Magic Bullets

• Review by Evgeny Genshaft
• Review by Dr. Manhattan
• Review by Denkista

Evgeny Genshaft

Right away, I want to warn you that I can only be about half-objective about this book, because at one point I received the latest version of "Magic Bullets" directly from its author, Nick Savoy. The book was password-protected. He sent it hoping that I would translate it for a Russian-speaking audience. So I understand that I may be a little biased, since I was personally invested in it at the time.

Due to unfortunate circumstances, Nick Savoy left the company before I managed to finish the translation. That was partly because of my procrastination and, possibly, Nick's incredible personal growth. I still have a certain number of chapters left. Maybe I should push through and finish it, just to finally get that weight off my shoulders.

On the other hand, I really internalized this book because I was translating it from English into Russian, and I can say that part of my growth in pickup happened precisely during that process. The mindset embedded in the book felt as if it was being embedded in me, because I was processing the text very intensely.

What is the book's major strength?

We all understand that historically, Love Systems is the group of people who stayed in the company after Mystery left it. In essence, Love Systems consists of Mystery's students and partners. They were among his earliest students and followers. So we can hardly expect major innovations from that company simply because the core system of thinking had already been laid down by the founder.

Savoy does not hide this. Right at the beginning he writes that any method needs a system. If Style had taken someone else's system instead of Mystery's, he probably would have succeeded too. And if Sinn had taken Style's system, he likewise would probably have succeeded. The point is not that the structure has to be perfect, but that it has to exist. And that is an important difference from so-called natural game, where everything is built around personal growth.

Yes, there is a certain structure, and you need to understand it. That is what Nick stands for. You can agree with it or not, but still.

Love Systems did not so much outgrow the M3 model as refine it extremely well. In some ways, I would even say they did it better than Mystery himself. In my view, historically, "Magic Bullets" anticipated certain things that appeared later in the book "Revelations". Maybe that is why there were legal disputes over intellectual property.

First:

The structure moved to a three-dimensional level instead of the line that Mystery built in the M3 model: attraction, comfort, and seduction. At least that was his clearest idea. Love Systems turned that line into a three-dimensional one, with three axes corresponding to the triune brain model:

1. Emotions. In other words, the emotional states a woman needs to go through for the seduction process to happen. Mystery's model fits here too; the guys just described it a little differently. There are fewer stages, they turned it into a pyramid, and the standard model became part of a triad in which this is the emotional component.
2. Logistics. The locations and material circumstances that need to make up the seduction process.
3. Physical touch. How the physical escalation should unfold alongside those emotional components.

In short, Mystery had already written about this, but the triad felt closer to me. It somehow describes these processes more clearly.

Second:

The emotional factors, the attraction switches that Mystery talked about, were laid out more systematically, in my opinion. They created several groups, which essentially echoes the triune brain model. In other words, they singled out certain social aspects of attractiveness, along with emotional and intellectual ones. And they identified more attraction switches overall.

Third:

There is also one more nuance regarding the opener process. I think they systematized that quite well too. A real concept appeared. Mystery, by contrast, divided openers into only two types: direct and indirect (directive and non-directive). And he positioned his own approach as exclusively non-directive.

The guys at Love Systems made the system more flexible by arranging opener options along a risk-reward spectrum. Accordingly, openers from the directive group carry the highest risk and the highest reward. In other words, once a girl opens on that opener, the stakes are much higher that you can move forward. Conversely, an opener along the lines of "Excuse me, do you know what time it is?" carries minimal risk and minimal reward, because it is very hard to progress from there. Then, depending on your calibration, the dynamic, your process, your style, and the context, you can adapt that to yourself. In other words, Love Systems reworked what had originally been built by Mystery's team and Mystery himself into something like a construction set that became far easier to tailor to yourself in the process.

The rest of the book, once the later parts of the models start to unfold, is essentially the application of that construction set. The application of those building blocks depending on the context.

So what is the bottom line?

They worked day game, night game, inner game, and a lot of additional nuances into it. I think they produced one of the best pieces of material anyone has ever made, not counting the classics that laid the foundation. I genuinely think this book would suit everyone. For a beginner, it explains the underlying process of building relationships very well and creates a very good balance.

On the one hand, there is a certain degree of cynicism in the idea that there are attraction switches. On the other hand, there is none of the excessive condescension toward women that the old school sometimes displays. That slightly irritated sense of superiority, as if women are stupid, broken, and we are going to show them all.

I can imagine that for some people, perceiving models and conceptual frameworks in order to apply them to the process of seduction may be difficult, and that can be counted as a drawback. Some people are more intuitive, let's say broad-souled, and for them it will be easier to read a book where all three hundred pages basically say, "just be yourself." In that sense, yes, this book can be a hard read, because it is almost methodological.

There are not many romantic, motivational, emotionally gripping things in it, and that is probably why I would not give it a full 10. Because that is a drawback, probably.

So overall, this book can quite comfortably earn its 8 out of 10. For excellently presented ideas, excellent refinement, and clear handling of practically all the objections that arise while reading it. But also for the drawback that it does not hit you emotionally enough the way many other books can. Because of that, in places it can be a longer and more difficult read. A lot of people will find it hard to transfer this into their own lives.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Dr. Manhattan

A Book of Excessive Concepts

This review was originally going to be very long. So long, in fact, that it had to be split into several parts that will be published later in a different context. In short, the book is good, but there is one major complaint against it: its contents do not conform to the basic principles required of anything that aspires to be taken seriously.

Any claim aspiring to a certain degree of scientific validity has to meet two basic principles:

1. The principle of sufficient reason is the principle according to which every meaningful expression & concept & judgment can be considered reliable only if it has been proven.
2. Occam's razor is the principle that, in brief, says: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity."

This will be covered in more detail in the review of The Mystery Method, or in a separate article about the relationship between model and method. In short, method = model + content.

A model is a system whose study serves as a means of obtaining information about another system; a representation of some real process, device, or concept.

In game, a model describes the behavior needed at a specific moment in time in order to achieve progression, for a linear increase in the level of compliance.

The content of a model is everything you say and do as you move forward in time.

That is, content is a set of gambits, or a Routine stack.

In this case, the model is from an entirely different dimension: it describes time, whereas content describes actions. In Magic Bullets, the author tried to compress the four-dimensional concept MM = M3 + content back into three dimensions, abstracting away completely from time and from the influence of actions on the target's compliance level.

For example, let us take the model proposed by Savoy in Magic Bullets:

1. Attraction - the feeling that your S-and-R value is equal to or higher than hers.
2. Qualification - the feeling that she has been chosen by you.
3. Comfort - the feeling of comfort and connection with you.
4. Seduction - the feeling of desire caused by you without awkwardness or embarrassment.

This model fully fails to satisfy either of the principles mentioned above, because:

1. It lacks sufficient grounds. Attraction does not depend on time or on the baseline level of compliance, unlike M3. Qualification (phase A3 in MM) is considered in isolation from attraction (stage A in MM), completely overlooking the possibility of gaming, for example, mixed sets, and violating the principle of causality in the absence of the Disqualification phase (phase A2 in MM). Thus, the model certainly works, but the absence of phase transitions makes measuring the level of compliance very difficult.
2. It does not comply with Occam's razor. Attraction and Qualification. Remove what is unnecessary. Spoiler: Qualification is part of Attraction.

The same applies to the model's content. As an example, we can take the classification of opener gambits. In MM, gambits perform only two functions:

1. An indirect opener aimed at opening the set. It begins from phase A1 of stage A and the game starts from a zero level of compliance.
2. A direct opener aimed at showing interest immediately. It begins from phase A3 of stage A and the game starts from a non-zero level of compliance.

Here there are sufficient grounds and nothing superfluous. And what do we see in Magic Bullets?

In the end, a solid 8 for the attempt, and a 6 for the result.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Denkista

The title of the book, "Magic Bullets," already primes the reader for a positive attitude toward this guide. And that might have been fine, if not for the tons of shortcomings. Follow the text below for those.

It would be unfair to call it a complete failure. People read it, praise it, cite its content as a source in arguments, and use it as a resource to enrich their own game. And they will keep doing so, not without reason. So what is the issue? The problem is that before it, a manuscript had already been written that laid out the vision of the seduction process concisely, consistently, and sufficiently, which is important: (MM, for anyone still in the dark). This "hard-hitting" work, by contrast, is overloaded with concepts and is even somewhat contradictory. But let us take it step by step.

The beginning of the book introduces the correct idea of the MUTUAL nature of attraction in the seduction process. First the target shows interest, then the player does. Exactly as in MM, in phases A2 and A3.

But then, almost immediately, the first "tweak" appears. It turns out that before direct attraction there must be a goal in the form of a "normal conversation," and only after that comes attraction. But then what does an abnormal conversation look like? What is the criterion for that normality?

By and large, for a person to keep up a conversation, they have to be interested; the girl has to agree to keep talking. And that Level of Compliance will keep increasing throughout the whole process of escalation, assuming things go well. The authors of "Bullets" do not mention such a word at all, thereby ignoring an important aspect of the dynamic of escalation and of how to assess it. That, in fact, is where the roots of their further excessive stage-splitting come from. Thinking in terms of buying and selling, they single out an entirely non-independent unit: Qualification. As a tool within the attraction stage, as phase A3, Qualification does exist. And its role is to intensify attraction and create the preconditions for a transition to comfort. The key word is intensify. The stage, however, remains the same: attraction. Moreover, a good setup for Qualification would be nothing other than the use of Disqualification beforehand. Therefore, from the point of view of checkpoints, Qualification works, but only if some Compliance is already present on the girl's side. Yes, there may be cases where interest from the girl exists even before the player has said a couple of words. But that interest did not arise out of nowhere. The A2 phase was caused by something nonverbal; there was a good level of Impact Value. If Qualification were a dichotomically correct stage in the attraction process, then seduction would begin without regard for mutuality. And the very fact of attraction would not exist. This also breaks the meaning of S-and-R value in the development of (at)traction.

Next, openers. A good opener consists of two parts. The first captures attention, provokes emotion, and hooks; the second develops the flow of emotion in the girl. I could not see the point of carving out a whole horde of opener classifications, because you can invent countless numbers of them. In essence, an opener has to answer why the interaction is happening at all (interest, banter, need, SOI, etc.) and how long it is going to last (whether there will be a plot and development). If interest in the girl is built into the opener, then it is a directive opener. It immediately declares the player's intention and constitutes SOI (the final step of phase A3 in MM, interest from the player toward the girl), implying the presence of some Compliance on the girl's side as a consequence of her recognizing the player's S-and-R value. A girl with high S-and-R value, however, will at best smile and ignore such an interaction. There is no risk/reward there, because luck and success depend not on the content of the words, but on the Level of Compliance between the girl and the player. Thus, for a beginner the book is useful. But with the reservation that as the player's skill and understanding of the process grow, he must be able to separate the essential from the unnecessary. And for that, the only guide he can really have in hand is the work that came first: MM. For those who stop at "Magic Bullets," game will amount to being satisfied with apples from the very lowest branches.

Rating: 6 out of 10