---
title: Episode 125 Fractionation (On-Off of Game)
episode_number: 125
era: mid
source_file: Episode 125 Fractionation (On-Off of Game).mp3
audio_size_mb: 54.8
duration_sec: 1795.2
duration_min: 29.9
language: en
provider: deepgram
model: nova-3
diarized: true
confidence: 0.998
transcribed_at: 2026-05-27T16:57:36Z---

# Episode 125 Fractionation (On-Off of Game)

**Speaker 0:** Thomas Torero podcast, a 125 on fractionation from Russia. I'm still in Russia. I'm still editing this beast of a documentary, the daygame documentary that I filmed this summer when I went around the world with Craig. We filmed guys in London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Singapore and Germany. In field, we interviewed them. So that's what I'm putting together, trying to do the first cut of that. And then it'll be polished, not polishing a turd, but polishing something glorious, something groundbreaking, hopefully. And that will then be finalized and shown in a London cinema, I hope towards the end of November, early December. But I'll keep you up to date with that in future podcasts if you want to come along to the world premiere. If you don't wanna or if you can't make it to the London screening, after that it will go online. What else have I been doing? Well, that daygame, dating, blue balls, sleeping, eating. And this morning I put out or yesterday rather a short article on my blog about where PUAs go to die. So what happens to pickup coaches? Why do they drop out? Why do they disappear? I had an interesting email about that a week or so ago. So that article is on my blog. And this week, I put up a YouTube video on under reacting, which is related to today, creating this vacuum where you get her to chase. It's all about frame control and dynamics. Remember the golden rule of frame in any interaction, the person reacting less holds all the power, holds the frame. And that's half of today's podcast, really, looking at that from a different angle. And this podcast is long overdue, about two, three years overdue because it was only when I was thinking about making that video and under reacting that I started to think about have I made a podcast on fractionation, this central topic, this theme that I hold so dear to understanding pickup, understanding the essence of game. If you boil game down, what does it come down to? Something that I focused on, something that I made a whole video program on back in 2014. It was a lecture series which then went into my textbook Street Hustle, and it was called Badass Buddha on these two seemingly contradictory forces. Always hard to say that early in the morning, contradictory forces. The badass, which is the pull and the Buddha, which is the push. The off and the on, the hot and the cold. Where's the sweet spot? That's what infield experience teaches you with calibration. But when to pull, when to push, that is the question. To pull or to push, that is the question as I say. And this is a balancing act which is at the heart of pickup. It's at the heart of what I still do. It's at the heart of all the dating models that I preach and I suddenly realized, fuck, I haven't made a podcast on it. So let us rectify that today. But I I'm sure, I hope you've heard me bashing on about fractionation or universal fractionation because in all my books, in all my main things that I've put out there, This concept is is at the heart of it as I said. I have said in podcast 90, there was a podcast called The Highest Form of Game. I have said about how to make her chase and that video on under reacting on YouTube, that's about how to make her chase and frame controls about this and qualifications about this. The vacuum is about this and challenging her is about this. But that's only half the equation because today we're talking about this sweet spot of pull and push and creating through pulling and pushing this amazing tension loop, which is extremely powerful in human psychology. It's at the heart of addiction. You could say the metaphor I use in Badass Buddha is that it explains fishing, when to reel in and when to release. You don't want the line to snap but you don't want it to go too loose and the fish to wiggle off and swim away. And it's something that women do to us naturally. Okay. There's not some evil conspiracy. Women are born playing the game and they're fantastic at maintaining just the right amount of tension on the line to keep us interested, to keep us coming back for more. Yep. So I think this is the granddaddy of techniques. And it works in sales, it works with people outside of game. It's it's so key for human psychology and the science of addiction, where you give somebody something nice, then you take it away, then they crave it, then you give it to them, then you take it away, then they crave it. It creates this cycle. It's catnip. Okay? It's what good teachers do. It's what good parents do. It's certainly what good pickup artist do because of this tension loop. It's what filmmakers do. It's what musicians do. In Badass Buddha, I explained it's what bullfighters do, drawing the bull in and then, you know, releasing that tension. Drawing it in a bit more than releasing that tension. Any good movie has this, right, with a scene structure. I'm learning this as I'm organizing the documentary and looking at documentary filmmaking how to get these tension cycles. So how to draw the audience in and then how to release the tension. It can't go on and on and on. Imagine a film, I say in Badass Buddha, that's just pure action sequences, crazy gun fights the whole way through. After five minutes, would be boring because, yeah, you create tension and then you just kept going to ridiculous proportions. But the opposite of that is imagine a film where every scene is just quiet shots of landscapes, no tension at all. It's calming but after five minutes, it's also boring. So a great psychological horror film, think of Hitchcock, knows about tension loops. A great TV series knows about cliffhangers. A great song, if you're looking at the science of music and how that interacts with our brain, also creates micro attention loops and we crave the bridge and we crave the chorus and we create crave familiarity. It goes on and on. It's a bit like Fibonacci sequence. You can see it in food, Right? Think of fast food, think of Maccod's, McDonald's where you get the sugar high and then a big sugar low creates a craving, creates an addiction, you want it more. The cycle is created and continues. Basically, anything that keeps you coming back for more with emotional highs and emotional lows. Okay. The alcoholic or the gym rat or the pickup artist, they know this all too well. And it works, as I said, spectacularly well on women. This is why drama works. Okay? This is why women love TV series, chick flicks, rom coms, this kind of romantic fiction with all these tension loops in it. Women love dramatic relationships. What a lot of guys don't realize when they're trying to stop women's drama is that women love it. It's it's a good sign. Women are testing your frame and then you're winning it and then they're testing it again and you're winning it. Sure, you don't want a girl, you don't want a relationship. I don't want a relationship. But if you were to have a relationship, you don't want a girl that's high drama. But in any relationship, I always say, a quiet relationship where nothing happens, that's a danger signal. Okay? Because naturally girls do this and they crave drama. This is why or part of the reason why they love the bad boys because the bad boys draw them in and push them away. Draw them in, pushing them away. It's that, cat string theory. It goes right back to mystery bait, hook, reel, release. That was in the Mystery Method. And his analogy, like my fishing line analogy is the cat string, where if you just give a cat a ball of wool, it looks at it and gets bored. Whereas if you chuck a ball of wool at it and then wiggle it around a bit, pull it away from the cat, the cat will dive on it and you pull it away a bit more, the cat goes crazy. Works with dogs as well. The cat will keep being interested if you have a pull and then a release and then a pull and then a release. And this is what works in game on every level. So I took the term fractionation. And in Badass Buddha, I came up with the term universal fractionation because very early on I realized this applies from a micro level such as a cocky funny line to a macro level such as pimps and long term relationships. Okay? Remember, girls are doing it too. Girls are pulling you in and releasing. This is why girls are so addictive and why texting is so frustrating and why blue balls is really fucking frustrating. Right? I'm experiencing it a lot here in Russia. But anyway, let's go from micro to macro. I will try to explain some of the concepts and some new concepts from Badass Buddha many many years ago. But let's start with the micro on the line level. Okay? So if you're a fan like me of lines and structures and routines, you'll recognize cocky funny and teasing lines and flirtatious lines. I've got that little cheap PDF, that little Kindle book, how to flirt with girls. And at the heart of the book, at the heart of each line is this principle of pull and then push or push and then pull. Just because it's called push pull, that's the game technique. It's often pull push as I talk about in the book. So an example of that would be to say to a girl, you're cute, but don't get a big head. Right? So you're pulling her in, you're cute, and then you're pushing away with a grin, but don't get a big head. Or push pull. So often, you know, you stop the girl and you say, wow, you know, it's great. You look like a giraffe. I like it. So you look like a giraffe is a bit of a is a bit of an old school neg. It's a push and then I like it. My buffer phrase, that's the pull. An old classic game line, you say to the girl, you're either the coolest girl I've ever met or a total weirdo. Remember to smile when you're saying it. So it's a pull. You're either the coolest girl I've ever met, that's the pull in and then the push away or either a total weirdo. And attraction is created in the playful push. This is why we say break rapport, tease and challenge. Because if you just said to the girl, you're so cool, you're so cute, you're so amazing, you're so wonderful, I love you, let's get married, It's sickening. So with direct cold approach pickup, sure you stop her, hey, I think you look really nice. And then you have to push, you look like a super cool giraffe. I love it. So often I'm pull and I push and I pull and I push in five seconds on a line level and the girl giggles and she flicks her hair and she goes red. Attraction is created in the playful push. But you can't just push, of course, you have to be normal, you have to ground it, you have to use the buffer phrases if you're going too far, I like it. It's cool. You're sexy. Yep. You're pulling her in. So on a physical level, even on the street, you'll notice that you're jumping in front of her. That's that's a pull in. That's very, I like you. But then you're looking away, you're leaning back, you're doing the old school what they used to call body rocking. So like when you approach a girl in the bar for Mystery Method, you're at a slight angle, you or you're leaning back. So it looks like to everyone else in the room, she's the person who's approached you. You are coming into a space, so I might do tiger eyes, then I go back. So you notice I'm not static on the street even though the two d alphas think you need to look like a rock. You need to be fluid. You need to look like you can take it or leave it, precisely push pull. That I might leave at any moment. Oh, look, there are my friends over there. Oh, look, I don't really care. Oh, look, there's a bird. Often I just point out random things. Oh, look over there. There's a pigeon with one leg, whatever. Pull and then push on a physical level. And the daygame set, it follows hot and cold, pull and push. So you do first of all attraction, which is the compliment and the stacking and the fun vibing. And then she hooks and you do a little bit of calmness, like in a cinema, like in the bridge section of a tune, even a Pumping House tune. It has to what's it called? The come down. It has to go back down before it goes back up again. As my grandmother used to say, what goes up, Thomas must come down. What goes in, must come out. I never knew what she meant. Yeah. So attraction, then comfort, calm, just grounding, talking normally, little cheeky eye date and then back up with some seduction. And with the verbal and the physical escalation, it's not just on on on on pull pull pull pull pull, it's pull and then calm and then pull and then calm and then pull and then calm. That's how we're racking it up with verbal and physical escalation. Yeah. Anyway, let's not jump ahead. Let's go back to the texting level. This is something guys forget and as I said recently, I'm gonna make a daygame dynamo texting video because even though I've made a basic texting video, guys are weak at this area of their game. Basically, main mistake of texting for guys is that they're too fucking keen. It's all pull. Right? Hey, when are you free? Let's go out. She says no. So they say, are you free Saturday? She says no. Okay. Are you free Sunday? No. Can I see you next week? Hey, why didn't you reply? Did you get my message? They're needy. Neediness is the worst turn off. It's the number one attraction killer. Where does neediness come from? We shall come back to this. But neediness comes from scarcity. Right? You haven't got enough leads. You're not doing enough daygame. You are freaking out about any one girl. So what I do is the ping. I do, you know, a little spike over text and then I go silent. We call that the vacuum. We call it ghosting. I'm doing it right now with a few girls that have been playing me around in Russia. All I can do is ghost, which means go quiet, forty eight hour roll off. So a couple of days of silence, Let the girl start filling in the blanks. That's the most powerful thing. The female mind, she will do it herself. Let her imagine I've fallen down a hole or run away or gotten married or left the country, whatever. Be mysterious. And then a little ping, spike it up again, then roll off. Of course, you don't wanna do this forever. The aim of texting is to get her out. But if she's flaked or if she's playing silly buggers, if she's only writing one line, you write half a line. If she's writing four lines, you write three lines. If she's taking two hours to respond, you take three hours to respond. Yeah? It's that rule of thirds. So texting level, create that gap where she can jump in. Be less interested than she is. I know you have to fake it because I know you wanna get her out. That's the whole point of this being a game. Okay? I wish women were just like men and you could say, hey, wanna fuck? And she says, yeah. Okay. And you send her a dick pic, she sends you a naked pic, she comes over and you fuck. That's why the gay guys have the advantage because it's two male brains. Alright? So the guy's like, hey, wanna fuck? And the other guy's like, yeah, okay. Imagine the notch count of gay men in New York and London. How easy it is. But women are not like that. That's why it's called the game. That's why we're not just looking for yes girls. Anyway, I digress. On the date level, I've already said, look at my date model, 12 step dating model. I talk about fractionation, hot and cold. I color it red and blue. I talking about I talk about spiking it up and then rolling off. Okay? And you shouldn't just be doing attraction attraction attraction on the date. You should be doing hardly any attraction at all. You should be doing comfort and seduction. Comfort and seduction. Second venue, quieten down, vacuum, lean back, let her lean into you. Just do touching. You hold her hand, you see if she squeezes your hand. Okay? On and then off. You lean in for a drive by kiss, but you don't kiss her. You see if she holds the distance. Could you kiss her? Does she kiss you? That's all universal fractionation. Okay? You're listening to her, you're looking in her eyes and then you're looking away. You're leaning in to make a point with your tiger eyes and then you're leaning back, you're getting distracted. Do you have to answer every question a girl asks you? No. Okay. You're you're on, you're in the room and then you're off. You see miles away, you're this international man of mystery. You don't give her direct answers. It's not always cocky funny, but when she asks you a question, you don't always give her the answer that she wants. You don't even sometimes acknowledge that you've heard the question. You just cut the thread. That's very powerful. Snip and stack Mystery used to call that. On the bedroom level, you'll know this. When she's back at yours, you do not just go a 100 miles an hour jump on her because you know LMR is gonna or token LMR is gonna rear its head. You know about ASD, so you roll off, then you're on, then you're off, two steps forward, one step back. It's all calibrated. It's all smooth. When you're having sex, right, go super hard to just smash her that she's loving it and then you stop, then you might be a bit tender, then you tease her, then you maybe do a bit more cuddling, then it's slow, then it's super dominant. You vary the sex. Sometimes it's on the floor, it's on the bed, it's on the table, it's in the kitchen, it's fast, it's slow, it's in and out, it's out, quite literally. You fractionate it up, otherwise it gets boring. You can't just do cuddling and you can't just do smashing. Right? And even when she's in your mini harem, that's the fuck buddy level, you gotta keep her in the tension loop. So sometimes you send her three messages in a day, sometimes you don't text her for two days. You might disappear for two weeks, then you come back. You fuck her well and then you don't message her. So you again, you leave her filling in the blanks thinking, oh, what's happened? I wonder what he's doing. What's he doing now? You don't tell her everything. You don't rub her nose in it as they say about all the other girls. It's implied. She knows that and letting her think that, that's the key for, non disclosure. Women love this imagination. It's the hamster wheel principle. Yeah. Let it spin. Don't fill in all the details. She's not a bloke. This is the heart of drama. Okay? So the whole podcast comes down to fishing. As I said. Calibration is just the meaning of knowing when you're badass, which is the pull and knowing when to be Buddha, which is the push. And I know they say this frustrating thing in game, just have freedom from outcome, man. They specifically say that in RSD. Just have freedom from outcome. Well, as I said in Badass Buddha, first you have to be badass because nice guys, have too much freedom from outcome. They're not approaching. They pretend they don't care about girls. They're into self help and fitness. I say no. Care about collecting phone numbers and going on dates and make outs and, getting the lays. Keep statistics. Do fast escalation. Do gutter game. Do same day lays. Get faster. Learn how to pull. Your problem as a nice guy is you're not pulling. So learn how to be a badass. And then after a while, after a couple of years, you'll get this problem where you're pulling too much. That's been the story of most of 2017 for me, pulling too much. So I have to then think, okay, Tom, freedom from outcome, roll off. You're the Buddha. You've got abundance. You've had abundance. Go traveling, just enjoy non game things. It doesn't really matter. Don't worry about the notch count. Don't worry about this. Because last year when I was making the product, stealth seduction, it was really intent, you know, pull pull pull pull pull. Get it done. And this year, I've had to remember, I'm not making a product anymore. Okay. You're meant to enjoy it. I know the tension loop is at the heart of it, but you're not to get so tense where it's stressful. So release, then you have freedom from outcome. Can you ever have freedom from outcome as a an Olympic athlete, as a sprinter, as a competitive sportsman? No. Because you wanna win. You want to be the best, you want to improve even just for yourself if it's not a team sport. You want to break a record, you want to do this, you want to do that. So that's completely the opposite of freedom from outcome. But I know what they're saying. Game, Tyler says from RSD, philosophical Tyler, he quite rightly boils game down to game is intent plus freedom from outcome. So he's saying it's to find the balance between pulling and pushing. Mystery described it, in a similar fashion. He said it's the balance between the flame and the ghost. So the flame is the hot fire. It's the intent. And the ghost is this ephemeral, whimsical, disappearing, vaporous thing, which is the freedom from outcome. And I say it's the badass, which is the pull pull pull and it's the Buddha, which is the push push push. So the frustrating thing I know of game is being on the street, holding your phone, when you're texting or being on the date or even being in the bedroom when she's on your bed like a girl was yesterday. And I was literally thinking, should I pull or should I push? Should I escalate more or should I back off? Which one is the right thing to do? Because remember in different circumstances, for one girl in one situation, might be time to pull and you might lose her because you didn't pull. For another girl in a similar situation, different girl, you're thinking, okay, I'm gonna push but in that situation that was the wrong thing to do. So it's very frustrating and it's it's not cookie cutter, it's not the same for all things. But let's come back to this principle of neediness which is really over pulling, over investing on the man's part because if, as I said in that recent video, we want to get her to invest, that means we really want to make her the needy one, we want to make her chase and that's why all the techniques of challenging and vacuuming, the forty eight hour roll off, the ghosting, that's to trigger her chase. Okay? And I know ultimately we are the ones chasing, that's why we say chasing tail, going out on the pull because we actually want her. But we have to give her the impression like a good salesman in a car showroom that we don't. So we play it cool. We make her seem like there's scarcity. We make her seem like we're drifting off. We make her feel like we care less. So a) she thinks, wow, this guy's got frame and b) she thinks, high value, I want him. And this issue came up on my Tom Torero Facebook page, a guy called David, he left the question a couple of days ago. Tom, what's the underlying psychological reasons for overreacting? He means guys overreacting. And I replied simply, neediness. And David replied, shit. It's the old, you can't get a job without prior experience and you can't get the experience without having a job first, I. Double bind. And then he says, fake it till you make it makes more sense now. So this is the catch 22, if you like, of fractionation, of pulling and pushing badass Buddha intent freedom from outcome. Quite right. With freedom from outcome, don't have it. Specifically with hot gills, if we're a beginner in pickup, you don't have freedom from outcome as I said because you haven't slept with a Victoria's Secret model or a catwalk model or an FHM model. You want to. But as David said, fake it till you make it. You have to seem like you don't want to. So if we go to the blog article which is with that YouTube video called under reacting, I wrote some practical things that you can do for this fake it till you make it to seem like you're the one who's less reactive. You're the one who has the frame. You're the one who doesn't care. Because we should finish every podcast with practical things, this has been quite a meta theoretical podcast if you like. It's important though. I hope you now understand this tension loop, micro to macro. But let's finish practical. I'm going to read out some of the list from this blog post under reacting. I say in any human interaction, one person is reacting more than the other. As I've said, by reacting less than the girl, you're showing you're holding the frame and are thus higher value. Triggering a girl to react and invest more than you can be achieved in many ways. First of all, on the street, you can tease her, which is in the stacking and the vibing. You can challenge her, which is in the stacking and the vibing, specifically in the form of Soviet Union, do more challenging and less teasing. You can stand solid while she's all flittery and giggly and nervous, you can seem like you're in control. You can speak slower than her which subconscious subconsciously shows her that you've done this before, you're not intimidated by beauty, you're holding the frame, she's the one who's got that high pitched voice because she's feminine but she's also doing all that nervous up talk and the ums and the ahs and the cools and the wows, the filler words that I say are banned for you. You overcome her shit tests with non reactivity. Yeah. A little bit of cocky funny, which is teasing and challenging, but you ignore some of her questions or you just brush them aside. She says, do you speak to girls often on the street? And you say, well, when I see something I want, I go for it. Anyway, another thing I noticed about you, non reactive, you just carry on over texts. So where loads of guys fall up and as I said, I'm gonna make a dating dynamo, daygame dynamo video on this. There's so much more to be said about texting, even though I say there is no such thing as texting because if your daygame is good, she's gonna come out. There are guys losing girls through neediness. She was on on the street. She will come out on a date but they just burn it. I've seen this with students on residentials. They burn it because they're over keen. So on text, write less than her, take longer to respond than her, qualify her. I've done a video on qualification. Just watch it on YouTube. Use the word why. Just qualify the girl. Ask her, can you cook? Or ask her, how tall are you? Whatever. Just qualify her. She will jump through your hoop. Ignore some of her questions. Guys think it's an interview where you have to answer every question that she asks you. You don't. Just ignore her thread, snip and stack. And the most powerful one, which I'm doing right now, ghosting. I know it's hard. I know especially if you've had a few beers. It's late in the evening, you're a bit pissed and you suddenly start mass texting all the girls in your phone. Don't. And certainly don't message your ex girlfriend because, yeah, you're you're destroying all the work that you've done. Ghosting is powerful because you create the vacuum. She jumps into the vacuum. And on a date, I've mentioned a lot of the key things. You lean back, slow body movements, like you're underwater, as I say in Street Hustle. Look away occasionally. Point out the music in the bar, interrupt her talking, break the topic. Challenge her in a serious way. Now, not in a funny way, challenge her on something. Say, no. You don't like heavy metal music and this is why. Or you don't like this film directed. Don't challenge her all the time. Don't be a dick, but wait for one big topic I used to say. Let's say she suddenly starts saying how she loves beach holidays. I wait for her to talk about beach holidays and suddenly I say, do you know what? I really don't like hot weather. Beach holidays is my idea of hell. Again, you're getting her to qualify, jump through your hoop, you're showing that you're not a pushover, non needy, holding a frame. Beautiful. Use a false disqualifier, you know, you say, I'm not looking for a girlfriend or you can say, normally I like blonde girls or I make a bad boyfriend, I travel a lot. All those are not actually false. I am disqualifying myself. But you get the idea. You're showing her, look, I'm not needy. I'm not going to kiss your ass. I'm not going to chase you, which makes her chase you. And as I said, overcome her shit tests. Okay. We shall leave it there. I've got to go outside. I've got to do some jobs. I'm gonna do some day game. The sun has come out after a week of wet windy weather. So that was, podcast a 125 on fractionation. Go to my website, tomtorero.com because I've got this week's article, and I've got articles that go with a lot of the videos. And look at stealth seduction. Check out the reviews. Look at street hustle. Check out the reviews, and all my other books are on there. Thank you for listening, ladies and gentlemen boys and girls until next week.