America’s Crisis of Social Connection, With Adam Grant

One of the topics I find myself returning to again and again on the show and in my writing is also going to be the subject of my next book is the decline of social connection in the 21st century. I've called this phenomenon the anti-social century and here are some alarming statistics. In 2000 Robert Putnam published the famous book "Bulling Alone," which documented the decline of social capital in the 20th century. Many people said he was way too pessimistic, a worry wart, who would be proved wrong by the bounteous social connections provided by the internet. Well, ha ha. A quarter century later, face-to-face socializing in America has fallen by another 20%. For unmarried men and for people younger than 25, that decline is more than 35%. Americans today statistically spend more time alone than in any period in recorded history. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every one hour they spend hanging out with someone outside of their house. The typical woman with a pet spends more time actively engaged with that animal than in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. And since the early 2000s, the time Americans spend helping or caring for people outside of their nuclear family has fallen by a third. When it comes to the ultimate expression of socializing, which is to say, parties, the situation is absolutely abysmal. Between 2003 and 2024, the time Americans spent attending or hosting parties fell by half for Americans under 25, which is the age when you're supposed to be going to parties. It fell by 70%. The share of Americans who say they entertain people at their home on a greater than monthly basis has also declined by about 70% since the 1970s. So what has happened? What has gone wrong with this picture? I think there are at least four big explanations. First, we're more harried than we used to be or at least we feel more harried. In 1970, the share of prime age women, the labor force, passed 50% for the first time. Today, it's near 80%. Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with working women and I certainly don't want to be quoted or clipped out of context to suggest that we should go back to the social norms of the 1950s. But women have historically kept the family social calendar. And when they went to work, men, I think, never picked up the job of social planning. Dudes, step up, please. We have calendars too. And if we don't make plans with our friends, plans for the family writ large will decline. Second, I think in the last two decades, parenting has become unusually intense. Between 1975 and 1998, mothers added about 200 minutes a week with their children and married fathers added even more. That means that evenings that used to go to adult friends now go to bath time and homework and I don't know, driving to the 11-fexture curricular activity of the week. Third, friendship networks are shrinking, especially for Americans without a college degree. You can't throw a dinner party if you don't have friends to invite in the first place. Hosting is turning into a luxury good. Fourth, and this is the one I find both most kind of intuitive and most important, the home has become too much fun to stay inside of between 2003 and 2022. The average American added almost two hours a day at home, as our living rooms became a riot of entertainment heaven between the phones and the TV and the streaming video. For 200 years, some people worried that machines would ultimately make human workers unnecessary. This never happened. The unemployment rate today is still quite low. Economists call this mistake the lump of labor fallacy and the history of work keeps proving it wrong. But in the last half century, machines have done something stranger. They have made other people unnecessary to our leisure. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology. You have to match all those calendars and clean the house by the food. Remember that one kid who only had eggplant, the one guest who only gluten, sit through some awkwardness and accept the risk that the night just turns out mediocre when you could have just turned on television in the first place. TV by comparison asks nothing of you. TikTok asks even less. On any given Wednesday at 7.45 pm, the screen wins any competition of convenience. Every one of those choices might make sense on its own. I'd rather just stay here on the couch. I'd rather not put on makeup. I'd rather not comb my hair. But if you add up 330 million of those decisions, you get a coordination failure, a country where everybody's home and nobody's coming over. I've come to think of the anti-social century as a story about what we misunderstand about friendship itself. It's easy to think of friendship as a spark. But the research suggests that it's much more of a slow burn. It takes roughly 50 hours to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend and more than 200 hours to make a close friend. In school, those hours pile up automatically. You have to legally be there at primary education. You show up. The bell rings and the person right next to you shoulder to shoulder becomes your friend. But adult life often lacks a similarly thick network to force us into repeated engagements with people that we might grow to love. Work fills the hours. Keyot activities might fill the evenings if you're a parent and screens fill everything else. And then we wake up one day at 40 and wonder why our friendships feel thinner than they did when we were 14. So today, I want to talk about the myths of social connection. What we get wrong about chemistry and closeness, why we lump very different relationships together under the single word friend, why making friends as an adult feels so much harder than it should be, and what it would take to get a few people to start hosting a damn dinner party again. My guest is the Wharton Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant. His new book is Vibe, the secrets of strong connections in a lonely world. Adam describes himself as a shy introvert who turned into an enthusiastic convener of people, which makes him, I think, the perfect person to ask how the rest of us can do the same. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain Edge. This episode of Plain English is presented by Comcast Business. Did you know Comcast Business detected 79.3 billion cyber threats last year? That's why they're introducing security edge preferred. It's big business cyber security designed for small business. Get started with Comcast Business Internet for $50 a month for one year on a qualifying internet package and find out how to get one month of security edge preferred on them. Plus, ask about a $500 prepaid card. Limited time offer, restriction supply requires 300 megabits per second internet security edge security edge preferred and wireless connect call today. Adam Grant, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Derek. I'm really excited to be here, especially because your work helped to shape this book. Thank you so much. Well, reading your book is now helping to shape my book, which currently does not exist, but in the next few years, I hope and certainly my publishers hope it will. I want to start with how we misunderstand social connection and friendship. You have done this incredible deep dive into the national and international studies on friendship and closeness. What are the most important myths about chemistry and closeness? And are there any myths that you found particularly depressing? Yes. So I think the the big myths about at least making friends and building connection are one that we have to be similar to each other to get along. That we need to have similar backgrounds and similar personalities. That's just not true. To that instant chemistry means we're going to be close. Sometimes that's just a traction and we don't actually have compatible goals or interests or values. And three, that closeness always takes time. Sometimes we can go deep with people very quickly. And I've become a big fan of actually skipping small talk, which we could talk about. Yeah, we'll definitely talk about skipping small talk. There was a finding in your book that was particularly interested in about this sort of like liking gap between how some people have been asked to estimate, who are your friends. And then all of those friends are asked to estimate who their friends are. And sometimes they don't necessarily overlap. I wonder what the pessimistic and optimistic interpretation of this result is. Yeah, Derek, when sociologists do this exercise, it turns out about half of the people you think are your friends. Don't friend you back. I thought it was depressed. That is hard to read it. Yeah. Okay, which was. who are the people that don't actually like me that I think do. But I think it's pessimistic if you stop there and you say, "Look, we're just not always good at reading what people really think of us and we're overestimating our connection with other people." But I actually think there's this silver lining in this story, which is it also means there are people who are not on your friend list that think of you as a friend that want to be closer to you. And I think that's good news for all of us who want to have more people in our lives. But I think what's really going on here is friend is almost a useless term. It's such a broad category that we don't exactly know what it means. Some people basically use it to describe anyone who's more than an acquaintance. Some people even include their acquaintances in it, and other people reserve it for their inner circle. And so I think we need more precise language so we can actually align our expectations and avoid missing out on meaningful connections. Let's get that precise language. You draw lines between allies, pals, and companions. Why is that three-part categorization useful as people navigate their social life? I think it's helpful because if we don't know what we expect from our friends, it's easy to be disappointed and even betrayed. So after synthesizing data from many countries and hundreds of thousands of people, it turns out that in most countries around the world, these categories of pals, allies, and companions come up over and over and over again. So your pals are basically people who share your interests. You have fun together. You might want to invite them to karaoke or pickle ball. Your allies are people who share your goals. You are on a mission together. They're not always the people you like the most, but they're the people you can rely on to get things done. They're your best collaborators. You might want to work with them. You might want to volunteer with them. And then finally, your companions are people who share your values. You have deep affection for each other. They're your closest confidence. They're the people that you can get compassion from. They're the people that you can be vulnerable with. And I think that making these distinctions is really helpful because we've all had experiences of, I actually had this happen to me. I had a really difficult experience of grief. And I opened up to a friend and he basically said, "Oh, that sucks," and never mentioned it again. And at first, I wanted to unfriend him. Like, "Okay, you failed. You're dead to me." But I've realized now with this framework that he was just not a good companion for me. But it's turned out that he's a great ally in PAL. We've hosted an event together that was a hit that we planned and we also have had a lot of fun playing racket sports together. And so, you know, instead of feeling like he let me down and he just couldn't be there for me, I realized there's a role he plays in my life. It's not the one that I thought he was going to play. I love this for the way this kind of categorization can be therapeutic and exactly the way you said, that there is an impulse, I think, when someone disappoints you to cut them out. But when you cut them out, that tends to be cutting them out of a circle that has one category, which is friend. It might be just as useful to demote or re-categorize them as you're not a companion, but you are a PAL. We can still host things together. We can still get a drink together. You're just not the person when my grandmother dies, when my father goes into hospice, that I am going to unload my feelings onto, expecting that you're the sort of person ready to hear them. They can remain in your life, but in the right kind of way. I also thought about that categorization in the realm of our experiences on the internet. I'm sometimes interested by the idea that people who spend a lot of time on Instagram or Twitter are surrounded by people with like-minded or similar interests. If I'm on Twitter, there's a lot of people that I'm talking to about the economy, or AI, or football, but they're not my pals. They're my acquaintances. Meanwhile, I think a lot of people in the modern world, when they spend less time socializing, spend less time out of the house, there are fewer pals in their network, even if they're on their phones all the time, talking with people about things that are interesting to them. Am I over my skis in wondering whether a feature of modern life is that a lot of people have more online acquaintances, more overall acquaintances than they used to have, but fewer pals than they used to have. I think you're onto something here. I've never thought about it quite that way, but I think it actually attracts with one of my favorite sub-sac pieces written by Derek Thompson, which I did not understand this trend until you captured it, that the whole point of having social media on the internet was to bring people together, but you wrote that basically now we're using our phones as little TVs and watching short form reels alone. We do interact about the content we see online, we leave comments, we have debates, but I think that we have these kind of simulated PAL interactions that aren't real relationships. There are people who have real pals on the internet, but I think a defining feature of having a PAL is you don't just interact face to face, you also interact side to side. You do things that are fun with your pals. You have shared activities that you plan because our peak moments of fun are not typing sentences back and forth, and they're not even having phone conversations with the people that we hardly know. They're immersing ourselves in a concert where we can find collective effervescence moving to the same beat. Actually, I can't dance, so you will find me doing that in a concert, but we might be going to a sporting event and cheering for me, it would be cheering for the Detroit Lions or the pistons or sixers maybe. That experience brings us closer together, moving together, putting ourselves out there together, and I don't think we're creating space for people to interact as pals like we used to because we find people who have common interests that don't live in the same places as us. They're online, but we can't find them in real life, and it's hard to then become closer pals or to do much that would maybe even cross the bridge from pals alone to also having some elements of being allies or companions to. Yeah, there's just something about this that seems resonant to me that like an element of being like a modern middle-aged guy in America is having 20 people you know on the internet who agree with you about the Chicago Bears offense, but you don't have two pals in your life you could actually call outside of your wife who's your everything, including your best friend, to vent about something. And this idea of ally inflation and pal deflation, I feel like is a function of our online lives. So I'm just putting putting a note in that because I think we're going to return to the internet in a bit. Your book includes this really interesting drawing and analysis of how our social lives used to look like webs and now they more commonly look like bicycle wheels. Can you unpack what that image is telling us and what the science behind it says? So I originally thought that might be a good thing because we know that having a sparse network is actually good for creativity. It's good for accessing new ideas. If everyone you know also knows each other, then you get a lot of redundant knowledge and you're essentially at risk for groupthink or being stuck in a filter bubble or an echo chamber. And I think there is some truth to that. What I hadn't appreciated is how problematic the bicycle wheel social dynamic is for our social lives. So if you think about yourself at the center of a bicycle wheel, you're the hub, you're connected to a bunch of people who are different spokes, but they are not in touch with each other. What that means is you have no community. So you have a bunch of separate friends when something is going wrong in your life and one person finds out none of the others do. That means they can't look out for you collectively. That means they can't coordinate a care package or a cadence where they're going to rotate who checks in on you. And sure enough, what the research on this shows is that when your friends know each other, you actually get more emotional support. And so I'm really worried that we have a bunch of independent ties where we can say, yeah, I've got a best friend or I've got three close buddies, but if they don't know each other, I actually don't have a real sense of belonging. Turning the page to talk a little bit about what the science says about the nature of friendship. What predicts friendship outside of raw time spent? Because you recapitulate the study that I had seen and hadn't forgotten because I thought I was so interesting that it takes roughly 50 hours for two people to become casual friends and even 200 plus hours to become good friends. Outside of sheer, just like hours spent together in the same place, what tends to predict whether two people become friends? Well, in general, I think it's easy to look at the averages and say, okay, we just need to put in the time. But if you break down the data, whether you're looking at college students or adults moving to a new city, some of them manage to make friends not in 50 hours, but in just three or four hours. And some of them even made close friends that quickly. So you can try to reverse engineer what's happening there, but what I like better are the experiments where you randomly assign people to have different kinds of initial interactions. And then you see how much they like each other, trust each other, and how closely bonded they feel together. And it turns out that you can make a real friend in nine minutes, nine minutes. If you only put in seven, you're screwed. But how does that not? And what is happening in those nine minutes that we found a way to essentially make so compact and dense all of the things that would typically take two hours to be expressed between two people? What's typically happening in those experiments is people are showing bounded vulnerability. That's how I've come to think of it. You're opening up, you're taking a risk with the other person, which shows to them that you trust them. And it also signals to you, well, I must trust them. Otherwise, why in the world did I just open up? But you're doing it in a way that doesn't run the risk of somebody saying, whoa, too much information. TMI, like, stop trauma dumping on me. And normally what that looks like is just skipping small talk and going right to deep talk. So I might ask you, what's your biggest regret, Derek? And it turns out that most people find that no more awkward, but much more meaningful than if I had said, hey, like, what do you think about the weather? Well, there's a lot of traffic, isn't there? Some other examples of questions that are, I think, pretty effective in the research would include, tell me about an embarrassing moment that you experienced, which is great because you're going to talk about something that probably was a little bit unpleasant, but you're choosing to make sure it's not mortifying or humiliating. And the other person will tend to reciprocate. And now we've, you know, we've just, we've just said, okay, we're going to, we're going to go there with each other. I'll tell you, I did this recently. I was at an event and I was really sick of small talk. And I said, you know what? I'm, I'm just going to put it out there. And so instead of even asking the question, I just volunteered a little bit of embarrassing information. And I said to somebody, you know, I tend to get really nervous around strangers. I'm extremely shy. I'm an introvert. And I've even been told that I move like a muppet of what I'm nervous because I get so awkward. And the other person started laughing and immediately told me an embarrassing story. And we were like this right away. It was like we'd known each other for months. And, you know, I guess we're most of my life. I was afraid to make those moves because I didn't want to get rejected or I didn't want to make the other person uncomfortable. And now in that situation, I think what's the worst case scenario? We don't have a bond to begin with. So if worst cases, we still don't have a bond. Best cases, they reciprocate the little bit of vulnerability with a little more. And we can accelerate our connection. You remind me of two things. The first is an essay by the psychologist Adam Astriani, where he has the line, great conversations need doorknobs, by which he means great conversations are activated by questions that people can grab onto and swing open a door and walk into a story, a confession, a subject of deep interest they can talk about for longer than how's the weather? It's sunny. Okay, that conversation's over. There's no doorknob at all. That's just a wall. But other conversations, whether it's about regret or self-deprecation, or what is most, what are you most interested in right now in the world? That's a conversation that certainly you can ask a fellow journalist. I don't know if it's the kind of deep question for everybody. Those are doorknobs that people can swing open and actually engage in something more interesting than, well, it's 67 degrees outside. The other is that the psychologist, Nick Epley, has done all sorts of wonderful work on how frequently we underrate how much we enjoy conversations, especially deep conversations with people that we don't know. I think he does this experiment at the beginning of Chicago Booth Business School, I believe, and this experiment with the incoming business students, where he'll ask them to turn to a stranger and ask some really, really deep, very specific questions. At first, it's a bunch of groans, and 30 minutes later, a third of the class is crying and they never want to stop this experiment. It goes to this idea that there is a latent desire to connect that is often peepered over by an anxiety that is, if I'm vulnerable, will they not reciprocate? If I'm kind, will they not reciprocate? Nick's theory is that we don't engage deeply because of anxiety about our vulnerabilities being discarded or ignored. Do you have another or attending theories as to why, if in fact, conversation is easy and deep talk is good, we haven't figured this out as a species in the last, you know, several million years of our existence. What is keeping us from making these kind of connections? Well, it will not surprise you, Derek, that Nick did some of the seminal experiments on deep talk that I covered in five, and Adam is quoted in there as well. I love both of those perspectives, and I think you're spot on. I think part of what's going on is we let our anxiety about what could go wrong, stand in the way of doing something that might actually lead a conversation to go right. I don't think it's just that though. I think there are also social scripts that get in the way. I think we have evolved politeness rituals, which we do to avoid offending other people, where we say to surface level because we don't want to be intrusive. We know it would be completely unacceptable to strike up a conversation with a stranger about politics or religion, but we're also afraid that if we ask them a question about what's your biggest challenge at work right now, or have you ever committed a crime? It's one of the effective questions in the research, believe it or not, that they're just going to they're going to clam up and think that we were too forward or intrusive. And the reality is that these scripts often make us comfortable and they stop us from connecting. I think that we need to break the scripts. I think we need to come up with better routines and rituals. And there are lots of ways to do it. They do not have to be heavy, right? I've had a ton of fun bonding with people by just saying, hey, I just had this debate about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. And I'd love to know what you think. And people immediately start riffing on that. And somebody recently said, Oh, you know, actually, it's a taco. And the instant bond, like, yeah, I can't decide if it's a sandwich or not, but it kind of is a soft taco. I love that. I've also I've had it. I've had a great time just skipping what do you do, which is kind of the perfunctory pleasantry that like in our work obsessed American culture, everybody starts with when they meet a stranger. And you capture this in your, your huge article on workism a few years ago. We define ourselves by our jobs in America. And so the social script says, you got to ask somebody, what do you do? Forget that. Why not instead ask what do you love to do and let people light up? I like that. I mean, because I personally, I do like my job. So when people ask me, what do you do? I, I welcome that question. I like talking at my job. But I, but I, I, what do you love to do encapsulates both the, if it's work, talk about work, if it's king, talk about skiing. I want to talk about friendship and adulthood. Do you think it's harder to make friends as an adult? I do. I think, I think that's true for two, two big reasons. Number one, I think we don't have a cohort like what you're still. So, you know, you, if you think about childhood, you were in a class with a group of people who were going through shared experiences with you. You then started joining a sports team or a debate club or a musical ensemble. And all of those people had similar goals. So they were potential allies. They had opted into doing things that they enjoyed. So they were potential pals. And you were just around them enough that there were opportunities for companionship. In adulthood, our cohorts have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. And then secondly, I think we just have more resources for having distant connection that make it, that really make it easy to state the surface. And I think this brings us right back to the internet. It is so little effort now to stay home and just to post and feel like you're getting interaction, but ultimately not realize that you're failing to make connection. And you know, I don't know a lot of five year olds who are great at texting. I don't know a lot of seven year olds who can delude themselves into believing that if they play video games with strangers on the internet, but never actually communicate with them that they have real friends out there, but adults can pull this off and not really realize it until they've kind of found themselves sinking into a crisis of loneliness or isolation. Yeah, I love the cohort theory. A very similar way that I framed it for myself is to think about the difference between thick and thin cultures. And I might be misusing some terminology that actually has a different meaning in the literature of thickness and thinness, but here I mean primary school, college, your first job, religion. These are all thick communities which is to say they have extremely high switching costs. It is illegal to not go to primary education. Practically no one drops out of a college that they enjoy early jobs. Again, high switching costs, you're desperate to get a job and you tend to be, this is where your theory comes back in, within a cohort of people who are just as nervous and scared and uncertain about the Excel functions as you are. And then there's religion where the congregation is communing not only out of a sense of social purpose, but also at a sense of existential purpose. There's a relationship between the congregation and itself and the congregation and God. But when I think about secular adulthood in particular, it's just liquid modernity. It's so much thinness. I love booklines. but if you don't like that month's book, no one's gonna scream at you if you don't come up. If you don't show up, I participate in fantasy leagues. I could probably drop out of one just because I'm too busy. No one would think they did it different. They would just feel my spot with someone else. A large group chat, what's thinner than that? You don't post for six months, no one cares and calls it out. And so it seems like there is something, and maybe you'll have a better or more precise academic word for this, but there seems something thinner, more liquid, less glue bonded about the kind of communities in which adults swim in, that is also a factor here. - First of all, bonus points for quoting the Polish philosopher, Ziegman Bowman, I think, who coined liquid modernity, I remember his first name is something like Ziegman, I actually don't remember his last name. I will look up who came up with this term while you speak. Not in a podcast reference every day. So, it is Ziegman Bowman, yeah, you got it. - Yes. - All right, my work here is done. I have earned my academic stripes, mission accomplished. I never thought about the thick thin distinction in this context, but I think you're onto something really interesting and important. The word that comes to mind for me is cohesion. I think we have lost our sense of social cohesion. And I think if we were to have this conversation with Robert Putnam bowling alone, it would have been because we don't have groups anymore. And I think there's truth to that, right? You've written in the anti-social century, you've documented very carefully how the trend that we know started decades ago has continued that people are not joining clubs and associations like they used to. I think though that that doesn't fully capture the cohort factor, cohorts are by definition cohesive. Let's take the new job example that you gave. You are not only struggling with the same difficulties, you're also going through an onboarding program together. You are going out to dinner as a group. You might have a common manager who is in charge of training new hires. And all of that allows you to have a sense of cohesion of there's a group of people who have similar challenges and obstacles, maybe some aligned goals, and can relate to what I've just gone through. And I think we're just missing that now. And it's one of the reasons why it's, I think, gotten easier and easier to see when people are not fitting in, when they are not reading the room. There's a study that was not designed to be hilarious, but is, which looks at millions and millions of emails. This is Samir Shriva-Stava and colleagues. And what they want to know is, can they predict from the words you use in your emails, whether you're eventually not going to stay in your team or your company? And what they show is they can predict your likelihood of being fired or leaving by whether you curse at the same rate as your co-workers. So if you swear too often or not often enough, it's a simple clue that you're not reading the room. In the past, it was so easy to pick up those cues. You would go through in-person onboarding with a cohort of people. You discover what the team norms were for, do we use expletives every third word, or are we very PC? And then you'd kind of slide into a rhythm. And now people join isolated. They don't have a cohort, they're not on site. And it's really hard for them to figure out what's appropriate in the team. Much more likely that they commit a faux pas. Much more likely that they either conclude, I'm not a fit here, or they are judged as a misfit and ultimately asked to leave. This episode is brought to you by Lincoln. What if your vehicle could help give you a reset? Lincoln Rejuvenate is designed to do just that. This multi-sensory feature combines expansive visuals, digital sense, and a seat massage for the driver and is available in the 2027 Navigator SUV. Visit Lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park when the vehicle is off or is any door is open. Do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. What we're talking about here is different kinds of community, whether it's an education community or a professional community or religious community. I feel like I often get the question when I write about the anti-social century. What's your advice for starting a community? I want to fix this problem at the neighborhood level at the level of my city. I want to start a new thing. How do I start something that works? And actually builds community rather than just creates a list of emails and three weeks later, no one's actually showing up with any regularity. What is the science? Where's the literature say here about the ingredients to the kind of communities that stick together? Well, this makes me think about what the psychologist Marilyn Brewer called the optimal distinctiveness. So optimal distinctiveness, I think, is the single most important ingredient for building a cohesive community. And it's something that nobody fully understands when they build them. Optimal distinctiveness is the feeling of fitting in and standing out at the same time. We want both. And I think normally when people try to build community, they just try to help us fit in. They try to figure out what everyone has in common. They say, okay, we all have a passion for gardening. And so we're gonna start a gardening club. Or we all are really concerned about solidarity around breast cancer. And so we're gonna get together a group of people who have been through that to try to raise money for the cause. And what they don't realize is that group is not unique. It doesn't allow people to feel like they have something distinctive to bring to the group. And also the group is different from other groups. I think that a sense of status often comes from feeling like I stand apart from the other people in my group and our group is really clearly differentiated from other groups. It's why people are so eager to join Mensa. For example, they want to show off that they are smarter than others. It's why Harley Davidson clubs are so common because Biker gangs really stand out. And people are able to say, yeah, we've been in here but we're also different from everybody else on the road. And I think that when it comes to creating optimal distinctiveness, the best starting point that I've seen is to figure out what is going to be unique about your group that other groups cannot offer. So it's not just gardening. You might have a group of gardeners who really also want to be fit. And so you have a power walk to the garden and back. And that becomes a tradition and no one can find that anywhere else. It might be that your group that's really passionate about raising funds for breast cancer awareness hates the fact as my wife Allison put it to me that it's often called a journey. A journey is an exciting excursion that you want to go on. And so you decide to brand yourselves as the anti-journey group and you even, you write some alternative lyrics to don't stop believing. And you start to sing those. These are not examples I would recommend to anyone I care about. By the way, I think the group has to do somewhere creating a unique identity and trying to figure out what are we going to do? What are we going to stand for in terms of our values and norms that will make us unlike any other group you could join? And that's how people gel. I love that. You're mad at me. This wasn't in my notes, but I, for about six months, was very interested in writing a book that I will never write called "Everything is a Cult." And what I meant was, everything should be a cult because while most cults don't do good things, they often do something very difficult, which is to get people who previously did not have the community to join to become incredibly devoted to an invented community. And the paper that most inspired this book project that we'll never see the lead of day was a paper by Laurence Yanukone called "Strict Churches Are Stronger." And he made this really interesting observation in like maybe the 1990s that you would think that in the age of rising secularism, the churches that were growing the most were the most like secularism. So reformed Judaism or mainstream Protestantism. But in fact, adherence to those faiths were plummeting. And what was rising instead were things like Mormonism and Orthodox Christianity and Orthodox Judaism. And its theory, if I recall, had something to do with switching costs. He said, in a way, by creating high walls to Mormonism or Orthodox Judaism, you ensure that the people who come inside those walls are really effing happy to be there and incredibly devoted to the cause. And you don't have free writers and you don't have the phenomenon of the book club that starts with 50 people and by the fourth book, there's 14. It's like, no, they are there and they're there together. And it is distinctive for sure. Like Orthodox Judaism is not conservative Judaism and they will let you know about it. And so I wonder just picking up on this little like thought bubble that I had, whether there's something important about what I suppose Yanukone would call "Strictness" and other people might, you might call like really tight cohesion, right? It's a group that is proud of its distinctiveness rather than just saying, oh, well, most Americans are secular. So let's focus on offering the version of Judaism that is the most similar to secularism. - Yeah, I love this. So it reminds me of two things. One is a Riley and Chapman on strong cultures. They do an analysis of what a strong culture is having common with cults. And exactly as you've anticipated, what they argue is that when you create a strong culture, which is where values are widely shared, but also passionately. held that you attract people who are uniquely interested in this distinct thing that they can't find anywhere else. And then once they're in, they realize, why would I ever leave? This is the only place for me. And they have that sense of solidarity that's hard to find elsewhere. The second thing, though, is I can't believe I'm going to do this, but I am going to quote Sigmund Freud, Freud's best idea. Maybe his only good idea was when he wrote about the narcissism of small differences. And I think that this is a piece of the puzzle here that there's research, for example, on horizontal hostility by Judith White and her colleagues, which shows that vegans actually tend to dislike vegetarians, even more than meatators. Because at least the meatators are consistent. I don't like their principles, but they have principles. Vegetarians, you're a bunch of wishy-washy hypocrites. It's kind of the view from the vegan eye. And I think that's part of what's going on here. If you look at these strict religions, is you are attracting people who are pretty far on the extreme. They are looking for structure. They are looking for consistency of principle. They don't want to be surrounded by anybody who's a half believer or who's, you know, who's not fully committed. And so you not only draw those people in, you then allow them to experience some group polarization where they're surrounded by people who share similarly extreme views. And that everybody else is out and were the ones who have seen the light and found the truth. Um, at the level of society, the share of Americans reporting no close friends rose from about 3% in 1990 to about 12% in 2021, according to this survey center on American life. What do you think is behind the friendship recession? I have a few hunches. I would love to hear yours, though, because you've been writing about this topic for over a decade now. Oh, sure. I'll start. Tell me, Derek, what's behind the friendship recession? Well, I don't want to anchor you with my theories. I think we're talking about a period when the structure of leisure time changed dramatically. I don't think that phones are entirely responsible for this, but I don't know how to begin the story outside of one phones and to something in the category of intensive parenting and rising feelings of status competition between young children. On the phone side, look, I mean, it is remarkable that we use in order to create friendships at a young age, a device that we consistently feel bad about and that often displaces physical face-to-face conversation, which I believe to be the basis of true friendship. I think it's very difficult to build a deep pal ship or deep companionship in the same mode by which you would typically build an acquaintance ship. Like, the phone is a great way to find people whose interpretation of AI's effect on overall GDP growth is exactly like mine. It is the perfect tool. But I'm not going to ask these economists who live in Michigan, California, New York to go out to wine with me when I'm having a bad week. They are very squarely in the realm of allies and not pals. And so the fact that young people are using a tool that is fit for ally ship and not fit for pal ship or companionship, I think, is making it harder to form close friends. I also think that the nature of childhood has changed a lot. There's a paper by two economists, married economists called Rainey. Is it Valerie and Gary, maybe Rainey, called the Rugrat Race, published in 1990s about how parents are spending much more time with their children than they used to. This has been borne out by many, many other surveys and times spent with children has gone up in the 21st century. And what that has done is it's created, it's strength and bonds. You could argue with in nuclear families with children spending much more time with their parents than they used to. But the day is only so long and more time spent with your parents or more time spent obsessing over extracurricular activities is time that you're not just down at the corner bakery or the deli, like making friends at the coffee shop where it is that like 12 year olds hang out these days, mall, maybe even bookstore, God willing, and just hanging out. And so as childhoods become more filled with activities, we've squeezed out hanging out. And so basically, I think there's a variety of social and technological forces that have squeezed out the kind of just shared face to face time that is the basis of forming long-term friendships. I think this where my theory begins. I think both of those hypotheses are right. I think I would add another one to the parenting one. I don't know if this is hypothesis three or if it's, it maybe it's two B because it's a side effect of the, the status competition that's going on. But Thomas Kern and his colleagues, as I'm sure you've read, have shown that perfectionism has been rising over time. We see that in the US, in Canada, and in the UK. And the rise actually started about a quarter century before smartphones, a whole generation earlier. And if you break down why, that's when competition rose. That's when parents started to worry, my kid is not going to have the same opportunities that I did. I've got to do whatever I can to make sure that my kid gets into an elite school and then into an elite firm. And I think as an effect of that, what we see is perfectionism is rising due to two parenting behaviors that have become more common. One is unrealistically high expectations for kids. And two is extremely harsh criticism when kids fall short of them. And if you put those together, that's putting a tremendous amount of pressure on kids to be extremely achievement focused. I sometimes tell my students at Wharton that their resumes sound like they're superhuman achievement robots. And they're just kind of wired for accomplishment and they're great at running that program. But when it comes to anything that doesn't fit in there, they don't have a lot of practice. And what they don't have practice with is, guess what, if you're supposed to be perfect all the time in order to succeed and excel, you don't know how to show vulnerability. Goodbye companionship. You don't know how to chill out and have fun and maybe make fun of yourself and do goofy things, you're not going to make any pals then. And I think the rise of what's called socially prescribed perfectionism, the sense that I need to put out an image of being flawless. And I need to put that out on a social media means that even my friends that I have snap streaks with are not necessarily going to see the real me. And just when you spend your childhood and then your teenage years curating an image instead of putting the real you out there, you are basically building walls as opposed to bridges to other people. Hmm. This again is not my notes, but I was just trying to listen closely to you and reformulate it for myself and tell me how you think about this theory. We spent a lot of this conversation talking about one skill of making friends, what to say, how to move beyond small talk, how to inject door knobs into conversations as we're leading conversations. But friendship might be more than that skill. There might be a sister skill, which isn't making friends, but accepting friendship, being prepared for intimacy, being receptive to the gestures of intimacy of those around you. And what I'm hearing in your answer, your to be explanation, is that even if we're just as good at, even if we were just as good, I should say, at making friends as people in previous generations, even if we were similarly gifted conversationless, and I'm not sure we are, and we were similarly good at small talk, and I'm not sure we are, we might be worse at accepting the friendships offered by others because of a sense of safety and protection and fear that we're not the kind of perfect person to deserve or be ready for the friendships offered. Is that a fair recapitulation? Yeah, and I think also people are afraid even to make the bid for friendship because they don't know if it's going to be received. So we have a problem on both ends. I do think we've gotten worse. We know that social skills are like muscles when they're not exercised, they atrophy. You can see it when astronauts come back from months on the space station. You can see it in studies of prisoners leaving solitary confinement. You can see it in data on all of us coming out of the pandemic. We just get rusty and awkward. And instead of saying, oh, that awkwardness might be received as, you know, kind of fun, or might even signal to the other person, hey, I'm not alone here. We think we've done something wrong. We failed. And so we start to retreat from social interaction. I think that the idea of the signals not being sent clearly or received openly is also part of the problem though. I think we're good at this in romantic relationships, right? So our parents or our grandparents would have defined that they were going steady. Now millennials and Gen Z will say, I don't know, we're official or we're exclusive or it's a situation ship. We don't have language like this for friendship. We don't sit down and say, hey, Derek, I think. I think you're a great ally and I'd love to be pals to it. Yeah, right. And I'm not sure if we should have that conversation or not. Some people might find it uncomfortable. I actually like it, but I do think there are small moves we can make to get better at sending and receiving. I was in an event last year and I got an email afterward from somebody that I had a great conversation with and she closed the email. I hope this is the beginning of a real friendship. Hmm. That's beautiful. And I've got to tell you that made my day. Yeah, no, that's really beautiful. I want to close by talking about a subject that was, I wrote about in my last story on this general topic, which is the decline of hosting. It's since 1975, the share of Americans who say they entertain people outside of their home on a monthly basis or more has declined by 71%, which is just unbelievable. Because you think about like the decline of religion being something that is typifying of the pulling back of American social capital, the decline of monthly church or temple visits is only 56% in the last 50 years. So it's like, that doesn't even hold a candle to how much more infrequently we're hosting people at our home. You write about this a bit in the book, the art of gathering, the importance of gathering. What did you learn in the course of writing this book about what the secret of a great gathering really is? I think the secret of a great gathering is planned spontaneity. It's choreography. And I'm not talking about social engineering here. What I'm talking about is creating conditions that allow people to connect in ways that they wouldn't otherwise. So my favorite starting point for any kind of gathering, and this is informed heavily by Priya Parker's work in the art of the gathering, is to say, okay, let's try to figure out what kind of connection I want people to form. Am I trying to bring people together as allies, pals, companions, or some combination of all of the above? If I want people to become allies, I am going to bring them together with a shared goal. I might have them do a jigsaw puzzle together. I might have them build legos together, right? It's a fun, hopefully a little bit of pal energy comes into it, but ultimately it's something that people have to figure out. How do we align our different talents in order to achieve something common? And then coming out of that, they feel like, okay, I'd want to be in a team with these people. If I want people to come together as pals, I am going to put them in a situation that makes them laugh. I'm going to make something funny happen. And you know this because you've experienced it. When I run a big event with hundreds of people, one of my norms is we have no devices in sessions or at meals. And at first I just announced the rule, and then a few people broke it. And I decided there needed to be a creative punishment for it. So I now have these really nasty birdie bots, jelly beans from Harry Potter, where if you were caught on a phone in a session or a meal, you are trotted up in front of the room and you have to play Russian roulette, you spin the wheel. And then you might get either what might be marshmallow flavored or it could be stinky sock. It's gross, it's funny, the whole group gets in on it. I love that as a way to just bring people together as pals or I often will have people do quick improv comedy exercises together. I've had some some improv experts say, okay, you know, just just walk around the room. And when I say stop, then you have to pretend you're the long lost twin of the next person you meet. People have hilarious conversations. I ended up talking to a woman who's over six feet tall and has a lot of hair. I'm five nine and bald trying to pretend that we were twins instantly brought us together as pals. And yeah, I think if you want people to be companions, you could set up some, you know, some conversation prompts. I was in a gathering last year where people were asked to journal. And one of the journaling prompts was draw your childhood house and circle a room in there that means something to you. And write for five minutes about what that room means to you and then read it out loud to the group. I was extremely uncomfortable as a shy introvert. This is not my cup of tea. But I ended up talking about the room in which my sister and I found out that our parents were getting divorced. And instantly, like companions came out of the woodwork at that gathering of mostly strangers. And so I think just a little bit of planning goes a long way for helping people to find a wavelength that they could vibe on. - I really love that answer. Last question. I don't want to ask you about AI at the level of society. You have children. How do you talk to your children about AI as a tool versus a friend? - So I had a great conversation with our son last summer. He was, let's see, I think he was, yeah, he was 11. And I asked him if he thought AI was gonna make us as a society happier or unhappier. And he said, unhappier. And I said, oh, interesting, why? And he said, because it's too easy to get the answers. And I said, do you like when things are difficult? And he said, I like challenging myself. And that's where I've started the conversation with my kids. The conversation starts with the best learning happens when we are challenged. That means we need friction. That means I don't ever allow a sentence to be written by AI. You can, you can ask a chatbot for ideas if you're stuck brainstorming and you're looking for some variety. But ultimately then, you have to express the idea in your own words. Ideally, you write the sentence first and then you seek feedback on it and you learn from it. And the conversation I'm having with my kids is very much about, okay, how do we put ourselves in situations where we have to confront challenges? They might be social challenges. I worry a lot that increasingly people are defaulting to AI companions, which I actually think is an oxymoron derrick. I don't think a chatbot can be a companion because by definition, companionship is a two way street. You could receive simulated emotional support, I guess, from Claude or chatGPT or Gemini. But guess what? You can't give it back. They are not going to know what it feels like to experience grief or sorrow or despair. And so you have nothing to offer and you can't be a companion and therefore you cannot have companionship. And I'm trying to have that conversation with our kids to say, look, you know, the basically AI tools are there to provide information. They're like a superpowered search engine. They can synthesize information more quickly, sometimes at the expense of accuracy. But ultimately, they are not a substitute for thinking and they are not a substitute for interacting. I'm thinking of your answer and connecting it with something you said maybe 40 minutes ago about how our social networks are changing their shape. They used to look like webs and now they look like bicycles with a hub, with individual one-on-one relationships with the spokes. As some of those spokes become artificial, it becomes even harder to imagine a webbed social network. Because if I ask Claude for help with a social problem I'm having, Claude isn't telling my best friend what it told me, it's not sending an email to my network to say, you know, Derek's going through something. And so it's impossible for that relationship to be truly social in a webbed way. It has to be a diet. It has to remain between two people. And so I can imagine how in a world where AI is taking over more social functions, it's a therapist, it's a gotrobed romantic partner, it's a friend. That's a world where the bicycle shape of our social networks is really frozen in place. You can't have webbed relationships with AI. That's something that scares me, especially given what you said about the significance of the power of a more web shaped social network for providing community to people. - I think that's, it's a really good point and it's a worrisome trend because if we start to offload some of these habits to AI, right? I can imagine somebody who's listening to or watching this conversation right now saying, you know what, I'm going to build the app so that when one friend finds out that you're going through a tough time, everyone else is going to know. And guess what? We lose that skill then. I think on curb Larry David called it middleing. Right? He said, you can't, like you can't put just anybody in the middle. You have to be able to middle. Not everybody can middle. And it is, it is a form of middleing, right? To be able to say, okay, I know how to connect to people who don't know each other but should. And I have the self awareness and the social awareness to check in with each of them first and do the double opt-in introduction because I don't want to barge into one person's life and dump somebody in who's not wanted there. And if we're just outsourcing those decisions to a chatbot, we're going to lose the skill ourselves to middle. And Derek, I think one of the most important practical takeaways for me of Reading Vibe was, if there's one thing that we could all do that will both strengthen our bonds, build better communities and boost happiness, it's introducing our friends to each other. It turns out that building bridges is out. actually more rewarding than deepening bonds, the sheer joy that we get out of just connecting to people and saying, "Hey, I can't wait to watch the sparks fly." It's much more satisfying than sitting down to people who have met 19 times before and saying, "Okay, I really want to work on bringing the two of you closer." And so I think the art of the introduction might be one of the most important social skills that we have not invested enough in. Well, I think the Larry David solution to the crisis of social connection in the 21st century is the perfect place to stop. Adam, thank you so much. This is great. Thank you, Derek. As always, I've learned a lot and I did not expect Larry David to be telling us how to have better interactions. Like, the Larry David theory of connection was not on my bingo card for today. It's a great bookend. It's a great bookend.