When I started Pick-up Evolution with Legend, it was my intent to create the type of website I would want to read. That is, if it was going to be about pick-up artist techniques and theory, I wanted it to be based on real world experience. If it was going to be a place where we shared our experiences, it was going to be a raw recollection of what ended up happening.

During mid-2008 through the end of the year it was just that: A raw report of what Legend and I were learning, our experiences and our trail & error. Plus our thoughts and experiences with motivation, learning pick-up artist techniques / seduction, self-improvement and life experiences.

When we started PuE, I was already saying that the market was saturated with pick-up artist products that were all essentially rehashes of the same material (many of which were “clones” of Mystery Method). Legend and I felt that everything that was being said in 2008 had already been said before and it was time that the “seduction community” (aka guys who actively want to be better with women) start moving into new territory.

At the beginning of 2009, we decided to Read the rest of this entry »

I was having a conversation with some guys about the seduction community this past Saturday night.

These were guys that had read up on a bunch of material, read “The Game”, etc.  We were sharing our thoughts on the techniques mentioned in that book and a lot of the techniques that have come and gone in the seduction community.

I want to make a comment about the seduction community and how it came to be.  The seduction community started out during the late 80’s/early 90’s.  Feminism was rampant and the pendulum of political correctness had swung WAAAY over to an almost anti-male sentiment.  I feel like there are still some lingering after-effects of that time even today, but for the most part, the era of extreme male bashing and feminazism has past.

Still, it was during that time that Speed Seduction came to be.  In fact, as Neil Strauss mentions in “The Game”, that was also the time when the internet was beginning to form.  It didn’t look like the internet we know today, but nerdy kids like me can remember the days of BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), Echo-mail and Newsgroups.

This atmosphere helped form a cohesion among men wanting to improve their skills with women.  Think about it.  Men were afraid to speak frankly about wanting to be successful Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to be very candid and straight up here.

Lately, I have slowed down my contributions to Pick-up Evolution. This doesn’t mean it’s permanent… it’s just what has happened.

The truth is, I love this site: I love the success it has had so far, I love our readers and I love that we have been able, from time to time, to improve a man’s life for the better.

But my life has shifted since I started writing for PuE. My outlook on life and what I contribute to the world. My outlook on the community has shifted too.

I’m going to cut right to the chase: The more that I think about the concept of a “seduction community”, the more I am fucking disgusted by it.

“Edge!!! What are you saying???  You have the #1 most trafficked seduction website up right now!  Are you just going to abandon it?”

Definitely not.

I am wholeheartedly in support of helping men succeed with women.  I think that is a sacred and honorable thing for a person to do – to help others get more joy in their relationships and to, overall, make the world a better place.

But when I think about community terms, “seduction lingo”, I am just nauseated.  I will never “sarge”.  I refuse to DHV… what a retarded idea.  And I am not going to do a routine to get myself into a woman’s pants.

Again, I am absolutely, positively 100% in men improving their relationships, but the seduction community is not the way.  It is riddled with community lingo that sounds good on the surface, but embedded within it is an agenda which is not my own.  And most of the time, that agenda is outside of my own integrity and beliefs.

This isn’t a moral stance from the point of view that picking up women is wrong.  Picking up women is fine in it of itself… if the guy’s a good guy and treats women well, he should pick up as many women as he wants.

But the seduction community’s way of going about it is bottom feeding!!!

Here’s an analogy:

A beggar can shake a can and fill it with money by the end of the day.  He can even get more money if he rents a wheelchair or a cane or bruises his face and covers it in band-aids.  But his success is from him pushing people’s sympathy buttons.  At the end of the day, he is still a beggar, still a bottom-feeder, putting on a show to earn scraps who were unfortunate enough to get their buttons pushed.  These “beggars” are not masters of their destiny, they are the lowest rung on the ladder of contribution to the world. It’s nothing grand – it’s bottom-feeding.

To take it further, the implied message of most

of the community is how to trick people into thinking you’re not a piece of shit.  This is fucked on two levels: it implies that the student IS a piece of shit and it implies that he needs to trick people.  Sure, Style and Mystery and all the charismatic instructors give you reasons you need to do things their way, but really boil it down:  they are saying you need to trick people.

For example, Mystery and Style say that you MUST put a false time-constraint on your approach because THEY had more success with it. Really?  Oh, so we should believe it then, because we’re too chicken-shit to try a different approach.

Fuck that – I am not a bottom-feeder, I am not a piece of shit.  And frankly, I’m through with following credos to trick the world into thinking I have the “value” of a celebrity…  If I’m going to put in effort, I am going to follow a method where I actually BECOME a valuable man.  One who truly contributes REAL value to making the world a better place in some way, however small or large.  It is my belief that great women and great sex are bi-products of men leading great lives and EARNING great success.

I would like to put out stuff that inspires men to be great men that contribute true value to the world and exercise the greatest strength any guy really has:  their laser-focused ambition and direction. I think it’s immature to wear a bunch of funky outfits and talk like a big shot if you have NOTHING to show for it.  To me, it is outside of integrity to do it.

That’s not to say that guys can’t get laid doing it, but for me, it feels dirty and empty.

When I first learned about pick-up artists and the “seduction community” back in 1999, I can remember the thoughts that went through my head.

“Is it really possible to meet beautiful women and just… pick them up? Is this real or is it a marketing scheme? If it works, will it work for me?”

And so I explored. I read. I visited websites and read more. I visited forums and read more still. I watched videos, listened to audio and practiced NLP self-improvement techniques.

But I didn’t do one thing… one very important thing, which was to TAKE ACTION IN THE REAL WORLD.

That’s one of the reasons why I harp on that point so much here. I wasted so much time “studying” when in reality, you can’t START with studying… studying only really helps after you’ve put in some real time and effort into doing your best in the real world then consulting the materials available. Reading won’t give you game. Taking action and practicing in real life will…

I hate to say it, but I spent years studying when I could have been actually learning.

Finally, I started to take action. Yeah, I was nervous and really awkward at first, but I learned to get better and smoother with it. Soon enough, I had a serious girlfriend and I retreated into the safety, warmth and comfort of a relationship. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it was comfortable. And despite all of my self-cheering, I didn’t truly believe at that time that I could do better. Sure, I told myself that I was the hottest guy on the planet and I could have any girl I wanted, but truthfully, I didn’t really believe it. I didn’t want to lose what I had and be alone again.

So I ended up staying in a relationship way too long… longer than I should have for that particular one. I eventually broke it off and took some more action, got more results, got a little more confident. But then some dating failure would knock me on my ass and I would either a) fall into a Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I’m going to talk about something that may offend some people. It may especially offend some of the people marketing products to you on their blogs.

My opinion is that it’s time to dump the seduction community, pick-up artist secret society bullshit.

I mean, I fill my blog with the words pick-up artist, pua, seduction, lay report, field report, etc.

But you know what? It’s for the search engines.

Frankly I would be MORTIFIED if someone I actually knew considered me a pick-up artist.

“Edge! What are you saying???”

I’m saying that I’ve read all of the material. I’ve read the books, attended seminars, met guys who study this stuff and, most importantly, gone out and taken action frequently and consistently. And guess what? It’s all great stuff!

Because of seduction / pick-up artist products, I have improved my quality of life significantly.

But it hasn’t Read the rest of this entry »

I had a thought today about learning to be better with women, better pick-up artist, better at seduction, etc. Whatever you want to call it.

I think that there are some figures in the seduction community that promise to give you certain skills or certain problems. Some focus on hypnotic language patterns, some focus on group theory, some focus on push and pull / cocky and funny and creating sexual tension.

These are the tools and they promise certain results.

But I think back to when I was starting out in learning to pick up women and learn seduction when I felt overwhelmed with all of choices out there. The resounding question – “Who should I choose as a school of thought to pursue? Where should I look first to improve in this area?”

If I were to give one thing to look at as a place to focus, I would Read the rest of this entry »