Baiting vs. Trading Information

Most men who've been studying the social arts a little while come to realize, either consciously or instinctually, that coming out and telling women things about themselves unasked is an inferior means of conversing than first being asked for things before telling them. People start to come to understand the laws of effort and investment intuitively, and they recognize that another person putting in effort to learn something about them is better than another person putting in no effort and learning something about them regardless.

Even then, though, this rule – a very important social rule – often flies under the radar of most men, and they continue seeking to build rapport with women (or even attempting to force rapport, you might say) by sharing as much free, unasked for information about themselves as they can.

I call this "trading information," and view it as one of the vilest, most heinous social crimes you can commit. It does two things that are positively detrimental to your efforts to be charming and engaging and delightful and seductive with women, and, after an example of what many guys do and you ought not to do, I'll explain both of those below. Then, I'm going to introduce a concept some of you may be familiar with but many are not: baiting, and how you as a conversationalist can use it to get women vastly more invested in you and your conversations with them.

Trading Information: How 99% of Men Converse

Guy: I saw you walking here, and I had to come tell you that you are the cutest girl I've seen this week. I'm Will.

Girl: Oh, hi. Thanks so much. I'm Selena.

Guy: So where are you off to?

Girl: Oh, um, I'm just going to the store to buy a few things.

Guy: That's great. I'm just getting back from seeing a movie. On my way to go get some dinner now.

Girl: Oh, I see.

Guy: So what do you do?

Girl: Uh, I manage a restaurant in the city.

Guy: Oh wow! My job isn't nearly as impressive; I'm a software engineer a few blocks away.

Just in this short snippet, you hopefully can pick up that this conversation is not engaging at all. Neither party is feeling genuinely connected or interested, and it feels awkward and unnatural for both of them. The man is clearly the pursuer, and the woman is in the position of wanting the pursuit to stop, because it's too clumsy and unsmooth and makes her feel uncomfortable.

Why is that, though? If I were to ask you why that snippet of conversation feels so off, could you list out some reasons?

Well, the root, the one we mentioned at the start of this article, is that the man here is seeking to trade information. In other words, he's hoping that by having her tell him a bit about herself, and him telling her a bit about himself, that somehow that will then inspire attraction between the two of them, and he'll eventually get a phone number, or a date, or he'll somehow end up with this girl in his bed.

As it were though, none of that happens, the vast majority of the time. Instead, it just comes off weird and unnatural. But why is trading information such an odd-feeling, unnatural way to converse?

There are two reasons:

• She's just met this man, and doesn't care about him yet. Why does she need to know what he's done with his day, or what he does for work? None of this matters to her; he isn't someone she sees as a part of her life at this point, or someone she has much interest in, even if she's somewhat attracted to him; and

• By showing but little interest in what she has to say about herself, and quickly turning the focus to himself so he can tell her about what he's doing and what he does, he's communicating to her that he really isn't all that interested in her; instead, what he's primarily interested in is talking about is him.

So, she doesn't much care about him yet, and he's communicating that he doesn't much care about her and instead wants to tell her about him, a topic she's not really all that interested in. See how that's setting up most conversations with a death sentence right off the bat?

This is what trading information is all about. It's an awful clumsy approach at getting to know a girl, though it's based on the best of intentions ("If I tell her stuff about me, she'll know more about me and like me more, and then she'll want to tell me more about herself!"). Unfortunately, those great intentions are grounded in a hypothesis that doesn't pan out (the hypothesis that talking about oneself leads to women feeling connected and revealing more about themselves in turn). Instead, we want to go the opposite route – by using deep diving to find out deep, personal details about women in a hurry – and lead women to become intrigued with us and probe us for more information, rather than being handed that information unasked, through the process of baiting.

Combining Baiting and Deep Diving

Just as trading information is awkward and ineffectual, the combination of deep diving and baiting is incredibly smooth, natural, and effective. Since I've been using this one-two conversational punch, I've had just about everyone I talk to entranced, and one woman after another telling me she feels so free and refreshed and amazing when she's talking to me. Oftentimes, this leads to us going to bed rather fast.

With deep diving, you show women you're extremely interested in them, as special, individual, unique people, as opposed to the interest that most men show in talking about their own lives and stories with women they've just met. You display a total lack of interest in trying to impress – quite different from most men, who do everything they can to be fun and entertaining and impressive. And you rapidly move to deep, personal details, which make women begin feeling quite quickly upon telling them to you that you know them better than most people do – which, of course, because they've told you a great deal of things they've told to few other people, you do.

Hand-in-hand with deep diving goes baiting. Baiting is how you get women to find out information about you. Why would you want women to find out information about you? Well, there are two main reasons:

• To get them to chase you and put effort into finding out who you are, and

• To come off as a very deep man with many things to say but with whom those things don't show up until a girl probes for them and asks, thus positioning you as an extraordinarily deep, mysterious, intriguing man – every woman's romantic fantasy.

Notice that nowhere in there are "getting to know you" or "feeling more connected to you" our primary focuses. That's because people don't really care about getting to know you until they're sold on you and want to know more about you and how you think and why you do the things you do, and because people don't feel connected to you because you've told them a lot about you. People feel connected to you when they've told you a lot about themselves.

Talk less about yourself, and have her talk more about herself. Anything you say about yourself, make sure it's something she's directly inquired about, or that it directly relates to what she's shared and helps build the conversation forward. And anything you say about yourself, make sure to keep it brief.

Those are the underlying principles of successful, engaging conversation, and if you hew closely to them, you'll do well.

Baiting Girls to Get to Know You

What, then, is baiting specifically? Well, there are three forms of baiting, and I recommend you get to know them all very well. They are as follows:

1. Intriguing statements short on details. When a girl asks you what you do, if you tell her, "I'm a foreman. I manage construction sites for office buildings downtown. I also really like photography as a hobby," she's just been overloaded with more information than she asked for and doesn't have anywhere to take this thread. She also is going to feel like you've given her so much information, you must be one of these people who says everything there is to say about a topic, and has nothing further of interest to offer. Just off of that small statement, you've now been designated "slightly boring" and "probably average."
   
   Now if, on the other hand, she asks you what you do, and you say, "I'm a bit of a photographer, but by day I put buildings up downtown," she's going to want to know what you photograph, how long you've been doing it, how you got into it; and she's going to know what exactly you mean that you put buildings up downtown. Her curiosity is wetted, and because you've been intriguing but brief, she's going to have to ask you if she wants to know more. And when you use intriguing statements like this that are short on details, women almost always want to know more, and they instantly designate you "fascinating and extraordinary" – even if the details themselves are quite mundane.

2. Deep diving hard on one particular topic about her. This is what I use for women who are "hard cases," the ones I talk to who don't proactively seek to learn much about me early on in the conversation. The way it works is, you pick a basic topic, like what she does for work or where she went to school or where she's from, and just go deeper and deeper and find out more and more about it, until she realizes she's told you so much about herself in that area and doesn't know anything about you in that area that she feels a large amount of social pressure to then find out the corresponding information about you, at least at the surface level.
   
   Put simply, you asks a woman what she does for a living, but she doesn't ask you, so you ask her if she likes her work, how long she's been doing it, what she'd like to do instead, and all that, until she at last turns it onto you and says, "Well, what do you do?" Then you can use the brief, intriguing statements of Bait #1.

3. The drop-and-hang. We discussed the drop-and-hang before when we discussed responding to interruptions, in particular responding to a woman who's interrupted you in the midst of the telling of a story. Drop-and-hang is what you can use to get women to reengage you and ask you to resume the story you were telling.
   
   Drop-and-hang is just as useful for general baiting as it is for that particular instance of being interrupted. It's something you'll use in a conversation with a woman who isn't asking you much about yourself, or when you've been talking to a woman for a long time about herself and haven't said anything about yourself in a while. You will basically come to the natural conclusion of whatever topic you were discussing about herself with her, and then let the conversation just die naturally. You might end the thread with a thoughtful, "Hmm," and smile a little bit and let your eyes slide off into the distance thoughtfully. Then wait a few seconds, and if she still hasn't reengaged, look back at her and smile warmly as if you're about to start laughing. She might laugh herself at the awkwardness of the pause in conversation with this guy she likes, and then she'll ask you something about yourself. "So, you said you were…"
   
   Note: you should not use the drop-and-hang early into a conversation with a woman who's anything short of in love with you and sold on you digging her too. Otherwise, she'll either auto-reject, feeling like you don't really want to talk to her, or she'll simply find it easier to exit the conversation than to put in work to move things forward with a guy she doesn't feel all that connected to or invested in just yet. The drop-and-hang is for use only with women you've been talking to for a while who are feeling connected and invested.

Our example for Bait #1 – the intriguing statements short on details – was our mention of the man discussing his career who said he's a bit of a photographer, who puts buildings up downtown as his day job. That's intriguing, and makes a woman want to ask for more information.

An example for Bait #2 might be a guy who asks a woman where she went to college, then asks her how she liked it, then why she chose that college, then if she still has any close friends from school or if she did the typical girl thing of fighting with all her friends and all her friends becoming enemies by the end of her four years, and just more and more about her and college until she finally asks, "Where did you go to school?"

An example for Bait #3 might be a guy who has the same conversation as the guy in the Bait #2 example, but the girl just never thinks to ask where he went to school, too engaged in talking about her own college experience, perhaps, or maybe just not as socially savvy as most other women. So, once the man has exhausted this thread, he lets it die, then gets a little distracted, then looks back at the girl and smiles warmly and as though he's about to laugh. She smiles, and begins wracking her brain for what she can do to get the conversation reengaged, remembering that she'd been talking a lot about where she went to school but knows nothing about where he went to school – so she asks.

Parting Thoughts on Baiting

One thing it's important to remember with baiting is that, with Bait #2 and Bait #3, the topics you're baiting women to ask you about must be topics you haven't discussed about yourself at all. If you've mentioned where you went to school already, and you're trying to bait her to ask you more about where you went to school by using Bait #2 or 3, it's going to be awkward for her to ask (because it won't feel directly relevant to the preceding conversation) and she might not even think to ask it at all. If on the other hand the topic hasn't been touched on on your side at all, that's when she's going to realize, "Oh! I don't know anything about his college – not even where he went to school!" and she'll have a ready topic she can use to engage you without feeling awkward or hesitant about it.

Our first bait – being short and intriguing and getting women to ask us more about whatever we've mentioned – is the most powerful bait to use, though it's also dependent on her being interested enough to start asking questions. e.g., the chance to be intriguing about what you do isn't going to surface if she doesn't ask you what you do. The very reason baiting works – that you seem to have much to say but don't offer that information without first being asked – goes out the window if you offer information without being asked. Therefore, you can't start talking about what you do unasked and still hope for it to be intriguing and engaging. The very act of offering information unasked removes much of the potential to intrigue.

If that all seems complicated, here's another way of thinking about it: women are much more interested in information they have to ask to find out than they are in information that's freely given to them. So, don't tell her something she hasn't asked about, and don't tell her all the intricate details and stories when all she asked was whether you had a good childhood ("I did, yeah," is often a sufficient answer; then you can ask her more about hers). Instead, wait for her to ask you something about yourself, then respond with an intriguing, engaging reply that makes her want to know more.

Yours,
Chase Amante