How to Make Friends as an Adult, Solved

Welcome back everybody to the Solved Podcast, the most over researched and underrehearsed podcast on the internet. I'm number one New York Times best selling author Mark Manson and this is my co-host lead researcher long time acquaintance. [Laughter] It's real party and we are here to be your friends for the next few hours. You see what I did there? I do see what you did there. All right, in my clever, was that a good intro? Was I clever enough on that intro? I think we have to min. Okay, yeah. Are you hooked yet audience? Do you need two friends for the next five hours? Well, we've got the podcast for you. In all seriousness true, I'm actually very excited for this episode for two reasons. One reason is I think friendship is probably the most important topic that is talked about least. 100% agree with that. If there was a ratio of importance to discussion, I think friendship would be maybe the highest. Real relationships get all the air time. Yeah. Physical health, mental health, happiness, everything, like your social life drives so much of all these things. We're going to be talking about it. And on top of that, it's a huge problem these days. There's some scary stats that I know we're going to talk about later, but just a few to like just the wet, the beak of the listener, the number of people without a close friend is quadrupled in the last 30 years. The amount of time the average person spends alone has grown by 25% and the amount of time that they spend socializing has dropped by 60% in the last 20 years. 20% of adults report feeling lonely on a daily basis, which is an all time high. So yeah, this is a problem. It's like a very, very real problem and you and I, we've been creating content in this industry for 15 plus years at this point. I remember there was a time where we used to do friendship content and it would just kind of bomb because nobody cared and we've really noticed in the last two or three years and it's starting to get a lot of traction because I think a lot of people are feeling isolated. They're feeling alone and they're feeling lost as to how to actually build and maintain friendships. So we're going to get into all that and then the second reason I'm excited for this is purely selfish, which is I need friends. I need more friends. I'm going to get into that. I need more friends. I, you know, that sounds kind of pathetic when I say it that way but but in all seriousness, I think this has been an unexpected challenge. I'm middle-aged now and I this was never a problem throughout my life. I always had a good circle of friends and I would say really in the last five to eight years, this has become a pain point. It just, it feels harder to maintain friendships. It feels harder to make friends, good friends and I'm not, I've not entirely been sure why that is. I've had some theories and prepping for this episode is there's been some interesting realizations, which we will definitely talk about. We're going to dig into all of that. Yes. So yeah, we might, we might just end up, you know, maybe we'll pull a couch in here in the studio and I'll lay down and we could just have a little Mark Manson therapy session. Oh god. So friendship is incredibly important. I think it's people underrate. It's important for a lot of reasons. It is, it's kind of, I think it's the water we swim in in a lot of cases. It's not as sexy. You mentioned romantic relationships. You know, it's not as sexy or emotionally dramatic as romantic relationships. It's not as practical and tangible as say like career development or improving your productivity. But ultimately it is maybe the highest leverage part of your life in terms of mental and physical and emotional well-being, right? I'd also say too, there's not a lot of like, there's not a lot of social structure. Like there is for relationships. There's not all these scripts. There's not, you know, yes, clearly defined ways of how you go about these relationships. So yeah, it's a very murky area. Well, and we, I think one of the reasons for it, we've already kind of tripped over it, which is like, I made a joke earlier about like I need friends. I immediately felt like a loser when I made that joke. And I think this is part of the problem is that people don't feel at liberty. There's like a certain amount of shame attached to it. That if like if you need help making friends or if you feel like you don't have any friends, there's just like this intense self-judgment that happens. And so you don't want to speak up about it. So some of the things that we're going to cover in this episode, we're going to talk about the three factors that lead the friendship formation and then how to find them and maximize them as much as possible. We're going to talk about how to be a good friend and the difference between a healthy friendship and a toxic friendship and how to know which ones your friends might be. We're going to talk about how to maintain friendships over the long term as well as how to reconnect with old friendships that maybe you've lost touch with. And then we're going to talk quite a bit about the modern challenges to friendship from smart phones and remote work and social media to also just kind of broader social and cultural dynamics. You know, the modern education system and the lack of family formation and the decline in religiosity like all of these things I think have very real effects and impact on the lack of friendship that's happening or the lack of social life. We'll talk about the highest leverage practices to build and maintain a fruitful social life and of course much much more. Now if you're new to the solve podcast, our whole thing is we take one topic and we just dive so ridiculously deep into it that the goal is that once you listen to this podcast, you will never have to listen to anything ever again. And we believe so strongly in this that we have an agreement with ourselves that once we cover a topic, we can never go back to it. So the idea is that this podcast is so comprehensive and so full of all of the relevant and useful information that you don't have to go back to it and we don't have to go back to it. As a result, it's very dense and it's very long. Generally speaking, the first half of each solved episode goes deep into the theory and concepts and all the information you need to understand about the topic and then the back half of the episode is where the actionable advice is the practical takeaways, the examples, the exercises, the tips. Most people as they listen to the podcast, they listen to it over multiple sessions, they like to take notes. We provide a PDF guide that summarizes everything that we talk about in the show. It has all of our citations, all the research, all the references, resources to read further. You can download that for free at solvepodcast.com/friendship. It's all there for you folks. There's no excuses. And I mean, really drew. It's not about the podcast itself. It's about the friends we made along the way. Well, as one of those hopeful friends, as a very familiar acquaintance with you, I can't get over it. You have a soft curl hanging down from here and I can't look at anything about that. No, keep going. It's still there. Give it a give it a there we go. There we go. It's okay. Hair diversion. Let's get into it. Yeah. So I actually want to start at an interesting and maybe unexpected place on this topic, which is Darwin. So everybody's familiar with Darwin's theory of natural selection. What they don't realize is that there was something that kept Darwin up at night, quite literally. It was something that vexed him very deeply, bothered him, and he struggled with throughout his entire career. And he never solved it. And that essentially was how do you explain friendship? The whole idea behind natural selection, survival of the fittest, you know, the each person's genetics is looking out for its own survival and replication. That makes sense. Even something like parents helping a child or children, you know, taking care of a sibling from a genetic point of view, that also makes sense. You share 50% of your genetics with your brother. So it makes sense that you would feel some sort of desire to help your brother or help your kin. Although in a lot of species, there is no such thing as family or family or you know, it's just every creature for themselves. What Darwin could not figure out is why are there hundreds and hundreds of species from insects to bats to birds to humans that consistently help other creatures that are not genetically related to them? It makes no sense. And while Darwin was very confident and kind of cocky about this issue publicly, we know from his private letters that it bothered him very deeply, to the point where he even wrote to a friend that he believed that if anything could unravel his theory and his work entirely, it was his inability to answer this question. So this question, this problem persisted in science for over a century. And it actually didn't really get answered until the 1980s. And it got answered in a very unexpected and kind of strange place, which is Game Theory and Political Science. So by the time the 1970s rolled around, Game Theory had emerged. And I think everybody's probably at least heard of or is loosely familiar with the idea of a prisoner's dilemma. A simple example of a prisoner's dilemma is a drew and I have to prepare for a podcast. Now I have two choices. I can either do no preparation and hope Drew does all the preparation or I can do my part of the preparation and and hope Drew does his as well. Now, if Drew and I both prepare for the podcast, the podcast will be better. If I don't prepare for the podcast, it Drew does. The podcast will probably still be good, and guess what, I didn't have to do anything. But if Drew is thinking the same thing as me, and neither of us prepares for the podcast, well, it's gonna be a very long day in studio, Mark Manson. Let's just put it that way. You get these prisoner dilemma situations between selfishness and cooperation that show up all the time. And GameFearists love to come up with different strategies and simulations of what is the optimal decision making to make in these sorts of scenarios. You're gonna attach different value amounts to each outcome and then you can kind of calculate out like what the optimal decision making or strategy is in any given situation. Now, by the 1970s, kind of a new way of thinking about this emerge, which was called iterative prisoners dilemma. So generally speaking, if you are in a prisoner's dilemma in a single instance, a selfish behavior is probably higher expected value. Because it's like, if I invest nothing in the podcast, and I believe you have a 50% chance of doing the work for the podcast, 50% of the time I still get a podcast for no effort and the other 50% of the time I just get nothing, but I also invest it nothing. It generally is gonna work out in my favor. But what researchers found is that if you run the same prisoners dilemma over and over and over again, Drew and I do 10 podcasts together, 20 podcasts together. So now, if I defect and decide not to prep for the episode, well, then maybe next episode Drew is like, well, fuck Mark, I'm not gonna prep for this either. And now it hurts both of us. And so what you tended to see is that when you ran the prisoners dilemma multiple times over a long period of time, it made more sense to be more cooperative. The other interesting thing about the iterative prisoners dilemma is that researchers noticed that this was kind of a microcosm of society in general, right? Like there's attention within all of us in many situations of doing what's good for ourselves versus doing what's good for the group. Maybe in isolation, we pick the selfish action. But the fact that we have to repeatedly see the same people over and over and over again, means that we develop a reputation and people remember what our choices were in the past. Now what's interesting about the iterative prisoners dilemma is that researchers came up with different strategies. So one strategy could be always cooperate. Like no matter what Drew does, I always prepare for the podcast, no matter what. Another strategy is always the fact. No matter what Drew does, I never prepare for the podcast. There's a strategy that that researchers came up with called the Grim Trigger, which is basically, I prepare for the podcast until Drew doesn't. And then as soon as he doesn't, I never prepare for it ever again, which is you could see this is like the person who holds a grudge, right? It's like, I'll cooperate with you, but then as soon as you screw me over, fuck you buddy, I'm never cooperating with you again. Some of these strategies got very elaborate. There was one called A Pavlov that took a long string of past actions from the other person in the prisoners dilemma and ran all sorts of probabilistic models and stuff to calculate what the highest expected value action was in the next iteration of the prisoners dilemma. So researchers like really went ham on this in the '70s. So there was a political scientist in 1980 named Robert Axelrod and he had a really clever idea. He devised a computer simulation that created a tournament to pit these prisoner dilemma strategies against each other to determine which one created the most value. And he reached out to someone who was brilliant mathematicians, economists, computer scientists from all over the world and he had them work on strategies for months and then submit them into the competition to see which one would perform the best. He ended up with 62 submissions from researchers all around the world and he ran a simulation and to everybody's surprise, the strategy that one consistently was maybe the simplest strategy of all, which is known as tit for tat, which is basically whatever Drew does, I'll respond in kind. So if Drew preps for the podcast, I'm gonna prep for the podcast. And if Drew says, "Fuck the podcast," I'm gonna say, "Fuck the podcast." In an evolutionary biology, this is known as Reciprocal altruism, which is basically like, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. Reciprocal altruism is in many ways like our innate sense of justice, right? Like if somebody does something nice for you, you are just naturally inclined and wanna do something nice for them. And if somebody hurts you or breaks your trust in some way, you're naturally inclined to wanna get back at them in some way. And but if that same person who hurt you or broke your trust comes back and apologizes and then does something nice for you, you're like, "Oh, they're not such a bad guy. "Let me be nice to them again." So it's basically what Axel Rodd's tournament showed is that this reciprocation of cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous. It is the most optimal strategy for a community. It basically solves Darwin's problem. It shows that friendship, building friendship and trust and cooperation within a group of people over a long period of time is the most evolutionarily adaptive strategy. It promotes the most survival, not only for the individual but potentially for the whole group as well. - Yeah, I wanna take into this just a little bit more 'cause I dug into this 'cause this is fascinating. - I love this shit. - And it was actually, so it was this program where it was submitted by a psychologist, not a computer programmer. - Yeah. - Okay. - I believe it was Anatole Rappaport who submitted it. It was four lines of code. Four, four lines. (laughing) Okay. - I looked it up, I could even understand the code. I don't program, I'm not a program. - Wow. - And I could understand the code. Four lines of code. And one little detail I think you missed there was that actually the strategy is cooperate first. - Yes, I forgot that you did. - If you go first, cooperate. - Cooperate first. - And then copy whatever the other one did. That's tit for tat, right? And it was so simple, there was these huge programs that people wrote, right? These huge computer programs. - Yes. - Very complicated like you were going to do. - These fit months on it. - Statistical models that they used, everything like that. And a psychologist came along and wrote four lines of code and it, by far. - I believe everybody out of water. - In these iterative competitions. - And it's crazy 'cause they actually ran the competition twice. So the first round they ran, they had 14 models and tit for tat one. And everybody kind of looked at it and they're like, "That, no, that's too simple." - I'm gonna beat this now. - Yeah, and they're like, "No, let's run it again "and let's run it with way, "but let's go get way smarter people "and run it with way more models." And then they like, did the second round with 62 models in tit for tat one again. - Yes. - So it is sometimes simplicity is the most effective in the most optimal. And so essentially what this tit for tat strategy tells us is that friendship is an evolutionary technology. It is something that we adopted for our survival. The emotional attachment that we feel to individuals, the mutual pleasant feelings, the desire to help somebody who's helped us, to support somebody who's has supported us. This is extremely innate. It's not only in our nature, it's in the nature of thousands of species around the world. It's like such a fundamental aspect of our, not even psychology, but biology, that like we literally rely on it for everything. Now not to nerd out too much, but some of these evolutionary benefits, and the motions podcast we talked about how one view of human relationships is that it is co-regulation of each other's nervous system. I think that's one way of looking at a social friendship. That is what we experience as emotional support is this kind of merging of our nervous systems through communication in the sharing of emotional stimulus with somebody else. Friendships were the original information networks. It's the way, like if you think about what cooperation is, it is building trust, it's building the belief that what you have done in the past, you are also gonna do in the future. And if I trust that you are going to do the things in the future that you say you're gonna do, it also means that I probably trust the information that you have that I don't have. You don't only have to rely on the knowledge that you gain from your personal experience, you can now rely on the knowledge of all the people that you trust and that you have relationships around you. It allows for risk pooling, which is basically a kind of a fancy way of saying it's like an insurance policy. - The original insurance policy. - It is the original insurance policy. A simple example is like, if I'm by myself, let's say we were like cavemen and I'm by myself and I wanna go hunt a giant elephant or something that could potentially feed me for a month, but it's very high risk. And if I fail, then maybe we don't have food for a week. If I'm by myself, that's a hugely risky proposition. If I'm in a tribe of 30 or 40 other people who are also hunting and gathering their own sources of food and they're willing to share it with me, that suddenly liberates me to take that big risk, to go hunt that elephant. And then maybe I bring, if I successfully hunt the elephant, then I bring it back for the tribe. And so not only do we pool the risk, but we also share in the rewards together. And really just collective action, in many cases, you get the holes greater than the sum of the parts, type of dynamic, right? So in technological and scientific discoveries, generally speaking, Newton has that famous quote, where he said, if I've seen further, it's because I stood on the shoulders of Jeff. giants, you know, generally speaking, nobody discovers anything in a vacuum on their own. It's by collating and combining and recombining and remixing information and creativity and thoughts from a wide range of people that you make profound discoveries. I've always found it super interesting that you tend to see major breakthroughs throughout history, whether it's in like science or technology or business or even like political revolutions, there's always clusters of people that show up together. Like it's never just a lone wolf, right, who makes this massive discovery. Like in the 17th century England, with all the early scientific discoveries, it was the Royal Society in London. You know, in the 18th century, you had all the founding fathers in the United States. A lot of the great physicists and breakthroughs around nuclear energy and quantum mechanics, like they were all refugees from World War II living in the United States together and teaching at the same two or three universities. And so you had people like John Bonnuma and Claude Shannon hanging out at lunch, just like shooting the shit about like, hey, I was thinking about this thing recently. And you know, sure enough, you get all these like world changing breakthroughs happening in succession over and over again from the same group of friends, essentially. Silicon Valley today. So yeah, that's a perfect example. Yeah, that's another great example. The last thing I want to point out, which I guess is just, it's appropriate. And maybe this kind of foreshadows a future episode that we do. But there's a little bit of a tragedy and all of this, which we've decided to call the tragedy of the nice guy, which is that the nice guy finishes last. Basically, the prisoner dilemma strategy of always cooperating gets you smoked. Like you just get wrecked. You get exploited cheaters, liars, take advantage of you. You get punished. I think this just raises the point that friendship, it requires that tit for tat dynamic, right? Like if your friend is disrespectful or an asshole to you, you need to be able to stand up for yourself. You need to be able to put down a boundary and say, hey man, that's not cool. Like don't do that again. Otherwise that friendship quickly turns into exploitation. It turns into a toxic friendship, which we're going to get to later in the episode. And so I just think it's interesting that even in this like super nerdy abstract theoretical game theory computer simulation, you get the basics of human boundaries and like the dynamics of what a healthy relationship is versus a toxic relationship. Right. I want to put just one little finer point on that too, because there was a duck into this a little bit more. There was a later version of tit for tat called generous tit for tat. I think it was called generous, tit for tat or something like that. Copying what the other person did, that's, you know, if they defect, then you're just going to defect, right? But then they threw one more line of code in there later that said, kind of put a little bit of a randomness variable in there. Even if the other person defected like a very small percentage of the time, you would kind of forgive them and cooperate back. And that one did even better. So put a pin in that because that's going to come up a little bit later too. Okay. So generosity aspect to it too and a forgiveness aspect to it that can even be programmed into a line of code. The thing this reminded me of this point, you know, we still haven't done a relationship episode which, yeah. Yeah. Don't worry, audience, we will definitely do multiple relationships episodes. But I remember, you know, John Gottman, who's him and his wife are like pretty much the pre-eminent researchers on really like romantic relationships, long term relationships and the quality of those relationships. It reminded me he is this concept of like bids. So when he analyzes married couples, one of the ways that he analyzes them is in measuring what he calls like bids for affection. He says that like married couples will make these bids in mostly subtle ways, right? So it could be something as simple as like, if I'm sitting on the couch and my wife comes and sits down next to me and she just puts her hand on my leg. You know, do I lean into her? Do I look over? Do I give her attention? Do I like smile at her or do I just completely ignore her and keep playing my video game or whatever? Generally what he found is that bids are, and healthy couples bids are reciprocated the vast majority of the time. So anytime either partner kind of reaches out to the other partner for just a small bit of attention or affection, it is reciprocated. And it reminded me of this tit-fret hat thing because what he also found is that generally in unhappier unhealthy relationships, you see those bids go unreciprocated or in some cases even punished. And again, it's interesting that like such an abstract theoretical game theoretical model of evolution, right? Like, explains probably the most sophisticated and important relationship research that we have, like why married couples stay together and more or get divorced. So I thought that was super cool as well. And I, you know, my- This is some nerdy shit. Mine, yeah, we're a dude, we are. But I know it's deep in the nerd zone. I know, for sure. It's absolutely fascinating though, that like these simple principles apply to very complex relationships. Yeah. So that's like the scientific and theoretical foundation. Let's get into what friendship actually looks like throughout history, how it's been defined, and what that means in the modern world. So the word friend is a protogermanic word. I'm going to totally butcher this. Free yons. That sounds right. But the word free on comes from basically ancient prehistoric Germanic and it literally means one who is free to love. So the free is actually still- is the word free. That's where we get the word free. And then I guess the yons is the- I think it's the active verb of like a person who is loving. So it's like a person who is free to love. So encapsulated in this word is everything that defines a friendship. Now what's interesting about these prehistoric Germanic communities is that they would- they used to sit in circles around the fire and all the slaves had to sit outside the circle. And so the word free yons was meant, was reserved for the people who were in the circle. It was literally the people who were free to love you or love whoever, right? So it was- there was a status component attached to it from these Germanic tribes, which we're going to come back to this. Put a pin in this. So across pretty much all ancient traditions, friendship is seen as both a moral good, a virtue, and also seen as something a path to spirituality. So from ancient Greece to the Bhagavad Gita, you see ancient texts extolling the virtues of friendship, how friendship is one of the most valuable and important things that you can experience in your life. And then from everything from Christianity to Sikhism to Islam, you see people talking about how friendship is a path to God himself, that to freely love somebody, to unconditionally have positive effect or regard for another human being is, in essence, holiness, spiritual attainment, path to enlightenment, whatever you want to call it. It is one of the few concepts that is universally lauded and seen as a good thing, cross culturally, cross history and time across the world. There was one ancient philosopher who really nailed it. And for those of you who have been listening to the show for a while, I'm going to give you one guess who it was. Starts with an A, ends with an Aristotle. Once again, Aristotle fucking nailed it as he usually did. So in the Nicomachian Ethics, Aristotle differentiated between three different types of friendship. You had utility-based friendship, you had pleasure-based friendship, and then you had virtue-based friendship. So utility-based friendship is relatively obvious. You have, you and another person have a shared interest in common. You can help each other achieve that shared interest. So this could be maybe a coworker that you get along really well with or somebody who shares the same hobby as you. I remember I had a friend who moved to Austin maybe like ten years ago. And it was interesting because his wife was really having a hard time making friends. She would keep meeting these women and hanging out with them and was very frustrated. She didn't seem to get along with any of them. And this buddy of mine, he seemed to have no problem. And I remember talking to him, I was like, why do you think that is? And he was like, well, I'm going to be honest. I think I just have lower standards. And I said, I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, you know, my wife, she kind of wants her friends to be a good person and be a good mother and have like the same hobbies and be excited about the same things and listen to the same music. And he's like, honestly, man, I just like to work on cars and I don't really care if my buddy is like a shitty father or not. As long as he's good at working on cars, I'm going to hang out with him. Now, probably something to that. Yes. Yes. And we will probably discuss that. I'm sure we're going to come back to that. But I think that's a nice illustration of the difference between say a virtue-based friendship versus a utility or pleasure-based friendship, right? Like it's, I have poker buddies. Like I never see them outside of poker. I never really talked to them much outside of poker. I don't really have anything in common with them outside of poker, but we like to play poker. So, you know, we're poker buddies. I think everybody kind of intuitively has something like that. There's pleasure-based friendships, which as somebody who was a big party boy when he was younger, I can definitely relate to this. In fact, I would say that I think maybe a common mistake that young people make is they mistake pleasure-based friendships for virtue-based friendships. They assume that because they have tons and tons of fun with somebody and they do a bunch of cool things with that person that they must be very close and intimate and it turns out that actually those two things are not the same thing. And then finally, you get the virtue-based friendships, which Aristotle said, a virtue-based friendship is long term. It's enduring and it is based on an inherent respect for the character of the other person. Basically, it's not just a person that you enjoy being around, that you have fun with, that you have shared interest with, but you actually see them as an admirable and good person and you are happy to spend time with them or do things for them simply for the sake of doing something for them. And Aristotle considered this one of the highest experiences in life. He saw virtue friendships as some of the most meaningful and enriching relationships that we could have. It's funny because it's in many ways the ancient Greeks probably correctly put friendship above romantic relationships in a lot of senses. They really saw something sacred and very profound about like a deep enduring friendship like that. Now what's interesting about Aristotle's model is that it's kind of like a layer cake. You kind of need the utility, the utility is the entry point. You need to have a shared interest with somebody to kind of open the door to have enough curiosity to find out if you like hanging out with them or not. And then you have to enjoy hanging out with a person to really get to know them well enough to really understand that is this a person, do I admire their character? Are they a really impressive human being? Would I like to learn from this person? Would I like to identify with this person belonging to the same group as this person? So each level kind of opens the door to the next level. They're not mutually exclusive. Generally speaking, a virtue friendship has all of these going on simultaneously. And then the last thing that Aristotle said, well not the last thing Aristotle said, but the last thing that I'm going to talk about in regards to Aristotle is that is I think is very important and it's going to come up a lot in this episode. Is that Aristotle made two points. He basically said the first two levels of friendship, the utility and the pleasure are inherently transactional. You know, it's like if we are, if we only hang out because we play poker together, the minute you stop playing poker, I am probably not going to see you anymore, right? And similarly, a lot of my party friends back in the day, as soon as I stop partying, I didn't really have anything in common with them anymore, right? So it didn't spend any time. Aristotle said that there's nothing wrong with that inherently. There's nothing wrong with a transactional relationship with somebody. He just argued that as long as the transaction is, there's a proportionality between the transactionalness of the friendship, then it's okay. And this comes back to the tit for tat thing, right? Like it's as long as both of you are getting some sort of benefit out of the friendship, things are fine. Like I'm happy to have a poker buddy that I only play poker with, right? I'm happy to have a party friend that I really only go party with. It's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. It only becomes a problem if say like, I'm always the one inviting the friend to the party and they're never inviting me to anything. And they're coming to my house and drinking all my booze and never bringing a bottle of wine. And it's only when there becomes an imbalance in the proportionality of whose contributing to the relationship that these friendships break down. And again, back to the tit for tat thing, it's kind of the breakdown of that tit for tat dynamic. Yeah. There was a parallel to in Confucianism as well. So Confucius outlined five, the five relationships of human nature basically. And friendship was one of them. All the others had a hierarchy to them, right? But friendship, was considered the only relationship where there were equals or at least some balance that we were talking about. But yeah, God Aristotle nailed it though. Yeah. You're getting in. You're, you're, you're, oh, did I, you jump my next point? And I spoke, well, it, so because the interesting thing is that Aristotle's point was that with virtue, the virtue of his friendship becomes non-transactual. Okay. You start doing things unconditionally for each other. You know, it's, it's, you don't, you know, maybe your buddies going through a hard time. And it's always you inviting them out. And you're covering, you know, you're buying him dinner and you're like helping him move into his new place. Yeah. And it's kind of one sided. But you also understand like, Hey, this is a really good friend. And I care about them. And, uh, you know, we're gonna, one day it's gonna be me on the other side. And it like, it doesn't matter. Right? Because I, I love them. I care about them. I want, I wish them the best. And it has like the transactional nature of this is gone at this point. Aristotle is like, that's the beauty of the virtuous friendship. But Aristotle said that for a virtuous friendship to exist, there could be no status dynamic. There could be no hierarchy. You not like nobody could feel like one person is better or superior than the other. And this is a very important point. It's the same point Confucius made. It's a very important point. And, and I think we're going to come back to it because Aristotle's argument would be that as soon as there's a status dynamic, as soon as there's like a higher status person and a low status person, the relationship is kind of forced into becoming somewhat transactional. Like it's, it's kind of impossible to make the relationship entirely unconditional. And, uh, just due to power dynamics within the relationship. So would you say then Mark that, that, you know, you say it like you don't have these friends, you're what you're saying when you say you don't have as many friends as you would like. It's these friendships of virtue. Because I think you do talk about friends all the time and you're like, oh yeah, my surfing buddies. This is what you do. You say, oh yeah, my surfing buddies, my poker buddies, my, or the, the, go to dinner party buddies that I have right now. Yeah. That's what you're talking about when you say, I think so. I think it's, it's a, it's a scarcity of virtuous friendships. Although it's funny because I do have a lot of virtuous friendships. Part of the problem and we'll get to this, this will definitely come up in one of the next sections. The part of the problem is that all my really good friends live in completely different places. All right. Yeah. So it's like I have half a dozen great friends that I really love and I see them all once a year. Okay. And it sucks. We'll talk about that very soon. We'll talk all about that. Yeah. So we'll come to that. So in terms of modern psychology, you know, their, their psychologists have identified really kind of three ingredients of what makes a friendship a friendship. Like what's the difference between saying a friendship and an acquaintance or a friendship, you know, a friend and I don't know somebody a colleague or somebody that you see all the time around the neighborhood. And they define it as basically number one is there's reciprocity. So both people are putting an effort, spend time together to do things for each other to share things about one another. There's trust. So you, basically you trust that this person has your best interests or isn't trying to fuck you over or won't lie to you. Doesn't have an angle or something. Right. Right. And then number three is there's intimacy. So there's self-disclosure. I mean, intimacy sounds like a heavy word. In this context, it's not. It literally just means self-disclosure. Like you're, you're willing and able to openly talk about yourself, not necessarily everything about yourself, but like you are sharing and for personal information with this person and they are sharing personal information with you. So those are like the three defining aspects of a friendship. So to come back to the proto-jermanic word of like somebody who's free to love or these two, these two, let's call them, let's call them the two disruptors for the episode. So the transactional nature or the lack of proportionality, right. It's like a friendship that's one-sided or somebody who is really just trying to get something from the other person and then the equality, the status equality. So if you take these three ingredients of friendship and then we kind of return to this idea that generally the function friendships need to be at least proportional if not non-transactional or kind of unconditional. If you think about a very transactional relationship or a disproportionate relationship, it generally involves one person who is always taking and the other person is always giving, that breaks the reciprocity that's going to interfere with trust and it basically puts conditions around intimacy. So it's like if an our relationship like you're always giving and I'm just always trying to take as much as I can get from you, it's going to create incentives for you to be very careful about what you share with me and maybe like not always be honest, maybe not always tell me what's going on. Similarly, if there's a status hierarchy, if there is like some sort of imbalance in the relationship, it can create trust issues, it can create reciprocity issues. The disruption of those two things can also interfere with people's ability to be intimate and honest with each other. So I do think it is worth noting that both of these things, the kind of unconditionality and the status equality, these are subjective, These are complex. completely perceptual. I think I've mentioned maybe briefly on the old podcast, but like when my career blew up, one of the things that happened that was a little surprising and also upsetting, some of my friendships got weird after that. And I think looking back, all of the people I got weird with were generally, generally men, they were generally people who had catched a lot of their self-esteem and self-worth to status, particularly like money and career claim. And I think for them, if I'm doing super well, then now they perceive us on different, like there's a hierarchy now, and then that interrupts our ability to have intimacy, to reciprocate to one another and to have trust. On the other hand, I had tons of friends who didn't really give a shit. They're like, "Good for you, dude, that's awesome." And they're like, "Are you going to pay for this beer? You fucking cheap skate?" You don't get nothing changed. Absolutely nothing. So a lot of it is subjective, a lot of it is perceptual. And people tend to, when it comes to the status equality thing, a lot of people will project their own assumptions. One of the things I've always said is that we tend to measure others the way we measure ourselves. So it's like, I have attached myself a steam to some certain metric. Let's say I base all myself a steam on being an amazing golfer. And you join the PGA. That's probably going to freak me out. It's going to cause all sorts of complications. I'm going to get weird around you and start being anxious and start second guessing the things I say to you. And then as soon as that starts happening, it's almost impossible to have a genuine friendship. It is by definition transactional. Yeah. I love that you're pointing out the subjective nature of this too, because I think there are a lot of people who want to try to objectify that balance. So when I said that, Confucius said that this was an equal, there was no hierarchy in the friendship, right? Ideally, there is not. Well, maybe objectively there is and somewhere there are other. With my friends, I'm sure there's certain friends of mine who I've helped with certain things that they've never repaid. I'm not sitting here keeping tabs on that. Subjectively it feels like we're still very equal though, because I get a lot of reward in return for helping them or for them doing other things or whatever it is. So it is, I just want to highlight it's a very subjective thing and don't try to objectify it. Funny because it's studying this aspect of it and thinking like it really started to make sense to me why celebrities are only friends with other celebrities and only date other celebrities, because if you're Kim Kardashian or whatever, every room you walk into, there is such a massive status disparity that you can, it's almost impossible to have a genuine friendship or relationship with anybody new you meet. Unless they're relatively on your level. And yeah, a lot of like theoretically you could say like, well, you know, she could just choose to not see herself that way or the people around her could choose to not see her that way. And like sure, yeah, sometimes like on the margins, you're going to have situations like that. But like by and large, it's just easier to just go find the other celebrities and you don't have to deal with any of this bullshit. You also see something similar with like rich people tend to hang out with other rich people, athletes, and they hang out with other athletes. You know, like humans were naturally drawn to people similar to us both in terms of what we're in our interests, right, friends of utility, but also status. You know, so it's like pro golfers probably want to hang out with other pro golfers. Real estate tycoons probably want to hang out with other real estate tycoons. Like it's just and not only because you have similar interests, but also like, hey, this is a peer. Like this is somebody who's going to get what I go through. They're not going to like put me on a pedestal or I'm not going to put them on a pedestal. Yeah, I guess I, what I'm getting at I guess is there really ever a true balance in the relationship though? You know what I mean? Yeah, because like I think I think I probably like kind of hangs around an average, you know, goes back and forth a little bit. Probably. Like there's, there's imbalance in a relationship at one point and then it might swing back a little bit the other way and it kind of goes around and everybody's comfortable with that imbalance too at the same time. I mean, we'll talk about toxic friendships later, but I do think this, this is where, you know, you're self worth really like generally speaking people who have a terrible self worth have terrible friendships. Yeah. And I think a big reason of it is that people with a terrible self worth, they see a status imbalance in every relationship they have. And so every relationship becomes transactional. And they're trying to compensate. And they try to compensate. They try to impress people. They try to manipulate people and it creates a very ugly, unhealthy dynamic. Or constantly trying to prove themselves in some way or show how friendly or yeah. Exactly. And so there's like, I guess there's kind of an unhealthy status dynamic there like where that subjectivity works against you. And then I think there's just, there's just the reality, right? Like it's funny because it's writing Will Smith's book. Like I really notice this hanging around him. Like I actually started to feel bad because I'm like, I don't know, like, how does this guy make friends? Every room he walks into, like people just start screaming and crying and like laughing. And he's like immediately the center of all it, like you can't. How do you have a friend? Yeah, after that, you know, like so it just, I think some of it too is just circumstances and human nature. One, okay. It wouldn't also be a solved episode if we didn't talk about Nietzsche a little bit. Yes. Nietzsche was like a real, he was all about, correct me if I'm wrong here, but he was all about friendships are actually a little more adversarial in a way. Like they challenge you. For instance, Mark, what the fuck are you wearing? I feel like I have to point this out. Dude, it's my surf bro outfit. You know, you start the very first episode we did. You were wearing a blazer. And now you're in here and Javiyan is in gym shorts, okay? I know I'm not exactly like a fashion king over here. I get it. My black shirt coming from the guy who wears a black t-shirt and black jeans every single episode. I get it. I get it. I'm just saying, where is the professionalism? You're throwing rocks in a glass house right now. You and I could have a Nietzsche friendship, I think. And I could just call you out constantly. I think I look good. I think I look good. Nietzsche being Nietzsche, of course, had to be hardcore. And he thought, he thought transactional relationships were stupid. He was like fuck utility, fuck pleasure. That's for weak people. He said, you should only have virtuous friendships and you know they're virtuous because you challenge each other. I actually think this is a very valuable point for maybe people to ask about their own friendships. Can you call out and challenge a friend? Because if you can't, then it's probably a transactional friendship. Yeah. Like in a transactional friendship, if you challenge somebody or if you like talk shit to somebody or call them on their bullshit, you're going to break that. The proportionality is going to get out of whack. But like if it's a friend of virtue, that person will actually probably be appreciative. Yeah. We like, wow, you're making me a better person. I appreciate that. Yeah. At least at some point. My friends are calling out my bullshit and I get pissed off. They're like, oh, you were right. Yeah. So yeah. No, you get it. That's our friendship definitions. Trust, intimacy, friendships of utility, pleasure and virtue. And generally virtue is where that's the, that's where majority of your meaning and happiness and well-being is, is having people in your life that you know are unconditionally supportive of you that have an unconditional positive regard for you and you have an unconditional positive regard for them and that you see yourselves as equals and peers, companions, all that. Right. And just be aware that those types of friendships exist. And if you are like, oh, I want more friends, maybe you have some friendships of utility. Maybe you have some that are just based on pleasure. Could any of those, you've got to start there. You have to, you probably have to start there. Like if you're, and we're, we're going to talk about this in a minute. But yeah, if you are coming from zero friends or you just moved to a new place, it's like, what's the most obvious thing? Yeah. It's like, well, go do a fun activity and meet people while doing it. Like that's, that's like step number one. You want to get into some, like some neurobiology and maybe see even some of the health effects of friendship. Not really. You don't want to. Can we skip? Can I, can I go get some water or something? You can, you can, yeah, kick your sandals off real quick and go get some water, Mark. I might take a nap while you do this section and then I'll come back. You don't want to miss this section. No, no, no, no, you don't want to miss this section because there's more evolution on this stuff. I know you're like super excited about the evolution. I was excited about the evolution stuff. So, okay, I'll stay, I'll stay. Okay. Why do, you know, friendships feel the way they do? Why do we only have a small number of friends, most of us, right? That we can really connect with anyway. Why do we gravitate towards the people we do? Well, this is, I mean, part of it, the answer is that's what humans do, right? But there's obviously a little bit more to it than that, right? And there's this anthropologist named Robin Dunbar, okay, who's kind of famous in this and he has this idea called the social brain hypothesis. And his argument is that we evolved the neocortex specifically and large brains more generally because we needed to navigate all these so relationships. Okay? Specifically that, that's the reason we evolved it. I wasn't toolmaking, it wasn't you know foraging, it wasn't mating, it wasn't any of these, it was navigating these complex social relationships that we have. And in primates and specifically, these are very complex relationships. And it takes a lot of brain power. It takes a lot of cognitive machinery to do this, right? And so sociality itself, it's a very high effort, very laborious cognitive process, right? You have to track just who, first of all. Who's doing what? Who said what? Facial recognition. How are they related to this person? Yeah. Can you trust them? The obligations, the O, U, U, O to them. Previous experiences, you have them, the emotions that they elicited from you or exhibited themselves. The history you have with this person. That's very, very complex in terms of like neural capacity. Evolution has selected for larger brains to handle that complexity, right? And he even came up with what's called now the Dunbar, Dunbar's number. Okay. In humans, this number is about 150 meaningful relationships. That's about the upper limit that you can have. But what's really, really interesting though is that he even found out that you could predict the typical group size of just about any social species just by saying how big their neocortex was. Like it's really, really interesting. So again, with humans is about 150 with chimps, it's about 50. And then with lemurs who are like proto primates, they're partly primates, I would say it's like a few to maybe 10, maybe 12, right? And each one of those you see it like smaller and smaller neocortes, smaller and smaller brains. Okay. So you can actually predict a group size just by looking at the brain of a, especially of primates in particular. So what he said was you have up to a limit of about 150 stable connections that you could have. There is some debate too. There's others other anthropologist and biologists who say, now it's actually an ecological reason. You can't have more than 150 people in any small area because there's not enough food, you know, it's not enough water, it's not enough resources, this man. But what Dunbar has found kind of over and over again, you go to even modern tribes, like 100 gather tribes, they, they top out about this number. And if they get bigger than that, the groups become very, very unstable and the homicide rate goes up. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So it's like, there's like a maximum. And it's, it's probably set because again, it's really, really cognitively demanding to navigate these social relationships. And anything above that is just kind of chaos. And everybody's at each other's throat and literally killing each other. You know, it's funny. Okay, this is going to really date me and make me sound like a boomer. But I remember when Facebook first came out, I'm talking like 2004, 2005. And people, what people started doing, I mean, initially it was just you had had your friends at your university or whatever. But then once it kind of broke out of the universities, maybe 2005, 2006, what people, the first thing people started doing is they just started adding and friending everybody they had ever met. Oh, it was for me. I was going, I was going for that for a little while. And I was like, Oh, this is stupid. But for a while, it was like, yeah, it was like everybody. It was just friending everybody. And I remember there were all sorts of think pieces back then that this is actually where I learned about Dunbar's number. They referenced Dunbar's research. And they were like, human brain can really only handle 150 relationships. Basically. And like, I think from what I understand, like the way to think about this is that it's not that you can only know 150 people, like in the abstract, it's, it's, you can only have a relationship with 150 people. Like you can only, that's the upper limit too. Yeah, you can only like empathize or identify with, with personally emotionally, be emotionally invested to some extent with 150 people. And beyond that, it just people become an abstract number 100%. And, and so people at the time, people were freaking out. They're like, Oh, all these people are like adding a thousand friends on Facebook. And like, you know, Dunbar's number says that this is just becoming people, people are being objectified. And they're becoming a number to like a high score in a video game that people were trying to like max out. And so then Facebook ended up putting a maximum 5,000 friend limit on people's accounts to basically prevent that sort of behavior, which is interesting. That 5,000 number is kind of interesting too. Because Dunbar, it's not just 150, he actually broke it down into more concentric circles. Yeah. So you have that 150. You could have kind of meaningful connections with these people. Or meaningful contacts. You could know them and have some sort of relationship with them. Right. You could have 50 about good friends, 15 kind of close friends and five like really intimate friends. That's kind of how it broke down. But on that upper bound where you talk about that 5,000, they say 1500 like is like kind of a somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 faces that you could recognize. Oh, interesting. Like you would have like could really memorize me like, I've seen that face before. Even if you don't know the person to know the name or whatever it is, you could know that. So it was interesting that they kept it at 5,000. I don't think they intentionally did that or maybe they did. I don't know. But it's just interesting that it landed there. Yeah. Stalin once said, you know, during all the atrocities he was committing in the Soviet Union. He said, the death of one is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic. Right. And this is why. Yeah. This is exactly why. Your brain literally cannot. It doesn't have the machinery to relate to more than a few thousand people at most. And so once you get into millions, it just becomes this abstract, blobulous concept of people. Right. And your ability to empathize or emotional investment just like hits a ceiling in it, in it, in it, everything past that number is just the same. And what kind of what Dumbar is saying, I think anyway, is that we didn't evolve brains to only handle those numbers of relationships because that was the group size. The group size is that big because that's all our brains can handle. So it's the other way around. So again, there's other people who are like, no, it's ecological reasons and food. Yes, the food, food resources and access to mates and all that does matter. But what he's saying is we just, it's so expensive for Mother Nature, like they had to cut it off at some point, right? Wouldn't the, you know, so we were kind of topped out at 150 for most human history. But then it's like agriculture comes around. And that's when you get city states and civilization and everything. And then obviously like now, I mean, we're in a city of 11 million people right now. So it's maybe that does lend the ecological argument. What we had to do was we had to create all of these cultural institutions. Social institutions on top of that in order to regulate these relationships and behavior. We have laws. We have, you know, social norms, like all of these things that we have modern society that we had to put on top of that. That's true. Now it was, I mean, those laws and social norms and everything are able to fit into our cognitive frameworks, obviously, right? But they still have to be in place and enforced by an external entity. Interesting. Sidebar. I had a friend who told me once, I don't know if he originated this theory, but his theory was that all of the major world religions emerged around the same time, which was at the same time of the first early city states or large scale civilizations. And his theory was that religions emerged as a socially organizing technology for thousands and thousands of people. It was basically the first way that you could coordinate multiple thousands of people in human history. And so like all of the myths and the belief systems were kind of optimized for that. Like it's not like somebody sat down and figured that out. It's just that they like spontaneously, a religion spontaneously emerged from the need to coordinate thousands of people at the same time. Dunbar actually says, yeah, actually, it all comes back to Dunbar. Yeah, Dunbar Dunbar. And I don't even know if he was the one who originated that. Yeah, actually, I mean, actually, I think Freud said something similar. Yeah, you know, I think even Karl Marx was even saying stuff about that. But yeah, there are all these kind of external institutions and kind of social technologies, if you will, that we use in order to kind of, I would say a little bit hijack your cognition around this. Yeah. Or at least keep it in a box. Yeah. In some ways like that. All right, back to friendship. Yes. Yes. So you have those those concentric circles we were talking about, right? So all the way down to the few thousand faces you can recognize to the you're kind of topped out at about five intimate friends that you can really like on that intimate kind of virtuous level that we were just talking about the Aristotle said. So again, Aristotle is right. Yeah. This is another another data point. You're you're topped out at about five of those real intimate ones. Again, these are limits though. I think I want to emphasize this here. These are limits. They're not the goals. The goal isn't to say, okay, I need five close friends. I need or a five real intimate, you know, writer dies. Yeah. Basically 15 close friends, 50 people I can call good friends. It's not that it's kind of just kind of the upper limit. Yeah. There's a lot of variation in there whether what what people need versus what they can. Yeah, I imagine an introversion, extraversion plays a lot into that. I mean, it's funny because when you were running through that, you were like five writer dies, 15 good friends, 50 friends. I was like, man, who is time for that? I was listening. I was like, does anybody really does anybody have time for that? We keep getting ahead of ourselves. We're told we're going to do that too. Sorry, we can tease in all these things, but they do. This does though. You already mentioned how this this dumpers number and his framework echoes in all sorts of different areas. So it's not just in yes, it's in social media, your circles. Even if you have thousands of friends, you only typically interact with like five to 15 of them, you know, and over the course of a year or longer, term times it might be 50. right? Up to 150 probably is what actually ends up happening there. Pre-modern villages or modern hunter gather tribes, they all kind of top out around 150. Military companies are usually organized around about a hundred groups of 150. Let's see, workplaces too. Organizations once they hit that 150 number, then they have to start, that's when all the corporate stuff that a lot of people will make fun of or kind of deride. That's where it comes in, but there's a necessity for it. We have to regulate behavior or some way. Again, these institutions have to come in on top of our complex cognitive problems. HR department. Yeah. Yeah. So this comes up over and over again, and it's just kind of, again, it's this cognitive limit that humans seem to have. And it's because once again, it's just, it's really, really difficult. It's a very, very difficult problem to solve, but it's a very important one too, apparently, because it's so conserved, especially within primates. This all this cognitive machinery that we devote to social relationships and particularly friendships as well. So it's just kind of a testament to how, what, if you think friendships difficult, well, Mother Nature thinks it's very difficult too, because she gave us, this is what she gave us. This is the best I can do, sorry guys. That's kind of where Dunbar's theory leads me anyway. Now, you already brought this up about the social media, and there's always this, there's always this strain of utopianism, right, that runs through technology. We're going to connect everybody and you've, you've alluded this already. And that's what Zachary Bruce saying. I'm here to connect the world. It's like, not only can you, I mean, yeah, you can do that in a very superficial way, but we're just not, we're just not capable of being connected intimately with thousands and thousands of people all over the world in disparate locations with disparate beliefs and all of these types of things. It's just we don't have the cognitive machinery. It's too much load. It's way too much load. And I think this is, you know, back to that utopian vision. I think the idea, at least back then, there was, there was kind of this optimistic view that if, if the world is exposed to everybody else, if everybody in the world is exposed to everybody else, then it will diminish judgments and stereotypes and assumptions. And we will have more compassion for other people, not realizing that that ability, like all of those things, stereotypes, assumptions, like group affiliation judgments, prejudice, really what those all are, are like cognitive shortcuts. And so the moral cognitive load you put on people, the more you expose them, the thousands and thousands and thousands of strangers, the more they have to rely on prejudice, assumptions, and stereotypes to make sense of the world. And so there, it's just like a classic backfiring of, of intentions. Yeah. And this will come up, I'm sure several times too, but that's probably a cautionary tale for, any future technologies we might think about. Okay, okay. Put up in that one too. So I hope I've established that. Yes. This is a very hard problem. And it takes a lot of brain power to do this. Okay. Let me give you some fascinating, fascinating examples of how we, how we do connect and how our brains work when we're connecting with other people and friends, basically the neurobiology of friendship. Okay. Okay. So for example, there's this thing called neural synchrony. Okay. It's kind of like when brains become one. All right. So there's this really interesting study. They took, they got, I think it was about 250 to 300 graduate students at this one university. Like they mapped out this social network of these graduate students. Okay. And then just like a subset of them and they brought them in to the lab and put them in an FMI scanner. They showed them all sorts of different videos. And be funny videos, comedy sketches, you know, maybe documentaries, maybe political stuff, whatever it was, all sorts of different kinds of videos. Okay. And they measured brain activity in different regions of their brains. They could predict with a very, very high degree of fidelity just from these brain scans who were friends. If they had kind of matching neural responses to these different videos, that predicted how, how the friendship network that they mapped out. That's fascinating. Isn't that crazy? That's, but that, okay, there's a chicken and the egg thing here. It's like, are those people friends because their neural networks map out the same around the same stimuli or do their neurons map out similarly because they're friends? Yeah, that's a good question. Or do we know? I don't know if they address that in the study. Actually, it's probably both. It probably is a little bit of both. Some of the other stuff I'll bring up, I think kind of corroborates this though. Okay. So because the similarity even persisted, even when they controlled for things like demographics, like age, even two, so they had some older grad students, some younger ones, backgrounds, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, all of that. Okay. Their conclusion anyway from all of this, it wasn't like, we didn't grow up the same or we don't like the same things as that. We have really the same brain patterns around, or how we see the world even, or how we interpret what's coming in. Yeah. Yeah. They call this neurohomophily. Okay. Mothally. I thought it was homophily for a little bit, but I worked it up. It's homophily. Okay. So we got the neurohomophily. We are a big podcast now. So we should pronounce things correctly. I thought of these words. I always say when they're written, I don't see them. Neurohomophily is a term that's used to describe how we're drawn to people's brains who literally fire like ours. Okay. So like when I do think and this is another point, I'll make a little bit later too, but you ever like you meet somebody and you just like you instantly click with them, there's probably there's a neural basis for this. Okay. And this is probably at least part of it. This is maybe apologies if I'm getting ahead, but does this have anything to do with me or neurons? Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I think another point that might kind of corroborate this evidence as being that your brains just kind of operate the same is that even when they scan them at rest, when they weren't watching anything, when they weren't, viewing any stimulus or anything like that, there was still a high degree of synchronicity between those neural synchrony between us, which is pretty well. That's pretty wild. So friends even nap the same way. That's crazy. NAP are arrested. Yeah. Seriously. They're just they're like daydreaming. Yeah. It's the same. Some of the implications of this, like your friends, you they're probably shaping to in some way. There probably is some back and forth to that. Definitely. When you when you give with somebody and you jive with them, then you will over time sink more and more. I'll get to that here in a second too. But you're literally kind of shaping each other's brains or at least you're sharing some sort of like mind space with them. And there's a neural basis for it. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah. Yeah. Like the big thing was from this is that it's not that you're kind of seeing the world together. It's not you're seeing it from the same vantage point. It's that you're you're really seeing it in the same way. You view the world. You somehow have this neural similar neural activity that causes you to view the world or interpret events or sensations or whatever it is in a very similar way to somebody. I feel like you see this most in married couples. Like the stereotype is that married couples after enough time together. They become the same person. Right. Right. And it's funny because my wife and I were just joking the other day about how similar we're becoming. Yeah. She so just to give two examples. My wife is one of the most like conscientious, organized, clean, very buttoned up people. And I'm obviously a fucking savage. And we were we were sitting up for dinner and she she was really hungry. And I had forgotten to get serving spoons. And she and I was like, Oh, shit. I like got up to go to go back to the kitchen to get them. And she just like reached her hand into a bowl of green beans and just took a fistful. Yeah. Throw them on her plate. And I looked at her. I was like, what the hell? And she was like, I guess I've been married to you for too long. But it's funny because I've noticed similar things like there are similar things that that she does that I've started doing over the years. And it's completely unconscious. And it's like to the point. So here's the other example. She's super picky about smells. And I've been you know, I've I've started this second company this year. So I've been spending a lot of time at this co-working space with them trying to trying to get that company off the ground. And in the there's a corner of the office at that co-working space that smells like a fucking bathroom. And it's subtle. But every time I'm in there, I'm like, do you guys smell this? It smells like a fucking toilet in here. And my wife, my entire marriage, my wife is complained about smells. Like she is zero tolerance for bad smells. And all the other guys at the at the company are like, they're like, what are you talking? I don't smell anything. God, Mark's like so whiny. It comes in here. Complains about smells all the time. And I was just it was really funny because I like, I was sitting there complaining. I'm like, you don't smell this? Like how do you work here? I don't even think I can work in here anymore. And like to the point where I took my laptop and I went to the commentary, because I just refused the work in the smell. And as I was sitting out there, I was like, oh my God, I've become my wife. Yeah. Yeah. You weren't like that. You never ever smell this. No, that's wild. That's wild. Not only when you meet somebody who kind of like sees the world, you the world and the way you do. But also over time, you kind of do get to this. Yeah. That's another thing actually on here that I have is interpersonal and neurocoupling. It's another kind of mechanism of very related one, two, it's basically every conversation you have is literally like a brain to brain wake up. So there's, they've put people, they've had two people have a conversation and the person listening is usually simulating the same brain activity that the speaker is with a slight lag behind it, which is pretty wild. And then they find that that coupling, that degree of similarity in their brain waves and the brain activity that they measure on the FMRI is tighter and tighter if you're closer friends. And if you've known each other longer and you have a closer relationship that you start to mirror these. So cool. Isn't that wild? So cool. Like this is, this is the same sort of stuff like when we did the emotions episode with the co-regulation. Yeah. Peace like to me, this, both of those things, I mean they're kind of the same thing but like it's just so fucking cool. I mean, the researchers call it like a super organism form. When people are having a conversation like this. And it makes like, I mean, not the, the derail, pull this too much back to the emotions episode, but like it, it, it calls back to the power of talk therapy, right? It makes sense, right? So it's like if you have something inside of you, it's been eating you up and, and really causing you to suffer. When, and then you tell somebody about it, you are generating that same neuronal state in their mind that you have been experiencing. But because of their context and their, they don't have the same baggage and background and assumptions and history that you do, they're able to sit with it and handle it and carry it. And due to the mirror neuron. So like they hear it, they feel your state, they understand what you're going through, but they're okay. Then you can, you can empathize from them. Oh, I can be okay too. You know, it's like you start to, it's almost like you see the puzzle pieces of like why this, this stuff works. I would say you just defined what the ideal therapist is. Yes, yeah, yeah. It's what you're saying. Yeah. It's so cool. It's, it's, it's wild. No, it's absolutely wild. But it is, it, it creates this like shared brain state. Like I said, it creates this super organism even too. So I'm sorry, but Mark, maybe some of the woo woo crowd is like, oh, we're on the same wavelength, like almost got it right. God damn it. No, true. But not, I mean, they already did this life episode. We can't do this again. We gave them the resilience episode. We can't give them, we can't give them this one too. Tiny, tiny morsel of truth in that. The brain signs seems to be backing that up just a little bit here. Okay. That's right, that, that, that, that there are vibes and you need to be on the same wavelength. Are you, are you shitting me? I'm not, not, I mean, I don't think there's any, like, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm I mean, I don't think there's any like cosmic order. I think it's just, there's a, there is a, there's something to it. There's something to it. But it's funny because it's, I mean, it makes, it does, it makes sense. So like, imagine, imagine you meet somebody who just does, like, and you try to express something to, like we've all had this experience. You meet somebody new, you try to express something, like maybe you try to make a joke. And like, they are just not getting it. Yeah. See what you see, they don't understand what you understand. They, like, feel things differently. They see things differently. You can feel that on a very deep level. And yeah, it feels like a misconnection. Oh, like, like, there's like a wire that's broken or something. Yeah, you're absolutely, that's a good point. You can really feel this one. It's not happening. Yes. You can really, like, I don't know, I feel like I'm very sensitive to that anyway. I come into a group or something like that. I'm like, oh god, I do not fit in here. Most people can feel that. I think pretty, pretty easily. Yeah. And there's a dissonance to it, which I think is probably why people use vibrations and wavelengths and energy as like the metaphor is because it does feel like dissonance. I'm sorry, Mark. God damn it. Sorry, even brought that up. I feel like by our 50th episode, we're going to be coming in here and like, Togas and Sarongs and like lighting incense. Yeah. I'll bring my crystals. Yep. Stay tuned, everybody. But you have, okay, you mentioned a couple of times now, but mirror neurons. Yes. Most people have probably heard this about this at least in some capacity or another, but I think actually the way they were discovered was maybe one of the most interesting things about it, like almost all great scientific discoveries it was discovered by accident. It was Geochomo result, Rizalatis lab in Italy, okay. And what the story goes anyway. So they were studying neurons in the premotor cortex of monkeys. So the premotor cortex is when you're planning motions. There's an entire little sliver of your brain dedicated just to that. Okay. So if you're reaching out to grab a glass or something like that, first the premotor neurons in your neocortex fire up and then they go to your motor cortex to move it. Okay. Fine. So they were studying these neurons in monkeys. And the story goes that one of his lab texts came in one day and was eaten ice cream. Or I guess it's Italy. What are they? It's not ice cream. Geolato. Yeah. And the story goes one of these monkeys was hooked up to their whatever equipment they were using. And they're eating the ice cream and neurons in the premotor cortex of this monkey started to fire. And they're like, what the hell? The monkey is not even moving. Yeah. Or not it like then there's not that being primed to move or anything like that, right? Can you tell this story in an Italian accident? What the they are not even moving. I have Italian friends make it so pissed off and they want to do that. That's the monkey. He is not the moving. They're not moving. What the hell? You got it in the fingers. Yeah. Yeah. You tell the tell us through with the million if you're watching this. I'm very sorry. I know you hate it when I do that. I'm so sorry. This is a monkey. Oh, baby. But his neurons are firing. You can't get canceled by making fun of the Italians. All right. Okay. For one thing, I'm not, I don't know how apocryphal this story is because I, well, no, it actually does make sense. The labs I worked in, we were eating in there all the time. And the ocean guys, the ocean guy at our university was like, guys, what the fuck? You have food next to the radiation fridge like this camp. So this is probably if you're like, they definitely would have been in the lab. But anyway, so he comes in. He's eaten the gelato and these neurons are firing in the premotor cortex and they're like, what the hell is going on here? This was the discovery of mirror neurons, right? Yeah. This is how they figured it out. There's like, wait a second. So, not only are there neurons that fire when you, when you do an action or when you observe an action too, a subset of those exact same neurons that are involved in the movement or in the reaction of whatever kind are firing as well. Okay. This is what they call mirror neurons. And so it's not just, it's not just motor actions though. This is how they discovered it and then the most obvious ones. But it's also things like, especially in humans with the, you know, our bigger neocortacies and stuff like that, we can simulate observations that we're having for people's intentions or their emotions as well. So like, you know, humans are pretty good about emotional recognition from facial different, differences in facial features. Mirror neurons are firing when that's happening or if you're sad or you're happy or something like that. Some of my sad and happy mirror neurons will fire as well. So these kind of three things that we talked about, you know, the neuro coupling, the neural symphony, the mirror neurons. Again, these are very, very complex neurocognitive mechanisms, but they're highly conserved too. Evolution thought it was important enough to keep it around so it has, but it also, it just, this is why we have these big beautiful messy brains too. Yeah. Do things like this. This is the only thing, you know, obviously these aren't the only three mechanisms that we have friendship and connection and all of that. These are three really big ones and they're very, very complicated and fascinating. Messy. Yeah. I'm just, I'm really, I actually am having like one of those holy shit, the brain is so cool moments during this section. It's just imagining the, the intricacy and the complexity of evolving, like if you think about the eyeball, right? Like, the fact that like, I don't know, like I can see you make a movement and my brain is able to take the light that is bounced off of your body and that configuration and automatically knows how to process it in such a way to imagine myself getting up and making the same movement as you. That's just so fucking amazing. That's like, it is really incredible and then you think about like movies and TV and theater and performance art and everything. Like it's just, all of it is playing on our mirror neurons and our ability to like project ourselves into situations and empathize with complete strangers really. Like it is really incredible. We'll have to get some weed with our spirit crystals I think too. We'll get high. But that, I mean, so it goes from we have these complex nervous systems in general and brains in order to navigate all these complex social interactions that we have in friendship is among the most complex of those interactions that we might have. And so just again, if you think making friends is hard, well, it is on every single level you can think of all the way down to the like neurons that are firing in your brain. It is a difficult problem to solve. And so take a little solace in that. I think that is what I want you to take from that little section anyway. I think it's also really cool and kind of poetic or ironic that it's like, it's like, human rationality happened as a side effect of evolving the ability to socialize and develop social relationships with each other. Like, it's rationality wasn't the point. It was just the tool that was necessary to develop social relationships and maintain them over a long period of time. - Right. You really have to work at rationality too. It's not like a built-in. You know, like connecting with people is more nature-esque than logic. - Right. We're not logical. - Which is anybody who's been on Twitter lately can, it's very obvious to you. (laughing) - It does kind of, and maybe we'll put a pin in this one too because we are going to talk about this a little bit later. But, you know, it does kind of raise the question, what happens to our neural, like our neural coupling and the mirror neurons and everything? When more of our communication is more and more distributed, more and more asynchronous, maybe put a pin in this one, but like, you start to see like, you don't have, there is no neural coupling. There is no, the mirror neurons aren't firing when you're texting somebody or when you're communicating online as much. Even like a Zoom call, you know, the loss of fidelity that you have in a video chat. There's a loss of mirror neuron firing in that. There's a loss of neural coupling and neural synchrony there too. So, this is something I think that, you know, you don't really quite think of, and again, why I think, as we'll see later a little bit too, is that why digital communication isn't necessarily a good substrate for, at least not for, like, really deepening your friendships or even maintaining them, yeah, over time. - Yeah, well, definitely excited to talk about that. - We'll get to talk about that. - But yeah, I think we've all had the experience of maybe texting something to somebody or receiving a text from somebody that sounds absolutely awful or is completely taken the wrong way. And then you actually see the person face to face and talk to them and you realize the whole thing was a misunderstanding. - Or during the pandemic, you know, the Zoom parties were kind of a thing for a while there. And I was always just so like, ugh. When I got down, I was like, that was so unsatisfying, you know. - Too cool. You're too cool, Drew. - I don't know. - Maybe I just have a well-developed mirror neuron. - Maybe. - System, I don't know. I don't know. - Maybe. - I want to end the section though too. So not all just neuroscience, but a little bit more mixed in. Some of the kind of health benefits and ramifications, I think, of friendships. And, you know, you did mention already that there's all these health benefits to friendship. But I want to go over some of them a little bit more in detail. Some of the more interesting ones anyway. This idea has actually been around for a long time. So there's now, you know, there's the loneliness epidemic. You know, the social connection crisis and all these things going around. And I'm sure people are aware that like, yeah, there's health consequences of this. Back in the resilience episode too, we talked about the Rosetto effect. Remember Rosetto, Pennsylvania. There was this small Italian immigrant community there. They smoked, they drank, they, you know. - They ate gelato. - They ate a bunch of gelato. They didn't exercise really intentionally. But they lived like these long, really healthy lives. And it was because they had these strong, strong social ties. It goes back even further than that though too. There was this Persian philosopher named, or is a physician kind of physician philosopher named even Sina. We know him in the West as Avancena, I think is how you say it. He actually prescribed though friendship as like a medicine almost. Because he noticed just how, how much healthier people who had like strong social networks were than people who didn't. He believes things like, you know, isolation made people ill. This was thousands of years ago too. This was about about a thousand years ago actually. He would also do this thing where he matched temperaments. Like so if you are a melancholic, you know, a sad person, you need to be around cheerful people. And if you were like a stressed out person, you need to be around calm people. You know, that kind of thing kind of simplistic, but also probably kind of wise in a lot of ways too. He recommended, he would prescribe shared meals, conversation and playful gatherings as deliberate therapies even too. Okay. Well, this was again a thousand years ago. He was already on top of this, right? And modern medicine showed there's actually something to this, right? Friendship isn't just emotional. It literally extends your life. Okay. So one study that I came across found that people with a more developed and stronger social network had about a 50% decrease in mortality over a seven year period than people who were self-reported themselves more lonely and had weaker ties with people as well. There's even some evidence that suggests that loneliness can be as bad, like chronic loneliness and social isolation can be as bad or worse for you than smoking about a pack of cigarettes a day, 15 to 20 cigarettes a day. That's mind blowing. Which is insane. Because like you and I are both former smokers, you know, how fucking terrible it is for you, right? And social isolation is even worse than that. And then you think about all the heart disease and all of that, right? Social groups and diverse social groups tend to encourage healthier habits as well. One of it, like just getting up and going out and going places with your friends. That just, you get the exercise benefits from that. If you do have like health conscious friends though too, those habits will rub off on you. There's also this kind of whole suite of physiological responses that your body and brain has when you're in the presence of friends. Like lower blood pressure, better immune, like when they take blood draws, you have better immune markers in your blood. Lower inflammation to and protection against heart disease. I'm going to go back to the inflammation thing real quick. This was something I came across and I thought was really, really fascinating too and relates back to the evolutionary stuff. When you are socially isolated or alone, at least for longer periods of time or in any situation where you don't want to be alone, inflammation markers up or regulate in your body. Why would this be? This is kind of weird. What they think is socially isolated human in our evolutionary past was probably a dead human. Or at least you were very, very likely to be much more likely to be physically injured. Up or regulating those inflammation markers, kind of ready you for that. If you're alone, you have a higher chance of being physically injured. So your body is like, "Okay, let's just prepare for this." No big deal if you then rejoin the group and then those inflammation markers come back down. That's why we see this lower inflammation markers and people who have stronger social networks. But the thing is, is that in modern society where you might suffer from chronic loneliness or social isolation or just stress in general that up or regulates all that inflammation, long-term, that's very harmful for you. So in the short term, that's adaptive for any injury you might cause. It'll help you deal with that injury, physical injury. Longer term, though, it wears on your vessels, your blood vessels, longer exposure to cortisol, it messes with your metabolism, long-term, screws up like you're hunger and thirst and all of that kind of stuff. So there's actual physical things that happen to you when you are socially isolated. That can lead to long-term chronic health conditions. It's so interesting, and this is not meant as a call out, but I do find it interesting or kind of amusing that like all of these health and longevity experts that are huge now, you never hear them talking about relationships. First of all, they tend to all be single men. Yeah. And second of all, you never hear them talk about social relationships or community. And again, that's not a call out. I'm a huge fan of like Hubert Men and Tim Ferriss and a lot of what those guys do. But it is just kind of, I don't know, it's just funny. Knowing how big of a, like what you just said, social isolation is worse than a pack of cigarettes a day. And they're saying you should take this supplement. Yeah, exactly. It's like an H.E.1. This episode is brought to you. Yeah, it's, I guess it comes back to the very first point I made at the top of the show, which is like the delta between the importance of this topic and how much it's discussed. It's just, it's absolutely mind-boggling. I think you do, you generally do see it though. Like a lot of unhealthy people are generally socially isolated. You just anecdotally see this everywhere. And it's sad. And you see it and it's heartbreaking. But yeah, there's all these physical health benefits. Obviously, there's a lot of mental health benefits to you. We've already alluded a lot of these. But isolation, it's a predictor of higher rates of depression and anxiety. Friendship though, it lowers the risk, I'm sorry, it lowers the recovery time that you have after like surgeries and injuries and even like life events that kind of take you down from depression and anxiety, you bounce back a lot quicker to when you have these social networks. I mean, to me, just the fact that the worst punishment we know of, sort of the death penalty is solitary confinement. You can take hardened criminals who have spent their entire lives being antisocial and violent and with awful relationships with everybody. And the worst thing you can do to them is put them by themselves for a long period of time. It's been outlawed in some states and some countries too, because that's, it's found to be so bad for you. It's so terrible for your mental health and physical health. Obviously, so we just thought to you, but it's, yeah, it's like a cruel punishment at this point. It is like, we've realized it's like a cruel and unusual. punishment. Yeah, and you can literally drive somebody crazy. Yeah. If you put them in isolation a lot. In which case, yeah, like death might not be a worse outcome for that. Another set of studies too, though, has shown the stress buffering effects. So interesting to just mention that, I actually when I was doing research with monkeys, this was kind of a one thing we did. We do these, we call them social isolation protocols, and it's not as bad as solitary confinement. Okay, but you would take a monkey for a few hours out of their cage with their family groups and you'd put them in a cage by themselves. And they would obviously have this like really measurable stress response, measure their cortisol or a CTH or whatever it was, whatever stress marker you were going to measure would always increase during that time period. If you put one of their cage mates next to them, though, like one of their siblings or whatever, that that stress response was blunted. It was it was short news. It came down interesting. You see this in humans as well. Yeah. You would put somebody in an F or a Mariah or hook them up to like heart rate monitors and measure their cortisol response and everything like that and give them electrical shocks. If they were holding the hand of somebody that they like a good friend or a spouse or whatever, that stress response was blunted. It even worked if it was a stranger to it. It wasn't as strong of a a blunting effect, but it would even work in that case too. So there's this stress buffering effect that that again that friends have, like I was just talking about with the inflammation stuff. It's very similar to that too. So we talked about this in resilience as well. Like the absolute best thing you can do for your like mental health, your physical health is probably have a good social support network and friends. So yeah. Okay. One last thing here. There's also a lot of these effects that I've just said, the mental health effects, the physical health effects, the stress buffering, all of that. It's kind of a two-way street even two. Not only it's not only that like the person who has been socially isolated feels better when they regain the group. The other people in the group also feel better when they're helping. So there's a reciprocal nature. Let's go back to the tip for that, tip for tat generous generosity. And it's a two-way street here. Well, this comes back to the happiness episode where we talked about that actually giving the people makes you happier than giving to yourself. Right. Yeah. Right. Like it's it is actually one of the highest drivers of happiness is helping others. Right. And this is I think this is the point I was trying to just make about the subjective balance in relationships. Just because I provide you like with something like some nourishment, the social nourishment or whatever it is, doesn't mean that you owe me for that because I'm getting something out of this too. Not to reduce it to a transaction again. But I'm just saying that there's there's a way to see this subjectively where it's like, okay, I actually I get something out of this too. And so I'm not going to sit here and keep track of everything. Yeah. You know, from that point of view anyway. Yeah. All right. Before we jump into some of the actionable advice, I do want to remind listeners that everything covered in this podcast is available in a PDF guide. It's at solvepodcast.com/friendship. You can download it for free and check it out. All right. On to the meat of the episode. The how to make friends section. How do you make a friend drew? How do you make a friend? Well, I think it's a, I mean, you're going to get it this year, but I think it's a simple but not an easy process. Yes. There's some simple practices or simple principles, but implementing them is not not as easy. So fun and true story. You and I have been working together for like 12 years. 11.5, 12 years. Something like that. Yeah. And it's funny because for years, you've been telling me Mark, we need to do friendship content. Mark, we need to, we, we should do an article on friendship. And every time we talked about it, I would go look at the research and I would be like, this is so fucking simple and obvious. No, I'm not going to write an article about that. But here we are. It is shockingly simple, but we will, we will get into all of the reasons that people are finding it more difficult and all of the things that can kind of get in the way of finding and creating friendships. But I will run through the research very quickly. It is not rocket science. None of this is going to surprise you. Basically, what researchers find is that making friends boils down to three things. Number one is proximity. How close are they to you? How often, what are the chances you're going to run into them? Are they in your neighborhood? Are they in your, your city? Are they going to the same school? Basically, proximity is the container of potential friends that you can make. It's the people that you, I guess have access to. Right. Right. Like you're not going to, you're probably not going to make friends with somebody a thousand miles away. Even if you happen to run into them just because you're never going to see them again. Funny LA story. So for people who don't live in LA, LA is absolutely massive and the traffic is terrible. And the running joke in LA is that if you meet somebody from the other side of LA, you're like, oh, it was great meeting you. I'll never see you again. Yeah. And that has happened a number of times from like, you know, they tell me where they were in town they live. And I'm like, might as well be Dallas. Right. Right. Right. So proximity is the first one. Second one is repeated exposure. And so this, this is why we tend to make friends with people at work, people that we go to school with, people who live down the street. It's the more you see somebody, the more likely are to become friends with them. And then factor number three is reciprocated this, this closure. And I'll get into this one a little bit more. I think there are a few different ways to look at this one. But basically it's like, are you, are you open about yourself? Are you sharing information about yourself? And it's the other person sharing information about them. So the way to look at this is proximity factor number one is kind of the container of potential friendships that you can have factor number two repeated exposure is the probability that you will become friends with that person. Generally speaking, the more you run into somebody, the more likely are to become friends with them. And then factor number three, the reciprocated disclosure is the depth of the friendship that you'll end up having. So some people, you know, you run into, we talked earlier about my poker buddies. There are, I have poker buddies that like I couldn't even tell you their last name or whether they're, they have a girlfriend or not. Obviously, I'm not very good friends with them. But so you just know by like snake eyes or something like that. Yeah. So it is, you know, the disclosure piece is, and I'll talk about this in a little bit, but the disclosure piece like really that is a, it is a necessary part of kind of going from the friend of utility or friend of pleasure to a friend of virtue, somebody who you, you feel emotionally attached to, identify with and, you know, respect and admire simply for who they are. One thing that I find interesting is, and again, this kind of comes back to the idea that this is just so painfully simple. And it's almost stupidly simple. Right. So in psychology, there's a thing called the mere exposure effect. I don't know how familiar you are with that. But it's basically, it's actually, it's very prominent in advertising. So if people have ever wondered like, why do, why does Coca-Cola just buy billboards and run commercials everywhere? Well, it's because there's, there's a thing called the mere exposure effect, which is generally that the more people see something or expose to something, the more positively predisposed they are to it. And it's just like a basic facet of human psychology and advertisers leverage it with, with all the advertising that they do. And it turns out the same thing is kind of true with people. Like if you run into the same person over and over and over again, you just generally start having a positive predisposition to them. Or you're much more likely to have a positive predisposition to them. And I think this is very important to understand because I think a fallacy that maybe our generation made or like younger generations make is something that I'm going to call for the purpose of this episode. I'm going to call it the peak experience fallacy. So it's interesting. I actually had a conversation with a friend recently and another guy in his 40s. We were talking about how much harder it is to make and maintain friendships in middle age than it was when we were teenagers or 20. And he said he's like, I think it's just all about creating these epic experiences with people. And yeah. I told him I was like, actually, I was totally that guy. I was like, actually, let me explain the research to you. But I've noticed that this is a very common belief among people. And particularly younger people, they think that the way you make friends is you go on some epic trip together or you do this insane party or concert or something like that. And it is interestingly, what the research finds is that peak experiences don't create friendships. What they do is they solidify friendships that already exist. So they like a peak experience will take somebody who is a casual friend and potentially make them a good friend. But they will not take a stranger and make them into a friend. And I don't know about you, but I've definitely made this mistake a lot throughout my life. I remember when I was like a university, I did a summer abroad in New Zealand. And the group of people that I was with, it was people, it was kids from all over the United States. So it wasn't, I think I was the only person from my school. So it was people from, were from all over. And basically we spent like two months all day, every day together in a foreign country. just having adventures, having a blast. And it's funny because that peak experience, I mean, especially as a 20 year old, there's a very intense experience. It was very profound. It felt very life changing at the time. And everybody grew very close very quickly on that trip. And as we were coming back, like there was very much a sentiment that we were, we were gonna be bonded for the rest of our lives. We're gonna keep in touch with people. We're gonna have like reunions in different cities and people are gonna drive to go see each other and like all this sort of thing. And a little bit of that happened. Like I ended up keeping in touch, I think, with maybe two or three people that I went on that trip with. But it was funny because within a year, I don't think I ever spoke to any of those people ever again. - Right. - And it's, when I look back through my life, like I see this mistake made over and over again, and I still see it made with people I know today. - Yeah. - Consistency, Trump's intensity. - Yes. - With friendship. It absolutely does. I know it sounds boring, but yeah. No, 100%. And this is what I found with my friends too. Over time, a lot of my friends, what they'll think me for is, hey, it's like really good hanging out with you. Glad we could grab dinner on a consistent basis and that. Yeah, we've had, we've went on trips, international trips and all that, but that doesn't stick with them. - Yeah. I've noticed the flip side of this as well. So I had a friend, I'll give him a shout out. So Steve Cam, founder of Nerd Fitness, is a really good friend of mine. And he and I became friends in New York. And I was still kind of in my big party phase or whatever and he wasn't as big of a partier. So he wasn't one of my closest friends in New York. I would see him occasionally and sometimes we would co-work together, but we weren't super tight. And I had my New York friends that I went out with all the time. But the funny thing is, is that Steve is a video game nerd and I'm a video game nerd. And so he eventually moved away from New York and we would just keep in touch. Like to this day, I think he and I text each other at least three or four times a week. - Okay, yeah. - And 95% of those texts are about video games. It's like about the game we're playing, about some boss we just beat, about like some game that's coming out next month. Like that is 90% of our conversation. But it's funny because those conversations have slowly accumulated over 10 years now. And it's funny now because I actually talk to him, like I consider him a much closer friend than any of the people in New York, I hung out with, essentially. - For a few texts a week. - Yeah, yeah. And it just adds up and it's funny 'cause he was just out here and he's been going through some personal stuff and like he and I had like a super deep conversation about life and age and marriage and like all this stuff that we've been going through and it was like a very deep personal friend conversation. And then we went back to texting about video games. - Yeah, and so it's like what I've learned, I guess the hard way, is that that's actually what building friendship looks like. It's like just a mountain of little pebbles stacked on top of each other. - Yeah, it's not as sexy as people want it to be, I think, but yeah. - Yeah. I will also bring up again the word that you pronounce so well earlier, homophily. - There you go. - Which is basically that we tend to like people who are like ourselves, right? And this again, this is similar to the mirror exposure effect. This is just human nature. It's not, you know, you could get all politically correct and argue that this shouldn't be the case. But the fact of the matter is is that we tend to associate and relate to people who look like us, who are same age, same gender, same occupation, have similar interests and hobbies. So it is, again, being like painfully obvious. Look for people who are into the same shit you're into. - Good place to start at least, yeah. - And I honestly, so this is one thing that I kind of changed my mind on doing the research, are not necessarily changed my mind on. But I think I have a little bit of a different perspective on it. 'Cause I think we're gonna talk later about how the, like, oh, just go join a gym or think of yoga class or whatever, like how that advice is maybe a little bit overrated. I think one of the things that conclusions I kind of came to like digging into this is that it's not necessarily the interests that create the friendship. It's the interests that create the repeated exposure with the friendship to emerge. - Okay, yeah. - Right? Like it's not, like I'm not friends with Steve because we both play video games. It's the video games are the excuse for me and Steve to have exposure to each other. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. - That's a really good point, actually. Yeah. And I think too, and yeah, we will get into that. I would like to join a yoga class or go do some interest group thing. I actually kind of came the other way because I used to think, as, kind of, as it, as like, yeah, it's super overrated. Now, I'm like, actually, there is a way to use this. And I think that point actually will come up again. So yeah. - I'm excited to talk about that because it's like that's, that is, as somebody who just went down that route and it didn't really turn up anything, I think there's an interesting conversation. - Okay, cool. I do think it's overrated, but I think I'm gonna predict that your point is that it's just not done correctly. - Yeah, I think it's over-prescribed, but underdeveloped is what it is, really. - Yes, I think I would agree with that. The last thing I will say about this too, this relates to the proximity piece is that we don't think a whole lot about the institutions and communities and networks that we embed ourselves into. - Well, they're disappearing too, which, yeah. - We're definitely gonna come to that. But it is, for example, you know, not just the neighborhood that you move to, but the company you take a job at, for instance, like, let's say you get two job offers, you know, one is from Apple and one is from like some small local business with like 10 people. The social reality of both of those companies is gonna be completely different. You know, at Apple, you're gonna be exposed to tons of people. You're gonna have probably a lot of infrastructure to create social relationships within like a lot of large corporations will actually like plan things to foster friendships at work. Where is it like a small local business? You're probably gonna see the same eight or 10 people over and over again. And if you get along great, that could be amazing. But if you don't, like, you might just kind of be shit out of luck. So that's just one example. There's a lot of downstream effects of thinking about, you know, what career path you choose, what religion you follow, what hobbies you get into, as well as where you live. So that's how to meet people. And we're gonna come back to that. I know you're gonna talk about a bunch of strategies to meet people more effectively and see people more frequently. Let's talk about deepening relationships. So the way I think about this is, basically our emotional attachment to people tends to be in proportion to the sum of the emotional experiences we have with them. So I think one way to do this is through vulnerability. And that is simply because being vulnerable, disclosing yourself, sharing very personal details about yourself tends to be an emotional experience, right? Like you feel very emotionally close to somebody that you share yourself with or they share themselves with you. But I don't think that's the only way to do this. And we're gonna talk in a little bit about the differences between men and women. And the reason I didn't want to limit it to vulnerability is simply because I've had a lot of male friendships that of guys I feel super close to. And I literally go years without having like a deep personal conversation with them. But like, they're like a brother to me, right? Like I feel a very intense attachment to them. So one realization I had about during all this too. - Yeah. - Oh shit, yeah. - Yeah, I like that bug me. Some of the research does label the third factor vulnerability. I like to see it more in terms of like disclosure or a shared emotional experience. - Yeah, I like the word disclosure. - Earlier on we were using vulnerability. I was like, "Ah, that like. " - Yeah. - It doesn't have to be like, - It's too narrowing your soul or anything like that. - It's too dudes. - Yeah. - It's just like, I'm like, "No man, I've had really good friends." I'm like, "I would never. " - Especially with brain-match-al-stead. - Brain-match-al-stead. - Just exchanging information. - Yeah, it was just super vulnerable. But just exchanging information can even be a connection path, yeah. - So I see it in terms of the sum of the emotional events or experiences that you share together. - Fair enough. - So one and one version of that can be like a deep vulnerable conversation. Another version of that could be a peak experience. A trip together, a concert, a crazy concert or a party together. It could also be dealing with hardship together. So there's a very intense friendship and bond between war veterans, guys who served in military together. Generally speaking, tragedy can often bring people together. Illnesses can bring people together. The other thing is, I think this is very timely as well. I wrote a note here. This was not in the research. I didn't see anything about this in the research, but I wrote a note just because it's anecdotally very timely. Like my wife just had a very good friend of hers. Just went through a divorce and then went through a bunch of crazy shit in her life after the divorce. And it's funny 'cause they grew up together, then they kind of grew apart for 10, 15 years. And then they were barely even friends anymore for a little while. And then it's like something changed. and happened that like they've grown very close together again. They've kind of like rekindled or re rediscovered their friendship. And it's like, I just think there's some, and I think about some people in my life as well, like some of the guys that I grew up with. There's something about just being present for a long period of time. Like it just seemed somebody go through many life phases. I think there's something about that that builds an intimacy. Like if I've known college drew and I've known grad school drew and I've known nomad drew and I've known research drew and I've known podcast drew. Like there's just a certain level of intimacy and comfort that comes from sustaining multiple periods of life together. I don't have any data to back that up, but that just feels very true to me. And I want to throw that out there. I absolutely agree. And I don't know how far you want to get into this right now, but I've had this happen in my life too. Actually with one friend in particular that I'm thinking of, we've known each other since preschool. Oh wow. And we've gone through everything and he lives in a different country now, but and he's went through a lot. He lost his wife a few years ago. He's been remarried and yeah, it's yeah. It's a completely different friendship that we have. It is. When we were kids, it was and we'll talk about how friendship changes throughout the life. But it was the surface level and fun and this and that. And then we've went through all the life, something down and seen each other change. We've gone apart. We weren't friends for a little while. I'm not like, didn't have a friend break up or anything, but then it's kind of like the virtue friendship, Aristotle's virtue friendship, but it's not, you know, because Aristotle really defined it as somebody's character you admire or somebody who you love simply for the sake of being themselves. Yeah. And it's funny because I don't even know if it necessarily requires admiration. It's just like at a certain point, I think being a part of somebody's life journey for long enough, you develop an emotional attachment. And then also if that person's been part of your life journey for long enough, you also develop an emotional attachment. Like I, there are, I have friends that I've known for decades and we've grown very apart, not like in terms of how we feel about each other, but it's just like we don't really have anything in common anymore. Yeah. But it is certain, like there's some threshold where you've known somebody long enough and you've just seen them go through enough things and you've been with them enough times. That yeah, it almost becomes like a chosen family thing. You know, it's just, it, it, I see them more as like a brother or sister than I do a friend. Right. There's just some constant element to this relationship that you have that is like, it's enduring enough that you're willing to, like even if they've changed or you've changed a whole lot, it almost doesn't matter. Yeah. Because you've known these different versions of themselves and you know who they are. Yeah. Yeah. I think there is some enduring element of it. Speaking of which, the research, there is some research on how long it takes to develop, to go from. Yeah. I found this actually pretty interesting. You know, I found this too. So yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, and it's much more than you would think. Yeah. At least it's much more than I thought. Right. So the, some researchers, they estimate that to develop a casual friendship with somebody, it requires spending 50 hours with them approximately, to become a friend, like somebody that you consider a friend, it's around 90 hours and then for a very close friend, it's 200 hours. Which yeah, it feels like a lot. Yeah, it does. And, and I, people need to realize that it is a lot. Yeah. You like it that you have to be patient with this. Yeah. It's funny. I remember I, I was at a party, if you year or two ago, and I ran into this guy, super young, very, very optimistic, you know, kind of one of these like delusional tech, bro, types. And he like, with a very straight face that he, he said that he wanted to develop the technology that solved the loneliness crisis. Right. Of course, I became very amused and I was like, tell me more. And, and it was interesting because his strategy was basically, he wanted to engineer like the highest peak experiences possible with the least amount of effort. And I remember trying to explain to him that, that's just not how it works. Exactly backwards, bro. Yeah. I was like, I was like, what you should be doing is, is, is, is engineering ways for people to see each other repeatedly in very casual situations over a very long period of time. Like, that's how you solve it. And he, he was like not having any of it. And then finally, we just not a move fast and break things. Totally. Well, no, the funny thing is, he and I went back and forth. Like, oh, I was like, I'm sorry, dude. I'm like, don't shoot the messenger. This is just, yeah. This is what the psych research says. And the, and then finally, he just looked at me and he's like, yeah, but dude, that doesn't scale. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Friendships don't scale. That's why they're meaningful. Yeah. Go back to Dumbar's number, right? Yes. You can't scale. You cannot scale your friendship network because you were just cognitively limited. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, as you said, consistency beats intensity, you know, 10 different one hour hangouts is going to beat one epic 10 hour hangout in the long run. It isn't so much the shared interest and values that make the friendship. I think they become the infrastructure that allow the friendship to emerge. It's really funny. Like, that story I told earlier about my friend who was like, I don't care if my car buddies are good fathers. I'm actually thinking there's wisdom in that. How so are you, man? Well, what I mean is like, because I think part, and then maybe I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but I think maybe part of the problem these days is that we have two high expectations for friendships. Oh, okay. Yeah. 100% really bad. Like, we think our friends should be amazing and brilliant and into all the same stuff we're into. And, you know, they should be able to teach us something and we should be able to do things with them. And it's, when I think back throughout my life, of like some of the closest friendships I've had or best friendships I've had, it's like, most of it is just like, yeah, I just really enjoyed doing that thing with that guy and he's fun to be around and we respect each other. And yeah, I don't really care what he does with half of his personal life. Like, I don't care if his wife was a bitch or not. I don't care if he wants kids or doesn't want kids. Like, he can do whatever he wants. It's his life, you know? Like, I just, I don't know. I'm not expressing myself very well right now, but I do think maybe we're setting too high of a bar for some of the relationships in our lives and it is backfiring a little bit. Like, you don't need, not every friend needs to be all things for you. Like, you can totally just have a good car buddy that you like love going on a racetrack with on Saturdays and, you know, talking about sports and the weather and, you know, maybe bitching about your kids every now and then, like, that's fine. That's totally fine. Yeah. Yeah, 100% agree. And I think we will get into that a little bit more and a little bit. So what are some strategies through? Like, you know, that's the high level. I just kind of laid out the high level terrain of like, okay, this is how friendships are formed. And this is generally what makes them, you know, deep in and this is how you build a social life. Like, what are some actual implementable strategies? Sure. Yeah. Yeah, maybe what we can do is kind of go over some of these strategies kind of in the abstract a little bit and then maybe you want to try to like work through let's take like an example or even use ourselves like how would I do this or something like that? Can we do that? I would love that. Okay. Let's do that. Okay. Well, first of all, like, let's kind of get your mindset around this. One of the things you just mentioned is like, yeah, there's probably not a perfect friendship out there. It's not going to be a perfect friend for you. And so, yeah, okay, set there. But there's a few other mindsets I think you need to kind of have going into this. One of them is just like, assume people like you or at least will be receptive to you. There's what they call a liking gap. Researchers have found this. Like when you go have an interaction with a stranger and you walk away, you generally think, oh, that didn't go so well and that person probably doesn't like me. That's generally people tend towards that. When the data shows they'll go and ask the other person, how much did you like this person? They either have a tendency to be like, oh, yeah, they were, they were great or at least neutral. Most people aren't just going to be like, that person was a piece of shit, right? They're more forgiving too, like a social, socially awkward interaction with them or something like that. People are forgiving of that because we all do that. Everybody, everybody's so worried about themselves. They're probably not as judgmental of you as you think. So I think first of all, just go into this thinking, okay, people are at least going to be receptive to me. Or at least some people are. There's people out there who are. I've gotten better over the years because I wanted everybody to like me at one point in my life. Like everybody probably does when you're a younger person. You do. I've gotten better at that person. When are we from that? Wasn't my best word, right? They probably don't like me and I'm okay with that. Because there's somebody out there who's as weird as me and as quirky and neurotic as me and all of that. So assume that people are going to like you, okay? Or at least be receptive to you. Another thing, like some of this is going to be uncomfortable. When we're going to get into some of these examples, it's probably you're probably going to get a little squeamish at some of this. It's going to suck. Some of it's going to suck. Okay. So be prepared for that. Go back and listen to the resilience episode. That's what you need, right? Don't discount friendship either. I think sometimes people are like, it's hard to make friends. So just fuck them, you know, not going to do this. Negative self-perceptions too. If you are kind of a more neurotic person, person and you go around and people don't like me and you're very kind of obsessed with that part of yourself. Probably get some therapy around that, honestly. CBT does wonders around this. Yeah. We'll get into this in the toxic friendship segment, but it is, your self perception is, your relationship with yourself is very much reflected in your relationships with others. And so if you kind of walk around thinking you're an unlikable person, you're going to attract a lot of people who don't like you, basically because anybody who does like you is going to be like, well, what am I doing here? If I'm trying to be friends with you and you just keep hating on yourself. It's exhausting. Yeah, it is exhausting. It's just exhausting, yeah. So like get your mindset around this, you know, right before you jump into anything too crazy, okay? Yeah. But then there are, I'll just kind of go through some of these and we can get into like an example, I think, but invest in recurring time together. Go into the same coffee shop all the time, whatever it is, invest in that for the long term. You just laid out, you know, 50 hours to like kind of an acquaintance type, you know, to like, what was it, 80 hours? 90 hours. 90 hours. To like a friend. To like a friend, right? That's a long time, okay? So patience is really key here too. When you're making friends, it's usually around positive emotions and like fun things. And then the self disclosure part we've talked about to be gradual with that. Yes. Don't, don't. Word vomit over people. Right. Right. Be gradual with that. Learn like small talk is there's actually an art to small talk. And you know, I've I've ragged on people before about talking about the weather and you know, stuff like that. Yeah, you want to get past that. But also too, like get good at small talk and be gradual with it, right? I think another tactic you can use to is lean on any existing friend networks that you have right now. Oh, there's also some research to suggest as well that synchronize the activity is better at making friendships for you. So like even if it's just like dancing class or singing. Yeah, those kind of things definitely. But even just like, like I mentioned, going on a hike or running, like you're all moving together, like that kind of stuff is even for whatever reason it's, it kind of gives more of a surface area too for the friendship to come around as well. I guess it technically gives you more, yeah, it gives you more to empathize with. Yes, right? Like because if you're just sitting and talking, you really, all you can really empathize with is what the person's saying. But if you're walking together or you're working out together or you're dancing together, now you can empathize with the movement, the practice, the art. Yeah, you know, I do, I do yoga and I do specifically. I do hot yoga. Yeah. And when they're, it's all synchronized. Everybody's doing the same thing at the exact same time and you have, you know, a very similar experience and you come out of the locker room with the other guys, you're like, holy shit, that was hot, you know, today or oh man, when we were doing this thing, this and that. And it's, you, you kind of have this shared experience you just went through that you can very much relate to. That's a window. That's an, that's an opening for you to like bond and identify with someone. Yeah. Okay, early on. Um, there's some made friends through hot yoga. Thank you. So I wanted to bring that. Yeah, I actually wanted to bring this up. You know, when, because I have kind of dog done like, like, go join a club and you'll make friends or go to a trivia night and you'll make friends and I'm like, that doesn't work whatever. So I've been going to hot yoga for a long time now or like two, three years, I guess close to three years now. And I was like, you know, I know the faces that are there and we say hi and have some small talk and this and that. But I don't make any friends from it. But what I've noticed too is that honestly, if I put in just a smidge more effort that I probably would say what I've noticed, there's a few people out particular who I've made like a stronger acquaintance with, let's say, this one guy, um, really warm guy, um, that's there. And once we got to talking and we're just at first it was, God, that was a hot one. You know, that was the, uh, really intense today or whatever. And we got to talk and we're like, you know, he's like, Oh, hey, I'm Derek. And I'm like, I'm Drew. And we get to talking and he's like, what do you do? What do you do? He's a therapist. Oh, I have a lot of therapist friends. And also, you know, like I do this crazy podcast thing and work for this guy and he's like, Oh, really? I'm trying to write a book and that kind of develops. He hasn't been in yoga for a while. So I haven't talked to him. But I think what I missed was the whole kind of second part of this, which is the self-disclosure and that like taking a little bit of risk and being a little bit vulnerable with people and the patience it requires to. I think there's that and I think there's a consistency element. And it's funny. I'm thinking about the interest thing. Like I do think, because I'm thinking about my experiences around this. And particularly like I was in a, I joined a CrossFit gym in New York for a while. And part of the problem was I went all the time, but it was different people every single time. So we're like, yeah. Like you have to go, you have to go so much for so long before you start running into the same people over and over again. And then even once, and maybe those in New York thing, just because there's so many people, but I definitely felt like there was a lack of consistency. And then it's on top of that, like I feel like it can't just be, like if you go to a CrossFit gym and you meet people to CrossFit gym, unless you're like obsessed with CrossFit and they're obsessed with CrossFit, it's probably not enough. And you probably need something like that, like a second thing outside of the CrossFit that you're both into and interested in. I think there's an interesting distinction here between interest, shared interest and shared obsession. Oh, yeah. Because I, like I have an interest in surfing. I have an interest in running. I say, yeah, I have an interest in a lot of things. I have an interest in watching football, but I don't think I would ever become friends with a guy just by watching football together. Right. The same thing with my yoga studio, like I'm not obsessed with yoga. I do it because it makes me feel better and that's great. Like the people I've met in there that I would potentially become friends of mine. Like I said, like Derek, he's a therapist and he's like, he likes writing and he likes reading and all that. And like that's what we connect on as not on the yoga. Yeah, I think there's, but there's like two or three things in my life that I am kind of obsessed over. Oh, and if I meet somebody who's also obsessed over that thing, then it's almost like instant friends. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair too. I do that with like people, if I run into another woodworker, man, boom. Yeah. It's like, oh, dude, what kind of saw do you got with this? Oh, do you use this planer to use this? And it's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. That creates a, the obsession level creates a deeper spark more quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I, you know, there's lots of little techniques and stuff like that. I think I'd just rather though get into like an example. Okay. Like kind of walk through this. Sure. Yeah. How, how would you, I guess, how do you want to do this, Mark? Because I guess what I could do is I can tell you what I would do. It's like, let's say I moved to a new city or something like that. I knew no one. Yeah. And what I would do. Yeah. We could walk through that maybe. Okay. We could try it like that. Or we could take a hypothetical example of somebody too if you wanted to. What do you think? Win, quink. Why don't we do this? Why don't, why don't we do the move to a new city? Okay. And walk through that and discuss that. And then I'm happy to just be open. I mean, I've been very open on this podcast that like, you know, social life is kind of the pain point in my life at the moment. And I'm happy to kind of talk through what I think my situation is. Like why, why that's happened? Because that's going to tie into a lot of other themes around age, phase of life, proximity, shared interest with people, consistency, stuff like that. Okay. So, all right. Well, okay. So if I moved to a new city, and I didn't know anyone, I probably would, and this I think has changed recently for me, I probably would join some of these clubs and groups and meetups and everything like that. There's probably, the hit rate is not going to be what you think it is most likely. But what I would change about this is that I, you know, I probably would go to a CrossFit jam. And I would be, I would practice that self-disclosure, gradual self-disclosure a little bit more, you know, introduce yourself. First of all, just be like, hey, I'm Drew. Yeah. You know, who are you? That's it for the first, probably, I don't know, handful of times that you even go. Mm-hmm. And just kind of get the lay of the land. You go find something though that to really matches with your personality, your values. You know, I know one person in my life, in particular, that I'm thinking of is a very compassionate person. And they would do really well in an animal shelter or volunteering situation or food bank or something like that, right? Those I think are actually really, really good places to meet friends. Because not only are values aligned, but it's usually people who are also very warm and open to. Think about it, somebody who grows and volunteers in an animal shelter or something like that. They're going to be open to meeting new people and being warm to you and everything like that, right? You just can't expect that to like just, it's not automatic. I think that's what I thought before, is that it's just going to be automatic. If you just show up these places, it's automatic and it's not. You know what I would also do is I would probably look for other people in there who seem to be a little uncomfortable or maybe out of place or maybe looking for something. Like, I don't know, I have an eye for those people and I'm like, yeah, this person's uncomfortable. Let me go introduce myself and we'll both be a little more comfortable after doing that. So I think that's kind of how to get started. Anyway, and get into your community and just be a little more active and engaged. Obviously, finding these things online, finding groups online, you can be in proximity to people online to some degree. There is a kind of psychological proximity that you have with online groups, but you need to take them physical, as is my opinion anyway. And I think that's how they really get started on this, but you have to be super consistent. The 50, 90, 200 hours that you're going to put in. Let's talk about the nuts and bolts of that. I'm with you. I want to get into this. Yeah, I'm with you all the way to there. Okay. I go to a bunch of clubs, groups, whatever, meet a bunch of people. Cool. Hey, I'm Mark. Nice to meet you. Blah, blah, blah. Now what? Yeah. It's three weeks go by. I don't see this person again. You know? Oh, okay. Or a week goes by. And then next week, it's like, oh, hey, how you doing? Nice weather. You know, like, what's the, what are the nuts and bolts? Like, do you invite them to something else? Do you organize something outside of the group or the event? Like, what do you follow up with them? What does that look like? I usually go to yoga at in the middle of the day. So that's right before I eat. And so one of the things I've thought about was a couple of the guys that have become friendly with there and be like, hey, you want to go grab some, like, there's a lunch box right next to it that I go through all the time. I'm like, hey, come grab a lunch with me. You know, if you want. Yeah. Or I'm heading over here if you want to grab lunch. Yeah. Do it that way. Catchable. Yeah, catchable. Keep it very casual at first, especially. Yeah. And I, at some point, you do have to cross that threshold though. And you do have to say, hey, we need to meet somewhere besides here. Yeah. We need to do something besides this thing here. Yes. That's what's going to take you up to the next level, I think, with someone. And I feel like that's the moment where you need to find the second thing. Like, you can't just be like, oh, we do yoga. Yeah. Like, it needs to be like, we do yoga and we're both psychology nerds or we do yoga and we're both really into long distance running. Hey, we should run together or we do yoga and we're both really in the tennis or whatever. You know, so generally speaking, like, I meet people through business networks because my obsession is fucking business. Yeah. Yeah. And I just find that that's generally the people I gel with the most quickly. But the people I kind of stick with are the people who share an interest outside of business with me. So it's like, I start with the business stuff. Like, honestly, if I could do LA again, I would come and I would just, I would just join business groups. Yeah. I would skip the CrossFit gym. I would skip the tennis lessons. I would skip the surf classes. I would skip all that stuff because I'm not obsessed with it and I didn't stick with it. Like, I went five times and then I'm like, I'm bored. I'm busy. Yeah. But the business stuff, because I'm obsessed with it, I would go all the time and I would see everybody all the time. And then from there, I'd be like, okay, who in this group likes to go surfing? Who in this group, you know, wants to go to a CrossFit gym? Who in this group wants to, you know, go see a soccer game or whatever. And then like, take it from there, I guess. I'm kind of, you're still skeptical at sounds. Well, I'm kind of like figuring this out on the fly. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Because listening to you talk, I'm like, I'm trying to piece it together with my own experience. Yeah, yeah. And like, the obsession thing I do think is important. It's like, start with the thing that you love the most and then maybe move on there. Like, I'll give you an example. I made some surf buddy friends and would go sit on the water with them and talk to them for hours. And I had nothing in common. Like, you know, just like completely different lives, you know, they work at nine to five at some insurance company or whatever. It's like, we kind of run out of things to talk about after a certain point. Whereas it's like, if I start with the business guy, I know I'm never going to run out of things to talk about. Okay. And so then I can invite him surfing. Yeah. Yeah. I see what you're saying. Okay. Because I think I, well, I don't know if I'm super obsessed with anyone. I'm like, I've told you before, I'm so fascinated and interested in so many different things that I can usually find something to connect with just about anybody on. Yeah. Like, you know, I grew up in a small farming community and I can talk to people about farming or I can talk to them about like, you know, running a regression analysis. Yeah. And so, yeah, I get that. Maybe that's a personal thing to me. I mean, it could be. No, it could be. Yeah. Having that mindset of like, you are a likable person, but I also think it's important to have a mindset of, of people are likable. Like, it's, it's like not going into a new job and being like, ah, these, these people are fucking losers or, you know, like, or, or I don't like these types of people. That's okay. That right there. Yeah. That's a huge one, I think. Yes. Some of these people I've already talked about like in my yoga class and stuff like that. If like, you're probably, to me at first, I was just like, I don't probably wouldn't like this person. And you like, they're actually pretty, they're nice. Super surprising. Open people. People surprising who like actually are interested in you. That's another thing. Be interested in other people. Mm-hmm. Show genuine interest in someone else. They'll show interest in you. Yeah. You will be very surprised. So don't like, I think there are, there are a lot of people who are like, oh, I don't want to associate with this type of person or whatever it is. Yeah. I've, I've dropped a lot of that. I don't, yeah, I don't know about you, but like, I am consistently surprised at who I become friends with and who I stay friends with. Like, if you, at any period in my life, if you had asked me to go through all my friends and ask who I'd still be friends with in five or 10 years, I would have been wrong about a lot of it. Yeah. And I think it's important to, yeah, to just not make predictions. Don't make assumptions about people. Don't assume. Like, I've had, I've had, I've met, I've met friends that annoyed the shit out of me. Like the first year or two, I knew them. I was like, my God, this fucking guy, like what is his problem? And then it's 10 years later, I'm like good friends with him, you know? So it's just stuff like that happens. You never know. When you offered me the job and I left grad school, you know, you have this built in network and grad school, right? And basically you're in any, any type of situation like that. And when I was leaving, I went to my cohort and I was like, yeah, I got some leaving or whatever in there. This is just one woman and she was Italian. Yeah. And she goes, no, Drew, I just started the like you. And this is after a whole year. And I was like, what the hell? So again, it does take some time, sometimes, sometimes personalities that you think aren't going to gel with you, end up jelling with you. Yes. But I mean, okay, but there is that, okay, there's the proximity of the repeated exposure, the gradual self-disclosure. Think of it in those terms when you're doing this. The one thing, I think maybe the reason why I'm dancing around a lot of this is because I've always been able to either have like a built in network, if I've ever moved or anything like that, like, you know, when I moved from the small town that I grew up in, what's a college, you have your college network, right? You see the same people in the classes or the dorm or whatever it is, the mirror exposure effect that we were talking about. When I went to graduate school, left again for graduate school, there's, you have a built in social network there. I'm going to do a hyal with a girlfriend and it ended up, we, all the like spouses and boyfriends ended up hanging out with each other and it actually ended up working out. Like I've always kind of had that. Yeah. So that's why I'm saying like leverage anything you have like that, any sort of network you have in place, maybe a friend of a friend. You know, one time I was traveling through Mexico and went to a walk-on. I told you, "Hey, I'm going to a walk-on." You're like, "I know somebody in a walk-on right now. Let me hook you up with them." And you did. And you know, like that was just certain dipitus stuff like that that happened. Yeah. You definitely want to rely on networks. I think the thing that like really makes friendships and that this is related to the interest thing, but I think it's actually more important is like, there needs to be stakes. Like if you just show up to a yoga class or something and you're not in the yoga, you don't really know what you're doing. And you just kind of sit there and chitchat with people. No, no, no, it's very active. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing's going to happen. And I think maybe this is kind of where the obsession thing is coming from is that like I find that you have to really care about the thing you're doing and then you find other people who really care about it too. And that caring can also be network based, right? So it's like, I have a friend that I really care about and I really care about you as a friend. And so I'm going to introduce you to and like there's stakes now to that relationship because you're both friends with me. So like I think it's the and I think this is actually going to be a really important component of what we're going to talk about in the next section about like why it seems so hard to make friends these days. And I think a lot of it is that the stakes society is quickly being optimized to be stakes free. Yes. That you can come and go anywhere as you please that there's no downside to anything. There's no friction to anything. And I think it's it's actually the stakes that make it meaningful and that make the relationships they're meaningful and that become the glue of the friendship. Which is why you can't engineer an app that's frictionless. Yes. That's why. Yeah. I don't know because I remember I talked to that guy and I tried to kind of explain that and he's like no no no you don't understand. So the peak experiences we're going to have friction built in. They're going to be challenges and they have to accomplish them. And I was like okay great. Yeah that's not going to work. Wrong order. This is you know we haven't talked about church and religion yet. Okay. But I think church school and business like if you look at the data on where most people make friends. It's those three things. Yeah. Church school business. Yeah. And if you look at all three of those things massive stakes. Yeah. Huge stakes involved. - Yeah. - And things matter. And things matter and you're going through it with somebody else that it matters for, right? And I think that is, that's at the root of it. And I guess, and again, to kind of return to my obsession point, maybe it's not obsession, but it's like, it needs the matter to you. Like you need to actually really care about it. Like looking back, I think part of the problem is, I didn't really care about CrossFit. And I look at the people at that gym who were friends with each other and they, that was, that was their fucking life. - Yeah. - It was their identity. It's what they, it's the thing they looked forward to every day. You know, for me, I was just like, I don't want to be fat, dude. - Those are, those are exactly the people at my CrossFit gym that I don't connect with. - Yeah. - They are. And that's okay. - Yeah. - You know, they, they connect with the coaches really well. They connect with each other really well. They all come over and they're drinking their protein shakes after a really cool, but what'd you think of those pull ups, you know, and this and that. And I'm over here with the other like nerds and stuff who are obviously just there to like, hey, I need to get off my ass because I sit in front of a computer too much. - Yeah. - 100%. - Yeah. - Back to the church thing though. Just for the record, Mark and I are not shitting on religion ever, okay? We don't like, - Are people, are people getting mad? - We've gotten some comments and like, whenever we brought up our religion and these, the few episodes that we've done and the podcast so far, people are like, you're shit non-religion. It's like, I don't feel like we're shit non-religion. - I don't need office. - Yeah. - Actually, yeah. - Even though we're not religious, like, - I feel like I'm the most pro religious atheist in the world. - I don't know what you people are thinking. (laughing) - And I feel very similar too. And I do, both you and I think we look back on our parents' generation, especially my grandparents' generation, the church was so central to their social lives. And such a, such a source of like resilience for them too. And not only just friendships and everything like that, but somebody dies in the church community. Everybody, rallies around. You get sick, everybody rallies around. When my mom had a pretty major surgery, but I was almost 20 years ago now, she was, had to go three and a half, four hours away for the surgery and the pastor showed up. She was there. - That's crazy. - She was insane. - Right. - So these types of things, now obviously, if you're not religious, I don't know. There's probably some ethical things around that. If you're not religious and you go to church and make friends, I don't know. - They'll be welcoming. I can tell you that. - I don't think it'll work. - I mean, they will be welcoming. But I don't think it'll work. And I think because there won't be stakes. - Yeah, yeah. - There won't be stakes. You're there for the friendships. You're there, it's transactional. - Ah, okay. That's I think what we're getting at. - Yeah. - Is that you cannot be transactional about your friendships in general. - Yes. - So stop treating them like that too. - And if you're only in the yoga class or the CrossFit class to meet people and make friends, then it's like that kind of undermines it. Because it's not actually an interest. It's not actually a shared interest. It's just a thing you're doing to talk to a stranger. So let's summarize really quick. And then I actually want to hold my personal LA example until we finish off this section. Okay. Because there's a couple more things that I think we should go through that will inform kind of my story. - Cool. - So in summary, moving to a new city, first thing that matters is stakes. So whether that's an interest, a genuine interest, something you actually care about, not just like, "I always wondered what playing tennis would be like." It's like, "No, you love doing this thing. You are super interested in this endeavor pursue that." And then find people on that same path. And then also related to stakes is like tap your networks, tap the people who are associated with, whether it's a new job, your partner, family, friends of family, all that stuff. Tap into those networks because I think what drives, what's gonna drive all these relationships is that there's stakes attached to them. That it's not just like, "Well, I might as well meet this person for coffee because I have nothing else to do." Step number two, be proactive, good attitude, proactivity, introduce yourself, be friendly, be patient, I would say. You know, give it time if you are in it. - More time than you think you need. If you're an environment where you see people over and over again, like give that time. I can tell you, you know, one of the differences, the jarring differences between New York and LA is that in New York, because there's so much going on all the time, you do get that frequency of contact kind of naturally just because you're constantly invited to stuff, whereas in LA, that frequency and that repetition takes up, gets dragged out over a much longer period of time. And I think that fucked with my wife and I for a while. Like we were frustrated of like, wow, we've been here two years and we've only seen this person like five times or six times and it still feels like we're just acquaintances and whatnot. Like I would say, the friendships I do have here, it took significantly longer than other places I've lived for those friendships to kind of formulate and cement themselves. So patience, wait for the consistency. And then when you find the people who share the stakes that you have, find that second or at that outside interest, that second commonality. So you meet somebody at church, turns out they also love playing tennis or you meet somebody at tennis, turns out they also are an accountant, you're an accountant, you know, like it's stuff like that. It feels like in my experience at least personally, it's like, it's almost never one thing you have in common, there needs to be something else too that you can do together or talk about or, you know, you can't just sit there and talk about tennis all day, every day, every time you see him. Yeah. Otherwise it's just a friend of utility. No, absolutely. Yeah. (upbeat music) So let's start with phases of life of like age-based friendships, like how friendships look throughout each stage of life, how they change from one stage to the next and why these things are important. Yes, sure. So starting really early on, right, when you're a kid, from let's just say zero to 12 years old, when you're born to when you're about 12. Friendships are very much like activity, bass, they're play-based, they're feeling good bass. I mean, proximity is really all that matters there, right? If you're around somebody, you're probably going to be friends with them just by being around them a whole bunch and you play a lot and you get into trouble a lot, all of that kind of stuff. Your attachment kind of system forms during this phase though too, right? So we've talked about attachment before, but just real quick, if you're secure attachment, you're kind of okay with relationships and their ups and downs and you can manage all of that. If you're anxious, you're more like kind of want to glom onto somebody, you're avoidant, you kind of want to keep everybody at arm's distance, right? Or somewhere in between. And then some combination of those two. That also bleeds into your friendships as well. So if you're anxious and you have a friend and you get possessive of that friend or if you're avoidant, you don't really be like, yeah, this is a friend sometimes and I, whatever, to cure people seem to have a better, better look with that. By about the ages five to seven, you get your first best friend, right? You remember your first best friend, right? I do, actually. Yeah, me too. Me too. And actually, we stayed best friends for a long time. I actually do. Yeah, it was kind of cool. And probably not anymore, life has changed. We don't live together anymore, you know, the proximity thing and all that. But kind of getting into those double digit years, now, you know, your eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 and their peer groups kind of start to form, right? And you start to a little bit at least see your place in the pecking order sometimes. If there is a hierarchy that forms, you kind of see where you fit in. How much do people, you start to get a sense of how much people like you versus like am I a likable person? You start to develop those beliefs then, okay? And that affects you throughout your life as we'll see a little bit too, okay? At this point, friendship is really less about kind of the deep emotional sharing. You know, it's not that friendship of virtue at this point yet. It's more about just presence and proximity, like I talked about. And what you're really learning in these though is like how to share, how to cooperate, how to empathize, how to belong in a group, okay? A lot of that foundational stuff is set there. But these really aren't those virtuous friendships. Yeah. They can develop into that later, but you probably not, you don't have a cognitive machinery yet to really develop those deeper level ones. That kind of, some of the more of that deepens as you get into adolescence, okay? You go through puberty, it's a very intense time, right? You friends become more central to your emotional life at this point. You start kind of pushing your parents away and your peer group becomes a lot more influential on your identity, on your emotional wellbeing, your mental health at this point too. Really, like I said, a big part of your identity is formed during these phases too. Peer influence, obviously this is peer pressure really comes in right now, okay? Risky behaviors, you take risk with your friends and stuff like that. And that's, there's gonna be really strong bonding periods too, right? Which is probably one of those reasons, you know, kids, do stupid shit. Do stupid shit. He experiences, he's closer to each other, identify with each other, yep. Exactly during this part, which is why, and since your processing emotions so intensely at this period, I think that's why we probably start over-indexing on it. 'Cause we remember those really intense peak experiences, like, oh, that was like really, really formative for me, or really like a core part of who I was at that point. And so we kind of tend to over-value about that point. This is also too where romantic and sexual desires can come in and start clouding everything, right? Or what life was like before you had to worry about sex? God, it was just so easy. It was so easy. So easy. So easy. great. And you could just like be with your friends, right? It was awesome. But then you start thrown in like, you know, your crushes and everything that happened, maybe in middle school, and those complicate your friendships. You know, I would there was definitely times when I was in middle school too, like me and a friend be fighting over like who's gonna who's gonna be who's gonna be her boyfriend, right? No, I do. I do. And that complicates that. I lost I lost a friend in high school over a girl. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Their intense identity shaping periods of your life that adolescence period is. And like I said, it's kind of when you push in your family out, it's kind of the first time you're seeing you feel yourself more seen in like a larger group or even society at this point, right? Because you're starting to form your own identity, because you're starting to get that independence that you have, you start to see your yourself in relation to other people that aren't your family at that point, which becomes very very important for the next phase. Young adulthood. Yeah. You get into basically you're out of high school, you're into college, maybe you're your 20s at this point too. This is where you start to form more capacity for deeper friendships though. Okay. Again, you're you're you're cutting yourself off more and more from your family usually at this point and establishing more and more independence and you're leaning more on the social relationships around you, not just for, you know, kind of emotional support, but even like to some extent survival, you know, I mean, like they become more important to who, not just who you are, but like whether or not you're going to get along in life. That's this is that period where friendships really take up a huge major role. There's also a lot of transitions during this phase though too. And I know for me anyway, I probably went through like two or three friend groups, I would say my 20s. Yeah. And that was where pretty jarring, pretty traumatic events for me. I think one thing that changes from these periods. Yeah. Like you said, when you're a kid, it's all it's just about fun and convenience. Yeah. When you're an adolescent, there's this identity formation that's happening. And I think what's interesting about this period is that you're still, there's a lot of status games going on. Yes. Like a big part of being an adolescent is like trying to figure out where you are in the pecking order. Who's cool? Who's not cool? Are you likable? And, but the funny thing is that you don't realize at that age is that you're judging status on very superficial. Yes. Silly traits. You know, it's like who's has the prettiest hair and who is the best at football player and, you know, whatever, who is the highest test score. It's, it's stuff that doesn't really matter in the long run. But you're kind of obsessive over it. And there's a lot of insecurity around it. And I think that's why a lot of very, very, very large percentage of adolescents, friendships are toxic to some extent, which we'll talk about in the next section because they are primarily based on status games and they are based in insecurity. And, but it's part of unlike an adult toxic relationship, it's not a flaw necessarily. It's just part of the maturing process. Like you kind of have to go through a lot of those toxic friendships to realize, oh, that's not a friendship. I was just being very insecure. And I thought, I thought she was really cool because of XYZ reason. And it turns out, no, that's not, that's not the case. I think what happens in young adulthood is you start figuring out what you actually value and care about. And, and similarly, yeah, you part of that process is shedding old friendships of realizing like, oh, I don't actually care about this thing. And now that I realize I don't care about this thing, it's kind of hard to be around this person after realizing that. Yeah. And a lot of XZ. Yeah. And so there, I do think there is quite a bit of disappointment, but there's also, it's funny because, you know, one of the common tropes in the self-help space is that when you grow, you're going to lose friends. And it's always, it's always framed or positioned as like, well, they weren't good enough for you anyway. Like, you know, people are just trying to hold you back. You know, it's kind of this very competitive, you know, they're jealous because you've like discovered who you are or whatever. Are you've uncovered some flaw in them and they don't like it? Yeah. And sure, I think on the margin, there's probably some of that. Especially if you do have like very toxic relationships in your life. Yes, there's going to be some of that. But I think a lot of it is innocuous. I think a lot of it is just like, you know, I realize that this isn't my path. And I want to be on a different path. And as soon as you realize that, you stop relating to that person. And it's not nobody's wrong. Like nobody's jealous. Nobody's like turning their back on you. It's not this big, like dramatic movie like thing. It's just life. Yeah. It's just realizing like, oh, I don't really have anything in common with you anymore. And that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think there, I think you're right. Like an adolescence is like late. Adolescence going on adulthood. There's a lot of pressure to kind of like find your tribe, right? And that, that spins up all of that, I think. And you know, it's, if you, there's some people who like, if they don't find that, they feel like less than, right? They feel unworthy and all of that. And they can carry that into adulthood. And I think that's a lot of what happens. But the, the, the pressure that mounts there, if you can find that release valve that you're talking about, like it's, that's just how it is. That's life. Yeah. That, for me, that's often to blow quite a bit too. Yeah. I wanted to be like, that's a part of a certain crowd or whatever it was. And then I found out, oh, no, I don't. Yeah. I don't. And I'm okay with that. And after it happens a few times, you, you, you, you kind of get over it. You're like, oh, yeah, that's just natural. Like people aren't supposed to be in your life forever. Not very few people are supposed to be, are supposed to be in your life forever. And that's okay. Yeah. I think one of the, one of the good things about modern culture is that there, it's like, if there is a good part about the fragmenting of modern culture, is that like you can find your little pocket in whatever stage of life you're in, you know, you, there's like nerd culture or whatever. I thought you were going to say it's easier to ghost people. Yeah. That's the other side of it. That's the other side of it for sure. Yeah. But yeah, that's, I, I think you can find it as long as you don't like kind of glum onto all of those, um, all of the like, you know, you need to be a part of this certain crowd or fit into this certain way. Like do your own thing, take your own path. There's plenty of opportunity for that. And that's where I, hopefully you can figure that out at this stage of your life when, and young adulthood and, um, and carry that on, uh, and later in life, and just be okay with yourself. Yeah. That's, that's what I found. And he was like, Oh, okay, I'm okay with who I am. And I don't fit into this mold over here. So I'm going to go over here. And that's fine. So yeah. So what about middle age? Yeah. Where we are, Mark middle age, ish. Well, 30 to 65, let's say or something like that, 30 to 60, somewhere in there, right? Um, I think there's a further narrowing that goes on here too, right? But a lot of things get in a way of friendships here. And this is where I think the whole narrative around the dip in friendship comes during a little parents parenting, very focused on your career. Um, you, I think it's worth explaining what you mean by the dip. Like there's, okay. Yeah. There's like, uh, yeah. So think about it. You know, like when you're in high school, you have this built in kind of infrastructure for your friendships, same thing with college for the most part. And it's even narrowed down a little bit more because you're all kind of in these little interest groups, right? Like your major, your degree, your clubs that you join wherever it is. And there's this whole infrastructure for it. Then you get out into the real world. Um, and there's not that same infrastructure there. Right? And then not only that, but you have all these responsibilities on top of you. And maybe you've gotten married by this point and had kids and you have a career or at least a job that takes up a lot of your time. Um, and all of these things just start pushing out your, your social network a little bit that you have to, you, you think any way that you have to prioritize all these other things. Yes. Um, and friendships kind of get pushed aside or tend to get pushed aside in this stage of life. Yeah. I, I, I, I would imagine that this is kind of the, if you were to average it all out, like the, all, the all time low of friendships is probably in this period of like 30s, 40s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Yeah. And then it probably comes back in retirement. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. A lot of people, you do though, there is a winnowing and this can be a good thing. Okay. You go from a bigger social group. I mean, like in college, I kind of had this kind of diffuse group of friends, right? And then it definitely narrowed down after college and my friend groups got smaller, but they got tighter. Um, and you, there's good and bad ways to navigate that obviously too, but that does happen. Um, you start to realize in this stage, though, too, that, oh, friendships really take effort. Yeah. And then I think where the problem comes is, are you willing to pay that price or not? Right? And this is where I think a lot of people are right now, at least like in our age group, anyway, it's like, I'm not willing, well, you know, people are assholes. Yeah. I'm not even going to worry about this. I'll focus on work. I'll focus on my relationship with my spouse. Yeah. Whatever it is. Right? I've got bullet points to go through here. I mean, I do think, and I now we're getting into like my personal experience as well. Okay. I would say if there's a few dynamics that I think make friendships in middle age, particularly difficult, you know, when you're young, you have no idea who you are. So you could potentially be anybody. So you're now interested in meeting, associating and hanging out with anybody. Right? It's like, there's just the world's your oyster. The more crazy background the person has, like the more interested you are to discover and figure out who, what a type of person this is. I think once you hit middle age, you know what you like, you know what you care about. You've got your commitments, you have your goals. I think it just narrows the range of people that I'm not gonna say that you're curious about, but like, you realistically, you're like, "Am I gonna be a good, "am I gonna be a close friend with this person?" Probably not. Like I just, you know, I can't go to Tahiti four times a year. So like, nice meeting you, Tahiti's friend, but like have a nice life. I would say there's a focus on higher quality relationships and lower quantity of relationships. And part of that is just out of your own psychological interest. The second reason for that is that I think there's real opportunity costs in middle age. So again, when you're young, nobody has anything going on. Nobody has any, like nobody knows what they're doing. Nobody has a career. Like nobody is, it's just, yeah, sure. I can take two weeks and go to Ireland like and drink beer, like fuck it. Why not? You know, and so you just, you just start doing things. And once you get to middle age, chances are you, you have a family, you have a house, you have car payments, you have insurance, you have a career, you've got a bunch of goals and dreams for yourself. You know, suddenly it's like just taking off and going spending two weeks in Ireland. Like there's major opportunity costs to that. You're like, "Okay, I'm giving up a lot to go on that trip. Do I actually want to do that?" No, actually, I probably don't want to do that. And I think that limits, that potentially limits a lot of the peak experiences that, you know, you get tons of peak experiences in your adolescence in your 20s and then I think once you get to your 30s and 40s, it's like a peak experience is a Saturday without the kids. That's kind of your peak experience. So that's a complicating factor as well. And then I would say that the third thing I wrote down is the relationship piece. It's funny. I feel like every married couple is gonna immediately understand what I'm saying. But, you know, when you're married, I can't tell you how many times my wife will make a friend and she'll come home and she'll tell me about the friend and she'll be like, "Please, please, please, I hope you like her husband." You know, or I'll make a friend and I'll come home and I'll tell my wife, "Please, please, please, I hope you like his wife." You know, 'cause it's, there's fucking, like, it's a thing. It's a real thing. And it's the difference between the spouses getting along and them not. It like very tangibly changes the relationship. It's the difference between a surf buddy that I see once a month and like a very close friend that I see on a weekly basis. When you're a couple and you, and like the magic formula is when you're a couple and you find another couple where it's like you both, both of you like both of them and both of them like both of you. And it's, but because there's four people involved instead of two, it's exponentially more complicated. That's not a linear like one to one thing. That's very true. Yeah, that's, okay, yeah, that's very complicating. It's a very big complicating factor that you, yeah. And it's tough 'cause then what you end up with is, you know, so my wife and I, we have two or three couples that we're close with. And those are probably our closest friends just because you get from like an ROI point of view. If my wife and I are gonna spend a Saturday night, it's better to spend it with a couple that we both like. You know, so we both get to have an enjoyable social experience. You know, so we have two or three couples that we get along really well with and we probably see them the most often. But then it's like she has her girlfriends and I have some of my guy friends and you just kinda like fit them in when and where you can. And often, you know, if you're busy and you're traveling and you got work stuff and. And you're hanging out with these other couples. Yeah, you're hanging out with these other couples. Like it just, it becomes very hard to fit them in. And on top of that, you know, when you have kids, you compound that even a third time. Which is, do we like the couple, does our kid like their kid? And I think a problem that a lot of couples or a lot of people run into is that their kids make friends with some other kid and they meet the parents and they're like, please God, let me like the parents. Please, please, please let me like the parents. And it's, and you know, once you find the parents that you get along with and that you really, you can be friends with and it's like, oh my God, this is gold. Now we can travel together, we can do weekends together, we can go to Disneyland together. Like we can have play dates together. It's hard to find, but then when you find it, you like latch onto it. Right. But yeah, there's a lot of complicating factors in this age range. And I think that the hardest part, the like the most difficult thing for, I think my wife and I to accept is that these complicating factors, they exist for a good reason. Right? My career makes it complicated, makes it hard and complicated to make a lot of friends. Part of that is just being a public figure, but part of that is just how busy I am. But I wouldn't give that up. I wouldn't trade that in, right? Being married in some ways complicates making friends. I definitely wouldn't give that up, right? So it's like knowing who I am and knowing what I care about and like really spending all my time focusing on like the two or three things that are most important to me, also complicates making friends, but I wouldn't give that up either. So it is a tough phase, I think. And it is, it's not that there's no solution, but I just think it's like playing your social life on hard mode, essentially. And you're coming out of a period of your life, your teens and 20s, which was like really playing social life on easy mode in a lot of ways. Like everything was working in your favor. - Yeah, yeah. And I think two other complicating factors I think I would bring up one is like your job stability during this time. This was something I didn't really think of until I was talking to my sister about this. And my sister has changed jobs a lot, not on her own necessarily. Most of the time it's been like, she's a social worker or has been in social work in some capacity, the department gets cut. They lay off this whole, whatever it is. She's had to change jobs quite a bit. And like those, especially for this period of your life, that's if you're focused on your career and focused on that, that's a big source of connection for you. And if you lose that every few years, those people just kind of fade away. - Yeah. So like, I never thought of that 'cause I've had this job early on, - Yeah. - Or had my friends. - That's a huge one. I think we should come back to that in the next section where we talk about why it's becoming harder to make friends. But yeah, the job stability thing. I mean, I see it, I forget where it wasn't in the research for this episode, but I did see somewhere recently that it was some statistic that it was like, a couple generations ago, like our parents' generation, like the average tenure at a job was like a decade. - Right. - And I think now it's like 18 months. - 18 months, less than two years. - Yeah. - And I see it too, like when we hire like resumes come in and it's a new fucking company every 12 to 18 months. And yeah, you can't really build a community or like a really stable social life. Or you can, but it's very hard. - Yeah, yeah, it's very hard. - We won't get into that. - And some of the complications here, but yeah, that's just wanted to mention that. - Yeah, the other thing I wanted to bring up though too is like any, like a lot of mental health problems usually develop in this. And in your 30s, I know a lot of my therapist friends are like most people start therapy in their 30s. - Interesting. - And then I have to continue in another 40s. - Yeah. - And so those, that comes up in that is, that's a factor in making friends. Your mental health, whether it's the stigma around it or just it's kind of a vicious cycle too. You know, if you have mental health problems, you don't feel worthy of having friends and so you don't go and make friends and it gets worse. And this is that time period for you. - I'll add another thing to that. - Yeah. Again, when you're in your 20s or a teenager, it's a level playing field. - Yep, yep. - You know, I think I know where you're going. - Yeah. Everybody's broke. Nobody has a career. Nobody, nobody, no major decisions have been made yet. When you get the 40, everybody's made some major decisions and everybody can see the consequences of your life. - Is your wire-dum-iron your sleeve at that point now? - Yeah. - Like so it's very, it can be a little bit obvious. Like you see people who like really squandered or really made bad choices or really didn't take care of themselves. And so it's, again, it comes back to that narrowing, right? Like it's the pool of people that you're gonna be interested in being friends with has like slimmed down quite a bit. - Yeah. - Okay, well we'll wrap this up then with later adulthood. - Yes, old age. - Old age when you get into your 60, 70s, 80s and beyond. All of those obligations are usually taken care of or they start fading away a little bit. Those big life obligations anyway, your obligations change. - Kids are grown up, moved out. - Yeah, probably got maybe retired. - Maybe paid the house off or closed to it. Or you know, you might have some financial stability or at least you've gotten used to your financial situation by that point, right? The people who seem to do the best in this have made some longstanding friendships or at least rekindled some. from the past that give them some, you know, some kind of a resilient network that they can lean on. Health issues become a point or become a thing at this point that you have to deal with. And so friends and your larger social network become even more important with this. What I think is interesting too right now, there's a lot of people who, there's probably a perception still even that, oh, old people are lonely. Actually, like, the highest rates of loneliness are in younger people at this time. Older people are actually doing better. Maybe not awesome, but they're doing better than a lot of the younger generations right now. And I think really what that is is that you get to this point and you're like, you realize what's important, right? You realize that these relationships are actually what is the most important part of life. And so you start to prioritize them more than you would have. You've done your career, you've made peace with the things you didn't accomplish at this point and you start saying, okay, actually what it is is relationships. I always think David Brooks. I think he's in his 70s now. And every interview I hear with him or every speech, he always brings up the fact he's like, I wish I would have spent more time on my relationships. That's the biggest regret he has. And so now he's come back to do that more and more. And I think it's just way more, you know, your mortality. It's more front of mind. So it's a clarifying event in your mind now. And you start to see that actually, you know, it's my friends and my family and the social ties that I have that are really what's giving me meaning at this point. So we double down on them. I definitely, I've talked to my mom about this. My mom is living in a retirement community in neighborhood. And she's happy as a fucking clam, which is great to see. But it's interesting talking to her about it because it's, there are a few impressions that I get one and you touch briefly on a couple of them. But one of one I've talked to her about or heard her say is that it's just like, you get to your 70, it's like everything's done. So you get to your 70s and you just kind of let go of stuff. You're like, you know what? I just want to play bridge and like go to movie night. You know, like I don't really, like let's not, like I'm not going to hold it against this person if, you know, 30 years ago they made a bad decision or whatever or they've been divorced twice. You know, it's just like, let's just play bridge and pizza. Consistency over intensity. Exactly. It becomes those small little things and you're just, you're, you realize how much connection on just a consistent even small basis matters at the point. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing that that's really apparent to is the importance of that network on just for health reasons. You know, it's just, you know, she at any given time she knows people in the neighborhood, neighbors, friends who are getting surgeries in the hospital, cancer diagnosis, you know, and she's had to rely on friends and neighbors a lot, you know, for for for stuff with her as well. And it's, you see how important it starts to get at that age. So yeah, it's just there seems to be a more, just kind of a more calm, positive regard. Yeah, it's just like, let's just get along. Yeah. Like, like, I think you're more forgiving of people too. Yeah. At that point, you know, you're probably, you probably are at the point where you're more accepting of different people. Yeah, I would say at that point anyway. Yeah. You've seen it all. Yeah. You've seen it all. Yeah. I just want to touch on gender dynamics because it is a thing and it is a bit of a hot button. Topic that comes up online quite a bit like it is definitely it gets mean quite a bit in various ways. So I guess I'll quickly go over the research and then we can kind of talk talk about maybe some of the spicier controversial takes. I don't have a ton to say about it, but we might as well touch on it since we're here. So the thing that is real, there's an old saying that men stands shoulder to shoulder and look out and women stand face to face and look at each other. There's actually quite a bit of evidence that that that is true. Men tend to prefer to do something together and women tend to talk to each other face each other and talk to each other and and as a result and again, this comes back to like why I didn't really like using vulnerability is that third factor. As a result, I think deep male friendships tend to be based around mutual experiences, things that they've gone through together, things that they've done together, challenges that they've faced together, projects that they've done together. And I think women for women, it tends to be much more about self-disclosure talking about their thoughts, their feelings, their lives, their past, their future, their dreams, everything. There's an old joke, I forget where I heard it or where it originated, but there was a guy who his friend got divorced and he went and played golf for four hours with him. And then the guy came home and his wife was like, "Oh my God, how is he? How is he doing?" And the husband just kind of shrugged. He's like, "Yeah, he's doing fine." And she's like, "Really? Like, what does he think about the divorce?" And the husband says, "Well, we didn't really talk about it, but the golf game went great." He shot a 74, it was awesome. And I mean, it is a stereotype. It's a joke because it's a stereotype, but as with a lot of stereotypes, there's some truth to it. So do you think that you've already mentioned you're like, "Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe that's okay." Women will tend to kind of criticize men for that. Like, "Oh, you can't open up to each other. You can't connect with each other." And it's like, "Well, yeah, well, the same way men will criticize women for dumping all their feelings all the time and complaining about every little problem in their life, right?" So it is my take on this is that there's no right or wrong way to have a friendship. Like, if there's a friendship, and look, I personally I personally like the self-disclose. And I personally, I will say this that my best male friendships are with men who are also comfortable being vulnerable and disclosing. Like, what I generally find is is men who just who don't go there or who can't really disclose much. I can be friends with them, but I'm never going to be very close friends with them. I definitely look for men who are capable of opening up and sharing thoughts and feelings and being vulnerable. But I also don't like demand that all the time. You know, like, if we just want to play golf, we can just play golf. Like, it's not a huge deal. So it is a thing. And the same way I think there's a lot of women out there who want to do things. And they don't want to sit around and talk about their feelings all the time. And that's great. They should be able to do things. Jess is over here. She's chairing. She's chairing along. So while it is generally a true thing, there's a wide variation between. It's a spectrum. And it's like men and women are all over that spectrum. And even though maybe the average of men is over here and the average of women is over here, it takes all types of people. Men also too, I think maybe you'll get into this. But men also too are much more likely like hang out in groups where women are much more likely to hang out one-on-one if you came across that. But I found this too. Like in my life, I didn't realize just how prominent this was in my life, too. Like the male friends I have, it's not that we don't hang out one-on-one, but it's like it's a very different vibe and a very almost a different relationship that I have with a friend when we're in a group versus when we're one-on-one. Yeah. Especially with my male friends. With my female friends, I have much more direct relationships with them. Yeah. So I don't know what that is necessarily. I agree with you that I'm more, I do tend to gravitate more towards men who are that we will self-disk those, but it's more like in a group setting and we're kind of about set it all off, which I've found pretty interesting too. It's interesting most of my friendships are one-on-one. You're one-on-one. Yeah. It's not that I don't have, like I said, it's not that I don't have one-on-one relationships with these, but sometimes it's just kind of like even like a good friend of mine, I'm like I'm going to invite him out. I'm like I shouldn't invite the other guys too. Yeah. Because it's a little more, I don't know, it just feels different and there's a different vibe to it. I will say so this spectrum both with the self-disclosure and the activity and I maybe even the group thing. This is very culturally driven as well. Yeah, oh yeah. So there are some cultures that are very, very gendered, very, for example, in Brazil, like men down there, there's a much more social pressure on men down there to be what is conventionally masculine. To the point that it's funny because when I go down there, it sometimes, it kind of feels like I'm going back to that madman. Yeah. I was just down there like a month ago and it was really funny. We went to my wife and I went to a dinner party. Really, I think it was like four couples and it was like really lovely dinner, an enjoyable night. And as soon as everybody finished dinner, all the women got up and went to the living room to like, I don't know, gossip and talk about girly things and then all the men immediately, like went straight into business and politics. Yeah. It's like, okay, the women are gone. We can talk about business and politics now. And it was just, I felt like we should have cigars and scotch and I should be in a three-piece suit or something. But like down there, that's just that's how it works. And the conversations with women around and is very different than when it's just the guys. Yeah. Once it bit all through and hear too. And this is something you can't unsee. But next time you go to a party, you talked about the shoulder to shoulder versus face to face communication, you know, men shoulder to shoulder, women face to face. Next time you go to a party, this is like literally true. Yes, you can see it. You can see it. So when men are talking, we're usually at a slight angle or like completely shoulder to shoulder when we talk. When women talk, they're usually face to face. And it's like when men, if you if you square up to a man when you're talking to him, I feel weird. The immediate thing I think is, are we going to fight or kiss? Like what is going on here? Are you trying to what are you trying to do here? Dude, it feels weird. It feels so weird. It feels weird. So just do a little your own little social experience. Do an experiment party. It's pretty crazy. You know, this is completely tangential too, but I heard this so like a long time ago and it's actually true too, but conversations usually happen in four or four timing. If you like if you're sitting around, there's like three or four people more than that is not. Yeah, they'll be in like four or four time. It's kind of crazy too. So if you try to throw it off and then it gets weird. So yeah, just anyway, sorry. Okay. The other thing is that that women tend to be much better about touching base, reaching out, yeah, pinging people. I mean men in general are I think they're bad at it. I would call it like the mechanics of friendship, right? Like it's it's generally, you know, following up with people, asking how they're doing, remembering birthdays, bringing a gift to a wedding. It's just there's a lot of like kind of social conscientiousness stuff. And it's funny because there's this has become a bit of a meme online of, you know, there are a lot of women who call it man keeping where it's like they it's basically girlfriends and wives who have to run the man's social life and social calendar. Yeah. Obviously, there's a decent amount of truth to that. It's actually interesting. If you look at rates of depression and suicide after divorce, men are like five times higher than women. Yeah. Generally speaking, after divorce, women bounce back pretty quickly. Men bounce back extremely slowly. And I personally think this is one of the biggest reasons is that women, the social life kind of defaults to the woman's social life and the men just kind of go along with it. It's funny because there's a lot of criticism of men online at the moment about this. And I, I feel like I see both sides of this. On the one hand, I, I do think men kind of suck at this and just need to get better. You need to take some responsibility. Yeah. For sure. Just to own it. Develop some basic skills. Reach out to your guy friends, like invite people to stuff, put birthdays on your calendar. Like it's not, it's not rocket science. It's not rocket science. And I think this might actually be a good, a good moment to get into like some very basic tactical things. And these are things that have helped me and it's funny. I actually have a guy friend who's like, he's like one of these very organized people. He actually created a CRM system for his friendships. You know where CRM system is? So it's like a customer management system. Like he's an e-commerce guy. But he was like, he realized that he was, he was losing touch with friends or losing track of them. So he like literally created a notion dashboard for his friendships. Oh, God. He created a CRM system where it basically reminds him, like if he hasn't seen spoken to somebody in like more than a month or two, it like pings him. It sends him a notification. Like reach out to that person or invite them to something. And it also, he developed a system where it's like every week he has some sort of activity or event that he can invite people to. Honestly, I laughed about it too. But when like after he explained it to me, I was jealous. I was like, dude, I would actually pay money for that to be honest because especially if you have like a system that ties our mind, right? Seriously. Yeah. Because it's it's and we'll get into my story in a little bit. But like I think one of my problems is just like I don't think about it. Yeah. I don't think about it until it's too late. Yeah. It's like it's it's I only think about it after I realize like, Oh, yeah, I haven't seen Jake in like two months. I wonder what that guy's doing. It's just and then you go on to the next day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, shit, I'm late for the podcast, you know? And we can laugh about it. But there's a certain amount of envy there and like, look, I mean, he told me he's like, he said, this is a game chain. He's like, my social life is 10 times better since I started doing this. I think that's maybe two. One of the mindsets I might not have might have left out was like, don't leave. Stop thinking that just just happens. Yeah. Right? It's not an organic process. Yeah. Uh, necessary. It can be some people are really good at that. But for a lot of people, no, it takes some effort and some work and some like some conscious, yeah, you know, uh, effort that you have to put in repeatedly. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I'll say about the man keeping thing and I say this is a married man with an extremely extroverted wife. Yeah. I think two things. And again, I'm going to make blanket statements. This does not mean all women or all men. Just on average, you know, I think in general, uh, women tend to be a little bit more extroverted. And I also think women tend to to care more about their social life. Yeah. And like, I don't mean that I'm not like trying to put down either gender. I think that's just the fact. I think women, um, it's a, it's a higher priority for a lot of women more so than it is for men. And so I, I think I imagine what a lot of men experiences are like, well, she's better at it and she cares more about it. So I'll just let, I'll let her take the lead on it. And I'll just, I'll, I'll, I'll be support, essentially. And, and I can see how like this shows up in marriages and relationships a lot. Like, there's a lot of things. If you remove the friendship aspect and like, I don't know, replace it with, so to use my marriage, like, and this can go either way, right? So my wife cares a lot more about cleaning and she's much better at it, right? So guess who does most of cleaning in the house? And now, and in one way you could look at that and say, that's totally unfair, Mark. You should be doing, you should be pulling your load. Yeah, maybe. Or if you look at the relationship as a team and my wife and I each have our own talents and our own things that we're good at that the other one's not, it makes sense to specialize. So like, I'm very good with numbers and finances and taxes. I also care a lot about finances and numbers and taxes. She fucking, her palms start sweating the second she opens the bank website, right? So guess who does all the finances, deals with all the insurance, does all of our taxes? I do. Yeah. And I could get, sit here and get mad, be like, that's not fair. She should do 50% of that. But no, that doesn't make sense. It's like we're a team. She's good at this thing that I'm not good at. I'm good at this thing that she's not good at. So we should divide, you know, there's division of labor exists for a reason. It's the same thing. It's like if my wife and I started a business, it would be insane to divide everything 50, 50. Like anybody who started a business, try dividing everything 50, 50 with your co-founder. That business is going to fail within a month. Like the first thing you do when you start a business with somebody is you say, okay, what are you excellent at that I'm not and what am I excellent at that you're not? Okay, let's go do those things. This is an own that domain in the business. And I think to a certain extent, relationships are like that. And I think through a combination of of women just prioritizing it more, but also men just being bad at it and not taking responsibility. Women tend to end up owning the social domain. And yeah, to a certain extent that might be unfair. And I would say if you're a woman listening to this and you totally your husband is like, or your boyfriend is just socially completely lost without you. Yeah, he should pick up some basic skills and maybe take a little bit of ownership over it. But I do think this idea that everything's 50, 50 and that there should be balance in all things. And both people in the relationship should own like be responsible for everything in equal proportions. Not only is that unrealistic, but there is also quite a bit of survey data showing that relationships that try to divide every responsibility 50, 50, 50, they fail more often. They are less happy. They have more problems. Just be realistic. Yeah. Just like look at your partner, look at yourself, figure out who's good at what, who enjoys what, and be okay with that, you know, it's not, it's not going to, a lot of it's going to be 80, 20 in different different directions for different things. Yeah. Can men and women be friends? Ah, this question comes up all the time. Do you want to take a stab at it first? I have a lot of female friends and I always have. So I don't, I don't, I don't know. What is wrong with you Drew? What is wrong? You're stood this way. Clearly something is wrong. I do see there's all these guys out there who are just like your friends with women and I'm like, I don't, I, you tell me what's what the issue is here. Because not only like, like I was, well, I always think I have more like direct relationships with, yes, with my female friends too. Like more of a one-on-one, whereas with my male friends, we kind of have this group that we're typically in and there's some, you know, overlap with other groups and all that, sure. But like, the female relationships I have, they're not like, I don't like dump things on them necessarily or they don't use, I don't use them as like an emotional outlet or anything like that. It's just that, I just see them as friends. Yeah. So tell me what the big fuss is about. Seriously, I think there's two reasons why people struggle with this. So first of all, the answer is yes, men and women can totally be friends. But I do think it, there are complications. Obviously, there are complications that don't exist. Okay, yeah, sure. I get that. Like, it's, and like, obviously, it's the elephant in the room. There's potentially sexual attraction with one or both people, right? So that's the elephant in the room. That's what complicates things. And I think it's, there's pretty clear reasons why. So, first of all, I think men and women can be friends most easily if there is no sexual romantic attraction between them, right? Yeah. Or at least no opportunity for it to do like, you know, like, I mean, a lot of my female friends either are married have partners over their own or, you know, their lives be understood. Yeah. Like, it so it doesn't matter. But yeah, yeah, going. So, I think by removing the attraction that simplifies it, I think where a lot of people get stumped on this is because they are friends with somebody that they're attracted to. And they kind of wish it was something more. Yeah. And as soon as you get into that, it becomes transactional. I've had these three. Yes. So to come back to Aristotle's framework, like, I would argue it's impossible to be friends with somebody you are, like as soon as you become sexually and romantically interested in them, there is some sort of inequality that is introduced into the friendship. And then by nature, it becomes transactional. And as we're going to get to in the next section, transactional friendships often become toxic, not always, but often. And so I can see why people have been burned by this before, especially, I mean, it's a trope among young men, you know, the friend zone, the dreaded friend zone. It's like the girl you have a crush on. And there they are. Yeah. We've all been there, man. You know, you become her best friend. And then for years, you just kind of hang around hoping that one day she's, she's going to wake up and like realize you are the one all along. It's, I find that a large percentage of people, both men and women who ask this question, it's the people who are friends zone. It's the young man or the young woman who has been friends with the person that they're in love with for years and years and years. And they feel overlooked and they feel taken for granted and they feel like they've like given themselves to this friend, quote unquote, hoping to get something else in return, but not realizing that it was transactional all of it. That's not a friendship. It's not a friendship. That is not a friendship. The friend zone is not a friendship. Yeah. Interestingly, ironically, like if you look at the data of like how people meet and what predicts the greatest long term relationship success, if the two people were friends before they started dating. Yeah. That is like the highest predictor of relationships. So how does that work because like you're not attracted to each other at first and then you are or like there is some mild attraction and then not really and you're like whatever and then you become more attracted. Like what? I think. I think in most cases what I would guess is that it's kind of like you said that there's no opportunity, right? So okay. Like they were dating somebody else. Yeah. And this is anecdotal, but like just by all the people that I've noted in my life and all the fans and audience and people who have reached out to me and talked to me. Generally, I think the way it works is like, you know, it's like a work friend who had a boyfriend or a girlfriend for years and then they moved to another office and you stopped seeing him or whatever. Like the gym and Pam situation in the office, right? Like I think that's like a pretty prototypical. They were friends first and then they they become a very successful relationship. There's like, there's some sort of blocker or lack of opportunity. Maybe they live in a different city, but you see him for whatever reason you see him once or twice a year and every time you see him, you're like, wow, I really like this person. So I think there's a lot of that going on. People do change, you know, not not to not to give hope to all the friendzones listeners out there, but like there are. It's rare, but there are situations where, you know, your friendzone for a long time, a few years go by. Maybe you get jacked. Maybe you get your shit figured out. Maybe you go to therapy. You know, maybe the person you're in love with gets their heart broken and they figure some of their shit out. Like people do change over time. And so I do think some people do evolve into a relationship. They're wearing a mess out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's one of those things like you can't, you can't wait around holding out on that. Like the irony with the friend zone is that the only way to get out of it is to give up. Like as soon as you get, like the only way that person is ever going to look at you seriously as a potential partner is when you stop trying to make them look at you as a potential partner. We've gone and yeah. Yeah. Ironically. That is very ironic. Yeah. Cool. I would say even. It's making from experience, but yeah. Yeah. You know, the funny thing that complicates this though is that there is some research that shows that men tend to vastly overestimate how attracted a woman is to them. Yeah. I do think that a lot of these friend zone situations are basically due to oblivious think like, yeah, she's totally in the name. Like this is totally going to happen. And meanwhile, like the woman's like, oh, he's such a good friend. Yeah. The other side of that is true too, right? The women underestimate. Yes. So how he's just being friendly. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. And there's a weird like evolutionary explanation you can get into. It's more costly if a man doesn't take the opportunity and it's more costly for a woman to take the opportunity and all that. But yeah. Toxic friendships are, you know, we're not going to go super deep into this because I think there's, you know, the cousin of this is toxic romantic relationships, which we will probably hit and cover on multiple episodes at some point. But I do think it's worth going over like you can't have unhealthy friendships. You can have bad dynamics within friendships. The irony with toxic friendships is that I think they tend to start with a bang. Toxic friendships are fundamentally built on insecurity and insecure people are secretly deep down looking for somebody to save them or show them that they're okay. And when they find somebody that they believe can do that for them, it is a very emotionally intense experience. And so generally speaking, just as with romantic relationships, the friendships that start very intense and get close extremely fast often blow up. So let's talk about what's happening psychologically speaking from a psycho, like a psychodynamics perspective. Basically, you have two individuals. They're very insecure. They see themselves as somehow unworthy or inferior. And when you are an insecure person, you are constantly measuring yourself against others. And the way you're choosing to measure yourself, it really comes down to your personal values or what you personally see as a status indicator or what a worthwhile person is. You know, it could be looks, it could be money, it could be popularity, it could be fame, it could be whatever being accepted by a certain group. If you are an insecure person, you are constantly in the status game everywhere you go, everybody you talk to, you're playing the status game with yourself. Now, when two insecure people come together, that spark emerges because they see the other person as a solution to their status game. So there's kind of this complimentary like, oh, this person makes me feel worthy and worthwhile. I should spend more time with them and then the other person feels that way too. And so it's just this like intense magnetism that happens and brings them together. Now, this can happen, I think this can kind of happen in two configurations. One configuration is that two people have different but complimentary insecurities. You know, maybe let's say we take two guy friends, right? Maybe one is the really athletic cool jock that all the girls are into. And then one is the super brainiac nerd that aces every test and configure everything out, right? And it's like, there's a synergy there of like the jock feels really dumb and is insecure about his ability to get in the college or whatever. And then the nerd is like, wow, no girl will ever talk to me. But when I hang around this guy, I feel cool. And so sometimes you'll see these kind of dyads play out where it's two friends kind of compensate for each other's flaws or insecurities. And I would say that's probably the less unhealthy version of a toxic friendship because it's essentially just a very transactional friendship. Each person is getting something out of the friendship, out of the relationship. And as long as they continue to get that thing out of it, it's probably going to be okay. Where things get dicey is when well, people's insecurities can start to get stoked. Like when you're in a friendship like that, you're probably very aware of the dynamic. And so you're probably very aware of how sensitive the other person is to the situation, right? So if you're like the tall handsome jock in that friendship, anytime you get pissed at your buddy, you know exactly where it's going to hurt him most. Yeah, I was buttoned. Yeah. You know exactly how to punish him and you know exactly where he's insecure. And chances are that's going to come out at some point. And vice versa, if you're, you know, say the smart, successful nerd, you know exactly where your buddies insecurities are as well. So you can just get a lot of ugliness in friendships like this. I think most of these sorts of friendships types probably just have a falling out at some point, a big fight over something dumb. I know I definitely had some male friendships that were like this and pretty much all of them ended over a stupid fight over something or other over a trip we were supposed to take or a party we were supposed to throw or a girl that I dated and he wanted to date or like whatever. It's usually something like that that kind of triggers it to fall apart. The second type of toxic friendship is the even less healthy friendship, which I would just call it flat out the codependent friendship. Essentially you have two people. You have one person who, let's say, is full of themselves and needs constant validation and approval and needs to be reminded of how great they are all the time. And then you have a second person who feels terrible about themselves and one way that they get to kind of live vicariously through the first insecure person by constantly following them around and telling them how great they are, how amazing they are and how much they wish they were like them. And so you get a situation where it's like one person needs to always feel superior and then one person, however, poorly the first friend treats them, they feel like they deserve it on some level. Going back to what we talked about earlier about the balance there, though, too, it's like I think there was a word you said in the recent always, it's always that way. And there's an unbalanced to it because of course you want to help your friend out when they need help. Yes. Sometimes you need to be helped as well. This is one thing I've always tried to be the helper. So I can kind of wade into this territory, but I'm aware of it and I call it out or be very aware of it when it does happen. And then there's been times more recently to you now. I'm like, okay, I need help from the same people and it balances out. So yeah, yeah, just wanted to point that out. You use the word always. It's always lopsided like that. There's a savior and somebody who needs to be saved. That's the problem. I would say the first type of toxic friendship, the issue is more, it's a transactional relationship but it's not transactional over something superficial. It's transactional over. It's trying to be a virtuous friendship, right? It's like I admire you. I wish I was more like you. But instead of just admiring you in a vacuum, I'm going to basically follow you around and envy you and hope that some of you rubs off on me and vice versa. And it becomes transactional at a self-esteem level and that's just a recipe for disaster because it's like the minute your friend, I mean, it works fine when both friends are giving each other validation and helping each other out. But if you build your self-esteem by being around your friend, the minute your friend checks out or gets mad at you or wants to maybe manipulate you or control your conditions on something in the friendship, it's going to get very, very ugly, very quickly. The second dynamic is even worse in that it is just, it's a unidirectional friendship at all times. It is one person is always needs more attention and validation and one person is always giving more attention and validation. And the irony, like if you're a healthy person, you are probably hearing this and you're like, why would anybody stay in a friendship like that? Yeah. But the problem is is that if you're a person who feels really shitty about yourself, you haven't had many friends throughout your life, you have very low self-esteem, you don't see why anybody would like you or hang out with you, that unidirectional, that constant giving to the friend, it feels like an upgrade over loneliness. Right. Because at least you're needed for something. And this plays out on a much more dramatic scale at the romantic relationship level where you see a lot of people who will get into bad romantic relationships, codependent romantic relationships, sometimes even abusive romantic relationships, simply because they feel so bad about themselves that they're like, well, I'd rather have a shitty toxic relationship than no relationship at all. Because at least somebody wants me around for some reason. It's really fucking dark and depressing. I don't know what to say about that. Because toxic friendships are inherently transactional, they often become very competitive. So what you see happen is a power struggle. We'll merge within the friendship. You'll start getting these arguments over who did more for the other person, who is liked more by other people, who invited who to more parties, who introduced who to their friends, who helped who the most at school. Like you start getting into these scorecard situations of like, no, you owe me. And the fact that that, first of all, that conversation shouldn't even exist in a healthy friendship that conversation doesn't even exist. That relationship, yeah. But second of all, the fact that that conversation is even happening, the fact that both people see the friendship in that way tells you right off the bat that it is a fundamentally transactional relationship that there's not any genuine admiration going on. It's likely some mix of envy and desperation that keeps the two people together. If there's one thing that I really do know about friendship as that scorecard is the most toxic thing, you cannot keep score. Again, it's a subjective thing, too. Like we talked about earlier, the balance in a relationship is always subjective. But the scorekeeping thing where you're trying to objectify it just amplifies the toxicity you do agree that it's not, you're just not going to recover from that. You can't, there's a saying to in business and I'm sorry because later I'm going to say why you shouldn't treat your friendships like a business. But there's a saying that you're never going to capture all the value that you create. Right. Like Mark, you've given away how many newsletters over the years, how many hundreds, thousands of ebooks. We put out ebooks all the time now and hundreds of pages. We've literally published advice to millions of people. You will never capture, quote unquote, capture all the value that you create. Especially in a friendship, just drop the scorecard. There's no balance just isn't ever going to be there the way you think it should be if that's what you think. Coincidentally, I do think dropping the scorecard is probably the easiest and first step to breaking out of a toxic friendship. Easiest to notice, too. Yes, it's easiest to notice and it's probably the easiest to stop doing. So it's funny and this is true with toxic romantic relationships as well. Only speaking, if you stop the dynamic and set up a boundary, the relationship will unravel itself. And it's actually pretty crazy how quickly it happens. Like the second, if you're like, let's say we're in a stupid argument over, I don't know, some scorecard situation, the second one of us is like, you know what, dude, it doesn't matter. I'm just happy we're friends. The other person like doesn't know what to do anymore. And it's like, wait, wait a second. I can't like pull my lovers and get what I want out of you. You're not feeding me. You're not validating me. You're not giving me the thing that I was here for. Nine times out of 10, they leave on their own. It's just the friendship kind of dies after that. And this is the big difference, I would say, between toxic friendships and toxic romantic relationships and then toxic family relationships. Because in both romantic and family relationships, you have a very deep emotional investment with the person where even when you do stop the scorecard and stop the drama and stop the games, it's extremely hard to let go. And so there's this constant undertow pulling you back into the drama because you still deeply care about this person. And you really want them to do well and be happy and you really love them and you really want this to work. So you find yourself like falling back into it over and over again. I think generally with toxic friendships, because friendships are, and I don't mean this in a bad way, friendships are more expendable, they're more replaceable. Generally speaking, as soon as you stop the toxic dynamic, the friendship just kind of falls apart. I'd say nine times out of 10. The only exception is if the friend also notices how fucked up the situation is and the two of you can kind of address it together. But I would guess that that's like the rare minority of situations. There's a little nugget in there too if you're trying to make friends, going back to the make friends thing is the scorecard. If you show up the places and you're like, I did this and this, therefore this person should react in this way when you're meeting people. That right there is the basis for a toxic relationship. Just to stop it right there to begin with. I mean, the scorecard thing is really huge. It's a nice red flag for everybody. Anytime I met a guy a while ago who like, I forget what happened anyway. I was like doing some crazy work trip or something and he texted me a few times and I didn't respond. And then he sent a snide comment about like, well, I guess you're too cool to respond to my, and I'm like, okay, we're done. You know, this is over. I'm just, I do, I'm 40. I don't have time for this shit. So yeah, opying out of the scorecards, the competitive dynamic, the status game is probably the first step. I would say, often out of the drama, a lot of times what happens in these sorts of friendships is that the friends will get entangled in each other's drama and messy life. You know, so it's, you're dating your friends, sister's best friend and they live together and you have to see them all the time and, oh, and you're sharing a car with them. Because there's such a lack of boundaries in toxic friendships, there's a lot of kind of material world. things get intermingled. People share living spaces, they share expenses, they give each other rides to places, they end up working together. And so there's just a very, sometimes there's a very messy disentanglement that has to happen. Like that can be a very awkward and difficult thing to go through. We are planning to do an episode on boundaries soon. I think this is where boundaries really shine, is just knowing where to draw the line and how to express that line and say, "Look, I'm willing to help you with this, but anything past this threshold, you're on your own, and then being able to stick to that is huge." And then obviously it's like if this person is not respecting your boundaries, not dropping the scorecard, continues to try to manipulate you and create drama with you, just stop that of the friendship entirely. We joke earlier about it being easier and ever to go. Somebody, it is easier than ever to go somebody. So, I mean, if you need to drop somebody you can, in some ways it might even be too easy. But I mean, I think the takeaway here is just that toxic relationships are inherently unstable and they are short-term fixes for what are deep personal emotional wounds. We did an episode a couple months ago on shame. Generally people will fall of a lot of shame, find themselves and lots of toxic relationships, friendships included. It is one of those things where you have to kind of get your own shit sorted first before you come back to a friendship. And again, interestingly, like the people that you will attract in the world are generally have a level of security and self-assuredness that is proportional to yourself. And so the more right you get with yourself, the more confident you get with yourself, the more secure you are with yourself, the more you will just kind of naturally filter out a lot of the insecure, dramatic people and you'll filter in a lot of the healthy, secure people into your life. - Yeah, we were talking about this and I, I don't know what it is. I don't put up with toxic relationships at all and I've never have, never tolerated them. And so it's hard for me to watch when it does happen. I see it. I definitely see it in my life and with some of my other friends and their friends. But I just, I've never had a tolerance for it and I never understood it. And I don't know whether it's because I think it is, I think I've realized that, you know, friends come and go like you were just saying, there's an expandability to them. They come and go and yeah, there's just an underlying security underneath that you have to be comfortable with. - Yeah. I would say to another, you know, so we talked about the scorecard, we talked about the intermingling of lives. You know, it's funny, we've talked about proximity and repetition. I would say another calling card of a toxic friendship is two people that feel the need to be together all the time and do things together all the time, talk, message each other all the time. There's a certain emotional dependence there that's probably not entirely healthy. I mean, like don't get me wrong, it's great to have really close friends that you can see a lot. But if you have a friend that you feel like you are dependent upon their perspective, their validation, their approval to do anything in your life, yeah, that's a huge issue. Like there's, I think insecure people have a romantic notion about that of like, well, they're my bestie. Of course, I include them in everything. Of course, yeah, of course I take them to my job interviews and of course I bring them home for Thanksgiving and of course I text them to a clock on a Tuesday night. It's like, no, no, no, that's actually not healthy. That's, that's like a level, that's co-dependence basically. All right, so we've gone through how to make friends, how to keep friends, how to have bad friends, how to get rid of bad friends. There is this whole loneliness epidemic going on, quote unquote, there's a lot of scary statistics about these days. There's a lot of crazy technological change that's been happening, social media, smartphones, AI. What's going on in the world? Like it's, we could have spent, we didn't, we glossed over pretty quickly in the intro, but like we really could have spent a full 10 minutes going over all of the harrowing social statistics that are going on in the world at the moment. People are losing friends, they're losing touch with friends, they are having like having trouble making friends, they're more lonely than ever before. What the hell is going on? Well, okay, we could actually kind of approach this in a couple of different ways. There's some external headwinds in the current culture, and then there's kind of, I think some internal, we'll call them internal headwinds or obstacles that we have to overcome. And let's, let's first start with the external ones. Okay, so just some of the most common things that are cited in the research as well, things like, you know, time poverty, there are schedules, we just try to pack everything in, especially in places like North America where very, very career focused, calendars get kind of, you know, full very quickly, we just don't have time for friends. And you know, proximity and repetition again, two big factors, and we just don't have that time for repetition for our friends anymore. Okay, so longer working hours, there's caregiving involved. People spend way more time with their kids now too. Like our generation spends a lot of time with their kids, who've seen in time use surveys that that happens. And a lot of times, you know, that's pretty taxing on friendships. It's really hard to fit in. Like I'm a third wheel now. - Let me tell you about it. - Right? Right? I'm like being like a single guy, my kids have friends and they've incorporated me into all of this. And I've been able to kind of navigate that pretty well. But it's definitely a factor, or you know, it's like, we don't go out and party anymore. - Of course. - We're gonna go hang out and, you know, watch a blueie or whatever. You know, sometimes you just gotta, you gotta go for that. - Does it ever bother you that it's like when you hang out with parents with young kids that it's like, it's all about the kids the whole time? Or do you ever run into that? 'Cause-- - Yes, I mean, so what I found is that, okay, if the kids aren't there, what they like to do is complain about the kids. And at first I was just like, guys, like shut the hell up. And like you made this decision blah, blah. What I eventually realized was, oh, this is their time to, they can't do that when their kids are around. - Of course. - They love their kids, they love being parents, but there's a side of it that they can't-- - They need to vent. - They need to blow off that steam, so I get that. I think the other side of it though too is, I watch them change in front of me. So we talked about how you watch people go through these phases. - Yeah. - I kind of see it, I've reframed it as, this is a privilege to me to watch this person that I love, change into something new. And go through these struggles and be able to support them and all that. So I don't know if I'm very, that's a very common reaction to it. I know some people who are like, as soon as somebody has kids in their life, they're like, I'm not even, I'm done. They don't want kids, they don't want anything to do with it. You're all you're gonna do is talk about your kid and parenting and how hard it is and I want nothing to do with it. I'm not like that, but like, I kind of get the motivation behind that. - Yeah, I, I think there's a spectrum of parents. And again, to your point, and the reason I'm, I'm even bringing this up is because I do think this is something that is new with our generation. Jonathan Height talks about this all the time about how the expectation that parents have now of what parenting is is like so inflated. It is obsessive focus on the kids 24/7. - Yeah. - Like the kids could be running up and down the wall. I don't know, like when I was young, if my parents were having dinner with friends and I walked in and I started talking and make a bunch of noise, my parents would tell me to shut the fuck up and go to my room. - Get that out, yeah. - Get out, yeah, get out, go to your room. Be quiet. - A adult. - A adult who are talking, right? And it just, it feels like there's a certain, like a lot of parents of our generation don't do that. It's like the kid becomes the thing. - Ah. - And putting aside the thing that that teaches the kid, which is not a good thing, it does make it very hard. It makes it hard to have like a real relationship or a friendship with those parents. That said, there are a lot of people who I do think are very good at prioritizing and organizing their time and attention. And they can step away from being parents and still be very present and have a life outside of parenthood. So people working longer hours, spending more time with their kids. - Yeah. - What else? - We are more mobile society now too. Right? And there's a lot more life transitions too. If you think about it, like I talked about going to grad school and stuff, right? So I've transitioned, I went living in a small town middle of nowhere. I moved to a city to go to university and then I moved to, again, to go to grad school and then I moved again and then I went and I traveled. There was no mad all that. All these life transitions, maybe you don't have that many, but they're much, much more common now. And so again, the proximity thing, right? That's a lot harder. Proximity and repetition become a lot harder when we're a more mobile society. That kind of waxes and wanes throughout economic booms and busts, of course, but it is a thing. I mentioned to, like my sister, just had a lot of jobs. We already mentioned that too. A lot of people, they just changed jobs more for a client. - Careers, yeah. - Remote work. - Remote work is a huge one too. That's definitely one that I think is, you know, especially the Americans, the American dream is to have everything kind of self-contained in this little box, your house, right? And it's your job, you have food delivery, you have all that kind of stuff. - Yes. - Yeah, so that's a huge one. And, yeah. And I don't know, the remote work thing too, I don't know. It was really funny through the pandemic where more people started working remotely. And I've been working remote since 2014, you know, so I was kind of used to it. But it was very, very interesting to see people like, I was polarizing. Some people hated it. It's a yes. And some people loved it. Some people thrive and some people really flounder. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of people who just let that social contact outside of their homes or they had kids or not, that was a really important thing for them. So that's a big one. Loss of third places, you know, who was that? That was Ray Oldenburg. Researcher who came up with that, cafes, libraries. Just going out, you know, is much less common. But also that's related to another one, which is a decline in civic and associational life. Yeah. So that's the Robert Putnam. And that's been going on for 100 years. He wrote that book back in the 90s, right? And what he noticed was that trend started way back, I think in the like really in the 50s, but maybe even 20s and 30s. I think it, yeah, I think he found it for some things he found it going all all the way back through the 20th century. But it was, I think, he was primarily focused on the 1940s and 50s through the 90s. Yeah. I mean, I think about this in my own life too. It definitely, like, look at the generations in my family. My grandparents were very active in all these civic organizations. My grandpa was a veteran of the Korean War. So he was in the VFW. My grandmother was in the rotary club. They had a bridge club. They did Elk's club and all of that. Like they were at my grandpa was even like a, he did some local government stuff. Like they were super, super engaged. Their church. Oh, yeah. That's another kind of also a third space plus civic engagement place that as the theory really deteriorated. The thing was is that these had these built in social structures that they could lean on and rely on to some extent. They were also pretty much all free. Yeah. I mean, there was a free order. There was a low fee to be in the Elk's club or whatever, you know. And now, I was talking about this the other day with a friend, her dad when she was growing up, who's since past, but when they were growing up, he had seasoned tickets to the Broncos and I felt teeing the Broncos. And he was a work in class, you know, middle class. They had lived in like a middle class neighborhood and whatever. Somebody like him today couldn't even afford that. Because it's gotten so expensive. These what third, third spaces have become less free and more paid play. They're more luxury. There is more luxury item now. I was just going to bring up and shit on Soho House. Oh, are you trying to be anti-elitas here, Mark? What is that? Is that even about elitas? I just think it's a shitty product. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's what I would absolutely agree with that. It's like you guys are taking what used to be free and try to like monetize it. Exactly. And don't get me wrong. The spaces are beautiful. And sure they have like cool talks or like, you know, film premieres and shit like that. But like I had a bunch of friends in Soho House in New York and then, you know, a friend, a good friend of ours here in LA was a member and so we would go a bunch and like every time I went, I'm like, what is the point of this? Yeah. What is the point? I think it's a little bit, it's like a metaphor for the modern age, which is they essentially took what what used to be free a third space, a community oriented space where people can join a club and meet meet up together and a they monetized it. But to monetize it, you have to introduce status games and when it as soon as you introduce status games, you can't actually have friendships because everybody's there. They're like, well, just talk about toxic friendships. Seriously, it's like, I remember like having this argument with a friend of mine who is a member. So I was like, I was telling her, I'm like, look, if you're paying $3,000 to be in a room, you cannot actually genuinely have friendships with people in that room because like everybody you talk to is like, oh, well, I better be getting my money's worth here. Like, I hope I make a friend. What do I need to say to make a friend so I can get my money's worth? Like, it is completely antithetical to what creates a friendship. Yeah. So that along with urban design, just in general, too. So we talked about LA, especially this is funny. The last time I was out here, so I have some friends out here in LA that I've known for a very long time. I consider them pretty good friends. We all went to college together. They live in different parts of LA. They never see each other. Yeah, it's impossible. I come into town and like, we're trying to get together and we're in, it's like a three-hour text chain. We're trying to try, I'm not joking. Trying to train you late because all of us got to get into a car. Yeah. It's all going to be around rush hour. We're like, use an AI to try to figure out where's the best place for us to meet. Like there was just that much friction around it and it's exhausting. It is. And so yeah, there is that, like they say in LA, you know, like you were saying, if you live on the other side of town, what I've noticed to about people who live in LA is like, you got your neighborhood and you just stay in it. Yes. You don't even leave it. You're surrounded by 11 million people but you're kind of trapped in this little box. It is, it's like 12 small towns. Yeah. It's not a big city. Yeah. That's a jarring realization when you move here. And it's just because like if you have more walkable spaces and more dense, densely populated areas that aren't built around cars, especially like we like to do that in the United States, especially the universities that were settled in the West, you just have more chance encounters with people face to face in the real world. That's as simple as that. And you have the proximity and the repetition and that's, you're already halfway there. So that's huge. One I want to bring up, though too, that is I think especially relevant is polarization and we're living more in low trust societies now. This is obviously more recent over the last couple of decades, I would say. But this is a huge thing. I think also too that the related to another one, kind of mental health stuff I want to bring up. And then I think that's a big, big problem. I think that's a big problem. I mean, it was primarily like the social media and mental health crisis, but we also talked quite a bit about loneliness and things like that. He was kind of pointing out which countries seem to be a little bit immune to a lot of the poor mental health trends that are going on and then the countries that are getting hit the hardest. He was saying he was relating it to individualism, but there were still a bunch of exceptions here and there. We talked a little bit further and he started talking about how some cultures just have this baked-in community time. It's like everything revolves around big dinners with neighbors and family and people take care of each other's kids. There's just much more of a cultural emphasis on community and face-to-face time and large meals and getting together with people and celebrating holidays together. He was kind of pointing out that these were the countries were still doing okay. They kept their sanity, essentially. I put it out, I was like, that seems to be an inoculation to this. It's not that they aren't being affected by social media and everything that's going on. It's just that it's that in person, all of those in-person institutions and third places that are maintained through the culture are inoculating the population to I think a lot of the mental health effects that we see in places like the US, the UK, Canada, Australia. Related to that, one of the other factors is household and demographic changes, more people living alone. That's been a big trend for a very long time, actually. You see that there's increased loneliness in the United States and more people living alone. But you don't see that as much in Sweden. More people live alone in Sweden, as we saw through the pandemic. We found out about Sweden and I was like, "Oh, a lot of people live alone there." They're doing okay because they have a lot of those other. Very communal. Yes, very communal mindset that they have. I think there's that inoculation to it too. Another thing that Jonathan Haidt found and I believe you discussed it with him too, was that conservative kids are doing better, yes, health-wise than liberal kids. - Yep. - And they're still-- - By a mark, like a white mark. - But they're still using social media just as much. - Yes. - They're still not exercising just in all of those things. I mean, they might be, there's different activities, but they're probably forced to go to church a little bit more. You know, they're probably forced to eat dinner together more just because of conservative social life. - Probably grow up in larger families, or have communal parents. - Have parents. - Yes, that sort of thing. So there's an inoculating factor. I totally agree with that. - Yeah. - So, and I don't want to just blame technology for all of that. I think there is a deeper social aspect to it. - Yeah, just like we saw in Rosetta, Pennsylvania, too. - Yes, and I think this is where Putnam's work is really appropriate. It's because it's like, I remember reading Bullying Alone for the first time, like 12, 13 years ago. And like right when kind of the social media stuff was just starting, people were starting to freak out about it. I think that book came out in either 99 or 2000, right? Bullying Alone was late 90s, I think. - I think, yeah, I think it was around this. - So he was kind of out of his time there. - Well, and the research was done in like 90, 92. - Yeah. - So it's, he was way ahead of his time. And basically, I just remember it being very eye-opening that this trend towards the atomization of society towards the isolation of people, the breakdown of institutions, the breakdown of third spaces, it's been a long term. It's been a century-long progression. And similarly to, it's interesting, when you look at political polarization and distrust in society, that also predates social media in the internet. Like that goes back into the 80s and 90s. It really starts with kind of the advent of cable television, I think. - Which coincided with like Reagan and Fatcher. And so everybody blames that, but it's, yeah. - Yeah, so I mean, these are multi-generational trends. And it is, I think a lot of things, you can look at social media or TikTok. As, I mean, it is both a cause and an effect. It's hard to say like what is driving this overall? - Yeah. Yeah. Those are basically the big external trends though. Most commonly cited ones, most researched ones that we know of anyway today. And so, yeah, I think just being, even just being aware of those a little bit and being like, okay, how does this affect the proximity? The repetition and the kind of reciprocal nature of disclosure that with my friends, all of those are headwinds that you might have to be aware of. There's some internal ones now too and go some of these internal frictions that we can go into more psychological, I guess. One of them, we've kind of touched on already the equality paradox. So people, there are people who expect friendships to feel equal all the time. And like we've already said, that's just not possible. Balance in relationships, I really think, you have to give it a long enough time line to balance out, right? You're gonna need things from friends sometimes and sometimes they're gonna need things from you and it's never perfectly balanced and you just gotta be okay with that. Again, the score card thing, we probably had on it enough, but just wanna highlight it again. - What I wanna circle with that too is just patience because I think one of the things that my wife and I learned moving the LA is that we were just impatient. Like we would meet somebody, we'd hang out with somebody a few times, it'd be okay and then we're like, well, I guess that's not gonna be a friend. But you don't realize how long it takes sometimes and how patient you have to be with people. - Yeah, there's charismatic people you really like being around and there's, but the most of us are more like, where you need to get to know us for a couple of months before you really start to find a lot of those things. So yeah. - And I think in middle age too, that becomes more of a factor, right? Because it is, you're not really looking for pleasure friendships and utility friendships are pretty obvious. So those virtue friendships, like they take time. You really have to get to know somebody and like when you really know your own values and what your own interest and what you care about, yeah, there's a certain openness that has to happen, I think. And I think some of this too is just also, we live in a culture of immediate gratification. You know, people not to get on my old man, shakes his fist on at a club, but I do feel like culturally, we're in a culture of instant gratification. You expect somebody who you show up and you're like, you're not cool, I'm done. - Yes, I'm out. - 'Cause our whole life is like, right, right, right, right, right. - Everything's like, yeah. The food's not ready, I'm out. - Right, it's like, I swipe, swipe, swipe. - Yes, exactly, you get on YouTube, watch 10 seconds, like, no, don't like it in the next video. You know, like it's just the entire, our entire lives are like that. And, but people are not. You can't swipe people away. And you have to give them time. You have to let them grow on you. And sometimes, like, sometimes people will surprise you. - Yeah, yeah. And I go back to the David Brooks thing. The friction is the point. The friction is the point in relationships in general, but about in friendships, overcoming some sort of friction. Yeah, I got to drive across half an L.A. to go see a friend. That's because I value that friendship. - Yeah. - You know, or whatever it is. It's like, I value your time and your perspective and your friendship enough that I'm gonna go through all of this shit. And be patient with you upfront too. And give people a chance a little bit too. Yeah. The tall, poppy problem too. This is, my Australian friend's always talk about this. - Yes. - And we have tall, poppy syndrome. And we don't want to look like we're being arrogant. - It's a very real thing. - It is. And it can show up in friendships. If there is an imbalance there in status or something like that. I think this actually got to be more common for a little while. Maybe still is to some degree. But you, at least for a while anyway, it was like, you could be friends. You know, you went to college with somebody. You could be friends. To be a doctor and you ended up just kind of being, you know, a level nine to five. - Shubble and shit. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And- - Working on a podcast. - Right. - Yeah. - And so if there is that imbalance in your that type of person who's like, oh, I don't want to, I don't want to feel like I'm holding this over arrogant or anything like that. And so you're just kind of like, I'm just gonna push this one away. - Yeah. - That's probably, that's a problem. Openly celebrating with somebody, you know, tends to be like a little bit faux pas, I guess. The last one I want to, I do want to go over. There, and we've kind of already mentioned it, optimization culture. - Ooh. - And that gets internalized, okay. We treat friendship like a market. We, you and I have actually been using some language around what's the ROI? - Yes. - And what's, you know, look I'm a capitalist, but yeah. - It's kind of like invaded every little crevice of our lives. And it's like, what is the return I'm getting on this? - So how see? This is my point through. This is what I would say. - Yeah, I know, that's why I wanted to bring it up again, because it often leads to a lot of like performance. - Yes. - To in relationships because it's like, oh, this person needs to get something out of this and I need to be a certain way. - Yeah. - And that erodes the disclosure, the authentic disclosure part of friendship, right? You're not being, you're not really being your true self when you're doing these sorts of things. - It's funny, like one of the reasons I like going down the Brazil is because I can talk freely about American politics. Like I don't feel free to talk. - Is it that? - Yeah, how can you bring it up? That's so fucked up. - Especially when you're meeting new people, there's always that kind of awkward moment. - Yeah, where it's like somebody will say something a little bit political and you're like, "Test them waters. What do I go with this?" - Yeah, how do I do it? Am I diplomatic about it? Do I say what I really think? Do I think, which way do I think they lean? It just, it's really exhausting. And the thing is to, what I find is that most people don't really care that much, but everybody's, because there are enough of a minority of people who do care a fucking lot, and you never know when you're around one, that it's just everybody gets kind of uptight and their butthole puckers up. Because it's, I don't know about you, but like, you know, I've been at dinners and stuff where it's just like somebody loses their fucking mind. - That's just ruined everything for everyone. - Over something very stupid. - Stupid, yeah. - So it's just so dumb, yeah. - So, yeah, and you and I, I don't know, we, I tend to navigate both sides, you know, like a lot of my family where I come from is more like a service, I have a lot of my friends now are more on the liberal side, and everybody knows that I'm more centrist. - Yeah. - And they tiptoe around me even still too. So it's, yeah, I hate it. I hate it, that is like that. - Yeah. - There's a demonization of people that they don't understand, that's really, really toxic, and it's, I have a neighbor of mine who's, who I would call him a friend now too. He over, during COVID and all that, he had a big falling out with somebody's been friends with her like 30 years. - Wow. - Over, you know, vaccine stuff or political stuff or whatever. - And the funny thing too is that it's not limited to the political conversation. - Yeah. - Because there's all sorts of adjacent conversations that like hit a political nerve that have like now become associated, right? It's like the pandemic, right? If you, you're afraid to even talk about the pandemic now, because it's, you might say so. - It's a huge collective thing we all went through and we can't even talk about it. - Right, because it's, you might, you might mention something that somebody in the room is gonna freak out and start raven about. And yeah, I've had the same thing. Like there's, there's actually a person that you and I both know, a mutual acquaintance used to be a friend of mine who I got in a stupid fucking argument over, basically something semantic that he took offense to. And yeah, he stopped hanging out with me. So it's, it is, it's very obnoxious. I think it's a, it's a subtle tax on, on everybody, like a mental tax on everybody that I think we don't think about. - There was maybe, maybe we can close out this section with this, but an interesting research finding I found, and it's not a strong link and hasn't been replicated during a high-up app. But there was some data suggest that there's a correlation between risk-taking and loneliness. And people who are reporting more lonely are less likely to take risks. There's an inverse correlation there. And I think social risks and stuff like it makes sense. It makes total sense. And then not only that, but they can get that dopamine fix instead of taking a risk, they're just, you're scrolling. So I think, yeah, it's just you have to be incredibly conscious about that. Since I've gotten off mostly, mostly gotten off social media, although I'll still find ways around, like, I'll still scroll through stuff, whatever it is, you can find ways. I've definitely noticed this though that I do really prefer more hanging out with people. And I'm typically the initiator too, which I'm fine with, yeah, on that. But we need people like you. People like me, need people like you. That's another thing I do. I want to point out too, is that this is a problem. Yes, it's a societal-wide problem, but it's solved on an individual basis. Yes. Right. And you have, it is the, the Gandhi quote, right? Be the change you want to see in the world. That's cheesy as that sounds. This is seriously built one relationship at a time. And you have to be part of the solution here. And I will say this too. So I have a friend here in town named Max. And he's, he's like, he's amazing. He's like, he reaches out to ever, he plans so many things he invites people to some like, I feel bad sometimes the amount of things he invites me to. And I like, I don't reciprocate. He's just an amazing connector. And I'm, I'm so grateful to be friends with him because if I like, he is like single-handedly boosted my social life by probably 30 or 40%. So if you are somebody, if you can develop this skill set, it is so valuable in this day and age. If you are the sort of person who can reach out, be proactive, check in on people, invite people to things. It is, it's incredibly valuable these days. And so it's a great skill to have. So obviously technology is a huge factor in all this. Like, what do you, what do you think is going on? I, we live in the most connected time in history. And yet we feel more alone than ever right now, right? It's crazy to think about that paradox. Yeah. Derek Thompson has this really cool video. That he just did a couple of months ago on the big thing. And he talks about how technology over the past like probably 100 years ish definitely the last 60 years has progressively kind of privatized social life. So we started with a car back in the 60s. You know, a car kind of like people had cars, but it was kind of a luxury thing. And then it became more middle class and everybody had a car starting around the 50s and 60s. That gave rise to the suburbs. We were able to privatize, get away from everybody and move out to the suburbs, have a little more room. Privateizer lives a little bit. Then the television came along. We were able to privatize our leisure time that way, right? From the 1960s to the 1990s, Americans gained 300 hours of leisure time per year. Nearly all of that went into watching television. Right. Okay. So you're sitting out, you're not out and about, you're not interacting with people, you're not making friends, right? He argues that the smartphone has privatized our attention now. And what he means by that is you could be sitting on a couch next to somebody, each of you on your devices and you're alone. All right. Forget that. You could be in a crowded restaurant and be alone. Exactly. You'd be on a bus. You could be, yeah, you could be surrounded by people and be alone with you because your attention is diverted to your device. Right. And so the way I think about this anyway is I go back to our three, our three sides of our triangle, right? Proximity, repetition and disclosure. Technology affects all of those. Now, I'm not going to sit here and say that technology is bad and it's the only thing that's eroding those three things. Okay. Because I think there's a way you can use it where it does leverage it. But if you think about it, proximity, you don't have to be around people anymore. There's no embodied experience that you necessarily have to have to be in a grouper to make a connection with somebody. You don't make that same connection when you're not there anyway. There was this trend to Derek Thompson points this out in that video. There's this trend called "Cance Elation" on TikTok, which is basically kids just doing dances that have like, oh, my friend just canceled this event. Now I get to stay home. Oh, yeah. "Cance Elation." They're allated. That somebody can't say that something, right? That's not what he points out there too. That's not really that's not loneliness. That's choosing to be alone. He calls it the anti-social epidemic. Not necessarily loneliness epidemic. Interesting. It's like Joe Mo, the joy of missing out. The joy of missing out. Yeah, that was yeah, that was the kind of a thing and that's kind of evolved into this now too. Repetition too, the digital interactions, yeah, they can be repeated over time, but more likely you're in a comment section or something like that. It's a one-off interaction. That's why people are such assholes on the internet because there's no stakes there, right? It's a one-time interaction. We saw with a tip for tat, direct that. In single interactions, you're more likely to defect. You're more likely to be an asshole. Single interactions then over repeated time. The disclosure thing too, okay? When and if we even do post anymore, which posting is even becoming less common now, right? It's more media than it is social, right? We're incentivized to perform instead of actually express ourselves genuinely, right? Which makes it transactional. Which makes it transactional, exactly. So, the stakes also can be a lot higher online like we talked about in the shame of the episode. There's you just don't even want to express yourself online anymore. Be cut for fear of getting canceled or called out or going viral for the wrong reason. It's there forever, right? So, you apply for a job in 12 years and that video you made with your friends comes back and bites you in the ass. Right. So, there's really not the incentive or the structure there for you to have genuine connections with people. Now, that's how technology can erode the three sides of the triangle. I think there's though there's ways that it can be used where it actually bolsters all of those, right? The thing I really liked about the like the early internet and early social media too, at least how we used it. You remember like Facebook was where's the party, right? You get on to figure out where the party was and then you go to the party. It was awesome. It was such an amazing tool. And there's still there's lots of tools out there like that. Meet ups and you know, yeah, dating apps even to use correctly. You know, I shit on a lot, but I still think there's utility to them. Repetition to keeping in touch with people has never been easier. It's low friction. So, like take that into account. You're not going to get the same quality as like an in-person interaction. But one of the rules I have now is like when I'm thinking of a friend, I sent him a text. He was like, "Hey, I was thinking I haven't seen him in a while or something and I haven't been around them." I need to get better at that. That is it's awesome. You're like, "Hey, I was just thinking about this time when we were growing up or when we were doing this." Hey, bro. Remember that thing? Yeah. Hey, bro. Remember that thing? Wouldn't that cool? We're just thinking of you how you're doing. Sounds easy and stupid a little bit even too, but it does go a long way with people. It will. And then the disclosure as well, I mean, again, I think the incentives can go either way with that. But technology, you can't call somebody up still, right? And for free, basically anywhere in the world now. And you can have a genuine conversation and connection with. So it's neither good nor bad. It's a tool. Yes. Okay. As I mentioned earlier, younger generations are reporting more loneliness and we tend to blame we tend to blame technology for that. And I think that is a part of it definitely. They're more likely to just stay online and scroll and not connect with people and they have a hard time connecting with people. Sure, I get all that. I just think though too that how younger people are are socializing is just different. And we're not quite caught up in the research on that. You know my gripe with some of Jean Twangies work, right? I don't get me wrong. I like her methods. I just don't agree with all of her interpretations. Okay. One of those is she's like, oh, kids aren't having sex. They're not drinking. They're not all of these, you know, all these things that we used to think of as kind of like rights of passage a little bit. And it's like, is that such is that growing up? Is that such a bad thing? I always find this so weird because when we were kids, all we heard about was the parents screeching about like, oh my god, kids these days, they're listening to loud music, they're doing drugs, they're having sex. We need to save the kids, they're corrupting our kids. And now it's the kids have actually stopped doing this. And now we're like, do kids need to have sex and use drugs? So you're like, every generation has some version of kids these days, right? Yeah, absolutely. And so I think blaming technology is a little bit lazy to just put it on that. I agree that it can be used in a very poor way that doesn't increase socialization and friends in all of this. But I think if we're and this is what Derek Thompson, I think, where he landed on it, too, he's like, if you just kind of do a values check a little bit and start using it in a way that does increase your sociality and your potential to make friends, then it's a great thing. I think the biggest effect I've seen from technology on my own friendships is just it is eroded at my at my ability to delay pleasure and satisfaction, right? Like I do think part of that jomo thing or that cancel it elation thing is when you're so easily entertained and comfortable at home. Yeah, there's like a joy and trust me, I'm guilty of this. My wife and I we joke about this all the time. Like, you know, sometimes we'll something we'll get canceled and we'll just like at each other and be like, yes, well, think about the comparison there, right? Because oh, you might go, it might not be a good time. There's going to be traffic. You're not going to find a part, it's a place to park. Maybe it's going to be a school or the awkward. You know, you may do something embarrassing or whatever or you can you can just sit and kind of like, get these roll watching Netflix. - Don't be mean, don't be mean, don't be mean. - Yeah. - So it is, there is an opportunity cost. Like I do remember being younger and sitting around being bored on a Saturday night and being like, man, is anybody doing anything and like going through my phone and texting every single one of my friends being like, "Yo, what are you up to tonight? What are you up to tonight?" I couldn't tell you last time I did that. - Yeah. - Like these days it's kind of the opposite. It's kind of like, it's like, I'm, I'm, I did all this stuff. I kind of just like stay on the play video game. (laughing) - I keep promising that I'm gonna go through my LA story. - Okay, yeah. - This is a good time to. - Yeah, like we're gonna deconstruct my friendship problems. - Now that we've been through all that, yeah. Let's hear it. - So I think we've covered almost all the elements at some point or another in this episode so far. So to, to, most listeners are probably familiar. You know, I moved the LA three and a half years ago from New York and I've said for a year or two now that my biggest, my biggest pain point is my social life. Like it's, I would say it's okay, not great. You know, I'd give it like a six out of 10. And for a couple of years now, I've, I've said that it's my highest priority and it's kind of the same. So we've talked about a few of the things. LA is a, it's a low proximity environment, right? So it's you don't, everything's so spread out. You don't really run into the same people super often. On top of that, it is, see New York, everybody was always busy, but everybody was on top of each other. So you would eventually kind of run into the same people frequently. LA has kind of the worst of both worlds where it's very spread out and everybody's busy. So it's, you just, you don't get that repetition. So even like the people in my neighborhood, you don't really get that, that repetition of like running into them frequently. - I just learned there's a subway in LA. I had no idea. It doesn't go anywhere. - Yeah. - I know. - For like in New York, you hop on the train and it can be, - Yeah. - or wherever. - The reason you've never heard of it is it doesn't actually take anywhere. - I have no idea. I've become, here's this 2018, I had no idea. - Anyway, I made the mistake that we talked about earlier. When I moved here, I did what we talked about. I was like, I'm gonna sign up for this class. I'm gonna take up surfing. I'm gonna join this club. I'm gonna start team tennis lessons. And essentially what that did is I met dozens and dozens of random strangers who I never saw again. Looking back, pretty much all my friends I made out here have been somehow through work. There are entrepreneurs, business owners, creators, podcasters, authors, or people who work in that industry or adjacent to those people who run agencies, people who run production companies, things like that. So looking back, if I did it again, I would just go straight, like I said earlier, my obsession is business. That's where I feel stakes in my life. I don't have kids, but I've got all sorts of ambitious professional goals. That's where the stakes are in my life at the moment. So that's where I would invest my social time. I'd probably join a bunch of business groups and try to network and stuff that, I eventually ended up doing, but I would have just done it much sooner. And then from there, from that network, I would have looked for people, basically the people who have become my friends are essentially people who have met through the business network who share a mutual interest. So they like watching football or they like the surf or they like the run. So I've gotten there, it's just taken way, way, way longer than it probably should have, and I would have expected. I would say another aspect of it. There's definitely the marriage thing is a complicate that the child thing is a complicate. The professional thing is a complicate. Everybody out here in West LA is like super ambitious. So they're like working crazy schedules. I'm actually a missing a friend's birthday party 'cause we're shooting this fucking Airbnb thing next week. Mark. I know. I know. (laughing) I can see the anger in your eyes. You know, if I was the type of guy who had a CRM system for my friends' birthday, I would have been on top of that. I wouldn't have scheduled the Airbnb thing during his birthday. So yeah, that's definitely a bigness. I mean, fortunately his wife is amazing. So she's scheduling his birthday before, so I can be there. I'm just, as you know, I'm a workaholic. So it's like that's honestly the biggest interference. Now there is some research around like CEOs and entrepreneurs and stuff like that. They do, it's not super solid research that they have, but they do see like, yeah, it's kind of like a high number of people who own businesses, run businesses do report more loneliness. So there's that. The other thing with you too, I think is that, you know, and just people who run businesses in general if they're at the top anyway, you don't have that work environment. Like most other people do. Like 90% of other people do. Because it's not like you can be buddy-buddy with all of your employees, right? There's a higher balance there, first of all. So you never really know like, are they hanging out with me? Yeah. Because I'm their boss or, you know, or maybe they're trying to get a leg up in their company or whatever, you do a good job of like being friendly with us and like doing things outside of work with us for sure. But I imagine there's got to be some kind of like, that's got to be in the back of your mind anyway. Oh yeah, it's funny because so my dad is a business owner as well. And I remember, you know, I worked a few summers at his company and he was really close with his head sales guy. And I remember one time I was hanging out with my dad and his sales guy, everybody called him fish. And this last name was Fishbeck. And I was hanging out with my dad one day and I said, like, oh, you know, like you're really good friends with Fishbeck and my dad kind of laughed and he's like, no, I'm not. And I was like, what do you mean? You like take them to football games and you guys go out for drinks and you know, you do business trips together and all this stuff. Like you get along great. He's like, no, don't get me wrong. Like Fishbeck is amazing. I really, he's a great guy. He's like, I'm his boss. Yeah. There's never going to be. Yeah, it can't. Yeah. You know, and it took me a long time to kind of understand that dynamic. I would say, I believe that I would say there's that combined. You know, so you lose kind of the workplace friendships. You get the, if you're CEO, you're probably working in the same hours. So you get that on top of it. But I'll say too, it's like it even bleeds over into your social life. So I am by no means like a celebrity or a super famous person. But like in my industry, I'm, yeah, I'm very well known and and and people who work in this industry and work in the creator industry in general or podcasting and like, I know who we are. Yeah. And so there is a dynamic, you know, there are certain rooms you go into and people start kind of buttering you up and kissing your ass and they're super nice and it's in the back of your head. You're like, is this genuine or does this person want something? And I've noticed that it takes me a good amount of time to just trust the intentions of people. I understand that. Which makes me sad. Like it sucks. But it is and then I would say too, there's also what I've noticed too is that even people who have genuine intentions, I think worry about coming off that way. Yeah. And so I've noticed that with a lot of my friends that I've made out here, it took a good three or six months. Yeah. Don't want to bother them. Don't look over eager. Yeah. Yeah. Like and I've actually noticed that I get, I do think I get invited the fewer things or, you know, people will casually text me less often because of that. Yeah. They're like, well, he's probably like super busy and it's got a lot going on. They don't want to look like a social climber. Right. And I've noticed it too with like friends who like genuinely have major life problems. Yeah. Won't ask, won't ask me for help because they're like, well, you do this for a living. So like, I don't want to bother you. And I'm like, dude, you're getting the worst. Yeah. I could, we, we should fucking talk. Yeah. So it's been a learning curve. I would say this, I actually wish we had done an episode like this two years ago. It probably would have saved me like six months of time. Yeah. It's, there's not a whole lot in the episode that like was illuminating or, or were things that I, I didn't know or hadn't figured out, but like, when you put it all together, when you, yeah, when you put it all together and, and, uh, have like the full birds eye view of it. It probably would have saved me some time and some partake. I will say the thing that I'm fucking terrible at is the reaching out and following up with you. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing I need to get better. Repetition. It's the scaffolding on which friendship is built. Yeah. Is that repetition? And it's, you can't, those three things are a triangle. You pull one of those out and all crumbles. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'll just make a notion, see our end system. Yeah. Okay. Well, hey, what's trying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 80/20 time. It's funny because this topic, it's interesting that this might end up being our longest podcast yet. Despite how simple it is. Like, we have done so much more research on other topics of shows. There has been so much more complexity for other shows than this one. Yeah. It is a very nuanced and it It's simple in theory, but very nuanced in contextual and implementation. So in terms of 80/20, I think we both agree the three factors of making friends is paramount, most important, right? So proximity, repetition, disclosure, making sure you're hitting those things consistently and regularly, that is the 20 that's gonna drive that 80% of the result on this. I think it's easy to understand that in the abstract, but I think there's probably some high leverage strategy or tactics that we went through that are probably worthwhile. I would say from my personal experience, the developing a habit of reaching out of texting people, reconnecting with people, pinging people, asking them how they're doing, just inviting people to things. That is, I think that's an 80/20 habit, right? If your default is to just reach out by text, if you're the one who's initiating more often, that's probably gonna pay dividends. What would you add to that? - Yeah, I mean, I would definitely, you gotta find your people too, right? That's the proximity part, I think. And yes, you can use digital technology, you can use social media and all of that, get it out into the real world as soon as you can and as much as you can. Use of those tools, like we were just talking about, when we talked about the technology, use those tools to find the people around you that are gonna be your people, right? Whether that is joining a club or a gym or volunteer organization, whatever it is, I really do think, I used to not think this, I used to think that that's kind of like bad advice, but just like kind of empty advice or generic advice. But now I see it actually for what it is. And now that I've done a few of those things, what I really took from what you said about that too, it doesn't have to be that thing either, right? Like I go to yoga and I meet people who are interested in other things. I'm not really into yoga and the whole woo-woo stuff. And there's plenty of people at this place who aren't either. So it's great. And same thing with CrossFit, it doesn't just have to be with CrossFit. It probably is better if you can find that obsession like you were talking about. But I really think that, you know, if you're, start there, if you're a huge, like, Dungeons and Dragons nerd too or whatever, like, is that what it's called? - Start Dungeons and Dragons. - Dungeons and Dragons. - I know nerd friends who do this all the time. - I'm not just like, "God, you guys are nerd." - Sorry, we're not all cool. Like you. (laughing) Yeah, I think the thing, the big thing that I took away around this is that it's not the first interest that makes it work. It's the second interest, right? So it's, and this was the mistake that I made. Is I went to the CrossFit gym and I signed up for the class and I was like, "I'm not making any friends." - I'm a pretty good buddy, yeah. - Take the first interest, find the people, and then once you've found those people, look for the second interest in common. And then I feel like once you have that second interest in common, that can be the base of a friendship. - Yeah, absolutely. And leveraging any existing networks to however loose they are too. - Professional, familial, - Hunter, perceptual, everything. - Yeah, everything, anything you can do to tilt the odds in your favor in this area. Again, we did mention it. It's a little bit of a numbers game at some point. - Yes. - Be patient with it. You're not gonna connect with everybody. It's gonna take a while too. It's gonna take a long time. I can maybe be a little bit more in the disclosure part. But a persistence and just an intentionality around it. It's not just gonna happen by itself. - Yes. - Right? We all kind of understand that when it comes to the dating, but we think friendship should just kind of happen. - I think it's because the first 20 years of our life, - It did happen for a month now. - It does just happen. It does just happen. 'Cause you, why? - It's true. - Because you're in proximity with all of your peers every single day. You have constant repetition of seeing them. And it's inevitable that you're just gonna have a lot of disclosure as you're growing up with people. So it is, I do think it kind of messes with us that we do take friendships for granted when we're young. And we spend all of our time focusing on learning how to date and find a partner. And then when you get older, it turns out that you actually, you have to put just as much work into your friendships as you do your romantic relationships. I wanna return to the disruptors that I talked about in the PhilSophical section. And I would even add a third to that list that we talked about as well. So the first one is transactional relationships. Trans-actional relationships are fine as long as it's you're aware of what you're doing and you're not too attached to the outcome. - Both sides are aware. - Both sides are aware and neither side is too emotionally invested in the outcome. Trans-actional relationships can work, but generally speaking, you can't really have a long-term healthy friendship with somebody where there's any sort of transactional thing going on. Second one is inequality in the relationship, right? A power dynamic, a status dynamic. Somebody who has authority over the other person. Like it's just, I'm not gonna say it's impossible, but like it just adds a lot of complication. And then the third one I'm gonna say is the lack of stakes. This comes back to what David Brooks talked about, which is, you know, we tend to bond with people that there's some sort of, there's certain amount of friction or overcoming of something to be with. And the only way that a friendship is gonna like, really feel valuable is that there's something to lose. And that there's, there's meaning behind it, there's something that matters to it. And so I think that's why when it comes to the interest thing, like don't just pick a thing that you're like, oh well, you know, I played golf once, maybe I'll play golf again. Like really find something you care about. And that matters to you. And has some meaning and significance behind it. Because then when you find other people who also, it carries meaning and significance for, it does add some stakes to the friendship. Making friends is inevitably like there are periods of awkwardness and it does get dull at times. And people do say things that annoy you and people show up late and cancel plans and you can't find parking. And like all this shit happens, right? So there's always gonna be friction. And the only way you're gonna really tolerate that friction is if you feel like, you feel like there in matters. - Yeah, you're invested. - Yeah. - Yeah, to some degree, for sure. - Yeah. - And becoming more invested, so we'll get to the disclosure part. I think the last part of that triangle that we've talked about. - I think it's being the one to initiate that and show in a little vulnerability there. It's important. Like we talked about in Tiffertat. What's the first line of code in Tiffertat? It's cooperate. - Yes. - And there's a very new question around like, oh, this is a person and are we gonna get along or something? I'll usually be the one to be like, hey, we should grab a drink, hey, come over and do this. Lead with that, I would say. And then just like in the Tiffertat too, there's some forgiveness. Like I was talking about the most successful one is a generous Tiffertat. There's a little forgiveness in there too. Forgive them when they, if they might mess up or they might say something stupid or annoying, like you said, that goes a long way. And as a part of this too, I can't emphasize this enough again. Drop the score card. Just drop it. I don't care what your friend didn't do for you and you did for that. That is just, that is no basis for a friendship at all. You're never going to, you're never gonna get back what you put into it. You're gonna die. You're gonna die someday, right? You're gonna just be dead as shit. You're not taking anything with you. So stop like accounting for all of it, right? Like relationships are way, way more important than that. And I would count a lot of, we talked a little bit about the political bullshit that's going on. I do see a lot of that as an extension of the score card. It's like, oh, you're this type of person. So you owe society this for this and you're this privilege because you're this type of whatever orientation and color and ethnicity and whatnot. Your side did this and so we did this, yeah, but your side did that. Like talk about how to ruin a social life and as quickly as possible is to start seeing groups in terms of what they owe you and other people. Like it just is completely antithetical. I mean, so I would expand that to just broader, like drop the assumptions about people. Drop the assumption that you know what type of person this is that you know where they come from. You know, oh, like, yeah, that's not the type of person that I usually like and I don't like how she acts this way and those sorts of people are cheesy or weird or whatever, you know, let the judgments go. Very, very last thing that I'm going to say anyway. And I guess I already said it, but say it again, the patient's part. Yes. 50 hours to make it and like the acquaintance 90 to make a friend, 200 to make a close friend. Yeah, that's a lot of time. Yeah. And that's a, there's a lot of time for error in that too. And a lot of time for you to grow apart a little bit and come back together. You have to be very, very patient. Friendships take a lot of time. Yeah, they do. They do. (upbeat music) All right, trade-offs. I think this one's going to be interesting because I feel like this is an area of your life that you're very strong in and this is an area of my life. I feel like I'm weak in. And so I think it'll be interesting to hear what sort of trade-offs each of us have made to put ourselves in this situation. Do you want to go first? Should I go first? You go first. Okay. Mine's easy. Like my social life is definitely suffered because I am so focused on work and I'm always busy and I have tons, I'm very, I have lots of goals and I'm very ambitious, which I love about myself, but I do see like the, there's a bit of a thin social life as a side effect of that for sure. The first thing I would say was time. So and that's what you're talking about is that I, I don't know if you're going to be able to do that. put a lot of time into friendships. Now, I think, like I haven't put that time into my romantic romantic relationships as much in the recent years, it was in a way. And so I've kind of been able to compensate with that, like I said, but it does take a lot of time. There was one time when we were doing the old podcast, we kind of talked about friendship. I went back, like there was a time where I was staying out here in LA, and I went back home, flew back home over the weekend. You flew back for a dinner. For a dinner. For a dinner with friends. The tip thought. The kind of grocery dinner. The team thought you were crazy, by the way. Yeah. Which you maybe you are, but you're definitely a good friend. If you're crazy, you're definitely a good friend. Those are two of my good friends. Those same friends, though, we have dinner like once a week, probably. Something like that. I'll go to their house and have dinner once a week. And it's usually, there's nothing exciting happens to it. We have some dinner. We talk about mundane things, but it takes the time away from other things that I do. And then, yeah, we go on trips, we do all that. The time thing is, is, is for real. Yeah. And yeah, you got to give it some TV time or some scrolling time or what work time to. Or time. Advancing your career. Yeah. Yeah. It's a major, major issue. I would say marriage and kids is a trade off. Not to say that you can't have friends if you're married and have kids, but it changes the equation. It changes your social life equation quite a bit. It's your partner becomes a huge factor in your social life. And then if you have kids, the kids become a huge factor in your social life as well. So I would throw that in there as a trade off. All of my friends who have kids have definitely said that to me. They're like, we've had friendships that have just gone away since we've had kids. Like, I'm still around and are other friends that we still hang out with, sure. But they're like, there's some people who just aren't around anymore. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We're at the end of the episode. What was your biggest takeaway from prepping and recording this? Maybe kind of two, I guess. One of them we just kind of talked about, which was, I now feel more of a personal responsibility, actually, to kind of be the initiator. And like, I'm-- we were talking about this off camera a little bit. I'm just somebody who kind of makes friends where I go. And I'm very fortunate that I've kind of always been that way, been able to kind of fit in with different groups and empathize with different people pretty easily. I feel like anyway, what this taught me, because I knew there's a loneliness crisis going on. I knew, but I kind of have the same as you. It's not what's easy. It's these three things. And this is all you got to do. It's actually much, much harder than that. And I feel more of a responsibility to the people in my community to be, like, kind of one of those hubs to bring people together. I do think, you know, and I have spare time. I have all these privileges that I can use to help other people out. And I feel more of a responsibility for that now, for sure. I definitely think we talked at lunch about how it was funny, like, both prepping for this episode and recording this episode, like, listening to you talk about how to make friends. It reminds me of like the, like, the hot girl talking about how to data guy. Like, yeah, it's like, clearly this has never been a problem for you. It's like, I could just tell, like, you didn't have the context of knowing what it was like to not have friends. Or not. I was so excited to do this episode and I'm like, oh, shit. Like, I don't really know necessarily what to say. Yeah. So it's been interesting watching you. I think this is an area that you have, like, a natural talent or a natural gift, you know, you've been blessed in some way. And so that's been interesting to see. I have not. I mean, I wouldn't say I've struggled to make friends throughout my life, but like, I've never amazing at it. Like, it was never, it never came super naturally to me. I definitely had to put some effort into it and definitely had my fair share of toxic friendships over the years. I would say the biggest thing that I took away from this is the patient's piece. And again, it wasn't that I didn't know that. It's just like prepping for this episode really drove that home of like, especially like the 50 hour, 90 hour, 200 hours. I was like, I was kind of, when I saw that, I was like, okay, how many of my friends in LA have I spent 50 hours with? And I was like, I don't even make maybe two. One. Yeah. I've been here three and a half years, you know? So that was just a little bit eye-opening. And then I would say to the trade off the opportunity cost, like the instant gratification piece. Like, it's definitely for me, I will work like a 12 hour day, I'll come home, I'll get a text message inviting me to something and my first reaction is like, dude, I don't wanna get off this couch. And it's really, I've had to consciously put effort into saying yes to those things, making space for those things. And it's something like you have to figure out something that works for you. If it doesn't come naturally, then you need to create some sort of method. I remember talking to a friend who said that he would like, set up recurring calendar reminders to reach out to certain people. And he was like, yeah, half the time, it's like I just saw the person. So I just delete the reminder or whatever. But he's like, sometimes I go, you know, if I go a month without reaching out to somebody or touching base with them, that reminder is a lifesaver. It like keeps me connected. So I do feel like as much as I shit on productivity hackers and like optimizers, this is an area of my life that left my own devices and with like armed with the full knowledge and understanding of what my choices are or creating for myself, I've not been able to crack it. So maybe the next step is to create that notion dashboard. There's going to be a certain person who said, oh my god, you have to do that. Like that's you shouldn't have to do that. But I think there's a certain type of person, especially if you're a systematizer, like I was saying. Yeah. And if your time is scarce as fuck, like that's the other thing is it's like one thing I say to my wife all the time, I'm like, if it's on my calendar, it'll get done. If it's not on my calendar, it's never going to get done because there's so little space between, you know, work and very important video games. Right. All right, well, we made it to the end. Please subscribe, leave a review. If you have not, it's the best way for the word to get out about this show. Leave a comment if you enjoyed the episode. And Drew and I will see you next time. Bye guys. (upbeat music)