---
title: Episode 97 CreativityCompetition
episode_number: 97
era: mid
source_file: Episode 97 CreativityCompetition.mp3
audio_size_mb: 55.6
duration_sec: 1820.4
duration_min: 30.3
language: en
provider: deepgram
model: nova-3
diarized: true
confidence: 0.996
transcribed_at: 2026-05-28T07:41:48Z---

# Episode 97 CreativityCompetition

**Speaker 0:** Podcast 97. Thomas Torero here in The US of AIDS. Very quiet. It's very dark. It's very rural. I am in Pennsylvania, somewhere near the Delaware Gap. I think that's what it's called. This is the quake estate named after William Penn's wonderful experiments of no sex, no drugs, or rock and roll. I'm here with family. It's a bit of downtime. We played some mini golf today, some Frisbee. We went for a walk. We've done some skiing, some very basic skiing in a local ski resort. It's just nice. We're eating traditional Czechoslovak food, and all is well. I'm looking forward to getting back to Europe for the daygame season. But it's good to switch off, as I've said in a recent YouTube video, life beyond daygame. Normal life. It's very good. Thank you to all the guys who came to daygame three point zero, the seminar last weekend in Central London. Around 50 guys were there. It was good. I was happy with it. So for free, it's going on stealth seduction in the vault section as a free bonus. Give me a bit of time. I'm with family this week. Hopefully, next week, I'll get around to editing it. You've got to convert the files. You've got to drop in the slides. The upload is very fiddly. La la la la la. And I think it's good enough to release as a standalone product. Something cheap and cheerful, not too expensive. That four hour seminar, I'll release it so you don't need to buy stealth seduction. Daygame three point zero was all about the evolution of my daygame and daygame theory in general, and that's the topic of this podcast really. Creativity, competition, how to push things forward, how things evolve in a healthy way. So that's coming. What else for housekeeping? Yes. Podcast a 100 is just around the corner. And as I've been saying for the last few weeks, if you want to be on it, the sound of your voice, send me a one to two minute m p 3 as an attachment to an email, tom@tomtorero.com. Tell me a daygame story. Tell me how daygame has changed your life. Tell me any material that was helpful. Tell me a funny blue bull story or an anecdote. Whatever. It's your chance to be on the podcast. One to two minutes. Tom@tomtorero.com. Send me an m p three. I promise every single one will be on the podcast even if it's it's hours and hours long. I've already got around twenty, twenty five, I think. 20. See, I'm sounding American. 20. I have 20 to 25 m p threes already. Hopefully, yours is next. I know you don't need to say your real name. I'm not gonna read out your email address, so it's all anonymous. And if you're there waiting for the daily installments of my book on the former Soviet Union daygame, Cold Calling, I'm nearly there. I think I'm on part 23 or 24 out of 30, I think. I can't remember. That will resume when I fly out of here on Saturday. Right? Don't really have much time at the moment, but that will be finished. Okay. Let's dive in. As I said, podcast 97 is on creativity slash competition because competition is a key part of a subculture or a sport evolving, pushing each other, and using this magic of creativity to come up with new things, like the London daygame model, like the daygame scene, which rose from the ashes of a lot of night game pickup companies in 2005, 2006, 2007. First of all, people were trying to use the night model on the street. Obviously, early daygame was indirect. People weren't really sure how to apply Mystery Method to the street. It was uncalibrated. Then it was wacky. Then it was click baity. And now, 2017, as I said in daygame three point zero, the scaffolding is coming off. That's not to say beginners don't need structure. They do. But for daygamers that have been doing it four, five, six, seven years, it's time to look at what's happening. And that's what the seminar was all about, going from intermediate daygamer to quote unquote advanced. And a key part of that is creativity. So, out of structure comes freedom, eventually ditching the London daygame model because you're doing it on autopilot, bringing in your own soul and warmth and heart, and running with different things, hopefully taking it to the next level. There's a new generation of daygamers, new kids on the block, and they should be experimenting and pushing things. They should not be copying my material or other people's material. They should not be saying what I say word for word or wearing the same jacket as me because that's not how things move forward. Competition is good, as I said, we'll come on to that. Anyway, let's begin with a quote. Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye. So straight away you should spot a contradiction. Yeah? Like badass and Buddha, which is the central contradiction of pickup. You need intent, which is the disciplined eye. And at the same time, you need that cheeky smirk, twinkling eyes, freedom from outcome, which is the wild mind. So creativity only happens under certain conditions. When I was a school teacher, creativity was a buzzword. Excuse me. Burping. That's all that Czech food. Yeah. And they were nagging us to make children more creative as if it's something you can, summon magically from somebody. Whereas the truth is really in the environment. Set the environmental conditions properly and creativity happens. That's an easy message. Yeah? But look at those two central things again. A wild mind, which we all have as kids or when we're really into something, but you also need a disciplined eye. A wild mind just makes you a little bit crazy and hyper, but you get nothing done. And the disciplined eye just makes you quite stiff. Excuse the pun. Like Steve Jobs. Yeah. That that one side of Steve Jobs, very serious, very geeky, very analytical, very difficult to work with. But the other side, very playful, very human, very warm, you could say. Maybe you couldn't say that about Steve Jobs. But, you know, his products are what people love. That's why they were so devastated when Steve Jobs died. Because he made products that were human. But that all came from a very disciplined, geeky, nerdy, coding eye. So daygame is both a science, certainly to the beginner with all the structures, the London daygame model, the texting structure, the dating structure. You gotta learn all that. And then eventually around the intermediate stage after about two years, you throw it all away. You take off the stabilizers. So I said in daygame three point zero, you remove the scaffolding from the building that you have been renovating and what next? Suddenly, it's liberating. It's a little bit scary because you don't need to use the model anymore. No. You don't need to jump in front of girls endlessly and say they look like French pirates. No. You don't need to wear the Tom Torero jacket or use the teases. It becomes an art and you inject, as I said, your soul, warmth, personality into this. You abandon the model and you try new things. That's where gutter game came from. Yeah? The burn your boats mission, leave your phone at home. That's where the cold calling stuff came from where I was traveling around countries and cities where often no daygamer had ever been before and I was trying different strategies. How does daygame work in Kazakhstan? How does it work in Ukraine? How does it work in Moldova? How does it work in this city? And, yeah, girls are girls, but there's flavors to different cities as I've said. So experimentation. That famous saying is creativity is intelligence having fun. So there's the contradiction once again. Buddha, intent and freedom, intelligence and having fun. Now, you could sit and you could read books on this stuff. You could listen to podcasts on creativity. You could sit there with a blank piece of paper waiting until you're in a super creative state to start your novel or your symphony or your next Goguen portrait. But you just gotta start. Okay. So you could take an improv course. Stand up course is not really a good idea for daygame because it makes you too funny, you're the entertainer. Improv courses, public speaking, Toastmasters, yeah, you could, but much better is just to go outside. Talk to girls. How do get better at talking to girls? You talk to girls. That's the essence of these podcasts. In that infield experience is king. Yeah. 90% infield, 10% theory. So just start. As I say, just push play or as marketers say, just ship it. So go out and face the bullets coming at you of the girls giving you topics. This is the bread and butter of daygame as I talked about in daygame three point zero. The beginner just goes up and says, hey, you look nice. You look French. That's it. And he expects the girl to hook and he's forgetting that that's just the beginning of stacking. Okay? A, that's too logical. We wanna be teasing and challenging her and, you know, flirting is friction, as I say. We wanna be accusing her. But then when she gives us that magical topic, she says she's from Berlin or she says she's an accountant or she says she's a rower, it's your job. I call it the Tom Show. I say, ladies and gentlemen, the Tom Show is starting from now. It's my job to tell a story. And when you're above intermediate, that should be improvised. That should be spontaneous. So you say what you see, you twist it, she gives you a topic and off you go. The best daygimmers are great improvisational storytellers. I know they're not being logical. They're not telling her about the population of Berlin or how their sister went to Berlin or where Berlin is in relation to Prague or about the factory industry of Berlin. No. That's dry. That's boring. That's dull. That's man speak. With girls, we're doing role play. We're taking the Michael, we say in London. We're taking the Mickey. We're making fun of her. No. It's not negging because this is not an LA nightclub. We're doing it softly with push and pull. Yeah? Fractionation. We got a smile on our face. We got the twinkling eyes. She knows we're being sarcastic and ironic. Yeah? So that's what I mean. You face these bullets day after day after day after day. You start seeing patterns and you get better at it. That's daygame improv. You come up with stories that can fit many occasions. In daygame three point zero, I gave away some of my stories that fit any girl, whatever she says. You might have seen my YouTube video daygame improv or improv for daygame, I think, I'm going up and down Oxford Street in London, looking at girls and talking about how they relate to cartoon characters or animals or famous people, what I notice. So that's to say what you see in twisting it, but there's more. So an intermediate daygamer needs to start being creative. He needs to tell stories. Jack London, one of my favorite authors, he said, you can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. Very call of the wild that. So just go out there or if you're writing a book, just start writing. It feels rough. It feels terrible. You're embarrassed by it. But when you look back on it or when you listen back to a recorded daygame set and you listen to her give you the topic and your reply, bits of it, you'll think, oh, that's that's pretty good. I'm gonna use that next time. And that's the trick a daygamer. He's recycling material but he's creating a gigantic personalized memory bank. That's why I say create, don't clone. Don't be a rip off artist. Now I don't mind if you're just the average Joe, a beginner daygamer using my material. But if you're on YouTube as a quote unquote coach, you shouldn't be using my material. You shouldn't be using my lines. You shouldn't be wearing my jacket. You're a pickup artist, not a rip off artist. And I don't often moan about this, but the problem sometimes gets worse and then it goes away. And guys will often word for word copy a video I've done or take something from a book. And I never did that. Either you credit who you're using, who you're talking about, or you invent. For the evolution of this thing that we do daygame, you need to invent your own material. Yep. I remember the phrase, you can't you can mimic a result but not the creativity. So if you if you're on YouTube, there'll be loads of sets that look the same, but what's lacking from them is the creativity, the heart and the soul. We say don't be a daygame robot. Often I'll get an email saying, well, Tom, I said the lines. I said exactly what you said and they didn't work. So that guy's misunderstood about delivery and about pacing and about tonality and body language and for subtext. Yeah. Verbal is the poor man's nonverbal. So don't be a robot. Give it that warmth. Give it that sparkle that's at the heart of charisma. You need the power but you also need the warmth. And start to move away from logic. I know it's difficult if you've come out of your office at 05:30, you're in logical mood, logical mode and you've suddenly got to be playful. Remember, flirtation is friction. Move away from logic, which just is about getting from a to b. And remember that humans are emotional. Guys online will often say that, know, they're they're so proud of us as rational beings. Okay. Part of us is rational, but don't underestimate how logical we are how emotional we are. We always say girls are very emotional, but guys are too. Some of the biggest decisions we ever make in our lives are based on our emotions. Most of my friends who are now married, married the local girl from the local town with a split second decision. Same as them having kids. Yeah? Or they took a job split second decision based on emotions. So if a girl's deciding to come with you on an instant date or give you her phone number or come back to your house, it's not based on logic. If it was, she never would. I often say to some of my students, imagine just going with a random stranger to their house after ten minutes for the promise of tea. Would you do it? And he's like, no way. Well, that's what we're asking girls to do. And girls I've bounced a girl back from the street to my house to close her in about nine minutes once. Crazy if you actually think about it. But that's emotional. So the more you can play the emotions like a piano, the better, the more fun you can have, the better, the more surreal you can be, the better. So think of Monty Python, think of role play. I remember that TV show, The Mighty Boosh. That kind of surreal humor goes down very, very well with girls. And forget trying to be perfect. So some students, especially when I teach in Germany or Scandinavia, they want it to be perfect. There's a very famous student I once had who said, Tom, do I need to approach from the left or the right? Okay. And I said, well, it doesn't really matter. It depends where the girl is and where other people are. And then another question, maybe from him or another guy was, it wasn't a question, he jumped in front of a girl. He said, hi. I just saw you from approximately 2.4 meters away and I wanted to say hello. Now, yeah, that's a German stereotype, it's a true story. No. No. No. Forget this pure logic. Forget being perfect. Perfection is very limiting in in in art, even in science. Okay? Daygame is messy. Dating is messy. Escalation is very messy. And I don't mean with just bodily fluids. I mean, it always feels weird. You always wanna be in rapport and you have to say, no, no, no, no, no. So it's messy. Accept that. It's exactly the same in daygame and for your projects. As I said, writing a book, don't stare at the paper, just start. Or like when I was coming up with street hustle or my ideas for stealth seduction or when I was writing dig in three point zero at the seminar. First, you scribble down ideas that you thought about in bed or in the shower. Often, I scribble down ideas after a walk. Going for a walk, gets you out of your head into your body and frees up mental space for things to pop up. Yeah? And then record them. Maybe record them as a voice memo. Record them on your phone in the notes. Yeah? Just start. Accept that things are pretty shitty in the beginning, so you're not gonna be good at public speaking or your daygame is gonna be rusty. Yeah? Or the first chapter of the book or your first book is gonna be shockingly bad. My little tricks are having a deadline, same in the daygame. I say, I'm only going out for two hours, so don't wander around and do one approach. Approach. No. No. Tom, get your 10 approaches done, you have two hours and after that you go home. A great trick for beginners is to be accountable. That's one of the only reasons really why you should still be on a forum if you're going out and doing day game. I would just keep an online journal. You can be anonymous. You can keep a blog. You can make a locked blog. That's what I used to have, but be accountable. So you say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 10 approaches, 10 approaches, that's 30. This is what went well. This is what I achieved. This is what I need to work on. I'm recording myself twice a week. This is my analysis for set one. This is my analysis for set two. That's the science science bit of creativity. That's the disciplined eye. And from that, from the badass comes the Buddha. From that, you will generate new ideas. You'll test new things. You'll start to see patterns. And that's all fantastic. Right. That took longer than I thought. So let's come on to the competition bit of it. Because competition is very good for pushing sport, obviously, for a subculture to evolve. I think of films like Pumping Iron. I've mentioned that movie before about the nineteen seventies birth of bodybuilding really with Schwarzenegger in Venice Beach in LA. And at the same time, in the same city, just a few streets away, there was another movement appearing which was skateboarding in the nineteen seventies. Surfers riding pavements instead of waves. There's a great documentary called Dogtown and Zed Boys, the evolution of skateboarding skateboarding in the seventies from quite a dorky thing to something awesome, where they were riding in abandoned swimming pools in the Hollywood Hills. So the evolution of a subculture. And, yeah, you need competition. You need deadlines. You need rivalry, healthy rivalry. This is all good. This is how daygame evolved from 02/1011. Guys going out there, trying to be the best, pushing each other, not arguing on forums but going out and testing this stuff. One of the rules of any pickup forum used to be, you can't ask a question, you have to go out and test it three times and then you can ask for feedback. And I think that should still apply. Yeah? So the bodybuilders were were in the gym, in the different gyms and then competing at these crazy mister universe or whatever competitions. The the Dogtown and Zed Boys, that was the rise of skateboarding with rival gangs. And it's good. Obviously, there's messy bits where you have competition, you have stresses, you have strains, you have infighting. And I said in daygame three point zero, be careful of your wings. Because often wings are great and it's symbiotic and you're boosting each other's state. But wings can bring you down, they can steal your sets, they can steal your vibe, they can be vibe vampires or vibe leeches. It can be competitive in a bad way. I've spoken about that when I'm writing cold calling, how I've had some bad experiences traveling with wings and good experiences. Competition can get too much, but competition is is what's still driving, the daygame scene in some way, which is good. But that's why I say don't copy what I do, rather go out and test something new and push it. I know guys are pushing faster escalation. Guys are pushing different kinds of pools in different situations, in different countries, in different cities. So definitely, right? My stuff is out there. It's the scaffolding, but please don't rip it off. Go out and push the boundaries. I'm excited to see where daygame goes in five, ten years. Alright. To finish. The last third of the podcast, we'll keep it practical because you you're thinking, why is he waffling on about creativity? How is this gonna help my daygame? So how can you improve this tricky bit, the missing piece of the puzzle, which is the storytelling or maybe even the stacking if you're a beginner? So first of all, remember Tom Torero's rule. Say what you see and twist it. So you go up to her and you give her the compliment. Excuse me. I think you look nice. What I noticed about you was. Say those sentences together, don't leave a pause. So excuse me, I just wanted to say I think you look really nice. What I noticed about you is and then say what you see with a twist. So you might say her geography or you might say her job or what she's up to right now, what she's carrying and twist it. That means playfully accuse her. And it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. You know, you might call her a French pirate or she looks like a Swedish lawyer. Doesn't matter if you're wrong because she'll reply and the reply is what we call the topic. And when a student comes back from a set, I say, what was the topic? Because I was listening on the microphone anyway. And often students go, don't know. Because if you're a beginner, there's too much adrenaline. If you're intermediate, you'll know the topic or if you record yourself, you'll know the topic right. When you got the topic, a useful springboard phrase, which I've spoken about in Street Hustle is to say, uh-huh. When I think of X, I think of X Y Zed. And, you know, try to place fully tease a little bit or challenge. So, ah, when I think of Miami, I think of good weather, obviously good beaches, but I think of Miami Vice. It sounds a little cheesy. You know, I can imagine you on a jet ski, wearing a shell suit, driving a pink car, whatever. Doesn't really matter. Now, that's sometimes enough to get her to hook, but more often than not, it's not enough. So a good exercise is to go home and think, oh, yeah, I met that girl from Miami today. That set didn't go very well. On a piece of paper, write down the word Miami and around it do a mind map. So what could you have said? What story could you have told about Miami Vice? Maybe you could have done a bit of a role play about the drug smuggling of the nineties, you know? Maybe some story comes to mind about South Beach. Maybe because we've to keep the story about her, you could have accused her of of being a bit of a Barbie doll, you know, getting into lounge bars and clubs for free. Whatever. But there's an example for Miami. You can do this on the Internet. You don't even have to, go out there if you're a lazy bugger. You can do word association. So use a random word generator and it will flash up a word like squirrel or Eiffel Tower or pickup truck. And you try to tell a little riffing story. Not funny, but accusing story on that word, bit of word association. You can do it with Google images. Type in Paris street fashion or type in whatever city you're in, Frankfurt street fashion. Look at the pictures of the girls and run the stack in the story. So, hey, I think you look nice. What I noticed about you is, ah, when I think of that, I think of, the Tom show bit. Yeah. And I keep going really until she, a, either walks off or b she hooks. I might throw out another stack. Never go beyond two stacks otherwise you you sound like a a hypnotist. You sound like a mind reader in Las Vegas. So just one or two. Where she's from, what her job is, what she's doing right now. So if you're in a city where everybody's from that city, you don't need to guess geography. You could say, oh, you look like a very dreamy art student. You know, I can imagine you throwing paint in your mama's basement. Yeah. You you look very abstract. You've got a very creative look about you. Am I right or am I right? She'll reply and riff on what she said. You can sit in one place. I say this on the improv video. Go to a park, sit on a bench near the high street and just watch girls walking past. Again, you don't need to approach them if you've got high a a, just sit there. As they go past in your head, run the open stack and story. So, hey, I think you look nice. What I noticed about you is, uh-huh. When I think of that, I think of x y zed. Yep. And you'll start to see patterns like a street photographer. You'll start to notice certain kinds of boots, certain kinds of hats, certain kinds of coats, that students look one way, that bankers look another way, that lawyers look another way, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. What else can you do? I said don't do stand up courses, but you could do an improv course. You go and see stand up comedy, certainly the ones where it's improvisational. So the audience will throw something or even a good heckle, you know, watch how they respond, watch how they take it surreal. They agree and amplify. They don't get into a frame war. They don't get all angry. They use that, as ammunition to fire back and they win. Yeah. Because if you get reactive, first one to get really reactive loses. Watch, great speakers, great orators and yeah, some stand ups. As I said, watch their delivery, watch their timing, all that stuff helps. But the best thing of all, as I said, is going out, leaving your house, talking to girls in coffee shops and supermarkets, bookstores on the street, record yourself with a dictaphone or your mobile phone. Just plug in your iPhone, headphones, them around your neck. It looks like you're listening to music. Excuse me. That Czech food was wonderful, but it's, doing dodgy things to me. Yeah. Record yourself. I use a cheap dictaphone. Doesn't really matter what it is. Just get a cheap dictaphone, put it in your pocket, leave it running. A dictaphone run dictaphone runs for hours, like twenty, thirty, forty hours. An iPhone or an Android not so long. And the problem with recording on your phone is if you go to close her, that means you pull out your phone, you have to kind of tilt it away so she can't see you recording. It's all a bit messy. I've been caught out a few times. But if you record yourself, you can a, listen to your voice. So listen to the speed, listen to the pitch, listen to the projection, listen to your ums, and ahs, listen to how you break tension, listen to mister nice guy, listen to you doing too much rapport. But most importantly for this podcast, listen to how you perhaps miss the topic. She gives you a topic and that's your chance to be creative. This is the bread and butter of daygame. This is where heroes are made. A great daygamer, as I said, is a great improviser. You can say to him, Almaty Kazakhstan. Or you can say to him, Chicago. Or you can say to him, cricket. Or you can say to him, tractor. And he should be able to riff for one or two minutes until the girl thinks, wow, this guy's cool and she hooks. We'll finish with a quote from a great poet from New England. Think or he certainly wrote about New England. I know he was in Boston for a bit. Robert Frost, because we're in America, Robert Frost, and I'm in countryside which reminds me of Robert Frost. He said, I took the road less traveled by. When you're faced with two roads, take the one, take the road less traveled by. That's very black sheep. That's individualism. You stick it to the man. That's the only way to be creative. So you take all of Tom Torero's material and you do something different. You say, okay, this guy did it this way, I want to push it in this direction or this direction. I want to try daygame here. I want to try this line. I want to try this form of escalation. And then you write to Tom Torero and you let him know. And I'll be delighted if daygame evolves and continues to evolve. I won't be delighted if you're a rip off artist, but I'll be very, very, very delighted if you create a new direction for daygame. It's almost time, you know. I feel, as I said in daygame three point zero, I've said everything I can say about how I daygame. I've shown you seventeen hours of it in style selection and how I text and how I date. Daygame three point zero is everything I've done really That's on top of street hustle and street hustle is my bible for tools and techniques. I'll be talking a lot more about black sheep stuff in the future. You know, go in your own way, sticking it to the man. I love that sentence. Creativity is an act of defiance because that's what it is. I like Tom Torero, but let's try something different. That was podcast 97. I don't know where I'll be next week. I honestly don't. But thank you for tuning in. Send me your m p three of your daygame story, tom@tomtorero.com. I'll speak to you next week. Torero.