#799 - David Robson - The Science Of Building Genuine Friendships

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is David Robson, he's a science writer, journalist and an author. Loneliness is the real pandemic. Many people are yearning for connection, but struggle to hold on to it. David has uncovered 13 laws of human connection which you can apply

to build and deepen relationships with the people in your life. Expect to learn whether we are actually in a loneliness crisis, how solitude impact our health, why people are struggling to make deeper connections, how you can express appreciation more freely to others, how you can heal bad feelings, why asking for help is actually important, why it's so crucial to get better at forgiving others. And much more. David wrote the expectation effect, he came on the show maybe three years

ago, two years ago and that book was so fantastic, awesome insights and today is the same. It must drop 20 studies, 20 different stories about some labs somewhere that found something out and it's been replicated so much fun. Lots and lots to apply to your life, great for interpersonal stuff, building new relationships and deepening connections, he's awesome, I really, really hope that you

enjoy this one. Don't forget that the next few weeks have some huge guests coming on in the only way that you can ensure you will not miss those is by pressing subscribe so please navigate to Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you are listening and press the follow button or the

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first subscription at drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David Robson. Are we in a loneliness crisis? What does the data say? Yeah, I mean, you see this like everywhere, like I think every week, there's a new like newspaper article saying that we're in this kind of loneliness epidemic and like there's no doubt that like the surveys showed that lots of people feel lonely, like as many as 50% of people

feel pretty lonely, like, you know, regular points in their lives. So yeah, it is a kind of crisis, but whether this is like a new phenomenon, that is really up for debate because if you look back at the historic data, which is imperfect, but you can go back like 60, 70 years and people were

reporting high levels of loneliness back then too. So even though I'm sure that like some elements of our society today are kind of driving people apart, you know, like people don't live in their families so much often we're kind of based in, you know, different continents even, people are living alone a lot more. Like I'm sure all of that is super relevant, but I don't think

it's the only reason that people are feeling lonely. And I think like the research really shows that there must be some kind of psychological barriers, you know, like the problem lies within us as much as in our environment. And that's why people have felt lonely for decades centuries, potentially. Oh, that's interesting. So there's a like an ambient level of human loneliness that's just endemic to being us. And then we have this sort of new world of technology and atomization

and isolation and digital communication and stuff. And maybe a lot of people are laying what is a much more sort of ancestral archaic problem at the feet of the new technology. Is that kind of how you frame it? Yeah, exactly. You know, like every time a new technology comes along, like we blame it for everything. I was saying, I like back in like Jane Austen's time, like people were saying

that reading novels, like driving the youth into madness. You know, so I think like technology, you know, like our cell phones, it just tools, they can be used to enhance connection or they can be used to kind of just engage in social comparison and make us feel really shit about ourselves compared to other people. But the tool itself isn't the problem. It's the way we're using it. So that's work. I'm coming from really is all about kind of mindfully knowing like how we handle

our relationships. This important. Yeah, I think to me, I would say there is a step change in the power that these devices have over us compared with previous ones. You know, yes, maybe the wireless in 1912 or something was these kids that are just going to be listening to the news all day or whatever. And then the television as well was a huge concern, especially when it was in more households.

This is going to turn everybody into sort of adults, totally useless citizens. I do think that there's a step change. I do think that social media and smartphones are a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree of what we're talking about here. But at the same time, how easy and convenient it is to now have a legitimate excuse, a genuine enemy that you can say this. This is why I don't connect with people the way that I want to. This is why I don't have any

social depth with the people that are around me. This is why I don't seem to be able to find a deeper meaning in my relationships. It's the buggy, it's like the smartphone of the gaps for all of your social else. Yeah, it totally is. I mean, like you can blame it on the technology and you can just kind of take this attitude that is your kind of helpless to solve your loneliness or you can

look at the kind of psychological literature. And actually, like what's come out in the last like five or ten years, it's that actually there are lots of things that we can do to enhance the relationships that we do have or to build new relationships, which is often a lot easier than we expect. I mean, that's something that comes out in the literature all the time that we're probably much better at being social and kind of having these authentic deep relationships than we believe we

we we are. We just have to know how to do it correctly. Just to set the scene, how important is social connection? I mean, it's so important. So I think like we all know, you know, it's nice to kind of have a group of friends so you can rely on and have like meaningful relationships of

your family, like to live with a spouse or a boyfriend or girlfriend. You know, like we know, I think everyone knows that that's super important for kind of mental health and happiness, but what has become so apparent is that social connection is fundamental for your health. I mean, accumulating evidence from 50 years shows that it's actually one of the big

predictors of mortality. So you have things like smoking, drinking, your BMI, whether you do exercise, you know, whether you're kind of taking care of things like your blood pressure, but social connection is right up there with all of these. It's as important, if not more important, than all of these other core lifestyle factors. So you really can't actually overestimate how important social connection is. It's just fundamental to living a good and healthy life.

Yeah, I was looking at some of the different correlations that you'd found. Immunity, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, neurodegeneration, so like friendships of the panacea, that the ultimate cure to whatever it is that ails you. Right. Yeah, exactly. I see it as being like exercise. You know, like exercise basically reduces your risk of like all illness. Social connection is pretty much the same. And there are really strong

evolutionary arguments for why that is. And essentially, when we were kind of, you know, in prehistory, it was like, we were living in nature. There was really dangerous with the threat of predators or other groups who might have attacked our group. Like you really had to have a solid alliances with the people around you. So if you were excluded or if your ties were quite weak, you were in danger. So the body, first of all, it evolved this kind of strong signal

to kind of warn you that something was up and that you had to remedy that. So in the same way that you feel physical pain to kind of warn you that you've got a wound that needs to be attended, you would feel social pain to warn you that your relationships really aren't as secure as they need to be to keep you physically safe. So that's why loneliness is so painful emotionally. And then we also, that is accompanied by a physiological reaction as well. So you see an increase

in inflammation because if you're isolated, you're at more risk of injury. So you have this kind of low level inflammation that's going to protect you from infection if you do get injured. You have like a higher, higher levels of blood clotting factors, which would stop you losing blood if you're attacked. Information and blood clotting might be good in the short term if you do have a wound, but actually in the long term, they're going to increase your risk of things like Alzheimer's or

a stroke or a heart attack. And actually those stroke and heart attack are the two things that are most strongly linked to loneliness. And you can really see the mechanism as so, so totally bound into our kind of evolutionary history. So everyone that's listening has been red-pilled about a lot of evolutionary psychology. They understand that a human on its own 50,000 years ago is a human that doesn't survive for very long. So I think everyone can understand the ultimate reason for why

loneliness would hurt, right, from the ultimate proximate paradigm. The mechanism is something that I didn't know about. And that is so cool. What are some of the other mechanisms, because this is, you know, a big question that I had. Why do friends make such a difference? Like, what are bodies got some weird Facebook friend-tick counter thing in the back of its mind? What's it doing to detect this? What's being mediated by the people that are around us? That mechanism

thing to me is really important. Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating and it's still being kind of researched and kind of developed this very. But you know, you can see in other social animals, like even rodents, you know, kind of do depend on living in groups. That they have these kind of loneliness neurons that are a little, a little like the areas of the brain that deal with hunger. So it's like it, you feel, say, shaded after you've eaten, say your hunger kind of decreases,

and then it increases when you're going to run out of energy. Well, it seemed to be the same with the loneliness neurons that is like when you've been apart from people for a while, or if you feel, you know, isolated from those who are around you, but you just don't feel close to them. It seems those loneliness neurons become more active, like they're kind of telling you they're giving you

this warning, like you need to tend your relationships. And then when you've spent time with your friends or your family, it kind of the loneliness neurons like stop firing so much until you, you know, until you're kind of in that danger zone again. So yeah, we are keeping track of our social connection very tightly. Automatically, it's kind of a low level desire, just like hunger, for all of the other things that we need to survive. Lots of people will say, I don't need anybody,

I'm alone Ranger. Maybe I've been in friendships before and I've been betrayed. Maybe I've tried to make friends and I've really struggled. I don't even care about the world. I've absconded. I've gone full Ted Kaczynski mode. I'm out in the equivalent of the digital woods, you know, in my apartment or whatever, how much are these effects of loneliness outside of our conscious awareness that we feel lonely? Do you know what I mean? There's some people who will not be around many people

and go, God, I just really do feel lonely. The solitude is hurting me. And then there's other people who either genuinely or sort of deceptively don't have that sensation. Is it your belief that pretty much everybody's brain is still playing the ticker sort of loneliness neuron thing is firing regardless of whether you think fuck the world or actually I really want a lot of friends. Yeah, I do think it's

like that. I mean, I think like, you know, pretty much everyone is going to need, need some kind of level of social contact. I think it differs depending on whether you're like introverted or extraverted for what that kind of social connection will look like. So, you know, some people I think are very happy with having like a hundred kind of weak ties that they see like semi-regulally. But they maybe don't have such a close bond with each one of those. For others, it might be

important just to have like their spouse or one close friend who they really rely on. But I think fundamentally some kind of social connection is this kind of basic human urge. I do kind of see looking at the literature and kind of reading between the lines that there might be some people who like you say they're kind of neglecting this basic need in the same way that someone with a

needing disorder might kind of start to neglect their need to eat. So you can isolate yourself and it's almost like you you just stop listening to the kind of brain on the body of signals of what you desire. But then your mental health is going to suffer in other ways. You just might you might not be linking it to that cause. But I think there's no way that you're not going to suffer some consequences from that. Yeah, I was trying to sort of correlate it to your last book, The Expectation

Effect, which everybody needs to go and read by the way, fantastic. I was wondering whether the story that you tell yourself about your degree of loneliness mediates this sort of loneliness neuron activation and the platelets being closer to coagulate all that stuff. I think it probably does a little bit like because say like we know that your kind of attitudes to stress in general

can have an influence on how you kind of physiologically respond to that stress. So if you see stress as being this kind of thing that makes you stronger and is important for growth, you have a better physiological response than if you see stress as being super dangerous and like I'm bad for your health and a sinophilia. So I do think like when we experience these kind of

transient periods of loneliness, I think how a mindset is going to have a role there. Like you could see, I think no matter how strong your social network, like sometimes you can still feel a bit rejected by people, but your friends aren't always going to act in the way that you want and you can kind of catastrophise that and you can start to tell yourself that like blame it on yourself and

see yourself as being totally unlikeable and you know something inherent within you. That's not going to be as healthy as if you just kind of take them off, philosophical, like stoical approach to that. And I accept that sometimes loneliness is a part of the human condition and you can recognise the loneliness as this kind of core signal, a bit like physical pain,

there's telling you that maybe you have to nurture your relationships in other ways. So if you've been let down by one friend, well maybe it's time to reach out to another to kind of get that connection that you're missing. What was the relationship between creativity and finances

with loneliness? Yeah, I mean, so this is a whole other mechanism by which social connection might be related to our health because it actually, when we're socially connected, we become more creative because if you're surrounded by loads of different people of different backgrounds who have different viewpoints, you have this kind of cross-pollination process where like their ideas feed into your ideas and vice versa and then that plays out in how innovative

you are as an individual and as a group. So you can see that in data from like the creators of Broadway musicals, for example, you sometimes had groups of like the choreographers, composers, lyricists who only worked together in very small isolated groups. They tended to be less successful, like as seen by like the critical success, how long the plays run, how much money

they took in. They were less successful compared to some of these groups who would like, they were a bit promiscuous in who they would work with, so they would be work with like one group for one production and then go on to another. But they were just carrying so many different ideas from all of the people they'd worked with. They had this kind of broader professional network and then that seemed to help them to break the kind of norms of the genre so that they became

more creative and what they were producing. And something like West Side Story seemed to come out of that kind of very collaborative process where you actually had people who had already worked with a whole bunch of other professionals before they joined that particular group. And then, you know, if you have, if you're more creative, you have more financial security often because you're doing better at your job. If you're well connected, you know, you just see more opportunities

for business. So that gives you better financial security if you're made redundant. You know, like something like in the UK, like 50% of people found their job through like an acquaintance. So it's easier to then kind of get back into employment. So that, you know, all of that is good in itself, but it's also just relieving you of like some of the biggest stresses that you're going to have to face in your life. So independent, independent of the kind of loneliness response.

So what that's doing to your levels of inflammation and the clotting agents, you're also just better, better equipped to deal with all of the challenges that you're you're going to have to face. And that's a cycle of feedback loop as well, presumably, that poverty, for instance, is a reliable inducer of stress into a human's life. If you drop into poverty, there's this great study that I learned about to do with epigenetics for mothers. And they did this study. Robert

Sapolsky talks about it to this study where women who entered poverty during pregnancy. And you can see this like epigenetic cascade into the child into the fetus. And if that child is a female, that child has every egg that they are ever going to make a baby from while they're inside of what will be grandmother, who has just gone into poverty. So you end up with three generations of this epigenetic. It's so interesting. So yeah, this sort of interest, it's like, um,

it's kind of like stabilizers in a way. It's just sort of robust, increasing robustness. Yeah, that's exactly how I see it. It's just that you, you know, like if you fall ill and you've got someone to take you to the hospital, um, like that is something that could potentially

increase your lifespan as well. Um, we know, you know, when people are socially connected, they're also just more likely to kind of take care of their health because they get that kind of feedback from other people who might be saying like, fucking out David, you've going to be a bit of weight or whatever it might be. Exactly. Yeah. No, totally is like that. Or like, you know, if you've got like a cough or whatever, they won't go away. Like you really do need to

get that scene right. Yeah, the denial of your own medical issues is harder if there's someone watching you. Yeah, that's exactly it. Um, so, you know, it's just so fundamental, but like you said, it's like we have, when you're connected, you have these kinds of, um, like stabilizers that mean even if you hit a kind of rocky road, like you're just better able to write yourself more quickly. Is it the number of friends? What is some connections more important or higher value than others?

How should we think about connect our connection balance sheet or the profit in loss account? Yeah. I mean, so it's going to vary from person to person in kind of what connections you really value. Like I know some people who, um, you know, just love like having a huge social network of people that they are so close to others are happier with just having like a very small but tight network group. Um, but even within those connections, like you can kind of differentiate.

So you have the people who are purely supportive. So, you know, they're always there for you when you need them. Um, and they're like an un, an allied good like they're just going to, you know, like you want as many people as you kind of those. Then you have the purely aversive people who are

kind of, you know, like consistently nasty. Um, like, you know, we would tend to like, I've been saying I've been saying friends, but you're talking social connections and social connections can be both good and bad. Right. Yeah. Well, they can. That's it. So I mean, like, um, you know, those people, I guess we would try to like shift out of our social network. But then there's these people who are kind of in the middle,

um, the kind of ambivalent relationships or frenemies. And what is weird about those is we might keep them in our relationship for our, in our kind of relationship network for our whole lives. But they're pretty bad for our health actually if you have too many frenemies. Um, so these are kind of, you know, Jekyll and Hyde figures who like might seem like your best friend one day. Then they're in a bad mood and they're like, lash out at you the next. But the good kind of my

outweigh the bad. So you, you don't want to just like fall out with them and like exclude them from your social network completely. Um, but what the research shows is that they can actually be more stressful for you than the purely aversive like consistently nasty people like, you know, if your boss is just always like difficult with you, you kind of can discount what they say. If sometimes they're praising you and then another time they're just unreliably really critical. That's like,

that raises your blood pressure a lot more basically. So even just knowing that you have like a an ambivalent connection in the next room is you and that you're going to have to interact with them. That is enough to raise your blood pressure. So is it the uncertainty? Is that what's causing it to happen? Yeah, it's the answer is totally the uncertainty. And it's because

then nice enough to us that we actually really care what they say. We're not like, um, we are not going to ignore them in the same way that we might ignore like your like horrible uncle who's just going to be critical like whatever you do. How can people recognize or learn to

recognize frenemies better? Hmm, I mean, so I think like there are, I think it like actually the question is pretty easy actually to kind of, so I put them in my book and it's basically like when you need help, is this person on a scale of one to seven helpful, like not helpful at all, very helpful and not hurtful at all or very hurtful. But essentially, if someone scores more than

two on both of those scales, they are a frenemy. And then the research shows that they're actually like pretty bad for your health if they, if you have too many of those frenemies within your group. Um, yeah, so I think like we can, I think we all know people like that. And I'm not saying that we should just like detoxify, but I think like we can be mindful of the way that we interact with them. So like if you're already feeling stressed, like just avoid an ambivalent connection, like don't

go to them for help. Um, if you have to see them like try to do something like to kind of chill out afterwards, like try to exercise some self compassion, like maybe just even like just remind yourself of the fact that like, you know, if they're nature, that they are this ambivalent connection and that you don't have to take what they say so personally, because that's, you know, that's on them. That's not on you. I think all of these things can help to mitigate their effects.

So it's kind of like a, a lowering of expectations in some ways that your, the unpredictability comes about because some days they convince you that they're potentially a good friend. But then many days they come and they're a dick or they're a loof for they're not responsive or they're mean or they're not helpful or whatever it might be. So just bringing down the expectation of the good, like and this is the reason why your boss that's just 24, 7, a cantankerous person

is, well, you know, it's Jim. Jim, he's just right. He just, that's the way he goes. But the guy that flip flops between, you know, Jim and John is the more difficult one. So by just, okay, everybody's Jim. Now everyone that's ambivalent is Jim and I lower my expectations and therefore

I don't, I don't get surprised when that happens. Yeah, I mean, that's how I see it. That's kind of how I deal with my own kind of ambivalent connections is just to be, to recognize that like I don't have to like, they can react however they're going to, but I don't have to actually engage with that in the same way that I did before. Like I can choose to kind of discount their kind of unpleasant side because it's, you know, that's their problem with the way that they're conducting their

relationships is not a reflection on me. What do you mean when you talk about the personality myth? Yeah, so this is the idea that I think a lot of us have that, you're like, you kind of think either you're like a super social person or you're not and there's not much that you can do about that. So you might just think it's like my shyness, my introversion that just stops me from talking to strangers or enjoying parties or making new friends, you know, when I move

house to like a different city. And the research shows that that's actually not true and so a common idea is that introverts just aren't going to enjoy being gregarious but actually when you give introverts challenges to kind of go out and chat someone in the park every week who every day, you know, who has a cool dog or cool hair or, you know, just make conversation with the

barista in your coffee shop. So things that they would normally find a little bit uncomfortable, like to start with, they have this strong prediction that they're really going to hate those interactions. Like everyone, including extraverts tend to be a bit pessimistic about how much they're going to enjoy talking to a stranger like we kind of assume it's going to be more awkward than it really is. But introverts kind of think that because of their personality like that's

going to be especially true for them. And then you look at how they feel afterwards and they enjoy it just as much as the extraverts. They actually really benefit from the social connection and exactly the same way. How much truth is there in the introversion extraversion, introvert, extrovert dichotomy? I'm sure that you dug into this and looked at the data and sort of debunked the brochines. Yeah, I mean, so I do think like people do kind of fall along that spectrum. I guess most people

are ambivots. We're a little bit extravert, a little bit introvert, you know, like we, I think most people enjoy socializing and recognize that fact. And then but also enjoy a bit of solitude as well. I like once those loneliness neurons have stopped firing and you've got your fill, you can go away like we just don't have the same appetite as someone who is like a pure extravert.

So I do think there are individual differences along that dimension. But what the research shows is that like no matter where you lie on that dimension, you do benefit from just becoming a bit more social than you currently are or most people do. So even extroverts can benefit from being a bit more social, but especially introverts can. And our personalities like they're not necessarily hardwired in our genes. We do have genes that influence whether we're introvert or extrovert,

but it's not like they seal our fate. Like people can move along that spectrum just by kind of practicing being more gregarious, being more kind of dominant in certain situations. Like, you know, we're not, it's not like our genes kind of determine our personalities like 100%. What would you say to the person who feels that the prototypical avatar for the eye struggle to make new friends? I find it hard to be gregarious. I'm not the loudest person

in the room. Or maybe I've just got a little bit of anxiety. I'm in my own head. I'm very thoughtful. What do you say to them to help them get out of their own skin a bit? Right. So I totally think it depends like how they feel about that, like how they kind of evaluate the effect that's having on their life. Like I think, you know, like I was saying earlier,

some people probably do just have less appetite for social connection. And if you're actually pretty happy with the way you are and you don't feel frustrated, then there's no need to change your behaviour. But I think lots of people do feel frustrated and would benefit from more acting more socially. And they believe that they can't because of their personality. And so I would say to those people, actually, that is where the personality myth is really a barrier and that you need to overcome

that by just kind of slowly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. And, you know, like I think the best way to do this, it's kind of proven in psychology is to set these implementation intentions. So it's all very well to be like, I'm going to be more sociable today. Like that's a really vague goal. It's not going to help you achieve that goal very much. So it's much better for

you to kind of identify like when and how you're going to go about that. So it could just be that you're telling yourself like when I'm at the supermarket and I see someone struggling to carry their groceries, I'll just offer to give them a hand. Or, you know, I'll just instead of just asking like straight for my coffee, like I will just try to ask the barista like how they are,

you know, how their days going like just make some kind of small talk. And what the research shows is that when you do that repeatedly, even over quite a short time span of say five days, even by the end of that five days, people are already changing the way they perceive those interactions. So they no longer expect those interactions to feel awkward. And they expect to enjoy them. And then they do enjoy them. So, you know, I think it's just something that we do

have to practice kind of day after day and recognize that, you know, it's a learnable skill. It's like learning a musical instrument like you have the potential to be sociable. You just have to put in a bit of work to practice those skills. Wow. Five days to make to start to reframe that. I suppose so much of what people are worried about is some odd catastrophic outcome. I'm going to ask the barista at Starbucks how their days going and then the police are going to come in or

they're going to laugh at me or it's going to be weird or whatever it might be. So it's almost like I guess exposure training. Yeah, it totally is. It's like overcoming any kind of phobia. So, I mean, you can't ever guarantee that there's never going to be someone who is unfriendly. But like what I love about these experiments where they've got like, you know, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people to enact these behaviors is that it is so rare for people to have a really

bad experience. Like in the first couple of studies, like just no one reported having hostility kind of frame back at them when they tried to talk to strangers on like the Chicago buses and trains or on the London underground. Like people, even like the London underground has like a really bad reputation for people being really unfriendly and isolated and not wanting to make conversation. But like people responded much better than anyone had expected. And I think like each person maybe

on the train is kind of sitting there, you know, some are happy in their own thoughts. Others are kind of feeling a bit lonely and they're just waiting for someone to kind of strike up the conversation, but they're not brave enough to do it. So a lot of people are actually super grateful when you're the one who kind of takes the first step and kind of, you know, open job after speak. Why is overcoming egocentric thinking so important?

Yeah, I mean, so this is one of the kind of barriers where like we, I guess the work on like the personality myth kind of shows that like we're all better at making connections than we think we are. But that doesn't mean that there's not room for improvement. And so egocentric thinking is one of the ways that sometimes we do needlessly create kind of misunderstanding between people.

So essentially all neurotypical people have the capacity to, they have a theory of mind, which means that you can kind of put yourself in another person's shoes and take their perspective and recognize, you know, like that they might have different opinions or knowledge from what you yourself have. Now the problem is that even though we have that capability, it's quite hard cognitively to do. So far more often than I think scientists had expected, people don't apply

their theory of mind. They act super egocentricly and just assume that like the other person that they're talking to can see what they can see knows what they know, thinks what they think has the same beliefs can understand their intentions even when they're super ambiguous and what they're saying.

And you know, I think we're quite robust in our interactions. So there's a lot of correction that goes on in any conversation when you're kind of, you know, there's a bit of misunderstanding and then like it soon comes out with like by asking the right questions or just by kind of elaborating

that allows the two people to kind of fully get on board with what they're saying. But just by being conscious of this fact that you might be thinking egocentricly and just kind of checking like does the other person actually understand what I'm saying like are they familiar with the terms I'm using. Do they have a completely different political opinion that I just haven't given

them a chance to express? You know, just doing those kind of little like safety checks in your conversation can just like smooth over the conversation so you're not making those kind of fundamental errors. Yeah, what else did you learn about the art of conversation? Presumably a lot of what we're talking about with regards to human connection is going to be mediated through it. So it's a pretty

key skill to develop. Right. Yeah, it is. So I mean, asking questions is fundamental. Something that is kind of well known is that you should ask more questions when you kind of meet someone for the first time. Like don't talk about yourself. But I think what we often misunderstand is the importance of the follow up questions. So you can go into a conversation and you could just be like asking,

it could be like an interview almost you like, what'd you do? Where'd you come from? Do you have a wife? Like, you know, like what's your favourite sport? Like fine, like you're showing an interest in the other person, but it does feel a bit formulae. Whereas if they tell you something like a bit quirky and then you like drill down on that and you just follow up by asking like what they meant or like

why that thing is so important to them. Like, you know, what joy or pleasure they get out of this activity that they've just described. Like those are the ones that really matter. And so you look at like people and speed dates. And like the amount of follow up questions that people ask like really predicted whether they would actually be selected for a second date. I mean, like if you asked enough follow up questions, it doubled your chances of getting a date basically. So it's

well worth bearing that in mind. The other thing that we should really bear in mind is like it's good to ask questions, but we also need to be quite generous with what we're telling the other person to. So self-disclosure like revealing your own kind of deeper thoughts and feelings is super important as well. And we have this kind of bias in our conversation where we we think it's always safer to just talk about like, you know, the superficial stuff, you know, like those kinds of

questions I was talking about earlier, like what profession do you do? Where did you grow up? What did you do at Halloween? You know, that kind of stuff. But actually when scientists have forced people into these conversations where they like, too strangers have to ask like super probing things like, do you have an intuition about how you're going to die? Or like what is your what is the most embarrassing thing that you've done in your life? Or what's your biggest mistake?

And why would you wish that you could correct it? You know, not the usual kind of stuff that we would talk about like within 20 minutes of meeting someone. But that is called the fast friendships procedure. And like, I mean, the name says it all, but I mean, it really puts people on this fast track to intimacy. Like within about 45 minutes, those people feel closer to each other than they do to some of their oldest friends, which is kind of amazing.

Just take us through high level what the fast friends procedure consists of. Yeah, so I mean, it's kind of asking those probing questions. But I mean, basically the it was developed by offer Aaron at a psychologist in New York. And essentially, he just got these participants to kind of total strangers to sit down with 36 of these questions that got

progressively more kind of intimate. Like there's nothing kind of dodgy or sexual there. But I mean, it's just you know, asking people like to kind of to look inside themselves and reveal something that they might have felt to embarrassed or vulnerable to talk about. So fears, dreams, you know, another one that I love is like, if you had a crystal ball and it could tell you anything about your life or your future, what would you want it to tell you and why?

So it's kind of getting people to really tell something that might have been secret beforehand. Or you know, something that they're scared about potentially, you know, it just kind of it's a kind of ambiguous prompt in that it's not forcing someone to go in any particular direction. But what you

choose is super revealing about what's going on in your kind of inner life. And yeah, so then he kind of tested like how people had close these participants felt at the end of this 45 minute conversation and compared that to people who just went through kind of normal small talk on, you know, like what's your favorite film or you know, could be I mean what talking about your favorite film could be super revealing. But most people just aren't going to go into enough detail or depth to really make

it sufficiently profound to kind of build that connection. You know, so the people who who went through the fast friendship procedure, yeah, they at the end, like he tried to get them to estimate how close they were to each other with this psychological test of like the relationship strength. And then he compared that to how people normally feel about like their old friends from their childhood or from university. And he found that already the kind of

average friendship between these two strangers was roughly at the same level. How funny. It's you know, when you see those Netflix documentaries and it's some person that was part of a famous historic event, they caught a ball at a sports game or their daughter went missing on holiday

or they did whatever. And they're always in some dusty warehouse somewhere. And I always thought when these people were being interviewed, I was just presumed that they told this story a million times that so many people were interested in their story and that had asked them these questions. But then you see on these Netflix documentaries, people get very emotional and tear up and struggle to complete their sentences and stuff like that. And that made me think, well, actually, they probably

haven't had that many people to tell this life story to. How many people in your normal day-to-day existence actually decide to go to that place and give you a canvas to talk about deeper things that maybe you don't usually think about or talk about. Maybe you've never talked about it before. Not because it's like shameful, but just it's a bit odd or no one's ever seemed to be patient or giving you the space to be able to do it. And yeah, that kind of made me think like, you know,

this is evidently one of the biggest things that's happened in someone's life. And it's still so emotionally charged. I have to assume that that's because they haven't got that. This isn't the

100th time they've said it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, so like when you kind of question people about stuff like the fast friendship procedure, most people, when you ask them, like, why you'd know us about talking about these topics, like what you, you've, like, this psychologist would be like, you've told me that you think it's going to be awkward, but why do you think it's going to be awkward? And then like, people just assume that it's that no one cares, like no one wants to hear

about their inner life or this kind of event that was so profound for them. And I guess it's almost because that event was so important for their life that the rejection would hurt so much more if they told it. The other person was just like, oh, yeah, anyway, you know, you'll never guess what happened to me yesterday. Like, you know, like, maybe that will happen in some case. It's like, with all of these things, there's no like hard and fast guarantee that it's going to

go in the way you want. But the numbers are really in your favor, like, you, these conversations in on average going to be so much more rewarding for you than you expect. Like, that's what the research shows that if we were just a bit braver, we would find like so much more reward from all of our social connections. The other thing to consider is who says that a person's negative response

to you opening up is a you problem. Like, you want to be around people to whom you can have deep conversations and talk about important things and play with new ideas and open up parts of yourself that you don't do typically. And it's so strange. This ability to make ourselves the bad guy in scenarios, especially socials. And oh, that's because of me. I'm so awkward. I'm so stupid. I'm so clumsy. That you're, I'm a second. Like, if someone had said to you this thing, would you

have been interested? You know, actually, yeah, probably that'd be pretty cool. It'd be pretty cool to find out about, you know, that this thing that they'd held with them from childhood that's very powerful to them. I would have been interested. I would have asked questions. Okay, and why did that other person not? Well, I don't know. They're just socially ungainingly. Okay. So it's not you that's done the social for part. It's actually them in their response to you. This is a them problem,

not a you problem. Yeah, that's exactly it. I think like, also, it could be, and I think this comes back to the egocentric thinking that we were talking about. Like, it could be that the other person really was interested in what you were saying. And they assumed that you knew how interested and how much they cared, how interested they were and how much they cared. And they just weren't communicating that correctly because of this egocentric assumption that it must have been written

all over their face. And so that's what comes out of that research on egocentric thinking is that we were really bad at judging how strongly our emotions are being communicated because we filled them quite strongly. We assume that other people will also be able to read them. And that's true in all kinds of situations like if you're lying, you assume that the other person can tell when

you're lying, but you're not really giving away so many tells that they can. Like, if you find, if you're at a dinner party and you find the food pretty disgusting and you feel like super self-conscious because you're at the host is going to kind of see that disgust all over your face. Like, scientists have actually set people up to have that exact experience.

Yeah. And like, it's completely undetectable. Like, you can't, no one can guess better than chance whether someone's eating something disgusting or whether they're eating something, you know, really delicious. And so I think that's happening here in these conversations that sometimes like people just aren't like letting you know what you really need to hear, but they might

still be feeling it. So there's no point in us like beating ourselves up over not getting quite the response that we expected because we just don't really know what that person was feeling often. How can people express appreciation more effectively? Yeah, I mean, that's so, yeah, that is something that we can all do to strengthen our connections is to just avoid this ambiguity that people have. Like, we are generally not very good at

saying compliments because we just don't do it enough. Like, I think there was some, I can't remember the exact statistic, but like we bite back the majority of the like nice things that we think about other people because we assume that they know it already or we think we're going to be so clumsy, we're going to sound like really ingratiating and falling sick of and falling. Falling is, yeah, you think it's going to be awful. So, so we just think like, okay,

I'm just not going to say anything at all that will be better. And again, it's like you're protecting yourself like is by expressing a compliment or appreciation or gratitude or kind of making yourself a little bit vulnerable. But like those fears are totally unfounded like people,

they just really love to hear good things about themselves as you would. And like as, is it gayness like you said, like if you just turn it around and think people were like, would I want to hear that like I look great today or that I said something really smart like, of course, you would. So I just, you know, the other person wouldn't. So yeah, just we can do it more often, expressing gratitude and appreciation. And what the research shows is like it benefits the other

person a lot, but it also benefits the person expressing those good feelings. So actually, once we've said something kind, we feel better ourselves. And it even like is good for us physiologically, like it actually reduces our stress response. So those this study, there was inspired by Shark Tank, the TV program where students had to kind of come up with a product, give a presentation like impairs. And the researchers told like just one person in each pair, like just, you know, express

gratitude to the person who is helping you with this. And then they measured like how they responded to the to giving the presentation itself, like how the kind of blood pressure, the cardiovascular system responded. And what they found that both the person expressing and receiving the gratitude attended to show like a more muted stress response. So they just, they were still like kind of charged and excited, but they weren't going into fight or flight essentially. Wow. How cool.

Yeah, that's something that I've noticed since moving to America. You may say that Americans have too much enthusiasm. And that may be true. But I think that Brits have the equivalent scarcity as Americans have abundance. And those this, when I first moved out here two and a half years ago, I got invited on a really big podcast. It was the, it was Tim Pools show on the day that the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict came down. So it was going to be, I think there was 300,000 concurrent

live viewers at one point. It was fucking insane. And I got invited to go and, and beyond the show, and it just happened to be the day that I was there. I'm like, oh, I guess I'm commenting on the Kyle Rittenhouse thing now. And I'm, I'd only been in the city for two weeks, maybe three weeks.

And I'd made some friends before, but largely these were just friends that I got. And in between me leaving the apartment, the Airbnb, I was staying in and going down to get picked up by the car that was coming to get me two different guys rang me that I'd met over the last sort of three weeks. And both separately, both basically said the same thing. Hey, man, just wanted to let you know, I know you might be a bit nervous about tonight, but you're going to smash it. Like I've got pizza.

And me and the misses are going to sit on the couch and we're going to watch it. It's going to be so cool. How are you feeling? I'm really happy for you. And I was like, this is such a lovely gesture from someone that didn't need to do it from someone that you kind of barely know. And it felt really alien and that was one of the big, oh, wow, you know, that, you can say that, you can behave in that way. The sort of zero sum, pure it and tall poppy,

Brit in me sort of bristled a little bit and didn't really know how to take it. But yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a really big deal. I suppose the other side of expressing appreciation is self-compassion. And you looked at self-compassion too. Yeah. So I think self-compassion is like super important

in kind of all the things I'm talking about. Because it's like you were saying that we often, like if there's any awkwardness in a conversation, like we just tend to put the blame on ourselves, like if you have met a stranger and there are like, you know, you say a few clumsy words or there's that kind of weird silence where, no, if you know what to say or like you don't quite know

when to finish the conversation, like you think like that was wholly my fault. Like I should have been more socially fluent and able to just like seamlessly kind of, you know, exit that conversation and go on to the next one. You know, the other person's feeling exactly the same way. So that is a common, the liking gap, which means that when we both have a conversation with a stranger, like each person tends to go away thinking that they liked the other person more than the other

person no way. So that shows up in the data. Yeah, yeah, it's really consistent. The liking gap. Yeah. So that in itself, I think, should leaders just, you know, once we know those statistics, like we can just stop like beating ourselves up so much like, because actually, so what's happening there is that it's like we, again, it's like egocentric. We're so conscious of how we've behaved. That's like kind of burning in our minds if we think we've said like a faux

part. So we assume that it was equally important for the other person, but they really aren't taking much notice of that. Like they don't really care if you're like the perfect conversationalist who's always got something like super witty and aposite to say, like what they are more likely to do is just think about the overall kind of emotional tenor of the conversation. It's just vibes. It's just vibes,

man. It's always been vibes. Exactly. Like was I laughing a lot? Like did they kind of validate what I was feeling like? Were they curious about me? You know, that's what really matters. Like you're warmth, not your confidence. So we can all be just a bit more forgiving of ourselves. And like, sometimes we will serve a part, but most often we won't. And it's just not worth the kind of

mental energy to become too fixated on that. Because even if you did the other person, like so that's the other thing that even when you make a definite faux part, like you turn up to a dinner party and you're the only person who hasn't brought like wine or cake or anything, you ask people to judge how they would to rate how they would judge another person for doing that, like how negative they would be. And then you get them to rate how they think the other

person is would judge them for the same thing. And consistently people assume that the other person is going to be twice as negative as they would be. Even if you make a faux part, it like really is and such a big deal. Like it's just it's so forgettable. Isn't it interesting? You know the fundamental attribution error bias. So somebody cuts you off in traffic. It's because they're a dangerous wanker. You cut someone else in traffic. It's because you need to really get to work

because your latent is an important meeting. We have this sort of we often attribute other people's actions to their personal motives, whereas ours are more to do with external events. And when you know we were able to not be as culpable. And it's like a reverse fundamental attribution error in social situations whereby we will always be the awkward clumsy social faux

part victim. And everybody else is a competent smooth James Bond talking person that that you know won't forgive us, but that we would forgive them is a very odd way that we sort of turn the bar stool upside down. Yeah, it's I mean it's crazy. Actually because like if you ask people like how smart are you compared to the average person like most people overestimate how intelligent they are or like how could a driver are you or 70% of people say that they're better than right.

Exactly. And yeah, if you ask people how smart do you think other people think you are? So you're kind of shifting that to like to a question of social judgment. Then people are really under confident. So it's like we we're constantly kind of thinking the best about ourselves, but also assuming that other people are thinking the worst about us. Wow. How interesting. Yeah, I am I learned a lot about this comfort with vibes and in precision, even though I I'm quite obsessive

about precision when it comes to speech. When I started the show, I thought that my goal was to be kind of like a ruthless indexer of information, kind of the ultimate blinckist app for whoever I was speaking to. And it was just to break down all of the different things in this new book or whatever. And then that would be it. And it had to be said in the most precise and accurate way possible. And then as you go on, when I think about this sort of conversations that I enjoy listening

to or the ones that I enjoy having, it's more just about vibes. It's was it fun? Did it flow well? Was it charming? Did we have a laugh? Did everybody feel comfortable and casual? And that's really what it is. And in an equivalent way, I did a live tour toward the back end of last year. So standing up on stage in front of between 500 and 1000 people. And I'd seen a few friends do performances, much bigger ones, comedians and stuff. And their mics would break or the lights would

go out or someone from the audience would yell something. And you might think, oh, that's going to ruin the flow of the show or that might get them off their game. Oh, my God, how awkward that the mics died. And it made me so much more warmly disposed to them to see how they dealt with something that went wrong. And they did it in a charming way. Or maybe they said something wrong. They forgot the line or they tripped over or they spilled water on themselves. And all of those there was no

such thing as a social faux pas. There was simply dealing with an occurrence in a charming or an uncharming manner. And if you dealt with it in a charming manner, even if you did it to yourself, it made me like, it's called what's it called the Pratt fall effect, which when someone messes up, if the you end up liking them more, as long as they can kind of style it out in a not totally socially ungainly way. So yeah, oddly, social faux pas can be a breeding ground for perhaps

social excellence in a way. Yeah, totally. I mean, I totally think it's like you said, it's like how you respond to the era. The like the perceived era is more important than like the era itself. And you know, like even stuff like, you know, like people really overestimate like how important like showing a few nerves are going to be like in an interview or on stage. But when you question

like observers like, you know, what did you think of this performer? And you know, like some of them might have been like touching their face a lot because they were nervous or like, you know, biting their nails, whatever. Those people were actually considered to be much more likeable than the people who gave like a super smooth performance. And I think it's just so relatable. Like, you see someone who is feeling probably like how you would be feeling. And even if you don't show

it on the outside, like you're going to have those nerves. So like your empathy is just kind of kicking in and you are kind of rooting for them to do well. And we see that more generally like there's this phenomenon called the beautiful mess effect, which is a bit like the prepful effect. But this is like we try to hide like our kind of failures and errors and vulnerabilities. Like, you know, you don't want to tell people if you're feeling like like you look a bit shit

today or you've got some kind of complex about part of your body. Yeah. Or it's for us to come back or something. Right. Exactly. Or you're like, you know, you like made a real fuck up with your job. And it's like, you know, it's really embarrassing. It's like a schoolboy error that you have to end up to. And people assume that like confessing those vulnerabilities is going to make them look weak. People are going to feel a

bit repelled by that. But actually people often like far often, far more often than you think, they're going to like appreciate your kind of courage and honesty and authenticity, but just like owning up to these things. And like we much prefer someone who's honest than someone who we think is kind of hiding something. So there's this study looking at like giving people kind

of profiles of like potential dates. Like weird profiles. I don't know like how they set this up exactly to look like natural, but like the potential dates had to like say whether they'd ever done like some pretty immoral acts like had they ever hidden an STD from previous lovers. And like had sex with them anyway. People who said they had done that were considered to be

a better potential date than people than people who refused to answer the question. So obviously someone who had never done it was preferable, but at least admitting to your immoral behavior was much better than just trying to avoid the question completely. What about the novelty penalty? What's that? Yeah. So that is, I mean it's like so familiar for

most people I think. Like you know when you've been on like you've had an amazing experience like you've you know been on a great holiday and you get home and you want to tell like all of your friends about it. And then like you're 10 minutes in and you can see their eyes glazing over like you're just not getting the interaction that you want. That's the novelty penalty because essentially people often prefer to hear stuff that is already a bit familiar to them

rather than something that is totally new. And like the researchers found this in this kind of kind of quite complex setup where they gave people like YouTube videos to watch and then they got one person from the group to describe the video. And they found that people much preferred hearing about a video they'd already seen compared to hearing about a video that they hadn't seen. And it's totally bizarre because it's like you'd think it would be boring to you to hear

repeated back to what you've just observed. But the problem is we're just like maybe our stories our storytelling skills just aren't up to scratch. So we're leaving a lot of gaps in the kind of narrative. And so it just isn't that obvious like why do I like why should I care about this? Like you forget to say kind of what really attracted you to that experience and why it was so personally important to you. Like you give the kind of maybe some of the irrelevant details while skipping

like the emotional content. And so that's what we need to do I think to be better conversationalist to avoid the novelty penalty is to again like lean into that self-disclosure and not be afraid to say kind of why something matters to you. To get a bit of personal investment I had a guy called Mr. Bollen on the show a couple of weeks ago he's probably one of the best storytellers on the internet. He does strange dark mysterious sort of true crime adjacent stuff. And it was really

cool he explained he does this story. It does a number of stories does one of them. And then he explains his approach to storytelling using the story that he just told and breaking down why he said things in this way. And a really cool insight that I learned from him was the power of omission. So when you're telling a story there's one about a lamp this guy who is in a marriage for years

and years and years and then this lamp in his living room starts to behave very strangely. And it turns out after he's a protracted story of all of this stuff that he was hit in the head during a high school football game and was knocked out for five seconds but lived an entire different life. And then came back around and was no longer married to this person for two decades didn't have his kids didn't have his dog didn't have his house didn't have anything and had imagined this entire

other life that he felt he'd lived for you know decades and decades. But he doesn't say that bit until the very end. So you know there's this sort of ever escalating anticipation about he's getting sort of stranger and stranger and stranger. But if he'd opened up the story by saying something like I'm going to tell you a story about a guy who was hit in the head in high school like you know that completely punks the game and takes you to the end before it started.

So just thinking about how consciously and and dexterously he looks at the art of storytelling not just conversation but of storytelling. And yeah what are you including and what are you excluding and maybe saying you know and this is how it made me feel and this is why it was really important to me. Like create some fucking stakes in whatever it is that you're talking about why

should someone care. Yeah exactly and I think so what we kind of maybe underestimate is that what people will care about is like the emotions that we're feeling and like you know if they're connected to us they kind of want the best for us. So if something was super important they kind of

really want to understand that bit. Well they don't care about is like your kind of journey tour from the airport or like you know like maybe they don't even care much about the details of the location itself that you've been to if you're on this amazing holiday what they really care about is like like you know did that fundamentally change your perspective on your life. Yeah exactly.

Yeah. What is important about truth and lies and secrets. So this really surprised me and it's the fact that on a stage just is almost always valued even if you're delivering bad news to people even if it's not necessarily like reflecting well on yourself even if it's the kind of situation where you would normally tell a white lie to save someone's feelings like kind of sugar

coating some negative feedback. There are very few situations where telling a lie is ever going to pay off which seems kind of like amazing and that I kind of assumed that like things like white lies are kind of a social lubricant like you just need them to kind of get along each day but these researchers in the US kind of they set people out on a mission to kind of either be as honest as they could be in every single interaction for a few days or to be as kind as they could

be in interaction in every interaction for a few days or to just carry on as normal. And what they found was that the people the wellbeing of the people who were kind or honest were pretty much the same actually but what was especially noticeable was that the people who were being like

sometimes brutally honest with people tended to report that their interactions were far more meaningful like they felt that they learned a lot more about those people and that those people learned a lot more about them when they were you know like saying some uncomfortable truths compared to people who are going around like with the specific intention of like trying to be as kind as possible and to make people feel as good as possible.

So that yeah I mean that's changed the way I deal with like a lot of my interactions now. Like it's not a pass to like be kind of just like rude and nasty like because there's I think in almost every case there's going to be a kind of telling the truth or like a like pretty blunt

and nasty way of telling the truth. So it's always better to kind of try to frame what you're saying in a way that can be constructive that will help the other person to learn from what you're saying rather than just being like to over generalizing in a way that is not helpful for their growth. So yeah be specific try to be constructive try to offer advice or your own time and resources

to help them to deal with the kind of negative feedback you're giving. But overall people will will appreciate far more the negative feedback that can be useful over a white lie that isn't going to help them to learn and to grow. How can people overcome the discomfort of telling people the truth even if it's going to be painful for the truth tell? So I think that is just practice actually I think like we're a bit like with the kind of overcoming the awkwardness of talking to

strangers. I think it's about recalibrating our expectations and you can only do that by kind of repeatedly performing this action and recognizing that the outcomes are you know on average far better than you expected and over time you just naturally start to recognize that the kind of little bit of awkwardness that you're going to face is worth it for the kind of rewards at the end. Yeah I suppose it's the same sort of exposure training thing that I can tell the truth and the

whole world doesn't blow up. Right. Okay well maybe I can do it again. Yeah yeah it's exactly that and I guess I start out with like small kind of like the low hanging fruit I guess is one way that I would deal with all of these social dilemmas is that you know you you build up maybe something

that's going to be much harder. I wonder if there's a I spoke about this a couple of months ago there's a website still up called a hundred days of rejection and it's a kind of exposure therapy social exposure therapy and each day you do something you ask the barista at the coffee shop

if you can have this for free you see if a stranger will give you a hundred pounds you do just sort of ever changing group of different things and some of them it's so toe curling like so awful and painful to do and I think so much of what you're trying to do there is just teach yourself this thing that you are adamant is going to be socially explosive is probably totally fine and you know with the truth as well I suppose the other side is that if you're holding onto

secrets for too long ultimately you're the one that's going to pay the price. Yeah sure the other person you know might be upset about it but it's you that's got to vacillate about this complex house of cards that you've built up trying to keep said secrets away from someone and you can

relinquish that by just saying it. Yeah exactly I mean I think you'd read about this one of your newsletters actually that it's like it is better to have like an authentic meaningful connection with someone who likes you for who you are than to kind of no matter how good the

relationship seems to be if you know that you're hiding something really important and you're always scared that they're going to reject you for that thing that you're hiding like that in itself is something that is going to lead you to feel that kind of existential isolation so you don't actually you're like surrounded by people but you don't really feel like emotionally connected to them.

So yeah I've totally agree with that and actually then there's lots of good research anyway showing that when you keep secrets and you mind like you some kind of going to these kind of awful things that you're hiding you actually experience it almost like a physical burden so when people are primed to think about a secret that they haven't told the people they love they actually like physically overestimate like how steep a hill is going to be to climb or like if they like throwing a ball

into a target like they'll over throw because they kind of assume that their strength isn't as great as it would have been. Oh wait. Yeah so it has it's like embodied cognition that changes the way you navigate the world like everything feels more tiring than it should be. Hang on so someone that is holding on to a secret when given a ball that they need to throw a target on average they overthrow the ball compensating for a perceived weakness. Yeah and and that is a what was the term?

It's like embodied cognition. Embodied cognition. Dude you find the best studies it's so much fun yeah how crazy to think about that yeah this sort of inner fragility that they have manifested in themselves this shame that they probably have about not being able to say this thing oh well my real world strength must be equivalently like feeble therefore I must throw the ball harder

and they end up overthrowing it. Yeah and so what happens then is if you get them to like reveal the secret to someone even just one of the researchers then like that embodied cognition kind of vanishes so they suddenly start to be more accurate in their movements or in perceiving the kind of physical challenges ahead of them. So you're saying baseball players and cricketers should be as honest as possible because it's a performance enhancer. Right yeah exactly yeah. Who knew? I won't

I learned a new word from you which was con felicity. Ah yeah yeah I love that yeah or mid-freuder is the kind of German equivalent so it's the we have shard and friday which is our kind of joy at someone else's misfortune but mid-freuder or con felicity is our kind of joy at seeing someone

else's happiness and success and achievements and this is so relevant when we think about celebrating our own successes like we tend to hide a lot of our achievements because we don't want to seem like we're bragging and we assume that the other person is going to judge as harshly for kind of

talking about our promotion or like that kind of professional award we won or even just like a personal best at the gym like we hide these kinds of things much more than we should because we assume the other person is going to feel envious of us for what the research shows is that like when people

find out that you've kind of had these good events in your life and you decided not to share them it's actually super insulting because you're treating them a bit like a spoiled kind of kid who has to kind of win up monopoly like every time you play it or they'll have a tantrum like it feels

incredibly paternalistic to find out that like your best friend or your colleague or your brother didn't tell you about something good in their life just because they thought you might react badly so it drives it drives a wedge in our connection in that way because it's just fundamentally like

offensive to be treated in that way but then yeah we're also missing the fact that most of these people would feel con felicity like rather than being envious they're just going to be happy for you and sharing in that happiness is just another way for you to be able to bond and to kind of share an emotional experience that kind of confirms that you you share the same values in life.

Well the other thing as well is if you share something which is genuinely meaningful to you and the you're proud of in a charming way obviously you can show it down people's throats and in which case the negative response is probably you deserved it but if you do it in a charming way and someone doesn't take a thing that's meaningful to you positively and it doesn't positively

reinforce it. Hey guess what that person shouldn't be in your life like they suck as a friend they suck and the same as the you open up to somebody you try and tell them something that's really meaningful or something that's shameful or something that you're scared of and they don't respond in the

right way that's not a you problem that's them problem. Yeah I mean to me all of these things it's like a classic case of someone being a friend of me like an ambivalent connection like if they're not responding to you when you're like opening up to them whether it's about failure or a success or just like a really meaningful experience then yeah like there's something kind of there's something going on in their life that is wrong but you don't have to feel embarrassed about the

fact that their response was inadequate. It is I need to do a little bit more thinking about this sort of reverse fundamental attribution era which is what you're kind of developing is a kind of self-confidence in social self-confidence that I will make errors but I know that I'm coming into

this playing the rules of the game remotely appropriately and trying to put my best foot forward and it takes basically all of the pressure of you socially and you go look I didn't mess up like I just you know I did the thing it's this person that's incapable of of receiving or returning

in an apt manner. Yeah I mean that's I think that's ultimately it like we should be able to expect from the people in our social networks that they are going to respond positively to you sharing your life with them and yeah so it's like is having that confidence to realize that if they're not

going to do that then maybe your social network is better off without them or at the very least you just don't have to like value their opinions so much but I mean the good news is that like we overestimate how likely it is that people are going to react in all of these negative ways like most people who really have your best interests at heart they're going to be like they're going to

respond in the way that you would want them to. What is there to say about envy then if confolicity and feeling joy in other people's successes is something that's good what did you learn about envy? So I mean I think it's perfectly possible for someone to feel like a bit of envy and confolicity at the same time and like that's how I feel sometimes like you know of my friends who are office and if they have like a huge success like I am like genuinely really delighted for

them I would never want to take that away from them but I would also like it for me. Yeah that's it and actually though there's nothing wrong with feeling envy so scientists kind of say there's like a malign envy where like you want to take that tear that person down well that is obviously

an unhealthy reaction but benign envy when you're like when someone else's success is just making you realize it's reaffirming what your goals are going to be for yourself and it's like a source of inspiration like that is totally something that's a totally natural reaction and it's something

that you should be listening to and then you know putting into action I think it's you know envy can be a really strong form of motivation you don't have to put yourself in competition with that particular person but it's good for you to just identify like yeah I still want to achieve that goal and the fact that this other person has achieved that goal has just proven that to me that

is probably going to be as good as I expected to be. Isn't it cool I really like this idea of being able to balance being happy for your friend's success with wishing that you could have it as well I don't think that that's something that's negative. Neil Strauss guy that wrote the game on the show a couple of weeks ago and he told me the title of his new book and I think a good rubric for whether or not a title is great is does the person that you tell it to think fuck why didn't I

think of that and like that's the kind of envy energy I think and the title of this book is the power of low self esteem and I thought god that's so cool that's so that it's like this oxy moron it's intriguing it's short I love it I was fucking god damn it like why didn't I think of that

and you know that's I don't think that I would judge myself for that kind of envy and you can even with this you know going back to the transparency the openness the the honesty thing I think I said it to him at the time and you know that almost calling out the emotion and going bro I mean

god damn it I wish that I'd said that that's that's so smart that's really really cool I'm really happy for you that's gonna smash like you know that's all of the things that we've just spoken about in a single sentence right exactly and I think that's a totally healthy reaction that I think

sometimes like in the past we would feel a bit embarrassed about saying that we feel like envy for someone but it's like you know that's also kind of a mark of that person so it's a low-key compliment yeah I think it is a compliment yeah like and I would take that as a compliment myself

as someone said they were like a little bit envious of me like as long as I knew that they were also feeling happiness for me as well like I would totally take that as a compliment yeah envy envy with happiness good envy with negativity dangerous need to be careful right yeah is

mentally why is asking for help important um so a lot of us kind of and it's again because we're scared of seeming like vulnerable and weak we're just scared of asking for help we assume that we're gonna you know be perceived badly for that but also we think we're gonna be a burden on the other

person that they're not really gonna want to help us anyway so we're kind of struggling alone um it makes our life a lot harder but a little bit like when I was talking about when you don't share success um because it's um because you kind of assume the other person's gonna

out badly and they feel insulted by that well actually people feel a bit the same if you don't ask for help when it would be totally natural for you to do so like if you've got a really good friend who would be able to like take you to the hospital when you're ill and you pay loads of

money for a taxi like they actually feel a lot worse for the fact that you didn't ask them like it's an insult to them so we by asking for help it can actually be a really good way of cementing a relationship and making that person know how valued they are and um that can even be true like

not in those kind of emergency situations but even just with the kind of the uh kind of little things in life that you could maybe do for yourself but like it just feels good when someone else is gonna help you out um so like asking someone to cook your favourite meal for you um just because you know it's gonna feel like super comforting to have it from that person rather than doing it yourself there's a Japanese concept called am I they describes that kind of um uh favor request where you could

you're perfectly capable of doing it it's a little bit inappropriate to ask for help but you ask anyway um the idea in um the Japanese concept is that actually that can enhance lots of relationships and make people feel kind of especially good about themselves and like you know they enjoy caring

for you and that's what the research shows and it's not just in Japanese culture it's also in American culture by um by asking for favours you're underlining the close nature of your relationship and people actually like you more for it and amazingly that even happens with strangers um so

if you kind of scientists set up this experiment where like they gave people these to have got maths questions and like at the end of um the kind of tests like one person had finished before the other one if one of the participants asked us the other to just kind of help them with the

remaining questions that actually increased the bond between the two participants and you didn't see that increase in the bond if the teacher was the one who kind of told the participant to kind of to offer that assistance you actually had to ask for it yourself to underline how almost

how much you respected that other person for how smart they were and how much you appreciated the help and that's that yeah it's a low key comment on their competence would you mind helping me carry these bags out you look like the sort of person that is sufficiently physically robust

that you can carry some bags with me uh amen would you mind taking me to the hospital I consider you to be the sort of person who is sufficiently thoughtful and cares about me enough you're as efficient a good helpful person that you will do this thing for me and I suppose as well

I'd seen some I'd heard about some studies around this topic but not as precisely if you just explained them but I seem to remember something to do with doing a favor for someone is see not seen as favorably as asking for someone to do a favor for you and I think that part of

that if that's true part of that is implicit in the I asked David to do me a favor is that well in future you know the the the debt cycle has begun between the two of us so yeah implicit in me asking you to do me a favor is that I will do you a favor as opposed to just coming out and then

doing something for you that you maybe didn't ask which then places the debt in your house I hang on a second I know you just you know unnecessarily brought around some food for my bird feeder but what are you going to ask me to do next week and I didn't you know I didn't kick this off in that

way whereas by requesting the other person to do it they have the option to not enter into this never-ending vicious redifting loop of favors yeah exactly like I think like I'm yeah like just you're I just think you're showing to the other person that you kind of fundamentally

think they're a decent decent person and like you said like there is an element I think of this kind of feeling we don't want to feel in debt but we don't mind giving generously and not expecting anything in return to another person so I guess that again it's this kind of asymmetry

we might do a favor totally altruistically not expecting anything in return but we're worried about the fact that we might need to to have that kind of yeah to cash in at some point the debt will be called yeah exactly what role does the gratitude gap play yeah I mean that's

really important in that just we so basically like when anyone does something kind of altruistic like they can benefit psychologically and even physiologically from having performed that act of kindness like as I call it in the book it's bit cheesy but it's like the gift of giving so

actually people who are generally altruistic in their lives they might be volunteers or just they are super helpful with like running errands for their family all of that kind of thing they live a lot longer than people who are a bit more selfish in their lives like if you're always looking

off yourself rather than off of people you might expect that those people would be prioritising their own health and so would be healthier but now actually prioritising the people around you actually as these kind of knock on benefits for your own health and well-being so like being

a generous person is really good but you have to be able to see some benefit from what you're doing like if you if someone does an altruistic act and they don't see that they've actually helped the other person they experience none of those benefits of having of having done the deed in fact

it just makes them feel kind of used and stressed and kind of stressed out and frustrated and the problem with the gratitude gap is that we maybe just don't like express our gratitude as much as we should do because we assume that the other person

kind of knows how self-evident of course I really am so grateful for the thing why wouldn't I be I think I would say that is exactly that and so we're not giving them the full benefits of what they've done to help us even even though we probably do secretly appreciate it what is a tactic for overcoming the gratitude gap?

So just expressing gratitude more explicitly I think is always important but also we should be careful about how we express gratitude like any any kind of sign of gratitude is probably going to be perceived pretty well

but you can make it a lot more powerful if you change the way you frame it and what a lot of us do mistakenly when we talk about gratitude is we do tend to make it kind of emphasize too much the benefits for us which is I've just said it's fine to say you know to show that the actors had

a good effect on us that it's been being useful but what makes it even more beneficial to the other person and makes them feel especially good about themselves is when you kind of turn that reflection back onto them and talk about the specific qualities that you appreciate about what

they've just done so like you were saying with that friend who's like given you that kind of lifted the hospital or the airport it's really good for you to tell them that like they've saved you a lot of time and money and they've made your journey a lot more comfortable

but it's even better then to say to make it explicit the fact that you appreciate the fact that they are the person they are the kind of person who would do that that you recognize that they are generous and you know giving and yeah like that they have your best

interests at heart like you really appreciate those qualities and so it's the combination I think that's powerful often we kind of focus just on one or the other but it's much better to kind of say both like the effect on you what you value in that other person what about healing bad feelings

yeah there's we are like a not very good at dealing with like disagreements like I think we all know that fact that kind of rifts can easily happen between people who are super close and often over the craziest things that become kind of amplified in importance and it's only when you know

months or years have gone by that you look back and you're like why did I let that small disagreement you know come to dominate what was actually a great relationship there are a few different ways that we can overcome that kind of overly kind of microscopic

attitude to our and kind of a forensic attitude to kind of the rights in the wrongs of a situation and one of those is just to kind of take a distance perspective that helps you to kind of zoom out from the situation and to recognize what is really important and so you know often then you'll

realize that you know you're arguing over something that fundamentally like might need to be discussed resolved but it's not so important that it's worth actually destroying what could be you know a very fruitful authentic genuine relationship for months or years to come

and so psychological distancing can work in many ways but you know it could just be imagining what an objective observer would think about the situation at hand so maybe imagining that you were actually talking about this with like a marriage counselor or whatever or just like some

friend or relative who isn't directly kind of biased towards one person and the disagreement with the other it could just be imagining that you're looking back on this situation in 10 years time and you know what do you think would really stand out as being important you know when years

have passed and this situation has long since you know being finished and over those are study looking at married couples so newly newly words for the first year like the researchers did nothing they just questioned them like how often they were about how often they were disagreeing and you

know how much they liked each other and like they had quite a few disagreements these married couples and they're kind of liking for each other over that first year like kind of went downhill quite like not dramatically but you know at the end of the first year they did not like each other as much

as when they first got married which I think is quite you know relatable but then at the end of this first year they got people to do this self-distancing exercise and what they found was that those participants their relationships satisfaction was stable like they still had these kind of

disagreements but they resolved them a lot more easily whereas people who hadn't been taught their intervention they just continued on that downward trajectory so actually that one small psychological intervention I think could save like a lot of marriages just take people through the

self-distancing thing again just so that they've got it as easy take away. So essentially it's like you know like even in the heat of the argument but definitely afterwards when you you know you're both kind of thinking about what's just been said it's to try to look at the situation from some

some new perspective so rather than just thinking about how you feel like in the present moment it could be imagining that you're looking back on that situation in 10 years time when like you know enough time has passed that you can be a bit more objective about what's just occurred

so just you know literally just thinking like how will I feel about this in like 2034 or just imagining that you're like an objective observer so just like thinking you know what would this kind of neutral party think about this disagreement my arguments like his or her arguments

like what would they how would they praise this and you know what importance would they lend to all this and you know it really works like people really do just like take that kind of step back or step you know into the future I'm recognised that actually you know it helps them to just recognise

what's important and what isn't essentially so doesn't mean that like you're just instantly going to forgive the other person but it means you can be more constructive in what you say you're not going to be so petty to kind of you're not going to resort to kind of those knee jerk insults

that you might do if you're still really immersed purely immersed in the the feelings of the fight itself yeah your 13th law in the book is something that I landed on after we probably did maybe between 305 hundred life hacks on this podcast over the space of six and a half years

and it was a huge series and it was how to make a good toasted sandwich or this new protein powder we'd found or a great meditation app or some new time blocking technique or whatever you know everything that we wanted and the number one hack that I had is basically the same as your 13th law

which is text your friends when you're thinking about them so you know a lot of the time you'll just be going about your day and some memory you'll pop up or you'll wonder I wonder what such and such a person's doing and you know this person that has no idea that you're in their thoughts arises

you think something nice about them and it goes away and maybe in some comic way they do end up benefiting from it but I've just taken to using that as a trigger to immediately text that person and honestly one of the most like sympathy texts ever if you can't think of something cool

but a man just thinking of you hope everything's well like like that's a or singing your praises you know talking about them over dinner saying I really love that he's got this new song out or he did you see that thing that he did or he just got married or he's got a kid I'm really happy

for him or whatever it might be and it's so good it makes me feel so good to do that and yeah text your friends when you think about them is just out of 500 life hacks into my favorite one yeah me too I mean and I think it's like again it's like this kind of liking that phenomenon it's

like all of these different psychological barriers that we've spoken about is that people tend to be quite resistant from doing that because they are kind of worried that it's going to be really awkward and the other person like especially you know you haven't seen someone for a while it's difficult

to know exactly what to say so you just avoid saying anything at all and you let the kind of friendship like fizzle out even further but the research shows you know when you send those messages like people genuinely really appreciate it like they're going to enjoy receiving that message a lot

more than you assume they're going to and you're going to feel a lot better like you said than you might have assumed that you do like you know friendships change all the time but actually just keeping people in your thoughts and in your life like that's one of the best things we can do to craft that social connection that we crave is there a favorite study that you came across

from the book that we haven't spoken about yet? I think the connection just went away so I didn't who the question is there a favorite study from the book that we haven't spoken about yet that you found? Yeah we've covered such a lot. Yeah so I guess one thing that I do kind of love and it's just such as like bizarre but amazing study so basically like what the research shows is that like for any the foundation of social connection is this thing called shared reality and so like

we know that like there's this phenomenon called homophilia homophilia and we're kind of like people who are similar to ourselves the similar music days similar you know same religion same like kind of world view on politics you know people who speak the same language or dialect came

from the same place like that those things are important but what really connects people I make you like actually want to be best friends with someone rather than just kind of vaguely know them as an acquaintance is knowing that they have the same inner kind of experience of the world so you know do they find the same things funny? Do they laugh at the same time? Do they get kind of the same chills at the same time in the same

song? A lot of these like intense visceral reactions to the world and so there are psychological studies that kind of just try to prime that and they're really dumb kind of imagine if the questions like if Jennifer Aniston was like a household object which would be like a screwdriver,

a cocktail shaker or like a pencil case and like the answers are like pretty much meaningless but if you tell someone that they both chose like toothpick for Jennifer Aniston like they sense that they have this kind of shared inner world and that makes them like that of a person a lot more and I just love that but actually there are these tiny little clues that we're experiencing

all the time that are just helping us to bond. It's bizarre but it really works like I mean and obviously that is such an artificial kind of experiment like I'm not saying that we should all play these kind of imaginative questions to like connect to strangers but I think it shows how

actually how much of our kind of connection and like clicking with someone can really depend not just on like those kind of big similarities in your like background education or all of that but like you know it's just those kind of immediate and impulsive responses to the world around us

and there's actually then like a bunch of neuro scientific research that shows that there's a literal truth in the kind of feeling that someone is on the same wavelength as you and you know like these researchers in the US got like a bunch of like a class of students to watch like a series

of YouTube videos some of which were like you know music video comedy documentary whatever and scan their brains as they were doing so and they found that just from the similarities in the brain activity as people responded to those videos they could predict who was friends with who and it

was really because they had this very similar streams of consciousness like their interpretation of framework is similar to someone else this isn't necessarily happening between the people it's that they are similar kinds of people so when they get a shared stimulus person a c and

f all move in the same way well why words because they've conditioned themselves and quite likely if you're going to observe the YouTube video in that way from all of the kids in the school yard you're probably going to get on with the ones that think like you and talk like you and have the same

sort of view right yeah yeah you click exactly and so you know it's like I think like you know sometimes again because we're so reserved we can avoid allowing people to kind of see inside our stream of consciousness so if you're like too cautious about revealing like what you think

or feel like there's just no way of constructing that shared reality like no the other person just doesn't know if you're thinking in the same way as them or not and so I think that's why things like self-disclosure are so powerful because you're just you're offering many more opportunities for you to recognize like and what way do you're kind of use of reality coincide?

Hell yeah David Robson ladies and gentlemen David I love your work I love the fact that you're digging into all of these fascinating psychological studies James Smith shamelessly repurposed a bunch in his book and then I've been using them on my life to us so I very much appreciate that I've

been subscribed to psych.org psyche.org for ever since we last spoke why should people go they want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing get the new book etc. Yeah so there's my website www.DavidRobson.ma you can kind of pre-order my book or order it

anywhere where you get your normal books i amazon you know bookshop.org whatever wherever you go and by do have like links on my web page as well I'm on twitter or x at deunderscore and discord robson my instagram which I'm just kind of trying to build up is David a robson so yeah you know I love hearing feedback I love having questions so go and touch I'm looking forwards to seeing what you do next mate thanks