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.