Going through an old hard drive can be a dangerous activity. You start looking for a file and end up finding an earlier version of yourself.
In this October 2021 podcast, I talk about finding a document of notes from the years I spent gaming with Tom Torero. Coffee conversations, nights out, things he did, things I did, and the ideas I was trying to make sense of at the time.
I floated a title for publishing that material. Tom Torero and Tony Hustle, Double Penetration. Subtle branding was clearly not the main objective.
The notes behind the finished system
Tom and I went out together regularly and travelled together. I had written down observations while the experience was still fresh, rather than trying to reconstruct everything after I had a neat explanation for it.
That matters because the early notes were not a finished seduction system. They were a mixture of diary, observations and possible explanations. Some of the thinking was much less refined than what I later published.
They left a trail. You could see where a concept came from, how I interpreted an interaction and where my approach differed from Tom's. That is more interesting than pretending a complete system arrived in my head one afternoon.
Two styles in the same field
When you spend that much time infield with another man, you see more than his public explanation of what he does. You see the decisions he makes, the situations he handles well and the things you would do differently.
The notes contrasted our styles and recorded what we learned from each other. That was the appeal of going back through them. Similar goals do not mean identical methods, and a disagreement can tell you more than another conversation in which everybody approves of everybody else.
This episode introduces the idea of sharing those records. The detailed adventures and conversations were the material I wanted to bring into that separate account.
Understand the idea before copying the words
There is another small point in the episode that fits this perfectly. I mention a community report about adapting the Male Leader Frame after some confusion caused by taking it too literally.
That is an important distinction in learning any system. A name or a line can help you remember an idea. It cannot do the understanding for you. If your interpretation produces behaviour detached from the actual interaction, repeating it more stubbornly will not fix it.
Read the explanation, look at the context and compare it with what happens when you use it. The point is to learn a skill, not to win a competition for the most literal imitation.
This is a historical update about work I was considering in 2021. The proposed publication, membership prices and platform announcements in the recording are part of that moment. The lasting interest is the material behind the polished books: two men going out, comparing approaches and leaving enough notes that the development of the ideas could still be examined later.
