7 Questions for Alex Odessa

Video Interview

Interview hosted by Maxim.

• Part One Video 

• Part Two Video 

Written Interview

0:00 [Part One]

— Hi, Alex! We’re doing this interview for the Begame project. Let’s do a quick run through everything. First, tell us a bit about yourself, whatever you think matters most.

– I haven’t recorded videos for about two months, so surprisingly I’m a little nervous. I’ve told my story many times. As a kid, I was a nerd. I recently spoke to one of my classmates and he confirmed it. Maybe only now people will believe that. I’m slowly turning back into the kind of guy I used to be before I became this macho pickup artist.

When I was meeting women during my peak years, let’s say from age thirty-three to thirty-eight, girls would say: “Wow, I’m going to tell my friends today that I met a real macho.” But these days I probably don’t feel like a real macho anymore. There was a time when I definitely was one, and to the classmates who knew me as a geek, that seemed insane. I simply devoted a lot of time to self-development.

Now those words sound generic, but during the Soviet era they weren’t generic at all. I had boxing, yoga, karate, and I’d been meeting girls in the street since I was sixteen. Considering that was 1986 or 1987, I’m not even sure Mystery started earlier than I did.

– I see. So how did you get into pickup in the first place?

– Around 1997 or 1998, after I read that there were actually people doing this regularly and calling themselves something like “pickup artists.”

That was back in the Ogurtsov era, when guys would block off a little street and say, “I’ll be meeting girls in this spot, and some other guy will be meeting them over there.” I never thought I’d join people like that. I used to laugh at them. I had some downloaded CDs, but they were full of such nonsense it was ridiculous, so I lost interest in the whole thing.

I came back to the topic later when a mutual friend told me about Vadim Sova and “Access Code.” My friend told me that Sova had this amazing way of opening women called a “time constraint.” The very first thing I learned from that story was that Sova would approach a girl and say: “You have twenty seconds to decide whether you’re coming back to my place or not. If it’s no, I leave. If it’s yes, we go together.” That was the first technique I ever used. I told a girl: “You have ten seconds to decide whether you’re coming home with me.” She replied, “Why so little time?” I said, “Samurai make life-or-death decisions in seven breaths. All you have to decide is whether or not you want to come back to my place. This isn’t life or death, so what are you afraid of?” She decided yes and came with me.

That was my introduction to Sova through a friend, and later we actually met in person around 2007 or 2008. I showed up on the Pickup.ru forum in 2005, when I realized people really had no idea how to meet women, how seduction works, or how to understand any of it properly. At that time there weren’t people operating at that level, so I became known very quickly. That happened because I’d been approaching girls since I was sixteen and studying this on my own, along with psychology and a lot of related things. By 2005 I already had a psychology degree and three to four years of psychotherapy practice. I’d spent about ten years learning by then. When pickup first started to emerge and develop, I was already fully prepared. By that point I had formed as a person, had already been married twice, and was about to marry for the third time. I’m still in my third marriage now. There were very few specialists at that level. At the time I was much more prepared psychologically and technically than almost everyone else, and that’s how people found out about me. Today there are plenty of people like that, but back then I was ahead of the whole market.

– Then I guess you kind of dropped out of the mainstream current?

– I didn’t drop out. I just moved at my own pace.

– I just remember your collaborations with Druid from SUMO, Vozhevatov, Volshansky, and I think maybe some others too.

– Yes, there were some. I tried doing collaborations with Pickup.ru. I’ll put it this way: if I had done a collaboration with RMES, I probably would have stayed more in the mainstream. I didn’t like Mankubus, I didn’t like his approach, and I didn’t like the business-oriented approach to pickup. What attracted me was the warm, human side of it. A more soulful approach, focused on the student’s actual needs rather than his wallet. I don’t work with people’s wallets. The people who do have to pour money into marketing, advertising, and all the rest. Maybe that’s one reason I never pushed that far commercially.

– I agree with your approach too, unfortunately it usually makes less money.

– That’s true.

– But probably brings more happiness.

7:03

– Here’s the next question: “Do you have a wife or an LTR? Why did you settle on her specifically? Do you still play while married, or do you only run trainings now? What didn’t work for you in your previous marriages? Haven’t you gotten tired of the game yet?”

– As for marriage, I never really aspired to it. And yet somehow I still ended up married twice. Ever since I was about fourteen, I had this recurring nightmare that I was married. It felt terrifying. I really did not want to get married.

My first marriage was open. I slept with her friends, even with the maid of honor at our wedding. We had some swinger-style parties. In that first marriage I experimented a lot, and openly.

– How old were you when you got married the first time?

– I got married at twenty. She was eighteen. By twenty-four I was already a karate instructor, and one day I brought two of my female students over and had sex with both of them. That ended up becoming the reason the marriage fell apart.

The second time I got married mostly because the girl insisted, and because I liked her body. In reality we only lived together for two months. I liked having sex with her, but I didn’t enjoy living with her. I have a son from my first marriage. From the third marriage I have a daughter, who is now thirteen.

I’m not going to go into whether I still “play” or not. If I say I don’t, people will ask what kind of pickup artist I am then. With the amount of experience I have, I’m not shy about approaching women, because in my family that’s considered part of my work. I do demonstrations, so I stay in the game. And second, I believe the most important thing in pickup is what it develops in you: your mindset, your approaches, your ability to handle stress. When you walk up to a woman you don’t know on the street, that’s a cold approach. It demands self-control, the ability to pursue your goal, flexibility, seductiveness, emotional presence, playfulness. It’s a huge challenge to your character, and that’s why those qualities grow. And for me, the actual seduction process itself was never much of a problem. If I can approach her, get her to let me into her world, and lead her somewhere with me, then I already possess some real seductive potential.

At one point this was all very easy for me. The hard part was just the initial approach, and after that either the girl was into it or she wasn’t, either she liked me or she didn’t. I even developed a phrase: “I like you, do you like me?” I would just ask it directly. If not, then why waste time? Later I didn’t even need to ask anymore; I started to feel it automatically. I would talk to her in a soft, low chest voice, not because I’d read that somewhere, but because it happened naturally. You slow down, smile, watch whether she’s following you, then kiss her. What more is there to say? Those were wonderful times.

– Got it. There was still one part of the question left. Why did you get married for the third time?

– I understood that she would be a good mother to my child. That was the main thing. Of course there was passion too. And I also didn’t want her to worry while she was pregnant, wondering where I was running around.

12:54

– When was it easier to seduce girls: the mid-90s, the 2000s, or now?

– It was easier for me before. That also ties into the next question about age. If you took the version of me from the 90s and dropped him into the present day, I probably wouldn’t manage either. Times have changed, methods have changed. I think I would adapt, but you have to change with the times. I wouldn’t be as effective as I could have been back then.

I can say what got worse and what got better. First, the internet killed pickup. Second, pickup got killed by the idea that it’s just a set of tricks, a way to get a girl into bed and then discard her. Online dating killed pickup. The image of a pickup artist became that of a manipulator who uses tricks to seduce a girl and then dumps her. I remember lots of guys who were afraid to approach women. I would walk up, take the girl lightly by the arm, and lead her over to the guy. People were amazed. I was so free, so easygoing, with no limitations. I could come within twenty centimeters of her and just start talking. Total social freedom. People caught that freedom from me. It was a huge advantage. Today you can’t manually rack up nearly as many connections in the street as you can online, so that skill is no longer magical, no longer some huge edge. Before, meeting women in the street was an enormous advantage. Even in 2006 a guy might meet one girl every two weeks. Back then there just weren’t many places to meet women. Now a girl can find a guy herself on the internet. Before it was university, then work, then home. They were scared. My mother used to tell me, “Get married while you’re still in college, because later there won’t be any girls around.” She was still living by those old standards. Back then, knowing how to meet women was an unbelievable advantage. Now that advantage is mostly gone. It still gives you something, but very little compared to what it used to give.

0:00 [Part Two]

– Listen, Alex, you brought up a very important topic. A lot of guys who were active in pickup got accused of being pickup artists or were met with negativity once women suspected it. How did you handle that?

– The way I met women, nobody could tell I was a pickup artist. I called it “loser pickup,” or sometimes, when I went in very directly, “bull pickup.” The simplest kind of opener possible. I’d walk up to a girl in a club and say, “Move over.” Then I’d sit down, put my arm around her shoulders, and ask, “What are you drinking?” Is that pickup or what?

– Not really.

– Exactly. It’s just a very direct, almost animal kind of game. Same on vacation: brazen, commanding, “Move over.” And that “loser pickup” thing, I only understand that label now.

I pushed almost all the work onto nonverbal communication. You don’t need to say, “Hi” or “Excuse me, miss,” all that is unnecessary. You need to talk to her as if she were just a girl from your neighborhood whom you happened to run into in a different setting. As if you’ve known her forever. Girls would tell me exactly that: “You talk to me as if we’ve known each other for a thousand years.” I could walk up and make a gesture that suggested we were already familiar, not exactly pinching her ass, but something in that spirit, so she’d assume I was someone she knew. So how could anyone accuse me of being a pickup artist?

A good pickup artist meets women in a way that nobody even realizes he’s a pickup artist. It happened sometimes, but very rarely. Once I even got annoyed and said, “What, are all of you in on this together or something?” The dumbest question women ask is: “Do you meet all girls like this?” Or: “Do you say that to everyone?” I hated that crap. Another one was: “Do you have a girlfriend?” I had to hear that too. And the funny thing is, I really did meet everyone that way. Those are disgusting questions, and you need to know how to answer them. I’m not going to give away those keys right now. Stupid questions just get in the way of an interaction.

3:28

– Got it. All right then. What would you tell yourself ten years ago?

– I did everything right. I got into sports, looked after my health, and honestly I should have quit active pickup sooner. I got tired of meeting women in such insane numbers. I was taking ten phone numbers a day. How much can a man do? Back then I simply couldn’t stop. If I liked someone, I’d start talking to her, and then I’d do it again and again. I took a number, took another, took another. I liked all of them. I met everybody. That was fifteen years ago. Over the last five years I was taking fewer and fewer numbers. I actually started forcing myself not to interact. I’d be riding in a minibus, hear a girl’s voice, and want to take her number. I had to make myself not turn around, not walk up. I started giving more attention to sport.

What advice would I give myself? Pay more attention to business and a little less to sport. If I were speaking to myself twenty years ago, I’d tell myself to work the commercial side of pickup rather than the cozy, idealistic side. I gave myself to the market that existed then. Of course I get some return on that now, but it doesn’t compare to the kind of return that comes from making serious money. Once you make money, you can convert it into whatever values you want. Money is a universal converter. You can turn it into almost anything. A “thank you” is much harder to convert into something tangible.

– I know there was a whole trend around info products. As far as I know, you’ve deliberately refused to release info products.

– There was a story like that. Some guy started selling my info products. I told him to take them off his site. He laughed and didn’t remove them, and after that I never released another product. I don’t want anyone selling my info products behind my back.

– That’s unfortunate, but understandable.

5:55

– Who do you think is the best seducer in Russia today?

– I honestly don’t know who I would name. I don’t know anyone I’d call that. The best seducers in Russia are oligarchs. Men with money and status get the most beautiful women. How are we even supposed to define the “best” seducer? These days the whole scene has become unsporting. I don’t want to promote certain guys, there are these brothers who even published some kind of book. They trick women into bed, manipulate escorts, promise them money, tell them fairy tales. So what’s the point of saying they’re effective? Can I really call them the best seducers? Men with money and fame sleep with the most beautiful women far more often than a seducer using honest methods does.

– So should we just shut down the pickup chats and go into business instead?

– Pickup, as I see it, is half-dead. Tell me, what’s the point of training naturally when someone else can just use performance enhancers? It’s the same in pickup. The guys who relied on honest, sporting methods lose to the guys using unsporting methods. Today there’s no real way to track that. So pickup as a sport is dead. This space has long been dominated by people who live by deception.

But in terms of what people actually need, they need real methods, because deception might get a woman into bed once or twice, but people need techniques that have nothing to do with lies. Techniques that are connected to building long-term relationships. You can’t build long-term relationships on lies; you have to build them on your real self. Sporting, honest methods are still needed, but they lost the competition to the dishonest ones. Which means that honest methods are no longer “pickup” in the market sense. They need to distance themselves from that label and call themselves something else. If you try to compete in the old sporting way, a deceitful pickup artist will always show you hotter girls and flashier results. You simply can’t compare. That’s why you’re forced not to call yourself a pickup artist anymore and instead find your own audience, people who want communication skills that have nothing to do with those shortcuts.

– I get it. Kind of sad.

– No, not sad. It’s just a different market. Pickup got boxed into certain limits. To truly help people, it should teach skills without deception. But if you don’t deceive, you can’t dominate that market. Without deception, you can’t rise above the rest and capture the client.

10:21

– How does age affect your game?

– Age matters, obviously. The older you get, the older your women get. The only question is by how much. How young can you still go? How young do you feel, and how young do you look? At fifty-one you can still run game on women in their forties, but who wants that? I shouldn’t even say it like that. Of course they matter, some people love them, some have lived a huge part of their lives with them. My wife is twelve years younger than I am.

In pickup, women in their forties have no market value. In pickup, what’s prized is eighteen to twenty-five. Can a fifty-year-old still seduce eighteen-year-old girls? Yes, if he has certain skills, status, finances, and fame. It’s possible, but difficult. Without question, the older you get, the older your women become. A ten-year difference means nothing to a pickup artist. Fifteen years is harder. Twenty is hard. Twenty-five is already pushing the limits. A thirty-year gap without status, deception, or external boosts is unlikely. That’s my view speaking from the height of being fifty-one years old. What comes next, I don’t know.

– I can see some gray in your beard. Have you ever tried dyeing it?

– There was a time when I did. There are photos. But now I’m too lazy. Why bother?

– Botox, peels, anything like that?

– No. I did use skin-lightening treatments on my face once, and that I actually recommend. As you get older, pigmentation spots start to appear, so I lightened them. But it’s a hassle, because after that you can’t go out in the sun for two months.

13:23

– All right. What do you think about today’s pickup “guru” types who claim something like fifteen hundred lays over five years?

– Come on, show me those fifteen hundred lays and I’ll believe it. People can say anything, and you can say it too, that you had fifteen hundred. Give me a break.

– I heard there’s a guy named Grach, also from Ukraine.

– Yes, I’ve heard of Grach. We’ve spoken a little. He’s a pretty brazen guy. Maybe it’s true, maybe not, but whether the number is really that high, I have no idea. It’s a different era now. I had somewhere around 250 to 300 women, but that was in the old-school era of street approaches. Now it’s a different world. With high enough activity online, you can find three women a week. That’s nine to twelve new women a month. It drives you insane. Eventually you stop seeing any difference between them. Your mind starts leaking. I remember what it was like when I had a new girl every day. You stop seeing a person and start orienting only around body parts: “Wow, what an ass.” You touch her, sleep with her, let her go, then the next one, “What great tits.” When you live like that, you’re not having sex with people, you’re having sex with female body parts. To sleep with three different people a week as actual human beings, that’s enough to make you lose your mind.

15:33

– Which school is stronger, the Russian one or the Western one? Are there any major differences between seduction there and here?

– Russian schools are stronger for Russia, and Western schools are stronger for the West. Let’s keep it simple.

– Were you the one who brought Mystery to Russia?

– No, not at all. God forbid. He came on his own. I met him and suggested to his organizer, Beckster, that Mystery should run a workshop for the guys in Odessa. If I hadn’t suggested it, someone else would have. RMES probably would have.

I was the first one who recognized him, the first one who proposed it. I walked up and told him I knew who he was. In practical terms, I ended up helping organize three events for them, three workshops. One of them was closed, and people paid five hundred dollars each. I was interested in it. I didn’t know English well, so we found a translator, found a venue, arranged everything. A whole team helped out.

– Can you say anything about his game? Did he ever comment on your game? Did he see you in action?

– Honestly, everybody is mostly interested in themselves. I was more interested in myself than in Mystery, so I wasn’t watching him that closely when I was busy. And when Mystery was busy, he wasn’t interested in me, or even in Beckster. And when Beckster was busy with girls, he wasn’t interested in anybody at all.

Seducers are crazy people. They’re interested in the game itself, in the participants. At those moments everything disappears for them except the game. The moments when he watched me, or I watched him, lasted minutes, not hours. If I’d been someone without my own experience, then sure, I would have run after him, absorbed everything, watched what he did. But I understood that whatever Mystery could do, I couldn’t necessarily reproduce. Different style, different tricks.

I enjoyed watching Beckster with women because in some ways he did things similarly to me. His approaches were direct; Mystery was less direct. Beckster was bolder, younger, better at opening girls, funnier and more playful.

Beckster gets offended that all the attention always goes to Mystery, while he gets overlooked, even though Mystery himself says Beckster became better because he’s younger. My general impression? Honestly, it’s a little sad. Old men are old men. He’s an old man, I’m an old man.

From the videos, Mystery used to be bright, charismatic, powerful, an unbelievable person. Now he still flares up sometimes, with the fire he used to have, but only for a short while. I mean, he can still burn through an entire night, but then he sleeps. You call and they say, “Mystery’s asleep, Mystery’s asleep...” He can sleep all day. Which probably means he was running hard all night before that.

– Thank you! That was really enjoyable, productive, and we even stayed on time.

– I can’t believe it. Yeah.