---
title: Episode 51 Calibration
episode_number: 51
era: early
source_file: Episode 51 Calibration.mp3
audio_size_mb: 55.1
duration_sec: 1805.8
duration_min: 30.1
language: en
provider: deepgram
model: nova-3
diarized: true
confidence: 0.998
transcribed_at: 2026-05-28T06:43:04Z---

# Episode 51 Calibration

**Speaker 0:** Tom Torero podcast 51 from Central Europe, Middle Europe, not Middle Earth but it could be Middle Earth and that it's wild and a bit bleak. A bit of snow this morning around three, four degrees, rough around the edges. Men are men, women are women. Thank God. So it's nice to be here in the former Iron Curtain region. And I'm here just for a few days seeing a friend and then on my way to The USA, if they let me in this time. I'm going to New York City. I don't know why I've chosen to go to New York City when it's still cold and the wind will be whistling down the avenues, but I'm excited. I love New York City. Really my second favorite city in the world after London, not just for day game but just for big city vibes. New York City is amazing. So I'll do a lot of stuff from there as well as a lot of my filming project. But I'll shoot other bits and bobs in New York. It is so cinematic. Alright, podcast 51 is on calibration. There's good news and bad news with this podcast. The good news is that, it's me putting out a podcast and I hope it's a good one because I haven't touched on this subject. The bad news is that I recorded a chat, an interview if you like, with one of my students last week in London on this topic and we recorded it in a loud noisy cafe. It was my fault. So we had to hold the microphone close to our mouths and it was distorted and there was music in the background which iTunes and YouTube doesn't like and it was just a mess. So apologies to John. John was my student but really he's a he's a coach. He's not a daygamer or a daygame coach, he's a nightgamer and this is how this topic came about. John's been doing daygame for over ten years I think and he's coached alone and he's coached for companies and many of the big guys in America and he's super calibrated, attuned to the night to really loud clubs and bars. So his attraction material is geared for those environments. And now because he's, he's getting a bit older for himself, he wants to focus on daygame and it was quite funny watching him apply his attraction material from the night to the day because quite obviously it's a different situation so it needs a different level of calibration. So that's what we're going to talk about today. How to be calibrated for the day, what that means practically, how it differs from the night, but how also the underlying structure which I call in street hustle, the universal blueprint is exactly the same. Just before we kick off, speaking of street hustle, thank you so much if you've ordered a copy. It's arrived, you've read it, you've written a review, just for supporting it. I sold so many copies in six days that Lulu, the publishersprinters asked me to put the sales page on hold for forty eight hours because The UK printers in particular, were printing so many that there was a backlog for other Lulu jobs. So they cleared that. Lulu should be bloody happy. That's what I said to them cause they're getting a cut obviously. But thank you very much for supporting Street Hustle. It's like a baby's being born. I feel like Mary in the Christmas story, know. It's out there now. It's, floating around the universe doing its own thing and it's a big weight off my shoulders The contents of street hustle was occupying my mind in some form or another for five years and the writing of the book occupied my mind and my time for half a year. So there we go. Anyway, it's out. Go to my website which is also revamped by the way. Nice and minimalist, loads really well on phones and iPads and what have you for you young technological kids. Just go to my website and find all the street hustle book links on there. Alright, on to calibration. Starting with a quote, a smart person knows what to say. A calibrated person knows whether or not to say it. So we're going to talk about the difference between IQ and social intelligence. And a good example to kick this off is somebody with a strong case of autism or Asperger's. I used to teach many kids in school with autism and Asperger's and they couldn't read social cues. Now, they were very creative or very talented, very specialized in their niche talent, often super high IQ, did very well in tests and recall, learned to read and write from an early age. But social cues lacking, so problems in the playground, problems picking up on double meanings or irony or in jokes. Even simple social cues, you know, like when to say please and thank you when something comes across as rude, having to teach them or with other specialists having to teach them facial cues to look happy, to look sad, to apologize to somebody when they've done something wrong. All these things that most of us take for granted. People with severe autism and Asperger's, not everybody but they can often lack being able to read social cues. But the good news is they can learn it just like they learn lists for tests. They can learn to read social cues and end up being extremely calibrated to certain environments. So you might notice that some even very well known pickup artists, both day and night have some form of autism or Asperger's, they talk about it and they've gone on to be very, very successful. So this is calibration, understanding your environment, being socially intelligent and having a high IQ doesn't help. So being nerdy, being logical, debating on forums, reading loads of pickup. Okay, you learn the fundamentals but doesn't teach you infield calibration. Surprise, surprise, the game is played infield and to be calibrated you need to go out, try, fail, try again. So we'll come on to that. Think about calibration like clutch control. Now I know for you yanks, you are driving, automatic cars, shame on you. But for us Europeans and Brits and maybe Kiwis and Aussies, I'm not sure. South Africans, I'm sure they're, in their jeeps. This is my stereotyped image with some gears. So they know about clutch control or if you ride motorbikes, you'll know about clutch control and the feel of it knowing when to change up or down a gear based on the sound of the engine and based on your experience. Okay? Or if you're driving an automatic car, think of it like when to put your foot on the pedal and when to ease off. So in game we say, when do you push and when do you pull? In the past I've been famous for saying, when are you the badass and when are you the Buddha? Okay. So when are you showing intent? When are you on on on on on grabbing, escalating, going crazy, being dominant? And when do you show chill, freedom from outcome, you're smiling, joking, nothing matters. And in the beginning, like, a young kid with autism or Asperger's learning social cues, it's very clunky, it's very mechanical and it looks weird. So when I taught John and he was running his high energy attraction stuff in coffee shops and malls and in quiet streets, it looked slightly odd. Now only slightly because this guy had game, this guy knew all about attraction, his stacking was amazing, his freestyling was amazing, his spiking was amazing but it was just at the wrong pitch. Different gear for day, different gear for night obviously And the way a day gamer learns to calibrate specifically for his environments, which are often low energy, you know, think of the British Museum, a quiet Starbucks or a small pedestrian cobbled street. He learns it through repetition, infield repetition and then muscle memory. Alright, so internalization. So you're starting off consciously competent when you know what you're doing but you have to think about it and then eventually you want to freestyle and become unconsciously competent, just like driving the car. Yes, so when you first had your lesson, I remember my first driving lesson just thinking how the hell does my mom or even my grand drive a car, this is so complicated, having to think about the pedals, the gear stick, the lights, the indicators, he kept saying look in your mirror, do all this stuff and then work out what road signs mean and look around and be aware. It's just overwhelming but after you've had your lessons and you've passed your test, you go from quieter roads to busy roads to motorways to extreme driving if you've done that course and then you can drive a car, know, listening to something on the radio, winding down the window, sometimes I make vlogs in the car, you can be talking to your friend, it's all internalized. It's muscle memory. Alright and that's why we say pickup is an art. Pickup is not a science. In the beginning I believe it's more like a science because I say do A, do B, do C, then you get X, then you get Y, then you get Zed but once you've internalized it, like driving the best formula one drivers, like Senna, watch that great documentary on Ed and Senna, it's almost a religious level art. Okay, he described himself as floating above the car, just being transcendent to the race and people said wow, how did you have these ultra specific skills and he said well it's, I'm not even thinking about it, right, it's autopilot but that's not to say natural, not be yourself. In the beginning, you've got to learn how to drive a car. So you've got to learn the London daygame model. You've got to learn the texting model. You've got to learn the dating model. It's all in street hustle. You've got to learn all these little external tricks. It feels weird. It's fake it till you make it. You're coming across as uncalibrated especially if you were, unsocial and nerdy like me in your teenage years and twenties. But eventually, yep, it goes from science to art. And like I keep saying, IQ doesn't really help because people with high IQs, they are often the least socially calibrated. Think of those geeky people in Oxford, I spent my whole time around these geeky lecturers, professors and also fellow students. Very very super high IQ but extremely uncalibrated socially. So not great doing an eight set table, night game interaction, yeah, not great at mingling in a party and telling jokes and flirting and spiking. Nerds are often going deep into topics, it's very logical, they are not thinking of how the other person's interacting, they're not often sure about social space even and they're completely clueless on a date. If you try doing a date in logical nerd mode, you know what's going to happen. Like I said, night gamers are extremely calibrated to these noisy loud environments where you've got to be physical, you've got to be quick, you've got to bounce in a different way, you can show dominance in a different way. Think of somebody who's really good at dance floor game, yeah, or Miami or Las Vegas club pickup. They're extremely calibrated to that environment if they go out night after night after night. They're running the same universal blueprint, like I say in Street Hustle. They're doing attraction in some form or another, they're spiking, they are getting her to hook, they're dialing it down a little bit but in different ways and running a bit of rapport and then somewhere, maybe in a toilet or behind a skip, they are running seduction. Alright, so how they're doing that is is different but the underlying map is the same. That's why we say the London model is the map, it's not the territory. I think some guys who run it robotically forever and ever and ever and ever, they think that the, the London daygame model is everything and it cannot be deviated from. And if you never just drop the map and actually look up and look around you, then you're not going to be a good walker or a mountain climber, are you? So learning calibration is frustrating. It takes time. You can't solve it in a weekend boot camp or a two hour training session and if you're switching from night to day or day to night, as the session with John showed, it's going to take a bit of time to switch your attraction material up or down. Okay, so when to spike? How hard to spike? Thinking about is the spike a neg because in the night you can get away with aggressive spikes and very sexual spikes which are hard negs, hard pushes but in the day try doing that. I remember when somebody was telling me about the concept of challenging in daygame. I was learning and they said, oh Tom you can challenge more. So I was living in Earls Court at the time and I remember around the tube station in Earls Court in London, I'd go up to the girl, do the stack, get the topic, go into vibing and then challenge her but really hard, really aggressively and it would get into this like yes, no, yes, no, really confrontational boxing match and should obviously walk off. So it's good to push it as a beginner, it's very good to push it in the opposite way to nice guy because you learn where the line is. So go too far for a few weeks and then I dial down my challenges so they weren't such hardened eggs. They were a little bit more cocky funny. I learned the playful smirk and you over time have your own calibration. So that's an important point. Your calibration is different from mine, your style of day game, even implementing the same London daygame model is different from mine. Some guys focus more on cheeky banter, that's definitely me. Some guys focus more on poker faced challenging. Some guys are more verbal in the beginning, some guys are more non verbal. Alright, some guys like noisy streets like Oxford Street or 5th Avenue. Some guys like me, like coffee shops. I like awkward indoor sets. Some guys like museums. This is all called targeted daygame. I talk about this in Street Hustle as well, where rather than just spraying your bullets far and wide, think about being a sniper instead. So if you like hipster girls, go to a hipster market. If you like arty girls, daygame in an art gallery. If you like students, daygame in a coffee shop near a university and daygamers go, what? You don't have to just do the front stop on a busy street? No. It's good to learn that way. Grow a pair of balls you know but then target your daygame Think about your calibration, alright. Do you know at the moment when you're getting an IOI which is an indicator of interest or an IOD, an indicator of disinterest. So you're looking at the girl and she might say or two girls might say the same thing but they mean different things and this is puzzling for a student who's just starting out. So one girl might say, oh I've got to go and actually in that case she doesn't have to go, it's just a test and you carry on, she's showing more IOIs. So it was fine but in another case a different girl might say I've got to go but the way she says it, her eye contact, the moment in the interaction, It might be an IOD, so no point plowing in that set. How do you find out? Well over time you get this sixth sense, this is from internalization. It's the same thing with I have a boyfriend. Yep, as a beginner just override it, say cool, I don't want be a boyfriend. Anyway, stack forwards but over time I come to realize when I have a boyfriend means no, I OD, don't bother plowing, she's engaged, loved up, nothing's going to happen, walk away. That's calibration. In game they call it micro calibration, which is the art of adjusting your behavior in real time, like I just said based on the reaction that you're getting. This takes practice. Alright. You need to have done hundreds if not thousands of day game interactions to be able to pick up on all these micro cues, micro calibration. So not just walking away from the set or listening to your recordings post day game session and thinking, fuck, you know, that was an IOI or ah shit, that was an IOD. I got it wrong. In the actual set, you can change your behavior. So remember what Tom Torero says, I've said this for years, the girl is your mirror. Yep, you could have a day game coach listening to you with ear, phones and a wireless mic but look at the girl and I know anxiety causes adrenaline and you can't look at the girl because you're all in your head and flustered, You're not in the moment as the hippies say. That just means you're not, you're not, flooded with anxiety. You are focused, standing there, looking at her, listening to what she says and it's a great principle the girl is your mirror because it's like a scientific laboratory. All you have to do is number one, do something. So maybe spike or plow. Number two, see how she responds. All right, look at her eyes, look at the proximity, look at her investment, look at her little smirk, look at any little nervous tics or is she scratching her arm, is she playing with her hair, is she crossed her legs, all this stuff. See how she responds and number three, use that information to make your next move. Rinse and repeat. Okay, so you can actually just think of calibration as knowing the difference between an IOI, remember indicator of interest or IOD, indicator of disinterest. Even simpler, is she on or is she not on? Somebody once told me calibration in a slightly different way, they said it's knowing if your behavior is a DHV, which means demonstration of higher value or is your current behavior a DLV, a demonstration of lower value and that's also important. That's kind of looking at it the other way that, you are noticing your own behavior. I like to see the girl's reaction because it's showing me how effective my tools and techniques in the Torero toolkit are but yeah, you can think about all your behaviors and this includes texting or even what you're wearing that day, what you're eating that day, what you're posting on Facebook that day, how you're behaving on a date, how you're behaving with your girlfriend or wife. Is what you just did or even better is what you're about to do a dhv, is it raising your value, is it displaying good value or is it lowering your value and go back to my talks on sexual market value and the sexual marketplace, What is a male's value? What are all the aspects of male value? Are you increasing them or are you decreasing them? And that's obviously key because girls are super savvy to male value. Okay? Now, here's the caveat, here's the problem, like I've already touched upon. With calibration, you can't really hide your lack of calibration or inexperience just like you can't really hide your approach anxiety. You can do all the right things and say the right things and use the London daygame model and dress the right way and stack properly but you might notice that when a student says exactly the same words as me, maybe he's read one of my, you know, flirting books and he uses the same stack with the same spikes. It doesn't quite work and the student sometimes gets pissed off and says, well I I use the London daygame model, I said what you said in that video, why didn't she hook? It's because of your underlying vibe. It's my underlying micro calibration, which leads to what they call in science, your micro expressions. Now this is not pseudoscience, this is the real deal. You can look this up, Google micro expressions, and these are very very brief facial expressions. I think they last between one twenty fifth to one fifteenth of a second, alright. Little things your face does, just a fraction of a second and they occur when somebody deliberately or unconsciously conceals a feeling, that's an important word, unconsciously. So you can try to hide your AA or even without knowing that you're trying to hide your AA, concealing that anxiety, you show it just for a microsecond and girls and other human beings, males as well, can see something in your facial muscles or around your eyes or in your eyes or around your mouth. Okay. They occur in high stakes situations and they cannot be controlled. So people that are trained to, suss out liars, it's nothing to do with the direction of the eyes and all that pseudoscience bullshit. It's actually just to do with these tiny, facial twitches. They can be analyzed, it doesn't necessarily say that is a lie or that is truth but they're looking for breaks in patterns, abnormalities. So even when you're going through passport control, the immigration officers are trained to look for micro expressions. So When you enter The US they ask you or they verbally bamboozle you with loads of weird random boring questions and when they're asking you these questions they're not listening to the answer, they're just staring into your eyes and they're trained to look for certain things. Yeah. They say that there's seven universal human emotions that you, display these micro expressions for. Number one is disgust. Two is anger. Three is fear, I. E. Daygame called approach pickup. Four is sadness. Five is happiness. Six is contempt and seven is surprise. So it was number three that we were working on fear, approach anxiety. Yeah or some guys have this inner hatred of women that they can't disguise. That's why I say log off forums and log off all that male right stuff because it makes you angry with women and that anger poisons your vibe, it's toxic and it comes through and even if you're trying to hide it in a passive aggressive way, she can see it. Okay? So over time, I promise you, over time as your AA decreases and your infield experience increases, you will be calibrated for day game. That's why I say choose one. I've never met a guy who's good at both night game and day game. It's because of this issue. If you spend a lot of time in bars and clubs, great, your body will be unconsciously competent at those environments, right. You'll be calibrated to that daygamers over time in the same areas again and again and again and again, the same kind of girls again and again and again and again, the same kind of mirrored reactions from them again and again and again and again. You'll just get muscle memory, all right. So I often see students running in, too early, bashing into people, bashing into the girl and yeah, he's trying to follow the three second rule but he's approached her at the wrong time, even the wrong moment. She's crossing the road and he approaches before, not after. Maybe he just rushes in and he hasn't seen the father or the boyfriend, he's not sussing her body language properly. He hasn't realized her feet are moving away. He hasn't read her face correctly. Social intelligence with proximity. He's too close or he's too far. Silly approaches because he's seen prank videos on YouTube. He tries to approach a girl, on a unicycle at a cash machine, yeah, whatever or classic. When I do two sets with students, he goes in, he forgets Mystery Method and he doesn't talk to the friend or we say the obstacle, the cock block, he doesn't befriend her and surprise surprise, she drags the girl away. So he's not calibrated to two sets. Many day gamers aren't calibrated to groups, that's why they don't do indoor day game or you know large gaggle of girls sitting in a coffee shop. He's not sure how to deal with that. That's where the old school game and mystery comes into play. Alright, group sets and dealing with obstacles. Many day gamers when they arrive in a city, a new city or a new part of a city, they immediately become uncalibrated because they're not used to the energy level of New York or they're not used to the energy level of a beach or a museum. Yeah, they're not used to the subway that's why day gamers hate high pressure spotlight situations because they're un calibrated. They can't read the signals properly. I do wish day gamers would get off the street and just stop doing that, front stop. I know it works but it's a one trick pony. So try and be calibrated for other situations. Get used to the spotlight effect and remember my street hustle technique of elephant in the room. So call out the awkwardness. Yeah. Give a time constraint. Listen, I know you're waiting for your bus or listen, I can see you're studying hard or studying Facebook. It's calling out the elephant in the room. It disperses, it dispels that social awkwardness and surprise surprise, it shows that you're socially intelligent. Something I love to do, I've been doing it with students last week in London, is to hit on shop assistants, pretty ones in posh department stores opening indirect direct and that's no, not lying and saying excuse me, can you help me buy a watch? No, it's not super direct. Hey, think you look nice. I'd like to take you out. It's opening with a little quip And again, it's in street hustle. I'm not gonna go into it now. And knowing how to close, it's a bit like in a strip club. You're not gonna just pull your phone out. She's gonna get fired because of CCTV. You say, listen, I know you're working. So go over there and write your number on a receipt or the coffee cup if it's in Starbucks and bring it back. Don't worry, I understand. I know you're working. I know your boss is over there. That's calibration. And it's the same with a girl walking down the street, swaying her hips, tighter clothing, giving off IOIs to guys. She's ovulating. It's the time of the month, it's the ovulating walk and spotting that takes calibration just like spotting a same day lay girl. Should you instantiate her? Should you bounce her? When should you go for the kiss? Should you pull her home? Is now the right time? What about when she's back in the apartment? When should you take her from the sofa to the bedroom? When should you stop watching the film and start making out? When should you pull the trigger? All this dealing with the token LMR, dealing with the date stuff, dealing with the instant date stuff, that's all calibration and you have to do it again and again and again, like I said, to become calibrated. So it's a frustrating podcast in a way because I'm just saying, look, all will be fine if you go out, pick day game or pick night game and get used to it because your body will get used to it and girls will eventually go, wow, you can just, this is amazing, know, this guy knows the right time, he knows to say the right thing, he needs, he knows to do the right thing, he's not cocking up and on a subconscious level she'll think wow, thank God he's leading, he's escalating properly, smoothly because lots of guys have trouble escalating smoothly, not just escalating. And like I said at the beginning of this podcast, a beginner, if you're a beginner or even an intermediate, you need to push behaviors to the opposite extreme of what you are now and I'm predicting you're mister nice guy like Tom Torero was mister nice guy. So you need to push your behaviors in the opposite extreme being that cocky lad who doesn't give a shit who escalates and yet in the beginning you fake it till you make it. Alright and push. Do too many spikes. Make your spikes too crazy. Be dirty. Be flirty. Push. Verbally push, know, find out where the line is and then over time you'll swing back to the nice bad boy, the badass Buddha, somebody who is calibrated. There you go. That was a good one. I like that. It all came out properly and that shows you that it's a good topic. It's an important topic. And finally, feel like I'm calibrated to doing podcasts. In the beginning when you do podcasts, it's extremely hard. You're in your head and you have to think about exactly what to say and you have to make loads of notes and you get brain freeze and you stutter and all that. But now, I sit down in a chair, don't edit and they just come out hard. That's what she said last night. There you go, that was podcast 51. The next podcast is going to be from across the pond. Sadly, all my New York coaching is sold out. Sorry gents on the East Coast, all sold out. So boot camps and one on ones they've sold out, but I will be back, towards the end of twenty sixteen. For now, take care, keep grabbing life by the horns.