Ep. #13 Using Stripper Bars to Kill Approach Anxiety and Build Concrete Inner Game with Fader

[Fader]: Hey, how’s it going, man?

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, really good, man. So Fader has been with Love Systems a long time since way back in 2006, is that right?

[Fader]: Yup, half a decade now.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow. When you can say half a decade, that's a long time. And you were running bootcamps the whole time and you’re based in NYC.

[Fader]: Yeah, bootcamps, and right now we’re moving to also doing the stripper workshops, which I’m sure we’re going to talk about. But yeah, both that, one-on-ones, phone consultations.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great. Well, yeah, so I did want to talk about the stripper stuff because I think you were in LA this weekend and it was a Love Systems first and actually, as you’re saying, it was an industry first. So yeah, I’d love to hear a bit about what is the stripper game bootcamp that you ran last weekend?

[Fader]: Sure, just quick correction. It was actually in Vegas.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Fader]: What I’ll do is I’ll run you through how the program came about and I can tell you a little bit about the specifics of the program.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent.

[Fader]: So, what was happening was I want to give the students as much time and value on a workshop as possible, a regular bootcamp. So I was taking them out and the infield would end at two, and the only place to go was strip clubs. Strip clubs would still be open. So I started taking students to strip clubs on workshop, regular bootcamp, to extend infields, give them an extra two, three hours. Over the course of two days, four hours, that's actually a free day.

What started to happen was I started getting really good results, and I didn’t understand why I was getting the results. Now I do understand, but at the time I didn’t. Basically, when you hit a more advanced level of game, what you should be doing is you should be doing, you would call it blueprinting for lack of a better term. You’re not going to treat a Colombian off the boat the way you would treat a Harvard-educated lawyer, which is different than you would treat a hipster, which is different than you would treat, say, a Goth girl. These are all very specific… the attraction switches would work on all of them, but obviously, a Harvard-educated lawyer, she’s going to be a little bit different than a party girl.

So what was happening was I kept seeing strippers. What’s very interesting with strippers and girls who are hired for their looks is there's a common psychology. You’re seeing the same girl over and over and over and over again. And I grew up partying in New York City and being in the club scene, and when I had no game, I was around these girls, I just wasn’t able to do anything, whether it was fear of escalating on them or not knowing what to say, or always being kind of in the friend zone while they went and hooked up with my friends. So I had a very good reference base for when I was in the strip clubs.

And so now that I had game, what I started to do is see social patterns and I started to figure out how t, for lack of a better term, exploit them, and from there I gained such a body of knowledge and such a reputation for picking up strippers, and it’s something I do on every workshop. I’m going to Portland this weekend and I’ll be dragging the students to strip clubs just like I dragged a bunch of them to strip clubs two weeks ago in Scottsdale.

So I was like, why don’t… here’s what’s funny. I’m not even teaching it for money, I’m just teaching it almost to get them knowledge out there, because I feel like I’m one of the few who has a kind of base of knowledge, but believe it or not, it’s supposed to be 10 hours of theory. I have a problem where I taught it last weekend, I didn’t even get to teach everything I wanted and I taught 15-1/2 hours of theory.

[Angel Donovan]: So is this all just on these types of girls, right, stuff you’d say? So just to give us a bit of background, someone who attends this kind of workshop, should they already know kind of the Magic Bullets and all the other Love Systems stuff before they go there or do you teach that as well?

[Fader]: I teach a very, very small subset of it that's much more in-depth. It would really help if people walked in with a good solid base. It makes things better. I had two students this weekend. One, he hadn’t taken a workshop with me but he took a workshop with a competing company many years ago. He already had a decent… he had a decent base. This really, really helped him. I think that this really isn’t the type of course where someone who hasn’t done, I don’t know, a thousand approaches or, you know, I can’t… these are arbitrary numbers, 20 approaches, it would be helpful for them to get their feet wet because this type of course, especially with the infield, it’s geared towards girls hired for their looks, strippers, models, bartenders, but the infield that's going to take place in strip clubs.

And in strip clubs you get few to little mistakes. Any mistake and they’ll go back to work. The only time that that doesn’t happen is if you have like a baby face, you looked innocent, the stripper thinks you’re a virgin and she thinks it's endearing that you’re in a strip club. Other than that, they have to work.

That's the number one rule of any form of hired gun game, is that people forget that they’re in a social situation with a girl, but the girl’s working. When you walk away, there are ramifications to the pickup whether it’s a waitress at work, whether it’s a girl at a kiosk in the mall or whether it’s even a girl who is working for the Peace Corps who’s on the street with three of her friends hanging out flyers. She is working.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So when you say walk away, you mean you’re walking away?

[Fader]: No, I mean the girls will walk away, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Fader]: Because the infield’s taking place at strip clubs. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go to the strip clubs, and that's why, unfortunately, due to the nature of strip club game, I can only do it in certain cities. I just can’t do it in any city because I know that we’re going to burn through clubs very quickly, because what happens is the girls gossip on where the money is, and there are good things and bad things about that.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, so a couple of things, I guess, like I haven’t been to any strip clubs in the US. I’ve been to some around the rest of the world. So how does it work? Like you say you’re going to several clubs, like do you have to pay a fee to get into each one or… ?

[Fader]: Yeah, you have to pay fees, depending on the city will determine how expensive the club is. In Vegas last weekend on Memorial Day, which is a major holiday, the clubs were 30 dollars. Generally, in Scottsdale, it was 10 dollars. Portland will be like five dollars.

[Angel Donovan]: That's pretty cheap.

[Fader]: Yeah, it’s cheap, but for Vegas you’re dealing with the best of the best, so they’re going to make their money. The number one strip club in the United States, in fact, they were making so much money that they weren’t people in, they were turning taxis away. We couldn’t even get in, unfortunately.

[Angel Donovan]: Which one’s that?

[Fader]: Spearmint Rhino.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, we have that in London, too.

[Fader]: Yeah, I’ve heard. I’d like to see it. I’d definitely like to see it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I know some of the Love Systems guys go there in London to celebrate.

[Fader]: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know how it is. I don’t know how the brand holds up, but in Vegas it’s considered the best of the best.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Fader]: I was actually on Monday talking to a girl who I’m friends with at Wet Republic, which is a pool party, and basically she had made 8000 dollars in three days, so good for her. She was just in there cleaning up and… just it has such a reputation. It sells itself. So there's a line. They get capacity and they just won’t let guys in.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And I guess there are different types of strip clubs as well, right?

[Fader]: Yes.

[Angel Donovan]: Like cleaner ones, I've never been in Spearmint Rhino, but I had the impression that it was one of the cleaner ones.

[Fader]: Yeah. You don’t want to go by clean. Don’t think that it’s in terms of clean. That's sort of right but sort of wrong. Think of it in terms of how… no one is more cognizant of her looks and how valuable than a girl who works in the sex industry, right? So think of how attractive the girls are, and that will bring a certain type of girl. Those girls are more socially savvy and they’re competing for more money. So how I would list clubs is you have like your show clubs, like at Spearmint Rhino, where you’ll have 10s, you’ll have porn stars, you’ll have girls who are just… they look almost like cartoons because they’re so perfect.

Then you have your kind of mid-level clubs. They’re not as good. It depends on the environment. For example, I mean, like at St. Louis, Missouri, Penthouse would be the best club. Penthouse in New York is a good club. Penthouse in Houston is a good club. They don’t have a Penthouse in Vegas, at least I don’t know of one, but they have a Hustler. Hustler was an awful club. Whereas a Hustler or a brand like Penthouse, they would normally hold their own, in a place like Vegas they’re going to be overshadowed.

So you have kind of your show clubs, your brand name clubs, then you have… now you’re start to get into what you’re talking about, your dirtier clubs, which are… there's going to be prostitution in the business. It’s called extras. The girls are going to be soliciting that. And then you have like your really, really just terrible, terrible, terrible clubs. These are places that are just very sketchy…

[Angel Donovan]: And I guess the quality goes exactly with that hierarchy you’ve outlined there…

[Fader]: Yes.

[Angel Donovan]: I mean, in those sketchy clubs you’re going to get much lower-quality, probably just normal girls, I guess, normal-looking…

[Fader]: Yeah. Yeah, no, no, some of them do have like average girls. Sometimes I think that strip clubs should really… someone should pass a law on who’s allowed to take off their clothes because some places, I’m just like, “What’s going on here?”

From the dancer’s point of view, she makes a choice. She can… she makes that choice directly related to how much money she thinks she’ll make. She can go to a Spearmint Rhino and compete for 5000, 6000 dollars a night, and she’s a small fish in a big pool, or she can stay in a city like Cleveland, work at a strip club like Christie’s and be a big fish in a small pool and try to use that strategy to dominate the club, right? She’ll do that based on where she thinks she can make the most money.

There are also other nuances like girls, when they travel, it’s very ballsy for girls to go travel from one club to another, especially if the club is not a travel-based club, meaning Spearmint Rhino in Vegas. Girls flock there from all over the United States. Christie’s in Cleveland where… Cleveland is actually my favorite place to teach workshops and I’m friends with quite a few of the dancers there, for a girl who doesn’t live in Cleveland to travel there to compete against them, she walks into a situation where every dancer will hate her. So that girl, she knows when she’s walking in there, she’s going to have all the odds against her the way these girls work.

The social dynamics are just amazing. These girls are very, very socially savvy. They might not be able to tell you who the president of the United States is but they are very, very socially savvy.

[Angel Donovan]: Tribal.

[Fader]: Yeah, it’s like social Darwinism. It’s like they’re forced to learn this.

[Angel Donovan]: I have seen… I don’t know if you’ve been to Thailand and Bangkok and…

[Fader]: No.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, you know, I think that’s probably something like on steroids, strip clubs on steroids, and I’ve seen basically fighting and you’ll have like a queen of the club and it’s anyone’s getting more attention or anyone’s getting prized by a client or anything, she’ll jump on it, and I’ve seen that a couple of times when I was showing friends on the local scenery. Yeah, but it’s interesting. Okay, so let's kind of get back to what you’ve been teaching this weekend. So it was the first one, and how did it go? Like what kind of things did you work on that the guys were interested in learning?

[Fader]: Sure. Basically, the only downside for me for the weekend, we’ll start with… we’ll get the bad out of the way, was I had way too much content, and even though I gave them basically a free day of content, I still didn’t get to teach everything, so I’m going to have to scale that down.

One thing that's important for me as a teacher is I always want people to understand psychology. I have this idea that… I call it the chessboard theory, which is if you… we put a chessboard in a room and you had to make a move, I had to make a move, the greatest chess player in the world had to make a move, we probably all make different moves. A move is really a symptom of the real problem, which is our thought process. We want right thought processes.

So the first day, what I did was I spent the day teaching a lot of psychology. Female psychology, most guys don’t understand how women are socialized and what they go through growing up and how they make the decision to whether it’s be a bartender, be a shot girl, be a stripper, be a prostitute, be a porn star, how they go about making these decisions.

So then after that we taught was hired gun psychology, which is, you know, hired gun is a very loosely-used term in the community. I use it in two ways. I use it… and I believe anytime you’re interacting with a girl in a social situation, when she’s working and you’re just in a social situation, that's a hired gun. The old-school way of using it is a girl who’s hired for their looks, bartenders, shot girls, things of this nature.

So then I taught the psychology behind hired guns because there’s a unique psychology to them too. Then I taught the psychology for strippers, specifically, I have a lot of psychology for that. I taught that. And then I started to teach the psychology of either A, miscellaneous points, and B, the strip club itself, because the strip club itself is its own entity that has its own psychology that's built into it.

So I taught all that. I taught them opening and that was it. The reason I don’t go into attraction is twofold. A, I don’t have enough time, and B, I need to see what I’m working with before I start molding them.

[Angel Donovan]: So after that first day… how long was it altogether, by the way?

[Fader]: The first day was supposed to go…

[Angel Donovan]: Sorry, the whole program.

[Fader]: The program is supposed to be 10 hours of theory and eight hours of infield. This one ended up 15 hours of theory and I think about 18 hours of infield.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow, so that's like three days or something.

[Fader]: I mean, I’ll try to… I’m a party kid, so I’ll just hang out. As long as I’m having fun and the students are learning, I mean, I’m down to always stay out. Unfortunately, that goes by the city I’m in. I chose to do this in Vegas because I knew I could give the students more time.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Like you want to give them more time. Okay.

[Fader]: Right. Why not? When I'm in a strip club I’m trying to pull too, you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Fader]: I think, in honesty, it should be 10 and eight, I know I’ll end up always teaching more than 10, but we’ll call that unofficially official, if that makes sense. It’s always going to be sold as 10. There is a chance that one day maybe it’ll become a three-day course. I don’t really want them to be a three-day course. I just want it to be a two-day course.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, so you told them the theory and then you took them into the club to practice the opening?

[Fader]: That’s right. I took them into the strip clubs, and now they have a good grasp. It’s not like… in a way it’s like real game. You have students, at least for this workshop. One of the students, he was from Korea. The strip club situation is very different in Korea than in the United States. So he had never been to a United States strip club, so immediately I would get him up to speed. The other student had been to one before, but much like regular bootcamp where students have probably been to bars or clubs, but now they’re seeing it differently. He's now immediately seeing it differently.

So as his interactions happen and as my interactions happen , I begin to mold him and make changes in the way he's interacting. For example, what I love about stripper game is strippers, they’re like little pickup artists. Like they have their own routine stacks. They are masters of frame control. So I’ll teach students things like, for example, stay off of her material, stay on yours. So one attraction switch for strippers is demonstrating that you have inside information, that you understand the business. So one of the unique glitches of strip club game—there are a lot of unique glitches to the actual game that exists only there and not in real game. I’ll give you an example.

In a strip club, the onus is on her because she’s trying to sell me. So in real game you do a cold approach. It’d be kind of weird for you to just stop talking. You can’t do that. You can do takeaways when she likes you. But strip club, you can just literally do takeaways immediately. So she’ll come up and she’ll say hi. She’ll be like, “I’m Bambi,” or some bullshit. Now, right there, what she’s doing is she’s baiting for me to go, “Hi, I’m Fader,” right? She goes, “I’m Bambi,” and I’ll just shake her hand, and she’ll be like, “And who are you?” And I’ll be like, “Do you want my real name or my stage name?”

Now, right there, I’m about to divert it off course. Now, she knows what the term stage name means. That's what Bambi is. Her name’s not really Bambi, right? And if her parents named her Bambi, they were basically dooming her to be a stripper, so that's their fault. But she’ll not know what to do with this, so she’ll be like, “I want both,” and I’ll be like, “Well, you can’t have both. I’m the high-maintenance one in this relationship.”

So she’ll be like, “Your stage name.” And I’ll be like, “Are you ready?” I’ll be like, “It’s Bamboo.” She’ll be like, “Bamboo?” I’ll be like, “Yeah. It’s exotic yet phallic.”

Now, sometimes some of them will laugh, sometimes some of them… some of them will laugh because they know what phallic means. Sometimes some of them won’t laugh and they don’t know what phallic means, and I can clearly tell it’s like a forced laugh. And I’ll be like, “Don’t you know what phallic means?” I’ll be like, “Are you smart? I like smart girls. I’m giving you a smart test.”

Now, right here, I’ve now taken over, right? I’ve knocked her off her little pickup artist/stripper game program, and now I’m leading and she’s listening. Does that make sense?

[Angel Donovan]: Totally.

[Fader]: Okay, so that's kind of what I’m doing. I was able to do that but I was exploiting things that only exist in the strip clubs, the idea of knowing that there's a stage name, the idea that I could break rapport, the idea that I can start teasing her more… I don’t want to say harsh because telling her she’s not smart really isn’t that harsh for strippers, but you can level all these nuances to take control.

One of the interesting things about stripper game is that, in my opinion, after having been doing this for five years, for me, I like a certain kind of girl. I like girls with breast implants. I like kind of trashy girls. That's kind of the… I mean, for hooking up, that's what I like. I don’t exactly like to date them, although I end up being forced to date them, which kind of sucks. I think it’s the easiest… strip club game is the easiest way to get really hot girls, really easy, who are good in bed, really consistently. Because, yeah, you’re dealing with the same girl over and over and over again, whereas, you know, like I said, what Love Systems teaches is very good. It will work. There's no doubt about it.

But trying… once you get to a more intermediate bleeding into advanced stage, treating a girl who’s like a hipster the same way you treat a party girl, the same way you treat, I don’t know, a girl off the boat, this is all… when I say off the boat, you know, they’re like an exchange student or someone who just moved to the country, you’re kind of just shooting yourself in the foot because they can all be treated in their own unique way, which will make… because what we’re doing in the game is we’re just making… we’re taking boy meets girl, boy and girl liking each other, starting a sexual relationship, and going from there. We’re just trying to make it run as fast as possible. We’re trying to be as efficient as possible.

So, you know, whereas these principles will work, these being like Love Systems principles, you know, someone who can speak Spanish and likes dancing and understands the Colombian culture will move things along faster than someone who’s never dealt with a Colombian before. So with stripper game, what’s happening to hired guns too is because we’re always meeting the same kind of girl with minor modifications, it’s very easy to get them.

Paradoxically, I always say this, it’s the easiest form of game but it’s also the hardest form of game. It’s very difficult because you’re competing against money, you’re competing against drugs, you’re competing against girls who are very bitter and jaded, some of them. So things happen really quickly with a stripper game. In hired gun game, they have so much access to sex it’s unrealistic.

[Angel Donovan]: OK. But you’ve got to offer something else. So you’ve gone into quite a few things there that are interesting. I think one of the things is that you’re saying that a lot of the girls are very similar and that's one of the reasons that you like it, because you know you’re going to find a certain… I guess a type of attitude and a type of attitude when it comes to sex, I mean, you know, so you're looking for that value in a relationship.

[Fader]: Yes.

[Angel Donovan]: Does that come from… I can feel that comes from being pretty socialized by the environment they’re in, right? So like a girl has been there for one year, she might not necessarily be really molded into that social environment and have become socialized by it and have taken on characteristics. But if she’s been there for three years, I guess you’ve probably seen enough of these now that they pretty much turn out the same way. Is that true? Like it’s not about giving stereotypes here, but you definitely see patterns forming.

[Fader]: Yes. Stereotypes is a really ugly word. It’s the difference between influence and manipulation. I mean, the kind of different spins on the same thing. All people in life look for patterns, and patterns are stereotyping in a way. So what you’re saying is true. Definitely, the environment and how long she’s been dancing will play a major part in how she is. Also, how attractive she is and what brought her to the darkness, for lack of a better term, there are many different ways they end up dancing.

One of my good friends, she basically… I met her on workshop. She was 19. She’s very outgoing. She was a promotional model, and she’s very sweet, she’s very nice. She comes from a good family, doesn’t do drugs. Then, when I got back to Scottsdale a year later and we were going to hang out, she was like, “Well, I need two hours to get ready,” and I’m like, “Well, I’m going to Skins,” which is a strip club. And she’s like, “Oh, I can’t go there.” And I didn’t even invite her. I’m like, “Why can’t you go there?” She’s like, “Well, I work there.”

And later on when I came out of there I asked her about this, and she said, well, now she was 21 and she basically… So I’m like, “Your parents own a yoga studio. You’re not abused. You come from a good family. Why would you go there?” She’s like, “Well, one of my friends wanted to go.” And she dresses very sexually aggressive. This is a girl who’s very comfortable with her sexuality. She said, “I tried it for one night.” She’s like, “I made 700 dollars.”

She’s like, “I have a job.” She works at… not Abercrombie and Fitch but one of these stories like Abercrombie and Fitch where she makes 7 dollars an hour. She’s like, “I made so much money.” She’s like, “Why not?”

That's one attitude, as opposed to, you know, this weekend, unfortunately, in Vegas, a student picked up a dancer who actually wanted to go with him, who really liked him, and you know, she was very quick to admit that her father had sexually molested her. That's really unfortunate. But they all find it different ways and it depends on, again, where they’re dancing. The one thing that's for certain is, no matter how long they’re dancing, it’s going to get worse because even if they’re innocent they’re surrounded by toxic people continuously and real toxic politics, really catty behavior, and girls with really, really bad values. So it’s just a matter of time. So it’s a downward spiral.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I totally agree with you. I have experience and it’s like I dated a stripper for a while and I have my own opinion from that, which I might add in later. But I wanted to ask you a few questions which…

[Fader]: Sure.

[Angel Donovan]: … kind of like, you know, that brings some of this stuff to a point…

[Fader]: Sure.

[Angel Donovan]: … is, like, we can look at these how you like now but we can go tackle them kind of how you want, first of all, what can we get from dating strippers? What is the value, like from a self-development area or just from a hot girls area? Or like what kind of motivations do you think it’s going to align with for guys where they can actually get value from it? And whatever kind of value that is, how long like… so if the guys are interested in those things, how long is it going to take like in your opinion to get good at this? How much practice do you have to put in? And what level should you have to kind of start getting into this before it would actually make sense?

[Fader]: Sure. To answer your first question, it depends on what you’re looking for in girls. One thing that I’ve learned, one overarching principle I’ve learned from teaching for so long is that you can never really judge anyone, meaning everyone has different qualifications. I had a student who, you know, he wanted an Ivy-League-educated girl, and whereas I don’t care about that, that was important to him. And that was not a stripper game student, obviously, but a regular student. That was important to him. He should have that. There's no reason he shouldn’t have that.

To me, I don’t even care. My qualifications are, you know, will she be affectionate? Will she be a good partner? Will she be a good mother?

Stripper game, for me, what other guys can get out of dating strippers is, number one, unfortunately, the trophy wife factor, right? They’re very, very hot. They’re also really, really sexual. No matter how good a girl is going to be in bed, it’s going to come down to her comfort levels with her own sexuality, and there are just a certain amount of girls who are just, I mean, 30% of girls have never had an orgasm from penetration. That's an actual real statistic you can look up. If a girl’s not comfortable with her sexuality, you could have the best comfort game in the world, and if she’s not comfortable the sex will be bad. There's no one more comfortable with their sexuality than the girl who’s taken off her clothes for money.

So you get attractive girls, you get girls who are not only attractive but very, very sexual, you also get girls who are really open-minded, nonjudgmental. For people who have unique lifestyles, it makes it… they’re more understanding. Whereas I don’t believe in lying to girls, so when I meet regular girls I have to explain to them my job. Right now I’m on a 27-city tour. I’ve done 12 cities in the last 13 weeks. Any girl I’ve met along the road, her knowing that a guy she likes or a guy she slept with or a guy she wants to pursue a relationship with, it’s very difficult for them to be accepting of the fact that you’re going to be going out meeting other girls. This could be true for, you know, if you have a relationship where a guy travels a lot. He's not even teaching pickup. He's a businessman.

These girls, because they’ve been through a lot, they’re really open-minded, they’re really nonjudgmental. They kind of come in my opinion in two forms. They’re either super-super-dramatic or as crazy it is, they deal with so much drama at the club, but in their real life they’re just kind of chilling, they just want to have fun. So that's great too.

The only other thing I would say about dating them that's an advantage is they lead very interesting lives and a lot of them have amazing social connections. I’ve had dancers take me to parties and introduce me to people that I just would never have expected they knew or they’ve never met before, and it’s pretty commonplace they meet tons of guys all the time.

A dancer I’m dating now, I actually thought she was off work so I went to go to her club just to hang out with one of my friends. It just so happened that she was at work, and she was hanging out with… I’m not going to tell you who it was, but the lead singer of a pretty famous band. She introduced me to him. It was no big deal and we were just all chilling and hanging out. I would have never had that experience if I wasn’t dating her.

So that would be I would say the advantages of dating dancers. Also, like I said, it’s very easy to get them… once you understand it, and it’s also very easy to find them. Whereas I live in Manhattan, Manhattan’s a 24/7 city, I could pick out a good club tonight where there are models and go and practice there.

That's not everyone’s reality. If you live in, I don’t know, even… let's take the last city I went to, Scottsdale, and the city I’m going this weekend, Portland, there are very, very few good places there. It would be hard to manufacture social situations where you could continuously get a shot at so many attractive girls very quickly. Scottsdale, you might be able to do it. Scottsdale has really hot girls. But again, that's more of a one-off than anything else.

What was the second question you asked me? That wasn’t how long will it take someone to get good, was it? I remember there were three questions.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that was it. It was like, how long will it take, you know, what we’ll have to do…

[Fader]: Sure, okay.

[Angel Donovan]: Of course it will vary, but there's going to be some kind of…

[Fader]: Sure, sure. Here’s the great thing about strip clubs, is you can just go from strip club to strip club to strip club and just practice really quickly. I would say, I mean, it depends on what level of game you’re walking in with. It depends what level of effort you’re willing to put in. That means just like anything else in life, it comes down to how hungry you are and how bad do you want it.

I’ve seen, and this will probably sound outrageous but this is totally true, I had a student in Portland of this year who, you know, he was supposed to do a fashion consult with me on Friday morning, so on Thursday I landed and I invited him out to strip clubs and basically gave him a one-on-one in the strip club game because, you know, I’m hanging out that Thursday. By Saturday, and he was a virgin, by Saturday he made one mistake, and if he hadn’t made a mistake he would have picked up a really hot stripper.

Now, that being said, he was taking a bootcamp, so he was learning on the bootcamp. So it’s not like he was just walking in super-cold. He walked in and learned the strip club quickly. He took the workshop, so he's doing regular sets, and of course I’m going to take him to strip clubs on workshops. So by the time Saturday had come around, he had done Thursday night, four hours of strip club game with me mentoring him one-on-one; Friday, regular workshop, two hours, three hours in a strip club; Saturday, four hours of infield, two, three hours in a strip club.

I mean, I think that if you have inner game dialed down, you have your act together, and you’re doing okay with game, you could probably be pretty proficient within three months. I mean, that doesn’t seem unrealistic whatsoever. In fact, I would think it would be much faster than three months, but I’ll just put three months out there as a safe number.

And the last question you asked was really kind of about the level of skill they should have. Honestly, I really think that there’s so much psychology going on, I would say you would need at least an intermediate level of game. I’ve seen so many students work with strippers and I’ve trained hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of guys at this point, because I definitely chose to put in the first day, I didn’t say this earlier when we were just talking off radio or whatever, off recording, but I definitely made sure to put in about half an hour of inner game because a lot of guys unfortunately validate themselves by women and they validate themselves based on how the interaction went and how attractive the girls are, and if a guy is doing that and he's going to go learn stripper game, that guy is going to end up in a really bad situation because the sets happen fast and the girls are hot and they’re very socially savvy. So I would think you’d really want to have your inner game down pat, you want to have kind of a decent level of game walking in, and that's how you could get the most out of it. I mean, you could do it without having ever done a cold approach, but honestly I think that would be a waste.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So I like the way you put that and it made me really kind of think, because a couple of times I’ve been to strip clubs with some of my buddies, and really it was just to see… to test ourselves, right?

[Fader]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: And I was just thinking right now that if you’re wanting to test your inner game and everything, it’s not a bad place to go because, as you say, they’re very heavily socialized and they’re very sensitive to anything you might do wrong or in terms of validation and things like that, so I could see that being another… like a tool or a learning tool, if you like, is you could go to some strip clubs, and I think it would probably help accelerate your advanced learning phase, if you like, when you want to get really good and really push yourself. It could be quite a good learning tool even if you’re not actually interested in dating those girls themselves.

[Fader]: That's totally true. One other thing that I’ve seen it do that you’re saying that reminded me is it’s actually great for students that have approach anxiety because they’ll approach you and the reason… there are a lot of reasons that people have approach anxiety, but what’s really, really happening with approach anxiety is, you know, I did a keynote, Super Conference in 2008, and I understand what the community says about hardwired anxiety… I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that.

What I did was I studied agoraphobia. We won’t get into the depth, but a really high-level view of agoraphobia is if you… it’s a fear of wide, open spaces, and if you’re agoraphobic and you’re not treated, your life pretty much ends because you can’t leave your house. Ninety percent of agoraphobics can be treated either through medication or through therapy. So I started with that and I started working my way towards approach anxiety.

The real reason people have approach anxiety, and I’ll just tell it you enough to show you why strip club game short circuits this, is we’re hardwired to make value calculations. We make value calculations consistently. If someone said… let's say the workshop I’m teaching on stripper game course is 100,000 dollars. No one would sign up for it because the value in the workshop, the value of information, isn’t worth the compliance, right? A hundred thousand. However, if the course was, give me 100,000 and within two years you’re guaranteed 100% to make a million dollars, every single person would sign up for that because now all of a sudden what you’re getting, your value for your compliance, has changed.

So people in general don’t like being judged. People feel really insecure when people are judging them and that's why public speaking universally is considered the number one fear, even a bigger fear than death.

So when people do the approach, what’s really happening is because they have that attachment to the outcome and how it’s going to go, and they feel that it’s going to validate or invalidate who they are, they have self-induced anxiety. One thing you can ask yourself is, do dogs have approach anxiety? When lions mate, does the lion have approach anxiety?

[Angel Donovan]: I was thinking sometimes, I mean, I have seen dogs where they’re kind of scared of you and they’ll back off from you a bit.

[Fader]: No, but humans… we’re talking about mating, let's talk about a female going into heat.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, okay. Okay. Sorry. [Laughs]

[Fader]: It’s my bad. I’m sorry for not explaining that. That's different. I’m talking about when animals are mating, right?

[Angel Donovan]: They kind of just charge each other.

[Fader]: Yeah, they just go, right? One of the reasons… the reason we took over the planet, because at one point we didn’t control the planet, we took over the planet not because we’re the biggest, the fastest or the strongest, there are animal species of every type that are each one of those categories, we took it over because we’re the smartest. And one of the things is humans have a mating pattern also. One of the challenges is we’re too smart for our own good. We stand in our way, right?

So one thing I’ll ask students is I’ll say, “Let's say I had a 6-year-old, could you walk up to her and start a regular conversation without anxiety?” Everyone will say yes. I’ll say, “If you had, let's say, an 800-pound girl who’s just dripping lard, would you be able to do that?” They might not want to but could you be able to, and they’d say yes. And I say, “Now you have this bisexual Playboy Playmate with breast implants in a bikini, could you approach her?” And all of a sudden everyone has anxiety, and the reason they’re having anxiety, it’s, again, it’s self-induced. The 6-year-old’s not a mating option, neither is the really fat girl. The Playboy Playmate is a mating option, so all of a sudden they induce their own anxiety.

So what happens, one of the ways we can get… there are many different ways to treat approach anxiety or phobias in general. One of them is the idea of progressive desensitization. So what happens is you have this student who can’t walk up to a female, let's say a girl who’s an 8, who’s probably really hot. In my experience you’re not really going to find 9’s and 10s in bars, they’re in bottle service clubs or in clubs that are really hard to get into. I don’t really see 10s in bars.

So you have this girl, an 8, who relatively speaking she’s a 10 in a bar, she’s the queen of the bar, that girl is very difficult to approach. But you put a student, you know, for the new student, you put him in a strip club though where there are girls who are hotter than her with their clothes off who will walk up to him and approach him, all of a sudden he begins to get desensitized to their looks, to their beauty.

One of the laws of influence is compare and contrast. They did some study where basically they showed a bunch of… Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. They showed a bunch of guys average housewives and they asked them to rate them, and they get 5’s, 6’s.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Fader]: Then they showed them a bunch of Playboy models. You know this one, right? The Playboy models get 10s. And then they do it in reverse. They show the Playboy models first, 10s, and then they ask them to rate the housewives. Now the housewives get 2s. So you see a bunch of strippers, you go back to the bar, that 8 is now a 6 and she’s more approachable.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that makes sense. That totally makes sense. I just want to interject, and that's very important like with this desensitization thing, I just want to interject because I was having a discussion with a friend a little while ago about this same subject, about the hotness of the girl and why we get anxiety, and also what we’re attracted to, right?

[Fader]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: Because, you know, we go through phases. After being in the game for a while, you know, you’re looking for something, and then after a while you kind of move on, you say, “That's not what I want anymore.”

[Fader]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: And what he said to me was that we are attracted to and we value, and therefore we feel anxious about, whatever we are insecure about ourselves. So if we think it’s… kind of like on a base level, like if we think we’re not attractive enough, then I think we really focus on the looks of the girl. But say we have another insecurity, say you want to go into the top business schools in the world, right? And that's something that's really important to you but you don’t feel that you’re going to be able to do it. Now you meet a girl who’s going to Harvard, right? She’s in Harvard Business School. Now you’re going to feel more anxious about approaching her and potentially more attracted to her and value her more than the other hot girl.

So I’m just saying like I really like I really like the way you explain that because that desensitization process is really important. And I think it’s very applicable for other areas as well, not just with looks because we also get anxious about different social situations and different types of girls.

[Fader]: Sure. Your friend is 100% right. I’ll never forget this story. It’s a former student who… I tend to stay in touch with my students, and if you meet cool people, who cares how you meet them? They’re cool people. So I’m in touch with a good majority of my students. One day he called me up. He's an amateur singer, but he does… you know, until you get discovered, you need some kind of a side job, you know, entertainment, sports. So he's a copywriter.

He's in the studio. He sings in a barbershop quartet. He's in the studio recording an album and he was gaming this girl, and the girl’s like, “Hey,” she’s like, “I have to record my song. Are you going to be here?” He's like, “Maybe.” And his manager comes up to him and he goes, “Do you know who that is?” I wasn’t there but he told me this story, but I’ll never forget the verbage. The manager goes, “You know who that is?” And he goes, “Some girl who likes me?” like very cocky. And the manager goes, “No, that's So and So.” And at the time she had the number three pop single in the United States. When she came out, he couldn’t game her anymore. He froze up.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh wow.

[Fader]: Yeah, so he called me in a panic about that because he thought it was… because here’s the thing. Value is relative. We just assign value. Like I said before, I had a student who wanted a girl who had an Ivy League education. I don’t care about that, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Fader]: But he cared. To me, I wouldn’t care that she has the top pop single in the United States. That doesn’t matter to me. But just like your friend said, he believes that that’s value. He's insecure about his singing, so all of a sudden here he is dealing with a celebrity who likes him and he's never been in this situation, and he just locks up and he's done.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So yeah, everything that was going well suddenly starts not going well.

[Fader]: That's why on my workshops, I mean, people are welcome to read the reviews, I spend the majority of the first day doing inner game, because inner game is so… it’s such a foundation of everything. I mean, what it really comes down to, if you want really cool girls who are really awesome, who are hot, who are cool, who have their act together, you need three things. You need your inner game – your beliefs, your inner psychology, how you deal with reality; you need your outer game, which is your lines, how charming you are, how you flirt; and you need to have a good lifestyle.

The idea that you’re going to be some loser with that fashion who picks his nose, plays Warcraft and has a Playboy Playmate as a girlfriend, that's a fairy tale. That's not real. Just like a girl who’s going to, you know, because at the end of the day, evolutionary psychology says, you know, you bring your looks to the table, you bring your replication value, and I’ll bring my survival value, my resources. The idea that a girl’s going to be 250 pounds and get this guy who’s a multimillionaire and is super-connected and is really witty, that's also a fairy tale. That's not what’s going to happen. We’re going to meet somewhere in the middle.

That's why part of the stripper game workshop… that's why I chose to actually do some inner game stuff. I really believe that inner game is the foundation for everything – regular pickups, your own life. Like we were talking about before the recording started, I’m going through a course right now, and the first day, we had this mindset stuff for TV appearances and we didn’t get past that, but they give you these beliefs and everything, and I was just like, “I know all this already,” right?

Because I’ve been studying self-improvement. I think that most guys, what happens in the community is people, they want to differentiate themselves in different marketing strategies. At the end of the day, the idea is to be natural while at the same time, I guess, you have these ideas where people like don’t use routines, routines are evil, and you have schools that are like routine, routine, routine, routine. The real truth of it is, be in the middle, right? Is be confident, be yourself, be your best self.

But I’ve met naturals who have never even heard of pickup who have slept with ridiculously hot girls, and they’re my close friends and I’ve heard them tell the same story seven, eight, nine times, if not more. So if you have good stories, if you have things about your life that are awesome, you should share those things. But the idea that students are going to come learn these magic lines like they’re some kind of magical incantation or some magic spell and they’re going to recite them on the full moon during the witching hour and a hot girl’s going to appear, that's not real.

And even if you do manage to trick a hot girl, because that's what you’re doing, you’re tricking her, you’re not showing her your personality, eventually you’ll run out of routines and your inner psychology will come out, because the true self is always coming through and she’ll see. She’ll see that's not who you are. And I speak from experience because that's how I did it. I had memorized tons of routines, tons of lines. I went out. I was getting girls and I would get laid, but I couldn’t keep the girl. After two weeks the girl didn’t want to be in my life.

[Angel Donovan]: Relationships?

[Fader]: Yeah…

[Angel Donovan]: Totally. Like relationships are the real tests of your inner game.

[Fader]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And for most guys who are getting into this stuff, they are interested in more than just a one-night hookup.

[Fader]: Yes.

[Angel Donovan]: As you say, maybe if you learn like tactics and so on, but if you don’t focus on actually improving yourself and your inner game, but also just bits of your life which help to support your inner game, then you’re not going to be able to hold onto the relationship or maintain it because she’ll see through you sooner or later, and it’ll probably be pretty quickly.

[Fader]: Yeah. It doesn’t even have to be like a boyfriend/girlfriend. You have to take her out on dates. You know, you have the guys who send a text and they get no response and they get needy, and they, “Why won’t you answer me?” or, you know. Right there, that's your true self coming through, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Fader]: There's really nowhere to hide it. I mean, inner psychology I think is one of the most important pieces to everything, to not even just the game but I’ve had so many students who after doing inner game with me have come back and… because all we’re doing is we’re taking a subset of communication strategies that exist everywhere, things like frame control. And that's what we were talking about before, which I thought was fascinating.

I learned frame control from a book. [Laughs] That's how I learned frame control. I read a book and I practiced it. Strippers are masters of frame control, and there's no stripper who read a frame control book. They just understand these things instinctively, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Fader]: Almost like animals, like social Darwinism, right?

[Angel Donovan]: However, I will tell you, like when I had my girlfriend…

[Fader]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: She was kind of like the head girl and she used to like bring the new girls in and stuff. And she used to train them up, [laughs] and she would tell them what to say to the clients and stuff. She'd basically give them routines, right?

[Fader]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: She'd say, “Yeah… ” but they didn’t call them routines before. It’s just like, “Yeah, when he says like he said that, you say this and he’ll buy you a drink,” right?

[Fader]: Oh wow.

[Angel Donovan]: They do give… I mean, she had all of those tips and she used to kind of train the girls up. But that was in China, so maybe it doesn’t happen in like America. But I’m pretty sure that they hand out these little tips. I know it happens in Thailand as well.

[Fader]: That makes sense.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. It does. I mean, but in the same way as before we started actually studying game, guys would try and pass on little bits of information. Less efficient, right? But it still kind of works.

[Fader]: Yeah, I mean, well, think about it like this, right? Strippers, they’re the mirror opposite of pickup artists, right? I really hate that word, pickup artist, by the way. I like to say dating coach, but any student who’s playing club strippers isn’t really a dating coach, right? He's just I guess a player.

It’s the yin to the yang, right? Their job is to hold out the illusion that you might have a chance to have sex with them while they take your money. Your job is to hold out the illusion that they may get your money while you take their time, and they have to come back… during that time you convey the personality, and then they backwards rationalize later on, “Wait a second, I spent 45 minutes of my night with Leon,” right? Well, that's my real name, Leon. I don’t go referring to myself as Fader.

They’ll be like, “I spent 45 minutes of my night with Leon, I must have really liked him.” They have to justify why they did that. And that's one of the ways where… that again goes back to Cialdini’s stuff. Everyone in the world should study influence because we’re constantly making decisions and most people, again, inner game, are not aware of their own internal processes, right? So the psychology is being exploited by everyone from marketers to vendors.

So one of the ways we’re influenced is commitment and consistency. The more we invest in something, and in advertising, in business, this is called sunken cost. And then it’s compounded by another business psychology called loss aversion, which is the amateur stock trader, he buys a stock at 50, it goes to 40, he should sell it. It goes to 30 and he doesn’t want to sell it because he believes that until he sells it he hasn’t lost anything. It’s just a number. Then it’s 20, then it’s 10, and then he's lost everything, right? And that's the commitment and… in business it’s called sunken cost. The money you put into something, and when you don’t want to get rid of it because of commitment and consistency, it’s loss aversion.

So I wouldn’t be surprised to find that strippers are… I know that a lot of… what started to happen that really helped me with this course, believe it or not, this course… was fascinating for me. Let me explain to you why. When I learned pickup, I had that one relationship, I wasn’t meeting girls. I found Love Systems, I took my workshop, read products, read products from many different companies, right? Figured out what worked, what didn’t. So I kind of went book to computer to execution back to computer.

With the strip club workshop, I looked for sources and I read many sources. There are a few out there and they’re all… except for one. I would read these things, and based on my realized experience, I’m like, “This is an absolute lie.” I’m like, “Any student who reads this and tries it will get slaughtered.” This has been phenomenal for me because everything I’m teaching is based on real-life experience.

What happened in January of last year was there came a point where I was… I’ll never forget this point. I was in Houston in a strip club and a girl clearly liked me. And I wasn’t that into her. I was just like, alright. I’m like… I felt like, “Well, I have this reputation now. I’m Fader. Students want to see me pick up a stripper. This girl likes me. I’m picking up a stripper. Who knows if we’ll sleep together? I don’t know.” Just because you get their contact information doesn’t mean you’re sleeping with them, right? Pulling out of strip clubs can be very, very messy.

So I’m sitting there bored and I just thought to myself, I’m just like, “Why don’t I get her to just teach me her internal processes?” So I said, “Hey,” I’m like, “I’m curious, I’m blah, blah, blah, blah.” Blah, blah, blah being, “One of my friends is a dancer. She wants to learn about dancing. Can you give me some tips for her?” And as she started to explain things to me… you know, I studied a little bit of NLP. I think NLP sort of has its place. I don’t know. NLP has a worse signal-to-noise ratio than pickup does, but there are a couple of useful things. And one of the useful things in NLP is eliciting people’s processes and their strategies.

So I got her to teach me the different pieces, and there was so much information I got that I was like, “Holy shit.” So then I said, “Maybe I can do this again.” So the next time I ended up in a workshop picking up a stripper that I didn’t care about, I did the same thing. I did the same thing. I did the same thing. And basically what I did was I aggregated all that information.

And then, what’s really twisted, right? Check this out: A lot of my friends, like girls… like that's how this course started. I told you earlier. I was going to these clubs that play house music, nine in the morning. This was before I found pickup, and I was hanging out with dancers. I was just the loser who didn’t hook up with them. They’d go like blow my friend in the back and then come out and hang out with me. So I had a lot of experience with these girls. I have a lot of friends who are dancers.

So what I did, you guys ready for this? This is… I guess I think it’s awesome, but overall it’s probably terrible. So, many of my friends dance in New York. I had them come over and proof the class for me. Like I’d buy them dinner and drinks. I’d order in, have liquor, and great food, they’d come over, and we’d just go through the course, maybe like, “This is wrong. This would never work. Why don’t you have this and this, so you did this last time?”

And multiple dancers came over here and helped me with the course, but the agreement was that I would never ever teach it in New York. So I’m never ever going to teach the strip club game in New York, right? Because they helped me. Kind of crazy, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that is pretty crazy. But that's valuable - it’s good to have that female perspective and…

[Fader]: Yes.

[Angel Donovan]: As you said like several times, I mean, my experience too has been that they’re extremely socialized and they know what they’re doing.

[Fader]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Whereas the girls you meet in bars, they don’t as often know why they’re doing things.

[Fader]: Yes.

[Angel Donovan]: But… unless they’re the higher-quality ones and they know a bit more. So, Fader, Leon, it’s been a great conversation. We covered a lot of ground today.

[Fader]: Thank you.

[Angel Donovan]: We went through all the stripper game, so it’s going to be great for all the guys to get their heads around that and see if it’s for them. And we also covered inner game, which…

[Fader]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: … a huge point there. So thanks, and I hope to catch up with you sometime maybe in New York.

[Fader]: Sure. Let me know when you come through, I’d be happy to take you out for drinks, we’ll have a bit of fun.