Ep. #6 The Love Systems Approach to Dating with Nick Savoy (CEO Love Systems)

[Nick Savoy]: How's it going?

[Angel Donovan]: Nick Savoy is one of the guys who have really been around quite a long time. Love Systems is one of the most popular and the biggest companies with dating advice currently, so there's obviously a lot to learn from that. And today we’re going to have a kind of deep dive into some of the basics of what they teach, because they have a lot of products that cover more advanced concepts. Today we’re going to talk around some of the topics covered by Magic Bullets and some of the more basic stuff that people get introduced to when they first start out with Love Systems.

[Nick Savoy]: Sounds good.

[Angel Donovan]: Nick, could you give us like a quick background like how you got into this, just talk a few minutes, you know, why you got into it and what you’ve gotten out of it?

[Nick Savoy]: Sure. I mean, like a lot of people, when I left college, or in this case, grad school, or left sort of an environment where there's lots of people your age constantly being put together in different social environments, I found it a lot harder just out on my own. I graduated school and I moved to a city for a job, and I didn’t know anybody there. And I started going out and I realized like, wait a minute, this is a lot harder than just walking down the hall. I mean, not that it’s necessarily easy to date the cute girl in your class or down the hall in the marketing department or something like that, but it was a lot harder when you don’t know anybody.

And I went out to bars, clubs, cafés, coffee shops, all the usual stuff, you know, just trying to meet attractive women to date, and I realized that I had a lot to learn. So I started going…I was looking at self-help books in the bookstores and looking online, and not very much stuff—and this is about almost 10 years ago now—not very much of that stuff was very helpful, and it was full of people that thought they had a good idea and would just sort of spread that, or people that are misinterpreting scientific studies with apes or things.

But what we never had was a bunch of guys that were actually going out trying to use this stuff night after night, and that happened with the growth of the Internet. And I started hanging out with some guys that were doing that, and then step by step over a period of years we put together a system that actually worked in the real world, not in some university ivory tower, not that looked good on a bookstand or on Oprah, but something that average guys like me could actually go out and use to date high-quality women where you’re not settling, you’re not hoping that somebody better is going to come along one day, but that you could see what you want and go for it.

[Angel Donovan]: Awesome. Awesome. Actually, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is there's a little bit of confusion about some of the systems and where they come from. So, originally you were working with Mystery a few years ago and you worked on something together.

[Nick Savoy]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: And then you kind of evolved your system from that. Can you give a quick overview of that to kind of clear up things…?

[Nick Savoy]: Yeah, sure. And I’ll stay away from some of the politics around it, but at heart, you know, where we diverged is, people come in lots of different shapes and sizes, and even in Los Angeles, say, what a first-generation family from Korea and a guy that's raised in that culture might be different from the divorced 45-year-old investment banker that might be different from the college kid that might be different from the guy like me that just moved to a city and doesn’t know anybody. The guy that wants to be a giant player and sleep with different women every night is different from the guy that wants a long-term relationship or wants to date multiple women or whatever.

So I kind of got sick of telling the same thing to every person, and I kind of got…and I just didn’t like that parts of that weren’t working. You can’t just pick somebody who is very good at promoting themselves and say, “Hey, I’m going to do what they do and everything will be fine,” because it’s not. You just can’t. What somebody would do, you know, what I do to pick up women, is actually a little bit different from what Soul does, one of the other top guys in the world, or what Mr. M does or what Braddock does or Cajun does, because we have different personalities, we look different, we have different backgrounds, and we’re interested in different kinds of women.

So what we did is we kind of started ground up, figure out, “Okay, we need to figure out what is the stuff that works for everybody and what is the stuff that's going to work for specific kinds of people? We need to figure out who those people are so that we’re teaching the right things to the right people.” And that's why instead of going with the guru system we went with a system where we were just going to go out and attract about 25 to 30 of the best pickup artists, dating coaches, ladies men, and so on around the world, and we made sure to get a lot of diversity in there.

So we’ve got people that live around the world. We’ve got people in every major ethnic group. We’ve got some of our instructors that are in their early 20s; some of them are in their late 40s. And that really gives us a kind of balance so that one day when I come up with some idea and go and try it out and it works, I don’t just say, “Oh, I’m going to go teach this to everybody.” I have this real-world testing lab where I can send it out to 30 people that are nothing like me, they can try it, their clients can try it, and if it comes back generally positive for everybody, okay, that's something that goes into the next version of Magic Bullets.

If it’s something that doesn’t work for everybody, only works for certain kinds of people, well, hey, that's something now we know for our in-person training. I mean, we hold bootcamps. Every weekend we train guys in small groups. We bring them out to bars or clubs or coffee shops or whatever, and actually they pick up women while we’re watching and we’ll show them how to do it and so on. And then the more information you have for that, the better. To make a long story short, we really wanted to focus on individual clients as being individual people, not as being people that we were trying to clone into somebody who they’re not.

[Angel Donovan]: And one of the things I found with Magic Bullets was it was very detail-orientated and kind of technical in that it had a lot of rules in it…

[Nick Savoy]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: …so you kind of seem to try to specify some situations and things you should do in those situations. Is that kind of the approach you took to explain all of this?

[Nick Savoy]: Well, the thing about Magic Bullets is if you get a copy of Magic Bullets, I’m not sitting there with you when you’re reading it. If you come to me, if you were doing sort of some one-on-one training with me or you’re in a bootcamp or something like that, I can see what you need, I can see what level you’re at, I can see how you’re responding to material and can adjust on the fly. With Magic Bullets, I can’t do that.

So I deliberately wrote that book on a couple of different levels. If you’re completely new, for example, and you just pick up the…you just start with Chapter 2, a simple system you can use tonight, within 20 minutes you can read that, go out to a bar, and you have a couple of the basic tools to at least get a phone number from attractive women. You know it’s not going to work every time, but you’ve got to start. And nobody’s explaining why anything works or what to do with, you know, “If this doesn’t work out exactly, here’s how you fix it. If she does this, you do that.” That's not at that level of detail.

But then, parts of the rest of the book—the book’s divided in a couple of sections. The next section of the book explains the whole model, and this is how in general we think about things. And that in itself, you can go out and use that. And the rest of the book is meant mostly as a reference manual.

So it’s not like you’re going to sit down and read—if you had an encyclopedia of dating, say, you’re not going to read the entire encyclopedia before you go out for the first time. But if something unusual happens or something makes you realize that you could improve your skills in one area, let's say it’s in dates, or wingman tactics, like when you’re going out with your friends, or how to meet women at work, or fashion or whatever it is, I mean, each of those things has their own separate stand-alone chapter and you can just go read that bit, pick up a tip, and then go back to what you’re doing.

So the idea being that Magic Bullets…it’s not written for my convenience, it’s written for a reader’s convenience. I mean, it’s actually written for what I wish had been around 10 years ago. So whether you’re new or advanced, I wanted to make sure there was material there on your level so that you could find the right stuff that you need to improve your game.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay. I want to come back to the advanced thing in a little while, but I’ll leave that for a moment. Could you give an overview of, you know, what is the Love Systems model, what is the overall structure of what gets taught in Magic Bullets?

[Nick Savoy]: Sure. I mean, at heart, what you need to do to succeed with a woman can be divided into three general areas. There's an emotional connection, there's the physical connection, and there's your logistics. That's pretty undeniable, but at a surface level, everything you’re doing should be designed to move you along on one of those three things.

Emotional connection is what we often talk about, so that's, your first thing you’re going to have to do is create attraction. The second thing you’re going to have to do is make her feel like she’s earned your attraction. And then the third thing you have to do is you guys have to become comfortable with each other. And those are different emotional processes, so within each of these we have step-by-step ways of doing it.

And this is what I mean by being able to do it on a bunch of levels. I mean, if comfort building is naturally easy to you and you’re like, “Yeah, if I’m attracted to her and she’s attracted to me and we’ve been talking for half an hour, I have no problem with the next four hours of conversation.” Fine. Great. Skip the whole bit on comfort. You know how to do it. But the idea is it’s supposed to be the kind of menu so that you can choose what you need to do to improve your areas.

So that'll be like the emotional side, and then physical side is getting her comfortable with increasing amounts of touch, what some people call kino. And there are specific tactics and specific things that you can do to make that happen. I mean, what you often see with new guys is what we call talking head syndrome, and you cannot talk a woman into bed. You cannot logic a woman into a relationship. You need that kind of…

You know, if I was at a bar and watching a guy approach a girl, I don’t need to hear a word that they’re saying. I can tell you exactly how well it’s going and what’s happening just by watching the physical conversation that's going on between those two, and that includes body language and other stuff like that.

And then your logistics is your social and physical context of what’s going on. That's stuff like…it’s kind of a mixed bag, but that's like, are you with your friends? Is she with her friends? Are you somewhere where you can have some privacy? Does she have to be anywhere anytime soon?

And the reason why we include this is actually at the advanced level. Like, advanced guys, after you’ve trained with us for a bit or if you’re a natural or whatever, the emotional and the physical stuff is not that hard. I mean, you’re not going to get every single girl, but you will know that, in most cases, if you go to a bar or a party or whatever, if there are the five most beautiful women there, you’ve got a good shot at getting one of those five, you know, solid phone number that's going to lead to a date, or leaving with her or whatever.

But the real issue is the logistics, and that's like, beautiful women get attracted all the time, but they also often travel in large groups and are with their friends and are with people there trying to “protect her” and so on, and often have very busy social lives. It’s not like dating the girl next door where she’s got all the time in the world. So the third leg of what we call the triad is logistics, and that's a lot of stuff specifically designed to put her in a position where she can act on that attraction and on that physical passion, and that's get her to where you and her have some privacy to somewhere where you can legitimately take it to the next level. And that's I think what separates somebody who’s good with women from somebody who’s great with women.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. So in each of those areas, is it routines that you’re using? Is it specific things that, say, people should say? What are kind of the practical parts of each of those? Could you give us like three examples, one for each?

[Nick Savoy]: Sure, you mean like an example of something that progresses you emotionally, something that progresses you physically, and something that progresses you logistically?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Nick Savoy]: So with emotionally, for example, I mean, we’ve done a lot of work into, how do you create attraction? Some powerful ones that we’ve really developed are role-plays. We use role-plays a lot because—and I could get into the details of why they’re so useful, but here are just a couple right off the bat. Number one, it’s fun. It’s not like the usual conversations that women have with guys who just kind of approach them with, “What do you do? Where are you from? Do you come here often?” A role-play is fun. It’s different. It gets her out of her reality.

Number two, you get to take more…you can push things further in a role-play. If I’m role-playing that you’re my wife or my mistress or something like that, or my naughty secretary, and I’m not talking about like bedroom role-play here, I’m talking…

[Angel Donovan]: So should they practice in bars or on the street? What exactly do you recommend?

[Nick Savoy]: Well, where you practice is up to you. I mean, bars are good because they’ve got large volumes of attractive women to approach, so you’re not going to run out of that. But if you’re somebody who prefers coffee shops and street corners and supermarkets, you can still use the same system there.

So what you would do in that case is there’s a little two- or three-page chapter in the book on day game and you’d go look at that and see how day game is slightly different. You’ve got your 10 rules for day game, so start with that. Start with a couple of conversation starters, start with one attraction technique, and go out and try it out, and try it 10 times. Who knows what kind of reactions you get? You might go all the way, you might get a few phone numbers or might not go too far. Then go back and reread that section. You need the actual real-world experience while you’re reading the book.

I wouldn’t recommend reading the book once, from cover to cover, and then never touching it again. I’d recommend reading a section, trying it, rereading that section again, going out, reading it again. And because it’s written at a couple of different levels, you’ll find that as the more advanced you get the more you’ll get out of certain chapters or passages, even stuff you’ve read before.

I will say that you should be going out and actually applying the material for about three times as much time as you’re spending at home reading the material. So if you think of Magic Bullets as like the textbook or the encyclopedia, if you were to read that half an hour and then be out meeting women for an hour and a half, I think that's about the right ratio.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, great. So, basically, if you’re going to make the most of this you have to be able to get out there and start putting it into practice. What do you find your customers do to make that easier? Are there other ways of, you know, [overlapping]

[Nick Savoy]: Yeah…

[Angel Donovan]: What do they do to make it easier?

[Nick Savoy]: Having a wingman is huge. Having a good wingman is going to keep you motivated. That's huge. They’ll be able to see stuff in your game or stuff that you’re doing that you might not be aware of. You’ll see stuff that they’re doing that either might be good or good warning lessons for you. You know, at times when you’re struggling…and anybody who says that this is an easy process and you read this one book or listen to this one lecture and then off you go, no, it’s fooling you. It’s not always going to be easy and there’ll be some times where you’re going to be frustrated, and having a good wingman who will help you through that frustration and make you go out and practice anyway is definitely going to help you. So that's one thing that I recommend guys do.

Another one is keep a journal. It’s hard to see how far you’ve come when all your focused on is the road ahead. I remember, it’s a couple of years ago, but there was this guy who I trained on a bootcamp. I mean, a bootcamp you have about, depending on the size, maybe eight to 12 guys. So you meet them all, you get to know them all a little bit, but you’re not best friends for life with any individual one. And one of the guys from the bootcamp left me a note on the lounge a couple of months later. And the lounge is sort of our free community for guys that have taken a bootcamp before and instructors, so it’s a little more private, a little more advanced, and you get into some long-term followup questions or stuff that maybe some of you didn’t run across or understand at the bootcamp or whatever. And he was like, “Oh, everything’s kind of exploding around me. This isn’t working out the way that I wanted it to. I need your advice right away, blah, blah, blah.” I kind of knew the guy and I liked him, so I gave him my cell phone number and he gave me a call.

It turns out that this guy—his problem like two months ago was he was able to approach but he was not consistently getting attraction, certainly not attraction from hot women—he was dating this super-hot girl and she agreed with him about wanting to have a threesome with her best friend but he didn’t know how to go about setting that up. And he was like talking to me in the same tones of sort of frustration and despair that he would have been talking with before he even was able to approach a girl, and he just thought that he hadn’t moved along. And I’m like, “Dude, you don’t see it because you’re growing a little bit every…it’s like the grass on your lawn. I mean, if you sit out there and watch it, you don’t see it grow, but if you come back like once a day and look at it you’ll see how much it’s grown.”

And that's why I really recommend guys keep a journal. Well, it’s one of the two reasons. One is really it’s going to help with your motivation to go back and reread and see, especially at the tough times, how far you’ve come. And then secondly, it’s great for activating that reflex in your head that makes you kind of question what you’re doing and come up with better ideas for next time. So if you’re writing about, “Okay, I went to the coffee shop, saw a cute redhead at the table, I did this, she did this, I did this, she did that, I did this,” then while you’re writing that your brain is going to be evaluating, going like, “Hmm, why did I do that?” And then that’ll help your brain come up with something better for the next time.

That's why I recommend that guys…for the same reason that guys never leave a conversation with a girl because they think they’ve run out of things to say. I mean, obviously you get around that now by getting the Routines Manual, which has got 200 pages of word-for-word scripts you can use if you want, but a lot of guys starting out will go start talking to a girl and after a few minutes they’ll just leave because they think they’ve run out of things to say. You’re not training your mental muscles by doing that. I mean, that's like, if you’re doing weights, stopping as soon as you feel tired or as soon as the weight starts getting hard. Well, you’re not going to get any benefit from that. You’re not going to improve those muscles.

But if you force yourself to stay, stay that extra five minutes or whatever it is, that develops muscle. It develops the muscle in your head that comes up with good improvised conversation, and that's important to being successful with women. So I promised two, but those are actually three things that I would say for somebody who’s just starting out.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, Nick, thank you. It’s been a great interview and with lots of great stuff there.