Seduction and the art of seduction is something that's extremely important in life. It's not just about sexual seduction. It's about seducing people to like you, to be on your side.
It's about selling anything. It's about being a master, a person in marketing or whatever. The process is the same. And here is a compilation of some of the best moments of the interviews I've done over the last 20 years when it comes to the art of seduction. and how to master this art.
And that's sort of what I consider the icon of seduction is the siren itself because that's where the concept came from. And that's a woman who has a very powerful sexual energy that any man can feel. It's not overt in that they're not coming on to you, but they just radiate this kind of intense physical energy. And there's an element almost of danger to them.
And that's sort of what excites the man about the siren. And then the male equivalent of that is what I call the rake. And the rake is a man who has an intense interest in women. He loves women to an incredible degree, like obsesses him.
But he can never be satisfied with one woman. And because he so much is interested in women, he understands them so deeply. Then there's the dandy. That's the kind of androgynous seducer who mixes male and female characteristics.
Then there's the natural, someone who's kind of got a childlike energy. They're just so authentic. They're not faking anything.
They've got that kind of innocence about them and it's devilishly seductive. There's the coquette, is someone who blows hot and cold. They know how to play hard to get. They get your claws in you and then they withdraw and you go crazy and you have to pursue them. You're going after them.
Then there's the star, which as well can be male or female. That's a person who has a kind of a distance. You know, a star is somebody that we project all of our fantasies onto. We imagine that they're almost larger than life.
And it's a person who knows how to be kind of blank and yet have this sort of Hollywood-like presence about them, a kind of confidence. And they become a screen which we project all of our fantasies on. And we can think of millions of examples in pop culture, you know. And then there's the charismatic.
This isn't so much a sexual seducer because not all the art of seduction is about sex. A lot of it's about social seduction, political seduction, marketing seductions. The charismatic is a man or a woman who's filled with this intense kind of confidence.
And the image that I use is that there's almost like a light inside of them. You can't see, but from within, it illuminates them. And it makes their eyes wide open with an energy, and it gives them this kind of animation. We have to hear everything they say.
They're great orators. Right? And they radiate this kind of confidence that sucks us in. We feel like when we're close to them, we're getting some of their own confidence. What makes for a great seducer is very simple.
You are outer directed. So when you meet somebody for the first time or you're on a date, you're not having that internal monologue going, does she like me or does he like me? Am I dressed well? Am I saying stupid things?
What can I do to impress them? No. You turn it off and you're outer directed and you're listening to them and you're entering their spirit and you're hearing them say things that give you idea of what they're missing in life, of what they want, of what their needs are, of what makes them an individual. You're absorbing it. You're entering into their spirit and then you can reflect it back to them.
You can give them gifts. You can take them to places that show that you're attentive to them. Because if you look at how we are in our day-to-day life, normally people never pay us attention.
They're always so self-absorbed. They're never thinking about us. The times where you get the sense that people are actually interested in who you are as an individual is pretty rare.
If you give that feeling to someone, it's incredibly powerful because we all want to be validated. We all want to be recognized. I talk in the art of seduction of charisma. And what I define charisma is, there's a person who has a kind of inner light inside of them.
They're so confident that they kind of glow with that confidence, that their words are kind of revealing it, their eyes are glowing, their gestures are glowing, and they're very charismatic. It could be a Malcolm X, it could be a Marilyn Monroe, it could be a John F. Kennedy, it could be a Mick Jagger, whomever. We sense this incredible confidence in them, this power. and it's like an inner lantern that just makes everything glow.
And we are so attracted to that. That's what charisma is. Why are we attracted to it?
Because we envy people who have that kind of confidence. We wish we could have that. And we find it very compelling. We want to know them. We think that some of it perhaps will rub off on us.
Obviously men and women are different. Men tend to be seduced by visuals. The way a woman looks is sort of the primal way of seducing a man. Women are very prone to words, to the verbal aspect.
And seducers, the typical Don Juan of the 17th century, they discovered that through language, through poetry, through casting a spell on a woman with their words, that this was the weakness that they had. And so many of these great early seducers... were just great talkers. If you look at like some of the great ones in the 16th, 17th century, they were not handsome men.
They were actually one of them was physically repulsive, but had such an incredible way with words that he could seduce almost any woman. The seducer is someone who has a kind of playful, open attitude. They're not someone who's judging. They're not moralistic.
They're not going, you're bad, you're good. They're kind of open, nonjudgmental. They give a lot of themselves. They want to please the other person.
They want to get that other person to open up to them. So the anti-seducer is the very opposite of that. For instance, being generous with your time or with your money is very seductive. So if you're on a date and you're kind of worried about the money or the expense, that's an anti-seductive sign. Like, oh, the woman or whoever, I'm not worth that money.
I'm not worth going to a nice restaurant. I'm not worth the expense. expense or the effort.
Tightness is anti-seductive. Openness, open heart, open spirit is seductive. So any kind of tightness or rigidity or closeness is very, very anti-seductive. If you're not able to let go of your tightness when it comes to a woman, something's wrong with you, man.
Just let go. Spend some extra money. Spend the extra 10 quid that you might need to spend. on taking you to someplace different. But it signals a kind of cheapness.
And it's not about money. It's about a cheapness in your spirit. She's not worth letting go. Okay, maybe you don't have that much, but my God, you have enough.
It's not gonna like make, if you're that poor, then, you know, okay, maybe. But probably not. You could afford it. Show that it means something to you.
Seduction is a language. It's not a language of words. It's a language of gestures that we're paying attention to.
We're paying attention to people's body language. were paying attention to their actions, to the things that they never say. So when you signal that discounts are so important to you that even on the first date you have to have a discount, you're signaling there's something tight about you in your nature and it's not very pleasant. Sukarno was a dictator almost of Indonesia back in the 60s. And there's a story of the journalist Cindy Smith who's interviewing him and The image in the West was this is this sort of brutal dictator.
And suddenly this writer, this American writer, said, God, he's not like that at all. He's listening to me. He's doing what I want to do. In fact, she had the feeling she was seducing him. At one point, he said, you know, I like the color of your hair.
I want to have the same hair color. Wow, this supposed dictator of Indonesia wants me to dye his hair the same color blonde as my hair. She thought, wow, I'm having such an effect on him. He's not what at all what I thought.
In the end, he was controlling the whole thing. I call that enter the other person's spirit. He was trying to be a sponge for her. He was absorbing her energy.
He was trying to get inside her world, her way of thinking. And it completely worked like a charm. She found him suddenly not what she thought. Money isn't just money. Money is a sign.
Money is something that has psychology, has other things attached to it. Let's just say it's a woman who is finding herself losing her attraction to a man because he's not making any money. That could be because it's a sign that he doesn't have enough ambition, he doesn't have enough drive.
Or it could be a sign he's just finding himself and eventually he'll discover it. But you kind of turned off a lot of women and I think, you know, yeah, it's mostly women. by the fact that this person doesn't have any drive, has no ambition.
They're not trying to make something of their life. And so it's not about the money that they're in, it's the fact that there's something missing in them. That kind of masculine energy, such as masculine women have great drive to make money as well, I don't mean to put it that way, but that kind of drive, that energy that makes them want to get ahead, can be very seductive and very powerful.
What is the major complaint that people have, particularly women, but men also, who've been in a relationship for three, four, five, ten years, is that there's no more magic left. There's no more enchantment. You know the other person so well that there's no mystery left.
They take you for granted. You see them every day doing the same things. So seduction is something that still goes on even in a relationship, even after you've been together for several years, where you don't have to do it every day because it gets tiring, but every... week or month or so, you do something, you re-seduce the other person.
You show that there's still something they don't know about you. You reveal that there are depths to you and things that they never figured out before. There's still an element of mystery.
There's still an element of drama. You're still put in the effort to take them to a place that they've never been to before. These are things that we don't have a lot in the world today. We don't live in a world with a lot of that kind of enchantment. Things are very direct and brutal, and I think people have this need.
Believe it or not, some of those early dysfunctional relationships with your parents are charged with this kind of sexual energy. And so you'll find yourself attracted to the very man or woman who's going to hurt you. Whereas the man or woman who is good for you, there's no kind of sexual charge.
You are actually more attracted to the person that has these damaged qualities. Why is that? Because you get to relive some of those early traumas. And so the problem that will happen is that the person who is good for you, that's actually caring, that will mesh with you, that physical charge maybe isn't as strong. And that's a problem, right?
Because you want to have that element. But you need to be aware of this. You need to be aware of the fact that some of the people that you're most attracted to, you're not attracted to just because of their sexy body or whatever it is.
There's also some kind of issues you haven't worked out from your early childhood that are at play in that relationship and that are going to cause you a lot of pain. People are dying to be taken out of their lives, out of the... banal day-to-day work and be taken on a ride. They want enchantment. They want some drama in their life.
They want pleasure. I talk about in the book, it's like a child. Seduction is reaching the child of everybody. And when you were a child, you were one years old, what was the greatest pleasure you had? It was being picked up by your father, your mother, and kind of whirled around and taken everywhere and lifted.
Twirled, etc. The sense that someone was taking you somewhere and you were under their control made you laugh. It gives you this incredible pleasure and that's what happens when you see a movie and it takes you on this journey where you don't know where it's going, what's happening next.
People don't have enough of that in their lives.