How to Make Friends as an Adult, Solved

Friendship is the most important thing nobody talks about. From ancient philosophy to game theory, we break down why friendship isn’t just some social nicety—it’s a biological survival strategy. Plus: the modern forces slowly strangling our ability to connect, and exactly what to do about it. You’ll walk away with a clearer sense of what real friendship looks like, how to build it, and how to stop shooting yourself in the foot every time you try. Get your free PDF guide: https://solvedpodcast.com/friendship CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:07:52 Friendship: an Evolutionary Puzzle 00:25:45 What Is Friendship? 00:27:11 Friendship in the Great Religious Traditions 00:37:21 Modern Psychology's Definition of Friendship 00:49:02 Your Brain On Friendship 01:03:34 The Neurobiology of Connection 01:22:48 Health Benefits of Friendship 01:33:11 How to Make and Maintain Friendships 01:35:19 Proximity and Repeated Contact and Reciprocal Disclosure 01:53:51 Time investment (quantity and cadence) 01:58:15 Evidence-Based Strategies for Making Friends 02:07:46 Examples Of Making Friends 02:26:50 How Friendship Changes Across the Lifespan 02:54:18 Gender Dynamics in Friendships 03:09:39 Can Men And Women Be Friends? 03:16:39 Toxic Friendships 03:17:41 Competitive Friendship 03:21:18 Codependency 03:34:45 Why It's So Hard to Make Friends These Days 03:35:48 External Headwinds: Why Getting Together Is Hard 03:53:18 Internal Frictions: Why Staying Equal Feels Impossible 04:02:45 Technology's Double-Edged Impact on Human Connection 04:11:19 Mark's LA Story 04:20:21 The 80/20 of Friendship 04:30:33 The Trade-Offs of Friendship ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

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

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  Welcome back, everybody, to the Solve Podcast, the most over-researched and under-rehearsed podcast on the internet. I'm number one New York Times bestselling author Mark Manson, and this is my co-host, lead researcher, longtime acquaintance,

• 0:15Mark Manson?

  Drew Verdi. And we are here to be your friends for the next few hours. You see what I did there?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  I do see what you did there. All right.

• 0:24Mark Manson?

  Am I clever? Was that a good intro? Was I clever enough on that intro?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I think we hooked him in.

• 0:30Mark Manson?

  Okay, yeah. Are you hooked yet, audience? Do you need two friends for the next five hours? Well, we've got the podcast for you. In all seriousness, Drew, I'm actually very excited for this episode for two reasons. One reason is I think friendship is probably the most important topic that is talked about least.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  100% agree with that.

• 0:52Mark Manson?

  Like, if there was a, if there was like a ratio of importance to discussion, I think friendship would be maybe the highest.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Romantic relationships get all the airtime.

• 1:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  And, yeah.

• 1:05Mark Manson?

  Physical health, mental health, happiness, like, everything, like, your social life drives so much of all these things. We're gonna be talking about it. And on top of that, it's a huge problem these days. There's some scary stats that I know we're gonna talk about later, but just a few to, like, just to wet the beak of the listener. The number of people without a close friend has quadrupled in the last 30 years. The amount of time the average person spins alone has grown by 25%, and the amount of time that they spend socializing has dropped by 60% in the last 20 years. 20% of adults report feeling lonely on a daily basis, which is an all-time high. So, yeah, this is a problem. It's like a very, very real problem. And you and I, we've been creating content in this industry for

• 1:51Mark Manson?

  15 plus years at this point. I remember there was a time where we used to do friendship content and it would just kind of bomb because nobody cared. And we've really noticed in the last two or three years that it's, it's starting to get a lot of traction because I think a lot of people are feeling isolated, they're feeling alone, and they're, they're feeling lost as to how to actually build and maintain friendships. So we're going to get into all that. And then the second reason I'm excited for this is purely selfish, which is, uh, I need friends. I need more friends. We're gonna get into that. I need more friends. I, you know, that sounds kind of pathetic when I say it that way, but, um, but in all seriousness, I think this has been an unexpected challenge. I'm

• 2:34Mark Manson?

  middle aged now and, um, I, this was never a problem throughout my life. I always had a good circle of friends. And I would say really in the last, uh, five to eight years, this has become a pain point. It just, it feels harder to maintain friendships. It feels harder to make friends, good friends. Uh, and I'm not, I've not entirely been sure why that is. I've had some theories and prepping for this episode is, is, there's been some interesting realizations, which we will definitely talk about. Well, we're gonna dig into all of that. Yes. Uh, so yeah, we might, uh, we might just end up, you know, maybe we'll pull a couch in here in the studio and I'll, uh, lay down and we can just have a little Mark Manson therapy session. Oh, God.

• 3:19Mark Manson?

  Um, so friendship is incredibly important. I think it's, people underrate its importance for a lot of reasons. It is, it's kind of, I think it's the water we swim in, in a lot of cases. It's not as sexy. You mentioned romantic relationships, you know, it's not as sexy or, or emotionally dramatic as romantic relationships. It's not as, uh, practical and tangible as say like career development, um, or improving your productivity. But ultimately, it is maybe the highest leverage part of your life in terms of mental and physical and emotional wellbeing. Right. I'd also say too, there's not a lot of like, there's, there's not a lot

• 4:02Mark Manson?

  of social structure like there is for relationships. There's not all these scripts. There's not, you know, Yes. clearly defined ways of how you go about these relationships. So yeah, it's, it's very murky area. Well, and we, I think one of the reasons for, we've already kind of tripped over it, which is like, I made a joke earlier about like, I need friends. I immediately felt like a loser when I made that joke. And I think this is part of the problem is that people don't feel at liberty. There's like a certain amount of shame attached to it. That if like, if you need help making friends, or if you feel like you don't have any friends, there's just like this intense self judgment that happens. And so you don't want to speak up about it. So some of the things that we're going to cover in this episode, we're going to talk about

• 4:47Mark Manson?

  the three factors that lead to friendship formation, and then how to find them and maximize them as much as possible. We can talk about how to be a good friend, and the difference between a healthy friendship and a toxic friendship, and how to know which ones your friends might be. We're going to talk about how to maintain friendships over the long term, as well as how to reconnect with old friendships that maybe you've lost touch with. And then we're going to talk quite a bit about the modern challenges to friendship, from smartphones and remote work and social media, to also just kind of broader social and cultural dynamics. You know, the modern education system and the lack of family formation and the decline in religiosity, like all of these things, I think, have very real effects and impact

• 5:31Mark Manson?

  on the lack of friendship that's happening, or the lack of social life. We'll talk about the highest leverage practices to build and maintain a fruitful social life, and of course, much, much more. Now, if you're new to the Solve Podcast, our whole thing is we take one topic and we just dive so ridiculously deep into it, that the goal is that once you listen to this podcast, you will never have to listen to anything ever again. And we believe so strongly in this, that we have an agreement with ourselves, that once we cover a topic, we can never go back to it. So the idea is that this podcast is so comprehensive, and so full of all of the relevant and useful information, that you don't have to go back to it, and we don't have to go back to it. As a result, it's very dense and it's very long.

• 6:15Mark Manson?

  Generally speaking, the first half of each solved episode goes deep into the theory and concepts and all the information you need to understand about the topic. And then the back half of the episode is where the actionable advice is, the practical takeaways, the examples, the exercises, the tips. Most people, as they listen to the podcast, they listen to it over multiple sessions. They like to take notes. We provide a PDF guide that summarizes everything that we talk about in the show. It has all of our citations, all the research, all the references, resources to read further. You can download that for free at solve podcast.com/friendship. It's all there for you folks. There's no excuses. And I mean, really Drew, it's, it's not about the podcast itself.

• 6:59Mark Manson?

  It's about the friends we made along the way.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Well, as one of those hopeful friends, as a very familiar acquaintance with you, I can't get over, you have a soft curl hanging down from here and, and I can't look at anything but that. It's still there. It's still there. Can you give it a, give it a, there we go. There we go.

• 7:21Mark Manson?

  Hair diversion aside, let's get into it. Yeah.

• 7:32Mark Manson?

  So I actually want to start at an interesting and maybe unexpected place on this topic, which is Darwin. So everybody's familiar with Darwin's theory of natural selection. What they don't realize is that there was something that kept Darwin up at night, quite literally. It was something that vexed him very deeply, bothered him, and he struggled with throughout his entire career and he never solved it. And that essentially was, how do you explain friendship? The whole idea behind natural selection, survival of the fittest, you know, the, each person's genetics is looking out for its own survival and replication. That makes sense. Even something like parents helping a child or children, you know, taking care of a sibling

• 8:16Mark Manson?

  from a genetic point of view, that also makes sense. You share 50% of your genetics with your brother. So it makes sense that you would feel some sort of desire to help your brother or help your kin, although in a lot of species.

• 8:29Mark Manson?

  There is no such thing as family, family, or, you know, it's just every creature for themselves. What Darwin could not figure out is why are there hundreds and hundreds of species, from insects to bats to birds to humans, that consistently help other creatures that are not genetically related to them? It makes no sense, and while Darwin was very confident and kind of cocky about this issue publicly, we know from his private letters that it bothered him very deeply, to the point where he even wrote to a friend that he believed that if anything could unravel his theory and his work entirely, it was his inability to answer this question.

• 9:12Mark Manson?

  So this question, this problem persisted in science for over a century, and it actually didn't really get answered until the 1980s. And it got answered in a very unexpected and kind of strange place, which is game theory and political science. So by the time the 1970s rolled around, game theory had emerged, and I think everybody's probably at least heard of or is loosely familiar with the idea of a prisoner's dilemma. A simple example of a prisoner's dilemma is Drew and I have to prepare for a podcast. Now, I have two choices. I can either do no preparation and hope Drew does all the preparation,

• 9:55Mark Manson?

  or I can do my part of the preparation and hope Drew does his as well. Now, if Drew and I both prepare for the podcast, the podcast will be better. If I don't prepare for the podcast and Drew does, the podcast will probably still be good, and guess what? I didn't have to do anything. But if Drew is thinking the same thing as me and neither of us prepares for the podcast, well, it's gonna be a very long day in Studio Mark Manson. Let's just put it that way. You get these prisoner dilemma situations between selfishness and cooperation that show up all the time. And game theorists love to come up with different strategies and simulations of like, what is the optimal decision making to make in these sorts of scenarios?

• 10:40Mark Manson?

  You can attach different value amounts to each outcome and then you can kind of calculate out like what the optimal decision making or strategy is in any given situation. Now, by the 1970s, the kind of a new way of thinking about this emerged, which was called iterative prisoner's dilemma. So generally speaking, if you are in a prisoner's dilemma in a single instance, a selfish behavior is probably higher expected value. Because it's like, if I invest nothing in the podcast, and I believe you have a 50% chance of doing the work for the podcast, 50% of the time I still get a podcast for no effort, and the other 50% of the time I just get nothing, but I also invest at nothing. It generally is going to work out in my favor.

• 11:24Mark Manson?

  But what researchers found is that if you run the same prisoner's dilemma over and over and over again, Drew and I do 10 podcasts together, 20 podcasts together. So now, if I defect and decide not to prep for the episode, well, then maybe next episode, Drew is like, well, fuck Mark, I'm not going to prep for this either. And now it hurts both of us. And so what you tended to see is that when you ran the prisoner's dilemma multiple times over a long period of time, it made more sense to be more cooperative. The other interesting thing about the iterative prisoner's dilemma is that researchers noticed that this was kind of a microcosm of society in general, right? Like, there's a tension within all of us in many situations of doing what's good for

• 12:09Mark Manson?

  ourselves versus doing what's good for the group. Maybe in isolation, we pick the selfish action. But the fact that we have to repeatedly see the same people over and over and over again means that we develop a reputation, and people remember what our choices were in the past. Now, what's interesting about the iterative prisoner's dilemma is that researchers came up with different strategies. So one strategy could be always cooperate. It's like, no matter what Drew does, I always prepare for the podcast, no matter what. Another strategy is always defect. No matter what Drew does, I never prepare for the podcast. There's a strategy that researchers came up with called the grim trigger, which is basically I prepare for the podcast until Drew doesn't. And then as soon as he doesn't, I never prepare for it ever again,

• 12:53Mark Manson?

  which is you could see this as like the person who holds a grudge, right? It's like, I'll cooperate with you, but then as soon as you screw me over, fuck you, buddy. I'm never cooperating with you again. Some of these strategies got very elaborate. There was one called a Pavlov that took a long string of past actions from the other person in the prisoner's dilemma and ran all sorts of probabilistic models and stuff to calculate what the highest expected value action was in the next iteration of the prisoner's dilemma. So researchers like really went ham on this in the seventies. So there was a political scientist in 1980 named Robert Axelrod. And he had a really clever idea.

• 13:36Mark Manson?

  He devised a computer simulation that created a tournament to pit these prisoner dilemma strategies against each other to determine which one created the most value. And he reached out to some of the most brilliant mathematicians, economists, computer scientists from all over the world. And he had them work on strategies for months and then submit them into the competition to see which one would perform the best. He ended up with 62 submissions from researchers all around the world. And he ran his simulation. And to everybody's surprise, the strategy that won consistently was maybe the simplest strategy of all, which is known as tit for tat, which is basically whatever Drew does, I'll respond in kind.

• 14:21Mark Manson?

  So if Drew preps for the podcast, I'm going to prep for the podcast. And if Drew says fuck the podcast, I'm going to say fuck the podcast. In evolutionary biology, this is known as

• 14:33Mark Manson?

  Reciprocal altruism, which is basically like, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. Reciprocal altruism is in many ways like our innate sense of justice, right? Like it's, if somebody does something nice for you, you are just naturally inclined to want to do something nice for them. And if somebody hurts you or breaks your trust in some way, you're naturally inclined to want to get back at them in some way. And, but if that same person who hurt you or broke your trust comes back and apologizes and then does something nice for you, you're like, oh, they're not such a bad guy. Let me be nice to them again. So it's, it's basically what Axelrod's tournament showed is that this reciprocation of cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous.

• 15:15Mark Manson?

  It is the most optimal strategy for a community. It basically solves Darwin's problem. It shows that friendship, building friendship and trust and cooperation within a group of people over a long period of time is the most evolutionarily adaptive strategy. It promotes the most survival, not only for the individual, but potentially for the whole group as well.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to dig into this just a little bit more because I dug into this because I, this is fascinating.

• 15:41Mark Manson?

  I love this shit.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And it was actually, so it was this program where it was submitted by a psychologist, not a computer programmer.

• 15:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Okay. I believe it was Anatole Rappaport who submitted it. It was four lines of code.

• 15:53Mark Manson?

  Four?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Four lines.

• 15:55Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  I looked it up. I could even understand the code. I don't program. I'm not a programmer.

• 15:59Mark Manson?

  Wow.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And I could understand the code. It was four lines of code. And one little detail I think you missed there was that actually the strategy is cooperate first.

• 16:07Mark Manson?

  Yes, I forgot that.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  If you go first, cooperate.

• 16:10Mark Manson?

  Cooperate.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  And then copy whatever the other one did. That's tit for tat.

• 16:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Right? And it was so simple that there was these huge programs that people wrote, right? These huge computer programs are very complicated.

• 16:19Mark Manson?

  They spent months on it.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Statistical models that they used, everything like that. And a psychologist came along and wrote four lines of code and it, and it. By far.

• 16:27Mark Manson?

  Blew everybody out of the water.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  In these iterative competitions.

• 16:31Mark Manson?

  And it's crazy because they actually ran the competition twice. So the first round they ran, they had 14 models and tit for tat won. And everybody kind of looked at it and they're like, that, no.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:42Mark Manson?

  That's too simple.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Like, oh, I'm gonna beat this now.

• 16:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and they're like, no, let's run it again and let's run it with way more. Let's go get way smarter people and run it with way more models. And then they like, did the second round with 62 models and tit for tat won again.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:55Mark Manson?

  So it is, sometimes simplicity is, is the most effective and the most optimal. And so essentially what this tit for tat strategy tells us is that friendship is an evolutionary technology. It is something that we adopted for our survival. The emotional attachment that we feel to individuals, the mutual pleasant feelings, the desire to help somebody who's helped us, to support somebody who's, who's, has supported us, this is extremely innate. It's, it's not only in our nature, it's in the nature of thousands of species around the world.

• 17:36Mark Manson?

  It's, it's like such a fundamental aspect of our, not even psychology, but biology, that like, we literally rely on it for everything. Now, not to nerd out too much, but some of these evolutionary benefits, you know, in the emotions podcast, we talked about how one view of human relationships is that it is co-regulation of each other's nervous system. I think that's one way of looking at a social, a social friendship. That is what we experience as emotional support is this kind of merging of our nervous systems through communication and the sharing of emotional stimulus with somebody else. Friendships were the original information networks.

• 18:18Mark Manson?

  It's the way, like, if you think about what cooperation is, it is building trust, it's building the belief that what you have done in the past, you are also going to do in the future. And if I trust that you are going to do the things in the future that you say you're gonna do, it also means that I probably trust the information that you have that I don't have. You don't only have to rely on the knowledge that you gain from your personal experience, you can now rely on the knowledge of all the people that you trust and that you have relationships around you.

• 18:48Mark Manson?

  It allows for risk pooling, which is basically a, kind of a... Fancy way of saying it's like an insurance policy. It's the original insurance policy. It's the original insurance policy. A simple example is like, you know, if I'm by myself, let's say we were like cavemen and I'm by myself and I want to go hunt a giant elephant or something that could potentially feed me for a month, but it's very high risk. And if I fail, then maybe we don't have food for a week. You know, if I'm by myself, that's a hugely risky proposition. If I'm in a tribe of 30 or 40 other people who are also hunting and gathering their own sources of food and they're willing to share it with me, that suddenly liberates me to take that big risk

• 19:33Mark Manson?

  to go hunt that elephant. And then, you know, maybe I bring, if I successfully hunt the elephant, then I bring it back for the tribe. And so not only do we pool the risk, but we also share in the rewards together. And really just collective action, in many cases, you get a, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts type of dynamic, right? So in technological and scientific discoveries, generally speaking, you know, Newton has that famous quote where he said, "If I've seen further, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants." You know, generally speaking, nobody discovers anything in a vacuum on their own. It's by collating and combining and recombining and remixing information and creativity and thoughts from a wide range of people that you, you make profound discoveries.

• 20:18Mark Manson?

  I've always found it super interesting that you tend to see major breakthroughs throughout history, whether it's in like science or technology or business or even like political revolutions. There's always clusters of people that show up together. Like it's never just a lone wolf. Right. Who makes this massive discovery. Like in, you know, the 17th century England with all the early scientific discoveries, it was the Royal Society in London. You know, in the 18th century, you had all the founding fathers in the United States. A lot of the great physicists and breakthroughs around nuclear energy and quantum mechanics, like they were all, they were all refugees from World War II, living in the United States together

• 21:02Mark Manson?

  and, and teaching at the same two or three universities. And so you had people like John von Neumann and Claude Shannon like hanging out at lunch, just like shooting the shit about like, "Hey, I was thinking about this thing recently." And, you know, sure enough, you get all these like. World-changing breakthroughs happening in succession over and over again from the same group of friends, essentially.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Silicon Valley today.

• 21:25Mark Manson?

  So, yeah, that's a perfect example.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:27Mark Manson?

  That's another great example. The last thing I want to point out, which I guess is just, it's appropriate, and maybe this kind of foreshadows a future episode that we do, but there's a little bit of a tragedy in all of this, which we've decided to call the tragedy of the nice guy, which is that the nice guy finishes last. Basically, the prisoner dilemma strategy of always cooperating gets you smoked. Like, you just get wrecked. You get exploited, cheaters, liars take advantage of you, you get punished. I think this just raises the point that friendship, it requires that tit-for-tat dynamic, right?

• 22:10Mark Manson?

  Like, if your friend is disrespectful or an asshole to you, you need to be able to stand up for yourself. You need to be able to put down a boundary and say, "Hey, man, that's not cool. Like, don't do that again." Otherwise, that friendship quickly turns into exploitation, turns into a toxic friendship, which we're gonna get to later in the episode. And so I just think it's interesting that even in this, like, super nerdy, abstract, theoretical game theory, computer simulation, you get the basics of human boundaries and, like, the dynamics of what a healthy relationship is versus a toxic relationship.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Right. I want to put just one little finer point on that, too, because there was, I dug into this a little bit more even, too, there was a later version of tit-for-tat called generous tit-for-tat. I think it was called generous tit-for-tat, or something like that. Copying what the other person did, that's, you know, if they defect, then you're just gonna defect, right? But then, they threw one more line of code in there later that said, kind of put a little bit of a randomness variable in there.

• 23:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  That even if the other person defected, like, a very small percentage of the time, you would kind of forgive them and cooperate back, and that one did even better.

• 23:15Mark Manson?

  Oh, wow.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  So, put a pin in that, because that's gonna come up a little bit later, too.

• 23:18Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's a generosity aspect to it, too, and a forgiveness aspect to it, that it can even be programmed into a line of code.

• 23:25Mark Manson?

  The thing this reminded me of, this point, you know, we still haven't done a relationships episode, which...

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:32Mark Manson?

  Don't worry, audience, we will definitely do multiple relationships episodes.

• 23:37Mark Manson?

  But I remember, you know, John Gottman, who's, him and his wife are like, pretty much the preeminent researchers on really like romantic relationships, long-term relationships, and the quality of those relationships. It reminded me, he has this concept of like bids. So when he analyzes married couples, one of the ways that he analyzes them is in measuring what he calls like bids for affection. He says that like married couples will make these bids in mostly subtle ways, right? So it could be something as simple as like, if I'm, if I'm sitting on the couch and my wife comes and sits, sits down next to me, and she just puts her hand on my leg, you know? Do I lean into her? Do I look over? Do I give her attention? Do I like smile at her?

• 24:22Mark Manson?

  Or do I just completely ignore her and keep playing my video game or whatever? Generally, what he found is that bids are, in healthy couples, bids are reciprocated the vast majority of the time. So anytime either partner kind of reaches out to the other partner for just a small bit of attention or affection, it is, it's reciprocated. And it reminded me of this tit for tat thing. Because what he also found is that generally in unhappy or unhealthy relationships, you see those bids go unreciprocated, or in some cases even punished. And again, it just, it's interesting that like such an abstract theoretical, game theoretical model of evolution, right?

• 25:03Mark Manson?

  Like, explains probably the most sophisticated and important relationship research that we have. Like, why, why married couples stay together or, or get divorced? So I thought that was super cool as well. And I, you know.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  This is some nerdy shit.

• 25:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Dude, we are.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  But I know, it is fascinating.

• 25:23Mark Manson?

  We're deep in the nerd zone. Yeah, for sure.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  It's absolutely fascinating, though, that like these simple principles apply to very complex relationships.

• 25:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So that's, that's like the scientific and theoretical foundation. Let's get into what friendship actually looks like throughout history, how it's been defined, and what that means in the modern world.

• 25:46Mark Manson?

  So the word "friend" is a proto-Germanic word. I'm gonna totally butcher this. "Frei onz."

• 25:54Speaker 01

  That sounds right.

• 25:56Mark Manson?

  But the word "frei onz" comes from basically ancient, prehistoric Germanic, and it literally means "one who is free to love." So the "free" is actually still, is the word "free." That's where we get the word "free." And then I guess the "onz" is the, I think it's the active verb of like, a person who is loving. So it's like a person who is free to love. So encapsulated in this word is everything that defines a friendship. Now, what's interesting about these prehistoric Germanic communities is that they would, they used to sit in circles around the fire, and all the slaves had to sit outside the circle. And so the word "frei onz" was meant, was reserved for the people who were in the circle.

• 26:41Mark Manson?

  It was literally the people who were free to love you or love whoever, right? So it was, there was a status component attached to it from these Germanic tribes, which, we're gonna come back to this.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Okay, interesting.

• 26:55Mark Manson?

  Put a pin in this. So across pretty much all ancient traditions, friendship is seen as both a moral good, a virtue, and also seen as something, a path to spirituality. So from ancient Greece to the Bhagavad Gita, you see ancient texts extolling the virtues of friendship, how friendship is one of the most valuable and important things that you can experience in your life. And then from everything, from Christianity to Sikhism to Islam, you see people talking about how friendship is a path to God Himself.

• 27:33Mark Manson?

  That to freely love somebody, to unconditionally have positive effect or regard for another human being, is in essence, holiness, spiritual attainment, path to enlightenment, whatever you want to call it. It is one of the few concepts that is universally lauded and seen as a good thing, cross-culturally, across history and time, across the world. There was one ancient philosopher who really nailed it, and for those of you who have been listening to the show for a while, I'm gonna give you one guess, who it was. Starts with an A, ends with an Aristotle.

• 28:16Mark Manson?

  Once again, Aristotle fucking nailed it, as he usually did. So in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle differentiated between three different types of friendships. So you had utility-based friendship, you had pleasure-based friendship, and then you had virtue-based friendship. So utility-based friendship is relatively obvious. You have, you and another person have a shared interest in common. You can help each other achieve that shared interest. So this could be maybe a coworker that you get along really well with, or somebody who shares the same hobby as you. I remember I had a friend who moved to Austin, maybe like 10 years ago. And it was interesting because his wife was really having a hard time making friends.

• 28:59Mark Manson?

  She would keep meeting these women and hanging out with them, and was very frustrated that she didn't seem to get along with any of them. And this buddy of mine, like, he seemed to have no problem. And I remember talking to him, and I was like, "Why do you think that is?" And he was like, "Well, let me be honest, I think I just have lower standards." And I said, I was like, "What do you mean?" And he's like, "Well, you know, my wife, like, she kinda wants her friends to be a good person, and be a good mother, and have like, the same hobbies, and be excited about the same things, and listen to the same music." And he's like, "Honestly, man, I just like to work on cars, and I don't really care if my buddy is like, a shitty father or not. As long as he's good at working on cars, I'm gonna hang out with him." There's probably something to that.

• 29:42Mark Manson?

  Yes, yes, and we will probably discuss that. I'm sure we're gonna come back to that. But I think that's a nice illustration of the difference between, say, a virtue-based friendship versus a utility or pleasure-based friendship, right? Like, it's, I have poker buddies. Like, I never see them outside of poker. I never really talk to them much outside of poker. I don't really have anything in common with them outside of poker, but we like to play poker, so, you know, we're poker buddies. I think everybody kinda intuitively has something like that. There's pleasure-based friendships, which, as somebody who was a big party boy when he was younger, I can definitely relate to this.

• 30:23Mark Manson?

  In fact, I would say that I think maybe a common mistake that young people make is they mistake pleasure-based friendships for virtue-based friendships.

• 30:33Mark Manson?

  They assume that because they have tons and tons of fun with somebody, and they do a bunch of cool things with that person, that they must be very close and intimate. And it turns out that actually those two things are not the same thing. And then finally, you get the virtue-based friendships, which Aristotle said a virtue-based friendship is long-term, it's enduring, and it is based on an inherent respect for the character of the other person. That basically, it's not just a person that you enjoy being around, that you have fun with, that you have shared interests with, but you actually see them as an admirable and good person, and you are happy to spend time with them or do things for them simply for the sake of doing something for them.

• 31:18Mark Manson?

  And Aristotle considered this one of the highest experiences in life. He saw virtue friendships as some of the most meaningful and enriching relationships that we could have. It's funny, because it's, in many ways, the ancient Greeks probably correctly put friendship above romantic relationships in a lot of senses. They really saw something sacred and very profound about like a deep, enduring friendship like that. Now, what's interesting about Aristotle's model is that it's kind of like a layer cake. Like, you kind of need the utility. Like, the utility is the entry point, right? Like, you need to have a shared interest with somebody to kind of open the door, to have enough curiosity,

• 32:02Mark Manson?

  to find out if you like hanging out with them or not. And then you have to enjoy hanging out with a person to really get to know them well enough, to really understand that, is this a person? Do I admire their character? Are they a really impressive human being? Would I like to learn from this person? Would I like to, you know, identify with this person, belong to the same group as this person? So each level kind of opens the door to the next level. Like, they're not mutually exclusive. Like, generally speaking, a virtue friendship has all of these going on simultaneously. And then the last thing that Aristotle's, well, not the last thing Aristotle said, but the last thing that I'm going to talk about in regards to Aristotle is, that is, I think is very important and...

• 32:44Mark Manson?

  It's going to come up a lot in this episode is that Aristotle made two points. He basically said, the first two levels of friendship, the utility and the pleasure are inherently transactional. You know, it's like if we are, if we only hang out because we play poker together, the minute you stop playing poker, I am probably not going to see you anymore. Right? And similarly, a lot of my party friends back in the day, as soon as I stopped partying, I didn't really have anything in common with them anymore. Right? So didn't spend any time. Aristotle said that there's nothing wrong with that inherently. Like, there's nothing wrong with a transactional relationship with somebody.

• 33:22Mark Manson?

  He just argued that as long as the transaction is, there's a proportionality between the transactionalness of the friendship, then it's okay. And this comes back to the tit for tat thing, right? Like, it's as long as both of you are getting some sort of benefit out of the, out of the friendship, things are fine. Like, I'm happy to have a poker buddy that I only play poker with, right? I'm happy to have a party friend that I really only go party with. It's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. It only becomes a problem if, say, like, I'm always the one inviting the friend to the party, and they're never inviting me to anything. And they're coming to my house and drinking all my booze and never bringing a bottle of wine. And, you know, it's like, it's only when, when there becomes an imbalance in the, the proportionality

• 34:07Mark Manson?

  of who's contributing to the relationship, that these friendships break down. And again, back to the tit for tat thing, it's kind of the breakdown of that tit for tat dynamic.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is a parallel too in Confucianism as well. So Confucius outlined five, the five relationships of human nature, basically. And friendship was one of them. All the others had a hierarchy to them.

• 34:30Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Right? But friendship was considered the only relationship where there were equals, or at least some balance there, he was talking about. But yeah, God, Aristotle nailed it though, didn't he?

• 34:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you're getting, and you're, you're,

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Oh, did I?

• 34:43Mark Manson?

  You took my next point. Well, so, because the interesting thing is that Aristotle's point was that with virtue, The virtuous friendship becomes non-transactional.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:53Mark Manson?

  You start doing things unconditionally for each other. You know, it's, it's, you don't, you know, maybe your buddy's going through a hard time. And it's always you inviting them out. And you're covering, you know, you're buying him dinner and you're like helping him move into his new place.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  We've all been there, yeah.

• 35:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it's kind of one-sided, but you also understand like, hey, this is a really good friend and I care about them. And, you know, we're gonna, one day it's gonna be me on the other side and like, it doesn't matter. Right? Because I, I love them, I care about them, I want, I wish them the best. And it has like, the transactional nature of this is gone at this point. Aristotle, like, that's the beauty of the virtuous friendship. But Aristotle said that for a virtuous friendship to exist, there could be no status dynamic. There could be no hierarchy.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 35:40Mark Manson?

  Not, like, nobody could feel like one person is better or superior than the other. And this is a very important point, it's the same point Confucius made. It's a very important point, and I think we're gonna come back to it. Because Aristotle's argument would be that as soon as there's a status dynamic, as soon as there's like a higher status person and a low status person, the relationship is kind of forced into becoming somewhat transactional. Like, it's, it's kind of impossible to make the, the relationship entirely unconditional. And just due to power dynamics within the relationship.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  So would you say then, Mark, that, that, you know, you say, like, you don't have these friends. What you're saying when you say you don't have as many friends as you would like, it's these friendships of virtue. Because I think you do talk about friends all the time. And you're like, oh yeah, my surfing buddies, this is what you do. You, you say, oh yeah, my surfing buddies, my poker buddies, my, or the, like, go-to-dinner-party buddies that I have right now.

• 36:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  That's what you're talking about when you say.

• 36:34Mark Manson?

  I think so. I, I, I think it's, it's a, it's a scarcity of virtuous friendships. Although it's funny, because I do have a lot of virtuous friendships. Part of the problem, and we'll get to this, this will definitely come up in one of the next sections. The part of the problem is that all my really good friends live in completely different places.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Okay, alright, yeah.

• 36:53Mark Manson?

  So it's like, I have half a dozen great friends that I really love, and I see them all once a year.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:00Mark Manson?

  And it sucks.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  We'll talk about that very soon, Mark. We'll talk all about that.

• 37:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, so we'll come to that. So in terms of modern psychology,

• 37:12Mark Manson?

  you know, psychologists have identified really kind of three ingredients of what makes a friendship a friendship. Like, what's the difference between, say, a friendship and an acquaintance, or a friendship, you know, a friend and, I don't know, somebody, a colleague, or somebody that you see all the time around the neighborhood? And they define it as basically, number one is there's reciprocity. So both people are putting in effort, spend time together, to do things for each other, to share things about one another. There's trust. So you, obviously, you trust that this person has your best interests, or isn't trying to fuck you over, or

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Won't lie to you.

• 37:51Mark Manson?

  Doesn't have an angle, or something.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:53Mark Manson?

  And then, number three is there's intimacy. So there's self-disclosure. I mean, intimacy sounds like a heavy word. In this context, it's not. It literally just means self-disclosure. Like, you're willing and able to openly talk about yourself. Not necessarily everything about yourself, but like, you are sharing personal information with this person, and they are sharing personal information with you. So those are like the three defining aspects of a friendship. So to come back to the proto-Germanic word of like, somebody who's free to love, or these two, these two, let's call them, let's call them the two disruptors for the episode. So the transactional nature, or the lack of proportionality, right? It's like a friendship that's one-sided, or somebody who is really just trying to get something from the other person.

• 38:39Mark Manson?

  And then the equality, the status equality. So if you take these three ingredients of friendship, and then we kind of return to this idea that generally the function, friendships need to be at least proportional, if not non-transactional, or kind of unconditional. If you think about a very transactional relationship, or a disproportionate relationship, it generally involves one person who is always taking, and the other person is always giving. That breaks the reciprocity. That's going to interfere with trust. And it basically puts conditions around intimacy. So it's like, If in our relationship, like you're always giving and I'm just always trying to take as much as I can get from you, it's going to create incentives for you to be very careful

• 39:22Mark Manson?

  about what you share with me and maybe like not always be honest, maybe not always tell me what's going on. Similarly, if there's a status hierarchy, if there is like some sort of imbalance in the relationship, it can create trust issues, it can create reciprocity issues. The disruption of those two things can also interfere with with people's ability to be intimate and honest with each other. So I do think it is worth noting that both of these things, the kind of unconditionality and the status equality, these are subjective. These are completely perceptual. I think I've mentioned maybe briefly on the old podcast,

• 40:05Mark Manson?

  but like when my career blew up, one of the, one of the things that that happened that was a little surprising and also upsetting, some of my friendships got weird after that. And I think looking back, all of the people I got weird with were generally, generally men. They were generally people who had catched a lot of their self-esteem and, and self-worth to status, particularly like money and career acclaim. And I think for them, you know, if I'm doing super well, that then like now they perceive us on different, like there's

• 40:47Mark Manson?

  a hierarchy now and then that interrupts our ability to have intimacy, to reciprocate to one another and to have trust. On the other hand, like I had tons of friends who like, didn't really give a shit. Right. They're like, good for you, dude. That's awesome. You know, and they're like, don't like, are you going to pay for this beer? You fucking cheapskate. You know, like it's nothing changed. Like absolutely nothing. So a lot of it is subjective. A lot of it is kind of perceptual and, and people tend to, when it comes to the status equality thing, like a lot of people will project their own assumptions and like. You know, one of the things I've always said is that that we tend to measure others the way we measure ourselves. So it's like if I have attached my self-esteem to some certain

• 41:30Mark Manson?

  metric, like, let's say, I base all my self-esteem on, you know, being an amazing golfer and like, you join the PGA, like, that's probably gonna freak me out. It's gonna like, cause all sorts of complications and I'm gonna get weird around you and start being anxious and start like, second guessing the things I say to you. And then like, as soon as that starts happening, it, it's almost impossible to have a genuine friendship.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:55Mark Manson?

  It is by, by definition, transactional.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I, I love that you're pointing out that the subjective nature of this too, because I think there are a lot of people who want to try to objectify that balance. So when I said that, you know, Confucius said that this was an equal, there, there was no hierarchy in a friendship, right? Ideally, there is none. Well, maybe objectively, there is in some way or another. Like, with all of my friends, I'm sure there's certain friends of mine who I've helped with certain things that they've never repaid. I'm not sitting here keeping tabs on that. Subjectively, it feels like we're still very equal, though.

• 42:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Because I get a lot of reward in return for helping them or for them doing other things or whatever it is. So it's, it is like, I just want to highlight, it's a very subjective thing and don't try to objectify it.

• 42:41Mark Manson?

  It's funny, because it's, you know, studying this aspect of it and thinking of like, it really started to make sense to me why celebrities are, are only friends with other, other celebrities and only, and only date other celebrities, right? Because if you're Kim Kardashian or whatever.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:57Mark Manson?

  Every room you walk into, there is such a massive status disparity that you can, it's almost impossible to have like a genuine friendship or relationship with anybody new you meet, unless they're relatively on your level.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:14Mark Manson?

  And, and yeah, a lot of like, theoretically, you could say like, well, you know, she could, that she could just choose to not see herself that way, or the people around her could choose to not see her that way. And like, sure, yeah, sometimes like on the margins, there, you're gonna have situations like that. But like, by and large, it's just easier. To just go find the other celebrities and you don't have to deal with any of this bullshit. You also see something similar with like, rich people tend to hang out with other rich people. Athletes tend to hang out with other athletes. You know, like humans were naturally drawn to people similar to us, both in terms of what were our interests, right? Friends of utility, but also status, you know?

• 43:56Mark Manson?

  So it's, it's like pro golfers probably want to hang out with other pro golfers. Real estate tycoons probably want to hang out with other real estate tycoons. Like it's just, and not only because you have similar interests, but also like, hey, this is a peer. Like this is somebody who's going to get what I go through. They're not going to like, put me on a pedestal or I'm not going to put them on a pedestal.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I guess I, what I'm getting at, I guess, is there really ever a true balance in the relationship though? You know what I mean? Yeah, because like, I, I think, I think it probably like, kinda hangs around an average, you know? Goes back and forth a little bit.

• 44:31Mark Manson?

  Probably.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 44:32Mark Manson?

  Probably.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Like there's, there's imbalance in a relationship at one point and then it might swing back a little bit the other way. And it kinda goes around and everybody's comfortable with that imbalance too, at the same time. You know what I mean?

• 44:41Mark Manson?

  I mean, we'll talk about toxic friendships later, but I do think this, this is where, you know, your self-worth really like, generally speaking, people who have a terrible self-worth have terrible friendships. And I think a big reason of it is that, um, yeah, people with a terrible self-worth, they see a status imbalance in every relationship they have. And so every relationship becomes transactional.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  And they're trying to compensate.

• 45:05Mark Manson?

  And they try to compensate, they try to impress people, they try to manipulate people. And it creates a very ugly, unhealthy dynamic.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Constantly trying to prove themselves in some way or show how friendly or, yeah.

• 45:17Mark Manson?

  Exactly. And so there's like, I guess there's kind of an unhealthy status dynamic there, like where that subjectivity works against you. And then I think there's just, there's just the reality, right? Like it's funny because it's, um, writing Will Smith's book, like I really noticed this hanging around him. Like I, I actually started to feel bad because I'm like, I don't like, how does this guy make friends? Every room he walks into, like people just start screaming and crying and like laughing. And he's like, immediately the center of all the, like you can't. How do you have a friend after that? You know, like, so it just, I think some of it too is just circumstances and human nature.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  One, okay, it wouldn't also be a solved episode if we didn't talk about Nietzsche a little bit.

• 45:59Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  And Nietzsche was like a real, he was all about, correct me if I'm wrong here, but he was all about friendships are actually a little more adversarial.

• 46:07Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  In a way, like they, they challenge you. For instance, Mark, what the fuck are you wearing?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  I feel like I have to point this out.

• 46:16Mark Manson?

  Dude, I, it's my Surf Bro outfit. I, you know.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  You start, the very first episode we did, you were wearing a blazer and now you're in here in Javianca's gym shorts. Okay. I know I'm not exactly like a fashion king over here. I get it, my black shirt.

• 46:31Mark Manson?

  Coming from the guy who wears a black t-shirt and black jeans every single.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  I get it, I get it. Where's the professionalism?

• 46:38Mark Manson?

  You're throwing rocks in a glass house.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  You and I could have a Nietzschean friendship, I think, and I could just call you out constantly.

• 46:45Mark Manson?

  I think I look good. I think I look good. Nietzsche being Nietzsche, of course, had to be hardcore. And he, he thought, he thought transactional relationships were stupid.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:56Mark Manson?

  He was like, fuck utility, fuck pleasure, that's for weak people. He said, you should only have virtuous friendships and you know they're virtuous because you challenge each other. I actually think this is a very valuable point for maybe people to ask about their own friendships. Can you call out and challenge a friend? Because if you can't, then it's probably a transactional friendship.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:21Mark Manson?

  Right? Like in a transactional friendship, if you challenge somebody or if you'd like talk shit to somebody or call them on their bullshit, you're going to break that, the proportionality is going to get out of whack, but like if it's a friend of virtue, that person will actually probably be appreciative.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:35Mark Manson?

  Be like, wow, you're making me a better person. I appreciate that.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least at some point. I know, I get, my friends will call me on my bullshit and I get pissed off. Ah, God, you were right. Yeah. So yeah, no, I get it.

• 47:43Mark Manson?

  That's our, our friendship definitions, reciprocity, trust, intimacy, friendships of utility, pleasure and virtue. And generally virtue is where. That's where majority of your meaning and happiness and well-being is. Is having people in your life that you know are unconditionally supportive of you, that have an unconditional positive regard for you, and you have an unconditional positive regard for them, and that you see yourselves as equals and peers, companions, all that.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And just like be aware that those types of friendships exist. And if you are like, oh, I want more friends. Maybe you have some friendships of utility. Maybe you have some that are just based on pleasure. Could any of those be?

• 48:28Mark Manson?

  You gotta start there.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  You probably have to start there.

• 48:31Mark Manson?

  Like if you're, and we're gonna talk about this in a minute. But yeah, if you are coming from zero friends, or you just moved to a new place, it's like, what's the most obvious thing? It's like, well, go do a fun activity and meet people while doing it. Like, that's like step number one.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  You want to get into some like some of the neurobiology? And maybe even some of the health effects of friendship?

• 48:56Mark Manson?

  Not really.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  You don't want to?

• 48:57Mark Manson?

  I do. Can I go get some water or something? You can.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, kick your sandals off real quick and go get some water, Mark.

• 49:06Mark Manson?

  I might take a nap while you do this section and then I'll come back.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  You don't want to miss this section then. No, no, no, you don't want to miss this section because there's more evolution on this stuff. And I know you're like super excited about the evolution.

• 49:15Mark Manson?

  I was excited about the evolution and stuff. So, okay, I'll stay, I'll stay.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Okay. Why do friendships feel the way they do? Why do we only have a small number of friends? Most of us, right, that we can really connect with anyway? Why do we gravitate towards the people we do? Well, this is, I mean, part of the answer is that's what humans do, right? But there's obviously a little bit more to it than that, right? And there's this anthropologist named Robin Dunbar, okay? Who's kind of famous in this. And he has this idea called the social brain hypothesis. And his argument is that we evolved the neocortex specifically, and large brains more generally, because we needed to navigate all these social relationships, okay? Specifically, that's the reason we evolved.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  It wasn't tool making, it wasn't foraging, it wasn't mating, it wasn't any of these. It was navigating these complex social relationships that we have. And in primates and specifically, these are very complex relationships. And it takes a lot of brain power. It takes a lot of cognitive machinery to do this, right? And so, um, sociality itself, it's a very high effort, very laborious cognitive process, right? You have to track, uh, who, just who, first of all.

• 50:37Mark Manson?

  Who's doing what? Who said what?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Facial recognition.

• 50:39Mark Manson?

  How are they related to this person? Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Can you trust them? The obligations they owed you, you owed them. Previous experiences you have with them, the emotions that they elicited from you or exhibited themselves, the history you have with this person. That's very, very complex, uh, in terms of like neural capacity. Evolution has selected for larger brains to handle that complexity, right? And he even came up with what's called now the Dunbar, uh, Dunbar's number. Okay? In humans, this number is about 150 meaningful relationships. That's about the upper limit that you can have.

• 51:11Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  But what's really, really interesting though, is that he even found out that you could predict the typical group size of just about any social species, just by seeing how big their neocortex was.

• 51:24Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Like, it's really, really interesting. So, again, with humans, it's about 150. With chimps, it's about 50. And then with lemurs, who are like proto primates, they're partly primates, I would say. It's like a few to maybe 10, maybe 12, right? And each one of those, you see like smaller and smaller neocortices, smaller and smaller brains. Okay? So you can actually predict a group size just by looking at the brain of a, especially of primates.

• 51:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  In particular. So what he said was, uh, you have up to a limit of about 150 stable connections that you could have. There is some debate too. There's others, other anthropologists and biologists who say, no, it's actually an ecological reason. You can't have more than 150 people in any small area because there's not enough food, you know, there's not enough water, there's not enough resources, this and that.

• 52:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  But what Dunbar has found, kind of over and over again, you go to even modern, uh, tribes, like hunter gatherer tribes, they, they top out about this number. And if they get bigger than that, the groups become very, very unstable and the homicide rate goes up.

• 52:23Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. So it's like, there's like a maximum and it's, it's probably set because, again, it's really, really cognitively demanding to navigate these social relationships.

• 52:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  And anything above that is just kind of chaos. And everybody's at each other's throats and literally killing each other.

• 52:39Mark Manson?

  You know what's funny? Okay, this is gonna really date me.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:42Mark Manson?

  And, and make me sound like a boomer, but I remember when Facebook first came out, I'm talking like 2004, 2005.

• 52:50Mark Manson?

  And people, what people started doing, I mean, initially, it was just you would add your friends at your university or whatever. But then, once it kind of broke out of the universities, maybe 2005, 2006, what people, the first thing people started doing is they just started adding and friending everybody they had ever met.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Oh, it was for me, I was go, I was going for that for a little while. And then I was like, oh, this is stupid. But for a while, I was like, yeah.

• 53:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it was like, everybody was just friending everybody. And I remember there were all sorts of think pieces back then that, this is actually where I learned about Dunbar's number. They referenced Dunbar's research, and they were like, the human brain can really only handle 150 relationships, basically. And like, I think, from what I understand, like, the way to think about this is that it's not that you can only know 150 people, like, in the abstract, it's, it's, you can only have a relationship with 150 people, like, you can only-

• 53:36Speaker 01

  That's the upper limit, too.

• 53:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you can only like empathize or identify with, with personally, emotionally, being emotionally invested to some extent with 150 people. And beyond that, it just, people become an abstract number.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  100%.

• 53:49Mark Manson?

  And, and so people, at the time, people were freaking out. They're like, oh, all these people are like adding 1,000 friends on Facebook. And like, you know, Dunbar's number says that this is just becoming, people, people are being objectified, and they're becoming a number to like a high score in a video game that people are trying to like max out. And so then, Facebook ended up putting a maximum 5,000 friend limit on people's accounts to basically prevent that sort of behavior.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Which is interesting, that 5,000 number is kind of interesting, too. Because Dunbar, it's not just 150, he actually broke it down into more concentric circles, right? So you have that 150, you could have kind of meaningful connections with these people, or meaningful contacts, you could know them and have some sort of relationship with them, right? You could have 50 about good friends, 15 kind of close friends, and five like really intimate friends. That's kind of how it broke down. But on that upper bound, what you're talking about, that 5,000- They say fifteen hundred like is like kind of a um somewhere between fifteen hundred and five thousand faces that you could recognize.

• 54:49Mark Manson?

  Oh, interesting.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Like that you would have like could really memorize and be like, I've seen that face before, even if you don't know the person or know the name or whatever it is, you could know that. So it was interesting that they kept it at five thousand. I don't think they intentionally did that, or maybe they did. I don't know.

• 54:59Mark Manson?

  Maybe they did. I don't know.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  But it's just interesting that it landed there. Yeah.

• 55:02Mark Manson?

  Stalin once said, um, you know, during all of the atrocities he was committing in the Soviet Union, he said, um, the death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:13Mark Manson?

  And.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  This is why.

• 55:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah, this is exactly why.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Your brain, your brain literally cannot, it doesn't have the machinery to relate to more than a few thousand people at most.

• 55:24Mark Manson?

  And so when, once you get into millions, it just becomes this abstract, blobulous concept of people.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:31Mark Manson?

  You know, and your, your ability to empathize or emotional investment just like hits the ceiling in it, in it, in it. Everything past that number is just the same.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  And, and what, kind of what Dunbar is saying, I think, anyway, is that we didn't evolve brains to only handle those number of relationships because that was the group size. It's that the group size is that big because that's all our brains can handle. So it's the other way around. So again, there's other people who's like, no, it's ecological reasons and food. And yes, the food, food resources and access to mates and all of that does matter. But what he's saying is you, we just, it's so expensive for Mother Nature, like they had to cut it off at some point, right?

• 56:10Mark Manson?

  Wouldn't, wouldn't the, you know, so, so we were kind of topped out at a hundred and fifty for most human history, but then it's like agriculture comes around and that's when you get city states and civilization and everything. And then obviously like now, I mean, we're in a city of eleven million people right now. So it's maybe that does lend a ecological argument?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  We, what we had to do was we had to create all of these cultural and

• 56:33Mark Manson?

  Institutions.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Social institutions on top of that in order to regulate uh these relationships and behavior. We have laws, we have, you know, just social norms, like all of these things that we, of modern society that we had to put on top of that.

• 56:47Mark Manson?

  That's true.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  You know, now it was, I mean, those, those laws and, and uh social norms and everything are able to fit into our cognitive frameworks, obviously, right? But um they still have to be in place and enforced by an external, uh, by an external entity, right?

• 57:04Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:05Mark Manson?

  Sidebar, I had a friend who told me once, I don't know if he originated this theory, but his, his theory was that, um, that like all of the major world religions emerged around the same time, which was, uh, at the same time of the, like the first early city-states or like large-scale civilizations. And his theory was that religions emerged as a socially organizing technology for thousands and thousands of people. It was basically the first way that you could coordinate multiple thousands of people in human history. And, uh, and so like all of the myths and the belief systems were, uh, kind of optimized for that. And like, it's not like somebody sat down and figured that out. It's just that they like spontaneously, religions spontaneously emerged from the need to coordinate thousands of people at the same time.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Dunbar actually says-

• 57:51Mark Manson?

  Oh, does he?

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:52Mark Manson?

  Okay, it all comes back to Dunbar.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dunbar, Dunbar. And I don't even know if he was the one who originated that idea, actually. I mean, I, it actually, I think Freud said something similar. Um, you know, uh, I think even Karl Marx was even saying stuff about that. But, um, yeah, there are all these kind of external, uh, institutions and, um, kind of social technologies, if you will-

• 58:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  -that we use in order to kind of, um, I, I would say a little bit hijack your cognition around this. Yeah. Yeah. Or at least, uh, keep it in a box.

• 58:23Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, in some ways like that.

• 58:25Mark Manson?

  All right, back to friendship.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Um, so you have those, those concentric circles we were talking about, right? So all the way down to the few thousand faces you can recognize to the, you're kind of topped out at about five intimate friends that you can really like on that intimate kind of virtuous level that we were just talking about, that Aristotle said. So again, Aristotle was right. Like, this is another, another data point. Um, you, you're topped out at about five of those real intimate ones. Again, these are limits, though. I, I think I want to emphasize this here. These are limits, they're not the goals. The goal isn't to say, oh, okay, I need five close friends, I need, or five real intimate, um, you know, ride or dies.

• 59:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Basically 15 close friends, 50, uh, people I can call good friends. It's, it's not that. That's kind of just kind of the upper limit.

• 59:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  There's a lot of variation in there whether, uh, what, what people need versus what they can actually handle.

• 59:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I imagine introversion, extroversion plays a lot into that. And I mean, it's funny because when you were running through that, you were like, five ride or dies, 15 good friends, 50 friends. I was like, man, who has time for that?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  I was listening, I was like, does anyone, really, does anybody have time for that today? Right. We keep getting ahead of ourselves. We're totally gonna get into that too. Sorry, we keep teasing all these things, but they do. This does, though, you already mentioned how this Dunbar's number and his framework echoes in all sorts of different areas. So it's not just in, yes, it's in social media, your circles. Even if you have thousands of friends, you only typically interact with like five to 15 of them, you know? And over the course of a year, longer term times, it might be 50, right? Up to 150 probably is what actually ends up happening there.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Pre-modern villages or modern hunter-gatherer tribes, they all kind of top out around 150. Military companies are usually organized around about groups of 150. Let's see, workplaces too. Like organizations, once they, once they hit that 150 number, then they have to start. That's when like all the corporate stuff that, you know, a lot of people will make fun of or, you know, kind of deride. That's where it comes in, but there's a, there's a necessity for it. It's like, we have to regulate behavior in some way. Again, these institutions have to come in on top of our complex. HR departments. HR departments, basically. Yeah. Yeah. So this comes up over and over again, and it's just kind of, again, it's this cognitive limit that, that humans seem to have. And it's because, once again, it's just, it's really, really difficult.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  It's a very, very difficult problem to solve, but it's a very important one too, apparently, because it's so conserved, especially within primates. This, this, all this cognitive machinery that we devote to social relationships and particularly friendships as well. So it's just, it's kind of a testament to how, what, you know, if you think friendship's difficult, well, Mother Nature thinks it's very difficult too. Cause like she gave us, this is what she gave us. She's like, this is the best I can do. Sorry, guys. Right? That's kind of, that's kind of where Dunbar's theory leads me anyway. Now you already kind of brought this up about the social media and there's always this, there's always this strain of utopianism, right? That runs through technology and so we're gonna, we're gonna connect everybody. And you've alluded this already, and that's what Zuckerberg was saying, I'm here to connect the world.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  It's like, not only can you, I mean, yeah, you can do that in a very superficial way, but we're just not, we're just not capable of.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Being connected intimately with thousands and thousands of people all over the world in disparate locations with disparate beliefs and all of these types of things. It's just, we don't have the cognitive machinery.

• 1:01:59Mark Manson?

  It's too much load.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  It's way too much load.

• 1:02:02Mark Manson?

  And I think this is, you know, back to that utopian vision. I think the idea, at least back then, there was, there was kind of this optimistic view that if, if the world is exposed to everybody else, if everybody in the world is exposed to everybody else, then it will diminish judgments and stereotypes and assumptions, and we will have more compassion for other people, not realizing that, that ability, like, all of those things, stereotypes, assumptions, like group affiliation judgments, prejudice, really what those all are, are like cognitive shortcuts. And so the more cognitive load you put on people, the more you expose them to thousands and thousands and thousands of strangers, the more they have to rely on prejudice,

• 1:02:47Mark Manson?

  assumptions, and stereotypes to make sense of the world. And so there, it's just like a classic backfiring of, of intentions.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this will come up, I'm sure, several times too, but that's probably a cautionary tale for, you know, any future technologies we might think about.

• 1:03:05Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Okay. Put it in that one, too. So I hope I've established that.

• 1:03:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  This is a very hard problem. It takes a lot of brain power to do this, okay? Let me give you some fascinating, fascinating examples of how we, how we do connect and how our, our brains work when we're connecting with other people and, and friends, basically the neurobiology of friendship here.

• 1:03:26Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  So, for example, there's this thing called neural synchrony, okay? It's kind of like when brains become one, all right? So there's this really interesting study. They took, they got, I think it was about 250 to 300 graduate students at, at this one university, like they mapped out this social network of these graduate students, okay? And then they took a subset of them and they brought them in to the lab and put them in an FMRI scanner. They showed them all sorts of different videos. It'd be funny videos, comedy sketches, you know, maybe documentaries, maybe political stuff, whatever it was, all sorts of different kinds of videos, okay? And they measured brain activity in different regions of their brains. They could predict with a very, very high degree of fidelity, just from these

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  brain scans, who were friends. If they had kind of matching neural responses to these different videos, that predicted how the friendship network that they mapped out.

• 1:04:24Mark Manson?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:04:26Mark Manson?

  But that, okay, there's a chicken and the egg thing here. It's like, are those people friends because their neural networks map out the same around the same stimuli? Or do their neurons map out similarly because they're friends?

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question.

• 1:04:47Mark Manson?

  Or do we know?

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  I don't know if we know. I don't know if they addressed that in the study, actually.

• 1:04:51Mark Manson?

  Or it's probably both.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  It probably is a little bit of both. Some of the other stuff I'll bring up, I think, kind of corroborates this, though.

• 1:04:57Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  So, because the similarity even persisted, even when they controlled for things like demographics, like age even too, so you had some older grad students, some younger ones, backgrounds, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, all of that. Okay. Their conclusion, anyway, from all of this, it wasn't like, we didn't, we didn't grow up the same, or we don't like the same things as that. We have really the same brain patterns around, or how we see the world even too, or how we interpret what's coming in.

• 1:05:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. They call this neurohomophily, okay?

• 1:05:31Mark Manson?

  Homophily.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  I thought it was homo Philly for a little bit, but I worked it up, it's homophily.

• 1:05:34Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:05:35Mark Manson?

  Glad we got that figured out.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Neurohomophily.

• 1:05:37Mark Manson?

  We are a big podcast now, so we should, we should pronounce things correctly.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  A lot of these words, I always see when they're written, I don't see them.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Neurohomophily is a term that's used to describe how we're drawn to people's brains who literally fire like ours.

• 1:05:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  So like when, I do think, and this is another point I'll make a little bit later too, but have you, you ever, like, you meet somebody and you're just like, you instantly click with them? There's probably, there's a neural basis for this. Okay? And this is probably at least part of it.

• 1:06:05Mark Manson?

  This is maybe, apologies if I'm getting ahead, but does this have anything to do with mirror neurons?

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  We're getting to that.

• 1:06:11Mark Manson?

  Okay, sorry. Sorry, sorry.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  I think another point that, that might kind of corroborate this evidence as, as being that your brains just kind of operate the same, is that even when they scanned them at rest, when they weren't watching anything, when they weren't. You know, viewing any stimulus or anything like that, there is still a high degree of synchronicity between those neural synchrony between us, which is pretty, that's pretty wild.

• 1:06:31Mark Manson?

  So friends even nap the same way? That's crazy.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Nap or rest of the, yeah, seriously. They're just sitting there and like daydreaming. Yeah. It's the same. Some of the implications of this, like your friends,

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  you're, they're probably shaping to in some way. There probably is some back and forth to that. Definitely. When you, when you get with somebody and you jive with them, then you will over time sink more and more. I'll get to that here in a second too. But you're literally kind of shaping each other's brains, or at least you're sharing some sort of like mind space with them. And there's a neural basis for it.

• 1:07:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  It's wild.

• 1:07:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Like the big thing was from this is that it's not that you're like kind of seeing the world together. It's not you're seeing it from the same vantage point. It's that you're, you're really seeing it in the same way. You, you, you view the world, you somehow have this neural, similar neural activity that causes you to view the world or interpret events or sensations or whatever it is in a very similar way to somebody.

• 1:07:25Mark Manson?

  I feel like you see this most in married couples. Like the, the stereotype is that married couples, after enough time together, they become the same person.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:07:31Mark Manson?

  And it's funny because my wife and I were just joking the other day about how similar we're becoming. She, so just to give two examples, uh, uh, my wife is one of the most like conscientious, organized, clean, very buttoned up people. And I'm obviously a fucking savage. And we were, we were sitting down for dinner and she, uh, she was really hungry and I had forgotten to get serving spoons. And she, I was like, oh shit. I like got up to go to, go back to the kitchen to get them. And she just like reached her hand into a bowl of green beans and just took a fistful of vegetables and threw them on her plate. And I looked at her, I was like, what the hell?

• 1:08:15Mark Manson?

  And she was like, I guess I've been married for, to you for too long.

• 1:08:20Mark Manson?

  But it's funny because I've noticed similar things, like there are similar things that, that she does that I've started doing over the years. And it's completely unconscious. And it's, it's like to the point. So here's the other example.

• 1:08:33Mark Manson?

  She's super picky about smells and, um, and I've been, you know, I've, I've, I've started this second company this year. So I've, I've been spending a lot of time at this coworking space with them, um, trying to, trying to get that company off the ground. And, uh, In the, there's a corner of the office at that coworking space that smells like a fucking bathroom. And it's subtle, but every time I'm in there, I'm like, do you guys smell this? It smells like a fucking toilet in here. And, and my wife, my entire marriage, my wife has complained about smells. Like she has zero tolerance for bad smells. And all the other guys at the, at the company are like, they just kind of, they're like, what are you talking about?

• 1:09:13Mark Manson?

  I don't smell anything. God, Mark's like so whiny. Comes in here, complains about smells all the time. And, uh, and I was just, it was really funny because I, I like, I was sitting there complaining the other guy. I'm like, you don't smell this? Like, how do you work here? I don't even think I can work in here anymore. And like, to the point where I took my laptop and I went to the common area. Cause I just refused to work in the smell.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Mark Manson?

  And as I was sitting out there, I was like, oh my God, I've become my wife.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Cause you weren't like that.

• 1:09:39Mark Manson?

  I was never like that.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Smell this, smell that, doesn't matter. Yeah.

• 1:09:42Mark Manson?

  Never.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  No, that's wild. That's wild. Not only, not only when you meet somebody who kind of like sees the world, the, the world in the way you do, but also over time, you kind of do get to this. And that's, that's another thing actually, um, on here that I have is interpersonal neural coupling. It's another kind of mechanism, a very related one, uh, to, it's basically every conversation you have is literally like a brain to brain link up. So there's, uh, they've put people, they've had, uh, two people have a conversation. And you're, the person listening is usually simulating the same brain activity that the speaker is with a slight lag behind it. Which is pretty wild. And then they, they find that that coupling, that, that degree of, uh, um, similarity in their brain waves and the brain activity that they measure.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  And the FMRI is tighter and tighter, uh, if you're closer friends. And if you've known each other longer and you have a closer relationship, that you start to mirror the.

• 1:10:38Mark Manson?

  So cool.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Isn't that wild?

• 1:10:40Mark Manson?

  So cool. They, like, this is, this is the same sort of stuff. Like when we did the emotions episode with, with the co-regulation.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Mark Manson?

  Piece like. To me, it this, both of those things, I mean, they're kind of the same thing, but like, it's just so fucking cool.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the researchers call it like a super organism forms when people are having a conversation like this.

• 1:10:58Mark Manson?

  And it makes like, I mean, not to derail, pull this too much back to the emotions episode, but like it, it calls back to the, the power of talk therapy, right? It makes sense, right? So it's like, if you have something inside of you, it's been eating you up and, and really causing you to suffer when, and then you tell somebody about it, you are generating that same neuronal state in their mind that you have been experiencing. But because of their context and, and they're, they don't have the same baggage and background and assumptions and history that you do, they're able to sit with it and handle it and carry it. And due to the mirror neuron, so like they hear it, they feel your state, they understand what you're going through, but they're okay.

• 1:11:43Mark Manson?

  Then you can, you can empathize from them, oh, I can be okay too. And you know, it's like, you start to, it's almost like you see the puzzle pieces of like, why this, this stuff works.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  I, I would say you just defined what the ideal therapist is.

• 1:11:58Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, is what you're saying. Yeah.

• 1:12:00Mark Manson?

  It's so cool.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  It's wild. No, it's absolutely wild. It, but it is, it creates this like shared brain state, like I was saying, and creates this super organism even too. So, um, I'm sorry, but Mark, maybe some of the woo woo crowd is like, oh, we're on the same wavelength, like they're almost kind of right.

• 1:12:19Mark Manson?

  God damn it. No, true.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  But not, I mean, they.

• 1:12:23Mark Manson?

  We already did this last episode. We can't do this again. We gave them the resilience episode. We can't give them, we can't give them this one too.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Tiny, tiny morsel of truth in that the brain science seems to be backing that up just a little bit here. Okay.

• 1:12:38Mark Manson?

  That, that, that there are vibes and you need to be on the same wavelength is, are you, are you shitting me?

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  I'm not, not, I mean, I don't think there's any like cosmic order. I think it's just, there's a, there is a.

• 1:12:50Mark Manson?

  There's something to it.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  There's something to it.

• 1:12:51Mark Manson?

  But it's funny because it's, I mean, it makes, it does, it makes sense. So like, imagine, imagine you meet somebody who just does like, and you try to express something to, like, we've all had this experience. You meet somebody new, you try to express something like, maybe you try to make a joke. And like, they are just not getting it.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Mark Manson?

  Like, they don't see what you see, they don't understand what you understand, they like feel things differently, they see things differently. You can feel that on a very deep level. And yeah, it feels like a missed connection.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:23Mark Manson?

  Like, there's like a wire that's broken or something.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're absolutely, that's a good point. You can really feel this when it's not happening.

• 1:13:29Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  You can really, like, I don't know, I feel like I'm very sensitive to that anyway. I come into a group or something like that. I'm like, oh god, I do not fit in here. Most people can feel that, I think, pretty, pretty easily.

• 1:13:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and there's a dissonance to it, which I think is probably why people use vibrations and wavelengths and energy as like the metaphor is because it does feel like dissonance.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, Mark.

• 1:13:50Mark Manson?

  God damn it, dude.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Sorry I even brought that up.

• 1:13:53Mark Manson?

  I feel like by our 50th episode, we're gonna be coming in here and like togas and sarongs and like lighting incense.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll bring my crystals.

• 1:14:05Mark Manson?

  Stay tuned, everybody.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  But you have, okay, you mentioned a couple of times now, but mirror neurons.

• 1:14:11Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Now, most people have probably heard this, about this, at least in some capacity or another. But I think actually the way they were discovered was maybe one of the most interesting, interesting things about it. Like, almost all great scientific discoveries, it was discovered by accident. It was Giacomo Rizzolatis' lab in Italy, okay? And what, the story goes anyway, so they were studying neurons in the premotor cortex of monkeys. Okay, so the premotor cortex is when you're planning motions. There's, there's an entire little sliver of your brain dedicated just to that. Okay, so if you're reaching out to grab a glass or something like that, first the premotor neurons in your neocortex

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  fire up and then they go to your motor cortex to move it. Okay, fine. So they were studying these neurons in monkeys. And the story goes that one of his lab techs came in one day and was eating ice cream. Or, I guess it's Italy, what are they, it's not ice cream.

• 1:15:07Mark Manson?

  Oh, gelato.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Gelato, yeah, it's probably gelato, right?

• 1:15:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  And the story goes, one of these monkeys was hooked up to their whatever equipment they were using. And they're eating the ice cream and neurons in the premotor cortex of this monkey started to fire. And they were like, what the hell? The monkey is not even moving.

• 1:15:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Or not, like, then there's not, not being. Prime to move or anything like that, right?

• 1:15:32Mark Manson?

  Can you tell this story in an Italian accent? Wait, they are not even moving.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  I have Italian friends and they get so pissed off when they want to do that.

• 1:15:39Mark Manson?

  The monkey, he is not the movie.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  The monkey, not the movie. With the, Ed, you got to do the fingers?

• 1:15:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you tell the, tell the story with the fingers.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Emiliano, if you're watching this, I'm very sorry. I know you hate it when I do that. I'm so sorry.

• 1:15:51Mark Manson?

  This monkey.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Abba badi badi.

• 1:15:53Mark Manson?

  His neurons are firing.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  You can't get canceled by making fun of the Italians, all right? Well, okay, for one thing, I'm not, I don't know how apocryphal this story is.

• 1:16:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Because I, well, no, it actually does make sense. In the labs I worked in, we were eating in there all the time. And my, the OSHA guy.

• 1:16:12Mark Manson?

  You're not supposed to, right?

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  The OSHA guy at our university was always like, guys, what the fu, you have food next to the radiation fridge like this camp? So this is probably, if you're like.

• 1:16:21Mark Manson?

  Science.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  They wouldn't have been eaten in the lab. They definitely would have been eaten in the lab, right? But anyway, so he comes in, he's, he's eaten the gelato and the, these neurons are firing in the pre motor cortex. And they're like, what the hell is going on here? This was the discovery of mirror neurons right here. This is how they figured it out. It was like, wait a second. So not only are there neurons that fire when you, when you do an action or when you observe an action too, a subset of those exact same neurons that are involved in the movement or in the reaction of whatever kind are firing as well. Okay? This is what they call mirror neurons. And so it's not just, it's not just motor actions though. This is how they discovered it and they're the most obvious ones. But it's also things like, especially in humans with the, you know, our bigger neocortices and stuff like that.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  We can simulate observations that we're having for people's intentions or their emotions as well. So like, you know, humans are pretty good about emotional recognition from facial, different differences in facial features. Mirror neurons are firing when that's happening, or if you're sad or you're happy or something like that. Some of my sad and happy mirror neurons will fire as well. So these kind of three things that we talked about, you know, the neural coupling, the neural synchrony, the mirror neurons. Again, these are very, very complex neurocognitive mechanisms, but they're highly conserved too. Evolution thought it was important enough to keep it around, so it has. But it also, it just, this is why we have these big, beautiful, messy brains too, is

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  to do things like this. This is the only thing, you know, obviously, these aren't the only three mechanisms that we have of friendship and connection and all of that. These are three really big ones, and they're very, very complicated and fascinating and messy.

• 1:18:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I'm just, I'm really, I actually am having like one of those, holy shit, the brain is so cool moments during this section. It's, just imagine the intricacy and the complexity of evolving, like if you think about the eyeball, right? Like, the fact that like, I don't know, like I can see you make a movement and my brain is able to take the light that has bounced off of your body in that configuration and automatically knows how to process it in such a way to imagine myself getting up and making the same movement as you. That's just so fucking amazing. It is really incredible.

• 1:18:47Mark Manson?

  And then you think about like movies and TV and theater and performance art and everything, like it's just, all of it is playing on our mirror neurons and our ability to like, project ourselves into situations and empathize with complete strangers, really. Like, it is really incredible.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  We'll have to get some weed with our spirit crystals, I think, too.

• 1:19:11Mark Manson?

  Want to get high?

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  But that, I mean, so it goes from, we have these complex nervous systems in general and brains in order to...

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Navigate all these complex social interactions that we have and friendship is among the most complex of those interactions that we might have. And so, just again, if you think making friends is hard, well, it is on every single level you can think of, all the way down to the like neurons that are firing in your brain. It is a difficult problem to solve. And so, take a little solace in that, I think, is what I want you to take from that little section, anyway.

• 1:19:53Mark Manson?

  I think it's also really cool and kind of, I don't know, poetic or ironic that it's like, human rationality happened as a side effect of evolving the ability to socialize and develop social relationships with each other. Rationality wasn't the point, it was just the tool that was necessary to develop social relationships and maintain them over a long period of time.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Right, you really have to work at rationality, too. It's not like a built-in, you know, like, connecting with people is more innate to us than like, logic, right? You know what I mean? We're not logical.

• 1:20:30Mark Manson?

  Which is, anybody who's been on Twitter lately can, it's very obvious to you.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  It does kind of, and maybe we'll put a pin in this one, too, because we are going to talk about this a little bit later, but, you know, it does kind of raise the question, what happens to our neural, like our neural coupling and the mirror neurons and everything, when more of our communication is more and more distributed, more and more asynchronous? Maybe put a pin in this one, but like, you start to see like, you don't have, there is no neural coupling, there is no, the mirror neurons aren't firing, when you're texting somebody, or when you're communicating online as much. Even like a Zoom call, you know, the loss of fidelity that you have in a video chat,

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  there's a loss of mirror neuron firing in that, there's a loss of neural coupling and neurosynchrony there, too. So, this is something I think that, you know, you don't really quite think of, and again, why I think, and as we'll see later a little bit, too, is that why digital communication isn't necessarily a good substrate for At least not for like really deepening your friendships or even maintaining them. Yeah, over, over time.

• 1:21:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah, well, definitely excited to talk about that. But yeah, I think we've all had the experience of maybe texting something to somebody or receiving a text from somebody that sounds absolutely awful or is completely taken the wrong way. And then you, you actually see the person face to face and talk to them and you realize it was the whole thing was a misunderstanding.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Right. Or like, you know, during the pandemic, you know, the, the like Zoom parties were kind of a thing for a while there. And I was always just so like, ugh. When I got done, I was like, that was so unsatisfying, you know?

• 1:22:12Mark Manson?

  Too cool. You're too cool, Drew. You're just.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Maybe I just have a well-developed mirror neuron.

• 1:22:18Mark Manson?

  Maybe.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  System. I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:22:20Mark Manson?

  Maybe.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Um, I want to end this section though, too. So not all just neuroscience, but a little bit more mixed in. Some of the kind of health benefits and ramifications, I think, of friendships. And, you know, you did mention already that there's all these health benefits to, to friendship, but I want to go over some of them a little bit more in detail, some of the more interesting ones, anyway. This idea has actually been around for a long time. So there's, there's now, you know, there's the loneliness epidemic and, you know, the social connection crisis and all these things going around. And I'm sure people are aware that like, yeah, there's, there's health consequences of this. Back in the resilience episode too, we talked about the Rossetto effect, right? Remember Rossetto, Pennsylvania?

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  There was this small Italian immigrant community there who they smoked, they drank, they, you know?

• 1:23:08Mark Manson?

  A gelato.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  They ate a bunch of gelato. They didn't, they didn't exercise really intentionally, but they lived like these long, really healthy lives. And it was because they had these strong, strong social ties, right? Goes back even further than that, though, too. There was this Persian philosopher named, or he's a physician, kind of physician philosopher named Ibn Sina. We know him in the West as Ibn Chena, I think is how you say it.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  He actually prescribed though friendship as like a medicine almost because he noticed just how how much healthier people who had like strong social networks were than people who didn't. He believes things like, you know, isolation made people ill. This was thousands of years ago too. This was about about a thousand years ago, actually. He would also do this thing where he matched temperaments. Like, so if you were a melancholic, you know, a sad person, you needed to be around cheerful people. And if you were like a stressed out person, you need to be around calm people, you know, that kind of thing. Kind of simplistic, but also probably kind of wise in a lot of ways, too. He recommended, he would prescribe shared meals, conversation, and playful gatherings as deliberate therapies even too.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Okay. Wow. This was again, a thousand years ago. He was, he was already on top of this, right? And modern medicine showed there's actually something to this, right? Friendship isn't just emotional. It literally extends your life. Okay. So one study that I came across found that people with a more developed and stronger social network had about a 50% decrease in mortality over a seven year period than people who were self-reported themselves as more lonely and had weaker ties with with people as well. There's even some evidence that suggests that like loneliness can be as bad, like chronic loneliness and social isolation can be as bad or worse for you than smoking about a pack of cigarettes a day, 15 to 20 cigarettes a day.

• 1:24:56Mark Manson?

  That's mind blowing.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  Which is insane because like you and I are both former smokers. You know how fucking terrible it is for you, right? And social isolation is even worse than that. And then you think about all the heart disease and all of that, right? Social groups and diverse social groups tend to encourage healthier habits as well. One of the like just getting up and going out and going places with your friends. That just you get the exercise benefits from that. If you do have like health conscious friends, though, too, those habits will rub off on you. There's also this kind of whole suite of physiological responses that your your body and brain has when you're in the presence of friends, like lower blood pressure.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Better immune, like when they take blood draws, you have better immune markers in your, in your blood, lower inflammation too, and protection against heart disease. I'm gonna go back to the inflammation thing real quick. This was something I came across and I thought was really, really fascinating too, and relates back to the evolutionary stuff.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  When you are socially isolated or alone, at least for longer periods of time, or in any situation where you don't want to be alone, inflammation markers upregulate in your body.

• 1:26:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  Now, why would this be? This is kind of weird. Well, what they think is, you know, a socially isolated human in our evolutionary past was probably a dead human.

• 1:26:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  Or at least you were very, very likely to be, or much more likely to be physically injured. And so upregulating those inflammation markers, kind of readied you for that, right? So, you know, if you're alone, you have a higher, higher chance of being physically injured. And so your body's like, okay, let's just prepare for this, right? Okay, no big deal if you then rejoin the group and then those inflammation markers come back down. That's why we see this, like, lower inflammation markers in people who have stronger social networks. But, the thing is, is that in modern society, where we're, you, you might suffer from chronic loneliness or social isolation, or just stress in general that upregulates all that inflammation.

• 1:26:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Long-term, that's very harmful for you. So in the short-term, that's adaptive for like, any injury you might cause, it'll help you deal with that injury, physical injury. Longer-term, though, it, it wears on like your, your, your vessels, your blood vessels, you know, longer exposure to cortisol, it messes with your metabolism long-term, screws up like your, your hunger and thirst and all of that kind of stuff. So, there's actual like, physical things that happen to you when you are socially isolated.

• 1:27:27Mark Manson?

  Socially isolated.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  That, that can lead to long-term chronic health conditions.

• 1:27:31Mark Manson?

  It's so interesting, and I don't, this is not meant as a call-out.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Mark Manson?

  But I do find it interesting or kind of amusing that like, all of these health and longevity experts that are huge now, you never hear them talking about relation. First of all, they tend to all be single men.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:49Mark Manson?

  And second of all, you never hear him talk about social relationships or community.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Mark Manson?

  And again, that's not, that's not a call out. Like, I'm a huge fan of Huberman and Tim Ferriss and a lot of what those guys do, but like, it is just kind of, I don't know, it's just funny. Like that, knowing how big of an, like what you just said, social isolation is worse than a pack of cigarettes a day.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they're saying, you should take this supplement.

• 1:28:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, AG1, this episode is brought to you.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's, it's, I guess it comes back to the very first point I made at the top of the show, which is like, the, the delta between the importance of this topic and how much it's discussed is just, it's absolutely mind boggling.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  I think you do, you generally do see it though, like a lot of unhealthy people are generally socially isolated. You just, anecdotally, you see this everywhere. And it's, it's sad. And you see it, and it's heartbreaking. But yeah, there's, there's all these physical health benefits. Obviously, there's a lot of mental health benefits too. We've already alluded a lot of these, but isolation, it's a predictor of higher rates of depression and anxiety. Friendship, though, it lowers the, the risk, or I'm sorry, it lowers the recovery time that you have after like surgeries and injuries and even, even like life events that kind of take you down from depression and anxiety. You bounce back a lot quicker too, when you have these social networks.

• 1:29:17Mark Manson?

  I mean, to me, just the fact that the worst punishment that we know of, short of the death penalty, is solitary confinement.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:30Mark Manson?

  That you can take hardened criminals who have spent their entire lives being antisocial and violent and with awful relationships with everybody, and the worst thing you can do to them is put them by themselves for a long period of time.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  It's been outlawed in some states and some countries too, because that's, it's found to be so bad for you.

• 1:29:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  It's so terrible for your mental health and physical health, obviously, as we just saw too, but it's, yeah. It's, it's like a cruel punishment at this point. Like, like we've realized, it's like a cruel and unusual punishment.

• 1:30:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and you can literally drive somebody crazy.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:03Mark Manson?

  If you, if you put them. In isolation.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  In which case, like, death might not be a worse outcome for that. Another set of studies too, though, has shown the stress buffering effects. So, interesting you just mentioned that. I, actually, when I was doing research with monkeys, this was kind of a, one thing we did. We do these, we call them social isolation protocols, and it's not as bad as solitary confinement. Okay, but you would take a monkey for a few hours out of their cage with their, their family groups, and you'd put them in a cage by themselves. And they would obviously have this, like, really measurable stress response. You'd measure their cortisol or ACTH or whatever it was, whatever stress marker you were going to measure would always increase during that, that time period.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  If you put one of their cage mates next to them, though, like one of their siblings or whatever, that, that stress response was blunted. It was, it was shortened, it came down.

• 1:30:56Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  You see this in, in humans as well.

• 1:30:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  You would put somebody in an FMRI or hook them up to, like, heart rate monitors and measure their cortisol response and everything like that and give them electrical shocks. If they were holding the hand of somebody that they, like, a good friend or a spouse or whatever, that stress response was blunted. It even worked if it was a stranger, too. It wasn't as, it wasn't as strong of a blunting effect, but it would even work in that case, too. So, there's this stress buffering effect that, that, again, that friends have. Like, I was just talking about with the inflammation stuff, it's very similar to that, too. So, we talked about this in resilience as well. Like, the absolute best thing you can do for your, like, mental health, your physical health, is probably have a good social support network.

• 1:31:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  And friends. So, yeah. Okay, one last thing here. There, there's also, and a lot of these effects that I've just said, the mental health effects, the physical health effects, the stress buffering, all of that. It's kind of a two-way street even, too. Not only, it's not only that, like, the, the, the person who has been socially isolated feels better when they regain the group. The, the, the other people in the group also feel better.

• 1:32:01Mark Manson?

  When the person comes back?

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, there's, there's a reciprocal nature to this.

• 1:32:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Let's go back to the tit-for-tat, generous generosity.

• 1:32:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  And it's a two-way street here.

• 1:32:11Mark Manson?

  Well, this comes back to the happiness episode, where we talked about that actually giving to people makes you happier than giving to yourself.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:32:20Mark Manson?

  Right? Like, it's, it is actually, one of the highest drivers of happiness is helping others.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Right. And this is, I think this is the point I was trying to just make about the, the subjective balance in, in relationships.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Just because I provide you with something like some nourishment, social nourishment, or whatever it is, doesn't mean that you owe me for that because I'm getting something out of this too.

• 1:32:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Not to reduce it to a transaction again.

• 1:32:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  But I'm just saying that there's a way to see this objectively where it's like, okay, I actually, I get something out of this too. And so I'm not going to sit here and keep track of everything.

• 1:32:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  You know, from that point of view, anyway.

• 1:32:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Mark Manson?

  All right, before we jump into some of the actionable advice, I do want to remind listeners that everything covered in this podcast is available in a PDF guide. It's at solvedpodcast.com/friendship. You can download it for free and check it out. All right, on to the meat of the episode. The how to make friends section. How do you make a friend, Drew? How do you make a friend?

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's a, I mean, you're going to get into this here, but I think it's a simple, but not an easy process.

• 1:33:31Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  There's some simple practices or simple principles, but implementing them is not always easy.

• 1:33:37Mark Manson?

  So fun and true story. You and I have been working together for 11 years, 12 years.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  Eleven and a half, 12 years.

• 1:33:46Mark Manson?

  Something like that.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Mark Manson?

  And it's funny because for years you've been telling me, Mark, we need to do friendship content. Mark, we need to, we should do an article on friendship. And every time we talked about it, I would go look at the research and I would be like, this is so fucking simple and obvious. No, I'm not going to write an article about that. But here we are.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:07Mark Manson?

  It is shockingly simple, but we will, we will get into all of the reasons that people are finding it more difficult and all of the things that can kind of get in the way of finding and creating friendships. But I will run through the research very quickly. It is not rocket science. None of this is going to surprise you. Basically, what researchers find is that making friends boils down to three things. Number one is proximity. How close are they to you? How often? What are the chances you're gonna run into them? Are they in your neighborhood? Are they in your city? Are they going to the same school? Basically, proximity is the container of potential friends that you can make. It's the people that you, I guess, have access to.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:51Mark Manson?

  Right? Like, you're not gonna... You're probably not gonna make friends with somebody a thousand miles away, even if you happen to run into them, just because you're never gonna see them again. Funny LA story. So, for people who don't live in LA, LA is absolutely massive and the traffic is terrible. And the running joke in LA is that if you meet somebody from the other side of LA, you're like, "Oh, it was great meeting you. I'll never see you again."

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Never see you again, yes.

• 1:35:16Mark Manson?

  And that has happened a number of times. From like, you know, they tell me where in town they live. And I'm like, "Ha, might as well be Dallas."

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 1:35:26Mark Manson?

  So proximity is the first one. Second one is repeated exposure. And so this is why we tend to make friends with people at work, people that we go to school with, people who live down the street. It's the more you see somebody, the more likely you are to become friends with them. And then factor number three is reciprocated disclosure. And I'll get into this one a little bit more. I think there are a few different ways to look at this one. But basically, it's like, are you open about yourself? Are you sharing information about yourself? And is the other person sharing information about them? So, the way to look at this is proximity, factor number one, is kind of the container of potential friendships that you can have.

• 1:36:09Mark Manson?

  Factor number two, repeated exposure, is the probability that you will become friends with that person, generally speaking. The more you run into somebody, the more likely you are to become friends with them. And then factor number three, reciprocated disclosure, is the depth of the friendship that you'll end up having. So, some people, you know, you run into, we talked earlier about my poker buddies. There are, I have poker buddies that like, I couldn't even tell you their last name, or whether they have a girlfriend or not.

• 1:36:38Mark Manson?

  Obviously, I'm not very good friends with them, but, so...

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  You just know them by like, snake eyes, or something like that?

• 1:36:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So it is, you know, the disclosure piece is, and I'll talk about this in a little bit, but the disclosure piece, like really, that is a, it is a necessary part of kind of going from the friend of utility or friend of pleasure to a friend of virtue, somebody who you, you feel emotionally attached to, identify with, and, you know, respect and admire simply for who they are. One thing that I find interesting is, and again, this, this kind of comes back to the idea that this is just so painfully simple, and it's almost stupidly simple. Right. Like, so in psychology, there's a thing called the mirror exposure effect. I don't know how familiar you are with that, but it's basically, it's actually, it's very prominent in advertising.

• 1:37:30Mark Manson?

  So if people have ever wondered, like, why do, why does Coca-Cola just buy billboards and run commercials everywhere? Well, it's because there's, there's a thing called the mirror exposure effect, which is generally that the more people see something or are exposed to something, the more positively predisposed they are to it. And it's just like a basic facet of human psychology, and advertisers leverage it with, with all the advertising that they do. And it turns out the same thing is kind of true with people. Like, if you run into the same person over and over and over again, you just generally start having a positive predisposition to them. Or you're much more likely to have a positive predisposition to them.

• 1:38:11Mark Manson?

  And I think this is very important to understand, because I think a fallacy that maybe our generation made, or like younger generations make, is something that I'm going to call, for the purpose of this episode, I'm going to call it the peak experience fallacy. So it's interesting, I actually had a conversation with a friend recently, and another guy in his 40s, we were talking about how much harder it is to make and maintain friendships in our, in middle age than it was like when we were teenagers or 20. And, and he said, he's like, you know, I think it's just all about, you know, creating these epic experiences with people. And...

• 1:38:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:38:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I told them, I was like, actually, I was like, I was totally that guy. I was like, actually, let me, let me explain the research to you. But I've noticed that this is a very common belief among people and particularly younger people. Like, they think that, that the way you make friends is you go on some epic trip together, or you do this insane party, or concert, or, or something like that. And it is, interestingly, what the research finds is that peak experiences don't create friendships. What they do is they solidify friendships that already exist. So they, like, a, a peak experience will take somebody who is a casual friend and potentially make them a good friend, but they will not take a stranger and make them into a friend.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:35Mark Manson?

  And I don't know about you, but I've definitely made this mistake a lot throughout my life. I remember when I was like, uh, in university, I, I did a summer abroad in New Zealand. And the group of people that I was with, it was people, it was kids from all over the United States. So it wasn't, I think I was the only person from my school. So it was people from, were from all over. And basically, we spent like, two months, all day, every day together in a foreign country, just having adventures, having a blast. And it's funny because that peak experience, I mean, especially as a 20-year-old, is a very intense experience. It was very profound, it felt very life-changing at the time. And, uh, everybody grew very close very quickly on that trip.

• 1:40:17Mark Manson?

  And as we were coming back, like, there was very much a sentiment that we were, we were gonna be bonded for the rest of our lives. We're gonna keep in touch with people, we're gonna have like, reunions in different cities, and people are gonna drive to go see each other, and like, all this sort of thing. And a little bit of that happened. Like, I ended up keeping in touch, I think, with maybe two or three people that I went on that trip with. But it was funny because within a year, I, I don't think I ever spoke to any of those people ever again.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:44Mark Manson?

  And it, it's, when I look back through my life, like, I see this mistake made over and over again, and I still see it made. With people I know today. Yeah.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  Consistency trumps intensity.

• 1:40:56Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  With friendship. It absolutely does. And I know it sounds boring, but yeah, no, 100%. And this is what I find with my friends too. Um, over time, a lot of my friends, you know, what they'll thank me for is, hey, it's like really good hanging out with you. Glad we could grab dinner.

• 1:41:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  On a consistent basis, this and that. Yeah, we've had, we've went on trips, international trips and all of that, but that, that doesn't stick with them.

• 1:41:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Mark Manson?

  I've noticed, I've noticed the flip side of this as well. Um, so I had a friend, uh, I'll, I'll give him a shout out. Uh, so Steve Cam, founder of Nerd Fitness is a really good friend of mine and, um, he and I became friends in New York and I was still kind of in my like big party phase or whatever. And, uh, he wasn't as big of a partier. So like, he wasn't, he wasn't one of my closest friends in New York. I would see him occasionally and sometimes we'd co-work together, but you know, we weren't like super tight. And, uh, I had like my, my New York friends that I went, went out with all the time and, but the funny thing is, is that Steve is a video game nerd and I'm a video game nerd. And so he, he eventually moved away from New York and we would just keep in touch. Like to this day, I think he and I text each other

• 1:42:02Mark Manson?

  at least three or four times a week.

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah.

• 1:42:04Mark Manson?

  And 95% of those texts are about video games. It's like about the game we're playing, about some boss we just beat, about like some game that's coming out next month. Like that's, that is 90% of our conversation. But it's funny because those conversations have slowly accumulated over 10 years now. And it's funny now because I actually talked to him, like I considered him a much closer friend than any of the people in New York I hung out with. Essentially.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  For a few texts a week.

• 1:42:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Mark Manson?

  And it just, it just adds up. And it's funny because he was just out here and, you know, he's been going through some personal stuff and like he and I had like a super deep conversation about life and, and age and, and marriage and like all this stuff that, that we've been going through. And, and it was like a very deep, personal friend conversation.

• 1:42:50Mark Manson?

  And then we went back to texting about video games.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:52Mark Manson?

  And, and it's so, it's like, what I've learned, I guess the hard way is that that's actually what building friendship looks like. It's like just a, a mountain of little pebbles stacked on top of each other.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's not as sexy as people want it to be, I think, but yeah.

• 1:43:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I, I will also bring up again, the, uh, the word that you pronounced so well earlier, uh, homophily.

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 1:43:15Mark Manson?

  Which is basically that we tend to, we tend to like people who are like ourselves.

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:19Mark Manson?

  Right? And this, again, this is similar to the mirror exposure effect. This is just human nature. It's not, you know, you, you could get all politically correct and argue that this shouldn't be the case. But the fact of the matter is, is that we, we tend to associate and relate to people who look like us, who are same age, same gender, same occupation, have similar interests and hobbies. So it is, again, being like painfully obvious. Look for people who are into the same shit you're into.

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  Good place to start at least, yeah.

• 1:43:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And I honestly, so this is one thing that I kind of changed my mind on doing the research, or not necessarily changed my mind on, but I think I have a little bit of a different perspective on it. Cause I, I think we're going to talk later about how the like, oh, just go join a gym, or take a yoga class or whatever, like how that advice is maybe a little bit overrated. I think one of the things that, the conclusions I kind of came to, like digging into this, is that it's not necessarily the interests that create the friendship. It's the interests that create the repeated exposure for the friendship to emerge.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:44:29Mark Manson?

  Right? Like it's not, like I'm not friends with Steve because we both play video games. It's the video games are the excuse for me and Steve to have exposure to each other hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  That's a really good point, actually. Yeah. And I, and I think too, and yeah, we will get into that, but like the, you know, join a yoga class or, you know, go do some interest group thing. I actually kind of came the other way because I used to think, ah, it's kind of, it's, it, I was like, yeah, it's super overrated. Now I'm like, actually there is a way.

• 1:44:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  To use this. And I think that point actually will come up again. So, yeah.

• 1:45:01Mark Manson?

  I'm excited to talk about that because it's like, that's, that is, as, as somebody who just went down that route.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:09Mark Manson?

  And it didn't really turn up anything.

• 1:45:13Mark Manson?

  I think there's an interesting conversation we have there.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Okay, cool.

• 1:45:16Mark Manson?

  I do think it's overrated, but I think I'm gonna predict that your point is that it's just not done correctly.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's over prescribed but underdeveloped is what it is.

• 1:45:24Mark Manson?

  Yes, I think I would, I would agree with that. The last thing I will say about this too, this relates to the proximity piece, is that we don't think a whole lot about the institutions and communities and networks that we embed ourselves into.

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  Well, and they're disappearing too, which, yeah.

• 1:45:40Mark Manson?

  We're definitely gonna come to that, but it is, for example, you know, not just the neighborhood that you move to, but the company you take a job at, for instance. Like, let's say you get two job offers, you know, one is from Apple and one is from like some small local business with like 10 people. The social reality of both of those companies is gonna be completely different. You know, at Apple, you're gonna be exposed to tons of people, you're gonna have probably a lot of infrastructure to create social relationships with it, like a lot of large corporations will actually like plan things to foster friendships at work. Whereas at like a small local business, you're probably gonna see the same eight or 10 people

• 1:46:23Mark Manson?

  over and over again, and if you get along, great, that could be amazing, but if you don't, like, you might just kinda be shit out of luck. So that's just one example. There's a lot of downstream effects of thinking about, you know, what career path you choose, what religion you follow, what hobbies you get into, as well as where you live. So that's how to meet people, and we're gonna come back to that. I know you're, you're gonna talk about a bunch of strategies to meet people more effectively and see people more, more frequently. Let's talk about deepening relationships. So-

• 1:47:07Mark Manson?

  The way I think about this is basically our emotional attachment to people tends to be in proportion to the sum of the emotional experiences we have with them. So I think one way to do this is through vulnerability and that is simply because being vulnerable, disclosing yourself, sharing very personal details about yourself tends to be an emotional experience, right? Like you feel very emotionally close to somebody that you share yourself with or they share themselves with you. But I don't think that's the only way to do this and we're gonna talk in a little bit about the differences between men and women.

• 1:47:48Mark Manson?

  And the reason I didn't want to limit it to vulnerability is simply because I've had a lot of male friendships that I of guys I feel super close to and I literally go years without having a like a deep personal conversation with them. But like they're like a brother to me, right? Like I feel a very intense attachment to them.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  So one realization I had during all this too. Yeah. Oh shit, yeah.

• 1:48:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I like that that bugged me. Some of you know, some of the research does label the third factor vulnerability. Like I like to see it more in terms of like disclosure or emotion, shared emotional experience.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like the word disclosure. Earlier on, we were using vulnerability. I was like, ah, that like, yeah, it doesn't have to be like burying your soul or anything like that.

• 1:48:35Mark Manson?

  As two dudes, I just like, I'm like, no, man, I've had really good friends that like I would never.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Especially with my, like just exchanging information, right? Which isn't super vulnerable, but just exchanging information can even be a connection path.

• 1:48:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So I see it in terms of the sum of the emotional events or experiences that you share together. So one and one version of that can be like a deep vulnerable conversation. Another version of that could be a peak experience, you know, a trip together, a concert, a crazy concert or a party together. It could also be dealing with hardship together, right? So you, you know, you, there's a very intense friendship and bond between war veterans, you know, guys who served in the military together. Generally speaking, like tragedy can often bring people together. Illnesses can bring people together. The other thing is I think this is very timely as well. I wrote a note here, this was not in the research, I didn't see anything about this

• 1:49:31Mark Manson?

  in the research, but I wrote a note just because it's. Anecdotally, very timely. Like, my wife just had a very good friend of hers. Just went through a divorce and then went through a bunch of crazy shit in her life after the divorce. And it's funny, because like, you know, they grew up together, then they kind of grew apart for 10, 15 years. And then, and then they were like, barely even friends anymore for a little while. And then it's like, something changed and happened that like, they've grown very close together again. They've kind of like rekindled or rediscovered their friendship. And it's like, I just think there's some, and I think about some people in my life as well, like some of the guys that I grew up with.

• 1:50:13Mark Manson?

  There's something about just being present for a long period of time. Like, just seeing somebody go through many life phases. I think there's something about that that builds an intimacy. Like, if I've known college Drew, and I've known grad school Drew, and I've known nomad Drew, and I've known, you know, research Drew, and I've known podcast Drew. Like, there's just a, there's a certain level of intimacy and comfort that, that comes from sustaining multiple periods of life together. I don't have any data to back that up, but that's, that's like, that just feels, feels very true to me. And I, I wanted to like, throw that out there.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  No, I absolutely agree. And I don't know how far you want to get into this right now, but I've had this happen in my life too, actually, with one friend in particular that I'm thinking of. We've known each other since preschool.

• 1:51:05Mark Manson?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

  And we've gone through everything, and he lives in a different country now, but, and he's went through a lot. He lost his wife a few years ago. He's been remarried, and, yeah.

• 1:51:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  It's like, it's a completely different friendship that we have.

• 1:51:18Mark Manson?

  It is.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Like, when we were kids, it was, and we'll talk about how friendship changes throughout the life.

• 1:51:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  It was, you know, surface level and fun and this and that. And then we went through all the life's up and downs and seen each other change. We've grown apart. We weren't friends for a little while, not, not, like, didn't have a friend breakup or anything, but then...

• 1:51:34Mark Manson?

  It's kind of like the virtue friendship, Aristotle's virtue friendship. But it's not, you know, because Aristotle really defined it as some, as like, somebody's character you admire. Or like, somebody who you, you love simply for the sake of being themselves.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:48Mark Manson?

  And it, and it's funny, because I don't even know if it necessarily requires admiration. It just like, at a certain point... I think being a part of somebody's life journey for long enough, you develop an emotional attachment. And then also, if that person's been part of your life journey for long enough, you also develop an emotional attachment. Like, like, I, there, there, I have friends that I've known for decades, and we've grown very apart. Not like in terms of how we feel about each other, but it's just like, we don't really have anything in common anymore.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:20Mark Manson?

  But at a certain, like, there's some threshold where you've known somebody long enough, and you've just seen them go through enough things, and you've been with them enough times, that, yeah, it almost becomes like a, the chosen family thing. You know, it's just, it, it, like, I see them more as like a brother or sister than I do a friend.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  Right, like, there, there, there's just some constant, uh, uh, element to this relationship that you have that is like, it's enduring enough that you're, you're willing to, like, even if they've changed, or you've changed a whole lot, it almost doesn't matter.

• 1:52:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  Because you've known these different versions of themselves, and you know who they are, and, yeah.

• 1:52:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I, I, I think there, there is some enduring element of it. Speaking of which, the research, there is some research on how long it takes to develop, to go from...

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I found this actually pretty interesting. I found this too, so, yeah.

• 1:53:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it, it's, and it's much more than you would think.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:16Mark Manson?

  At least, it's much more than I thought.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:17Mark Manson?

  Uh, so, the, some researchers, they estimate that to develop a casual friendship with somebody, uh, it requires spending 50 hours with them, approximately, um, to become a friend, like, somebody that you consider a friend, it's around 90 hours, and then for a very close friend, it's 200 hours. Which, yeah, that feels like a lot.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. And, and I, people need to realize that it is a lot, too. Like, that you have to be patient with this.

• 1:53:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's funny, I remember, I, I was at a party, maybe a year or two ago, and I ran into this guy, super young, very, uh...

• 1:53:54Mark Manson?

  Very optimistic, you know, kind of one of these like delusional tech bro types. And he like with a very straight face that he, he said that he wanted to develop the technology that solved the loneliness crisis.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:54:06Mark Manson?

  Of course, I became very amused and I was like, tell me more. And, um, and it was interesting because his strategy was basically, he wanted to engineer like the, the highest peak experiences possible.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 1:54:18Mark Manson?

  With the least amount of effort. And I remember trying to explain to him that, that that's just not how it works.

• 1:54:23Speaker 01

  That's exactly backwards, probably, actually.

• 1:54:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I was like, I was like, what you should be doing is, is, uh, is, is engineering ways for people to see each other repeatedly in very casual situations over a very long period of time. Like, that's how you solve it. And he, he was like not having any of it. And then finally.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's not a move fast and break things.

• 1:54:42Mark Manson?

  Totally. Well, no, the funny thing is, is he and I went back and forth like, oh, I was like, I'm sorry, dude. I'm like, don't shoot the messenger. This is just, this is what the psych research says. And, uh, and then finally he just looked at me and he's like, yeah, but dude, that doesn't scale.

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:54:57Mark Manson?

  I was like.

• 1:54:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:54:59Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  Friendships don't scale.

• 1:55:01Mark Manson?

  Friendships don't scale. That's why they're meaningful.

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  And go back to Dunbar's number, right?

• 1:55:05Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  You can't scale, you cannot scale your friendship network because you are just cognitively limited.

• 1:55:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, anyway.

• 1:55:12Mark Manson?

  As you said, consistency beats intensity. You know, 10 different one hour hangouts is going to be, beat one epic 10 hour hangout in the long run. It isn't so much the shared interest and values that make the friendship. I think they, they become the infrastructure that allow the friendship to emerge. It's really funny, like that story I told earlier about my friend who was like, I don't care if my car buddies are good fathers. I'm actually thinking there's wisdom in that.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Oh, so what do you mean? What do you mean?

• 1:55:44Mark Manson?

  Well, what I mean is like. Because I think part, and then maybe I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but I think, I think maybe part of the problem these days is that we have too high of expectations for friendships.

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Yeah, 100% agree with that.

• 1:55:57Mark Manson?

  Like, we, we think our friends should be like amazing and, and brilliant and into all the same stuff we're into and, um, you know, they should be able to teach us something and we should be able to do things with them. And it's, when I think back throughout my life of like some of the closest friendships I've had or best friendships I've had, it's like, most of it is just like, yeah, I, I, I just really enjoyed doing that thing with that guy and, and, and he's fun to be around and, and we respect each other. And, uh, yeah, I don't really care like what he does with half of his personal life. Like, I don't, I don't care if his wife was a bitch or not. I don't care if he like wants kids or doesn't want ki- like, he can do whatever

• 1:56:40Mark Manson?

  he wants. It's his life, you know? Like, I just, I don't know. I may, I'm not expressing myself very well right now, but I do, I do think, um, I do think maybe, maybe we're setting too high of a bar for some of the, the relationships in our lives and it is backfiring a little bit. Like, you don't need, not every friend needs to be all things for you. Like, you can totally just have a, a good, a car buddy that you like love going to the racetrack with on Saturdays and, you know, talking about sports and the weather and, you know, maybe bitching about your kids every now and then. And like, that's fine. That's totally fine.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I 100% agree. And I think we will get into that a little bit more in a little bit.

• 1:57:19Mark Manson?

  So what are, what are some strategies, Drew? Like, you know, that's the high level. I, I just kind of laid out the high level terrain of like, okay, this is how friendships are formed and this is generally what makes them, you know, deepen and, uh, this is how you build a social life. Like, what are some actual implementable strategies?

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:57:39Mark Manson?

  That we can use?

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe what we can do is kind of go over some of these strategies, kind of in the abstract a little bit. And then maybe we, you want to try to like work through, let's take like an example or even use ourselves, like how would I do this or something like that? Can we do that?

• 1:57:51Mark Manson?

  I would love that.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay, well, first of all, like, let's kind of get your mindset around this. One of the, one of the things you just mentioned is like, yeah, there's probably not a perfect friendship out there. There's not going to be a perfect friend for you. And so, yeah, okay, it's set there. But, but there's a few other mindsets I think you need to kind of have going into this. One of them is just like, assume people like you, or at least will be receptive to you. There's what they call a liking gap. Researchers have found this, like when you have an interaction with a stranger and you walk away, you generally think, oh, that didn't go so well. And that person probably doesn't like me. That's generally, people tend towards that. When the data shows, they'll go and ask the other person, how much did you like this person?

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  They either have a tendency to be like, oh yeah, they were, they were, they were great, or at least neutral. Most people aren't just going to be like, that person was a piece of shit, right? They're, they're more forgiving to like a social, socially awkward interaction with them or something like that. People are forgiving that because we all do that, right? Everybody, everybody's so like worried about themselves. They're probably not as, as judgmental of you as you think. So I think first of all, just go into this thinking, okay, people are at least going to be receptive to me, or at least some people are. There's people out there who are. I've gotten better, I guess, over the years of just, because I wanted everybody to like me at one point in my life, like everybody probably does when you're a younger person, you do. I've gotten better at, ah, that person went away from that, wasn't my best work, right? They probably don't like me and I'm okay with that.

• 1:59:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:20Speaker 01

  Because I like, there's somebody out there who's as weird as me and as, you know, as quirky and neurotic as me and all of that. So assume that people are going to like you, okay? Or at least be receptive to you. Another thing, like, some of this is going to be uncomfortable. When we're going to give any of these examples, it's probably, you're probably going to get a little squeamish at some of this. It's gonna suck. Some of it's gonna suck. Okay? So be prepared for that. Go back and listen to the resilience episode. That's what you need, right? Don't discount friendship either. I think sometimes people are like, it's hard to make friends. So just fuck them, you know, not going to do this. Negative self perceptions too. If you are kind of a more neurotic person and you go around like,

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  people don't like me and you're very kind of obsessed with that part of yourself. Probably get some therapy around that. Honestly, CBT does wonders around this.

• 2:00:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah, we'll get into this in the toxic friendship.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:13Mark Manson?

  Segment, but it is your self perception is your relationship with yourself is very much reflected in your relationships with others. And so if you kind of walk around thinking you're an unlikable person, you're going to attract a lot of people who don't like you.

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:00:30Mark Manson?

  Basically, because anybody who does like you is can be like, well,

• 2:00:35Mark Manson?

  what am I doing here? If I'm trying to be friends with you and you just keep, you know, keep hating on yourself.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  It's exhausting.

• 2:00:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it is exhausting.

• 2:00:43Speaker 01

  It's just exhausting. Yeah.

• 2:00:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  So like, get your mindset around this, you know, right before you, before you jump into anything too crazy. Okay.

• 2:00:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  But then there are, I'll just kind of go through some of these and we can get into like an example, I think, but yeah, invest in recurring time together, going to the same coffee shop all the time, whatever it is, invest in that for the long term. You just laid out, you know, 50 hours to like kind of an acquaintance type, you know, to like, what was it? 80 hours?

• 2:01:13Mark Manson?

  90 hours.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  90 hours.

• 2:01:14Mark Manson?

  To like a friend.

• 2:01:14Speaker 01

  To like a friend. Right. That's a long time.

• 2:01:17Mark Manson?

  It is.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  So patience is really key here too. When you're making friends, it's usually around positive emotions and like fun things. And then the self disclosure part we've talked about too. Be gradual with that.

• 2:01:29Mark Manson?

  Yes. Yes. Don't, don't word bomb it all over people.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  Right. Right. Be gradual with that. Learn like small talk is, there's actually an art to small talk. And, you know, I've ragged on people before about talking about the weather and, you know, stuff like that. And yeah, you want to get past that, but. Also too, like get good at small talk and be gradual with it, right? Um, I think another tactic you can use too is lean on any existing friend networks that you have right now. Oh, there's also some research to suggest as well that um synchronized activity is uh is better at making friendships for you. So like uh e- even if it's just moving.

• 2:02:05Mark Manson?

  Dance class or.

• 2:02:06Speaker 01

  That that's like the.

• 2:02:07Mark Manson?

  Singing.

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, those kinds of things, definitely, but even just like going, like I mentioned, going on a hike or running, like you're all moving together. Like that kind of stuff is even for whatever reason, it's it's it kind of um gives more of a a surface area too for the friendship to come around as well.

• 2:02:22Mark Manson?

  I guess it it technically gives you more. Yeah, it gives you more to empathize with.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:02:29Mark Manson?

  Right? Like, cause if you're just sitting and talking, you really, all you can really empathize with is what the person's saying. But if you're walking together or you're working out together or you're dancing together, uh now you can empathize with the movement, the practice, the art.

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:46Mark Manson?

  You know?

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  I I do, I do yoga. I do specifically, I do hot yoga.

• 2:02:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  And so uh you go in there, it's all synchronized, everybody's doing the same thing at the exact same time and you have, you know, a very similar experience. And you come out there, you get into the locker room with the other guys, you're like, holy shit, that was hot, you know, today or, oh man, when we were doing this thing, this and that. And it's you, you kind of have this shared experience you just went through that you can very much relate to. That's a window. That's an that's an opening for you to like uh bond and identify with someone.

• 2:03:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  Okay, early on. Um.

• 2:03:14Mark Manson?

  Have you made friends through hot yoga?

• 2:03:16Speaker 01

  So I wanted to bring that, yeah, I actually wanted to bring this up. So I, you know, when. Cause I have kind of dogged on like the like, go join a club and you'll make friends or go to a trivia night and you'll make friends. And I'm like, that doesn't work, whatever. So I've been going to hot yoga for a long time now, or like two, three years, I guess, close to three years now. And I was like, you know, I know the faces that are there and we say hi and have some small talk and this and that. But I don't make any friends from it. Well, what I've noticed too is that honestly, if I put in just a smidge more effort, that I probably would. What I've noticed, there's a few people in particular who

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  I've made like a strong acquaintance with, let's say. This one guy, really warm guy that's there and once we got to talking and we're just, at first it was, God, that was a hot one, you know, that was the really intense today or whatever. And we got to talking and we're like, you know, he's like, oh, hey, I'm Derek. And I'm like, I'm Drew. Like, you know, we get to talking and he's like, what do you do? What do you do? He's a therapist. Oh, I have a lot of therapist friends. And also, you know, like I do this crazy podcast thing and work for this guy. And he's like, oh, really? I'm trying to write a book. And that kind of develops. He hasn't been in yoga for a while, so I haven't talked to him. But I think what I missed was the whole kind of second part of this, which is the self-disclosure and that like

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  taking a little bit of risk and being a little bit vulnerable with people and the patience it requires too.

• 2:04:42Mark Manson?

  I think there's that. And I think there's a consistency element. And it's funny, I'm thinking about the interest thing. Like, I do think, because I'm thinking about my experiences around this and particularly like I was in a, I joined a CrossFit gym in New York for a while. And part of the problem was I went all the time, but it was different people every single time. So it was like, yeah, so you have to like, you have to go, you have to go so much for so long before you start running into the same people over and over again. And then even once, and maybe that was a New York thing, just because there's so many people, but

• 2:05:21Mark Manson?

  I definitely felt like there was a lack of consistency. And then it's on top of that, like, I feel like it can't just be, like, if you go to a CrossFit gym and you meet people at the CrossFit gym, unless you're like obsessed with CrossFit and they're obsessed with CrossFit, it's probably not enough. You probably need something like that, like a second thing outside of the CrossFit that you're both into and interested in. I think there's an interesting distinction here between interests, shared interest and shared obsession.

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:05:53Mark Manson?

  Because I, like, I have an interest in surfing. I have an interest in running. Yeah, I have an interest in a lot of things.

• 2:06:05Mark Manson?

  I have an interest in watching football, but I don't think I would ever become friends with a guy just by watching football together.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  Same thing with my yoga studio. Like I'm not obsessed with yoga. I do it because it makes me feel better. And that's great. Like the people I've met in there that I that would potentially become friends of mine. Like I said, like Derek, he's a therapist and he's like, he likes writing and he likes reading and all that. And like, that's what we connect on is not on the yoga.

• 2:06:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think there's, but there's like two or three things in my life that I am kind of obsessed over. And if I meet somebody who's also obsessed over that thing, then it's almost like instant friends.

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's fair too. I do that with like, like people, if I run into another woodworker, man, we're boom.

• 2:06:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:43Speaker 01

  It's like, oh dude, what kind of saw do you got with this? Oh, do you use this planer? Do you use this? And it's, yeah.

• 2:06:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that I think you're right. That creates a, the obsession level creates a deeper spark more quickly anyway.

• 2:06:53Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. I, you know, there's, there's lots of little techniques and stuff like that. I think I'd just rather though, get into like an example and like kind of walk through this.

• 2:07:02Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  How, how would you, I guess, how do you want to do this, Mark? Because I guess what I could do is I could tell you what I would do. Let's say I moved to a new city or something like that and I knew no one.

• 2:07:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  And what I would do, we could walk through that maybe.

• 2:07:16Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 2:07:17Speaker 01

  We could try it like that, or we could take a hypothetical example of somebody too, if you wanted to. What do you think?

• 2:07:21Mark Manson?

  Wink, wink.

• 2:07:24Mark Manson?

  Why don't we do this? Why don't, why don't we do the move to a new city?

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:07:27Mark Manson?

  And walk through that and discuss that. And then I'm happy to just be open. I mean, I've been very open on this podcast that like, you know, social life is kind of the pain point in my life at the moment. And, and I'm happy to kind of talk through what I think my situation is, like why, why that's happened? Cause that's going to tie into a lot of other themes around age, phase of life, proximity,

• 2:07:57Mark Manson?

  shared interests with people, consistency, stuff like that.

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, cool. All right. Well, okay, so if I moved to a new city.

• 2:08:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  And I didn't know anyone, I probably would, and this I think has changed recently for me. I probably would join some of these clubs and groups and.

• 2:08:12Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 2:08:12Speaker 01

  And meetups and everything like that. Um, I think you're right, there's probably, the, the hit rate is not going to be what you think it is. Most likely, um, but what I would change about this is I, you know, I probably would go to a CrossFit gym. I probably would go into yoga, um, and I would be, I would practice that self-disclosure. Gradual self-disclosure, a little bit.

• 2:08:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  More, introduce yourself, first of all, just be like, hey, I'm, I'm Drew.

• 2:08:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  You know, um, who are you? That's it for the first, probably, I don't know, handful of times that you even go. Um, and just kind of get the lay of the land, you go, find something though, that to really matches with your personality, your values. You know, I know, um, I, one person in my life in particular that I'm thinking of is a very compassionate person. Um, and, uh, they would do really well in like an animal shelter volunteering situation or, um, food bank or something like that. Right? Those I think are actually really, really good, um, places to meet friends.

• 2:09:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:14Speaker 01

  Because not only are your values aligned, but it's usually like people who are also very warm and open to. Like you think about somebody who goes and volunteers in an animal shelter or something like that. They're, they're going to be open to, to meeting new people and being, uh, warm to you and everything like that. Right?

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  You just can't expect that to like, just, it's not automatic. I think that's what I thought before was that it's just going to be automatic. If you just show up to these places.

• 2:09:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  It's automatic.

• 2:09:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:41Speaker 01

  And it's not, you know, what I would also do is I would probably look for other people in there who seem to be a little uncomfortable or maybe out of place or maybe looking for something like, I don't know, I, I have an eye for those people. I'm like, ah, this person's uncomfortable. Um, let me go introduce myself and we'll both be a little more comfortable after doing that. So I think that's kind of how to get started anyway and get into your community and just be a little more active and engaged.

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  Obviously, like finding these things online, finding groups online, you know, you can be in proximity to people online to some degree. There is like a kind of psychological proximity you have with online groups, but you need to take them physical. Is my opinion anyway.

• 2:10:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:22Speaker 01

  And I think that's how to really get started on this, but you have to be super consistent. You know, the 50, 90, 200 hours that you're going to put in.

• 2:10:31Mark Manson?

  So let's talk about the nuts and bolts of that.

• 2:10:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:10:33Mark Manson?

  Because like I'm with you.

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  I want to get into this, yeah.

• 2:10:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I'm with you all the way to there.

• 2:10:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:10:39Mark Manson?

  I go to a bunch of clubs, groups, whatever, meet a bunch of people. Cool. Hey, I'm Mark. Nice to meet you. Blah, blah, blah.

• 2:10:50Mark Manson?

  Now what?

• 2:10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:52Mark Manson?

  It's three weeks go by, I don't see this person again, you know?

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 2:10:56Mark Manson?

  Or a week goes by, I don't see this person again. And then next week it's like, oh, hey, how you doing? Nice weather, you know, like what's the, what are the nuts and bolts like? Do you invite them to something else? Do you organize something outside of the group or the event like what? Do you follow up with them? Like, what does that look like?

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  I usually go to yoga at in the middle of the day, so it's right before I eat. And so one of the things I've thought about was a couple of the guys that I've become friendly with there and be like, hey, you want to go grab? Some like there's a lunch spot right next to it that I go to all the time. I'm like, hey, come grab lunch with me, you know, if you want.

• 2:11:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:32Speaker 01

  Or I'm heading over here if you want to grab lunch.

• 2:11:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  Do it that way. Casual. Keep it casual. Keep it very casual at first, especially.

• 2:11:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  And I, at some point you do have to cross that threshold though.

• 2:11:43Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  And you do have to say, hey, we need to meet somewhere besides here.

• 2:11:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:47Speaker 01

  We need to do something besides this thing here.

• 2:11:49Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  That's what's going to take you up to the next level, I think.

• 2:11:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  With someone.

• 2:11:54Mark Manson?

  And I feel like that's the moment where you need to find the second thing. Like it can't just be like, oh, we do yoga.

• 2:11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:59Mark Manson?

  Like it needs to be like, we do yoga and we're both psychology nerds. Or we do yoga and we're both really into long distance running. Hey, we should run together. Or, or we do yoga and we're both really into tennis or whatever, you know? So, so generally speaking, like I meet people through business networks. Cause my obsession is fucking business.

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:19Mark Manson?

  And I just find that that's, that's generally the people I gel with the most quickly. But the people I kind of stick with are the people who share an interest outside of business with me. So it's like, I start with the business stuff. Like honestly, if I could do LA again, I would come and I would just, I would just join business groups.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:40Mark Manson?

  I would have skipped the CrossFit gym. I would have skipped the tennis lessons. I would have skipped like the surf classes. I would have skipped all that stuff because I'm not obsessed with it and I didn't stick with it. Like I went five times and then I'm like, I'm bored, I'm busy.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:54Mark Manson?

  And but the business stuff, because I'm obsessed with it, I would go all the time and I would see everybody all the time. And then from there, I'd be like, okay, who in this group likes to go surfing? Who in this group, you know, wants to go to a CrossFit gym? Who in this group wants to, you know, go see a soccer game or whatever? And then like, take it from there, I guess. I'm kind of.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  You're still skeptical, it sounds.

• 2:13:23Mark Manson?

  Well, I'm kind of like figuring this out on the fly.

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:28Mark Manson?

  Because listening to you talk, I'm like, I'm trying to piece it together with my own experience.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:32Mark Manson?

  And like, the obsession thing I do think is important. It's like, start with the thing that you love the most and then maybe move on there. Like, I'll give you an example. I made some surf buddy friends and would go sit on the water with them and talk to them for hours. It had nothing in common. Like, you know, just like completely different lives. You know, they, they work a nine to five at some insurance company or whatever. And it's like, we kind of run out of things to talk about after a certain point. Whereas it's like, if I start with the business guy, I know I'm never going to run out of things to talk about.

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 2:14:11Mark Manson?

  And so then I can invite him surfing.

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I see what you're saying. Hmm. Okay. Because I think, I, well, I don't know if I'm super obsessed with any one thing. Like I've told you before, I'm so fascinated and interested in so many different things that I can usually find something to connect with just about anybody on.

• 2:14:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  Like, you know, I grew up in a small farming community and I can talk to people about farming or I can talk to them about like, you know, running a regression analysis over here. And so. Yeah, I get that.

• 2:14:41Mark Manson?

  Maybe that's a personal thing to me. I mean,

• 2:14:43Speaker 01

  It could be. No, it could be.

• 2:14:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Having that mindset of like, you are a likable person, but I also think it's important to have a mindset of, of people are likable. Like it's,

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 2:14:53Mark Manson?

  Like not going into a new job and being like, ah, these, these people are fucking losers or,

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna bring that up to you.

• 2:14:59Mark Manson?

  Or I don't like these type of, types of people.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  That's, okay, that right there. That's a huge one, I think. That people, um, so, some of these people I've already talked about, like in my yoga class and stuff like that, if like you're prob, to me, at first I was just like, I probably wouldn't like this person. And you like, they're actually pretty, they're nice,

• 2:15:16Mark Manson?

  People surprise you.

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  Open people.

• 2:15:18Mark Manson?

  People surprise you.

• 2:15:19Speaker 01

  Who like actually are interested in you. That's another thing. Be interested in other people.

• 2:15:23Mark Manson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  Show genuine interest in someone else. They'll show interest in you.

• 2:15:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  You'll be very surprised. So don't, like, I think there are, there are a lot of people who are like, ooh, I don't want to associate with this type of person or whatever it is. I've, I've dropped a lot of that.

• 2:15:35Mark Manson?

  I, I don't, yeah, I don't know about you, but like, I am consistently surprised at who I become friends with and who I stay friends with. Like if you,

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:44Mark Manson?

  At any period in my life, if you had asked me to go through all my friends and ask who I'd still be friends with in five or 10 years, I would have been wrong about a lot of them.

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:52Mark Manson?

  And I think it's important to, uh, yeah, to just not make predictions. Don't make assumptions about people. Don't assume, like I've had, I've had, I've met, I've met friends that annoyed the shit out of me. Like the first year or two, I, I knew them. I was like, my God, this fucking guy.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:10Mark Manson?

  Like, what is his problem? And then it's 10 years later, I'm like, good friends with them, you know? So it just, stuff like that happens. You, you never know.

• 2:16:17Speaker 01

  When you offered me the job and I left grad school, you know, you have this built-in network in grad school, right? Basically, or any, any type of situation like that. And when I was leaving, I went to my cohort and, you know, I was like, ah, guys, I'm leaving or whatever. And there, there's this one woman and, um, she was Italian.

• 2:16:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:32Speaker 01

  And she goes, no, Drew, I just started to like you. And this was after a whole year. And I was like, what the hell?

• 2:16:41Speaker 01

  So again, it does take some time, sometimes, sometimes personalities that you think aren't gonna gel with you end up gelling with you. Yes. Um, but I mean, okay, but there is that, okay, there's the proximity, the repeated exposure, the the gradual self-disclosure. Think of it in in those terms when you're doing this. The the one thing I think maybe the reason why I'm dancing around a lot of this is because I've always been able to either have like a built in network where if I've ever moved or anything like that, like, you know, when I moved from the small town that I grew up in, went to college, you have your your college network, right? You're you're you see the same people in the classes or the dorm or whatever it is, the mere exposure effect that we were talking about. When I went to graduate school, left again for graduate school, there's you have a built in social network there. I moved to Ohio with a girlfriend.

• 2:17:27Speaker 01

  And it ended up, we all the like spouses and boyfriends ended up hanging out with each other and it actually ended up working out. Like, I've always kind of had that.

• 2:17:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  So that's why I'm saying like leverage anything you have like that, any sort of network you have in place, maybe a friend of a friend. You know, one time I was traveling through Mexico. I went to Oaxaca and I told you, hey, I'm going to Oaxaca. And you're like, I know somebody in Oaxaca right now. Let me hook you up with them. And you did, you know, like, that was just serendipitous stuff like that that happens.

• 2:17:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you definitely want to rely on networks. I think the thing that like really makes friendships and that this is related to the interest thing, but I think it's actually more important. It's like, there needs to be stakes. Like, if you just show up to a a yoga class or something and you're not into yoga, you don't really know what you're doing, and you just kind of sit there and chit chat with people.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  No, no, no, it's very active.

• 2:18:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, nothing's gonna happen like, and I think maybe this is kind of where the obsession thing is is coming from is that like, I find that it it you have to, you have to really care about the thing you're doing. And then you find other people who really care about it, too. And that caring can also be network based, right? So it's like, I have a friend that I really care about, and I really care about you as a friend. And so I'm going to introduce you to and like, there's stakes now to that relationship because you're both friends with me. So. Like, I think it's the, and I think this is actually gonna be a really important component of what we're gonna talk about in the next section, about like, why it seems so hard to make friends these days. And I think a lot of it is that the stakes, society

• 2:18:58Mark Manson?

  is quickly being optimized to be stakes free.

• 2:19:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:19:01Mark Manson?

  That you can come and go anywhere as you please, that there's no downside to anything, there's no friction to anything. And I think it's, it's, it's actually the stakes that make it meaningful and that make the, the relationships there meaningful and that become the glue of the friendship.

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  Which is why you can't engineer an app that's frictionless.

• 2:19:22Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  To, that's why.

• 2:19:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And it's funny, cause I remember I talked to that, to that guy and I, I tried to kind of explain that. And he's like, no, no, no, you don't understand. So the peak experience is we're gonna have friction built in. There're gonna be challenges and they have to accomplish them to get, and I was like, okay, great. Yeah, that's not gonna work.

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  Wrong order.

• 2:19:39Mark Manson?

  This is, you know, we haven't talked about church and religion yet.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, I was gonna just get into that too, yeah.

• 2:19:45Mark Manson?

  But I think church, school and business, like, if you look at the data on where most people make friends, it's those three things.

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:54Mark Manson?

  Church, school, business.

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:55Mark Manson?

  And if you look at all three of those things, massive stakes.

• 2:19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Huge stakes involved.

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:01Mark Manson?

  And things matter. And, and things matter and you're going through it with some, somebody else that it matters for, right? And I think that is, that's at the root of it. And I guess, and again, to kind of return to my obsession point, maybe it's not obsession, but it's like, it needs to matter to you. Like, you need to actually really care about it. Like, looking back, I think part of the problem is, I didn't really care about CrossFit. And I look, and I look at the people at that gym who were friends with each other and they, that was, that was their fucking life.

• 2:20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:31Mark Manson?

  It was their identity. It's what they, it's the thing they looked forward to every day. You know, for me, I was just like, I don't want to be fat, dude.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  Those are, those are exactly the people at my CrossFit gym that I don't connect with.

• 2:20:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:42Speaker 01

  They are. And it's, that's okay.

• 2:20:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  You know, they, they connect with the coaches really well. They connect with each other really well. They all come over and they're drinking their protein shakes after. What'd you think of those pull ups? You know, and this and that. And I'm over here with the other like nerds and stuff who are obviously just there to like, hey, I need to get off my ass because I sit in front of a computer too much.

• 2:20:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:59Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Yeah. Back to the church thing though, for the record, Mark and I are not shitting on religion ever. Okay?

• 2:21:08Mark Manson?

  Are people, are people getting mad?

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  We've gotten some comments and like, whenever we've brought up a religion and these, the few episodes that we've done in the podcast so far, people are like, you're shitting on religion. It's like, I don't feel like we're shitting on religion.

• 2:21:18Mark Manson?

  Kind of the opposite, actually.

• 2:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, even though we're not religious, like.

• 2:21:21Mark Manson?

  I feel like I'm the most pro-religious atheist in the world. Like, I don't know what you people are thinking.

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  And I feel very similar too. And I do, both you and I, I think we look back like on our parents' generation, especially my grandparents' generation. The church was so essential to their social lives and such a, such a, such a source of like resilience for them too.

• 2:21:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:45Speaker 01

  And not only just friendships and everything like that, but you know, somebody dies in the church community, everybody.

• 2:21:50Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:21:50Speaker 01

  Rallies around.

• 2:21:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:51Speaker 01

  You get sick, everybody rallies around. My, my, when my mom had a pretty major surgery, but it's almost 20 years ago now. She was, had to go three and a half, four hours away for the surgery and the pastor showed up.

• 2:22:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  She was there. Like insane, right? So these types of things now, obviously, you know, if you're not religious, I don't know. There's probably some ethical things around that. If you're not religious and you go to church to make friends, I don't know. They'll be welcoming. I can tell you that.

• 2:22:19Mark Manson?

  I don't think it'll work. I mean, they, they will be welcoming.

• 2:22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:23Mark Manson?

  But I don't think it'll work. And I think because there won't be stakes.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:22:27Mark Manson?

  There won't be stakes.

• 2:22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:28Mark Manson?

  You're there for the friendships. You're there, it's, it's transactional.

• 2:22:32Speaker 01

  Ah, okay. That's, I think, what we're getting at.

• 2:22:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:35Speaker 01

  Is that you can't make this, you cannot be transactional about your friendships in general.

• 2:22:39Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  And so stop treating them like that too.

• 2:22:41Mark Manson?

  And if you're only in the yoga class or the CrossFit class. To make, to meet people and make friends.

• 2:22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:46Mark Manson?

  Then it's like that kind of undermines it.

• 2:22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:49Mark Manson?

  Because it's, it's, it's not actually an interest. It's not actually a shared interest. It's just a thing you're doing to talk to a stranger. So let's summarize really quick and then I actually want to hold my personal LA example until we finish off this section.

• 2:23:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:23:03Mark Manson?

  Because there's a couple more things that I think we should go through that will inform kind of my story.

• 2:23:09Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 2:23:10Mark Manson?

  So in summary, moving to a new city, first thing that matters is stakes. So whether that's an interest, a genuine interest, something you actually care about, not just like, well, I always wondered what playing tennis would be like. Like, it's like, no, you, you love doing this thing. You are super interested in, in this, this endeavor. Pursue that.

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:34Mark Manson?

  And then find people on that same path. And then also related to stakes is like tap your networks. Tap the people who are associated with, you know, whether it's a new job, your partner, family, friends of family, all, all that stuff. Like tap into, into those networks. Because I think what, what drives, what's going to drive all these relationships is that there's, there's stakes attached to them. That it's not just like a, well, I might as well meet this person for coffee because I have nothing else to do. Step number two, be proactive. Good attitude, proactivity. Introduce yourself. Be friendly. Be patient, I would say. You know, give it time if you are in.

• 2:24:13Speaker 01

  More time than you think you need.

• 2:24:15Mark Manson?

  More time than you think you need. If you're in an environment where you're, you see people over and over again, like give that time. I, I can tell you, you know, one of the differences, the, the jarring differences between New York and LA is that in New York, because it's, there's so much going on all the time, you do get that frequency of contact kind of naturally. Just because you just, you're constantly invited to stuff. Whereas in LA, that, that frequency and that repetition takes. Gets dragged out over a much longer period of time. And I think that fucked with my wife and I for a while. Like, we were frustrated of like, wow, we've been here two years and we've only seen this person like five times or six times and it still feels like we're just acquaintances and whatnot.

• 2:24:59Mark Manson?

  Like, I would say the friendships I do have here, it took significantly longer than other places I've lived for those friendships to kind of formulate and cement themselves. So patience, wait for the consistency. And then when you find the people who share the stakes that you have, find that second or that outside interest, that second commonality. So you meet somebody at church, turns out they also love playing tennis, or you meet somebody at tennis, turns out they also are an accountant, you're an accountant, you know, like, it's stuff like that. It feels like, in my experience at least personally, it's like, it's almost never one thing you have in common.

• 2:25:43Mark Manson?

  There needs to be something else too, that you can do together or talk about, or, you know, you can't just sit there and talk about tennis all day, every day.

• 2:25:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:25:53Mark Manson?

  Every time you see them.

• 2:25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:54Mark Manson?

  Otherwise, it's just a friend of utility.

• 2:25:56Speaker 01

  No, absolutely, yeah.

• 2:26:00Mark Manson?

  So let's start with phases of life, of like, age-based friendships, like how friendships look throughout each stage of life, how they change from one stage to the next, and why these things are important.

• 2:26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So, you know, starting really early on, right? When you're a kid, from, let's just say, zero to 12 years old, from when you're born to when you're about 12. Friendships are very much like activity-based, they're play-based, they're feeling-good-based, they're, I mean, proximity is really all that matters there, right? If you're around somebody, you're probably gonna be friends with them just by being around them a whole bunch and you, you play a lot and you get into trouble a lot, all of that kind of stuff. Your attachment kind of system forms in this, during this phase though, too, right? So, you know, we've talked about attachment before, but just real quick, if you're a secure attachment, you're kind of okay with relationships and their ups and downs, and you can manage all of that. If you're anxious, you're more like, kind of wanna glom onto somebody, you're avoidant, you kind of wanna keep everybody at arm's distance, right?

• 2:26:59Speaker 01

  Or somewhere in between, and then some combination of those two. That also bleeds into your friendships as well. So, you know, if you're anxious and you have a friend and you get possessive of that friend, or if you're avoiding, you don't really, you're like, ah, this is a friend sometimes and I, whatever. Secure people seem to have better, uh, better luck with that. By about ages five to seven, you, you get your first best friend, right? You remember your first best friend, Mark?

• 2:27:24Mark Manson?

  I do, actually.

• 2:27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, me too, me too.

• 2:27:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:27Speaker 01

  And actually, uh, we stayed best friends for a long time, actually. Yeah, it was, it was kinda cool and, and probably not anymore. We, life has changed. We don't live together anymore. You know, the proximity thing and all that. But, uh, kind of getting into those double-digit years now, you know, you're eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, and there, peer groups kinda start to form, right? And you start to, a little bit at least, see your place in the pecking order sometimes if there is a hierarchy that forms. You kinda see where you fit in, how much do people, you start to get a sense of how much people like you, um, versus, uh, like, am I a likable person? You start to develop those beliefs then, okay? And that affects you throughout your life, as, as we'll see a little bit too, okay? At this point, friendship is really less about kind of the deep emotional sharing.

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  You know, it's not that, that's not that, uh, friendship of virtue at, at this point yet. It's more about just, uh, presence and proximity, like I talked about. And, um, what you're really learning in these though, is like how to share, how to cooperate, how to empathize, how to belong in a group, okay? A lot of that foundational stuff is set there, but these really aren't those virtuous friendships. So they can develop into that later, but you're probably not, you don't have the cognitive machinery yet to really develop those, um, deeper level ones. That kinda, some of the, more, more of that deepens as you get into adolescence, okay? You go through puberty, it's a very intense time, right? Um, you, uh, friends become more central to your emotional life at this point.

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  You start kind of pushing your parents away and your peer group becomes a lot more influential on your identity, on your emotional wellbeing, your mental health at this point too. Really, like I said, a big part of your identity is formed during these, these phases too. Peer influence, obviously, this is peer pressure really comes in right now. Okay. Risky behaviors, you take, you take risks with your friends and stuff like that. And that's, there's gonna be really strong bonding periods too. Right? Which is probably one of the reasons, you know, kids.

• 2:29:22Mark Manson?

  Do stupid shit.

• 2:29:23Speaker 01

  Do stupid shit.

• 2:29:24Mark Manson?

  Peak experiences. Feel closer to each other, identify with each other.

• 2:29:27Speaker 01

  Yep. Exactly during this point.

• 2:29:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:29Speaker 01

  And which is why, and, and since you're processing emotions so intensely at this period, I think that's why we probably start over indexing on it. Cause we remember those really intense peak experiences like, oh, that was like really, really formative for me or really like a core part of who I was at that point. And so we kind of tend to overvalue them at that point. This is also too where like romantic and sexual desires can come in and start clouding everything, right? Remember what life was like before you had to worry about sex? God, it was just so.

• 2:29:58Mark Manson?

  It's easy.

• 2:29:58Speaker 01

  So easy.

• 2:29:59Mark Manson?

  So easy.

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  It was so great. And you could just like be with your friends, right? It was awesome. But then you start throwing in like, you know, your crushes and everything that happened maybe in middle school. And those complicate your friendships or, you know, I would, there was definitely times when I was in middle school too, like me and a friend be fighting over like who's gonna, who's, who's gonna be, who's, who's gonna be her boyfriend, right? Like, no, I do, I do. And that complicates things.

• 2:30:22Mark Manson?

  I lost, I lost a friend in high school over a girl. Yeah.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, same.

• 2:30:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. They're intense identity shaping periods of your life, that adolescence period is.

• 2:30:34Speaker 01

  And like I said, it's kind of when you're pushing your family out, it's, it's kind of the first time you're seen, you, you feel yourself more seen in like a larger group or even society at this point, right? Because you're starting to form your own identity, because you're starting to get that independence that you have, you start to see your, yourself in relation to other people that aren't your family at that point, which becomes very, very important for the next phase.

• 2:31:01Speaker 01

  Young adulthood. You get into, basically you're out of high school, you're into college, maybe you're in your twenties at this point too. This is where you start to form more capacity for deeper friendships though. Okay.

• 2:31:13Speaker 01

  Again, you're you're you're cutting yourself off more and more from your family usually at this point and establishing more and more independence and you're leaning more on the social relationships around you, not just for, you know, kind of emotional support, but even like to some extent, survival. You know what I mean? Like, they become more important to who, not just who you are, but like whether or not you're going to get along in life. That's this is that period where friendships really take up a huge, major role. There's also a lot of transitions during this phase, though, too. And I know for me, anyway, I probably went through like two or three friend groups, I would say, in my twenties. Yeah. And those were pretty jarring, pretty traumatic events for me.

• 2:31:52Mark Manson?

  I think one thing that changes from these periods. Yeah. Like you said, when you're a kid, it's all it's just about fun and convenience. Yeah. When you're an adolescent, there's this identity formation that's happening. And and I think what's interesting about this period is that you're still, there's a lot of status games going on. Yes. Like, a big part of being an adolescent is like trying to figure out where you are in the pecking order. Who's cool? Who's not cool? Are you likable? And and but the the funny thing is that you don't realize at that age is that you're judging status on very superficial. Yes. Silly traits. You know, it's like who's has the prettiest hair and who is the best at football player and, you know,

• 2:32:35Mark Manson?

  whatever. Who is the highest test score? It's it's stuff that doesn't really matter in the long run. But you're kind of obsessive over it. And there's a lot of insecurity around it. And I think that's why a lot of very, very, very large percentage of adolescents friendships are are toxic to some extent, which we'll talk about in the next section, because they are primarily based on status games and they are based in insecurity. And but it's part of unlike an adult toxic relationship, it's not a flaw necessarily. It's just part of the maturing process. Like, you kind of have to go through a lot of those toxic friendships to realize, oh, that's not

• 2:33:17Mark Manson?

  a friendship. I was just being very insecure. And I thought, I thought she was really cool because of XYZ reason. And it turns out, no, that's not. Yeah, that's not the case. I think what happens in young adulthood is you start figuring out what you actually value and care about. Yes. And

• 2:33:35Mark Manson?

  And similarly, yeah, you, part of that process is shedding old friendships of realizing like, oh, I don't actually care about this thing. And now that I realize I don't care about this thing, it's kind of hard to be around this person after realizing.

• 2:33:53Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, I had a lot of experiences like that.

• 2:33:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:58Mark Manson?

  And so there, I do think there is quite a bit of disappointment, but there's also, it's funny, because, you know, one of the common tropes in the self-help space is, is that when you grow, you're going to lose friends. And it's always, it's always framed or positioned as like, well, they weren't good enough for you anyway. Like, you know, the people are just trying to hold you back. You know, it's, it's kind of this very competitive, you know, they're jealous because you've like discovered who you are or whatever.

• 2:34:27Speaker 01

  Or you've uncovered some flaw in them and they don't like it.

• 2:34:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And sure, I think on the margin, there's probably some of that, especially if you do have like very toxic relationships in your life. Yes, there's going to be some of that, but I think a lot of it is innocuous. I think a lot of it is just like, you know, I realize that this isn't my path and I want to be on a different path. And as soon as you realize that, you stop relating to that person. And it's not, nobody's wrong, like, nobody's jealous. Nobody's like turning their back on you. It's not this big, like dramatic movie-like thing.

• 2:35:05Mark Manson?

  It's just life.

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:06Mark Manson?

  It's just realizing like, oh, I don't really have anything in common with you anymore. And that's okay.

• 2:35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think there, I think you're right. Like in adolescence, it's been like late adolescence going into adulthood, there's a lot of pressure to kind of like find your tribe, right?

• 2:35:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:20Speaker 01

  And that, that spins up all of that, I think. And, you know, it's, if you.

• 2:35:27Speaker 01

  There's some people who like if they don't find that they feel like less than right? They feel unworthy and all of that and they can carry that into adulthood. And I think that's a lot of what happens. But the pressure that mounts there, if you can find that release valve you're talking about like it's, that's just how it is. That's life.

• 2:35:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:42Speaker 01

  That for me, that softened the blow quite a bit too. Cause yeah, I wanted to be like that's a part of a certain crowd or whatever it was. And then I found out, oh, no, I don't.

• 2:35:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:50Speaker 01

  I don't and I'm okay with that.

• 2:35:52Mark Manson?

  And after it happens a few times, you, you, you, you kind of get over it. You're like, oh yeah, that's just natural. Like people aren't supposed to be in your life forever. Not very few people are supposed to be, are supposed to be in your life forever. And, and that's okay.

• 2:36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think one of the, one of the good things about modern culture is that it's like, if there is a good part about the fragmenting of modern culture is that like you can find your little pocket in whatever stage of life you're in. You know, they're like nerd culture or whatever culture is.

• 2:36:19Mark Manson?

  I thought you were going to say it's easier to ghost people.

• 2:36:22Speaker 01

  Well, that, yeah, that's the other side of it. That's the other side of it for sure. We'll get into that.

• 2:36:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:28Speaker 01

  But yeah, that's a, I, I, I think you, you can find it as long as you don't like kind of glom onto the, all of those, um, all of the like, you know, you need to be a part of this certain crowd or, or fit into this certain way, like do your own thing, take your own path. There's plenty of opportunity for that. And that's where I, hopefully you can figure that out at this stage of your life when in young adulthood.

• 2:36:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:51Speaker 01

  And carry that on, uh, and later in life and just be okay with yourself. That's, that's what I found anyways. Like, oh, okay. I'm okay with who I am and I don't fit into this mold over here. So I'm going to go over here and that's fine. So yeah.

• 2:37:02Mark Manson?

  So what about middle age?

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Adulthood where we are, Mark, middle age ish, well, 30 to 65, let's say, or something like that. 30 to 60, somewhere in there, right? Um, I think there's a further narrowing that goes on here too, right? But a lot of things get in the way of friendships here. And this is where I think the whole narrative around the dip in friendship comes during adulthood. Parents, parenting, you're very focused on your career. Um, you.

• 2:37:29Mark Manson?

  Wait, I think it's worth explaining what you mean by the dip. Like there's.

• 2:37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

• 2:37:33Mark Manson?

  There's like a.

• 2:37:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so think about it, you know, like when you're in high school, you have this built in kind of infrastructure for your friendships. Same thing with college for the most part. And it's even narrowed down a little bit more because you're all kind of in these little interest groups, right? Like your major, your degree, your clubs that you join, whatever it is. And there's this whole infrastructure for it. Then you get out into the real world. And there's not that same infrastructure there. Right? And then not only that, but you have all these responsibilities on top of you. And maybe you've gotten married by this point and had kids and you have a career or at least a job that takes up a lot of your time. And all of these things just start pushing out your, your social network a little bit that you, you have to, you, you think anyway that you have to prioritize all these other things.

• 2:38:15Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:38:15Speaker 01

  And friendships kind of get pushed aside or tend to get pushed aside in this stage of life.

• 2:38:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I, I, I would imagine that this is kind of the, if you were to average it all out, like the, the all time low of friendships is probably in this period of like

• 2:38:30Speaker 01

  30s, 40s.

• 2:38:31Mark Manson?

  30s, 40s, 50s.

• 2:38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:32Mark Manson?

  And then it probably comes back in retirement.

• 2:38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:38:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:36Speaker 01

  A lot of people, you do though, there is a winnowing and this can be a good thing.

• 2:38:40Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:38:41Speaker 01

  You go from a bigger social group. I mean, like in college, I kind of had this kind of diffuse group of friends, right? And then it definitely narrowed down after college and, and my friend groups got smaller, but they got tighter. And you, there's good and bad ways to navigate that, obviously too, but that does happen.

• 2:38:59Speaker 01

  You start to realize in this stage though, too, that, oh, friendships really take effort.

• 2:39:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:04Speaker 01

  And then I think where the problem comes is are you willing to pay that price or not? Right? And this is where I think a lot of people are right now, at least like in our age group anyways, like I'm not willing, you know, people are assholes. This sucks. I'm not even gonna worry about this. I'll focus on work. I'll focus on my relationship with my spouse.

• 2:39:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:22Speaker 01

  Whatever it is, right?

• 2:39:24Mark Manson?

  I've got bullet points to go through here. I mean, I, I do think, and I, now we're getting into like my personal experience as well.

• 2:39:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:39:33Mark Manson?

  I would say if there's a few dynamics that I think make friendships in middle age particularly difficult. You know, when you're young, you have no idea who you are. So you could potentially be anybody. So you're now interested in meeting, associating and hanging out with anybody. Right? It's like, there's just, the world's your oyster. The more crazy background the person has, like, the more interested you are to discover and figure out who, what type of person this is. I think, once you hit middle age, you know what you like, you know what you care about, you've got your commitments, you have your goals. I think it just, it just narrows the range of people that, I'm not gonna say that you're curious about, but like, that you realistically are like, am I gonna be a good, like, am I

• 2:40:17Mark Manson?

  gonna be a close friend with this person? Probably not. Yeah. Like, I just, you know, I can't go to Tahiti four times a year, so like, nice meeting you Tahitian friend, but like, have a nice life. I would say there's a focus on higher quality relationships and lower quantity of relationships. And, and part of that is just out of your own psychological interest. The second reason for that is that I think there's real opportunity costs in middle age. So again, when you're young, nobody has anything going on, nobody has any, like, nobody knows what they're doing, nobody has a career. Right. Like, no, nobody is, it's just, yeah, sure, I can take two weeks and go to Ireland, like, and drink beer, like, fuck it, why not?

• 2:41:01Mark Manson?

  You know, and so you just, you just start doing things. And, once you get to middle age, chances are, you, you have a family, you have a house, you have car payments, you have insurance, you have a career, you've got a bunch of goals and dreams for yourself, you know, suddenly it's like, just taking off and go, spending two weeks in Ireland, like, there's major opportunity cost to that. Yeah. You're like, okay, I'm giving up a lot to go on that trip. Do I, do I actually wanna do that? No, actually, I probably don't wanna do that. And, I think that limits, that potentially limits a lot of the peak experiences that, you know, you get, you get tons of peak experiences in your adolescence, in your twenties, and then I think, once you get to your thirties and forties, it's like, a peak experience

• 2:41:45Mark Manson?

  is a, is a Saturday without the kids. That's kind of your peak experience. So that's a complicating factor, as well. And then I would say that the third thing I wrote down is the relationship piece. It's

• 2:41:59Mark Manson?

  It's funny, I feel like every married couple is gonna immediately understand what I'm saying. But, you know, when you're married, I can't tell you how many times, like, my wife will make a friend and she'll come home and she'll tell me about the friend and she'll be like, "Please, please, please, I hope you like her husband," you know? Or, "I'll make a friend and I'll come home and I'll tell my wife, like, "Please, please, please, I hope you like his wife," you know? Because it's, there's fucking, like, it's a thing, it's a real thing. And it's the difference between the spouses getting along and them not. It like, very tangibly changes the relationship.

• 2:42:42Mark Manson?

  It's the difference between a surf buddy that I see once a month and like, a very close friend that I see on a weekly basis. When you're, when you're a couple and you, and like, the magic formula is when you're a couple and you find another couple where it's like you both, both of you like both of them and both of them like both of you. And it's, but because there's four people involved instead of two, it's exponentially more complicated.

• 2:43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's not a linear, like, one-to-one thing. That, that's, that's very true. Yeah, that's, okay, yeah, that's very complicating. It's a very big complicating factor that, yeah.

• 2:43:17Mark Manson?

  And it's tough, because then what you end up with is, you know, so my wife and I, we have two or three couples that we're close with and those are probably our closest friends, just because you get, from like, an ROI point of view.

• 2:43:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:43:32Mark Manson?

  If my wife and I are gonna spend a Saturday night, it's better to spend it with a couple that we both like. You know, so we both get to have an enjoyable social experience. You know, so we have two or three couples that we get along really well with and we probably see them the most often. But then it's like, she has her girlfriends and I have some of my guy friends and you just kinda like, fit them in where, when, when and where you can. And often, you know, if you're busy and you're traveling and you got work stuff and...

• 2:44:03Speaker 01

  And you're hanging out with these other couples.

• 2:44:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and you're hanging out with these other couples, like, it just...

• 2:44:07Speaker 01

  It's the time.

• 2:44:08Mark Manson?

  It becomes very hard to fit them in. And on top of that, you know, when you have kids, you compound that even a third time.

• 2:44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:16Mark Manson?

  Which is, do we like the couple, does our kid like their kid? And I think a problem that a lot of couples or a lot of people run into is that... Their kids make friends with some other kid and they meet the parents and they're like, "Please, God, let me like the parents. Please, please, please let me like the parents." And it's, it's, and you know, once you find the parents that you, that you get along with and that you really, you can be friends with, then it's like, "Oh, my God, this is gold. Now we can travel together. We can do weekends together. We can go to Disneyland together. Like, we can have playdates together." It's, um, it's hard to find, but then when you find it, you like latch on to it. And, uh, but yeah, there's a lot of complicating factors in this age range.

• 2:45:01Mark Manson?

  And I think that the hardest part, the, like, the, the most difficult thing for, I think, my wife and I to accept is that these complicating factors, they exist for a good reason, right? Like, my, my career makes it complicated, makes it hard and complicated, uh, to make a lot of friends. Um, part of that is just being a public figure, but part of that is, is just how busy I am. But I wouldn't give that up. I wouldn't trade that in, right?

• 2:45:32Mark Manson?

  Being married, in some ways, complicates making friends. I definitely wouldn't give that up, right? So it's like knowing who I am and knowing what I care about and like really only spending all my time focusing on like the two or three things that are most important to me,

• 2:45:46Mark Manson?

  also complicates making friends, but I wouldn't give that up either. So, um, it, it's, it is a tough phase, I think.

• 2:45:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:54Mark Manson?

  And it is like, it's not that there's no solution, but I just think it's, it's like playing your social life on hard mode, essentially. And, and, and you're coming out of a period of your life, your teens and twenties, which was like really playing social life on easy mode in a lot of ways. Like, everything was working in your favor.

• 2:46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think two, two other complicating factors I think I would bring up. One is like your job stability during this time.

• 2:46:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:21Speaker 01

  This was something I didn't really think of, um, until, I was talking with my sister about this. And my, my sister, um, has changed jobs a lot, not on her own necessarily. Most of the time it's been like, she, she's a social worker. Her husband in social work in some capacity. Her department gets, gets cut.

• 2:46:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:39Speaker 01

  They lay off this whole, whatever it is. She's had to change, change jobs quite a bit and like those. For especially for this period of your life, that's a if you're focused on your career and focused on that, that's a big source of connection for you. And if you lose that every few years, those people just kind of fade away.

• 2:46:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  So like that I didn't, I never thought of that because I've had this job for early on.

• 2:47:02Mark Manson?

  That's a huge one. I think we should come back to that in the, in the next section where we talk about why, why it's becoming harder to make friends. But yeah, the, the job stability thing, I mean, I see it. I, I, I forget where it wasn't in the research for this episode, but I did see somewhere recently that it was some statistic that it was like, you know, a couple of generations ago, like our parents, parents' generation, like the average tenure at a job was like a decade.

• 2:47:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:47:28Mark Manson?

  And I think now it's like 18 months.

• 2:47:31Speaker 01

  Less than two years. Yeah.

• 2:47:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And, and it, and I see it too. Like when we hire, like resumes come in and it's a new fucking company every, every 12 to 18 months. And yeah, you can't really build a community or like a really stable social life. Or it'd be, you can, but it's very hard.

• 2:47:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's very hard.

• 2:47:49Speaker 01

  We will get into that and some of the complications here, but yeah, this is one of the mention that the other, the other thing I wanted to bring up there too, is like, any like a lot of mental health problems usually develop in this and your 30s. And a lot of my therapist friends are like, most people start therapy in their 30s.

• 2:48:03Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 2:48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, and I have to continue it into their 40s, you know?

• 2:48:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:08Speaker 01

  Um, and so those, that comes up and that is, that's a factor.

• 2:48:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:13Speaker 01

  In, in making friends, uh, your mental health, whether it's the stigma around it or just, it's kind of a vicious cycle too. You know, you, if you have mental health problems, you don't feel worthy of having, having friends. And so you don't go make friends and you, it gets worse. And this is that time period.

• 2:48:28Mark Manson?

  I'll add another thing to that.

• 2:48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:31Mark Manson?

  Again, when you're in your twenties or a teenager, every, it's a level playing field.

• 2:48:36Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep.

• 2:48:36Mark Manson?

  You know?

• 2:48:37Speaker 01

  I, I think I know where you're going.

• 2:48:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Everybody's, everybody's broke. Nobody has a career. Nobody, nobody, no major decisions have been made. Yet, when you get to 40, everybody's made some major decisions and everybody can see the consequences.

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  Wearing on your sleeve at that point.

• 2:48:55Mark Manson?

  Like, so it's very, it, it can be, it can be a little bit obvious. Like you, you see people who, like really squandered, uh, you know, or really made bad choices or really didn't take care of themselves. And it, so it's.

• 2:49:12Mark Manson?

  Again, it comes back to that narrowing, right? Like it's it's the pool of people that you're going to be interested in being friends with has like slimmed down quite a bit.

• 2:49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, we'll wrap this up then with later adulthood.

• 2:49:28Mark Manson?

  Yes, old age.

• 2:49:29Speaker 01

  Old age, when you get into your, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond, all of those obligations are usually taken care of, or they start fading away a little bit. Those those big life obligations, anyway, your obligations change.

• 2:49:41Mark Manson?

  Kids are grown up, moved out.

• 2:49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably got maybe.

• 2:49:44Mark Manson?

  Retired.

• 2:49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've maybe paid the house off or close to it, or, or, you know, you've you might have some financial stability, or at least you've gotten used to your financial situation by that point, right?

• 2:49:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:54Speaker 01

  The people who seem to do the best in this have made some longstanding friendships, or at least rekindled some from the past, that give them some, you know, some kind of a resilient network that they can lean on. Health issues become a point or become a thing at this point that you have to deal with. And so friends and your larger social network become even more important at this. What I think is interesting, too, right now, you know, there's a lot of people, there's probably a perception still even that, oh, old people are lonely. Actually, like, the highest rates of loneliness are in younger people at this time. Older people are actually doing better. I mean, maybe not awesome, but they're doing better than a lot of the younger generations right now. And I but I think

• 2:50:37Speaker 01

  really what that is, is that the you get to this point, you're like, you realize what's important, right? You realize that these relationships are actually what is the most important part of life.

• 2:50:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:49Speaker 01

  And so you start to prioritize them more than you would have. You've done your career, you've you've did what you you've made peace with the things you didn't accomplish.

• 2:50:57Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 2:50:57Speaker 01

  At this point, and you start saying, okay, actually, what it is is relationships. You know, I always think of David Brooks. You know, he's, I think he's in his 70s now. And every interview I hear with him or every speech, he always brings up the fact that he's like, I wish I would have spent more time on my relationships. That's the regret, biggest regret he has. And so now he's come back to do that more and more.

• 2:51:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:16Speaker 01

  And I I think it's just way more, you know, your mortality, you it's more a friend of mine. So it's a clarifying event in your in your mind now. And you start to see that actually, you know, it's my friends and my family and the the social ties that I have that are really what's giving me meaning at this point. So you double down on them.

• 2:51:33Mark Manson?

  I definitely, I I've talked to my mom about this. My mom is.

• 2:51:39Mark Manson?

  In a, living in a, like a retirement community neighborhood.

• 2:51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:43Mark Manson?

  And she's happy as a fucking clam.

• 2:51:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:45Mark Manson?

  Which is great to see.

• 2:51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:46Mark Manson?

  But it's interesting talking to her about it, cause it's, there are a few impressions that I get. One, and you touched briefly on a couple of them, but one, one I've, I've, I've talked to her about or heard her say is that it's just like, you get to your 70, it's like, everything's done, you know, so you get, you get to your 70s and you just kinda let go of stuff.

• 2:52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:05Mark Manson?

  You're like, you know what, I just wanna play bridge and like, go to movie night.

• 2:52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:09Mark Manson?

  You know, like, I don't really, like, let's not, I'm not gonna hold it against this person if, you know, 30 years ago, they

• 2:52:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:17Mark Manson?

  made a bad decision or whatever, or they've, they've been divorced twice, you know, it's just like, let's just play bridge and eat pizza.

• 2:52:23Speaker 01

  Consistency over intensity.

• 2:52:25Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 2:52:25Speaker 01

  It becomes those small little things and you're just, you're, you're, you realize how much connection on just a consistent, even small basis matters at that point.

• 2:52:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:35Mark Manson?

  And then the other thing that, that's really apparent to is the importance of that, that network on, just for health reasons.

• 2:52:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:52:42Mark Manson?

  You know, it's just,

• 2:52:45Mark Manson?

  you know, she, at any given time, she knows people in the neighborhood, neighbors, friends who are getting surgeries in the hospital, cancer diagnosis, you know, and, and she's had to rely on friends and neighbors a lot, you know, for, for, for stuff with her as well, and it's, you, you see how important it, it starts to get at that age.

• 2:53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:04Mark Manson?

  So yeah, it's just, there seems to be a, a more, just kind of a more calm, positive regard.

• 2:53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:13Mark Manson?

  It's just like, let's just get along.

• 2:53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:15Mark Manson?

  Like, like.

• 2:53:16Speaker 01

  I think you're more forgiving of people too.

• 2:53:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:18Speaker 01

  At that point, you know, you, you probably, you probably are at the point where you're more accepting of different people.

• 2:53:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:24Speaker 01

  I would say at that point, anyway.

• 2:53:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah. You've, you've seen it all.

• 2:53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:26Mark Manson?

  You've seen it all.

• 2:53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:30Mark Manson?

  I just want to touch on gender dynamics because it is a thing and it is a bit of a hot button topic that comes up online quite a bit. Like it's definitely, it gets memed quite a bit in various ways. So I guess I'll quickly go over the research and then we can kind of talk, talk about maybe some of the spicier controversial takes. I don't have a ton to say about it, but we might as well touch on it since we're here. So the thing that is real, there's an old saying that men stand shoulder to shoulder and look out and women stand face to face and look at each other. There's actually quite a bit of evidence that that, that that is true. Men tend to prefer to do something together

• 2:54:15Mark Manson?

  and women tend to talk to each other, face each other and talk to each other. And, and as a result, and again, this comes back to like why I didn't, I didn't really like using vulnerability as that third factor. As a result, I think deep male friendships tend to be based around mutual experiences, things that they've gone through together, things that they've done together, challenges that they've faced together, projects that they've done together. And, and I think women, for women, it tends to be much more about self disclosure, talking about, you know, their, their thoughts, their feelings, their lives, their past, their future, their dreams, everything. You know, it's, it's, there's an old joke, I forget where I heard it or where it originated, but it was, there was

• 2:55:00Mark Manson?

  like a guy who his friend got divorced and he went and played golf for four hours with him. And then the guy came home and his wife was like, oh my God, how is he? How's he doing? And the husband just kind of shrugged. He's like, yeah, he's doing fine. And she's like, really? Like, what does he think about the divorce? And the husband says, well, we didn't really talk about it, but the golf game went great. He shot a 74.

• 2:55:30Mark Manson?

  And I mean, it is a stereotype. It's a joke because it's a stereotype, but as with a lot of stereotypes, there's some truth to it.

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  But okay, dude, so do you think that that you kind of already mentioned, you're like, maybe that's not such a bad thing? Maybe that's okay. Like, women will tend to kind of criticize men for that. Like, oh, you can't open up to each other. You can't connect with each other. And it's like, well.

• 2:55:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah, well, the same way men will criticize women for dumping all their feelings all the time and complaining about every little problem in their life. Right? So it is, my take on this is that there's no right or wrong way to have a friendship. Like, if there's a friendship, and look, I, I personally, uh, I personally like the self-disclose. Like, and I personally, I will say this, that my best male friendships are with men who are also comfortable being vulnerable and disclosing. Like, I, what I generally find is like, is men who just, who don't go there, or who can't really disclose much. I can be friends with them, but I'm never gonna be very close friends with them.

• 2:56:31Mark Manson?

  I, I definitely look for men who are capable of opening up and sharing thoughts and feelings and being vulnerable. But I also don't, like, demand that all the time.

• 2:56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:42Mark Manson?

  You know, like, if we just wanna play golf, we can just play golf. Like, it's not a huge deal.

• 2:56:48Mark Manson?

  So it is, it is a thing. And the same way, I think, I think there's a lot of women out there who wanna do things. And, and they don't wanna sit around and talk about their feelings all the time. And that's great. They should be able to do things.

• 2:57:01Speaker 01

  Jess is over here.

• 2:57:03Mark Manson?

  She's cheering.

• 2:57:03Speaker 01

  She's cheering along.

• 2:57:06Mark Manson?

  So while it is generally a true thing, there's a wide variation in between. It's a spectrum, right? And it's like, men and women are all over that spectrum. And even though maybe the average of men is over here, and the average of women is over here, um, it takes all types.

• 2:57:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:24Mark Manson?

  It takes all types of people.

• 2:57:26Speaker 01

  Men also too, I think, maybe you'll get into this, but men also too, um, are much more likely to hang out in groups. Where women are much more likely to hang out one-on-one.

• 2:57:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:35Speaker 01

  If you came across that. But, um, I found this too, like, in my life, I didn't realize just how. Like how prominent this was in my life too. Like the male friends I have, like it's not that we don't hang out one on one, but it's like, it's a very different vibe and a very, almost a different relationship that I have with, with a friend when we're in a group versus when we're one on one.

• 2:57:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:56Speaker 01

  Uh, especially with my male friends. With my female friends, I have much more direct relationships with them.

• 2:58:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:01Speaker 01

  So I don't know what that is necessarily. I, I agree with you that, um, I'm more, I, I do tend to, um, gravitate more towards men who are, that we will self disclose, but it's more like in a group setting and we're kind of all bouncing it all off, which I've found pretty interesting too.

• 2:58:16Mark Manson?

  It's interesting. Most of my friendships are, are one on.

• 2:58:18Speaker 01

  You're one on one? Yeah. Uh, it's not that I don't have, like I said, it's not that I don't have one on one relationships with these, but sometimes it's just kind of like, even like a good friend of mine, I'm like, I'm going to invite him out. I'm like, I should invite the other guys too.

• 2:58:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:29Speaker 01

  Cause this is gonna be a little more, I don't know. It just feels different and there's a different vibe to it.

• 2:58:35Mark Manson?

  I will say, so this spectrum, both with the self-disclosure and the activity and I, I maybe even the group thing, like this is very culturally driven as well.

• 2:58:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 2:58:45Mark Manson?

  So it's, there are some cultures that are very, very gendered, very like, for example, in Brazil, like men down there, there's a much more social pressure on men down there to be what is conventionally masculine.

• 2:59:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:59:04Mark Manson?

  To the point that it's funny, cause when I go down there, sometimes it kind of feels like I'm going back to like that Mad Men.

• 2:59:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:11Mark Manson?

  I was just down there like a month ago and, and it was really funny. We went to, uh, my wife and I went to a dinner party, really, I think it was like four couples and it was like really lovely dinner, enjoyable night. And as soon as everybody finished dinner, uh, all the women got up and went to the living room to like, I don't know, gossip and talk about girly things. And then all the men immediately, it like went straight into business and politics.

• 2:59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:37Mark Manson?

  And it's like, okay, the women are gone. We can talk about business and politics now. And it was just, I felt like we should have cigars and, and scotch and, uh, you know, uh, I should be in a three piece suit or something, but it, it like down there, that's just, that's how it works. And, um, the conversations with women around and is very different than when it's just the guys.

• 2:59:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. One tidbit I'll throw in here too.

• 3:00:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:00Speaker 01

  Um, and this is something you can't unsee. Uh, but when you, next time you go to a party, you talked about the shoulder to shoulder versus face to face communication, you know, men shoulder to shoulder, women face to face. Next time you go to a party, this is like literally true.

• 3:00:13Mark Manson?

  Yes, you can see it.

• 3:00:14Speaker 01

  You can see it. So when men are talking, we're usually at a slight angle or like literally shoulder to shoulder when we talk. When women talk, they're usually face to face.

• 3:00:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:23Speaker 01

  And it's like when men, if you, if you square up to a man when you're talking to him,

• 3:00:27Mark Manson?

  It feels weird.

• 3:00:28Speaker 01

  The immediate thing I think is, are we gonna fight or kiss? Like, what is going on here? Are you trying to, what are you trying to do here, right?

• 3:00:34Mark Manson?

  Dude, it feels weird.

• 3:00:35Speaker 01

  It feels so weird.

• 3:00:36Mark Manson?

  It feels weird.

• 3:00:37Speaker 01

  So just do a little, uh, your own little social experiment.

• 3:00:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah, do an experiment.

• 3:00:41Speaker 01

  At a party, it's pretty crazy. You know, this is completely tangential too, but, um, I heard this a while, like a long time ago, and it's actually true too, but conversations usually happen in four or four timing. If you like, if you're sitting around, there's like three or four people, more than that is not.

• 3:00:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:54Speaker 01

  They'll be in like four or four time. It's kinda crazy too. So if you try to throw it off and then it gets weird. So, yeah, just anyway, sorry.

• 3:01:00Mark Manson?

  Okay. The other thing is that, that women tend to be much better about touching base, reaching out.

• 3:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01:06Mark Manson?

  Um, yeah. Pinging people. I mean, uh, men in general are, are, I think they're bad at, I would call it like the mechanics of friendship, right? Like it's, it's generally, um, you know, following up with people, asking how they're doing, remembering birthdays.

• 3:01:23Speaker 01

  Bringing a gift to a wedding.

• 3:01:25Mark Manson?

  Bringing a gift to a wedding. Uh, it's just, it, there's a lot of like kinda social conscientiousness stuff. And it's funny cause there's, it, this has become a bit of a meme, uh, online of, you know, there are a lot of, uh, women who, who call it man keeping.

• 3:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01:39Mark Manson?

  Where it's like they, it's basically girlfriends and wives who have to run the man's social life and social calendar.

• 3:01:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01:47Mark Manson?

  Obviously, there's a decent amount of truth to that. It's actually interesting. Um, if you look at rates of depression and suicide after a divorce, men are like five times higher than women.

• 3:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01:59Mark Manson?

  Generally speaking, after a divorce, women bounce back pretty quickly. Uh, men bounce back extremely slowly. And I personally think this is one of the biggest reasons is that. Women, the social life kind of defaults to the woman's social life and the men just kind of go along with it. It's funny because there's a lot of criticism of men online at the moment about this. And I, I feel like I see both sides of this. On the one hand, I, I do think men kind of suck at this and just need to get better.

• 3:02:33Speaker 01

  Need to take some responsibility here, for sure.

• 3:02:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah, just own it, develop some basic skills, reach out to your guy friends, like invite people to stuff, put birthdays on your calendar. Like, it's not.

• 3:02:43Speaker 01

  It's not rocket science, right?

• 3:02:45Mark Manson?

  This is not rocket science. I, and I think this might actually be a good, a good moment to get into like some very basic tactical things. And these are things that have helped me. And it's funny, I actually have a guy friend who's like, he's like one of these very organized people. He actually created a CRM system for his friendships. Do you know what a CRM system is? So it's like a customer management system. Uh, like, he's, he's an e-commerce guy, but he was like, he realized that he was, he was losing touch with friends or, or losing track of them. So he like literally created a Notion dashboard for his friendships.

• 3:03:19Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 3:03:20Mark Manson?

  He created a CRM system where basically it reminds him, like if he hasn't seen, spoken to somebody in like more than a month or two, it like pings him, it sends him a notification to like, reach out to that person or invite them to, to something. And it also, he developed a system where it's like every week he has some sort of activity or event that he can invite people to. Honestly, I laughed about it too, but when, like after he explained it to me, I, I was jealous. I was like, dude, I would actually pay money for that, to be honest, because.

• 3:03:50Speaker 01

  Especially if you have like a systematizer mind, right?

• 3:03:53Mark Manson?

  Seriously, like, yeah. Cause it's, it's, and we'll get into my story in a little bit, but like, I, I think one of my problems is just like, I don't think about it.

• 3:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:03Mark Manson?

  I don't think about it until it's too late.

• 3:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:06Mark Manson?

  It's like, it's, it's, I only think about it after I realize like, oh, yeah, I haven't seen Jake in like two months. I wonder what that guy's doing. You know, like it just.

• 3:04:15Speaker 01

  And then you go on to the next thing.

• 3:04:16Mark Manson?

  And then I'm like, oh shit, I'm late for the podcast, you know? And we can laugh about it, but there's a certain amount of envy there. And like, look, I mean, he told me, he's like, he said, this is a game changer. He's like, my social life is. Ten times better since I started doing this.

• 3:04:31Speaker 01

  I think that's maybe too, one of the mindsets I might not have, I might have left out was like, don't leave, stop thinking that just, just happens, right? It's not an organic process.

• 3:04:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:42Speaker 01

  Uh, necessary. It can be. Some people are really good at that, but for a lot of people, no, it takes some effort and some work and some like, some conscious.

• 3:04:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:48Speaker 01

  You know, uh, effort that you have to put in repeatedly.

• 3:04:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:52Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 3:04:53Mark Manson?

  The other thing I'll say about the man keeping thing, and I say this as a married man with an extremely extroverted wife.

• 3:04:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:59Mark Manson?

  I think two things, and again, I'm going to make blanket statements. This does not mean all women or all men, just on average, you know, I, I think in general, uh, women tend to be a little bit more extroverted. And I also think women tend to, to care more about their social life.

• 3:05:18Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 3:05:19Mark Manson?

  And like, I don't mean that, I'm not like trying to put down either gender.

• 3:05:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:05:23Mark Manson?

  I think that's just a fact. I think women, um, it's a, it's a higher priority for a lot of women, more so than it is for men. And so I, I think, I imagine what a lot of men experiences are like, well, she's better at it and she cares more about it. So I'll just let, I'll let her take the lead on it and I'll just, I'll, I'll, I'll be support essentially. And, and I can see how like, this shows up in marriages and relationships a lot. Like there's a lot of things, if you remove the friendship aspect and like, I don't know, replace it with, um, so to use my marriage, like, and this can go either way, right? So my wife cares a lot more about cleaning and she's much better at it,

• 3:06:07Mark Manson?

  right? So guess who does most of the cleaning in the house? And now, in, in one way, you could look at that and say, that's totally unfair, Mark. You should be doing, you should be pulling your load. Yeah, maybe. Or if you look at the relationship as a team and my wife and I each have our own talents and our own things that we're good at, that the other one's not, it makes sense to specialize. So like, I'm very good with numbers and finances and taxes.

• 3:06:35Mark Manson?

  I also care a lot about finances and numbers and taxes. She fucking, her palms start sweating the second she opens the, the bank website, right? So guess who does all the finances, deals with all the insurance, does all of our taxes? I do.

• 3:06:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:51Mark Manson?

  And I, I could get, sit here and get mad, be like, that's not fair. She should do 50% of that. But no, that doesn't make sense. It's like, we're a team. She's good at this thing that I'm not good at. I'm good at this thing that she's not good at. So we should divide, you know, there's division of labor exists for a reason. It's the same thing. It's like, if my wife and I started a business, it would be insane to divide everything 50 50.

• 3:07:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:15Mark Manson?

  Like anybody who started a business, try dividing everything 50 50 with your co-founder. That business is going to fail within a month. Like the first thing you do when you start a business with somebody is you say, okay, what are you excellent at that I'm not? And what am I excellent at that you're not? Okay, let's go do those things.

• 3:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:31Mark Manson?

  This is, and, and own that domain in, in the business. And I think to a certain extent, relationships are like that. And I think through a combination of, of women just prioritizing it more, but also men just being bad at it and, and not taking responsibility. Women tend to end up owning the social domain. And yeah, to a certain extent, that might, that might be unfair. And I would say if you're a woman listening to this and you, you totally, your husband is like, or your boyfriend is, uh, just socially completely lost without you. Yeah, he should pick up some basic skills and maybe take a little bit of ownership over it. But I, I, I do think this idea that everything's 50 50 and that there should be balance in

• 3:08:15Mark Manson?

  all things and both, both people in the relationship should own, like be responsible for everything in equal proportions. Not only is that unrealistic, but there, there is also quite a bit of survey data showing that relationships that try to divide every responsibility 50 50, they fail more often. They are less happy. They have more problems. Just be realistic.

• 3:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:08:35Mark Manson?

  Just like, look at your partner, look at yourselves, figure out who's good at what, who enjoys what? And be okay with that, you know, it's not, it's not gonna, a lot of it's going to be 80 20 in different, different directions for different things.

• 3:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:08:52Mark Manson?

  Can men and women be friends?

• 3:08:54Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 3:08:56Mark Manson?

  This question comes up.

• 3:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:08:57Mark Manson?

  All the time.

• 3:09:00Mark Manson?

  Do you want to take a stab at it first?

• 3:09:01Speaker 01

  I have a lot of female friends and I always have, so I don't.

• 3:09:05Mark Manson?

  What is wrong with you, Drew?

• 3:09:06Speaker 01

  Ever understood this one.

• 3:09:08Mark Manson?

  Clearly, something is wrong.

• 3:09:10Speaker 01

  Do you see, there's all these guys out there who are just like, you're friends with women? And I'm like, what the? I don't, I, you tell me what's, what the issue is here. Because I, not only like, like I was, like I was saying, I have more like direct relationships with,

• 3:09:24Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:09:24Speaker 01

  with my female friends too, like more of a one-on-one, whereas with my male friends, we kind of have this group that we're typically in, and there's some, you know, overlap with other groups and all that, sure. But like the female relationships I have, they're not like, I don't like dump things on them necessarily, or they don't use, I don't use them as like an emotional outlet or anything like that. It's just that I just see them as friends.

• 3:09:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:44Speaker 01

  So, tell me what the big fuss is about, seriously?

• 3:09:49Mark Manson?

  I think there's two reasons why people struggle with this. So first of all, the answer is yes, men and women can totally be friends. But I do think it, it, there are complications. Obviously, there are complications that don't exist and.

• 3:10:03Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, sure.

• 3:10:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:04Speaker 01

  I get that.

• 3:10:04Mark Manson?

  Like it's, and, and like, obviously, it's the elephant in the room. There, there's potentially sexual attraction with one or both people, right? So that's, that's the elephant in the room. That's what complicates things. And I think it's, there's pretty clear reasons why. So first of all, I think men, men and women can be friends most easily if there is no sexual, romantic attraction between them, right?

• 3:10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, or at least no opportunity for it to do like, you know, like my, I mean, a lot of my female friends either are married, have, have partners of their own, or you know, they're lesbians too. Like, you know, like, so it doesn't matter, but yeah.

• 3:10:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:44Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 3:10:45Mark Manson?

  So I think by removing the, the, the attraction, that simplifies it. I think where a lot of people get stumped on this is because they are friends with somebody that they're attracted to. And they kind of wish it was something more.

• 3:11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11:01Mark Manson?

  And as soon as you get into that, it becomes transactional.

• 3:11:04Speaker 01

  I've had these too, yes.

• 3:11:05Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11:06Mark Manson?

  So to come back to Aristotle's framework, like I would argue, it's impossible to be friends with somebody you are, like as soon as you become sexually and romantically interested in them, there is some sort of inequality that is introduced into the friendship and.

• 3:11:22Mark Manson?

  And then by nature, it becomes transactional. And as we're going to get to in the next section, transactional friendships often become toxic. Not always, but often.

• 3:11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11:33Mark Manson?

  And so I can see why people have been burned by this before. Especially, I mean, it's a trope among young men, you know, the friend zone, the dreaded friend zone. It's like the girl you have a crush on.

• 3:11:46Speaker 01

  Been there, dude.

• 3:11:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah, we've all been there, man. You know, you become her best friend and then for years, you just kind of hang around hoping that one day she's, she's gonna wake up and like realize you were the one all along. It's, I find that a large percentage of people, both men and women who ask this question. It's, it's the people who are friend zoned. It's, it's the, it's the young man or the young woman who has been friends with the person that they're, they're in love with for years and years and years, and they feel overlooked and they feel taken for granted and they feel like they've like given themselves to this friend, quote unquote, hoping to get something else in return, but not realizing that it was transactional.

• 3:12:31Speaker 01

  That's not a friendship.

• 3:12:32Mark Manson?

  It's not a friendship.

• 3:12:33Speaker 01

  That's not a friendship.

• 3:12:34Mark Manson?

  That is not a friendship. The friend zone is not a friendship.

• 3:12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12:36Mark Manson?

  Interestingly, ironically, like if you look at the data of like how people meet and what predicts the greatest long-term relationship success. If the two people were friends before they started dating, that is like, that is like the highest predictor of relationship success.

• 3:12:54Speaker 01

  So, okay, how does that work? Because like you're not attracted to each other at first and then you are? Or like there is some mild attraction and then not really? And you're like, whatever. And then you become more attracted like what?

• 3:13:04Mark Manson?

  I think, I think in most cases, what I would guess is that it's kind of like you said, that there's no opportunity. Right? So.

• 3:13:12Speaker 01

  Okay, like they were dating somebody else.

• 3:13:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and this is anecdotal, but like just by all the people that I've known in my life and all the. Fans and people who have reached out to me and talked to me. Generally, I think the way it works is like, you know, it was like a work friend who had a boyfriend or a girlfriend for years and then they moved to another office and you stop seeing them or whatever. Like the Jim and Pam situation in the office, right? Like, I think that's like a pretty prototypical, they were friends first and then they they become a very successful relationship. So there's like, there's some sort of blocker or lack of opportunity. Maybe they live in a different city. But you see them, for whatever reason, you see them once or twice a year. And every time you see them, you're like, wow, I really like this person.

• 3:13:58Mark Manson?

  So I think there's a lot of that going on. People do change, you know, not to, not to give hope to all the friendzoned listeners out there, but like, there are, it's rare, but there are situations where, you know, you're friendzoned for a long time, a few years go by, maybe you get jacked, maybe you get your shit figured out, maybe you go to therapy, you know, maybe the person you're in love with gets their heart broken and they figure some of their shit out. Like, people do change over time. And so I do think some people do evolve into a relationship.

• 3:14:36Speaker 01

  The one Harry met Sally, right?

• 3:14:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah, like, it's not the norm, but, and, and I think it's one of those things, like, you can't, you can't wait around holding out on that. Like, the irony with the friendzone is that the only way to get out of it is to, is to give up. Like, as soon as, if you get, like, the only way that person is ever gonna look at you seriously as a potential partner is when you stop trying to make them look at you as a potential partner.

• 3:15:01Speaker 01

  Moved on and yeah, yeah.

• 3:15:03Mark Manson?

  Ironically.

• 3:15:04Speaker 01

  That is very ironic.

• 3:15:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:05Speaker 01

  Cruel, I would say, even.

• 3:15:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:09Speaker 01

  Speaking from experience, but yeah.

• 3:15:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah. You know, the funny thing that complicates this, though, is that there is some research that shows that men tend to vastly overestimate how attracted a woman is to them.

• 3:15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:15:23Mark Manson?

  I do think that a lot of these friendzone situations. Are basically dudes who oblivious think like, yeah, she's totally into me.

• 3:15:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:15:31Mark Manson?

  Like, this is totally gonna happen. And meanwhile, like, the woman's like, oh, he's such a good friend.

• 3:15:35Speaker 01

  The other side of that is true, too, right? The women underestimate.

• 3:15:38Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:15:38Speaker 01

  They're just like, oh, he's just being friendly.

• 3:15:40Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:15:40Speaker 01

  No, he's into you.

• 3:15:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 3:15:42Speaker 01

  And there's a weird, like, evolutionary explanation you could get into. It's more costly if a man doesn't take the opportunity, and it's more costly for a woman to take the opportunity and all that, but yeah.

• 3:15:52Mark Manson?

  Toxic friendships are, you know, we're not gonna go super deep into this because I think there's, you know, the cousin of this is toxic romantic relationships, which we will probably hit and cover on multiple episodes at some point. But I do think it's worth going over, like, you can't have unhealthy friendships. You can't have bad dynamics within friendships. The irony with toxic friendships is that I think they tend to start with a bang. Toxic friendships are fundamentally built on insecurity. And insecure people are secretly, deep down, looking for somebody to save them or show them that they're okay. And when they find somebody that they believe can do that for them, it is a very emotionally intense

• 3:16:35Mark Manson?

  experience. And so generally speaking, just as with romantic relationships, the friendships that start very intense and get close extremely fast often

• 3:16:51Mark Manson?

  blow up. So let's talk about what's happening psychologically speaking, from a psycho, like, a psychodynamics perspective. Basically, you have two individuals. They're very insecure. They see themselves as somehow unworthy or inferior.

• 3:17:07Mark Manson?

  And when you are an insecure person, you are constantly measuring yourself against others. And the way you're choosing to measure yourself, it really comes down to your personal values or what you personally see as a status indicator, or what a worthwhile person is. You know, it could be looks, it could be money, it could be popularity, it could be fame, it could be whatever, being accepted by a certain group. If you're an insecure person, you are constantly in the status game. Everywhere you go, everybody you talk to, you're playing the status game with yourself.

• 3:17:40Mark Manson?

  Now, when two insecure people come together, that spark emerges because they see the other person as a solution to their status game. So there's kind of this complementary, like, oh, this person makes me feel worthy and worthwhile. I should spend more time with them. And then the other person feels that way, too. And so it's just this intense magnetism that happens and brings them together. Now, this can happen, I think this can kind of happen in two configurations. One configuration is that two people have different but complementary insecurities. You know, maybe, let's say, we take two guy friends, right? Maybe one is the really athletic, cool jock that all the girls are into.

• 3:18:20Mark Manson?

  And then one is the super brainiac nerd that aces every test and can figure everything out, right? And it's like, there's a synergy there of like, the jock feels really dumb and is insecure about his, you know, ability to get into college or whatever. And then the nerd is like, wow, no girl will ever talk to me. But when I hang around this guy, I feel cool. And so sometimes you'll see these kind of dyads play out where it's two friends kind of compensate for each other's flaws or insecurities. And I would say that's probably the less unhealthy version of a toxic friendship, because it's essentially just a very transactional friendship. Each person is getting something out of the friendship, out of the relationship.

• 3:19:05Mark Manson?

  And as long as they continue to get that thing out of it, it's probably going to be okay. Where things get dicey is when, well, people's insecurities can start to get stoked. Like, when you're in a friendship like that, you're probably very aware of the dynamic. And so you're probably very aware of how sensitive the other person is to the situation, right? So if you're like the tall, handsome jock in that friendship, anytime you get pissed at your buddy, you know exactly where it's going to hurt him most.

• 3:19:37Speaker 01

  Know his buttons, yeah.

• 3:19:38Mark Manson?

  Yes. You know exactly how to punish him, and you know exactly where he's insecure. And chances are that's going to come out at some point. And vice versa, if you're, you know, say, the smart, successful nerd, you know exactly where your buddy's insecurities are as well. So you just get a lot of ugliness in friendships like this. I think most of these sorts of friendships probably just have a falling out at some point, a big fight over something dumb. I know I definitely had some male friendships that were like this. And pretty much all of them ended over a stupid fight over something or other, over a trip we were supposed to take, or a party we were supposed to throw,

• 3:20:20Mark Manson?

  or a girl that I dated and he wanted to date, or like, whatever. You know, it's usually something like that, that kind of triggers it to fall apart. The second type of toxic friendship is the even less healthy friendship, which I would just call it, flat out, the codependent friendship. Where essentially, you have, you have two people. You have one person who, let's say, is full of themselves and needs constant validation and approval, and needs to be reminded of how great they are all the time. And then you have a second person who feels terrible about themselves, and one way that they get to kind of, like, live vicariously through the first insecure person by constantly following them around and telling them how great they are, how amazing they are, and how much they wish they were like them. And so you, you get a situation where it's like,

• 3:21:05Mark Manson?

  you know, one person needs to always feel superior, and then one person, however poorly the first friend treats them, they feel like they deserve it on some level.

• 3:21:14Speaker 01

  Going back to like, what we talked about earlier, about kind of the balance there, though, too. It's like, I, I think there was a word you said in there, and you said, "always." It's always that way. And there's an unbalance to it. Because, of course, you want to help your friend out when they need help.

• 3:21:26Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:21:26Speaker 01

  But sometimes you need to be helped as well. This is one thing, like, I've always tried to be the helper. And so I can kind of wade into this territory, but I, I'm aware of it, and, and I- Call it out or like be very aware of it when it does happen.

• 3:21:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:38Speaker 01

  And then there's been times more recently too now, I'm like, okay, I need help from the same people. And it balances out. So yeah, just wanted to point that out. You use the word always, it's when it's always lopsided like that.

• 3:21:50Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:21:51Speaker 01

  There's a savior and somebody who needs to be saved.

• 3:21:53Mark Manson?

  That's the problem. Yeah. I would say the first type of toxic friendship, the issue is more, it's a transactional relationship, but it's not transactional over something superficial. It's transactional over, it's trying to be a virtuous friendship, right? It's like, I admire you, I wish I was more like you. So, but instead of just admiring you in a vacuum, I'm going to basically follow you around and envy you and hope that some of you rubs off on me and vice versa. And like, so it becomes transactional at a self-esteem level. And that's, that's just a recipe for disaster. Because it's like the minute your friend, I mean, it works fine when both friends are giving each other validation and helping each other out.

• 3:22:36Mark Manson?

  But like, if you build your self-esteem by being around your friend, the minute your friend checks out or gets mad at you or wants to maybe manipulate you or control you or put conditions on something in the friendship, it's going to get very, very ugly very quickly. The second dynamic is even worse in that it is just, it's a unidirectional friendship at all times. It is, one person is always needs more attention and validation and one person is always giving more attention and validation. And the irony, like, if you're a healthy person, you are probably hearing this and you're like, why would anybody stay in a friendship like that?

• 3:23:14Mark Manson?

  But the problem is, is that if you're a person who feels really shitty about yourself, you, maybe you haven't had many friends throughout your life. You have very low self-esteem, you don't see why anybody would like you or hang out with you. That unidirectional, that constant giving to the friend, it feels like an upgrade over loneliness.

• 3:23:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:23:37Mark Manson?

  Because at least you're needed for something. And this plays out on a much more dramatic scale at the romantic relationship level, where you see a lot of people who will get into bad romantic relationships, codependent romantic relationships, sometimes even abusive romantic relationships, simply because they feel so bad about themselves that they're like, "Well, I'd rather have a shitty, toxic relationship than no relationship at all, because at least somebody wants me around for some reason." It's really fucking dark and depressing when you put it that way.

• 3:24:07Speaker 01

  I'm like, "I don't know what to say to that."

• 3:24:10Mark Manson?

  Because toxic friendships are inherently transactional, they often become very competitive. So what you see happen is a power struggle will emerge within the friendship. You'll start getting these arguments over who did more for the other person, who is liked more by other people, who invited who to more parties, who introduced who to their friends, who helped who the most at school. Like, you start getting into these scorecard situations of like, "No, you owe me." And the fact that that conversation shouldn't even exist. In a healthy friendship, that conversation doesn't even exist.

• 3:24:53Speaker 01

  Any relationship, yeah.

• 3:24:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah. But second of all, the fact that that conversation is even happening, the fact that both people see the friendship in that way, tells you right off the bat that it is a fundamentally transactional relationship, that there's not any genuine admiration going on. It's likely some mix of envy and desperation that keeps the two people together.

• 3:25:18Speaker 01

  If there's one thing that I really do know about friendship is that that scorecard is the most toxic thing. You cannot keep score.

• 3:25:29Speaker 01

  Again, it's a subjective thing too, like we talked about earlier. The balance in a relationship is always subjective. But the scorekeeping thing where you're trying to objectify it just amplifies the toxicity to agree that it's not. You're just not going to recover from that. You can't. There's a saying too in business, and I'm sorry, because later I'm going to say why you shouldn't treat your friendships like a business. But there's a saying that you're never going to capture all the value that you create.

• 3:25:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:53Speaker 01

  Right? Like Mark, you've given away how many newsletters over the years? How many?

• 3:25:58Mark Manson?

  Hundreds, thousands.

• 3:25:59Speaker 01

  eBooks. We put out eBooks all the time now, hundreds of pages.

• 3:26:02Mark Manson?

  We've literally published advice to millions of people.

• 3:26:05Speaker 01

  You will never capture, quote unquote, capture all the value that you create, especially in a friendship. It just dropped the scorecard.

• 3:26:11Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:26:12Speaker 01

  There's no, there's no, the balance just isn't ever going to be there the way you think it should be. If that's what you think.

• 3:26:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:26:18Mark Manson?

  Coincidentally, I do think dropping the scorecard is probably the easiest and first step to breaking out of a toxic friendship.

• 3:26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Easiest to notice too.

• 3:26:28Mark Manson?

  Yes, it's easiest to notice and it's probably the easiest to stop doing.

• 3:26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:26:32Mark Manson?

  So it's funny, and this is true with toxic romantic relationships as well. Generally speaking, if you stop the dynamic and set up a boundary, the relationship will unravel itself. And it's actually pretty crazy how quickly it happens. Like the second, if you're like, let's say we're in a stupid argument over, I don't know, some scorecard situation. The second one of us is like, you know what, dude? It doesn't matter. I'm just happy we're friends. The other person like doesn't know what to do anymore. And it's like, wait, wait a second. I can't like pull my lovers and get what I want out of you.

• 3:27:09Speaker 01

  You're not feeding me.

• 3:27:10Mark Manson?

  You're not feeding, you're not validating me. You're not giving me the thing that I was here for. Nine times out of 10, they leave on their own.

• 3:27:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:27:18Mark Manson?

  It's just the friendship kind of dies after that. And this is, this is the big difference, I would say, between toxic friendships and toxic romantic relationships. And then toxic, toxic family relationships. Because in both romantic and family relationships, you have a very deep emotional investment with the person. Where even when you do stop the scorecard and stop the drama and stop the games, it's extremely hard to let go.

• 3:27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:27:46Mark Manson?

  And, and so there's this constant. Undertow pulling you back into the drama because you you still deeply care about this person and you really want them to to do well and be happy and you really love them and you really want this to work. So you find yourself like falling back into it over and over again. I think generally with toxic friendships, because friendships are, and I don't mean this in a in a bad way, friendships are more expendable, they're more replaceable. Generally speaking, as soon as you stop the toxic dynamic, the friendship just kind of falls apart. I'd say nine times out of 10. The only exception is if the friend also notices how fucked up the situation is and the but the two of you can kind of address

• 3:28:28Mark Manson?

  it together. But I would guess that that's like the rare minority of situations.

• 3:28:33Speaker 01

  There's a little nugget in there, too. If you're trying to make friends, going back to the make friends thing is the scorecard. If you if you show up to places and you're like, I did this, this and this, therefore this person should react in this way when you're meeting people. That right there is the basis for a toxic relationship. So just stop it right there. To begin with.

• 3:28:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean, the scorecard thing is is really just, it's a nice red flag for every like, anytime I I met a guy a while ago, who like, I forget what happened. Anyway, I was like, doing some crazy work trip or something. And he kind of like, he texted me a few times and I didn't respond. And then he like, sent like a snide comment about like, well, I guess you you're too cool to respond to my text. And I'm like, okay, we're done. Like, this is over. I'm just, dude, I'm 40. I don't have time for this shit. Yeah. So yeah, opting out of the the the scorecards, the competitive dynamic, the status game is probably the first step. I would say opting out of the drama. A lot of times what happens in these sorts of friendships is that the friends will get entangled in

• 3:29:34Mark Manson?

  each other's drama and messy life, you know, so it's you're you're dating your friend's sister's best friend and they live together and you have to see them all the time. And oh, and you're sharing a car with them. Like, there's a because there's such a lack of boundaries in toxic friendships. There's a lot of kind of material world things get intermingled. People share living spaces, they share expenses, they give each other rides to places, they end up working together. And so there's just a very, sometimes there's a very messy disentanglement that has to happen. Like, that can be a very Awkward and difficult thing to go through.

• 3:30:19Mark Manson?

  We are planning to do an episode on boundaries soon. I think this is where boundaries really shine is just knowing where to draw the line and how to express that line and say, look, like, I'm willing to help you with this, but like, anything past this threshold, you're on your own. And then being able to stick to that is huge. And then obviously, it's like if this person is not respecting your boundaries, not dropping the scorecard, continues to try to manipulate you and create drama with you, just opt out of the friendship entirely.

• 3:30:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:30:55Mark Manson?

  You know, we joked earlier about it being easier never to go somebody. It is easier than ever to go somebody. So, I mean, if you need to drop somebody, you can. In some ways, it might even be too easy. But, I mean, I think the takeaway here is just that toxic relationships are inherently unstable and they are short-term fixes for what are deep, personal, emotional wounds. We did an episode a couple of months ago on shame. Generally, people full of a lot of shame find themselves in lots of toxic relationships, friendships included. It is one of those things where you have to kind of get your own shit sorted first before you come back to a friendship.

• 3:31:39Mark Manson?

  And again, interestingly, like, the people that you will attract in the world are generally have a level of security and self-assuredness that is proportional to yourself. And so, the more right you get with yourself, the more confident you get with yourself, the more secure you are with yourself, the more you will just kind of naturally filter out a lot of the insecure, dramatic people and you'll filter in a lot of the healthy, secure people into your life.

• 3:32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were talking about this and I, I don't know what it is. I just, I don't put up with toxic relationships at all and I've never have, never tolerated them.

• 3:32:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:18Speaker 01

  And so, I don't, it's hard for me to watch when it does happen. I see it.

• 3:32:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:21Speaker 01

  I definitely see it in my life and with some of my other friends and their friends. But I just, I've never had a tolerance for it and I never understood it. And I don't know whether it's because, I think it is, I think I've realized that, you know, friends come and go, like you were just saying, there's inexpendability to them.

• 3:32:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:36Speaker 01

  They come and go and... Yeah, there's just an underlying security underneath that that you have to be comfortable with.

• 3:32:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I would say to another, you know, so we talked about the scorecard. We talked about the intermingling of lives. You know, it's funny, we've talked about proximity and repetition.

• 3:32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:32:53Mark Manson?

  I would say another calling card of a toxic friendship is to is two people that feel the need to be together all the time and do things together all the time, talk, message each other all the time. There's a certain emotional dependence there that's probably not entirely healthy. I mean, like, don't get me wrong, it's great to have really close friends that you can see a lot. But if you have a friend that you feel like you are dependent upon their perspective, their validation, their approval to do anything in your life.

• 3:33:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that's a huge issue like there's, I think, I think insecure people have a romantic notion about that of like, well, they're my bestie, of course I include them in everything, of course.

• 3:33:40Speaker 01

  Without them.

• 3:33:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah, of course I take them to my job interviews and of course I bring them home for Thanksgiving and of course I text them at two, two o'clock on a Tuesday night. It's like, no, no, no, that's, that's actually not healthy. That's, that's, that's like a level, that's, that's codependence, basically.

• 3:33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:34:00Mark Manson?

  All right, so we've gone through how to make friends, how to keep friends, how to have bad friends, how to get rid of bad friends. There is this whole loneliness epidemic going on, quote unquote. There's a lot of scary statistics out these days. There's a lot of crazy technological change that's been happening, social media, smartphones, AI. What's going on in the world? Like, it's, it's, we could have spent, we didn't, we glossed over it pretty quickly in the intro, but like, we really could have spent a full 10 minutes going over all of the harrowing social statistics that are going on in the world at the moment.

• 3:34:43Mark Manson?

  People are losing friends, they're losing touch with friends, they are have, like, having trouble making friends. They're more lonely than ever before. What the hell is going on?

• 3:34:52Speaker 01

  Well, okay, we could actually kind of approach this in a couple of different ways. There's some external headwinds in the current culture. And then there's kind of, I think, some internal, we'll call them internal headwinds or obstacles that we have to overcome. And let's, let's first start with the external ones. Okay. So just some of the most common things that are cited and in the research as well. Things like, you know, time poverty, our schedules. We just try to pack everything in, especially in places like North America. We're very, very career focused.

• 3:35:22Speaker 01

  Calendars get kind of, you know, full very quickly. We just don't have time for friends and, you know, proximity and repetition, again, two big factors, and we just don't have that time for repetition for our friends anymore. Okay. So, uh, longer working hours, there's caregiving involved. People spend way more time with their kids now, too. Like, our generation spends a lot of time with, with their kids. Seen in time use surveys that that happens. And a lot of times, um, you know, that's pretty taxing on friendships. You know, it's, it's really hard to fit in. Like, I'm a third wheel now, right?

• 3:35:54Mark Manson?

  Let me tell you about it.

• 3:35:56Speaker 01

  I'm like, being like a single guy, my, my kids have friends and they've incorporated me into all of this. I've been able to kind of navigate that pretty well, but it, it's definitely a factor. Or, you know, it's like, we don't go out and party anymore.

• 3:36:07Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 3:36:07Speaker 01

  We're gonna go hang out and, you know, watch Bluey or whatever. Sometimes you just gotta, you gotta go for that.

• 3:36:14Mark Manson?

  Does it ever bother you that it's like, when you hang out with parents with young kids, that it's like, it's about, it's all about the kids the whole time? Or do you ever run into that?

• 3:36:22Speaker 01

  Cause I mean, yes, I mean, so, so what I've found is that, okay, if the, if the kids aren't there, what they like to do is complain about the kids.

• 3:36:30Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:36:30Speaker 01

  At first I was just like, guys.

• 3:36:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:33Speaker 01

  Like, like, shut the hell up. And like, you made this decision, blah, blah. What I eventually realized was, oh, this is their time to, they can't do that when their kids are around.

• 3:36:41Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 3:36:42Speaker 01

  They love their kids, they love being parents, but there's a side of it that they can't.

• 3:36:46Mark Manson?

  They need to vent.

• 3:36:46Speaker 01

  They need to blow off that steam. So I get that.

• 3:36:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:49Speaker 01

  I think the other side of it, though, too, is I watch them change in front of me. So we talked about how you watch people go through these phases.

• 3:36:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:58Speaker 01

  I, I, I kind of see it, I've reframed it as, this is a privilege to me to watch this person that I love.

• 3:37:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:05Speaker 01

  Change into something new and go through these struggles and be able to support them and all that. So. I don't know if I'm very, that's a very common reaction to it.

• 3:37:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:14Speaker 01

  I know some people who was like, as soon as somebody has kids in their life, they're like, I'm not even, I'm done.

• 3:37:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:19Speaker 01

  They just, they don't want kids, they don't want anything to do with it. You're, all you're gonna do is talk about your kid and parenting and how hard it is, and I want nothing to do with it.

• 3:37:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:24Speaker 01

  I'm not like that, but like, I kinda get the motivation behind that.

• 3:37:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I, I, I think there's a spectrum of parents. And again, to your point, and the reason I'm, I'm even bringing this up is because I do think this is something that is new with our generation. Jonathan Haidt talks about this all the time, about how the expectation that parents have now of what parenting is, is like so inflated. It is obsessive focus on the kids.

• 3:37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37:52Mark Manson?

  24/7.

• 3:37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37:54Mark Manson?

  And like, the, the kids could be running up and down the wall. I don't know. Like, when I was young, if my parents were having dinner with friends and I walked in and I started talking and make a bunch of noise, my parents would tell me to shut the fuck up and go to my room.

• 3:38:05Speaker 01

  Get the hell out, yeah.

• 3:38:06Mark Manson?

  Get out, yeah. Get out, go to your room, be quiet.

• 3:38:08Speaker 01

  Go outside.

• 3:38:09Mark Manson?

  Adults are talking, right? And it just, it feels like there's a certain, like, a lot of parents of our generation don't do that.

• 3:38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:38:16Mark Manson?

  It's like the kid becomes the thing. Uh, and putting aside the, the, the thing that that teaches the kid, which is not a good thing. It does make it very hard. It makes it hard to have like a real relationship or a friendship with, with those parents. That said, there are a lot of people who I do think are very good at prioritizing and organizing their time and attention and, you know, like they can, they can step away from being parents and still be very present and, and, and, you know, and have a life outside of parenthood. So people working longer hours, spending more time with their kids.

• 3:38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:38:54Mark Manson?

  What else?

• 3:38:54Speaker 01

  We are a more mobile society now too, right? And there's a lot more life transitions too, right? If you think about, like, I talked about going to grad school and stuff, right? So I've transitioned, I went, I was living in a small town middle of nowhere, I moved to a city to go to university, and then I moved to, again to go to grad school, and then I moved again, and then I went and I- Travel, there was Nomad, all that, all these life transitions, maybe you don't have that many, but they're much, much more common now. And so again, the proximity thing, right? That's a lot harder. Proximity and repetition become a lot harder when we're a more, more mobile society. That kind of waxes and wanes throughout, you know, economic booms and busts, of course, but it is a thing. I, I mentioned too, like my sister, she's just had a lot of jobs. We, we already mentioned that too. A lot of people, they just change jobs more frequently.

• 3:39:38Mark Manson?

  Change careers, yeah.

• 3:39:40Speaker 01

  Remote work. School, remote work is a huge one too. That was, uh, that's definitely one that I think is, you know, we've, especially Americans, the, the American dream is to have everything kind of self-contained in this little box, your house, right? And it's your job, you have food delivery, you have all that kind of stuff.

• 3:39:55Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:39:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's, um, that's a huge one. And I don't know, I'd like the remote work thing too. I don't know. It was really funny through the pandemic where more people started working remotely. And I've been working remote since 2014, you know, so I was kind of used to it, but it was very, very interesting to see people like, that was polarizing. Some people hated it.

• 3:40:16Mark Manson?

  It's a, yes.

• 3:40:17Speaker 01

  And some people loved it.

• 3:40:18Mark Manson?

  Some people thrive and some people really flounder.

• 3:40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of people who just let that social contact outside of their homes, whether they had kids or not, that was a really important thing for them. So that's, that's a big one. Loss of third places, uh, you know, who was that? That was, uh, Ray Oldenburg, a researcher who came up with that. Cafes, libraries, um, just going out, you know, is, is much, uh, much less common. But also that's related to, to another one, which is the decline in civic, um, and associational life.

• 3:40:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:51Speaker 01

  So that's the Robert Putnam.

• 3:40:52Mark Manson?

  And that's been going on for a hundred years.

• 3:40:54Speaker 01

  He wrote that book back in the nineties, right? And he, what he noticed was that trend started way back, I think in the like, really in the fifties, but maybe even twenties and thirties.

• 3:41:02Mark Manson?

  I think it, yeah, I think he found it, for some things, he found it going all, all the way back through the 20th century. But it was, I think, right, he was primarily focused on. The nineteen forty's and fifty's through the ninety's.

• 3:41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think about this in my own life, too. It definitely like, look at the generations in my family. My grandparents were very active in all these civic organizations. My grandpa was a veteran of the Korean War. And so he was in the VFW. My grandmother was in the Rotary Club. They had a Bridge Club. They did Elks Club and all of that. Like, they were, my grandpa was even like, he did some local government stuff. Like, they were super, super engaged. Their church, again, that's another kind of, also a third space plus civic engagement place that has

• 3:41:47Mark Manson?

  Is deteriorated.

• 3:41:48Speaker 01

  deteriorated. The thing was, is that these had these built-in social structures that they could lean on and rely on.

• 3:41:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:53Speaker 01

  To some extent.

• 3:41:56Speaker 01

  They were also pretty much all free.

• 3:41:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:59Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? There was like, or there was a low fee to be in the Elks Club or whatever, you know? And now, I was talking about this the other day with a friend. Her dad, when she was growing up, who's since passed, but when they were growing up, he had season tickets to the Broncos, NFL team, the Broncos. And he was a working class, you know, middle class, had a, they had lived in like a middle-class neighborhood and whatever. Somebody like him today couldn't even afford that.

• 3:42:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:24Speaker 01

  Because it's gotten so expensive. These, what, third, third spaces have become less free and more pay-to-play.

• 3:42:31Mark Manson?

  They're more luxury.

• 3:42:32Speaker 01

  There is more luxury item now.

• 3:42:33Mark Manson?

  I was just gonna bring up and shit on Soho House.

• 3:42:39Speaker 01

  Oh, are you trying to be anti-elitist here, Mark?

• 3:42:41Mark Manson?

  It's not even about elitism. I just think it's a shitty product. It's, it's a

• 3:42:46Speaker 01

  That's why I would absolutely agree with that. It's like, you guys are taking what used to be free and trying to like monetize it.

• 3:42:52Mark Manson?

  Exactly. I mean, it's, and don't get me wrong, the spaces are beautiful and sure, they have like cool talks or like, you know, film premieres and shit like that. But like, I had a bunch of friends in Soho House in New York and then, you know, a friend, a friend of, a good friend of ours here in LA was a member. And so we would go a bunch and like, every time I went, I'm like, what is the point of this place?

• 3:43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:43:13Mark Manson?

  What is the point? I think it's a little bit It's like a metaphor for the modern age, which is they essentially took what what used to be free, a third space, a community oriented space where people could join a club and meet meet up together. And A, they monetized it, but to monetize it, you have to introduce status games. And when as soon as you introduce status games, you can't actually have friendships because everybody's there.

• 3:43:41Speaker 01

  They're like, well, talk about toxic friendships.

• 3:43:43Mark Manson?

  Seriously, it's like, I remember like having this argument with a friend of mine who was a member. And I was, I was like, I was telling her, I'm like, look, if you're paying $3,000 to be in a room, you cannot actually genuinely have friendships with people in that room. Because like, everybody you talk to is like, oh, well, I better be getting my money's worth here. Like, I hope I make a friend. What do I need to say to make a friend so I can get my money's worth? Like, it just, it is completely antithetical to what creates a friendship.

• 3:44:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, there's so that along with urban design, just in general, too. So we talked about LA especially. It was funny, the last time I was out here, so I have some friends out here in LA that I've known for a very long time. I consider them pretty good friends. Um, we all went to college together. They live in different parts of LA. They never see each other.

• 3:44:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's impossible.

• 3:44:30Speaker 01

  I come into town and like, we're trying to get together and we're in, it's like a three hour text channel. We're trying to try, I'm not joking, trying to triangulate because all of us got to get into a car. It's all going to be around rush hour. We're like using AI to try to figure out where's the best place for us to meet. Like, there was just that much friction around it and it's exhausting.

• 3:44:49Mark Manson?

  It is.

• 3:44:49Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, there is that, like they say in LA, you know, like you were saying, if you live on the other side of town. What I've noticed too about people who live in LA is like, you got your neighborhood and you just stay in it.

• 3:44:57Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:44:58Speaker 01

  You don't even leave it. You're, you're surrounded by 11 million people, but you're kind of trapped in this little box.

• 3:45:01Mark Manson?

  It is, uh, it's like 12 small towns.

• 3:45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:45:06Mark Manson?

  It's not a big city.

• 3:45:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:45:07Mark Manson?

  And it, that, that's a jarring realization when you move here.

• 3:45:12Speaker 01

  And it's just because like, if you have more walkable spaces and more dense densely populated areas that aren't built around cars, especially like, we like to do that in the United States, especially the newer cities that were settled in the West. You, you just have more chance encounters with people face to face in the real world. That's, it's as simple as that.

• 3:45:31Mark Manson?

  And you have the proximity and the repetition and that's, you're already halfway there.

• 3:45:36Speaker 01

  So that's huge. There, one I want to bring up. Though too, that is, I think especially relevant is polarization and we're living more in low trust societies now. This is obviously more recent over the last, you know, couple of decades, I would say, but this is a huge thing. I think also too, that the, related to another one, kind of mental health stuff I want to bring up, but the, like the pandemic, kind of, this all ties in together with that as well. What I've noticed anyway, just as an anecdote, when I get on planes now, I don't, people don't strike up conversations like they used to on planes. It's like, I've, I've really noticed it. I've been flying a lot more lately, but still, like, I used to, probably every other plane ride I'd have,

• 3:46:19Speaker 01

  you'd have at least a 15 or 20 minute conversation with somebody. And I generally wasn't the one who started it. That never happens to me anymore.

• 3:46:26Mark Manson?

  You know why? And this ties into a broader reason behind all of this?

• 3:46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:46:31Mark Manson?

  Is because when you get on a plane now, you have wifi, you have your podcasts, you have 200 movies you can choose from, you have TV shows that you downloaded on your iPad. It's like, I get on a, it's funny because I'm old enough to remember the days when an eight hour flight was a very daunting thing. It was like, oh my God.

• 3:46:53Speaker 01

  You're feeling yourself.

• 3:46:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I'm gonna have to sit in a chair for eight hours. This is gonna be awful. And like now, now I'll do a 12 hour flight. Like it's nothing.

• 3:47:01Speaker 01

  You're like, yeah, I gotta catch up on a whole season of, you know, whatever, the banner.

• 3:47:04Mark Manson?

  Three movies, a nap and catch up on some work and I'm landing.

• 3:47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:47:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that that's it. We'll get into a little bit more of that in the technology section that we're going to go into. But in, in general though, you know, the people just tend to trust other people less.

• 3:47:22Mark Manson?

  Less.

• 3:47:23Speaker 01

  Okay. So when you're out and about, you just, there's the unfamiliarity you have with these people, you're much, much less likely to break that barrier for whatever reason, whether it's. All the toxicity online around politics and everything like that has to do with it. I'm sure road rage has gone up too. You know, it's just we're living in a like the institutions that used to kind of provide some trust for us have deteriorated and we're kind of all on our own and it's scary. I think that's part of it as well.

• 3:47:49Mark Manson?

  I remember last year when I talked to Jonathan Haidt about this and he was, he and I were kind of going country by country and looking at, I mean, it was primarily like the social media and mental health crisis, but we also talked quite a bit about like loneliness and things like that. And he was kind of pointing out which countries seem to be a little bit immune to a lot of the poor mental health trends that are going on and then the countries that are getting hit the hardest. And, uh, and he was saying, he was like, I, he was relating it to individualism, but there were still a bunch of exceptions here and there. And then we talked a little bit further and he started talking about how some cultures

• 3:48:28Mark Manson?

  just have this baked in, uh, community time, you know, it's like everything revolves around big dinners with neighbors and family and, um, people take care of each other's kids. Like there's just much more of a cultural emphasis on, on community and face to face time and large meals and getting together with people and celebrating holidays together. And he was kind of pointing out that these were the countries were still doing okay. Like they kept their sanity essentially. And I put it out, I was like, that seems to be an inoculation to this. It's not that it like, it's not that they aren't being affected by social media and everything that's going on. It's just that, that it's that in person, all of those in-person institutions and third

• 3:49:11Mark Manson?

  places that are maintained through the culture are, are inoculating the population to, I think a lot of the mental health effects that we see in places like the US, the UK, Canada, Australia.

• 3:49:24Speaker 01

  Related to that, one of the things, one of the other factors is like, uh, household and demographic changes, like more people living alone. That's been a big trend for a very long time, actually. But so you see that, you know, there's increased loneliness, say in the United States and more people are living alone, but you don't see that as much in Sweden. A lot more people live alone in Sweden.

• 3:49:41Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:49:42Speaker 01

  As we saw through a pandemic, right? We, we saw, we found out, this is what we found out about Sweden is like, oh, a lot of people live alone there. And they're doing okay.

• 3:49:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:49Speaker 01

  Because they have a lot of those other.

• 3:49:50Mark Manson?

  Very communal.

• 3:49:51Speaker 01

  Yes, a very communal mindset that they have. And so I think you're right, there's that inoculation to it, too. Another thing that Jonathan Haidt found, and I believe you discussed it with him, too, was that conservative kids are doing better.

• 3:50:03Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:50:03Speaker 01

  Mental health wise than liberal kids.

• 3:50:05Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 3:50:06Speaker 01

  And they're still.

• 3:50:07Mark Manson?

  By a mar- like a wide.

• 3:50:08Speaker 01

  But they're still using social media just as much.

• 3:50:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:50:10Speaker 01

  They're still not exercising just all of those things. I mean, they might be, there's different activities, but they're probably forced to go to church a little bit more. You know, they're, they're probably forced to eat dinner together more just because of conservative social life.

• 3:50:23Mark Manson?

  Probably grew up in larger families or.

• 3:50:25Speaker 01

  More communal.

• 3:50:26Mark Manson?

  Have parents.

• 3:50:27Speaker 01

  See their grandparents.

• 3:50:28Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:50:28Speaker 01

  That sort of thing. So I, there's an inoculating factor. I, I totally agree with that.

• 3:50:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:50:33Speaker 01

  Um, so it, and I don't want to just blame technology for all of that. I think there is a, a deeper social, uh, aspect to it. Just like we saw in Rosetta, Pennsylvania, too.

• 3:50:42Mark Manson?

  Yes, I, well, and I think this is where Putnam's work is really appropriate is, is because it's like, I remember reading Bowling Alone for the first time, like 12, 13 years ago. And like right when kind of the social media stuff was just starting, people are starting to freak out about it.

• 3:50:57Speaker 01

  I think that book came out in either 99 or 2000, right? Bowling Alone, it was late 90s, I think.

• 3:51:01Mark Manson?

  I think, yeah, I think it was around there.

• 3:51:03Speaker 01

  So he was kind of ahead of his time there.

• 3:51:04Mark Manson?

  Well, and the research was done in like 90, 92.

• 3:51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:51:07Mark Manson?

  So it, it's, it's, he was way ahead of his time. And basically I just remember it being very eye opening that this trend towards the atomization of society, towards the isolation of people, um, the breakdown of institutions, the breakdown of third spaces. It's been a long term, it's been a century long progression. And similarly, similarly too, it's interesting if, when you look at political polarization and distrust in society, that also predates social media and the internet. Like that goes back into the eighties and nineties. It really, it really starts with, uh, kind of the advent of cable television, I think.

• 3:51:46Speaker 01

  Which coincided with like Reagan and Thatcher. And so everybody blames that, but it's, yeah.

• 3:51:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So, I mean, these are, these are multi-generational trends and it is, I think a lot of things, you know, you can look at social media or TikTok.

• 3:52:01Mark Manson?

  As, I mean, it is both a cause and an effect. It's hard to say like, what is driving this overall?

• 3:52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, um, those are basically the, the, the big external trends, though. Most commonly cited ones, most researched ones that we know of anyway to date. And so, yeah, I think just be, even just being aware of those a little bit and being like, okay, how does this affect the proximity, the, the, the repetition and the kind of reciprocal nature of disclosure that I have with my friends? All of those are headwinds that you might have to be aware of. There's some internal ones now too, and go to some, some of these internal frictions that we can go into more psychological, I guess. One of them, we've kind of touched on already, the equality paradox. So people, there are people who expect friendships to feel equal all the time. And like we've already said, that that's just not possible.

• 3:52:53Speaker 01

  Balance in relationships, I really think it, you have to give it a long enough timeline to balance out, right? You're, you're gonna need things from friends sometimes, and sometimes they're gonna need things from you, and it's never perfectly balanced, and you've just gotta be okay with that. Again, the scorecard thing, we've, we've probably hit on it enough, but just wanna highlight it again.

• 3:53:10Mark Manson?

  I, I wanna, what I wanna circle with that too, is just patience. Because I think one of the things that my wife and I learned moving to LA is that we were just impatient. Like, we would meet somebody, we'd hang out with somebody a few times, it'd be okay. And then we're like, well, I guess that's not gonna be a friend.

• 3:53:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:53:28Mark Manson?

  But you, you just, you don't, you don't realize how long it takes sometimes.

• 3:53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:53:32Mark Manson?

  And like, how, how patient you have to be with people.

• 3:53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, there's, there's charismatic people you really like being around, and then there's, but the most of us are more like, well, you need to get to know us for a couple of months before you really start to find a lot of those things. So, yeah.

• 3:53:44Mark Manson?

  And I think in middle age too, that becomes more of a factor, right? Because it's, it is, uh, you're not, you're not really looking for pleasure friendships. And utility friendships are pretty obvious. So those virtue friendships, like, they take time. You, you really have to get to know somebody, and like, when you really know your own values and what, your own interests and what you care about, yeah, there's a certain openness that has to happen, I think. And I, I think some of this too, is just also, um, you know, we, we live in a culture of immediate gratification. You know, you, people.

• 3:54:16Mark Manson?

  Not to get on my old man shakes his fist on at a cloud, but like I do feel like culturally we we're in a culture of instant gratification.

• 3:54:26Speaker 01

  You expect somebody who you show up and you're like, you're not cool. I'm done.

• 3:54:29Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm out.

• 3:54:30Mark Manson?

  Cause our whole life is like.

• 3:54:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now everything's like, yeah, the food's not ready. I'm out.

• 3:54:34Mark Manson?

  Right. It's like.

• 3:54:35Speaker 01

  Swipe, swipe, swipe.

• 3:54:36Mark Manson?

  Yes, exactly. Get on YouTube, watch 10 seconds like, no, they'll like it next video. You know, like it's just the entire, our entire lives are like that and uh, but people are not. You can't swipe people away.

• 3:54:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:54:48Mark Manson?

  And you, you have to give them time. You have, you have to let them grow on you and, and sometimes like, sometimes people will surprise you.

• 3:54:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I go back to the David Brooks thing. The friction is the point.

• 3:54:58Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:54:58Speaker 01

  The friction is a point in relationships in general, but in friendships, overcoming some sort of friction. Yeah. I gotta drive across half of LA to go see a friend. That's because I value that friendship.

• 3:55:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:55:08Speaker 01

  You know, um, or whatever it is. It's like, I, I value your time and your, your perspective and your friendship enough that I'm gonna go through all of this shit.

• 3:55:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:55:17Speaker 01

  And be patient with you upfront too.

• 3:55:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:55:19Speaker 01

  And give people a chance a little bit too. Yeah. The tall poppy problem too. This, I, my Australian friends always talk about this.

• 3:55:25Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:55:25Speaker 01

  Oh, we have tall poppy syndrome and we don't want to look like we're being arrogant or.

• 3:55:29Mark Manson?

  Very real thing.

• 3:55:30Speaker 01

  It is, it is. And it can show up in friendships. If there is an imbalance there uh, in status or something like that. I, I think this actually got to be more common for a little while. Maybe still is to some degree, but you, at least for a while, anyway, it was like, you could be friends. You know, you went to college with somebody and you could be friends. They went off to be a doctor and you ended up just kind of being, you know, a low level.

• 3:55:49Mark Manson?

  Shoveling shit.

• 3:55:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And.

• 3:55:52Mark Manson?

  Working on a podcast.

• 3:55:53Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Um, and so if, if there is that imbalance and you're that type of person who's like, oh, I don't wanna, I don't wanna feel like I'm holding this over arrogant or anything like that. And so you're just kinda like, I'm just gonna push this one away.

• 3:56:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:56:07Speaker 01

  Uh, that's, that's probably, that's a problem. Openly celebrating with somebody, you know, tends to be like a little bit faux pas, I guess. The last one I want, I do want to go over.

• 3:56:19Speaker 01

  There and we've kind of already mentioned it optimization culture.

• 3:56:23Mark Manson?

  Oh.

• 3:56:23Speaker 01

  And that gets internalized. Okay.

• 3:56:27Speaker 01

  We treat friendship like a market. We you and I have actually been using some language around what's the ROI on this?

• 3:56:32Mark Manson?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:56:32Speaker 01

  You know, look, I'm a capitalist, but it's kind of like invaded every little crevice of our lives. It's like, what is the return I'm getting on this?

• 3:56:39Mark Manson?

  So how see this is my point, Drew. This is what I was saying.

• 3:56:43Speaker 01

  I know. That's why I wanted to bring it up again, though, because it often leads to a lot of like performance.

• 3:56:48Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:56:48Speaker 01

  To in in relationships, because it's like, oh, this person needs to get something out of this, and I need to be a certain way.

• 3:56:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:56:55Speaker 01

  And that that erodes the the disclosure, the authentic disclosure part of friendship, right? You're not being you're not really being your true self when you're doing these sorts of things.

• 3:57:05Mark Manson?

  It's funny, like, one of the reasons I like going down to Brazil is because I can talk freely about American politics. Like, I don't feel free to talk.

• 3:57:13Speaker 01

  Isn't that I can't. Yeah.

• 3:57:14Mark Manson?

  How fucked up is that?

• 3:57:15Speaker 01

  That's so fucked up.

• 3:57:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah, especially when you're meeting new people. There's always that kind of awkward moment. Yeah, where it's like somebody will say something a little bit political and you're like.

• 3:57:24Speaker 01

  Testing the waters. Where do I go with this?

• 3:57:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah, what? How do I do? Am I diplomatic about it? Do I say what I really think? Do I think which way do I think they lean? You know, it just it's it's really exhausting.

• 3:57:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:57:37Mark Manson?

  And and the thing is to, you know, what I find is that most people don't really care that much. But everybody's because there are and there's enough of a minority of people who do care a fucking lot.

• 3:57:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:57:52Mark Manson?

  And you never know when you're around one.

• 3:57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:57:55Mark Manson?

  That it's just everybody gets kind of uptight and their butthole puckers up.

• 3:58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:58:00Mark Manson?

  Because it's, I don't know about you, but like, you know, I've been at dinners and stuff where it's just like somebody loses their fucking mind and like.

• 3:58:06Speaker 01

  It's just ruins everything for everyone.

• 3:58:08Mark Manson?

  Over something very stupid.

• 3:58:10Speaker 01

  Stupid. So just so dumb. Yeah.

• 3:58:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:58:12Speaker 01

  So I, yeah, and you and I, I don't know, we we. I I I tend to navigate both sides, you know, I like a lot of my family where I come from is more like conservative. I have a lot of my friends now are more on the liberal side and they, everybody knows that I'm more centrist.

• 3:58:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:58:28Speaker 01

  And they tiptoe around me even still too. So it's, yeah, I hate it. I hate it that it's like that.

• 3:58:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:58:36Speaker 01

  There's a demonization of people that they don't understand that that's really, really toxic and it's. I I have a neighbor of mine who's who's I would call him a friend now too. He over during COVID and all that, he had a big falling out with somebody he's been friends with for like 30 years.

• 3:58:52Mark Manson?

  Wow.

• 3:58:53Speaker 01

  Over, you know, vaccine stuff or political stuff or whatever.

• 3:58:57Mark Manson?

  And well, the funny thing too, is that it's not limited to the political conversation. Cause there's all sorts of adjacent conversations that like hit the hit a political nerve.

• 3:59:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:59:05Mark Manson?

  That have like now become associated, right? It's like the pandemic, right? If you you're afraid to even talk about the pandemic now because it's you might say.

• 3:59:12Speaker 01

  This huge collective thing we all went through and we can't even talk about.

• 3:59:15Mark Manson?

  Right. Cause it's you might, you might mention something that somebody in the room is gonna freak out and start raving about. And and yeah, I've had the same thing. Like there's there, there's actually a person that you and I both know, a mutual acquaintance. He used to be a friend of mine who I got in a stupid fucking argument over. Basically something semantic that he took offense to. And yeah, he stopped hanging out with me. So it's, it is, it's very obnoxious. I think it's, it's a, it's a subtle tax on, on everybody. Like a mental tax on everybody that that I think we don't think about.

• 3:59:52Speaker 01

  There was maybe, maybe we can close out this section with this, but an interesting research finding I found, and it's not a strong link. It hasn't been replicated or anything like that, but there was some, some data to suggest that. Uh, there's a, uh, like a correlation between risk taking and loneliness and people who are report being more lonely are less likely to take risks. There's like an inverse correlation there. Um, and I think like social risks and stuff like

• 4:00:19Mark Manson?

  Makes sense.

• 4:00:20Speaker 01

  It, it makes total sense.

• 4:00:21Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:00:22Speaker 01

  And then not only that, but they can get that kind of dopamine fix instead of taking a risk. They're just, you're scrolling.

• 4:00:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:00:28Speaker 01

  So I, I think, yeah, it's just, you have to be incredibly conscious about that. You know, since I've gotten off mostly, mostly gotten off social media, although I'll still find ways around. I'm like, I'll still scroll through stuff, whatever it is, you can find ways. Um, I've, I've definitely noticed this though, that I do really prefer more hanging out with people. And I'm, I'm typically the initiator too, which I'm fine with, um, around that, but.

• 4:00:50Mark Manson?

  Uh, we need people like you. People like me need people like you.

• 4:00:53Speaker 01

  That's another thing I do, I want to point out too, is that this is a problem. Yes, it's a societal wide problem, but it's solved on an individual basis.

• 4:01:00Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:01:00Speaker 01

  Right? And you have, it is the, the, the Gandhi quote, right? Be the change you want to see in the world. As cheesy as that sounds, this is seriously built one relationship at a time. And you have to be part of the, the solution here.

• 4:01:11Mark Manson?

  And I will say this too. So I have a friend here in town named Max and he's, he's like, he's amazing. He's like, he reaches out to every, he plans so many things. He invites people to so like, I, I feel bad sometimes, the amount of things he invites me to, and I like, I don't reciprocate. He's just an amazing connector and I'm, I'm so grateful to be friends with him because if I like, he, he is like single-handedly boosted my social life by probably 30 or 40%. So

• 4:01:39Speaker 01

  Hold on to those people.

• 4:01:39Mark Manson?

  If you are somebody, if you can develop this skillset, it is so valuable in this day and age. If you are the sort of person who can reach out, be proactive, check in on people, invite people to things. Um, it is, it's incredibly valuable these days and, and so it's a great skill to have.

• 4:02:00Mark Manson?

  So obviously, technology is a huge factor in all this. Like, what do you, what do you think is going on?

• 4:02:06Speaker 01

  We live in the most connected time in history, and yet we feel more alone than ever right now. Right? It's crazy to think about that paradox.

• 4:02:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:02:14Speaker 01

  Derek Thompson has this really cool video that he just did a couple of months ago on The Big Think. And he talks about how technology over the past, like, probably 100 years-ish, definitely the last 60 years, has progressively kind of privatized social life. So he started with a car back in the 60s, you know, a car kind of like, people had cars, but it was kind of a luxury thing, and then it became more middle-class, and everybody had a car, starting around the 50s and 60s. That gave rise to the suburbs. We were able to privatize, get away from everybody, and move out to the suburbs, have a little more room, privatize our lives a little bit. Then the television came along. We were able to privatize our leisure time that way, right? From the 1960s to the 1990s, Americans gained 300 hours of leisure time per year. Nearly all of that went into watching television.

• 4:02:59Mark Manson?

  Wow.

• 4:03:00Speaker 01

  Right? Okay, so you're sitting out, you're not out and about, you're not interacting with people, you're not making friends, right? He argues that the smartphone has privatized our attention now. And what he means by that is you could be sitting on a couch next to, next to somebody, each of you on your devices, and you're alone, right?

• 4:03:16Mark Manson?

  Forget that, you could be in a crowded restaurant and be alone.

• 4:03:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. You'd be on a bus, you could be, you could, yeah, you could be surrounded by people and be alone with, because your attention is diverted to your device, right? And so, the way I think about this, anyway, is I go back to our three, our three sides of our triangle, right? Proximity, repetition, and disclosure. Technology affects all of those. Now, I'm not gonna sit here and say that technology is bad, and it's the only thing that's eroding those three things, okay? Because I think there's a way you can use it where it does leverage it. But if you think about it, proximity, you don't have to be around people anymore. There's no embodied experience that you necessarily have to have to be in a group or to make a connection with somebody. You don't make that same connection when you're not there, anyway.

• 4:04:03Speaker 01

  There was this trend too, Derek Thompson points this out in that video. There's this trend called "cancelation" on TikTok, which is basically kids just doing dances that have like, "Oh, my friend just canceled this event, now I gotta stay home."

• 4:04:15Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:04:16Speaker 01

  Cancelation, they're elated that, that somebody canceled on something, right? That's not, what he points out there too, that's not really, that's not loneliness, that's choosing. To be alone. He calls it the antisocial epidemic, not necessarily loneliness epidemic.

• 4:04:30Mark Manson?

  Interesting. It's like Jomo, the joy of missing out.

• 4:04:34Speaker 01

  The joy of missing out. Yeah, that was, yeah, that was the kind of a thing and that's kind of evolved into this now too. Repetition too, the digital, digital interactions, yeah, they can be repeated over time, but more likely like you, you're, you're in a comment section or something like that. It's a one-off interaction. That's why people are such assholes on the internet. Because there's no stakes there, right? It's a one-time interaction like we saw with a tit for tat. During, in, in single interactions, you're more likely to defect. You're more likely to be an asshole in single interactions than over repeated time. The disclosure thing too, okay?

• 4:05:10Speaker 01

  When and if we even do post anymore, which posting is even becoming less common now, right? It's more media than it is social, right? We're incentivized to perform instead of actually express ourselves genuinely, right?

• 4:05:22Mark Manson?

  Makes it transactional.

• 4:05:23Speaker 01

  Which makes it transactional, exactly. So the stakes also can be a lot higher online, like we talked about in the shame episode. There's, you, you just don't even want to express yourself online anymore because for fear of getting canceled or called out or going viral for the wrong reasons.

• 4:05:37Mark Manson?

  Right. It's there forever, right? So it's maybe you apply for a job in 12 years and that video you made with your friends comes back and bites you in the ass.

• 4:05:45Speaker 01

  Right, right. So like, there's, there's really not the incentive or the structure there for you to have like genuine connections with people.

• 4:05:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:05:53Speaker 01

  Now, I, that, that's how technology can erode the three sides of the triangle. I think there's though, there's ways that it can be used where it actually bolsters all of this, right? The thing I really liked about the, like the early internet and early social media too, at least how we used it. You remember like Facebook was, where's the party?

• 4:06:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:06:12Speaker 01

  Right? Like you get on to figure out where the party was and then you would go to the party. It was awesome. It was, it was such an amazing tool. And there's still, there's lots of tools out there like that, meetups and, you know, yeah, dating apps even to, you know, use correctly. You know, I shit on them a lot, but I, I still think there's a utility to them. Repetition too, keeping in touch with people has never been easier. It's low friction. So you like, take that into account. You're not going to get the same quality as like an interpersonal interaction. But one of the, one of the rules I have now is like, when I'm thinking of a friend, I send them a text.

• 4:06:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:06:42Speaker 01

  It was like, hey, I was thinking, and I haven't seen him in a while or something and I haven't been around them.

• 4:06:45Mark Manson?

  I need to get better at that.

• 4:06:46Speaker 01

  That is, it's, it's awesome. You're like, hey, I was just thinking about this time, you know? When we were growing up.

• 4:06:52Mark Manson?

  Hey, bro, remember that thing?

• 4:06:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Hey, bro, remember that thing?

• 4:06:55Mark Manson?

  Wasn't that cool?

• 4:06:55Speaker 01

  Was just thinking of you. How you doing?

• 4:06:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:06:57Speaker 01

  You know, sounds easy and stupid a little bit even too, but it does go a long way.

• 4:07:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:07:02Speaker 01

  With people, it will. And then the disclosure as well, I mean, again, I think the incentives can go either way with that, but you know, technology, you can call somebody up still, right? Like, and for free, basically anywhere in the world now, and, and you can have a genuine conversation and connection with them.

• 4:07:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:07:22Speaker 01

  So it's, it's neither good nor bad. It's a tool.

• 4:07:25Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:07:25Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, as I mentioned earlier, younger generations are reporting more loneliness and we tend to blame, we tend to blame technology for that. And I think that is a part of it. Definitely. They're more likely to just stay online and scroll and, and not connect with people and they have a harder time connecting with people. Sure, I get all that. I just think though, too, that how younger people are, are socializing is just different.

• 4:07:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:07:50Speaker 01

  And we're not quite, we're not quite caught up in the research on that. You know my gripe with some of Jean Twenge's work, right?

• 4:07:57Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 4:07:58Speaker 01

  I don't get me wrong. I like her methods. I just don't agree with all of her interpretations sometimes.

• 4:08:02Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 4:08:02Speaker 01

  One of those is she's like, oh, kids aren't having sex. They're not drinking. They're not all of these, you know, all these things that we used to think of as kind of like rites of passage a little bit. And it's like, is that such, is that growing up? Is that such a bad thing?

• 4:08:13Mark Manson?

  See, I, I always find this so weird because when we were kids, all we heard about was the parents screeching about like, oh my God, kids these days, they're, they're listening to loud music. They're doing drugs. They're having sex. We need to save the kids. They're corrupting our kids. And now it's the kids have actually stopped doing those things.

• 4:08:30Speaker 01

  Now we're like, well, you kids need to have sex and do some drugs.

• 4:08:36Speaker 01

  So, and there's, every generation has some version of, oh, kids these days, right?

• 4:08:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 4:08:40Speaker 01

  And so I think blaming technology is a little bit lazy to just put it on that. I agree that it can be used in a very poor way that doesn't increase socialization and friends and all of this. But I think if we're, and this is what Derek Thompson, I think where he landed on it too, he's like, if you just kind of do a values check a little bit and start using it in a way that does increase your sociality and your, your potential to make friends, then it's a great thing.

• 4:09:07Mark Manson?

  I think the biggest effect I've seen from technology on my own friendships is just, it is eroded at my, at my. Ability to delay pleasure and satisfaction, right? Like, I do think part of that Jomo thing, or that cancellation thing, is when you're so easily entertained and comfortable at home.

• 4:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, okay.

• 4:09:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah, there's like a joy, and trust me, I'm guilty of this. My, my, my wife and I, we joke about this all the time, like, you know, sometimes we'll, something will get canceled, and we'll just look at each other and be like, yes.

• 4:09:44Speaker 01

  Well, think about the comparison there, right? Because, oh, you might go, it might not be a good time. You might, there's gonna be traffic, you're not gonna find a place to park.

• 4:09:52Mark Manson?

  Maybe it's awkward.

• 4:09:54Speaker 01

  Awkward, that like, you know, you may be do something embarrassing or whatever. Or you can just sit and kind of like get these.

• 4:10:01Mark Manson?

  Scroll, watch Netflix.

• 4:10:03Speaker 01

  Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, yeah.

• 4:10:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, so it is, there is, um, there's an opportunity cost. Like, I do remember being younger and sitting around being bored on a Saturday night and being like, man, is anybody doing anything? And like, going through my phone and texting every single one of my friends, being like, yo, what are you up to tonight? What are you up to tonight? I couldn't tell you last time I did that.

• 4:10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:10:24Mark Manson?

  Like, it, it, these days, it's kind of the opposite. It kind of, it's kind of like, it's like, God, I'm invited all this stuff. I kind of just want to like, stay home and play a video game. I keep promising that I'm gonna go through my LA story.

• 4:10:37Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah. This is a good time to.

• 4:10:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah, like, we're gonna deconstruct my friendship problems.

• 4:10:42Speaker 01

  Now that we've been through all that, yeah, let's, let's, let's hear it.

• 4:10:46Mark Manson?

  So, I think we've covered almost all the elements at some point or another in this episode so far. So, to, to, most listeners are probably familiar, you know, I moved to LA three and a half years ago, from New York.

• 4:11:01Mark Manson?

  And I've said for a year or two now that my biggest, my biggest pain point is my social life. Like, it's, I would say it's, it's okay, not great. You know, I'd give it like a six out of 10.

• 4:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:11:11Mark Manson?

  And for a couple of years now, I've, I've said that it's my highest priority, and it's kind of the same. So. We've talked about a few of the things. LA is a, it's a low proximity environment, right? So it's you don't, everything's so spread out, you don't really run into the same people super often. On top of that, it is, see, New York, everybody was always busy, but everybody was on top of each other. So you would eventually kind of run into the same people frequently. LA has kind of the worst of both worlds, where it's very spread out and everybody's busy. So it's, you just, you don't get that repetition. So even like the people in my neighborhood, you don't really get that, that repetition of like running into them frequently.

• 4:11:54Speaker 01

  I just learned there's a subway in LA. I had no, I had no idea.

• 4:11:57Mark Manson?

  It doesn't go anywhere.

• 4:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Right, like in New York, you hop on the train, it can be, you know, wherever.

• 4:12:02Mark Manson?

  The reason you've never heard of it is, uh, it doesn't actually take you anywhere.

• 4:12:05Speaker 01

  I had no idea. I've been coming out here since 2018. I had no idea. Anyway.

• 4:12:10Mark Manson?

  I made the mistake that we talked about earlier. When I moved here, I did what we talked about. I, I was like, I'm gonna sign up for this class. I'm gonna take up surfing. I'm gonna join this club. I'm gonna start taking tennis lessons. And essentially what that did is I met dozens and dozens of random strangers who I never saw again. Um, looking back, pretty much all my friends I made out here, uh, have been somehow through work. They're business entrepreneurs, business owners, creators, podcasters, authors, um, or people who, who work in that industry or adjacent to those people, people who run agencies, people who run production companies,

• 4:12:51Mark Manson?

  um, things like that. So looking back, if I did it again, I would just go straight, like, like I said earlier, my obsession is business. Like, that's where I feel stakes in my life. I don't have kids, um, but I've got all sorts of ambitious professional goals. That's where the stakes are in my life at the moment. So that's where I would invest my, my social time. I'd probably join a bunch of business groups and try to network and stuff that, like, I eventually ended up doing, but I would have just done it much sooner. And then from there, from that network, I would have looked for people, basically the people who have become my friends are essentially, um, people who I've met through the business network who share a mutual interest. So they like watching football, or they like to surf, or

• 4:13:34Mark Manson?

  they like to run. So I've gotten there. It's just taken way, way, way longer than, um, it probably should have, than I would have expected. I would say another aspect of it, there's definitely the, the, the marriage thing is a complicator. The, the child thing is a complicator. The professional thing is a complicator.

• 4:13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:13:58Mark Manson?

  Everybody out here in West LA is like super ambitious. So they're like working crazy schedules. I'm actually, I'm missing a friend's birthday party because we're shooting this fucking Airbnb thing next week.

• 4:14:08Speaker 01

  Mark.

• 4:14:08Mark Manson?

  I know, I know.

• 4:14:12Mark Manson?

  I can see the anger in your eyes.

• 4:14:18Mark Manson?

  You know, if I was the type of guy who had a CRM system for my friend's birthdays.

• 4:14:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would have been on top of that.

• 4:14:23Mark Manson?

  I wouldn't have scheduled the Airbnb thing during his birthday. So yeah, that, that's definitely a big miss. I mean, fortunately his wife is amazing. So she's like scheduling his birthday before, so I can be there. I'm just, as you know, I'm a workaholic. So it's like, that's honestly the, the biggest interference.

• 4:14:42Speaker 01

  There is some, there is some research around like CEOs and entrepreneurs and stuff like that, that they do. It's not super solid research that they have, but they do see like, yeah, it's kind of like a high number of people who own businesses, run businesses do report more loneliness.

• 4:14:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:14:58Speaker 01

  So there's that. The other thing with you too, I think is that, uh, you know, you and, and just people who run businesses in general, if they're at the top anyway, you really, you don't have that work environment like

• 4:15:10Mark Manson?

  No.

• 4:15:11Speaker 01

  other, like most other people do, like 90% of other people do.

• 4:15:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:15:14Speaker 01

  Because it's not like you can be buddy buddy with your, with, with all of your employees, right?

• 4:15:18Mark Manson?

  There's, there's a hierarchy.

• 4:15:19Speaker 01

  Balance there, first of all. So you never really know, like, are they hanging out with me?

• 4:15:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:15:23Speaker 01

  Because I'm their boss or, you know, or maybe they're trying to get a leg up in the company or they're, you know, whatever. You do a good job of like being friendly with us and like doing things outside of work with us for sure. But I, I imagine there's got to be some kind of like, that's got to be in the back of your mind anyway.

• 4:15:39Mark Manson?

  Oh yeah. It's funny because so my, my dad is a business owner as well and, and I remember, you know, I worked a few summers at his company and, and he was really close with his head sales guy. And, um, I remember one time I was, I was hanging out with my dad and I, I, his sales guy, everybody called him Fish. And, um, because his last name was Fishbeck. And, um, and I was hanging out with my dad one day and I, I said like, oh, you know, like you're really good friends with Fishbeck. And my dad kind of laughed and he's like, no, I'm not.

• 4:16:08Mark Manson?

  I was like, what do you mean? You like take them to football games and you guys go out for drinks and you know, you do business trips together and all this stuff like you get along great. He's like, no, don't get me wrong. Like fish is amazing. I really, he's a great guy. He's like, I'm his boss.

• 4:16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:16:22Mark Manson?

  It's not a friendship.

• 4:16:22Speaker 01

  There's never gonna be.

• 4:16:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it can't like, you know, and it took me a long time to kind of understand that dynamic. I would say, I believe that I would say there's that combined, you know, so you lose kind of the workplace friendships. You get the, if you're a CEO, you're probably working insane hours. So you get that on top of it. But I'll say too, it's like, it even bleeds over into your social life. So I'm by no means like a celebrity or a super famous person, but like in my industry, I'm, I'm very well known and, and, and people who work in this industry and work in the creator industry in general or podcasting and like.

• 4:17:06Speaker 01

  They know who we are.

• 4:17:07Mark Manson?

  They very much. And so there is a dynamic, you know, there are certain rooms you go into and people start kind of buttering you up and kissing your ass and they're super nice and it's, it's in the back of your head. You're like, is this genuine? Or does this person want something?

• 4:17:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:17:23Mark Manson?

  And I've noticed that it takes me a good amount of time to just trust the intentions of people.

• 4:17:32Speaker 01

  I understand that.

• 4:17:33Mark Manson?

  Which, which makes me sad. Like it sucks.

• 4:17:39Mark Manson?

  But it is, and then I would say too, there's also what I've noticed too, is that even people who have genuine intentions, I think worry about coming off that way.

• 4:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:17:48Mark Manson?

  And so I've noticed that with a lot of my friends that I've made out here, it took a good three or six months.

• 4:17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Don't want to bother them. Don't want to look over eager. Don't want to look.

• 4:17:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Like, and I, I've actually noticed that I get, I do think I get invited to fewer things or, you know, people will casually text me less often because of that.

• 4:18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18:11Mark Manson?

  They're like, well, he's probably like super busy and it's got a lot going on.

• 4:18:16Speaker 01

  They don't want to look like a social climber or something.

• 4:18:18Mark Manson?

  Right. Yeah. And I've noticed it too, like friends who like genuinely have major life problems. Won't ask, won't ask me for help because they're like, well, you do this for a living. So like, I don't want to bother you. And I'm like, dude, you're getting divorced. I could, we should fucking talk.

• 4:18:36Mark Manson?

  So it's been a learning curve. I would say this, I actually wish we had done an episode like this two years ago. It probably would have saved me like six months of time.

• 4:18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18:49Mark Manson?

  It's, there's not a whole lot in the episode that like was illuminating or were things that I didn't know or hadn't figured out, but like

• 4:18:58Speaker 01

  When you put it all together.

• 4:18:59Mark Manson?

  When you, yeah, when you put it all together and, and have like the full bird's eye view of it. It probably would have saved me some time and some heartache. I will say the thing that I'm fucking terrible at is the reaching out and following up.

• 4:19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:19:13Mark Manson?

  That's the thing I need to get better at.

• 4:19:14Speaker 01

  Repetition. It's the scaffolding on which friendship is built is that repetition. And it's, you can't, those three things are a triangle. You pull one of those out, it all crumbles. And yeah.

• 4:19:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I think I'll just make a Notion CRM system.

• 4:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. Well, hey, let's try.

• 4:19:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah, let's try it. Yeah.

• 4:19:33Speaker 01

  Worth a shot. It's worth a shot. Yeah.

• 4:19:37Mark Manson?

  80/20 time. It's funny because this topic, it's interesting that this might end up being our longest podcast yet, despite how simple it is. Like we have done so much more research on, on other topics of shows. There's been so much more complexity for other shows than this one. Yet it is a very nuanced and, and it's simple in theory, but very nuanced in contextual and implementation.

• 4:20:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:20:05Mark Manson?

  So in terms of 80/20, I think we both agree. The, the three factors, right, of making friends is paramount, most important, right? So proximity, repetition, disclosure, making sure you're hitting those things consistently and regularly. That is the 20 that's going to drive the 80% of the result on this. I think it's easy to understand that in the abstract, but I think there, there's probably some like high leverage strategy or tactics that we went through that are probably worthwhile. I would say from my personal experience, the developing a habit of reaching out, of texting people, reconnecting with people, pinging people, asking them how they're doing, just inviting people to things like that is

• 4:20:52Mark Manson?

  I think that's an 80/20 habit, right? Like if your if your default is to just reach out by text, if you're the one who's initiating more often, that's probably going to pay dividends. What would you add to that?

• 4:21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would, I would definitely find like, you got to find your people too, right? That's the proximity part, I think. And, and, you know, yes, you can use digital technology. You can use social media and all of that. Get it out into the real world as soon as you can. And as as much as you can. Use those tools like we were just talking about. When we talked about the technology, use those tools to find the people around you that that are going to be your people, right? Whether that is joining a club or a gym or volunteer organization, whatever it is. I really do think, I, and I used to not think this. Okay, I used to think that that's kind of like bad, not bad advice, but just like kind of empty advice

• 4:21:49Speaker 01

  or generic advice. But now I see it actually for for what it is. And now that I've done a few of those things, what I what I really took from what you said about that too, it doesn't have to be that thing either, right? Like I go to yoga and I meet people who are interested in other things. I'm not really into yoga and the whole woo woo stuff. And there's plenty of people at the at this place who aren't either. Right. So it's great. And same thing with CrossFit. It doesn't just have to be with CrossFit.

• 4:22:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:22:11Speaker 01

  It probably is better if you can find that obsession like you were talking about. But I really think that, you know, if you're, start there. If you're a huge like Dungeons and Dragons nerd too, or whatever, like, is that what it's called Dungeons and Dragons?

• 4:22:25Mark Manson?

  Dungeons and Dragons.

• 4:22:26Speaker 01

  I have nerd friends who do this all the time. And I'm just like, God, you guys are nerds.

• 4:22:29Mark Manson?

  Sorry, we're not all cool like you. Yeah, I think the thing, the big thing that I took away around this is that it's not the first interest that that makes it work.

• 4:22:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:22:40Mark Manson?

  It's the second interest, right? So it's, and this was the mistake that I made is I went to the CrossFit gym and I signed up for the class. And I was like, I'm not making any friends.

• 4:22:48Speaker 01

  CrossFit buddies, yeah.

• 4:22:48Mark Manson?

  Take the first interest, find the people. And then, once you've found those people, look for the second interest in common. And then I feel like, once you have that second interest in common, then that that can be the base of a friendship.

• 4:22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And leveraging any existing networks to whatever, however loose they are too.

• 4:23:05Mark Manson?

  Professional, familial.

• 4:23:07Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 4:23:08Mark Manson?

  Social, everything.

• 4:23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything and anything you can do to tilt the odds in your favor in this this area. Again, we did mention it. It's a little bit of a numbers game at some point.

• 4:23:17Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:23:18Speaker 01

  Be patient with it. You're not not going to connect with everybody. You're not. It's going to take a while to. It's going to take a long time. I can maybe be a little bit more in the disclosure part, but a persistence and just an intentionality around it. It's not just going to happen by itself.

• 4:23:32Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:23:33Speaker 01

  Right? Like, we all we all kind of understand that when it comes to dating, but we think like friendships should just kind of happen. It's not just going to happen.

• 4:23:39Mark Manson?

  I think I think it's because the first 20 years of our life.

• 4:23:42Speaker 01

  It did happen.

• 4:23:43Mark Manson?

  It does just happen. It does just happen because you are. Why? Because you're in proximity with all of your peers every single day. You have constant repetition of seeing them.

• 4:23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:23:53Mark Manson?

  And it's inevitable that you're just going to have a lot of disclosure as you're growing up with people. So it is. I do think it kind of messes with us that we do take friendships for granted when we're young and we spend all of our time focusing on learning how to date and find a partner. And then when you get older, it turns out that you actually you have to put just as much work into your friendships as you do your romantic relationships.

• 4:24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:24:17Mark Manson?

  I want to return to the the disruptors that I talked about in the philosophical section. And I would even add a third to that list that we talked about as well, you know. So the first one is transactional relationships. Transactional relationships are fine as long as it's you're aware of what you're doing and you're not too attached to the outcome.

• 4:24:36Speaker 01

  Both sides are aware. Yeah.

• 4:24:37Mark Manson?

  Both sides are aware and neither side is too emotionally invested in the outcome. Transactional relationships can work, but generally speaking, like you can't really have a long term, healthy friendship with somebody where there's any sort of transactional thing going on.

• 4:24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:24:50Mark Manson?

  Second one is inequality in the relationship, right? A power dynamic, a status dynamic, somebody who has authority over the other person. Like, it's just I'm not going to say it's impossible, but like it just adds a lot of complication. And then the third one I'm going to say is a lack of stakes. This comes back to what David Brooks talked about, which is, you know, we We tend to bond with people that that there's some sort of there's certain amount of friction or overcoming of of something to to be with. And the only way that a friendship is going to like really feel valuable is that is that there's something to lose and that that there's there's like it's there's meaning behind it. There's something that

• 4:25:33Mark Manson?

  matters to it, you know. And so it's I think that's why when it comes to the interest thing like, don't just pick a thing that you're like, oh, well, you know, I I played golf once, maybe I'll play golf again, like, really find something you care about and that matters to you and has some meaning and significance behind it. Because then when you find other people who also it carries meaning and significance for, it does add some stakes to the friendship. Making friends is inevitably like there are periods of awkwardness and it does get dull at times and people do say things that annoy you and people show up late and cancel plans and you can't find parking and like all this shit happens, right?

• 4:26:16Mark Manson?

  So there's always going to be friction. And the only way you're going to really tolerate that friction is if you feel like you feel like there it matters.

• 4:26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're invested.

• 4:26:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, to some degree, for sure.

• 4:26:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:26:29Speaker 01

  And becoming more invested. So we'll get to the disclosure part, I think, the last part of that triangle that we've talked about. I think it's being being the one to initiate that and showing a little vulnerability there is important, like we talked about in tit for tat. What's the first line of code in tit for tat? It's cooperate.

• 4:26:44Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:26:45Speaker 01

  If there's ever any question around like, oh, is this person and are we going to get along or something? I'll usually be the one to be like, hey, we should

• 4:26:50Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:26:50Speaker 01

  grab a drink. Hey, come over and do this. Lead with that, I would say. And then just like in the tit for tat, too, you you you there's some forgiveness, like I was talking about the the most successful one is a generous tit for tat. There's a little forgiveness in there, too.

• 4:27:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:27:04Speaker 01

  Forget forgive them when they they might mess up or they might say something stupid or annoying, like you said.

• 4:27:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:27:10Speaker 01

  That goes a long way. And and as a part of this, too. I can't emphasize this enough again. Drop the scorecard.

• 4:27:18Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:27:18Speaker 01

  Just drop it. I don't care what your friend didn't do for you and you did for them. That is just, that, that is no basis for a friendship at all. You're never going to, you're never gonna get back what you put into it. Like, you're gonna die. You're gonna die someday, right? You're gonna just be dead as shit. You're not taking anything with you. So stop like accounting for all of it, right? Like, it's just, like, relationships are way, way more important than that.

• 4:27:42Mark Manson?

  And I would count a lot of, you know, we talked a little bit about the political bullshit that's going on. Like, I do see a lot of that as an extension of the scorecard. It's like, oh, you're this type of person. So you owe society this for this and you're this privileged because you're this type of whatever orientation and color and ethnicity and whatnot, like.

• 4:28:01Speaker 01

  Or your side did this and so we did this, yeah, but your side did that.

• 4:28:05Mark Manson?

  Like, talk about, like, how to ruin a social life and as quickly as possible is to start seeing groups in terms of what they owe you and other people. Like, it just is completely antithetical. I mean, I, so I would expand that to just broader, like, drop the assumptions about people. Drop the assumption that you know what type of person this is, that you know where they come from. You know, oh, like, yeah, that's not the type of person that I usually like. And I don't like how she acts this way. And those sorts of people are cheesy or weird or whatever. You know, let the judgments go.

• 4:28:41Speaker 01

  Very, very last thing that I'm gonna say anyway. And I guess I already said it, but say it again, the patience part.

• 4:28:48Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:28:48Speaker 01

  Fifty hours to make like the acquaintance, ninety to make a friend, two hundred to make a close friend. That's a lot of time. And, and that's, there's a lot of time for error in that, too. And a lot of time for you to grow apart a little bit and come back together. You have to be very, very patient. Friendships take a lot of time.

• 4:29:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:29:05Speaker 01

  They do.

• 4:29:06Mark Manson?

  They do.

• 4:29:09Mark Manson?

  All right, trade offs. I think this one's gonna be interesting because I feel like this is an area of your life that you're very strong in and this is an area of my life I feel like I'm weak in. And so I think it'll be interesting to hear what sort of trade offs each of us have made to put ourselves in this situation. Do you want to go first or should I go first?

• 4:29:30Speaker 01

  You go, you go first.

• 4:29:31Mark Manson?

  Mine's easy. I like, my social life has definitely suffered because I am so focused on work and I'm always busy and I have tons, I'm very, I have lots of goals and I'm very ambitious, which I love about myself, but I do see like the, there's a bit of a thin social life as a side effect of that, for sure.

• 4:29:54Speaker 01

  The first thing I would have said was time. So, and that's what you're talking about is that I, I put a lot of time into friendships. Now, I think, like, I haven't put that time into my, like, romantic, romantic relationships as much in the recent years, at least anyway. And so I've kind of been able to compensate with that, like I said, but it does take a lot of time. There is, you know, one time when we were doing the old podcast, we kind of talked about friendship. I went back, like, I, there was a time where I was staying out here in LA and I went back home, I flew back home over the weekend.

• 4:30:24Mark Manson?

  You flew back for a dinner?

• 4:30:25Speaker 01

  For a dinner, for a dinner, with friends. It was an anniversary dinner.

• 4:30:29Mark Manson?

  The team thought you were crazy, by the way.

• 4:30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:30:32Mark Manson?

  Which you, maybe you are, but you're definitely a good friend. If you're crazy, you're definitely a good friend.

• 4:30:37Speaker 01

  Those are two of my good friends. Those same friends, though, we have dinner like once a week, probably. Something like that. I'll go to their house and have dinner once a week. And it's usually, there's nothing exciting happens to it. We have some dinner. We talk about mundane things, but it takes the time away from other things that I do. And then I, yeah, we go on trips. We do all that. The time thing is, is, is for real.

• 4:30:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:30:59Speaker 01

  And, yeah, you gotta give up some TV time or some scrolling time or work time to advancing your career. Yeah, yeah. It's a major, major issue.

• 4:31:11Mark Manson?

  I would say marriage and kids is a trade off. Not to say that you can't have friends if you're married and have kids, but it changes the equation. It changes your social life equation quite a bit. It's your partner becomes a huge factor in your social life. And then if you have kids, the kids become a huge factor in your social life as well. So I would, I would throw that in there as, as a trade off.

• 4:31:34Speaker 01

  All of my friends who have kids have, have definitely said that to me. They're like, we've had friendships that have just gone away since we've had kids. Like I'm still around and our other friends that we still hang out with, Sher, but they're like, there's some people who just aren't around anymore.

• 4:31:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:31:46Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 4:31:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah, absolutely. We're at the end, end of the episode. What was your biggest takeaway from prepping and recording this?

• 4:31:54Speaker 01

  I guess maybe kind of two, I guess. One of them, we just kind of talked about, which was I now feel more of a personal responsibility, actually, to kind of be the initiator. And like I'm, I'm, we were talking about this off camera a little bit. I, I'm just somebody who kind of makes friends where I go. And I'm very fortunate that I've kind of always been that way. Been able to kind of fit in with different groups and empathize with different people pretty easily, I feel like, anyway. What this taught me, because I knew there's a loneliness crisis going on. I knew, you know, but I kind of have the same as you. It's always easy. It's these three things and this is all you gotta do. It's actually much, much harder than that. And I feel more of a responsibility to the people in my community to be like, kind of one of those hubs, right?

• 4:32:40Speaker 01

  To, to bring people together. I, I do think, you know, and I have spare time. I have all these privileges that I can use to help other people out. And I feel more of a responsibility for that now, for sure.

• 4:32:51Mark Manson?

  I definitely think, we talked at lunch about how it was funny, like both prepping for this episode and recording this episode, like listening to you talk about how to make friends. It reminds me of like the, like the hot girl talking about how to date a guy. Like, it's like, well, clearly this has never been a problem for you. It gets like, I could just tell, like, you didn't have the context of, of knowing what it was like to not have friends or not.

• 4:33:16Speaker 01

  I was so excited to do this episode and I'm like, oh shit. Like, I don't really know necessarily what to say.

• 4:33:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So it's been interesting watching you. I think this is an area that you have like a natural talent or a natural gift. You know, you've been blessed in some way. And so, so that's been interesting to see. I, I have not, I mean, I, I wouldn't say I've struggled to make friends throughout my life, but like I've I was never amazing at it. Like it was never, it never came supernaturally to me. I definitely had to put some effort into it and definitely had my fair share of toxic friendships over the years. I would say the biggest thing that I took away from this is the patience piece. And again, it wasn't that I didn't know that. It's just like prepping for this episode really drove that home of like, especially like the 50 hour, 90 hour, 200 hour.

• 4:34:03Mark Manson?

  I was like, I was kinda, when I saw that, I was like, okay, how many of my friends in LA have I spent 50 hours with? And I was like, I don't even make maybe two, one. Yeah. I've been here three and a half years, you know? So that was just a little bit eye opening. And then I would, I would say to the, the, um, you know, just the, the trade off, the opportunity cost, like the, the instant gratification piece. Like it's definitely for me, uh, you know, I will work like a 12 hour day. I'll come home, I'll get a text message inviting me to something and my first reaction is like, dude, I don't want to get off this couch. And it's really, it's, it's, I've had to consciously put effort into saying yes to

• 4:34:47Mark Manson?

  those things and making space for those things. And it's something like you have to figure out something that works for you. If it doesn't come naturally, then you need to create some sort of method. I remember talking to a, a friend who said that he would like set up recurring calendar reminders to reach out to certain people. And he was like, yeah, half the time it's like, I just saw the person, so I just delete the reminder or whatever. But he's like, sometimes I go, you know, if I go a month without reaching out to somebody or touching base with them, that reminder is a lifesaver because it like keeps me connected. So I, I do feel like as much as I shit on productivity hackers and, um, like optimizers,

• 4:35:30Mark Manson?

  this is an area of my life that left to my own devices and with like armed with the full knowledge and understanding of what my choices are, are creating for myself. It is, I've not been able to crack it. So maybe the next step is to.

• 4:35:45Mark Manson?

  Create that Notion dashboard.

• 4:35:47Speaker 01

  There's gonna be a certain person who says, "Oh, my God, you have to do that." Like, "You shouldn't have to do that." But I think there's a certain type of person, especially if you're a systematizer, like I was saying.

• 4:35:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And if your time is scarce as fuck, like, that's the other thing. It's like, one thing I say to my wife all the time, I'm like, "If it's on my calendar, it'll get done." If it's not on my calendar, it's never gonna get done, because there's so little space between, you know, work and very important video games.

• 4:36:12Mark Manson?

  All right, well, we made it to the end.

• 4:36:14Speaker 01

  We did it.

• 4:36:14Mark Manson?

  Please subscribe, leave a review if you have not. It's the best way for the word to get out about this show. Leave a comment if you enjoyed the episode, and Drew and I will see you next time.

• 4:36:27Speaker 01

  Bye, guys.