VH1's The Pickup Artist - My Confession as a Professional

I know Matador. Met him outside a Holiday Inn in downtown Toronto where we were both working doing pickup workshops. In his New Rocks, he's taller than me. Well-built. Good-looking in an unsmiling, serious way. We shared a smoke, talked about Miami, and tried to keep it low-key as nervous-looking guys came in and seemed to recognize us.

At the end of our talk, he asked again for my name. Then he said, "I'm James."

I liked that about him. Never took him up on the offer to hit the VIPs in Miami (that's not really where I find the women I like), but he impressed me as a good shit.

I know J-Dog. He was one of the senior instructors at the first PickUp 101 workshop I coached at (Art of Attraction). Another guy I shared a smoke with (sensing a theme here?) Funny, hungover just like me on that sunny Saturday morning. Charming accent and full-on commitment to dressing like anything but the computer engineer he was. Totally himself, totally comfortable. I liked him right away. Justin's a good shit.

I know Mystery. I met him once at the taping of the David DeAngelo Deep Inner Game seminar in Vegas. 9 feet tall and accompanied by a cute blonde carrying a tiny, barky white pomeranian dog. I knew nothing of the guy before then. He went on stage and impressed the room with his knowledge of social situations. But I couldn't quite figure out why he looked so uncomfortable, both on stage, and after when the acolytes gathered round like little kids surrounding their much taller baseball hero after batting practice.

Then I met him once again in San Francisco when he gave a talk, at the invite of his former student Lance Mason, to a group of guys at the Project San Francisco house. And here's where he lost me. Up close, I realized just how tall, thin, and annoyingly Tommy Lee good-looking he was. He sat on an elevated stool in the middle of the floor and held court with transparent stories designed to impress women with his cool (I still wonder to this day exactly what kind of girlfriends he was trying to get with his tale of coming to his stripper girlfriend's aid to chase off a guy following her in a car with a lead pipe... scratch that... I know exactly what it was for, and that's part of his genius. It's a story designed to wet the panties of women who need an abusive dick for a man... like damaged strippers and club girls).

He had full sleeves of tattoos running down both arms. Then he paused to reveal the magic. They were real sleeves, bought at a Hollywood shop. No real ink, just transparent fabric with standard tattoos patterened on them to make it look like a full boat of tats.

Now he was really losing me. I'm a pretty easy-going guy, but I take my tattoos seriously. In my world, anyone with a tattoo that can't tell you the real story of why it means something to them is a shallow fuck not worth knowing. Now, someone who wears fake tattoos just for effect? Well...

Fashion aside, I couldn't get over the feeling that his entire talk was about him putting on a show at all times. He confessed to feeling terror afresh every morning when he awoke, knowing he would have to crank up the pickup engine, and when he said that, I actually felt a connection for him. He seemed human. Vulnerable. More like the damaged, sweet kid in The Game, and less like the impervious charlatan imposing his will on a room full of guys too unsure of themselves to call him on his bullshit.

I did not like him. I would never hang out with him. I would never trust him to even get me a beer, much less trust him to teach me how to find a girlfriend. But I respected him.

See, in the pickup industry, where I worked at PickUp 101, there's an ethos. Everyone fights with everyone else. It's totally competitive and totally insecure. All it takes is thinking there's another guy out there who can get hotter women than you, or worse, thinking he's selling things that way but can't actually walk the walk, and you want to kill. You want to eliminate the competition.

Fortunately, one of Lance's greatest innovations at PickUp 101 was creating an environment where we had to play nice with everyone. I thank him for that, because it made me put aside any personal distaste I had for others in the community, and focus instead on what we had in common.

I mean, we are all working, doing something we love, generally for pretty short money, to teach men to be happier with women. And we all do it because we remember really clearly what it was like to be terribly unhappy with women. So I said nice things, and kept my feelings about Erik Von Markovic the man to myself. I wished him the best, and we went on about our business.

Then I heard about this show. I'll admit. I didn't want to watch it.

I have no interest in being a Pickup Artist. I have no interest in being a Venusian Artist. I never have. I only got into this, from the first, because I wanted to find how to get a great girlfriend, and keep her happy, so one day I can raise a family of my own. I wanted a better social life. I wanted to repair damaged relationships with my family and friends. I wanted to be a better man.

And that's what I hear every day from men. I've never had a single student tell me his real goal was to bang as many skanks as possible.

So when this show came out, I was convinced it would be a train wreck. Mystery running his usual shit, looking for all the world like a slightly medicated yet handsome drug dealer, slinking through the club looking off-kilter and saying seemingly random things to tremendously drunk and coked-out girls... I had no desire to watch.

Yep. I'm a hater. I'll admit it. God bless him for his work, but so not my cup of bourbon-laced tea.

And then I watched. And watched. And all my misgivings about the man were still there. The obvious discomfort being on camera was there. The odd, clearly designed to impress vocabulary. The stiffness, the shallow eye contact, the seeming inability to connect... I saw it all... but as I kept watching, I saw something I never recognized before, and I felt like a right dick, because I know it had been there all along, and the fact that I am a hyper-competitive asshole kept me from seeing it.

No, it's not that he's brilliant. That's easy to see.

No, it's not that he is great at getting what he wants with the women he wants. It's different than what I want, but I've never doubted that.

The big secret that was hiding in plain view all along was simply...

He.

Cares.

About.

People.

He cares like a motherfucker about his students. Even on this goofy show (and having lasted all of one week on a reality show, I know way more than I wish to recall about how staged and annoying these shows can be), you can see how much he wants the sweet, genuine, lonely guys on The Pickup Artist to be happy.

He wants them to get girls. Hell, he just wants them to take a chance and act in spite of their fear.

And when Spoon finally worked up the nerve to talk to three girls in the club, it really didn't matter that he made mistakes. Mystery lit up. You could see the proud relief in his face, and for the first time, I realized it's really not all about him. He does this because he cares, maybe too much. He does this because these men need him.

He does this because he too wants a family of his own someday.

I'm 36. Mystery is 35. And I don't care how much ass you pull in your life, once you hit mid-30s, you really want to get your shit together and find a woman who just simply makes you happy, and stops playing the childish games that kept you running all through your 20s.

I mean, his whole model has been based on survive and replicate? What does that really mean? It's just the same as "find a great woman to be the mother of my children."

I've found the woman I want to raise a family with. I know what an amazing partner she is for me, and I know what a great mother she will be for our family. I don't know exactly how to make it all work, yet, but that's the next challenge. And I have faith, because I've already raised one family at PickUp 101. I have sons and brothers all over the world.

So do you, Erik. You don't know how much love there is for you in the world. You've given more than you even know, and I feel like a jerk for not seeing it before.

When you decide you are ready, you will be an amazing father. You already are in more ways than you know.

We should all aspire so high. What else is there for greatness in this life than to pass on what we have learned to the children who can make the world an even better place?

Love and peace,

Sean Messenger