---
title: Episode 184 Daygame Free Solo
episode_number: 184
era: late
source_file: Episode 184 Daygame Free Solo.mp3
audio_size_mb: 56.2
duration_sec: 1841.1
duration_min: 30.7
language: en
provider: deepgram
model: nova-3
diarized: true
confidence: 0.995
transcribed_at: 2026-05-27T17:09:57Z---

# Episode 184 Daygame Free Solo

**Speaker 0:** Hello. From Tom Torero, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. From Mother Russia, is podcast episode 184 called daygame free solo on the joys, on the flow state of solo cold approach daytime pickup. That's what this podcast is about, that's what this channel and my website and everything I do is about. It's been my muse. It's been my compass. It's been my therapy for almost a decade. That's the topic of today. Like I said, I'm in Russia on my way home to The UK to Wales to sort the van out. Lots of things needed to be sorted, are being sorted on the van, the tires, a cracked windscreen, leisure batteries, leaks, cracked vents, all sorts of gubbins needs to be sorted ready for the off. This year's big black sheep bandit adventure, which I shall talk about maybe in the next podcast when I shall be back in Wales. And I'm here in Russia stopping off to try and close some loops that were opened in early February on the mission here and even in January. So it's nice to be back. I was away for a week. There was no podcast last week. I was in Bali, Indonesia. I was on a diving trip in the North, for some rep diving in Taluk and Tamam and some guys said, were you diving on Tinder? Was it muff diving? Well, thank fuck. I wasn't in the grotty part in the South, which is like Phuket, the backpackers, the Aussies, the the Brits who are indeed trawling grotty Tinder, I guess. And God bless you. If that's your thing, Asian girls, Tinder, go for it. Go to Bali but, no. Thank fuck it was a break from daygame. One guy said, oh, you should go meet some Russian birds in Bali. I was like, fuck that. I spent January and February freezing my bollocks off here in Russia doing more than enough daygame pickup. Anyway, like I said, I'm back in Russia. It's cold. The air outside is like a razor blade to the throat. I say in my book Cold Calling, it fucking wakes you up. And most of the filming in January, early February, that was done in shopping centers just because of the camera battery dying in the cold. But now there's actually blue sky and snow has been removed from some of the pavements. I am outside enjoying. As I said, the purest expression of pickup which is solo day game. And in today's podcast, we'll talk about how to do solo day game, why to do solo day game and a lot of the inner game. I know I don't often talk about inner game and mindsets, but once you've got outer game sorted and once you're a pretty competent daygamer and once you've had a wing and once you've gotten over a bit of your approach anxiety and you've taken trips abroad with friends and wings and got pissed and all that good stuff, hopefully, of you out there will understand what I mean by the the inner game, the conquering of your own mind. The opposite of adrenaline, you could say, it's a flow state. A long time ago, I gave a talk maybe 2012, maybe 2013 in London, a very early '21 convention. And my talk was on daygame as a flow state based on the work of Mikhail Csiksentmihaly and how to achieve this zen like flow state. So, no, not chasing adrenaline even though people think that's what it is perhaps being addicted to highs and lows. I've always said I'm I'm chasing this flow state way more than the outcome. If I was just a sex addict, I'd keep a bird or two around and just perpetually smash and never refuse a bang. I enjoy the process. The process of getting ready, putting your boots on, zipping up your jacket, overcoming those voices in your head, learning to balance everything out and the process, however cheesy that sounds, when you get the bang or the bang comes too easy, it's actually a bit of a disappointment, isn't it? So I enjoyed the fishing, as I said in last year's fly fishing video. I enjoyed the fishing more than catching the fish. And solo day game, I often think is like free diving, diving without tanks, learning to control that panic, learning to control that fear, going deeper and deeper and deeper. Yes. You wanna go nice and deep. And if you like, free diving and spear fishing. That would be a very very good analogy to solo cold approach pickup. In that it's, yep, on your own. Yep, no assistance with tanks. Yep. It's Zen like on a physiological level too. You get that, Zen stoic flow where everything melts away. Look up all the studies on flow and peak states and maybe my twenty one convention talk is still online somewhere but right from the beginning I realized I was achieving this from talking to girls which is quite amazing really. When people hear you, you're a pickup artist, they often equate that with you just wanting to smash a lot. I guess the guys just coming back to the grottiness of barley, if you're in barley and you're smashing rather ugly girls off, wherever, whenever. Know I'm stereotyping but this is what a lot of guys do who don't want a cold approach. So let's say you go over there as a good looking Aussie guy and you smash a lot of rather ugly girls from Tinder, that's very popular in Asia. I don't think you'd achieve a flow state. It might be good if you just love smashing but I'm sure that would wear off. What I've been addicted to for the last decade is this feeling of the free dive, of the fishing rather than the catching. Yep. The good analogy would be that I'm not even a fan of eating the fish. So yeah, I like getting a girl back into my bed, smashing her a few times. That's all good, that's all fun, that's all necessary. It's nice to summit the mountain but far more enjoyable process from A to Z, even the planning, even the preparation. So when you take a break from solo day game missions which is very important, you rejuvenate, you replenish, you're still thinking, you've got that nemesis in the back of your mind, one city you wanted to conquer or that one type of girl you wanted to get or that one new daygame location you wanna try, you wanna plant your flag in that country. So the preparation, getting everything ready, turning up and making something happen from nothing. Because you can't even rely on a wing for your state, you can't rely on pipelining, I think they call that when you do some internet or tinder before you arrive. No, it's just you. Your, the shirt on your back, your pair of nice big bollocks, you put on your jacket and out you go and you make something happen. And what a difference that is from, We said in Indonesia, trawling Tinder is like eating last night's pizza that was delivered and now it's gone cold and now you're eating it for breakfast. What a difference. So I encourage you in this podcast, if you haven't tried it already to go solo. I've said before, daygame I believe is a solo sport. It should be done in its purest form. So yep, you could say I am a purist because it encourages all this good stuff, mind control, discipline. And no, being alone is not the same as being lonely. Often a guy will say, well, aren't you lonely, Tom? Always doing day game on your own. No, they're two completely different things and in this podcast when I'm gonna make some analogies with other sports particularly mountain climbing and free solo climbing, I hope it hammers home the point that, that's the whole point indeed being alone. Completely different from being lonely. You can be very lonely with a wing. You can be very lonely with a girlfriend. You can be deeply lonely in a family. Perhaps think of some Christmas has gone past with your extended family when you think I just want to fucking get out of here. And then the opposite of that is doing something, achieving a mission, achieving a goal on your own, not being lonely at all. The sense of achievement, the flow state, the buzz of that completely different to that feeling of loneliness. So I know what you mean by lonely and I have suffered from depression and loneliness and I still do but that's not what I'm talking about today. Anyway, why did I wanna record this podcast on this rather vague esoteric in a game topic? It's because of a documentary film I watched in the cinema last time I was in The UK and now I've rewatched it online. So you can find this. You just need to search a little bit. It's a documentary. It's fucking phenomenal. I knew it was gonna be just because of the subject matter. But the early reviews said this is just breathtaking. This is, you know, you can't really describe how good it is without sounding like a cheesy cliche. It's called free solo. That's the name free solo about a young climber who climbs, without ropes. So free climbing. He also climbs on his own. That's why it's called solo. He's called Alex Honnold. I think that's how you pronounce his name. I believe he's American. He might be Canadian but I think he's American. That's how little I was focusing on his life. I was focusing just on the achievement of this movie, of this documentary. He climbs he's the first person to free solo climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, a 900 meter plus massive granite face with no ropes all alone and he climbs it. He climbs it in a very fast time. If you I think it's three or four hours and, this documentary follows him from living in a van to his amazing frame with this girlfriend. He gets on board and she's trying to cut off his balls and say, it's too risky and it's selfish and you shouldn't do it. And weirdly, she's trying to kill the dream that she was attracted to in the first place because he met this bird at a book signing. He's done other massive free solo climbs. And, yeah, she was turned on obviously by this mammoth climber with an unbelievably big pair of bulls. It puts solo day game, to complete shame. This guy, who we shall talk about today, Alex Honnold. Yeah. He meets this girl and slowly she's got that nesting instinct, you know, taking him to IKEA, trying to get him to buy a fridge, trying to get him to move out of the van. But his frame is fucking awesome in the film because he's got such a focus. He's so absorbed on this nemesis, on this dream of climbing El Capitan. He's been dreaming about it for again over a decade and he achieves it and he's like, look, this comes way before the girl. This comes way before you love. This is what I'm gonna do and if we have to break up, fine. Later on he does actually buy a house with her and I think since doing the free climb, he might have calmed down a little bit. He might even be getting married, having babies, whatever. But that's irrelevant. Let's focus on what he actually did, is the topic of the documentary. So even if you're not into climbing, watch this. Because if you're into daygame and discipline and controlling your mind and all that good stuff, any kind of flow state activity, watch this documentary. If you could watch it in a fucking IMAX cinema, that would be breathtaking because you'll get sweaty palms and I know people watching the early screenings had to leave the cinema because of the vertical shots. The him wriggling up cracks and clinging on just by thumbs. It's fucking unbelievable. It'd be bad enough with ropes. And, of course, it's been climbed. I think El Capitan was first climbed in the late fifties, perhaps early sixties. But by a massive team who were using, pittens and ropes and I think the first summit took something like forty seven days going up and down in that siege kind of expedition way, the very Victorian way of mountain climbing where you, siege the mountain and get up by any means you can. Whereas this stuff, whereas solo day game, I'm trying to keep it about day game, is what in mountaineering you call alpinism. Alpinism, the Alpine style is the purest, fastest type of climbing, it's self sufficient. It can often be solo, it's minimalistic and it's not about these fixed lines and stocked camps. It's about facing the mountain by quote unquote fair means as, the great Reinhold Mesner said. Mesner is another guy you should look up if you're into all this stuff. He climbed Everest in 1980. The first guy to climb Everest solo with no oxygen in this Alpine style. And he did so many more and what all of the 8,000 meter peaks in the Himalayas. He's a beast. He's a fucking monster of a mountaineer. And he was all about this Zen flow state of climbing alone, climbing fast, very stoical if you read his stuff. You can also read a book called Mountains of the Mind by an author called Robert McFarlane and he's talking about why men climb mountains. It's really got nothing to do with the summit or the fact that the mountain is just a slab of rock and ice and it's a lonely hostile place. So why do men do it? And when George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Everest, he said because it's there. Hence mountains of the mind. The struggle is within. And solo daygame, I really really believe that the struggle is within and the conquest is within. So I say in my first book daygame, you're really learning to seduce yourself. You think you're there for the girl, for the pussy, for the hot ass, that's the carrot on the stick. But if you wanna get all in a gamey and metaphysical and zen like, you're seducing yourself, you're conquering yourself and I'm sure if you have tried solo daygame, you'll know what I mean. The battle is a, leaving your house. That's a fucking hard battle because of the the coziness and the comfort of leaving your house. B, then making that first approach because a lot of day gamers when they try solo day game, they walk around for one hour, two hour, four hours. And c, they fail because of those voices in their head, weasels. I've made two videos I think called excuses excuses and you know what I mean. Every guy has a different subset of voices in his head. It might be that you can't find any hot girls or that people are watching or that there's a security guard over there or she's not my type or whatever. There's hundreds but each guy has a subset of voices that keep coming back and every time you see that girl, what's the voice in your head? So one of actionable things you can do from today's podcast is be okay with those voices, listen to those voices and detach yourself from them, observe them, let them come up. It's classic cognitive behavioral therapy used to treat anxiety and depression too. Let them come up and when you come back from your day game session, write them down. You can keep them a secret. You don't need to tell anyone. But it's interesting what the excuses are, what patterns there are, how it relates to past things in your life with girls and next time you're out, next time I go out, I'll be going out to day for solo daygame when a voice does pop into my head and say, oh she's too hot or she's walking too fast. Then I say, well, that's a very familiar voice. It's actually a challenge to override that voice in your head to say that's an interesting voice, thank you very much, fuck it. Approach anyway, prove yourself wrong. So in Russia when you say she looks like a bitch, she's so fucking hot, she's gonna blow me out. You say fuck it, interesting voice, approach, what do you know? She was very pleasant and sweet and you got the number. So little challenges like that, daily challenges is part of the joy of solo daygame. Let's come back to the documentary because I wanna pick out some of the themes from Alex Honnold's climb of El Capitan and how they specifically relate to accusations against solo daygame or daygame in general. First of all, people say that Alex Honnold is very selfish. He's a nut job. He's got a death wish because he's climbing without ropes. So any mistake means death. And whilst that's true, he comes back and he says, well, what about the guy who eats junk food and smokes and drinks all the time and you know settles down and he's lazy, he's a blob, isn't that a death wish? You know, and who are you to to moralize and say that I shouldn't do this, I shouldn't feel completely alive in this thing, I shouldn't have a flow state from this thing. Who are you to say you should actually lead a more miserable life of 90 years old and not die doing the thing you love. So the the thing with his girlfriend or just girl in the beginning of the documentary until she becomes the girlfriend, it's very telling. And girls are doing this subconsciously, I'm not blaming this girl, it's sexual strategy, know, lock this very alpha guy Alex Honnold down, get babies, get a house, make him settle. But you can see how that wouldn't make her happy and obviously it wouldn't make him happy. And he says to it, look, I'm not gonna stop doing the one thing I love and his mother understands that and his friends understand that despite lots of free solo climbers dying. That's the whole point of being a mountaineer and you accept that and it's very liberating and the closer you are to the edge as they say, the more you feel alive. And the way he deals with her is a beautiful metaphor for how you should deal with those kind of accusations against you, you know, you're so selfish, you're so self absorbed. Well, yes. If you wanna achieve greatness, if you wanna be a solo daygamer and get results and go on a mission and achieve something, yeah. I am in that sense very selfish. I am certainly very absorbed. I accept I'm difficult to work with. I've said in other podcasts and in my latest book below the belt. Why I'm difficult to work with and wing with because of this obsession. And yeah, it might be delusions of grandeur. I think you have to have delusions of grandeur. If you're Alex Honnold and you look up the face of El Capitan ten years ago and you say I'm gonna fucking climb that alone with no ropes, you have to be nuts. That's borderline crazy. But then you can prove yourself wrong. So you start out with these delusions of grandeur. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do this. I'm amazing. That's necessary. That's needed. Narcissism is needed for the start of this. Obviously, I'm saying you transcend it by actually doing it and and achieving it and realizing when it gets to the top of El Capitan, well, who gives a fuck? You could have just jogged up the backside of El Capitan, taken the trail. That's not the point at all. Could have been dropped off by helicopter on the Summit Of El Capitan. That's not the point at all. The point was the planning and the ten years of the choreography, the planning in his head, the visualization which is another good daygame technique. I know I don't talk about visualizations a lot because it sounds a bit woo woo. But you can lie there in your bed and imagine yourself going out. Imagine putting on your boots and your jacket and leaving the apartment and meeting that girl and how you stop it and how you flirt and how she hooks and how you get the number and how you date and how you escalate and how you close. The type of girl, your perfect type of girl. Alex Honnold was obsessed with El Capitan, Yosemite, but in particular El Capitan. So he knew every fucking crack and that's not a that's not hypeable. He really every pitch he knew. He knew the choreographed movements that he could practice in your head. So know exactly the type of girl you're going for. How tall is she? What color hair does she have? What color eyes does she have? What does she wear? How does she walk? So when you see that girl from your peripheral vision, bang, you're in. You move towards it without thinking. That's another really really important part of mind control. Another cool thing in this documentary, surprise surprise is that Alex Honnold has lived in a van, I think for over ten years for all his climbing. And he's not like an Instagram van lifer. He actually says he would prefer to live in a house but just because he's in the mountains, he wants to be at the base of these routes very quickly just for convenience, just for this mission. It all comes back to the mission which transcends the summit. Do you get what I mean? This mission in Russia this year transcends the bangs. If I wanted fast bangs, once again, go to Asia, just bang some birds off Tinder. That's not the aim and people misunderstand that. He lives in a van. So looking at his life in a van and his minimalism and his stoicism, you'll get a lot of the parallels to the black sheep stuff and last year's project and it will hint at what I'm gonna be doing this year. So yes, I won't keep going on about this film because we gotta come on to some digging, but please watch it. If you can in the cinema but if you can't watch it, stream it online. And fair play to the director who's another very respected famous climber called Jimmy Chin. And his previous documentary was about his own ridiculously complicated and brutal ascent of the shark's fin peak of Myra in the Himalayas. And so that previous documentary is called Meru. I can't say enough about him a photographer, as a director, as a filmmaker and he clearly gets this kind of flow state stuff as well which most climbers do, which most free divers do. Surprise, you can see the parallels. In my first book, daygame, I end it with talking about the documentary film Man on Wire. That's another fantastic flow film about somebody walking between the Twin Towers when they were there in New York City on a high wire. And people say, it was a publicity stunt. He's a circus performer. He's an idiot. He's got a death wish. But again, that film goes into why the the decades of selfish absorbed focus with delusions of grandeur pays off if you want a flow state. The other documentary I often say to watch is called Deepwater which is a sailing documentary about the nineteen sixty nine first around the world race. The film's actually about an English sailor who gets into quite literal deep water called Donald Crowhurst. But the the more interesting character to focus on in the documentary you can read up on is a guy called the Vagabond of the South Seas. A French sailor, a legend, Bernard Montissier, I think you say. And he was a sailor who was gonna win that race. But as he got close to turning north and heading back to Britain to the finish line, he actually just carried on sailing. Carried on sailing solo for more than two years. And when asked why, he said, because I am happy at sea and perhaps it saves my soul. So get into his writings if you want to understand again this mindset of being alone but not being lonely. And now, listen to this mod podcast, you might be thinking, well, Tom, you're preaching going your own way, saying fuck it to society and girls and friends and family and being completely alone, being a hermit, saying fuck you to the world, it's too hard and retreating. Well, you believe that to be the message of this podcast, you've missed the point entirely, completely wrong. I'm talking today about achieving greatness in one particular thing, your mission. And to be able to do that you have to have this laser fucking focus. So you go off for a time and you achieve that. Then during the rest periods, of course, you come back down to earth quite literally for a climber to your dog, to your family, to your friends, to normality. You might even complete that mission. I know Bernard Morticia eventually got married. Whatever, that's irrelevant. We won't get into that discussion. Again, on monogamy or not settling down or not. Anyway, let's talk about more practical things because you're listening to this thinking, alright, that's a load of waffle. I've been doing day game with the wing. How do I do day game solo? Well, first of all, the answer is what it says on the tin. You say goodbye to your wing for a bit and you go out and you try it. And like I said, the first thing that will happen will be the approach anxiety increasing again because you don't have anyone to lift your state or banter or vibe with. So you get that first one out the way as quickly as possible. Doesn't even need to be a proper set. You can just do a hit and run. You can have a chat with a girl in the coffee shop, a girl in a store, an old person, whatever. If you're really shitting yourself, ask for directions to a good coffee shop. Just ask a bloke, it doesn't really matter. Get your feet moving, get your tongue moving and then listen to those voices. Go home, identify those voices. Also identify as you're walking around, hopefully with the time limit, you say to yourself, okay, two hours off we go. Identify your energy. Is it better in the morning? So it's like for a climber, he knows. Should he climb in the morning? Should he climb in the afternoon? Is it better if you break in the middle? Have a coffee, have a banana? What is your optimal system? What is your optimal route? Do you do better with a 10 ks route or a five ks route or a 20 ks route? Do you do better doing it daily? Are you a person who has to have a complete anal system going on where you say one number a day or x number of approaches a day or is it better three times a week? Are you better saying I want x number of numbers and then I can go home or you better saying to yourself I need to do y number of approaches and then I can go home. These will be different. Certainly, one size doesn't fit all you have to identify it. Then you have to up to it. So you can try going out for one hour and you can try going out for two hours. You can go on a two day mission alone. And that really fucking toughens you up. If you wanna see how tough your mental state is with day game, go on a mission to a different city. I will link how to do that below. I wrote a whole article on it. And just try it for a weekend, then try it for five days, then try it for seven days, then try it for a fucking month. And don't just try it in one place like, I'm going to Asia to do daygame or I'm going to Ukraine to do daygame. I say in the article, the sign of a very competent daygamer is you can climb all over the world. Yep. You can do daygame in Australia, in Canada, in your home city, in South Africa, on South American girls, on North American girls, on yep. Asian girls, whatever. You try all these different situations. And you then come back to normality. You take time off. That's why I went diving in Bali. That's why I'm gonna be doing the van thing. Ten days a month of daygame going hardcore, beasting it, number farming, closing loops is more than enough if you're doing it solo. Then you got to go back to some companionship and normality and regularity and doing other things. Flow states can be achieved in lots of different ways. I often tell guys who think flow states are all about you know motorbikes or diving or climbing or daygame. Watch the movie Jiro, spelled j I r o, Dreams of Sushi. It's about a Japanese old sushi master who achieves flow states just from the daily zenness and discipline of being a sushi master in a tiny restaurant in a Tokyo subway station. It's a beautiful documentary. It's very very quiet. Jiro dreams of sushi. So there's lots of different means to getting flow states. But we're coming to the end of the podcast. I'm glancing down. We've reached half an hour. I think that needed to be said because there's lots of misunderstandings about doing day game on your own and why people actually do day game and why you would do day game for ten fucking years. That sounds insane. To some of you that might have been waffly. If you're a beginner and intermediate and you just want techniques, there's loads of that on my channel. But I think if you're intermediate and above, sure, then you've got to think about this mythical thing of vibe of state and of flow and why you're actually traveling and doing day game and why you should give solo day game a go. Until next week, we'll have a practical podcast next week back to the day game diagnosis, mp3 analysis podcasts.