Ep. #15 Las Vegas, Stripper Girlfriends and the Playboy Lifestyle with Dean Cortez

[Dean Cortez]: Hey Angel, good to be here, man.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Actually, it’s quite funny, Dean and I were just talking and it turns out we’re from the same side of the world but we actually didn’t know. We’re both from around Thailand these days. So that's kind of funny. So yeah, what I want to start with today is to really go back to before you ever read any dating advice or anything like that, and what was your lifestyle like and where were you, and how is it that you actually got into dating advice, started reading about it and so on?

[Dean Cortez]: Oh man, I shudder when I consider these memories, taking me way back to those [laughs]…those dark days in my dating life.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Dean Cortez]: Well, you know, Angel, I talk a lot about scarcity versus abundance. A guy can either have a scarcity mentality or an abundance mentality, and my attitude back in the day was one of scarcity. And a lot of guys fall under this category I think, where you’re putting all your eggs in one basket where you meet a girl and you lust after her and you want to do whatever it takes to date this girl and lock her down and make her your girlfriend, and that's the only girl in the world as far as you’re concerned at that time. And when things don’t work out, if she doesn’t feel the same way about you or she just wants to be friends, it’s devastating. And it’s a very tough way to go through your dating life, is to believe in scarcity, getting hung up on one girl and always evaluating girls in terms of which one can be your girlfriend.

And at that age, when I was in my early 20s, a lot of my friends we’re getting picked off and locked down and getting married, and I was still single. I’m still single today, thank God. And I can thank God because at that time, had I gotten serious with a girl and gotten married, it probably would have been a big mistake, because when you’ve got that scarcity mentality, you take whatever you can get. You’re not thinking in terms of finding the right girl for you, the perfect girl for you and for your lifestyle. You’re thinking in terms of “I need steady sex” and you will take whatever comes along.

An analogy that I often use is that opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan, the World War II movie.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Dean Cortez]: Well, the soldiers show up in a boat on the beaches of Normandy for the big invasion, and a lot of these guys get shot down and blown away before they even get off the boat, they die in the water, and then they hit the beach. And then, once they reach the beach, probably 70% more of them get cut down by machine-gun fire, and only a few guys make it across that beach. And I would say you and I, Angel, are guys that made it across the beach. We didn’t get cut down in our prime before we ever really got in the game.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Dean Cortez]: And that's how most guys end up, they get cut down before they ever wind up in the game. So that was my lifestyle. It was very typical. It was getting hung up on girls, oftentimes winding up in the friend zone, not knowing how to escalate and take things to the next level and make women feel as attracted to me as I was to them. So that's it in a nutshell. I was in need of help.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. [Laughs] That's great. I love the illustration on the shores, getting hit by bullets…

[Dean Cortez]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: …and taking me back to the battle days. [Laughs] So after that, what happened? How did you first find out about dating advice?

[Dean Cortez]: Well, my story is interesting. It’s all in my book M.A.C.K. Tactics, which I wrote actually prior to The Game.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Dean Cortez]: It came out in stores around the country around 2004, 2005. What had happened was I moved out to Las Vegas after a really bad breakup. I was totally down in the dumps. Here I was in Las Vegas. The hottest chicks in the world are in Las Vegas from all over the place…

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: …the bars and the clubs are totally off the hook, and I still couldn’t close a deal with these chicks. I felt a little bit intimidated, because there's also a lot of guys in Las Vegas a lot of young good-looking guys with money, throwing money all over the place. So how could I compete?

So what happened was one night I’m hanging out in the bar like four in the morning after a very frustrating night at the nightclubs, and I see this guy standing near me and he's just got four women hanging on his every word. And this guy was wearing a T-shirt, a pair of ripped-up jeans, a pair of sneakers, probably about five foot seven, you know, not that impressive to look at, but this guy had these four like incredibly hot stripper-type girls hanging on his every word. So I figured this guy must be a multimillionaire or maybe some like actor or some rock star that I don’t know about.

Well, it turns out I met the guy after he dismissed these four girls, got their phone numbers and gave them a kiss and told them he’d call them, sort of blew them off, which I was amazed by. It turns out the guy was a hostage negotiator. This guy actually was a hostage negotiator, what you see in the movies and on TV shows.

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: But he was young and hip. He wasn’t one of these grizzled old alcoholic veteran guys like you see in the movies. And we became friends, I started hanging out with him, and I was just fascinated by the way this guy could just charm anyone. He would take me around the VIP clubs and bars, and it’s like everybody knew this guy, and he could literally approach any girl in the place, start talking to her, have her laughing and just all over him within minutes, and then steer her to wherever he wanted to go.

Now, as time went on and I saw him do this night after night after night with really, really hot women, I started to understand that what he was doing was he was using certain strategies and communication techniques of negotiation when interacting with people. Being a negotiator is all about learning how to build a bond with somebody very fast and very effectively to win them over to your side, to build comfort and to build trust, and then sort of guide the interaction to where you want it to go, at the same time using certain trigger words and certain phrases to influence the person’s emotional state.

So I started learning this stuff from him, I started applying it to my own interactions with girls, and I started getting way more successful. So I thought, “This is a book.” I was looking to write a book at that time. I was a journalist. I thought, “This is going to be a homerun. We’ll do a book that applies hostage negotiation to interacting with women.”

And that's when I discovered the whole seduction community. I thought I was onto something that nobody else had ever written about, but then I found over the Internet that there were layers and there were gurus. I learned about Mystery. I learned about Neil Strauss. And then The Game came out, which sort of beat me to the punch and was a huge bestseller. And I learned about all these new techniques and I started to study them as well. I synthesized some of their stuff into the M.A.C.K. Tactics program, but always tweaking it and always field-testing it to make sure that it worked.

And so M.A.C.K. Tactics was created to some degree by the best seduction artists, but a lot of the material in there is very fresh that you’ve never seen before, whereas a lot of the stuff today I feel is very recycled. A lot of guys read a few books, go to a few seminars, and then say, “Well, now I can be a guru too,” and it just doesn’t work that way. It’s not authentic.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow, that's a really interesting way to get into this. Who would have thought, a hostage negotiator?

[Dean Cortez]: Uh-huh.

[Angel Donovan]: I can understand the guy would be very laid-back and cool no matter what the situation, right? He's not going to be affected by the girls around him for sure. That's pretty cool.

[Dean Cortez]: Well, yeah, knowing how to manage stress levels is really a big part of the game. When you approach a woman, her first reaction is to feel stressed out. Who is this guy? What does he want from me? Knowing how to manage that stress by using language is a very powerful tool.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So other than this guy, did you find anything particularly useful? You said you heard about the seduction community, Mystery and those guys. Is there anything in particular you found useful from some of the gurus out there or some of the products or just any other techniques that they used?

[Dean Cortez]: I enjoyed Mystery’s material a lot, and Mystery is definitely an innovator the way he broke down the whole process of seduction, into steps, you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: And the way he analyzed it, which was very interesting to me, and he's very good at it, I know he's the genuine article…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Dean Cortez]: However, a lot of these guys are drawing lessons from his material and then using it improperly. A lot of guys are getting hung up on trying to be the most clever guy in the bar, using these routines and these patterns and then these little stories, but it’s like learning enough karate to get your butt kicked in a lot of cases. These guys have enough so-called game to walk up to a group of girls and get their opinion on something, but they have no idea how to take it from there.

And with my friends and I, we’ve always defined success by getting laid or getting girlfriends. I don’t care about being the most clever guy in the bar wearing a top hat and a feather boa around my neck in black fingernail polish. I want to be the guy who slips in there under the radar and leaves at the end of the night with a really hot chick. That's how I define success.

And so his stuff was definitely valid. A good friend of mine is Carlos Zuma, who’s a well-known dating coach, and Carlos’ approach is all about helping guys unlock and unleash the alpha man inside of them, so he's really strong on masculinity. That’s sort of his angle on this.

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: And I believe in that very strongly. Carlos and I wrote a book together called The Alpha Rules, which has been pretty popular.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Dean Cortez]: So Carlos is definitely and influence, and David DeAngelo is a terrific writer, the way he breaks down attraction and how attraction is not a choice but is something you can actually trigger in a woman. That's good stuff as well. A lot of the newer stuff I feel is recycling a lot of the innovators.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Dean Cortez]: So those are the guys that I would say have been influential for me.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, I didn’t actually find out when you got into this really exactly, to give a better idea to our users. You’ve been around obviously a long time. So when was it that you met the hostage negotiator and you started writing your book and so on?

[Dean Cortez]: That was back in 2004, and the book came out around that time period.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Dean Cortez]: Since then I’ve expanded upon it. We built a company and now there is this entire line of products that I’ve created, that I’ve worked on with other top guys in this business, and also products that I promote, the ones that I feel are just absolutely superior. Those are the ones you’ll also see featured on my websites.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Okay, that's cool. Alright, so after you learned all of this stuff, what happened with your dating lifestyle? Could you give me some kind of comparison between what you said it was before and what it is today? What is your dating lifestyle and are you there today?

[Dean Cortez]: I’m there today. My ideal dating lifestyle is all about having options. I came to learn that really, this time of my life, I’m not looking to get married and have kids and settle down. If that’s your goal, more power to you. It’s not mine right now. And so having options is what it’s all about, not getting hung up on a girl.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Dean Cortez]: And also, no matter how beautiful a woman is, if she doesn’t accept my lifestyle and complement my lifestyle, in other words, make my lifestyle better and help me achieve what I want to achieve, then she’s out of the picture.

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: She’s out of the picture. I’m on to the next. So I’ve been through a lot of women and they accuse me of being a player, but really they’re just not measuring up to what I need, and that's the abundance mentality that I referred to earlier. So my dating lifestyle is very full. I can always pick up…I mean, I might not go out for a week when I’m holed up writing and working, but it’s nice to know I can always pick up my phone and send out a text message or make a phone call and line up a date within two minutes. It’s not a problem.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Okay, that's a great point on the player because, you know, we often hear the issue that guys don’t want to be players and they don’t want to be called players by girls. But that's a great point that if you’re dating girls you’re actually looking potentially for a girl that can actually match your expectations, and sometimes that means going through a few dates or many dates with girls, right?

[Dean Cortez]: Yeah. A lot of beautiful women are very needy and very jealous and very lazy as far as what they bring to the table. They’ve been coasting on their looks for so long and there are so many guys desperate to be with them and to spend 24 hours a day with them that it sort of messes with their head when they start getting involved with a guy like me, because I just don’t play into their trap, you know. [Laughs]

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

[Dean Cortez]: So I want to maintain my independence. And you know, I’ve been with enough women now that I know what I’m looking for, and that's a really powerful decision to be in, when that girl comes along. And it’s not just about finding the right girl. It’s about the timing, your own timing. What are you ready for at that stage in your life?

[Angel Donovan]: That's an excellent point too, and I think a lot of guys don’t really think about that. So on your sort of journey, what would you say the three big things were that you learned or you changed that contributed to this success with women?

[Dean Cortez]: Well, learning how to control conversations has always been a big thing that I’ve always worked on since I got into this.

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: And you know, one of the very strong points of M.A.C.K. Tactics is using language and verbal skills.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Dean Cortez]: And there are 10 M.A.C.K. Commandments in the book, and one of the M.A.C.K. Commandments is three-quarters of macking is listening, understanding how to listen to women and how to sort of invisibly guide the conversation so that you plant seeds in her mind about your own positive qualities and why she should want to be with you without ever trying to sound like you’re bragging or anything.

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: And also touching on topics that get her to share and reveal what she wants. So most guys just plunge into these conversations with no game, no clear strategy, and it turns into a job interview just like, so what’s your name? Where are you from? Have you been here before? And you’re sort of stuck in where you’re not taking this thing anywhere, and after five or 10 minutes she’s getting a little bit fidgety, and then she says to you, “I have to go find my friend now.” We’ve all been in that situation. [Laughs] And she’s out of there. So knowing how to manage, control and guide the conversations was a big step for me.

Secondly, I stopped dating girls in the conventional way, you know, calling a girl up and saying, “Well, maybe if you’re free sometime we could do something,” and you’re taking her out to an expensive restaurant to try to impress her or taking her to the movies, which is totally pointless, just sitting in the dark and not saying anything for two hours. What kind of an interaction is that, right?

Instead of spending money on women and dating them in that way, instead of courting women and wining and dining women, I started doing it all on my terms. I invite girls to accompany me on cool activities that I’ve already got in motion and I bring them out to meet them. It’s not at a restaurant where I’m going to spend a hundred dollars. It’s for cup of coffee, for a drink at a cool bar, maybe going to sort of an outdoor festival or even taking the girl along with me when I shop to get her opinion on stuff, stuff that I want to buy. So you flip the script in terms of how you date women and you become much more successful in my opinion.

Also, taking girls out and wining and dining them, it backfires. I mean, I used to do that all the time, and how many times did I actually get laid as a result of taking a girl out to a fancy dinner? Almost never. I got a handshake at the end of the night. Because there's too much expectations. She’s thinking to herself, “What does this guy expect from me for spending all this money?” And then you’re not really comfortable either because you’re thinking, “Well, I better get something at the end of the night for all this money I’m shelling out.” [Laughs] So when you date girls in the conventional way, it often backfires. It’s one of the great myths, I think, of dating, that you have to play by those rules, you know.

So that's number two. And then number three, I guess, would be learning how to escalate and be flirtatious in how to guide things towards the close, because a lot of guys, they get so intimidated and so nervous they don’t want to risk it. And then a lot of guys wind up thinking, “Well, at least if we’re friends it’s better than nothing.” But I don’t waste time on that. I know how to escalate, take things towards the close, and then decide whether or not I want to see this girl again, whether she’s a possible girlfriend.

But I’m willing to gamble a little bit, you know? I was in Vegas for a while. I know all about gambling, and you’ve got to risk to win. So those are my three, I think, the three changes that I made in my own game that have gotten me success.

[Angel Donovan]: Dean, great. Really clear stuff there. So has it led to a difference in the type of girls you dated before and now?

[Dean Cortez]: I’ve always loved beautiful, exotic women from different cultures. That's always been my sort of fascination. So the women have remained the same. There’s a lot more of them these days, certainly. But I think the women would say there's a difference in me, you know, as far as how I carry myself and my level of confidence.

I’ve also had the opportunity to date a lot of women from different countries because I travel a lot, which is always a goal of mine. And I think that when I talk about travel and all the opportunities that opened up for me as far as dating and sex, it never would have been possible if I hadn’t gotten my game together. I think you would agree with me that most guys when they lack game and lack confidence, they wind up grabbing onto the first girl they can, getting married, having a kid or two, and they shelve all those other goals and dreams because they’re just trying to hold onto that relationship because it’s the best they think they can do. So all those other goals and passions they have for themselves earlier in life sort of go out the window.

But when you’ve got game, you’ve got confidence, it becomes a bigger-picture thing. Once your dating life is handled, you are free to pursue all kinds of other things and not worry about the dating aspects. And that could mean going for a career that's a bit risky but it’s what you really, really want to do. It could be pulling up stakes and moving to another town or to another country. Your options and your horizons are broadened when you’ve got the dating portion of your life handled. But it’s only one part of the picture. I talk about bigger-picture lifestyle stuff in my programs.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that's a great point. You’re not the first to mention this on these interviews either, and that just points out how important that fact is, that this is actually something that supports your whole life, really. It improves your whole life and it’s not just about dating at the end of the day.

[Dean Cortez]: And not knowing how to get women and not being confident could literally ruin your whole life. You know, you might wind up in your 40s divorced, broke, depressed, and you’re thinking back, you just blew the last 20 years of your life on a bad relationship that you never would have gotten into if you’d had the confidence to date other women and been able to.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, certainly, not having the confidence to attract the women you are chasing for 20 years and not get anywhere. That’d be a waste of time.

[Dean Cortez]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Dean Cortez]: That would be a total waste of time.

[Angel Donovan]: So is there any special dating experience like that really, you know, one special girl you met or some great experience you had since you started on this whole trip?

[Dean Cortez]: Well, I’ve run the gamut. I’ve dated women from all backgrounds with them all living in cities…

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: ..in New York City, in Los Angeles, and then in Las Vegas where I actually lived with a stripped for two years. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: That would be the foundation of my program on how to seduce strippers. I’ve got a lot of experience in that area. That was actually a real crash course in sort of male-female psychology, living with a stripper. She was one of the top strippers in Vegas at one of the top clubs, pulling down 2000 dollars a night sometimes.

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Dean Cortez]: And all of her friends were strippers. So I would throw barbecues at my house and swimming pool parties and it’d be all strippers, and I was like the only guy there. I felt like a young Hugh Hefner. It was fantastic. But by talking to these girls I really got a deeper understanding of how easy it is to manipulate men. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Right.

[Dean Cortez]: The way they spend money on women you know? Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Dean Cortez]: And all that experience got poured into my program on strip club seduction, it’s called. It’s a fascinating program and it’s totally the real deal because I’ve been there, and for a long time in Las Vegas strip clubs were like my singles bars. I would go in there with the mission of picking up women and I learned how to do it. So that was a great experience, and now it’s a lot of travel. I’ve dated women from countries…that are from small provinces and I’ve dated women who are actresses and models over in Asia.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Dean Cortez]: So it’s a wide range of experience. It’s hard to pick one ideal dating experience because there are times when I want to be in a relationship and I want that security with one woman, but then there are times when I want to totally blow it out and…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Dean Cortez]: …you know, be a rock star, you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Dean Cortez]: And the cool thing is I’ve got the ability to do both.

[Angel Donovan]: That's great. I understand exactly where you’re coming from. Okay, so you’ve given us a few hints as to some of your products and stuff you’ve had out, but what I want to hear really, have you got any recent goings-on or any upcoming events or any products in particular you can talk to our users about?

[Dean Cortez]: Well, if you go to macktactics.com you can watch some free instructional videos. You can download a free 95-page book, which contains a lot of techniques, a lot of information. It’s all free.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Dean Cortez]: In the website, you’ll find a number of new products we’ve got out. One of the most popular is one called Dating Younger Women, which is amazing because, I mean, I’ve actually reached out to all of my connections in the seduction industry and the program includes over 12 hours of interviews with many of the top guys in the game.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Dean Cortez]: So they shared all their secrets for getting younger women and how to master that aspect of your dating life. Also, I mentioned the strip club program. It’s very popular. And I have a new one called The Ultimate Approach. It’s all about approaching women. And I would urge you to go to M.A.C.K. Tactics and check it out because there's also a link there to my blog, which is constantly updated and full of free stuff and a lot of great articles. So macktactics.com, M-A-C-K tactics dot com, that's your gateway to this whole world of what I’m talking about.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Great. Well, thanks Dean. It’s been awesome having you here today, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

[Dean Cortez]: I’ll see you there, Angel. Thank you very much.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright man, take care.