The last 5 and a half weeks Part 3-The Gold Coast

I hope everyone reading today had a great Christmas!

Anyhow, I'm very fascinated by the response my posts are prompting in the comments. I would clarify a few things. First of all obviously not all Australians are racist, unfriendly and rude. Just the majority of them I have met in bars, clubs, and on the street. This includes both men and women. Most conversations I had with strangers included them using racial remarks or slurs. Super consistently. In fact most people I brought this up to, agreed with me wholeheartedly. I'm not using this as some reason the US or another country is better, I'm simply stating my experience with a country. I more than anyone realize the US has problems and I'm not here to get into arguments about who has a better country or who's more evil. I'm just relating my experiences as they happened...

Ok so now that we have the legal disclaimer out of the way, we can get back to the trip. We weren't flying straight from Cairns to the airport, the plan was to fly to Brisbane and rent a car there to drive the 90 minutes to The Gold Coast. Specifically Surfer's Paradise. Now unfortunately when we arrived there was a big storm that had just hit Brisbane. In fact we were warned that if we rented a car today, we may have to pay for hail damage... SO we decided to take a bus instead.

The bus ride was kind of annoying because Moxie and I were having a rather "blue" discussion as we're apt to have over 2 hours through really bad traffic. Now we weren't being loud or obnoxious but this couple kept gasping and looking back frequently. They also made comments to the woman sitting in front of me. This really annoyed me, but I realized there wasn't much I could do but ignore it or make it much much much more socially awkward for the remainder of a long trip.

Finally we arrived at Sweater's house. Sweater is not what you expect from the description in The Game. He looks much younger and full of life, and he dresses really well know. Overall he's one of the most positive genuine people I've met through this whole scene. That night we decided to go to dinner at a place called Melba's. Here's where I noticed something weird. there were a TON of high school age looking punk kids walking around. For some reason I've developed a 45 year old's distaste for high school kids. I feel like channeling my inner Al Bundy everytime I see a group of high schoolers :) Turns out I'd stumbled into something called "schoolies."

Now for those of you who are unfamiliar with Schoolies, allow me to introduce it. Schoolies is a celebration for all the kids graduating from high school. It stretches for weeks as the newly turned 18 year olds are let loose over the whole city. Kinda like a plague. Or an infestation. It also doubles as a chance for every lame guy over 25 to come down to the gold coast to try to bang an 18 year old. These guys are affectionately referred to as "toolies". I had unknowingly become a toolie... Now personally I believe that NO ONE is datable before 25. Myself included :) You're just no emotionally settled enough to be in a solid relationship. Plus the urge to get out there and see what else is around is too strong. So hitting on 18 year olds, not really my thang. But it sounded cool in theory so we did end up out on Schoolies more nights than I'd have liked. But not every night as we had to start an intensive 8 day marketing bootcamp

That started the day after we got to Surfers. At 8 AM. I thought they had gotten rid of 8 A.M when I left college. Apparently it's still a really real hour of the day and one that comes way too quickly if you were out the night before. This led to me being a combination of my three least favorite states. Hungry, Tired, and Cold. The seminar room was freezing and I had to go out and have a sandwich and a cigarette to get back to neutral. It also didn't help that we were 2 minutes late the first day and there was a sign that said "no one comes in or out until our first break at 10:10." So we stayed away for the first 2 hours.

The seminar had a lot of interesting information, but ultimately was more for business consulting than actual business building. But I got a few ideas for systematizing some of the day to day work I have around here now.

We actually went out and had to practice cold calling and walking in to businesses to try to sell them consulting. That was nerve wracking. It's way harder to approach a business, get through the secretaries, and workers to a business owner, and then convince them to set up an appointment than it is to pick up a girl. Way more stressful, way less comfortable. For me at least... I would rather do 10 thousand more approaches in ridiculous low probability situations than have to get out the phone book and call more businesses. I just really don't enjoy selling or see myself as a salesperson. I'm more of a creative person, or at least I like to think I am :) But I still did the cold calls and walk ins and did allright. I figured the best way to do walk ins was to seem like an interested customer and then topsy turvy those motherfuckers. Act like you weren't trying to sell them as opposed to walking in and asking for a business owner.

It's interesting that in door to door selling like this, it starts off indirect and then becomes very direct at the closing time. Whereas if you're very direct off the bat you get a lot of rejection upfront(especially when you ask for a business owner and the store has a no soliciting sign) but if you get through and they're interested it's easier to make appointments. Anyway back to the direct versus indirect thought. In pickup the idea of indirect versus direct is simply semantics. It's not that you have to be indirect to start a conversation easier. It's that you have to establish social comfort first. The underlying meaning behind indirect openers is that you are fun and social. But what's actually happening is that by having a 30-45 second conversation about a box or whether or not drunk I love Yous count, you establish social comfort. The person or group of people have become comfortable talking to you because they have done it for a long enough period without you weirding them out that they're willing to listen more to you. This doesn't happen when most guys approach, because most guys will open with something like "What's Up?" and instantly force the girl to carry the conversation, which is way too much work for a girl to do right away for a guy she's not attracted to. Social Comfort is the first of 3 types of comfort that are happening all throughout the interaction. The other two types of comfort are rapport and sexual. Rapport based comfort is what is genuinely accepted as comfort in the community and includes commonalities, dates and phone game, intimacy(in to me I see :) vulnerability, conspriacy, "we like each other" vibe, comfortable touching, and much much more. Sexual comfort is comfort with physicality, and sexual esalations in general. I'll post much more about all this soon enough. AFC Adam was a huge help with all of this stuff and was the first to point out starting in comfort to me.

Anyway there were two notable nights in the Gold Coast, the first happened at a club called twenty one where I talked myself in for free because of my shark tattoo. One of the most annoyin things about this trip were the multiple bars and clubs that would not allow me in because of my "visible tattoo. I actually had to wear long sleeves. I rolled them up once and a bouncer warned me that Iw ould be kicked out if I did that again... But I digress... So we were at Twenty One on Moxie's birthday when Moxie opened a 4 set of two guys and two smoking hot girls. I started talking to one of them while ignoring the extremely LARGE police inspector who had been hitting on her for hours. She was really into me right away, which I attribute to having cooler clothes than everyone else in there and not being afraid of her because she's hot. So we were talking and then I noticed she had huge x scars on both of her wrists. She had obviously tried to kill herself at some point. So I brought it up. As someone who's tried to kill themselves I pretty much always bring stuff like this up when I see it. Just because I understand the headspace. We talked about both of our suicide attempts and we were about to kiss when...Her friend passed out drunk. They both said they took pills, but her friend was out. We tried giving her water the works, nada. My girl was freaking out and trying to figure out where to take her and how to get her there. The passed out girl finally wakes up and now wants to dance, but my girl has already called their friend to come pick her up. Now an interesting side note about Surfer's Paradise: Places are open until 5 but you can't come in or even back in after 3. They call it lockout. By this point Moxie had bounced leaving me with the fucked up girl, my girl who is near hysterics and two dudes. Plus now it's 2:45 so I have a choice to make. Try to bang my girl after the friend gets picked up or go find new girls with Moxie before lockout. I realized I'd probably end up locked out with those two dudes and my girl and have to deal with a really awkward situation, so I bailed. I don't regret it, much...

The second notable night happened when we met one of the coolest guys ever. He's a friend of Sweater's, and one of the best guys I;ve seen with women. He's mostly into strippers and waitresses, but the night after we all hung out he pulled some girl into the bathroom of a club using some of my stuff. He ended up getting kicked out cause he took her to the women's room instead of the men's. Anyway he came out for Moxie's real birthday celebration and brought two smoking hot Swedish waitresses. He's so cool, but I couldn't figure out what he was doing, besides being fun. He makes a ton of game related mistakes yet gets better results than almost anyone else I've ever seen. I think he's real proof that fun is the ultimate attraction switch. Fun being a high form of positive emotional stimulation. As long as the girls are experiencing good emotions they stay. This guy's the Greek King of good emotions.

So that's all the fun stuff from the Gold Coast there's probably a bit more that happened including Moxie and I eating ourselves to death in Souvlaki but we'll leave that till next time. Where we'll pick up back in Sydney.

S