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