Operation Pickup
Believe it or not, this man has the power to seduce almost any woman he wants. Hugo Rifkind became his pupil, and put the secrets of the underground cult of the pick-up artist to the test

I must begin this article, I feel, by apologizing to every woman I have met over the past 48 hours. You, half of that couple in the Soho Hotel. You, that drunk, sobbing girl in the Sanderson lounge. You, those three model-esque waifs by that pillar in Soho’s Player bar and you, that bright-eyed young blonde in the VIP room of Mayfair’s Funky Buddha. You especially, actually. You quite liked me, I could tell. I do not have a best friend with a jealous girlfriend. I do not have another friend with two new dogs, both of which he is keen to name after Eighties pop stars. At no point, in all honesty, did I ever need a female opinion on anything. They were pick-up lines, every one. I’d just been taught them. And I didn’t even want to pick you up. Actually, I live with my girlfriend. But it almost worked, didn’t it? You will learn, Neil Strauss told me, to engineer every part of an interaction. You will open, you will demonstrate value. You will isolate your target from her group. You will make an emotional connection, you will make a physical connection. You will do this. Reader, I did not. Not quite. As both a responsible journalist and the faithful boyfriend of somebody already distinctly unamused, I was eager not to compromise myself in researching a story. Although I could have done. It was astonishing. I really could.

Although he would now describe himself as retired, Neil Strauss remains one of the greatest pick-up artists in the world. You know the Tom Cruise character in the movie Magnolia, who teaches hopeless men how to seduce women? Strauss was one of those. He has devised and taught techniques and routines that he believes will enable any guy to pick up women. He once sat and listened while one of his students used the exact words and phrases he had taught to make a date with Paris Hilton. I meet Strauss in the Soho Hotel in London. He’s American and in his thirties and looks, as one rival pointed out, like the butt of Bugs Bunny’s japery, Elmer Fudd. I am a small guy and funny-looking, he admits. Although short, he wears chunky platform trainers that push him up to around 6ft. I’d imagine that women often assume he is gay. But not for very long. There are four of us here me and two eager seduction students. Both have heard of Strauss before. Or rather, they’ve heard of Style, the pseudonym that he uses online. Every pick-up artist in the world has heard of Style. Within their strange, slightly terrifying community, he is a superstar. Two years ago, Strauss was living with a group of pick-up artists (or PUAs) in a luxury villa in Los Angeles, dubbed Planet Hollywood. The house was the physical hub of a vast PUA network that exists online, swapping tips and techniques for seducing women. PUAs call this the community. Within the community, Style and his housemates Mystery, Tyler Durden, Papa and others became something approaching legends. A steady stream of international visitors passed through, paying huge sums to learn their secrets. People would sleep on floors, and in cupboards, just to be able to stay, and learn. Then the housemates started to fall out. Eventually, Style left. Now, a year on, he has written a stunningly explicit book, exposing everything he learnt, everybody he met while learning it, and everything he thought about them. That’s why he is here. Within the community, he concedes, lots of people are going to be very, very upset. We will call my fellow students Energy and Puma, because, as you may have gathered, this is the kind of name that a pick-up artist has. I toy with being Ace, but it doesn’t catch on. Energy is 26 and from South Africa. He works in IT. A while ago, he says, he used to be fat. Puma is 35. He also works with computers. He’s tall, and a little bit gangly. He’s more comfortable in his skin than Energy, but no obvious Lothario. By the end of two nights, both will have flirted with scores of women, and extracted phone numbers from a handful. Puma will have kissed two. Without wishing to be too rude about either of them, these aren’t the kind of guys who would normally be in that situation. We will be making the transition, says Strauss, to PUA from AFC (Average Frustrated Chump). Jargon, we quickly learn, is very important to PUAs. Picking up girls is known as sarging, for reasons far too insidery and odd to divulge. You start a conversation by opening, you finish it by closing. A group of people is a set, in that two girls will be a two-set and two girls and a guy a mixed three-set. We learn of Anti-Slut Defences (ASDs), Indicators of Interest (IOIs) and Cat/String Theory. This is seduction by equation, the point being that no situation is entirely unique, and any situation can be dealt with. It’s not exactly romance. On night one, we concentrate on opening. Strauss teaches us two opening routines the Jealous Girlfriend Routine and the Eighties Dogs Routine. It turns out that Energy, although he has never met Strauss before, already knows the JGR. He learnt it from the internet. So. My first opening. Trembling like the AFC I am, I circle the Soho Hotel lounge, and approach a two-set, a pair of brunettes by the bar. I take one step past them, and turn, as though on a whim. I am supposed to say the following: I have to get back to my friends in just a moment, but I need a female opinion on something. My friend just started going out with a new girl, but he’s still in touch with his ex. Do you guys think that’s ok? In fact, I say this: Please excuse me. Very sorry to bother you, but do you have a moment? My friend has a girlfriend. And, um, she doesn’t like the last girl that he went out with. And what do you… I mean… is that… I get it out eventually, while the girls stare at me like I’m some sort of stammering sex pest. Back at the table, Strauss tells me where I went wrong. I missed the time constraint at the beginning (I have to get back to my friends), which would have relaxed them and removed their fear that I’d be plaguing them all night. Then I asked for their attention, rather than simply announcing that I needed it. Plus, I got all the words wrong. I’ve seen worse, he says.

Five or six girls and a bar later, I’m starting to get the hang of it. If you have your eye on a particular girl in a set, PUA wisdom states that you should ignore her at the expense of her friends. This should make her feel left out, and start to clamour for your attention.
After a while, slightly surprisingly, we are joined in our sarging quest by Daniel Ryan, the guitarist from rock group The Thrills. In his other life, Neil Strauss is a rock journalist, writing for Rolling Stone and The New York Times. He claims to have used PUA techniques in an interview with Britney Spears. He quit the PUA life when he met his current girlfriend, Lisa Leveridge, who plays guitar for Courtney Love. They’ve just moved in together, in LA. Ryan last saw Strauss on a night out in LA, along with Strauss’s own guru, a legendary PUA called Mystery. That was just astonishing, he reminds him. Mystery had that girl in the toilets in like, five minutes. And her boyfriend was still at the bar.
There are advanced techniques, I’m told, for dealing with rivals, boyfriends and even husbands the Alpha Male of the Group, or AMOG. AMOGing is entirely negative, designed to usurp a rival male by goading him into deferring to your superiority. Hard slaps on the back are a favourite trick. Strauss himself created Stylemogging, a more subtle technique in which one uses barbed compliments to establish oneself as the supreme arbitrator of whatever is under discussion. You’ve got better at that, a bit, is apparently a classic Stylemogging comment. At this level, it all starts to get a little scary.


Mystery is the inventor of a concept called the neg. One negs a girl by showing her active disinterest basically by being a little rude. Ridicule her, very slightly, in front of her friends. The best negs happen in response to IOIs (see above). If somebody asks you your name or your job, simply tell them they are being nosy and move on. I try my first neg on the very drunk blonde friend of an equally drunk Irish girl from whom Puma is extracting a phone number by the Sanderson Hotel bar. I forget exactly what I say, but it makes her start crying. About her ex-boyfriend. I think your negs are a little strong, says Strauss. Also, avoid drunks.
Mystery also invented a concept called peacocking. To peacock, a sarger must essentially dress like a rock star, in the most outlandishly confident manner that he possibly can. For night two, I decide to wear jeans, a leather jacket, a white dress-shirt and a thin black tie. Certainly, I feel my confidence growing. Although I feel like a bit of a tit on the Tube.

Night two gets off to a good start. Strauss makes us each open a few times to get our confidence up, and then we move on to more advanced techniques. We learn how to demonstrate higher value, to show that we are not just oddly dressed freaks with interesting dilemmas, but fascinating people with a wealth of interesting chat. There’s the Best Friends Test, in which you quiz girls about their brand of shampoo. There’s the Numbers Quiz, in which you pretend, in an isn’t-this-nuts kind of way, to read a girl’s mind. And to top them all, there’s The Cube, a psychological game in which you ask a girl a bunch of weird questions about objects sitting in the desert, and then describe her own personality back to her.

Midway through all of this, we are joined by a British PUA called Magnus, who has heard that Strauss is in town. Do you use The Cube? Strauss asks him. All the f***ing time, says Magnus, gravely. Magnus has four girls on the go in different parts of the world. He looks like a frog.

By the end of The Cube, your target should be enthralled. Never hit on a woman, says Strauss, until she is attracted to you. By now, she should be. In order to move things along, and go kino (get physical) we learn something called the Evolution Phase Shift. It’s a long, convoluted routine, progressing from hair-pulling, to touching, to biting, and ultimately to kissing. Normally, I’d never believe it would work. After meeting Magnus, though, I’ll believe anything.

After a little more practise, my game is improving dramatically. I can open with fluency, and there’s an injection of confidence which comes from knowing exactly what you are going to say next. And my negs are improving. Nobody cries. When one girl asks me what I do for a living, I tell her I scavenge in dustbins. Strauss approves. Ultimately though, we students only know two openings. There’s a limited amount of time we can spend in any one bar.

We end up in Mayfair’s Funky Buddha. Strauss has briefed us to look at nobody as we enter the bar. Beautiful women of which there are many must be utterly ignored. We must concentrate only on each other, so as to give the impression that we are the most fascinating, intriguing party in the whole nightclub. We do. People stare. It seems to be working.

After a decent interval, Energy approaches two rather stunning girls in a booth. One is a brunette in a fur coat who looks like Posh Spice. The other is a pretty, smiling blonde. Confronted with such women, 48 hours ago, Energy would probably have vomited. Nobody could possibly guess this now.

A few moments later, I follow him over, to act as his wingman. As instructed, I force myself to smile and chuckle, as though we’ve just been enjoying a shared joke. Are you talking about the... I say. This is the agreed, all purpose wingman opening. Yes, agrees Energy, and I gather he’s doing the Jealous Girlfriend. I join in. His opening has become a mixed four-set, and we are part of it. I follow up with the Best Friends Test, and then Energy does a Numbers Quiz, and then we shift our seating around (isolation) to each give our targets The Cube. I’m with the blonde. I smile a lot. I look at her eyes. I never lean towards her, which forces her to lean towards me, to catch what I am saying. By the time I’ve finished, she is quite honestly looking at me like I’m the most fascinating person she’s ever met. As a human being and, perhaps more crucially, as somebody with a girlfriend, I feel like absolute scum.

I’m certainly not going to go kino, but I don’t have any more routine. I make some excuse, and leg it to the bar. Which probably comes across as a neg. This is all so easy, it’s terrifying. Later I spot her again and attempt, in a guilt-ridden way, to have a normal conversation. I think she’s slightly puzzled as to why I’m no longer as interesting as I once was.

There are, as Strauss is keen to stress in his book, two sides to all of this. On the one hand, a guy any guy really can learn to pick up women, and can do so far more effectively than the naturals of whom they may have grown up in awe. On the other, they risk losing their soul. I must have spoken to 30 women over those two nights, and I couldn’t even tell you any of their names. The routines I was taught didn’t give me any opportunity to ask.

On top of that, some PUAs can seem downright sinister. Having begun learning pick-up lines in their late teens, they seem only able to relate to women as conquests, and men as rivals. At the end of that night, Strauss and I take a walk to Leicester Square. For PUAs across the world, Leicester Square has near legendary status as the best place in the world to pick up women. We meet, not entirely by chance, a group of early twentysomething men on a boot-camp (workshop) with a renowned American PUA who calls himself Tyler Durden, after the Brad Pitt character in Fight Club. He, like Mystery and Strauss, once lived in the Project Hollywood house.

Tyler Durden (according to Strauss and several hundred websites) is one of the most polished PUAs in the world, with routines for every occasion. No woman, allegedly, can resist him. Yet in Leicester Square, I watch him ridicule a homeless female beggar with such misjudged excessiveness that, mid-interview, I feel compelled to turn my back on him and empty my wallet into her hands. Magnus, likewise, occasionally comes out with comments of such startling crassness that my mouth hangs agape. These guys are awkward geeks who have learnt how to be arrogant Casanovas. Outside their routines, they are now arrogant geeks. Not a nice mix. Perhaps these guys could pick up any woman in the world, and perhaps they could show me how to do the same, but this still isn’t a world in which I feel comfortable. And not just because of my girlfriend.
Don’t worry, man, says Strauss, at one point. You behaved yourself. When I meet your girlfriend, I’ll tell her that. You are never, ever meeting my girlfriend, I tell him.