Ep. #12 Routines and Pick Up Lines 101 with The Don

[The Don]: Hey, how you doing?

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, man.

[The Don]: Great.

[Angel Donovan]: So, yeah, just going back, so you’ve been with Love Systems since 2006 way back when it was Mystery Method Corporation, pretty much one of the first guys there, right?

[The Don]: Yeah, yeah, I was one of the early people at the company, yeah, back when it was Mystery and Sin and Matador and everybody, way back when.

[Angel Donovan]: Cool. Must have been fun times. It must have been fun to see how the whole thing has grown and changed over time too.

[The Don]: Yeah, it’s gotten really, really big, but you know, I think the way it’s sort of caught on has been mostly because of The Game initially, but it seems like as time has gone on, like when we first had students and stuff it seemed like everybody came to us only because of The Game. Everybody had read the book. But more recently I think it’s caught on almost more word-of-mouth. It’s interesting. It’s changed how students find us, from the Internets, from forums like you guys have. A lot of people are referrals from other friends who have taken it before. So it’s definitely widened it’s sort of circle of appeal I think outside of just the pickup people who had come to it through The Game.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So you coauthored the Routines Manuals with Savoy and you also headed up the interviews for like the first 35 of them, the Interview Series for Love Systems.

[The Don]: Yeah, I did.

[Angel Donovan]: So what I wanted to do is like talk to you a bit about the routines since there were these two Routines Manuals that you guys have been using for quite a while pretty much. I mean, when did you write those? Was it back in 2007 or…?

[The Don]: No, to be honest I…I think it might have been 2008 or…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: Yeah, it might have been 2008 when we did it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: Just so many people had asked for something like that after I did a lot of bootcamps. I started doing them 2006 and just I started out helping Sin, and then I started doing my own. That was like the number one request, is like, “Where can we get a compilation of routines?” It definitely needed to be done.

But at the same time, you know, it serves a certain purpose but it’s not the end-all, be-all of what you need to know. I mean, we like to sort of offer with a caveat that you have to understand why these things work, not just go out and say them like a parrot. So it’s important to understand the principles behind it and why, but there’s sort of a balance to be had, I think, because people who just sort of speak in general principles and sort of theoretics, it’s hard for guys who are learning this to go out and really internalize it and use it. So you need a routine sort of from the very beginning to get you rolling and give you tangible things to go out and do, but at the same time you have to sort of get those general principles in your head and be able to come up with things that sound like routines on the fly.

So it’s more like a list of examples of things to teach yourself to improvise. That's kind of really the way I thought of it when we wrote it. We don’t want people to just go out and regurgitate this stuff word for word nonstop, but it’s sort of what good improvisation should sound like, and when you’re starting in the very beginning, things to actually say [laughs] because…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: …you know, for a guy who’s out on a bootcamp for the first time, it’s a pretty terrifying experience. So giving them just something tangible to work with from the very, very beginning I think is really important. It’s like training wheels. And then eventually the training wheels can come off.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So it sounds like one of the main reasons was to give the guys something to say, so when they’re nervous they can just kind of fall back on that. But I’m also thinking like one of the reasons was to give them ideal examples of some of the things that you’re trying to teach them, because you can explain in the abstract, “Okay, you should say it like this and you can get the theory and everything,” but sometimes it’s very hard to grasp that until you’ve seen an actual example of how it’s put into place.

[The Don]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the thing, it’s sort of like a platonic ideal of what a good made-up conversation will sound like. As you get better at the stuff, it gets easier to come up with things that sound like routines without writing it down beforehand or thinking of it. But also it’s important like when you discover something that works really well for yourself to write those things down, like this sort of conversational thread seems to work very well every single time, so I’ll go back to that. I’ll use that.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: And you work up your own little bag of tricks that isn’t just routines but…I mean, good conversationalists do that anyway.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: You’ll hear them tell the same story a few times if you’re around them a lot.

[Angel Donovan]: And it gets better as time goes on, like you’ll find one of your best buddies, he’ll tell you a story, right?

[The Don]: Yeah, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And you’ll hear him tell that story 10 times, and on the tenth time he's really got it down…

[The Don]: Absolutely, yeah. You know where the jokes are, you know where the punch lines hit, you know when to take a break if there’s an emotional moment, anything. It’s definitely a presentation thing that some people just do naturally. Some people don’t ever even think about it, but guys don’t come to bootcamps or [laughs] like that, you know.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. So how would you advise people to use routines? I’m guessing like everyone isn’t the same, so some people want to rely on the more or longer…what are like the kind of extremes that you’ve seen where it’s worked well and maybe some examples of where it hasn’t worked well and any pitfalls to avoid?

[The Don]: Yeah, I think they’re generally frontloaded more, like they happen earlier in the interaction, for the most part, especially for a beginner, because that's when you have basically no connection yet. You’re not a person in their mind that they can have a conversation with. They don’t understand who you are. You don’t have anything, any common ground to work off of. So you’re basically in a position of doing sort of attention-getting in the early part of the interaction.

So this stuff, it’s conversational threads that can be done almost generally to get a reaction. The further you are into the conversation, the more personalized it’s going to become, so the more silly a lot of times a routine will seem if you’ve got a personalized conversation.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: But at the beginning, we have these things that are sort of more suited to appeal to women in general. And also, cutting through the ice is kind of puzzling for some people who don’t naturally go out and socialize with strangers, so it gives them a way to do it that's been tested, and it works for them. So you’re generally going to stack them up towards the front. Once you get some interest in a general sense, in like, “Oh, this person’s funny, interesting,” whatever, then you can start to personalize it and you move away from routines. It’s more sort of personalized comfort stuff.

There are also comfort routines in the Routines Manual, but let's face it, in a conversation that goes on for an hour and a half, what are you going to do, plow 50 routines into a whole comfort thing? You can’t do that. So you have to rely more on general principles in the comfort phase and then occasionally hit a three-pointer or something if you need to with a routine or some sort of pre-thought-out conversational thread that you’re going to go into.

So, yeah, generally I’m going to think of them as frontloaded, used for openers, used for attraction, getting some attention, and then from there, backing off from it a little bit and be a little more normal, and hitting them once in a while.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Alright. It sounds like it’s something that you might always use when you run out of something to say. For whatever reason, you’re on a date or whatever, you run out of things to say, it’s something to fall back on in those situations. It’s kind of like a security belt.

[The Don]: Yeah, and some of them will move you forward too, but yeah, absolutely. I mean, having a whole headful of this stuff will prevent you from hitting that awkward silence that everybody dreads.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: Even the stupidest thing, I mean, just an opener. I mean, openers are just usually silly conversational pieces or it’s just really old-fashioned ones that nobody really uses anymore like the opinion openers and stuff. But if you really don’t have anything to say, an opinion opener, and you can be 50 minutes into the conversation, an opinion opener is just an interesting conversational topic that you could bust out instead of turning into a stuttering mess.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: So yeah, absolutely, it’s also definitely an emergency stopgap when you need it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So, I mean, routines, are they something that you still use today personally or how does it go?

[The Don]: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Maybe less so, but a lot of times they become more abstract. You’ll have certain sort of threads you go into. But a lot of what we do now is kind of like teasing and role-playing.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: But a lot of the same teases will come up over and over again, and a lot of the same role-players will come up over and over again, like I’ll joke around with them I’m a male stripper, and I’ll start referring to myself in the third person by my male stripper name, which is Bamboo, and then I’ll just keep referring to Bamboo in the third person as I’m talking about myself. And it’ll just go on and I’ll kind of improvise around that, but it’s a theme that continues throughout the conversation.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: It’s silly and it’s stupid but it’s the same sort of thread, I just do it different every single time.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. That's interesting because the routine, like people think of them as it’s a scripted conversation, right?

[The Don]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And it’s very, very structured. But what you’re talking about there is more like you have themes or ideas or concepts that you kind of bring into your conversation routinely, quite often. So maybe they’re a set of 10 subjects which you tend to use in different ways, 10 different teases or 10 different ways to develop comfort and so on.

[The Don]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you might have some sort of thing where she is your mascot for the night, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: You have her do things for you and do tricks and do silly things like that, and that’ll keep coming up. You could pretend you’re gay the whole time, just do like weird things and pretend that you’re gay and talk about guys with her. Meanwhile, you’re hitting on her like in between it, but going back to that, and then just run that theme kind of on and off. The thing is don’t beat it like a dead horse.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, yeah.

[The Don]: It’s like making conversation and then hitting it again, because jokes that pay off later on but not too often, like callback humor, things are a lot of times funnier when they come up the third time in an unexpected way. So if you can set some of those into the conversation too… and then you’ll get an idea of which ones work with you and improve the conversation, and none of it is necessarily even scripted.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah, right, right. So, I mean, can you use routines for anything? Like in the manuals, what kinds of routines do you have? Do you have it for lots of different situations and challenges or parts of the pickup that people come across?

[The Don]: Yeah, I mean, in Love Systems there's like the sort of triad model of…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: You know, and it goes like opening, transitioning, attraction, comfort qualification, all that stuff. So the way we did it in the book is we just broke it up by sort of category within the chronology.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: But that said, it’s never written entirely in stone either. I mean, sometimes there are some girls that are more serious that don’t respond to a silly, funny, disqualification-type things in attraction, so then you would move like a comfort-type routine, what would typically 90% of the time be a comfort type of thing because it’s too serious. You’ll move that forward. That can become attraction material.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: And it’s definitely put in in the way that it’s most often going to manifest itself, but you have to be sort of flexible too. Like I said, sometimes an opener, if you’re going to hit an awkward silence an hour into the conversation, sometimes if you can’t think of anything, just the silly openers…just something to say. Like a generic situation, like, “Have you ever read your ex-boyfriend’s email?” Like randomly you just, “Oh my God, my friend had this whole thing,” and it’s just a story to tell.

But ideally, right, you don’t necessarily need those. You should have a whole sort of vocabulary of your own routines after you’ve been doing this for long enough. Like you don’t necessarily need our openers. You can have your own openers. But you should do the same thing. If you have a bunch of sort of opinion-style openers, that can be your emergency fallback when there’s an awkward silence.

The way we’d sort of say to do it is typically like use the Routines Manual first when you go out, and then kind of create your own. We’d tell most guys like make a Word document. Every time you say something awesome and you’re like, “Wow, that was pretty sweet.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: Write them down when you get home. If you go out for a year and do that, you’re going to have your own routines manual, and then you’re not in any danger of anybody using the same stuff as you.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, totally.

[The Don]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So when would be the ideal time for someone to use a routines manual? Because I’m thinking like maybe someone who’s been introduced to a kind of routines-based system, so something like the Love Systems system, should start out with it pretty early.

[The Don]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: It’s kind of funny that I noticed you’re the only guys who have put out a routines manual, which is kind of strange given the emphasis that a lot of people put on them.

[The Don]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Why do you think that is, just because it’s hard work to put it all together or…?

[The Don]: Yeah, it was definitely a pain in the ass. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[The Don]: Yeah, it was a big pain in the ass to put together. And then we did the second one, so we have two of them that are out.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: The first one was so popular, then we had so many sort of requests for another one that we did it. I don’t know, I mean, I think that it’s a really good question. When we were like putting it together we were kind of asking ourselves the same thing, why didn’t we do it sooner?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: But, you know, I’m not really sure [laughs]. I guess it’s easier to sort of talk in generalities about this stuff a lot of times, and then when you give concrete examples and you have to like dig through and try and find the best ones, ones that are really going to work so you’re not steering people in the wrong direction and ones that most guys can relate to, you know…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah.

[The Don]: …then one way or another, you know, some of them are very specific to the people who say them or particular personality types, so a lot of that was hard to do. And then also, it’s sort of an overview of the whole triad model and all that stuff in the book, so you have to cover some of the theory at the same time as during the routines so people understand why they were work. Yeah, it’s a lot of work.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: I guess maybe that's why. It becomes almost like an overview of the entire theory plus applied examples of it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. No, I can definitely see how it would be hard work, because you have to make sure everything goes into it right. When anything spans that kind of practical detail, it does take time to make sure it’s right.

[The Don]: Yeah, absolutely. And then, yeah, when you’re giving an example, if a book is mostly theory you’d only have to give a few examples. This is sort of almost end-to-end examples, which I think is useful. I mean, people are going to get more out of…you learn by seeing it done and seeing what it actually is. When you talk about the theory, if you haven’t seen a guy go out and do it or you haven’t sort of understood exactly what types of things they’re saying, it’s pretty tough to internalize it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I think another thing to think about, I guess, like for someone who’s interested in routines, is like what of learning style you have, because some people, they can read something which is more theoretical and they get it and they’re able to apply it very easily…

[The Don]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: But other people, they really need those concrete examples. So you’ve got to kind of appreciate what kind of learning style you have.

[The Don]: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Absolutely. And like I said, you can’t just learn by reading routines and parroting them either. You have to understand why they work. And each routine in the book has its own commentary, so we sort of explain why this works and what the general objective is of it and what you’re trying to do. Because yeah, if you don’t understand why it works, you’ll never sort of progress to the next level, which is coming up with your own stuff on the fly. Because you’ve seen how a good example works, you can sort of mimic the spirit of it rather than just the words.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So like if someone was going to, I mean, or they had decided they wanted to just use routines and they were going to get this, when do you think would be the ideal time like to get this Routines Manual which would actually help them having all of these routines? What should they have studied first or done first before they think about doing this?

[The Don]: I mean, it helps if you’ve read Magic Bullets, which is sort of our introductory book.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: That's definitely a help, but, I mean, we cover a lot of that stuff in the Routines Manual as well, just sort of the basic structure. But I mean, yeah, a very, very beginner would benefit from it, and then if you’ve been doing it for a while, it doesn’t hurt to have more stuff in your arsenal. You’re going to come across a couple of things, no matter who you are, that are going to be things that you haven’t seen before that are going to be useful for you, yeah, that are going to probably become staples for you at some point, in there.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: So yeah, I think it can apply to just about anybody. It’s structured enough that a beginner can come in and it doesn’t have to have everything like mastered, but if you’re serious about this stuff and you’re really dedicated to it, like you said, it’s the only sort of encyclopedia of this stuff that's out there. So it’s kind of like I think a must-have for anybody who’s into it.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, you know, once you’ve got it, how do you use it, like how would you study it and put it into practice?

[The Don]: We’re big proponents of use your phone.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[The Don]: Take the stuff that you like the most, create a notepad in your phone, and then put just…you have to learn them…the thing is, you don’t have to learn them word for word, you have to learn them idea for idea. So if there's a long sort of paragraph of stuff, you don’t have to sit there and get it exactly right, but in that paragraph there are probably three ideas that are being worded. So you can word them in your own way, but just make sure you hit all of the ideas, hit the funny part at the right time, and move on. But you can say it in your own language. So just get that idea, sort of the point, down. Sometimes I tell people to write those down next to it.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: Okay, you read this routine, it’s a half a page paragraph long with a couple of breaks, but like what are the ideas? What are the main ideas that you have to hit? Write those down on a sheet of paper. Once you have those ideas down, which isn’t that hard to remember, like it’s a lot easier than remembering word for word, then just put the name of the routine in a notepad. Like, say, you have openers, attraction routines, put the names of three routines in there.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: And then once you’re in a conversation, when you get stuck sometimes, you can just pretend [laughs] you’re looking for a message or something…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Yeah. Yeah.

[The Don]: …pull up the notepad and see it. That's when you’re…I mean, that's more of a beginner thing. As you get further into this stuff, you’re not really going to do that anymore. And you get better at holding this stuff in your head I think the longer you do it.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[The Don]: Braddock usually describes it like…it becomes like Google in your head once you get pretty good. You start being able to like, she says something about a trip somewhere, search starts spinning in your head and you pull up either some natural story that you have, some routine you have that's relate to a trip or something like that, and it just hits when it’s supposed to. But the only way you get there is by having a whole lot of stuff in your head and relaxing so that your brain can work too.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right, right. So should they study all of the routines all at the same time or take them a few by a few, like you said, like note down three? So how would you…

[The Don]: Let's say they’re a beginner, that they’re going to be learning, they’re usually going to get good at each sort of step. They’ll get good at opening and then fuck up the attraction part, the early part of attraction, then they’ll get better at attraction and just have it go nowhere, kind of fizzle out, then they’ll get better at comfort. So if you’re a beginner and you’re learning opening and attraction, just learn that stuff until you have that down. That's really the most important thing in general. I mean, the first 15 minutes, if you can get that down and get most girls hooked, your whole life will change as far as with women.

So comfort stuff, most guys can figure out how to do that. There are definitely some tricks. The trick with comfort is you’re mostly going to act normal but you want to accelerate the intimacy. You want to do things to make it move faster than it would if you just sort of left it to its own devices. So there’s stuff in the Routines Manual about how to do that, how to accelerate. You like each other, but how do you keep this from dragging out to five dates and being, you know, like a less exciting process.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah.

[The Don]: So that's sort of the purpose in like the routines in the comfort section there. But yeah, for guys that are starting out, the first 15 minutes in getting girls interested, hooked and attracted, that's the bread and butter of this. If you can do that all the time, then, you know, even if you screwed up stuff later on, you’re still going to end up with a lot more girls than you did before.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great, great. So like in to set expectations, how much practice does it take? If you’re using a routine, are you going to get it right the first times and does that depend on the person or what’s the typical curve?

[The Don]: Well it's like they don’t know you screwed up, only you do. Don’t flinch. The whole thing is, they only know that you screwed up when you flinch. So even if you say something stupid or if a girl says something that jars you, as long as you don’t flinch, you’re not going to have a negative response from here necessarily, unless what you said is completely retarded.

But again, if you’re just doing the routines based on the ideas of the routine and not trying to say it word for word, it shouldn’t come out unnatural. It should come out in your own words. But the way they’re worded in the Routines Manual sort of helps you understand how to do it in a polished sort of way.

So yeah, I think be willing to make mistakes and go out and do it, but just realize like there are times where you think you’re screwing up horribly and everything’s over and it’s just totally fucked up, and it’s just you getting down on yourself because you lost the train of thought or you didn’t deliver it exactly the way you wanted to. They don’t see that as much as you do.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I remember way back in 2004, 2003 or something, TD from RSD…

[The Don]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …Real Social Dynamics, he was writing a lot about routines, and obviously that's why they’re in The Game, because they were being used a lot at the time.

[The Don]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And I remember he wrote this post about how long it took to learn to do a routine properly, and it went something like the first 10 times you use a routine, it’s going to suck. The next 20 times it’s going to be like average. Then, the next 20 times it’s going to be really good. So you had this learning kind of curve instead of expectation of how many times you’d have to put it into practice in order to get good. Have you got any feedback on that time scale?

[The Don]: I think it depends on how experienced you are in general, like if you took me or Braddock or somebody and you’re like, “Well, go do this routine on some girl. Go talk to some girl and fit this routine in,” I think I could probably deliver it almost 100% the first time out as long as I like had it right in my head. I’d find a way to deliver it the right way.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah.

[The Don]: And so would he and so would a lot of the other guys that are really good. So if you’ve been experienced, I think you can just be like, “Oh, that's fucking money,” and then go out and use it that night and probably kill with it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yup.

[The Don]: In the beginning, if you’re not used to talking to girls that much and not used to how much you can get away with and the fact that they don’t know what mistakes you’re making and things like that, once you relax about it I think you could do it a lot better. But yeah, for a beginner, you’re going to like…your inner critic is more harsh I think when you’re a beginner.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: So I think that's what causes some problems for guys when they’re trying to do, because they’re critiquing themselves the entire time they’re doing it. So that's going to be getting in the way.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: Whereas like I feel like I could probably go do…I might fuck it up, but I won’t care that much, so it probably won’t necessarily even register.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that's an excellent point. You shouldn’t be trying to execute these routines perfectly.

[The Don]: Yeah, actively trying to do it perfectly is probably what’s going to [laughs] screw you up.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, hey, Scott, this has been a great coverage of routines. It’s got a lot of insights into it. Have you got anything else to add that we missed?

[The Don]: Yeah. Like I said, just remember, it is really useful to learn routines and they’re like a really important tool in the whole process, but try to not just learn the routines. Try to figure out why they’re good, what makes them good. And then in your improvisations, which are inevitable, most of the conversations you’re going to have no matter what you do are going to be improvised, try to implement those principles, the ideas of teasing her over things and role-playing and finding ways to connect and all the things that you’ll see that get done by the routines, find a way to do them on your own.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. So the end goal is to understand why the routines work and…

[The Don]: Yeah, because improvisations do exactly what the routines do.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[The Don]: That's really what’s the sort of end goal is for sure.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. Excellent. Alright man, thanks for this. It’s been great talking to you.

[The Don]: Absolutely. Take care.