Adam Grant: You CAN Make Lasting Friendships As An Adult

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And over time, you learn what normal looks like for your body. So you notice when something changes and it's thoughtfully private. Every session starts with your fingerprint and of course your data is encrypted. Right now, Kohler Health is offering 10% off Dakota when you enter promo code RICHROLL10 at checkout. Go to Kohler.com slash Kohler Health to learn more. You can spend about 75% of your time alone, but if you start to exceed that 75% number, you're in trouble. New York Times bestselling author. And the organizational psychologist, Adam Grant. Offering practical guidance for strengthening bonds with friends, relatives, and colleagues. I think a relationship in which you can't be candid is actually not a relationship. It's a charade. What most people do is they say things like, I love you, but no, I love you. And therefore, I'm going to tell you this. This is illustrated through this rollercoaster you've been on with Brene Brown. I came out of that very public fight with somebody I'd met once for five minutes in a green room before a speaking event. I swore I would never talk to her again. It's almost amusing how often I find myself violating the very things I study and teach. This epidemic of loneliness, moving us further and further apart from each other. If you list your friends and then they list their friends, only about half of your friends list you back. If your goal is for me to like you, come to one of my events that I invite you to. I know. Like, Rich ghosted me and he doesn't like me is how I'm feeling right now. What are we now? I mean, are we allies? Are we pals? Are we friends? Are we none of the above? Are we just associates? So Adam, it's so nice to meet you in person for the first time. We did this during the pandemic on Zoom, but finally I got you here. I remember it well. Yeah. Glad to be back. I appreciate it. The occasion for this conversation is your new book, Vibe, which we're going to focus on today. To me, I'm curious if people ask you like, why did you write this book or what was the impetus to this? And I want to hear the whole origin story behind it. But to me, it feels like a natural extension of Think Again. Like Think Again is all about like, how can we better understand each other? And this is taking it a step further to say, okay, now we know how to understand each other. How can we more deeply connect with each other in a meaningful and kind of like longstanding, sustainable way? Nailed it. Done. Yeah. I have nothing further to add, Your Honor. Okay, cool. But there was a few kind of inciting incidents, like a sort of one in your background and then a more recent one that made this feel more timely and pressing. Definitely. I think from a personal perspective, I was a very shy, nerdy introvert as a kid. I'm still an introvert. I think I'm still nerdy. I'm less shy than I used to be. And I got bullied in elementary school. My friend group dropped me in middle school. And I kind of, at that point in my life, felt like people don't want to talk to me for the most part. And I suddenly realized a few years ago, sitting on stage, that I went from people not wanting to have conversations with me to strangers listening to me have conversations with other people. And that transformation is fascinating. And I keep having experiences of meeting people and feeling like, wow, we just had instant chemistry. But I also still have experiences where I see people that I know well and like a lot. And sometimes it's just awkward, or we stumble our way through it. And I really wanted to understand how do we vibe with more of the people more of the time? What is your definition of vibe? We know the kind of casual, like, oh, that person has a vibe, or we're vibing. And I don't feel like we really have pinned down what that actually means. There's a sort of mystical, ephemeral quality to it. And you're kind of taking that and trying to drill it down into something practical. I want to. So I think about a vibe as the quality of a connection between people. And neuroscientists have studied this and shown that when two people feel like they're vibing, their heartbeats and their brainwaves actually start to synchronize. And so they're literally vibrating in rhythm together. And this is something, I mean, the core thesis is essentially like upending this notion that it just is something, like, you know, I just don't vibe with that person, to this idea that it's something that you construct and that you can build and work on. Bingo. And it's actually easier in a lot of situations than we might realize. Tell the story about your LA Talks experience, because that's sort of the way into this discussion. Yeah. I mean, it's fitting that we're doing this in LA, I think. So I, let's see, three years ago, I was on book tour for my last book and Rainn Wilson from The Office was going to be the host. And he texted me the night before and he said, I've COVID, I can't come. And I thought, who could possibly replace Dwight Schrute? And I didn't want to let the audience down. I also wanted to make sure it was a great event for my publisher. And I basically started emailing and texting everyone interesting I knew in LA. And the first person to respond was Jennifer Garner, who I had met once over Zoom for half an hour a few years earlier. And she said, I got you. And she skimmed through the book in the car on the way to the event. And we proceeded to have one of the most riveting conversations I've ever had in my life. And we ended up releasing it as a podcast and I got all this feedback about how great our chemistry was. I was like, where did that come from? She wasn't prepared at all. I didn't know what I was getting into. We had no real plan. And it was a great experience of the vibe just feeling like magic. But as a social scientist, I want to know what actually caused it and how do we create more of those kinds of interactions? What happened was you went into that green room and trying to like, how do I connect with this person? What's my strategy? Let me ask her about her life, et cetera. And she kind of flipped the equation on you. She did. She answered a couple of my questions and then she said, no, no, no, I don't want to ruin the dynamic. What we should do is we should start riffing like we would if we're on stage. And so she actually, we did a rehearsal almost live. It was different topics. She's an actor. Yeah. I mean, she knows what she's doing. She's done her fair share of chemistry reads over her career. But what I never really thought about before is, and this is ironic to say in a podcast because we often have long form conversations, but one of the rhythms that you see in successful conversations is people go back and forth more often. Sometimes it's called burstiness, where it seems like the interaction is literally bursting with energy and ideas. And in an interview that rarely happens, right? Somebody asked a question, they teed up, you give your two or three minutes soliloquy and then next question. And Jen was creating this much more natural riff, which then we carried on stage. All right. So clearly, here we are sitting across from each other. I had a one hour Zoom experience with you. I have a sense of how you behave and how you act. And I've seen you in many interviews, but I don't know you, you know, and I want this to be great. And so I'm nervous. And how do I get Adam to like me? What is your advice about how you and I can create a vibe so that this becomes more dynamic of an exchange than it would ordinarily or otherwise? This is very meta. Yeah. Well, I already like you, Rich. I admire you. And you know, that's not just because of the way that you turn your life around after your struggles with addiction. It's not just because of your extraordinary athletic achievements. It's also because of, I think all the time about the lighthouse observation that you made last time we talked about how you didn't feel like you needed to be an evangelist selling a tool like meditation. I have such a vivid memory of that. And I think all the time about how I can be more of a lighthouse. And so I think if you and I are trying to maximize our vibe, I guess the question is, what do we need to shine a light on together? Yeah. The way I always approach these conversations is trying to figure out, like, I'm not a psychologist, but like what animates this person? And what can I say even in the conversation before the podcast to establish some degree of trust? And I would say that my go-to move is generally to lead with some degree of vulnerability, you know, to establish like, hey, like I want this to be open. I trust you with this thing about me. And maybe I can go through this person's life and find some similarities. Like you have diving. I have swimming. You know, I grew up in Michigan. We're supposed to hate each other based on that. I grew up in Michigan also. You know, like how can I work that in, you know, so that it feels natural so that we're on a level that we wouldn't be able to achieve or that I would have to work very hard to accomplish. Well, I mean, you already did it, right? Even just saying you were a little nervous, that was a display of vulnerability. And it immediately leads me to say, wait, Rich is the host. Why would he be nervous? I'm the one who's supposed to be nervous as a guest. Well, it's, you know, the other thing we share is being chronic people pleasers. My goal is I want you to like me. You know, like that gets in the way of like trying to just get something out of you that is helpful to the audience. Like I'm here to serve the audience, but I have this other agenda. How do I balance these things? I don't know. You know, like I've done this a thousand times plus and I'm still nervous because I want it to be good. And I want it to be good for you too. I want you to leave and feel like, oh, that was worth my time. Well, I have no doubts about that. But also, I mean, that's a good nervous energy, isn't it? That anxiety is a sign that you care. Yeah. It's the same kind of butterflies that you would get like before a race or before a dive or something like that. It's like, you know, you want to perform well. It's not like fear. It's more like expectations that you're placing on yourself, I suppose. Which I think is fair. So I do have to say, though, if your goal is for me to like you, come to one of my events that I invite you to. I know. Rich ghosted me and he doesn't like me is how I'm feeling right now. This is a perfect setup to get into the material in the book because this is my core dilemma. I mean, first of all, for anybody that doesn't know Adam, I have never seen somebody so Johnny on the spot with email. Like I haven't emailed you that many times, but every time I do, you reply instantaneously. I know how busy you are. I'm like, this is an insane superpower. I don't know how you do this. Like I am the worst. I have these avoidant tendencies, but also my communication just stacks up and then it's just very difficult to respectfully be corresponding with all of these people in the world. And I carry around all this guilt about it. And that is a segue into kind of the challenges of my relationships and my friendships, especially as I get older. You know, this becomes like something that I'm trying to solve for. I've been pretty good lately about reconnecting with my college friends, but how do I make new friends? And the kind of tableau in the background and probably the real reason that you wrote this book right now is because of this epidemic of loneliness and our increasing relationship with screens that have created this facsimile of connection while also kind of moving us further and further apart from each other. And now all of the AI tools that are supplanting human communication on digital devices that are even moving the needle further in the wrong direction. Yeah, I'm worried about all of those things. And I think it didn't used to be so hard. You didn't have to keep up with an inbox in order to keep up with another human being. You showed up at school, you showed up at work, you went to whatever third place you happen to run into people at, whether it was a library or a bar or a gym. And increasingly, we can live our lives completely isolated. And the weird thing about that, Rich, is there's a big debate among social scientists about whether we even have a loneliness epidemic at all or whether it's an aloneness epidemic. People are spending more time alone. How do you distinguish the difference? So loneliness is about how you feel. Do you feel isolated and excluded? Aloneness is about how you spend your time. What are you doing? How much are you around other people? And the aloneness is clear. Robert Putnam told us a quarter century ago that we were bowling alone. And now we're golfing alone, and we're playing video games alone, and we're eating alone. And those trends have all continued. But on the one hand, Americans feel, on average, more isolated than the typical person anywhere in Europe. But on the other hand, it's not so clear that people are distressed by this. And I think that's actually part of the problem, that a lot of people say, you know, I'm content to see no other humans in a day. I like the fact that, you know, I can dash my food, and I can eat in silence, and I can binge a movie. And I think in the short term, we've kind of orchestrated our lives to create these dopamine hits that, in the long run, leave us empty of real connection. But I think we don't always feel the pain right away. What is the message to that person who thinks they're perfectly fine in that habit loop? Well, my read of the data is you can spend about 75% of your time alone without feeling lonely. But if you start to exceed that 75% number, you're in trouble. And I think what that means is We need to figure out how to connect and reconnect, which goes right to the heart of your question of how do I make new friends and how do I keep up with old ones? Yeah, I had Anand Giridharadas on the show recently and he said something that I've been thinking a lot about, which is the idea or the fact that we have offlaid our systems of human connection to a select few tech oligarchs who are the exact people who are the least qualified to manage human interaction. These are not people who are known for their capacity for that skill set specifically. They tend to be coders, introverted coders or whatever, and we figured out how humans should interact and connect. Actually, are you the right people to be designing this for us? And yet here we are, we're all living in this world that they've created. Are you suggesting that tech oligarchs are not masters of human relationships, Rich? Is that what's happening right now? I mean, aren't they masters of all things? Galaxy brains that we should basically give over our freedoms to, Adam? I mean, it's ironic in hindsight because the origin story of a lot of social media was people who had a hard time connecting. Sure. This is their solution, right? Yes. But it was not intended to replace or displace the real interactions that were working fine for probably the majority of humans. And here we are. All right. So help me learn how to make friends. Why are you looking for friends? Because friendships are inextricably related to my own feelings of happiness. And I would say that I fall into this pattern where I'm at home with my family, and that's great. And then I have someone like you who's coming in here, and I prepare for this person. And I come in, and I have a meaningful social interaction. And then I kind of go home. And you're my big social interaction for the day. And the great thing about this job that I have is that sometimes people like yourself, they do become friends. But I also am managing so many things. And like most people, I'm just busy. I'm just trying to get through the day. And we also live kind of in a remote area. And here in Los Angeles, it's like, oh, do you want to go to this dinner party? Or do you want to? This is going to involve an hour and a half of driving there and an hour and a half back. And do I really want to do that? I'm going to be up too late. I'm going to be tired. And all of that plays into it. And so as a result, I end up sort of more misanthropic than is healthy. Okay. All right. So I have some ideas for you. First of all, let's talk about what kinds of friends you're looking for more of. Can we talk about allies, pals, and companions? Yeah, because this plays into how we define what a friend is and some confusion around that. Exactly. So I was stunned to read a whole series of studies by sociologists showing that if you list your friends and then they list their friends, only about half of your friends list you back. Which is really shocking and depressing. Very depressing until you realize, oh, a big part of that asymmetry is we have different definitions of what a friend is. Some people, they need to know your kids' names and birthdays and have the ability to pick up the phone and cold call you or pop in to visit you with no warning before they will say, yeah, we're friends. And others will call you a friend the second time they meet you. And I think we need probably clearer and more nuanced language about, well, what kind of friendship is this? And what role do we play in each other's lives? And you've identified four categories. So yeah, I think the three meaningful ones are allies, pals, and companions. The first one is associates. That's sort of like Arthur Brooks calls this deal friends. Yeah, it's a very transactional relationship. It might be your carpool neighbor. It could be your carpenter. Right. So we have allies, we have pals, and we have companions. So allies are people you pursue goals with. They're your go-to collaborators. They usually have complementary skills. You would love to start a project with them or maybe even a company with them. Pals are people you have fun with. You'd probably invite them to maybe go surfing together. Or maybe you show up at a concert together because you love the same band. And then companions are people you confide in. They're people that you count on for emotional support. You might call them in a medical emergency. And I think a lot of friendships fizzle. And this is not unique to friendships. It's also true with professional relationships and even family bonds. A lot of our connections fall apart because we're not on the same page about what kind of bond we're trying to build. You want to be my pal, but I think we're just allies. And so we're like ships passing in the night. So what is to be done? I would imagine in every interpersonal dynamic there is some degree of asymmetry, a difference of expectations, right? Like some person is like, oh, I really want this person to be my friend. And that other person is thinking like, this person's cool to go have a coffee with. But I'm going to kind of create the boundary there. Yeah. Well, I think the starting point is really to ask which of these dynamics are missing in my life. So one of the things I did after I finished writing the book was I wrote a little quiz to take to try to figure out what's your default approach to interaction? And then what might you be overlooking? And whenever you write a psychometric assessment, the first thing you have to do is test drive it yourself. And so I took the quiz and I came out with my results and realized I approach almost every person I meet as a potential ally. And I'm constantly asking, you know, what are you trying to accomplish this year? What's your biggest challenge? And then I want to try to find a way to help. And I'm just cutting off the opportunity to just enjoy each other's company. Right. Like the other person's like, can't we just like have lunch, dude? No, no, no. I want to solve your problem. I want to talk to you about you can see everything. Yes. And I don't need you to solve my life. No, if I can't fix something that's bothering you, then why am I here? How does that work in your marriage? Not always well. Allison has to remind me. Just sympathy, not solution sometimes. But what's interesting about it is I realized, okay, maybe I have room for more pals and companions in my life because my relationships are so heavily ally driven. And so I became obsessed with playing Paddle last year or Paddle, whatever you want to call it. And you need three other players. And I thought, okay, let me take all my favorite people in Philly that I never spend enough time with that I always put off. Oh, yeah, we should hang out. We should catch up. And let me invite them to play. And we've started a league now. It's our own league. It's a WhatsApp group. And somebody jokingly called me the commissioner recently. I just send a weekly poll. And then whenever we've got a quorum, we show up and play. It is a blast. There's no goal outside of the activity. But it's a completely different kind of interaction than I've had in my life. And so let me put the question back to you and ask you, what kinds of bonds are you missing or looking for? This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We are in the stretch of the year where people take inventory. And if you're anything like the folks who write to me consistently, there's a thing that you've been carrying around stuffed in your back pocket. Maybe it's a coaching practice or a newsletter or a project you keep describing to your friends, but you never end up building. Listen, another year of describing it isn't the same thing as starting it. And that's where Squarespace comes in, because it's genuinely the shortest distance between that idea and something real. 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I've been doing a lot of it lately. Las Vegas, Bodega Bay, and NorCal, South Florida, Austin, New Mexico. And my favorite thing about my favorite thing is ditching the map and the GPS and just discovering cool, off-the-beaten-path spots on my morning runs. Coffee bars, independent book and record stores, vintage shops. And as always, I stayed and will stay in someone's home. Because my non-negotiables travel with me. A real kitchen for my nutrition, proximity to a legitimate gym, and a place with some actual personality. And every time I stay in somebody's place, the same thought lands. While I'm here, my home is sitting there empty, doing nothing. When the reality is, you can list your space on Airbnb when you're away. And the details you already love about your own home, the things that make it unmistakably yours, are exactly what some traveler is hoping to find. It's especially worth considering when big events come to your town and travelers are looking for the comfort of a real home. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. I think what I'm missing is more kind of community-based interaction, like groups of people, you know, like because of, because of like, you know, we have a bit of an empty nest now and we do live in this kind of quiet part of the, of town here. And so I'm pretty good when it comes to like, really deep stuff and with my old friends. But new friends, more casual, more casual. But new friends, more casual kind of relationships, activity-based stuff, you know, run clubs serve the same purpose. You know, I think there's also, and I'm interested in what the science says about this, like the idea of participating in a, in, in vigorous physical activity with other people, something about having an elevated heart rate or, or like focusing on a, on executing a skill when you're with other people. That's obviously conducive to a lot of ease in, you know, kind of taking away the anxiety of a new interaction. But I also think it lends itself to depth. Like some of the best conversations I've had, often with people I don't know that well, is out on a long run. And you just, there's something about it, like where you just start opening up and like suddenly you're having this incredible conversation that makes you feel much more connected to that person. And I've always been curious, like, is there some, some kind of dopaminergic or hormonal thing that occurs when you're in that, you know, kind of low grade, elevated aerobic state? Yeah, I think you're onto something important here. So I think intense shared experiences accelerate connection. We have lots of evidence for that. And part of that is because when your hearts are racing in unison, it creates a feeling of synchrony. You feel like, you know, we're literally moving in lockstep and we're in harmony together. We have a shared purpose. We are kind of on the same path and we also don't have the same, we don't have the pressure of having to lock eyes. Especially for introverts, eye contact can be extremely overstimulating. And I think sometimes just like, you know, staring ahead at the road, you're like, okay, sweating together is social grease. And, you know, we can just like, we can chat without worrying about how is, what am I saying going to be evaluated? And if I, if I express some vulnerability, is the other person going to judge me as weak or are they going to see that as an act of courage? It's just easier to be in a shared flow state where you're not second guessing or self-monitoring all the time. Another thing I've been thinking a lot about is the value of our digital interactions. Like it's easy to be dismissive of them altogether. Like, okay, this is obviously contributing to loneliness and isolation and, you know, all these things that we've, we've touched on a little bit here. But I have ongoing text conversations with people that I've connected with online that I've never met and maybe never will meet. And they do, there is something nourishing about that. You know, I'm talking to this person that I always wanted to meet, maybe I'll never meet them, but short of this platform, that wouldn't have even been possible. And also recognizing that like my whole career sort of like emerged out of these platforms that are now, you know, kind of notable for the way that we, they have driven us apart. I think there's something to that. I think one of my mentors, Jane Dutton studied high quality connections and she, one of her big findings was that momentary enjoyable interactions actually add to our wellbeing, even if there's not a relationship that comes out of them. And I think that a lot of us are overlooking that. I think like we, we minimize friction. Like you don't want to have to say hi to the Uber driver or to the barista. But those kinds of pleasant exchanges, they actually have a meaningful effect. They allow you to feel seen. They allow you to feel hopeful about human nature. And I think there's no reason why they can't happen digitally. I think the expectation though is often that, okay, if I haven't converted this communication into a lasting bond that I've failed, no, it's perfectly okay to have a nice interaction with somebody and then not build a relationship out of it. Talk a little bit about first impressions. You have some interesting, somewhat contrarian thoughts on this. This idea that on first, you know, on, on, on first brush, you kind of get a read of somebody and our intuition kicks in like, yeah, this is somebody I want to get to know better or they're not. Then we have kind of organizational structures around this speed dating and the like, where do, where do our intuitions lead us astray? And what is it that you want to say about what, what's lacking in terms of relying too much on that for the future of our relationship? I think the big mistake we make when we form a first impression of people is we've only seen a slice of their personality. We've seen a particular pattern in a particular context. and that may not be what they show up like if we were to meet them in a different setting or if we were to talk about them, if we were to talk with them about a different topic. So I think often about examples of great friendships and collaborations that almost didn't happen at all because people misperceived each other. Yeah, you have a series of examples in the book. I mean, so let's take some easy examples. Let's take the two computer science students who met on a Stanford orientation tour and could not stand each other. They found each other extremely obnoxious and they got into these very petty arguments. And then fast forward a year or two, they're in the computer lab together and they realize they both think search is really inefficient. And Larry and Sergey build Google together. They clashed in one context where they each wanted to one up the other and kind of prove their status and intelligence. But now they have a shared project and they become great allies. Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, similar example. But the one that you really dig into is this C.S. Lewis relationship with Tolkien. Yeah, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, first of all, if they had not become the best of friends, we would not have the Narnia series and we would not have the Lord of the Rings. They were basically both academics who rode on the side as a hobby. Neither was really succeeding at it. And it wasn't clear that they were ever gonna pursue it professionally until they started encouraging each other. But their relationship almost never got off the ground because they met at a faculty meeting and C.S. Lewis goes home that night and writes in his journal that Tolkien needs a smack or so. And he thinks he's insufferable. He thinks that he is pompous. He thinks that he has these very old fashioned ideas about how literature should be taught. And it isn't until months later where they're on opposite sides of a big fight over the English curriculum at Oxford, Lewis ends up showing up at an Icelandic myth discussion that Tolkien is leading. And he goes because he's always liked Norse gods. And he sees a completely different side of Tolkien. He sees instead of being serious, he's playful. Instead of being judgmental and dogmatic, he's open-minded when talking about these myths. And they end up walking back from this basically book club together and staying up until about 2.30 a.m. talking about Thor and their pals instantly. And that opens the door for them to become each other's most important sounding board for ideas. They challenge each other to actually try to write science fiction stories. And those stories go on to plant the seeds of their greatest accomplishments. And it would just be so easy to freeze frame and say, all right, you didn't like each other in that faculty meeting. As academics, you're done. This is never gonna work. But guess what? You talk about Norse mythology, and lo and behold, there is an opportunity to develop compatibility. So the lesson that you extract from that for all of us is? Well, I think the big lesson is we should think differently about people's personalities. I think I was trained originally to think about personality as a set of relatively stable traits. So I'm an introvert. I am highly agreeable. I like to get along with people. I am extremely conscientious and goal-oriented, and you expect me to be that way all the time. But we all have these if-then signatures where in different contexts or different situations, different aspects of us come out. So if I'm on a stage, suddenly I don't look as much like an introvert anymore. And my inner extrovert emerges. If I believe that you're wrong about a matter of social science, I might sound extremely disagreeable and become a logic bully. And I'm basically trying to defend a principle that's important to me, which is intellectual integrity and the pursuit of truth. But you will see a part of my personality that is not my default. If I am playing paddle with this group of friends that I really enjoy, I might actually become less goal-oriented and not worry about whether I win, although that's pretty rare for me. But I think we should look at other people in terms of, okay, I saw a particular then. What is the if that brought that out in them? And then if I didn't like it, are there different ifs that could have listed a different then? Right, we meet somebody, maybe they're having a bad day or they're in a specific set of circumstances that are creating the set of conditions to manifest a trait that you don't like. And then we project that trait onto them as being a constant, as opposed to saying, well, this is context-specific. Let me give this person a break. I mean, I think that requires a little bit of humility on our part, like a moment to like step back and exercise like a reservation of judgment. Like we make judgment calls all the time and we do it generally with little to no evidence to support whatever that judgment is. But once we make it, it becomes fairly intractable and difficult to then kind of backpedal. That is very well put. That's what I should have said. It reminds me of, there's that saying, I think it's Maya Angelou, who said, when people show you who they are, believe them. And I think people are too quick to accept that at face value. I think somebody engages in one behavior you don't like and all of a sudden, you're supposed to judge their entire character based on that? No, I think what we should take away from that message is much more nuanced. It's when somebody shows you who they are consistently over time and across different situations, then you should believe them. But let's not overgeneralize. You saw somebody do something you didn't like in one moment. That may not be the defining moment of their life. And then the next step from there is how do you create sustained connection with somebody who doesn't see the world the way that you do? Which is really kind of the core disease that we're all suffering from right now. Yeah, it's a huge problem right now. The study that I think really shocked me the most was the average person would rather interact with a stranger who shares their politics than a friend who doesn't. I think you just completely misunderstood the meaning of friend. The whole point of being friends is to say, I respect enough about you and your values that I can accept that we might not agree on everything. You have three quotes that kind of define or delineate the themes of the book, but one of them is similarity is not necessary for solidarity. I even believe it. I think a lot of people assume that similarity attracts. And there is some truth to that. So you are more likely to gravitate toward people who have similar personality traits to you, who have similar backgrounds. The fact that you and I both come from water sports and come from Michigan is an immediate draw. Once similarity has brought us together, it has no ongoing influence on our likelihood of becoming close or staying close. And what matters is not whether we are similar, it's whether we feel similar. And what that depends on is basically us building compatibility. It's us developing a shared interest in what happened and you can see everything. And what can we learn about Elizabeth Holmes from this extended observation of somebody who seems to believe her own lies? You and I get fascinated about that together and we go deep on it together. And all of a sudden now we've created a sense of similarity, but it doesn't matter whether we were objectively similar or not. The unique obstacle of our time is the fact that we can go on somebody's social media platform and scroll through all the things that they've said, dating back years and years and years. And this is contributing to forming a kind of view of their theory of mind. And then we make a judgment on that before we've even met them. And we layer that over them as a template for who this person is prior to even having our first authentic interaction with them. Before all of this, obviously, we could meet people the way that they are. We didn't know everybody's opinion on every single thing before we met them. And so now we have to contend with that and overcome this thing just to do what we did naturally prior to all this nonsense. That's so true. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this, but I think you just captured something really important, which is people are almost using your history on social media as a reference check. And they're trying to pre-cancel you. They're looking for a reason to already conclude we're not a fit. We're not gonna match. As opposed to saying, you know what, everybody is more than the most unpleasant opinion that they've shared. And some people have even left their old opinions out there because they wanna remind themselves that they're not proud of every thought they've had. And they shouldn't internalize every idea that comes into their head. Nor should they necessarily believe every emotion that enters their heart. And I think we're pretty good at giving ourselves that grace and saying, oh yeah, I was much less mature then. Or I've grown a lot since then. But we don't extend that same grace to others. And I think we do that at our own peril. I think we also, and you get into this in the book as well, we look at that and we say, all right, well, this is the way this person sees the world. This is what they think. And we then make the leap to say that this is how they're going to behave. So there's this whole thing in the book about acceptance, like how can we accept people and reserve our judgment while also setting a boundary around behavior. And these two things are very different. But by being able to differentiate these two things, it gives us a way in to connect with people. We can not be okay with how they're behaving in certain ways but we can accept their differences in comparison to ours. That was an aha moment for me when I met my favorite basketball player, Joe Dumars. I'd grown up, he was my favorite player on the bad boys. He was the good guy on the bad boys. And Jody had the really interesting experience of having to corral Dennis Rodman, not an easy task. And then later when he was in the front office, he traded for Rashid Wallace, who was the most volatile player in the NBA. And an NBA legend actually called him and said, don't do this. This guy is gonna, he's just gonna destroy the vibe on your team. And I think Joe understood something that I didn't, which is he said, look, this guy's got a hot temper. And instead of trying to reject that, I can accept that. And so in his first conversation with Rashid, he picks him up from the airport. He says, listen, I understand that you're gonna fly off the handle if you think a ref makes a bad call. And I accept that. That's okay, you can do that. What I can't have is you getting a technical foul in the fourth quarter. I cannot have you getting kicked out of the game when the game is on the line. And so can you contain whatever outbursts you're gonna have to the first three quarters? And Rashid said, I got you, Jody. And he proceeded to have not only an amazing half season, but help lead the Pistons to the NBA championship. And I think this idea of saying, I accept your personality, I accept your preferences, I understand that you have these tendencies, but let me contain the damage. Here are behaviors you might engage in that are not okay. Here are situations where expressing that aspect of your personality is not okay. It's such an effective way to deal with people's vices, to say, I'm not gonna eliminate your vices, but I can put them in a box and make sure that they don't cause a lot of harm. There's also a lot that goes into how you communicate that message so that it can be received and accepted by the person who's hearing it, right? Yeah, I think when psychologists study how to get people to change in marriages, they actually find that if you communicate acceptance, your partner is more likely to change. And so my wife, Alison, does this very effectively with me. She used to try to get me to stop being late for everything. And now what she says is, I understand you have a habit of running late. I understand that you get into a flow state and you lose track of time. I understand that you don't mind if people are late and you expect the same of other people. Here are situations where that's not okay. We cannot show up late to a dinner party where the food is either gonna get cold or get burned. We can't show up late when a bunch of people are waiting for you. An event can't start without you. Those are situations where it's really important to be on time. And I react so much less defensively when she starts with, I accept that this is part of you. This episode is brought to you by Freaks of Nature. Here is the thing almost everybody gets wrong about sunscreen. We treat it like beach equipment, like something that you pack. But UV exposure is cumulative, you guys, and it does not take the winter off. The cold, the overcast morning ride, the hike at altitude, the hours in the car, the low winter sun straight in your face. These things matter. Your skin is absorbing all of it quietly all year long, which means the people who actually protect their skin aren't the ones who only remember to do it in July. They're the ones who are still wearing it in January. 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And so for listeners of the show, Seed right now is offering an exclusive 25% off your first order of DS01 Daily Symbiotic when you enter the promo code RICHROLL25 at checkout. This gets into how to manage disagreement in a healthy way. And I think what happens in most cases is we pivot to some degree of avoidance. There's a conflict, a blow-up, and then we kind of recede into the background. We make a judgment call like, okay, well, I don't want to deal with that person anymore. Or I don't want to deal with that issue. Let's agree to disagree. Yeah, like, right. And just kind of walking away from it, too sheepish to engage with the idea. And a big call to action in the book is like, listen, we have to figure out how to fight in a productive way, in a constructive fashion, and have the hard conversations. And when we do that, we actually emerge from that. Maybe we still don't have a meeting of the minds, but there is connective tissue that takes place. But for many people, and myself included, being kind of an avoidant personality, this is a very difficult thing. It's a very fear-inducing thing. And underneath that fear is like, well, if I say what I really think, then I'll be abandoned. Or this is going to be very unpleasant, and it's not going to go well. We're making our own judgments about a future that has yet to transpire. Yeah, I think a lot of people struggle with this. And I think I would put a few things on the table here to try to change. At least, here's what's helped me think about this differently. First of all, if you look at the research on marriages, it doesn't matter how often you fight. It's how constructively you fight that predicts whether you stay together or split up, and also how satisfied you are in your marriage. And so we don't actually need to worry about, oh, no, are we arguing too often? The question is, can we argue in ways that still show love and respect? And it turns out this is not as hard as most people think. There are ways to fight that keep you on the same side. It's you and the other person against the problem, as opposed to you against each other. And my favorite, probably, demonstration of this is there have been about a dozen experiments where people are encouraged to confront someone that they're currently biting their tongue and being honest with. And so it might be a friend, a co-worker, a family member. You're supposed to tell them a hard truth. Some people are randomly assigned to do this. Others aren't. And the question is, what happens in a week or two afterward? A week or two later, on average, you feel closer to the person that you've confronted, and they feel closer to you, too. You have shown that you care enough about your relationship that you want to be honest with them. I think a relationship in which you can't be candid is actually not a relationship. It's a charade. And I think a lot of us are afraid that we're going to damage the relationship if we speak our minds. But in reality, those conflicts are more likely to strengthen the bond than they are to disintegrate it. And the reason for that is when you have to work through a problem together, you are making a commitment to hear each other. You are making a real investment in trying to improve the relationship. We sometimes forget to convey that, or we make the mistake of saying, never go to bed angry. And then you only fight when you're angry and tired, which is not a good recipe for healthy conflict. But if you remember that what causes conflict to go south is not the message you deliver. It's often the motives that the other person perceives. You can make it really clear, Rich, I've been actually worrying about having this conversation with you because I really care about our relationship and I don't want to do anything to jeopardize it. Rich, I want to have the kind of bond with you where you can be honest with me and I feel I owe you that in return. And I feel like I've been letting you down by not getting something off my chest. That kind of statement makes it very clear. I am putting myself in a situation that makes me uncomfortable because I care about us and I care about you. You have this illustrated graphic cartoon in the book of two people having an argument and in between is a squiggle that represents the problem, but they're going at each other. And then by distinction, you have them aligned and then they're both looking at the squiggle as the problem, like we're together and we're going to solve this problem. So it's extracting the problem from the interpersonal dynamic. Another way, or maybe this is a related idea that was a big epiphany for me, is how to engage in kind of a constructive disagreement in a way that isn't identity threatening. I think we kind of commingle our identity into these arguments and that's what's making them heated because we feel like the person is being attacked or challenged as opposed to an idea that the person has or a behavior that the person has. And this is a big piece in recovery also. It's like the addiction is not the person. The person could be a perfectly good person. They have this condition that makes them behave in a certain way. Let's focus on resolving and solving and healing this behavior and what's caught the underlying like kind of condition that is giving rise to the behavior. That's a great parallel. I think one of the things that people do constantly, I learned this actually about a quarter century ago. I went through conflict mediation training and I thought if I could learn to help other people resolve their conflicts, I would be less avoidant myself and it partially worked because as I help people try to resolve their conflicts, I saw that that was a muscle they needed to build and I was basically letting that muscle atrophy by never leveling with other people. And so the idea of just saying to somebody, hey, I'm going to tell you something that upset me about your behavior because I respect you as a person, because I care about you as a person. Like, oh, I can communicate that at the same time. What most people do is they say things like, I love you, but no, I love you and therefore I'm going to tell you this. On some level, this is illustrated through this roller coaster that you've been on with Brene Brown. It's been one of the best roller coaster rides I've ever been on. Like having this kind of colossal conflict and then feeling like the relationship was kind of irreparable to now you like hosting a podcast together. Okay, so 2016, I wrote a New York Times piece critiquing the way that people respond to authenticity and I think a lot of times people use, I'm just being myself as a smokescreen to be disrespectful or unkind and I was critiquing that and Brene had the best definition of authenticity that I'd ever seen. And so I quoted her and I thought it was a shout out, only I quoted her out of context and that's happened to her repeatedly throughout her career and it did not land well for her and she came back swinging and then I responded swinging and I came out of that very public fight with somebody I'd met once for five minutes in a green room before a speaking event. I swore I would never talk to her again and I didn't know it, but she was also, she was very displeased with me. Because you thought she was too angry or because you felt like you were too enervated by the whole thing? I was definitely judging and blaming her. How could you take this intellectual argument and make it personal? And why did you go on the attack when I was trying to start an important conversation? And I think she looked at me, I now know, and said, here goes another quantitative social scientist misquoting and misrepresenting qualitative research and doing it in a way, by the way, that might do a disservice to women. And not realizing this is a perfect if-then situation. In this context, she's going to react in this way simply because she has a long history of this and this is what, you know, really agitates her more than anything, but you not knowing that. I had no idea I was pushing one of her buttons and then she pushed one of mine back. I thought she was in kind of preacher-prosecutor mode as opposed to thinking scientifically, which we talked about last time we were together. And that could have been the end of it. We literally did not interact for four years. And in the interim, people I like and respect kept saying, you know, I think you're really misjudging Brene Brown. I think she's brilliant, she's extremely generous and caring, she's humble, she's very eager to find out if she might be wrong because she wants to get it right. And I just rolled my eyes over and over again. I'm like, no, I don't think you know Brene. So much for the inner scientist. Exactly. I was not curious at all about whether my hypotheses might be wrong. And then in 2020, I got a call from the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team. And they basically wanted to work on their vibe and try to strengthen their team collaboration and culture. And it was the middle of the pandemic and I didn't get as much on-site time with them as I wanted. And so I decided we're going to do a Zoom speaker series and we're going to try to bring in different experts who will really help all of us learn how we can become a stronger team. So I survey all the players and I say, if you could have anybody on earth speak to you, who would you want to learn from? The most common answer by far is Brene Brown. And I was like, my nemesis, no! But I'm all in for Team USA. I want to do everything I can to try to help them win a gold medal. And so I reached out to Brene and I explained the situation and I said, would you be willing to help them? Did you acknowledge the beef in that email? No. No, I didn't know how to bring it up. I felt like it had been too long and we didn't have enough of a connection. And so I just asked, would you be willing to do this? She replied right away and said yes. She showed up early. She went above and beyond to help the team and also me. And I saw a completely different side of her. At what point did you guys sit down and walk through what had happened? Did she just show up and you guys were both pretending like nothing had happened for a while? We did the thing over Zoom and we just, yeah, we didn't even talk about it. It was an elephant in the room. And then I invited her onto my podcast and she invited me onto hers. And I think I was on hers and at the very end I said, it's up to you whether you want to run this or not. But I just wanted to apologize because I quoted your work out of context and I didn't realize I was doing it, but my intentions are not relevant here. I understand the impact that it had on you and I'm sorry for that. And I'm committed to making sure I represent you accurately in the future. And she seemed to appreciate that. She thanked me. She apologized then for maybe responding a little bit emotionally, but that was the end of it. And we never really talked about it until we sat down to start a podcast together earlier this year and said, maybe we should really dig into this. At some point you did recognize that you had taken what she had said out of context. So there was that epiphany. Was that the result of the Zooms you were doing with this team? Because once you then realize that, then I would imagine at some point you're like, okay, I recognize my side of the street here that needs some repair. Yeah. Yeah. I think what happened was we did the conversation with the soccer team and then I was just so taken aback by, I knew how smart she was. I knew she was going to drop wisdom. I wasn't prepared for the complete rethinking of my opinions of her character that I was about to do. And it hit me hard. I was like, wow, not only was I wrong about her, I was backward. And so then I went back and re-read our exchange and I wasn't pissed off and I saw it much more through her eyes and I realized, yeah, I dropped her into the middle of this with no warning and I was not thoughtful at all about how I did it. And that was a mistake on my part and I need to own it. We've all had interactions similar to this, where there's some kind of miscommunication that creates a rift. Two people move apart from each other and generally it never gets mended, right? And you're somebody who kind of knows better than everyone. You should have been able to identify this immediately and go into reparation mode. You didn't. You went on this journey. It all ended well. But to me, what I see is this default setting that all of us have as human beings, even somebody who studies this stuff and has such a wealth of knowledge and understanding about the way the human mind works. We just can't see ourselves clearly. We can identify where our friends and other people are kind of moving in the wrong direction or where, hey, maybe you should think about it this way or you should call that person and say this. But when it comes to our own behavior, we're just unbelievably myopic and we're also resistant to being told otherwise. And we have our version of the story and we tell our friends that version and they affirm it and then we become more and more entrenched in that narrative. And then it becomes this thing that can, you know, that becomes very, very difficult to overcome. I, it's funny, I'm it's almost amusing how often I find myself violating. the very things I study and teach. And I even noticed early in my career that in a teaching semester, I was less hypocritical than in a non-teaching semester, because I teach a class on escalation of commitment to a losing course of action, where you make a decision, it doesn't work out as you hoped, but then instead of rethinking it, you double down, and it's not just a sunk cost issue, it's not just an economic problem, it's an ego and emotion problem. Yeah, this is identity-threatening. Big time, I wanna prove to myself and everybody else that I am a good decision maker, and I am a smart, competent person. And what would it mean if you were proven otherwise, given the position and the degree of authority that you hold over this subject matter? Devastating, but I find myself teaching escalation of commitment. And then in the back of my mind is this, am I escalating my commitment to this feud with Brene Brown right now? Am I guilty of the very thing that I'm trying to warn my students about? Maybe. And this reminds me a little bit of, have you come across Solomon's paradox ever? Tell me. It's one of my favorite findings in psychology. So it's named after King Solomon, who apparently gave wise advice sometimes, but couldn't manage his own decisions at all. The finding is that we often give better advice to other people than we show good judgment when we're making decisions for ourselves. And so how can we be wise when we're advising, but foolish when we're choosing is the big question. And study after study has shown, yeah, you give somebody else guidance on their choice and you are full of wisdom, but now you have to make your own choice and you're kind of ignorant and incompetent. And the main reason this happens from the data I've read is that when you're making a choice for yourself, you tend to be stuck in the weeds. And you're kind of zooming in on all of these specific criteria. Whereas when you advise others, you zoom out and you can see the big picture and just say, look, here are the two or three most important perspectives to pay attention to here. And so I think one thing we could take away from this body of research is if you're ever struggling on a decision or you're trying to figure out how to get out of a conflict, you should walk somebody else through your guidance on what to do and then take your own advice because the advice you give to others is usually the advice you need to take for yourself. Yeah, I mean, the antidote is surrounding yourself with people you trust, whose judgment you trust and having an open dialogue about what you're going through and soliciting their input to make sure that you are thinking correctly and to hold yourself accountable to better actions. I mean, this is a benefit of like being in recovery. I'm surrounded with people that are telling me when I'm off track and I have a men's group and we run our decisions by each other. Like I have so many blind spots and it's amazing. I've been doing this for like 10 years, this men's group and we're just all in these patterns, and despite like the feedback that we give each other, it's like, we'll find ourselves doing the same thing again and again and again. Like it's so challenging to step off whatever that hamster wheel of kind of embedded behavior patterns that we all are kind of blind to in our own lives. But I also think the benefit of that is learning how to receive feedback. And I think in my experience and observation, like most people are not very good at this. Like they don't really want feedback. They want affirmation of what it is that they wanna do. And I think this goes back to the identity piece. Like negative feedback is identity challenging as opposed to here's a problem or a creative project that I wanna make better. Like if you're a creative person and you're writing a play or you have a comedy routine or you're editing a film, like you bring people in you trust, you're like, okay, what's not working about? It's not helpful for them to say, this is great. You wanna know like, okay, how do I fix this? And you're not threatened by that because everybody wants the best for this project. And if you can think of whatever decision you have to make or a problem that you're trying to resolve as a creative project and detach your identity from it so you're not threatened by the counsel of other people, it seems like a much better way to navigate the situations and avoid stepping into potholes. I think that's a great reframe. I think that's easier to do when you're more confident in your skills. I think often about this research showing that novices actually seem to rely more on praise because they're just looking for encouragement to say, you can do this. Whereas when you become an expert, you're more interested in criticism. And you don't wanna know- You also become more calcified around your opinions. If you've been successful, you're like, well, I know how to do this. Far be it from this person to like, tell me I'm not doing it right. I think that's both a risk and unfortunately a common trap that people fall in. And I think a lot of people get caught up in trying to prove themselves instead of looking to improve themselves. I wanna talk about messy relationships. We have our best friends, our BFFs, we have acquaintances, we have colleagues, all different types of relationships to your point of not narrowly defining friendship. But most of us also have people in our lives that we kinda like having around and we get something out of it. But also like there's a lot of drama there. Maybe they're a frenemy. Should I stay friends with this person? Should I create a boundary? What is your thinking around how to navigate this type of scenario? Well, several decades of evidence show that when it comes to both your happiness and your physical health, frenemies are actually worse than enemies. And I think a lot of people find this surprising. They think the most toxic person in your life has to be somebody who's always an adversary and who's constantly putting you down and bad-mouthing you behind your back and undermining you. But what the research shows is that ambivalent relationships, where you have mixed feelings toward other people, are actually worse for your well-being because they're unpredictable. You don't know whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde is gonna show up. You don't know whether you should move in for a hug or brace yourself for a brawl. I think people have this all the time with their in-laws. They belittle your parenting, but they're also really good to your kids. And so how should you feel about them? You don't know. You spend all this time and energy trying to predict what's gonna happen and to resolve your uncertainty about it, and that can actually take a toll physiologically. There are experiments where people are brought into the lab to interact with somebody that they have an ambivalent relationship with, and their blood pressure actually spikes more. Their heart rate spikes more. And it's also true that the more ambivalent ties you have in your life, the greater your risk for cardiovascular disease because these mixed feelings about other people where you really like their virtues, but you can't stand their vices, that is an enormous amount of strain to put on yourself over time. You're in this low-grade stress situation perpetually. Chronically, yeah. So the solution is identify your frenemies and break up with them? What are you saying? I mean, this can't apply when you're dealing with extended family and relatives, et cetera. I think the zeitgeist response to that right now, I think the ideas that are popular in our culture are ghost, no contact, cut them off. And I think sometimes that is a healthy response if you have the option. But I think in other cases, if you like their vices, you could try to figure out how do you minimize their virtues? Or how do you even find the virtue in their vices? I had a funny example of this recently. I met, a friend of mine introduced me to her husband at an event I was hosting. And she said, I didn't bring him the last two years because he has no filter. And I'm worried that he's gonna offend a lot of people. But he's my favorite person on earth. So I immediately wanna know, how is this completely unfiltered person your favorite person on earth? And she says, I never have to wonder whether he's telling me the truth. He's incapable of lying. Like whatever thought is in his head is gonna come out of his mouth. And because of that, I know he's extraordinarily high integrity. That reframe can make a relationship less ambivalent. Instead of wandering around with this person who's constantly embarrassing you, you're walking around with somebody who's honest to a fault. What was the most surprising thing that you discovered delving into this world of connection? Oh, there's so many surprises, so many. Okay, most surprising finding for me is, we are constantly in settings where we meet new people or have the chance to meet new people, but aren't sure what to do. So you show up at a mixer or a dinner party or a conference. And we think that we're gonna build bridges, but most people actually just hang out with their old friends. People don't mix at mixers because we're afraid of getting rejected. We're afraid of having an awkward conversation. And so we just play it safe. This experiment I read sort of blew my mind, Rich. It's an experiment where people are going to an IT conference. And they're given a list of people to meet. 16 people go and try to find these people. And if you follow them about a year later, they are significantly more likely to have gotten a new job because they met those 16 people and some of them had leads and they were able to change jobs. And that's kind of neat, right? We give people a little bit of structure and direction. And all of a sudden, they make friends and allies and pals that they wouldn't have otherwise. What I did not see coming in this study is the 16 people were chosen at random. There was no matchmaking here. It wasn't, well, let me find the Michigan swimmer who also has overcome addiction for Rich to meet. It was literally, we've got a list of 1,000 people coming. I'm gonna pick 16 arbitrarily. And it didn't matter who was on the list. Just having that little nudge, knowing, okay, there's somebody that was suggested for me. And also they're expecting me to come find them was enough to help people overcome the barrier of introducing themselves. So the takeaway from that is what specifically? Like, it's not necessarily about some preset shared set of interests. It's about the sort of environmental dynamic and context that is creating the conditions for a greater degree of intimate conversation and therefore connection. Jackpot, compatibility is not something you have to select on in advance. It's something you built. And if you have just that little bit of motivation to go and meet somebody, you can find common ground with almost anybody. One of the things that was interesting for me in the book is what you had to say about some of our deepest and most kind of important longstanding relationships. And as somebody at my age, I know what it's like to lose touch with these people that you care about. The phone gets heavy. You really wanna connect with them, but so much time has transpired and it's easier just to go another day and then a year passes. Then we have that experience when we do pick up the phone or we're at some event and we see that person and we pick up right where we left off. And there's no like small talk. You're just like right where you were 20 years ago, and it's amazing. And you feel deeply connected to that person, which speaks to this idea that you talk about, which is depth is more important than like frequency or duration. Yeah, a lot of people hesitate to reconnect because they think it's just been too long. And they think they've violated some imaginary standard of if we haven't texted at least once a week, we haven't seen each other once a month, we're no longer friends. Or that person's angry or stewing in resentment. Yeah, because you dropped me. Exactly, but those are unspoken norms. And it turns out a lot of people don't subscribe to them. And it doesn't matter how often we've been in touch. What matters is how much we care about each other, how much we respect each other, whether we have a foundation of common interests or experiences together. And a lot of people, even in some of these studies, people are asked to write a note to reconnect with somebody that they would love to get back in contact with. And still many people don't send it because they're just afraid that it's not gonna go well. And I think one of the best things that I've learned from actually trying to live this myself is oxytocin, the love hormone or the bonding chemical that we all experience, it's released when you hear people's voices, but not when you read their messages. As one of the, I think the easiest things you can do if you wanna reconnect with somebody that you've lost touch with is record a voice note and send it to them. You don't have to deal with then the anxiety and awkwardness of, are they gonna answer my call? And what are we gonna talk about? You just record a little message that says, hey, I know it's been a while. I miss you. I've been thinking of you. Here's why I appreciate the role you've played in my life. Here's an article I read that I thought you would love. I just watched a movie that I think would be right up your alley. Would love to catch up and then see how they reply. I've actually been practicing that recently. And it's been a really cool experiment. I do it in the gym in the morning. I'll reflect on somebody I care about, or maybe I saw some posts they left on social media, or I got some update, or I saw them in something, and I just leave them a voice note saying, oh, I saw that, I thought it was really cool. I was thinking about it. No expectation of them getting back to me and completely detached from any expectations of anything coming from it, just out of the generosity of spirit and heart. And not because it's their birthday, or there's this occasion, or this sort of socially imposed obligation. Like, oh, I just genuinely woke up and I was thinking about you, blah. And it takes like five seconds. And I try to do at least one of those every morning, if not two or three. And it's been remarkable. What are you hearing back from people? I mean, some people don't get back, or they're busy, or they'll get back later. And yeah, it's just, it's, I mean, everybody, I think fundamentally, I'm curious what you think about this. I think everybody just wants to be seen and understood. Honestly, like that is what's animating all of us, right? If somebody would just understand me, if they would see me the way that I actually am, and to the extent. extent that you can kind of find a way to see that person and let them know that you see them and understand them. Like that's so, that can be so meaningful for somebody and to do it not in a transactional spirit, but just out of pure generosity. Like I feel better. Like it doesn't even matter. Like if I'm, it's like when you, it's the inverse of that is like making your amends in recovery. Like you make your amends. It's not about how they react to it. You know, like you're doing it for your own sobriety and how they choose to receive that is totally their business. Similarly, in a positive fashion, like I do that and like I'm totally detached for how they receive it. I know it makes me feel good. I know that I want to be seen and understood and not taken out of context or misinterpreted. And to the extent that you can do that for somebody, it's, it's like a beautiful gift and it's so easy. It really is. And yeah, I think even, even though the written message is sometimes less powerful, it can, it can still make a huge difference. I remember my first semester of grad school, it was 2003 and the winter holidays came around and I just, I started feeling lonely. I felt like I had left college where so many people that I really liked and enjoyed were within walking distance and now everyone had dispersed. It felt like my community had fallen apart and I hadn't yet found my niche or my people in grad school. And I remember I was just, I was sitting, I was sitting in at my desk one day and I thought, who are the most important people in my life? And I started making a list of them and I started writing each of them an email about why I appreciated them. And I just started sending a few a day and it's probably the most immediate mood boost I've ever gotten from anything I've done. Um, just the act of sending them. It was, it was meaningful to me to say, Hey, I don't think I've ever told you why you matter to me. And the responses that came back like were from a bunch of people that I kind of now I would say they were allies and pals and it opened a whole channel of companionship. Yeah, that's cool. Um, we're running out of time. I gotta let you go here, but I'm not going to let you go without two last things. The first thing is given your understanding of how to create and foster understanding between individuals and now everything you have to say about how scaling that understanding into greater connection, what would you do if you were given the opportunity to let's say solve an intractable social problem? Like you get a call from the white house, come to the Capitol and help us resolve, um, brinksmanship so that we can pass laws and legislate and get over ourselves and you know, reach across the aisle. Like what would you do in that context? Or perhaps you're being flown to camp David and you're going to help broker a peace treaty, uh, in the Middle East. Like we have decades of, of, of like our inability to resolve these problems that have, that have so many kind of downstream, you know, very real world implications. So with your expertise, now you're in charge. How are you constructing a dynamic that could be conducive to solutions that, you know, we have yet to kind of implement in our, in our kind of like systemic, uh, institutions that are, that are creating all these issues for us. I don't have a silver bullet. I wish I did. I, I think there are some steps you could take that would increase the probability of, of peace or of collaboration. But let's just be clear that the base rate of success in intractable conflict is really low. And so even if we're improving the probability, it may still be low. I think where I would probably start is to say we want to get people to bond on multiple wavelengths. And so I'm going to design some ally interactions, some pal connections and some companionship moments too. Um, I think the best research on this that I've seen is a study of, um, seeds of peace. So seeds of peace is a camp in Maine that brings together Palestinian and Israeli teenagers to actually talk about solutions to the conflict. And I don't think there's an expectation that anybody's going to resolve the major issues in the Middle East there. What they want to do is build lasting relationships between future leaders so that one day if they have the opportunity to come to the table together, they're willing to sit there and hear each other and work together. And there is remarkable evidence from seeds of peace showing that if you happen to be in the same discussion group as a Palestinian and an Israeli camper, that you are 15 times more likely to become friends. Actually discussing the hard issues about like who has this right to land and who is responsible for escalating the conflict that is more effective in building a real friendship between people who come from warring countries than eating together, bunking together or socializing together. And what I would do is obviously that has to be carefully facilitated, but I think that we, we often just don't listen to the people that we fundamentally disagree with and people will say, well, I won't listen to someone who doesn't, who denies my right to exist. I won't listen to someone who's an enemy. Like how do we think not listening to Putin goes for us? You actually need to understand the people who are most opposed to you in order to figure out how to deal with them. And so I would say we need to sit people down for hard conversations and I'd set a rule. You're not allowed to interrupt each other. You have to listen to the quote unquote other side, explain where they are and how they arrived at the point of view that they've arrived at. And then they need to listen to you share that too. Ideally we're reminding the clock, we're sharing our origin stories. What was the moment when this identity became important to you? And that's hopefully a little bit humanizing from, from the research on this. But then let's think about like, how do we, how do we build more of these, these real moments for connection into our interaction? So let's become allies for at least a little bit. I would put them on a sports team together. I would ask them to build a Lego tower together. And it seems trivial, but when you actually have to work together toward a common goal, you start to respect each other a little more or at least begrudgingly see a little bit of humanity in each other. I would think about trying to find a musician they both, both love. And playing that music and seeing how they respond to each other, seeing that side of each other. And I don't think any of these steps are going to be game changers, but what I'm trying to do is chip away at decades of resentment. I'm trying to break down and dismantle stereotypes and I want people to look at each other and say, this is how I perceived your group. And I realized not only are you more complicated than that stereotype, but maybe I'm taking a whole group of people who should be seen in 3d and I'm flattening them into only two dimensions. And everything you just shared is applicable to organizational conflict of any kind or dynamics within an athletic team or just general interpersonal conflict. I mean, I think all of those principles are suitable for navigating differences in those contexts as well. I hope so. And I think that, you know, it may, it may be a fool's errand. You might, I think you take on intractable conflict and your odds of falling flat are pretty high, but you know what will guarantee you don't resolve it? Never making the attempt in the first place. Yeah. All right. Last thing, cause I gotta let you go. Uh, to the person, perhaps it's a young person, um, who is feeling lonely and, um, and recognizing like they don't have any friends. We've all seen the statistics, particularly with young people, uh, about, um, the D the, the sort of decreasing, uh, friendship kind of quotient that exists right now. Young people like just don't have as many friends as they used to. What is the first thing or the message that you want to convey to that person to help them kind of get outside of themselves and make a friend? I think for young people who are feeling lonely, there's no better first step than just joining a group, a club, uh, a nonprofit, uh, volunteering opportunity. Start with something you're interested in. Um, if you, if there's a sport you love, if there's a hobby you have, if there's, if you love birds, join a bird watching club and you're going to meet people who are potential pals and you're going to start feeling like allies looking for a rare bird. And some of those shared moments together, open up opportunities for companionship too. Uh, there's great evidence from the UK that you can reduce loneliness and depression as well. And also enhance happiness and belonging just by encouraging people to join some new groups and get more involved in their existing groups. Um, groups are the easiest place to find friends. They're also where we get a sense of community. And so I think pick the sport, pick the sport, pick the hobby, pick the curiosity, pick the interest, pick the skill you want to learn. Um, join a pottery class, sign up for volunteering for the make a wish foundation. Something that brings you together with other people who share your interests and your values. And there are friends waiting to be made there. Amazing advice. Uh, I appreciate you, Adam, your gift to the world, uh, vibe, everybody available everywhere. If you think you understand connection and friendships, think again, think again, like a scientist, perhaps, uh, pick up the book and hopefully, uh, we can continue this conversation. Uh, I know you gotta go, but, uh, it's been great to spend some time with you today. Thank you. Pleasure has been all mine. What are we now? I mean, are we allies? Are we pals? Uh, are we none of the above? Are we just associates? Uh, well, we're no, we're more than associates. Are we pals? I mean, I guess we, we participate in this like activity of podcasting, but you know, maybe we can scale that into something else. Uh, that, uh, which is, which is basically on me. So if you email me again about one of your events, I will be quick to respond with a, with the affirmative to that. And maybe we can like take this to the next level. I look forward to it. Bring it on. Uh, thanks man. Cheers. Thank you.