Ep. #31 Down to the Essentials: Fashion, Inner Game and Learning Pick-Up with Brad P.

[Angel Donovan]: Hey, this is Angel Donovan, your host for Dating Skills Podcast. This week I'm interviewing Brad P., a pickup artist who is very well-known in the seduction community and on the pickup artist conference circuit. Brad P. has been training men since 2005 and doesn’t make any excuses about what he’s teaching. It's about practical advice that gets you laid. That sounds brutal, but as you'll see in the interview, there's a lot more behind Brad P.’s ideas than simply getting laid.

Hey Brad, how are you doing?

[Brad P.]: I'm doing great, how are you doing?

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, alright. So the first thing I wanted to talk with you today about is to go into image and fashion, because I know that's something that you've started out with way back when you got into all of this. By the way, what year did you kind of like appear on the scene?

[Brad P.]: Well, I started learning my game in the early 2000s, and I actually went professional in 2005, so I'm going into my ninth year now.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, alright. Yeah, good stuff. Nearly a decade.

[Brad P.]: Yeah, been there a long time.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So I think some of your dress sense was more on the extreme side, if I remember, when you first came out. One of the things that we say at Dating Skills Review is that image and fashion is a good place to start because it's kind of like an easy win. It's an easy thing to work on, doesn’t require a lot of effort, and…

[Brad P.]: Yes, it's easy.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Brad P.]: I say that too.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, great. When do you suggest someone should work on like their image and fashion? Are there different cases of where some people should focus on it to start with and other people should, you know, that it's not such a big deal? Like if you had a typical student, when you would ask them to put a bit of effort into sorting that out?

[Brad P.]: Usually what I tell people to do is probably around the second or third month of when they're learning the game and they're actually going into the field is a good time to update their fashion.

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Brad P.]: The reason why I say that is because it's good to get a few test approaches done in the beginning just to see how women respond to you.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: That gives you a baseline to compare to when you start changing your fashion. You can say, “Well, am I doing better? Am I doing worse?” Because fashion is a process of experimentation, and if you don’t have a baseline to start from, you won't be able to move in the right direction.

The exception to that would be if you clearly know that your fashion is bad. If you're already sure about that, then by all means fix it right away, because it doesn’t take that long to fix it if you have a good idea right from the beginning. Fashion’s really about concepts and ideas, and if you have the right idea on your first try, you can be fixed very quickly. Most people go through a number of ideas before they find the right one, but some people get it on the first try.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great. So you mentioned some people might have to work on it earlier if it's bad. Are there any signals they can look out for? Like, you know, I'm a guy, I'm really not sure about my fashion or image sense. Is there any way I can know that it's probably something I should start with earlier rather than later?

[Brad P.]: Well, if you've been dressing the same way since you were 13 or 14 years old, that's a bad sign.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Brad P.]: I mean, I'm not even making a joke. That's the way some people are.

[Angel Donovan]: Sure.

[Brad P.]: If people are telling you it needs work, then it probably does, or if you're getting blown out immediately every time you approach and you don't think that it's anything with your voice or your body language or anything like that, it could be your fashion. Bad fashion can get you blown out quite a lot, I would say.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Literally like if you get blown out when you're approaching a girl before you actually start talking?

[Brad P.]: Yeah. I'm not talking about blown out after two minutes. I'm talking about blown out in 10 seconds or less.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great. And so, you know, the kind of things, they're looking for reactions from girls, they're just like they look away, you know…

[Brad P.]: Yeah, they look away. They say, “No, thanks, I have a boyfriend, we're lesbians,” all those kind of…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Right, the major putdowns.

[Brad P.]: Right, exactly. And those kinds of putdowns are usually… I mean, the two most common things would be your fashion’s bad or they just can't hear you. Some people talk really low or they mumble, and if they can't hear you they're just going to automatically do that.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. You're asking them to put in too much energy or effort to try and listen to, figure out what you're talking about.

[Brad P.]: Yup, and they don’t want to do it.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. So where would you say they should start? Like I've decided that… say I'm like two months into it and it's time for me to start working on this, where would you say they should start? What’s the first step?

[Brad P.]: I say the process for this is about start by opening your mind, and then start to do some modeling. Model yourself after stuff that looks good and that people already know. You know, a lot of people who ask me about fashion, they want to really jump and say, “What store should I go to? What should I wear?” and I don't think you need to start with that, because I can put you in an outfit in one day and you'll great, but you want to be the kind of person who’s going to be able to update their own style, and you want to be able to keep up and maybe even do your own innovative things in the future. You want to be able to grow in your look, grow in your fashion, and that comes from opening your mind and modeling stuff that looks good. So let me go through those a little more in-depth for you.

[Angel Donovan]: Sure.

[Brad P.]: When I say open your mind, here's what I'm talking about. As men, there's a tendency to think, “Hey, if you're interested in fashion, that makes you gay or that makes you feminine or that makes you not manly.” And we all probably have had those friends who criticize us when we, you know, one day you're wearing a pink tie and they say, “Oh, what are you, a faggot? What’s with the pink tie?” you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Totally.

[Brad P.]: After you've heard that a few times, you start to internalize that and say, “The manly thing to do is to never be interested in fashion,” but that is wrong. So you have to let go of those kinds of thoughts and you have to get that stuff out of your head. You have to say, “I'm a modern man who wants to look good. I'm going to take an interest in fashion from now on. Even styles that I wouldn't wear myself, I'm going to model them and analyze them, try to see why they work for others. I'm going to try to understand why people choose the looks they look. I'm going to particularly try to understand people who put work into fashion and people who have fashion as a hobby or fashion as their profession.”

So that's all about opening your mind and getting into fashion and starting to open your eyes and look around at the different things people are wearing, browsing maybe fashion websites even and just looking at what people are wearing on the Internet, looking at what people are wearing to dance clubs – that's also a great indicator. And once you're becoming fashion-aware and open to growth, that is the first step.

Now, on to modeling for a moment. One of the reasons it's so easy is because you don’t actually have to be creative to have good fashion. You don’t have to be original to have good fashion. In fact, if you're being original, that's pretty difficult and dangerous to try to pull off, especially if you're a beginner.

The best thing to do in the beginning is look for a fashion role model. It can be a friend of yours who gets a lot of girls. It can be a celebrity or an outfit you saw in a magazine. I recommend that people find their fashion role model and buy the same outfit and just wear that outfit for starters. One outfit, one fashion role model, just wear it.

And this is basically an exercise that allows you to get a taste of what it's like to put an outfit together, to wear something you wouldn't normally wear and something that other people already understand. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel in fashion, you don’t want to give some people something they’ve never seen before, you want to give these girls you're approaching something they’ve already seen and they’ve already decided that they like it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Brad P.]: You don’t want to confuse them.

[Angel Donovan]: So, you know, you had some good pointers there on how to choose the role model, because that strikes me as pretty important there. You want to make sure you get the right person. So one of those was, you know, obviously, one of your friends who’s doing well with women, so you've got some feedback there. However, one thing about that is sometimes you could have friends who like brag a lot about how well they do with women, but maybe they aren't—you know, this is quite a usual scenario, actually—they're not actually doing that well with women. So how would you, you know, when I'm going about like trying to figure out, “Okay, this guy’s doing well with women,” are there any signs that you would say they have to make sure that are showing before they choose that guy?

[Brad P.]: I would say you really have to choose someone that you trust, that you've known for a long time and that you've seen the results in real life.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Brad P.]: I actually encourage people to try to choose someone from the media, who is on television or in movies or in magazines, because that's really a lot more of a safe bet.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Brad P.]: Those people have professional stylists and they look good every time.

[Angel Donovan]: Your advice on fashion is all pretty clear and straightforward, and that's the way we like it here. So how long would you say… you know, you're going through this period of basically modeling someone, so it's kind of like training wheels until you start developing it as your own skill. So I like the way you talk about it. It's basically building a skill that you're going to have for life rather than just basically pulling some clothes off one time and having one set of clothes you can go out with. So it's something really you're developing. How long would you say it takes someone, if they're copying a role model, how long would you it take before they can start experimenting a bit on their own and having a real feel for it?

[Brad P.]: Good question. I would say it depends how fast you're able to grow your comfort zone. The faster you can grow your comfort zone, the more you'll be able to experiment. Typically, what happens when I give fashion makeovers to students of mine is I try to imagine a better version of them, and then I put them in that outfit. And sometimes they embrace it immediately. And other times they say, “I don't know about this, this is way out of my comfort zone,” and then we take it into the field and experiment, and once they see that it works, suddenly they become comfortable with it.

[Angel Donovan]: Great.

[Brad P.]: So if you can be comfortable enough to try three or four looks in, I don't know, maybe two months, you know, maybe you have one outfit in each look, you're going to get a great idea of what it takes, what people like, what they don’t like, what girls are responding to. And by your third or fourth experiment, you'll probably be starting to get the hang of it.

Like I said, you never really need to stop modeling because the idea isn't to create a new style. That's for professional fashion people. All you need to do is copy a good style. That's basically the idea. If you can copy a good style every year for the next 20, 30 years, you will always have good style.

[Angel Donovan]: Totally. Now, let's talk about money. Is this going to cost people a lot of money? Like do they have to buy big brands, hundreds of dollars, or is it something that you can do on a budget? What do you normally…

[Brad P.]: You can definitely do it on a budget.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Brad P.]: There are certain looks that you have to spend a lot of money on, but there are so many different options available that if you don’t have the money for brand-name clothes and expensive items, you can choose a look that is cheaper and it can be great for sure. There are people who stuff at thrift stores and it's five dollars for a shirt and five dollars for a pair of jeans, and it can look really good.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Brad P.]: But you're only going to get certain looks with that. Like right now, here in the US, there's like, I don't know, this grungy hipster look going on.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: You can buy those clothes used and they can really work for your look, because a lot of that look is in the hair. You know, if your hair is looking kind of dirty a certain way and you've got some old clothes on and you've got a beard and your pants are a little too tight, then you've pretty much got that look.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Brad P.]: But there are other looks that are really upscale. Like suits, you really have to spend on them. Certain items that you might wear to clubs, high-end clubs want to see high-end clothes. So you can't do every look on a budget but you can do a lot of looks on a budget.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right, and this is something I wanted to go into, is you say that in high-end clubs, they're looking for maybe a different look, right? And you'll have a different look to fit in. So does like the outfit you're picking out depend on where you intend to meet women? Like if it's in the street daygame or if it's in some types of clubs versus some higher ends of types of clubs, would you say you have to kind of pick based on where you're going to go and where you're going to hang out?

[Brad P.]: Yes, absolutely. You wouldn't want to have yourself pimped out for a high-end club and just walk in in the middle of daygame doing that. It's not going to work as well. So yes, consider your location and scout your location, and see what people are wearing there and see what the best-looking people look like there.

[Angel Donovan]: That's great advice, and very important I think because some of the advice that you see around the community is kind of simplistic and it's just like “you should peacock and peacocking works all the time,” or something like that.

[Brad P.]: I don't know too much about that myself.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. About peacocking?

[Brad P.]: Yeah, I just never really learned it. I mean, I didn't give you much background about me, but I didn't learn any of my game from the seduction community. I learned it all from naturals and just going and experimenting.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Brad P.]: So I haven't really learned all of the techniques and terminology and… So people sometimes ask me about peacocking, and I really have very little understanding of what it even means.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Well, you know, the idea of peacocking as invented by Mystery, Erik von Markovik, is basically to wear stuff which people are going to notice. That's pretty much it. So it's just to wear something different, some standout things. And there are a few other companies that talk and advise on peacocking, but not to such an extreme as Mystery originally originated it.

[Brad P.]: Well, if you do that strategically and it's relevant to the venue and it’s part of your pickup strategy, that sounds like something that could work.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. I mean, in the past, like my friends and I, we think it's interesting to… I mean, we just did this naturally over the years, okay? So we’d get a present from… I travel a lot. I've traveled a lot all my life, and I tend to have like jewelry and things which have come from different places. So, you know, a few presents from people in different places, like a necklace and so on. I've got a necklace. I have no idea why, but everyone notices it. Just I guess it looks a little bit unusual.

So that's really the kind of peacocking that we think works, is just it's basically something interesting, just shows you're a bit different, and hopefully it's something about who you are and it represents something about how you are different, whatever you've been doing in life.

[Brad P.]: It sounds fairly subtle to me, so it sounds like it's not going to make or break you.

[Angel Donovan]: Nope, just an interesting thing to talk about, basically.

[Brad P.]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: That's the way we see it. Okay, so I think we've done a really good overview of fashion and image there. It'll be very helpful for the guys. The next topic I wanted to talk to you about was inner game. Inner game, you know, I think there are lots of different ways people talk about inner game, and something I think that's interesting, I think that sometimes when people have been into the game for a while and practicing and they're not getting results, I think sometimes it's blamed on inner game. What’s your take on the whole inner game thing?

[Brad P.]: Well, you have to go in the field, first and foremost. You're not going to really save your game with inner game if you're not going on the field. You're could stay home and have great inner game, and girls are not going to come to your house. But as long as you're not hiding from the field by studying inner game, it can be effective. It can help a lot.

And inner game is definitely a big factor for a lot of students. I fix inner game issues all the time that are stubborn and take months and months to fix. I run a program in Los Angeles called Pickup Mansion, and people move into a house and study pickup for six months, 12 months, and a lot of times we work on inner game issues in Pickup Mansion because they can be stubborn and they can take a long time to fix. But once you fix them, it can be a game-changer because it unlocks your ability to learn, it unlocks your ability to go in the field more, it unlocks your ability to feel good, and when you feel good, you pick up good.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It sounds like, you know, the inner game issues you're talking about, you could almost break them down into a more specific, right? Because in inner game, I think one of the problems of inner game is that it's a generic concept and it could mean lots of different things, and many people may talk about it in different ways. So are there any specific issues you're thinking about like that you had to work on and you would have labeled them inner game?

[Brad P.]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Is there another more specific way you can talk about that?

[Brad P.]: Yeah, absolutely. I agree, it is a vague topic, and it really needs to be broken down into more specifics. After nine years of teaching this stuff—I've been teaching for a long time—I've actually boiled it down to I guess probably about 16 or 18 areas that I've seen that are the most common problems, and I have a program for it called Secrets of Inner Game where I actually go through each of these one by one, how to recognize them, how to beat them, what action steps you can take. So that's called Path to Inner Game, and it's on bradp.com, but I’ll go through a few of those with you now…

[Angel Donovan]: Great.

[Brad P.]: I don’t have time to go through all of them, but we can certainly go through a few of them. The first one that I've recognized in a lot of students is the tendency to create negative interpretations of things that happened in the field or things that happened in life. So anything that happens to you, you have a choice. You could interpret those positively, negatively, or in a neutral manner, and people who are really good at pickup tend to interpret things positively. And I'm not saying you should be completely unrealistic and ignore the facts in front of you, but there are some things that are very hard to read, and you're not going to interpret every single thing right every single time. People who are good at pickup, they generally accentuate the positive, and the negative, they might recognize it but they throw it away and they don’t dwell on it.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: So positivity I guess is one of the first things. Another factor that I see a lot is some people just beat themselves up, and they kind of yell at themselves like, “Ugh, I can't believe I did that! Dammit! Fuck!” you know, and they're like cursing in their own head or even out loud in some cases.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Brad P.]: And I see this at workshops, and I’ll give a student a minor correction and he'll kind of get angry at himself. And I’ll say, “You know, you don’t have to be angry about it. We'll work on it and slowly you'll get better at it.” You can't expect that you're going to be great at every part of the game right away. All these things take time, and I feel that when you make a mistake you can recognize it, you can work on it, but don’t be angry at yourself. Let yourself slide. Cut yourself some slack. Give yourself a break. The people who let themselves slide a little more, they do better in pickup, because while the guy who’s not picking up girls is in the corner being mad at himself, the guy who lets himself slide is on to the next two or three sets. Huge difference. It can turn your whole night around.

Nice guy syndrome is a big one. If you're not familiar with nice guy syndrome, you can kind of look that up. It's a huge problem with a lot of pickup guys.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: Neediness is a problem for a lot of people. Inability to assume leadership roles, being uncomfortable with leadership, that's an inner game issue. The last one I’ll probably address is what I call social freedom. This is an inner game issue where you believe that everybody around you is looking at you, and if you make a mistake they are going to realize it, and then they're going to think badly of you.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Brad P.]: So that's called social anxiety, when you're just anxious all the time because of what people might think of you.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: The opposite of social anxiety is social freedom, and social freedom is something that can be built over time, and I actually have a series of exercises to build that that people can get. They can find it on my website. It's called 18 Degrees of Social Freedom, and if anybody wants that, just let me know.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Brad P.]: And you know, maybe there are other areas that are important that I won't get into now that people can get on Secrets of Inner Game, but yeah, it's a powerful thing. If you fix your inner game and you're going in the field along with that, it can really improve your results and it can just make you feel a lot better too.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: You just feel a lot better about life.

[Angel Donovan]: What percentage of your students would you say it makes or breaks, there's one of these issues that's making or breaking their success?

[Brad P.]: I would say probably about half.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, good. Are there any signs they can look out for? I mean, I think some of these… the nice thing about the way you've broken it down is it's pretty obvious, it should be pretty obvious to people if that's something they're doing. So it's pretty easy to identify.

[Brad P.]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Brad P.]: Exactly.

[Angel Donovan]: Rather than having inner game, “Do I have an inner game problem or not?” So I think pretty much immediately… is this something you would see immediately, literally the first week of starting to practice this stuff?

[Brad P.]: No, it's not always that simple.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Brad P.]: Here's the way this works, and this is a little nerdy coach topic here.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: But as you go in the field more and more, a lot of your issues will start to come to the surface that you've never even noticed before. So for example in Pickup Mansion, people come and they start going in the field all the time, and some of these people haven't been in the field very much at all before they came to Pickup Mansion. So about two months in, suddenly they have an anger problem, or three months in, suddenly they have some low self-worth thing that surfaces.

And the reason that happens is because pickup forces you to be your best self, and if you're not being your best self, girls will let you know that. The field will tell you that. It's like looking in a mirror. You can't deny what needs work when you're going in the field all the time. The field is the ultimate teacher, the field is the ultimate mirror, and as you go in the field more and more you'll start to realize what issues you have, what is making you uncomfortable.

I would say the biggest sign that you might have an inner game issue is if you just feel bad all the time. In the field, if you feel bad when you think about pickup, that might be an early warning sign of an inner game problem.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. So should you be enjoying it? I mean, are there people that enjoy this as soon as they get started in it and is that a good sign?

[Brad P.]: It depends how you look at it. In my coaching experience, I've noticed that most people think it's really hard in the beginning. They think approaching women is hard and they have approach anxiety, and in my opinion that's because a lot of the reading they’ve done in the seduction community, things they’ve read on the Internet, makes it sound like this is going to be a breeze. So they get into pickup thinking this is going to be easy, and it's not. It's hard. So if you look at it that way, you're not going to feel good. And I think that's what the root cause of this is.

On the other hand, if you started out like me with less expectations, I was having a ton of fun when I first got started because I didn't have any books, I didn't have teachers, I just had this idea that I was going to go and hit on girls every day. And as I started to realize that there was a method to it, I was so happy because I realized this is something you can learn, this is something you can work on. You can get good at this. You can master it like you master martial arts or skiing or playing an instrument. That is what was fun for me. Just believing that it's possible to improve makes the whole thing fun.

[Angel Donovan]: Totally. Totally. An interesting thing you just touched on there was that people are facing a mirror of feedback, and that's what brings these… when they go out into the field and they get responses from girls, you know, that kind of feedback that they haven't had before. So I was just thinking basically that these guys probably have avoided that type of feedback, not just when it comes to girls but also in other social areas of their life to that date, and that's why these internal issues, these inner issues come out at this stage, because it could be the first time that you're facing these in your whole life and in a way you've somehow avoided actively or maybe subconsciously avoided these types of feedback in the past. What would you say about that?

[Brad P.]: Yup, that's possible. A lot of people get negative feedback and they ignore it because it's too painful to take seriously.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: And pickup makes you start to take everything seriously and pay attention, because you start to believe that you can fix things.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Brad P.]: So it makes it a lot less painful to get that negative feedback.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, I'm a great believer in learning this stuff, learning pickup. It can actually propel your whole life forward because of the process you're talking about, getting feedback, understanding internal issues, getting over those, getting more feedback and taking it to the next level, and you can apply these skills in every part of your life afterwards. Is that something you'd agree with?

[Brad P.]: Yeah, it's changed my life and I've seen it change so many people’s lives, students of mine, guys who've studied with other coaches and guys who've read books on it. It's the greatest self-help activity a person can do. I can get more results for my student than any other kind of motivational speaker. I can change lives better and faster than Tony Robbins.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Brad P.]: The reason why is because, as a self-help expert, I have a better incentive for my students than any other kind of self-help coach. If you studied with me and you did all your work and you work on your game, you're going to get pussy. That's really motivating. Tony Robbins can't guarantee anybody pussy if they work on what he says to work on.

[Angel Donovan]: Totally, totally.

[Brad P.]: But here's the real implementation stuff… Yeah, sorry Tony.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Brad P.]: So if you're studying pickup, you are part of the greatest self-help movement in the history of the world, and you should be happy about that and you should be proud of that every day that you're part of it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. You know, I think that's a major reason of course we're all driven by sexuality to a large extent. And then there's the fact that you're getting a lot more feedback. It doesn’t take long to do a hundred approaches, and you're getting feedback a hundred times, which if you look at any other area of self-development, I don't think that can be said. It's a lot more complicated to get direct feedback, you know. If you're trying to improve your social skills, fine, you can go out, but it's not quite as blatant the feedback getting turned down or accepted by a girl.

[Brad P.]: That's right. Yeah, you can't ignore what’s happening. It's either happening or it's not. Pickup makes it really obvious.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. Great learning tool for everything in life. Alright, and the final area I wanted to go over with you is you've got a couple… We're going to talk about learning, how to learn efficiently, how you should learn, and ways that you can kind of sabotage your learning curve and make it take a lot longer. And you and your company, you've brought out a couple of reports talking about this topic. They're called the Forbidden Truth reports, 1 and 2, 2009 and 2011. Could you give me like a quick synopsis? What are those two reports about?

[Brad P.]: Yeah, sure. These reports are a result of me being in the field many, many years, and some of it is just my observation, and some of it is actually statistical scientific evidence. And basically the theory on this is that everybody’s sitting home reading, nobody’s going in the field, and reading fucks you up, it makes you move backwards, whereas going in the field makes you move forwards.

So everybody who’s listening to this, if they could stick to one simple rule, they're going to move forward. For every one hour you spend reading, you should spend two hours in the field. I'm not saying you should completely quit reading, I'm just saying you should do more time in the field than you do reading, studying, listening to DVDs or anything like that. And that's the basic crux of the report.

There's a lot of supporting evidence in there and you can see how I reach this conclusion, and you can check the statistical evidence that goes along with this, but this theory that you should be in the field more than you're studying has been tested. For the last five years I've been running a program called the 30/30 Club, and we make everybody who joins, we make them pledge to approach 30 women every 30 days. And that's an attainable goal, it's very doable and everybody does it, but it makes such a difference because you actually have real field experience to go along with the things that you're studying.

That's the combination. Study a little bit and do a lot of work in the field. That's how it's done, and that's what we do in the 30/30 Club, and that's why the 30/30 Club guys are getting laid way more than the guys on any other forum on the Internet. We analyzed every forum on the Internet and tried to figure out how many lay reports they're posting per active member, and you can actually read the statistics on which forums have people getting laid the most in the Forbidden Fruit 2, if you're interested in that.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah. So that was an interesting thing to do, although it's really impossible to get true stats on this kind of thing.

[Brad P.]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: There are also surprises involved.

[Brad P.]: Sure.

[Angel Donovan]: It's not a bad proxy to go around all the forums. It's probably one of the best things we could do, is just go around the forums and see how many people have done reports on actually getting laid or not. And I thought the interesting thing about that second report, which was the one where you do the survey of the forums, is that there are three forums who have got over 10% in terms of active members who are actually getting laid.

[Brad P.]: They were all under 10%.

[Angel Donovan]: Let me bring this up to make sure I'm getting it.

[Brad P.]: Yeah. There are no free forums that are over like…

[Angel Donovan]: No, no, so I didn't mean free forums, I meant three in terms of one, two three.

[Brad P.]: Oh. Oh, three. Okay, yup.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. There are three forums that are getting—let me just bring this up—right, over 10%…

[Brad P.]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …and all the other ones, which also happen to be free forums, as in like not paid, you just go in and you access…

[Brad P.]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: …are getting much lower percentages of getting laid. So that's an interesting thing. What do you think’s behind that? It's paid forums versus free forums. What do you think drives that difference?

[Brad P.]: Well, I've asked myself that question many times and I don't think anyone can give a definitive answer on something like that. It could have something to do with the fact that, hey, people who pay are more serious, so they're going to try harder, so they're going to get laid more, you know? That's one theory.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: Another theory is, hey, if you're on a paid forum, you're around more serious people, so you're going to get better ideas. Another thing to keep in mind is, hey, paid forums have coaches who are professional coaches. For example, in my 30/30 Club, nobody is allowed to give advice unless they are already getting laid.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: So my main theory on this is that bad advice is lethal. It will kill your game. Because that's really all you have to go on, the advice that you're getting. So if you get bad advice, you're done. Your game’s never going to get good.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, you will walk in the opposite direction you have to and you'll get extremely frustrated, you will start sabotaging some of the inner game issues we were talking about before and actually making your situation a lot worse…

[Brad P.]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: …and, you know, basically the willpower and the positive energy you're bringing to it will steadily get sucked, and so your ability to do well in this will go down rather than up.

[Brad P.]: Right, right. Exactly. So my main theory on this is that the people on the free forums are mostly keyboard jockeys who don’t get laid and they're just passing around the same bad advice over and over and over again. There’s some good advice on there, yeah, there probably is, but mostly it's guys who aren't getting laid even if they misapplying good advice. That'll move people backwards. Bad advice moves you backwards. Good advice that's timed wrong moves you backwards. So, for example, if a guy’s having approach anxiety and you teach him Neil Strauss’s dual induction massage to get threesomes, and he goes out and tries that, that's bad advice. I mean, that's obviously a very exaggerated example, but I just want you to see what I mean.

[Angel Donovan]: Yup.

[Brad P.]: So my theory is that you have to purge your brain of all bad advice, and all forums should strive to create an intellectual atmosphere that is 100% purified, and bad advice is not allowed to enter the environment. And that's what I've tried to do on the 30/30 Club, and I think that's why people are getting the most, because the intellectual environment is what makes or breaks you. Bad advice, your game’s fucked. Five years later, you still won't be getting laid. But if you get good advice, you'll be getting laid a few months in in most cases. And that's what's going to make or break your game. So that's my theory on why people are getting laid more in paid forums, because the advice is better and there's no bad advice getting circulated around.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Well, I agree with you that that's one of the biggest sabotaging factors, is bad advice, introducing noise into the equation. I think you could literally look at people who get better and how long it takes them and if they make it at all, and rather than looking at how much good advice they consume, look at how much bad advice, the proportion of bad advice that they’ve been consuming. Or maybe it's not bad advice, like you say, it could be good advice, wrong timing, so it's just low-quality in general…

[Brad P.]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …and it's not concentrated and it's not focused. And I think if we could do that study, I think that that would really, really show that this bad advice or low-quality advice actually corrupts you and it prevents you from learning properly. And I think we can say that about every area of life, if you've been to school and you've studied things, and we all know how much the Internet and information overload can be confusing.

And you know, an interesting analogy I think is diets today. There are thousands of diets out there today and most people are just so confused and unable to make progress in that area. And over 60% of Americans are classified as obese today, and I think a lot of that is down to information overload and confusion because there's so much different random advice out there and people just can't cope with it. They don't know where to go. So yeah, just an analogy to throw out there.

[Brad P.]: Yeah. I'm really glad to hear you say that because I feel like before I pointed out this information overload in 2009, nobody ever talked about it. It was just read as much as you can, buy every DVD, and that was all people wanted to do. And now that information overload is a topic that has been brought into this discussion, I think it's helping everybody. Whether they study with me or not, they're being helped that they’ve actually heard that term.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah.

[Brad P.]: So thanks for saying that.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, that's great. When I'm studying anything, I actually study the people I'm learning from first to make sure that they're the real deal and I'm going to get good information from them, because the source of information is probably more important these days than the information. It's kind of like you have to do due diligence on where you're getting that information from first, is the way I see it.

[Brad P.]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So you know, on the paid forum thing, I wanted to push back a little bit on you.

[Brad P.]: Sure.

[Angel Donovan]: I think there's a notion of privacy. The paid forums are private by nature, so you don’t have the public. And I think, particularly when it comes to lay reports, I think a guy doesn’t really want to publish, you know, post a lay report, even if it's not associated with his real name, because a lot of people use aliases when they're posting these forums. They don’t want to post something that's public. So a bias to that might be that in the free forums a lot of people just aren't posting their lay reports.

[Brad P.]: That's possible. That could certainly be a factor.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah. And I think the other thing about the paid forums is that by paying for it you introduce stakes, right? Now we're actually paying for it, and so there's accountability for it. And whenever people pay for stuff, there are a lot of studies that when you have money behind it, when you have more investment behind it, if it's money or effort, but in this case it's money, that you're going to do more about it. And personally I'm a member of other paid forums, not like dating but other areas on the Internet…

[Brad P.]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …and I see the motivation levels and the quality of information in those places. I won't say it's a hundred percent perfect information all the time, but it's definitely hundreds of times better than the free forums on the same subject, which is why I don’t spend any time on free forums these days. I spend, if any, time in the paid forums.

[Brad P.]: Yup. Yup, putting some money into it definitely makes you work harder. That's for sure. Actually, the more money you put into it, the better results you get. I've noticed that in my own coaching.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: When I started coaching, like I said, I wasn’t part of the seduction community, I was just out there on my own doing it, I didn't know other people really were doing it…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Brad P.]: So I used to do my seminar, it was very informal, it was in the top floor of a pizza place, and I’d buy some pizza and beer and people would come in and just eat pizza, and I’d talk off the top of my head about how to pick up girls. But I was good already and I knew how to teach, and I was picking up a lot of girls myself. And people would pay 40 bucks for the seminar.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: People did not put in that much effort and use what they learned. They had their pizza and their beer, and they hit the road, you know? There were some people getting laid, but it wasn’t like it is now. As my seminar cost started going up into the thousands of dollars and we were doing workshops and stuff in the field and more intense programs, people’s effort that they put in went up as the money went up. It was the strangest…

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Brad P.]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I mean, there is some selection bias there as well, I think, you know? Someone who’s willing to pay more is probably a lot more motivated as well, so that's a confounding factor there. But for sure, you know…

[Brad P.]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …there's the correlation. If you spend more, then you're much more likely to get the results.

[Brad P.]: Yeah. I mean, some people would pay 40 bucks for this seminar, and it was like their last 40 bucks, and so they would work hard at it.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Brad P.]: And the people who didn't value the 40 bucks because they had, you know, were making a hundred grand a year, they didn't tend to work as hard. So it's also what that money means to you, you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Totally, yeah. Yeah, I would say that. Yeah, that's great. Okay man, I think we've done a good tour of that subject. Now, we ask the same question to everyone who comes on the show. If you wanted a student to get as good as he could as quickly as possible with women, what are the top three things you would advise him to do? He's starting from zero.

[Brad P.]: Okay. I would say you need to be in a structured learning environment. You can't just be wandering around the Internet and just reading free emails and posting on free forums. If you do that, you're a dabbler. You're dabbling in this. You're not serious about this. You're dipping your toe in the water, and you're not going to get good that way. So I would say pick some kind of structured learning environment.

And if you have to pay a little money every month, pay it, because the structure is going to help you, because that is what’s going to prevent you from just blowing in the wind and taking any bad advice that comes your way or taking good advice that's poorly timed. That would be the first thing I would recommend.

I have the 30/30 Club. A few other people have structured learning environments. 30/30 Club is like a college course in seduction, and we keep it structured. You come in, you do everything you're supposed to do, and you know when to do it. So there's no guesswork. There's no, “What should I work on now?” There's none of that.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Brad P.]: And that makes a huge difference. And there are other programs online as well.

The second thing I would say is even if you're not going to get into a structured learning environment, pick one method and stick to that method. These methods don’t necessarily work that well if you mix them with a whole bunch of other stuff. Can it work? Yeah, it could work because you are out in the field and that's going to make you learn no matter what you're studying. But when you're mixing stuff together, you're going to confuse yourself. And students confusing themselves, that's what slows it down. You'll still learn if you're confused because you're in the field, but it will take you a lot longer than if you were focused on one method.

So pick one coach, pick one teacher, study his method, give it a year before you say, “Oh, I don't know if this is working.” You know, I've seen a lot of guys like float around method to method and they're like, “I don't know if it's working,” but they haven't even given it an honest shot, you know? They just want to quit after three months, and three months of any method probably won't get you that far. This stuff takes a long time to learn. So that would be number two. Let's see. You wanted three, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yup.

[Brad P.]: Third will probably be, if you really want to do this, you have to be serious. You have to commit to it. And the best way to commit is to just go somewhere, see it live, learn from a pro. Take a training, take a workshop, it will change so many of your perceptions. When you come into this stuff and you read about it and you watch the DVDs, you form a perception that's way better than you had before, but it's not totally realistic yet. Until you've had a professional diagnose what’s going wrong with you and until you've seen people do pickup correctly, you're not going to really know what it looks like and what you're supposed to do with it.

So pull the trigger, take a training with somebody, and get serious about this. Don’t dick around and question it and be like, “I don't know if I should. I don't know, that's a lot of money. Oh, I don't know if this guys knows what he's talking about.” Everybody’s got refund policies. If it sucks, just get a refund. It's easy to do. But pull the trigger, take a workshop, get serious.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, man. This is a good roundup of advice there. Well, I want to thank you for coming on the show today. It's been a great talk and I think it's going to be very helpful for the guys on our podcast.

[Brad P.]: Great. Thanks so much. It was a really cool interview. I think you have some really good thoughts and you've got a great handle on all this stuff. So I'm just happy to see that somebody like you who has a good handle on this is out there doing these reviews, because reviews are important. Everybody’s going to say their stuff’s the best in the marketing, but we need an impartial person like you to help newbies sort that stuff out. So thanks so much for doing what you do, and thanks for having me on today.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, Brad. Thanks again. Ciao.

[Brad P.]: Alright. Have a good one. Buh-bye.