The Economics of Loneliness — with Noreena Hertz

We’re revisiting one of our favorite interviews featuring Noreena Hertz. Noreena is an economist, a bestselling author, and an Honorary Professor at the University College London. She discusses the learnings from her latest book, “The Loney Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart." We find out how loneliness impacts more than just our mental health and the second-order effects of our “contactless” world. Follow Noreena on Twitter, @noreenahertz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 1:27Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the Prop G Pod. The Hound is on vacation. I'm gone. I'm out of here. I'm going European. I'm taking August mostly off, although I was on with Anderson Cooper last night because when I'm on with AC, it's not work. Today, we are recycling one of our most important interviews, The Economics of Loneliness, with Narina Hertz. Narina is an economist, bestselling author, and honorary professor at the University College London. Narina discusses the learnings from her latest book, The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart. We find out how loneliness impacts more than just our mental health and the second-tier order effects on our contact-less world.

• 2:19Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Narina Hertz, an economist and author of The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart. Professor Hertz, let's bust right into it. Let's discuss your book, The Economics of Loneliness. How have we ended up in a situation where loneliness is costing us billions?

• 2:41Speaker 03

  So when we think about loneliness, we think about it typically as being something that affects our mental health. And it definitely does that. But loneliness is also not only damaging to our mental health and our physical health. Loneliness is as bad for us as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's also damaging our economy. It's doing that two ways. First, because of the healthcare costs that are associated with loneliness. If loneliness is making people sicker, well, there's obviously a higher healthcare cost associated to that. But also loneliness is affecting productivity in a very serious way. We know from extensive research

• 3:23Speaker 03

  that lonely workers are less productive, less efficient, less motivated, more likely to quit a company. We know that the single biggest determinant for whether someone's productive at work is whether they have a friend at work. And yet, even before the pandemic struck, 40% of office workers were lonely. One in five people said that they didn't have a single friend at work at all.

• 3:48Scott Galloway?

  So break down the actual mechanics of loneliness. Is it a function of the fact that your behaviors degrade when you don't have the guardrails or checks and balances or motivation of being around other people? Or is it that you physically and biologically get less healthy because we're pack animals and not in the proximity of others? Break down the actual biomechanics of loneliness.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  So because we are designed in evolutionary terms to be creatures of togetherness, because we are hardwired to connect, what happens is that when we are lonely, we've almost got a kind of clever systemic alert system goes off, telling us, don't be alone. So our blood pressure goes up, our pulse rate goes up, our levels of cortisol go up. Essentially, we're put into a state of fight or flight when we feel lonely. And the trouble is, of course, that in contemporary life, what happens is we don't act on that alarm signal, or many people don't act on that alarm signal,

• 4:57Speaker 03

  and so remain lonely for days or weeks or months or even longer. And it's this state of remaining lonely for protracted periods of times that is clearly associated with premature deaths, with increased rates of stroke, of heart attack, even a 64% increased rate of dementia.

• 5:20Scott Galloway?

  And what is it, let's put COVID aside for the time being, because obviously it's pretty easy to understand how COVID has created, for lack of a better term, an epidemic of loneliness. But what about our society more broadly, or the era we live in, has led to, I mean, people have been talking about loneliness as the new cancer for a while now. What is it about our society that increases the problem?

• 5:43Speaker 03

  So there are a number of reasons why even before the pandemic struck, we had built a lonely world and one in five Americans were lonely, often or always. One in five millennials said that they didn't have a single friend. So a number of factors from where we

• 5:59Scott Galloway?

  Let's just stop right there. One in five millennials say they don't have a single friend.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:04Scott Galloway?

  A single friend.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  It's a shocking statistic. And it was actually my students that first alerted me to how big a crisis loneliness was, especially interestingly amongst the young. We think about loneliness as being something that affects the elderly the most, but it's actually the young who are the loneliest.

• 6:23Scott Galloway?

  I read, I apologize, I keep interrupting you, but I read people under the age of 18, 50, the number of sub-18-year-olds who see their friends every day has been cut in half in the last 10 years.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  And I mean, there's an obvious reason for it.

• 6:41Scott Galloway?

  Yep.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  The migration to smartphones and amongst the young in particular. This really has become their form of communication with a whole host of deleterious side effects. I mean, I started my research very agnostic on the role that smartphones and social media played in today's loneliness epidemic. But having researched the subject at length for a number of years, I feel confident that it's playing a significant role, especially amongst the young. At first, it was hard to know, we saw, we had seen a correlation for some time with rising levels of loneliness amongst young people and smartphone usage amongst this same generation.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  But it was hard until about a year and a half ago to know categorically that using social media was making young people lonelier. But technology isn't the only driver. It is clearly a driver and a real driver and helps account for why the young are the loneliest generation amongst us. And yet there are other factors that play too, for sure.

• 7:45Scott Galloway?

  So how do you diagnose loneliness? How, if, if someone's listening to this podcast and they think, well, I'm not entirely sure if I'm suffering from loneliness and if it's having a negative effect on my mental or physical wellbeing. And then what can I do?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  So firstly, when I talk about loneliness, it's important to be clear, as you say, what am I actually? What do I mean by that term? And for me, loneliness is not only feeling that you're craving intimacy and the company of friends and family, but it means also feeling disconnected, disconnected from your friends and family for sure, but also disconnected from your employer, from your work colleagues, from your fellow citizens, from the government. It's about feeling invisible and uncared for by those closest to you, but also by these bigger institutions, by the state, by your workplace.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  So for me, loneliness is personal, but it's also political. Its drivers technological and often also economic. So some of the things that you, that if you answer in the affirmative might suggest to you that you're lonely might range from. I feel that I wish I had more friends, a more obvious definition, to I feel invisible, um, to I feel uncared for by my government. Those are all, um, as I define it, ways of thinking about loneliness. So I think about loneliness as an existential state as well

• 9:25Speaker 03

  as a personal one. But if you're feeling lonely in a, in even the most kind of traditional sense yourself, there are definitely things you can do. One, one of the things that there's a lot of research to show really helps if it's you who might be thinking, feeling lonely, um, is actually reach out to someone else.

• 9:48Scott Galloway?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  And that is something which we know not only makes you feel better and actually also has a health dividend, helping others has a health dividend, but it also of course makes whoever you're reaching out to feel better too. So it's a, it's a kind of win win.

• 10:07Scott Galloway?

  You touched on something that's in your book that was revelatory for me, and that is loneliness is not only a function of feeling invisible or uncared for amongst your family, friends and community, but feeling detached from your government, or, or I would say the wider, where you say the wider community, that you can feel lonely on different levels.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Um, yes. And so the first aha moment that we were in the midst of a serious loneliness crisis, even before the pandemic, was my students coming into my office in office hours and confiding in me how lonely they felt. But the second was my research, which at the time was looking at the rise of right wing populism across the globe.

• 10:51Scott Galloway?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  And as I interviewed and heard from Trump voters, railroad workers in East Tennessee, Parisian voters for Le Pen, voters in Italy for Salvini. I heard time and time again from their stories how lonely they felt. Lonely, both in the sense of feeling that they lacked a support system and friends, but also lonely in the sense of feeling forgotten and forsaken, which of course is what right-wing populists have played very effectively too, speaking to that sense of forsakenness that clearly so many people do feel,

• 11:34Speaker 03

  often with legitimate grievances on that front, for sure.

• 11:39Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, the other thing that, or one of the many things that you brought up that was, was sort of eye-opening was, you're right, when you think of the cartoon, if you will, or the image or the stereotype of loneliness, you think of an old man or an old woman who's lost their spouse and is lonely. And something that I've noticed, I coach a lot of young men and women are college age or whether they're in college or not, and especially I find among young men that we don't want to use the word because it's somewhat shameful and it somehow implies that they're not successful socially or that they're not cool. So it's, there's more shame involved than just saying, okay, you're 21, you were supposed to be, you thought you were going to college, you're not for whatever reason,

• 12:23Scott Galloway?

  you thought you were going to have a job, you don't, or you don't have a job you like. But you're, it's clear you're lonely. It's clear you don't have, you know, a network or you're just, you know, the lack of better term, you're lonely. And my sense is, and I don't, I ask this generally to learn, not to make a point, my sense is both older and younger men are worse at this, that they have more trouble acknowledging that they're lonely and making that step to reach out to other people, that women are generally speaking better at remedying this than men. Is that, is true or false?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Well, the data actually doesn't show, it's pretty equally split, actually, loneliness amongst men and women, but I think you're right in terms of, I think there's probably a disproportionate, and this is more anecdotal than based on empirical evidence, that it's harder for men to admit to being lonely, in the same way that we know that it's harder for men in general to talk about emotional problems they might be having. So I think that that makes sense. But we know that there are just a lot of lonely people out there. I mean, when I was in Manhattan as part of the research of my book, I actually

• 13:41Speaker 03

  had heard that you could rent a friend. And I rented a friend, a woman called Brittany, for a few hours. And it was a very odd experience, because it kind of felt like she was my friend. We drank coffee together, we walked around a bookshop, we went into a clothes shop. But when I asked her who else her clients were, I thought it was quite eye opening. She said to me, most of my clients, they're men and women, aged thirty to forty, professionals who've moved to the city. Really? Yeah, people working all hours, mainly in tech, finance, consulting, new to the city, don't have a network here, and are just lonely and want a friend, want someone

• 14:24Speaker 03

  to have a coffee with or go to see a movie with. Yeah, I found that was quite eye opening. So loneliness clearly affects everyone amongst us, but certain groups are lonelier than others. And we know that there's a link between income levels and loneliness. The lower your income, the more likely you are to be lonely. We know that there's a association between age and loneliness. The young, you know, young people are lonelier on average. And women, actually, through the pandemic, have been disproportionately lonelier, women, rather than men, actually, from the research that has been coming out over the last few months.

• 15:04Scott Galloway?

  Is that because, so it strikes me that loneliness is not only a function of physically not having contact or bumping off people as much, but that you feel forgotten, or you feel that you are enduring something and no one empathizes with you. And where I'm headed with this is the dispersion of responsibility for educating children has moved from schools to mostly mothers at home. And that they feel, does anyone really feel my pain? Does anyone really know how incredibly hard this is for me? And, and that leads to loneliness. Like, I am alone here. No one really gets what I am going through. Is it not only a function

• 15:46Scott Galloway?

  of proximity to people, but just how goddamn hard your life has become? It feels to me like moms have just, if there's a cohort, people talk about cram parents not being able to see their kids. I would say that moms are the ones that have had, had, just have really gotten crushed in this thing. Is it, is it a function of your situation, not just proximity to other people?

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, you're absolutely spot on there. Loneliness, you know, you can be, you can be on your own and not be lonely. And you can be very lonely amongst other people. And part of the reason, and that can be even lonelier. And part of the reason for that is when you feel that you're not seen, heard amongst them, that's a very lonely feeling. And when you feel that you don't have agency or are powerless. And, and you're right, a lot of women unfortunately feel like that at the moment as they've been landed with disproportionate amounts of housework and dealing with children, even when they're

• 16:48Speaker 03

  holding down jobs alongside their husbands. We know that childcare and housework is not being disproportionately shared. And also, the other reason why women are disproportionately lonely, unfortunately, probably stems from the fact that we've also seen a rise in domestic abuse during the pandemic. And, you know, there's nothing lonelier than being, of course, in an abusive relationship.

• 17:13Scott Galloway?

  What role does government play? I go by the soccer field and I think, okay, it's impossible to get a higher ROI than community-sponsored sports. Where we just reach into... When I grew up with a single mother, I had a guy come... I was a box boy in junior high school and a guy come up to me and say, "Hey, do you play baseball?" And he said, "I'm a coach at this league." He literally, he knew I didn't have any money, he paid for my gear, and I played baseball. And it was wonderful for me. And then I look at seniors communities. I remember living in South Beach and walking by and seeing these, you know, very, very senior citizens, sitting out in front, watching the wonderful free show that is South Beach

• 17:56Scott Galloway?

  and thinking, you know, I don't know, it was like a senior community center, I'm like, "It's impossible to overfund this." What role does government have in facilitating connection and helping to diminish loneliness?

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Well, these things that you're talking about, community daycare centers for elderly people, youth clubs for young people, sports centers for young people, public libraries, they're all elements of what I call the infrastructure of community. And I believe it's absolutely crucial that these are funded adequately, because if people don't have physical spaces to be together, to do things together, not only are they going to feel lonely, but how will we as a society come together again if there are no physical spaces we share? And yet, since 2008, we've seen, since the financial crisis, we've seen a steady defunding,

• 18:53Speaker 03

  this is not only in the United States but globally, of the infrastructure of community. In the United States, federal funding for public libraries has fallen by 40% since 2008, for example. And this is clearly having a really significant impact and needs to be a priority moving forward, for sure.

• 19:18Scott Galloway?

  Coming up after the break...

• 19:19Speaker 03

  I really do believe that we should think of social media companies as being the tobacco companies of the 21st century and need to be, and that they should be regulated as such by governments when it comes to children, especially.

• 19:36Scott Galloway?

  Stay with us.

• 19:46Scott Galloway?

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• 20:46Scott Galloway?

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• 21:57Scott Galloway?

  It feels as if the pandemic, when you start dispersing, or we call it the dispersion, that is, everyone retreating to their homes or remote work, but the ugly cousin of that really is segregation, right? And isn't segregation kind of another just huge driver of loneliness, when we're only surrounded by people who look, smell, and feel like us? We lose empathy. Do we come back from this? Or is this a, you know, isn't a danger that we're taking a step change down in what makes us lonely? That we no longer feel the empathy, we no longer reach out because we become, I don't know what the term is, our society permanently becomes trained to be introverts and not trust the person next to us?

• 22:39Speaker 03

  So I talk about the rise of contactless in general. And this is something that we saw beginning before the pandemic. So, you know, people choosing to eat at home and order on DoorDash rather than go to a cafe, or do a Peloton class on their bike. And that was a trend before the pandemic, but obviously, the pandemic has massively accelerated this. And this poses a real danger because to us as society, that we are trading off convenience for community, and not only creating a society in which we're more lonely,

• 23:18Speaker 03

  but also, more importantly, losing out on being able to practice the skills that in many ways, underpin what we might think of as inclusive democracy. Because even going to a yoga class and having to think about where you put your mat, and, you know, being mindful of the person next to you, even walking around a grocery store and navigating your trolley and making sure you don't bump into someone, even in a line waiting for a coffee, those are moments, there's a moments in our day when we practice thinking about others, looking at others, noticing others, being mindful of others, and doing things with

• 24:00Speaker 03

  people who are not necessarily like us. And there is a Real danger that we are going to increasingly lose out on such interactions, especially as local stores, which of course, and studios and cafes, which are of course, all places where we can come together with people, are facing the triple whammy of the economic downturn, COVID and the shift to e-commerce that we're witnessing. And yet, at the same time, we are creatures of togetherness, we are hardwired to connect. And so I think there is a countervailing force, which ultimately, I hope and do believe will prevail,

• 24:44Speaker 03

  which is that we do actually want to be around other people and that after this pandemic is over, we'll actually want to connect more in person.

• 24:54Scott Galloway?

  Well, you highlighted that in a capitalist society, voids get filled with for-profit businesses. I've read about in Japan, you can rent a family. You not only can rent a friend, you can rent a wife and a kid and then go have, and then go to your friends who are already married with a kid and feel normal. What, when you think about, you know, as a parent, other than getting them off screens and, and just forcing them, which I find, I find I no longer ask, I'm like, we're doing this, than giving them options. Are there any, as a parent, how do you foster a decrease in loneliness among your kids such that they build good habits?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  So I think one important thing is to have a frank and open conversation about loneliness with your children. Because one of the things that came out of my interviews with teenagers in particular, was the extent to which their exclusion is often not witnessed or even realized by the adults in their lives, whether it's their parents or their teachers, because so much of their social lives is happening on their devices or their screens. So it's not like in the old days where you'd see a kid not being asked to sit with others and somebody could do something about it or your kid not being invited. Something you may not even know that your child is being excluded and is lonely.

• 26:19Scott Galloway?

  Hundred percent.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think have that conversation in an open way and express your own vulnerability. I think when it comes to our devices, our phones, one of the things teenagers, when I was interviewing them, would always say to me was, hey, it's not just us who are on our phones the whole time. And that's true. I mean, we're all guilty of it, of being in the room with our partner, with our family, not even hearing them because we're so addicted to these devices, which we know have been designed to be addictive. And so, you know, I think model good behavior yourself. So it's really important. But I don't underestimate how hard it is, which is why when it comes to children in particular, I I really do believe that

• 27:02Speaker 03

  we should think of social media companies as being the tobacco companies of the 21st century and need to be, and that they should be regulated as such by governments when it comes to children especially.

• 27:16Scott Galloway?

  Talk about casual chats.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Yes. So we don't, um, it's not just long in depth, kind of half hour, hour long conversations that make us feel connected to other people. So too, it turns out to even very short, what we might think of as micro exchanges. That 30 second chat you might have with your, with a server who's pouring you coffee. That hello, how are you at your greengrocers, the kind of 90 second exchange you might have when you're handing in your dry cleaning. These are all moments, um, micro exchanges that it turns out make us feel much more connected to each other and and much happier.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Um, again, another reason why it's so important that we nurture and support our local um, stores, especially our independent stores right now. Um, because these are the places that anchor and nurture our neighborhoods and actually us.

• 28:16Scott Galloway?

  So just, just to be transparent, Professor, pretty much every question interview I do is mostly an excuse so I can talk about myself. And this is that part of the, the interview. But uh, there's this movie, this Woody Allen movie, Hannah and her Sisters, and Max Montsy is dating this much younger woman, Barbara Hershey. And she's breaking up with him. And the thing he's most upset about is that she is his link to the outside world. And I'm naturally an introvert and I can feel myself, my natural tendencies withdrawing from the world and other people. And I have two hacks such that I try to stay somewhat engaged and they're very basic and I want you to tell me if you think these are productive hacks.

• 28:58Scott Galloway?

  The first is I'm in Ubers and taxis a lot and I always talk to the driver. Just because I find it interesting, I get reward from it and I find that exercising those muscles of talking to a stranger, it results just in a lot of good things. It's interesting, you get really interesting color and it just kind of keeps those, I don't know, those muscles working of talking to strangers. And when you, when I, when you use the term, you identified it as casual chats, it really summarized or kind of cemented what I'd already sort of felt. And the other thing is what I call impulse texting and that sounds worse than it is, but so often we think, I need to catch up with so and so, or I wonder how they're doing.

• 29:40Scott Galloway?

  And you think, well, okay, to pick up the phone, to have, to schedule a meeting, to write a note, I'll just, I'm trying every time I think about something, somebody, I just immediately pull up their number and say, hey, I was thinking about you, what's going on with you, this is what's going on with me. And it can be two sentences, just like a ping. And I'm trying to do that three, four, six times a day. Someone flies into my mind from, you know, 10 years ago, hey, I was thinking about you, what's going on? And I find it's keeping the, if you will, the engine warm. So one, always speaking, always talking, I do it with waiters too, because I was, I had those jobs and I liked it when people spoke to me. It made me feel seen, if you will. And then two, impulse texting. Your thoughts?

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Love both of them. Both of them, I think are absolutely on the money and, and I would. Endorse and recommend on the um kind of speaking to people. Yeah, especially now, I think it's harder when you're wearing a mask and you're walking down the street.

• 30:44Scott Galloway?

  Hundred percent.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  You know, really, you know, kind of nod your head in a in a noticeable way. So if you're away, if you can, in a socially distanced way, do stop and just say, hey, how are you to somebody? You're doing okay. Um, we all wanna be seen and heard, especially now. It's really hard. On um sending people texts, it's actually one of the things I also really recommend people to be doing right now. Think, is there anyone in your own network who might be lonely? Who might appreciate being um being reached out to and just send them a text? Um, if you can go meet with them, fine. But it's interesting that you say that you're doing it as well as a way, not only to help them, but also

• 31:28Speaker 03

  to feel connected to others yourself. And I think that's absolutely right. Oh, and you also mentioned this idea of speaking to people as being like a kind of muscle that you need to exercise. And again, that's something um that I noticed with my students, and maybe you've noticed it too, that increasing numbers of students I was seeing when I was sending them group assignments were finding it challenging to interact in person, face to face. And I actually, I raised it with a colleague who runs one of the US's most prestigious universities. And he said that at his university, it had gotten so bad that they were having to run remedial how to read a face in real life classes

• 32:11Speaker 03

  for their incoming students, because so many were arriving really lacking the most basic social skills, because they hadn't been exercising them at all. And even nursery school teachers who I interviewed tell me that they're seeing, you know, children aged four, five, coming to nursery school lacking social skills because their parents are spending so much time on their phones that they're not imparting these skills to their children. So this idea that we use it or lose it, I think, is actually real when it comes to um social interaction, as it is in other areas as well.

• 32:44Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, also, there's just so many layers to this. I think about, I spend a lot of time on Twitter. I'm addicted to it. And I think Twitter and its algorithm has taught us. To move in and, you know, oftentimes dunk on people. You either like something or you don't. There's no casual chatting. And that the, the reward is to call someone out. And I think I can't imagine that that is, that is helping making us more, you know, laughing or saying something silly or saying something, or God forbid you say something off color. It does feel like social media, in a strange way, you know, the whole idea was to connect us, but it does feel like it's taking us back to a place where we feel just safer.

• 33:26Scott Galloway?

  Cause if you extend yourself, you're so vulnerable and you can be just hit so hard. If you say something stupid, it just, it feels like a lot of this is headed in, headed in absolutely the wrong direction. And you talked about social media firms being regulated. Can you, can you give more specificity to that?

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Sure. So, um, so one of the areas I think that, that government should be intervening is around the addictive nature of these platforms, especially when it comes to children. And I would actually go as far as to say that when it comes to children, addictive social media should be banned and the onus should then be on social media platforms to one, prove that they're not addictive, which will be impossible. And two, actually redesign their products so that they aren't as addictive as they are. I think another thing that government can do and is actually moving forward in the United Kingdom where a bill is currently under consideration and is likely to be passed,

• 34:31Speaker 03

  is actually making social media companies responsible for the psychological, any psychological harm created as a result of posts on their platforms. I think there are really serious moves here from both the right and the left to hold social media companies much more to account when it comes to the kind of language that is allowed on their platforms. And I know in the United States, you know, where freedom of speech is kind of held up as say, totemic, this is. You know, it's a harder argument to win. And yet, in the United Kingdom, sixty five percent of students have experienced cyberbullying.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  When we know that tweets are retweeted thirty percent more if they have words like hate in the tweet.

• 35:19Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Um, and if we, when we know that the algorithms are actually incentivizing cruelty and toxicity and bullying, you know, at some point, we have to say enough is enough in the same way that we said enough is enough with debacle companies at some point.

• 35:35Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I would argue, Professor Hertz, that it's not a freedom of speech. Freedom is saying, or, and that it's not credible, that the reality is, freedom of speech has just been weaponized by big tech, who has overrun our government, and that the majority of parents, I think even the majority of teenagers, the majority of citizens realize that freedom of speech shouldn't be freedom of reach. And, you know, if you can reverse engineer content to depression of our teens, you know, freedom of speech takes a backseat, at least among reasonable people. It's used as a smokescreen here. Any closing thoughts on, if you were to try and summarize, what was the most, the single most surprising thing you found in your research for this month?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Um, I think it was just how pervasive the problem was. And realizing that it didn't just damage our health, but also our wealth and affected who we voted for were also really kind of stark realizations. But also realizing that there's so much we can do. Because, you know, we built a lonely world, but we don't have to continue to live in a world in which we are so segregated and disconnected and kept apart. And there are so many things we can do, so many things governments can do, from refunding

• 36:59Speaker 03

  the infrastructure of community, to really properly regulating social media companies, to actually putting significant funds into the loneliness crisis of today, which is particularly acute. Around 50% of people are currently feeling lonely right now. This is recent US data, but also recognizing that this isn't just about what governments can do top down, but it's also about what we can do so we can put our phones down more and be more present with each other. We can think about how to support our local stores who really anchor and nurture us and enable us to have these micro connections with each other.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  And we can also think about who in our own network might be feeling lonely and actively reach out to them, meet out with them, or just send them a text. It can make a huge difference.

• 37:51Scott Galloway?

  Norina Hertz is an economist, bestselling author, and honorary professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity at the University College of London. Her book, The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart, is out now. She joins us from her home in London. Professor Hertz, stay safe and thanks for your good work.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 38:14Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 38:17Scott Galloway?

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• 40:02Scott Galloway?

  Algebra of happiness. I give the same toast at every wedding. First, first, always express affection and sexual desire. It states your relationship is singular. I think we all want to be wanted. And I think every time you feel that passion, every time you feel affectionate for your spouse, your lover, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, whatever, you should express it. I think it's healthy and wonderful. Two, two, never let your wife or your girlfriend be hungry or cold. Ever, ever. Two-thirds of the really terrible fights you're going to have, somebody hasn't eaten or somebody is cold. So always carry a blanket and protein bars. You're welcome. And finally, and this is the most important thing, don't keep score.

• 40:46Scott Galloway?

  Decide in your relationships, what kind of friend you want to be? What kind of son you want to be? What kind of husband, what kind of wife you want to be? And pursue that and put the scorecard away. Unfortunately, keeping score got in the way of a lot of my relationships, especially with my dad. My dad, I don't think was a wonderful father. So I always thought, well, I'm not going to be a wonderful son. And then I realized at a certain age, well, I want to be a wonderful son because I enjoy his company. And I also looked at his life and how he was raised. He was abused, grew up in depression era Scotland, and he was a much better dad to me than his father was to him. And that's enough for me to decide that I wanted to be a wonderful son and not keep score, but just be the man, be the brother, be the husband, the friend that you want to be.

• 41:32Scott Galloway?

  I'm trying to keep less score out and about. Now, what does that mean? I think people are really suffering right now. And for my whole life, I have always kept score in that. In that if I was in a parking lot and someone backed up and then honked at me and flipped me off, I was willing to get out of my car and point out how ridiculous that was. If somebody at a ticket counter at Delta Airlines was rude or not attentive and didn't treat me with the respect I deserve, given how much I flew and how much money I spent, I reminded them early and often about what an important customer I was. And what you have to realize is that it's not about you and it's not necessarily the the world isn't going to come to an end.

• 42:17Scott Galloway?

  We are not going to die in a supernova explosion. If occasionally you go through your day and you come out on the negative side of the ledger, and that is people are upset, people give you shit, people honk at you, people flip you off, you don't get the customer service that you as a master of the universe deserve, because you know what? Other people have really bad days too. And so I'm trying to not only keep not keep score in my key relationships, but occasionally just say, there by the grace of God go I. I'm trying, especially with my kids in the car, to say, wow, that guy must be having a bad day. Or when someone melts down in front of me at the checkout line at CVS, I ask her, I say, is there anything I can do to help as opposed to getting in her face, as I used

• 43:01Scott Galloway?

  to do as a younger man, and remind her what a fucking idiot she's being, to recognize, to have some grace, that people are suffering, maybe, who knows? Who knows what they're struggling with? Maybe they're struggling with mental illness. Maybe they've lost someone. Maybe they've been fired. It's okay to rack up some losses in the scorecard with people you've never met, with strangers. Show some grace, show some dignity. Think of it as you're not losing, you're going home and you're demonstrating grace, you're demonstrating dignity. What would Jesus Christ have done? I don't believe in Jesus, or I believe Jesus was a man, but I don't buy into his lineage. But I constantly reminding myself, what would Jesus have done in that line at CVS? First, I'm not sure he would have been at a CVS, but what would he have done? Because I have been, what's the term here, such a warrior of the scorecard.

• 43:46Scott Galloway?

  That's kind of a polite way of saying, I have been a real asshole. And you know what? That's just no way to live your life. We all need to demonstrate more grace.

• 43:57Scott Galloway?

  Our producers are Caroline Shager and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our assistant producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prov G Show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.

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