[00:00:00] How to get laid. Part one. Do you suck with women? Are you a virgin or totally inexperienced with women? Do hot women intimidate you? Do you fear approaching women? Do you not understand how women work and what they want? Are you shy, insecure, a loner or socially awkward?
[00:00:20] Are you deeply introverted? Do you hate socializing? Do you believe that no attractive woman would ever sleep with you? If any of these apply to you, then this multi-part series on how
[00:00:32] to get laid is exactly what you're going to need. This is going to be a no bullshit, highly practical guide of field tested advice, not just theory, but what it really takes to turn this situation around for you in your life because I've been where you've been and
[00:00:49] I've faced those challenges and I've overcome these challenges too and so I can help guide you into what it really takes to do this. This guide is not going to be some magic pill
[00:00:59] solution or some sort of cheesy pickup line that you use. This is the deep changes that you need to make to yourself and to your lifestyle in order to turn yourself into an attractive
[00:01:10] man and to get the kind of results that you would be happy with when it comes to dating. I'm Jim Grinstead and today we're going to talk about pickup artists and what you heard is what it's all about. Like real estate, building wealth, multi-level marketing and
[00:01:42] so many other things, it's about convincing people they can change their lives by learning a few basic skills and reading some books. But if those don't do the trick, there are additional courses, additional books and even person to person consultations that
[00:01:59] will make you successful. And if you're not, there are more courses to buy. Do these courses work? Well there's a saying among salespeople that if you want to increase your success rate, increase your failure rate. In short the more pitches you make, the
[00:02:18] more likely you are to find a buyer. It also depends upon how you define success. If it's not just on the bed post, how many is enough? If it's flirting with a woman, your success will be higher. If it's having meaningful conversations with
[00:02:34] women in hopes of finding the one, then there's no way to tell. Now so far I've been talking about men trying to pick up women but there are courses for women and those with more fluid identities as well. It can be done because they all
[00:02:49] preach the same message but from different angles. I'll tell you more about that later. For now here's the short course on how to be a pickup artist. First make yourself look desirable. One way to do that is to surround
[00:03:19] yourself with women. It's a signal that you're pre-qualified and that women want to be around you. Secondly, you learn to join a group of people by having them willingly invite you in using pre-tested lines and techniques. These aren't
[00:03:38] pickup lines or bragging just a way of helping them believe that you have a more interesting life than they lead. Lastly, ignore the person you're interested in and maybe even insult them so they'll begin pursuing you. This is called
[00:03:55] negging for being negative to the person. There's more to it than that and that's why you need the additional courses and personal consulting. There's another group of people who offer the same services as pickup artists with their own inventory of books, seminars and consultations. They're called
[00:04:18] matchmakers. Adjacent to pickup artists and matchmakers are wings. The job of a wing is to connect two people. Sometimes a pickup artist will use someone who can help them gain access to a group. Matchmakers often play the role
[00:04:33] themselves having set up the date. If matchmakers have lots of clients they may use wings to handle the volume since they can't be everywhere. When matchmakers go to work, everyone's in on the game. There's no secret as to
[00:04:46] what's going on. The person who hired the matchmaker may employ some of the same techniques as the pickup artists but everyone understands the roles they play. They also know who the wing is and why they're present. Whether
[00:05:00] it's a matchmaker or pickup artist, the techniques are the same. Dr. Jeremy Nicholson writing in Psychology Today quotes a 2012 study which said it would seem clear that there is in fact a substantive degree of psychological research to support many claims made by the seduction community. The three
[00:05:19] reputed phases of courtship, attraction, building mutual comfort and trust and seduction are supported by a significant and steady growing literature based in physiological, social and evolutionary psychology research. However, the authors also caution it is equally important to
[00:05:36] note that many of the strategies advocated by the community are not currently supported by peer reviewed literature. Given that, it appears that the overall approach advocated by the seduction community does have merit but the effectiveness of each individual technique is still up
[00:05:54] for debate. Now for opportunities to use these techniques, money changes hands so it's reasonable to ask what the value proposition is for pickup artists and matchmakers. With pickup artists and matchmakers, there's no guarantee of success. However, with matchmakers, there are
[00:06:17] measurables such as how many dates you go on and how well the matchmaker did in pairing you with someone who's compatible. For the person who goes on a date with a client, the only value comes in whether they thought
[00:06:29] it was worth their time. How do clients measure the value of a pickup artist? Now they want to get laid although what they frequently end up with is just more contact with women and maybe more self-esteem.
[00:06:52] How about the person targeted by the pickup artist? For them, it's just an encounter but do they put a value on whether the person they're talking to is intentionally trying to manipulate them? How would they feel about being played as a mark? To flip this around a bit,
[00:07:12] what about the person who goes to a bar to enjoy the party and uses their charm to get someone else to buy them drinks all night? They may or may not have sex in mind but free drinks are most
[00:07:22] definitely on the menu. Manipulation is part of the plan. Here's another point of view. Robert Green wrote a book that sold two million copies. It's called The 48 Laws of Power. He followed that with another book called The Art of Seduction.
[00:07:45] Green's book was published in the 1990s amidst the wave of self-help books. His sales were boosted by celebrities who praised it. Green has no psychology degree or other professional training. He said his first book was based on his observations of the metaphorical mass people wear daily.
[00:08:03] Seduction is in a high form of power because you make people feel pleasure, you make them feel excited or interested in you and then their resistance to your ideas slowly lowers and you have the ability to influence them and to move them in
[00:08:22] the direction that you want. If you yell at them like, are we talking about your child and you tell them, do this, do that? They're resented and for good reason. But if you're a subtler, if you're more seductive in your approach, if
[00:08:34] you're more indirect, people will do what you want or go in your direction without ever even realizing it. Green's seduction isn't about one night stands or sex for that matter. It's about using power to reach goals, but
[00:08:48] that's what pickup artists do as well. It's up to you to decide if there's a moral difference between using them to get a better job or to get laid. I promise to tell you about women pickup artists like the guys are they socially awkward average frustrated chumps?
[00:09:05] Pretty much. Lisa Bonos, a Washington Post reporter, arranged for two colleagues and a professional wingman, Thomas Edwards, to help them learn how to better approach men. The goal wasn't sex, but to help them develop skills that wouldn't turn them into backsters, someone who's seen
[00:09:23] as a friend, but not as a potential partner. I call it the girlfriend strategy. So the girlfriend strategy is specifically for three people in a group. And the idea is to work together as a team and the girlfriend strategy one person plays a facilitator.
[00:09:38] You're a facilitator here. You're not talking to him that you're into that. I'm pretty outgoing, so I volunteer to facilitate. What are you ordering? This evening. Yeah. From there, find a way to bring Veronica or LaVon yet into an obelisk.
[00:09:55] I think that my friend, Veronica, over here drinks and we'll do like to come back to Eugene. Yeah. Yeah. Veronica wanted to learn how to show strangers that she's flirting with them and not just being friendly. My challenge for the evening was to learn how to facilitate
[00:10:13] connections without saying that much. And LaVonia tends to be a little shy in these situations. So the goal there was just to get her comfortable talking to people. That's how the game began. As the night progressed, I could see that Veronica and LaVonia were getting more comfortable.
[00:10:29] It was nice to see Veronica smiling while in a new conversation. We talked to a lot of people, but not a lot of numbers were exchanged. I did meet someone I thought was cute and I leaned in for a kiss. Sorry, viewers. That moment was off camera.
[00:10:45] Now let me ask this. Is training to become a pickup artist a wing or a matchmaker? Really just a way of teaching social skills, getting comfortable with meeting new people is selling a course on pickup artistry just a marketing ploy. The people who teach these courses,
[00:11:01] even the legitimate matchmakers and wings, don't talk about success or failure rates. And even if they did, failure or success is likely to be different for every client. Perhaps those learning pickup artistry or renting themselves out as a wing are just teaching people how to flirt
[00:11:18] or to recognize when someone is flirting with them. I'm Jean Smith. I'm a social anthropologist who studies flirting. A flirtologist, if you will. Now, as a flirtologist, I do research. I write books. I give talks and I work with clients, both private and corporate,
[00:11:38] all with the goal of helping people to become better flirts. Smith wants you to become a hot ape. As part of my quest to help people become better flirts, I did research. I went to the cities of London, New York, Paris and Stockholm
[00:11:53] and I researched the flirting behavior of its inhabitants. And I found there were six things that they all had in common, six ways that they could signal they were flirting and understood when someone was flirting with them. And I teach this as. Hot ape. It's the six signs.
[00:12:16] It's an acronym for the six signs of flirting. She walks us through it at a TED talk. So what if I were to say to you, you must be a parking ticket because you've got fine written all over you. Would you laugh? Well, age is for humor.
[00:12:33] Raise your hand if you thought my joke was funny. Go ahead. Don't be shy. OK, everyone with your hands up, I would totally date you. Well, if my husband weren't such a control freak. But anyway, if you didn't raise your hand, it's not a good match.
[00:12:50] It's just not going to work between us. But it's me, not you. But this is a good thing because hot a people, it takes time. Let me speed this up a bit. H is for humor. O is for openness, open body language. T is for touch.
[00:13:10] A is for attention, paying attention to the other person. P is for proximity, the difference between standing intimately close or invading someone's space. E is for eye contact. Now, my favorite story of hot eight being used in the field
[00:13:26] was to relate to me by one of my clients. She had shared hot eight with all of her friends. And one night they went out hot a being guys. And one of her friends was making eye contact with a with a guy at the bar.
[00:13:38] And she went over and spoke with him. She came back a few minutes later, bit dejected. And my client said, well, what happened? What happened? And she's like, nothing. Well, did you hot a bit? She's like, yeah, yeah. And so then they started going through the signs.
[00:13:54] Well, did you use humor? She's like, yeah, yeah. What about open body language? You didn't do this like you usually do. Did you know? No, no, no. What about touch? Did you touch him back hand? Oh, God, I didn't use touch. And then they started laughing.
[00:14:08] They're like, well, no wonder. And when we think about flirting like this, it totally changes our paradigm of rejection. And in situations where we're often feeling self-conscious or a bit nervous, we have scientific tools to help us remember what to do.
[00:14:25] And finally, it makes it not about us. It's a checklist. It's tasks. It's things to do rather than how we often see flirting, which is a stranger's evaluation of our worth. Dale Carnegie wrote a bestselling book that remains popular to this day
[00:14:44] called How to Win Friends and Influence People. It was first published in 1936. In short, the book encourages readers to praise others, be interested in the other person, avoid arguments by listening to the other person's point of view
[00:15:00] and lastly bring them around to your way of thinking by not being critical and acknowledging your own mistakes and how you came to change your point of view. That makes it easier for them to come around to your way of thinking.
[00:15:12] That sounds a lot like the techniques being taught by pickup artists today. For the rest of this discussion, I'm going to eliminate wings. For the most part, they just bring people together, then get out of the way. That leaves us with pickup artists and matchmakers.
[00:15:30] I'm pulling matchmakers off the table as well. Legitimate matchmakers bring people together, help them be better at dating and then get out of the way. There's no subterfuge. Only pickup artists remain unless they engage in false advertising or promote slipping drugs into someone's drink.
[00:15:49] There's nothing illegal about what they do. No law has been broken. So let's go back to the value proposition. For me, pickup artists are scammers. They convince a mark to willingly hand over something of value for their or someone else's benefit.
[00:16:07] What keeps me from solidly calling it a scam is that my definition is unfair to women. It contains an underlying assumption that women aren't capable of recognizing manipulation and protecting themselves from it. But here's what I do know. All con artists create a false reality.
[00:16:25] They encourage us to believe things that just aren't true. One of the most common cons is to convince slowly people that they're truly loved, then empty their bank accounts and disappear. Pick up artists prey upon our trust. And that's why I call pickup artistry a con.
[00:16:43] A con only works by gaining the trust of another person than abusing that trust. The outcome of the scam may be positive with students learning how to better relate to other people, but they're brought in under a false premise
[00:16:58] that even a backstreet can fall into bed with the most beautiful woman in the bar by playing them as suckers. Scams and cons is an independent production. So if you enjoy the podcast, please help us by telling your friends and encouraging them to listen.
[00:17:19] Scams and cons is available wherever podcasts are found and it's scamsandcons.com. Thanks for listening. Did you guys hear about that couple that went on vacation and one spouse murdered the other? In fact, the entire vacation was planned
[00:17:44] just so that they could make the murder look like an accident. Ah, so like a slaycation. Oh boy, sounds like a fun, new true crime podcast to me. On every episode of Slaycation, we'll examine true cases of people who were killed while on vacation. Was it murder?
[00:18:06] Or just a horrible accident? That's up to you and the law to decide. But either way, if you leave for your vacation in the plane and come home under the plane, you've definitely gone on a slaycation. Join us every week for a fascinating new episode.
[00:18:26] But make sure to pack your body bags because getting away can be murder. This is Slaycation.