#81 15 Years of "The Game", Prizing and Masculine Polarity with Swinggcat

[Angel Donovan]: Hey, Josh! It’s great to have you on the show. Welcome!

[Swinggcat]: It’s good to be here.

[Angel Donovan]: Man, you’ve been in this game – often it’s called “the game,” of course – and I’m sure you're going to describe it as a bit more than that when we get into it. You’ve been really one of the main characters since this whole game thing came out.

How did it affect your life when the book, The Game, came out? Is it something that came up to people starting to recognize you? I mean, at that point, I’m not sure if you were still around in forums or anything, but it’d be interesting to know how that affected you.

[Swinggcat]: Well, one thing I’ll say is, The Game coming out is one of the best things that happened to me and happened to a lot of other people because canned material stopped working.

That kind of pushed me and a lot of other people to learn to read the situation instead of rely on these lines. Later on, I’ll talk about a little bit about how I really think relying on them kind of erodes your sensitivity to women and what’s going on in the situation.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, man. What I wanted to do is get a bit of your history because I’m not sure if everyone knows who you are and they’ve heard all about your stories.

They’ve read The Game, they’ve got one version of that story, but most of that story’s actually about Neil and what he’s doing.

But you were around at that time – in fact, you were around before Neil Strauss came along, as far as I understand. Anyway, I’m not exactly sure myself so it’d be really great to hear how did you get into all of this. What’s your story? Because it was so long ago and things were so different back then.

[Swinggcat]: Oh, the mysteries of Swinggcat.

Back in the ‘90s – I forget if I was on break from college or this was back in high school. It was so long ago. But there was this special on the news about this nerdy-looking guy that taught men how to seduce women.

His top student was this guy named Housewife-Banging Cunningham. I was sitting there with my mom and my sister, watching this special, and they were saying, “God, those guys are fucking losers! Who would pay money to go to a workshop like that?” and I was like, “Yeah that really is pathetic.”

As soon as the special was over, I scurried to my computer and looked up this guy – Ross Jeffries – and I wanted to buy his course, but I didn’t. At that time, I was a poor kid – a college student or in high school, I can’t remember – so I couldn’t afford his course, but I bought his book.

I tried a couple of lines on some girl I was on a date with and they actually seemed to work somewhat. And then I kind of forgot about it.

Maybe a year or two went by; I wasn’t doing that great with women. There was a night where I was so desperate that I ended up having sex with this girl who is probably wider than she was tall. And in the morning, I was half-crushed by her enormous torso, and half-depressed that I’d hit an all-time low.

I finally ponied up the cash and I bought Ross Jeffries’ Speed Seduction course.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, was that the original one?

[Swinggcat]: The original one. They didn’t even come on CDs – they came on these cassette tapes. I think it was right before winter break in college. I spent literally hours and hours and hours, memorizing all of the patterns.

I remember that New Year’s, I went out – not what I usually do. I was drunk and made out with four or five girls, and then I thought, “On the next girl, I’m going to use Ross’s yet-to-be-called Discovery Channel pattern.”

I did the pattern on her, and she was absolutely disgusted with me.

I kind of was screwed; his stuff didn’t really work, and then I got some sort of email or letter from him that he had this online community, this email list that you could join, and you could meet up with other guys who are involved in this stuff.

I got sucked into hanging out with these guys and –.

[Angel Donovan]: What year was this, man?

[Swinggcat]: God, this must have been like ’96 or ’97, maybe a little later. Pretty early on. Maybe it was a bit later; it’s been so many years.

I started hanging out with these guys, and we’re still very skeptical and no one in the group actually talked to women. They would sit around and they would talk a lot of theory.

I think I was the only one who actually had the nerve to – although it was painful, but I actually do the walk-up.

I think one pickup line Ross Jeffries had back then was you were supposed to go up to girls and say, “Hello, my name is Manny the Martian – what’s your favorite flavor bowling ball?”

I just found it utterly humiliating, so it was very difficult for me to do. But I would actually do it; I was the only one who approached girls. I wasn’t sure the stuff worked, and then someone introduced me to something called handwriting analysis.

You’d basically go up to a girl and analyze her handwriting, and while you're analyzing her handwriting, you would do these patterns on her.

That worked okay. I got some numbers with that stuff and I got better with the Speed Seduction stuff and eventually found myself as Ross’s right hand man.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So basically the Speed Seduction – it’s all about patterning, is that correct?

[Swinggcat]: It’s all about patterning. You're basically putting women into a hypnotic or sexual trance.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, did you find that it worked? It does put them into a hypnotic trance? What was it you were feeling about that at the time?

[Swinggcat]: I felt that it did work and I wasn’t sure in the beginning if it was that I had confidence in these patterns and that’s why it was working for me – I had something to say and I believed in the pattern – or if they were actually doing something to the women.

Early on, I was very skeptical that hypnosis worked until a friend of mine who was actually in the game put me into a hypnotic trance and I lost my equilibrium and hit the ground. And then I thought, “Okay, maybe there’s something to this stuff.”

That’s how I really got into a lot of the Ross Jeffries stuff. Me and this other guy developed something that was in The Game called The October Man Sequence, and that’s something I don’t necessarily use anymore. I think it is effective, but I also think that there are easier ways to get women.

I don’t think you need to go through all those mental contortions to succeed with women and get the outcome you want; I think it’s a lot simpler than that.

[Angel Donovan]: So you're referring to intents with The October Man Sequence?

[Swinggcat]: Yes, I think in The Game he’s a two-timer, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, it’s funny because a lot of people don’t know this. The name that Neil Strauss put in The Game, the characters even aren’t necessarily one person. Sometimes they’re too people. It’s a bit mixed up.

Two-timer was intense, and that’s what we used to call him back then. Grimble was Swinggcat – it was you, Josh. Was there anyone mixed up in your character or was it purely you?

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, he combined me and – a lot of people might not know a guy named Craig Clemens.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, right. Of course. Actually, Craig Clemens has been on a reality TV show just recently.

[Swinggcat]: Oh, yeah. I saw it. He’s now a reality television star, right? He’s been on quite a few at this point.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that’s right. It’s funny because I’d forgotten all about him. I remember seeing him back in the day and he came up in a show – anyway, we’re getting sidetracked here.

So these characters – then what happened?

[Swinggcat]: I was really involved in the Ross Jeffries stuff and at this point I was still living in Northern California. I had largely lost interest in hanging out with the community at that point. I was just hanging out with college friends and stuff like that, or a couple of guys I talked to from time to time.

There was this kid from UC Santa Barbara who wanted to hang out with me and meet me, because he heard that I was the one other guy within the Speed Seduction world who would approach women, so he was very excited to hang out with me.

This is very primitive days, very few people approached. They would talk a lot of theory. A lot of these guys didn’t go to bars; they would mostly hang out in bookstores and coffee shops and maybe work up the courage to start up a conversation. With a girl, there’s nothing wrong with that; there just wasn’t that many people approaching.

This guy got in touch with me, we hung out, and right away we did not get along. He was very strong about that Speed Seduction was full of shit.

He called me about this guys he read about online; he went by the name of Mystery. He told me that this guy didn’t use patterns; he used something called routines. I was interested and we went out and I asked for him to show me what some of the Mystery method stuff was, and it was a disaster of an evening.

I think he went up to some girls and – what was that old line? He asked them if they knew that Elvis died.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, I remember that line. I never understood that line.

[Swinggcat]: [Chuckles] I never did either. And then he went into something, I think it was on the old ASF called the Mr. Smooth Routine.

He was talking to this girl, we were talking to this group of people, and one of the girls was an attorney. He told her that she was an intelligent woman and he grabbed her breast, and then he grabbed his crotch and said that he was an intelligent man and started humping her, and said that they should have an intelligent conversation.

This escalated to almost a fight between him and the girls, and I had to calm everyone down. So I didn’t have high hopes for this Mystery guy. I think at that point, he also introduced me to another guy, I think he’s called Sisonipyh or something like that. It’s hypnosis – backwards. That character eventually became David DeAngelo.

All of their advice – David DeAngelo and Mystery – I was getting through this guy, so it was all hearsay, and it sounded just god-awful.

Eventually, when I moved down to LA, this guy named Chris Powells did a review of Mystery’s workshop. I was curious to see what Mystery was about, so I emailed this guy Chris Powells.

I think I just moved back from college, I was staying at my mom’s place at the time and Chris Powells came out to my place in Woodland Hills and I took him to Corey Feldman parties. Corey Feldman was a friend of mine at the time, and we walk into Corey Feldman’s party and he says to my friend Chris, “Hey Neil, I haven’t seen you in a long time, Neil Strauss!”

I look at Chris and I’m like, “Is your name Chris or Neil?” And he tells me, “You can call me either.”

Anyway, Neil and I went out and we sarged for a couple of years. Back in the Ross Jeffries days, we used to call it sarging – that was the name of his cat – that was for picking up women.

So we hung out for a while and he kind of taught me a lot of the stuff that Mystery was doing. Actually, I’ve been his roommate at the time, a guy who went by the name of Rick H., and a lot of where David DeAngelo got his cocky funny stuff was from this guy Rick. Rick kind of taught me a lot of that stuff.

Back then it was wonderful because I was able to take from all of these different styles. There was this great thing that we created that you were a part of called “Mystery’s Lounge.”

I don’t know, but I just thought it was this wonderful exchanging of ideas before all us went commercial, and then share with each other. I thought that was a really magical time and there was a lot of progress made in terms of ideas and in contexts and techniques. I thought those were good times.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, they were kind of like the golden days.

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, too bad they’re gone. That’s my history of how I was involved with the game and all of that stuff.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. So when did your own style emerge? Was it as a result of merging these things together, or was it some kind of event? What happened? Because your own style has really influenced a lot of people since then.

Did that come about just organically, or was there some kind of event or something that happened that triggered it?

[Swinggcat]: I think there are so many things that came about. There were all these different styles. I’ve always been one of those people that if I learned from someone for a while and then, I don’t know. I just decided to fuck it all up and try something else.

Usually it doesn’t work, but eventually I keep trying so many different things, that eventually I stumble onto something.

I would say during that time, by all means, I think all of these people, in different ways, all the people in The Lounge, everyone definitely influenced me in different ways.

During that time I was falling out a lot. I mean, I think a lot of us went through this where literally, our whole life was pickup. You know, during the day – and it’s absolutely sick! I don’t advise this for anyone. Absolutely pathological.

One of the things I started doing, which is kind of sick, is every time a woman would reject or it wouldn’t go well with a woman, or she made me feel bad about myself, I would actually write it out – my whole sequence of emotions and what she did to make me feel that way, or how she made me prove myself to her.

Whatever it is, I started studying the patterns of what women were doing to me, and I started experimenting with doing that sort of stuff on women, mixed with some of my big influences back in the day.

Definitely, Robert Greene. The book Art of Seduction, I think me and Neil really liked it, but a lot of people felt that it was mostly theory and it wasn’t applicable.

I beg to differ. That book was a huge, huge influence on me.

Likewise, Robert Cialdini’s Psychology of Persuasion I think is a really brilliant book for how compliance works. You start thinking about different ways to apply it to seduction or pickup or meeting women; it’s extremely useful.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, so naturally, it sounds like with this picking apart of your own emotions, you managed – your approach actually came from that, because you're known for a few different strategies, which kind of went against the grain back in the day, like prizing and push-and-pulling.

Which you [inaudible 19:03] too much today, but they really do go against the grain, and it’s really good to hear the story of how you came about that because it sounds like it was very systematic, looking at your own emotions and understanding that.

[Swinggcat]: I would say a lot of it was, in a very big-picture way, Rick was David DeAngelo’s roommate and Rick had a huge influence on David DeAngelo’s whole idea of cocky and funny. He also had a big influence on me, and the big takeaway I got from Rick is that concept of stealing a woman’s frame.

That got me to look at some of the things that women do to make men try and win them over. By looking at that, I slowly but surely started – it all started by me stumbling on to this concept of making a woman qualified or prove herself to you.

There’s actually a great line – I think it’s from the movie Mean Girls – which Lindsay Lohan’s character says, “Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean you don’t want them to like you.” That realization was huge for me.

Even if a woman didn’t like me, she still wanted me to like her and that I could turn that need for my validation into attraction, and it absolutely worked like magic. It still does.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s interesting. As I said, a lot of the guys who’ve come after you have definitely been strongly influenced by your material, so I’d say it’s alive and strong.

I know in Jackson’s reviews often he’ll say, “Yeah, that’s like some stuff I’ve seen that originally came from some of Swinggcat’s work.” You’ve definitely created something quite different and unique there that’s survived the times.

How would you say that goes against the grain? If we look at the world as it is today and how people court, how is traditional courtship – how does the way you think about it differ from what everyone else is doing out there?

[Swinggcat]: Well, I’ll give you a description of it and then I’ll give you answers to that.

One is what I talked about years ago, which is the whole concept of prizing, and then we’ll talk about it within masculine polarity, which is another concept we’re going to talk about.

I think how it traditionally works is when a woman enters a bar or a nightclub or a party, typically men orbit around her and they show off their best attributes to the best of their ability. They try and win her over.

The big question is, “How do women choose which guy they like or that they go home with?” There’s a concept I like to call – it’s something we all have – called vertical polarization bias.

One of the filters through which we share the world is through hierarchies. Typically we think of up is good, down is bad. When you die, you want to go up to heaven; if you're bad, you go down to hell. Even if you're a car enthusiast – you make almost a mental list in your mind. You put your favorite cars at the top of the list and you put the cars you don’t like so much at the bottom of the list.

We think of things in hierarchies, and typically when a woman walks into a bar, she quickly puts the guys into a hierarchy. Certain guys that she might think are hot – she puts them at the top of the hierarchy, and she puts guys that she doesn’t think are that hot at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Typically, the one at the top of the hierarchy in the number one spot is the guy she likes. Throughout the night, as she interacts with these guys, that hierarchy might change a little bit, but at a certain point, it really starts to solidify.

The guy at the top of the list, he has a pretty good shot at taking her home. Now number two or number three could oust number one from that position, but here’s where things get tough.

If you're more towards the top of her hierarchy, she’s going to be very forgiving of your not-so-admirable traits and red flags. She’s going to be forgiving of those things, and she’s going to be very sensitive to what you have going for you.

But if you're at the bottom of the heap, she’s not going to let any of your negative traits slide and she’s going to be oblivious to any good traits that you have.

I find for a lot of guys, playing this game of conventional courtship doesn’t work, especially if you live in a town like LA or a city like London or New York. If you're not tall, dark, handsome and rich and maybe even famous, it’s very hard to compete against these other guys if you play this game of orbiting women and trying to win them over.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s really interesting, man. I bet a lot of guys can relate to this where they feel like they’re doing the same things as other guys in the club, but it doesn’t seem like they’re getting perceived the same way as the women.

Like you say, the good things about you are getting ignored and the women will focus on the negatives. I think that’s a nice framework that can solidify how perceptual bias works because everyone knows that there is this perceptual bias. It’s a nice, simple little framework you have there for understanding it.

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, I think what happens for a lot of guys is the more they go out to bars, they become aware of the rules of conventional courtship. They become painfully aware that they need certain qualities to compete against the other orbiter. If they don’t have those qualities, it really seems impossible.

The thing is, even if you're a guy out there really struggling, you’d probably notice that there are some guys that don’t seem to have any of the qualities on a woman’s dream list, and yet they’re still able to get those high-quality women.

I think it’s similar in cities like New York and LA – there’s always these “it” night clubs and you see the big begging trough outside of the club where everyone’s begging to get in. Very quickly, if you frequent these places, it can seem like if you're not really good-looking, if you don’t have a couple of women on your arms, or you aren’t willing to pop a bottle service, that it’s impossible to get into those club. That’s the rule – you need these things to get in.

And yet every once in a while, you’ll see some schlub who doesn’t have women in his arms; he doesn’t spend any money at the club, and yet he gets right in. That’s because he’s playing a different game; he’s not playing by those rules.

I think this is kind of a big metaphor not only for life but for how some guys play a different game to get high-quality women.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s interesting; I think everyone can relate to that example of the New York night clubs. I’ve certainly seen that.

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, and unless you're a masochist and you're really set on getting into these clubs – which, for a long time, I was one of those people – you start to figure out how to get into these places without spending a dime.

And the same thing is true with high-caliber women. If you play a game of conventional courtship, unless you're going to spend a lot of money on a plastic surgeon and lots of money on women, it’s a really tough game to play.

There’s another game that you can play and I want to talk a little bit about what that is.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, let’s get into it. Is this masculine polarity?

[Swinggcat]: We’ll get to masculine polarity.

There’s a study that is kind of revealing – and it fuels the direction that I’m going in – done by a woman named Annette Lareau, where she observed the parenting strategies of middle class and working class parents.

She noticed that middle class parents use what she calls the concerted cultivation strategy. What that is the middle class parents instill in their children a sense of proactive entitlement. That basically is instilling the belief that they can get what they want out of a social situation and giving them the strategies for doing it.

They also get them involved in lots of extra-curricular activities like karate and Little League and soccer, and this gives them ample opportunity to practice questioning, challenging, negotiating with adults, so they can get what they want out of the social situation and really [inaudible 27:21] their sense of proactive entitlement.

Whereas with working class parents, they instill in their kids more of the skills for catering to the needs and desires and judgments of authority figures and teaching them to obey authority figures’ boundaries and follow their rules, and so when these kids grow up, oftentimes – not always, but oftentimes – they have a very, very different set of skills. Because middle class kids grow up to have this proactive sense of entitlement, they tend, on average, to be a little bit more successful.

I think this whole model of proactive entitlement spills over nicely into sexuality. I definitely think that boys who are sexualized at a young age learned a proactive sense of entitlement with women that their late bloomer counterpart oftentimes did not. They definitely learned how to bend the rules and boundaries of women and to ignore words like, “You aren’t my type” or “I don’t sleep with guys on the first date” or “Let’s just be friends.”

They’ve learned the skills to become sensitive to women’s sexual cues and to their attraction signals, and learn how to cultivate strategies for exploiting that at a young age, whereas a lot of late bloomers learned other skills.

They became really good at kissing women’s ass, winning them over, catering to their desires and taking what they say at face value.

The next big question is, “What is this proactive sense of entitlement?” and the way that I’m going to break it down is – there’s two ways. Let me back up.

I think, one, definitely a proactive sense of entitlement is what I call prizing. The basic idea of prizing is that a woman sees you as the prize when you have enough value in her eyes. But if you walked away or didn’t validate her, she’d take it as a loss.

One of the ways in my virtual e-book, Real World Seduction, that I talk to prize women was to put them –. I had this whole concept of frames, and when you define the underlying meaning of the interaction between you and a woman as you being the prize and her being the suitor, trying to win you over – let me back up.

Basically the idea behind frames is by changing the underlying meaning, you put the woman into the role of the suitor trying to win you over and you put yourself into the role of the prize.

There’s another way that you can do it that I’ve been developing the last couple of years called masculine polarity. I’ll talk a little bit about that. Any questions so far for me?

[Angel Donovan]: I think there’s a lot to take in, maybe we could just do a quick review of it.

[Swinggcat]: Okay.

[Angel Donovan]: Basically if we go back to this contemporary model, we’re trying to flip that on its end. The way you approached it was looking basically at the rich and how they have a sense of entitlement, and I can very much relate to that for many of my experiences.

If you assume that things are going to work for you, they tend to. And I’m sure people have heard this in other areas of their life as well, like business, other areas. It’s kind of like if you're confident, more things tend to work for you because you are embedded in that kind of confidence.

That word, which is a bit general – like confidence – is often some kind of entitlement, because you’re acting confidently. It’s actually showing that you’re entitled to have something.

I’ve seen it work amazing tricks in my travels. In China, they have lots of clubs where either you’re VIP or you wouldn’t have access to them.

Me and my friends, we would walk up to the club entrances and we’d walk around the lines of peoples standing to get in there, and we’d just walk in. It was our thing, and we’d never get stopped.

People who saw it would get weirded out by it and the people in the queue would think something was going on. It was just a sense of entitlement.

Sometimes the people at the door would say, “You can’t come in” or anything but they had low-end voices because they could see that we were just assuming that it wasn’t going to be a problem.

And we go, “Yeah, it’s fine.” We just come in and walk in it and it was never a problem.

You can’t do that everywhere, but it’s just an example of where I’ve seen this working a lot. The more you get used to being entitled, for sure, feeling that thing’s within your grasp, the better off everything is for you.

[Swinggcat]: I totally agree. It’s something that the more you practice it, the better you get at it.

I think what’s interesting is entitlement, a lot of times, is misunderstood. Someone who is stuck at a low-end job will, in a sense, have a sense of entitlement; they certainly think their talents aren’t recognized or they aren’t paid enough money, but they don’t have the belief that they can actually get what they want out of the situation or from another person.

They don’t have the skills for doing it, and I think what you’re talking about, getting into the club and assuming that you’re someone who should get into the club, is a skill that’s cultivated over time. I mean, it’s something that has to be practiced. You have to get used to having that sense of entitlement and assuming it with other people.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. You were kind of saying there’s two points – because I think we were talking just before the call - like some people can have this sense of entitlement where it doesn’t work because they don’t have the skills or anything to follow up with it.

It actually makes the situation worse and it aggravates relationships because the people around them aren’t going with that frame. Whatever it is that makes that frame work, they don’t have it. I guess that’s the key here.

You can’t just assume it; you need to actually have the skills behind it.

I don’t know if you were going to go into more detail about what it is actually underneath that that makes it work.

[Swinggcat]: We’ll kind of get there but I’ll give you a big breadcrumb.

A lot of what I believe prevents men from having entitlement with women is actually their ego. I really believe that’s where a lot of the problems stem from.

The basic idea for entitlement – one of my basic ideas – is something called masculine polarity. You’re familiar with the yin yang symbol?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Swinggcat]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So for people at home, it’s – it’s been a while since I explained this.

[Swinggcat]: Basically ‘yin’ is a feminine energy; it’s a feminine polarity, and ‘yang’ is a masculine polarity. The basic idea is when the polarities align, they attract each other like magnets.

One of the issues is that because of how conventional courtship is set up, men usually end up projecting a feminine polarity, and they actually pull the woman into a masculine polarity.

What happens is as men orbit a woman, they feel more and more attraction for her. She may feel a mild attraction for one of her orbiters, and that’s the one she ends up choosing. If you’re a guy that doesn’t have all the conventional things that women are looking for, it’s a pretty lousy model to follow.

But if you learned to project masculine polarity, something almost magical happens. You pull the woman into a feminine polarity and she begins to orbit you, and she feels a strong polarity attraction. Instead of seeing you in relation to other guys, she sees herself in relation to you.

So instead of putting you somewhere on that hierarchy, that hierarchy becomes irrelevant, and she worries about where she falls on your hierarchy.

I’m into reading weird philosophers and stuff like that, and the existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard, said that a person doesn't become a complete self until it defines itself in terms of something outside of itself.

Do you have any comments on that?

[Angel Donovan]: No, but this is something that I think is embedded in science – the only we understand anything in our lives is compared to other things. Everything’s relative, the way we look at things, the smells.

I mean, you can tell this. If you’re sitting in a room that smells, after a while you can’t smell anything. You walk out of the room, you walk back in and all of a sudden you can smell it again, because it’s relative. Your senses are relative compared to everything else.

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, and everything – the meaning of it is very contextual and I think, for women, this is even more true for them than it is for men.

For a lot of women, this is just the truth, they don’t feel complete. They don’t feel like a complete self until they define themselves in terms of a man.

Largely, what it means for a woman to be romantically in love with a guy is for that guy to become her whole world, for him to define her.

A way to put it is that masculine polarity largely defines feminine polarity. When you project a masculine polarity, the woman is compelled to define herself in terms of you. To put it another way, her self-worth and sense of identity hinges on you when you have her in a feminine polarity.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Does this have anything to do with the way the world’s changing, modernizing a bit? Because we say that women are less feminine than they used to be; they have taken on some masculine traits, because now they’re working and their lives are a little bit different than they used to be.

I’m trying to understand why is the woman getting sucked into the feminine polarity and she’s not quite there yet? Is it because the times have changed, or is it because unless we’re acting like a real masculine man, then she’s –?

[Swinggcat]: When I talk about masculine polarity, we’re going to get into some part of that structure. I don’t think it necessarily has to do with – this actually has little to do with acting like an alpha male or anything like that.

There sure are some elements I’ll get into, but I will say this: that in our culture, it is true that men are acting more masculine. But at the same time, lots of our women are acting more masculine.

But at the same time, men are acting more feminine. There is this feminization of men in our culture and a lot of it has to do with – more and more we’re bogged down and controlled by our ego to put this into this feminine polarity.

[Angel Donovan]: So it sounds like you’re saying that we’re considering ourselves as magnets or whatever, that men are closer to a female polarity than they should be and women are closer to masculine. For that reason, our bonds and our attraction aren’t as strong as they’re used to be.

Also, she’s more free to look around the room because there’s no strong attraction; nothing’s strongly pulling her towards anything. But if you can reinforce your masculinity, you can change that. Is that kind of –?

[Swinggcat]: I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s exactly right.

I want to talk about some of – there’s ten parts to really developing masculine polarity, but I want to talk about a couple of them that I think are really crucial. I think projecting a masculine polarity so you can pull a woman into a feminine polarity really starts with developing an inward locus of validation.

Basically what that means is that you draw yourself worth from the inside, from yourself, as opposed to outside sources, as opposed to other people.

I’m not suggesting that you become the Buddha or anything like that; it’s actually perfectly fine if you do get validation from other external sources, but I think what’s imperative is that your self-worth doesn’t hinge on the woman you’re trying to seduce. It doesn’t hinge on her giving you validation.

[Angel Donovan]: I guess that’s maybe difficult for guys to understand sometimes in real values. I guess, if we take a little scenario here, say they get rejected by a girl. Maybe they got her number in a bar or whatever and they call her and after about five minutes, she’s like, “You know, I got to go. I’ve got something else to do. It was nice talking to you.” You know, she kind of flakes on the call.

In that situation, how is he supposed to feel, or how is he supposed to react to that in a way that he’s not getting affected by her and he retains his own self-worth and he looks at himself rather than that external situation?

[Swinggcat]: Of course there are situations where the girl doesn’t – and we’ll get into more of these – situations where the girl maybe doesn’t call you back, or you’re talking to a girl and things seem to be doing great, but she starts flirting with another guy or laughing at his jokes.

Internally, you feel angry about that and it’s totally normal. It’s not that some guys feel that; we’ve all had that before. I think anyone who says they haven’t had that is a lying sack of shit. We’ve all had it; it’s a normal human response.

But the reality of it is that’s your ego that’s doing that. Another example is if you approach a girl and she acts bitchy towards you. You always want to create a line to put her in her place, and that’s your ego being reactive.

I am going to give some exercises for not getting hooked by your ego. One of the big tricks to staying in a masculine polarity and having a strong masculine polarity, is not getting hooked by your ego – not getting sucked into needing the woman’s validation.

That’s not just for masculine polarity, that’s for some of my earlier stuff when I talk about being the prize. The typical frame obviously is the guy who’s very reactive and wants the woman’s validation – that throws him into the frame of trying to win the woman over, putting her up on a pedestal, seeing her as the prize.

As you start to detach from your ego, you can reverse that frame and make the woman actually chase you, see you as the prize and put her into the role of the suitor. The frame I typically use now is that I put her into the role of the pleaser who wants nothing more but to please me, and I’m the chooser that gets to decide if she qualifies pleasing me.

[Angel Donovan]: Great! So what would be some practical measures to create this situation?

[Swinggcat]: I’m going to give some very practical advice – and if you want me to, I will, but I really don’t want to give any particular lines or techniques. What I want to show are ways of controlling your ego so you can naturally stay within this masculine polarity.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, sounds good.

[Swinggcat]: Is that cool?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that sounds better.

[Swinggcat]: Okay. Probably some of your listeners really want some great pickup lines, but there’s a reason why I [inaudible 42:21] if you want lots of great techniques and stuff like that. But I want to talk about something a little bit different, if that’s okay.

[Angel Donovan]: This stuff sounds a lot more in line with – we’ll be taking things over the years to allow guys to get to do this themselves. I mean, guys are using routines less and less in reality. The guys in our academy don’t necessarily use routines at all very much. They use them to just get started and then they want to move on and actually develop themselves.

This sounds like it’s more in line with that kind of thing. Is that correct?

[Swinggcat]: Well let me ask you a question, because I’m actually curious. I’m guessing at a certain point, you used all those routines, right?

[Angel Donovan]: For me, it was actually kind of funny because when I first started, it was just before Mystery came around, so there weren’t routines, and I didn’t get into the Ross Jeffries stuff. All I did was go out and start shooting my mouth off, and it was kind of like this experiment.

I guess I was lucky because the two guys I met in London, they weren’t using any Ross Jeffries or anything like that; they were just confident and going out and being playful. And so I hung out with them and I just started talking a lot more, and things went well for me.

And then a few years later, when all the routines came, I started to use that and practice that. Some of it worked for me.

I mean, what I noticed also was that I went through this intense time just like you where I was just going out all day, all night – as you said, which was pretty pathological. What happened is you have your own routines that you just grow out of that because you’ve met so many girls that the same lines are just coming out of you.

There’s only so many ways a conversation could go at the end of the day, and given your personality, you’re going to say the same things, or your experience, your lifestyle and so on.

You develop your own routines, and that’s kind of what happened for me. I just found that that wasn’t working for me, in terms of routines. It was getting very boring as well.

I started the company, coaching people with this. At the time there are a lot of routines to help the guys get started because I was also going out and teaching people in the clubs, so I was having to do this even more.

I tell you, it gets really boring very quick to say the same lines all the time, especially when it starts becoming your job. It got to the point where when you say them, it’s like your mouth doesn’t want to say them anymore. I don’t know if you got to this stage, but it’s like your mouth will just start tripping on the words. Your brain is so bored by the words, there’s no life to them.

That’s what I found with routines, ultimately. If you’re going to go down that route that far, then it does become like what Neil Strauss once said, you become this social robot where you’re not being responsive or natural anymore.

And then I went back to just being myself and going back to where I’d started from, which was just shooting my mouth off, having learned naturally what works and what doesn’t just through tons of experience in the field, I guess.

[Swinggcat]: I think for me, initially, it gave me a sense of – maybe you didn’t go through this because you learned routines after you master them you were doing more of the natural thing.

For me, it definitely gave me a lot of false confidence, like a sense of false confidence. I liked it because without having to think about anything, you just begin mindlessly. I had these great pickup lines and witty responses to things when said, but similar to you, after a while, the lines – I always come up with my own material, but after a while they just didn’t seem to work anymore.

So I come up with new stuff and like when you get a new shirt, I got the same sense of false confidence again, but then I found myself getting worse.

I liken canned material to GPS. I’m a pretty directionally-challenged person, so GPS is a real godsend for me. But I find over time as I rely on it, it erodes my familiarity and sensitivity to my environment. I've lost, to a large extent, my ability to navigate myself around town.

In a similar way, canned material, over time, the more you use it, the more you rely on it, and the more it dulls your sensitivity to your environment and the women in front of you.

Put simply, over the long haul, I find that canned material makes you socially dumb as a stump. I think we’ve seen this with the social robots that canned material can make people become. I mean, we’ve definitely seen it with people we know; we’ve been around the scene long enough.

I don’t know, I think in a way canned material is a band aid for a bigger problem. I think that there’s a reason why guys struggle to think of what to do or say to get the girl, and I think a lot of it is because their own ego is pulling them into their head and hemming in their perception.

Not to get philosophical on you again, but Aristotle talked about something called phronimos, which is a kind of an ethical master. A phronimos doesn’t rely on ethical principles to guide his actions. Instead, he lets the situation itself solicit him to take the appropriate course of action.

What I find is when you really start – and this happens over time; it’s happened to a lot of us – when you start to let go of your ego and push your perception outward, oftentimes the situation itself is going to show you what to do to get the girl.

You’ve probably had some experience with that where you’re letting the environment itself and the girl in front of you guide your actions. We talked about how meaning is contextual; when you’re using these one-size-fits-all routines for every situation, oftentimes they come across as very artificial because they don’t fit the situation you’re in.

If you open up your perception, you’ll see exactly what to do. Over time, you’ll develop those intuitions.

[Angel Donovan]: Do people need as much pathological experience as us to be able to do this?

[Swinggcat]: That’s a good question, and I guess that’s what I was getting at before is, I’ve often asked myself the question, “Did I really need to go through all this stuff, to do all these routines, to get to the point where I am now?”

If we narrow that to, let’s say, opinion openers. There was a big phase where everyone was using opinion openers; it made it very easy – do I need to say what an opinion opener is, or do your listeners –?

[Angel Donovan]: No, we’ve definitely covered it on the show before. If you don’t know what an opinion opener is, you can definitely go back down to some of the first shows and I’m sure we’ve got a whole episode on it on routines at one time.

[Swinggcat]: Okay. There was a time when I thought, “Well, it was good that I went through all those opinion openers because it allowed me to approach literally thousands of women that maybe I otherwise wouldn’t have.

But the more I think about it, if I were to teach myself back in the day, if I could teach Josh 15 years ago, I would not teach him opinion openers. It’s scary, but I think you got to buck up and take the risk and just learn how to talk to people. And I think opinion openers are a big crutch, ultimately.

If you’re really shy and you just want to get the experience of talking to someone, okay, but I think at a certain point you just need to learn how to talk to girls. If all you’re doing is the opinion opener, it can turn into a huge crutch, and it will prevent you from developing your intuitions and reading the situation itself.

Back in the day, one of the types of openers that we had was the situational opener, where you read the situation. Well I think that’s the only type of [inaudible 49:57] opener these days.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s kind of natural, right? You’re just picking up on something funny in the situation or whatever it is and you bring it out.

I know people call that a situational opener, but it’s kind of just vibing off the situation like you said. It’s like paying attention to what’s going on.

I guess the value in it, when I think about it, is in if you can pay attention and you see more than other people, that’s often where you become witty, you have humor, because you’ll see something in a situation which other people haven’t noticed and the girl herself hasn’t, and you’ll point it out and she’ll see it. That creates value and it’s funny, and it makes you stand out as well.

It goes back to that point of you saying that you definitely have to develop these skills to pay more attention to the situation, rather than pulling away and putting these routines in front of you, which do – I see where you’re coming from. They stop you looking at everything because you’re really more inside your head because you’ve memorized these things and you’re pushing them out.

You’re not paying – as we normally do in any situation – as much attention to the external in order to relate to it.

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, exactly. The situation itself, the woman herself shall put out attraction signals if you’re outside of your head; when you’re attached to your ego, you’re constantly looking for signs of validation, that she likes you.

When you’re outside of your head, you see signals. You see openings. You see signals of sexual interest; you see her sexual cues. You see attraction signals; you see opportunities to vibe with her, whether it’s something funny happening in your environment or something she says.

When you’re present and in the moment, you can see things that you simply can’t see when you’re in your head. When you’re in your head, it’s very hard to connect to people and you have to do these very cookie-cutter things like have your vulnerability routine or this or that to create this artificial sense of connection.

But when you get outside of your head, naturally you’re going to have interesting conversations with women, where the conversation goes. I find that the fun of vibing with women is there is this element of serendipity, where there’s unexpected surprises that happen in the conversation where, unexpectedly, you discover you have things in common with them, where you give them the space to prove to you what an awesome girl they are, instead of constantly throwing all your wares, throwing all your attraction, bragging to them about all your accomplishments and how awesome you are.

That doesn’t really give them the space to prove to you how great they are. The very act of them proving to you how great they are and you rewarding that does really put them in the frame of either trying to win you over or trying to please you.

I really do think, at the end of the day – some people don’t necessarily think “This is just my model and it works for me” – women ultimately are pleasers, and they want to please, and you’ve got to give them space to do that, and space to really enjoy getting your validation instead of you constantly smothering them and asking for their validation.

[Angel Donovan]: There’s definitely something to that. We all know that everyone likes a challenge; it’s just in our nature. Whatever we’re given lightly is not something we’re going to value. At this point, that’s pretty much very, very hard science.

I’m wondering, in terms of practice points, you said you had ten points you defined this masculine polarity, which enables us to change this frame.

We’ve been talking about the ego – is that one part of masculine polarity, or is it the whole thing?

[Swinggcat]: I think the ego is actually involved in all of these parts. Did we go through the ten parts yet?

[Angel Donovan]: No, there was a few of them we’ve touched on, I believe.

[Swinggcat]: I think we went over – I’ll just say what the ten parts are and then maybe we’ll cover one or two more.

The first one is an inward locus of validation. We talked about that a bit.

The second is being desire-driven as opposed to ego-driven.

The third is being the chooser.

The fourth is taking the initiative.

The fifth is replacing boundaries. When you’re in a feminine polarity, typically you see a woman as having a lot of boundaries that you have to get past, whereas when you’re in a masculine polarity, there’s a perceptual shift where you see openings.

A lot of that has to do with getting outside your head and letting the situation itself guide your actions. I guess that’s another step.

Then we have handicapping. We have radical honesty and we have setting the right precedent.

Let me talk a little bit about radical honesty.

[Angel Donovan]: I’m interested in this one, in particular.

[Swinggcat]: Years ago, I actually discovered a book called Radical Honesty and I was drawn to it. It’s written by this kooky and radically-honest therapist named Brad Blanton.

There’s actually a great article you can find; I think it was published back in 2007 in Esquire Magazine, where they interviewed this guy. During the interview, he’s picking his nose and scratching his balls and farting loudly. He actually believes that the “one-cheek sneak” I think he calls it is a bit deceitful.

He confesses to sleeping with over 500 women, half a dozen men and a hermaphrodite hooker with complete double organs. He cops to letting his dog lick him off.

This guy does sound like a complete kook, but I think there’s something very simple and true about his philosophy, which is that we’d all be better off telling the truth. While lying is easy and we all do it, it creates more problems than good.

That goes for even those small lies.

My sister and I – I made my sister read the book – we made a vow to practice radical honesty for an entire year. To be fair, we really had a good time making people cringe.

I really took this to the extreme. There was a family friend of ours and she asked me if this dress she was wearing made her look fat. Since I had to practice radical honesty, I told her, “The dress doesn’t make you look fat, but to be honest with you, it looks like you put on about 12 pounds.” I can really see it in her face. “Have you upped your sodium intake?” And she burst into tears.

Probably my sister and I inherited a bit of a schadenfreude from my grandmother. To be fair, we really weren’t practicing radical honesty; we were using radical honesty as a carte blanche to be assholes to people.

After that, I did practice some real radical honesty, which is really difficult. Trying to be radically honest 100% of the time is really hard because so much of what we say and do is layered and layered with bullshit, with deceit, on so many different levels.

I don’t know – I find if you confront a lot of people on being liars, they’ll defend themselves on the grounds that they don’t want to offend other people or they don’t want to hurt their feelings; they’re protecting them. And I think this is utter bullshit.

The need to lie often stems from a need to protect and coddle and enable that insidious little bastard we call the ego.

[Angel Donovan]: [Chuckles] You guessed it.

[Swinggcat]: And I think the real reason we lie is that we want others to like us. We like others’ validation. Oftentimes, us men – I’m guilty of this – will pretend to like things that a woman likes to impress her or to spark a common interest.

If you’re a pickup artist or player, sometimes you do the inverse. You judge a woman for liking something that you secretly like to give her a hard time, to challenge her and make her qualify herself to you. These things are very common; we’ve all done them.

But in all fairness, lying, as we all know, has enormous consequences. One, you have to keep the lie up. Oftentimes you got to make up even more lies to cover your tracks.

Maybe you were making fun of a woman for liking Dave Matthews, but secretly, you’ve got a huge poster of him in your living room. Now you’ve got to take down that poster when she comes to your house so she doesn’t know that you were bullshitting.

Maybe a woman was really into Beyoncé, and you hate Beyoncé, but you pretended to like her. Now you got to worry about her grilling you on Beyoncé songs or even worse, her dragging you to a Beyoncé concert. Now you got to go to this terrible concert.

[Angel Donovan]: There’s a great book – I don’t know if you’ve read it, by the way – by Sam Harris called Lying.

[Swinggcat]: I’m a big fan of Sam Harris.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I read that book. I haven’t read Radical Honesty, but I’ve heard about Radical Honesty. After I read Lying, I had the same thing. I just decided, “Alright, that’s it. I’m not going to waste my time lying anymore, because it just hurts.” It just comes back to hurt you long-term. It’s always this kind of short-term.

What you were saying about the ego, I was like, “Yup, that’s definitely where it’s going.” Every time you lie, it’s in some form trying to protect your ego, and it makes you feel very uncomfortable when you first start to stop lying in those little white lies. I think the white lies are the hardest things, because it’s the things that everyone’s doing all the time just to make situations more socially easy.

I guess you do it more in the West Coast than in the East Coast.

[Swinggcat]: That’s probably true. I totally agree with you on that.

It’s really funny, and I’m sure you’ve experienced this too, when you start practicing radical honesty and you stop making those white lies, one of the things that happened to me is I became quite disgusted with myself because I became aware of what a liar I was. I would lie all throughout the day, and there are layers and upon layers of lies.

I think by not lying you definitely do become a more powerful person, and the other thing too is when you tell the truth, you really start connecting with people in a much more genuine way.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s true. Everyone is going to the mainstream image. That’s what the ego does – it’s like, “This is the mainstream, what we’re supposed to be saying to be cool,” but it is this mainstream thing where everyone can be a lot more unique.

If you want to stand out and be a bit more unique, simply being yourself and saying – no matter how weird you think it is –. Recently, when I went to go on dates, I get into biotech and pretty geeky stuff. I’ll talk about MRIs or whatever crazy shit I’ve been doing lately in terms of testing and stuff like that, and it’s an interesting experiment because you think girls are going to think that’s totally fucked up and just weird.

And not one time has anyone not taken an interest in this subject. They’d be like, “Oh, really? What the hell’s that all about?” and taking a deep interest in it.

I’m not sure why we have this fear of uncloaking ourselves. I guess it’s because once we are out there and it’s the real us, then we’ve got something to be worried about, because if we do get rejected, it’s not just this model that we’re taking; it’s actually something real.

I don’t know if you’ve got ideas on what’s stopping guys from going out and practicing radical honesty.

[Swinggcat]: I think anyone can start practicing it and they’ll develop more of a masculine polarity by practicing it. I think what prevents us from being radically honest is what I talked about before, that we have this need to be liked by other people.

It’s not that we’re such noble people that we don’t want to offend or hurt other people; it’s that we want them to like us, so we tend to like the things they like and we cater our conversation to something that they will like. When you’re vibing with someone, you need to take them into consideration, but what you shouldn’t do is if someone’s talking about something that bores you, you shouldn’t pretend that you’re into that.

It’s perfectly fine to tell someone that you really aren’t interested in that conversational topic, or if a woman’s talking about something you don’t know about, it’s perfectly fine to say, “Oh yeah, I have no idea what this is about. Educate me.” That’s totally fine too.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I’m in LA at the moment and that comes up all the time. I’m just like, “Oh, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Educate me.”

[Swinggcat]: Which is great! It’s so good to do that, because so many people don’t, and then you find yourself talking to someone and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I know about that” and you find out that they have no idea what the fuck you were talking about. What you thought was a connection was not a connection.

[Angel Donovan]: Well I guess that’s an important point you’re making as well, because until you’re honest about what you don’t understand about the conversation and what you do understand, then there can’t be any real connection.

At some point, they’re going to realize that “Oh, he was just saying yes but he didn’t really connect with me on that topic.” And then they'd start to disbelieve in the whole connection.

[Swinggcat]: Something that we can both relate to is early on in the pickup community, back in the Mystery Lounge days – and this is probably largely [inaudible 01:03:06] although I think we’re also going on a different direction – is that you learn all these different tactics. You’ve got the Qualifying and you’ve got the Challenging and you’ve got the Push-Pull and you’re trying to do Compliment a Woman.

Early on when we were using all this stuff, most of us, most of the pickup community, was terribly disingenuous and fake. The whole thing was super plastic and fake, but what I find is that when you start practicing radical honesty, you don’t need to worry about how you make this woman qualify you or how do you challenge her, or how do you pay her a compliment, or when to pay her a compliment, or how to use push-pull.

When you’re truly genuine, you’ll just naturally start challenging her at the right time, paying her compliments at the right time and using push-pull in just the right way. You’ll all naturally do these things.

The reason why we have a hard time doing them is because most of us are consummate liars. When you’re connecting with someone for real, there are things you’re going to like about them and there are things you aren’t going to like about them.

And so the idea of push-pull, which is a concept I’ve talked about before, is the idea of emotionally pushing someone away from you and then emotionally pulling them back in.

To give you an old like that I used to use is one where I would tell the girl – and this is fine to use if it’s true – if she was very sarcastic, I would accuse her of being sarcastic and I would say something like “I’m sarcastic too and if we hung out, we’d have the best fun making fun of everyone at their expense” but then we’d be comically tainted, so we can’t hang out.

There’s a push and there’s a pull, and it goes back and forth with that. But instead of memorizing a bunch of push-pull lines, if you’re real with people, you’ll actually naturally do this in your communication.

[Angel Donovan]: I’ve got a good example of that. Guys may have heard of this push and pull, and it sounds like it’s hard to do – pushing and pulling. It’s not something natural for them.

I’m just thinking of an example just earlier this evening actually, I did push-pull by acting naturally, by just being honest.

A girl called me up and I was like, “Oh, yeah.” She’s like, “What are you doing tonight?” I was like, “I wanted to take you to this event, but I can’t because I’m going to do this interview, because I had my battery failed yesterday and I had to reschedule my –.”

I was just telling her this, but actually there’s a push-pull in there because I was saying “I was going to take you out – but then I didn’t because this is what happened.” Most people would delete that whole story because first of all, maybe they'd be afraid, “It’s the first time a girl called me up.” They’d sort of be afraid of just saying, “Oh, I was thinking about taking you out this quickly” – or that kind of thing. Or “I was planning to do something and now I can’t do it.” And they maybe were not getting to the negatives on the other side.

It does just kind of happen naturally. I think we’re always planning and things don’t work out, or you’re thinking something and then you decide against it. I think people can relate to this.

You’ll think, “Oh maybe I should do this.” “No, I’m not so interested in that after all.” Our thoughts aren’t actually really super solid and planned out all the time, so I think that’s where this natural thing of push-pull can come from. If you really, really do get to where you are coming from, then often the things we think, we kind of go backwards and forwards anyway.

I don’t know if that’s how you think of it naturally.

[Swinggcat]: I definitely think there’s a lot to that. Oftentimes in school, we’re taught to put together logical and coherent thoughts, and when we communicate with other people, oftentimes because we want to appease them, we make our thoughts very logical and coherent.

But the reality is, naturally, our thoughts are oftentimes in contradiction with each other, and there’s a concept in hypnosis that they use to induce trance called apposition of opposites.

The idea is putting two things together, juxtaposing two things that don’t go together. When there’s two things that don’t fit together and you make the mind concentrate on both of them, people’s critical factor has a tendency to go down, and it’s very hypnotic. It’s very entrancing.

I think part of being radically honest is you come across a little bit more than that and instead of people thinking that you’re a bad communicator, they actually see you as more charismatic. I also think that is a good example of push-pull.

The other thing that happens when you’re radically honest with people is that they have a tendency to qualify to you and prove themselves to you. Unlike the pickup artist that just wants to be difficult with a woman so he disagree with her for no particular reason – I don’t mean to use pickup artists; I mean, to a large extent, I consider myself a pickup artist or a seducer. Certain guys out there, guys who haven’t learned this stuff – maybe a guy at the club will be difficult with a woman just to be difficult with her.

But if you’re just honest, like the woman talks about something that you’re not interested in and you’re honest with her that “This conversation’s boring me,” automatically she’s going to prove herself to you or she’s going to try and cater to you at that point.

That definitely puts her into the frame of pleasing you and trying to win you over and putting you up on a pedestal.

One other thing I want to say is, I don’t think we just lie to others, but the main radical honesty we need to practice is being radically honest with ourselves. Most of us are lying sacks of shit to ourselves.

Why do we do this? We do it to protect our fragile egos.

[Angel Donovan]: You really hate the ego, don’t you, man?

[Swinggcat]: Yes, he is my enemy. But I will say that the ego is definitely – you can’t get rid of the ego. He is a cursed twin that’s attached to you for life, so you got to learn to deal with that.

I’ll give you some stuff, some exercises for that, but a lot of times we guys will talk about how they’re 100% confident and secure with themselves, and I certainly had been out with guys like that. They’ll make fun of meditation or inner game, and they talk about being alpha and having confidence, and then when it comes time to talk to women, they’re scared to death to approach.

There’s something not quite right there in terms of their confidence level, and I think the first step to controlling the ego is recognizing exactly how it controls us.

To me, you do that through being 100% honest with yourself when you’re feeling insecure or when you’re making excuses for yourself for maybe not pursuing a woman or not even approaching her.

[Angel Donovan]: I like the concept man; transparency and accountability to yourself are certainly things that worked for me in my life – not just in this area but in everything. I totally get where you’re coming from and how that works. I would say, until you’re not transparent with yourself, it makes it very difficult to go forward.

I’ve seen this in some people’s lives, where they’ll often make excuses or they’ll say “Oh I didn’t do that because of x reason.” Basically, I think a good practice is just to try and write down in a journal your true thoughts, so you can go backwards as well and you can look over and you can see if things line up.

Sometimes, our mind will try to trick us. We’re talking about something that’s pretty tricky here. Like you were talking about guys who are approaching girls in clubs and they say, “I didn’t approach the nine because she wasn’t a nine; she was a seven or a six.”

Those kinds of things can be pretty tricky, because guys will say those a lot and they’ll kind of believe them in the moment and realistically [clear 01:10:55]. I’m not sure what the answer is to solving that. I think one thing can be just trying to journal as truthfully as possible, and the next step is to try and communicate that to others.

When we were learning this stuff, you obviously met people that you were able to talk to pretty straightforwardly about this stuff. I know you – you’re pretty straightforward and you’ll talk about this stuff, the dark side, the positive side and everything and try and get at the truth of it.

Once you got a few people like that around you, you can start to develop it more and it helps you yourself.

[Swinggcat]: I didn’t see the value in what’s called “inner game.” When I got into this stuff, I wanted to learn all the techniques and stuff like that, I saw myself as someone that was quite secure with myself and didn’t think that I had many insecurities. It was more about learning the techniques and stuff like that.

It was really when I started to work on the inner game stuff, when I really dug into the ego, that I was a bit horrified of what I found. I would say, even if a guy thinks he is secure yet he’s not getting the results he wants, he should probably do some exercises to look inside his ego and see what’s under the hood.

Because the first step to really getting control of that is – it’s like in AA. Step one is acceptance, right? And it’s accepting that basically your ego is a little bitch, and you’ve got to recognize that to start gaining control of it and to reverse the roles.

[Angel Donovan]: Absolutely. Hopefully today you’ve managed to persuade some guys that it’s time to accept that it’s there.

Like you said, everyone has an aspect of this. I’m not going to say I don’t have an ego today, even with all the hours and everything I’ve put into this, I certainly have an ego; I certainly feel it’s much better than it used to be.

[Swinggcat]: Right. Before we end this, I could share a couple of exercises for getting control of your ego that had been really helpful for me.

The journal idea is not only a good idea, but I did the journal thing for probably around ten years. Maybe one day I’ll publish those.

[Angel Donovan]: That would be interesting.

[Swinggcat]: I wrote out all of my insecurities, all if that stuff. It’s something I’ve been working on a long time. I don’t think you ever get to the point where you don’t have an ego; you always have an ego, and putting your ego in check is a muscle that you constantly have to flex. If you don’t work on it, your ego will start to control you again, and that’s just the reality of it.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent. So you’re saying there, journaling is a great idea?

[Swinggcat]: It’s a great idea! I don’t know if we have a little time, I have a couple of exercises that you can use to help control your ego, a couple of them I can share right here.

[Angel Donovan]: Sure, that would be really helpful for the guys.

[Swinggcat]: Okay. This is kind of an exercise – a meditation exercise – and the point of it is just to get to know your ego and all the crazy thoughts. Before you can gain control of your ego, you’ve got to become aware of the different thought patterns that he has.

Just a simple thing to do is to find a quiet place, put a timer on your phone for 15 minutes and you can either sit in your meditation Lotus position, or you can sit on a chair – it doesn’t really matter.

Personally, I like to do my meditation sessions with my eyes open, because I want the ability to control my ego in environments or situations where I have my eyes open, but if you rather have your eyes closed, I think that’s fine as well.

The main thing is that you spend 15 minutes just focusing on your breath. Inevitably, what’s going to happen is thoughts are going to pop into your head. The main thing is, don’t fight it, because you can’t.

Your ego is like a radio that never shuts the fuck up, so don’t even worry about fighting it. The purpose of this exercise is really two-fold.

First purpose is to just gain awareness of all the crazy thoughts going on inside your head. If you do the exercise, there’s a good chance you’re not going to like what you’d discover.

I actually remember, when I first started doing these meditation sessions, I worry that I needed to be committed, because there were all sorts of crazy thoughts that I became aware of.

But this is a really important step, because this is how you’re going to begin to recognize all the destructive thought patterns that your ego uses to control you, so it’s extremely important.

The second purpose of this is to start training yourself not to get hooked by your ego’s crazy thoughts. While you can’t shut him up, he’s going to keep jabbering on all this nonsense, you can train yourself, you can flex that muscle of not getting hooked by a thought.

I can give you two visualization things you can do: you’re doing your meditation exercise and some of these you may find a little bit hokey but they absolutely work.

One is to imagine a river in your mind as you’re doing your breathing, your 15-minute meditation thing. Imagine a river in your mind, and anytime a thought pops up, simply stick it on a leaf and put it down the river. It may linger for a little but eventually it will go downstream.

Now another one you can do – and this is one I actually really like – is imagining your mind as a rock concert. Your breath is the star – that’s where you’re shining the light. All of your other thoughts are roadies who are trying to take the spotlight away from your breath. When one of your thoughts tries to do that, simply put the spotlight back on your breath, and this really works.

These two exercises, if you practice them, you’ll get better in not letting your ego hook you and not getting hooked by all of the crazy thoughts. For me, that one is pretty useful.

But I thought I’d give another one; I think it’s important to learn how to do this.

[Angel Donovan]: Let me just jump in because the whole meditation thing, I’ve been doing for a while. Like you, you were just saying you do that with your eyes open so that you’ll be able to do it in normal situations, kind of step out of yourself.

Just to bring it into the context of dating, if a guy goes to a bar and he starts to get all of these negative thoughts – if he’s been meditating, he’s more likely to think, “Ah, there goes my ego,” rather than actually being completely tied to it and not even seeing it. Because he’s actually feeling part of it and he’s so submerged in it that he doesn’t realize that it’s his ego and not him.

In that dating situation, it allows you, like you said, to be there and put it on the leaf and let it go down the stream.

Like you, I started off meditating in a very quiet place. In fact, the only place I could ever get to actually meditate was if I went to the gym and I went to the sauna afterwards, and then I was slightly able to meditate. That’s how bad I was many, many years ago. That was the only way I could, because I was in the right state of mind and it was quiet and there was no one there and it was kind of hot.

And I close my eyes. And then slowly, I’ve exposed myself to more and more situations until last summer, I was living in Malaga at the time, and I would sit in one of the main public places – the biggest square – and I would meditate at the side, with my eyes open. It’s like a bustling square with tons of tourists and everything.

Once you get into that stage, you kind of take it step by step and you can get to that point where you’re in any situation and you can be meditating and be free and not be riding on your own thoughts like that. I don’t know if you can relate to that, if you did this step by step, or you just jumped to –?

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, that’s actually – I’m glad you brought that up. I don’t know if you’ve done any of the Griffith Park trails since you’ve been in LA?

[Angel Donovan]: No, I haven’t – oh no, I have, actually. I’ve done it once or twice, actually, accidently. I’ve done it twice, actually.

[Swinggcat]: On one of the trails, I would hike up to the top and then I would meditate. I started doing this early in the morning a lot. What I noticed is that there was a lot of other hikers on the trail, and I could feel their energy looking at me because I was in Lotus position, I’m sitting there.

At first, it would totally take me out of the meditative stage, but after a while, you’re able to do it. As you were saying, the nice thing is when you find yourself in those high stress social situations, like approaching a woman in a popular night club, you’re able to stay in that state because you practiced meditating in situations where there’s other people around.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, putting it into a language that the guys might like, it’s practicing being cool [chuckles].

[Swinggcat]: It’s practicing being cool, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: You’ll be able to stay cool in situations, instead of getting sucked into them.

[Swinggcat]: Exactly. Another one which is similar to this is getting to know your thought patterns while you’re actually approaching a girl.

This can be a bit more challenging than the last exercise.

Basically the idea is the next time you spot an attractive woman, I want you to walk towards her with the intent of approaching her, but without using a canned pickup line. So no going up to her and saying “Hi” or “What time is it?” or “Do you come here often?” or “Is this bar good?” or “How is your night going?” or any of the other default lines you normally use to approach women in a mindless way.

Instead, I want you to approach on your own wits, I want you to actually read the situation.

When you do this, something interesting is going to happen and I want you to pay attention to your thought patterns. What thoughts are racing through your head?

You might be filled with lust over her beauty, or you might worry that she’s going to act bitchy, or embarrass you. You might get anxious or scared, or you might have doubts like she’s out of your league, or think what you’re going to say isn’t witty enough. You might second-guess yourself, or just go completely blank.

Wherever your mind wanders is actually fine – you should let it wander. The whole point of the exercise is just to get to know your ego’s thought patterns in high stress social situations, and to gain awareness of this.

And you might be able to still approach her; perhaps you don’t even approach her because it’s super nerve-wracking. But either way, you’re going to be aware of what your ego does to you.

Oftentimes, what it will start to do – and you can feel this happen in these high stress situations – is you can feel your ego literally pulling you back into your head and taking you out of the here and now, and doling your sensitivity to what’s going on around you. Another exercise for strengthening your ability to ready the situation.

I actually think when you let go of ego, we all actually have a natural ability to read the situation. We all kind of know what to do to get a girl. So this is pretty simple.

Imagine that you’re out with a friend or a wingman and he asks you how to approach a woman. I’m willing to bet you can tell him exactly what to do, exactly how to approach her.

The reason is that your ego isn’t involved. When your ego is involved, it has a tendency to shift your perception outward, so you know exactly what to do. So that’s an interesting exercise; I don’t know if you noticed that early on that you were able to always give better advice when it wasn’t you approaching the girl.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, of course. I think everyone can relate to that.

[Swinggcat]: And it really shows that all of us do know what to do. So the next step is, and this is kind of fun thing so you can basically advise a friend on how to pick up a girl or you have an imaginary wingman; you might not want to tell anyone.

You have an imaginary wingman that you’re telling them, you’re advising them on how to pick up the girl. After you do that, the next step is instead of allowing your wingman to approach her, you need to approach her, since you know exactly what to do.

But what’s likely to happen is your ego’s going to come back into the equation and you’re going to second-guess yourself, and you’re not going to approach her.

This is the hard part: a lot of times, even when we know what to do, we don’t trust our intuitions. We don’t trust what the situation tells us to do, but we need to take those risks.

This is a little exercise for radically, honestly approaching women. Simply imagine that you spotted a really attractive girl and ask yourself, be really honest with yourself, if there was no risk involved, there are zero consequences, would you approach her?

Would you approach any girl if there were zero consequences? If there was no risk?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, of course [chuckles].

[Swinggcat]: I mean, what guy wouldn’t? So the next step is if you answered yes, then you need to approach her. But what normally happens at this point is once again, the ego’s going to come up with a bunch of excuses.

It’s going to say, “Well I’ll approach her in a little bit; I’m having a bit with my buds. Maybe in a little bit I’ll approach her.”

[Angel Donovan]: “She’s busy on the phone.”

[Swinggcat]: “She’s on the phone,” or –.

[Angel Donovan]: “She’s busy, she’s in a hurry going somewhere.”

[Swinggcat]: Right, or “I should wait; she might have a boyfriend. Let me wait a couple of minutes to see if her boyfriend comes back.” It just goes on and on, and I think wherever your ego goes is fine; you should let it run hog wild.

But the one thing that I think really works – and I’ve actually used this with myself – is to take each excuse that your ego comes up with, and you can write this in a journal or you can do it right on the spot. Let your ego run wild with all of its excuses, but preface each one of the excuses with “I’m too much of a prison bitch to approach her, so I’m making the excuse that…”

You know, “…that I’m going to wait and finish my drink before I talk to her.” What this does is this does a good job of calling your ego out on his own bullshit.

I’ll give you one other way to short circuit the ego by giving your subconscious mind an alternative.

Oftentimes what happens when you’re scared to approach a girl or whatever, you’re not approaching a girl, is the ego starts looping these negative thoughts. The subconscious mind has a tendency to move away from pain and towards pleasure.

So what you really need to do is to give the subconscious mind an alternative. I don’t know, Angel, maybe it’s been several years, but can you remember a girl that you didn’t want to approach, you thought things were going to go really bad?

If we go back, I don’t know, the ‘90s maybe.

[Angel Donovan]: No! It’s probably not that long ago. Certainly just a couple of years ago, there was this amazing girl. I mean, I did approach her, but I definitely had these nerves about this girl because she just looks so spectacular and she had such a great personality. You could see that she was just bubbling with energy and confidence and everything, and she had a whole crowd around her. It was a whole bunch of factors.

[Swinggcat]: Definitely, that’s an intimidating situation. At any point, did you feel that if you approached her, it wouldn’t go well?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, for sure. That’s what was going on in my mind.

[Swinggcat]: So if we were to take that – you did approach her, which is awesome, but oftentimes we find ourselves in situations where the ego is just not allowing you to approach her. It’s decided that it’s going to go back.

A question that I like to ask myself is instead of “Is she going to be nice? Is it going to go well? Is it going to go bad?” – “What are the chances, what percentage is she going to be very receptive to me, is it going to go well?”

When you were nervous to approach her, if you asked yourself before you approached her, “What percentage did you think – what were the chances of it going well?” If you were to think about that.

[Angel Donovan]: I probably thought 50-50 at that point.

[Swinggcat]: Okay, well 50-50 is kind of high. Now what do you think the chances were of you making out with her five minutes later?

[Angel Donovan]: No, that was – I was also in Thailand, and it wasn’t that high-end social club there. It’s really not the kind of thing you see. I put that really, really low; it wasn’t on the cards [crosstalk 01:27:47].

[Swinggcat]: 5%? 4%?

[Angel Donovan]: To tell you the truth, I didn’t even think of playing it that way. I was just like, I’m going to spend some time with her, get her number and then carry things on from there.

[Swinggcat]: Let’s take this further –.

[Angel Donovan]: But if I was in the States, it would be completely different.

[Swinggcat]: Okay, so let’s say even in the States. What do you think the percentage of making out with her five minutes later was? Let’s just put a number.

[Angel Donovan]: It’s difficult. If you try 50-50, depending on how the interaction goes, it can work a lot of the time, yeah.

[Swinggcat]: Okay, so you’d put 50% that you could make out with her a couple of minutes later

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, if it goes well.

[Swinggcat]: Okay. What do you think if you approach her, what are the percentages of maybe an hour later, banging her in the backseat of a car or a hotel room? Or a bathroom?

[Angel Donovan]: What you’re doing is now getting into – that’s never been my style. I’ve done it on a few occasions, but it’s not something I have a lot of experience in, because that’s just never been what I’ve wanted out of this.

I’d actually put that as very low just because I don’t have the experience to back it up, and so my mind doesn’t think that way. Do you know what I mean?

[Swinggcat]: That’s fine. What percentage would you put it at? It doesn’t matter. What percent?

[Angel Donovan]: Give me 5%.

[Swinggcat]: 5%, okay. Still 5% chance of banging this girl in the bathroom is way higher than playing the lottery, buying a lotto ticket. Correct?

[Angel Donovan]: Absolutely.

[Swinggcat]: And on top of it, it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s free. The only thing that could possibly go wrong is your ego gets bruised [clear 01:29:29]. I’ve approached thousands and thousands of women and I think the worst that happened is one time I got punched but I was in the wrong for that and I’ve got a couple of drinks in my face. But nothing bad happened.

The question is, to give your subconscious mind an alternative, “Is it worth the risk” – which, there is no risk “of a 5% chance of banging her in a bathroom or even a car, half hour after meeting her? Is it worth going up and approaching her?” And I think it absolutely is.

[Angel Donovan]: Most guys are going to say “Yes, it is.”

You just said that in all your years, which is many years now – it’s over 15 years – the worst that happened to you is you got punched once and you’ve had two drinks thrown in your face?

[Swinggcat]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, I’m thinking, nothing really bad has happened to me ever. The most awkward thing was once a boyfriend came up. That’s happened a few times, but the boyfriend – and most of the time the boyfriend’s just been a bit sulky and I just said, “Alright, no big deal. Hi, I didn’t know you were with a guy.” That’s it.

[Swinggcat]: No big deal.

[Angel Donovan]: No big deal.

[Swinggcat]: It’s funny how people fear murder, being hurt, all that stuff. But what they fear more than that is a bruised ego.

[Angel Donovan]: You are absolutely right there. That’s what they’re scared of.

[Swinggcat]: And so I think if you can see that the worst that happens is you might end up with a bruised ego, maybe, but the payoff – a 5% chance is really good. I mean, even in your case.

[Angel Donovan]: Of something happening in the real world.

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, of banging her in a bathroom. Probably for a lot of guys much higher than a 5% chance at least the interaction going well, possibly making out with her even, there’s a good chance that that will happen.

If they’re able to take the risk of swallowing their pride, which is no big deal – no one cares.

I think the fear of rejection is worse than the actual rejection. In fact, I don’t know about you, but when I was starting off years ago in the early 2000, I remember whenever I was in the club and I was having a hard time getting warmed up, I would purposely act really obnoxious. Because as soon as a woman said something rude to me, it was almost like a boxer being socked in the face. I woke up and I could talk to anyone.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s funny – that’s exactly what used to happen to me. Sometimes early on in the night, I’d have to get rejection to get started.

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, I know. It’s funny because I initially was scared of rejection and once it happened, my confidence just went through the roof and I was ready to rock and roll.

[Angel Donovan]: Do you think other guys can harness rejection that way? Is it a certain way you think about it, or is it just natural?

I’m not sure that everyone responds that way. Some people tend to let it push them down rather than respond by getting motivated, more driven by it.

[Swinggcat]: I don’t think that all guys are the same in how they take rejection, but I think that we’re all the same in how we're attached ego and that the more we train ourselves to detach from ego, the less those sort of blows are going to affect you.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, and maybe we can train ourselves to respond the way you said.

[Swinggcat]: I think we can, with practice. Some people have a proclivity towards – almost like a boxer when they get socked, they wake up and they can fight. Some guys, when they rejected, that’s really what snaps their game into shape and they’re ready to make stuff happen.

That’s the way I am and you are. I know a couple of people like that, but I know other people who aren’t like that; they’re kind of devastated when they get rejected. However, if those people learned to detach from their ego a bit, I don’t think the blow would affect them so strongly.

[Angel Donovan]: Well for sure, man, this meditation has been life-changing. I came into it later, and it’s helped me in relationships.

I guess now I’m realizing, now that I’m dating a little bit in LA, I’m realizing it’s had an impact elsewhere, because I was in relationships for a few years there so I didn’t really know what dating was like anymore.

I say it’s had a pretty big impact on casual dating; a single lifestyle also.

How long have you been meditating and using these approaches to it?

[Swinggcat]: I got into meditation maybe – I’m trying to think. [Inaudible 01:33:49] gotten much more serious about it and I was obsessive about it about a year ago. I’ve probably been doing it for four or five years, and slowly I got more and more drawn into it.

I just feel, on the whole, besides it making you better with people and with women and your personal life, I find it in general, your state of well-being is a lot better when you meditate.

[Angel Donovan]: Everything in life is better. Can’t say that enough.

Meditation isn’t easy to get started, but it’s definitely worth it. We’re just talking about dating here, but I’d say it’ll spill out all over their life.

I love the way you’ve linked it as an exercise to these dating problems, because I think most guys don’t realize how helpful it can be.

[Swinggcat]: Oh yes, it really is. Some people might not initially see how this relates to pick up because I haven’t really given you any pickup lines or techniques, but I can tell you that these types of exercises of learning to control the ego, in my humble opinion, will improve your game and your success with women more than anything. I think you and I have both tried a lot of shit over the years.

[Angel Donovan]: [Chuckles] Yeah, we’ve experimented with a lot of stuff.

[Swinggcat]: We’ve experimented with a lot of stuff and I have to say that meditation is part of it, but learning to control the ego has worked for me better than anything. That’s a really key, key piece.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s really amazing to come from you, because you’re so well-known for some push and pull routines and things like that. I think it’s really amazing for you to come on the show and talk about this stuff from a completely different perspective – from some guys who have read The Game and probably still visualized Swinggcat as this guy who’s still back there doing these routines, this approach to it all.

It’s great to hear from you in particular about how you’ve change and how you’re looking at this now.

[Swinggcat]: Very cool. Thank you and we can do another – to a certain point, I’d be happy to come on here and do another, more technique-type interview, but I feel that this stuff that I talked about is really important and need to get out there because I think this is the stuff that’s going to bring change to guys’ lives.

You know that because you’ve been doing this sort of stuff in your own life as well.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I totally agree. Really, at the end of the day, techniques – I’m sure you don’t really use many techniques these days; you don’t even think about it.

But man, just before you go, we ask the same question of everyone who comes on the show. What would be your top three recommendations to help a guy get results as fast as possible with women?

It could be anything – maybe something we talked about today or absolutely anything from your life, from your experience.

[Swinggcat]: First thing, and this is going to go back to this course, is I highly recommend meditating for at least 15 minutes/day. I think that’s pretty crucial.

The other is there is a guy named Albert Ellis, and I’m trying to remember the name of his autobiography. You can look it up and put it on your site. He is the founder of the movement called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

He discovered his approach to therapy by teaching himself how to overcome shyness and approach women. Over the course of a summer, he literally forced himself to approach 200 or 300 women, and it was absolutely torturous for him at first, but I think after the first 50 or 60 it became very easy. After he did this little experiment that summer, he never had any problems talking to people again.

I found his autobiography very inspirational for anyone who’s going through the process.

The third recommendation, which I talked about – I’ve thrown some other recommendations at you [clear 01:37:39] – but the third one is I really recommend picking up Brad Blanton’s Radical Honesty and actually attempting to practice some radical honesty in your life because besides meditation, that’s another thing that will have a huge impact on your life and your relationships with women and picking up women and being successful with women. I think that’s absolutely huge.

[Angel Donovan]: Thanks man, these are really good. It’s very obvious for this whole interview that you read a lot. You’re definitely pretty well-educated. Do you spend a certain amount of time reading every week? Just to give the guys an idea how you get all these references and everything you’ve been talking about.

[Swinggcat]: I read five books at one time and to me, I don’t really go about it in a methodical method; it’s just if something interests me, I get drawn into it.

Kind of the same approach I have with women, as certain women just draw me in and I get more and more curious about it, and you have to make me more and more curious. Just like a book – if it doesn’t interest me, I have no worries about putting git down and not finishing it. If it interests me, I’ll keep reading.

Do you have a certain methodology you go about reading stuff?

[Angel Donovan]: No, over the years I’ve tried to. I love to read. The only thing I’d been able to kind of do is I’ll say Sunday is Study Day; I’m not allowed to work. I’m not allowed to hang out with my girl – to my girl, it’s Study Day as well. It’s one day where I just sit back and I’ll take some time to read, listen to audio courses.

[Swinggcat]: That’s so awesome! I should make more time for myself to do that. Lately I really haven’t had as much time as I would like to just read books, but for me it’s recharging and I think it’s just good for the mind to put new ideas inside it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, it’s really important to study. The other one is since I’ve been in LA, there’s so much driving involved, I listen to audio books and podcasts all the time. I’m learning way more than usual just because you’re always on 20-minute little journeys here, so you got some time to kill that way, so it’s pretty useful living in LA, which I’m sure most people do here.

[Swinggcat]: That’s definitely being outside of [inaudible 01:39:58] time, too.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Man, thanks so much for coming on the show. It’s been a long episode and you’ve got so much information; I’m sure the guys will really appreciate it. Thanks for your time today.

[Swinggcat]: Yeah, absolutely.