On a recent episode of Dr. Phil, he invited the founders of Love Systems (formerly known as The Mystery Method) and Ross Jeffries (founder of Speed Seduction) to talk about their business, techniques for picking up women, and basically giving everyone an idea about what they’re about.

Dr. Phil seemed nonconfrontational, given the target demographic for his program and the fact that the episode was titled “Women Beware”, and likened learning how to meet women to the fact that women wear pushup bras, makeup, and take a lot of time to work on their appearance. If women can take steps to make themselves more attractive, then why shouldn’t guys be able to learn the same thing?

Mystery Method guys defended their method, claiming that people have to learn a good way to approach. If the way you start a conversation is boring and uncreative, then you’re likely to just get tuned out, and the girl won’t get a chance to know you. Both the women on the program said the Mystery Method techniques were really interesting and caught their attention, and they were a lot different from what they were used to hearing and being approached with (drunk dudes and sleazy guys).

Then Ross Jeffries came on and Dr. Phil seemed to be more aggressive towards him, perhaps because the image he portrays in his advertising is mysogynistic. But Jeffries has always claimed that the way to draw attention to his product is through really blunt, offensive, locker room talk, while the actual tone of the product is a lot more positive. Jeffries commented that Dr. Phil’s producers do the same thing, taking the most provocative clips from the shows to get people to watch (but this rebuttal was cut from the show). He also went on to attack the Mystery Method company, saying that they teach techniques that are destructive to woman’s self-esteem and can have negative long-term reprecussions.

In actuality, even though there’s a lot of negative press surrounding both these groups and the idea of guys learning how to pick up women, and the fact that the competiting seduction gurus often get into drawn out battles with each other, the fact is beneath all of this are just some good, common sense ideas. Both these methodologies (Mystery Method and Speed Seduction) place an emphasis on improving yourself and your lifestyle to become a more attractive person. Both place an emphasis on drawing boundaries about who you are and what kind of behaviour you’ll accept from people. The Mystery Method is based on telling interesting stories which portray attractive qualities about yourself, which is something that most cool people do anyway. I’m sure a lot of you have friends that tell the same kind of stories the first time they’re meeting new people, it’s just that they’re not really that consciously aware that they’re using the same stories over and over again. Speed Seduction, on the other hand, teaches you to learn certain patterns and phrases to make your speech more persuasive and interesting. When you look at some of the romanticists that have existed over the years, people like Casanova, you’ll find that they use the same kind of descriptive language, they just didn’t consciously try and learn and apply techniques to acquire this manner of speech. Or maybe they did?

The overall reaction of the studio audience was pretty positive, and as the show went on and the guests got a chance to explain their side of the story, they started to win over the audience. Savoy, of Mystery Method, later said that there doesn’t have to be this negative image of the seduction community. If you’ve thought about making improvements to your social skills, there’s plenty of material and information out there to help you do. You don’t have to have money, looks, or fame to get the kind of success and social life that you really want, you just have to make the decision to get out there and socialize, and now you have the tools out there to help you improve.