The Asian Playboy (aka JT Tran) is one of the top “Pick-Up-Artists” in the world, a guy who teach other men how to go to clubs and bars to pick up women. Now the teachings and lifestyles of these men are now mainstream, with VH1’s The Pick Up Artist being broadcasted in 2007 and 2008. Asian Playboy is one of the most highly respected pick up artists who is of Asian descent, having been featured in many different media such as Asian Week Magazine, VH1’s The Pick Up Artist 2 television series, D Magazine, and many more. He’s also lectured at Harvard University.
Check out an interview with JT that aired on ABC.
Many of you may not believe in his lifestyle. Some may be skeptical about who he is. But after reading this article, you’ll have to admit that this guy knows what he’s talking about when it comes to picking up women and bettering your romantic life.
The main thing I liked about JT is not that he’s teaching Asian men how to “sleep with tons of women,” but I loved the fact that he’s defying the negative stereotypes about Asian men and helping other Asian men do the same. We have an uphill battle due to the American media, but taking it one step at a time is great.
Recently I got to sit down and have a chat with the Asian Playboy to find out more about his company and what he does, and also try to pick his brain for any guys out there who need some help with the ladies.
AmpedAsia.com: Tell us briefly about your transformation from before you were the Asian Playboy to now.
Asian Playboy: I think I was very much a typical shy, nerdy Asian guy. Parents emphasized school, although I was primarily by my mother. Going into college, I didn’t kiss my first girlfriend and lose my virignity until I was 20. A late bloomer compared to mainstream Americans, but statistically the average age of Asian Americans sexual intercourse.
I was lucky with respect to the fact that in an engineering, technical school where I studied Aerospace Engineering (and later on to become a real life rocket scientist) and a male to female ratio of like 10 to 1, this tall, cute, blonde white girl took interest in me. As I’m sure many guys in general can attest, she chose me and not the other way around.
I studied pickup starting in 2004 and only became a professional in 2005. Which was entirely by accident when a Canadian mother called me up to help out her son who had been harassed by neo-Nazis in highschool. That was the start of what is essentially the “Asian PUA” movement, one separate but part of both the Asian American and Seduction Community.
AmpedAsia.com: Tell us a little bit about your personal love life and your lifestyle.
Asian Playboy: I’m currently seeing two girls, one Asian one white. All of whom know what I do. I’m pretty honest about it. I’ve had girls that I’ve dated all the way from Australia Google me to find out more about me so I’m pretty open about what I do. A lot of my time is spent traveling around the world from London to Sydney, having a whole lot of fun, and helping my Asian brothers out while meeting as many beautiful women as I can. And the rest is spent building up the brand and corporate empire as well as furthering the cause of a stronger, more masculine and sexual image of Asian men.
AmpedAsia.com: What is the ABCs of Attraction?
Asian Playboy: The ABCs of Attraction is both the name of my company as well as the actual framework and method that I teach. It’s actually a very simple and intuitive acronym, going from A all the way to F. Pretty simple, huh? You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand it, but it took one to create it. Part of the beauty is that each “phase” is “holistic.” Holistic meaning that we incoporate all three major components of Game or confidence. Which are your Inner Strength (belief system and thoughts), Physical Confidence (your body language and subcommunication), and Verbal Attraction (your bantering, repartee and communication skills). For example, A stands for Attitude, Attract, THEN Approach. Meaning that it’s important to have the right positive, masculine mental Attitude before you go up and talk to the girl. Attraction then happens even before you open your mouth by the physical confidence you display. And then finally the Approach happens last with words coming out of your mouth. Paradoxically, the least but also most important step in attracting and seducing women.
AmpedAsia.com: So you have several instructors at the ABCs, can you tell us about the differences between each of them and also yourself? What makes each instructor unique?
Asian Playboy: That’s the beauty of the ABCs is that it’s more of a “plug and play” kind of framework. I don’t try to clone myself on either my students or coaches. You simply take your style and plug it into the framework and voila. But to answer your question, yes, we have several instructors across America. From William who runs the Better Asian Man and is known as the “Smart Bomb of Direct Game” to Gareth Jones the Cunning Linguist and master of all things Phone and Text Game related to Johnny Wolf, founder of the PUA Summit, and lifestyle expert as well as all around big cuddly bear. I have guys that are Asian, White, Latin, etc. They bring their unique personality and talents to the table and their respective students by their understanding of the ABCs and thusly able to pour their knowledge and experience directly into the brains of our students.
AmpedAsia.com: At what point in your life did you tell yourself, hey, I can do this, I can date beautiful women although I’ve got all these things going against me like being short, being Asian, amongst other things.
Asian Playboy: I think it was about late 2004/05. I had been struggling with pickup and practicing constantly, going out 4 to 6 nights a week while holding down my 9 to 5 engineering job. Unlike others, I had no qualms about learning pickup, I thought of it as simply a form of education and self-improvement, much like college (but cheaper and more rewarding over the longterm as emotional and social intelligence are higher predictors of both financial and personal success than a college education). But what I was encountering where a lot of things that weren’t discussed in the Pickup Community, namely dealing with racism, prejudice and other disadvantages. And while it was being discussed in the Asian American community, none of it was practically and consisted mostly of Internet whining without any proactive, practical application one could use in real life. So anyways, I was compressing about 5 years of being behind curve into 1 year. It was only until I went backpacking through Europe with several of my good looking, tall, white, muscular friends when both a mental and technical barrier were overcome. Namely, while my white peers had the same level of success in Europe as they did in America, I quite simply- without really doing anything different- dusted them in terms of results with the ladies. I got laid on my first night by a French girl and then kept on getting laid all the way up the blonde Scandinavians of the north. When I came back, I realized that I had the skills necessary to be successful and that what I was encountering in terms of the difficulty of success in America had nothing to do with me, or at least at this point where I had become the kind of socially experienced, sexual gentleman that I had always wanted to be. Rather, it was society at large, both how America views Asians, but also the failure on the part of the PUA Community AND Asian American Community.
AmpedAsia.com: Obviously, most women prefer men to be taller than them, but it seems that you date a lot of women taller than you. Is there any beliefs regarding height in particular that you’d like to dispel or talk about for our readers?
Asian Playboy: Height is important. That’s pretty much a biological and psychological fact. No use arguing about it or complaining, it is what is. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something. It’s on of the natural advantages of the world and if you don’t have it, there isn’t much you can do about it other than a few tips and tricks here and there. But the biggest thing is that while height definitely plays a role, there are a lot of factors that also stimulate a woman’s attraction and interest in you as a man. Where men are light switches with only an On and Off switch, women are a lot like oven knobs. There are a lot of things, from height, muscle, look, to humor, dominance, charm, and personality that can also either help or hinder you. As I always like to tell my students, “Sure it would have been great being born tall, dark and handsome, but I can settle for simply being short, stunning, and smooth.”
AmpedAsia.com: So if a woman does have these mental barriers, perhaps say she says “I only date white guys, or I only date tall men,” do you have a method to breaking her down?
Asian Playboy: You can’t change a woman’s MIND, but you CAN change her MOOD. In my upcoming free 60 minute audio training guide “Exposing the Myth Behind Why Asian Men Can’t Date White Women” that everyone can begin downloading soon and for free, I delve into this topic. One of the stories is about this date with a white girl who literally found Asian men unattractive and undesirable, but at the end of the relationship, her faith in men (and Asian men in particular), had been restored. So yes, it can be done. No, it’s not easy especially if you aren’t the kind of man yet that you’ve always known you should be, but aren’t. Also, women typically don’t have those kind of hard mental barriers. They’re more “squishy” if you will, or like preferences. So long as you aren’t hitting major stereotypes, which unfortunately a LOT of AMs do inadvertently or because they don’t know any better, you can defeat those subconscious prefrences through the use projecting a very dominant, sexual, and masculine persona when you meet her. The idea being that masculinity and sexuality while overcome stereotypes. But that’s true of any man, regardless.
AmpedAsia.com: Describe your proudest moment or a defining moment you had as a pick-up artist.
Asian Playboy: I’ve had many proud moments. Moments ranging from the base to the noble. Things like a student getting laid on his first night of bootcamp to threesomes. There are the students getting married and emailing me how happy they are with themselves, life, and the woman they chose to be with. To one of my coaches meeting his highschool crush that he had no chance with back then and is now in a committed, longterm relationship. It’s like being surrogate father or big brother to many of them so I definitely take pride in their accomplishments, knowing that I had a small part in their growth and development. Having BALLS just makes you Male. USING them is what makes you a MAN.
AmpedAsia.com: Is there any difference to you between seducing an Asian girl vs a White Girl or vs a Black girl?
Asian Playboy: Seducing an Asian girl if you’re an Asian guy is pretty normal. You aren’t particularly fighting against any negative perceptions (although there is that pesky fact that 1 out of 4 Asian females marry someone out of their own race, but that’s a different subject altogether). Being confident as well as socially savvy will win the day. I will admit though that a lot of Asians are cliquish than the norm so a lot of times you have to go in through the social circle or indirectly. This is different for White/Black/Latina girls where being more direct and dominant is the avenue to success. There is no such thing as a successful Asian PUA out there, in my opinion and experience having taught thousands of AMs around the world, who is not good at direct game. If all you’re running is Pick Up Version 1.0 (i.e. – indirect game), then you’re doing useful a huge disservice and you’re not as good as you think you are. Sorry, but you’re not. Mystery and Matador are personal friends of mine and I respect them dearly and consider Mystery a genius in what he accomplished and invented, but a lot of aspects of the indirect Mystery Method simply doesn’t work for Asian men, period.
AmpedAsia.com: (For the people like me that aren’t 100% familiar with the lingo, I took the liberty to find some definitions of indirect vs direct game.)
Indirect game is taught by many seduction coaches such as Mystery of VH1’s The Pick Up Artist. Basically it’s talking to the girl and intriguing her without conveying sexual interest from the get-go.
Direct game is the opposite in that it conveys direct sexual interest from the get go, and is more like what a natural player would do. It’s more aggressive than indirect game and pretty much requires the man to really man up and show that he’s not a coward and that he can show sexual interest.
Mystery Method is a method of “indirect game” for seducing women at bars or clubs created by Erik von Markovik (aka Mystery). You can read about it at
http://www.seductionbase.com/mysterymethod.htm
AmpedAsia.com: So there’s no such thing as a successful Asian PUA who runs only indirect game?
Asian Playboy: It’s an oxymoron. A myth. A unicorn. Doesn’t exist. If he thinks he’s good, he’s not.
AmpedAsia.com: Why can’t Asian men run indirect game?
Asian Playboy: Indirect Game allows you to learn a lot of useful skills ranging from getting over Approach Anxiety (being afraid to approach women), engaging the group, holding court, bantering, and a lot of other useful social skills. But that just means you’re a good talker and entertainer. You still aren’t actually SEXUALLY attracting her, which is a huge difference you need to understand and is actually the biggest stumbling block for Asian guys both mentally to implement as well as with women to engage in them as their blueprints of what they consider sexually attractive doesn’t include Asian males. Not that it excludes them, but that they probably have never kissed much less dated an Asian Man. So their idealized concept of a sexually attractive male is typically their first love, sexual encounter, etc. as well as what they see in the media. From Brad Pitt to Johnny Depp. And because she’s probably never had a sexual encounter with an Asian male (90% of my non-Asian girlfriends have never been with an AM until me) much less thought about it, even if you’re interesting and talkative, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s thinking about how you’re like in bed and what it would feel like if you were to ravish her. No, she just probably thinks that you like to talk and are a very interesting conversationalist. That’s just General Attraction. For a lot of newbies, getting to that level is probably pretty cool as it’s a far cry from when they stayed indoors all day and played Starcraft 2. But that’s just the ABC phase of the ABCDEF model (ABCDEF model is part of the ABCs of Attraction method of attracting women). DEF is where the boys are separated from the men, the wheat is separated from the chaff, and the rubber meets the road. D is for Dominant, Direct Intent, then Disqualify. You have to have to be dominant, mentally, emotionally, and physically, in order to engage her sexual imagination as well as expressing direct intent. Then after that, you disqualify in order to not come off as horn dog, sleazy, or desperate. Two steps forward, one step back. Mystery Method and the vast majority of the white-owned pickup & dating companies would have you disqualify yourself FIRST (disqualifying is the subtle act of telling the girl you want that you aren’t interested in her which can result in her wanting to come after you), which is what’s fucking up a lot of Asian American Men. You’ve just disqualified yourself twice going in. Once because you aren’t in her dating pool (which isn’t your fault, that’s just the society we live) and then disqualifying yourself before you went Direct (or Phase D) on her. Instead of being a lover or potential lover, you’re probably just a good talking Asian guy who she thinks is gay.
AmpedAsia.com: You mentioned that the indirect stuff and disqualification is bad because most females don’t see Asian men as their sexual idea, but then this obviously changes when it comes to asian females that have dated Asian men before, so does this mean indirect game is okay or even better with Asian females?
Asian Playboy: Yes. Absolutely. I believe a man should be competent at BOTH indirect and direct game. But Asian Men in generally absolutely, positively, 100% HAVE TO LEARN DIRECT GAME. Not only will it make the difference in your dating and sexual lifestyle, but it’ll generally make you a better man since it requires you to, well, man up not only with women, but with life in general.
AmpedAsia.com: What are some things an average Asian guy can do right now to start improving his game?
Asian Playboy: 1) STOP being negative – No more logging into Asian American forums and bashing AFs who date WM, no bashing WMs for stealing our Asian women, no more paying attention to how the media screws us over. Our thoughts become our actions. So stop with the negativity.
2) UPDATE YOUR PASSIVE/SEXUAL VALUE – Project a sexual, masculine image. Clean up that hair cut. Don’t use gel or get the Dragonball Z haircut or the penis haircut or Asian chillibowl. Get a real hairstyle and use real hair product. If you don’t know what to do, just get a faux hawk and buy Difi for now. Update your wardrobe. No more shopping at the Banana Republic or Armani Exchange. Throw in color and stop with the black/grey. ALWAYS go for a fitted look. Baggy, especially if you’re a small Asian guy, just makes you look even smaller and shorter and generally emasculating.
3) OPEN UP YOUR HORIZONS – Don’t just date Asian girls. You’re limiting yourself to a tiny portion of possible beautiful women out there. Asian girls aren’t doing that, so why should you? Get out there and talk to women. Maybe they don’t see AMs in a sexual light, but that’s a far cry from them seeing you in a negative light which is what a lot of AMs seem to think, that white/black/latin girls are dismissive of AMs which isn’t the truth. They just haven’t experienced their first Asian Man, which will hopefully be you. As I like to tell all my girls when I’m their first Asian… Once you go Asian, you can’t go Caucasian… Once you go Yellow… HELLO!
AmpedAsia.com: Do you have any special tactics for approaching women in clubs/bars that are in large groups or in their own social clique/circle?
Asian Playboy: General indirect game will work. For the most part, get introduced by a friend of the group, or make impromptu friends and ingratiate yourself into the group. Always befriend the Asian guy(s) as a lot of Asian males are seriously territorial which I believe comes from the frame of scarcity. It’s also why every Korean club or Vietnamese club I’ve been to, the night always ends up with some bar brawl between angry Asian men.
AmpedAsia.com: And then when they are with guys and as you said the guys are territorial, so how do you isolate them enough to get their number or stuff like that without getting into trouble with the guy?
Asian Playboy: Befriend them. Be cool with them. There are various tactics. You can watch my YouTube video demonstrating anti-cockblocking measures “King of the Hill”, AmpedAsia.com: Is it more often that you would get a woman’s number the first night you meet, then have sex with her on a date later, or is it more often that you’ll have sex with her on the first night you meet her?
Asian Playboy: One night stands are something of a “myth” in the pick-up community. Sure they happen, but the reality is that highest probably of success that you’ll like to have with a woman is on the 1st and 2nd date. 3rd date is probably as equal to your chances (assuming you’re decent) of pulling off a same night lay with her. It gets lower after that into infinity. Imagine a rat’s tail curve. Obviously this differs if you met her through a social circle or other social setting which are more slow burners, but the premise is the same. Woman are the Gatekeepers to Sex. But Men are the Gatekeepers to RELATIONSHIPS. They have their power. We have ours.
AmpedAsia.com: Okay then briefly speak about tactics you’ve used to go from 1st date to sex?
Asian Playboy: I could say, but I’ve already written a great article about this topic: How to Have a One Night Stand in 5 Easy Steps.
AmpedAsia.com: Have you ever seduced a girl who is more prudish, maybe she’s a virgin or has had very little sexual experience, a girl who really is very innocent, brought up with very high moral standards, doesn’t hook up randomly, always gets long term boyfriends.
Asian Playboy: Women’s attraction is triggered regardless of whether or not they’re prudish or adventurous. They still get hot, bothered, and horny to the same stimuli regardless if she’s “religious” or not. If she isn’t willing to commit to you in some romantic fashion, there’s a good chance it has more to do with your ability to provide that masculine, sexual presence she wants in her life. It’s about giving “good date” if you will. At some point, she wants to lose her virginity or have an incredible good, fun time. The question is, is it going to be you or someone she’s been eyeing because that’s the “type of guy” she wants to remember as her first time. There’s also obviously a lot of other factors at play.
AmpedAsia.com: How can one sign up for an ABCs of Attraction bootcamp, and where can we find you online?
Asian Playboy: You can call my office toll free at 1-888-689-GAME (4263) or visit our website at http://www.abcsofattraction.com I also run the longest running Asian dating advice blog now moved to AsianPlayboy.com where you can (soon) download the free 60 minute advanced audio training guide, “Exposing the Myth Behind Why Asian Men Can’t Date White Women.” We teach around the world from London, Sydney, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. It’s 3 days and 3 nights of hard work and hard play that has changed the lives of Asian men everywhere.
AmpedAsia.com: If you’re interested in doing a bootcamp with JT Tran and the ABCsofAttraction, then check out the trailer below.
Thanks a lot to JT and the ABCSofAttraction for the Interview!
Written by Editorial Staff