Wilder Interview

by Wilder

Read the transcript from our telephone interview with Wilder here.

1. Introduction and Project San Francisco
2. Joining the Community
3. AFC Behaviour
4. Workshops
5. Routines and Openers
6. Gay Cats
7. Shit Tests and Emotional Women
8. Peacocking and Dressing Well
9. Multiple Relationships

Thanks to cocheese for transcribing Gay Cats.

1. Introduction and Project San Francisco

You're listening to Magnus, of the Bristol Lair, and on the other end of a very long phone line, we've got Wilder, and - well, I'll ask him to introduce himself.

My name's Wilder, I'm in San Francisco, I'm 33. I've lived in San Francisco for about 10 years, before that I was on the East Coast of the US. I actually started Project San Francisco, we live in a 9 bedroom mansion in North Beach. There are 6 other guys besides myself in the place, one of them is my business parter and Mystery's Lounge member Sensei, who has possibly the tightest game of anybody outside Mystery and TD of anybody that I've ever met. On top of that there's 5 other guys who are all to some degree or another involved in the scene. 2 of them are or have been Mystery's Lounge members, everybody else is on mASF or our local lair list.

So you met them through the scene, and invited them to live with you?

I actually met Sensei through the RSD crew, when I got back here I ended up meeting up with him. We started this place, he knew two guys and we pulled in three other guys from the scene.

How does that work out, there's been quite a bit of controversy at Project Hollywood where various people have been saying it's not a good idea to live with other PUAs.

Mystery visited up here and said that Project San Francisco was a model for all Projects in whatever city. We've really hit the ball out of the park with this place, the guys are fantastic, we only have one pick-up crew running out of the house business-wise, so we don't have any business conflicts. Everybody is friends. We have an amazing infrastructure. We have weekly business meetings and dinners, monthly parties. We run a really tight ship here.

Are there specific rules that you have with the guys that you live with to make sure there's no problems living together, and relating to pick-up.

We have quiet hour, during the week starting at 10 or 11, so if we pull on a weeknight we have to be quiet. We don't end up fighting for targets. We all know that whoever opens the set has first shot. We haven't really ended up having any squabbling over targets or anything like that.

Sounds like you've got a good thing going, we were hoping to get something going in Bristol but now I'm going travelling and various other things. It might come to pass in the future, We'll have to be in touch in to find out how you make it work.

It takes a lot of work but it's worth it. It's a really, really great experience.

What sort of location is it?

We're at the corner of North Beach, Chinatown and Russian Hill, basically close to one of the nightclub/strip club districts. It's a really good location, it's exactly where we'd put this place if we could put it anywhere in the city.

Joining the Community

How did you personally get into the game, and find out about all the websites and the community?

That's a great question. I first got laid when I was 19, so perhaps I'm a late starter, and I think because I was a late starter, it took so long to get going, I was very motivated to I wanted to get to a level that most people took for granted. I never found the scene until I was 30. At 25 I was just passing the mark when I was better than average, but that was all strictly learning on my own - no specific focus on pick-up, it was just something I was always interested in. So at 30 I was better than most. Around 31 I found the scene, I was doing a course in hypnotherapy, and one of the guys told me his roommate told him about a site that talked about using NLP. I found and did part of RJ's Speed Seduction course. That's not really a part of my game, but that was my first exposure. Then I found DYD, I think I did the first DYD CD audio series. Then I ended up sending off for the interview series which came with the TD interview, from there I went to the RSD workshop, and also found out about the San Francisco and LA lairs. When I went to the RSD workshop I met Mystery and TD and Papa, and got invited to the Lounge, from there I met all the other guys, and my current wing. When I went to the RSD seminar I had everything down except my cold game. All my relationship game and social circle game was pretty tight. So when I went there I got invited into the upper ranks alot sooner than people who have just found the scene.

So you've been studying the art of seduction, if not cold pickup, on your own for a long while before that?

Right, with no structure, but it was an obsession for a really long time. I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out - what worked and what didn't work. If you'd have come along and asked me was I studying seduction, I would have said no, but that's exactly what I was studying.

What specific benefits have you found from meeting other guys and from the material on the website?

Specifically, the thing that I had, was if I was talking to a girl, I could sleep with that girl. But I couldn't meet anybody I didn't know. I could through social circle, which was great, but I couldn't walk into a bar and start talking to someone I didn't know. So for me that's what I got out of the scene. Now I know how to open groups, now I know how to talk to girls I don't know. It opened up a whole new world for me.

Then on top of that the scene gave me a lot of feedback with regards to developing that part of my game. a) the cold approach, and b) now I'm hooked in with a group of people that are really good at what they do it's like I have a different level of mastermind circle. I have a group of people who are really rock solid in their relationship game and their cold game, so if something comes up where I'm "I've been seeing this lately", I get some really good feedback from people who have been down that road. That way I learn much faster.

I'm sure you've found what I have, which is that alot of them are just really cool guys and good people to know.

Absolutely, that's been the biggest benefit of getting in the scene. Meeting some of the greatest people, who also have a focus of learning about this type of interaction.

AFC Behaviour

Do you have any stories of severely AFC behaviour from your past?

I do, I have a great story. When I got out of college I wouldn't say I was in love, but I had oneitis for a girl who was the ex-girlfriend of one of my soriety brothers. I kept in touch with her on and off through the next ten years. Throughout that ten years I always had a thing for her - every relationship I had I had one foot out the door because I always had this girl in mind.

To her credit, she tried really hard to like me, I was just too AFC at the time. The funny thing was I wasn't AFC with other girls. With every other girl who I didn't want, because I wanted this one, I was my normal self. I had girls all the time. But because I was so into her, I did all the things you should never do. I flew her into town, I took her away for the weekend, I bought her things, I always sent her flowers on her birthday.

She tried so hard to like me, but she just couldn't because I was giving her such a poor demonstration of a man she could be attracted to. Untilfinally, after ten years she came out here, she'd been out before but normally she'd sleep in a different room, but she said "let's go away for the weekend". She came out here, I took her away for the weekend, we were together, alone, in a bed and breakfast. We started to hookup and Istopped, and I was like "how weird is this", and she's like "yeah...". And that was it, it was over. Like I said, she tried so hard to give it a shot, but it just wasn't there.

The real AFC part is that when I get home, after that, I sent her a letter, and it was three pages long, saying she's the one I want when I think about kids, and when I think about the future. Six weeks went by, after I sent the letter, until finally she calls, and basically we talked for a half hour, but we ended up her saying something like "the best I can offer right now is my friendship". So that's a girl way of saying "it's never going to happen", which I didn't need to hear - I should have already known.

But, what I took from that was, of course, "the best I can do right now is offer you my friendship". So I went to my roommate, who was like a brother to me, an incredible natural, and I was like 'she said "the best I can do right now is offer you my friendship"'. He sat me down, and he looked at me, and he said "Dude, this thing, is deader than dead. That girl is gone, you have no shot, it is completely fucking over - you need to understand that." It still took me another, probably two and a half months after that to actually finally come to the realisation that that was completelyover and done with. When that happened that was probably when I really started to address all the AFC views that I had around women that I'd really liked.

That was before I found the cold game stuff but not too much before, it was all part of the evolution of getting rid of those things, and actually being the man that allows women to be attracted when they really want to be.

I think there's something we can all relate to there - certainly I can!

Workshops

So now your running workshops?

Sensei and I run a workshop out of Project San Francisco. It's Pickup 101, pickup101.com. We've run about 8 so far, including two pilot/offshoot workshops, one of which was an MLTR workshop - dating multiple women, which actually didn't quite have the market we thought. That's the stuff that Sensei and I are most excited about, because it's what we talk about the most - managing a relationship. We both are constantly dating multiple women, him for the last 8 years, for me it's about the last 3.

When we went to the community with this, we went out to put together an incredible workshop for a really cheap price, we were so into this material, but we had practically no-one sign up. We went back and found out that most guys actually aren't dealing with the issues that come up around dating multiple women, because they're just not there yet.

So now we have to get everyone there, and then we can do these different workshops, because it's good stuff.

I think the RSD guys are finding that the big end of the market is the bottom end - the very basic level, guys who have never even kissed a girl

Right, we're going back to an even more basic level than we have right now. I definitely agree that there's a lot of guys out there who really need the basic information.

So do you think that basic information is very universal?

Yes and no, I do think it's very universal but everyone has their own take on it. You can stress different aspects of the basic information, and I think that's what everybody's doing. RSD stresses different aspects to what Badboy does, and the stuff that we do, or that David D does. The stuff that we talk about is probably different to most people. We spend a lot of time talking about image and identity, and not just from a pick-up standpoint, although that's important. Who are you when you present yourself to the world, and how does that person dress, and act and behave. What kind of extra-curricular stuff do you have. We help them build that identity that is congruent with who they are and what they want to be.

We also talk alot about stories for generating attraction - I just put out a post about this on Cliff's Notes. People come out of our workshop with individual material. If you ever hear jlaix's material, it's great, but nobody could steal it and use it except him, it's crazy. We set people up with material like that, it conveys their personality in a way that's powerful, in a way that makes them entertains the audience, builds interest and attraction, and it's congruent because it's stuff that happened to them. That's one of the things that we think is fundamental.

That and all the normal stuff, body language, cocky and funny - the cocky and playful frame that came from David D, all of that.

Routines and Openers

So you still think it's a good idea to use the same routine in each pick-up, but to make it your routine?

I do, I'm a big believer in routines. I'm a writer, and people are constantly amazed by my ability to make things up on the fly. I never thought of that as an ability, but I guess it is. So I ad-lib maybe 90% of my sets, but I'm still a believer in routines. It's the difference between Improv and Stand-Up comedy. Improv may be funny, it may not be funny, but a stand-up comic has practiced those routines, he knows where the punchline is, he knows where the pauses are, he knows when he's going to get a laugh. That's what an attraction routine is, it's something that communicates the right things. Imagine telling the funniest joke the audience has ever heard, but instead communicating sexuality and confidence - that's what a routine is. I think it's great to have some routines in your bag that are yours, that you're comfortable with and that you know are going to build value. So you know, when you're done, after two or three minutes of material, that the people listening will have been thoroughly entertained, laughing their asses off, touching you, and wanting to hear more. If you have a couple of things like that in your bag, and you know that you do, that's a great thing to carry out into social networking and pick-up.

Do you think it's more difficult to construct an opener?

Maybe, maybe not. I had a post called "Wilder's Opening Theory" - it's not that difficult to come up with a structured opener - it's one of the things that we do with our students in workshop. I would say that if you have an opener that you really love, you just can't wait to go out and use it, and you'll use it to open every set, and you know it's going to open. I have a couple of those.

You're basically looking for an initial hook question, something that's girl-relevant. There was one on our last workshop; "Hey guys, how soon is too soon to get engaged to a guy you've just met?" Now every woman has an opinion on that, it's very girl-relevant. I don't remember the post-opener story, but I know that that question is going to suck girls in. Now the post-opener story is a safety net, after you've done some playful banter with whatever they give you as an answer, you have a story that is an attraction routine based on the question, that ends in a punchline that you know is going to get big laughs, and that will generate the kind of value and attraction that you want.

I think a canned opener is fine, the better you get the less an opener is a big deal. Most of the time when I go out with Sensei we hardly ever think about openers, and if we do, we hardly ever get to the post-opener story, we just roll right into set.

I think it's important to not make the opener a big deal - casually talking to girls should just be a thing that happens when you go out.

Absolutely, but then again that kind of frame comes from talking to a lot of girls - so if you're not there yet, there's no problem saying "I'm gonna go out and use structured openers 300 times". That's the kind of thing that gets you to the place where you feel congruent laughing and bringing up random conversational threads and being more natural with that.

So the canned stuff is a good way to get the other parts of it down?

Yep, I agree.

Gay Cats

I enjoyed reading your contribution to Starchild’s gay cat routine. Can you show us how you’d deliver it…

Yeah, so, I’ll just pretend that you’re a girl... Hey, you ever met a gay cat? … No seriously.

Ah, no?...

Yeah, so check this out. My friend Sarah, she wanted a cat. She went to the store and bought 3 cats. They ended up all being males. And she put them all into her house, and I would go and visit them. And they kept getting closer and closer and get along better and better. And I would go over there, after like a month or two and its like I’d see these 3 male cats. They’d be spooning, and they’d be licking each other… it was really funny. So I’m looking at her and I’m like: “Sarah, you know your cats are gay!” She’s like: “What?” I’m like: “Kinda well, you know, not by birth gay… more like, you know like prison gay, it’s like they haven’t seen a woman in months! And you’ve done this to them!” “She looked at me and she takes this really hard… she’s fucking up her cat’s sexuality, she’s actually bummed out about it! So she gets this plan, she like, has this neighbour, a guy, who has a female cat, and she doesn’t really like this neighbour. So the guy goes out of town, she breaks into his appartment, steals this guy’s cat, puts this female cat in the room with her three, like, little gay cats, which are thrilled. Now I don’t know what happened while they were in there… But I do know… after two hours… and its like the cats are still sitting there as usual. And I don’t even know what happened to those cats. And, I know now, the neighbour’s cat is knocked up. So I think, if you want them, I know a place in a couple of weeks we can go to get your very own little gay kitten.

Awesome, I’m resisting the urge to squeal like a little girl.

Ya, that’s good. So I don’t really play with that story much but, my thoughts of it are really good. I especially like the line about, you know: “not from birth gay, more prison gay.” I think that’s a hilarious line. I put a post up about Story Theory, and most of what I did to that story is in that post. Like, putting what I call “an initial hook” up, which is something really quick that’s gonna pull your audience in. Which is, in that case: “Have you ever met a gay cat?” And its like “What?” Now you know they’re listening. And then, you know theres a bunch of bull to the middle part, but the end part is still some sort of a punch line, which is “If you want, I know where you can get your very own little gay kitten.” So, that’s how that story works out.

Shit Tests and Emotional Women

On fastseduction we often talk about seducing the girl's emotional brain, do you think there is a point at which her logical brain has to be seduced as well - she has to logically see you as the best person she could be with at this time?

I just watched Don Juan de Marco the other day, and he talks about how every woman is a puzzle to be solved, so yes. It can revolve around age, where you live, what you do for a living, your nationality. If in her mind she has to be with a Jewish guy, and you're not Jewish, then you'll have to address that at some point. You may end up addressing the logical aspects of that from an emotional perspective because obviously she has to come to the conclusion that it's ok to be with you.

In a way any logical question could be treated as a shit test?

We've started calling shit tests, 'Alpha Tests' he talks about how, when a woman's testing you, she wants to feel your masculine power. Imagine if you met a guy like in the matrix, on whom you couldn't land a blow... You'd want to see that, you'd invite your friends over, you'd sneak up on him, break into his house when he was sleeping. and he'd just wake up and move - and you'd be like "amazing!" and you'd want to see that again and again. So that's what we think of when a girl's testing you - she's just amazed by your masculinity and she wants she wants to see how you're goning to get over that objection - she wants you to pass. They're begging you to show them exactly why they should be attracted to you. They want to see that you are the man that they are hoping that you are. What we do a lot of the time is evade and be playful - if the girl says "I only date Jewish guys" then you go like "Oh I only date supermodels, we've gotta get you an agent... you're good looking enough, but I don['t know if you're ... get yourself on the runway". Then it's like, over.

So do you think it's possible to pre-empt shit tests, if the girl is asking you to display masculine traits, is it a sign that you're not displaying them in the first place?

Multiple Relationships

You said that you guys have a lot of experience with relationships. What do you see as the difference between cold game for a one night stand and the longer term game to find someone to bring up your kids, which I know a lot of guys are interested in.

That's an interesting topic, let me say one thing before we go into that, and that's that in my opinion there are two places that pick-up guys come from in the community, and 90% of these guys are guys who woke up one day and said "you know what, I don't have any women, and I need to develope some game because it's making me miserable", and they go out and they learn pick-up. And they go from being a guy who's an AFC and has no women, to being a guy who is a player, and they don't ever have a relationship and they don't know about building relationships. Some of the best guys in the community, some of the best pick-up guys there are, have had one relationship, or two relationships. That's a very different place to come from than someone like Sensei and I who both found the community after having, in his case 10 years in my case probably more like 6 years, of successful one or two year relationships in my past. So most guys are guys who don't have a lot of relationship game.

There's a big difference between relationship game and pick-up game, but at the same time there's also a lot of things that they have in common. Being unflappable is a big thing in a relationship as well as in pick-up, having interesting things to say, developing yourself the way that pick-up guys do. Getting better personalities, those are all things that are important in relationship game.

Things like the cocky/playful frame, I use that all the time - my father was cocky/funny, that's how I was raised. I'm always making fun of girls, always doing stuff like that in a relationship. Guys ask me "Do I have to?" be like that all the time, and I can't answer that - I'm not saying you have to - it's just part of who I am, I've been doing it for so long, that I do it all the time anyway. I do it with my guy friends, I do it with my girlfriend.

After that, if you really want relationship game, you shouldn't be afraid to have relationships. If you want to stay in the game you have to find a way to have an open relationship, but you don't want to shy away from really getting to know girls on a deeper level. Sometimes that can take a year, two years or even longer, and until you have some of those relationships in your back pocket, you will not have the relationship game that you would have having that time in a relationship.

Absolutely. One of the things - I hope it's a myth, on ASF, guys seem to think that it's probably not possible to get a girl to be your girlfriend and be resistant to players, whether natural or trained. From talking to Tyler Durden, in his experience the boyfriend is the guy that's waiting for the girl that he's in bed with to come home.

There's a couple of issues there - one is that his attraction game is better than almost anyone else's on the planet. He's dealing with a skillset that most guys are probably never going to have. If you're worried about your girlfriend coming across Tyler Durden - there's only about four of him, it's not that big of an issue. On top of that, there's not a lot of guys that have relationship game, but I can tell you a fact about the guys that do have it - they don't worry about this stuff. I don't worry about this stuff, nobody cheats on me. My relationships are set up so that it's completely ok if they do. I'll tell a girl from the beginning - I never want to stop you from doing something that makes you happy. When I give them permission to do that, you take away one reason they'll go out there and cheat on you - to make you mad or to get more attention. They know that's not going to work with me because I've already told them I want them to be happy. So it's just a non-issue. I have the opposite view to most of mASF in that I come from a background of relationships, and they come from the background of picking up girls. I can tell you that if you are pressing all a girl's relationship buttons then you are keeping her happy, she understands. The reasons finds so many girls cheat with him is that most guys are shitty boyfriends. Most girls with boyfriends, I know they're bored. When you are the guy waiting at home for a girl, and you are making her happy, she knows how rare that is. She knows you're the one guy in ten million that will actually be her boyfriend, and keep her attracted, and keep her happy, and keep her hot after you - when you have that, and you know how to be supportive, and be all those things that are involved in being a good boyfriend, when she knows that there's no way in hell she's going to cheat on you.

That's it - most of my female friends are in long-term relationships, and I just can't see them cheating - I can't see it happening.

So my guess is that they are with guys with decent game?

But all the while, do these girls know that you have other girlfriends?

That's part of my game now, that they do, yeah. I don't have girls that test me on that any more. Everyone knows that I'm dating multiple people. In general, when you're developing that type of structure, you don't talk about relationships, you evade any questions that are serious of that nature, you don't see a girl more than once a week. I break all these rules from time to time, but that's because I know what I'm doing. If you only see a girl once a week, she's gotta assume that you're doing other things. If she brings it up "oh, are you seeing anybody else?" you can playfully evade it like "well, not right now, unless you count that girl in the closet... don't look in my closet!" So I've just evaded that question, and I'm not going to go in with that. So I never have to say I'm with other girls, it's just assumed.

So it's not like you have this harem of girls who all know about each other and all come to the same parties whatever?

They all do come to the same parties, I invite all of them to my parties, but they don't really know about each other. When I invite a girl to one of my parties, she knows that every other girl I know is going to be there, and she knows that I'm going to have history with lots of them. I don't ever say "here's my Thursday girl, this is my Wednesday girl" like that. I know that what I want is to have one primary relationship, and then you know, things on the side, with no emotional commitment.

Wilder

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