---
title: Episode 193 Inner Game
episode_number: 193
era: late
source_file: Episode 193 Inner Game.mp3
audio_size_mb: 57.1
duration_sec: 1872.3
duration_min: 31.2
language: en
provider: deepgram
model: nova-3
diarized: true
confidence: 0.996
transcribed_at: 2026-05-27T17:11:33Z---

# Episode 193 Inner Game

**Speaker 0:** Tom Torero podcast a 193 on daygame mindset speaking in a rather hushed professional tone of voice because I'm in an airport lounge in Russia surrounded by serious looking business people. I'm pretending to be professional. I'm waiting for my flight to Dusseldorf and then onwards to The UK. It's a long convoluted day based on air miles and cheap flights. But anyway, hustling for April in Russia is complete. So I will see family for a few days, and then it's back to Scandinavia to pick up the van adventures before back to sunny Russia. What have I been up to? Well, I've been a busy boy, not just doing daygame. I have been putting things on my website. If you go to tomtorero.com, you will see some day game city guides. Yesterday, I did one for New York City. So maps and day game locations and suggested date venues and example in fields. So that's all for free on my blog today. I'm in the middle of doing one for good old great British London. So if you're new to London Street, pick up meeting girls during the day, not in bars, not in clubs, not on Tinder, not online, not social circle, not work, but shock horror, just going up to girls during the day, which is becoming easier and easier, I do believe, as men retreat into video games and their mobile phones and get less social social skills, charm, charisma, and confidence are all lacking. They're all lost. So just the act of going up to somebody and smiling and giving them a compliment is a revelation. It's, appreciated more and more in my experience. So those are on my website, tomterry.com. Plus, let me just belch. Thanks to all this free beer. Based on popular demand, I have put out a list of film recommendations for hustling and heist movies. So if you're a sneaky bastard, if you like the art of the hustle, not just the day game hustle, but the wider hustle, then I've put 20 films plus some TV shows. That's on my blog. If you're looking for examples of good frame, PUA, characters to emulate that have been featured in movies and television. The link for that list is in the article. I did that way back on YouTube. And speaking of hustlers, when does a hustler get hustled? Well, definitely in Russia. There are many attempts For hustling, if you've ever walked down a sunny street in a Russian city, you'll see a carnival of hustlers, not just street promo people, but bar girls, guys with dodgy, scruffy looking doves. They put them on your arm, and then you can't escape, and then they ask you for money. If you've been to the Ukraine, you'll see all sorts. You'll see monkeys. You'll see bears on chains. You can't blame. It's it's street hustling. There's grandma. There's babushkas selling their pickled vegetables outside train stations outside airports. There's rip off DVDs and watches. But, anyway, I'm I I can spot, in particular, the bar girls, the the girls in the evening. Last year when we were doing boot camps here, some of the students were cheekily on Tinder, and they were matching with girls late at night and then turning up to the meeting point. And there would be surprise surprise, two girls rather than the one he had been messaging. And those two girls would magically suggest the bar that they knew, and they would take these students to the bar. The bill would come a few drinks later, it would be for hundreds. I think not thousands, but hundreds of euros. And if you don't pay, the Russian boys arrive. But so I always thought, well, I'm immune to that. I'm a daygamer. I'm not on Tinder. But the other day here in Russia, I got a massive IOI in the sunshine, a big indicator of interest. The girl walked past me, big eyes. She was quite formally dressed. She lit up when I stopped her. She told me she's studying veterinary medicine. She wasn't from that city. She was just there for a few days. It all seems quite innocent. But you had those tiger eyes, those anime eyes. As I was talking to her, she was taking a step forward, brushing her ample chest up against me. So I thought happy date, same day late, bounced there for an instant date. It seemed all quite innocent. She showed me photos of her family, standard instant date, good escalation. She she was in the city to meet a friend and that's what she was gonna do then and there and that I could meet her in about an hour. So I thought, okay, delayed. Same day lay, I will go home, tidy the apartment, brush the old teeth, put some clean pants on, went back, and she wasn't at the meeting point where I had said to meet. She said she was nearby in a certain bar. Now if you're an experienced daygamer, that's a bit of a red flag. A girl shouldn't be leading. But sometimes in the back of your mind, you're thinking, okay. Well, it could be a cool bar. She might have just been there waiting for you. I weighed up whether I should go or not. I turned up to where she said the bar was, and it was a dingy basement bar, very neon, tacky, nineties, very Tarantino. And I took a deep breath, walked in, and lo and behold, it was full of shisha smoke, kalyan, they say in Russian. And there was the girl sitting at a long table with three massive local dudes. And one of them stood up, kind of shook my hand, well, they grabbed my hand, pulled me into the table, told me to sit down. They kept suggesting I have a drink. And immediately, I remembered the the scam from last year's students. So I took a fake phone call and I pegged it. I legged it. Now, I could be completely wrong. Maybe that was very innocent, but, being in Russia, you gotta be careful and I doubt it. So there you go, when a hustler gets hustled. So par for the course. Today, a topic which is not so seedy, a topic which I rarely talk about. I'm often criticized for not talking about. That is in a game. So the voices that go on in your head, the beliefs you have, the self talk, the internal monologue of a daygamer. And the reason I don't often talk about in a game, as I've said before, is because I believe it's largely mental masturbation. As they say in fight club, self development is mental masturbation. It's just avoidance for most guys for going in field. They'd rather go to a seminar. They would rather read the book. They would rather sit and think about approaching without actually having to leave the comfort of a seminar room or their house. But, and here's the but, a big but, like a big juicy Brazilian but. If we're talking about that internal monologue and self talk and mindsets, when you're actually pacing the streets, you're going up and down the streets, that's a different story. Because respect immediate to any guy that's left his house with his daygame boots on and he's actually out there talking or sometimes trying to talk to girls. That's a million miles better than being in a seminar, reading a book, even listening to a podcast. So that's what we'll talk about today. The things that go through my brain when I'm having a shaky day. And for the majority of the time, you're gonna leave your house, hit the streets, whether you've been doing it for a month, a year, or ten years. And the truth is you don't feel like doing it. You might be hungover. You might be a bit croaky. You might be tired. You might be in a negative mood. You might be in a work mood. It's not really approach anxiety for me, but as I've said, it's it's a mixture of apathy, excuses, tiredness, can't be bothered, not feeling social. Why should I be doing this? You know, there's a million other things I could be doing. So a mixture of things, lot of apathy, a lot of that negative chatter as you're putting on your boots. Step one, leaving the house. That's a massive thing like going for a run. If you can just leave your house, then things will happen. So I say, okay, we'll just put on your boots, put on your jacket. In this case, get the camera gear ready and go outside. And then you're faced with the voices in your head. And I've spoken about them before. I've made videos on them from New York. There's one called excuses excuses, and there's one from Kyiv called excuses excuses part two. So all the typical voices, the wheezes that a daygamer will hear in his head, and they're very, very normal. If you're a beginner, you'll you've also got that massive amount of adrenaline just like a skydive or going on stage to do a speech. So sweaty palms. So just getting over the approach anxiety. That's a that's an added thing. But let's say you've got past the approach anxiety. You will still feel shit. For the majority of the time, you don't walk out your door with a spring in your step and a smile on your face. Occasionally, you do. I'd say one session a week, perhaps. It's nice weather. The other day, it was beautiful weather, you know, crisp and cold, but very sunny. And everybody was out on the street. The sun was streaming down the main avenue. I walked out onto the street immediately in flow, excited to be doing day game, grateful to be outside. And when you're in flow, when you're in a flow state, if you've achieved it through skiing or playing an instrument or doing your hobby or even in your work, you'll know that when you're in flow, you think of absolutely absolutely nothing. The dream for a day game mindset is to have nothing, just a blank canvas, just an empty mind, very zen like. So when you're just in that flow, you're surfing perfectly, you're snowboarding perfectly, You're playing that guitar solo perfectly. There's nothing going on in your mind. Your logical brain is shut down. But as I said, that's maybe once a week if you're lucky, perhaps once a month. So for the rest of the time, what are the things you can tell yourself as you're walking around? Some people do it even before they leave the house. The caveat here is that they are going to leave their house. They're doing it just before. So this is not just chanting mantras and then going to bed. That is the bollock self development. But me old wing, Rami, Rami the Great, he was very keen on, not only keeping a journal of positive thoughts, but he would do self talk in the mirror. He would say sentences, motivational quotes out loud before he went out. He would do visualizations. He would calm himself down. He would do breathing exercises, whatever. If it floats your boat, and more importantly, if it gets you in the right place, calms you down, fires up your mojo, aligns your chakras, and you go outside and you have a a beautiful day game session, then fair play. Do whatever you have to do. Stand on one leg, whatever woo woo stuff you wanna do, dangle crystals in front of you. If it makes your day game session better, fine. But for me, I will purposefully come back to sentences, beliefs, mindsets as I'm walking around. I'm doing my self talk, as I said, infield to combat the negative internal monologue, the I'm tired, I can't be bothered, what's the point? All those lies we tell ourself. She's too busy, she's too hot, she's probably got a boyfriend. All those false stories that people are watching, people care. Maybe that's her dad over there. This feels creepy. The internal chatter, if you don't get on top of it, it will get on top of you. So it's like when you go surfing. If you don't get on top of those waves, they will come at you. They will throw you off. You'll go under. You'll get tired. You'll get dragged down. You're gonna go into a tailspin. So the trick when you're out daygaming is to get it sorted as quickly as possible. Tyler, good old Tyler Durden, RSD Tyler, one of his biblical rules in field, which I agree with, is to minimize time between interactions. Now he's in a club, so pretty easy. Even if you're outside the club in the queue waiting to go in, you can just fire up conversations. The first one, second one, third one, fourth one, as quickly as possible from arriving to do game, you start minimize time between interactions, you get into that nice upward cycle, you get your buzz going, your mojo's on, and you're moving your mouth, your social muscle is being used. And if you can do that as quickly as possible, not only the approach anxiety goes away, but that negative chatter, that internal chatter also goes away. But for a daygamer, there's a lot of dead space in a lot of cities. If you look at that New York City guide, even the London City guide, I'm gonna do one tomorrow for Moscow. There's lots of dead areas where you're walking from one daygame location to the other, and that's the danger time. The other the other massive danger I see with students is that they'll say, right. Here we go. Out of the metro station, out of the train station, off the bus, time for daygame, let's go, and then they walk around for two hours. Or some beginners do it four hours without approaching. So I've said many times, make that first approach ASAP. Make it as quickly as possible. Not on a 10, not on a beautiful eight walking quickly, just on a six. Or as you see Charlie and Kevin doing in the beginner's guide, just anybody, on boot camps. I often do it on guys. Just throw out a compliment, a hit and run. I like your hat, mate. Have a nice day. Just say it to an old lady. You know? You're looking very lovely today. Have a lovely day. Make somebody smile. If they smile, it was a successful hit and run. If you don't do that within the first five minutes, you're gonna get in your head. The waves are gonna start coming on top of you. The negative voices in your head are gonna beat the positive ones. So what if we said approach quickly, minimize time between interactions if you can during the day. So a high volume spot. I've listed them already for New York City, for London on my blog, not just going for the dream 10, but approaching sixes, then sevens, then eights, whatever way you can to get into it. But still, a daygamer is gonna have this time when he needs to control the weather in his own head. I know some guys that listen to music between sets. I know some guys that can only dig in with a wing because they don't like those voice appearing in their head, so they just chat to the wing. Whatever floats your boat. But for me, largely doing day game solo, here are some of the things that I tell myself, that I remind myself, that I say to myself. I think I've listed 15. I'll also list them on the blog. You might wanna write them down. You might wanna come up with your own list. But you're gonna need them for that dead space, that dead time to combat the negative thoughts. Okay. Number one, I've said, you can tell yourself first one's the worst one. How many times have I said that on podcasts and to students? First one's the worst one. Okay. You can have a blindingly good first set. I've walked out the door. A few weeks ago, first set was was the lay. Okay? So you can get lucky. But, generally, as a rule of thumb, you're gonna be a bit grumpy. You're gonna be a bit sleepy. You're not gonna be on fire. Your stacking and vibing is gonna be shit. You're gonna be serious. You're not gonna be smiling. So just get it out the way. Next one I've written down. A big one for me. I say, predicting. Go and find out. Because many times, and this gets worse the more daygame experience you have, you get cocky and you think, well, she doesn't look like the type of girl that would like casual sex. She looks very prim and proper. She looks like a supermodel. She must have a fiance. She looks in a right grump. You certainly see that in London and New York. I'm not gonna approach her. She looks like she's having a really bad day. She's gonna blow me out. Stop being so arrogant. Go and find out. Go and prove yourself wrong. That's the next one I used to say on boot camp all the time. A girl would walk past. I would say to the student, what do you think about her? And he would say, well, she looks like a a bitchy lawyer or she looks like a ditzy blonde, very stupid, not my type. And I said, well, go and prove yourself wrong. A, go and find out, and then b, come back and tell me. And more often than not, you come out of the set and she wasn't bitchy. She wasn't a lawyer. She was actually very nice. She was very sweet. And the opposite can be true. If you just think, right, I'm just gonna go for shy looking sevens who look all sweet, You approach them, you get a horrible blowout. Or I know guys that say, I'm only approaching off indicators of interest. And you'll get an IOI. This has happened to me many times. A really big IOI where the girl looks pretty horny, you'll go and approach it. She'll blow you off off pretty severely. So stop limiting yourself. Stop letting those voices talk to you. Stop predicting, go and find out, and prove yourself wrong. The next one, as my father used to say, she's somebody's girl. Okay? No beautiful girl is single. Get over the purity fantasy. Enter the secret society. Hushed voices here because businessmen are interested in this one. Someone is banging her, and the nice guys with the purity fantasy will say no. She's innocent. She's not thinking about sex. She's never had casual sex. She looks like such a sensible girl. Well, if she's hot, she's got options. She's some guy's sexual partner, probably more than one. So why not you? Why can't you be the one? Don't blow you yourself out before you've even approached by saying I'm not gonna approach. That's you saying she's out of your league. And if you say that, well, you're right because you're not gonna approach. You're never gonna bang that kind of girl. I've said before, I've had students that say, I want to learn how to bang nines. And you find out after some chat that they don't approach nines. So you go, there's a big part of the problem. How do you know? How do you know what the response is gonna be? The good is your mirror, so get some feedback from these so called nines. Yeah? Anyway, look at the hot girls and think someone is banging her. Another great mindset. What are we on for five, I think? This is fantastic, especially in places like Moscow or London or New York. Walk around walk around a touristy area for this one and say somewhere right now in this city of 8,000,000 people plus however many million tourists and students, there is a lonely yes girl walking around. Think of it like Pacman. I've made a video on this. Somewhere on the Pacman screen is is is the magic coin or whatever. So even if you're feeling low, even if you're feeling grumpy, even if your skill's not that good, even if you're a beginner. I've seen it on boot camp where the guy's really got no skill and his values well, bless him, his value delivery is not great. There's a lot of things he needs to change and he's fresh off the boat, and he's in the boot camp, and you're thinking, well, okay. If he gets a couple of numbers, that'll be good. And I've seen the same day lay. I remember I might have told this story before, but in Westfield shopping center in West London, a complete beginner just found a, a cabin crew assistant who bounced him for a coffee and then him back to her hotel and got the same delay. I had another student in London who just vanished. And the next day, he messaged me from Manchester saying he had met a girl and had gone back to Manchester on the train same day lay. Yes, girls. Lonely girls. Big cities are magnets for waifs and strays and runaways and lonely people such as yourself. So visualize the whole city and say it's your job to find that girl. If I said to you there's a girl walking around the city and she's got a check for you for a million dollars with your name on it, you've just got to go up to girls and say, do you have the check? You do, wouldn't you? So it's exactly the same with this. If I said to you somewhere in your city, there's a yes girl, go and find out. And the guy says, well, I I did two approaches this week. Often I say on Skype calls, come on, man. Volume. Volume. Volume. Volume. It's not a numbers game. Of course, there's skill in it. But if you're doing two approaches, seven approaches a week, 10 approaches a month. Sometimes guys will say, I've been doing decking for four years and I've done about a 100 approaches. And you go, Jesus. You're not finding the yes girls quite clearly. Okay? If you say there's a yes girl in every 100 or whatever arbitrary statistic you wanna give yourself, you'll see why that guy's not finding the yes girl. Okay. The next one. Think about that feeling of approach anxiety you have. And we used to say on on boot camp, you can feel it in your stomach, show me where it is. Or very self development e and the guy would say it's in my hands, they're all tense, it's in my neck, it's the butterflies, I feel a bit sick, I need to go to the loo and say okay, you feel it, look around all the other guys walking around London or New York or Moscow or Tokyo they feel it they feel it far worse because they're not even on a boot camp so this is good that a a is a barrier that stops other guys doing daygame. This is fantastic. The more I do this, think fantastic. We want less guys doing this stuff. We want more guys on Tinder. We want more guys, in their bedrooms playing video games. We want more guys with lower social skills because as I said at the beginning of the podcast, it makes your job easier. So if you can get over the a a barrier by first one's the worst one, jump in, minimize time between interactions, you're playing in an open field. Competition's going down. So thank fuck for that. Next one. I say to myself, if you're intermediate and above, you can say to yourself, Tom, you've been here before. You've felt shit before. You've pulled it off before. You can pull it off again. You've been in exactly the same situation. It's raining. Your feet hurt. You wanna go home. You've been here before. So just the fact that you're out, something might happen, but the fact that you've got over it in the past is a big boost. I say to myself, I've had shitty months, shitty years, so this day is no different. You can put it off again. Next one. This is a good one from, Baxter, I think. He says there's plenty to go around. So don't be that guy who's angry walking around looking at hot girls with their holding hands with their boyfriends and being angry with the guy. Baxter would say, look at the guy and say, you know, well done, mate. Okay? There's a hot girl in a city like London, New York, certainly fucking Moscow. There's plenty to go round. So don't be in that scarcity mindset of fuck you, you know. That's one less hot girl because she's with that guy today or I'm never gonna find a hot girl. There's there's so few. Okay. If you live in a tiny city in the outback of Australia, yeah, you need to get yourself to Sydney. Or if you're in the middle of nowhere in America, you need to get yourself to New York or if you're tired of London daygame, you need to see Russian daygame or Brazilian daygame or Colombian daygame. But there's enough to go around, so fear not. Next one. Similarly positive. You gotta give to get. You can make someone's day. You can make this win win. It doesn't have to be walking around feeling like you're taking that this is something wrong. A lot of guys have this opinion of daygame. They come on training. I know guys that have done it for a long time. They think daygame is is weird. You shouldn't do it. It's it's just inherently bad. It's something that they have to hide. And that going into an interaction is terrible. If you go into an interaction, I used to say open with love, and I know it's cheesy, but I would warm up with shop assistants and Starbucks baristas and just try and make them smile, make their day, make a shop assistant who's having a bad day, make her smile. That immediately improves your vibe. And then when you do go into the proper interaction, the the next hot girl you see, you go in with that blast of warmth. That's what I mean by open with love. And even if she says she's getting married next week or there's her husband, she still had a good interaction and that makes your next interaction better. If you keep leaving interactions, like, fuck you, bitch. And she because she said she was engaged or she turned you down and said, well, fuck off then. You say that inside. Imagine what your next interaction is gonna be like. Imagine how tense your face facial muscles are. Yeah? The creepy look for the next open. Alright. The next one is about having done it before and being realistic and pragmatic. You say to yourself, there's more nos than yeses. She obviously has the right to reject you because you're approaching her from nowhere. So sales, they say every no takes you closer to a yes. But just remembering this is a game of more no's than yes's. Keeping that in the back of your mind, not getting all stuck on the stats and the averages and the percentages because that gets you in your head. Remember, the aim of the game is to be in your body, out of your head, and in your body. But when you get a no, you can say in a cheesy Wolf of Wall Street manner, every no takes you clay closer to a yes. So if you're a believer in your stats and you say I get whatever one number out of three, one number out of five, I got rejected the first time, rejected the second time. So I'll often say to myself, okay, Tom, well, mathematically, this is gonna be the good one. Here we go. So believing in the maths actually calms you down. Whether it's exactly true or not because daygame is not a science, it's not really relevant because you're telling yourself self fulfilling prophecy, it happens. Placebo. Yeah. The next one, and we gotta speed up. She's a naughty girl. And as I say that Russian businessman, look at me. Yes, she is. It's the purity fantasy doing away with it, doing away with the idea that there are some good girls and some bad girls. For this one, just look at my book Secret Society. It's just about this point that you're looking at all girls and thinking, she watches this kind of porn. She has this kind of fetish. She has this kind of face when she orgasms. She's got this kind of naughty secret. I am gonna be her bad boy experience. And with that mindset, like walking into an all you can eat buffet with that cheeky smirk, the twinkle in your eye, interactions go from friendly to sexual. That's a secret society daygamer. Anyway, that's covered in the book. The next one I've said is that she wants you to win. Guys are becoming introverted. Guys are becoming weedy. Guys are less confident. Guys are hiding their dicks. So she's looking for a guy to lead. She's looking for a guy that's direct. So the shit tests are encouraging you. She's saying, are you a man or a mouse? Let's see. Did you did you pass the test? Phew. Thank fuck for that. I'll give him another one. Did he pass that? Oh, fuck. He's the real Okay. I'll give him another one, a harder one. And you pass that. She's like, thank fuck for that. So comes back to the point I said at the beginning of the podcast. Less guys are doing it, so you be one of the guys to win. The next one, if you're having a bad round of golf, my dad used to say, well, it's at least it's a walk. Or as Mark Twain said, golf is a a good walk spoiled by a small white ball. You could say their game is a good walk spoiled by some rejections and flaky numbers, but often I just think, well, this is a bit of exercise. It's better than being at home. I'm gonna cover 10 k. I look at the walking app on my phone. I say, okay, I've got to seven k, 10 k, and then this links with the next one. I'm grateful. I have gratitude. I'm not in an office right now. I'm in the sunshine. This is a beautiful city. This is my job. I often remind myself of that, that I have this ability to walk around and talk to girls in the sunshine just to see what happens. This is fantastic. Think of all the other terrible things that I could be doing right now. So a bit of gratitude immediately spikes your vibe. And finally, linking to the 10 k or to the you're gonna do 10 approaches or you're gonna get two numbers. Create some kind of Pavlovian classical conditioning. So you say you can have that cold beer after your 10 sets or you can go and have your dinner after you've got two numbers or often I say you can have that coffee with a girl. So if you pull a girl on an eye day, you can have coffee and a piece of cake. You'll be amazed how that drives you to minimize time between interactions and open more. Okay. Those are my day game mindsets. I'll put them on the blog for a bit of clarity. You can copy paste them into your phone, make up your own. Remember, we're not talking about chanting these in your bedroom, we're talking about chanting these on the street. The main thing is to watch out for your whining, watch out for the victim mentality, watch out for the lies you tell yourself. And also wings. I didn't really talk about that today, but wings that sap your vibe, wings that, sap your mojo, wings that are miserable or wings that get you in your head. Guess what you can do with those wings? You can say goodbye just like I will say goodbye now from the airport as I go and catch my flight to Germany. I forgot to plug something today and I will. I need to get into the habit of plugging things I've done. I forget that I have to sell you something so I can continue this hustling. I've written talk is cheap, and that is true. You can hear me talking about picking up girls, but if you want to see me doing it, if you're if you're always preaching daygame, then guys are gonna wanna see you do it, then I spent the whole of 2,016 filming across the world my infield product, stealth seduction. So the link for that is below if you wanna see hours and hours, sixteen plus hours of me infield all over the world with all these different types of girls. Okay, we shall leave it there. I shall say from Russia and next week I think back in Scandinavia. Goodbye.