Ep. #23 "What I Stopped Doing to Get Better Results" 10 Years of The Game with Jackson Hunter

[Angel Donovan]: Hey there, this is another episode of Dating Skills Podcast, and today we have one of our editors, Jackson. And Jackson’s been around for around 10 years, and actually Jackson and I go a long way back because we had a company in the UK way back in 2003-2004. We were just doing dating coaching at the time, called Impact Interaction. So that’s kind of how we met. Hey Jackson, great to have you on.

[Jackson Hunter]: How you doing, Angel?

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, since it's great to have you on here.

[Jackson Hunter]: Good to be on the show, mate.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So, can you just give us like a quick background on when you got into this—it was around 10 or 11 years ago, I think—and kind of how you first got into it.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. I guess I had a similar sort of story to most guys. I was just terrible with women growing up. I didn't know how to meet women, how to attract them. I was just very shy, very anxious around women that I didn't know. So I started looking for answers online and I found a few different sites, some different advice. Started trying it out with some success here and there, but wasn’t till I moved over to London, met up with a bunch of different guys, yourself included, going out and really trying different things, putting into practice what we learned and started to get results, see what was working, see what wasn’t working, and just sort of coming up with a formula, I guess, for being able to go out, meet women everywhere, and get some dating success. So that was, yeah, about 10 or 11 years ago. Time flies.

[Angel Donovan]: Too fast. Way too fast. So, Jackson and I were talking a minute ago and what we said we would focus this episode on is, since Jackson’s been around for 10 years, we talk about the things that he's learned over time which didn't work out so well and he's kind of left by the wayside afterwards, so kind of the things that he was doing for a while and we’d learned to do, and later on he found out there are better ways of doing it and he kind of dropped those things and moved on to other things.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the biggest difference when we first got into this and now is these days there's just so much commotion out there for new guys who are starting out. There's thousands upon thousands of different books you can read, DVD courses, products, seminars. Back when we first got into it, there were a few forums online. There were maybe one or two guys who had some products or workshops about dating, but all of this information wasn’t as accessible as it is today.

So back then it was a matter of talking with guys who were in a similar situation, sharing some theories on why and trying out what they thought worked, reporting back what we did. And there were just, you know, I don't know how many guys were seriously into this, maybe a hundred to 200 guys who were posting on a regular basis back then. It was a much more complicated process of going out and just refining everything. If you get into it now, there's so much more information out there that you can put into practice.

So, I mean, there were a number of things that I was trying out 10 years ago that at the time I thought that's the way to do it, that's what somebody has recommended, whereas today I would feel retarded that even trying some of these ideas are just ridiculous. But at the time, when you don't know any better, you try everything and see what works and throw away what doesn’t, and you need to continue the process. So, even now, I mean, I'm probably doing things that even a couple of years I wouldn't have thought was possible, but it's just trying different things, pushing the envelope.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson Hunter]: You start to see what you can get away with, developing things from there. So I'm sure in a few more years I’ll be doing things different from what I'm doing today. But yeah, what we want to do is try and give guys a few tips that they can, I guess, shortcut their learning curve so they can stay away from the things that aren't really going to be that effective in getting results…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson Hunter]: …and then focus all their time on what’s going to get them the most results for the least time possible.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: So, I mean, I think the first thing that guys really need to do is to work out what they actually want from this. Most guys who get into this, they say, “I just want to be good with women,” which is great, but it's also a very vague concept. So what does being good with women mean to you? For every guy, it's going to be something different. One guy might be going out getting a bunch of phone numbers, for other guys it's going to be taking girls home from a bar every night, other guys want to get a girlfriend and maybe get married. So you need to work out what you actually want and find people who have had similar success in that area, try and learn from them.

I mean, there are guys out there who are teaching pitching techniques and things that are going to be great for going out in a nightclub, picking up girls in loud, high-energy clubs. If you're the kind of guy that's looking for a girlfriend who’s maybe a shy girl who doesn’t go out a lot, hangs out in the library studying, spending all your time learning techniques for going out and picking up girls in high-energy clubs probably isn't going to get you what you want out of this. So you need to focus on what's going to make you happy and try and spend all your time I guess searching for information that's going to take you in that direction.

[Angel Donovan]: So that's an excellent point and it's an excellent starting point, and it's kind of funny because I was thinking about this exact stuff this week because, like I was saying just a minute ago, I read Hypnotica’s new book and it says a lot about what do you want to do rather than how you do it, which as we know, having been in this for a while, is that… I think, like let's see if we kind of went through the same courses that we started out with one objective and… I think what happened to me was that I kind of got hijacked toward, like distracted, and I started chasing other goals…

[Jackson Hunter]: Yup.

[Angel Donovan]: And then after a while you kind of come back full circle to whatever was the idea you roughly had, which wasn’t very well-formed, you know…

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And you kind of come back to that, and then you start actually getting the happiness and the satisfaction from it.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I know for myself once I got into it fairly hardcore, I had times where I was doing things and trying things that took me in the total opposite direction from what I probably wanted initially, but you don’t even realize it at the time. You're so focused on it and you can't see the bigger picture. Yeah, you definitely can get sidetracked and you're doing things that are wasting your time and also taking you somewhere that you don’t even want to go. So that's something that you definitely need to keep an eye out for.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson Hunter]: When we first got into it, I remember it was all about, I guess, trying to learn what lines worked the best with women, like what are the best techniques to use and best information that everybody wanted. And one of the earliest guys that was teaching was a guy called David DeAngelo, who a lot of our listeners are probably familiar with. And he had a DVD program that he released, and he was talking about how all the guys that come to him, they were, “I want the best lines you've got. I want the best approaches, the best techniques to make girls attracted to me,” and he was trying to teach them that what you really want to be focusing on is the inner game. You need to build up your confidence and work on yourself so that you don’t need to use all these techniques, so it just sort of happens naturally. But the guys couldn't understand that. They were so focused on what to say.

And I was the same way. I don't know if you had that experience as well, but I was focused on everything I can say to make a girl like me. And I think so many guys that get into it, they’re in that exact same situation, but it's hard to tell someone these are the things that you really need to focus on unless you've been through that experience and learned it for yourself.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: So, yeah, go on.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so, I mean, I’d say this is one of the hardest things because I think it relies a lot on experience. There are things that you can't see without having experienced them, and in some ways there are wrong turns that you're going to have to make, but you just kind of want to limit those as much as possible. And I think one of the key things is to, like you said, try and keep a specific goal in mind, and also trying to keep an open mind about things that you can't see about how it's working. So you're saying that people are focused on what to say, and someone says, “Well, it's not about that. All you have to do is be more confident,” and it's a hard concept to understand. But if someone’s saying that and you respect them because you've seen that their material is good and they seem to have the lifestyle that you want to get to, which is your specific goal, then you've kind of got to stick with that. And it's going to be maybe a little bit harder to understand at first, but if you stick with it, you will get there.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a difference between knowing something on a surface level and knowing something on a deep gut level after experiencing it yourself.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson Hunter]: So one of the things when I first got into this, one of the beliefs that people were saying you need to develop is the belief that women enjoy sex as much as men do, and I read and at the time I was like, “Well, that doesn’t match my experience, but this is what people are saying, so I'm going to choose to believe it.” But it wasn’t until I had that experience of going out and having it happen again and again and again that I actually internalized it and it became my belief and I was able to, I guess, modify my behaviors to incorporate that new belief.

If you tell a guy women are more attracted to your personality than your looks, if he has the experience of going out and women are rejecting him again and again and again, he's going to believe, “Well, that's not true. My looks are affecting my success with women.” If you're able to change the way he approaches women, the way he interacts with them, the way he flirts with them, the way that women respond to him so that he gets positive responses, he can start to develop that belief that, “Okay, my personality is more important in attracting women than my looks.” But it's not until you have those positive experiences that you're able to really internalize that new belief.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah, so it's a question of kind of like seeing is believing, and sometimes you have to see it several times as well or many more times.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I've had a number of experiences when I was first getting into this where I was told certain things like, you know, “This is what’s important,” or “This is what you need to do.” I said, “Oh, okay, that's how it works.” So I might have gone out and approached a girl and thought that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, but I was still doing it all with these bad beliefs because I guess your beliefs are probably the hardest thing to change. I guess that's why people are more interested in the lines and the techniques and the tactics because that's something you can adopt and use straight away, whereas to actually change your beliefs on a deep level, it takes a bit of time. You can't just do that overnight.

So I think it's, in one way, I mean, I went out and I made a lot of mistakes with women. I did things that don’t really work. But at the same time, that was great because I was able to see what’s not working. I was able to put things into practice and gather evidence in the real world. So I was able to change my beliefs slowly over time based on the results that I was seeing.

So I think for guys out there who are afraid to go out and mess up, make mistakes, you're not really going to waste your time by going out and trying something. If it doesn’t work, you're going to see, “Okay, this is one way that I tried, didn't get the best results for me. Let me try this other way.” So you learn from every experience. There's no failure. There's only learning. So at the end of the day, you've got nothing to lose by going out, talking to some women, trying out different techniques, trying out different mindsets, and seeing what works best for you from there.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. And so I think there's another thing to that, is that you have to really put kind of like 100% in and really do exactly… experiment exactly with the approach that you're looking at and trying to learn from. A lot of the people who are unsuccessful at this, it's because they half-ass it, right?

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: They say, “I want to try this,” but underneath they're afraid or they don’t think it's going to work, so they don’t go all out, they don’t put that best effort in to make it as good as possible, and they don’t try it the 10 times it might take to get it right. So I think a lot of people who stumble and eventually maybe even give up, this is actually what’s happening, is just that it can take a lot to do something. Well, it seems pretty easy, but it can take a lot of effort to do it the right way. And if you do it a half-ass way, you're going to get mediocre results, and then you're going to start blaming it and you're going to say, “Oh, this doesn’t work.”

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, especially too when you're first starting out, like with anything, the first time that you try it, you're going to have to put in more work because you don’t have anything to start from. It's like if you were going to the gym or if you're 50 pounds overweight and you decide, “I'm going to go to the gym once a week for half an hour,” you're not going to get the results that you need. You're going to have to go to the gym four, five days a week, put in the time, put in the effort to lose that weight. But once you get a base level of fitness, you can probably go to the gym once, twice a week, and just maintain what you've already worked to achieve.

And I think it's the same with approaching and dating women. When we first started doing this, we went out a lot. I mean, I don't know about you, but I think I was out seven nights a week, either out in bars and clubs approaching women or on dates with women that I've met on those other nights. So I was out probably for a year pretty much every single night. So you put in more effort to start to build up your base level of competence. But now, I mean, I could probably get away with going out once a fortnight, and after doing one or two warmup approaches, it will just come back straight away because it's like muscle memory. It's ingrained inside you. And once you've put in the work to develop the base skills, you don’t need to work as hard once you've got that initial experience.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And there's something about the frequency as well when you're first starting out, because it's like when you're trying to put in place new habits…

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: If you're doing it very, very frequently, it becomes much, much easier. But if you space it out once per week… And this happened to me when I was busy, and at some points I found that really things weren't moving forward. I wasn’t getting better. I didn't have the time. I wasn’t putting the time in or I wasn’t going out enough or seeing enough women or just being around women enough to get better at it at that time. But as soon as you start making it a daily thing, as you said that, yeah, we went through these intense, then you start seeing like literally every few days you're getting new epiphanies, you're starting to believe more, you're starting to see things that you heard people talk about in the DVDs or the books or whatever it is.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. Yeah, I think, initially, like you're really trying to overcome 20, 30, 40 years of bad habits depending on what age you get into this. So when I got into it I was about 20 years old, so I had 20 years of bad habits that I needed to try and correct. So if I'm going out once a week, once every two weeks, talking to one or two girls, it's not going to be enough to overcome what I've been doing for 20 years. So you really need to put that effort in and literally sort of shock your system into growing and developing and learning new ways of behaving. And if you're able to do that and get past that initial pain period, then it becomes that bit easier as you go on and on until you get to the stage where I guess you don’t even really think about it. I mean, I've been out times with you where we're walking down the street in London and I'm talking to you, and I turn around and you've disappeared, and you're off down the street talking to some girl and getting a number, and I guess you're not even really thinking about it. It just becomes part of who you are in your daily life.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Interestingly, just as a side note, is that, I mean, that used to be really automatic to me to the point where it was actually difficult to stop. [Laughs] So at one time I felt like a recovering, [laughs] I don’t what you call it, but a recovering something.

[Jackson Hunter]: [Laughs] Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: But I'm over that now and I don’t get these urges to kind of approach women and talk to them all the time like I used to. I don’t talk to a lot of people about it, but it's… I guess that you can see that people are really pliable and you can become what you want because, you know, before we started all of this, like walking up to a girl and talking to her was like just a crazy experience that you'd never think of doing, right?

[Jackson Hunter]: Sure.

[Angel Donovan]: And there was a one negative point to this, this point where if I tried to go and pass, I literally could not walk past without talking to her. It got pretty out of hand. Basically, I decided at one point that if she was a really nice, high-quality girl that I should approach her, and after following that role for a while, it became so automatic that it was hard not to do.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And then I had to kind of work to erase that afterwards, so to just be able to relax, you know, and once you've tried to go walk past and not have to take that opportunity, right? You can let opportunities go all the time as well.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to remember as well like there's a difference between being conscientious about this and going out and making a real effort, so to get good with women, and becoming obsessive to the point where this overtakes your life and you won't do anything else.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson Hunter]: You don’t want to end up in that stage, and I've seen plenty of guys who end up there. They can't go out without talking to every woman they see, and to the point where they don’t do anything else. If they're not talking to women, they get miserable and depressed. They need the constant feedback and stimulus from a woman’s positive reactions to feel good about themselves, or they just turn weird, like it's hard to explain. But guys who take this too far, I think they lose sight of why they get into this in the first place.

For me, it was I wanted to have choice with women. I wanted to have options. I wanted to be able to go out and meet women in different situations, and I wanted to do that to improve my life. I didn't want to do it so that it overtook my life, and some guys they lose sight of that and become obsessive about it. And you need to watch out as well because you can end up at a stage where you're putting in more and more work into this, talking to more and more women, and you're probably going backwards because you're losing your own sense of identity and who you are as a person. You're losing touch with all these other interests that make you who you are, and you're just so focused on approaching women and getting great reactions from them. It can just take it into some really dark places. You should watch out for that as well.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, totally agree with you. It's kind of like it's crowding out the rest of you, you know?

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: You can have all of these great things going for you, these great interests and these things you're doing in your life which make you who you are and make you that more and more attractive to women and so on, and then if you take this dating advice and studying this stuff and practicing it too much and you become obsessive and it becomes 80% of your life, then, you know… And maybe it's okay for a little while, right? I mean, it's always good to learn something to do intensely from a month or that kind of thing, but if you do it for a while you'll start losing all of that stuff that made you unique and more attractive, and really you should be building out that stuff. And as you said, you're basically going backwards because you're losing some of the things that you could have built out and made stronger, and make yourself more attractive in a sustainable fashion to women rather than in a, how would you say, in any individual interaction, right? So maybe you know what to say and so you say some great things when you first meet a woman, but if you're going to actually start having relationships with women and being with them every day, then you're going to have to go a lot further than the first few conversations that you mastered from focusing on them so much.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, when it comes down to women, they’re going to have a relationship with a guy that they're attracted to, that they like, that they connect with, that they have things in common with. If you're just a guy who goes out to bars and nightclubs every single night trying to talk to as many women as you can and that's all you do, then you're really going to find it hard to find a woman who wants to have a relationship with you.

Women go out to bars and clubs to unwind on the weekend, have a drink, have a dance with their friends, maybe meet a guy. They don’t do that as their whole life. They’ve got other things that they're doing as well. And if you're this one-dimensional club guy that doesn’t have anything else going on, once women find that out, they're going to think that you're weird and they won't want anything to do with you.

And I know that there's a lot of guys who go into this hardcore, even some dating instructors who they couldn't have relationships with women because they had nothing going on in their lives that women were attracted to. They had the ability to make a great first impression. They had all these great stories that they could tell so that women think, “Oh, this guy’s awesome. He's got all this crazy stuff going on. He sounds like so much fun. He's the perfect guy.” But once they actually went out on a date with the guy and started to find out more about him, they found out that he couldn't actually back any of it up. It was just all a front that he used to meet them and impress them, and there was nothing sort of real behind it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, totally. So I guess we're covering the whole subject of being too obsessive and ditching the rest of your life for this, and really, really, you know, if you want to do well at this stuff, you've got to continue working on all the other great things that you're working on in your life, and maybe even work harder at them, because you get rewards from all of these things. So that's obviously a big area where a lot of guys go wrong and they waste a lot of time, or maybe they never really get what they wanted in the first place out of this. What other kind of mistakes along the way did you make?

[Jackson Hunter]: I think I spent too much time focusing on the wrong things that I thought would make me attractive to women.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson Hunter]: I mean, going back 10 years ago when we first got into it, there was a lot more emphasis on, I guess, gimmicks when it comes to meeting women. So there were different things that people advised that were great tools to meet women. If you could master these, then you'd be able to meet any woman and have confidence and attract any woman. So things like palm reading, handwriting analysis, learning astrology, all these sorts of things that they termed as “chick crack.” If you could master these things, that's a great way to get rapport with women and attract women and…

I mean, looking at it now, is learning how to read a woman’s palm going to make you more attractive to her? I mean, I would say no. Is learning how to analyze her handwriting going to make her think, “Oh, this guy knows what my handwriting means. I want to jump into bed with him straight away?” That's not going to happen in reality. Maybe if you learned a few interesting tricks, it might boost your success by 1 or 2% at the most, but that's not focusing on the main areas that are going to make you more attractive as a man.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Mm-hmm.

[Jackson Hunter]: And they were things that I sort of looked into back then. I had a couple of books on palm reading and different sorts of spiritual things. I thought if I can just figure out how to master these, then it will make me more attractive to women and it'll make everything easier, and I was just focusing on the wrong things. If you took palm reading, for example, I mean you could probably spend a year learning everything about what different lines mean, how to interpret everything, and at the end of that year, if you've studied this intently, I’ll say you're not going to do much better with women than when you started. At times, you know, you might even do worse because you've focused so much on that. You forgot about the things that actually make a man attractive to a woman.

So I think focusing on the small details that is okay to do once you've got the core principles in place, you need to prioritize what you're focusing on. So I think that the main things that guys should be working on are just how to approach women, have a natural conversation, how to develop their sense of humor, how to lead women, how to sexually escalate, how to be more masculine, just basically the core things of being a man. I mean, what it comes down to, women want to go out who is confident, is fun, goes for what he wants, and is good in bed and can give them a good time. I think they want a normal guy that they can see themselves with not this weird guy who’s going around reading their palms and telling them all about astrology and doing [00:29:43] readings and all sorts of mystical stuff. They might find that interesting for a while, but they're not attracted to a man because of that.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright. So calling those things gimmicks is a good term, and they really are kind of distractions. And maybe part of the reason these things are interesting to us, they're just kind of like things that we want to use and we're like, “This seems like a good idea,” is that it enables us to kind of hide behind them, right? We don’t have to be ourselves…

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, I think that was the whole idea of indirect game back then that everyone was using that became popular with Mystery and Style and a few other guys, was having this series of routines and openers that you can use to really hide behind, hide your true intent, not have to face up to your fears and not have to risk rejection and put your ego on the line. And that's why most guys get into this, I think. They're afraid of getting rejected by women. They're afraid of what might happen. And when you're able to find a way that says you can approach any woman and you don’t have to risk rejection, it sounds very attractive because here's like this backdoor I found to bypass my biggest fear, and I can still get the same results.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson Hunter]: But over the long-term, you're not confronting the fear that you have, and so it's always going to be there, and so you actually face that front on. You're always going to have that layer. So, I mean, I know when you and I were doing this with a lot of the other guys, it was all about indirect game using all these gimmicks and openers and different things that hid the fact that we were interested in a woman.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: And I don't know how you found it, but the more that I did it, it just… It didn't feel right. There's always this sort of feeling inside of like, “Oh, I'm not really getting where I want to be. I'm not getting past this fear.” There's always something there that sort of feels like it's not quite right.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And, well, for me it made things more complicated, like I found the girls less manageable because they didn't know what was going on a lot of the time…

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …which made them feel uneasy. And you see it basically because they tend to, I don't know what the word is, but maybe bounce around between different emotions…

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …a lot, which just makes the kind of like… It just makes it more challenging to deal with what’s going on, right? And you get some very strange reactions. And back when we were doing it a long time ago and I was really testing a lot of that kind of stuff out, I used to get some very strange reactions from women or very kind of extreme reactions, because they didn't know what to do, you know?

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And maybe they’d just grab you, and then like a second later they're like, “I don't know if I should even talk to you,” and like they were being… They really didn't know where to be, and it meant you had to put a lot more effort into kind of controlling where things were going, whereas, you know, when you make it more, how would you say, natural, then the girl knows where it's going, and it's a lot easier and there's nothing that she can't comprehend about it, and it just makes the whole interaction a lot easier and it means that you don’t have to like deal with basically kind of sidewinders, reactions that you're not going to expect because she's not sure what’s going on so she's going to react in a funny way. So when you're more natural about things and you're not kind of like holding back and keeping a front on, you get less of those more challenging reactions that you have to think on your toes and you have to like, “Okay, what am I going to do with this? Because I've never seen this before.”

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, totally. I've had situations back then where I did all this stuff, I ran all this “game” on women and got their phone number, went on a date with them, and really they were unsure why they were there.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Jackson Hunter]: They weren't sure if I was interested in them…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: …if I was gay or…

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson Hunter]: You know, women would say, “Are you a comedian? You've got all these like funny stories you tell.” And at times where I kissed a woman, and they'd be, “Oh, why did you do that?”

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson Hunter]: And they actually had no idea that I was interested in them because I hadn't expressed that. I guess it was more like a performance rather than an interaction. You've got all these stories and lines that you've practiced on getting out there to elicit a reaction from her, but it's not really taking into account that there's this other person involved in an interaction with you.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: And so it was very strange for the girl.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And that example you gave of where the woman says, “Why did you just kiss me?”

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: You know, that was something that was common to me at the time as well, because they didn't know where you're coming from. And it's not that they didn't want to, they did want to, but they didn't believe you.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Like, “this isn't happening” kind of thing, because, “I don’t understand, because he's acting all weird and now we're kissing and I don’t understand it and I'm not sure what to do.”

[Jackson Hunter]: I had that all the time… Yeah. I had a lot of women say, “Is this happening? Is this real? I don’t understand what’s going on.” It didn't match, I guess, their reality, because they'd never had something like that happen before, which is what I guess we were trying to do, is trying to differentiate ourselves from all the other guys out there so that we're not getting the same reactions. But at the same time, if it's completely out of the ordinary that women don't know what you're doing, they don't know how to respond. They wonder why you're talking to them, and like they get confused by the whole thing.

So you can also end up wasting a lot of time doing that. You can go out on dates with women who possibly have no interest in you at all, but they don't even know that you're into them because you've done such a good job of hiding it and playing these games. You're doing all this push/pull stuff, making them think you're interested and then pushing them away, but in the end it just sort of fries their brains and they're like, “I don’t even know what’s going on.”

[Angel Donovan]: Totally, and of you lose some of the higher-quality women who kind of won't stand for that kind of stuff, who have strong personalities, they know who they are. The higher-quality women, they’ll kind of like be, “I don't know what’s going on with this guy, but it's not right,” and you'll end up losing them and not doing well with those women.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. I think the biggest problem with it is that it puts you in the mindset that you need to keep entertaining a woman, you need to keep coming up with these interesting stories and ideas and routines to keep a woman’s interest, and that if you just relax and have a normal conversation and just be yourself, you think that you're going to lose her, that she's not going to be interested. So you need to keep coming up with new and better ways to hold her attention, which isn't the case at all. But when you go into that mindset, it can be hard to break out of it.

And I know a lot of guys who were seen as being very successful with women. They could go into a club, pick up any woman. When it came to actually going on a date with them, they would have all these scripted stories and routines written on a piece of paper, hidden in their pocket or their wallet, and they'd go out, have a drink with the girl, run through all these stories, then forget what they were going to say next so they'd have to run to the bathroom, take out their piece of paper, read through their notes, like, “Hey, oh, I've said that one. Oh, I haven't done this one. I’ll say this next,” and they're so stuck in their own head that it just weirds women out.

I mean, I've even done similar things myself where I used to have the same conversation topics that I talked about all the time. I thought that I had to run through a list of stories and routines and games if I wanted to get a woman into bed when I was on a date with her.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson Hunter]: Now, later on, I found out that this isn't the case. But at the time, you do it, and especially if it does start working, you think, “Okay, this is how it is.” But once you actually start exploring the possibilities, then you can say, “Okay, well, maybe I don’t need to do this.”

As an example, I remember before the book The Game came out, there was a game that everyone used to do called The Cube.

[Angel Donovan]: I knew you were going to say that. [Laughs]

[Jackson Hunter]: [Laughs] Yeah, maybe some of the readers are familiar with this, maybe they aren't. It's a psychological game, like a visualization tool. You get women to picture certain things in their mind, have her tell you what they are, and then you interpret them and tell her what that means about her, whether there's any validity to it or not. I mean, possibly there is, but that was one of the things that I did every single time I went on a date with a woman, because I was just, “God, this is what you do.”

And so I've been doing it for a little while and I've had some success in getting dates, hooking up with women, having sex, so I just figured, “Okay, this is one of the things that I have to do.” I remember going on a date with a woman one night, and we had a fun time, got back to her house, ended up sleeping with her. The next morning, I realized, “Oh, I didn't run The Cube on her last night. How did that work?” And like I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that there's something that I thought I needed to do all the time, I didn't do it, and I still got the same result. And I actually thought, “Well, if I don’t need to do The Cube, then what else don’t I need to do?” And it was from that point that I started cutting back on a lot of the things that I was doing, trying to get just the absolute minimum of what I needed to do to get the same results so that it was more efficient.

So just focusing on the core basics, the principles of what’s going to get the most success for the smallest investment, and when you're able to do that, you can look at things in a different perspective and think, “Oh, I was just wasting my time for so long doing all these things that I thought were getting me results, but really I was getting results despite doing that.” It wasn’t the fact that I ran The Cube on women and got them to picture different things in their head that they decided to sleep with me. It was just some interesting bit of conversation that we had. Women don’t make the decision to sleep with a man based on one or two routines that you do. They base it on who you are, how you make them feel, and I think once you can see that, you can cut out a lot of the crap that you spend your time focusing on and just focus on the core things that make you attractive as a man.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And something that you brought up several times as you were making your point is being stuck in your own head, and I think that's really a key point because like when you're learning some of this stuff and you're a bit nervous because it's new, you'll focus all your attention on it and trying to execute it right or say it right; however, what you should be doing is just observing. Like if you don’t understand how the woman is in front of you and you're not listening to her properly, then it's really going to go the opposite direction from what you need. So one of the most important things I probably learned over time is there are also times just to shut up and just to become more observant. In fact, one of the best things—I don't know if I just did this naturally by accident or whatever, but I always tended to just observe a lot as well and just kind of pick up things from there, and really I think that helped me to get away from some of the worst habits I picked up…

[Jackson Hunter]: Yup.

[Angel Donovan]: Because if you're not being observant, then you're not going to see that it's having a negative reaction or not the ideal reaction, and you're not going to understand what it's really doing. But as long as you learn to enhance your observation skills and to see how women are reacting to it and learn about women, then over time, even if you have picked up some of the wrong tools, then you should start to be able to calibrate and see, “Oh, that isn't actually working for me.”

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. Definitely. Right. One of the things that you touched on there is just being able to just shut up and say nothing, is the sometimes the best thing that you can do.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: And it's funny because you talked before about coming full circle, I mean, that was the problem that I had initially, was I guess not having enough to say, just being shy and not knowing what the right thing to say to a woman was. I remember, I think it was the first ever date I had with a woman, I was probably like 16, 17, I can't remember, it was such an awkward experience. I went out with this girl, and for about 90% of the time we were together, we just said nothing. It was just horrible, awkward silence where both of us were extremely nervous, we didn't know what to say, and it was so uncomfortable that I thought, “I need to come up with some stuff that I can say to women because I don’t want to go through that situation again. It was so painful.”

But now, when you do it with the right belief and the right mindset, you can sit back for a while, not say anything, because you're comfortable with that silence. There's a difference between an awkward silence and a comfortable silence. And sometimes now I'm out on a date talking to a girl, that conversation topic will come to an end, I’ll just sit back, just smile at her, sip a drink, and wait for her to bring up something new. Whereas before I always thought that the burden was on me to always bring up some interesting conversation.

Sometimes you just want to sit back and let women feel that sort of anxiety a little bit as well, because I think as guys we're so focused on the fact that we're out trying to impress women that we have this approach anxiety, sexual escalation anxiety. She's going to judge us if we don’t say the right thing or wear the right outfit or whatever. We have all these different things going on in our own head that we don’t realize women have got exactly the same stuff going on.

I know that a lot of the times when you go out and approach a woman, you might not get the best reaction. It might just be a, you know, timid sort of response. You might think, “Oh, she's not interested.” Chances are she's just a bit nervous. She doesn’t know what to say either because she's not used to guys coming up and saying something interesting to her.

So they’ve got those same thoughts in their head, you know, “Does this guy like me? Is my hair looking good tonight? Does he think that I'm fat?” You might be on a date and she's thinking, “Oh, I wish I could think of something to say. He's probably not attracted to me,” or you know, “Does he know that I had some garlic before for dinner?” or “I hope he doesn’t notice [00:45:43] breath,” or “Maybe I'm not his type,” or there could be a million other things. I think women are more critical of themselves than guys are.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: But we don’t realize that. We're so in our own head about what’s going on with us that we don’t realize women are nervous as well.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, totally, and missing out on that fact for me in the past, when I moved to Asia, because there were a number of factors which meant that the women in Asia often were more anxious, because, number one, maybe they hadn't met that many foreign guys; number two, often their language skills weren't as good in English, of course.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And this made them extremely anxious, and if they didn't understand something I said perfectly, then they wouldn't feel comfortable responding.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And there are many reasons why a girl can feel more anxious than you in many situations, and for me it really came… I did not really learn that until I moved to other countries and I saw an extreme version of it. And then, when I went back to the Western world, I could see it for what it was, that like, “Oh, this is all around us.” But you know, luckily, I saw something a bit more extreme and it was kind of forced in my face, because the girls wouldn't know what to say, and so I had to deal with it and learn with it. And then when you go back to the West, you can pick up… Again, it's back to observation. You can pick up when they're being anxious, and it could be because they're not sure about the topic you brought up as well, like, “I'm not sure if I'm going to sound intelligent about that,” you know? Or, “I don’t have anything great to say about that.”

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, absolutely. I remember going on a date with a Polish girl in London, and I had all these different things that I thought were interesting stories that I was determined to get out there and tell her, and she wasn’t giving me anything back. I wasn’t getting any feedback from her.

[Angel Donovan]: Yup.

[Jackson Hunter]: And I just thought, “Oh, she's not interested. She's not liking what I'm saying. She's not into me. It's going really badly.” And I just got a bit fed up. I said, “Oh, what’s going on with you? You've got nothing to say tonight. What’s the problem?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t feel I have anything to say that can compete with all these stories you're telling me. I don't think I have anything interesting about me.” And so whereas I was thinking she's just not interested at all, she's like, “Oh, I can't say anything that's as good as what this guy has to say.” I was making her feel intimidated.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: And I just sat back and sort of had a natural conversation with her and just found out about her for her to feel comfortable being around me.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. And you know, you just brought up something really important that I'd missed out on for years and it wasn’t a habit. It's kind of like a fear of asking what’s going on, right? So you just like, “Oh, why are you so quiet?” right?

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: But I guess back in those days, you know, asking questions, there were several mindsets associated with like, you know, it's not a good idea to kind of like question what’s going on with the girl and stuff. But you know, honestly, it's one of the easiest and the most straightforward things to do if you're unsure of what’s going on in a situation, just say, “Hey, what’s up?” or “Why did you do that?” in a just very like relaxed manner, and you'll get a straight answer, and then things kind of move on from there. But I remember kind of like avoiding that kind of thing and just trying to kind of keep on going with what I was doing rather than just like addressing it and saying, “Hey, what’s up?”

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. You didn't want to lower your value. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Right, that was one of the terms, like I didn't want to lower my value by suggesting I was actually interested in knowing what was going on with her.

[Jackson Hunter]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] How about that?

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. I've had the same things now, like when I go on dates with women now, sometimes I might say, “You seem nervous.” So you're like, “Hey,” and they’ll say, “Yeah, I am nervous.” And I’ll say, “Why? What’s the problem?” She goes, “Oh, it's not that often that I meet guys who are sober when they come and talk to me and actually are interesting and fun, and I go out and I like them. So I'm just not used to this experience.” So, if I didn't ask, I might think she's being quiet because she's not interested, she's bored, whatever, but until you ask you don’t actually know.

So that's definitely something that you can incorporate when you're out with girls, is talk to them and remember that they're people just like you. They’ve got feelings and thoughts, and if you ask them, chances are they're going to give you a real answer, because the fact that they're out with you in the first place means they're probably interested in you.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, totally. Alright, well, we're talking about a lot of subjects here, but I guess one big theme is like overcomplexity, making things more complicated than they need to be. And there's often a direct simple way to cut through the kind of complex things that you might be using in fact to kind of shield you. And I think a lot of it is about fear, right?

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: It's about we don’t want to put ourselves on the line, which kind of comes back to if you're going to try something, do it wholeheartedly, make your best effort, and just put yourself out there and don’t worry about it too much. It's not the end of the world if it doesn’t work. I say like what is more the end of the world is if you don’t put your whole heart into it and do it right, because then you will just be wasting your time potentially, not getting the result you want and not really testing out an approach that may improve your life with women.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I think one of the, I guess, principles of trying to adopt this how can I get the same results for a lot less effort, so when I used to go out in London, I was determined running what we used to call Solid Game, which was about going really indirectly, not showing my intentions, convey my personality through different stories and routines and games, and then once the woman’s interested and attracted and we've got rapport, getting her phone number and organizing to get out on a date with her. And quite often that could have taken anywhere from an hour to two hours, but back then we were like that's solid gain, that's the best way to do things…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson Hunter]: …spend two hours getting a phone number, go on a date with her, maybe sleep with her that night or have a second date, sleep with her then, however it worked out, because obviously you needed to spend seven hours with a girl before she'd sleep with you. That was scientifically proven, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yep, it was. [Laughs] Yeah, scientific. [Laughs]

[Jackson Hunter]: Whereas, you know, if I went out now and I went up to a woman and I said, “Hey, how are you doing? I noticed you over here and you look interesting. I wanted to come over and meet you. My name’s Jackson. How’s your night going? Blah, blah, blah,” talk for 10 minutes, I might get a phone number from that. That's just as solid. I could go out on a date with her and be in the same position, but I've just saved two hours of my time, and I'm also in a position to approach a lot more girls that night that I'm out. So I can get the same results for a lot less effort.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson Hunter]: So yeah, definitely I think guys can experiment with different approaches. I think the closer you can get to opening girls without any pretext or excuse for why you're talking to them, the better you'll do in the long run. I know that with us and pretty much every guy who was going out in London back in those days, we were all doing the opinion openers, which, for guys who maybe haven't heard of those, is going up to a group of women, “Hey guys, can I get a female opinion on something?” and then going into some sort of story as to why we're talking to them.

And you know, I mean that can be effective in getting a conversation going, but you also run the risk of the women talking to you because they're interested in the actual conversation and not you. And I've had times where I’ll spend 30 minutes talking to a girl, thinking it's going great, I'm running all this material and telling all these stories, and then she just happens to mention that she has a boyfriend or she's a lesbian or whatever it might be, and that's just a half-hour that I've spent that I could've found that out in the first two minutes.

So if you want to do things the hard way, you can take practicing on doing indirect approaches or you can learn how to do direct approaches. And there's a time and place for everything. I'm not saying that a direct approach is the best in every situation. I think depending on the environment you are in will determine the best type of approach that you should do. But if you're going to do the same indirect approaches everywhere you are, you are going to get some success but it's also going to feel like a lot of work. It's going to take up a lot of your time. You're going to get frustrated with it a lot, as I know that I did and a lot of our friends have. And I know that once you try different things, put your ego on the line, put your balls on the line, try some direct approaches, you might be shocked at the results that you start to get. So it's worth trying.

[Angel Donovan]: Yep, definitely. And I guess in the long run there's an upside. That is that you're being you rather than something with a kind of fake veneer in front of you or a mask…

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …which is going to make you feel about yourself and over the long-term is going to be good for you in terms of your self-esteem, your ego, and so on. And just conveying relaxation to the women when you're talking to them, because like when you're carrying a veneer, subconsciously at some level, you're going to probably have some issues with that, and they can come across to the girls you're talking to.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, well, I had similar issues with that, and you may have had the same thing that I did where once I got some success with women, whether it was getting numbers or having sex with different women, I attributed that success to my game, to the stories that I was using and things that I was using. So I developed confidence in my game rather than in me, so I don’t think I really developed my own self-confidence. It wasn’t, “Okay, women are interested in me.” It was, “Women are interested in me if I say these certain things and I go through this script that I'm running, hey, I can sort of almost trick them into liking me,” because it really comes from the place that women have more value than you and that just being yourself isn't enough. You have to entertain them, trick them, get them to like you by entertaining them, and you develop confidence in what you are saying to women.

So if you're in this situation of being in a nightclub and you can go through things perfectly as you've done before, you feel confident. You have situational confidence. But if you're in a different situation, maybe just stay out with a bunch of people and for whatever reason you can't run the same stories and routines you've been doing, all of a sudden you might panic. You've got this anxiety, “Oh, now I have to be myself. I don’t have my game to fall back on. Women aren't going to like me for just being myself, so I have to do all these different things to overcompensate.” And it can probably really destroy your confidence.

So I think if you've had too much success with women based on all these gimmicks, like these different things we've been talking about, whether it's stories or palm reading or hypnosis and NLP, these are the things that people try, you think, “That's why women are interested in me,” when it's not the case, so you risk damaging your own self-confidence with women by hiding behind all of these different tricks, really. So that was a big thing that I had, and it wasn’t until I started being myself with women, I thought, “Oh, women are hooking with me because they like me. I can just be myself. I don’t have to worry about what I'm going to say next. I don’t have to worry about coming up with new exciting stories. I can just say whatever, I can be myself, and it's going to be fine.”

And in the situations where women don’t like that and women aren't attracted to me, then it's not a big deal. You can't expect that every woman is going to be into you, same as you're not going to be attracted to every woman, no matter what they do. So once you can come to terms with that, I think it takes a lot of pressure off you and you can just relax a lot more and just enjoy the whole process. I don't know if you've found that as well.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh yeah, yeah. It becomes a lot more enjoyable for sure, and it's just the way to be. What I was going to say, well, I was thinking about when you were talking about this, was when you've had some success with women, you were attributing it to things you'd done, but sometimes, as you say, it's got nothing to do with those things and it's actually something different. Well, again, I think that comes back, you know, how can you avoid those kind of errors, like thinking that it's because of one thing you've done or whatever and continuing to do that for a long time, is pillow talk, you know? When you're successful with women, you've got a girlfriend or you're sleeping with women, don’t be afraid to talk to the women about how you met them and so on afterwards. Girls often reveal quite interesting details that will surprise you.

And I remember I was always surprised by the kind of details they brought up, and it was often something completely different than what I thought was the reason that they were with me.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And you're like, “Oh, really? Okay, cool.” You know, hopefully it was something that you were doing naturally and you didn't even know you were doing, you know?

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Like I remember one time, a girl who became my girlfriend for quite a long time, when I first met her, we went on a date somewhere. And we're walking along the road, and I was walking next to the curb and she was walking on the inside of the curb. So I was next to all the cars and the traffic, and I didn't realize I was doing this. This is just something I've always done, right? When I'm with women. And she remembered that as being very, you know, me looking after her, doing the right thing, and she just thought, “Yeah, he's a solid guy. He made sure he’d be protecting me from the traffic because there was a lot of traffic coming and stuff.” And it wasn’t anything I thought about at all. It was just something that I guess I've kind of grown up with. So lots of like interesting things that you would never have thought of will come out with those kind of conversations, and again, it just stops you from making the wrong assumptions about where your success is coming from.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. Have you ever done that where you've slept with a woman and you've asked her when she first was interested in you, and she said to you, “Well, I noticed you standing over there with your friends and I was hoping that you were going to come up and talk to me?”

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: And you think, “Oh, all that stuff that I did probably didn't even matter. She was interested before I even opened my mouth.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: So what you think has led to her becoming attracted to you isn't the case at all.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: She was just interested in you for who you are, but you didn't even realize that until she told you.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Well, I remember one time I was in Montreal and I was in a bookstore while my buddies were somewhere else, and there was this really cute Japanese girl there, and I walked up and I said, “Hi,” and a day later we hooked up. And so I asked her the question, “Oh, so when did you think you were going to sleep with me?” And her answer was, “As soon as you walked up and said hello.”

[Jackson Hunter]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: You know? And I was like, “Okay.” [Laughs] You know?

[Jackson Hunter]: [Laughs] If only it was always that easy.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. And it's natural as well. I just think a lot of this comes back to misconceptions we have about sexuality that we've been brought up with that have been taught to us and so on, and that's completely natural. If she found me attractive, then why not, right?

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And she assumed because I walked up to her and I said hi in a bookstore that I was interested too, so the next assumption was, “Yeah, I'm going to sleep with this guy.” So when you look at it that way she doesn’t surprise me, given where we are…

[Jackson Hunter]: I think that's something that we lose track of, is we can become so focused on all these tactics and techniques to try and make women attracted and seduce them that we forget women are naturally attracted to men, like just by virtue of being a man there's a good chance a woman is kind going to be attracted to you. You don’t need to do anything. If a woman I'm attracted to comes up to me and says hello, she doesn’t need to tell me any sorts of stories or do any sorts of tricks to make me want to have sex with her. I'm just attracted to her naturally. And it's the same with women in a lot of cases.

I've got a friend who goes out on dates with women that he ends up friends with. He's not great with women, so he’ll go out on dates and it won't lead anywhere. He might go out sometimes on four, five, six dates with the same girl, and nothing is happening. He's not escalating with them. He's not kissing them. It's not leading anywhere except to friendship.

And he would say to me, “What are you doing when you go out to hook up with all of these women?” And I said to him, “Nothing. What are you doing to not hook up with all of these women?”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Jackson Hunter]: I don't think I'm doing anything in particular. I'm just letting nature take its course. More likely you’re doing something that's turning women off the idea of sleeping with you, whereas they were probably interested in the first place. So take a look at your behaviors and the things that you're doing and maybe try eliminating some of those rather than trying to add things in, thinking that that's the key to getting what you want.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. Totally. Well, now we've covered a lot of ground today, and I hope it isn't overwhelming. I know some of these ideas can seem kind of like abstract for someone who’s kind of just starting out in this stuff, but hopefully we've given you a lot of pretty concrete examples so you can relate to them and see how things can seem a lot more complex than they actually are and sometimes it just pays to simplify things down and focus on the bare essentials.

[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with the 80/20 rule where 80% of success comes from 20% of your actions.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson Hunter]: It's the same with women. It's the same with everything in life. If you focus on getting the core things right, just doing the basics right, you're going to get a lot of success. So focus on going out, approaching women, having fun, being yourself, being in control, being confident, trying to escalate things, you're going to do well. If you go out and practice, then your confidence is naturally going to improve, women are going to respond to you better, and you'll start seeing results.

So I would say throw away a lot of the stuff that you think you might need to do. Forget about trying to hypnotize women. Forget about trying to use NLP tricks and [01:06:56] on them. I mean, we've both met guys who do these sorts of stuff, and I think more often than not they just come across as weird and creep the girls out. If you just focus on being a cool guy who's interesting, fun to talk to, sociable, you're going to find that you get a lot of success naturally.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Thanks, Jackson, man. That's a great point to finish on. Thanks for making the time for this today, man. It's been great having you on.

[Jackson Hunter]: Not a problem. Been fun. I hope the listeners get something out of it.