(1) Beginner

With the right mix of practices both before you go out and while you’re already out, you can keep yourself in a proper social and seductive state.

In part 1 of this series, we discussed what “state” is and how it worked. We also mentioned a few caveats to keep in mind regarding state as a tool for seduction. Today we will discuss how to get in state and how to manage it in field.

Here are a couple articles that supplement what I’ll be covering today:

• What Men Who Get Laid Do Before a Night Out

• Picking Up Women When You’re Feeling Low Energy

How do you handle conversation in a group… especially when there’s a girl you like and want to talk to there? With 3-second eye contact, quality face time, and more.

Ideally, you’d like to be able to meet a girl one-on-one, hit it off with her, and run through the courtship free of distractions or interruptions. You know, that’s like meet her on the street... or in the café... or in the bar... or waiting for the train... and she’s allll by herself. All yours, from the moment you walk up.

In reality, you’ll get this some of the time. But if you’re waiting for only girls you can meet in isolation, you’ll pass up a lot of pretty girls who might otherwise have available to you. Girls you did not approach because they were with other people, and you didn’t want to have to deal with a group conversation.

It is a little dicier handling group conversations. However, there are upsides too. The biggest of which is, like the old ‘group theory’ of yesteryear PUA, once she sees you win over her group of friends, suddenly it becomes a lot easier for her to show attraction to you and agree to move forward with you (assuming she does like you). Effectively managing a conversation with multiple people involved, while also showing interest in and proceeding things forward with one specific girl in the group, shows a lot of good, attractive qualities about you. Leadership, confidence, social savvy, influence, ability to build a private world with her even as you charm everyone else... all these are on display as you work your way deftly through a group conversation situation, if you’re doing it right.

In this article, I’m going to give you some tips on doing it right, to better put you in that ‘successful group conversationalist’ bin.

Psychopaths have tremendous social acumen, but can be very harmful to those closest to them. Here are the 8 signs your friend is one.

They are everywhere. They work with you. They’re in your social circle. They might even be a family member.

Hell, you may even be one.

Psychopaths are everywhere.

Okay, they’re not everywhere. There’s no way to know for sure, but current estimates are that 1% of the population are psychopaths.

And psychopaths are people, except they lack sympathy. Sympathy, not empathy. That’s the big distinction I think needs clarification. If they lacked empathy, they would have a very hard time fitting in with people and manipulating them, since they’d have no idea how those people felt. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that people on the autism spectrum lack empathy. A common factor in autistic people is they regularly have no clue how others feel in a conversation, and they cannot read the most basic of social cues (which are communicated via facial expressions, body language, voice tonality, etc.).

By lacking sympathy, however, psychopaths lack the ability to actually be concerned about you. They lack the emotional response necessary to think “I feel scared for him if he makes this bad decision, so I’ll save him from it” or “He’ll be hurt if I do this to him, so I won’t do it to him.” To conceptually understand something is not even in the same universe as emotionally understanding something. The latter is infinitely more clear.

They may be able to conceptually understand that you might not like it if they bone your girlfriend, but they won’t feel the potential of regret when they consider the possibility of you finding out and being heartbroken.

You can see how this might be potentially dangerous to date a psychopath or have one as a friend. They do not have Nature’s control mechanism of sympathy that serves to prevent mass tragedies in the human species.

Their only concern is what they can get from you, how much it will cost them, and... that’s it, really.

They aren’t fundamentally evil or malicious, but they do have the capacity to be more cruel and malicious than the average person. Given the right conditions, they will strike without a second thought.

It’s imperative, then, that you learn how to spot a psychopath so you can make more informed decisions on what role you want them to play in your life.

How much should you care what others think? Everyone cares at least a little. The key is that the reactions of others can tell you what to modify in yourself.

I’ve always seen the opinions of others as a paradox.

We’ve all heard people say they don’t care what anyone thinks of them.

Well, that’s sort of impossible. If you didn’t care what people thought of you, you would never take time to cater your reputation or really even talk to people in general, since their opinion of you is a non-issue.

Obviously the spirit of this mantra of “no fucks given” is meant to combat the neuroticism that leads to the criticism or hate of others keeping you from pursuing what you want to pursue, but there is something to be said about learning from criticism.

Criticism, and even hate, can highlight possible areas of improvement, especially in regards to how you communicate your thoughts and ideas, either verbally or non-verbally.

In other words, if someone dislikes what you say or do, many times it’s how you come off doing it, not necessarily what you actually did.

And if we completely ignore the criticisms of others, we are missing out on possible improvements, no?

For instance, the advice of a mentor or teacher is criticism, but it comes from a place of compassion. He wants you to see how he sees your flaws, because he wants you to fix them, since it’s your desire to become better.

A story about a guy who never bothers to develop his social skill set. How does life unfold for a man who chooses not to learn to socialize and date?

Lucien was always a bit of an outsider. Though he wasn’t one of the nerds in school. Sometimes he joined in on making fun of them, just to prove the point. Mostly he just ignored those kids though. He had his own loose group of friends he rolled with: Elliot among them.

After high school, they mostly went separate ways. One friend went to a community college, and another went to work in his father’s construction business. Elliot and Lucien both went to a state university.

The two friends had heard stories about how easy the women were at Trent State. They anticipated a bountiful stream of willing coeds in school. Their long years of high school dry spells – they thought – were done.

They arrived on campus and looked around. Hot young girls in tight pants and mini skirts everywhere. The girls sat on park benches. Walked down campus sidewalks. Laughed with friends and hung out alone. “Geez,” said Elliot. “This place is a gold mine!” He looked at Lucien. “Come on, we’ve got to talk to these girls!”

Lucien went with Elliot, and Elliot chatted up a pair of girls seated on the grass. The girls seemed to like Elliot – they laughed at his jokes and brushed at their hair. But Lucien didn’t know what to do. Elliot seemed like he suddenly knew all the right things to say; Lucien just felt adrift.

Elliot tried to include Lucien – “This is my best friend Lucien. He’s one of the most awesome people I know” – but all Lucien could do was spit out a few boring lines of conversation and both girls would return their focus to Elliot again. Eventually Lucien gave up his attempts to talk. He watched Elliot for a while, but began to envy him. So he stopped watching, tuned out Elliot and the girls, and stared off into the campus.

If some guy tells you “bros before hoes”, you should probably put your guard up. It isn’t always a conscious thing when men violate this rule, though.

Whenever I hear a guy say “bros before hoes,” my first thought is “Sure, unless there’s a really hot ho in the room.”

As with most morality, you can rest assured that if someone is espousing it or is enforcing it on others, it is in the service of self-interest. This doesn’t necessarily negate the positive outcome of enforcing the specific ethic, but one should be skeptical of anyone virtue signaling, because despite the possible positive outcomes of the ethic, you might still become a casualty when the espouser doesn’t follow it.

This is the nature of trust, is it not? You expect one to act a certain way, especially since they’ve professed to be a keeper of such virtue, because you will bring them into situations where, if they don’t follow it, they could hurt you.

Unfortunately, almost without exception, every person who earnestly supports an ethic will at some point contradict it.

Thus it is highly advised that you be careful who you give the chance to put one over on you.

Now, I’m not saying that nobody is your friend or that any guy would cross you if it lands him a hot girl; but I am saying that, most of the time, he will, excluding the following conditions.

1. His chances with the girl are low, even if he does cross you

2. You provide A LOT for him

In other words, he might be able to tool you or be rude to you for a girl, but he probably won’t if his odds with the gal are low, or if you provide for him, socially or monetarily. That girl’s pussy might feel good, but is it worth losing a connection? This is how sociopaths think twenty-four hours a day.

This may seem like a cynical view, but my experience says otherwise. You can see the dark truths of the world and still be optimistic. You can love life but not walk down Southside Chicago at 2am. It’s unnecessary.

Same with thinking that guys are going to value your friendship over the prospect of pussy. It’s unnecessary and ignores the primal truth of the world – we’re in this for the pussy (and the gals are in it for the cock).

This should be your first assumption with most of your friends, if not all of them.