 I talked to a guy on the phone yesterday, his name's Dan Chang, and I stole this from him and it's fucking awesome. He broke down and his site is thefriendformula.com, I want to give him credit because I love this. He basically broke down a conversation and conversation skills is one of the hardest things to teach because it's just so abstract, right? You're in a conversation, you're trying to be present, you're focusing on the girl, but where are you during that stage, right? Like how do you know where, how you're doing, how do you know what's going on? So what happens in any normal conversation? It's between a man, a woman, a man and a man, random people, people you haven't seen for a long time. You start with cliches. How's the weather, you've been here often, how's it going, what's good bro, right? Normal cliches, when you open any conversation, what do you do when you pick up the phone? How are you? What's up? And if they respond, oh I'm not good, things are really, really bad actually. Thanks for asking. You're just like, whoa, we're not there yet, I was just saying hi. You're jumping the gun, so what needs to happen after cliches is then you exchange some facts, right? So you're talking to a girl at the bar, hey, how's it going, you come here often, all the lame cliché lines, cool, where are you from, what do you do, oh yeah, I live over here. I'm from San Diego, I'm from LA. And then you start sharing opinions, oh yeah, so you're from San Diego, what do you think of LA? Oh, I like LA, it's cool, it's kind of the same as San Diego, it's bigger, it's more spread out, different club scene, and I'm like, yeah, actually LA is cool, but San Diego sucks, it's Man Diego, and I go into that whole spiel, right? And then eventually we start sharing feelings, right? Drivers behind how we feel about things, you know, I really miss growing up on the East Coast, you can talk about childhood things, but if we skip this stage, if we go straight from cliches to feelings, like if you walk up to a girl and be like, hey, how's it going, nice to meet you, she goes good, and you say, tell me about your childhood, gonna get some weird looks, right? Or if you kind of just jump in the other way, if you go real directly real quick, because a lot of the things that we're taught is we need to connect, we need to share our emotions, and that's true, but you have to follow the stage, even with people you haven't seen in a long time, that are your friends. You know, you can quickly kind of dive in, and someone who's like your best friend, right? I could just call him up and I could be like, dude, I just got through a terrible, going through a horrible breakup, I'm crying all the time, help me out, right? You have that closeness, but if you don't, you know, follow this in conversation, you can always kind of know where you're at. If you're talking to a girl and you're just talking about facts and where she's from, and what she does, and her major and all that shit, if you don't go into some sort of opinion, some sort of stance on that, the conversation is gonna lose energy, it's gonna die. And we connect through our feelings. So if, you know, she has to feel something from you. If she walks away from that conversation, knowing a bunch of facts, but she doesn't feel anything, you're probably not gonna see her again. Even if you get her number, she's probably gonna flake. Cuz she needs to feel, we don't remember what typically happens in conversations, like, you know, what I'll do sometimes is I'll write down facts about her in my phone as notes right after the interaction, just so I can use that as callback humor and stuff when I text her, and that'll give me some points, like I was actually listening. But so often, I'll have a conversation with a girl, I'll remember almost nothing. But I'll remember feeling this amazing bubble, cuz it was just me and her, everything else in the space kind of disappeared. We had that connection, I felt good, she felt good. And the truth is, none of the conversation actually matters. What matters is the feelings.