Tyler Durden Clones Busted?

A few days ago I posted about an interesting phenomenon going on here in Los Angeles with guys pretending to be Mystery in clubs in order to pick up chicks.

Well, now it seems it’s happening in New York too, but this time it’s not Mystery who’s being impersonated, it’s Tyler Durden.  And they’re apparently not even doing a very good job of it either.

The following is an email I got from a girl named Laura talking about her run-in with the PUAs/Tyler Cone.

Laura writes:
I just wanted to write because I’ve heard of this happening but never actually thought guys would be so hapless at a local, low-key bar. Wrongo!

I was out in the East Village tonight and there was a huge group of men aimlessly sarging. One approached two friends and me and said "I need an opinion on something." Unfortunately I’ve not only read The Game but wrote about it for a couple of relationship venues so I pointed out immediately that I knew what he was doing.

First he asked if is we’d date a guy in a wheelchair, which sort of tanked because one of my friends already did date a guy in a wheelchair and another of my friends dated the hot guy from Murderball so we were like "yeah." So he started playing the strawberry game with my other friend, but fucked it up by telling her it was her strawberry field and then asking what she’d say to the farmer she’d stolen from and she was like "But the strawberries were mine."

Then the wingman-god-knows-what came up and started delivering a routine about approaching some midgets on the street and insulting them which, instead of demonstrating value, demonstrated that he was rude to midgets and didn’t have a good punchline for his story. The awkward/obvious part was that in between, we interrupted to try to have a real conversation about what he was talking about, and he just totally froze, didn’t acknowledge anything, then dove back into his clearly-rehearsed script.

So here’s the best part: when wingman #2 came up to say "I heard someone over here is talking about sex," Mr. Strawberry hadn’t even gotten to the part where he’d analyzed the game and said it was about sex because he was doing such a dreadful job. So Mister Two said "Well I heard you said you’d read the game? I’m in that. I’m Tyler Durden. I’m here teaching these guys." Oh and he also proved his close friendship with Neil by revealing the top-secret insider information that Neil used to be a writer for "The Rolling Stone" magazine. Which, good cover, except he wasn’t Tyler Durden. At all. And I did what any girl would do OBviously and called Neil Strauss and asked him Tyler’s real first name which wasn’t the one on Mr. 2′s passport. The end.

Just FYI we would have talked to any of them if they’d feigned interest in us rather than painfully reciting memorized lines that made us feel like we were watching a showcase of dramatic readings at the local high school. Oh, and not said they were Tyler Durden, which is just retarded and weird.

Owch.

Either these guys are newbies who just took their first RSD seminar, or they’re a couple losers who went out right after reading The Game.  Either way, they’re going through their learning curve.  But for anyone out there interested, I will say this:

If you’re going to PRETEND to be someone, pretend to be someone rich, famous, or powerful instead of pretending to be a PUA.  Especially one named after a character in a well known book/movie like Fight Club.  You’ll get much farther in the long run.