Two blog posts offer a valuable insider’s look at a couple of pickup artist workshops (aka “bootcamps”). There aren’t enough impartial customer-based reviews of seduction workshops which aim to teach men the science and art of game, so any information that seems authentic — i.e. not written by a friend of the PUA guru as a marketing gimmick — will get highlighted here for the readers’ benefit. And the Chateau offer to readers who wish to write guest posts about their experiences with bootcamps, good or bad, still stands.
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The first review comes from KrauserPUA. He came across this popular Chateau blog post featuring a video of PUA Yad doing a street kiss close in ten minutes that you have to see to believe. It is one of the best videos out there testifying to the power of game to create sexual attraction in women from absolutely nothing except pure energy. KrauserPUA was suitably impressed, and decided to contact Yad to work on his daygame skills.
Part Three of Four: I take a one-on-one tutorial
I’ve been frustrated with the recent plateau in my game. Any time I go out daygaming I’ll come home with a fistful of numbers / facebooks / instant dates but I’m just not converting. In addition my state is still too variable and some days I struggle to hook sets. Hours of DVDs have been studied, blogs read, and introspection performed. I’m well over 500 sets into my daygame career. Time for some outside help.
There’s not many good daygamers out there. I’m fully prepared to drop a few hundred pounds on high quality instruction – this is a part of my life that consumes hours and hours of every single week – but I need to find a guy who is not just better than me but who also has a style that fits. Having been in the London scene since last summer I whittle the short list down to five names. One name stands above all others so I email this guy. A week goes by then he accepts the proposition and quotes a price that is high but justified if he lives up to his rep.
Readers know I constantly admonish aspiring PUAs to mistrust snake oil sellers and to insist on in-field evidence. I sought out this guy because (i) I’ve seen legit in field vids of him (ii) a number of people I know and respect spoke highly of him and (iii) his haters fail to find any credible argument against him. What didn’t interest me in the slightest was whether he worked for a famous pick up company.
But a good video does not necessarily a good instructor make. Maybe the guru can perform well when it’s just himself opening sets, but fails when he attempts to impart his knowledge to acolytes. I have heard from friends who took bootcamps that oftentimes the instructor’s method of teaching is to simply push students into sets like a marine sargeant barking orders.
We meet and go to his house to watch my videos. For over an hour he is playing them, pausing and commenting on what I do well, do badly, fail to do, and related theory behind the observations. He’s a technically astute and observant guy. About 90% of what he says I’m nodding my head in immediate agreement and there’s a few things in particular where I’m thinking “woah, that’s spot on. I totally didn’t realise that”. Before we’ve even left his house I feel I’ve gotten my money’s worth. The main insights:
– I’m failing to build rapport quickly
– I’m not talking enough about her
– I’m not personalising the conversation.
So far so good. Students need to take some responsibility for a successful workshop experience as well. Having videos of yourself approaching girls would, I imagine, greatly aid instructors trying to help you figure out where your flaws lie and how to fix them.
We head out to Oxford Street and he demos the first set, a leggy Austrian girl in short shorts. He hooks easily and its ten minutes much along the lines of what’s in the above linked video.
Sounds like this guy Yad is as advertised in his street pickup video. There are a lot of hucksters in the seduction community, (as in any burgeoning business model with an underserved base of potential customers), so when the genuine article comes along, the Chateau will extend its praise.
My thoughts?
He’s definitely the real deal. Although in raw performance I out-gamed him (closed hotter girls, got the instant date) I think that’s just because he wasn’t in his top gear and was spending more energy watching me than gaming for himself – which is exactly what he should be doing as a paid instructor. There’s no doubt in my mind that the famous “10 minute kiss close” video linked above is legit.
There is absolutely nothing about him or his game that I can’t do…. eventually. He’s not relying on his looks, money or position. Every part of his success is behaviour, words and vibe and he showed me how he got those skills. I simply have to keep working until I get them too.
His game is essentially the same as mine, just better. I trend more towards the alpha / masculine side but beneath his gentle yeti exterior he subcommunicates strong masculine polarity and the girls pick up on it.
His apprenticeship relied upon the same nerdish laser focus as my own: diarising the time, approaching girl after girl, day after day, committing fully to the skill set.It’s great to see someone who is good enough to make it worth modelling their behaviours, and yet close enough that it feels attainable. This guy is a proof of concept – you can bang the hottest of girls in the prime of their lives using nothing but learned game and with no physical or situational advantages. This is the very embodiment of game.
Glad to see this guy found a good instructor and success for the money he paid. The Chateau, as usual, is ahead of the curve in identifying and bringing to the readers valuable information and resources that will improve their game and love life. There is more to KrauserPUA’s review, so go there to read the rest. He’s a proponent of the instadate; you should be, too. Instadates are flake-proof.
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The second insider-y review comes from regular reader Kidstrangelove, who writes about his experience with a PUA lair event in New York City (not to be confused with pickup workshops which are more intensive, and also more expensive).
First off, the meeting space was in a dance and acting rehearsal center, and the first thing I saw when I walked in were dancers of all ages. Was I in the wrong place? No, there it was, the familiar look of peacocking, in full presence. I have never really seen intense peacocking till that day, thinking that the infamous Mystery and Neil Strauss pic was just a tall tale. […]
Luckily for me, the guys that spoke at the very first lair meeting I attended were Rob Judge and Zack Bauer, two guys whose philosophy on girls influences till this day. So I figured, what the heck, I’ll come to a few of these. Now, one year later I can give you a good description of what goes on there, so here we go – the good, bad and ugly of the NYC lairs.
Kidstrangelove goes on to list the good, bad and ugly of this particular lair meeting. Examples:
The speakers, knowing that they have very little time to talk, usually give you their “best material”. You really save a lot of time, money and effort, and without the need to filter through marketing bullshit. I heard that Richard La Ruina, aka Gambler, had a notorious reputation of being more of a marketer than a coach, but when I heard him speak, he really got to the core of what his philosophies were about, and I actually learned something. […]
Mystery gave a brief presentation in Virginia a few years ago (before his VH1-induced fame hit the inflection point on his power curve) which representatives of the Chateau attended, and the same impression was had — the core philosophy was ably covered in the short time available. Mystery is more charismatic than the average dude in real life, and highly intelligent, but if you observe carefully you can make out the latent nerd in him bubbling just under the surface, like Lewis Skolnick about to let loose with an asthmatic cackle. In the future, cultural anthropologists, if they are fair and balanced, will regard Mystery as a more important philosopher and paradigm shifter than the leading economists and respectable mainstream pundits of his day.
A huge chunk of the people that come there are socially inept in one way on another, and therefore make SHITTY wingmen. From lifelong nerds, to people new to the USA with the unsexiest of accents, to people who think verbal game is the end all, be all of self improvement (and therefore do not concentrate on their appearance). You can tell – a lot of these guys need help, on the bright side, however, they usually are persistent with their changes. But I don’t want a protege – I want an even matched wing, or better yet – someone BETTER than me.
There are some natural alpha males who attend pickup workshops and seminars, but the majority of attendees are nerdy or otherwise socially maladroit men who happen to have good-paying jobs and lots of discretionary cash. The money and societally acceptable lifestyle is obviously not getting them laid, so they turn to PUA teachers to lead them out of the wilderness. Hopefully, these gurus take their responsibility seriously, because they are doing nothing less than saving lives from years of soul-crushing loneliness. You want to make a man happy? Get him laid.
This is also why the Chateau has repeatedly counseled — against the strawmen of the haters — that the goal of PUAdom is not to get nerds laid with “9s and 10s”, but to get them success with women a point or two above what they are normally used to dating. Such an improvement, if executed on a society-wide scale, would cause a massive seismic disturbance in the mating market that would be felt from the cities to the country, by cougars and by kittens. One million average men suddenly dating up from 4s and 5s to 6s and 7s would have a huge impact on the dynamics of the dating market, starting with a crash in the entitlement stock of millions of plain jane American women. The younger, inexperienced and idealistic men ask: can a man be happy with anything less than a 10? Of course. In real life, when a man learns the skills that enable him to date 7s instead of the 5s he has spent his whole life dating, his happiness shoots through the roof. Most men would be perfectly content dating women just a point or two better than their usual fare.
People Lie and “Embellish the truth”. There was always a question and answer session before each meeting. You can tell a lot of these guys are exaggerating, you can tell a lot of these guys are straight bullshitting. My bullshit detector is very strong, but to an absolute beginner – they might believe the hype. It’s like keyboard jockeying – live and in front of you!
Yes, anytime there is status and money (big sums of money) on the line, there will follow lies and marketing. Your job as an educated consumer is to sift through the detritus to find the few gems worthy of your expense.
Some Instructors are either horrible or limited. I think I’ll let my friend’s post on CH’s blog answer that. I was there. The presenter was Nick Sparks of The Social Man. And everything said in that post is true.
The Chateau is not anti-PUA workshop. They undoubtedly serve a valuable function as thousands of men are still ponying up big bucks to instructors across the world in the quest to attract more and better quality pussy. If the bootcamps and workshops were all scams, it would be common knowledge by now, nearly a decade after the first in-field seminars were established.
But there are shysters out there, and they need to be identified and shamed out of business. Plus, many seduction businesses charge what seem to Chateau proprietors to be exorbitant fees for what they are delivering. Nonetheless, that is more of a moral issue than a business ethics issue, for as long as there are men willing to spend thousands for weekend trips to the clubs with experienced PUAs, the market will respond by charging those prices that maximize profit.
So all in all it was an entertaining experience. Would I recommend it to others? Sure, because going to these meeting represents a proactive step in getting better with girls, which we can all respect and agree on.
In due time, the sorting process will allow the cream of the seduction businesses to rise to the top, while the squirrelly outfits sink into oblivion. Websites like this one can be a valuable consumer protection resource. In the future, perhaps the Chateau will set up a ranking system of the best to worst pickup workshops and bootcamps and their instructors, which readers can reference at a glance should they decide to shell out for professional instruction.
