Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Don Martin on Why We’re Never Meant to Go Through Life Alone | EP 695

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

What if loneliness isn’t a personal failure, but a biological signal that you’re built for connection?In this powerful Thanksgiving Day episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles sits down with author, researcher, and longtime podcaster Don Martin, whose upcoming book, Where Did Everybody Go? unpacks one of the most misunderstood challenges of modern life: the loneliness crisis.This conversation continues our acclaimed series The Irreplaceables, exploring the human qualities no machine can ever replicate. Today, Don illuminates why true healing also requires returning to each other.Airing this episode on Thanksgiving is intentional. It’s a day framed around togetherness, but for millions of people, it is one of the loneliest days of the year. Whether you’re surrounded by family, on your own, grieving, working, or simply navigating the quiet, this conversation offers science, compassion, and practical hope.Don dismantles the myths we’ve been taught about loneliness, reveals the societal structures that have quietly unraveled our sense of belonging, and shows us how connection can be rebuilt..If you’ve ever felt invisible, disconnected, overwhelmed by the state of the world, or unsure how to create stronger relationships in your community, this episode is a grounding companion.Get the full episode show notes here:Listen, Watch, and Go DeeperAll episode links—including my books You Matter, Luma, and Passion Struck, The Ignited Life Substack, YouTube channels, and Start Mattering apparel—are gathered here: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesDownload the companion workbook: The Connected Life ToolkitAvailable now at TheIgnitedLife.netIncludes reflection prompts, community-building practices, and science-backed tools for strengthening meaningful relationships.In this episode, you will learn:• Why loneliness is not an emotion but a biological survival signal • The real reason half of Americans report feeling lonely (and why it’s not screens) • Why kids and teens are the loneliest demographic in the U.S. • How the decline of malls, walkable neighborhoods, and third places quietly rewired society • Why feeling lonely in a crowd is normal and what your brain is trying to tell you • How marginalized communities uniquely experience and overcome disconnection • Why storytelling is a powerful tool for belonging and social change • Practical steps you can take to rebuild connectionSupport the MovementEveryone deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter.Show it. Wear it. Live it. https://StartMattering.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on Passion Struck. A lot of times we engage with deep dark topics, loneliness, death, religion, politics, all of those kinds of things, and come away just feeling really depressed and hopeless. And who am I? I'm just one person. I don't matter. And I think bringing it back to something that you all talk about, I think giving people a sense of purpose and a sense that this information isn't too much for you, you can learn

it, you can learn a new thing, you can embrace a new thing, you can. You can talk about the big scary stuff in life, and your opinion on it, your involvement in it, even just your willingness to learn about it, matters because you matter. Welcome to Passionstruck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning.

heal what hurts and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. welcome back friends to passion struck this is episode 695 and today's episode is unlike any other i've ever released and intentionally so if you're joining us for the first time welcome to this extraordinary community and if you're one of the many who return for every episode thank you your

loyalty is the heartbeat of this global movement As always, if this show has ever inspired you, here are two simple ways that you can help it grow. Share this episode with someone who will find it meaningful and leave a five-star review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It's truly the most powerful way to help new listeners discover these conversations. We are currently in the midst of our month-long series, The Irreplaceables, an exploration of the qualities that make us undeniably, unforgetably human. Earlier this week in episode 694, we were live at the Oxford Exchange in Tampa, Florida with the extraordinary Jane Marie Chen, who reminded us that healing begins when we stop performing for the world and start returning to ourselves. And today, on Thanksgiving Day, we turn to a piece of our humanity that has never mattered more, our deep, innate need for connection.

You might wonder why I chose to air an episode about loneliness. on a day dedicated to gratitude, gathering, and togetherness. Here's the truth. Thanksgiving is often painted as warmth, family, and togetherness. But for millions of people, it's one of the loneliest days of the year. Some are physically alone. Some feel invisible in their own families. Some are grieving someone who isn't there.

And others are surrounded by people, yet feel emotionally miles away. Loneliness does not wait for a convenient season. loneliness finds the quiet spaces in all of us, including the ones that look full from the outside. That's exactly why I chose to air this episode today. My guest is Don Martin, author of the phenomenal new book, Where Did Everybody Go? And in this conversation, Don dismantles the myths we've been told about loneliness and what truly creates belonging. Together, we explore why half of American adults say they're lonely, and why loneliness is not a personal failing. We go into how the collapse of malls, walkable neighborhoods, and third places quietly rewired

are social fabric. We discuss why kids and teens, not older adults, are the loneliest groups in society. We unpack why social media isn't the villain we've made it out to be, and what the science actually says about rebuilding connection in our neighborhoods, our relationships, and our own lives. This episode is a grounding reminder that being human is not about never feeling lonely. It's about never facing loneliness alone. So whether today finds you surrounded by family, traveling, working, grieving, celebrating, or simply being, this episode is for you.

Before we dive in, remember, you can find companion tools and frameworks for every episode at the ignitedlife.net. My free substack where I hope you apply these insights from these conversations to your life. Now let's step into this powerful Thanksgiving Day conversation with Don Martin. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. You ever wake up and feel like your body's auditioning for a Rice Krispies commercial? I mean joints popping, muscle stiff, workouts taking forever to bounce back from. That's why I went

all in on Bubbs Natural's collagen peptides. I get listened to this 18 grams of clean protein with only 70 calories. And believe me, it tastes like magic, even in plain water. No clumps, no chucky taste. You'd never even know it's there. Named after Navy SEAL Glenn Bubb Doherty, this brand walks the talk, donating 10% of profits to charity. And Bubbs is legit. It's Whole30 approved and sustainably sourced. No sugar, no junk, no weird fillers. So live better longer. For a limited time only, our listeners are getting 20% off at Bubbs Naturals by using Code PassionStruck at checkout. Just head to BUBS naturals.com and use Code Passionstruck, and you're all set. After purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you.

I am so excited today to welcome Don Martin to Passionstruck. Hey, Don, how are you today? Hi, John. Thanks so much for having me. I love that you're here today. I love it when I have fellow podcasters on the show. And you've been doing yours for a little bit longer than I have. What originally got you started? Oh, gosh. Well, I started way back before podcasts were anything when it was just a hobby that weirdos did in their basements back when it was like, oh, that guy has a podcast when it was a weird thing. I remember the first time I started my, the first iteration of my podcast back in 2009. But I remember realizing that like podcasts had changed in pop culture and like society at large because like seven, eight years in, I've been doing

it a while. I saw a commercial for some kind of prescription medication because we have those here in the U.S. commercials for prescription medications. And I remember I'm a busy attorney. I'm a busy doctor. I'm a busy mom, those kinds of things. And it was like, I'm a busy podcast producer. I need Genomex or whatever. And I was like, that's a job now? What? When did this become a job? I've been doing it so long, but it went from a weird hobby to now celebrities do it for quick cash. Yeah, I remember about four years ago, I got that question that I hate, what do you do? And just to keep it simple, I said, I'm a professional podcaster and the person just looked

at me like, you can actually make money doing that. Oh, yeah. Well, and that's what's crazy is that the line between you could be one of a really successful podcast and long running. And it's like still, it's, well, this is gross. money and it's just wild like how fast and how different it changes so yeah absolutely well you are an author if I have it correctly of five different books yeah my best book comes out in November 2025 where did everybody go yeah and that's the one I really wanted to talk about today because you're

really going into the loneliness crisis that has really become pervasive and I want to start here because in 2020, as I understand it, during the lockdown, you yourself experienced a loneliness that felt impossible to ignore. Could you take us back to that moment and describe what shifted for you? Sure, at length in the book, the summary version is, and I was somebody that thought I wasn't a lonely person that I had friends and I had coworkers and I had a job and I had trips I told myself I would take. And I had plans. I had a life. I had a sphere of people and community, or at least I thought. And then the world shut down. And I realized, oh, all of those little connections are a lot more tenuous than I thought they were. It wasn't that the pandemic. It wasn't that lockdown created loneliness for me.

it's that it highlighted how fragile those community bonds were already, but how fragile they were and how fragile they'd become over the years. And I think a lot of people started reassessing a lot of the big questions in life during lockdown, during that pandemic. And one of the ones that I started really deep diving into was the idea of loneliness and what loneliness is and what its evolutionary purpose, in our lives and in our society. Because obviously, if you've seen an inside-out movie,

you know, that emotions themselves were evolved for a purpose, right? They're all here to do something. So what's loneliness's purpose? And I found out it has one, and it's wild. It's trying to keep us alive, which is not what a lot of people think. It's like when you dig into anger or anxiety or aggression,

it's, oh, these are survival mechanisms. They're doing it weird. It's doing it in a way that I don't entirely love, but it is trying to keep me alive. and loneliness similarly, but it's not just an emotion like joy or anger or sadness. It's more like a biological imperative, something like hunger or thirst. If hunger tells us that we need to eat and thirst tells us that we need to drink, loneliness tells us to seek other people because we've learned over all of the time in

human evolution that we survive better in groups. We survive better when we are in community with one another. And that was a big aha moment for me over the last few years, as I dove into loneliness. Today I'm wearing for those who can't see it, a shirt that says, I matter, which is part of our clothing line at start mattering. But I always felt at its core, loneliness is often the absence of feeling like you matter to someone or something.

How does this idea resonate with your findings on the topic? So loneliness, the kind of the functional definition that sociologists, researchers have I've been using since around the 1980s is that loneliness is basically the disparity between the amount of social connection that you want and the amount of social connection that you are getting. So a lot of people will give like silver bullet advice for loneliness. And the reason that doesn't work is because loneliness, even though it is a metric, you can measure it.

That measurement is different for pretty much everybody, the subjective standard for what you need to fill your cup up, so to speak, and what I need to fill my cup up and how we fill our cup up are different everybody needs social connection but how much of it and what kind differs from people but yeah it's not an absence necessarily it is the feeling of the distance between the amount of connection that you want and the amount that you're getting yeah what's interesting to me is i had julian had hunt lundsted from brigham young university on the show who's been studying this for a very long time and she made the comment to me that to you can be surrounded by people and still feel completely lonely.

That's a sentiment that was shared with me by one of the researchers that I spoke to out of the University of Arizona. He was a guy named Dr. Matthias Mel talked about how he posed the question to me. He said, are you alone when you're at a concert? Are you alone when you're at a coffee shop? And his answer was yes, because you're not actually engaged in conversation in those situations in those settings. you are not in that place forming new or maintaining existing community bonds.

You might be doing other things to help your mental health. It might be fun. It might be good for you to go hear music that you like or enjoy a beverage that you enjoy. But that's not the same thing as creating or maintaining social bonds. Yeah, you can absolutely be lonely in a crowd. In fact, whenever there was a team, like I said, the team that I spoke to out of the University of Arizona, did some really interesting pioneering research. They were some of the first people to be able to compare loneliness to an objective standard, which is time spent alone. And they

measure that, or they qualify time spent alone as basically time when you are not in conversation with other people. And they were able to do that using some pretty interesting tech using 20 years of data, which is pretty fascinating. But what they were finding is that not only can way too much time alone be predicate for loneliness, but also not enough, like too much time with other people could also make you feel lonely. Because again, it's that lost in the crowd feeling. You're not actually there. You're just one among many. You're not actually there forming community bonds. Yeah. And as you were interviewing these researchers, was there a particular interview besides the one you just mentioned or historical

insight that fundamentally changed how you think about it? Oh, gosh. I think that when we talk about loneliness, anytime I tell somebody that I'm writing a book about loneliness, the two things that they immediately say are, oh, well, are you going to talk about screens? Everybody's on a screen and they're shutting down all the malls, and that's why everybody's lonely. We don't have any anymore and everybody's on a screen. And I think that you're talking about historically, you're talking about was there any point of data in history that kind of woke you up to it? Going back and studying kind of the history of both third places and also going back and

studying and really diving into how we have blamed technology for loneliness over the last century and a half or so was really fascinating because we just keep doing it. When it comes to TVs, we always say kids are on screens, but that's to absolve ourselves of the truth that we're the ones giving them the screens. And also, we don't really know what to do with our kids. We took them out at the workforce, which is a good thing. We don't want kids in minds. We don't want kids putting their little fingers in machinery.

And we made school compulsory, which is great. We want kids learning. But we also took them out of society, and we haven't really found a way to put them back in it yet. Like, we don't keep them in mixed spaces with adults. And so when you pull adults, when you pull kids, kids feel lonely and they are the most lonely of any age group. It's wild. And that's always true. Whatever the current youngest generation is, they're the loneliest people.

Why? Because we don't have a place for them in society. We want them to be over there. We want them to be out of the way. We want children to be seen and not heard. And we don't bridge them into society. So they feel like they don't have a place. The other thing is talking about screens, we blame screens, we blame the iPhone, we blame the iPad,

we blame that for loneliness, we blame that for disconnection. But we've done that with everything. In fact, we've been doing it for a really long time. I went all the way back. We even blamed loneliness on the written word because if we were relying on the written word, then we wouldn't be using our memories to communicate with one another. And that was going to create disconnection. So we've done it with the written word. We did it with the telegraph. We also blamed disease on the telegraph, much in the same way that we blamed COVID on 5G. We blamed loneliness on air conditioning. We blamed loneliness on central heating. We blamed loneliness on bedrooms. Just the fact that people have their own room is a reason for loneliness.

Going back and kind of debunking that throughout the book, throughout the research, that it's not screens and it's not, like, these things are not causal. They can be corollary. They could be parallel. They can be symptoms. But they're not causal. And I think that was really fascinating. Yeah, for me, it's hard to believe, but the CDC in the U.S. reports that nearly 42% of high school students report feeling persistently sad or hopeless. When I think of it, it's just not a statistic. That's millions of kids who are carrying invisible weight.

How much of that correlation do you think ties into this loneliness? These are the same thing. Yes, absolutely. You're hitting the nail on the head. Absolutely. Young people, like I said, whoever they, whoever they, youngest people are in society at the time, are pretty much always the loneliest people. And they're always left out of loneliness conversations. When we talk about loneliness, we talk about loneliness

with the elderly. We talk about it as though it's an inevitability of our lives, as though we're going to, we get our driver's licenses, we get our right to drink, we get our right to a hotel room, we get our right to own a car, we buy a house, we get married, we have kids, and then eventually everybody dies and moves away and we become lonely. And that's an inevitability. The thing is, we start our lives lonely because we do not have places to welcome kids into society. We don't have good models for how to introduce them to others. And in fact, in the last 25 years, especially here in the United States, ever since 9-11, 2001, we've had from a top-down systemic issue where we are teaching kids fear, fear of the other,

fear of strangers, fear of the unknown. And we are teaching that to one another. We have generation over generation, not just not knowing how to model connection with other people, but modeling that the idea of a stranger, the idea of somebody that you don't know is inherently dangerous, is inherently something to be afraid of, and that fear, that lack of connection, that is all living together. But, yeah, 100% when you're talking about millions and millions of kids and CDC data and all of that, yes, absolutely.

This is all the same conversation. Yeah. How pervasive do you think this is outside the U.S.? I think it's, we hear about it more in the U.S. because that's where we live. But do you think this is pervasive across all of society, or do you think it's more in the Western countries? Oh, no. It's everywhere. It's just other countries outside of the U.S. have taken it a little bit more seriously than we have. The Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic in 2023. But Britain has had an organization devoted to understanding and combating loneliness for many years. So is Japan. So have many countries around the world. The U.S. is actually late to the conversation and treating it as the mental and physical health crisis that it is, because it is actually a health. In fact, what's wild is that loneliness is exacerbates early death, early mortality from all causes. If you are lonely, you are much more likely to die from all causes. It's killing us sooner. It's not only a mental health issue, but it's a physical health issue.

And it impacts everything from like bad knees to IBS to cardiovascular failure and all points in between. It's wild how like big loneliness gets. and how quickly it gets that way. But yeah, it's everywhere. It's an everyone problem. It's, like I said, it's something that's baked into our DNA to feel lonely. And the U.S. is actually late to the conversation and treating it like the crisis that it is.

I hope you're finding this Thanksgiving conversation with Don Martin meaningful. Part of what Don and I discuss is how loneliness often begins long before adulthood. How so many kids today feel invisible unseen were disconnected even in busy loving homes. That's one of the reasons I wrote my upcoming children's book, You Matter Luma, to help every child feel noticed, valued, and emotionally safe. It's a story that reminds children and adults that being seen isn't something you earn, it's something you deserve. If you want to help a child in your life, feel a little more connected. Visit You Matterluma.com or pre-order the book on Barnes & Noble. Now a quick break from our sponsors.

Thank you for supporting those who support the show. you're listening to passion struck on the passion struck network now back to my thanksgiving day conversation with don martin yeah i think something that you just said there is important for listeners to understand and that is loneliness is kind of like a biological signal it's like hunger or thirst instead of a character flaw that people have. And I think that reframing is really important. Yeah, absolutely. That was a big early aha moment for me, was that we evolved loneliness for a purpose and it's trying to keep us alive. It's trying to keep us connected to other people. The problem is, especially in the modern

day, we view other people as a source of fear. We are afraid of people, especially if they are not like us. If they are the racial other, the sexual other, we're dealing at the immigrant other. If they are somebody who is not like us. If we do not initially view them as part of our in-group, if they are part of our out-group, we are taught not only to fear them, but to stay away from them. Stranger equals danger. But that fear that we have been seeping into all the crevices of society, especially here in the U.S., is only keeping us more disconnected and only exacerbating the loneliness crisis, which is bad because it's literally not good for our mental and physical health. Like I said, loneliness is trying to keep us alive by connecting us with others. And the more

that we fight that, we fight that to our detriment. One of the areas I'm trying to spend more time on is the decline of young men in society and understanding their role and playing the role that they have for really a millennia. And there's a lot of talk about a male loneliness epidemic. And based on your research, is that framing accurate? No. In fact, the male loneliness crisis is a myth. It is made up by dating podcasters, mostly like those alpha bro male dominated podcasters. It's bad dating advice from in-cell folks on that side of the potteroverse from a decade ago that's been repackaged as a loneliness epidemic. In fact, the data tells us pretty consistently that men and women experience almost exactly the same amount.

of loneliness. How they go about creating and fostering connection are different, mostly because of how men and women are treated differently in society. Women are allowed to be emotional. Men are not allowed to be emotional. So women will talk, men will act. There's a lot of other stuff in there, and I go into it farther in the book. But a guy is a cisgender heterosexual man is much more likely to create or foster connection with you by saying, oh, you're going out of town. Yeah, I'll watch your dog or, oh, you need some help fixing that. I'll help fix that for you. That is a way of creating and fostering connection.

As far as actually experiencing loneliness, though, and the detrimental effects of loneliness, men and women are, I think, the most recent peer research data tells us that they are one point different. And the preponderance of the data over the last decades, sometimes women are up a little bit, sometimes men are up a little bit, and it all comes out in the wash. Gender isn't really impacted by loneliness. loneliness is an everyone problem. The idea that this is being, that this is something specific to men,

it literally is rooted in telling young, specifically cisgender heterosexual white men that the reason that you can't get a date is because the world is actually conspiring against you. Everybody's conspiring against you. There's no place for you in society, even though you run everything. There's no place for you and women don't want you and yada, yada, yada. That's a myth.

Well, I just want to ask your opinion, though, why do you think so many young men feel adrift? And, you know, what I really look at is across the world, you have now 130 million young men dropping out of high school. The balance of who's graduating from college is completely flipping from what used to be male-dominated to now female-dominated. Even when I go to church, I'm hearing, you know, the ministers talk about that the male is not fulfilling the role that they used to in the household of being that strong person who's holding their family together. So there's absolutely something here that's going on. Well, yes, you are correct. There is something going on with men. And pretty much every researcher agrees that's true.

It's not loneliness, though. there is, however, something going on with men, but it's something going on with a lot of parts of society. There's this cristo-fascist, extremely right-wing kind of takeover of a lot of places. It has to do with white supremacy and telling men that they are the most important. But you brought up a lot of different kinds of points. So talking about education, who is graduating from college? Well, not a lot. College in and of itself is a luxury for a lot of people. A lot of people can't afford to go to school anymore. A lot of people are embracing trade schools instead. We are seeing other alternatives for formal education, for advanced education, and for what

that degree looks like after the fact. That doesn't necessarily have much to do with loneliness. That has to do with a lot of other factors like finance and government and just what jobs are available. Like a lot of times we put a lot of weight on unemployment report. but we don't put as much spotlight on, like we say, oh, only 5% of the population is unemployed, and yay, that's a win, but we aren't actually deep diving into, okay, so the people that are employed, what does that employment mean? Is everybody working a full-time job? No. In fact, quite a large percent of the population are working multiple part-time jobs or multiple jobs without benefits or something like that. So there's a bigger, more nuanced conversation there. As far as pastors saying that men aren't

fulfilling a role, that starts getting into religion and that starts getting outside of the scope of social science and more into the scope of what any one religion at any one time says that a person's role in society is or should be. We do know, just bringing it back to data real quick, we do know that everybody is getting married later in life for a lot of reasons. It's very expensive to buy a house. It's very expensive to plan, generally speaking. The average age, to get married when you were my parents' age or my grandparents' age was maybe in your late teens, early 20s. And now it's in your late 20s, early 30s. And that number's only going to either peter out or go up, because everything is incredibly expensive. And people are also

prioritizing other things. People are realizing that you don't have to be married to live a fulfilling life anymore. People have more agency than they used to. People have more job prospect than they used to. People have more freedom than they used to. We are seeing that a lot of people don't have to enter marriage for security. They can enter marriage because they want to. And that's meaning that people can get married later in life. They can have kids later in life and they can do that whenever they feel safe and secure, which for a lot of people and a lot of intersections of society is a lot later in life because there's a lot less security just generally speaking. Now, you mentioned malls earlier in the discussion. And there's a fascinating line between the death of the American

Mall and the erosion of social bonds that I think a lot of people probably don't think about. What do malls in their decline reveal about loneliness in America? Well, I actually am really fascinated at how much time we've spent blaming malls for the erosion of community bonds. So the idea of the place of the American Mall inside. of the loneliness discussion is that it's basically an accessible what's called third place for a lot of people. And a lot of communities, if you didn't have anything else, you had the mall. And the mall is where you could go and you could hang out and you could gather and you can

meet up with your friends and you could go yada yada. And sociologists, researchers in the area have always had a contentious feeling about the American mall as a third place because they really exploded in popularity in the 1980s. mall culture really exploded in the 1980s and 1990s, but we saw a shift in the early 2000s, somewhere around 2006, I want to say, which actually, funny enough, we also saw a decline in church attendance at the same time. Church attendance, mall attendance, pretty much all kinds of attendance at existing American institutions, we just stopped going to them after a while. For lots of reasons, somewhat different reasons, but we just stopped going to established institutional

places, but to take it back to the American mall. There is a question as to whether or not the American Mall has ever actually been a third place. If you look at, if you look at the original eight qualifiers for a third place, which comes to us from the book The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg. If you look at the original eight qualifiers for a third place by Ray Oldenburg, the American Mall isn't and never was a third place. It's not a casual place for people in the community to go to. It's, people say that there's, people say that there's no financial barrier for entry, but it is a place of commerce. Like you can't just, you can technically go and not spend money, but it's literally just a whole bunch of stores and restaurants inside of a

building. You aren't necessarily going there to meet new strangers. You might be there to meet up with friends, but the purpose of the third place is to try to kind of get to know the community. New people or regulars and strangers alike, regulars and newbies alike are supposed to mix and create conversation, create community, build and foster, maintain community bonds, discuss the stuff going on in the community. It's supposed to be a very casual kind of vibe. It's supposed to be a home away from home. And the American Mall just simply isn't that and never was.

Some folks disagree because for a lot of people, it is a place to go. And we don't have a lot of places to go, especially because of what's called the suburbanization of America, which is something that Robert Putnam talked about in his book, Bowling Alone, which is a seminal work that came out around the year 2000. It started off as an article in 1995. It came out around the year 2000, his big book, where he also talked about loneliness, but more about disconnection and about how stuff like bowling leagues, stuff like just places to meet up

are disappearing from society and what, if anything, is replacing them. So when it comes to the American Mall and it comes to loneliness, you have to start saying, okay, Oldenburg and a lot of people like to create like a platonic ideal out of the neighborhood bar. When you talk about a third place, a lot of people will talk about the TV show Cheers. Do you remember the TV show Cheers? It's about your neighborhood bar, right? It's a place where everybody knows your name. Absolutely. Yeah, they're always glad you came. And that's where you went after work. That's where you went on the weekends. That's where your friends were. And anybody from the Harvard and Oxford-educated, irritated psychologist, Dr.

Frazier Crane, is sitting next to a Midwestern Corn Fed, Hymbo in the form of Woody Heraldson, and then there's the out-of-work accountant, and then all of different stripes, the hierarchy that exists outside of that place doesn't really exist inside of the bar, right? When we talk about third places, people uplift cheers or the neighborhood bar or something very like it as a platonic ideal of the third place. Ray Oldenberg did that in the great good place, and he really idealized the idea of the neighborhood bar. The problem is neighborhood meetups spaces, generally speaking, are disappearing from society as we continue to prioritize homes over mixed-use spaces. So as more and more land has developed into residential neighborhoods,

you'll notice it's seas of houses, maybe some sidewalks, connected to other seas of houses, maybe connected to estuaries of roads off into a highway somewhere, and then commerce and the neighborhood bar is actually 20 miles away. Because the alternative would be, if you lived in a residential neighborhood, finding out that three doors down, the old Johnson place is getting turned into a neighborhood bar, which I think would freak people out in 2025, where it's like a bar serving alcohol where kids could see. People had this idea that living anywhere near any form of commerce is going to bring in drugs and alcohol and crime and the unhoused and people not like me and that's a terrible idea. And I want to live in a sea of houses. The thing is we also know

that those make people very bored and unfulfilled and increased loneliness. All of this is in conversation with what is a third place? What is the third place in the modern day? what do we do to create third places at all? When it comes to the American Mall and our idealizing of it as a third place, we've already entered into a negotiation of what is a third place. What are we willing to call a third place? No, it doesn't meet all eight. But basically we are entering into a negotiation where we have decided

which version of capitalistic enterprise fits with our version of nostalgia. And in all of that conversation is where do we like to be and where do we like to hang out. The mall, like I said, isn't and never really was intended to be a third place. It was intended to be a main street. It was intended to be a marketplace. It was intended to be a whole bunch of stores inside of the building, which it is. There are some interesting updates to that where we have seen some malls that are risk of dying off because they've been dying for a while now, become mixed-use spaces, but they're becoming mixed-use residential spaces where some of the

unused shops are being turned into apartments. And that's an interesting kind of way to reclaim those spaces. But we are also seeing other people find unique ways to create third places and also reframe our understanding of what a third place is at all. A lot of people who live in big cities, they think that they have access to a lot more third places, simply because they have a lot more amenities around them, a lot more stuff to do around them. But stuff to do is also not necessarily a third place. There's some really interesting information that came out of the American Community Live survey telling us that anybody, that people who live in urban areas, yeah, they have more stuff around them. But when they go hang out at that stuff, the people who live in more urban

areas, more densely populated areas, aren't talking to people in those coffee shops or restaurants or bars or whatever. They're going and hanging out either with themselves or with their friends, so they're not meeting new people. They're still partitioning themselves off from strangers, whereas people in more ex-urban or rural areas might have fewer amenities, but they are much more likely to talk to strangers. When it comes to malls, when it comes to third places, when it comes to all of those conversations, it's a big, messy conversation about which version of capitalism do you apply which version of nostalgia to? And was any of it ever, actually a third place, especially because we've been kicking kids out of them for the last 20 years or

so. One of the best conversions I saw of a mall was when I was an executive at Lowe's. In Wilkesboro, North Carolina, they took the town mall and converted it into the corporate headquarters for a period of time. And then they moved from there to northern suburbs of Charlotte into buildings that had five or six layers and they put all the senior executives on one floor isolated. And I loved them all. One, it had this feel that people would say, yeah, I'm where the old JC Penny used to be, or I'm in the old Sears Automotive, or I'm in the old juice place or the old ice cream store. But because of the way that they're designed to have the whole cafeteria ecosystem around the center of the mall, it made the senior leadership very accessible to the rest of the company.

And you'd see them walking around. And it just made it so that they would stop by cubicles and talk to people a lot more. And then when we moved to the Charlotte location, they started to isolate more to that top floor. And so you were summoned up there. They had their own chef. And I just sought to start to create over time a real difference. and the accessibility to the senior executives and who was able to be around them that really had a profound shift. To me, it was a really interesting dynamic of having them.

Oh, I think they're really interesting. All of the different ones that I've seen that have been converted into these like residential mixed use spaces, I'm just like, man, especially here in the Chicago area, like, I'm just imagining like waking up and it's a blizzard outside, but I don't have to go anywhere because I could just go downstairs to eat. or go downstairs to the bookstore or go downstairs to the movie theater and just spend my whole day inside. There's a lot of positives to it. And also, it gives people, like, accessible housing in much more densely populated areas that

they might not otherwise have been able to afford. So it's a really cool thing. It's a really cool evolution of the mall. And I know that there's a mall near me that's nearing extinction that they're considering turning into a water park, at least part of it turning into a water park. And I'm like, well, I don't know about that. in the middle of winter here in the Chicagoland area. But it's interesting to

see what the next evolution for the American Mall might be because they've been struggling to stay afloat in a lot of places. Yeah, well, I wanted to have a different shift in the conversation and talk about minority communities because

I think it's important, particularly LGBT and people of color. And it seems that they experience loneliness different. What did you find the data that mainstream conversations are missing? Again, just like talking about young people, usually when we talk about loneliness, we talk about it in big, broad strokes data, which typically centers the cisgender heterosexual white experience.

However, to no one's surprise, whenever you start intersecting that data with any kind of marginality, so if you're a person of color, if you're disabled, if you're a queer person, you experience much greater loneliness. It turns out if you are ostracized from society already, that disconnection is just greater. It's just bigger and worse. However, what's fascinating about looking at marginalized communities and loneliness is how marginalized and oppressed communities have risen to create community where they otherwise would not have had any. So I'll just talk about the queer community experience.

If you have young children listening, I'm going to mention a couple of couple of things, and you just, you're warned. Queer people have historically created community in some rather interesting places. If you know the singer Bet Midler, she actually has a nickname called Bathhouse Betty, and that's because she used to sing in bathhouses in New York, and I'm not going to go into much more detail about that, but it will tell you that for a good period of time, queer folks created community in and around spaces where basically nobody else wanted them, and they were allowed to exist. So bars, bathhouses, other places that kind of existed on the edges of legality. And it's in those spaces, it's out of those spaces that, like, community

was formed. Basically, if you've ever seen that cartoon where there's a whole bunch of people and they're in a little box, and they're like, well, you can't be in here. And so this other person goes and creates their own little box, it's that. Marginalized and oppressed communities are actually brilliant at meeting the needs of their own community in creating community spaces, which is why they are so hesitant at times to welcome outsiders into their spaces. But if you experience an intersection of marginality, you are typically just inherently more lonely than other people because you are already experiencing being ostracized from society at large. And Don, your podcast Head on Fire celebrates curiosity.

and challenges conventional wisdom. How do you feel hosting that show has changed the way since 2009 of the way you see yourself and the world? I know for me it does just from the variety of guests that I get to interview like yourself. Yeah, focus on talking to people in overlooked or misunderstood fields. I've really formed a huge appreciation just for expertise and for what expertise means.

Like, I've talked to a mycologist about how studying fungus on fruits greatly impacts the American diet and pesticides and all of that. I've talked to a woman who studies sound, like ocean sounds and what we are learning about the memory of the planet and also how it's made her a better cellist. I talked to Jerry Salts, Pulitzer Prize, senior art critic for New York Magazine, just like about the value of opinion and the democracy. democratization of criticism and what that means and whose opinion matters. And I've just really formed a deep appreciation for what it means to be an expert. And I just think it's really cool that people have these deep wells of knowledge. And what I've learned about it is that there is so much out there that I don't know and that excites me because I get to spend the rest of my life learning. I love that answer. Why do you think people are so hungry for that type of content

right now. Oh gosh. Well, one, I think people are interested in lives that aren't like theirs. But two, I also think right now we are just hungry for expertise. We're just hungry for people that like are just genuinely interested in making the world a better place and doing that through good research and good faith interrogation and willingness to admit that you don't know something, an intellectual curiosity to go find it out. And I think people are really hungry to see folks in positions of leadership or positions of authority.

One, admit when they don't know something. And two, model just what being an expert means. It doesn't mean that you know everything. It means you know how to learn. And it means how to maybe teach that to other people. And I think people are just so hungry for people who are just trying to make the world a better place in their one little weird niche area.

Yeah, and one of the things that, as I was researching, you seemed to cut across everything is that you use storytelling to cut through the noise. And it's allowed you to build followings of hundreds of thousand on social platforms and other things. Why do you think this storytelling is so important to cover often misunderstood topics or overlooked topics? I talk about big stuff. My research, my books, my platform is used to talk about systemic problems, homophobia, transphobia, racism, bigotry, immigration, yada, my work has talked about all the stuff that you're not supposed to talk about at dinner, right? Religion, death, loneliness, big conversations that are like, we're not supposed to talk about that. We're

supposed to talk about the weather and whether or not your car's working or something. But I talk about those things and I think that storytelling allows me an avenue of permission to talk about these things with my audience because nobody ever feels talked down to and nobody ever feels bored. But also, we don't ever skimp on the research either. You're going to come away from my social media content. You're going to come away from my books. You're going to come away from whatever it is that I'm creating. Hopefully, that's the goal of not only being informed, but you're going to laugh along the way. You're going to realize that even though the night is dark and full of terrors, you can learn about it in a way that feels uplifting and hopeful. A lot of times we

engage with deep dark topics, loneliness, death, religion, politics, all of those kinds of things, and come away just feeling really depressed and hopeless. And who am I? I'm one person, I don't matter. And I think bringing it back to something that you all talk about, I think giving people a sense of purpose and a sense that this information isn't too much for you, you can learn it. You can learn a new thing. You can embrace a new thing. You can talk about the big scary stuff in life. And your opinion on it, your involvement in it, your even just your willingness to learn about it matters because you matter. You as a cog and a machine, you as one of 380-something million people, you as one of 7 billion people, you still matter and you can make an impact because

real impact isn't necessarily made at the national or international level is most often made and felt most deeply at the community level, at your street level, in your home. And I think that storytelling is an invitation into a bigger conversation that other people that you might otherwise think you don't really, it's too big, it's too scary, it's too much. I don't even want to broach it because I just don't, my anxiety can't handle it, my mental health can't handle it. But if we start off by talking about animal crossing, if I'm a little self-deprecating, if I invite you into the conversation and reframe things in a way that feels accessible, approachable, and uplifting, not only can you learn, but you can learn how you matter inside

of all of it. I love that answer. Well, Don, minutes before I started talking to you today, I was texting with a friend of mine who was the former chief astronaut of NASA. and I want to ask you a phone question. Sure. You are transported into becoming an Artemis astronaut and you are put on the first mission to Mars and told that you, as one of the first astronauts, have a role in deciding what this new planet is going to be like for the future.

If you could redesign one element of modern life on Mars to help us feel less alone, What would you change first? Oh, God. I actually, I'm going to steal an answer from one of the people that I interviewed. And it was a woman named Sherry who spent decades as a city planner. And I asked her a similar question. I said, okay, so you have a magic wand and you can change one thing about society.

What would you change? And she's, okay, so if it's not mixed use spaces, if it's just like something magical, I would move the garage behind the house. And I was like, what do you mean? He was like, we aren't entering or exiting our homes from our front doors anymore. And in my experience, as a city planner, people self-reported feeling lonelier

in places where the garage is in front of the door because we are entering and exiting our homes through our garage. We are entering and exiting our homes through our cars. So that even that little bit of time that we spend going in and out of our front door, waving at our neighbors, seeing how lives are being lived next to us, across from us. We're not getting that anymore, and we haven't gotten that in a really long time.

So I think some level of putting people in proximity to one another and encouraging one another to literally just spend time with each other. Going in and out of your front door, more mixed-use spaces, communities that are actual communities and not just isolated islands of big boxy houses. I think that starts at the street level. That starts at creating connection with the people on your street. So I'm going to steal that and I'm going to say that.

Okay. Well, I guess the house I just bought fits that description because... Mine does too. In fact, so I interviewed her last year. We bought a house this year. And I am not kidding you. That was a factor. That was a factor when I was deciding which neighborhood I wanted to live in.

That was a factor when I was deciding which house I wanted to buy. that the garage is behind the house. And I'm trying to make it an effort of going in and out my front door, of sitting on my front porch, of getting to know my neighbors, waving at folks across the street, and just living here the last couple of months, I've already felt a little bit safer, which is a big deal to say right now.

It was a queer person married to a queer Mexican immigrant just outside Chicago where the president is sending ice all the time. Just the idea that I am in a community that at least knows who I am and at least on the surface seems to care and check in and wave every now and then. It just creates a sense of safety. It creates a sense of belonging. And it's that sticky stuff that connects you to community. Yeah, I did the same thing. I bought my house with that in mind.

I have a funny story for you. First house I ever bought was in La Mesa, California. We lived in this very blue-collar neighborhood. but every single house had exactly, as we're describing, you would walk up and the garage would be right next to your front door. And I will tell you, I have never been in the neighborhood that had so much neighborhood connection is that one. And all my neighbors were electricians and plumbers and this and that.

And we would hang out on the street corners and have big neighborhood get-togethers. And I remember the first time my parents visited, My dad is now 87. He said to me, why did you buy a house with the garage door facing the street? He goes, I have always hated that. And we always buy houses where it's on the side or behind. And so the houses after that I was buying or moving away from that just because of that comment that my father made. But this one, obviously, we decided to go back to our roots. And now we have almost daily conversations with our who are out in their front yards too, and it's really made, or people walking their dogs or something else. Yeah, people know my dog's name. People ask about him. It's a much different experience.

I grew up in an extremely rural area for the last, better part of the last decade. My husband and I lived on a horse ranch. Me getting to be in community, in a neighborhood with neighbors is a new experience. And it's just, it's been a wild transformation in my own life and in my own happiness and own sense of belonging. That's what I would use my little magic wand or spaceship or something to do. Stick us in more community with one another. So, Don, throughout today, we've been talking about your new book, Where Did Everybody Go, The Loneliness Crisis Unpacked? For people who want to learn more about you, we're the best places for them to go. Oh, sure. Well, I've made it very easy for people so you can find everything by Don Martin at bydawnmartin.com. B-Y-D-O-N-M-A-R-T-I-I-N.

there's links to all of my books. There's links to my podcast. You can find my podcast head on fire wherever you get your podcasts. And I'm all over social media. Once again, made it really easy for you at by Don Martin, B-Y-D-O-N-M-A-R-T-I-N. So TikTok, Instagram, threads, pretty much anywhere. I'm also on YouTube, though I don't do a lot with it. But I don't accept to cross-post interviews and social media content and stuff. But yep, I'm all over there. Probably a smart thing because I struggled so much with understanding their algorithm. That YouTube comment section gets real bad real quick. It's scary.

Don, thank you so much for joining us today on Passion Struck. And congratulations on the release of this latest book. Thanks, John, so much. Thanks for having me. That's a wrap on today's timely and deeply human conversation with Don Martin. I hope it helped you feel a little more connected to yourself, to your people, and to the world we're all navigating. together. Here are a few reminders to carry with you. First, loneliness is not a flaw. It's a

biological signal that we're wired for relationship. Second, disconnection is rarely personal. It's structural, cultural, and far more common than we admit. And the antidote to loneliness isn't more people. It's more meaningful people. If this episode resonated with you, please take 60 seconds to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcast or rating on Spotify. It's a single most powerful way to help new listeners discover these conversations. Want to go deeper, join me at theagnetlif.netedlife.net for weekly insights and behind-the-scenes notes, as well as workbooks. Subscribe to the Passion Struck and Passion Struck Clips YouTube channels for full

episodes, shorts, and bonus content, and visit Start Mattering.com to wear your purpose and remind yourself and others that you matter. On Friday, instead of my typical solo episode, we continue the irreplaceables with a conversation that dives into a different force that isolates us. Not loneliness this time, but vengeance. My guest is James Camel Jr., Yale Lecture in Psychiatry and author of the Groundbreaking New Book, The Science of Revenge. James has spent decades studying why the human brain braves retaliation,

how grievance becomes addiction, and why forgiveness, far from weakness, is actually a neurobiological recovery. In our conversation, we explore why revenge activates the same neural pathways as drugs and gambling and how each of us can interrupt the revenge loop before it destroys our peace, purpose, and relationships. There's this science story that shows that revenge seeking actually activates the same pleasure and reward circuitry as addiction and that your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs.

And that's a huge discovery. It just happened over the last 20 years. And it's of momentous importance because revenge has been shown in multiple forms of data, public health data, the CDC's national violent death reporting system, and the FBI's national crime reports, and also behavioral studies around the world that revenges the primary root motivation for almost all forms of human violence and intentionally inflicted suffering. Until then, remember, to matter is to be seen, to be seen as to be known, and every revolution begins with one intentional act of paying deeper attention. I'm John Miles, and you've been

passion-struck. Thank you.