Never Run Out of Things to Say

Hey guys, welcome back to the Todd V show. Today I'm very excited to share with you a brand new method that came directly out of me coaching clients one on one and me trying to get them through their sticking points. Basically, we came up with a way to always have something to say. So this will solve your iran out of things to say, what do I say next, all those kind of problems in game, not only by giving you something to say, but by giving you something useful and correct for the stage of game you're in. So again, there's a brand new method. I've never shared it with the world before and I'll be sharing it with you here on this podcast. One quick announcement. Here's my coaching schedule for the next month and half. I'll be doing a bootcamp July 25 through 27th in Las Vegas, August 8th through 10th in New York City. I'll be doing an immersion program, August 17th through 23rd in London. I'll explain what an immersion is in a moment. I'll be doing another bootcamp August 29th through 31st in San Francisco, then another immersion September 7th through 13th in New York City. And finally, a bootcamp September 19 through 21st in Austin, Texas. Every bootcamp is three days of real world training with me gaming right by your side. I'll be coaching you by going through your sticking points in surgical detail. Basically, I'll be showing you exactly how it's done from open to close so that you can do it too. To get more information about bootcamp, go to ToddVD.com/coaching and talk directly to my team. I'm also doing two immersion programs. These are seven day long programs, but they are for intermediate students and above only and I really do mean that. These are seven days of hardcore game at a very high level, completely uncensored. It's much more self-directed, so you'll be gaming with guys at your same skill level. It is really hardcore advanced game. And yes, if you're a total beginner, immersion is not a program for you. Nothing against beginners we've all been there, but this program is more focused on higher level game concepts and might be too advanced for some. To learn more about immersion, go to ToddAmerge.com. These dates are coming out fast, so act on this now. Okay, so let's talk about the brand new technique. Shall we? I'm excited. So I was with one of my students on an immersion program in New York very, very recently. And he was having trouble with coming up with something to say. And the interesting thing was he had studied his theory. He knew programs like the system and verbal game Academy inside and out. And he knew what he was trying to do in game and he could explain exactly why, but he was just having trouble coming up with a specific thing. So if I gave him a can of line, he could actually put it in the right place. But as soon as he was out of canned things to say he was having a really hard time generating new ones. And he could even identify what were good ones, but he still was just having a hard time coming up with ideas. And I don't know how this came to me, but discussion with him reminded me of a book that read a very, very long time ago, which was about someone trying to put a formula on creativity. Because essentially this, this student was having a trouble problem with creativity is having trouble coming up with genuine unique new ideas. And the book I'm referencing here is a book called DiBono's Thinking Course. It's by a guy named Edward DiBono. And his contention was that genius or creativity or brilliant insights are not just flashing a pan lightning struck. It just happened that there is actually a formula to make them happen more. And he actually created a whole book full of exercises and principles for creativity. And one of his earliest exercises in the book was something he called PMI and PMI stands for plus minus interesting. The idea here is that when people are presented with a new idea, it's very easy to automatically associate it with everything you've seen before and categorize as good or bad and write it off or immediately think it's good rather than just considering it objectively. And there's sort of the idea of brainstorming right in a brainstorming scenario, the idea that there's no such thing as bad ideas, you just get all the ideas out there. And then you can evaluate them later. Or for example, a lot of times when someone has writers blocked their having trouble coming up with something to write the issue is that they're trying to censor or they're trying to write something good. Whereas if they will just start typing or just start scribbling on a page, the words will start coming. And so you want to just get that generative process started you don't want to be doing too much of judgment in that initial phase. You want to be just getting your ideas out there. And especially if you're trying to be creative, creativity by its very nature means thinking differently than people have in the past. So if you're automatically using past stereotypes or past associations as your first port of call, that's going to be a problem. So no idea the idea of plus minus interesting in Edward DiBono's book would be if you take some new idea or even some old idea, although that'd be a less interesting thought experiment, take some new idea. And instead of saying, oh, that's a good idea or that's a bad idea instead, just say these are the things that would be good about it. These are the things that we bad about it. These are the things that are interesting about it. And then only then can you decide whether it's a good or bad idea. And you might not even decide that it's a good or bad idea. You might just say here's some interesting thoughts that came out of it or it might be good in this context and bad in another context. So it's a much more nuanced way of thinking about a new idea. I don't actually remember the examples given in the book, but I just thought some things that remind me of similar to it would be imagine you had a car with triangular wheels. Now at first you're like, that's a stupid idea. Wheels are round and there's a reason why wheels are round. But there could be reasons why triangular wheels might be good. For example, let's say you're on a hill, there would be more friction. You wouldn't slide down the hill, hill quite as fast. Maybe that's a good reason for triangular wheels. Or maybe let's say you're going over a very uneven rocky patch and maybe the triangular wheels cut into it better and rolled better than the round wheels do in that context. I don't know if that's actually true, but it could actually happen. The point is sometimes an idea that on its surface seems entirely idiotic might actually have some merits in some situations. Or imagine a pencil with two erasers. Well, it's not even a pencil anymore. It's in some ways. And so you might be like, that's stupid. You can't use it as a pencil. I was talking to a friend of mine who works in copy editing and the first thing that she said was, well, usually you wear out the eraser before the pencil. So that's actually quite a good idea. And you might not have thought about that, but there's something there. There's also interesting things about it. Like if you were to throw it against a wall, it would be more likely to bounce and less likely to leave a mark than a normal pencil would. Where that's useful anyway, who knows, but it is interesting. Right. And so there are positives about these ideas. There's negatives about these ideas and there are interesting things about them. And even if the idea fundamentally is stupid or doesn't work in the end, maybe one of the interesting factors about it gives you a new idea that is in fact very, very useful. Or maybe there is some positive elements that you can then modify the idea and come up with something good. So that's the idea is that instead of immediately judging something you take these strange bizarre ideas. And Edward Dabona would use these thought experiments so you could give these to kids in teaching them and have them just think more creatively and more abstractly and more kind of robustly about the material overall. So first of all, this isn't a bad principle in life. And being more creative is something that could be very, very helpful, especially in modern society where things are becoming more formulaic, more mechanistic, and where human creativity may be one of, you know, the last really unique things we have. There's a lot to this exercise just for its own sake, but let's talk about in game. Let's talk about this as a generative tool. Most of the time in game when guys are trying to come up with something to say they sit there racking their brains. What do I say? What do I say? What do I say? What do I say? What do I say? What do I say? And there's two problems with this problem number one is that you're asking to come up with creativity from nothing from no seed. Right. In fact, the best way to come up with what to say in an interaction is to listen to the interaction and get your ideas from it. That's because there's lots of ideas coming from the interaction that you can use. And also because when your ideas come from the interaction, it's going to seem congruent. It's going to seem like it's in the flow. It's going to make sense. It's not going to seem like it came out of nowhere. And it's not going to seem like some weird gamey thing that you just pulled out of your ass. So the best way ironically to come up with something to say is not to say what do I say what do I say what do I say it's to actually listen to the interaction and use that as the source of what to say. The second problem guys have when coming up with what to say is that they're constantly filtering it. They're trying to say something good. Right. And so when you think of something to say and you could say at the moment and you think wait is that good. Let me think is it good could it not be good. And then you say it five seconds later it's out of sync you missed the timing and even if it was good is probably no longer good five seconds later because it comes off weird and strange and awkward. So you need to be more in the moment. Now as far as speed of implementation the way you're going to get that from this exercise is just from doing the exercise a lot until you get good at it. But as far as generating things to say here is the beauty of the plus minus interesting exercise as related to game. Basically every single thing a girl tells you is a gift is a concept I learned from improvisational comedy where if you're doing an improvisational scene with a partner every single bit of information they give you should be treated as a gift. They gave you something to work with because without a scene partner if you're going to do comedy you be doing you know stand up comedy as a on the spot monologue which is insanely difficult to do and it will almost never be funny almost always be bad. But with a scene partner to play off it's actually tremendously easy to come up with funny things by comparison and you can come up with some really brilliant stuff so every single thing every single bit of new information your scene partner gives you is a gift. Similarly in game every single bit of information the girl gives you is a gift she's giving you not only things to say but also things to say that are relevant to her relevant to the conversation that are spontaneous in the moment and won't seem like game. So it truly is a valuable thing and in game this can be obvious things like if she tells you a story she obviously gave you a lot of information if she answers a question for you she gave you a lot of information. But even if she just happens to say a completely normal thing and use an unusual word that unusual word is information or if she shakes your hand a little stronger or a little more masculine or a little more feminine or she gives you a funny look or she you know squint in a certain way all of those are gifts. Every little bit of information the girls giving you is a gift and the more you learn to be aware be present in the moment pay attention to the woman and use these gifts the more you're going to have things to say in game. So once we understand that what the girls giving us are gifts now how do we use these gifts and I'm going to give you some examples of using the plus minus interesting. So so let's take a biographical fact first let's say the girl says she's a doctor and let's just go through it. go through it. What are some positive? about being a doctor. Well, she probably makes a decent income. She saves people's lives, potentially. She's probably relatively smart and responsible, a little bit organized, because she went through all those years of school, those kind of things. She's probably relatively respecting the community. She probably has a certain amount of things to lose in life, so it would not be in her interest to behave recklessly or commit a lot of crimes or be, you know, a horrible human being. So there are a lot of definite positives in terms of dating a girl for the girl being a doctor. And any of these could be used by the way in the evaluation or qualification phase, as reasons why her being a doctor helps her to win you over, makes you like her more. And again, what you want to be doing throughout game is you start off, you see the girl and obviously the only thing you can notice about her is superficial, because you don't know more than that. First, you have some reservations about her that creates sexual tension or tension socially in general. And then eventually she wins you over and now there's a reason other than her physical appearance, why you like her and now it makes sense to go ahead and close. Before you had a reason that you liked her, it didn't make sense to get a phone number except for superficial reasons or because you just wanted to have sex with her, we're just going to come off like you have an agenda. So this evaluation is very, very important. Okay, so those are some of the positives about her being a doctor. Let's look at some of the negatives about being a doctor. Well, what are negatives? Well, number one, maybe she works really long hours, so she's not very available from a relationship standpoint. Maybe she is a doctor for the wrong reasons. Maybe it's because her parents told her what to do and she just followed that and she hasn't thought for herself and maybe maybe she's that kind of person. Who knows? Maybe her being a doctor means that if she ever were angry at you, she could she could drug you kill you and get away with it. Maybe her being a doctor is maybe it's because she likes blood and carnage. Who knows? Point is there are negatives about being a doctor, either in a serious way or potentially in a teasing way, but there are plenty of negative things about it. Another one just popped into mind, maybe something about being a doctor is oftentimes doctors think they're very smart and maybe her being a know what all is annoying or her acting like she's smart all the time is annoying. Again, there are plenty of possible negatives you could find. And why are the negatives useful? Well, the negatives are useful early on in game during the premise phase and during the early banter phase in game to have some of those negatives to push a girl away to give her a hard time to create that sexual tension to show that you're not too wrapped up in her. You don't have her on a pedestal, those types of things. And again, I mentioned the whole sequence, right? When you first meet the girl, you're not sure about her yet. That's when you have the negative spikes. Then you're starting to be one over. That's when you show some of those positive spikes and then that's when it makes sense to close. There's also this third part of game afterwards when you have evaluated the girl or throughout the interaction when you just need some filler because you can't just do gamey conversation all the time. If it's gamey conversation all the time, the girl will be emotionally stimulated, but she'll also think the interactions weird. You'd have some normal conversation, just some normal discussion of ideas, some normal just talking about stuff. That's not always about you and her and it's not always flirty and it's not always sexual. And this is where the eye, the interesting part comes in. So, what's interesting about the girl being a doctor? Well, maybe you've always had certain questions about how the human body works. You have to be a little careful about that with doctors because they don't like being asked medical questions all the time. Like, you know, my leg is sore, what's happening? That's maybe not so interesting to them, even if it's interesting to you. But thinking of the body as a phenomenal machine and something beautiful or something you've always had questions about, if you have a truly unique or insightful question, they've always wanted to ask a doctor, well, now you met a doctor and here's your opportunity. Or maybe you have a personal story about being a doctor or not being a doctor. Like, for example, for me, when I was in college, there were a few careers that were considered respectable careers you could have like doctor lawyer, those kind of things. And then engineer I found out was when I didn't even know what an engineer really was until I went to college, which is weird since that's why I ended up studying side note. But I decided I didn't want to be a doctor personally because I didn't like memorizing so many things in like biology and chemistry. All right. And so there's a lot of interesting things that come out of that. One, I could tell my personal story and why I chose other sciences. And that's a little bit interesting. But two, I could ask her. I could say, you know, this is why I didn't do it. I had trouble memorizing things. What did you do for all that memorization? Did you just like sit in your room for hours and et cetera? Do you come up with a crazy thing or did you just accept that you don't know it until you know it? There's interesting stuff that comes out of that. Or there's questions like what's the craziest operation you ever had to do or things like that? Again, you had to be a little careful with that because some people don't like talk about their work, but some people love it. Right? And it is an interesting thing. Or there's in terms of most careers, the what made you decide to do that. That's a general interesting question for almost any curve. When you are, you know, six years old at career day and they said, what do you want to do when you grow up? Is that what you said or did you say something else? And what made you change your mind? Those are interesting topics. And those are general good get to know you things that build a lot of comfort without being boring because they're not generic questions. Some of them are questions, some of them are stories. But even the ones that are questions, you're giving you unique insight or a perspective along with asking the question. So it's interesting information. So let's take a step back here. So we just got pretty much the most boring biographical thing. What do you do for living? I'm a doctor and I don't know you guys can play back the tape and see exactly the duration of me expounding on all the ideas that that just created for me. But that's, you know, I have to imagine more than 10 minutes worth of ideas on just what do you do for living? I'm a doctor, which is one of the more boring things you can find out about a person. So you can imagine doing this plus minus interesting on something more interesting like some passion or hobby or unique, you know, life thing she does that you've never heard of before, et cetera. The point here though is that if you practice this exercise, which by the way, I'm a big fan of things that you can practice in-game, but you can also practice at home, right? You can get really, really good at this brainstorming exercise without ever going out and talking to a girl. Now, this is not an excuse to not go talk to girls. You still need to go talk to girls. You still need to work on your game. But let's say you have, you know, a day when you can't actually make it out or your between meetings at the office and you can't go talk to a girl and you want to get better at your game, you just pick some random thing and do a plus minus interesting on it. You just got better at game. You got better at coming up with things to say in game and not only again, did you just generate random content, you generated positive and negative emotional spikes and you generated comfort content. You basically generated the three predominant types of things you need to say in game all from one little tiny kernel of information and you can practice this anytime you want. So again, I really recommend you do this exercise on your own in your free time. At first, it is just an idea generation exercise. It is a brainstorming session and it may not come that quickly to you. And if it doesn't come that quickly to you in a way, that's a good thing. I know it's it's not good that it doesn't come quickly to you. But what that means is that this is something you really need to work on and you're gaining more value from it. Right? If it takes you 10 minutes to come up with a list of some positives, negatives and interestings, that means you really need to work on building this essential conversational muscle. On the other hand, if you are able to turn these around very, very quickly, well, that's a good thing in the sense that you'll be able to use it in your actual game much, much sooner. But again, this is something you can practice and come up with tons and tons of ideas. And again, you can pick someone's job, someone's hobby, what someone had for breakfast. You could pick someone's name if you happen to know a bit about names and where names come from and things like that. You could pick some random thing that happened that's not even necessarily related to the girl. It'll be less intimate. But again, there's still going to be good content coming off of it. So you can plus minus interesting almost anything that said and get tons and tons of ideas. So I do recommend strongly you practice this little exercise on your own until you get good at it. If you get good at it, it's going to dramatically improve your results. Now, while I'm here talking about this, I want to tell you about one other kind of bit of theory, bit of exercise content for game that came out of the very same conversation. It was later in the same conversation, but I think they were inspired by each other to some degree, minus fired by the same line of questioning. And it's also incredibly valuable in that it's another thing that I've never said publicly. It's something I always kind of intuitively understood from practice, but I'd never put into words. And here's what it is. I got asked some questions after talking about generating these different types of content and how some of the contents for premise and sums for evaluation. Question comes up a lot about, do you still tease when you're in the later phase of game? Obviously when you're in the premise phase of game early on flirting, bantering, there's a lot of teasing going on. But later on, when you're building comfort, having a more sincere conversation, do you still tease? And the answer is yes. You do it less in terms of as a percentage of the conversation happening, i.e. like it's fewer teases per minute, like the rate of teasing is less later on in conversation, but you still do it. And the teases actually are just as important. You just don't need to do them as often because they're very strong at this point, right? When you're almost a stranger to the girl and she doesn't know you very well, you need to do more teases to get leverage in momentum because the girl doesn't care very much. When the girl already cares deeply about your opinion of her when she already really likes you or even loves you, one tease goes a long way so you don't need as many teases. But teasing still remains a part of the conversation throughout. However, there's two sort of phases early on in game where you're teasing and where the kind of effect of the teasing needs to be opposite, right? So during the sort of premise phase where you're putting up barriers, creating sexual tension, maybe pushing the girl away, you're establishing this manduumum, but not necessarily that you like her, your teases are going to have more of a negative edge to them. Whereas in the evaluation phase when the girl's winning you over, you don't want to be suddenly won over by everything. On the other hand, you don't want to be pushing her away all the time, but you still need to keep teasing. You still need to keep it sharp. And so what I found this really, really interesting is this, when you do teases in the premise phase early on in game, typically like a push pull tease, you're going to do the positive spike first and the negative spike later. So for example, things like, you're cute, I hope you're not crazy. Pause this spike first, negative spike later. I can't decide whether to fall in love with you or run away. Or even if you're talking to a group of two girls, but you seem like the good girl, you seem like the bad girl. It wouldn't work quite as well if you did it in the opposite direction. Again, pause this spike first, negative spike later. And that trend comes up over and over and over again in the premise face. On the other hand, if you go to the later phase where the girl is winning you over, you can do almost the same exact content you just reverse it. Here's what example it would be like, "That's cool. You still have a lot of red flags, but I'm kind of starting to like you now." Right? So again, the red flag is the negative, and then I'm starting to like you now as the positive. So it ends on a positive note. Now this is not universal. There are ways to make premise teases that will go the opposite direction and ways to make evaluation teases that will go the opposite direction. What's really happening here is it's where the emphasis is. In premise, the emphasis is on the negative part of the tease and in evaluation, the emphasis is on the positive part of the tease. But as a shorthand, typically the second part of the tease is where you put the emphasis. There are ways to construct teases where that won't be the case. But generally, if you follow the rule of thumb that they end on a negative in premise and end on a positive in evaluation, you'll do well. And if you know the overarching concept that the tease emphasizes the positive or emphasizes the negative, you'll know how to use it. And again, with this plus minus interesting, what do we have? We have a whole lot of positives and a whole lot of negatives to use. So you should never be short on ideas for positives and negatives for these teases. So that's a bit of new methodology we came up with. This is something I realized that I've been doing in the back of my head for years and I never had really codified or explained to students. And when I started explaining to the students, they started using it. They were able to come with ideas tremendously faster, tremendously better. So it worked for them. Therefore I suggest you try it. And I think there's a strong chance it'll work for you. And this tackles one of the biggest issues guys having game, which is actually two issues. One is not coming up with anything to say. And the other is resorting to terrible things to say like a bunch of get to know you boring interview questions. So if you can solve those two things in your game, you're going to be way ahead of most guys. Therefore, try this exercise, learn it, do it, implement it. It's going to make your game a lot better. So that's it for this particular show. But I do still answer questions on these. So if you do want your question asked, if you'd like to hear your particular concept or idea or sticking point addressed on a future show, send over your question to [email protected]. That's Todd with two Ds in both cases. I do prefer audio questions, ideally a minute or less, but I will take questions in whatever form as long as they're good. So if it's written audio, I'll take good questions in whatever form. But again, audio is definitely preferred. Send them over to us if you want your question answered. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, I am doing coaching in some pretty cool cities over the next few months. If you're interested in that, go to Toddvdating.com/coaching and hopefully I'll see you on one of those programs as well. Take care, see you next time.