Ep. 11 The Emotional vs. The Logical Journey of Dating with Derek Cajun

[Derek Cajun]: Hello. How’s it going?

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, man. Okay, so Cajun, you’ve been around a long time, you’ve been with Love Systems a long time, when did you join exactly?

[Derek Cajun]: I actually came into it around 2006, is when I met Tenmagnet, who is another one of the instructors, and he convinced me to go to a seminar near the end of 2006 and I did that, and then ended up helping him out in a couple ones near the end. So I think I officially came in the roster in early 2007, but by 2006 I was already kind of involved. So since then, so quite a while.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, great, great. And pretty quickly after, you’re well-known for when you appeared on a TV show in a contest, kind of like a pickup contest, which was Keys to the VIP. That was around that period or… ?

[Derek Cajun]: That was in 2008, I believe, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, and give us a bit of context. How did that happen and how did it go and… ?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah. I guess it’s a funny and kind of interesting story in that they had come to me wanting me to do the show because they’d heard that I was a Love Systems instructor in Toronto and that's where the show is filmed, and the timing when they wanted to do it I actually couldn’t do it because I was away during a seminar out of the country, and so I recommended they use my cousin who was also sort of at the time kind of into the same sort of stuff and did reasonably well. So they did, they went along with getting him on the show. When they actually started to film it, it ended up being a different date, so I was actually free that weekend. So I actually came along just sort of as moral support for my cousin Mitch.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow.

[Derek Cajun]: And yeah, so I wasn’t even supposed to be on it. So I went there, and they have this other guy with him that was with him, they were competing against each other, and the other guy wasn’t doing so well in the sense that I guess he was kind of creeping girls out, and so the producer came to me, because I was there, because like I said I was there for moral support and they were giving me free drinks so I was helping out and stuff, so I was around. And they came to me at around midnight after they’d been filming already for about an hour and a half and said, “Hey listen, we’re not going to have a very good show. Would you mind putting the mics on and trying this out?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure, let's do it. I’ll go for it, whatever you guys need.” And so they did that. So at around midnight they mic’d me up and then said, “Okay, we need at least three sort of approaches that we could put on the show,” so I ended up doing four in the next hour, and three of those are the ones you see on the show.

[Angel Donovan]: That sounds like fun.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, so it was fun, and like I said it was one of those things where… a lot of guys, especially in the industry that I work in, they’re like, “Oh my God, that must have been so stressful. You have to do well and it can make a break to you.” The thing is I didn’t have much time to think about it. I was just sort of there and I just went and did it, so it wasn’t really that stressful because like I said I was already there talking to people the whole time, so it was just more like, “Now they’re going to record me.” But yeah, it was really fun, and I guess if you saw the video, it turned out really well, so no regrets there.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that must have been a ball of fun. Were you already doing bootcamps at that time?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah I was, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so there’s a tiny bit of pressure when you’ve got students watching you, and for the same reason it’s got to work out, right?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Good reasons. So, but yeah, on live… no, it wasn’t live, right? But on national TV, so it’s a big thing.

[Derek Cajun]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: So after that, I mean, is there any kind of backlash or anything like people recognizing you in the street or anything like that?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, actually more than you’d think. I always complain, or not complain, I guess I always kind of joke about it that I’m Internet famous but only amongst lonely men…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] That’s not so bad.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, yeah. But I do get recognized quite a bit, especially in Toronto, New York I get recognized quite a bit, and then LA. God, whenv I go to LA it’s almost like… I know what it feels like to be somewhat of a celebrity there because it doesn’t matter where I go, there’s always at least a dozen or two dozen guys in the club where I’m at that recognize me and want to come say hi. I mean, I like it. I usually get lots of free drinks and stuff, so it’s beneficial. Too bad that women don’t really recognize me, but that’s alright, I guess.

[Angel Donovan]: In this case I guess it’s probably a good thing.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, yeah, it is, especially. But no, it’s great. I love it. And it’s toned down I think a bit now since… it’s been a couple of years since this came out, so I’m enjoying my anonymity a bit more, but…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And I think I heard that one of the other Love Systems instructors was going to be on Keys to the VIP.

[Derek Cajun]: He was, yeah. Biscuit was on it as well yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: He’s a French guy, right?

[Derek Cajun]: Yes. Yeah, he's French-Canadian now.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, cool. Alright, good. Alright, so now I just want to segue into some of the meat of the interview. So like one of the video DVD programs that you’re on recently with Love Systems that they just launched was Beyond Words and it’s all about body language and physical escalation.

[Derek Cajun]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, could you talk about like kind of some of the coolest things that you put out there on that one?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah. Well, it’s good stuff because it’s about I think eight or nine hours of content on the DVD.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah. And the good thing about it is that the guys that I did with, so there was me and there was Vercetti, and Mr. M sort was the producer behind the whole thing, and then we have guest spots by Keychain and 5.0, and I think that’s it. Anyway, the cool thing about it is that, one, Vercetti, he’s like a classically trained Shakespearian actor, so a lot of the stuff that he was going over are actually sort of exercises and stuff they do in theater training in order to sort of fix fundamental body language problems or things that have to do with posture and the Alexander technique if you know what that is, which is learning how to like… posturing and speaking from this position and stuff. So there’s lots of good stuff on there but it’s not just sort of, I guess, pickup-centric, if you want to call it that, but more along the lines of these are things that people have been thinking about for hundreds of years that are proven to work.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Derek Cajun]: The stuff that I kind of got into—I’m an actor as well.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: I’m not doing the acting training like Vercetti is, but a lot of the stuff that I talk about have roots in acting as well, so things like subtext, for instance, which I go into quite a bit on the DVD. It is something that I think is probably the most… like I always say now, it’s probably the biggest thing for, in terms of… maybe not necessarily for beginners, but guys that want to get really good, subtext is essentially all what it is, like if you ask me, because it is essentially what you’re communicating outside of your words, which is predominantly the majority of what you’re communicating, especially with women who tend to communicate on these subtextual levels where it’s not really what they’re saying, it’s what they’re thinking or what they’re meaning by what they’re saying.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, so just so people know what we’re talking about, let’s just think about a concrete example. What would be a situation where there's some subcontext, subtext, going on?

[Derek Cajun]: Right, okay. So the classic example, this isn’t really something that has to be with anything you really hear in a bar, but if you ever had a girlfriend you’ve probably heard this enough times where you’ll say… maybe she looks upset or something, and you say, “Oh, babe, what’s wrong? Are you upset?” and she says, “No, I’m not upset.” Okay, well, the subtext there is, one, she’s saying she’s not upset but obviously she is upset because that's what she’s trying to communicate by the way that she said it. Maybe her body language communicates that, things like that.

When it comes into sort of… in the bar and meeting strangers and having conversations, it literally comes down to, “What are you thinking when you say what you say?” So, what are you thinking? A lot of guys when they start off they’re thinking, “I really hope this works. I really hope I don’t get blown out. I really hope she likes me.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: And the problem is, when you actually think that, you actually end up communicating that. It’s not that people kind of know what you’re thinking at all times. I imagine that’s a source of a lot of anxiety amongst guys that think that is literally true. It’s not really true, but what is true is that your intentions and your thoughts actually go into the words that you say, regardless of if they have anything to do with what your thoughts or intentions are. They’d still get communicated. So it kind of comes down to, what are you thinking in your head when you say what you say?

I go over some exercises in order to fix that, in order to change those negative beliefs you may have in your head and how you’re transferring those with the words that you’re saying. I imagine that it’s difficult hearing this, especially what I’m saying now. They’d be like, “Well, Cajun, that’s great, but how the hell do I change what I’m thinking in my head if I’m literally scared or I’m quite literally worried about what the consequences maybe of what I’m saying?” And I understand that and I went through kind of the same issues when I started doing this stuff. So I do have these exercises you can do in order to change your beliefs about the context of what you’re saying. And so I’d like to go over one right now if you don’t mind.

[Angel Donovan]: That would be great.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah. One of the ones I used to do, and this may sound a little bit, I guess, funny, I just think to myself in my head, “What if the girl that I’m talking to had a big piece of bird shit on her face and didn’t realize that it was there?” And so I just sort of do this as an exercise in my head where I think, “If I was talking to somebody who had a big piece of bird shit on their face and they didn’t know it was there, how would that change the way that I talk to them? How would that change sort of the way that I’m saying what I’m saying?” And let’s say that I can’t help them. Let’s say that I can’t let them know that they have that on their face, well, how would you talk to someone that had a big piece of shit on their face? You wouldn’t really be able to take anything they said seriously and you’d almost have this sort of, I guess not aloofness, but this sort of, like you get a joke that she doesn’t get I guess kind of attitude in sort of the subtext of what you’re saying.

That’s actually a quite attractive subtext when you think about it because women for the most part essentially want to figure us out. They want to know… it’s not because they’re trying to figure out necessarily our secrets or our intentions and things like that. I mean, they are, but what it really comes down to is they want to know what the sort of the meaning behind what we’re saying is. So if a guy’s talking to them they want to know, “Okay, is he hitting on me or is he just being friendly? Is he being sincere? Does he just want to get in my pants and he’s just faking this friendliness? What is going on in his head?” And women are very good at figuring that out and it’s beneficial to them. So when you can sort of paint the subtext of what you’re saying as if to say, “I get a joke you don’t get,” They’re going to want to know what that joke is and they’re going to be more interested in speaking to you because they’re going to want to know, “Why is this guy saying it like this? What is this smirk for? What does he know that I don’t know? This is intriguing. This is interesting. I want to talk to him more so I can figure this out.”

Now, I always say, the joke that you get that they don’t get, on the surface in your head you may be thinking, “Well, she has bird shit on her face,” or whatever you want to believe, but in the long run the joke that you get that she doesn’t get is that she’s attracted to you. That’s the joke, and so it sort of pays off in the end when she finally realizes that, okay, maybe she’s talked to you long enough to maybe… she is attracted to you now. Well, that’s the joke. So there are these things you can do—that’s just one example—in order to change the subtext of what you’re saying.

The best example I can always give is to watch any sort of early Marlon Brando movie. Marlon Brando is amazing at subtext. In fact, he pretty much invented the whole idea of adding subtext to acting, the method acting movement, and what he would do, essentially… I always end up getting into these long diatribes about Marlon Brando, so I’m going to try to catch myself here.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Derek Cajun]: But he was sort of groundbreaking in the sense that he introduced a whole new level of acting when he started doing this stuff because it wasn’t so transparent as acting was before. It became almost… you couldn’t really understand where his emotions were coming from. They were coming from such a true place. It’s almost hard to not become infatuated with his performances, especially his early ones when he usually played these very charismatic characters. So I recommend anyone watch early Marlon Brando. The Wild One is a good example. But even his more popular ones, A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and stuff like that, those are all excellent.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Okay, so people want to know the technical stuff behind this. So you’re saying this comes from method acting?

[Derek Cajun]: Essentially, that’s where I got it from. I’m not saying all the other people that end up doing this get it from that, but that’s where I got it from and that’s what I found the most beneficial and the most… it works the best for me. And from what I’ve been teaching other guys, it seems to work as well for them too. So it’s more of a matter of understanding the concept and being able to sort of… like I always say, having the ability to believe your own bullshit will work wonders for essentially having the skills to seduce, because it really does come down to being in control of what you’re thinking, and if you can sort of almost, not brainwash yourself, but if you can trick yourself into having these facetious beliefs that are beneficial, that’s going to work for you very well in the long run.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great. So when we’re talking about body language, is this the approach you’ve taken to it, kind of from like work from the inside to get the response, get what you want on the outside communicated?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, because that’s… I mean, you can’t pantomime your way through a seduction scenario with a woman. It’s just not going to… literally, there needs to be a core belief there that these movements and these things are emanating from. Otherwise, it’s going to seem very, very sort of scripted and forced, mechanical.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Derek Cajun]: So, and this is I think one of the fundamental problems of guys that get into this, is they actually think that it’s a formula. And essentially, there is a formula aspect to it but for the most part, these things that make up this formula all have to come from real emotions because if they don’t, it’s going to be totally transparent. They’re going to be able to read you like a book. They’re going to know that your beliefs aren’t in tune with your intentions, or I suppose your actions are not in tune with your beliefs or your intentions. So there is a certain degree of truth and sincerity, but there’s also a degree of that sincerity has to come from a place that’s beneficial. It doesn’t help to be sincere about your intention if your intentions are, “I’m scared and I want to trick you into liking me.” That’s not going to work. You do have to have the sort of I guess truth, but the truth needs to come from a beneficial place. It needs to be a beneficial truth. So it has to be, “Yes, I like you. Yes, I want to sleep with you, and I’m not scared and I don’t care if you know that, and I’m willing to be upfront and honest with you because I don’t really care if you know or not because I’m honest with my intentions.” And a lot of guys don’t realize that but that’s actually very attractive. Women are turned off by men that want them. They’re turned off by men that want them and try to hide it or try to trick them into thinking… hiding it or trick them into thinking that it’s not true when in fact it is, because we’re a hell of a lot more transparent than guys think we really are. We’re quite easy to read. So it’s not a matter of hiding those things, it’s a matter of finding a way to communicate those in a way that’s beneficial.

[Angel Donovan]: This is interesting because I think Love Systems is seen as one of the more technical approaches to pickup and dating out there. If you read like the Magic Bullets and things like that, it’s quite a structured method. So could you talk a little bit about how this interplays with all of that and how it sits together?

[Derek Cajun]: Sure, yeah. I mean, the structure is there because, for guys just getting into this, there are sort of structural things that they need to focus on when they first get started. It’s almost appealing I think to a mainstream sort of… especially male logical audience, which is I think predominantly what makes up our core audience.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Derek Cajun]: So those things obviously are going to help them a hell of a lot more than any sort of… I mean, I could talk about… and I do talk about subtext, and these are the sorts of things I’ve been talking about during the course of a seminar. It all happens on the second and third day, because on the first day I’m going to focus on the sort of fundamental core concepts that are going to help them the most, depending on where they are and where they’re coming from. There are certain things you need to know that are going to stab you in the foot way before you even think about subtext. So things like having your basic body language skills when it comes to how you’re going to approach them or the types of logistical problems that will come up that you can foresee if you know these sort of fundamental rules that you’re going to be able to sort of overcome without having to deal with those.

So those are essentially very much more important in the beginning than any of these things that I’ve just been talking about, but in the long run, once you actually get those things down, this is where you go from being, “I can have a conversation with a girl in a bar or maybe I can get a number,” to being, “I can go home with a girl any night if I wanted to,” or, “I can attract any girl I talk to once,” you know, once you have these things down. So that’s the biggest difference, I think, is if you want to just be able to… if you’re coming from a place where, “I piss myself just thinking about going out to the bar,” well, then yes, you need to focus on these fundamental sort of core… these core sort of rules and framework that we cover in Magic Bullets and we cover in the seminar as well. But once you get that sort of down, you need to start working on these other things that are going to actually help you achieve the sort of I think lofty aspirations that most guys kind of come in here with, which is really the only way to do it.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Derek Cajun]: So that’s I think the core difference, I think is that it comes from a place of being able to get decent and being able to get excellent or to a place where you can actually feel like, “Wow, this is the place that I never thought I’d be able to get to and now I’m getting snippets of and I’m getting pieces of this.” And before long you’re there and a couple of weeks have gone by or a month and you’re like, “Wow, I’m exactly the guy that I’ve always wanted to be or always thought myself one day becoming.” And that’s a good feeling. So, that’s what I try to… for my own personal journey where I’ve gone through that, that’s the sort of things that I like to impart, is that you can do this and it is possible. You can go from being the geeky sort of awkward guy that doesn’t know how to talk to anyone to being someone who can take his pick. And I think that’s something that is worth talking about since I think that’s something a lot of guys don’t realize is possible.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so it sounds like you continue to have that kind of overlaying structure to use for guidance in what you’re doing, but this is at a much lower level of detail in a way.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, our sort of fundamentals are, I mean they are very detailed, but the thing is that we structured that for guys that are coming in from a place of no knowledge of what we teach essentially, right? A lot of the stuff that I tend to talk about like on interviews and stuff are things that… sort of like the bleeding edge of what I’ve been thinking about recently in terms of seduction and how to teach it. So a lot of time when I give interviews I’m not going to go over sort of the fundamental stuff that we’ve been teaching the past few years that are in, again, Magic Bullets, and that are in our seminars, essentially because, I don’t know, I feel it’s more interesting to talk about the bleeding edge kind of stuff, because that’s just what I tend to be concentrating on and thinking about most of the time. But yeah, I don’t want to take any credence away from the fundamentals because they are fundamentals for a reason.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent, excellent . Okay, so the other aspect of the program as I understand it, I haven’t watched it yet, is physical escalation.

[Derek Cajun]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so what does that come down to?

[Derek Cajun]: Physical escalation, yeah, I mean, it essentially comes down to… this is usually like there are several types of anxiety that you run into in the course of seducing someone. There’s the approach anxiety, of course, when you first have to get up and you have to talk to them. And then you have sort of the physical escalation anxiety, which is essentially anxiety you feel when you have to escalate things from being a friendly conversation into being something a bit more, something more flirty, something more even romantic or sexual in the long run. And then of course, just for curiosity’s sake, one of the last things that you’ve got to deal with is sexual anxiety.

But for physical escalation, it usually comes down to… there’s a structure to this in the sense that you’re going to go from certain sort of… you’re going to be touching a girl differently from when you first meet her, and then once you get to know her a little bit more you’re going to touch her a bit differently, and then once some flirtatious behavior has been exerted and there’s been some flirty dialogue between you, it’s going to escalate again. It usually follows, like I always teach it goes from friendly to flirty to romantic and then to sexual.

Now, there are different types of things you’re going to do in each one of those categories. So, for instance, a friendly way to talk to someone and to touch someone would be something, like a good rule of thumb is, anything you could do to a guy and he wouldn’t think you’re gay is good for friendly. So these are things like shoulder touches or like high fives or even to some extent putting your arm around someone you know. You see guys do it sometimes with their friends and they’re like, “Oh, my good buddy, I’m going to put an arm around him.” You could do that sort of stuff fairly early on. That kind of bleeds a little bit into flirty, but it’s still within the realm of friendly.

You get into flirty stuff and then it sort of changes into something that you could realistically do to maybe all the girls in a group, but you’d really want to concentrate on the one you kind of like. So these are things like, flirty stuff would be any sort of friendly touch that has a prolonged sort of duration to it, so if you were touching her shoulder before, well, you touch her shoulder then let your hand raise off her arm as you retreat it or as you take her hand back. Or you put your, like I guess, yeah, so the arm around, that would be more flirty. Any sort of thing that has to do with touching her hands will be flirty. Any sort of thing like the lower, what do you call it, the hips or the small of the back, so touching them in those areas will be more flirty. And this is all sort of touch and go. You never want to do this and keep your hand there.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: You wouldn’t put your hand on the small of her back and just leave it there. You just do it and then you take it back, just to give her that feeling of like, “Ooh, he's being flirty or he’s escalating this,” and then you get sort of romantic where… and these are kind of self-explanatory. Romantic things obviously are things where the context of what you guys I guess are or what you guys are doing has sort of now been established.

So you are both flirting with each other, so now it’s okay to go to romantic stuff, which would be sort of things where… anything where you’re touching her face or you’re getting in close to each other. A kiss would be romantic, obviously; not a make-out, but just a kiss. Holding hands will be romantic. Sitting down, her hand is on your thigh or your hand is on her thigh, that would be romantic. Sitting down with your arm around her for a prolonged period would be romantic. Staring into each other’s eyes, as cliché as it sounds, would definitely be romantic.

So those would be romantic, and then sexual is sort of the stuff that doesn’t necessarily happen too much in the club or the bar or the lounge. A lot of that stuff tends to happen when you’re alone with her in a place where logistically sex could happen. So these are things, of course, making out obviously would be sexual. Any sort of like heavy petting and stuff like that where you’re touching her body in a sort of sexual way would be obviously sexual. So, like I said, those are the things that tend to happen outside of the bar. You can get away with some of them in the bar depending on where you are in the bar, what kind of a bar it is, but for the most part that tends to be the escalation, and it follows that order obviously as well.

So you want to really say don’t wait for a green light in terms of when you think you can get away with going forward with those escalations. Look for the absence of a red light. So you’re not looking for green lights, you’re looking for the absence of a red light. So you keep going until essentially she puts on a red light. If she puts on a red light, okay, that’s fine, and you stop.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, so what’s a red light? This is what’s going to scare guys the most. What’s going to happen?

[Derek Cajun]: A red light would be if she recoils or she turns her body any way from the touch or she gives you any sort of negative look. Now, a negative look is something that is a little bit… it can be complicated because if it looks like she can’t believe that you just touched her in the way that you did, that’s not a red light. That’s more of a, I guess, yellow light, essentially. It’s her questioning what you just did and see if you have the balls I guess to stand up with the action you just took. If it’s, “Don’t touch me,” well, then that's obviously a red light. If it’s, “I can’t believe you just did that,” that’s not a red light, that’s more of a yellow light, and in which case you have to stand up to what you just did and not go back on it, because that’s going to be a sign of weakness.

So red lights, they’re quite evident. You’ll know it when you see it because you’ll feel that pang of social anxiety and that pang of awkwardness. But it’s okay. I always say, stroll through foreign territory like you own it. So it’s not a matter of you being scared of apologizing for what you did, it’s a matter of laughing it off or just smiling and then going back in the steps. So if it was maybe something flirty you did, then you go back to doing friendly stuff. Friendly stuff is stuff that she can’t get mad at you for doing friendly things, because that’s stuff that you would do to your grandmother or any stranger you meet. It’s not something you can really get called out on.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. So you just take one step back, basically.

[Derek Cajun]: Right, right.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So, I’m kind of interested, what is kind of like the worst thing that’s ever happened, the worst red light you ever got? So a guy who has probably approached like thousands of girls, what’s the worst thing that has ever happened to him?

[Derek Cajun]: A girl said, “Don’t fucking touch me.”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] That’s pretty harsh.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, and the thing was though, is when she said that and I kind of give her a weird look because it was weird, because I had only touched her shoulder when it happened.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: Which is, I guess that is the worst thing that could happen, right? Probably the scariest situation a guy can think of is the first thing he does and gets called out like that. But what happened was I just gave her a weird look as if that’s very socially weird that she did that because it was.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: And I looked at her friend and I said, “Is she alright?” and her friend kind of looked at me and very apologetically said, “Oh, it’s okay. No, she just broke up with her boyfriend tonight.” And I said, “Okay,” and then I left obviously because I knew that that was something that wasn’t… like it wasn’t personal, it wasn’t anything that had to do with me, she was just having a terrible night and that was a product of it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, great. So what would be the subtext for that situation? Were you thinking like bird shit on her face or were you thinking…

[Derek Cajun]: No, the subtext was, “What you just did was very, very rude and there must be a reason for why you did that and I want to know what it is.” And so for me, what I was thinking in my head was, “That was exceptionally rude and I hope you have a good reason for this. Otherwise, you’re the most socially retarded person in this bar.” And that’s what I would treat them as if she didn’t have a good reason. In this case, she did kind of have a reason. That’s fair, I suppose. She broke up with her boyfriend and she’s feeling like that. I’m not going to take that personally.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I’ve seen worse on YouTube. I’ve seen girls smash up Xboxes over that stuff, so it’s not so bad.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, I saw that video too. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] That was a good one.

[Derek Cajun]: It was. But look, the thing is you always have to ask yourself, is she really… ? I mean, anyone in the bar, if you just talk to a girl in a bar, she doesn’t know you, so nothing she says is going to be personal anyway. So you always have to think to yourself, “There probably is a reason for this.” If she’s having a bad night or maybe she’s just a bitch, that could be a valid reason.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, yeah. What you’re saying is really important because if you walk up to a girl and you’ve never seen her before and she does something like that to you, it’s impossible that it has something to do with you unless you’re being really weird about it, but you’d have to really go out of your way to do it.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, exactly. I just tell guys, “If you’re following my advice, the only way you’re going to get blown out is if there’s another fundamental problem with the situation that doesn’t have to do with you. So it’s either the person’s personality or it’s some other… some event that's taken place or something out of your control,” because what we teach doesn’t get those kinds of reactions. It’s structured in a way that that usually will never happen. If it does, it’s not on your end, it’s on their end. So there really is no wrong you can do here if you’re following the proper sort of rules.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And do you find that the physical escalation aspect and the physical aspect actually kind of varies a lot between girls? And like what I’m thinking of, like I’ve lived around a lot and I’ve been in different cultures and, well, I remember one situation actually. This is like probably 10 years ago. I was in management consulting. I was sitting opposite my client in a meeting and one of his assistants, this cute girl, was sitting next to me, and while I’m having this discussion with my client, her hand’s like slapping my leg, right? And it’s kind of there, and in those days I had no idea about this stuff, and honestly for the whole meeting I was getting freaked out. But that was in Spain, okay?

[Derek Cajun]: Okay. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: And afterwards, because at that time I’d only just arrived in Spain, I hadn’t been there that long, and I realized afterwards that like touching’s a very relaxed thing over there, right? So it wasn’t necessarily that flirtatious. Yeah, a bit flirtatious, but I thought it was like really extreme and it was kind of freaking me out, like throughout the whole meeting.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So have you got anything to say like about the cultural dimensions of this or…

[Derek Cajun]: It is worth mentioning, yeah, because there are certain cultures that the social norms of what people do with touching is a bit different. I know a lot of… like a lot of Asian, especially like in Japan, it’s very sort of low-key when it comes to touching.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: And the thing is, it’s not to say that if you do do these things that I’m saying, I believe it’s universal in the sense that you may into some more I guess barriers and more resistance with this stuff in certain cultures, but it’s still working. It’s not like it’s not going to attract them because it still will. It’s just a matter of them being in a place where they’re either, A, they can do it without any sort of negative, you know, like their friends will see them or other people will see them that maybe they know. That has like a very strong sort of influence in terms of how she may… the resistance that she may give you, but for the most part, if she likes you and she’s in a place where people won’t be able to judge her, it’ll work regardless of the culture.

A friend of mine once said that whenever he spent some time in Japan, and he said he’d be talking to girls in the bar and stuff and nothing would happen in terms of physically until eventually they go back to his place and he turned around to pour a drink or turn on music and he turned back around and then she’d be naked, and it’s sort of that’s the way it works I guess there, is the sense that you don’t do too much physical escalation in public, it’s only once you get behind closed doors that these things sort of happen.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: So, yeah, there are actually cultures like that. I’m actually interested to see how Spain would work. You said that that’s… sort of touching is so much more socially normal to their… I would say, when it comes to touching, if a girl is overstepping what you think is the social norm in terms of touching, then you always go a step further than that. So if a girl like in your situation was the Spanish girl under the table was slapping your leg, I would very nonchalantly like take her hand and squeeze her hand. You would just hold her hand or something like that to see what she would do. With situations like that, like I said, you always have to a sort of take their cues and then go a step further.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, and I think your system of like moving forward is great because you have to do that, you have to have that mindset. However, the part about astepping back is the way you can start calibrating in these cultural situations.

[Derek Cajun]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: Like Japanese, I mean, Japanese girls for instance, I know because I’ve been out that way, but if you’re holding her hand, it’s like serious, it’s on, you know?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: Whereas in other places it’s not a big deal. But basically, like in other places, you say, “Okay, I’m kissing her, so now it’s on,” right? But with a Japanese girl, if you’re holding her hand, she’s like, “Now it’s on. It’s done,” right?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So it’s just like these different, I guess, barriers. So it would be interesting like, have you mostly been in Canada or the US personally or… ?

[Derek Cajun]: I’ve been all over. I’ve been to Japan. I’ve been to most of Europe and all over Australia. And the only places I haven’t been to, there are some places in Europe, like I haven’t been to Spain or South America.

[Angel Donovan]: I think Brazil is crazy. I’ve been out that way but I think the social norms are probably the most extreme there in terms of openness.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, I’ve had a lot of friends going there and they said that I think it has to do with the fact that women outnumber men there, but women seduce men there. They hit on the guys.

[Angel Donovan]: I’ve heard about that too, yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, it’d quite be interesting to see that, so. But yeah, no, it’s different all over, but the fundamental stuff I think remains the same. It’s just a matter of how early you can get away with certain things is usually the biggest difference.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. Excellent. So we talked a bit about some of the anxiety. You were just talking about these like big anxieties you come across like approaching anxiety, and then you’ve got physical escalation anxiety. And I know you’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that in connection with inner game, like what kind of stuff have you been working out?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah. The thing is, like I always wonder, because I come from the same place that I think a lot of guys getting into this came from, where it was very, very hard, very difficult for me to go out in the beginning because it’s so sort of… your experiences when you first start are so laden with negative sort of experiences that this anxiety tends to come up quite a bit, because that fear of, oh, bad things may happen, or something socially embarrassing may happen, that does tend to happen quite a bit, especially with someone like me who didn’t have sort of this advice to go on. I literally got good by literally going through every sort of negative situation you could possibly imagine.

The thing for me though is that I think that most men sort of live their lives in quiet desperation in the sense that they believe that one day they’ll get good at whatever it is they believe they’ll good at. So let's say in this case it’s talking to women, I think all men sort of believe, “Oh, you know, one day I’ll be good,” or, “One day I’ll get good at that.” But the thing is, and this is true for anything else they tend to aspire towards, they never actually go out and tend to go after these things and they just stay in this, like I said, this sense of quiet desperation. And they’d hope, but hope isn’t really good enough. You have to act on these things.

I would say that you should start being the guy that you see yourself being in 10 years. Usually, in my workshops, I get them to write a list. On the left, I tell them, “Write down the five things you spend the most time doing in a day. It might be your job or playing video games or hobbies or whatever. And then on the other side I want you to write down the five things that in 5 to 10 years from now you will have done. It could be personality traits. It can be sort of goals when it comes to monetary goals or professional goals. It can be anything, but five things you want, you could see yourself, the most ideal version of you, having accomplished in 5 to 10 years.”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Derek Cajun]: And obviously the two lists are very different. They probably don’t have anything in common in terms of the one on the left they spend most of the time doing has nothing to do with the things they want to accomplish. Maybe their job would be the only one that maybe has to do with it. And so I tell them they need to start taking the things from the right list and one at a time filling them in on the left list. So you should start spending at least a portion of your day, maybe the number five thing you spend the most time doing, we’ll replace that with one of the things that you want to accomplish in the next 5 to 10 years and just spends time working towards that. It’s the only way you’re going to be able to do it. It doesn’t just happen.

So you should start becoming the man that you see yourself being, and this happens on a day-to-day basis. Like some of the things that I always wanted to be that I had to start actively sort of conquering was, for me it was I want to be fearless, was one of them. I wanted to be a sort of like being able to take any girl, pick any girl in a bar and know that I could seduce her or attract her at the very least. And then there are other ones that are a bit more I guess personalized for me like being able to… I’d like to be able to learn how to ride a horse and swing a sword and speak several languages and appreciate fine scotch and all these other things that I sort of associate with, this ideal version of me in 10 years, and I’m working towards those as well. But for the most part, any situation that comes up in the regular course of my day where I can prove to myself that I’m getting better at that or that I can do that, then I’ll always do it. Sometimes it means standing up for myself. Sometimes it means if a guy’s pissing you off, tell him. If you think a girl’s hot, tell her. We have this game that the other instructors and I play, like tell her and where if we’re doing something and the guy’s just, “Oh man… ”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] That sounds fun.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah. You know....

[Angel Donovan]: No, I was just saying it sounds fun.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, it sounds fun. Yeah. So you say… yeah, but for the people that don’t know though, if you’re going walking with your buddy and you say, “Oh my God, that girl’s so hot,” your friend’s going to say, “Tell her,” and you have to go and tell her. So, or, “Oh man, that guy at the grocery’s really rude. What an asshole,” tell them. You have to do these things. And it works on sort of your ability to deal with fear.

I think that we teach guys how to… social skills on how to attract women, but I think what we really teach is how to deal with fear, which is essentially what it comes down to. I had guys that have been in the military that come to my course and they say, “I’m more comfortable sitting in my tent with bomb shells firing around me than I am being in a bar having to talk to a girl.” That’s a really messed up belief. That’s really messed up that that fear can drive him to such lengths. So for the most part it’s dealing with fear, and you can do this on a daily basis where you have to literally sort of deal with your own sort of insecurities and your own fears, after a while you become numb to them. It almost becomes addicting in the sense that it becomes something you want to do. It’s fun to sort of overcome your own fear.

[Angel Donovan]: And this is a great subject even for beginners because I think what happens to some beginners is that they start hearing some of this stuff and they think it sounds a bit too, how would you say, high-level, abstract, kind of like airy-fairy, and because they’re looking for something more concrete, but I think in many cases it’s actually this stuff far more than anything else that holds them back eventually.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah. I think guys take a very logical approach to this. That’s fine because there are sort of very logical and fundamental rules to it, but in the long run you’re not dealing with the logical sort of game. You’re dealing with an emotional game.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Derek Cajun]: And that’s what life is. It’s, well, a series of emotional sort of I guess challenges, what it comes down to. And you ask anyone who’s gotten successful at anything whether it be sports… it wouldn’t be very logical things. There is an emotional aspect to it, even athletes that, say, like Olympic athletes and even ones that compete at a very high level of sports, they’ll say… like Michael Jordan I think is maybe quoted as saying this, but a lot of Olympic athletes have said it too, is they know whether or not they’re going to win the race before they even start the race.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Derek Cajun]: Because you can get them to the logic side of it in terms of they exercise more than anybody else and they have the fastest lap times and stuff, but it doesn’t matter because when you get into it, that race really comes down to a head thing, it comes down to an emotional thing. It comes down to what you truly feel in that race.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Yeah, that's definitely so true. I don’t know if you read it, but if you read Agassi’s autobiography, it’s called Open…

[Derek Cajun]: No, I haven’t.

[Angel Donovan]: That whole book is the perfect illustration of basically the whole game is in the game. Before every match he’s like, “I’m in this kind of state. I’m feeling this. Oh, sure enough, I lost.”

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And then in the next one he’s like, “Yeah, I’m feeling good,” boom, and it all works out. So it’s a great book for getting insights into that.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, there’s another one I think that it’s very similar to that, I think, was the… I think it’s called the Inner Game of Tennis or something like that. I think it’s called the Inner Game of Tennis, I believe is what it’s called, and it’s sort of the same fundamental rules, is that literally how you perceive any sort of activity about to happen, how you perceive it happening literally has a direct effect on what happens. It’s, who is it, Werner Heisenberg, the founder of the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, said that the path only exists once it’s observed.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Derek Cajun]: And this is sort of true in quantum physics in the sense that only once you believe something can happen does it truly ever… be able to happen, and that belief is usually what creates the path.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Derek Cajun]: And this has to do with the most fundamental rules of reality, I think is what it comes down to. So there are things that… and like you said earlier, this airy-fairy sort of stuff, and to a certain extent coming from a place of just starting this it may sound like that, but once you get the fundamentals covered, this is literally what it comes down to every single night. Being able to control your mood and your mindset is… and this is why I like to talk about subtext so much, is that I believe this is what it literally comes down to, is being able to change your state. That’s the biggest difference for me. What I see on a regular basis with guys and with myself included comes down to those sorts of things, the beliefs I have about what I believe is happening in my mind.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So you’re talking about focusing on these kinds of improvements daily, right? So you have your list. How do you keep them front of mind? So there are lots of distractions in our lives, and how did you approach it when you wanted to change some of these things in a practical… ? One of the examples that you gave us which was good is the tell her, tell him game where basically you kind of set out with your friends to support you in developing that attitude, right?

[Derek Cajun]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: So, it’s constantly getting bounced back at you and you’re not… even if you get distracted they still get to push back at you. Are there any other examples, like practical examples, of stuff you’ve done?

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah, like the ones that I tend to do the most are any sort of situation where it comes up where I think that in hindsight I may say, “I wish I would’ve have done that, I wish I would’ve said that, I wish that would’ve happened,” I'll always take that risk, and in the moment if I can. If I can’t, it’s like, let’s say I don’t think of what to say or I don’t remind myself in that moment, afterwards, when that feeling does come up where I say, “Oh shit, I wish I would’ve done this, I wish I would’ve said that,” the next time that situation comes up, I will do that every single time.

And you’ll fail. You will fail, especially when you first start. And you will fail and that’s just sort of the nature of the game, but the next time you do it, it may not be as bad. So the first time you do it you’ll fail miserably. The next time you do it, it won’t be as bad because you’ve experienced doing it. It won’t be as scary. You won’t have the same apprehension or the same uncertainty because you’ve already done it once. You already have a little bit of knowing what may happen so that you do it a little bit different that time. It maybe doesn’t work out quite as bad, but then you get a little bit more confidence, and the next time you do it, you do it again and you learn literally how to do these things in a way that works. The brain works like that whether you’re conscious of it or not. It’ll build these sorts of these neural networks in your brain to know what to do in a certain situation to avoid social embarrassment and to avoid fear and to avoid negative consequence. It’s just the way the human brain works. So whether you think of it or not, you’ll always do that.

So that’s something that I do on a regular basis, is I’ll always take these risks in the sense that I’ll say, this is worth… like the person that I want to be would not put up with this or would not deal with this the way that I’m dealing with, so I need to change that. And the only way to change that… I can’t live with myself unless I change it. So it will get you into trouble. No doubt, it will get you into trouble and you will get in trouble…

[Angel Donovan]: So what kind of emotion is behind that? Because I think, I mean, here are your words, right? “This isn’t the person I want to be.” But I guess what’s more important is also like the emotions people have behind that which enables them to then act. So they’re saying like, “This isn’t the person I want to be,” but how do you think? Is there some particular way you have to feel in order to then act on that and step up and make it happen?

[Derek Cajun]: You have to sit down with yourself and tell yourself, “Am I happy with the person that I am right now? And the person that I want to be, is it worth the trouble I have to go through to become that person?” And if it’s not, then there’s nothing really I can do for you, because it’s not easy, it’s hard. It’s very, very hard. There’s a reason that guys that have become good at pretty much everything else in life still come to guys like me and other instructors in our company to get advice on this because it’s fucking hard. It’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, is to be able to sort of—I’m not just talking about being good with women, I’m just talking about being able to stand up in any situation and be the person that you want to be, that guy inside. It’s really fucking difficult.

And once you get good at that, God, the sky is the limit. Being good with women is the least important thing you’ll find that you can get good at this. It comes down to sort of being the man that, like I said, the man you’ve always wanted to be, the one that you see in movies and shit, or they may be your dad or the men you worship in your life. It comes down to being that guy. And so you just have to ask yourself, is it worth it? And I’m going to tell you right now, it’s not easy and it’s going to be tough, very tough, the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and I’m not even really there yet. So it’s a work in progress, but for the most part it just starts a little bit at a time. You can’t do it overnight. You just have to start with small stuff and work your way up.

[Angel Donovan]: So I guess coming back to kind of like the bootcamp and where you get involved with this with students, like to what extent do you think bootcamps are like an emotional journey? Like people come there obviously a lot of the time with different reasons. One of them, maybe they want to see someone do the demonstrations, or they actually want to learn the details of the method. How often do you think it kind of comes down to more of like an emotional journey, something more like this?

[Derek Cajun]: I would like to say 100%. If the guys that come to my seminar are not fundamentally changed by the end of the weekend, I feel like I’ve failed as a teacher because one of the things that I like to teach is that the life they’ve been living their whole life isn’t necessarily the life they need to keep living. There’s so much possibility and you don’t have to… it could be anybody. You don’t need any sort of innate sort of talent or skill to get good at this stuff. It just comes down to how bad you want it and what you’re willing to go through to get it, and that’s the biggest thing.

Courage, and like I said, fear, is what I tend to teach over the course of the weekend. The one thing that gets hard I think is how to deal with fear, and I put all my guys through some very sort of scary situations, some situations that on paper would be, you’d think, “Wow… ” I mean, they’re all the same, they’re all just talking to women and sort of getting outside of your comfort zone with women, but for the most part, for most guys, that’s the scariest thing you can think of.

So, if they don’t learn the lessons that I want them to learn by the end of the weekend, which is essentially how to deal with that fear, how to feel that fear in their body, in their brain, in their heart, and say, “Fuck it, I don’t give a shit, I’m going to go through with this… ” And that’s the biggest thing, because that’s the thing that’s going to stick with them after the weekend, is having the ability to check that fear, to say, “No, fuck this. I’m not going to get into this. I’m going to fucking do it because I’m not willing to be a slave to this fear any longer.”

And when you can do that, like I’ve said, talking to women is the smallest thing. That tends to be the scariest thing for guys, and once they realize that they can overcome that fear, anything else becomes small potatoes compared to that, and that’s I think the biggest thing that we teach in our seminar. Marketing-wise, teaching guys how to attract women is the easiest to market in order to get them to our course, but I think, like I said, it has to do with dealing with fear. That’s essentially what we teach, and that’s what gets the biggest results outside of the bootcamp. The women will come, but it’s those lasting lessons you learn about yourself and what you’re capable of that truly change I think who you are as a person.

[Angel Donovan]: Great words and really applicable to most things in life.

[Derek Cajun]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So, hey Cajun, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation with you today and it’s been great catching up, and I hope to catch up with you soon.

[Derek Cajun]: Me too, buddy. Nice talking to you, Angel. Thanks again.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.