The Social Connection Chronicles
The Social Connection Chronicles is a conversation between two friends about the skill of connecting with other people. Social skills coach John Bush and co-host Robert Richardson discuss the mechanics of connection, including starting conversations, making friends as an adult, dating and relationships, reading a room, and building confidence. They avoid pickup lines and manipulation, focusing instead on honest, practical, sometimes funny talk about becoming someone people feel good being around. New episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
Episodes
Why Hating Women Is Killing Your Dating Life
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
How to Meet People Without an App
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 wheth
The Smart Kids Nobody Worries About
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 mo
How to Be Understood by Someone Still Learning English
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 t
Why the Same Dating Advice Fails Men and Women
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 bui
Do Naturally Attractive People Give Bad Dating Advice?
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 a
Why You Want a Boring Relationship
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 s
Throning, Shreking, Banksying: Five New Dating Terms
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.Shre
Five Red Flags People Miss Early On
Five things worth noticing in the first few months with someone, before you're in deep enough that noticing gets harder.We start with the one that does the most damage: a partner who won't take responsibility for anything. I make the case that the healthiest version runs the other way, with both people defaulting to "I could have handled that better," because two people like that never build resen
Social Anxiety: Start Smaller Than You Think
Most advice for social anxiety comes down to going out and talking to strangers, which is useless if that's the thing you can't do. This episode is about what the first step actually looks like when the obvious one is out of reach.I go through why social anxiety feels worse than it is, since nearly everyone in the room is too busy worrying about themselves to be watching you, and why people who we
