7 Questions for Nikita Nebesny

Video interview

Interview hosted by Dr. Manhattan.

• Interview with Nikita Nebesny 

Written interview

00:10

– Hi everyone! Hey, Nikitos! I've wanted to record something with you for a long time, but somehow it never worked out. Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you even get pulled into our pickup world?

– Sure. Back when I was little and still in school, I had this huge head compared to the rest of my body. I looked goofy, basically. Kids are cruel, they look at your appearance. Later everything caught up, everything evened out. My mom kept telling me I was handsome, and deep down I felt like, you all just don't get it. Even though other people probably saw me as the ugly duckling, I always imagined myself as movie heroes: Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone. I believed I was a good-looking kid and that I deserved to be the best, to be heroic. The heroic part was harder, because my mom spoiled me a lot.

My mindset was heroic, but in reality I was timid, because my mom solved everything for me. Still, in seventh grade, because of family circumstances, I went to live in a village while my mom was abroad. And the village toughened me up. It really gave me that masculine backbone, because you had to fight, period. There was no way around it. Once I got stronger, people started saying I was handsome. I became more confident. My body caught up with my head, and I started getting girls, cute, fun ones. After a year or two, I got my fill of that and started looking further. I wanted the really stunning girls, the ones collecting tons of likes online. Like out of a movie. Around then I discovered Sasha Tikhomirov, this photographer guy. He shot these beautiful girls, dated them, everything looked amazing. That made me want more, and Sasha became a role model for me. He filmed girls, and they were insanely beautiful. So I decided: I'll become a photographer. If I'm a photographer, then I have a built-in reason to meet these girls, they have a reason to spend time with me. Back then there weren't that many photographers, and everyone wanted good photos for VK, everywhere, all over the place. So I started really trying.

There weren't many photographers, and if you're just starting out and you show up with a camera right away, you know how it looks, like in those memes: "Are you even really a photographer?" Sure, it wasn't some magic cheat code that instantly sent you to the stars, but it was still a big advantage. First I photographed girls I knew in the village, then girls in the city, because by then I'd moved there. Those average girls had prettier friends, and little by little they started recommending me to those prettier friends. Those prettier girls had star-friends, actual model types. Then those girls started recommending me upward too. So the experience piled up, piled up, piled up. And after about eight months, sex with those models started happening too.

By then I was already reading pickup books and had started piecing things together. I read Leslie's Life Without Panties, read Bogachev, and thought: damn, so there really is a framework for this. So I started trying things, taking bits from there. I never really liked street game much, I kind of looked down on it. In my whole life I've probably only done those all-day street approach sessions ten times or so. But I always thought: how can you not go up to a beautiful girl and meet her? That felt like a challenge to me. I approached, failed, same as everyone else. It was all fine. I wasn't doing anything supernatural. But over time, experience started showing. I'd shot so many girls, so many girls, so many girls.

Me and the guys basically started a trend. That's not an exaggeration, that's a real thing that happened on our peak run: one day a girl is starring in a Timati music video, the next day she's flying in from Moscow specifically to do a shoot and video with us. We had that whole Orlyonok Production phase. We were filming videos, getting hands down girls' panties, and it was wild. And not with random girls either, with actual models who had contracts, who'd worked in England and elsewhere. It was crazy that a model would come shoot with us, even though we were just neighborhood boys, not much money, just some notoriety, and we had no clue how to monetize any of it. But there she was, coming straight from Timati to shoot with us.

There's one video, I can send it later if you want, it's called "Odessa Summer." I literally had no money to get to Odessa, so I stood there with a sign saying I wanted to go to Odessa. Some driver picked me up, I got to Odessa, walked into the glamorous Arkadia club, and all the girls started gathering around me, feeding me. So many girls. I was barefoot. Half naked, but girls everywhere. Anyway, I'm rambling, I should get back to the point of how I ended up where I did. So. I had this one friend, a poker player. Really strong player. One of the best in Ukraine. Recently he hit for 170,000 euros in one go. Just like that. PokerStars: "You won 170 thousand." He literally sent me the screenshot.

Back then we started hanging out, and in a year he got way better. Quiet guy, modest, great sense of humor, but he couldn't show it. And I'd just tell him, "Bro, in this situation do this. In that one, walk over there. Dress like this." And he'd go, "Alright, let's do it." He listened to every piece of advice. Just listened. Honestly, the guys who succeed with me are the ones who don't overthink, they listen. He listened and listened, and in the end he started having success with girls. His humor came out, girls started coming into his life. He wrote a promo post about me on his poker blog, and I instantly got six or seven clients paying me forty bucks an hour. That was it, life got better. I started renting apartments. That's how I got into all this. How are you supposed to become a player without pickup? No, guys, pickup is important. Without it the picture is incomplete. Without pickup you're missing a third of the whole thing. You can be handsome, rich, even confident, but you still won't understand those little manipulative female dynamics. And that's a huge disadvantage.

– Okay, thanks! I picked the questions mostly around looks, though.

– Pick whatever works. As long as it's useful.

09:00

– Let's start right away with the first one. Are looks important in seduction? Your favorite question.)

– Yes. Yeah, I'll explain. I always like to start by saying that every field has its masters. Pickup artists are masters of pickup. A pickup artist has certain knowledge, has followers, guys he's helped. And sometimes there are guys he didn't help, and maybe they don't like him for that. I always, always say this first: guys, this is my personal opinion. I stress that, because some people don't get it. This is not absolute truth. It's my opinion, because it's an interview with me, so that's what I'm giving.

I think looks are the initial element in seduction. Let me explain why. A guy has a certain number of points, right? That's obvious, that's an axiom, no need to prove it. There are ratings: handsome, rich, whatever else, and you add up a certain number of points. Or you don't. And then you either have success or you don't. The question is what matters first in the hierarchy. I'm not saying other things don't matter. But if you're sitting there with nothing but your dick out and you need to seduce a girl, what's the first thing you should do? First, get off your ass, learn a little about trends, or better yet, come to me. Honestly, that's just a fact, because the guys in my group who try to figure it out on their own don't get the same results. The day I create some course where guys can level up without my direct help will be a very happy, game-changing day in my profession. For now, I can't do that. So either they come to me, or they figure things out themselves, study trends, fix their hairstyle, and that's the first step.

Then he walks outside. We're not even talking about pickup yet, or confidence, and we're not even talking about the fact he might still be socially awkward. Let's say this awkward guy goes out in cool clothes and goes, "Uhhh... aaa..." We don't do that. Let's assume, at minimum, he can say hello to a girl and something like, "Hey, where are you headed?" or "Hey, that's a beautiful dress." Just the bare minimum, nothing high-level. But he looks decent. Girls will glance back at him, whisper about him. If he shows up to a birthday party with a new group, the girls will ask, "Who's that new guy? Look how cute he is." And then he'll ruin it with his "Aaaooouhh..." because he won't yet match the image he's wearing. But he'll learn to match it very quickly.

Looks come first because they switch on an incoming stream of attention, and they let you work on your skills in practice instead of in isolation. Skills have to be trained in real life, same as learning English or anything else. It's like buying yourself a ticket to another country so you're forced to practice the language. In this case, your appearance is that ticket.

– I agree. Especially if you're a direct-game guy doing straightforward approaches, then looks are fundamental. More important than voice, though maybe height matters too. There was one more question: what percentage would you say looks matter?

In my opinion, a guy's appearance as a whole accounts for about 35 to 40 percent. If he's really well put together. And I mean the full package: the face you were born with, plus how you dress. I'm talking specifically about success in seduction, sex. I'm not talking about long-term relationships after sex, because the ratio shifts a little there. What does a girl want? Confidence and beauty. Even if the guy is basically useless, some kind of screwup, if he has confidence and looks, the girl will think: I want to sleep with him. He's confident. That's how I see it.

14:30

– Screwup, funny word.) Right, the basic survival and reproduction triggers. Thanks. Let's move to the next question. What's unique about the Nebesny Method, and why such a flashy name?

– Ah... nice. That's actually a good question. The Nebesny Method is a method precisely because it's something assembled. Anything new is made from older pieces. We recently saw Morgenstern say in a Dud interview that you can't really create something completely new. You take pieces, bricks, and arrange them into a new sequence, a new order, a new set. Same with me. There's the concept of a stylist, and that's great. You dress a guy well, now he looks stylish. But I have this whole psychology of style. Guys sometimes ask, "Okay, I got dressed, am I good now?" But something still doesn't work. And I go, "Straighten your shoulders." "What do you mean, straighten my shoulders?" Go stand in front of the mirror right now: you look terrible because you're all crooked. Stand up straight. Then he does it and goes, "Oh, that's what was missing." You walked in hunched over, while there's a leader in the room, and you're ruining the whole look. If you straighten out, that's the cherry on top, that's the cream in the cake.

There's psychology in style, plus a ton of little nuances. Stylists, for example, know that if you want lips to look fuller, you shave around them. Girls like full lips. I realized this when I started shaving a little more space between my lips and beard. From a distance the lips look bigger. I thought, damn, what a life hack. Those kinds of elements, those triggers, even the way I show a beard in photos. What stylist is going to explain that? That's something a photographer has to explain, how a man can present his beard, how to build the whole external component of a man, including this incredibly important information field. In today's world, your information field is a dense part of who you are. It's inseparable. A girl sees you on Tinder, and if you've used the right triggers there, she has already fantasized so much that even if you show up and don't fully match it, even if you fall well short, it'll still be fine. Girls are emotional creatures. If she's built you up in her head as some kind of hero, then she's already assigned those qualities to you herself. I explained that a bit chaotically, but to sum it up: the Nebesny Method is a combination of posing techniques for photos, photo editing, barbering, and the art of style. The most essential parts, squeezed down.

18:26

– Every kind of progress is also a kind of regression. Doesn't Nikita think that excessive focus on appearance could hurt personality development?

– I'll answer that logically. If you're a scientist and you want to make some breakthrough, something hugely important, you need to spend time in the lab, six to eight hours, running those rats around so they eventually lead you to some huge discovery. Elon Musk would probably laugh at this and a meme would pop up: "Oh, looks? Holy shit. Never heard of it." I have an article where I talk about a "hypertrophied skill." That's when a person is insanely exceptional at something, or he's some old smelly grandpa with a billion dollars. I'm speaking broadly here.

So let's say the old guy has a billion. He'll have friends, beautiful girls, supermodels, and interesting people around him. Talented women will come to him too: an actress, a singer, an intellectual, because he has that oversized asset. Same thing, I'm sure, with pickup artists. Maybe there are a thousand, maybe five thousand, maybe ten, maybe fifty. Some random overweight Mexican guy, and he still cracks girls like nuts. Then some Nikita Nebesny will look at him and say, "Yeah, sure, looks don't matter." But for everyone else, even businessmen and entrepreneurs, okay, keep working, great, you're making money.

I have a friend, Igoryok Vinogradov. A lot of people know him. Amazing guy, amazing girl by his side. He's not rich, but he takes care of his appearance, he has good natural features, and he has unconscious pickup skills. A natural, as they say. The girls he gets are incredible. Meanwhile all these entrepreneurs making 200k-plus a year are basically sitting on the bench in comparison. Kosenko hangs around here, but he isn't sleeping with girls like the ones Igor sleeps with. So basically, money doesn't save them in that area. Which means if their goal is to have beautiful girls, or even just one super-beautiful girl, then maybe they can get her, if they actually make that a goal, carve out some time away from business, invest in their image, and so on. Right now guys don't pay enough attention to that. In fact, the fact that they don't invest in themselves is what slows down their personal development.

22:03

– Do you believe that after twenty-five a person can still develop good taste if they didn't have it before? There were lots of makeover shows where someone would transform, then after a while go back to the old version of themselves. Does the Nebesny Method help prevent that relapse?

– I don't know where I can post links here, but I'm working on a new case study right now. From older ones, I have Yura, who's 38, and Mikhail, who's 32. So far they're holding up, producing new content that matches the level I set for them. They can already dress themselves with taste. If someone gets interested in that story, he can figure it out for himself. What, thirty years old? The usual example, maybe it's even fake, is Colonel Sanders creating KFC at seventy. Personally, guys, I believe you can do whatever you want at any age. Honestly, I'd bet someone could become heavyweight world boxing champion at forty-five even if he started training from scratch. I believe that. That's just the kind of person I am. And I have two examples that back it up.

– And how long did those case studies last... I mean after you'd already run them through the course?

– One lasted a year, the other half a year.

24:50

– Nikita, you talked about the basics in clothing: white T-shirt, white sneakers, light blue jeans, and so on. Can you talk about the basics in hairstyles? Are there any universal hairstyles that suit everyone the way some clothing basics do? Does head shape matter?

– Yes. Head shape matters. I only learned that quite recently. Or rather, not that I didn't know, more that I didn't believe it, I brushed it off. In general I'm a very flexible person: if I see something new, I try to understand it, like okay, there's some gap here. I'd hear people talking about head shape and think: what head shape? Just get a haircut and that's it. But when you study a lot in your field, eventually you get curious. Today my buddy Said, great guy, was telling me how he built his business: he invested 180,000 euros of his own money into placing rental power banks around Moscow. His strategy was to refine everything, make it excellent, build the perfect software for the offer. And some other guy just went out and placed the power banks. The software wasn't perfect, the design was crappy, everything was crappy, but he got there first and improved things gradually. So when Said entered the market, people told him, "Oh, so you're like that guy, like that company." And he's the kind of person who can't work like that anymore.

What I understood first was this: the main thing is that you feel good with the hairstyle. But in general I always recommend that guys keep the sides short. Not because of how it fits the shape of the head exactly. It's because girls get a psychological trigger from it: it signals that the guy gets regular haircuts. That's an extra trigger for neatness and being well-off. Exceptions only prove the rule. So yes, I think head shape absolutely matters. There are egg-shaped heads, triangle-shaped heads, square ones. And it's not just about head shape either. You can visually make yourself look taller just by wearing black clothes. Or put on stripes and you'll look even taller. If you're short and wear segmented clothes, stripe here, stripe there, the eye gets stuck on you. Someone looks and thinks, "Alright, got it, little guy." Because they really examined you. Same thing with hair. If your shape is egg-like, you can't leave bulk here by the ears. There is a basic haircut. The basic one is neat sides. Does head shape matter? It does. That's why shaved sides don't work for everyone.

– With your permission, one quick clarification. One of my exes is an international-class stylist, won a bunch of competitions. She cut my hair for two years. She said a hairstyle is built mainly off head shape, skull structure, and so on.

– Looking at you, I think your style features are right. Your head is oval, so this hairstyle is perfect for you. My head is shaped like an axe, and this hairstyle works for me too, plus I grew out a bit of beard. Your hair emphasizes everything correctly.

– Right, yeah, they look at the bone structure and all that, so there is a dependency.

30:02

– Last question, more of a conceptual one. Is it worth wearing a classic suit as everyday clothing, or as an outfit for going out in the field?

– Earlier I would've said yes. Now I'd recommend classic style maybe for going to a club. Though of course you need to tweak it a bit. There's that super-authoritative classic look where not a single step left or right is allowed. And then there's a suit with just a little bit of flair. No tie, top two buttons undone. When you show up in a suit, it signals that you're some kind of successful guy. Even if you aren't actually successful, that night the girl won't care. Based on that signal, she'll want to be with you.

Recently there was a situation on an island, where the status symbols are different, and I wore a shirt and shorts that looked kind of noble, like some young merchant prince. The girl happened to be an entrepreneur, and she was into colorful, layered, velvet-type things, and she fell for me right away. I slept with her immediately. The next morning she realized I wasn't remotely on the level my clothes suggested. "Sorry, baby, I dress like a young millionaire." I just can't help it. But at that moment it worked. Same with a suit: sure, maybe for a club or maybe for fieldwork, but honestly I don't even want to get deep into the field topic because there are too many variables. Say you go to a mall and you have to walk around there for an hour. What if some girls notice that you're just roaming around? I think that lowers your status. Personally, I'd feel awkward. I don't want to give advice on something I don't really know. I think if you're walking laps around a mall, that probably won't look great. Maybe for that you want slightly less conspicuous clothing. Honestly, you'd probably know better yourself.

– Hard to say. During the day maybe it does make sense. Though over time you kind of lose the habit of wearing classic clothes. I don't remember the last time I put on a suit. At most I wear a Bugs Bunny vest or something. And you also answered whether peacocking works, with a pretty solid example.)

– Well, that's all the questions. Super fast, informative, and super fun!

– Yeah. I actually enjoyed it. Really, that was a great talk. It's great that you don't interrupt, that you ask questions and actually listen to the answers. That's an awesome quality in an interviewer.

– Well, I'm interviewing you. My job is to ask questions and listen to the answers. Thanks! Bye, everyone!