Dale Valor is a dating coach and the first thing he has new students do is get in the friend zone. Deliberately. His argument is that a man with a lot of female friends is a man women trust. If you had enough friends, one of them would have introduced you to someone by now.

Most of the episode is about the online echo chambers young men fall into. Dale's response to guys who tell him you can't talk to a woman in 2025 without going to jail is that he's been out thousands of times and never once seen anything like it, and if it were true he'd be under the prison by now.

I make the argument that I'm not interested in lecturing anyone morally about hating women. I'm telling them it doesn't work. You're not a good enough actor to hide contempt, women read it instantly.

We also get into what pickup artistry actually figured out and where it went wrong, why the jerk part was always optional, the difference between being playful and being cruel, and why going out alone is an advantage rather than a problem.

Two guests this time, both of whom met each other at a Meetup event. Sean Tremblay runs the largest social Meetup group in San Diego and has organized events for thousands of people. Desiree Wilson is twenty-three and has done the app thing extensively enough to have a system for it.

The core argument is that meeting people in person skips a step the apps can't. You find out in thirty seconds whether there's anything there, instead of investing weeks in a conversation that dies the first time you meet. Sean's route into that was running events rather than attending them: he was, in his words, a dateless wonder, and organizing was how he got the practice.

Desiree has an interesting system for screening. She describes deliberately raising a mildly controversial view early to see how the man responds, on the theory that someone who needs her to concede is showing her he wants control, and someone whose goal is control is a predator regardless of how the evening is going. She also mentions that love bombing is a similar behavior.

We get into why men and women have completely different experiences on the same app, why "let's just be friends" reads as an insult when you met on a dating platform and doesn't when you met in person, and the thing men worry about, which is being there to buy dinner for someone who was never interested in them.

Mara McLoughlin is a speech language pathologist and the founder of IRL Social Skills. She spent years in schools helping non-speaking autistic students find a way to communicate, and kept noticing a different group nobody was helping. The kids doing fine academically, causing no trouble, and struggling with everything social. No academic impact, so no services.

Her program is built on the PEERS model out of UCLA, runs from age eleven through adults, and teaches parents alongside the kids.

A few things from the conversation: small talk is big talk. Listening is the underrated skill, because listening is how you get the information you need to adjust. The skills taught to younger kids are based in play, and then relationships shift to being based in conversation around middle school, and nobody teaches that part. And that so-called soft skills are hard skills.

We also get into why online interaction doesn't build the same capacity. There's no reciprocity and nothing happens in real time, so brains get conditioned not to respond in the moment.

The part I'd point people toward is on belonging. Mara makes the case that a lonely kid who finds three hundred likes on a comment has found belonging, and will follow it wherever it goes, which is exactly how extremist communities recruit. Nobody else offered them a group. She also separates fitting in from belonging. Fitting in is squeezing yourself into a space. Belonging is being somewhere you don't have to.

She recommends the documentary Join or Die, about Robert Putnam and his book Bowling Alone.

Links referenced in this episode:

• irlsocialskills.com
• instagram.com/irlsocialskills
• youtube.com/irlsocialskills
• coachjohnbush.com

This episode touches on suicide risk among autistic people. If you're struggling, you can reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 in the US.

Nick Sacco founded Connect English in San Diego and has spent twenty years teaching English to students from thirty or forty countries at a time. He came on to talk about how to actually connect with someone when you don't share a language.

He gives useful tips like slow your speech down by about ten percent and will people understand far more. Cut phrasal verbs, so "she got angry with me" rather than "she went off on me," because there are thousands of those. Drop idioms, since "right off the bat" means nothing to someone from a country that doesn't play baseball. And counterintuitively, reach for the more technical word rather than the simpler one: most learners studied English from textbooks, so "frequently" lands faster than "often," and its Latin root gives Spanish, Portuguese and Italian speakers something to grab.

Nick also makes the point that mispronunciation gets read as low intelligence, and it's usually just that the sound doesn't exist in the speaker's first language. If your language has no short i, you cannot hear the difference between ship and sheep, let alone say it. He teaches people the physical mechanics and they start hearing it within a couple of weeks.

I talk about the intellectual discomfort of putting a confident person in a setting they've never been in and they come across as far less capable than they are. That's what speaking a new language does to somebody.

There's also a story about two students nearly coming to blows over whether eating horse is acceptable, what Nick learned from Muslim students about introductions, and why his school runs a food week.

Find Nick at https://www.connectenglishsandiego.com and Connect English on Instagram.

A follow-up to the last episode. The author we discussed also wrote a novel whose main character has enormous confidence, puts herself out there constantly, and gets nowhere, which is the point she's making about advice that doesn't transfer.

That set us off on a bigger question. Men are told to be confident, make the first move, don't be too emotional, find your purpose first. Women get advice built from a different set of assumptions. How much of the standard guidance is just the wrong advice handed to the wrong person?

Most of the episode is about confidence, because it's where the mismatch is clearest and because "be more confident" is the most useless instruction in dating. If you had it you wouldn't need the advice. I go through how it's actually built, which is small wins, repeatedly, over months.

We also cover never chase and focus on attraction instead, why "don't show weakness" is closer to right than it sounds but gets taken too far, why appearing too available reads as low value, and where the "don't be needy" advice has swung so far that people are now afraid to tell a partner they miss them.

Robert makes the case that the whole thing is downstream of social status, and I make the case that the standards advice women get is sound right up until it stops being realistic.

Links referenced in this episode:

• ssm.coachjohnbush.com
• coachjohnbush.com

Stephanie Yeboah wrote a piece for British Vogue saying she was done taking dating advice from conventionally attractive people. Her argument is that the advice she keeps being handed assumes a starting point she has never had. Robert and I agreed with her, and spent the episode on why.

My version of it is narrower than hers. Most bad advice comes from people who never had to learn the thing they are teaching. That overlaps with being attractive often enough that the two look similar.

Ask a naturally good golfer how to stop slicing and you get "just swing the club." You already knew that. What you needed was the part they never had to think about, because it was never hard for them. Social skills work the same way. The people who give the most useless advice are usually the ones who were fluent at fifteen and have no idea what they are actually doing.

Robert describes it from the other side. He spent a few years in Tokyo where every interaction went well, and it taught him nothing he could pass on to anybody else.

We also get into where the pickup artist industry came from, which was a group of men who watched confident people, correctly noticed something was working, but drew incorrect conclusions about why it worked.

Links referenced in this episode:

• coachjohnbush.com
• Social Skills Mastery program

Our guest is Shel Dockser of The Healing Shell, who works in energy healing and mentorship, and the through line is that boring is underrated.

I use a car analogy I've made before. If you wanted an exciting car, you'd want a ten percent chance the airbag goes off every time you turn the key. Nobody wants that. You want the thing to start, predictably, every time. Excitement in a partner works the same way, because it usually means unreliability. Shel had the better version from experience: she went on a date, thought "this is boring, so I must be safe," and it became the steadiest relationship she'd had. Her friends were telling her to look for more excitement next time. She's not going to.

The rest is what to do when you disagree anyway, because you will. Shel's framing is that accountability isn't asking what did I do wrong, it's asking what can I own, including owning your own reaction when it's really about your history rather than the person in front of you. She has a concrete way to call a pause: name the emotion, name how intense it is, say what you're going to do about it, and ask for a beat. And she has a good ear for the phrase that signals a fight has already gone bad, which is "I'm sorry you feel that way," along with what to say instead.

There's a stretch in the middle on disagreeing with people whose politics differ from yours that I'd point anyone toward. Her approach is to find the overlap first, and she makes the case that both sides of most arguments are reasoning about fairness and disagreeing about its shape.

We also get into why people are afraid to apologise even when they know they're wrong, what a five-minute post-conflict talk should cover, and whether forgiveness arrives all at once or has to be worked toward.

Links referenced in this episode:

reikihealingbyshel.com

https://coachjohnbush.com/

Why Relationships Should Be Boring! (YouTube video)

USA Today ran a piece on dating trends hitting new lows, with five terms in it that were new to us. We went through all five and disagreed with the article on at least one.

Throning is dating someone to borrow their social status, which we agree is a bad idea but doesn't strike me as new. People have married upward for centuries. What's new is that the status being borrowed is a follower count.

Shreking is dating someone you're not attracted to on the theory that they'll treat you better. The logic fails on its own terms, and I explain why: if the premise is that attractive people are careless because they have options, then the people you're switching to have spent years being rejected, and some of them are carrying that. You've changed which pool you're shopping in, not whether the pool has a problem. This leads into the part of the episode I care most about, which is why men are so angry about online dating and why aiming that anger at women is both wrong and useless.

Banksying is quietly withdrawing from a partner before ending it. I'll defend half of this one. A breakup that arrives with no warning maximises the damage, and adults handle divorces with months of notice all the time. What I object to is doing the withdrawing in secret so your partner is still blindsided at the end.

Then zip coding, setting your dating app radius so tight you only meet neighbours, and monkey barring, lining up your next partner before ending the current one.

Links referenced in this episode:

• coachJohnbush.com
• ssm.coachjohnbush.com
• Social Connection Chronicles on Instagram