel about the outside of themselves—and more still cannot begin to fathom why so many men are. We may see a woman as a sleek, aerodynamic greyhound, whereas in her Game Reality her Puppy Body resembles a pug—a flat-faced, bulging-eyed mess of loose folds of skin. We men want to cling to our Actual Reality because we “know” it to be true... The woman sitting across from us is a mega-babe and we want to bring that truth into Mutual Knowledge by making sure that she knows that we know that. And yet we always forget one little detail... When realities collide, Game Reality always triumphs Actual Reality. 310


Always. Always. Always. Actual Reality: zero...Game Reality: infinity A woman's Multiverse, in which she may have a distorted, irrational, unflattering image of herself, invariably triumphs over any logical, phenomenological, tape-measurable evidence we can assemble about how, say, her cute button nose is the perfect incarnation of a Fibonacci Sequence. Oh, just in case you wondered... The unavoidable supremacy of a woman's inner Game Reality is is precisely why we play the game of seduction on her home turf in the first place.

You will never in your life know how any individual woman in your life experiences her own Puppy Body--which, again, may not necessarily look like a “puppy”, but which definitely also does not look like the “her” that you see through your eyes. A woman will never tell you how she envisions her Puppy Body, nor would mere words begin to do justice to their complex relationship even if she tried. The most important truth for you to remember is that a woman’s relationship with her Puppy Body is never reflected on the outside. Some of the most gorgeous, pristine women you'll ever encounter view their Puppy Body as a growling, 311


mangey junkyard dog that deserves all the kicks and abuse it gets. Other women, who could only charitably be called plain, have a Puppy Body that appears to themas an adorable, beloved furball they enjoy cuddling with at every opportunity. One of the most significant improvements we can make in our ability to seduce women is changing the way we interact with a woman's Puppy Body. The way we've been taught to do it is to praise a woman's looks early and often. Like just about every other fucking thing people are hell-bent on teaching us, that’s the fucking worst advice ever. I would like to encourage in the strongest possible terms to stop doing that. In fact, I'm going to recommend that you don't ever praise a woman's looks ever again. Like, ever. At least not any woman you're actively seducing and have a desire to eventually fuck. No good can come from complimenting a woman on her physical appearance...only a great deal of bad.

Praising the outside of a woman is like playing Russian Roulette without an empty chamber in the gun. Because we don't know--

Actually, hold that thought for a sec. Before we go 312


any further I need to take you aside and tell you something... My man, I fully recognize this shit is cray-cray. This whole Inner Role-Playing Game Theory of Mind is so totally fucking weird that it cannot possibly be true. Little Prince? Alice? Sleeping Captain? Puppy Body? The way you seduce a woman is to board her ship in her Game Reality? Are you fucking kidding me with all this?! Everything you and I are talking about is so far beyond the pale of the conversation that anybody else on the entire fucking planet is having about the human endeavor that this shit has got to be false, wrong and potentially deciduous. Or at least stratocumulus. Or maybe I'm thinking of scabrous. Scabrous: indecent, salacious and/or covered with scabs. Yeah, that sounds about right. This is some weird, scabrous shit. And if anything it's only gonna get weirder. Hell, directly ahead we've got... Stroke Zero. The Myth of Self Esteem. Seduction Singularity. And the grandaddy of them all: Quantum Entanglement. Now in my defense, I didn't invent how human beings are organized--I've simply come along to explain it to you because none of them other motherfuckers would. 313


My mentor from beyond the grave, Terrence McKenna, speaks of the Artist as Shaman--a mystical journeyer who goes into a world unseen by others to find a Way...if there is a Way to be found...and then return to tell of it. So if the Way I found is weird, it's hardly my fault. You simply cannot spelunk to any meaningful depth into the human experience without it becoming really, REALLY fucking weird. If anything, I've taken great pains (great pains, I'll have you know!) to distill the weirdness down to its pure essence so we could ingest it one teensy-tiny, candy-coated, profanity-infused drop at a time. Still, even if not one word in this entire book turns out to be True—and the odds border on 100% that not one word here will turn out to be true, other than referring to it as “scabrous”, naturally—what if, coincidentally and entirely by accident, what I'm sharing with you turns out to be Useful? What if my Inner Role-Playing Game Theory of Whatever-the-Fuck, against all laws of physics, rationality and common decency, somehow actually works? Suppose this crazy, scabrous shit actually leads to more women in your bed and other good outcomes besides? What then?! In that (exceedingly improbable, mind you) event, then I suppose you'll ultimately need to make a decision. You'll have to decide to either play game precisely as I lay it out for you in the 22 Strokes ahead, or else go play it in some less crazy, less weird and less scabrous way. 314


Because this really isn't a mix-and-match kind of thing. You cannot seduce a woman using the singular model that I'm sharing with you half-way or halfheartedly. It's all the way or not at all. All at once or never. I'm just putting this in your mind now--you won't actually need to choose until we reach the end and it's time for you to head into the Real-World Gaming Environment and put all this to the test. But eventually you gotta pick a team. There can only be one. I recognize that I don't have much to offer you other than my insanely weird Inner RPG Model of Fucking Everything. Our whole team would be just me and you. Oh, and the enchanting ladies we get to play the game of seduction with, fo sho. Oh, also 10,000 brand new Bonus Points, which I'm gonna immediately credit to your account without so much as a by your leave--because I am so not above buying your vote!--bringing your total up to a groovy 27,000 points. Now if you ultimately choose the other team— and, despite my blatant attempts just now to ` my way into your good graces, I super-strongly suggest that you do choose them—then you'll have the combined wisdom of every other expert on relationships, dating, pick up, romance and sexuality on the planet on your side. Of course, you and I won't even be playing on this planet. The game we're playing is within. After all, 315


that's why it's the Inner RPG Model. We're journeying to a whole different reality where the laws of earthbound physics no longer apply. Still, let's be honest with one another, you know, man to man... In the end you'd have to be out of your fucking mind to join me in the Game Reality where we're headed. Ding-dong! Who's there? Some dudes with straightjackets for you and your imaginary friend! Okay, be right out! Hurry, my imaginary friend, let's get back to work...because we've got a lot of strange shit to cover before they bust down the door and haul one or both of us away!

As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted... Because we do not know—and we can never know— the actual relationship a woman has with her Puppy Body, our best strategy for interacting with that member of her crew is: not at all. The Nash Equilibrium in this situation dictates that we should act as if the woman's Puppy Body isn't even a member of the woman's Welcoming Party, although it most certainly is. 316


Every time boy meets girl, her Puppy Body comes trotting out like Pavlov's dog--eager for the inevitable compliments that the boy typically starts ladling out like a hog farmer slopping its pigs. But that's not how you and I are going to do it. We're not going to make friends with a woman's Puppy Body. We're not going to seek it out and scratch its little head and single it out for flattering words. Instead, our entire strategy will be to leave it the fuck alone. We shall let sleeping—or not-so-sleeping, as the case may be—dogs lie. In a phrase... Never compliment the outside of a woman you are actively seducing. Because if you utter sweet words of praise about a woman's exterior (whether “nice rack, baby” or “great legs” or even “wow, you're so hot”) and there's not an exact match between her internal Puppy Body and your external assessment—and there will never, in the history of any woman you ever meet, be an exact match between these two--then your well-intentioned upstroke will have resulted only in you losing major Trust Points with her. Think about it like this... Are there any dudes out there who simply irk the shit out of you? Some moronic dildo-head whose very existence annoys you? Some jackass whom you wish would have the decency to move to another city or at least die? You know the kind of ass-wipe I'm talking 317


about, right?! Every guy has another guy or two that he fucking hates. Let’s call our vomitous example of one of these dudes Annoying Joe. Now suppose you meet a pixiehaired, tiny-breasted cutie at a party and she just moved to your own from “up North”--because “up North” is a place you move from, not to--and she's only met one other person and guess who the fuck that is? That's right, you guessed it—Joe. And you go, “Ugh, Annoying Joe? I'm so sorry you had to meet him.” But she says, “Oh, I thought Joe was sweet. He's pretty cute, too. Do you know if he has a girlfriend?” In one stroke your estimation of this cutie's tastes and opinions would've gone straight through the floor. The very fact that she couldn't recognize what an obvious waste of humanity Annoying Joe is suddenly makes you doubt her taste in every other area. That happened to me once. I was seducing this tight blonde I met and then I found out she'd fucked the smarmy, smirkish young attorney/semi-professional drunkard who was then playing the role of Annoying Joe in my life--and she fucked him not once, but twice!--and I was so thoroughly disgusted by that discovery that I permanently lost all interest in her. 318


Ugh. And that's exactly how a woman with a broken relationship with her body feels when you come along and start gushing praise-iferously about her sexy little Puppy Body. Ugh. It doesn't matter that she actually is pretty...in the same way it doesn't matter to you or me if our Annoying Joe actually is an awesome dude. You cannot stand him and really that's the beginning and the end of that story. “You have such beautiful skin!” you might say, quite truthfully, to a woman you've approached. On the inside she's thinking you're either an idiot for not being able to see all the obvious flaws, stretch marks, blemishes, blotches and veins in her skin, or else you're lying because you want something from her. Either way, she's already starting to not trust you and you've only just met. This isn't to suggest that your assessment of a woman's exterior will always be more flattering than her own--lots of gals think they're hotter than you or I would ever give them credit for—but rather that your separate perceptions will simply never match. Remarking on the physical appearance of a woman you are seducing is a lose-lose proposition. Absolutely no good can come of it—only bucketloads of bad. 319


I want you to write this down in blue Sharpie on the palm of your hand and stare at it till it burns itself into you eyeballs... Never compliment the physical attributes of a woman you're actively seducing.

It can prove so unsettley and stand-outish for a man not to compliment a woman he's chatting up that she may eventually notice and attempt to draw you out. “Ugh, I feel so fat,” she will pronounce out of the blue. “I really pigged out this week.” A lesser man, a weaker man—in other words, me until way more recently than I'd care to admit (hint: last year!)—would take the bait and run with it like a Grade A Moron, protesting her self-deprecating remark with great solemnity. “Oh, no, you're a babe.” “You're so fine, Princess.” “You are a paragon of feminine loveliness.” You know, the shit we say. And she's thinking, 'Sigh, boys are so boring and predictable.' From now on here's how I'd like you to react in the face of a woman's inevitable complaints about any aspect of the outside of herself... Do nothing. 320


Say nothing. Smile. A little. Just look at her with your little smile for a moment, then continue on with your seduction.

Like any habit, this can be a hard one to break. When I first arrived in London nearly six months ago, I had a Czech lover possessed of such an astonishingly perfect body that I simply couldn't restrain myself from gushing about her perfect breasts, her tight pussy and her lean thighs every time we got together—despite the fact that I also knew (I KNEW!) that she also had an ongoing eating disorder and all the attendant body dysmorphia that goes with it! Maybe on some level I thought perhaps that sharing some of the Truth (ha!) of my high regard for her physicality would sink in and magically would help her repair her dysfunctional relationship with her Puppy Body. You want to know what all my well-crafted compliments about her outside got me? A one-way ticket on the MegaBus to no longer fucking her, that's what. My appreciation of her (truly spectacular, my friend, truly spectacular!) body was so at odds with her disapproval of it that she preferred to not see me at all rather than have to endure hearing me say godawful nice things about it. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus! 321


That's Roman-speak for, “Sooner or later, even the best of us acts like a fucking idiot!” I’m well aware that advising you not to compliment a woman on her physical appearance goes directly against centuries of “best practices” on stage and screen where the Hero spends the majority of his time praising the external beauty of the Heroine—until she finally falls lovingly in his arms. Alas, life is not like stage or screen. Instead, it's like a role-playing game. And the part of a woman that plays the role of her body is unmoved by the endlessly sugar-coated compliments it hears from outsiders. Oh, and before you get all chuckly and holierthan-thou about how so many women seem to be neurotic about their looks, you should know that men occupy an even lower station in this scheme of things. An even greater percentage of men are completely and totally disconnected from their bodies. They don't even have enough of a relationship with their body for us to call it dysfunctional. Their Puppy Body is a Gollum-like creature slinking amongst the muck and filth of the lowest decks of their ship, haunting and hunted as it fights with rats, lawyers and other vermin for the meanest of scraps to stay alive. In the Western world, the average man in his fifties these days looks as if he's eight months pregnant. With triplets. Or even if he's not overweight, he's allowed his 322


muscles and bones to atrophy from neglect and disuse. Like any other part of you, your Puppy Body wants to play—to gambol about, leaping and frolicking and sniffing other puppy's asses. Your Puppy Body just wants--and deserves--to be loved. If you know any men who've fallen out of love with their body, send them to me because I can totally help them. My Low Carb Revolution book is smallishly about weight-loss and eating well...and biggishly about my unique model of habit change and how to fall back in love with your beautiful body.

Let's once more be grateful that the dames have been banned from these parts, because this would be their cue to wrap their fingers around our necks and screech, “TELL ME I'M PRETTY, GODDAMMIT!” Yo, yo, yo, back way the fuck off, baby! Here's the dealio... I'm not suggesting you stop complimenting women. Upstrokes are the best strokes of all. Please do offer a woman as many sincere compliments as you desire. However... Never praise a woman you are seducing for her outside—if for no other reason than it's totally superficial. Instead, freely compliment a woman for the positive attributes you perceive within her, such as 323


her business savvy, wit, ambition or femininity. Women (no less than men) sparkle and shine when their inner qualities are singled out for praise in front of the rest of the class. A powerful woman enjoys it when her power is recognized and appreciated by a powerful man...whether or not you think her tits are fetching is truly at the bottom of the list of things she'd like to hear from you. And whenever you give a woman an upstroke, always bear in mind that it's not her that your praising, but rather a specific, individual member of her crew. This is why you want to avoid doling out Universal Compliments such as, “You are such a generous person.” She is NOT a generous person...because there is no “she” in the way the Keepers of the Standard Dogma would have us believe. There is no global, monolithic “experiencing organism”, but rather a community of parts of who take turns playing the different games she plays. No sooner do you bust out a Universal Compliment about her being courageous (or any other similarly broad concept) than one or more of her parts who are not at all courageous—who are, if anything, downright cowards--will feel picked on and slighted. Instead, always direct any upstroke to the specific crewmember that deserves the praise. To wit... 324


“Wow, when you left your husband, not knowing where you'd live or how you'd support yourself, that took real courage, didn't it?!” That, my friend, is the type of heartfelt compliment that could touch a woman all the way in her Deep Spot. Which is a place within her so deep that it only comes as the very last stop at the very end of our journey together...but I promise you it's well worth waiting for.

325


36: The Mysterious Case of The Shriveled Up Spinal Cords

Here's a sobering thought... Virtually everybody on earth is a stranger to you. There are more than 7 billion humans alive today and statistically you don't know any of them. I'll prove it. Let's do the math. (Noooooooooooooooooooooooot math!) First, we've got our immediate Tribe, the 150-200 friends, family and such that we're able to keep in touch with on a regular basis, at least if Dunbar's Number is to be believed. Well that's an infinitesimal number compared to 7 billion, so let's see if we can pad it out a bit. Let's add in the many folks we may recognize by name or sight (frustratingly. not always both!)--folks from church or bingo or church bingo, which pretty much covers the entire non-work spectrum of the human endeavor, wouldn't you say? Even that's an miniscule number—maybe 500 people? Maybe? Hell, we're still way shy of 1000. Meanwhile on the other side of the equation there's more than seven BILLION people whom we don't know and will probably never meet. I don't have a calculator handy, but I'm pretty sure that 700 divided into 7,000,000,000,000 is, for all practical purposes, ZERO! 326


And there's more fucking people showing up all the time...within our lifetimes the world population is expected to nearly double to 13 billion. So, statistically, just about every human being is a stranger to us. Which is kinda depressing when you think about. And which is why most of us never think about it. But we sure as fuck feel it. We feel it constantly. In our central nervous system. In our spinal cord. In our Deep Spot. Humans have a deep, built-in craving to connect with others, to see them and have them see us, to touch and be touched. But mostly we don't. On the sidewalks, the subways, the stores...there's a flock (pride? school? pod?) of people in every direction, but we studiously avoid looking at, talking to or acknowledging one another. We don't talk to strangers. We rarely talk to anybody we don't already know. About the only people we give ourselves permission to open up to are the NPCs of life. Recall that in an RPG, Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are often controlled by the game itself and typically perform a single, narrow function such as giving you tips on which direction to take your quest, selling you magic potions or helping you build up your stats in some way. The functional equivalent of NPCs in the Real327


World Gaming Environment are waitresses, bank tellers, insurance agents and the like whose roles in our lives are more defined by the job they're currently performing than by being an actual 3D human being. Here's what a crazy world we live in... Most of us walk around ignoring all the other “Players” in the Real-World Gaming Environment, while the only “people” we give ourselves permission to talk to are real-life NPCs—and then only long enough to make small talk while tipping the cabbie, paying the cashier or tucking a fiver in the fluorescent green t-back thong of a generic, silicon-breasted stripper. Which is a pretty fucked up game to be playing. Again, when you think about it. So, again, we mostly don't. No wonder so many people seem to be a little grumpy, right?! Despite being surrounded by more people than have ever been alive at the same time since the dawn of Humanoidazoidal Experiment some three million years ago, we mostly keep to ourselves and remain in a constant state of being hungry for attention and affection—blocking out the sounds of the world with our ubiquitous ear-buds connecting to an iSomething and hidden behind sunglasses to dim our surroundings down to a sleep-inducing replica of Plato's Cave. Here's the first-saddest secret I'll share with you on our entire journey... 328


Humanity is literally starving to death from lack of connection in the midst of the greatest All-You-Can-Meet buffet ever invented. The effect of being so desperately alone despite swimming in a sea of humanity causes our spinal cords to shrivel up just a bit--to borrow Eric Berne's mordant turn of phrase. We all want to connect with other people, but since those other people virtually never talk to us or even look our way unless we happen to be playing the role of an NPC (“Hit me again, barkeep!”), they seemingly don't want to connect with us in return. And, of course, they're thinking they exact same thing about us. Here's a secret that sounds so ridiculous that it cannot possibly be true... Everybody quietly longs to play with the other Players in the Real-World Gaming Environment, but nobody wants to go first...and so nobody goes at all. Instead we grin and bear it--stuck in a suspended animation of sensory and social deprivation. Last month I was riding the Tube and this adorable-ass 19 year-old tatted up Suicide-Girllooking Irish lass complimented me on my kicks (some utterly Age Inappropriate bright pink hightop Chucks) and we started talking and literally we became Facebook friends by the time we reached the next stop--during which the entire crowded subway car stared at us like it was the first time in the 150year history of the London Underground that two people had actually spoken to one another...because it 329


probably was. What's that about?! When puppies bounce down the street, they stop and sniff the butts of every other puppy they encounter, and then obligingly swivel around to get their butts sniffed in return. Which is exactly what your Puppy Body wants to do—connect with the other Puppy Bodies it's surrounded by. Hell, it'll even skip the butt sniffing if you'll just give it a chance to exchange hugs, handshakes, ideas, something! But...nope. We fall into lockstep with the other silent robots around us. We avert our gaze and keep our mouths shut. 'Cause that's what everybody else does. Except that once in a great while when we don't...when the molecules that make up you and the molecules that make up another person actually collide and the two of you interact in some fashion. And we realize with a start that there's another option besides pretending that everybody else doesn't exist all the time. We can actually, finally connect with another homo fucking sapiens! O frabjous day! Callooh, callay! we chortle in our joy!

The space between our normal (wouldn't “abnormal” be more appropriate?!) game of pretending that the other Players around us don't 330


exist...and connecting with somebody we don't yet know is vast. Vaster than vast. There's a chasm, a void, a canyon of the grand variety between each and every human. If there weren't, we'd already be friends with lots more of 'em and Dunbar's Number would measure in the tens of thousands. On paper it seems like a small step to go from not knowing somebody to knowing them. It's not. It's the biggest step of all. Again, we're talking about getting to know other Players, not NPCs. The Non-Player Characters in the game of life are stuck behind the counter at their job and have no choice but to stand there and endure our awkward attempts at communication. NPCs don't count. You and I are learning how to seduce actual women into our actual beds, not how to flirt with the barista at your local coffeehouse...however dreamacious she may be. Here's a secret that will save you years—seriously, years—of frustration, energy and misplaced flirtingness... You cannot fuck NPCs. Average men waste sooooooooooo much time chatting up Non-Player Characters instead of putting their attention on a female Player whom they might 331


actually be able to seduce. Alright, alright, “waste” is definitely too harsh a word. There's nothing wrong with flirting. If you enjoy flirting, keep doing it. However, I want you to realize the cost-opportunity involved. Flirting is exactly like kissing. Both are pleasant ways to pass the time, but they're also both self-contained, stand-alone activities that do not lead to fucking. Neither flirting nor kissing are part of the seduction process as you and I are going to practice it. And flirting is all that you can do with an NPC. A woman who's stuck there tearing your ticket stub in half at the concert doesn't have the luxury of being able to let her Naughty Girl out to play while she's on the job, ergo she cannot be seduced at that moment. When her shift is done and she goes back to being a “Player” with an infinite choice of games to play, THAT is when you can seduce her...but of course that's when most men make themselves scarce since they wouldn't know what to say to a woman outside the safety of her work environment. Catch-Motherfucking-22, indeed. Major Major Major Major’s only in when he’s out and out when he’s in, bitches!

Which brings us back to the vast gulf separating us from one another. More specifically, to the vast interstellar region between you and a woman before 332


the two of you meet. A space in which there's no certainty that your molecules will ever collide with hers, but rather only the potential for that to happen. I refer to this state of potential meetingness as Stroke Zero, since no strokes have yet passed between the two of you--a Stroke being the smallest unit of human interaction...any verbal or physical (or limbic, but we're not there yet) communication with another. When we meet someone else, the way we interact is by exchanging strokes. I stroke you, then you stroke me. A head nod is a str0ke. “Hi” is a stroke. Being asked, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” is a stroke. A punch in the face is a stroke. Giving Becky from accounting a shoulder rub is a stroke. (Once more, don't ever do that. Don't ever give Becky from accounting a shoulder rub. At least not if your desire is to fuck her some day. You are banned from giving shoulder rubs—shoulders rub?!--to any woman you're not already fucking.) (I'm not kidding. Don't do that. Ever.) Anyhow, humans have a strong preference for reciprocity...for keeping things balanced and fair. If someone strokes us, they want to be stroked 333


back, and vice versa. We're happiest when our strokes come in even numbers. When you say hello to a co-worker, you expect some manner of response. If you greet a co-worker and they don't respond, the stroke counter becomes stuck on an odd number rather than a more satisfying 2 or 8 or any other even number—which is greatly disturbing to our spinal cords. Why didn't they respond, you wonder? Are they mad at you? Did you do something wrong? Do they know something you don't? Maybe you're about to be fired—and they found out, but they've been sworn to secrecy. Seriously, what the hell?! Normally, I stroke you...then you stroke me...and everybody's happy. Unless, of course, that first stroke is a punch in the face, and then the second stroke would necessarily be a punch back in their face, and then nobody's happy and we're right back where we started so the moral of the story is that if you are going to finally break through the Universal Silence and actually interact with another human maybe you might find some alternate method of stroking them besides than punching them in their motherfucking face, even though they probably deserve it and it'd feel so damn good just to pop the shit out of somebody and...Squirrel! 334


Whew, sorry—if this is the “quiet, writerly” side of me, can you imagine how fucking exhausting I must be in person?! Keeping the strokes balanced extends all the way to the bedroom. When you suck a woman's pussy, quite naturally you expect her to suck your cock in return. And so on. Sex itself boils down to trading lots of wet, yummy strokes back and forth—sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always deliciously. The ultimate, scrumptious result of this furious exchange of strokes is that the spinal cords of you and the woman you've just seduced into your bed are a little healthier and a little less shriveled up than they were before. And that's a game worth learning how to play, wouldn't you say?!

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37: The Narcissus Test

You are currently at Stroke Zero with virtually every woman you will seduce for the rest of your life.

(In truth, you're at Stroke Zero with literally—not virtually—every woman, but if I take away your hope that you'll someday be able to use your emerging superpowers to finally win over/back that One Special Cowgirl who's been two-stepping around the perimeter of your dance hall for ever so long, then you'll get mighty sore at me, and I don't want you to be sore at me, cowboy, so let's just pretend you are totally gonna get Her one day. Even though, as I say, you're actually not. But, hell, it's just pretend...and we can pretend anything right?!) Once you discover how unexpectedly simple it is to cross what previously seemed like a vast gap separating you from some bewitching member of the opposing sex, then the rather delightful problem you face is deciding whom to pick. Of all the women on God's green earth, which one should you seduce next? Her? Or maybe her? Definitely NOT her! Definitely, definitely her! In order to help you winnow down the potential 336


number of women to play with from approximately half of 7 billion to, well, one—one being the total number of women you can seduce at any given moment in time; even if you're playing for a threesome, you first seduce one woman into the game and then together you decide upon and seduce a second woman to join in the fun—you first subject them to a quick and quiet query (a Triple-Double of alliteration, woot!) that I refer to as the Narcissus Test. It's so named because of the Greek hunter who was suchly enamored of his own damn self that he stared at his pretty reflection in the river until he fell in and drowned...or maybe he was torn apart by angry birds...or perhaps he got lost in a cave—hell, man, I can't be bothered to Google every goddamn thing, you know?! Instead let's whitewash over my ignorance by sharing with you a lurid secret that somehow never makes the final cut in those morbidly chipper books on relationship advice... All humans possess an innate desire to fuck themselves. The closer we come to finding a match— externally, internally, whatever-the-fuck-ly—in another person to ourselves, the more satisfying the experience of connecting with them. We long to fuck someone who is as much of a badass as we are...in whatever way we consider ourselves a bad-ass. The Narcissus Test is a measure of how close someone else's perceivable stats are to our own. 337


If they're enough like us in looks, status or whatever category we consider worthwhile, then we'll fuck them. Otherwise, not so much.

Let's play a game. (Because, honestly, what the fuck other option do we have?!) The game is called Leaving The House. Which is harder than it seems...like lots of things. But it's a swell game to play if your aim is to seduce women, because outside of your house is where they keep every fucking one of them them. Together let's step out into the Real-World Gaming Environment, populated by Players running hither and yon, making a great show of not talking to one another, as well as Non-Player Characters mostly stuck in one place, being paid to nod and smile while they give us our change or show us where to sign for the new car we've just leased. Before we make it two blocks, a stumblebum reeking of gin and cigarettes saunters up, mumbling something about giving him a quarter. We keep walking without a glance or a word. Our perception of the bum's Social Value is so low that even a common courtesy such as returning a stroke that someone’s given us can be safely ignored. Any time two people come into close enough proximity to actually notice one another, they each make instant and unconscious assessments about the 338


Social Value of the other. We're not talking about their actual value, of course. All humans are equally valuable, naturally. (Well, except for the ones from Oklahoma—who couldn't even properly be referred to as human beings, now that I think upon it.) No, we're speaking about their Social Value--the perceived status of a person within the context of the environment you find them in. In Las Vegas, the biggest rockstar on the planet would the possess the highest possible status in town. Yet if you plopped him down in the middle of an Indian tribe in the Amazon, he'd immediately have the lowest possible Social Value because of his lack of raw survival skills. (Now if we're talking Fat Elvis landing amongst cannibals, then his value to the tribe would rise in proportion to the temperature of the pot they planned to cook him in!) You might be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and therefore a Big Swinging Dick amongst the kind of brilliant, professional women you'd run into at, say. a Tony Robbins' seminar. But if you showed up at a bumping nightclub packed with pretty young things just a couple of years removed from being teenagers, you'd just be another Creepy Old Guy to them. Your relative Social Value according to their standards would be so low that you'd fail their Narcissus Test before you ever got a chance to demonstrate your absolute Social Value—by buying everybody drinks, or buying the whole friggin' nightclub, for that matter.

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While we're still at Stroke Zero with someone else, we're already making guesstimations about their Social Value relative to our own. The amount of “awe” we feel in the presence of a celebrity reflects the gap between what we perceive our own value to be versus theirs. The higher their perceived value in our eyes compared to the value we grant ourselves, the more awestruck we will feel. And, naturally, this manifests itself as physical stimuli in our body—which can become overwhelming in the vicinity of people we hold in the highest esteem. The reason teenage girls scream their heads off and actually burst into tears when they get up close and personal with the latest incarnation of the Beatles is because they are so completely swamped with physical sensations in their bodies from the experience that they've got to dissipate some of those feelings or they'll explode like a drummer from Spinal Tap. Since the game of giving somebody a Narcissus Test is largely played without ever directly communicating with the other person, we can be--and often are--totally wrong in our guess about the “worthiness” of someone we've just met. But we never fail to make a guess. Nor do they fail to make one about us. These initial guesses concern themselves primarily with the outside of our fellow players. A young, attractive woman has high Social Value simply by virtue of being alive. She doesn't have to be 340


intelligent, educated or in any way earn her status other than being young and pretty. (Hunky young men of a similar age also get something of a free ride, although they still usually have to pay for their own drinks.) Fast forward twenty or so years and that same girl won't get anywhere near the traction she once did based on her youth and looks alone. By then she needs to clearly demonstrate her status based on other accomplishments in her life in the interim. Superficial or not, youth and beautify are highly prized by every civilization and with each passing decade we all lose a little value. To your and my advantage, however, society seems far more forgiving of men growing older than it does of women. So long as a man can muster sufficient wealth, influence and/or fame, he can continue to increase his Social Value to the bitter end. Hugh Hefner remains surrounded by attractive (if you consider vapid, silicon-titted, peroxide blondes to be attractive) women in their mid-twenties because he is ALL of those things—wealthy, influential and famous. Indeed, during the writing of this book, Hugh Hefner, a man of 86 years, married a former playmate in her mid-twenties...and not a single person in the media blinked an eye at the 60 (SIXTY!) year difference in their ages. But you certainly don't have to be Hugh Hefner to give off a glow of higher status. My earlier encouragements for you to get a handle on your body, dress more stylishly and make some goddamn art were all aimed directly at improving your chances 341


of passing a woman's Narcissus Test regardless of your age.

But here's the rub, here's the motherfucking rub... Most of us don't use the Narcissus Test to narrow down the torrent of available women to a trickle who meet our loftitious and superbluous standards. Nope. Instead we use the Narcissus Test to fail ourselves. Unfortunately, that's not a typo. Rather than taking advantage of our first impressions of a woman to pre-qualify them as being worthy of our seductive energies, we mainly end up disqualifying ourselves—often for the most non-True and non-Useful of reasons. She's... Too young Too classy Too tall Too successful Too fit Too sexy Too all of the above There's a distinguished title for men who flunk 342


themselves left and right, who go out of their way to reject women before they can be rejected fist: Idiots. I oughta know...I was the King Motherfucking Idiots for years and years.

of

the

Nobody in the storied history of the masculine persuasion ever gave himself more flunking grades on the single-question, pass-or-fail Narcissus Test than yours truly. I routinely passed up talking to the super-sexy girls, or even the sexy-girls, or sometimes even the plain girls. More often than I'd care to admit I ended up slumming it in the C.H.U.D. Zone, ugh! Hell, I coulda joined C.H.U.D. Anonymous! “My name is John and it's been 24 hours since I munged a C.H.U.D.” Because that’s what you’d with a C.H.U.D., right?! You’d mung her in her mung-hole! Why oh why did I used to do this? Why oh why do you sometimes still do the same? What's up with us not going after the best and the brightest of the women around us, but instead lowering the bar all the way to the ground and settling for the ones we “think” we can get?! How the fuck can we stop doing that and do something else instead...such as, oh, maybe seduce an actual, full-blown, colt-leggish hottie once in a while?! Well, I’m gonna show you how to get there, my brother. But to reach that point we’re gonna have to face 343


one of deepest, darkest demons... Rejection. Okay...breathe!

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38: If You're Not Getting Rejected Once In A While, You're Doing It Wrong

Men are so damn nice. As often as not we don't even wait for a woman to reject us--we're more than happy to save them the trouble and do it ourselves. The real reason we do this has little to do with our actual merits as men and even less to do with our social value. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with our self-esteem—which, as shall nextly discover, is just a fucking myth. Nor is our penchant for self-rejection something we can talk ourselves out of or think our way past through methods peddled by our brothers (and, increasingly, sisters) in the Pick Up community. Here’s a secret that would never occur to any of those fine, upstanding supporters of Standard Dogma, Inc... Our Fear of Rejection doesn’t happen in our heads...it takes place entirely in our bodies. Specifically, in the overwhelming physical sensations we feel the closer we get to a high value woman. The very thought of approaching a megababe lets loose a storm of butterflies in our stomach, accompanied by a constrictness in our breathing, a palpitatious heartrate and a woogly-googly of nervousment. 345


And then come the voices. The voices trying to wave off the landing, abort the approach and go do something—anything!--other than our ridiculous plan of talking to that hottie. Of course, the voices in your head have no clue whether you can or cannot succeed with a particular woman. They only want one thing: for the distressing charge in your body to go away. For the physical discomfort of feeling “too much” to end...immediately, if not sooner. As we’ve already explored--and will continue to explore until this sinks into our DNA--the quickest way to get rid of those distressful feelings is to abandon whatever you're currently doing. Thus have many otherwise strong, decent men failed again and again to ever ask for what they want—in the bedroom, the workplace or the world at large. So that’s Why we avoid going after the real hotties. Now let’s turn our attention to How we can turn this around. We’ll do it in two simple steps. First, no more Narcissus Test. We will no longer play the game of Passing (or, far more commonly, Failing) ourselves in advance with any particular woman. Just gonna stop playing that game, period. Plus jamais, as we say in French. Never again. Second, we’re going to Lean Into Sensation. Not all the way in. Just a little. I'm talking about brushing the back of your hand against the prickly thorn of a cactus—not stripping off your clothes and hurling your entire body on top of a cactus bed like 346


Richard Branson running out of his burning house on Necker Island. Leaning Into Sensation means moving forward in a seduction even when the charge in our body becomes a little uncomfortable. Imagine you’re at a party and you spy three women clustered around the kitchen island. Approaching #1 would be like grabbing a highvoltage wire, #2 like the milder agitation of licking the top of a 9-volt battery and #3 akin to traipsing through a field of daisies because she has such low Social Value in your eyes that talking to her would be about the same as talking to another dude. Pick #2. Leaning Into Sensation doesn't mean forcing yourself to talk to the hottest babe in the room. You gotta work your way up to that. Just lean in as far as you're willing to go—to feel as much as you can bear and no more. But also no less. You want to increase your ability to succeed on Miniand Epic Quests alike? Cultivate the habit of feeling more in your physical body and feeling it longer. And guess what? Going after slightly (or lotsly) hotter women than you’re accustomed to means you're sometimes going to hear, “No.” But that's good. That's normal. That's healthy. Like it sez... If you're not getting rejected once in a while, you're 347


doing it wrong.

Whadya say we take this out of the realm of theory and put it into practice?! I'm gonna give you an exercise. Now before you get your Hello Kitty panties in a knot about having to do an exercise, I should point out that this is the ONLY exercise I’m giving you...and, of course, it’s not a written exercise. Written exercises are stupid. Nobody actually does them. And even if we did, the only thing written exercises accomplish is giving the part of us that plays the game called Writing a few minutes of practice at writing—which is rarely, if ever, the point of the fucking exercise in the first place. Besides, what we’re doing is not really even an exercise. It's a game. (Like everything is.) This is a game about discovering how to tolerate more stimulation in your body, and then using that awareness to get more of what you desire. And it takes all of two words to explain the entire rules of the game I want you to play--the game that’s going to help you learn how to Learn Into Sensation so you start approaching and seducing hotter women despite the higher risk of being rejected, and those two word are... Skip lunch. 348


Say whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? No, really, that's it. Just skip lunch. Forget to eat lunch accidentally on purpose...and then put lots of attention on what happens next in your humanly fuselage. Right around lunchtime you'll be fine. But maybe an hour later, two hours tops, when you still haven't eaten, you'll begin feeling some sensation, perhaps in your throat, perhaps in your stomach, and quite commonly both. This will be merely a feeling. A physical feeling. What's interesting isn't the feeling itself, but the story we attach to it. Because we always have a story. And the story may go something like this... “OhMyGod you need to eat as soon as possible because if you don't you will die and I'm so hungry that I'm about to pass out, waaa waaaa, my blood sugar's low, hurry and make this terrible, painful feeling of hunger go away right now because waaaa waaaa my pussy hurts I can't stand it any longer ack ack boom!” Or words to that effect. And in the face of that torrent of unadulterated victimhood, I would encourage you to merely chuckle and do nothing. Obviously don't eat, of course. But, more to the point, don't try to “fix” whatever you're feeling in your body. Don't try to make the “hunger sensations” 349


disappear through positive thinking or wishery. Indeed, don't even judge them as positive or negative sensations. Just notice them and feel into them. And then continue with the business at hand. Above all, don't eat until dinner time, no matter how charged you grow about needing immediate sustenance. Allowing uncomfortable sensations in our bodies to overwhelm us and dictate our behaviors can (and regularly does) ruin our lives and block us from our greatness. The more sensation you can learn to tolerate in your body, the more of all the good things in life that you run around telling everybody that you want can actually be yours. If you can last for an entire afternoon without eating and yet still maintain your calmness and productivity and good humor, then you will have taken a huge motherfucking step forward in expanding your ability to level up in life. When you can learn to just “be” with your physical sensations--however strongish and nagful they may feel--without panicking or trying to make them go away, then you’ll have also discovered the secret to approaching and seducing women whom you previously flunked yourself for on the Narcissus Test. Big Self Help keeps beating us shriekishly over the head with the mantra that we are slaves to our thoughts...and if could just change our thoughts, then our lives will change as a direct result. Well I call Shenanigans! (The Urban Dictionary defines “Shenanigans” as: “full of shit, off topic or 350


passive-aggressively annoying”--which neatly describes the greater part of the polished turds passed off as self help wisdom these days.) We are not slaves to our thoughts. That's an outright fabrication by people who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Instead, we have allowed ourselves to become enslaved by our sensations. More particularly we've grown addicted to feeling as few of them as possible. That’s why our Captain falls asleep. And other parts of us fall asleep. And finally the rest of us falls asleep until there’s nothing left. Leaning Into Sensation pulls out of our internal Multiverse and into the external Universe, that’s why we’re playing this game. So here's what we're gonna do.. Skip lunch. Just for one day, to start. I'll do it with you. I'll skip lunch, too, and subject myself to the very same the gnawing, hollow, yearning feelings in my own corpus delictum--just to experience first hand what it feels like to not eat for a few hours in the middle of the day. Just as with approaching a woman of higher Social Value than you'd normally consider, you may feel like you're going to die if you go through with this. I promise that you won't die from skipping one little meal. (Well, you won't die from hunger, at least...I can't promise you won't be hit by a truck, stray bullet or meteorite!) 351


How can I be so sure you won't perish from hunger? Because that's not how your body works. Check this... Back in the mid-sixties a fellow known to posterity only as A.B. visited a hospital in Scotland in a desperate bid to get a handle on his obesity. Dude weighed 456 pounds, which in America today is about average, but back then was considered a tad on the hefty side. The good doctors suggested he consider fasting—simply not eating at all for a period of time. They were thinking maybe for a few days or so, but they let him decide how he wanted to play the game. Mr. A.B. shrugged dutifully and disappeared, never to be seen again. Well, at least most of him was never seen again. The rest of him did show up precisely 382 days later. For that's when A.B. strolled back into the hospital...and was promptly ignored by the doctors and nurses on duty, there being nothing particularly wrong with him. He was just a normal, healthy 28 year-old lad weighing a normal, healthy 180 lbs— who coincidentally had not eaten a single bite of food since his last visit to the hospital one year and two weeks earlier! He went over twelve months without a single meal, surviving s0lely and entirely on water and a daily vitamin! During his year without eating, A.B. lost 276 pounds, and never gained them back again. 352


True motherfucking story. But, hey, I'm no fucking doctor—so if you do die from skipping lunch don't come crying to me or nothing. By the way, I wrote another book on this same subject—a short, magical fable about the relationship you develop with your hunger when you fast for any length of time. I began the tale while I was in the midst of a seven-day fast. You can find Dancing With The Hunger on Amazon.com. And if by some medical miracle you actually do survive an entire afternoon without topping off the gas tank of your stomach, then you may have learned a poignant lesson. Discovering how to “sit” with overwhelming sensations in your body (whether positive or negative), without trying to fix them or change them, is a powerful opportunity for growth. Once it truly sinks in that Rejection actually takes place in your body rather than in your mind AND once it sinks in that you—YOU!--can actually tolerate these awkweird, fiendly, naggish physical sensations without croaking, then a door to a bold new future of being rejected by hotter and hotter babes opens up right in front of you. Now all you gotta do is walk through it.

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39: EVERYTHING You Know About SelfEsteem is Wrong

Sooner or later even the walk-on fourth-stringers in the game of Big Self Help get around to writing a book, recording an audio program and/or creating a weekend workshop designed to convince you that you're good enough, you're smart enough and, doggone it, people like you. The more you appreciate yourself, they are wont to say, the more you'll accomplish in life and the happier you will be. The Pick Up Gurus even get in on the act, pumping up their charges until they feel worthy and deserving enough to hit on the nearest ultra-babe. If you don't yet have the self-confidence to approach a 10, you are told, you just gotta Fake It 'til You Make It. Self-esteem is the centerpiece on the altar to the Machine-Mind that the academics and psychologists have so studiously erected. The jewel-encrusted goblet containing the potent elixir of self-esteem never runs dry, yet it somehow always fails to slake our thirst to feel better about ourselves...and so we must continuously come back for more. The Theory of Self-Esteem holds that we are all awesome (sounds reasonable enough) and therefore we should always feel awesome (again, a capital idea), because the better we feel about ourselves the 354


happier and more productive we will be. And what a happy world this would be if any of this reflected the human experience as you and I know it. But, alas, it does not. I recognize that I'm much given to hyperbole, but this time I ain't a-woofin'... EVERYTHING you know about self-esteem is wrong. Because the Theory of Self-Esteem itself is wrong. It is based on false premises—and therefore isn't True. Plus it doesn't even work—and therefore isn't Useful. Which means it's not a valid theory at all, but rather just a myth. Yet everybody continues to play along with the Myth of Self-Esteem. The world is increasingly divided into two types: those who are desperate for another fix of selfesteem...and the dealers are hawking the latest shipment of the good shit. Self-esteem is the dank weed on the mean streets of Standard Dogma-ville. Deep down, everybody knows full well that the Theory of Self-Esteem is neither True nor Useful—at least not in their own life. But nobody talks about it. 355


They never bring it into Mutual Knowledge— where I know that you know something, and you know that I know that you know it. And since nobody shares what they know, everybody thinks they're the only person on the planet that self-esteem doesn't work for...they're apparently the only one who can see that the Emperor’s got no fucking clothes on. Yet once upon a time there was someone who didn't buy into the Myth of Self-Esteem. You've heard of him. His name was Mr. George Carlin. He was a man who didn't suffer fools gladly—and he loved nothing more than to single out the purveyors of the self-esteem movement as deserving to be thrown into the lowest rungs of hell...and he invariably ranked them at the very top of his legendary list of “People Who Ought To Be Killed”. Man, the world is a duller place without George Carlin in it, don't ya think?! I want to let you in on a secret that may be a tough pill to swallow at first, but which will immeasurably improve the quality of your life and your ability to seduce women if you can get it down... There's no such thing as self-esteem. Self-esteem does not exist. At least, not in the sense intended by everybody who uses that term. You, sir, are not possessed of an unswerving, indefatigable sense of self-satisfaction and confidence 356


that pervades every aspect of the adventure of being you--for the by-now obvious reason that there is no global “you” to feel all or any of that. The Myth of Self-Esteem postulates that our lives will be greatly enhanced by feeling really good about ourselves all the time, regardless of which crewmember is out and which game it's playing. But that's not the way the human experience plays out. Ever. Case in point... The term “self-esteem” was coined in the 1890's by a true pioneer of intellect and accomplishment, Prof. William James. Yet despite being a widely revered medical doctor, philosopher and psychologist, as well as the author of several enduringly important books-and, quite frankly, a genuine bad-ass--Mr. James' own life was remarkable for its complete and utter absence of the very concept that he himself had formulated. William James had the self-esteem of a rock. A rock with very low self-esteem, mind you. So not even like a Pet Rock or The Rock or anything. Just a regular fucking rock. William James was incessantly plagued by real and imaginary ailments in some part of his body or another that caused him crippling pains and distress. He suffered physically and emotionally non-stop and was tediously vocal about it. The good professor was also a world-class depress-erino who tottered on the 357


edge of suicide for years at a time, but ultimately lacked the courage to go through with it. How could a man of such great attainments have been such a simmering kettle of miserable? If selfesteem were a real thing, shouldn't William James of all the fucking people in the world have possessed it in spades? Or, if not him, how about that Beethoven chap? Good old Ludwig van was easily the second-best composer of all time, yet he was another tragic, depressed, semi-suicidal sod. As was the chronically gloomy Charles Darwin, whose irrational fears of the outside world were so highly evolved that they forced him to hide away as a virtual recluse for most of his later years. Now if you were to ask any of the Keepers of the Standard Dogma why men of the greatest accomplishment in the history of the motherfucking world could possibly have been plagued by such abysmal self-esteem, they'd react like the apes from the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey— grunting howlishly and scratching their swollen heads at the baffling black monolith in front of them. And if you want to send these braniacs into a fullblown myocardial infarction, simply pose a follow-up question asking them how it's simultaneously possible that some of the most toxic members of society—sociopaths, career criminals and politicians—regularly score off the charts on standardized tests of self-esteem?! According to received wisdom, self-esteem is supposed to be a good quality and the more good you 358


bring to society, the more you should have of it. And the more bad you do, the less you should have. That just makes sense, right? But that's not the way it pans out. Many of the most awesome people you know think they're shit. You might be one of them. Many of the shittiest people you know think they are the shit. You might work for one of them. We could lock all the Keepers of the Standard Dogma and a hundred monkeys besides in the same room and they wouldn't be able to come up with the first clue as to explain why their fabled model of selfesteem crashes and burns at on either end of the spectrum—and frequently collapses everywhere in the middle, as well. Mind you, they're not playing stupid. They are stupid. “If your model of the world disagrees with experiment,” Dick “Hung Out With Strippers Every Afternoon” Feynman taught us, “it's wrong. Period.” Once more, with feeling... Self-esteem is a myth. It does not exist. It doesn't exist in the Actual Reality outside of us. And it most certainly doesn't exist in the Game Reality within us. The only place that self-esteem can be said to exist 359


is as an ephemeral construct in the minds of the Gurus whose vacation-home mortgages rather depend on it. Okay, it's not like you didn't know this was coming, but let's go ahead and get it over with... Fuck self-esteem! AND the hobby horse it galumphed in on! So if you've been waiting around for a dusting of self-esteem—or worthiness or amour propre or some other nominalization du jour—to be sprinkled upon you like magical fairy dust that will finally provide you with enough confidence and courage to talk to that girl or compose that symphony or do any of the things you've always wanted to do but didn't have the inner fortitude to go through with, then your wait is over. But probably not in the way you imagined or hoped for. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but if you're waiting for Godot—motherfucker ain't coming!

Here's how you actually work... Each of your various parts are at a DIFFERENT point on a continuum that ranges from completely sucking at playing their game to being a bonafide Master at it. Even if none of your crewmembers has yet summited their own personal Mount Everest, the more hours they put into their game, the higher they 360


climb and the better they become. And one of the most delightful secondary gains that follows from climbing higher on the mountain is developing an awareness of how high up you are. When you can look down and see last year's Base Camp thousands of feet below you, then you know damn well that you're making good progress. When one of your parts is halfway up the mountain, it still kinda sucks at playing its game, but it sucks a lot less than it used to. And it knows it. It knows it sucks less. And that feels good. But it also knows it still sucks some. And that feels less good. We've already touched on how the (random-ish, but convenient) 10,000 hour milestone is as much about getting better on the inside of us at any given game as it is about improving our motor skills or whatever on the outside. When a crewmember finally summits and no longer sucks at playing its game, he fucking owns it. At the height of Michael Jordan's career, the side of him that played basketball knew exactly what a force of nature it was. Of course that part of him didn't start out that way. In his early years, Jordan's hoops-playing avatar thought it sucked and others agreed—most famously Pop Herring, the gruffish coach who cut him from his high school basketball team. 361


But Mike Jordan, as he was then known, kept putting in the hours slogging up the mountain until eventually he didn't suck at all, either inside or out, playing brown ball. On the other end of spectrum... If you're just now emerging from your Man Cave after having sequestered yourself from the Stream of Life, as Goethe liked to call it, for last few months or years while grieving for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore or whatever the fuck you were up to, then it's likely that your Lover is somewhat or completely out of practice at approaching and seducing women. Hell, he might have never been “in practice” to start with. In which case, your Lover may be closer to the Suck end of the continuum of the game of seducing women than he is to Mastery. If that's the case, then your Lover knows it. And it probably pisses him off. He's grumpy and upset by his awareness of how much he sucks. But the truth is... Our parts always, always, always suck when they first start playing their game. There's no getting around that. Although the self-esteem-inators want you to believe exactly the opposite, it's actually a good thing that our parts know when they suck at their game. Having an awareness of how sucky or masterful 362


we are at playing a game can be crucial to your survival. Literally. Suppose you recently decided to learn how to fly a plane. To that end, last week you took your very first lesson. Now if I come along and suggest we rent a plane this afternoon so you can fly me around, you would go inside yourself and consult with the crewmember who's learning to fly. His quick response would basically be, “Fuck no. We ain't even close to being there yet.” Which is the truth. It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours of classroom study and flying time with an instructor to even reach the point of being able to fly solo. And then a thousand or more hours to get good at it. Eventually, a year from now or three years from now when you have a few thousand hours of flying time under your belt we could replay this scenario and I could suggest we fly the friendly skies in your plane. At that point you would go within yourself and the part of you that's now become a bad-ass flyboy absolutely knows how good it as at playing that game, and so it would say, “Fuck yeah. I am good at that flying shit—let's do it!”

Developing the certainty that it knows how to play 363


its game well is a natural progression that any part goes through as it approaches Expertise. And being super-frustrated during the initial days and months of climbing the learning curve of a new game is just as much of a natural and unavoidable stage. And, again, each of our crewmembers has to climb its own mountain. There's not just one big mountain just as there's not one big us. Every game is its own mountain. Climbing Mount Entrepreneur doesn't give you any advantage or headstart whatsoever if you later opt to climb Mount Chess. This is just another reason why the Myth of SelfEsteem is nothing more than a soft turd in a flaming paper bag some jackass left on our doorstep. The fact that Messers James, Beethoven and Darwin had pulled off daring and spectacular summits of the mountains of philosophy or music or the natural sciences was of no help to their other crewmembers in not feeling sucky about whatever they felt sucky about during their long, dark, soulsucking nights. Every single hour spent trudging and hauling itself up Mastery Mountain applies only to the lone crewmember making the ascent. Restated in what radio icon Paul Harvey liked to call, “short-sleeve English”... Stats are non-transferable between our parts. 364


Although Michael Jordan summited in the game of basketball—not just summited, but moved the summit higher than it had ever been before!--unless he's also spent some portion of 10,000 hours scrambling up the foothills and escarpments of the mountain of learning to speak Chinese or programming in Ruby On Rails, then he wouldn't (and shouldn't) have any particular confidence that he can play either of these games at a high level. Because he can't. Yet. The Myth of Self-Esteem essentially asks us to pretend to be outstanding at games that we legitimately still suck at. Even more absurdly, it urges us to feel a global sense of positive-ness and confidentiosity about all the possible games that our crewmembers could possibly play. My friend, that's the start of a Monty Python sketch, not a way to live your life. Since our troops get better at their game both on the outside AND the inside as part of their long, purposeful apprenticeship, the confidence they ultimately develop about playing the game is a natural byproduct of getting good at it. It's well-documented that getting good grades leads to higher self-esteem, but higher self-esteem does not lead to better grades. 365


As Ray Baumeister puts it, “Self-esteem is a result, not a cause.” There's no formula we can learn, no mantra we can repeat, no amount of PostIt Notes we can affix to the bathroom mirror that can accelerate the increasing confidence that naturally flows from climbing higher up the mountain. Nor would we want there to be. The essential message of Seth Godin's delightful tome, The Dip, is that EVERYBODY sucks at playing any particular game until they make it across the “dip” that separates them from where they are now to where they want to be. Fame and fortune await the few who can reach the other side of dip precisely because the ones who make it are few in number. And we can only cross that gap one crewmember at a time. Each individual member of our inner team has to individually haul its own ass every step of the way to the top of its own mountain. Again... Stats are non-transferable between our parts.

However—and this IS a mighty big however, I gotta admit—once any one of your crewmembers has summited, another member of your gang may become emboldened to attempt an ascent of its own. 366


This second side of you is well aware of the wine, women and song that flow from the first part having reached such lofty heights, and so it will sometimes negotiate with your Captain to make its own run at the 10,000 hour barrier. After you've scaled Mt. Everest, then K2 can look mighty enticing. Mighty, mighty enticing. Plus, like attracts like and bad-asses prefer to hang out with other bad-asses. Just as millionaires want to chum around with other millionaires, once a part of you has summited, it prefers to associate with parts that can also play at an elevated level. Some of the most bad-ass people you'll ever meet will have two or even three crewmembers that have summited completely different mountains—along with several others who are furiously making ascents of their own. And that is where the “self-esteem” of Great Men comes from, my friend—not from incantations delivered by smackish characters hawking positivefullness and swell thinkery. Here's the closely guarded secret that the high priests preaching the Gospel of Self-Esteem would rather have their faces gnawed off by rats in a rusty, Orwellian cage around their heads than admit out loud... Not only are you not good at everything...you actually suck at almost everything. Because we all suck at the shit we suck at. 367


Which is most things. But at least we're in good company! We all start off in the Suck-Zone and we're stuck there until we get out. And it hurts to be there.

Neo: “Why do my eyes hurt?” Morpheus: “You've never used them before.”

Nobody in the history of the world didn't suck at a new game when they first started playing it. But if they kept playing, they got better. Both on the outside, in terms of the absolute speed with which they can press the button on a slot machine designed to extract the life savings from the marrow of their bones, as well as on the inside, as they improve at ignoring the clamor and brouhaha of all their other crewmembers who noisily and justifiably object to losing their combined life savings into this demon machine! Until you get good at seducing women, you're going to suck at it. Do it anyway. If approaching and seducing an ultra-babe is too much stimulation, keep chunking down until you can lean into your sensations at some point of tolerable uncomfortability. It won't be easy. Choosing the Path of Greater Sensation means choosing to wake up. 368


For a man who hasn't gotten laid in a while (and, believe, I've been there!), even seducing a plain girl can be almost overwhelming. But just stick with it. And don't knock plain girls. Plain girls swallow. I've got one final secret for you here. And I'm even going to resist the temptation to label it as the most astonishable and happysome revelation in the history of everything. Instead, I'll simply refer to it as a tiny toss-off secret that looks like one of those small steps for man--but which you could easily parlay into a giant leap for mankind. So here's the Little Secret That Could... Even though you are going to suck at seducing women in the early going, the women you will be seducing suck just as much or more at being seduced. They don't know anything more about seduction than you do. In fact, they'll know much, much less than you. At least you're here putting in the hours crawling out of the Suck-Zone, while the womenfolk are so damn lost they don't know which way is up. I mean, God bless 'em. But you realize what that gives us, young man? Hope. It gives us hope. 369


Because even though we're gonna suck when we first start playing this game, a good many of our fellow players will suck even worse. And that gives us at least some hope of success from the get-go— which is a delightful luxury indeed! Now I want you to hang tightly to that hope, since just down the road things are about to get even weirder. What am I saying? Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!

370


40: Quantum & Sexual Entanglement

Physics,

like people, ain't just one big monolithic entity. There are several branches, which are as different from one another as any of our crewmembers are from each other. The physics of our magically cooked friend Newton focuses on fundamental forces, from a falling apple to the universe as a whole. Relativity, the physics of wildebeest-haired Prof. Einstein, explores matter when it's moving quickly, up to and including the speed of light. And Quantum physics burrows into the very, very strange realm of things that are very, very small--a bizarro-land where the laws of Newton and Einstein suddenly no longer apply. Quantum physics is so weird that scientists chucklingly refer to as the “platypus of physics”! (This passes for grand humor among nerds, don't ya know?!) And certainly no aspect of Quantum physics is weirder than the principle of Quantum Entanglement. Legendary MIT physics professor, Walter Lewin, summed it up best: “The most bizarre, the most absurd, the most crazy, the most ridiculous prediction that Quantum mechanics makes is Entanglement.” And the reason we're having a discussion about it in the middle of a book on seduction is because Quantum Entanglement deftly explains one of the heretofore most inexplicable events in the entire 371


human experience... What happens a man and a woman meet? Why do they sometimes click and sometimes not? What mysterious, unpredictable forces come into play during the initial moments when a man and a woman connect for the first time? If we can better understand the intricate dance played out just beneath the surface during the first second or two of our initial contact with a woman, this has the potential to forever change our conception of what it means to approach and seduce a member of the fairer sex. Which is kind of a big deal. That is, if you want more fucking. If you’d rather play dead-end games like giving shoulder rubs and flirting with NPCs and make out sessions, go to fucking town! It's always easier to keep playing the games we're accustomed to. Learning a new game is hard. It hurts to endure those all goddamn uncomfortable sensations while sitting in the Suck-Zone without running away until we get good enough to reach that luscious day when a part of us can play its game with slightly less suckage than ever before!

According to Quantum Entanglement, whenever two particles “meet”, they have the potential to become Entangled—interlocking to such a degree that they essentially mate and become one super372


particle rather than two separate particles. This happens instantaneously and unpredictably. And once it happens, it stays happened. These two formerly separate entities now exert a direct, measurable effect on one another. This super-particle is bound together energetically, but not necessarily physically--you can move them an infinite distance from one another and their connection remains intact. If you stop and measure one of the particles, it has a 50-50 chance of exhibiting variables such as up/down, positive/negative and plaid/polka dot or whatever flavor of the month is. Now here's the cool part, if, at the EXACT instant that you test the properties of Particle 1, you also test Particle 2, you will discover that its spin, position, momentum, polarization, etc. will always-invariably100%-of-the-time-without-fail reflect the opposite, corresponding value to its mate. At the moment of observation, therefore, Particle 1 somehow “transmits” a Qubit (the smallest quantum unit of information...basically, the universe's equivalent of a Stroke) to Particle 2 that lets it know what value it's decided to exhibit so that Particle 2 can take on the opposite value. Again, it doesn't matter how far apart the particles are. Even if they're separated by light-years, they can put on the Quantum Entanglement Show any damn time you like. Every

other

fundamental 373

force

of

nature


diminishes over distance. But not Quantum Entanglement. And the effect that the particles have on one another is always instantaneous regardless of how far apart they are, even if they're farther apart than light itself can travel in an “instant”. The quantum data that lets the second particle know what value the first particle possesses can travel superluminally, meaning it can (and somehow magically does) travel faster than the speed of light. How this information actually gets transmitted between the two particles has baffled the greatest minds since the mid-1930's, when Quantum Entanglement was first observed. This apparently telepathic communication between two bits of matter doesn't adhere to any other known laws of the universe, yet it has been observed and proven over and over again. Smart guy Albert Einstein was so pissed off by this phenomenon that he spent years of his life trying without success to disprove Quantum Entanglement, which he famously referred to as “spooky action at a distance”. Legendary cat torturer Erwin Schrodinger called Quantum Entanglement “THE characteristic trait of quantum physics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought.” It's worth noting that all the high-level work being done around the globe today on attempting to create Star Treky teleportation devices depends entirely on the “spooky action at a distance” of Quantum Entanglement. 374


If Quantum Entanglement ranks as the most mysterious phenomenon in the known universe, then the mystery of what goes down when Boy Meets Girl surely ranks a close second. So let's turn around and apply our strange new model of how quantum particles forge a connection with one another to the somewhat larger entities represented by a man and a woman. Because people can become Entangled, too. Sexually Entangled. And to understand how, let's invite another colorful character on stage: the Singularity.

In the beginning of the universe there was a whole shitload of nothing. Okay, not technically true. All the shit we have now already existed, but to save space it was shrunk down to an infinitesimal speck known as the Singularity. It contained not only all the matter in the universe, but the “blueprint” on how to expand into all the colorful, zippy clusters and super-clusters of galaxies that we know and love today. Of course, until that Singularity existed, only the potential for our universe existed. Similarly, before the community of particles called a Guy and the community of particles called a Doll first encounter one another, they have no connection. No Entanglement, no nothing. 375


And then they collide—upon which they either become Sexually Entangled or they don't. If No, they can still know one another and be friends or co-workers or whatnot, but they will never be tight, never be lovers, never have that extra special something that any two people can have for one another. If Yes, then their Entanglement leads inevitably to the birth of a sort of singularity between them that has the potential to expand into the universe of their entire relationship—whether for a night or a lifetime. This is the Seduction Singularity. In one moment, you and a woman are still complete strangers to one another. In the next, you notice one another for the first time. You're still at Stroke Zero--you haven't explicitly communicated in words yet, even though all sorts of communication is going on outside of your ability to perceive it. If and when you become Sexually Entangled with a woman, the seeds of a Seduction Singularity also become manifest. And now you are no longer two distinct communities of particles, you are one supercommunity that contains the entirety of the Divine Feminine and the Masculine Ideal. Just as any piece of a holograph contains the whole picture, the Seduction Singularity represents every possibility of your mutual exchange of energies. Everything that transpires in the ensuing seduction, 376


regardless of how long that seduction lasts, flows from the original Seduction Singularity. The Seduction Singularity is the condensed burning fire of your combined desires, able to expand infinitely in every direction--like the Cosmic Inflation that delivered the universe to its current form today. You are now in a position to appreciate that my personal hesitation in playing the Relationship game isn't because True Love doesn't exist...but rather because True Love exists in infinite measure. In truth, we have the potential to become Sexually Entangled with any woman--or man or goat, for that matter...you get to play this game absolutely any way you desire and fuck anybody who tells you otherwise!--which also means we have the potential to become Entangled with every one of them. Every single time we become Sexually Entangled with someone else, a Seduction Singularity comes into existence—and with it the potential for True Love to expand infinitely in every direction. And yet... Not every particle or person becomes entangled with every other. You cannot make this happen. No amount of intention or desire will entangle you someone else. Nevertheless, the potential to become entangled always exists whenever two people meet. And when that happens, a new Seduction 377


Singularity is the inevitable result. This is true whether or not you can (for social reasons, say) or will (your God wouldn't approve) actually seduce the woman you've just become entangled with. Here's a seriously inconvenient secret that nobody ever talks about nor will ever fucking own up to... On some obsequious, purple, clairvoyant, nevergonna-speak-of-it level, you are Sexually Entangled with many of the woman you are “just friends” with-which means you would totally fuck them...and vice versa. If a Seduction Singularity did manifest between the two of you, then the potential—not the certainty, but the potential—for a successful seduction is 100%. She will deny it. You will deny it. Everybody wants to play, but nobody wants to get messy. People are afraid to get off the boat. And well they should be. Like they say in Apocalypse Now... Never get off the fucking boat. Unless... You're going all the way. And that's what we're doing here. Going all the way. Yet from time to time I like to remind you that you really don't have to do any of this. You always can stay on the fucking boat. 378


Most sensible people do.

Every time you connect with another person there's a possibility that the two of you will experience Einstein's “spooky action at a distance” and become Entangled. This process isn't dependent on anything you say or do. Sexual Entanglement occurs independently of any words you might speak to one another. It isn't necessarily Love At First Sight or Nothing—but close. If you don't become Sexually Entangled during your first significant interaction with a woman then the chances of it occurring later range from slim to none. (Again, didn't invent this game, just reporting from the front lines on how it's played.) You can become better at noticing a new-born Seduction Singularity. The more you Lean Into Sensation, the sooner you will learn to feel the “Spark” that is the natural byproduct of becoming Sexually Entangled with a woman. It's a subtle and yet palpable sensation--with the softness of the clicking of a ballpoint pen...like pieces of each of you gently snapping into place. In the beginning you're going to suck at noticing when the click happens—that precise, palpable instant when you and a woman become entangled—because we all suck at everything until we suck less at it. 379


So don't get all frustramerated and selfgrumpstrational that you “can't feel anything” when you initially meet a woman. Just continue to stop failing yourself on the Narcissus Test and keep pushing past Stroke Zero with the dames you encounter, and eventually you'll also suck less at noticing when the Seduction Singularity happens. Since the feminine is more connected to physical stimuli because of the Infinite Desire flowing through her, by Nature a woman more readily perceives the formation of a Seduction Singularity; by Nurture, however, she frequently won't give you any external indication that she's aware of the Spark, because to do so would give away her hand. And that's because, once a woman is Entangled with a man, if he genuinely knows how to seduce her then she'll be virtually powerless to resist. And the feminine—powerful, violent and cruel as it is--doesn't like feeling powerless.

If your Lover becomes Entangled with a woman's Naughty Girl, then the two of you are Sexually Entangled. But that's still just one crewmember on each side. Every other part of you could dislike every other part of her, but if your Lover and her Naughty Girl are Sexually Entangled, then the potential for a successful seduction exists. Here's one of those fundamental secrets that virtually none of the men and virtually all of the women are aware of... 380


A woman doesn't have to like you in order to fuck you. The only requirement is that her Naughty Girl feels the Spark with your Lover. Everything else is optional. Naturally, any of your troops can become Entangled with any other member of somebody else's crew in a non-sexual way...and often do. The Job Part of you might become Professionally Entangled with a charismatic boss or superstar employee, but doesn't mean you want to fuck them—until and unless your naughty parts also get in on the game. Similarly, you can become Spiritually Entangled with your pastor or Creatively Entangled with your artistic pals or even Domestically Entangled with your pets. We've got colors and flavors and variety of Entanglement aplenty.

Left to its own devices, the Seduction Singularity of a Sexual Entanglement will remain at a resting state—possessing merely the potential for a seduction. Charcoal briquettes don't cook the motherfucking steaks by themselves. You gotta light the little bitches on fire and fan the flames, baby. Similarly, you've got to pour energy into the space between you and a woman to keep turning the heat up. Which is exactly how any Quantum Leap works. 381


You keep adding energy to an electron until finally it can't take it anymore and it levels up. Everything in nature levels up...because everything in nature is a game. The goal of the upcoming 22 Strokes is to give you a framework for continuously adding heat and leveling up until you and the woman you're seducing reach a boil. Then together you make steam. is.

And, as we already know, steam's where the party

382


41: To Decide, or Not To Decide, That Is The Question

When a pirate's about to raid another ship, he doesn't send out a hand-written note on scented paper politely inquiring if boarding them just after tea time next Tuesday would prove convenient. No, he keeps his fucking mouth shut and goes after the other ship when they're not expecting it. We haven't shared a secret for a minute, so here's one... The less a woman expects your seduction, the greater your chances of success. Because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Or something. Although surprise is one of the most robust forces in psychology, it's also one of the most overlooked. Even the cool kids hardly ever talk about it, despite the fact that surprise thoroughly permeates the human experience…in sports, humor and gambling, as well as in our romantic and sexual encounters. The element of surprise can be your best friend during a seduction--heightening the experience for you both. She may revel in the surprise that sex was even on 383


the menu today, when she wasn't particularly (or at all) expecting it. She might relish the surprise that her Naughty Girl was so damn eager to come out and play—and that her Bodyguard was equally ready to permit it. Most especially, a women may feel surprised and delighted when she discovers she has to do so little Heavy Lifting before getting to enjoy sex. Rather than having to feign interest in every last detail of some random dude's predictable life for date after predictable date until he finally works up the backbone to make a move, she gets the rare opportunity to indulge in her Infinite Desire right away and then get back to her busy life. Some of our most enduringly enjoyable moments in life hinge upon surprise—not the least of which is expressing our sexuality unexpectedly with people we barely know or have just met. But that's not the way we usually do it. The Party Line wants us believe that having The Sex is a really, really big deal and should be the subject of a long and purposeful investigation beforehand. A woman “needs” ample time to decide if she even wants to have The Sex...and then still more time to figure out if you are whom she wants to have The Sex with...and then she (or you) still need to solve the logistics of exactly where the two of you will have The Sex. It's a wonder anyone ever has The Sex at all!

Because that's a lot to think about. As it turns out... 384


All that thinking carries a price. The more we are forced to make decisions, the worse we become at making them and the more likely we are to select an option we'll come to thoroughly regret later—such as flipping off a cop while drunk or attending Law School. People are only able to make a finite number of decisions before growing wearyful from the effort. Too many choices in a row simply tires us the fuck out--a well-studied and thoroughly documented phenomenon known as Decision Fatigue. It's that state where we're just fried and don't want to do any more thinking for a while. This mental lethargy can result from the long, slow grind of just another day at the office. The professionals who study Decision Fatigue have observed that prisoners are statistically far likely to be granted parole if their hearing is scheduled in the morning, while the parole board is still bright eyed and bushy tailed. If their appointment comes towards the end of the day, after everybody's all fatigued from making too many weighty decisions, then chances are good the convict is gonna remain the Bitch of Cell Block C for another year or three. Or Decision Fatigue can come from just one BIG decision in a row. “That's it, I've decided I’m leaving that bitch! Shit, now I’m all tired and need a nap! Okay, I'm leaving that bitch...right after I take this nap!” Some people seem to dwell permanently in the heavy fog of perpetual Decision Fatigue. 385


Some of these people may be your friends. Some of them may be you. “What do you wanna do?” “I dunno...what do you wanna do?” “I dunno.” “Me, neither.” “Wait, what are we deciding—what to do or where to eat?” “Oh, I thought we were choosing which movie to watch?” “Oh, so which one should we pick first?” “Dunno—which one do you wanna pick first?” Shrug.

Learning hurts. So does making choices. To acquire new knowledge or to make new connections between existing knowledge, our brains literally grow new synapses and neurons. Learning is like a remodeling job that never ends. We can only sustain the effort of terraforming our mind with new synaptic connections for a short time before reaching saturation...after which our performance declines precipitously. That's why 386


quarterbacks typically make their worst choices and throw their stupidest interceptions late in a game. It’s why politicians tweet pictures of their junk to some bright-eyed teen from Sugarbaby.com after 2 am--at the tail end of a long day of being a professional asshole. It's not for nothing that Big Box stores the world over line their check-out area with sugary, carbtastic snackage. They know that by the time we reach the registers, our decision-making abilities have fallen through the floor after all that choosing between dozens of styles of jeans and 128 flavors of salad dressing. The phenomenon of Decision Fatigue has drawn the feverish attention of business and military leaders alike because of its conspicuous drain on our Collective Productivity. If ringing up one more customer's purchases or shooting one more Commie (we still shoot Commies, don't we?!) pushes someone into Decision Fatigue, then the planet might soon be overrun with customers who didn't pay for their shit or non-dead Commies or (shudder!) both. One of the reasons that Monogomy (dude, I can't even spell that word correctly!) tugs at us with so much gravity is because it handily solves one the weightiest problems that fatigues personkind—whom shall I love and fuck...and who shall return love and fuck me in return?! Once we've picked our latest One True Soulmate (TM), then it's all decided and we don't have to make any more decisions in that department for the rest of 387


our life—or until a few months later when they abruptly and without apology abandon us on the street like a puppy they wish they’d never adopted and we’re standing there all broken-hearted and crying while people walk past pretending not to see us...oh sorry, got a little carried away there, ‘cause that, ummm, happened to a like a friend of mine or something. Women will tell you that when her man forbids her from fucking other men he’s showing “how much he loves her.” His unwillingness to share her is how she knows it’s love. Right. Meanwhile, in the world the rest of us actually live in, here’s the real secret to the enduring popularity of Monotony... Not having permission to fuck other men is a huge burden off a woman’s already occupied mind and represents an entire huge category that she no longer needs to think about, so she's plenty willing to sign up for that shit. And that goes double for men, who’s brains are so goddamned relieved when they finally find a regular source of pussy that they’ll agree to just about any demand to hang onto it for a little longer.

Meanwhile, Decision Fatigue has screwed YOU out of many of your attempted seductions. More than once you've become Sexually Entangled with a lovely member of the female persuasion, but 388


when it finally came time for her to make one last decision and say “Yes” to fucking you, she was too fogged from the weight of all the other microdecisions and questions you asked and answers to do anything other than say, “Listen, I'm really tired, let's just call it a night.” And if your experience is anything like mine, another opportunity to make sweet love down by river with this particular lady never returned. You just got fucked over by Decision Fatigue, my friend...and they don't even MAKE a goddamn t-shirt for that! If a woman who would otherwise fuck you is in the throes of Decision Fatigue, she'll abort or sabotage a beautifully crafted seduction for no good reason other than avoiding the foggish necessity of making any further decisions--especially the inevitable Yes or No to The Sex that seems to hang over her head like the Sword of Damocles. Here's a secret that'll win you a lot of admirers amongst the fairer sex if you'll just make the effort to master it... A woman's capacity to enjoy herself during a seduction is directly related to her opportunity to avoid Decision Fatigue entirely. The 22 Strokes coming so very soon (yay!) were specifically designed to afford a woman the rare and beautiful experience of letting go of control, so she can relax into the experience and feel into her Infinite Desire without running headlong into the brick wall of Decision Fatigue. 389


And it shouldn't surprise you to discover that the fewer choices a woman is required to make, the more will fall to you...such that your risk of losing your way in the Fog of Overthinkery becomes a cause of genuine concern. Not to worry, I've got a plan--I’ve done thought this shit all the way through for ya so you ain’t gotta.

But first, speaking of surprises, here's a shocker... The fine folks over at Standard Dogma Inc. have folded, spindled and mutilated Decision Fatigue from every conceivable angle, and for once they’ve actually colored outside the lines and come up with a model to describe something that has touches of both poetry and magic. Their model of Decision Fatigue is as precious as a skinny 7th grade boy writing a love sonnet in calligraphy to impress a curvy high school freshman. So this time around I am actually loathe to rain on their parade and make fun of their efforts, bless their little hearts. Besides, my mother taught me that if I don't have anything nice to say about somebody, I shouldn't say anything at all. Or, at least she would've taught me that if she hadn't drank herself to death while I was still a kid, leaving me to be raised by a cruel foster family. But enough about my sad, lonely childhood. Here's their Actual & Official Explanation of Decision 390


Fatigue... We have within us a little reservoir of Cognitive Resources that we can apply towards thinking about shit (except they're not allowed to say “shit”--they'd get their toupees washed out with soap for that!) or deciding shit. This pool of Cognitive Resources is finite and easily drained—and when it runs out we become acutely limited in our ability to make further decisions. For some mysterious, inexplicable reason, our SelfControl is also powered by this same tank of liquidious Cognitive Resource juice and once the tank runs low we are said to be in a state of Ego Depletion, meaning our decision-making ability AND our willpower both crap out so that we can't think our way out a paper bag while simultaneously becoming unable to resist any temptations that surround us. Again, this is an actual model published by professional academics in peer-reviewed publications, not some more crazy shit I just made up. Their model apparently explains why otherwise decent people whose supply of Cognitive Resource juice has been drained by furiously using their brains all day long at work will come home and kick their kids and yell at their dog and then find themselves completely unable to resist should you say to them, “I know you're on a diet, but would like one of these delicious chocolate-chip cookies I just baked?!” Gobble-gobble! Snarf-snarf! 391


All gone!

I call it the Top Fuel Model of Decision Fatigue. Their framework seemingly postulates that under the hood of our skulls there's an 8000 horsepower, nitro-injected Top Fuel engine sitting atop a firebreathing dragster that's capable of catapulting us down the track at over 300 mph—but this supercharged engine is only good for about a quarter-mile of effort before we exhaust our limited supply of Top Fuel. Then we gotta turn the motherfucker around and top off the tanks with more rocket sauce before we can make another run. Man, I love dragsters. And I sooooooooo wish their Top Fuel model of Decision Fatigue was True. Or Useful. Or something. Because this is a serious problem. So many of us go through life in the death grip of Decision Fatigue-overwhelmed by the stress of the almost infinite variety of choices in modern society. We wander around lost metaphorical fog of indecision.

in

I fucking spent years doing that. Like we all do. 392

a

literal

and


Fortunately there is a solution...but, of course, it's not the one's they're selling us. To date the Dogma Squad have only postulated two solutions for Decision Fatigue—though believe you me lots of corporations are pouring lots of money into a mad scramble to ferret out more so they can put the squeeze on improving our Collective Productivity. One of their official antidotes is simply a Bad Idea, while the other is the Worst Idea Ever...and I say that merely in the spirit of Truth in Advertising and not with any kind of judgment attached, just in case you wondered. Their Bad Idea: You simply wait around for the Cognitive Resource tanks of the Top Fuel dragster of your mind to naturally refill of their own accord—which they inevitably will if you give them enough time. That’s it. Wait around. They don't specify what particularly you ought to do during the waiting around, but it's a safe bet that watching television or spending your consumer dollars at the local shopping mall would earn you a nice chuck on the chin and a hearty pat on the back from their sponsors. Their Worst Idea Ever: The academics and social psychologists who done thunk up the Top Fuel model of Decision Fatigue in the first place actually advocate, in scholarly papers and in front of classrooms filled with impressionable 393


young people, that the fastest, bestest way to refill the tanks of our Top Fuel dragsters is to, well, add more Top Fuel ourselves. More specifically, they recommend that we deliberately spike our glucose levels by taking frequent breaks from the stultifying boredom of our shitty jobs to eat sugary candy bars and drink sugary drinks in a carboholic orgy of Insulin intoxication. Big Food could not be happier. Fellows and fellow-ettes with goddamn Ph.D.s are urging the public to do even MORE of what led America to the dubious distinction of becoming not just the fattest nation in the world, but the fattest nation in the history of the world: consume ever-greater amounts of sugars and carbs. Sugars and carbohydrates are now the Official Foodstuffs of Standard Dogma-ville. Now you don't need to have read my book the Low Carb Revolution to recognize that encouraging people to constantly spike their blood sugar levels with carbs and sugars in order to contribute more to the Collective Productivity is pretty much the Worst Fucking Idea Ever. Sugar and carbs may taste yummy, but they aren't the answer to anybody's problems except for Big Pharma, whose business model rather depends on the accelerating rise and rise in cases of Diabetes. Welcome to the United States of Insulin. Here, take a shovel and start digging a six-foot deep hole in the ground. 394


Oh, and here's a powerbar and a soda. You know, in case you get fatigued...from digging your own fucking grave and all. Our motto since 1984: “Ignorance is power.” Of course, if by some stroke of justice in th world their Top Fuel model turns out to be neither True nor Useful, then we could always put down our shovels and overcome Decision Fatigue in some different way. Perhaps even some good old-fashioned way, like we always did it before. In our own inner Game Reality. That’d be a trip, huh?!

395


42: Overcoming Decision Fatigue Once And For All

We

cannot successfully seduce a woman—or get much of anything done, really—when we're mired in the lingering fog of Decision Fatigue. So let's stop dicking around and figure this thing out. All politeness aside, Decision Fatigue has nothing to do with the Top Fuel model that the clowns over at the Cirque du Dogma are trying to balloon-animal into existence. But you already knew that. Which begs the question... If Decision Fatigue is a real thing—and it is—and if it's not caused by the depletion of a pretend container of finite Cognitive Resources stored within us—and it's not—then what's going on?! How the fuck did we all manage to get so lost and fatigued in the first goddamn place? Well, it turns out the world is a big, complex place-and becoming more so all the time. There are now so many games going on at once that figuring out which one we're supposed to be playing, and which part of ourselves is best suited to playing it, can by itself tire us out—and we haven't even done anything yet! Let's discover how Decision Fatigue can result 396


from even the briefest of interactions between two people. By way of example, we're going to play a very simple, two-stroke game with someone else. They'll go first, we'll go second. Can merely two strokes lead to Decision Fatigue? We’re about to find out.

Imagine the following scenario going down in the Real World Gaming Environment—you know, the tippy top of the iceberg that sticks out above the water and that everybody else thinks of as everything there is to know about “reality”... You're sitting alone at a coffeehouse. Some random dude enters and approaches your table with a clipboard in hand and asks if you'd sign his petition. That's Stroke 1. You look at the petition. You think about it for a second and then say, “Not right now.” That's Stroke 2. Random dude shrugs and leaves. Doesn't seem like much just happened, does it? But something happened. You now feel slightly exhausted and can’t quite remember what you were doing before he briefly interrupted you. Without being consciously aware of it, you've gone into Decision Fatigue. And it's about to get worse. A few moments later you leap up and run outside, desperate to locate the dude with the 397


petition. But it's too late. He's long gone. Okay, so what the fuck’s going on here?! We've seen again and again during our adventure so far that all the important shit in life goes down on the inside—either in our own internal Game Reality or in someone else's. So let's venture behind the scenes and discover what went down in your Multiverse during the few seconds of the two-stroke interaction with random clipboard dude. How we do anything is how we do everything. This brief swatch of time may prove highly illustrative of how we act and react during all the other seconds of the day—as well as hold the master key to unlocking the door of Decision Fatigue once and for all.

Let’s replay the interaction, but this time from the inside out... So there you are at the aforediscussed coffeehouse, sipping on a mocha-chocolata-shores-of-GitcheGumee latte and minding your own damn business. You happen to be in Down Time, meaning any one of your crewmembers is free to seize the wheel, and perhaps just now it's your Little Prince, who's feeling somewhat self-conscious and sulky since Margaret said that mean thing to him the other day—and who cares if “the other day” was back in middle school 398


1000 years ago?!--when some random young dude walks up and thrusts a clipboard in your face saying, “Will you sign my petition?” Back inside yourself, your little man doesn't even know what a petition is, so he doesn't know how to react or what to say. Instead he makes a fuss and several other crewmembers rush topside to find out what's the racket--your Artist, Lover and Puppy Body among them. But one of whom want to take the helm and deal with this petition thing. Although only a second or so has ticked away on the outside, it already seems like a minute or more has elapsed in the Perennial Now of our inner Game Clock. By this point a confused crowd of lesser parts and stowaways (Hullo, mum!) are crowding the top dek and making a great show of seeming to help with their incessant stage-murmuring... Peas n carrots! Peas n carrots! Peas n carrots! Finally one of them wonders loudly, 'What's the petition for?' and that seems like a capital question to ask, since knowing the answer to that could determine which member of the gang is best suited to playing the game called Signing A Petition. A quick glance at the petition reveals that it's about saving penguins. 399


Well now you're getting somewhere, because it just so happens you have a passionate crewmember who loves animals because you used to be a Vegetarian back in the day because you learned that girls tend to like boys who don't senselessly slaughter poor little cows and puppies or whatever it is those terrible meat-eaters feast upon and this lasted a couple of years until it finally dawned on you while girls tend to like vegetarians, they tend to fuck the carnivores and so Bacon, here I come! But even if you don’t play with him anymore, the part of you that’s a Vegetarian is still hanging around on your ship--because where the fuck else would he go?--and now there’s a great pounding on his cabin door for him to wake up and hurry topside. Greatly to his surprise—and I just wanna skip to the punchline by noting this entire door-slamming farce upon your inner stage is exactly how you react to every novel occurrence throughout your day and by now you might already be developing a sense that this breathless panic within you may...just may...have something to do with the crippling, mysterious condition known as Distress Fatigue—the Vegetarian is summoned from his dark, mushroomy quarters belowdecks and hustled topside for the first time in years and instructed to cast his animal-loving gaze at the petition. It's love at first sight. Your Vegetarian is totally down with signing the petition and donating money to save the penguins— turns out they're melting or some crap--but there's just one little problem. 400


The part of you that’s a Vegetarian ain’t got no money. And he doesn't have any friends who have money. In fact, he doesn't have any friends at all. He just stays in his cabin and never gets to come out and play his game of not eating animals anymore, so how would he possibly have any friends among the crew? One of your stowaways suggests he ask the Accountant—that guy’s got nothing but money—and so the Vegetarian dutifully seeks out the Accountant even though he knows the response he's going to get beforehand. And, sure enough, the serious, besuited Accountant takes one look at the hippy-dippy-hairdown-to-there Vegetarian with his LuLu Lemon stripey pants and bandana around his neck and responds with a big fat “No” on donating any money to save the parrots. “Uhhh, penguins.” “Whatever.” And so it falls to the poor—literally and figuratively--Vegetarian to be the one to give the sad response to the random dude with the petition by saying, “Not right now”. Teary-eyed, the Vegetarian ploddingly returns to his cabin as the other crewmembers and stowaways also disperse and for a long instant the helm remains unmanned. Your Little Prince was the last one at the wheel before the interruption, but it's not like he has it “reserved” or anything and if he doesn't step lively some other part of you may take over, wanting to 401


play its own game, and so the Little Prince runs and hops over your Puppy Body, sprawled out on the worn wooden deck like he owns the place, and ducks between the legs of your favorite grandma, who walks just as slow down here as she did when she was alive, and just as your Little Prince is about to reach his goal the part of you playing the game called your Job remembers that he was supposed to call into work to find out about the Jenkins deal and he abruptly grabs the wheel of your ship. “Uhhh, where's the phone?” your Job part wants to know. It's a Saturday, so he's been scarce all day and he definitely wasn't the last one to use the phone and now your thing's not sitting there on the table where it's supposed to be and he kinda needs it to make his call. So your Job avatar rings the heavy brass bell mounted to the main mast and shouting something about a “missing phone” and your crewmembers and stowaways scramble back topside again—hell, none of your heavy-rotation, on-call parts had even made it back to the Ready Room yet—and they start pointing at one another while angrily denying they were the last one to use the phone and nobody can figure out where it is or what happened to it and then, finally, Grandma perks up... “I wonder if that nice boy with the petition picked it up?” At which everybody freezes. And does a slow-burn turn towards Grandma. As the realization that she might well be right sinks in. 402


“Call in the AV Guy!” The call to Call in the AV Guy gets repeated down the line until the AV Guy--who records every little thing we see through the twin periscopes of our eyes-shows up with clangy portable video cart and big flatscreen monitor and more remote controls than a sex toy convention. The AV Guy rewinds the tape and, sure enough, we can clearly see the petition dude holding the clipboard directly over your iPhone 5 with one hand, as he reaches down and pockets it with the other, then beats a hasty retreat before you knew anything was asunder. It was never about saving the possums or whatever the fucking thing...it was always about stealing your fucking phone. “Dammit! Dammit! DAMMIT!” shouts your Job part, who really needs to make that call and find out about the Jenkins deal. Simultaneously, all hell breaks loose yet again as your crewmembers yell and scramble in every direction with wails of, “We wuz robbed!” “Go-go-go!” one of them yells at your Puppy Body—who now leaps to his feet and propels you out the front door of the coffeehouse. Your Puppy Body doesn't have a strategy to deal with the thief if he does catch him. But that's not his job. His job is only to deliver your physical body to the young thief— presumably when that happens another part of you will take over and beat his ass and retrieve your phone. 403


You did bother to stick with those martial arts classes long enough to generate a capable Ass-Kicking crewmember, didn’t you?! Of course, in the end he won't be needed. We already know this story doesn't have a happy ending. The thief has well and truly absconded with your sweet, uninsured iPhone and you trudge grumpily back inside. Total elapsed time: 8 seconds with petition guy, 7 seconds to register that your iPhone was missing and to run out the door--just another typical 15 seconds out of your day! You feel tired and defeated, wrapped in the clinging fog of Decision Fatigue, certain of only one thing in the world... You need a fucking cookie.

Whew! It’s starting to make a little more sense why people so willingly sign up to play somebody else's stupid game for 40+ hours per week for 40+ years of their life, because at least it's a respite from the bewildering uncertainty and confusion that lays in wait for them around every corner in the Hot Chaos of the Moment. On paper the Now seems like a Kodak moment of relaxing tranquility and an obligatory photo-op with your arm around Eckhart Tolle, but in practice every moment of being a modern day a go-go human is closer in spirit to dashing at a full sprint across the 404


panicked decks of the Titanic as it sinks into the chill North Atlantic—only without the luxury of a tuxedoed string quartet playing “Nearer, My God Thee”! Now don't for a second imagine all this is just some fanciful metaphor. This is the reality of how shit goes down within your Game Reality—and mine and everybody else's. This, my friend, IS Decision Fatigue. And the reason it's fatiguing is because inside most of us there's absolutely nobody in charge. Noticeably missing from both their model and ours (so far) is the presence of our Captain. O Captain! My Captain! Rise up and hear the bells! How much fucking longer we gotta wait for the next Walt Whitman to come along?! Life is almost unendurably difficult when our Captain is asleep. Without the Captain, our crewmembers are like Keystone Cops after way too many cups of coffee--scrambling hither and yon in an 18 frames-per-second pratfall of hyperactive skull fuckery. Living in the Hot Chaos of the Moment can be physically, emotionally and sexually draining—and that's on the best of days. Sadly, in the overwhelming preponderance of people, their Captain is fast asleep. Through absolutely no fault of their own. On the first day of Kindergarten every sweet little kid is handed a Blue 405


Pill and a plastic sippy cup of watered-down apple juice and told, “You know what to do!” So they do what they're told. They swallow the Blue Pill and their lil' Captain falls asleep before it ever had the chance to fully wake up in the first place.

Here's a secret that nobody who dwells in the Bunsen-burnery Lab Reality of academia will ever stumble upon... A wide-awake, fully alert Captain is our natural state and birthright . Therefore... Decision Fatigue is an aberration. It's the inevitable byproduct of a sleeping Captain—which itself is in aberration. So here's the secret to overcoming Decision Fatigue once and for all... Wake up your Captain and keep him awake. And, finally, you already know the secret to waking up your Captain, but since it's scientifically proven that we learn best by playing the game called The Spacing Effect—which requires repeated exposure to a new learnings spaced out over time-let's restate it just once more... The secret to waking up your Captain is to plan and execute your next Epic Motherfucking Quest. 406


Your troops cannot pull off an Epic Quest without the direction and guidance of your Captain. Oh, they can brainstorm about it plenty, and they can talk for hours with their friends about the swell things they're going to achieve in life, but without a Captain overseeing the operation, their ship of dreams will surely founder and sink to the bottom of the Sea of Great Ideas. When your Captain is awake and on his game, then at every given moment the right part is playing the right game at the right time. And this is suuuuuuuuuch crewmembers, you have no idea.

a

relief

to

your

We all need structure. We all need to know where we're supposed to be and what we're supposed to be doing—our parts most of all. (And since we are our parts, it's really not even most of all, it's all of all!) Figuring out who's supposed to be at the helm and where the great ship is meant to be sailing is a source of so much (unnecessary) anxiety among your crew...especially during those times when a part is already feeling over-extended by its seemingly endless trudge through the airless void of the SuckZone. Naturally, just because your Captain is awake doesn't mean everything's peaches and cream from here on. You'll still have your sorrows...but now they'll come as singles spies, not in battalions. While we're on the topic, here's the obvious secret to keeping your Captain awake... 407


Once your current Epic Quest ships, at once begin planning and executing your next hijinks! The Infinite Lust of the masculine never ends. It's never full. Never content. You never stop executing and you never stop shipping. Nor would you want to. And don't ever let anybody else convince you otherwise. Least of all yourself.

408


43: On Avoiding Porn

There's just one final obstacle between us and the 22 Strokes we've been building towards. Rosie Palma and her Five Sisters. You thought maybe we weren't going there? Baby, we're going all the way there! So let's just rip the Bandaid off real-quick-lickity-split... I want you to avoid watching porn. Before you get all freaked out and try to tar and feather me--with vaseline and tissues, no doubt...and, Ewwww!--for coming between you and your beloved porn (again, Ewwww!) just hear me out. Avoiding porn isn't gonna be easy. It's gonna hurt a little. But just 'cause something hurts a little doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. I’m not going to be the first person who’s told you this secret, but I sincerely hope I’m among the last... The less porn you watch, the more sex you'll have. Abso-fucking-lutely guaranteed! Over time we grow comfortable feeling a certain amount of stimuli and no more. This becomes the Baseline of what we’re willing to experience in our bodies, our Hedonic Set Point--and we go to great lengths not to violate it. 409


Each of us has a Hedonic Set Point that functions like a thermostat—cooling us down when we're overheated, and introducing some spice in our life when things get too chill. As we’ve discovered, the Hedonic Set Point in a woman's body is logarithmically higher than in yours or mine—hence her ability to feel into her Infinite Desire when she's given the opportunity. Which, in practice, isn't all that often—certainly not as often as most women would like. But not to worry, we're doing our part to change that. Whereas a woman's Hedonic Set Point has a default setting of a Spinal Tap-ish 11, ours hovers around a 2 or 3, at best. A man can get filled up quickly on a rather slight amount of stimulation--just like those people who get gastric bypass surgery and now their stomach’s merely a thumbnail-sized pouch and they can barely eat more than a few bites of anything before feeling stuffed. When that happens they naturally lose their desire to eat any more until they're done digesting and processing those two or three bites they just ate. And that's exactly what porn—online or off—does to our already meager desire. A single ten to twenty minute wankathon can completely satiate our sexual appetite and hold us over for the next day or three. Locking ourselves in our room to jack off to porn is no different than locking up a lion in a cage and tossing it a slab of meat every afternoon. 410


Eventually both man and lion will lose their desire to hunt. The gushing firehose of free and instantly accessible online porn has derailed the sex lives of an entire generation of men by suppressing our hunger. And when we lose our hunger, we lose our desire to hunt and, ultimately, we lose touch with our Infinite Lust--the super-charged, super-conducting, superplasma-fied engine that drives us to our greatness. Do you want to build an empire, earn a fortune and seduce the hottest women from around the globe? Or do you want to hide behind your computer and watch lesser men than you fuck women you'll never get to meet? Seriously, which do you want? Straight up, my friend, the less time you spend watching other dudes having sex the more you will have sex. That's just the way it works.

Consider doing a 30-Day Challenge: going for a whole month without spanking it to porn to discover how the landscape of your sexual expression can transform itself. Should you decide to play this game—and I sincerely hope you do--then within a day or so into it you'll begin feeling those old, familiar uncomfortable sensations in your body. Although they'll be centered deep in your loins, they may feel something like hunger pangs. And so they are. 411


Only it's your sexual hunger, stirring and awakening within you. If your Lover has been asleep, this is his opportunity to wake and start singing, “Feed me, Seymour!” By the time you reach the fourth or so day of your avoid-a-porn-athon, you might be thoroughly overwhelmed by the physical sensations coursing through you--begging you for a sweet release from their pent-up misery. As with our lunch-skipping, daytime-fasting game, when that happens, don't do anything. Don't judge the distress you feel in your body or attempt to make it try to go away. The Path of Greater Sensation is the red pill that finally wakes you up--pulling your Lover from the safety of his purchase in the Multiverse and out into the visceral excitement of the Universe as made manifest in your physical body. Choosing to wake up brings the magic, my man. The motherfucking magic. And a magical you is an unstoppable you—which is what we've been playing for all along!

412


CONGRATU-FUCKING-LATIONS—YOU HAVE CONQUERED LEVEL III!

413


Invite Yourself To The Party!

Hurry,

we’ve got no time to lose--the Party's already

started!

No matter where you are in the world, no matter what day of the week or time of night, there's a Party happening right this second! An oh-so-sexy Party. With naughty ladies and wicked times and streamers. A Party with everything you can imagine—and quite a lot you cannot. There's just one little problem: you're not invited. Let that sink in for a moment. There's an fantastical Party going down somewhere-everywhere--even as you read these words. But you are not invited. Worse still, you are never going to be invited. Like, ever. Til kingdom come, the fat lady sings, the cows come home—it don't matter. Your invitation's not in the mail. And it ain't coming via text, smoke signal or even semaphore...just to dash your hopes entirely. Are you ready for what may be the biggest secret of them all? Here it is on a silver platter... Just because you haven't been invited to the Party 414


doesn't mean you're not welcome. Nobody gets invited to the Party. No man, that is. The only way for a man to attend the Party-in-progress is to invite his motherfucking self. You don’t have to be good enough, deserving enough, rich enough, hot enough or whatever enough to attend the freaky Party. No matter who or what you are, if you’ll just give yourself permission to attend the sexy Party, then not only can you join in the fun, but you'll be welcomed with open arms by all the other Partygoers. They'll be delighted that you rank among the few who figured out how the Party works. The uninhibited expression of your sexuality is the Party. It's the ultimate Infinite Game--a 24-hour, guilt-free theme park of hot and cold running fantasies! Seduction is about first giving yourself permission to join the Party...and then masterfully inviting a beautiful woman to join you there. If you don't invite her to the Party, another man will. If you don't invite yourself to the Party, nobody else will. If you don't ever go to the Party, nobody will notice or care. Every single step that you and I will take on the remainder of our journey together is about showing you how to arrive at the Party in motherfuckin' style. 415


HOLY SHIT—YOU'VE ARRIVED at LEVEL IV!

416


LEVEL IV HOW TO WIN AT THE GAME of SEDUCTION...WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

417


Welcome to The 22 Strokes

Dude, you made it to Level IV! If it feels like we've been through a lot, it's because we have. I'm seriously proud of you for doing everything it took to get here. To make it even more worth your while, you've earned your bad self another 15,000 points, bringing your new total to a mind-blowing 42,000. Just ahead you'll find the 22 Strokes—the payoff for all the hard work you've put in so far. Each stroke builds upon the one before it and progresses towards the goal of seducing a woman into your bed. If I were teaching you to juggle—and I'd love the opportunity to teach you to juggle...I could have you up and running in fifteen minutes flat!--first we'd start with one ball. You'd learn how to throw that ball from one hand to the other. That's the first stroke in the game of learning to juggle. Once you had that down, then we'd move to the second stroke, which requires you to make two throws...tossing one ball from your right hand to your left and then, after the merest of pauses (and while the first ball is still in the air), tossing the ball in your left hand over to your right in such a way that the two don't collide in midair. Then we add a third stroke, necessitating three 418


throws, and so on until we reach five consecutive throws, by which point you're actually juggling. Likewise, although you'll be presented with all 22 Strokes in one fell swoop, your best strategy for incorporating them into your seductions will be to get to a point of sucking less with each new stroke before jumping back into full-blown suckage with the next one and so on. By the way, slugger, if you've skipped here from somewhere earlier in our journey because you wanted to hurry up and ride your glittery, little unicorn straight to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I should probably point out you're not going to understand one-tenth of the shit we're talking about. Everything in Level IV is built on the foundations of our unique model of the world and our specific vocabulary for describing it that we explored in such depth through the first three levels of our game. So if you skipped ahead, you missed learning that the only way not to suck at playing a game is to suck at it until you suck less. In which case... You probably still suck. Counterclockwise, if you’ve been on board all along and have taken every motherfucking step of this journey right beside me, then you’ve been slowly but surely alchemizing yourself into the superhero you were born to become. And that means it’s payoff time, baby! 419


The Hot Chaos of The Moment

The

game of Seduction--like every other game ever invented--is played in the Now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Right the fuck now. The Future literally does not exist in a woman's internal Game Reality. The Game Clock is always set at the never dull, often panicky, always krazy kakes Now that we refer to as the Hot Chaos of the Moment. To further celebrate reaching Level IV, I want to share another secret with you. You'll want to ignore this secret. Forget it, skip it, pretend it doesn't exist, act like it's not true for you. That's fine. You're the Boss of you, now and always. You know better. Okay, you know what?! Fuck that! You don't know better! Not about this. I'm about to share with you a concept that, by itself, can increase the amount of fucking in your life by a billion percent. That's billion with a “z”! So just pay attention and seduce women like I tell you and everybody will be happier. Most especially the women whom you previously left disappointed 420


and frustrated in the past because you omitted this one critical step and therefore failed to seduce them into your bed. Never lose sight of the universal truth that women want to be fucked far more than you want to fuck them. Your desire to penetrate a woman may reach to the moon, while her desire to be penetrated reaches to the stars and beyond. So with that ridiculously over-inflated preamble, here's this monumental new secret in all its notparticularly-monumental-sounding glory... A woman will only fuck you now.

That's it. That's the whole secret. Hardly seems worth the wait, huh?! But it's everything. A woman will only fuck you now. She won't fuck you tomorrow or at any other imaginary point in the future. It's right now...or never. Which means, my friend, that you never stop a seduction half-way through. You don't go through 11 of the strokes with a woman and then make a “date” with her to finish up the remaining 11 on Tuesday evening at 7:45. There's no Lay Away in seduction. 421


That's not how seduction works...and that's for goddamn sure not how women work. Do the 22 Strokes one after another without stopping until the very end. Not split up over two days or two weeks or any other coupling of timeunits. Any time you stop short of getting naked in bed with a woman, then you must start all the way over again at the beginning the next time you see her. Every seduction begins from scratch. This is true even with your existing lovers. As I say, you're not going to want to do this. When the sensation and Decision Fatigue mount during a seduction, you'll want to check out and get out. I used to be the worst guy in the world about ejecting when things were still going well. I'd reach my limit of sensation and so make “plans” to see her sometime “later”, when I was lemon-freshened enough to jump back into fracas. Dude, there's no motherfucking “plans”. Closer don't make plans. Closers close. Circle this one in permanent marker on your Kindle, baby... Pussy is for closers.

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In my lilly-livered past, I'd often get so worked up and trembly in my body at the possibility—the distant, unimaginable possibility—that a woman would actually want to have sex with me that I'd regularly slam on the brakes even when things were going well and would stupidly try to make arrangements to get together again “some day soon”. Ugh, seriously, I'd bring a perfectly good seduction to a dead stop and ask for a woman's fucking telephone number so I could call or text her later. (Bonus Tip #247: Never ask for a woman’s phone number unless you have a desire to fuck her again.) Then I'd give her a big hug, and say, “Can't wait to see you soon! It's gonna be awesome!” On the way home I'd be soooooo super-proud of myself. What a stud, I thought--I got some girl's digits! I'd barely be able to sleep that night out of the excitement that I would see her the next....whenever. And although I didn't have possess any kind of strategy for making it happen I just knew that somehow we'd end up in bed together. Can you imagine how this story usually ended? Can you fucking guess how many women I connected with at a later date and actually had sex with?! If you guessed “few to none”, then you, sir, are a goddamn genius--and here’s another 3000 points to prove it, bringing you to forty-five-motherfuckin’thousand. I could seriously cry when I recall some of the spectacular babes I caught and idiotically threw back because I didn't seduce them all the way into my bed, but instead tried to play the lower-sensation Long 423


Game of spreading things out over time. Here's another secret to put in your crack pipe... The Long Game is your worst enemy. It's almost infinitely easier to meet a woman, march through the 22 Strokes with her, and fuck her exactly the way she wants and needs in a single afternoon or evening, than it is to space the ride out over days or longer. And here’s why... Waiting leads to thinking. And thinking is the opposite of what you want a woman to be doing...and, frankly, the exact opposite of what she wants to be doing. She already thinks too much in her life, her career, her everything. You're her opportunity to think a little less for a little while. Besides, she can't fuck you with her brain, she can only fuck you with her body--so what the fuck is there for her to fucking think about in any fucking case?! But--you may be thinking furiously--doesn't a woman need to “get to know you” first? Doesn't she require an investigative discovery process worthy of Erin Brockovich that stretches out over weeks before she'll be willing to play the game called Fucking? In a word... 424


NO. The utterly fascinating—I'm sure!--history of your entire life does not matter to a woman. Here's a mindboggling secret that's STILL sinking in for me... Not only does a woman not need to know everything about you before tapping into her Infinite Desire with you, she doesn't even necessarily have to like you. From the reverse angle... A woman will fuck you even if she doesn't like you.

I am not remotely suggesting you should ever be a dick to a woman—or to any-fucking-body--I'm just pointing out that you can be as charming as Cary Grant and Clark Gable combined, and you'll still find plenty of women who will not like your green eggs and ham. Who would not like them here or there. Who would not like them anywhere. Yet they'll still fuck you. But only right now. Not tomorrow. Because whether a woman likes you or not, she will never fuck you tomorrow, she will only fuck you now. So there's nothing to wait for, my friend. There's nothing to gain and everything to lose by playing the Long Game. If you meet a woman and feel the sparkity-spark of connection between the two of you, 425


seduce her then and there all the way into your bed. That's why it's called the Hot Chaos of the Moment—because it's going down right the fuck now! The more you give yourself permission to let go of the Discovery Process every time you meet a new women, the sooner you can get to the good bits. And-let's just keep being honest with one another, shall we?—the bitter truth is that the less she knows about you the better. Unless she's a Venture Capitalist doing due diligence before making an angel investment in your start-up, the scintillating minutiae of your life aren't exactly making her pussy wet. Even knowing your name is pretty fucking optional. Quite often the first thing I'll playfully say to a woman after we've fucked is, “You're such a naughty girl—you just had sex with me and you don't even know my last name!” And the funny part? About half the time I can see in their eyes that they're thinking, 'Last name, shit— what the hell's his first name?!'

Here’s another secret that the dating and relationship pundits conspicuously forgot to include in their syllabi... Seduction is less about YOU than it is about a woman finding a safe opportunity where she can feel into HER Infinite Desire. 426


Which means—and I hate to be the one to break this to you, because I'm sure you are a damn fine man and you deserve to win a woman over on your own merits--that in the end... You are interchangeable. Just as with the game of Relationship, playing the game of Seduction is more compelling to us and to a woman than who we play it with. The really fucking Good News about this is that now you can finally get over yourself when it comes to approaching and seducing women. You are not too old, too ugly or too anything to give a woman what she wants and needs. If you feel the Tesla spark of connection and become Sexually Entangled with a woman, then you're her “type”, end of story. And that's when you should carpe the fucking diem. The ultimate goal of a seduction is to plug a woman safely into her Infinite Desire and take that wild ride with her while staying completely present and fully connected. And if you can learn to accomplish this on a consistent basis, my friend, then you will be greatly cherished by the beautiful women fortunate enough to be seduced by you.

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Three Playing Fields, Two Players, One Game

According

to the Inner Role-Playing Model of the Human Experience everything is a game...and every game is played both on the inside, in our Game Reality, as well as on the outside, in Actual Reality. Of course, that's just for single-player diversions such as learning to play mathematics or double-belled euphonium. Seduction is necessarily a two-player game. As such, it goes down on three (count 'em, 3!) separate playing fields at once...and no wonder most poor sods get so goddamn confused they don't even know where to start when it comes to seducing a woman! The three game boards of seduction (or any other two-player game) are: Your Multiverse: in this case inhabited by your Boarding Party of Captain, Little Prince and Lover aboard your great ship, sometimes supported by your other crewmembers and often heckled by your trashtalking stowaways. The Universe: your physical bodies, as well as the words and movements of you and the woman you're playing with in your shared reality, including all the attendant physical sensations on both sides. Her Multiverse: our primary playing field, where her Welcoming Party of Captain (if awake), Alice, 428


Naughty Girl, Puppy Body and Bodyguard await, along with her own semi-dysfunctional inner gang populating the decks of her ship.

Now before you get all out of breath and Decision Fatigue-y by these overlapping realities, I want to reassure you I'll be keeping track of the 3-ring circus of seduction for you every step of the way as we progress through the strokes ahead--directing your attention to the appropriate playing field at the appropriate beat during each stroke, so you'll always know precisely where to focus your energies. The only way to improve upon that sweet offer is for me to actually show up and seduce a woman for you, and then turn her over to you for the fucking. But then why the hell would I do that?! Of course, you and I could always fuck her together. I'm that crazy. And I know she's that crazy. The only question is, are you?!

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Stroke 1: Lions Pounce!

Every seduction starts with a Hunt. Whether your hunting grounds is a dance floor, a bookstore or a topless beach in Bulgaria, in every case you want to “summon” your Lion for the hunt. To do that, take a few moments to go deep within, down to the most barbaric, sexual part of yourself. Rouse your Lion from his slumbers. Wrestle with him. Slap him on the snout a couple of times to get him a riled up. You want your Lion eager to hunt. If you initially suck at imagining yourself going inside to do this, instead conjure up the most explicit sexual fantasies and then feel your brutish savagery coursing roughly through your veins...that'll get your Lion’s attention. As your Beast stirs, allow your Animal Magnetism to expand around you like a sphere. Feel the Infinite Lust radiating from your skin. When you are totally turned on, your Lion cannot help but be present. And when your Lion is present, women will notice. From across the room. From across the city. Women will usually give no indication whatsoever of feeling the panting presence of your Lion, but that's only because they have enough social intelligence to keep their awareness hidden. Believe me, if your 430


ravenous Lion is at the helm of your ship, every woman who comes across your horizons will feel it. Maintain this bestial Turn On as you roam the museums and airplane terminals and capitals of the globe. Connect with the primitive emotions and cravings of this shaggy, hungry Beast within. Let its horrific yearnings inflame your passions. Feel your very body transforming into Lion as you spy one tasty morsel after another on your hunt. Every time you glimpse a gazelle worth chasing down, you’ll instinctively want to give yourself a passing or a failing grade on the Narcissus Test— which effectively asks, “Am I good enough to get her?” The answer every time is: YES! You are “good enough” to seduce ANY availableish woman of adult age...although it may take you a good many more hours of trudging across the desert of the Suck-Zone until your opinion of you is as high as my opinion of you. Just keep sucking 'til you suck less!

Then comes the moment when you turn a corner and glimpse a woman you simply must have... The classy proprietress of the new art gallery down the street. The 6'3” blonde striding smilingly through the train station in Stockholm. 431


The dreadlocked Canadian backpacker at an Old Town coffeehouse in Sacramento. The fit, fortyish MILF in a bikini joyfully sculpting a godawful, sagging sand castle on the beach in South Padre Island, Texas. The perfectly put-together entrepreneur and millionaire with chocolate skin and a balcony you could do Shakespeare off of that you met at weekendlong Tony Robbin's seminar. Mmmmmmm, mouth-watering, one and all! And now comes the time where you actually approach her. Remember, up until this moment you ARE the Lion. That part of you is at the wheel of your ship and so that is literally “who” you are at this instant. And when a Lion spots a gazelle separated from the herd, what does he do? He pounces. That's what a Lion does. That's all he does. A Lion does NOT... Think. Estimate his chances of actually subduing any particular gazelle. Pretend to send a text message while circling around the gazelle as he gets the “lay of the land”. Notice or care about the rising sensation in his 432


body. (Of COURSE he has increased sensation in his body, he's about to kill and eat a fucking gazelle—he damn well better be excited!) A Lion does none of these things and neither will you. When you spy a woman you want to play the game of Seduction with, there's only one course of action... Pounce. Approaching a woman with your Lion at the helm means coming in a little hot, as the flyboys are wont to say. Which sets you up for instant success or instant failure—both of which are imminently desirable outcomes. After all, if a seduction is destined to fail, the sooner you know it, the better. The seismic collision between your masculine and her feminine forces is your best shot at becoming Sexually Entangled and thus generating an allimportant Seduction Singularity—which, again, happens right away-ish or never.

A word of warning... Coming in a little hot with your Lion at the helm will scare off more than a few ladies. Let them go. These are most definitely not the droids you're looking for. It's the dames who feel your Lion, who ratchet up 433


to Defcon 3 in response, but who still don't run away-those are the ones you want to play this infinite and infinitely delightful game with.

Another word of warning... A powerful show of your masculine energy will scare the holy shit out of some gals. They may respond by instantly and intently disliking you. That's fine. Don't apologize or try to fix their upset. Whether they like it or not—whether they like you or not--the Infinite Lust of the masculine also turns them the fuck on. Again, just because a woman doesn't like you doesn't mean she won't fuck you. The best way to approach a woman is fully possessed by your Lion. And then... At the very last second... Right as you walk up to her... You pull the ol' switcheroo... Get all Siegfried & Roy and make your Lion disappear. In Actual Reality that means coming in like a house afire...and then as you step into her territory, the fire is suddenly, mysteriously doused.

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In Your Multiverse: Just as your Lion is inches away from devouring this woman in one enormous gulp, your Captain forcibly grabs it by the scruff and roughishly hauls it belowdecks, ignoring the Lion's roars and piercing claws as he locks it back in its heavy cage. Rushing topside, your Captain takes at the wheel. With practiced hand—once you suck less at doing this, that is—he smartly brings your great ship alongside hers, and grappling hooks are thrown to secure the brace of ships together as your Little Prince and Lover look on. Meanwhile in her Multiverse: Deep within her ship stands the iron cage in which her own Beast remains locked away, deliberately cut off from the world....sleeping...deeply sleeping. Then comes the slightest of stirs in the dimly lit hold as a thick smell descends through the ship--a musk of wet fur and hot panting breath and the male sex. The cloying and wrenching scent wraps around the cage of the sleeping Tigress. The nostrils of the Tigress flair at the sweet waft of its greatest playmate...the loathed stench of its worst enemy. The recognition of its once and future foe, the Lion, is immediate. With a startle of breath and acid snarl, the Tigress's eyes snap open. Could Playtime be imminent?! According to the existential Game Clock of your mutual Game Realities, this entire primal, internal frenzy has occupied minutes or more, yet that 435


translates to a second or less on the outside. Back in The Universe: You find yourself face to face with a lovely and slightly startled creature who's wondering what in the hell just happened. And what's about to happen next. The game is now well and truly begun.

RECAP: Lions Pounce!

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THE SPACE BETWEEN THE WORDS “What do I say to a woman?” “How can I initiate a conversation?” “What should we talk about at the beginning?” Legit questions, all. And I'm about to offer you some strokes that'll break the ice with any woman in any setting. Before I do, however, I want to share a secret inspired by modern composer Arnold Schoenberg's famous pronouncement that “Music isn't the notes, it's the space between the notes”... Seduction isn't about the words...it's about the space between the words. There are no magic words or phrases in seduction, and if anybody tells you otherwise then they're just big stinkyheads who don't know stuff. The words don’t matter. And as you gain experience points and suck less at playing this game, you will find yourself using fewer and fewer of them...until eventually you can reach the point where you barely need any words at all. But you're not quite there yet, so over the next three strokes I'll offer you a framework to help launch you into a conversation with a woman you’ve just met. This support structure was designed for those 437


dudes (of which I am most definitely one) who are obsessed by strategy--who need to know how one thing leads to another...and when...and sometimes why, but not necessarily. The conversational gambits (howz that for a highfalutin turn of phrase...I daresay it ought to be pronounced in the haughty, clenched-jawed voice of Thurston Howell, III...“conversational gambits”!) of the strokes that follow will deliver you nicely to the first of our four Checkpoints in this brand-new model of Seduction. That said... If you have a different take on how to open a conversation with a woman, by all means use yours. Approaching a strange woman (like there’s any other type!) and getting into conversation with her is a monkeyshine that quite a few Pick Up Artists and Artist-ettes excel at--and if their diddly-do-babs work for you, do that. Mine is intended solely for those men who don't yet have a solid strategy for crossing the void of Stroke Zero and becoming Sexually Entangled with a woman. Although the South Col Route used by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to ascend Mt. Everest remains the most popular and photographed path to this very day, there are at least fourteen other ways to successfully arrive at the summit. (Descending the Everest is whole 'nother game. Far more climbers lose their lives coming back down than going up—often through sheer Decision Fatigue that leads them to make small, yet critical, errors in 438


judgment that cost them their lives.) Whether advancing along my route or some other, your Captain will do all the climbing in the early going—keeping the conversation crisp and alive, but without any of bawdy-talk from your Lover. You generally don't want to introduce any sexuality into the tender young bamboo shoot of your seduction until you've reached Checkpoint #3, whereupon you explicitly invite her Naughty Girl out to play and discover that the little Bamboo Shoot That Could is suddenly waist-high and hard as...well, something that's, like, totally hard...I can't really think of anything right now--and anyway it's high time you pulled some weight around here and thought up a damn simile or two of your own for a change, don't ya think?! While your Captain is bold and naturally possessed of a confidence bordering on arrogance, he's not overtly lecherous—and that's precisely why you want him at the wheel in the beginning rather than the puckishly sex-obsessed rake that is your Lover. And if you ever do come in like a typical jack-ass-all drunkishly leading with their Lover, dropping memorized pick-up lines and quipping about “gettin' lucky” tonight--then any woman worth seducing will launch you out the other side faster than a jetpowered trebuchet! So if your Captain has a completely different set of words he prefers saying to a dame he's just met, permit him say those words instead—and then meet us back at Checkpoint #1 just down the line, deal?! 439


The rest of you gentlemen, shoulder your packs and let's scale this damn mountain!

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Stroke 2: Say “Hello!”

Soooooooooo,

there you are, standing before a woman you've just approached–your Lion having been yanked away at the very last second, leaving your intrepid Captain at the helm--and facing the question that's plagued man since the dawn of time... What the fuck do you say to a woman you don't know?! Someway, somehow, if we are to seduce her we must first make it across the vast--quite possibly uncrossable--void of Stroke Zero. I like saying, “Hello!” Now because it's just one lonely, little word, you may feel honeyed into sweetening the pot by adding still more words, turning that lone word into a treacly phrase and then a sugary sentence and pretty soon you're reciting the Gettysburg Fucking Address when you first meet a woman--even as the needle on her Creep-ometer swings all the way over to “Extra Creepy” and she's backing away like you're a door-todoor Encyclopedia Salesman even though I'm pretty sure they don't have those anymore because why the fuck would they? So, say just the one word... “Hello!” It's our first Stroke and it's the only opener you'll 441


ever need. Say “Hello!”, then do nothing more, say nothing else. Smile genuinely and give her your full attention, but don't otherwise speak. If she hesitates in responding, the sensations in your body will shoot through the roof and you'll want to dissipate them by jumping in and saying a bunch of other shit. Reciting the Gettysburg Fucking Address kind of shit. Don't. Now it’s on her. Eventually, after the longest second or two of your life, she'll respond with some variation of, “Hello!” That may not seem like much, my friend, but “Hello!” is a start. And that's more than we had before.

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!”

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Stroke 3: Make A Situational Remark

The

next thing you say to a woman ought to be a situational remark. Since it necessarily depends on the situation you find yourself in, you cannot predict in advance what it will be, nor would you want to. Seduction is an exercise in getting present and staying present, from start to finish and, ultimately, head to toe. A situational remark can be an innocuous statement about the weather, the long line you're both stuck in or the view from the observation deck (“If you jump, I'm coming after you!”). Whenever possible—and it's always possible, once you learn to pay more attention--you can remark upon some aspect of her wardrobe or accessories. It's as simple as, “Wow, what amazing shoes!” (Or purse, earrings, etc.) Women take great pride in discovering the unique elements that contribute to their overall style—and are not accustomed to straight men (or other women except for their pretend friends), ever noticing or remarking upon them. Almost any kind of acknowledgement about your shared situation or her wardrobe will work here.

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Concurrently, there are a few cans of worms you might not want to open with...conversational chicanery that you should avoid like the proverbial Ten Plagues of Egypt from the Old Testament--up to and including the Plague of Frogs, the Plague of Boils and the dire-sounding Plague of Pestilence, whatever that fuck that shit was. Avoid... Making a compliment about her body or physical appearance--here or anywhere during the entire seduction, duh! Posing a question of any kind. Asking a question right up front means requiring a woman to think about how to respond, which means figuring out which side of her knows how to answer that question. Even a simple request such as, “Donde esta el bano?” can hurl a woman into a downward spiral leading to Decision Fatigue, which is not the direction we want her going! Asking what she does for a living. For one, it's a question. For another, in order to answer you she'll have to summon the job part of her. That means one of the interny cabin girls on board her ship has to be dispatched to find the job crewmember and rouse her and get her all dressed in her business attire and drag her topside and put her behind the wheel to respond to your interrogations...and this is unquestionably the last thing in the world the woman you are talking to wants right now. She's out socializing or having fun or on the way to get her nails did, and she will resist any attempts to 444


bring that side of her out—often quite vocally; I've had women practically snarl at me when I've slipped up and posed the “So whatdya do for a living?” question. Additionally, some women particularly resent being drawn into the game of What's My Line because men so often use it as a trap to establish their own higher value or supposed superiority over a woman. The perfect time to chat with a woman about what she does for a living is after you've fucked her. You want to save some of the joys of Mutual Discovery for later, right?!

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark

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Stroke 4: Remain Standing

If

the environment you find yourself in allows it, always seduce a woman from a standing position. And remain standing the entire time. Standing keeps her tumesced and a little offguard...and makes you more alert. It also happens to be our natural state, allowing the many and complex energy streams within us to flow more easily from one part of the system to another--that is, if you embrace any of that irrational, woo-woo, tree-huggin’, Chinese meridian, Indian chakra, Japanese ki, Hawaiian Ho’oponopono crap like me and about five billion friends of mine believe in. Sitting down dissipates the charge in your bodies, which we don't want...while standing increases your mutual sensation, which is always worth playing for. As well, standing gives you more options to include your whole body in your communications with her. It provides you with space to maneuver— allowing you the flexibility to bounce from one side of her to another, to move closer or further away, and to turn your seduction into a 3D interactive performance art piece revolving around her. Standing for any length of time is also a sweet callback to something each of us has done many times in the past when we made a hot new friend standing around an open-pit fire at a party or loitering in the gym parking lot for two hours chatting up some chick from spin class or the like. 446


Some of the most memorable conversations of our life take place while we’re standing up. Coincidence? Only if you believe in that kinda thing. Finally, it's a scientifically proven fact that standing up makes you funnier. They're called Stand-Up Comics for a reason, you know?! Nobody would pay to see a motherfucking Sit-Down Comic.

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing

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Stroke 5: Praise Her Look/Energy

You've broken the ice by saying “Hello!” and you've forged a casual connection by remarking about the situation or such. Nice job, by the way! There used to be a time when you wouldn't say anything to an attractive woman, when you'd stare at her with so much intensity that your eyes coulda bored holes straight through her—but you still couldn't bring yourself to open your mouth and utter a peep. Instead you silently begged Odin and the lesser gods of Valhalla that she would be the one to risk leaping across Stroke Zero—preferably by making a first move drawn straight from the gummy pages of Penthouse Forum. How'd that work out for you? Of course it's easier not to talk to a beautiful woman than it is to talk to her. Of course it's going to cause you some pain and suffering in your body, mind and soul to approach a living, breathing woman and talk to her despite wanting more than anything to run the other way. Our unwillingness to suffer just a little is holding us back. Any jackass can hoist a fully loaded barbell up and down a few times and suffer greatly for all of twenty seconds. Only a great man can sit in a little suffering for hours and years in order to change himself and change the world. 448


My friend, here's a secret with the potential to lead you to that Big Breakthrough you so fervently desire... It's your willingness to stay in the Little Suffering for a long time that transforms you into your Greatness. The Big Breakthroughs don't usually come riding in on a thunderclap with a cracklish bolt of lightening that gets all the pain over with at once...but more commonly bubble up from the Little Suffering of slowly cooking ourselves in the Crock-Pot of Life. So you’re already off to a fantastic start with this woman by saying hello and adding some kind of innocuous remark–“I’m pretty sure they hung that Picasso painting upside down”. Just like that, you’ve crossed Stroke Zero. Now let’s level up by making a comment about her Look. This is a foreign concept for most men, since we don't typically have a Look...or even know what one is. Dudes are content to throw on the least-smelly clothes from their bedroom floor and head out the door. Hell, Stanley Kubrick, the second-best filmmaker of all time, famously owned only two pairs of pants and two shirts. He'd wear the one set of pants and shirt for days and days until one of his assistant directors worked up the nerve to encourage him to change clothes, upon which Kubrick would simply put on the other pants and shirt, and continue with the business at hand. Conversely, most woman have a “brand” she pimps out every time she ventures into the RealWorld Gaming Environment--a unique Look that distinguishes her from all the other Bettys out there. 449


Not every woman does this. But most. As Helena Rubinstein summed it up, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.” A woman's Look isn't any single element of her wardrobe, appearance or accessories, but rather the overall statement all that stuff makes. So the third thing--after “Hello!” and a situational comment—you can tell a woman is, “I look your Look.” But don't stop there. Explain why you like her Look, and, even more intriguingly to her, explain what her Look says about her. This will light a woman up if for no other reason than she doesn't get this kind of feedback...ever. Even her gay friends aren’t running around explaining her own Look to her. Still we all appreciate positive feedback when it comes. Tell a woman, “I like your Look”--and then quickly add, “It says...” Now it doesn't MATTER what you put next. Again, the very fact that you're offering her your observations about the impact of her Look is a topic of the greatest fascination to her. No other men, and precious few women, will usually give her a single upstroke about the Look she's projecting. So, besides being an golden opportunity to compliment a woman on something other than her physical body, the sheer 450


novelty of discussing her Look provides a launching pad that neatly sets up the next stage of your interaction. Plus, your comments immediately give you the luxury of being funny, playful and a bit cheeky with her. Last year I met a 21 year-old graffiti artist wearing fishnet hose under cut-off jean shorts, with bright pink hair and a nose ring, and I told her, “I like your Look. It says, 'If you want to play with me, you better be prepared to get messy!'” She followed me around like a puppy for the next three days. Or you can tell a woman... “I like your look. It says, 'If the Zombie Apocalypse happens today, you're ready to run!'” I often use my interpretation of a woman's Look as an opportunity to praise some aspect of her personality that I want to encourage.... “I like your look. It says, 'If you wanna Go, I'll Go—but I'm Going all the way!'” The more outrageous your (always positive, fo sho!) critique of her Look, the better. “I like your Look. It says...'You just expected to spend a holiday weekend on our Planet and then you got stuck here and now Alien Overlord Zorg won't return your texts!'” By the way, women consider any reference to them as unique beings from another planet who are just 451


visiting Earth to be high praise, indeed! It doesn't matter if your statement about a woman's Look makes any sense to you, she will understand and appreciate it. And if you're not as clever as me—because, let’s face it, who is?!--you can always tell her something simple such as, “I like your Look. It says, 'I get what I want.'” If she doesn't have much of a Look going on—say she's wearing a plain white bikini at the beach or walking home in her work uniform--you can make the exact same kinds of statements, but substitute “Energy” for “Look”. Hence... “I like your Energy. It says, 'If a Great White Shark attacks us, you're not concerned about out-swimming the shark, you just care about out-swimming me!'” As with her Look, a woman will know exactly what you're talking about if you compliment her Energy. Girls already speak girl-speak. Or you might try... “I like your Energy. It says, 'Back on my Home Planet, I'm an overweight, middle-age man but they gave me this crazy body suit to wear while I'm here and I'm still not sure exactly how it works.'” Again, work that fucking Alien Angle whenever possible...and pretend to be an Alien along with her as the two of you plot to overthrow the world and shit. 452


RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy

453


Stroke 6: Chitty Chat

Now

that we've said, “Hello!”, made a situational comment and remarked cleverly-ish upon her Look/Energy, let's accelerate into the first corner of our young conversation by doing a little Chitty Chat—with a big emphasis on little. Back when I still sucked at seduction so badly that I whimpered myself to sleep every night, Chitty Chat represented the furthest reaches of my engagement with a woman. I'd get into Chitty Chat with some chick and instead of emerging on the other side three to five minutes later, I'd loop back around on some new and different topic, again and again until 30 minutes had passed, 90 minutes had passed--and since the Feminine is infinitely social, the woman was glad to sit there and “just talk” with me for the entire evening if that's all I wanted. It wasn’t all I wanted, it was just all I could figure out how to do.

Chitty Chat is just casual getting to know each other stuff--asking the sort of easy questions that any crewmember who happens to be lazing about the deck of her ship can answer with ease. “Where are you from?” “What's your name? 454


“What do you like to do for fun?” I often ask a woman, “What's your story?” This sounds almost like an intimidatingly existential question, but without exception women take it as permission to describe whatever part of her life looms largest at the moment. Last year I met a super-sexy, semi-trailer-trashy, early-twenties blonde on Freemont Street in downtown Las Vegas and within twenty seconds of meeting her I asked, 'What's your story?' She giggled that she was just emerging from a failed marriage and hadn't had sex with any man except her ex in over five years and not even with him for the last two years...and that was basically the end of our Chitty Chat and the start of the hottest 72 hours of my three-month sojourn in Sin City. Again and always, avoid discussing what a woman does for work until after you've fucked her. Neither her job part nor yours has any role to play in the seduction process. Let sleeping parts lie.

However... For fun and extra credit, during Chitty Chat you can talk about a totally made-up job that you clearly do not really do. I sometimes tell women I'm a door-to-door Player Piano salesman--you know, the old-fashioned kind with the rolls of paper with holes punched in ‘em? I 455


have this whole routine about me exhaustedly pushing an upright player piano down the street and knocking on doors and trying to get the thing into their house for a demo and then describing how we have to do all-nighters at the factory, punching out the player-piano rolls for gangsta rap tunes and shit. Women love made-up stuff. Because... It gets them out of the serious world of overthinkery they have to dwell in so much of the time. Alternately, I’ll claim to be a door-to-door stripper pole salesman. My best selling model, I tell them, is a see through Plexiglas pole with live goldfish inside. From here I often suggest that the woman I’m chitty chattying with is actually a stripper herself--but won’t admit it because she’s too much of a good girl or something...and the older the woman you say this to, the better it works. Being a spy is a good pretend job for one or both of you to have. These days I regularly say to a woman, “I'm not even gonna ask what you do for work because I know you'll just lie since you're probably a spy or something.” As with being an alien, women totally dig being mistaken for a spy and they will start running with it, accusing you of being a spy in return and so on. The point of Chitty Chat is to briefly bond with a woman on a social level and make friends with her various 456


crewmembers, while giving the two of you space to become Sexually Entangled and generate a Seduction Singularity that can cosmically inflate across the vast chasm that once separated the two of you. Or not. As you already know, seduction ain't science. It's motherfucking Magic.

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat

457


CHECKING IN

Alright,

my love, we're about to reach—and, yes, I did just call you “my love”...how the fuck could I NOT love you after you've shown so much willingness to put in the work to level up again and again as we've sailed through these treacherous, uncharted waters?!--the first of our four Checkpoints. Each one represents a note that must be played in the song of seduction... Checkpoint #1 (Stroke 7): Celebrate the realization that you and the woman you're seducing are each special and unique individuals Checkpoint #2 (Stroke 9): Demonstrate that the two of you will enjoy a unique and special relationship together as a couple Checkpoint #3 (Stroke 12): Establish that your relationship as a couple is sexual in nature Checkpoint #4 (Stroke 21): Reveal that your sexual relationship begins Now Once more, in Paul Harvey’s short-sleeve English, here are the essential beats of a successful seduction... You and her are both bad-asses in your own right There's something special between the two of you That something special is sexual Sex is on the menu right now 458


As before, feel free to go Off Book anytime and anywhere you like. Color outside the lines as much as you desire...just so long as you rejoin our One True Path at each Checkpoint. Total elapsed time to reach Checkpoint #1: 5-10 minutes

459


Stroke 7: Qualify, Qualify (CHECKPOINT #1)

Congratulations

on reaching Checkpoint #1 and earning yourself another sick 4999 points, which leaves you...oh, sorry, a single point shy of 50,000 total points--so I’m guessing you’re gonna have to keep reading until you pick up that next point! Or...I can bribe you again. If you’ll find your way to where THE SEDUCTION BIBLE lives on Amazon and give it a nifty 5-Star Review so them other dudes out there will know it’s worth reading, then I’ll repay your solid with a solid by tacking one more point onto your current 49,999. You don’t need to write the fucking Great American Novel, just something like, “Yo, read this shit!” and then slap 5 stars on it and we’re golden. And now here’s your reward: 1 more point. Which goes quite nicely with your new total of 50,000 motherfucking points, way to go, sir! Now this is the point in a seduction when it begins to dawn on a woman that this is, well, a seduction. Upon which she's going to start wondering why. Why are you picking her to play this game with....other than the obvious fact that she has a pussy? And... 460


Why should she pick you...other than being the proud owner of a cock? To answer these questions, we want to quickly and efficiently qualify her as being worthy of you, then qualify you as being worthy of her. Once you’ve established that you're both bad-asses, that’s all the reason either of you need to fuck.

QUALIFY HER: Remember earlier when the two of you were Chitty Chatting? And remember how you were paying attention to whatever she was telling you? You were paying attention, right?! Dude, what do I keep telling you? You gotta stay one hundred percent focused and present when you’re seducing a woman. Okay, let’s pretend you were paying attention...this is where you remark upon one aspect of her life that demonstrates a positive quality about her. Maybe she shared an experience that reflected boldness or adventurousness. Then say, “I admire how bold you were by traveling to India by yourself.” Women especially like to be known for their courage and loyalty—so if you discover evidence of either of these traits by one of her crewmembers, now's the time to articulate it. Not in these words 461


exactly, of course, but something in the ballpark of... “I admire your courage in the academic realm. You’ve encountered so many obstacles on your path to a Ph.D.--and you just keep going.” Or... “You sound like a loyal friend!” Qualifying a woman just needs to be about one thing...not two, not two hundred. A mistake often made by men is meticulously assembling an entire dossier on some poor creature they just met. They strip-mine her whole life history across multiple dates under the guise of 'getting to know her'--as if learning every particular of a person's past inevitably leads to a genuine understanding of who they are in the present. (If this strategy actually worked, then professional historians would understand people best of all and would presumably get laid more than any other category of men...instead of, well, never!) All it takes to qualify a woman is to bring a single, genuine quality about her into Mutual Knowledge between the two of you so she feels just a little bit seen.

QUALIFY YOU: This is the step that a wearying number of men get wrong. Men universally over-qualify themselves to women. If I had to pick just one secret to print out on little 462


cards to hand out at the Dude Factory, it would be... All the many, glorious details of who you were in the past and what you've done in your life up until now don't matter in the least to a woman in terms of your fuckability. In a previous incarnation, when I was certifiably the Most Clueless Man Alive, I breathlessly trotted out my entire resume with every woman I met. Only slowly did it dawn on me that the more time I spent boring a woman with all the reasons she should to fuck me, the less likely she would be to do so. My friend, nothing turns a woman off faster than having to sit through a tedious recitation of a man's supposed awesomeness. Here's what you need to know about what a woman needs to know... A woman cares less about what you've done in your past than about what you're doing right now. And I mean Right-The-Fuck-Now! Forget sharing your exploits from the high school debate team or how much money you earned last year--and, instead, start showing up to your seductions. Stand (hint, hint!) in front of a woman entirely awake and alert—steered by your abundant Masculine energy and powered by your Infinite Lust, giving her the gift of your entire attention. Feeling you Fully Present in front of her is the only true and useful aspect of your character that a woman 463


needs to know before she believes you're qualified to fuck her.

Not bragging about yourself at this stage of the game may prove to be a hard step for you to take. It certainly was for me. Fuck--it still is. When I think back on all the potential sex-capades I talked myself out of by revealing too much pointless information about myself, I could cry. Ugh, all those wasted hours and wasted babes! Seriously, even now there's a tear forming in the corner of my eye, lemme tell you. But wait... I suddenly feel better, because I just remembered that less than an hour ago, no lie, in the middle of this very afternoon here in London, I was fucking a spectacular, mid-twenties, 6' blonde photographer possessed of a tight, Eastern European body, with the sweetest smooth pussy--like a paper cut between her thighs--and the total elapsed time of our conversations from meeting to fucking was perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, at most...and just about the only “fact” she knew about my entire life was that I was book writer from America. It was only afterwards, as we lay slap-andtickledy, butt-nakedly upon the bed--scrolling through a collection of her color-drenched photographs on her iPad--that I noticed her stylized signature at the bottom of the pictures and thus did I learn her last name. 464


She never did ask mine. True story. RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1)

465


Stroke 8: Get Entangled or Bust

If you and the woman you're seducing are going to become Sexually Entangled on this day—and this day is the only day that matters—then it will have happened by now. Should you become Entangled, then you'll find yourself being pulled towards her. It will feel easier to keep playing with her than to stop--as if there were a stickiness to your connection. Simultaneously, her eyes will light up. That light is her opening to you, giving you the permission to enter her Multiverse. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to open up to her in return so that your two Game Realities can merge into one. I want you to steer your ship directly into that light...because that's the magical route to the enchanting world within her. When you're Sexually Entangled with a woman, you'll feel it. Just as you'll both feel it when you're not. If the two of you have not become Entangled, it will become displeasantly, abundantly evident. Your turgid conversation will feel as weighted down as Virginia Woolf's stone-filled pockets when she waded to her death in the River Ouse. You'll feel an increasing desire to get away—to swim back to shore 466


and save yourself. And you'll—wait, wait, wait...what kind of sick fuck compares a misstep in the seduction process to the tragic suicide of a literary icon?! “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Can you believe I actually make a living from thinking this shit up?! A good living at that?! One that affords me the opportunity to travel the world full-time--writing down one stupid-ass thing or another for a few hours a day and banging hot chicks the rest of the time! Ugh, I am so annoying. Seriously... Fuck me! AND that Horse Of A Different Color I insist on riding everywhere! Seriously, what an arrogant fucking asshole I am. I wouldn't blame you one bit if you totally hate me for leading the life of a rockstar without having gone through the bother of actually becoming a rockstar. And what’s up with that Artist as Shaman shit anyway? Is that like a code word for selling my soul to Satan in exchange for all this esoteric knowledge or some fucking thing?! And you really ought to be burning with jealousy, because right now your life maybe kinda sucks a little 467


(or a lot), and you're stuck in whatever godforsaken life situation you're stuck in. And although some of the shit I'm telling you may be rocking your world a little, here and there, you still can't begin to imagine how everything's gonna click into place so you can finally make it to other side of the Suck-Zone and make sweet love down by the river with one fine bitch at some point in your very distant future, much less bang one or two fine bitches a day the way I do it. But, if it's any consolation—and it won't be, because, again, Fuck Me and everything I say!—I used to be stuck in a far worse place than you'll ever reach. And however big of a pussy you are now, I was a far bigger pussy, and I suffered the sufferings of a dozen men as I slogged my formerly fat, broke ass across a sexless desert of indifferent women and sneering men for year after hopeless, lonely, directionless, celibate, didn't-even-have-twenty-extrabucks-to-pay-a-local-streewalker-to-blow-me year. Until finally—recently...like only in the past couple of years recently—I managed to pull it all together and, without so much as a fucking map to guide me or a single person in the world to cheer me on through my miserable sufferings and insufferable missteps, I somehow, miraculously and incomprehensibly, washed up on the far shores of the Suck-Zone and I dragged myself wearily to my feet and then... And then... And then I made one of my most significant decisions of my life, my friend. 468


I decided to come back. For you. So here we are. It's me and you, man. Doing this work together. Crossing the Suck-Zone of Seduction one painful, suck-ass step at a time. But at least you've got a motherfucking map. At least you've got one motherfucker to cheer you on. I had fucking neither one. But I still made it across, and so can you. So brush the sand out of your little pink vagina and let's keep moving. It won't be easy. I'm going to annoy you plenty. Deal with it and keep up. You're gonna suffer. Of course you're gonna fucking suffer and you're gonna hate me for the suffering. But you can't avoid the suffering, nor should you try. Here's a motherfucking secret that the Standard Dogma-teers—with their presto-change-o programming fixes and their polished turds of incessant positive affirmations--hopes you'll never figure the fuck out... The brutal alchemy of your current experiences is what will ultimately transform you into a Master. That said, still... Fuck me! 469


Whew, I'm glad we got that out of the way. That's just something that needed to be aired out, you know?! I am available for children's parties, by the way.

So if you and the lady of the hour do not become Sexually Entangled, you can either load up the pockets of your overcoat with stones and head for the river, or you can walk away. You have no other hand to play. “No, no, no—I don't wanna go!” Cast your ship off from hers with a tip of the hat like the gentleman you are and sail off in your separate directions. “But...but...I really like THIS girl!” Believe me, if you're not feeling the tension of a Sexual Entanglement, she's not feeling it a hundred times more. If she enjoyed your company, of course she'll be sad when you go, but she'll also be more than a little relieved if she suspected your goal was to seduce her. “I'm NOT leaving!” Look, fine, stay. Seriously, you can hang out with her the rest of the evening or even the rest of your lives. You can become best pals and do all kinds of things together— talk, go bowling, dance, make fun of strangers passing by the sidewalk cafe where you're nursing 470


overpriced chocolate martinis. I do this with women ALL the time. The majority of my friends are women and the majority of them are not my lovers and never will be. Their Naughty Girl and my Lover simply never became Sexually Entangled. These women love me dearly, but they would never fuck me. Instead, other members of our crew became Entangled with one another and so we go to the theatre together or to Ecstatic Dances or we take turns hypnotizing one another or whatever turn our friendship takes...and if you're willing to play by those rules with the women you don’t become Sexually Entangled with, then by all means enjoy your playdate. Female friends are the funnest things to play with ever. But, please, for her sanity and yours, let go of the belief that you will ever successfully seduce her. Here's a secret that will save you (and your female friends) untold amounts of grief if you'll just take it to heart... You're fucked if you think you're gonna fuck any of your existing female friends. Nowever, that gives you both boundless space to grow into even better friends. Glad we cleared that up! Listen, you're moving in the direction of so much sexual abundance that you can walk away from any seduction, as well as easily refrain from hitting on 471


your female pals, because--who knows?--maybe just around the next corner awaits a lovely and unsuspecting gazelle for you to pounce upon.

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust

472


ENTERING HER GAME REALITY

Bro, I got more Bad News... By this point in the seduction, after all the time you've gamely put in, you still have approximately 0.00% (I've rounded up to the nearest hundredth fer even gooder scientifical akkuracy there, Pogo!) of having sex with the lovely lady in question. Even though you're both Sexually Entangled, you are still on the outside looking in. You don't get to play any games with her—most especially the game of fucking--until and unless you become a character in her Multiverse. How can I be so sure she won't fuck you yet?! Well, don't take my word for it, let's ask her... If we were to freeze the whole scene right now with our nifty, patent-pending Freeze-O-Ray Gun and asked the woman in question if she'd fuck you, she'd briefly go inside herself to learn the answer, then return to announce, with unwavering conviction, “Nope.” It's probably a good thing you're frozen solid right now, because you'd be all, “What the fuck?! I've been chatting up this fine bitch for fifteen minutes now and I'm still at zero motherfucking point zero zero percent?! What the fuck was the purpose of any of this?!” And I'd be like, “Calm down, motherfucker, we're 473


just one stroke away from changing the game completely!” Then you'd go, “Pardonnez moi, monsieur...please continue at your earliest convenience.” 'Cause, you know, that's just how dudes talk to one another when dames ain't around.

But, seriously, how does she know that she won't she fuck you yet? How could she be so damn certain you are still a “No” fully fifteen minutes into the seduction? Welcome to the equivalent of Fermat's Last Theorem in the world of seduction--the unsolvable conundrum that everybody gave up trying to resolve decades ago... How the fuck do women know who they want to fuck or not? Well, that real Fermat shit got all proved in the end, so maybe (no promises...just maybe) we can get all Good Will Hunting on this shit, too?! Perhaps the answer is hidden in plain sight, behind a door so obvious that none of them other Einsteins in Big Dating Advice even noticed it, much less thought to unlock it. Although, in their defense...actually, sorry, I got nothing. Let's not sugarcoat it... They're just fucking stupid. 474


Big Dating Advice is like the Hamburger Helper of the self-help world—and they’re all still eating that shit straight from the box.

To solve the perpetually perplexing problem of how a woman knows whether she will fuck you or not, we need to journey into... Where else? Her Multiverse. Imagine showing up on the deck of her great ship-where her crewmembers continue to play the Statue Game thanks to our swell Freeze-O-Ray Gun--and then finding our way belowdecks. Just a couple of levels down, there's a narrow corridor running parallel to the keel of the ship with cabin doors on either side. At the far end stands a plain wooden door. It's closed and locked, but there's a heavy, golden skeleton key dangling from a hook nearby. Take the thick key in hand and slide it slowly into the snug keyhole—you dirty, dirty boy!--and push the door open to reveal a spacious cabin filled with dudes—and more than a few dudettes—milling about and having tea and whatnot. Just inside the door hangs a worn brass bell. If you ring the bell—go ahead, don't be shy!--the assembled guys (and dolls) will fall easily into a line. This is the woman's Booty Line Up—made up of the avatars of the people who've already been cleared 475


and pre-approved for her to fuck due to their good looks, good fortune, social value or whatever randomy criteria she sets for her lovers. This illustrious group may include some of her exes, a few people she currently likes or is already seeing, along with the usual suspects from the ranks of movie stars and other celebrities...and, for some inexplicable reason, in this case there's also a wellgroomed German Shepherd near the far end of her Booty Line Up. Here's the deal... Only once your avatar appears in her Booty Line Up do you become eligible to become her lover, because the only way a woman knows if she's down to fuck any particular person is if they show up in this cabin of her ship. (For men it's much more of a Cattle Call—we'll fuck just about anybody who shows up to the audition!) Have you ever played the game of What Famous Person Would You Fuck with a woman? As soon as you throw out a name, on the outside she'll immediately give a thumbs up or thumb down. But to discover how she arrived at that answer, now and always one needs to go into her Game Reality. And what happened was this... With lantern in hand and at the leisurely pace of her internal Game Clock, she found her way to the Booty Line Up cabin at the end of the corridor, unlocked the door with the gold skeleton key, rang the bell and surveyed the troops to determine if Ryan Gosling or Robert Downey, Jr. or whatever Young Punk of The Month you named is among their 476


number. (Oh, in case you wondered, Johnny Depp's avatar is factory-installed in the Booty Line Up of all women these days--every generation has its Valentino.) Having ascertained that a particular person was (or was not) in her Booty Line Up, then she can come back and give you her answer. Now just because someone appears in a woman's Booty Line Up doesn't mean she WILL fuck them, it merely means she CAN. They've been cleared and approved through whatever vetting process a woman uses, but she still needs to be seduced.

Back out in Actual Reality with the woman you are currently seducing, by this point you have already done enough to deserve to be in her Booty Line Up-you've become Sexually Entangled with her, generated a Seduction Singularity between the you and qualified yourself as a fellow bad-ass. Yet there remains one critical element missing... You do not yet exist in her Game Reality. The next step is for you to insert a game piece—an avatar representing you—into her Multiverse. Only then will you begin to exist on the inside of her. Only then can your avatar can take his rightful place in her Booty Line Up--tucked between that ginger-haired guy whose name you can never remember from that popular TV show, and the sleek 477


German Shepherd who used to lick peanut butter off her pussy during a lean time in her dating life. Ohhhhhh. That's explains the dog.

Total elapsed time to reach Checkpoint #2: 10-15 minutes

478


Stroke 9: Create A Grand Adventure (CHECKPOINT #2)

Welcome

to Checkpoint #2! Let's put another 3500 points in your tank, just 'cause we can--bringing you to 53,500 for the nonce, you fucking bad ass! It's time to turn loose your Lover, who's demonstrated such admirable restraint up until now. Slowly at first, and then with increasing momentum, he's gonna steer the seduction directly into the highly charged winds of your mutual sexuality. Besides being sexy and sexual, your Lover is also just a little nuts. He'll casually say and do things that would mortify many other parts of you. Your Lover takes risks. He pushes buttons. He skates right into the middle of a patch of thin ice...and if he crashes through into the freezing water below, he'll try to hand-catch a fish on the way out. And he's about to make quite an entrance. Your Lover's going to kick things off by presenting the woman you're seducing with an Outrageous Offer—which is a shared activity well beyond the pale of your fledging friendship. Last year when I lived in Las Vegas for three bacon-crisp months, at this stage of the game I'd sometimes invite a woman to accompany me to the 479


top of the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel and “make out like teenagers”. Then I'd immediately drop my Outrageous Offer and continue with the thread of our ongoing conversation for another minute or three, and suddenly stop and say, “Okay, I'll let you come with me to the top of the Eiffel, but we're just holding hands! I don't kiss on the first date.” This also marks the first occasion she's heard we were even on date. Which, of course, we were not--it was just my Lover being typically brash and buttonpushy. An Outrageous Offer should to be an invitation to bounce from wherever you are now to some other place in the general vicinity—although it really doesn't matter whether it's a plausible or implausible destination. Activities I've suggested to women upon knowing them for ten minutes or less... “Let's go midnight Glow Bowling!” “Yo, zipline down the middle of Freemont Street!” “We should take some magic mushrooms and go hang out at the cemetery!” “When's the last time you went skinny dipping in the middle of the night?!” The point of an Outrageous Offer isn't to actually take her up to the top of the Eiffel Tower and kiss her or the like, but to encourage her to start imagining that she will be doing other things with you—that the two 480


of you have a future, however silly and farfetched. And therein lays the secret passageway... It is through that imagining—which necessarily takes place within her Game Reality, as she conceptualizes your scenario of the two of you doing something together—that your avatar finally gets inserted into her Multiverse. That's all it takes.

Then you immediately turn up the heat by proposing an activity logarithmically more outrageous than the first one... So next you create a Grand Adventure with her-preferably one involving international travel and nights spent together and all the trappings of a storybook romance. “You seem cool,” you might say. “We should run off and join the Peace Corps together. And help some poor kids and stray animals. But no place too poverty stricken. Hopefully they'll station us in Dallas or something.” Or... “Listen, if we get drunk tonight and accidentally get married, is it okay if we have a Black midget Elvis impersonator preside over our divorce tomorrow?!” Or... “What d'ya say we steal a hot balloon and a case of champagne and see how far we can get by dawn?!” 481


Again, although you and the woman you're seducing are standing—STANDING, big fella—in the Universe, the Grand Adventure you're creating with her is being processed and imagined in her Multiverse. Which doesn't make it any less real for her. Quite the contrary, since Actual Reality only becomes “real” for her when it's in her Game Reality. Stay with me, brother. You got this. You’re right there. No sooner do you mention flying away in a hot air balloon than she's loading up her Welcoming Party into the wicker basket hanging beneath it and envisioning setting off on that voyage.

Because I’m a fucking asshole who gets to travel the world full-time, I always have a Next Place I'm Going that I can invite women to. As you know, I've been living in London the past six months, but once I wrap up this wicked little book in the next week or so, I'm moving to the sexy Spanish town of Barcelona for a few months, then I’ll be taking a leisurely, two-week Repositioning Cruise on a giant passenger ship back to the United Snakes of Amerika in time for Christmas. As you might imagine, at Checkpoint #2, every single woman I seduce gets an invitation to come visit me in sunny Spain or join me on my cruise or some kind of thing. Of course, I do genuinely want them to come play with me--however, even if I wasn't actually going doing any of this, I could still invite them. 482


It's the thought that counts. It's literally the thought of all this, not the doing of any of it, that counts Even if I currently lived in the asshole of the universe, Indianapolis, Indiana (hey, that's Kurt Vonnegut's assessment, not mine!), there's nothing stopping me from saying to a woman at this juncture of the seduction, “Hey, let's run off to Barcelona together! All you need to pack is a bathing suit and a pair of heels—and just the bathing suit bottoms, really, since all the beaches are topless!” Again, it’s not about the going there, it’s about the thinking about the going there. Because whether she eagerly accepts your invitation to a Grand Adventure or laughs it off as absurd, the end result is that she spent a moment on the outside and several long minutes on the inside imagining it... And so your avatar is now a character in the Inner Role Playing Game that continually unfolds within her. You're in like Flynn, baby!

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing 483


Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2)

484


Stroke 10: Board Her Ship...

While you're standing there—standing, my brother!-talking to your hottie, just connecting a little and imagining some adventures together, it once again doesn't seem like much is happening, does it?! Well, fucking everything is happening, but down beneath the surface, like it always is. In her Multiverse, the place is abuzz with activity... Your two great ships have been loosely lashed together, and with every passing moment the bonds grow tighter. On board your vessel, your Captain, Lover and Little Prince have been watching the delightful chaos on the deck of her ship—where a score of her crewmembers and stowaways have been rushing around as they try to figure out what the fuss is about. All they know right now is that another ship has pulled alongside their own and they seem to be heading in a slightly different direction. None of them is quite certain what game they're supposed to be playing or which part is best suited to playing it—and the situation isn't being helped by that same ol' batshit crazy stowaway who so often wanders the deck of the woman’s ship during times of uncertainty, spouting her batshit crazy nonsense-“Don't talk to boys!”...“How'd your ass get so fat?”...“Wait, Rosebud's that crappy sled?!” 485


Your Captain is piloting both ships from his perch at the helm—but that will change once your Lover gets into position. Since your two ships have become Entangled with one another, and you now exist as an avatar within her Multiverse as a result of her imagining a Grand Adventure with you, the boarding can proceed. Thus does your Lover now find his way to the shouldering gunwales between the boats, and swing first one long leg--

Now before you rush out to buy a pirate costume... This isn't anything “you” need to do. I'm just describing what happens beneath the surface of you and a lady in such a way that you can grasp, for perhaps the first time in your life, exactly how your words and actions back out in Actual Reality impact and change the game being played in Game Reality...and vice versa. Mostly vice versa. Never forget the Real Game's inside. The things you say and do out “here” in the Universe are largely controlled by what happens in your Multiverse, not the other way around, the way everybody has been insisting your entire life. You first compose a symphony inside yourself— your tousle-haired composer locked away in his cabin with a bottle of wine, a pot of ink and a stack of foolscap—and only later do you write it down for 486


realz in the outside world. According to the Inner RPG Model, changing the way you move your game pieces on the inside inevitably changes your results on the outside. And the way you move your avatar within her Game Reality is to hit the beats of each of the 22 Strokes. Again, you don't have to “try” to do any of this on the inside of you or her. This is what you already do. This is what all people have always done.

--and then your Lover throws his other leg over the rails, and drops firmly onto the deck of her ship...with your Little Prince not far behind. Her startled crew move backupishly as your Lover strides deliberately among them, offering a charming smile here and a provocative wink there. To one side, her Bodyguard stiffens, biceps abulging. Your Lover makes eye contact and slowly gives a head nod of respect, which the Bodyguard barely returns—the mutual agreement between the two of you being that you're not friends, but neither are you enemies, and let's keep it that way. Directly behind him is her Naughty Girl. And baby is dressed to kill! She looks like a cross between a turn-of-the-century French whore and a dominatrix from the distant future. 487


And she's all bouncing up and down, rocking back and forth, trying to peek out from behind the massive Bodyguard and catch the eye of your Lover, who for his part seems to be totally ignoring her at the moment. Instead your Lover turns abruptly and advances to the helm of her ship. Ever so casually he reaches out one hand and rests it lightly on the outer ring of the wheel with a Cheshire cat smile, shrugging his eyebrows mischievously in the direction of a bewildered Alice. If her Captain is awake, this is the point where she crosses her arms and leans against the main mast, taking in your Lover with bemused detachment. Masters love to watch other Masters work. As for the rest of her crewmembers, it's finally starting to slowly dawn on them exactly what game is being played. They know this game. They like this game. If everybody plays their part, then they're all eating steak tonight. Unless...

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark 488


Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship...

489


Stroke 11: ...or Run Away

Unless... Somebody objects. Despite becoming Sexually Entangled and generating a Seduction Singularity between the two of you, if any of her troops protest loud or long enough, ain't nobody eating steak on this night. Fuck steak...Spam won't even be on the menu. This objection could come from tortured sexual nightmares of her past, or from besuited career ambitions in her present, or even full-breasted maternal yearnings of her future. It can also be possible for a 3D, holographic stowaway representing her mom or therapist or possessive husband to storm on deck and make enough of a fuss to rain on everybody's parade. Motherfuckers! No matter which quarter it comes from--if the protests appear intractable, then her crew will swing into action to repel your boarders. A curt “Beat it, pal!” from her Bodyguard or snarls from her suddenly awake and barkish Puppy Body might not be enough do the trick. The atomic bonds of your mutual attraction could already be so strong that she'll need to pour enough 490


dark energy and negative emotion into the space between you to create a Separation Event. Cue Alice, the undisputed Queen of Upsets. This little Terror of Tiny Town has no remorse or regret about raining down verbal and psychic blows on your Lover and Little Prince until they scramble for safety back to your ship. She's more ruthless than Dexter—she'll cheerfully slice you to pieces with a few cutting remarks, the hurtful memory of which will still sting years later. Such a charmer, that girl! Things seemed to be going so well in the seduction until--BOOM! The woman suddenly blows up, angrily accusing you of being married or a player or gay or whatever angle she can find to get your goad. This isn’t a test. This is a woman who doesn’t want to be seduced by you on this night and she’s gonna make sure you get the fucking message. It doesn't take a drink in the face to realize you're staring down both barrels of a Separation Event...until it does. Your only reasonable response is to do the right thing and grant her wish. Maintain your poise, thank the lady for her time, and walk away like the fucking gentleman you are and will continue to be. Above all, don't react emotionally—here or in the face of any upset by any woman at any time. To 491


purloin Lincoln's illustrious phrase, be guided by the better angels of your nature. Retreat peacefully and graciously. Brave Sir Robin ran away-No! When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled-I never did! Brave Sir Robin turned about, and valiantly, he chickened out-Oh, you liar! Of course, just because you're able to summon the strength of character to walk away from the bloody meat cleaver of her rejection without reacting emotionally on the outside doesn't mean you won't be hurting on the inside. More specifically, your inner boy may feel sad, unwanted and more than a little scared by her abrupt dismissal. Here's my advice to you... In the face of rejection, make your Little Prince your immediate and exclusive priority. Stop whatever you were doing or intended to do, and nurture him. Reread the chapter on the “Care And Feeding of Your Little Prince.” I mean, like, go home and actually reread it and follow the recommendations. 492


Because after being dismissed so cavalierly, your Little Prince needs the comforting and concern that can only come from you. He wants and needs to feel... Handsome. Safe. Loved. Knowing that your Little Prince will suffer the slings and arrows of a woman's rejection from time to time, you may be tempted to lock the little guy in his cabin when you sail into a seduction. I strongly advise against it. Yes, your Little Prince can be hurt. Yes, he takes rejection hard. Yes, when Alice comes out swinging, she purposefully aims her blows at him because she knows that's your soft part. And that's exactly why you bring him along every time. You need the trusting boyishness of your Little Prince to temper the strength of the Captain and the perpetual lust of the Lover. Your Little Prince embodies your soft underbelly. He is your vulnerability. You need him just as much as he needs you, because being strong without being vulnerable is the very definition of an Asshole. 493


Sure, assholes can't be hurt. They don't suffer. And, because of that, they cannot learn and they cannot grow. Assholes cannot see into the woman they are seducing and so they never even learn she has a Deep Spot, much less how touch it. Assholes make a lot of noise, but they usually don't get very far in this world. Being an Asshole is like driving around in second gear. Sure, they can plow over a bunch of shit and run down a bunch of people without themselves being hurt, but they also rarely reach their intended destination. Yet with your vulnerable Little Prince at your side, you can go as far as you can dream. So keep your inner boy close, and watch his little back. When he gets hurt—as he will—then stop whatever you're doing and take care of him. At those times, nurture him and love him with everything you've got. I don't give a fuck how wu-wu and girlish this may sound to you by the light of day, just do it and watch your life change. Soothe the Little Prince within you. Calm him. Embrace him. You're his last line of defense, his only hope of feeling handsome and loved and safe. Don't let him down.

494


RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away

495


THE STIRRING OF HER BEAST

In the dank, darkened hold of the woman's great ship, the wooden floorboards creak beneath the weight of the massive iron cage as her beautiful, dangerous Beast stirs growlishly. Flare of nostril. Stretch of stomach. Grimace of throat. Twitch of whisker. Scenting ancient, primal, lustful longings. The menacing claws of her Tigress ache in anticipation of the fight to come. The fight to come. The creature stands in deadly stillness, heavy of breath, not daring alert the others of its newfound wakefulness and the hunger of its loins. A too soonly roar of sexual desire might frighten the others. Sometimes a predator attacks. Sometimes a predator waits. And now, wrapped in the alluring stench of the death-battle to come, it waits.

Total elapsed time to reach Checkpoint #3: 30 minutes 496


Stroke 12: Join The Battle Between Her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (CHECKPOINT #3)

Dude,

Checkpoint #3--another 3500 points, bringing you to a record-breaking 57,000 points--and, let me just say, you fucking rock! Alright, before you become as incurably, intractably and insufferably arrogant as lil ol' moi, let's get back to work. Because this is the shit. We've reached the turning point in the seduction. It's about to be on like motherfucking Donkey Kong. But first...

Can I just open up and be vulnerable with you— because, you know, I've got my own little boy inside of me, and he sits beside me while I'm writing, with his own 64-color box of crayons and a heap of construction paper and sometimes he makes paper airplanes and draws flames on the side and faces of people screaming, and then he loudly crashes these planes into the ground...between me and you, the goddamn kid scares the bejeezus outta me sometimes, ya know?--and say that I am going to miss you when our adventure is done? 497


I've sincerely enjoyed every moment of our journey together. I feel like you and I have bonded during our explorations of the topsy-turvy, other-worldly Inner RPG Model as we've sailed toward the distant reaches of a woman's magically surrealistic Game Reality. Even though we might not yet have met in the Universe, in some enchanted, Quantum Entangledly way, you and I have already succeeded at placing our avatars in each other's Multiverse. And, frankly, the closer we get to the end of our odyssey, the more our eventual separation weighs on my heart. Nothing like a side of Separation Anxiety to bring on a case of the sads. I'm gonna miss you, motherfucker. Or...maybe we can get all Casablanca on one another and turn this into the beginning of a beautiful friendship, eh, Louie? To that end—howz about you friend me up on FACEBOOK at this exact URL:

facebook.com/lowcarbrevolution Plus follow my ass on TWITTER:

@the_bookwright Now that we got all the weepy bits out of the way, let’s get back to figuring out how we’re gonna fuck this chick! Because we're closer than you realize. 498


Here's a secret worth repeating every day for the rest of your life or until you finally believe it, whichever comes second... Women want to fuck way more than you want to fuck. Your desire is profound. Insert finger-in-mouth-popping sound here. Hers is infinite. Booyah. End of discussion. So, believe me, nobody wants you to succeed at seducing her more than she does. But here's the rub... A woman cannot seduce herself. She needs your help. Here's a secret you'll never hear from the chuckleheads over at Big Dating Advice, Inc.--who podcastishly and blogiferously dispense flaccid seduction tips like they were Sarah Palin handing out free condoms at the Eunuch's Convention... Women want you to bear—or at least share--the responsibility for giving her Naughty Girl permission to come out and play. Even after all these centuries of “progress” into a supposedly sexually liberated, post-feminist, nonmonogamous, frisky-pants society, the Naughty Girl within every woman remains perpetually UglyStepsister-ized--while her cloying Good Girl whirls and twirls glass slipperishly around the ballroom like 499


Cinder-fucking-ella without a time limit. So we're going to give the lady want she wants. We'll take ownership of giving her Naughty Girl a space to play and permission to play there so she won't have to—always remembering the woman we are seducing has probably never been in this situation before with a gentleman who's truly a master of seduction, and so, frankly, she still sucks at playing this game, because how can she ever get better at it if she never gets a fucking chance to play?! Fortunately, you showed up at exactly the right moment in her life for her to be seduced. Now.

Alice is a jealous little bitch, so if you know what's good for you—and, increasingly, you do...go YOU!-then you'll want to make sure she feels seen before you start humping your woman's leg like the second coming of Beavis and Butthead. Always, always, always acknowledge the Good Girl within a woman. Never omit this step. Not even (especially not even) with the hookers, strippers, porn stars, actual sluts and sexual intellectuals like the Nicole Daedones and Arden Leighs of the world it may be your good fortune to befriend. And here's the magic phrase I never want to catch you repeating verbatim... 500


“You seem like a good girl.” Once more, she seems that way because she is. Even the naughtiest girl you'll ever meet is also a good girl, because no one of us is dominated around the clock by a single side of us. When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better. --Mae West (Man, they don't make 'em like motherfucking Mae West anymore, do they?!)

Then say, in your own words, “There's a part of you that's really good. And she always tries to do the right thing?” During the brief instant in actual time it will take a woman to pronounce a quick, “Yes”, join me on the Game Clock as we note how this one short phrase sets up three potential wins... In the first, by saying ‘There’s a part of you...’ we're implicitly referring to the Inner RPG Model that states we all have different parts taking turns being us—WHICH ALL WOMEN ALREADY KNOW AND UNDERSTAND, EVEN IF THEY DON'T USE OUR SAME VOCABULARY TO DESCRIBE IT. This means that from here on we can build on this...isolating and communicating with individual crewmembers within her as needed to further the seduction. In the second, we've explicitly identified one part of her as being a Good Girl, and we've publicly praised her, which makes this crewmember feel seen. We're 501


also giving this part permission to continue being good even as we later identify and interact with a different, naughtier ego state. And in the third, we're using the most beloved word among my fellow hypnotists: try. Since trying implies failure, what we're saying is that her good girl may try to do the “right thing”, but it doesn't always work out, and that's okay, too. And now for the coup de grace... Let's introduce the star of the remainder of the seduction by calling out her Naughty Girl with all the Price-Is-Right-“Come-On-Down!” gumption we can muster... “On the other hand,” you continue, “you also have a Naughty Girl in there, don't you?” Wait for her response. Another breathless, “Yes.” She's may look at you with some surprise. It’s because she’s not accustomed to men possessing Clue #1 about how she ticks, much less speaking her own language so fluently. Upon which add--in different words than these, as I keep saying, “And when your Naughty Girl comes out to play, she can be very, very naughty, can't she?!” Very few women will have a ready response for this unexpected statement. But she'll be thinking really, really hard. Just mentioning her Naughty Girl like that perks 502


her up in her Game Reality just like calling roll in a highschool classroom. Where before she was all doodling and daydreamery, now she sits bolt upright at the mention of her name. We've now nicely set up the rest of the show and effectively announced to the audience that during tonight's performance the role of her Good Girl will be played by her Naughty one instead—there's nothing to think about, no impending Decision Fatigue to tire her out, that's just the way it’s gonna be.

For extra credit, you can add... “If your Naughty Girl did get out, I bet she'd need a very, very Naughty Boy who knew how to handle her, wouldn't she?!” This phrase does so many wonderful things. It lets her know that being Naughty isn't a flaw, but an attribute. It also lets her know that while she may be a little naughty, you are very, very naughty—which gives her permission to be naughtier still. And, finally, it gives her a mega-dose of Chick Crack by suggesting that if she does let her Naughty Girl out to play, then you can handle her. Ain’t nothing a woman fantasizes about more than being handled by a dominant, masculine presence in the bedroom. Congratulations, you've just taken a big step in turning this woman on. 503


And thus is the eternal battle between a woman's Good Girl and her Naughty Girl joined.

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3)

504


Stroke 13: Enter The Metaphor

Perhaps the weirdest secret of them all is why it's still a secret to so many good people that the real game's played inside us. Because deep within the Multiverse of the woman you're seducing, the act of inviting her Naughty Girl out to play has created quite a stir... Your dashing Lover, white linen shirt a-billowing, now extends a beckoning hand in the direction of her Naughty Girl. She looks to the Bodyguard with eyebrows raised expectantly. He shrugs noncommittally, half-stepping aside. He has no objections on this day. As Alice and her Puppy Body pretend a little too hard not to be paying attention, the Naughty Girl sashays (that's a real thing, sashaying!) across the polished wooden deck and sandwiches herself between your Lover and the helm, tucked like a happy sardine between his lean, hard body and the great wooden wheel of life, relaxing into the adventure to come. The adventure to come. Except... Your Lover deliberately removes his hands from the helm. The wheel slowly tips over, veering the super-pair of her ship and yours into an uncharted 505


path. Her Naughty Girl is at a loss. She wasn't expecting this. What is she supposed to do? Take the helm? She doesn't know where you're going. She doesn't want to be in charge right now—that's what your Lover's for!

In case you hadn't noticed, the Grand Adventure we proposed earlier--“Can you imagine...just me and you for two weeks on a massive luxury liner without a worry in the world?!”--is also a grand metaphor between you and your sweet young thing about the sexual adventure you're embarking upon. If you end up pocketing only a single jewel from the treasure vault we've been burgling, let it be this... Changing the story outside changes the story inside. And not the other way around, as the Standard Dogma-ticians have always insisted in their cartoonish helium-voiced keynote speeches punctuated by bullet-pointed PowerPoints. You don't need to have a point to make a point. So you're now going to change the story in her Multiverse by removing “your” (you as embodied by your Lover) hands from the helm—such that “she” (the she currently being performed by her Naughty Girl, thank you very much) suddenly faces the Decision Fatigue-y choice of taking control of the wheel and steering in some direction she hasn't even thought about yet...or else quietly insisting that you 506


retake control and continue on the sexy journey you seemed to already have in mind. And you accomplish this out in the Universe by simply saying, “Are you really gonna come join me in Tilting at Windmills on the plains of Spain?” or whatever Grand Adventure you proposed. Since your Grand Adventure is a shared metaphor about your shared sexual desires, what you've just done is opened the door and offered her a graceful exit, should she choose to take it. She can quite easily respond, “No, I'm not coming with you.” Not coming with you. If she does say, “No”, then the seduction will probably fail. Like they sometimes do.

Often as not—and quite a bit more often than that—the woman you're seducing will happily play along. Women love to pretend. They enjoy imagining a fun and desirable future for themselves. At the same time, she will frequently say something like, “Yes, going on a Grand Adventure together sounds like fun—I just need to figure out when/how to pay for tickets/some other logistical concern.” And you respond, “We'll figure that out together.” Which is girl-speak for, 'I'll own—or at least share— the Decision Fatigue of solving those little problems.' And which also means that you’ve taken control once 507


again. Meanwhile, back in her Multiverse, her Naughty Girl can relax once more into arms of your Lover as he reaches around her on either side to take firm grasp of the great wooden wheel--confidently steering in the direction of her Infinite Desire. As the salty winds carry the muffled timber of a rough growls. From not one Beast... ...but two.

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away 508


Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor

509


Stroke 14: Play With Your Food

You've

invited her Naughty Girl out to play, once again dangled the carrot of a Grand Adventure, and, beneath the surface, your crews are getting to know one another. Out here, in the vivid hallucination we call Actual Reality, it's time to get to know her just a bit more. You know, swap stories, connect with her as a person, poke her and prod her with your presence and imagination. A gossamer touch on her forearm. Or a presumptuous palm pressed into the small of her back...which, I hasten to add, you won't even be able to reach if you've chosen the sensationdissipating path of sitting down, fool! Lustily brush her hair back from her cheek and gaze at her cheekily for a beat too long. Humans are never not communicating.

And, for the love of Poseidon, keep playing the game you're already playing. Don't suddenly start playing some different motherfucking game and confuse everybody--the way weak men so often do. Never ask shit like... “Are you married?” 510


“Do you have a boyfriend?” “Is there someone special in your life right now?” Why the fuck would you ask a woman any of that?! If she also likes playing the Relationship game on the side, that's her motherfucking business, not yours. That's got nothing to do with the game the two of you are playing. I don't even ask my ongoing lovers who their other lovers are. And that's the same motherfucking game, but it's still none of my business unless they want to share with me. If a woman you're seducing unilaterally mentions a boyfriend or husband, simply answer with one word. Say... “Respect.” Then just proceed as before. And never mention it again. “Respect” lets her know that she's been heard...and that it's got nothing the fuck to do with the game at hand. Besides, she most likely said it because she still sucks at being seduced and figures it's something you're supposed to mention or whatever the fuck. She doesn't mean to spoil the fun, she's just trying to find her way. If a woman makes a grab for the wheel of the ship, gently take it back. 511


She may think she has a clue about where the two of you are headed, but she sure as fuck doesn't know how to get there—only you do.

And, for the love of Pallas Athena, play with her. Think up a cute little nickname for your new toy. That's what lovers do, assign each other pet nicknames. But don't settle for mundane tropes like sweetie or honey or baby-cakes. You can do better than that. Fashion a cleverish nickname from some aspect of her experience that's she shared with you. I had a curvy Russian lover that I referred to, “My Lil Commie.” A feisty Australian became, “Bon-Bon”--because, like the candy, she had a hard shell on the outside and a soft, creamy filling within. Then there was... “Legs.” “Ducky.” “Lindita”--“little pretty one” in Spanish. “Vampira”–“female vampire” in Spanish “Salope”–“slut” in French, which doesn’t have nearly the same negative connotations as it does in English And “Grandma”--which I've used more than once on those world-weary babes still in their early 512


twenties who think/act like they were 100 years old or something...and which are quite common, as it turns out. The nickname shouldn't be anything mean. Besides, why would you ever be mean--what the fuck's wrong with you?! Come up with a nickname that you'd give a bratty, lovable kid sister and bestow it upon her. It’s just more chick crack, believe me.

You've done most of the talking up until now. Let her talk some...if she wants. Sometimes a woman will be feel so safe and relaxed and connected that she won't need to use her words. Don't force it. Don't ask her any questions that she'd have to go inside to find the answers for...yet remain curious about her. Listen to her. Give her the gift of your undivided attention. Here, now and always... Enjoy your new toy. Revel in her uniqueness and distinct energy. Feel into her—whatever that means to you. If you're not having fun, what's the point of playing? This is a motherfucking game, you should both be enjoying yourselves! In a phrase... Slap & Tickle! 513


Here's another tip that goes against your mama's otherwise sage advice... Always play with your food before eating it!

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor Play with your food 514


Stroke 15: Cross The Gulf of Little Suffering

The

final leg of the journey to seduce a woman requires you to cross the legendary Gulf of Little Suffering. Reaching the far side of this metaphorical body of water won't be easy. During your initial seductions you’ll turn back, flounder and/or capsize on jagged rocks like the Contra Fucking Concordia far more than you'll arrive at your intended destination. Making the crossing even worse is that your success depends more on what you don’t do than anything you do do. Heh-heh, I said, “doo-doo!” (How is it humanly possible that I spent more than five years at university, immersed in a strictly classical education of literature and languages—I learned to read the Gospel of Matthew and Homer's Illiad in the original Greek, for Yahweh’s sake!--and still somehow turned out like a perpetual Third grader mainlining Red Bull and sporting his first little hard-on?!) Be guided by our axiom that any motherfucker can take a short amount of Great Suffering, but it takes a true bad-ass to endure the exponentially harsher experience of the Little Suffering. After all, if preparing your taxes hurt just a bit more, but didn't take as long to finish, then the experience would qualify as a Great Suffering and 515


every American would be lined up at the mailbox on the morning of January 1st with a shit-eating grin of accomplishment on their face. Instead, doing your taxes doesn't hurt very much. But it doesn't hurt very much for such a very long amount of time, that year after year most Americans wait until April 14 & 99/100 before wobbling collapsedly across the finish line like one of those justwon't-quit Olympic marathoners from countries whose names you can't pronounce. The real grief in making it across the Gulf of Little Suffering arises not so much from the treacherous seas themselves as from the two pestiferous (an actual word from the actual dictionary for a change!) monsters who make their watery home in these parts. Both of these lurking leviathans are already wellfamiliar to you—unless you're one of them linejumping motherfuckers who skipped straight to the end for the “good bits” about how to get more pussy without really trying, in which case I just wanna say that me and the rest of the boys so look forward to fucking all the dames that you will spectacularly fail to seduce, you lazy fuck! But let's still do the quickest of reviews of these two bugaboos, since, again...the Spacing Effect. The first monster awaiting us in the final stretch of the seduction is our old friend Decision Fatigue— which, as you may recall, is a measure of how much we still suck at doing something. The less we suck at playing a game, the less exhausting it becomes to play it, both inside and out, and the less Decision Fatigue we experience. 516


Until then, every new choice smarts just a little. Decision Fatigue is like the jellyfish of the Gulf of Little Suffering--a tiny, clingy, stingy thing that stealthily sneaks up on you and: ouch! And the closer you come to your destination, the more stingish become the jellyfish. There'll be times when you find yourself well-nigh lost in a cloud of their nettle burns. “What's the next stroke?” you'll wonder foggishly. Don't turn back, that's the next step. Keep on sailin' on, my brother. With each crossing you'll suck a little less. And that alone is no small comfort...forewarned IS forearmed. The second familiar foe is Sensory Overload— which is a measure of your crewmembers' reluctance to leave the safe inner world of your Multiverse and manifest themselves in your corporeal body to play a “real” game out here in the Universe. Sensory Overload is a bitch. It's a foul monstrosity with bulging eyes and toxic, suction cup tentacles that you'll either want to harpoon or flee from. Great will be the temptation to cut loose the lines holding your ship to the woman's and abort the seduction 'ere port is reached. Unwilling to endure your own flushing of face and pounding of chest and frothing of stomach, you'll want to make hasty goodbyes and allow your crewmembers to retreat back into the buttery, sensationless domain within you. 517


But this is where your Captain earns his pay. He alone can tenderly, yet firmly, require your crew to stay the course. Your Captain can—and must—refuse to turn back. There's only one reason to ever abort seduction...if you discover the bitch is crazy.

a

Never put your dick in crazy. Baring that, don't stop—no matter how prickly, stickly and uncomfortable become the sensations. Above all don't seek to dissipate these feelings through the busywork of drinking another cocktail or getting something to eat. You're not that thirsty. You're not suddenly that hungry. Sure, eating and drinking at this stage of the game provides a Florence Nightingale-ish balm that soothes over Decision Fatigue and Sensory Overload alike. It's a speedy way to off-gas the excess nervous energies in your body when you're supremely turned on. But guess what? Guess the fuck what?! You're supposed motherfucking point.

to

be

turned

on--that's

the

You want to be turned on and you want her to be turned on. You want the mega-volts of electricity Tesla-coiling between your bodies to be so crispity, crackledy sparkish that if the two of you stepped in a puddle of water you'd be instantly fried into charblackened nihilism dust. 518


Resist the siren call of “busywork”—those absolutely unnecessary actions that distract us from being present and whose only purpose is to provide a temporary respite from the intense sensory expressions in our body. Here's a sad story of dissipating nervous energy gone too far... You ever wonder why even the biggest names in stand-up comedy these days scoot onto stage packing a huge plastic water bottle, and at once set to awkwardly twisting the top off, and before they can even get the first joke out of their mouths the bottle's already dancing jerkily near their lips, waiting for anything approximating a sustained laugh, and then they tip that baby back and drink hard and deep...glub-glub-glub?! What the fuck's that about? There's not a motherfucking waterfountain back stage?! They got that thirsty during the few seconds it took 'em to walk over to the microphone? Of course, you and I know the comics are simply in Sensory Overload--because they’re taping their fucking act--and they're trying to calm themselves down. Bless their little tears-of-a-clown hearts, them motherfuckers are just nervous. Glub-glub-glub. Still, it's hard not to cringe in embarrassment every time you see this. Hell, you wouldn't catch an actor on Broadway or London's West End walk out with a water bottle in hand... “To be”--glub-glub-glub--“or not to be.” 519


Here's a good rule of thumb... Save the eatin' and drinkin' for after the fuckin'. You know, after you've both earned it. For now, stay the course. And that's doubly true for handling her. A woman will often suggest that the two of you get a drink, grab a bite to eat or some other excess-charge-off-gassing activity. When that happens, your Little Prince—chivalrous chap that he is—will want to leap in and rescue her. He'll want to run and fetch princess a drink. He'll want to scour the bar after the kitchen's closed for some pickles or a bag of chips, because baby gots da munchies. Or some other well-intentioned, but thoroughly misguided, attempt to help the damsel in distress feel, well, less distress. Yet that very distress is furthering the cause of your seduction, my friend. That's amore. Wait, sorry, that's Turn On. Amore is when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie. I always get those two confused. When your dame turns into a damsel and suggest eating or drinking something, say to her, “Good idea!” Then just keep doing whatever you were doing. You are at the helm of this seduction, not her.

520


I promise this is the last motherfucking time I’m gonna mention this--but only because I’m finally convinced that by now you truly get how fucking important this concept is... Both here and elsewhere, cultivating your ability to sustain powerful sensations in your body is one of the most important steps of your transmutation into a great man. Great men are willing to experience tremendous distress in their bodies on the way to accomplishing their current mission. Instead of trying to make the hyper-abundant sensations swamping your body go away the instant you perceive them, cultivate the habit of simply breathing into the experience. You don't have to like it, you just have to tolerate it. Carry this practice into all of your masculine endeavors. Because... How you do anything is how you do everything. A great man can hold the bang-buzz-wallop of the moment in his body without trying to fix it. Your ability to sail calmly across the Gulf of Little Suffering without weakishly pausing to glub-glubglub is the gauge of your potential to succeed. Wanna fuck more? Then glub-glub-glub less! 521


RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor Play with your food Cross the Gulf of Little Suffering

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Stroke 16: Bring Her Naughty Girl ALL The Way Out

Women are starved for quality attention. Most of the sleepwalkers whose paths they cross in an average day don't see them...or even look their way. Give the woman you're seducing your full attention. And then some. If you've been holding anything back, brother, now's the time to bring it. Focus every cell of your being on seeing her, feeling her, connecting with her inside and out. She'll feel your attention. Getting attention is hot. Look deep within her, directly into the eyes of her Naughty Girl, and drop your voice to a playful whisper, “Your Naughty Girl is very, very naughty, isn't she?!” Quite commonly she can do little more than nod in agreement. Add, “If your friends and family knew how Naughty she is, they'd be shocked, wouldn't they?!” Sit still. Wait for her response. It won't be long in coming—and it will be almost a relief for her to finally admit just how very naughty she wants to be. “Yes,” she will say. “Yes, yes, yes!” 523


And she'll quite possibly elaborate from there. This can be a powerful experience for a woman because society and its conventions have forced her to keep the depth and breadth of her sexuality wellhidden from her family and even her friends. Opening up and admitting just how slutty she wants to be—which, again, is not just sluttier than you suppose, but sluttier than you can suppose—can be as cathartic as it is liberating. Always—always—tell her: “That's beautiful. Your secret is safe with me.” Seduction hinges on giving her Naughty Girl a space to play in and permission to play there. Anytime she exposes herself to you—emotionally, physically, sexually--make a fuss over showing your approval. You want her wrapped up in a blanket where she feels safe and appreciated. At the same time that you're explicitly calling out her Naughty Girl, become heavier with your touch. If you're standing--like I done told you, boy--then you can easily step into her and give her some of your body weight. You want her to feel you. You want her to feel your size and your strength...your angular man body compared to her womanly curves. Connect with her through your grounded masculine energy. Tell her, in a voice just above a whisper, “Your naughty girl isn't just hungry, she's starving, isn't she?!” 524


Lean in like you're about to kiss her, but don't. Bring your lips almost to hers—then stop. “No tongue!” Not kissing a turned on woman is one of most powerful choices you can make to fan her flames and turn her on even more.

What the fuck does that really even mean—”turn on”?! You're about to find out... Some of our crewmembers can take the helm of our great ship without any notice whatsoever. For example, if you and I were to meet somewhere in the world and you came up to me speaking Spanish or French, then the appropriate part of me that speaks either of those languages would jump into the breach so effortlessly there'd be no detectable pause. Other crewmembers, however, require some or a lot of physical control over our bodies in order to play their games. Therefore it takes these parts of us longer to “get into place”, if you will. The reason professional athletes warm up and run around practicing before the game starts isn't to suddenly get a little bit better at their sport, but rather because that's the process needed to summon their inner baseball player to take over their body completely. It's exactly like the human dude in Avatar. He has to get in the pod and wait while it powers up and a connection is made, and only then can he take over 525


the Na’vi body and play their game. (Speaking of which, when you think about that picture in the context of everything we’ve been discussing in terms of role-playing in other realms and guiding our inner avatars and the like, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Avatar is, by a wide measure, the highestgrossing motion picture in the history of the planet. The more than $2 billion it earned is merely a measure of how much the experience of being ourselves while also being in someone else’s body resonates with, well, every human alive!)

Summing up... Seduction is about coaxing a Naughty Girl out to play until she takes over full control of a woman's body. The words you use, your touch, your proximity— all of these are tools that help her Naughty Girl get here. And the onslaught of sensations that can lead to Sensory Overload are just the “growing pains” of a part of us showing up—which is why we never want to dissipate them. Once her Naughty Girl is plugged completely into a woman's body like the nice army guy in the Avatar pod, we describe that state as being Turned On. The more fully her Naughty Girl gets in her body, the more turned on she becomes. The more turned on she grows, the more ready she is to fuck. So turn on is entirely about the physical process of bringing her Naughty Girl our of her Game Reality and 526


delivering her into the woman's body in Actual Reality so she can play with our Lover, who's similarly taken over control of our own body. It's just all so magically delicious. And now you finally know what it means to turn on a woman! it?

That was worth the trouble of getting here, wasn't Wasn't it?!

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away 527


Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor Play with your food Cross the Gulf of Little Suffering Bring her Naughty Girl all the way out

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Stroke 17: Menage-a-Quoi?

By this stage of the seduction, I like to keep raising the ante and coaxing a woman’s Naughty Girl into her body until she's like an unbroken mare ready to bust out of the gate at a rodeo, and so next I propose a threesome. Surprise, surprise! Bet you weren't expecting that! Guess who else wasn't expecting that? The lovely lady, that's who. Never be afraid to take the road less traveled. Surprise is your greatest ally in the game of seduction. Just to be clear, this isn't a metaphor or anything. I invariably propose a threesome at this point in the game. Now I'm not actually negotiating for a threesome right now—although there are many situations where that'd be the perfect note to play. (As a general rule, the less time that passes after meeting a woman that you suggest a menage-a-trois, the more likely you are to get one; right up front is never too soon...by the time you're already dating is way too late.) The key to suggesting that the two of you bring another woman into your bed—pleez note the real win we're playing for here is that it simply assumes 529


the sale of also bedding this particular woman—is to keep it as casual as possible, exactly as if you were asking if she's ever been to Hawaii. The structure for asking for a threesome is first to find out if she's ever been with another woman...and second to propose that you handle all the logistics of setting one up as a special gift for her. Because you're generous like that. Here's a secret that most women and precious few men truly grasp... Virtually all right-thinking women find other women attractive. Ask her, straight up, “Have you ever been with another woman?” Often, it’s, “Yes.” And if it’s, “No,” quite often she’ll quickly add that it’s only because “the opportunity never came up”--which is girl-speak for, “I'm too shy to ask for what I really want.” Again, good thing you came along, right?! 'Cause you ain't too shy to ask for nothing! And it turns out that you happen to have this female friend who's really hot and who's also really shy, and you say something like, “I'll talk to her and we'll set up a play date.” Just like that, you've found your new toy another woman to play with and you've offered to take care of all the logistics. She will commonly be quite delighted by your 530


offer to drop a yummy treat like this right in her lap. Once more, the point isn't—although it always could be—to finagle an actual threesome with this woman at this moment, but rather to continue coaxing her Naughty Girl out of the dull, sensorydeprived realm of her Multiverse into the rock-em, sock-em action of our fuckalicious Universe by getting her into her body and super turned on. Of course, I actually do always have several female lovers who are open for threesomes. But, just as with the Grand Adventure, this stroke works equally even if it remains a perpetual fantasy. If you don't already have a bisexual lover who's ready to play with another babe, then simply ask, “What kind of women do you like? What type of woman turns you on?” And just to process that question, she'll grow a little more turned on. Once she tells you, reassure her, “I'll find the perfect one for us and make all the arrangements.” At which point she's happy that not only are you offering to help her fulfill a lifetime fantasy, but you're also willing to sign up for all the Decision Fatigue and potential rejection of landing another sister goddess for the two of you to play with. What woman could possibly say no? I mean, any woman could—but why the fuck would she?! Brazen adventures like this don't come along but once or thrice in a lifetime for your average women...if that. 531


“Uhhhh, what if she says that she doesn't like chicks?” I'm glad you asked. Frankly, that’s even better. Merely ask her if she's ever been with two men at once. If she hasn't, she's damn sure thought about it. If she has, she damn sure wants to do it again. This is actually an even heavier fantasy for many women because it involves being penetrated by two men—if not at the same time, at least one after the other. And this is like double-swoon for a woman. A fantastic final step here is to marry your proposed Grand Adventure with the outrageous offer of a threesome with another woman or man. Just the other day I seduced a ridiculously tall Ukrainian chick and she's already bought tickets to come visit me at my next stop in Barcelona with the express attention of finding a young Spanish stud to fuck her at the same as me. We can't do that here in London on account of her husband or some fucking thing. Instead we need to do it in that most mythical of places... The Land Where It Doesn't Count.

532


RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor Play with your food Cross the Gulf of Little Suffering Bring her Naughty Girl all the way out Menage-a-Quoi?

533


Stroke 18: “It Doesn't Count”

All cultures throughout history have created rules of engagement for the opposing sexes that its members are expected to adhere to or else risk being ostracized or worse. At the same time, societies have also recognized the need for intermittent exceptions to these often draconian rules—a few days per year where the populace can blow off steam and just plain misbehave without being penalized for it. If the citizenry didn't have certain times or places where their latent debauchery could rise to the surface without it counting against their permanent record, their lives would be even more intolerable than they already are. But not everybody gets their annual vacation days exactly during Mardi Gras, so, in our infinite human cleverness, we've fashioned an ingenious number of opportunities to get our freak on in situations where “it doesn't count”. These include... Anything-goes cruise ships. Entire cities devoted entirely to sexy times: Cancun, Mexico....Pattaya Beach, Thailand...Ibiza, Spain...Sunny Beach, Bulgaria. Conventions, business trips or anything outside the 100 Mile Rule—without which few businesspeople would ever get laid. 534


Her: “I'm not supposed to be doing this because of Whatever-The-Fuck.” You: “That's okay, [insert clever nickname you've given her], it doesn't count because we're in a different time zone.” Her: “Sounds legit.”

Without a doubt, the world center of “it doesn't count” is my frequent stomping grounds of Las Vegas. The city itself helpfully sponsors an advertising campaign about how 'What Happens In Vegas Stays In Vegas'. In other words, it doesn't count. I love Las Vegas--it's like a classy lady who'll fuck anybody who shows up...and you know how I adore sluts! Exactly one year ago, when I first begin work on this wicked little book before you—and if you've enjoyed yourself remember to bounce over to Amazon and give it a short, sexy 5-Star review!--I moved to Las Vegas in the middle of summer. I rented an apartment right off the Strip, just two blocks behind the MGM Grand. Day after 112-degree day I sat by the pool at the nearby Hard Rock Hotel, mapping out the journey we've been taking together. By night, I prowled like an uncaged beast through some of the most fertile hunting grounds in the world. Even though everyone who comes to Vegas 535


already knows the drill, with each woman I seduced I made sure to point out that our dalliance wouldn't— indeed, couldn't—count because we were in the middle of the desert, far away from the onerous and oppressive rules of their home turf. Telling a woman that your dalliance together “doesn't count” gives her an excuse to misbehave without getting in trouble for it. And I'm not talking about getting in trouble with the folks back home. The “it doesn't count” is less for them than it is for any of her other crewmembers--or, especially, her stowaways--who try to get in the way. The primary leverage that stowaways have on guiding a woman’s behavior is the mess of being caught or punished. Informing her stowaways that “it doesn't count” because you're in the middle of the ocean or whatnot shuts them down pretty quickly. If there's no repercussions and no mess to clean up later, then minor crewmembers and butt-insky stowaways got nothing further to add to the conversation. And the simple truth is, it really doesn't count. This is just sex we're talking about here--a fun, playful, physical expression of our mutual energies and desires. And most people need more of that in their lives.

Telling a woman “It doesn't count” lets her know... Nobody will find out. 536


This doesn't mean she’s a slut. It won't even make her 'numbers' go up--since, for the record, nothing happened. You really don’t need to make a huge production about explaining why it doesn't count. Women already get it...in exactly the same way they get that when they're on vacation—and only when they are on vacation--calories do not count. And you certainly don't have to be in Las Vegas or some other far-flung decadent corner of the world to take advantage of this powerful meme. You can and should use it anywhere and anytime. In truth, the more random and contrived it is, the better it seems to work. You can say to a woman, “The awesome thing about being here in Shreveport, Louisiana is that you can let your Naughty Girl out to play and it doesn't count. What happens in Shreveport stays in Shreveport.” Her: “I thought that was Las Vegas?” it.”

You: “No, no, it's Shreveport now. They moved Her: “Well, that’s good news.”

Her: “You're touching my leg again.” You: “It doesn't count, you know, since it's not yet midnight! After midnight it's definitely not okay to touch a strange woman's leg, but before that it's 537


perfectly fine.” Her: “Really?” You: “Why not?!”

I once said to a blindingly blonde MILF from Canada: Me: “I know you said you were married, but you left the part of you that's married back home, didn’t you? Seriously, you didn't even pack her for this trip—so we can keep playing.” MILF: “That...that actually sounds true.” Me: “It sounds true because it is true.” MILF: “You're going to fuck me now, aren't you?!” Me: “Since it doesn't count, I'd be a fool not to, wouldn't I?!” MILF: “And you’re no fool, are you?” Me: “No, I am not. Now stop talking and put this in your mouth instead.”



Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor Play with your food Cross the Gulf of Little Suffering Bring her Naughty Girl all the way out Menage-a-Quoi? “It doesn't count”

539


Stroke 19: Don’t Kiss The Girl

Never kiss a woman until you're actually fucking her. That's the whole chapter. If you trust me, skip straight to the Blame Game. Or if, at this late stage of the game, you still need me to Show My Work for any of my ridonculous, what-the-fuck-planet-did-I-think-that-up-on pronouncements, keep reading...

Nothing—and I mean nothing—kills the possibility of seducing a woman into your bed upon first meeting her more certainly than making out with her. Kissing opens two different doors with a woman, neither one of which we ever want to open in the first place. Behind Door #1: Kissing dissipates most or all of the steamy sexual tension you've worked so hard to build up with her. Kissing is the Path of Least Sensation. Kissing is the glub-glub-glub of a comic's water bottle—a counterproductive way to off-gas the charge of your mutual turn on. Making out with a woman before you fuck her is like scarfing down an entire bag of off-brand potato chips right before sitting down to a lavish dinner at 540


Ruth's Chris steakhouse that someone else is paying for...and finding you no longer have much of an appetite. Well, why would you, since you filled up on fucking chips rather than fill her the fuck up?! Behind Door #2: Kissing is far too intimate for the current relationship you're developed with the woman you're seducing. Get this and you'll get a lot... Kissing is a portal for mate selection and a way to bond with someone you want to play the Relationship game with, NOT a stepping stone to having sex with a woman you've just met. Men think making out with a woman is First Base. It's not. Coaxing a woman's Naughty Girl out of the isolation of her Multiverse and into her physical body in your shared Universe by turning her on is First Base. Kissing is more like striking out. How can we be certain that not kissing a woman before you’re fucking her is both True and Useful for your seduction?! Here's how... Because not a single PUA guru on the planet endorses what I’m telling you. Every one of them little beady-eyed, peacocked motherfuckers will eagerly sell you their latest ebook, audio guide and holographic-edutainment eyedrops (they're coming...you know they're coming!) about how to pull off their patented version of the Kiss Close. 541


It's a “close” all right, but only because most of the time it marks the close of your seduction. Kissing a woman you've been successfully seducing before you fuck her is like holding four Aces in a sweet poker game, and abruptly folding...as you thank the House profusely for the two free, watereddown cocktails. Here’s the part men don’t get... Women don't experience kissing as a way station on the road to bigger and better things...they consider it a complete and self-contained experience unto itself. A heavy make-out session can totally satisfy a woman's longing for connection and intimacy. It can fill her up so neatly that her spinal cord has no more need or desire to experience additional sensation with you that night. Whereas men “select” our mates based largely on smell and pheromones—hormones that act outside our bodies to influence others--women make important biological decisions about a potential mate based largely on a man's saliva. The moment your tongue touches hers, she “swipes” a sample of your spittle and proceeds to run a series of biochemical tests on it in one of the many laboratories deep in the bowels of her ship. A bunch of geeky, under-appreciated crewmembers run tests on your saliva and then send a runner topside with the results. If you're not an exact genetic match by the fickle standards of her onboard laboratory, then a big red 542


“F” is stamped on your paperwork. And when a woman's Naughty Girl sees that she's gotta stop. A big red “F” is a “No.” That's just the way it is. All women and no men know this. Until now. You're the second one, after me. Her lab's not testing for what may happen tonight in your hotel room, it's testing for a match to service her ovaries for the rest of her life. Either you win the genetic lottery and the woman gets the all systems go from her lab rats...or a big red “F”. There's nothing in between. Why do you think the fucking classic Shoop Shoop Song keeps telling us, over and over again: “It's in his kiss, that's where it is”? Why even take a chance that you'll end up on the losing end of this genetic roulette wheel? Why siphon off all the delicious charge you've built up between the two of you that's now zippity-zapping through her body?

Not kissing a turned on woman means the heat building up within her has no place to escape—and so it pushes her ever closer to the boiling point. Shall we add the next layer? 543


By now, you want to keep on not kissing her AND make a fuss about it by bringing it into Mutual Knowledge. Get up all in a woman's business. Bring your lips dangerously close to hers, yet somehow never quite get there. Tell her, “I don't know you well enough to kiss you yet!” Or... “I bet you want to kiss me, but I think we should wait til we're engaged!” Or simply state... “You want me to kiss you right now, don't you?!” When she moans or breathes “Yes”—which she so often will--pull back and taunt her even more. “I thought so! You are so Naughty—you barely know me!” Brush your lips across hers while keeping your tongue planted firmly in your own damn mouth, if you please. Not only have you dodged the bullets of opening Door #1, and dissipating all the sexual charge you so steadfastly built up, or Door #2, and getting kicked to the curb for out-of-your-control biological reasons, but you're also using the very fact of NOT kissing her to drag her Oh-So-Naughty Girl the rest of the way out into her turned on body. The best part? 544


No other motherfuckers do this! And, frankly, this is another one of those things you're not gonna want to do this, either. The next time you're out seducing a woman and you've got her Naughty Girl all the way out into Actual Reality, you are going to WANT to kiss her. Badly. Because you're instinctively aware that if you kiss a woman much of that overwhelming, overpowering sensation in your body will be relieved and you can relax a bit. Fuck relaxing! You go on motherfucking vacation to relax...you seduce women to wake up and become more alive than at any other moment in your life. When you feel the urge to kiss her, resist it. You think it's hard for you? Well, it's even harder for her. And the more you resist, the more she'll feel your strength and admire you for it. This is what playing in the big leagues feels like. Welcome to the motherfucking Show!

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” 545


Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor Play with your food Cross the Gulf of Little Suffering Bring her Naughty Girl all the way out Menage-a-Quoi? “It doesn't count” Don’t kiss the girl

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THE BLAME GAME

We're

closing in on the fourth and final Checkpoint, so let's turn this motherfucker up to “11”! By this time her Naughty Girl should be all the way out and in state of almost breathless arousal, while your Lover radiates an almost animal desire for her. Take advantage of every 0pportunity to touch, nuzzle, cuddle, hold and gently bite her. Brush your lips against any body part you like, but continue to refrain from making out with her until your cock's inside her—and that's the last time I'm gonna mention that. Here’s a secret that I cannot for the life of me understand why more men don’t know... Women love turning men on. If she gives you an erection—and if you're playing it right, she should—then make a big fuss about it. Take one of her hands in yours and say something like, “I bet a lot of men tell you that you're pretty. But those are just words, and boys lie. But you know what can't lie? Your body. It doesn't know how to lie.” Then quite deliberately place her hand on your lap where she can feel your hard cock through your pants. Look directly at her while saying, more or less, 547


“Look what you did to me! You caused that—I hope you're happy!” If she's turned on, she will be happy...and if she's not, she'll punch you in the fucking face and you deserve it for being a fucking douche. If you can't figure out when a woman's turned on enough to touch your cock through your pants, then you need to go back to page one and read everything all over again until it sinks the fuck in. For the rest of you, tell her she is to blame for your hard on. On the outside she'll laughingly deny she had anything to do with your erection, but inside... She will love being singled out for causing it. Women never ceased to be amazed at the workings of the male body. How that fucking thing between our legs fills up with blood and stays hard is one of the great mysteries of the universe for her—and the realization that she has the power to create and maintain your hard on is a great turn on to a woman. Continue to stay all up in her business. Push her buttons. Keep blaming her for your erection. You want to compliment a woman? Let her know how much she turns you on. That's the kind of compliment a woman wants to hear, all right. Say to her, “Did you put a spell on me or something? You're an evil temptress, aren't you?!” Women adore when you acknowledge the powers of their Inner Witch. 548


Keep playing the Blame Game, pushing it further and further. After all, it IS her fault you have a raging boner...and therefore it's not at all unreasonable to begin setting up a scenario where she's part of its solution, right?! Also play the Blame Game for every indication of turn on in her body. Tease her by asking, “Why are you blushing?” Her: “What? I don't know. Am I?” You: “Your cheeks are so red and flushed. You're totally turned on right now, aren't you?!” Her: “Maybe.” You: “It's okay, I won't tell anybody. It'll be our secret!” Bring any and every indication of turn on to her attention—erect nipples, goosebumps on her skin, sweaty palms, heavy breathing and engorged lips. Hell, just make shit up at this stage of the game. Because it is a game and you're both having fun. I've actually said to a woman, “You're hair’s getting shiny...that means you're totally turned on!” All right, next it's time to close the sale. You need to get this right, baby, because you don't want to screw things up at this late stage of the game. Here's another secret not in wide circulation for pretty fucking obvious reasons... 549


Every time a seduction fails, an angel gets his wings chopped off. You want that on your fucking conscience?!

Total elapsed time to reach Checkpoint #4: one hour

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Stroke 20: Handle The Transition To The Party (CHECKPOINT #4)

You've

made it to Checkpoint #4, pocketed another 12,000 points, hit a world-record total of 69,000 points, and, from my perspective, officially become a Stud. By the way, if you ever return to these parts to reread my wicked little book, then you get to double it all— double the points, double your successes, double every-fucking-thing! It shouldn't take you more than an hour to arrive at Checkpoint #4, and the less you suck at playing this game the quicker you can get here. “What's the rush?” you may ask. Listen, part of respecting a woman is respecting her time. She's busy. Seduce her and fuck her now...and if she still has time to kick it with you later on, she will. Don't ruin this special evening for her by taking so long to seduce that she can no longer can fit the fucking part into her schedule. Recall that she wasn't planning on any of this in the first place. Once her Naughty Girl has completely emerged from her internal Multiverse to the external Universe of her physical body like Pallas Athena materializing 551


fully formed from the brow of Zeus, then she's ready to make the transition to the party. When it's time to bounce, you need to hit these three beats... ASSUME THE SALE INVITE HER TO THE PARTY HANDLE ALL THE DETAILS

ASSUME THE SALE Remember the Party we talked about earlier? The one going on day and night in every city in the world? The one you're never going to be invited to— but to which you can always invite yourself? Yeah, that Party. Well, it's going on. Tonight. At your pad—or whatever passes for your pad on this night. Assuming the sale means inviting yourself to the Party. You don't need to ask permission or approval from anyone. You don't need to consult with any members of her crew—least of all her Naughty Girl. A woman wants you to take charge and take control. However, never let it stray far from your thoughts 552


that most women under the age of 40 or so still suck at being seduced because they've had so few opportunities to play the game with men who know what the fuck they're doing. Sometimes a woman will try to grab the wheel of the ship or will rashly drop the anchor in the middle of a parking lot. She's rarely trying to cause trouble or derail the seduction, she just doesn't know any better. Just like you didn't know any better once upon a time not that fucking long ago, so stop judging her. Squeeze her hand or thigh or whatever you can reach and let her know, “We're good...I got this.” That lets her know there's nothing for her to worry about. You're in charge and she can relax into the experience. Women want this. They want men who are real men, rather than the lady-boys who dominate the world today. They want men who know what they want and know how to get it without hesitation or apology. In other words... They want you.

INVITE HER TO THE PARTY Now that you've invited yourself to the Party—a step that, by itself, took me a good many years of my life to finally pull off--it's time to invite her to join you. Invite her to the Party as easily and casually as you 553


earlier proposed setting up a threesome between her and another woman. Simply take her by the hand and start moving in the direction of your pad—or the mode of transportation that leads there—and say not this, but something like this: “Let's go to my place and hang out a bit, [her nickname], because it will be fun.” Notice this isn't a question, but rather a friendly suggestion. You've made the decision that the two of you should level up together, and you're shouldering the responsibilities for carrying out that decision. The way the Masculine is supposed to. So the Feminine can relax into it and enjoy the experience. Your invitation doesn't need to be elaborate, convoluted or involve any trickery about needing to show her something on your laptop in your bedroom. Come over and spend time with me. That’s all you need. Because that's what men and women do together.

HANDLE ALL THE DETAILS This beat really should come first. In fact, it could even be Stroke 1. It could be Chapter 1 in the entire book. Before you even set out to hunt, have a clear and easy-to-follow plan for getting your tasty gazelle back 554


to your pad so you can devour her. You must handle ALL of the details. Always. Never ask a woman, “So...where do you live?” Or... “Should we maybe go to your place?” Or, worst of all... “What do you want to do next?” NEVER ask a woman a logistical question at this stage of the game that will surely plunge her into Decision Fatigue and plunge your seduction into the motherfucking Abyss of Nothingness. Asking a woman to participate in the logistics of where you’re going to fuck her will pull her straight out of her Feminine/feeling energy and put her into Masculine/problem-solving mode—which is not where you want her. You're the man: act like it. Come over--because we'll enjoy spending more time together.

Once the two of you are well on your way to your chosen play-atorium, the game becomes maintaining the intensity of your attraction without letting it grow so big that your Beasts emerge before it's safe. Whether in a car, bus, monorail or some highspeed pneumatic tube of the future, during the 555


transition to your pad, settle your energy back into your body. Let her feel your grounded, masculine energy. Women want to savor the experience of how solid you are and how certain you are of your desire for her. Be a man of few words from here on. In any case, there's nothing left to say through words. The important communications from here on are at an energetic and physical level. Weak men can still sabotage a perfectly good seduction at the point by turning into Tigger— bouncy, pouncy, fun-fun-funning with overexcitement at the prospect of sex directly ahead. Few things in life freak out a woman more than a man who acts way over-eager at the imminent prospect of sex. You want her to follow your lead here. And that lead should be that falling into bed together is the most natural and normal thing for the two of you to do. Just in case I'm being in any way unclear about my expectations for you during the Transition to the Party, lemme spell it out: Calm The Fuck Down Take a chill pill and let the inevitable happen. Be cool, my friend. 556


You deserve this. She deserves this. And only by showing that you can handle yourself and your excitement before sex will she trust that you can handle her once the clothes hit the floor. When you arrive at your chosen sexatorium, let her get in the door and become comfortable with the space. Her Bodyguard still needs to make sure she's gonna be safe. Give her the “nickel tour” so she knows there's no surprises lurking behind some darkened door. Show her the bathroom so she can freshen up and so she can take care of any final negotiations with her crewmembers and stowaways that may be required. Now you can make her tea or pour her a drink. However, you're not going to finish either one. Because this is the part where you fuck her.

RECAP: Lions Pounce! Say “Hello!” Make a situational remark Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat 557


Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor Play with your food Cross the Gulf of Little Suffering Bring her Naughty Girl all the way out Menage-a-Quoi? “It doesn't count” Don’t kiss the girl Handle the transition to the Party

558


Stroke 21: Alice: The Sequel

If, at the very last moment, a woman suddenly gets a little upset, it’s usually nothing big. If there was something big, then you would’ve already been Blown Out way earlier in the seduction. This is probably just a test. A test to make sure that she can trust you and feel safe in the event her Beast breaks free of its heavy cage in the hold of her ship. Her upset may take the form of a piercing complaint about your environment... “Why’s it so fucking cold in here?” “Do you not own a vacuum cleaner or what?” Or it may take the form of an impertinent remark directed at you... “What are you—one of those players?” “How many women have you had sex with?”--in a taunting tone that somehow suggests that whatever number you say will either be too high or too low. The already widely known secret to passing a woman's test is to... Remain emotionally non-reactive. Because... That's the only thing she's testing you for. 559


If you react emotionally—you fail. If you actually answer her question—you fail. If you turn into a lady-boy and try to appease her—you fail. Imma tell you another secret. But you gotta promise never to share it with the leading lights of Big Dating Advice because it would liquify their brains faster than pouring salt on a slug. For realz, if they learned of this secret their gray matter would melt down like a slice of fake cheese dropped in the toaster and they'd no longer be capable of... Wait a fucking minute! Actually, now that I think about it, please do feel free to share this secret with every representative of Big Dating Advice you come across... Women don't test you...only Alice does. If you're snuggling up with a woman on the couch and she abruptly she busts out with an upset, that means her Naughty Girl has just been elbowed aside and Alice has temporarily taken over. And what an adorable little sociopath she is! If this happens--and it won’t always happen that Alice shows up to make a last-second attempt to derail the seduction...but it won’t never happen--then I’d like you to just stop. Just stop. Don't react to whatever the woman said— emotionally, or any other way. 560


Instead, take a long, hard look at her. Not at the woman sitting there in front of you, but at the part of her lurking beneath the surface. And you'll see her. You'll see Alice looking out of her eyes—and she'll be rather startled, because she will realize that you can see her. And now it's your turn to have a secret... You know Alice better than the woman you’re with knows Alice. In fact, you know Alice better than Alice knows Alice. And you're going to use that knowledge to give her exactly what she needs. More precisely, what she needs to hear. What does she need to hear? You remember, because it's virtually identical to what your Little Prince constantly needs to hear. Alice needs to hear that she's loved. And safe. And pretty. So look at Alice—hiding in the depths of a woman's eyes—and with all the love and safe protectiveness you can muster, and in that completely different tone of voice you use when speaking to a five- to seven-year old girl rather than a grown woman, say to Alice these two magic words... 561


“You're pretty.” These are the last two words Alice ever expected to hear at this moment. “You’re pretty.” And they are the two words she most wanted to hear. The effect will be immediate and obvious... Deep within the woman in front of you, Alice will curtsy in grateful acknowledgement at being seen, and then retreat without another word, relinquishing control to the Naughty Girl for the duration of this ride. Believe in my Inner RPG Model of Seduction or don't believe in it, I don't give a fuck--just do THIS the next time you face a woman's upset and get the shock of a lifetime... “You're pretty.” Besides, this is the one time you get to tell a woman that you're not yet fucking that she's pretty—so you might as well make the most of it!



Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor Play with your food Cross the Gulf of Little Suffering Bring her Naughty Girl all the way out Menage-a-Quoi? “It doesn't count” Don’t kiss the girl Handle the transition to the Party Alice: The Sequel

563


Stroke 22: Big Cats Play Rough

If you bring nothing else to your sexing of a woman, bring this...

Women love being handled--everything else is optional. Handling a woman means being completely and utterly present with her. It means giving her the full force of your attention. It means owning your strength and taking charge—moving a woman physically and sexually in the direction you want her to go. She yearns to be surrounded by the energetic container of your masculinity because it allows her to expand her boundaries and let her nastiest fantasies out while still feeling safe and protected. A woman loves to be handled by a man who loves handling her. She appreciates it when you know what you desire and have a plan for achieving it. If you want her to suck your cock, tell her. And don't bother saying please. Conquering a woman can mean playing bigger than you've ever played before. After all, big cats play rough. And your Lion is the biggest, baddest cat of them all. Or so we've been led to believe. In reality, of course, every species of Tigress is larger, more 564


powerful and more deadly than any Lion.

Here's the secret behind how the real game between the sexes is played, revealed for the first time ever... You come at a woman, all strong and powerful in your Lion. An apex predator who's going to devour her, one ripping bite at a time. But then her Tigress finally gets to emerges from her metal cage and the fight can be joined at last. From across the deck of her great ship, your Lion smells her strength. It reeks of death. But he comes at her anyway, rough and biting, but still playful. She knocks him aside with a powerful blow from her paw. Regaining his feet, your Lion squares up with her Tigress. Eyes lock. Nostrils flare. Your Lion now fears the eviscerating claws of the Tigress—capable of slicing him from head to toe—but he attacks anyway, with a huge roar and a swipe of Lion paw on her ass. He will settle for nothing less than her full surrender. Complete and total, crawling across the floor, 9 ½ Weeks surrender. But the Tigress hasn't even begun to fight. Most women won't even start pushing back until they first feel your full strength. Only then can the battle truly be engaged. 565


And there can be only one. Never lose sight of this certainty... There can be only one. And it has to be you. Except... It never will be. She's stronger than you. Maybe not physically, but in every other way. She has more endurance. More power. More savage ruthlessness. And she has a secret weapon: she can hold vastly more—infinitely more—sensation in her body than you can. Even knowing these odds, even knowing that he cannot win, your Lion charges once more, squaring her hips up and fucking her hard, one paw pulling her hair hard as he growls right in her face. There can only be one—and he intends to be that one. You flip her over. Fuck her from behind. If you're handling her properly, there will come a moment where it's an outright struggle. Where she's really pushing back with all her might—physically, emotionally, energetically, sexually, everything. Roars. Bites. Growls. It's a fucking rough, sexy mess. Don't give in. Don't back down. Fuck her harder. Fuck her deeper. The deeper you go within her, the deeper you go within yourself...and the more she can surrender to you completely. 566


Women crave this profoundly. And they get to experience it rarely. There are few moments in an entire lifetime more profoundly fulfilling than colliding your masculine energy directly into the full force of her deadly femininity. Lion against Tigress, head to head, Beast against Beast. When you reach this point, feel into yourself and feel into her....then give it all you've got. Go big or go home. This is not the time to hide from your Lion nature. Big cats play rough because they play to win. Knowing that he's overpowered, knowing that he could lose—and not just lose, but fucking be fatally eviscerated while trying—your Lion fights the fight of his life. And that's what the Tigress seeks... The respect of your Lion's realization the she's the more powerful of the two...and the courage to attack anyway, knowing he could fail and die. Respect. Courage. She expects and deserves nothing less from you. Will this be scary for you the first time or ten? You better fucking believe it. 567


Do it anyway. Women are turned on by men who are scared, but who don't let their fears stop them. And with that, her Tigress can at last--graciously and deliberately--allow herself to submit. She can bow down to your King of the Beasts, the ruler of the Universe. Because she knows and you know... She is now and always will be the Queen of the Beasts in the Multiverse. Her submission is merely a sign of her power. There can only be one, indeed.

With the battle decided, now you can fuck her even more deeply than before. The more passionately you penetrate her, the fewer words there are...until ultimately there are none. Go deep. Feel into her. And let her feel into you. Feel her joy, her pain and her softness. Let her feel your wounds, your fears and your vulnerability. As you look into her eyes, you'll find yourself at the edge of her Deep Spot. Go there. Look into her eyes and acknowledge her for the unique being that she is—both in the Universe without and the Multiverse within. 568


Even as you continue fucking her, expose your most vulnerable self through the infinite and infinitely close space between you. This wordless place of sharing between you contains some of the most honest moments of your life. Slide in and out, touch no part of her other than the walls of her beautiful pussy with your hard cock. Look at her and only at her. Think of her and only of her. Feel her...and nothing else. This will be an unbelievably sensuous experience for her. It will feel intimate, romantic and powerful all at once. It's possible that you will tumble into her Deep Spot, that you'll fall into the bottomless vulnerability within the abyss. Who knows what you'll find there?! I'll tell you this much—whatever it is, nobody will ever believe you when you come back out again and try to explain your experience. Oh, and if you haven't already, put your tongue in her mouth and kiss her deeply--it's high time to do so and you've both earned it!



Remain standing Praise her Look/Energy Chitty Chat Qualify, qualify (Checkpoint #1) Get Entangled or bust Create a Grand Adventure (Checkpoint #2) Board her ship... ...or run away Join the battle between her Good Girl and Naughty Girl (Checkpoint #3) Enter the metaphor Play with your food Cross the Gulf of Little Suffering Bring her Naughty Girl all the way out Menage-a-Quoi? “It doesn't count” Don’t kiss the girl Handle the transition to the Party Alice: The Sequel Big Cats play rough

570


CONGRATULATIONS, STUD, YOU'VE COMPLETED LEVEL IV—AND THAT'S ALL THE MOTHERFUCKING LEVELS THERE IS!

571


THE POST-GAME SHOW

Wow, I almost need a cigarette after all that! Wow, here we are on the other side of the 22 Strokes! Wow, you made it all the way to the end, young man. I'm so proud of you for reaching this point, for not getting off the fucking boat until we reached our final port of call. In the process, you've just snagged another 13,500 points—accumulating a handsome total of 82,500 points. Which means you've broken your own worldrecord and achieved your highest score on any book you've ever read. Okay, sure, it's probably the first and only time you've ever earned any points by reading a fucking book, but still--high score! And high score means...high five! Don’t leave me hanging, fool! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!

With that, we're gonna let the door swing closed on your romp with the lady who was lucky enough to be seduced by you. If we started exploring all the decadent possibilities and delicious permutations in bed, we’d be here for another 500 or 600 pages. I’m going to assume you already have a good working knowledge of the intricacies of the female body. If not, get one. 572


If you don't know how to eat a pussy so well that women are pounding on your door in the middle of the night to get more, then invest the time and energy in discovering how. If you can't tell a woman's G-spot from her belly button, buy a goddamn book or ten on the subject. If you don't know how to extend, expand and explore the female orgasm in all its infinite glory, then figure out a way to figure it out. Here's a fantastic place to start, a Tribe teaching and living a practice known as Orgasmic Meditation... www.Onetaste.us I first learned about the practice of Orgasmic Meditation through the bestselling 4-Hour Body, by Timmy Lou Who Ferriss. I've spent the past couple of years playing with the people in this Tribe, engaging in their unique form of sensual meditation. I highly recommend the experience—for both men and women alike. Meantimewise, if you've enjoyed surfing the nonstop tsunami of epistemological tomfoolery that is THE SEDUCTION BIBLE, then write up a hawt, short, 5-Star review on Amazon to let them other motherfuckers who think they already know everything know how much they don't know, ya know?! Positive reviews weigh super heavily in the decision-making process of potential readers these days. I know you're super-busy, but if you could take just a minute out of your schedule to single a sentence about my wicked little book that could influence 573


other men to undertake this journey of a lifetime, then I'd be much obliged. Nextwise, what's the point of FaceBook, Twitter, SnapChat, Reddit, Vine or whatever space-age, holographic, fully immersive social media is popular by the time you read this two weeks from now if not to pimp shit out for your friends?! Pimp my shit out on your social media network, then friend me up so I can pimp yo shit in return. 'Cause that's what motherfucking friends do, they hook each other up... FACEBOOK:

facebook.com/lowcarbrevolution TWITTER:

@the_bookwright

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If you are super-mega-desirous of booking me as a speaker for your group or convention, then the Facebook and Twitter links above are your best bet for connecting with me. Since I travel the globe full time and I’m also often at sea, I can rarely be reached via phone or text. If you wanna schedule an interview or such for your magazine, podcast, radio show, site, blog or what-the-fuck-ever, we can always Skype or Google Hangout or whatever the next big thing is. And if you enjoyed the experience you had here, then check out some of my other work at… TheJohnMcLeanExperience.com 575


Or don't. You are now and always the motherfucking boss of you! And finally, directly ahead you'll find the muchpromised, long-awaited Special Bonus Section containing the secret of how to ask for (and get) anything you want. It's some good shit. I hope you enjoy it, and I sincerely hope you use it for good and not evil. The more you master the 22 strokes and the Inner Role-Playing Game Model of the Mind underlying them, the wider and deeper your sex life can become. And once you've got your sexuality humming along nicely, it's fascinating how easily so many other aspects of your life can drop into place. Until we meet again, thanks for playing!

576


SPECIAL BONUS SECTION: THE SECRET TO ASKING FOR (and GETTING) ANYTHING YOU WANT!

577


The Secret To Asking For (and Getting) Anything You Want.

We've now come full circle as we deliver you to the final launching point for your steam-powered greatness—and along with it a return to your natural state and birthright as a superhero. A superhero needs a superpower or two. And it's time to get yours. As we've already discovered, everything— EVERYthing!--is a story. Humans do not respond on a deep, internal level to an academic recitations of facts, data, bullet points, fancy graphics, or mental reprogramming. Rather we respond to metaphors and stories. Only once a concept takes on the characteristics of a story, can the person we're communicating with can fully process and respond to it. Therefore, if we turn a request for something that we want into a story, people are far more likely to say, “Yes”. And it all begins with the word Because. This simple word has the potential to become the single most important term in your vocabulary when it comes to asking for what you desire, because it does something very profound... It builds a story around your request. 578


BECAUSE, BECAUSE, BECAUSE In 1989, a fascinating study was carried out by social psychologist Ellen Langer to test the potential of the homely little word, “because”. Dr. Langer located a busy copy machine in one of the storied libraries on the campus of fancy-pants Harvard University. Starting at the back of the line, Dr. Langer asked each person in front of her if she could cut in front of them, saying, “Excuse me, I've got five pages, may I use the Xerox machine ahead of you?” Somewhat remarkably, nearly half of them said “Yes”. Of course, the other half said “No”. But now she had a baseline: If you politely state a request, perhaps 50% of people will go along...itself a remarkable endorsement of asking directly for what we want. Next, the good Professor sought to improve upon her success by introducing the word “because”. She ran the same drill, save with the critical addition of a because phrase. “Excuse me, I've got five pages, may I use the Xerox machine...” she would say, adding, “...because I'm in a rush!” Now the people in line in front of her had a reason to comply with her request. There was a story attached to it—a story all of us can relate to, a story about being in a rush. By simply adding “because” 579


and adding a simple story, Dr. Langer found that an incredible 94% of students let her cut in. Only later did she stop and reflect that her story was patently ridiculous. After all, she was in a crowded library of a supercompetitive university during finals week. Of course she was in a rush--who the fuck there wasn't in a rush?! Every motherfucker in there was in just as much of a full-blown, panicky dash to write their papers, make copies and cram for tests as everyone else. This realization made Prof. Langer suspect it was the word because that made the difference rather the reason she gave for wanting to move ahead in line. She theorized that students in line ahead of her simply needed to know she had a story. If that were true, then it didn't even matter what the story was about. In other words, the story could be that she was in a rush...or it could anything else. So she returned to the crowded library for one more social experiment in line-jumping. For this go-round, her idea was to deliberately make the story about absolutely nothing. So she used the line, “Excuse me, I've got five pages, may I use the Xerox machine ahead of you...because I have to make some copies?” The even more mind-blowing result?! Basically the exact same number of people reacted favorably to this new version as before—93% versus 94%--despite the fact that she offered them the Seinfeld of reasons, a reason about nothing! 580


Of course she was there to make copies, that's what you DO with a Xerox machine! This was like asking people ahead of you in line at the local McTacoHut, “May I go ahead of you, because I'm hungry?” Well, naturally you're hungry. We're all hungry. Who the fuck would walk through the doors of a fast food joint if they weren't starving half to death?! By the way, the professor's successes in linejumping weren't attributable to her great beauty or personal charisma, of which I am sure she is plentifully blessed in both departments. She later reproduced her experiments using males and females, some pretty, some not so pretty, some younger, some older—and found no difference in the 0utcomes.

USE “BECAUSE”...BECAUSE IT WORKS From now on, whenever you make a direct request of anyone, whether during the context of a seduction or elsewhere, always include the pivotal word “because”. Even though the story that comes after the because really doesn't seem to matter, whenever possible I personally like to make the story about the person you're communicating with rather than about yourself. After all, cultivating the habit of putting your attention on others always makes for better communication. You can accomplish this by imagining a possible benefit for the person you're making the request of...then just putting it after because. 581


For example, one might say, “Do you want to just give me a warning, officer, because that will be less paperwork for you to fill out?!” Each and every time I invite a woman to come over and play with me or go on a Grand Adventure, after the initial request I add, “...because you deserve to have fun” or “because it'll be hot” or “because you'll enjoy yourself”. Something simple that benefits them is all you need.

THE ENTIRE REQUEST So we covered the second part first, since the because phrase obviously comes at the end of whatever you're asking for. Now let's go back and fill in the beginning. Before I reveal the full and complete secret of asking for whatever you want, however, I need to point out that, like all great superpowers, it comes with great responsibilities. Knowing how to ask for what you want and getting it assumes that you've taken the time to explore what you really want in the world. Only use the secret I'm about to share with you when you are genuinely expressing a burning desire of yours. And only use it to make requests of others that are in the best interests of you both both. Remember, none of us live in a vacuum. Our actions always have 582


consequences. Don't ask for anything that the other person will later regret saying, “Yes” to. Deal? If you’ll pinky-swear to these two caveats, then here we go, brother! Imma present this secret to you as a formula, because that's really what it is--a formula for making a request in a single sentence with a very high likelihood of a positive response.

HEAD TILT + REQUEST + NAME + BECAUSE PHRASE Let's quickly break the formula down, then put it back together again and send you on your way, shall we?!

HEAD TILT As you begin asking someone for what you want, tilt your head to one side. Nobody knows for sure why tilting your head to either side dramatically improves your chances of a positive response, but it's quite well-documented by social scientists that it works. (The best guess is that tilting your head serves to make you more attractive to the other person because it hides any asymmetries in your facial features, which makes you appear more trustable.) But, whatever...just fucking do it this way, my man, because it works! 583


The first time you tilt your head to one side as you ask someone a question it may feel sorta awkward. But you know what else feels awkward?! Every other thing in your whole life when you did it for the first time! The head tilt is an essential part of the secret to asking for (and getting) anything you want, so always include it.

THE REQUEST Naturally, this is whatever you're asking for. Once more, because you'll dramatically increase your odds of receiving a “Yes” by using this formula, please only ask for things you genuinely desire. And don't ever be mean or selfish or hurtful when using this. Ever. Please.

NAME Insert their name—or the clever nickname you fashioned for her--between the request and the because phrase. Why? Again, because it works! I texted one of my lovers in Austin once: “You wanna go out and pick up another woman tonight, Alanna, because then she and I could both eat your pussy?!” (BTW, she said yes...and we did...and we did!)

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BECAUSE PHRASE The because phrase technically can be anything at all, but I personally prefer to make it about the person you are asking (i.e., a potential benefit for them) if possible.

PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER Here are some examples. Remember, all of these start with a Head Tilt to one side or the other. “Would you like to make an offer on this house today, Stephen...because you're going to enjoy living here?” “Should I stick my cock in your ass now, Lindsay...because it will feel so good?” “Do you want to join our strange cult, George...because then we can drain your bank account?!” (Use this one sparingly!) Once more... Head Tilt + Request + Name + Because Phrase Now that you have an official superpower, you are officially a motherfucking superhero. Now go embark upon your next Epic Quest and make the world a better place!

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THE SEDUCTION BIBLE

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