Something You Should Know - Our Obsession with Aliens & The Dangers of Loneliness and Isolation

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on something you should know, must you sign a legal document in blue or black ink? Then, are we alone in the universe? Are there aliens out there? It's a question humans are obsessed with. There's no culture that doesn't do it. So I really do think that that indicates that we have always had this premonition that we're not alone in the universe and that we kind of enact that by looking to the stars and telling interesting stories about what might be there. Also, everyone crosses their legs, but should you? Could it do harm? And loneliness. It's on the rise. Social connection is declining, and it's a big problem.

Starting point is 00:00:40 There was a time not so long ago. Our social connections were much, much higher, much more likely to spend time with friends, much more likely to have six or more friends, much more likely to not have no friends. And what got in the way was technology, first television and now phones. All this today on something you

Starting point is 00:00:58 You Should Know. When you're flying Emirates business class, enjoying a good night's rest in your lie flat seat, you'll see that your vacation isn't really over until your flight is over. Fly Emirates, fly better. Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know, with Mike Corrupt. You've probably heard the conventional wisdom that when you sign a legal document or I guess any important document,

Starting point is 00:01:38 you should use blue or black ink. But is that true? Well, we are going to start today by looking into that. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to something you should know. So when you sign a legal document, like say a credit card application or a mortgage closing or even endorsing a check, you've probably heard that you should use a blue pen. Well, here's the straight scoop. You probably don't have to, but using blue or black ink is usually a

Starting point is 00:02:08 smart choice. Why? Well, many institutions still prefer blue ink because it stands out against black printed text, and it makes it easier for document handlers to say, yeah, this is an original and not a photocopy.

Starting point is 00:02:24 But with that said, there is no federal law that says a signature in a different color is invalid. What really matters legally is that you intended to sign it, you agreed to the terms, and you actually did sign it. One important aside, though, avoid signing checks or endorsements in red or any other light color unless your bank says it's okay.

Starting point is 00:02:49 Some scanners really struggle with red ink, and while it seldom outright invalidates the check, it can slow things down or raise flags. So for most of us, when in doubt, pick up a blue or black pen, sign neatly, and move on. And that is something you should know. We're about to talk about alien life forms, but not in the usual do they or don't they exist way.

Starting point is 00:03:20 Instead, we're going to talk about something even more fascinating, and that is why humans can't stop thinking about them, why we're so obsessed with aliens. From ancient myths to blockbuster movies, comic books, video games, the idea of beings from another planet somewhere else has a hold on us that never quite lets go. But what's driving this obsession? Is pop culture feeding our curiosity?

Starting point is 00:03:49 Or is our curiosity feeding pop culture? To help unravel this, I'm joined by Becky Ferrara. She's heard on NPR's Science Friday, and she is a science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Popular Science, MIT Technology Review, and the Washington Post. She's author of a book called First Contact, The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens. Hi, Becky. Welcome to something you should know. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. So let's start with a question I've always had, and that is this. So pop culture is filled with stories of aliens and pictures and ideas of what they look like.

Starting point is 00:04:31 They're in movies, in TV, comic books, video games. Is the pop culture what fuels our obsession with aliens, or have people always been obsessed with aliens? And because people are obsessed with them, pop culture delivers stories in movies, books, and TV shows, because that's what we like. I really feel my personal opinion is that this must be a fascination that dates back tens of thousands of years, if not earlier. And the reason I think that is because you see in all myths that are surviving from all cultures a urge to personify the sky.

Starting point is 00:05:08 In many cases, this would have been for survival because people wanted to be able to link the seasons and other important information to the stars. But in order to do that, they made these tales about what might be living there, who's there. they would make the constellations into these various characters. And this is just like, there's no culture that doesn't do it. And so I really do think that that indicates that we have always had this premonition that we're not alone in the universe and that we kind of enact that by looking to the stars and telling interesting stories about what might be there. So when you look back over the centuries of people imagining aliens from other worlds,

Starting point is 00:05:47 has the image of those aliens, do we know? what was it? Was it the way we think of aliens now that we see in the movies, or did they think of it in a whole different way? You do get about 2,500 years ago the first sort of iteration of thinking of aliens in the modern way that we think of them. So an alien as an entity that's like us, a life form like us, that's on a physical plane, similar to our own planet. And that's a really exciting change in history, too. And what was the general sense of how these aliens were getting around? In other words, were they themselves flying through space or were they on a ship? Because it would seem that spaceships would kind of evolve out of, well, first we had

Starting point is 00:06:32 airplanes. And, you know, that's kind of where that came from. But obviously, thousands of years ago, there were no airplanes. So how did they think the aliens were moving around? Yeah, I think it depends as much as you, you know, on the culture and stuff. You have some, you know, some gods in ancient cultures would have particular vehicles like the solar boat is a very common trope throughout the ancient world, the idea that there's a god like riding on the sun and it's a boat that goes under the water at night. So there's things like that that actually have like physical vehicles are imagined, but a lot of it is just, you know, floating gods through space, right? I used it, for example, a very famous Japanese tale, the tale of the moon princess. And this is just,

Starting point is 00:07:16 this is a person who, an alien being, an extraterrestrial entity who's from the moon, who is reborn in a peapod on Earth. So you can have those mystical kind of vehicles where they might be born again and walk among us on Earth. The actual idea of like how we would actually have space travel kind of starts with humans imagining ourselves going into space. You get stories like that about 2,000 years ago. And it's much more, yeah, we're going into space to see them. We go to other planets to visit alien life rather than the other way around. And how were we supposedly going to do that? A lot of the time, it's that a ship goes to sea, and this is, of course, 2,000 years ago

Starting point is 00:07:57 where nobody knew what was on the horizon a lot of the time, would get lost and would end up transported by a whirlwind or something like that to another planet. That's the premise of what is widely considered the first alien science fiction story, which was written 2,000 years ago by this satirist. called Lucian of Samasota. And it's called True History. It's a very funny book. It's meant to be a send-up of a lot of the things that's going around at that time, which aliens are often very good satirical material. But that's the way that it was imagined then. I don't know if you know this statistic or have a sense of it, but what's the general feeling among people in the world

Starting point is 00:08:36 today as to whether or not there are aliens or we've been visited or, you know, what's the general sense of the world. So I can't speak for all cultures because obviously this changes a lot depending on where you're at. But for North Americans and for Western culture in general, that is a very, people believe in aliens much more than they don't. And all throughout history, you have this kind of interesting dance between the alien optimist and the alien pessimist,

Starting point is 00:09:02 and the pessimists are always wildly outnumbered by the optimists. So what's interesting to me is that people are coming to that conclusion through very different means. I personally believe that aliens are more likely than not to exist simply as an odds game, because when you look at the universe and see all these play, it just seems much more strange to me that you would have something unique happen on Earth. But other people come to that realization through these intense experiences that they have where they feel like they've communicated with aliens or that aliens have abducted them, all these kinds of things. And even if you're not a person that has felt that or

Starting point is 00:09:39 experienced something like that, I think just the ripple of effect of knowing people that have had that kind of experience, the connection and the subculture that has grown out of that, has really given people this idea that there's got to be something out there. And then you also have just this very adversarial relationship between the government and the UFO community and the UAP kind of community. What does UAP stand for? Oh, it's unidentified anomalous phenomena. It's the new term that people are trying to use a bit more because it extends to, you know, things that you would see in the ocean and things like,

Starting point is 00:10:14 things that are not necessarily flying. That has also driven a lot of engagement and helps aliens become, like, one of the best fuel for conspiracy, right? The idea that the government is hiding them to some extent or whatever. So it's really interesting to me that we still, as our ancestors did, have these diverse meanings of what aliens are, but there is a very clear preference in the public for the idea that they do exist and walk among us or that they have been here that's i think a much more fringe idea but that's you know it's very common and um i you know writing on this topic i certainly get

Starting point is 00:10:52 feedback all the time for people who who feel like that has happened i personally don't subscribe to that i've never had those experiences but i don't diminish people who are uh you know have their own experiences of these kind of things i think they should be listened to but yeah so i don't personally believe that they've walked among us i don't think there's evidence to support that um but I think most people who are following even just the scientific search for life feel like it's intuitively more likely that you would have, even simple microbes. It doesn't necessarily have to be a full alien civilization, but it seems really unlikely that even given how unique Earth is,

Starting point is 00:11:28 this would be the only place that would spring life. Well, when you look at pictures of Earth and where it sits in our galaxy and where our galaxy sits in our little corner of the universe and how big the whole universe is and you think about the speed of light and how far, how fast, and how long it would take aliens to get here, it just seems so unlikely.

Starting point is 00:11:54 Yeah, absolutely. I'm very pessimistic that we will have a contact with an intelligent alien life form, certainly in our lifetimes, but, you know, I think it's a really, you're not only putting out the space problem, but the idea that we could be on the same wavelength, literally, right? Like, is very, it's hard to believe, right?

Starting point is 00:12:14 We're working with a lot of human assumptions about how is the best way to communicate with these aliens, and we're coming up short on our end, so there's no reason to expect that another intelligent civilization would, A, even be interested in contact, and then B, would be able to think about how another intelligent species would think. I mean, this is just like, you know, it's an unknown, unknown kind of a situation, right?

Starting point is 00:12:39 It is something that I think is frustrating for people who are interested in this topic. But I also think it's kind of an opportunity to see that this really is an intergenerational journey, a quest, to discover if we're alone or not and to constrain the odds that we're alone. And it should be looked at in that way. That's why I like to think about the deep roots of this history because I think all of the thinking that our ancestors, did about how the sky works and what's different and what's the same, what's a cycle, what's an anomaly. This has really set us up to be able to use the amazing instruments that are coming online right now to search for life. So it may be frustrating to think it won't happen in your lifetime, but at the same time we're part of a grand mission that goes back many thousands of

Starting point is 00:13:25 years. Well, there's really two parts to this, at least the way I look at it, is when you look at the vastness of space and all the galaxies and all the zillions and trillions of planets, it does seem likely that there is alien life somewhere else. There just odds are. But that's a very different theory than we've had contact with them, that they've been here or we've had some interaction. Those are two very different things. Yeah, I totally agree.

Starting point is 00:13:58 And I think there's a sense that when we look at a, our past, the amazing things that humans have done, you know, without the technological advances that we have today, it can seem, this is, you know, the sort of plays into this ancient aliens idea that aliens have come to help us in the past with all these things. I just reject that outright. I think human, the fact that we see that all over the world, these amazing constructions and monuments and achievements that you just wonder, how could someone just with so few tools be thinking along these amazing lines? Like, that is just a testament to our own species. I'm a very human chauvinist. I believe in our ability to do these kinds of things. So I do think that I see no need

Starting point is 00:14:35 to credit aliens for things like that. I want to ask you in a moment about Area 51 and Roswell and what's going on over there. And I'm talking with Becky Ferrara. She is author of the book First Contact, the story of our obsession with aliens. Maybe it's just a phase you're going through. You'll get over it. I can't help you with that. The next appointment is in six months. You're not alone. Finding mental health support shouldn't leave you feeling more lost. At CAMH, we know how frustrating it can be trying to access care. We're working to build a future where the path to support is clear,

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Starting point is 00:15:52 So, Becky, what about Area 51 and Roswell? And people have been talking about these things that they're hiding something. It's all very mysterious. Nobody really knows. So what's going on there? Yeah, with Area 51 and with Roswell, they're both fascinating stories. Area 51 is an example of kind of the thing I was talking about before, where you can attribute a lot of these sightings to human activity. In the 90s, you know, the Air Force admitted that they had told many people during the 1940s and 50s who were reporting these UFOs that they were wrong.

Starting point is 00:16:25 that hadn't seen anything when they in fact knew that it was their experimental spycraft, right? That this was a new age of aviation and trying to get an edge in the Cold War. And so I think that that to me shows that there was a, you know, a willingness to kind of deceive the public about what was really going on in the interest of not giving up any secrets about their spy craft programs. With Roswell, it's a really interesting case because there actually was a cover up there, but it was very tiny. Like the, The official report is that that crashed object was a part of Project Mogul, which is this program that was high altitude balloons to try to detect Soviet nuclear weapon detonations in the atmosphere. So they didn't want people to know that that's what they were doing.

Starting point is 00:17:13 They didn't want people to be scared that, you know, the Soviets were going to be testing these nuclear weapons. And so they just said it was a regular weather balloon. It's a very small lie, but that's just because it was a lot. that really propelled the distrust. So I think there's real lessons there that the U.S. government now was kind of trying to change its posture and be more transparent because that was, it's a tough situation.

Starting point is 00:17:38 You don't want to give up your top secret information, but at the same time, when you're deceiving the public, that gives grounds to these conspiracy theories, right? Because they are grounded in some tiny level of truth. Right, yeah, that just adds fuel to the fire when they do that. I've also had this pretty strong belief that, you know, if there was an alien that crashed and he's being held in a tube somewhere in New Mexico, somebody would have talked. By now, somebody who was there, who had been there,

Starting point is 00:18:09 or their grandson would have found a letter, and there isn't any. I really don't think that a conspiracy of this size is that containable. I know a lot of people really vehemently disagree with me on this and perhaps I shall one day be rendered wrong by the big revelation of this tentacled creature at Area 51 or something like that. But yeah, I tend to agree with you on that that, you know, a lot of people will often be like, well, the scientists, they're hiding this. As a science reporter, I can tell you that scientists want the truth out more than almost any demographic I could imagine. I don't think that would last very long in containment in scientific sphere, a secret of that proportion. You know, and I also just to the, I just,

Starting point is 00:19:02 I just think the public would be able to handle that. Maybe that's naive of me. I just don't see the reason for having some kind of decades long conspiracy or like cover up about this kind of thing. I think, you know, it's, it would be much more damaging to the public to learn that there was no transparency on such an important issue than it would be to just. come clean about it. Right, yeah. So if there is an alien in a tube in New Mexico, just tell us what would be the harm in that. From your lips to Congress, right? Like I really, I don't like the kind of speculation without the evidence of this kind of, on this kind of topic, because it's a topic of incredible importance to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. So yeah, I think

Starting point is 00:19:49 the, I think it's a very unlikely outcome that there have already been aliens that are, you know, put under wraps and military centers. But it does make for good lore. It's a very good driver of great popular culture content. And so I can't, I can't fold it for that. Regardless of what you believe about aliens, I find it so fascinating that it is such a big topic. It's, you know, kind of the ultimate conspiracy theory. And people love to speculate about what could be, what might be, what has happened, what hasn't happened. it sparks that energy in people. Oh, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:20:29 I mean, it is the original content like gusher. You know, there's a really interesting story even just from the 1830s where a New York Penny Press ran a fake story about how aliens had been discovered on the moon, and it made the Penny Press's circulation just go into the stratosphere. I mean, this is like a very old phenomenon that if you stick aliens in it, it's going to become just an incredibly popular story. And I think it speaks to what I was talking about before. This is just a subject that people are innately interested in.

Starting point is 00:21:00 It's accessible. The bar is low for getting into it because aliens are such an immersive part of our popular culture. They're ubiquitous. And there's also actually some scientific grist to it, right? Like that's my main beat for aliens is the tools and technologies and observatories that will actually try to answer that question to some degree that is reproducible. on firm ground, right? So it has all the elements. It's got this human appeal that is deep in our being, and it's also got these tendrils on the government and science, and there's

Starting point is 00:21:33 constant news about it. You know, you even see with the new interstellar object, the comet that has come through our solar system this year, that just, you know, that should just be an interstellar comet, but that is sparking all this conversation again about aliens. It's very easy to graft aliens into a lot of subjects that maybe they shouldn't even be in, but because we just can't help ourselves as humans, we need to see the alien and everything. I wanted to ask you, though, when civilization matured and people started writing stories,

Starting point is 00:22:03 and there was fiction and books and articles and then movies and TV, how much did that turbocharge the interest? Oh, yeah, very much, especially I think visual pop culture, the advent of, you know, pulp fiction in the 20s and 30s that then was fed into film. That is a big part of the main,

Starting point is 00:22:22 you see, and you see it affecting how people, what kind of aliens they would see if they were seeing aliens and sightings or reporting that they had had contact with aliens walking among us, right? You would see the kind of pop cultural aliens at the time. So the gray alien that emerges that's very famous, you know, that's a, that's a creation of 30s and 40s pulp fiction that then people start to actually see in real life. Well, that's what I find so fascinating about this is how it touches a nerve in people. And as, and as you've pointing out, it's done this forever. And people have always looked up and wondered, but there's something so, I don't know what it is, that it really gets people going that there must be something

Starting point is 00:23:05 out there. And I think there must be something out there. But boy, then the imagination takes the ball and runs. You can really take it anywhere. And I do think that, you know, we're a species that we do like to empathize with aliens, well, I shouldn't say alien, but like other types of intelligences even on Earth, right? We are a species that has domesticated a lot of animals. We used to walk around with other human species with whom we interbred like the enderthals. So it's kind of in our imaginative DNA to think that, you know, there's something out there that could understand us. And so I think it really, we've had experiences before of being able to create some kind of contact with another species, even here on Earth, and that is informing our, you know, deep

Starting point is 00:23:51 premonition that it could be possible out in space as well. Well, this is a topic where truly the imagination can just run wild. And as you pointed out, people have been speculating about life out there somewhere forever, and it's, well, I guess it's just hard not to. Becky Ferrara has been my guest. She can be heard on NPR's Science Friday program. And she's author of the book, First Contact, The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Becky, thanks for exploring this with us. Thank you so much, Mike. I appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:24:29 When they were young, the five members of an elite commando group nicknamed the Stone Wolves raged against the oppressive rule of the Kradarocan Empire, which occupies and dominates most of the galaxies inhabited planets. The wolves fought for freedom, but they failed. leaving countless corpses in their wake. Defeated and disillusioned, they hung up their guns and went their separate ways, all hoping to find some small bit of peace

Starting point is 00:24:56 amidst a universe thick with violence and oppression. Four decades after their heyday, they each try to stay alive and eke out a living, but a friend from the past won't let them move on, and neither will their bitterest enemy. The Stone Wolves is season 11 of the Galactic Football League Science Fiction series, by author Scott Sigler.

Starting point is 00:25:18 Enjoy it as a standalone story or listen to the entire GFL series beginning with season one, The Rookie. Search for Scott Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Adam Gidwitz,

Starting point is 00:25:35 host of Grim, Grimmer, grimist. On every episode, we tell a grim fairy tale. Not the cute, sweet versions of the fairy tales that your children have heard so many times. We tell the real grim fairy tales. They're funny. They're weird. Sometimes they're a little bit scary.

Starting point is 00:25:52 But don't worry, we rate every episode, Grim, Grimmer, or Grimmist. So you, your child, your family can choose the episode that's the right level of scary for you. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmist, and our new season, available now. The holidays bring out the best and the hardest parts of the best. being human. For many people, it's a season of warmth and togetherness, but for others, it's a moment when loneliness cuts the deepest. And that's not something we can shrug off. We now know that social connection isn't just nice to have, it's a core ingredient for long, healthy living. Isolation, on the other hand, carries real physical and emotional consequences. To explore just how

Starting point is 00:26:42 profound this is and what practical steps we can take to strengthen our own connections, I'm joined by Ken Stern. He's a leading authority on longevity and aging, host of the Century Lives podcast from Stanford Center on Longevity, and he is the former CEO of NPR. Ken is also author of the book Healthy to 100, how strong social ties lead to long lives. Hi, Ken, welcome to something you should know. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. So I imagine most people listening have heard that social connection is important. Friendships are important. But I think where it gets fuzzy is what does that mean? Is one friend good? Do I need 100 friends? Do I need 10 friends? What about my siblings? If I'm married, am I bulletproof? Nobody really seems to know what social connection is. So let's zero in on

Starting point is 00:27:38 When we talk about social connection, what is it? Yeah, so it tends to be some combination of all those things you just mentioned, Mike. It's the ecosystem of friends, family, neighbors, people you know very deeply, and people you know casually. Those are your ecosystems. And the strength of it, you know, can vary a lot from person to person. But it's the people who care about you. there for you in an emergency, who get you out of the house and help you have a purposeful

Starting point is 00:28:15 life. That's the best way I think I can describe what someone who has good social connections has. It makes me wonder, though, that if it is so vital to our existence, to our health and longevity and everything, why we're not better at it? Why it's so hard for so many people to connect with others. You think we'd be better at it. We could do it better. You might think that, Mike, but we have all sorts of negative health behaviors in our life.

Starting point is 00:28:46 We're not very protective when it comes to how we live our lives. You know, we've been, there was a time not so long ago, probably 40, 50 years ago that our social connections were much, much higher than we are now, much more likely to spend time with friends, much likely to have six or more friends, much likely to not have no friends. And what got in the way was technology, first television and now phones. Robert Putnam wrote about it in Bowling Alone, starting around the 1980s. Technology got in the way of our social connections.

Starting point is 00:29:22 We're much more likely to be lonely and socially isolated. And that is actually when people in the United States and our healthy aging started to diverge from other better, more healthfully aging countries. So talk about some of those places where this is less of a problem and what goes on there that we might learn from. Everything that is intervening between us and our social connections is true in other countries. They have phones, they have televisions, they have bad technology habits. You get on a subway in Singapore or in Seoul.

Starting point is 00:29:58 People are face down in their phones just like they are here. And yet their healthy aging is much better than here. You have a chance of the odds that you'll live about a decade longer in Tokyo than you will in New York in terms of healthy aging. So I wanted to go to these places and find out what's different there. And the primary difference is they've put social health and social health infrastructure at the core of their healthy aging strategies in ways we haven't done here. They talk less about hospitals, they talk less about fitness, they talk less about

Starting point is 00:30:35 eat well. They focus their public strategies and their social strategies on how to help keep people connected as the age. And they do it by doing things like what? Yeah. So the key to social connection is being around like-minded people. The science of social connection and friendship is you have to be proximate to someone for up to 50 hours to be a friend, 200 hours to be a close friend. And what happens in, as we age,

Starting point is 00:31:06 is we get socially isolated and have less chance to make connections. So in these countries, it's all about how do you take people as they age and put them next to people for many hours. So that's often about working longer. People say in Japan are much more likely to work in their 60s, 70s, and 80s as a health strategy, not as an economic need. It's a commitment to lifelong learning in the U.S. We often think of learning as something we do in the first quartile of life. But like in Korea, it's a constitutional right and people think of it as something they do across their lives.

Starting point is 00:31:42 So you see old people at college. You see old people in lifelong learning centers. It's about a culture of volunteering that puts people for many hours a week together. Or it's in things like intergenerational relationships. The one of the things that was universal across the five countries I studied for this book is they all imagine that intergenerational relationships putting the young and the old together is a key element of healthy aging for both the old folks and also for a key element of development for the young. So there are systems they set up to bring people together in significant ways

Starting point is 00:32:22 throughout the life course. That really makes a difference to social connection and as a result to healthy aging. So people who have a lot of social connections, have friends in their lives as they get older. How did they typically make those friends? How did these people come together? Just speaking for myself, a lot of my good friends are still back from my college and graduate school days. And that's because we were together all the time and built very close lifelong relationships.

Starting point is 00:32:56 opportunities to be together on a continuous basis, start to decline as you get older. Work's a big piece of it. So a lot of people's social networks come from work, not because people who work are better at social connections, but because they're constantly together, less so in the age of remote work. But historically, when you're together, that builds friendships, social connections, and relationships that are important. What happens as we get older, it's not that we really get worse at it, is that there's less and less time that we spend with lots of different people. So as you retire, especially, all those relationships that you built up at work, they often just fall off a cliff. So as I listen to you talk, it sounds like,

Starting point is 00:33:43 from what you're saying, that the problem happens later in life. But I know plenty of like middle age people who seemingly fall into this category. That it isn't retirement and after. It's almost everybody except maybe, you know, kids in school because they're kind of forced into being social. Yeah, it's the loneliness of modern life. We all live in big cities now surrounding people and we're increasingly lonely. And that's largely because we've allowed technology to intervene between us and spending time with friends. That's not a, I write about the second half of life. That's my bias.

Starting point is 00:34:22 But loneliness is not limited to it. In fact, the people who actually describe themselves as loneliness are younger people. They're surrounded by others, but they can still be lonely. And part of it is because it is the case that any time in your life, you can feel without purpose, without meaning, you can be divorced from those around you. It's harder in the second half of life, so that's why I describe it. But that can happen anytime. And that's why many of the things I write about in terms of finding purpose, meaning finding, seeking out relationships that matter, actually apply it just as much to your, to your 20s and 30s as they do to your 70s and 80s. So when people find themselves feeling this loneliness, did it creep up on them or is it a fairly sudden thing where it just all of a sudden one day feels bad or it just kind of, you kind of slide into this and then realize you're like, how?

Starting point is 00:35:22 How does it happen? So we all, you know, there's no magic formula to this, Mike. There's no one-size-fuss-all. We're all lonely at some times in our lives. We're all feeling, we're all, feel isolated at sometimes. The most connected people can feel that. There's no, there's no magic pill or magic potion that can keep you from feeling lonely. The real risk is that we don't build the social networks that will get us.

Starting point is 00:35:52 through those times, right? The hard times, you know, if you look back 100 years, we all grew up in very tight-lit-knit communities. We had the infrastructure that would help us through times of feeling lonely or disconnected or purposeless. Right now, we did not to have those. So part of the goal that everyone should have

Starting point is 00:36:16 is thinking about where can I find people who are like-minded? Where can I find people who will stick with me? and help me through those difficult times. Because we're all going to feel lonely. We're all going to feel disconnected at some time during our lives. I know I felt that. I'll guess, Mike, that you felt that there is no magic pill that will immunize us from it, from the senses of loneliness.

Starting point is 00:36:42 It is having social networks and people around us help us. You asked me at the beginning, Mike, about what is being socially connected? Is that having one friend or two friends or five friends? It really depends on your needs, but it's having enough people to help you carry through those times of loneliness and, you know, for some for despair. Well, I remember hearing, you know, was on a different topic. It was about children. But they said one of the barometers of a child's success is if they have friends. And just all it takes is one. If they have no friends, that's a real problem. One friend, and then, their bulletproof. Does that apply to grownups, too? So I don't know if there's a formula for it. I will say that the number of people reporting that they have no friends has increased about tenfold since the beginning of the century. So if

Starting point is 00:37:40 that's the barometer, there are a lot more people at risk now than before. The social scientists will say, do you have someone who you can call in an emergency? If you wake up at the middle a night and your heart is pounding and you need to go to the hospital. Do you have someone who can call who's not 911? That's a barometer of social connection. But there are others. And I don't know if it's one friend. I suspect that's different from person to person. I actually like to think of it as a network of friends, some who are close. And frankly, there's also something called weak ties, people who you know but aren't close friends. That's actually also a barometer of good health. So I sort of push back on the notion that you should aim to have one or two or one

Starting point is 00:38:27 close friend and one distant friend. You need to find a network that is comfortable for you and that you can turn to an emergency. And, you know, often it's good to have a portfolio of friends in those cases. But given what you said, that the number of people who claim to have no friends has, what did you say, 10 times more than from the beginning of this century? Yeah, exactly. Telling them to go get more friends or to find a network obviously doesn't work because if they knew how to do that, they would do that. So how do you do that? Yeah, I never tell people to go make friends.

Starting point is 00:39:03 One of the most frequent questions I get is from people who say, I'm an introvert. How do I make friends? I'm kind of introvert myself, and I couldn't tell you the best way to make friends. I can tell you, though, that the key to friendship is being in physical friends. proximity to people and that you need to find ways to be in physical proximity to people on a regular basis. Work is a good element of that. Going back to school is a good element. Volunteering is a good way to do that. All reasonably calculated, being involved in your neighborhood is another way to do it. That's where friends come from, not by going out to the bar

Starting point is 00:39:41 and buying rounds of drinks. It's from being together in a place that has meaning and value to you and being close to people, physically proximate to people who share those values. So deliberately trying to make friends may not be a great strategy. It doesn't hurt. But I will tell you, if I could go back to Japan, which is the longest lived country on Earth, where the median life expectancy now for women is 90, which is crazy high. It also has the highest number of older workers, and 80% of them say that they go back to work, not because they need the money,

Starting point is 00:40:19 but because that gives them the reason to get out of the house. It gets them next to people who share common interests, and it gives them a sense of purpose. It's not that they're learning to make friends, it's that they're being in places where they are next to people who share interests. And friendship and social engagement flows from that. Do you think that people who are struggling with this or seemingly struggling with this,

Starting point is 00:40:47 know they are? Or do they think, well, you know, I'm on Facebook and I have friends of there and I'm okay? Oh, I think, you know, the last surgeon general described that we have a loneliness epidemic in this country. And it's not because, I don't think that was a surprise to people.

Starting point is 00:41:08 People know that they're lonely. They know that they're being intermediated by technology. what they don't have is sort of a clear path back towards social connection. And that's because in the U.S., you know, there are all these institutions that brought people together. They could be unions, they could have been churches, they could have been sewing circles, they could have PTA. All of those institutions have been declined for a half century now.

Starting point is 00:41:35 And we haven't created new social mechanisms to bring people together. That's the challenge, which is not that people are any less friendly, or any less sociable or desire friendships less, set the mechanisms for the social health infrastructure in the U.S. just like our roads. They're filled with potholes and decline, and we haven't invested them in them in the ways they have in other countries. Well, it's interesting to hear how other countries and cultures

Starting point is 00:42:03 are attacking this problem of loneliness and isolation. But on a very personal level, people struggle with what to do. If they're feeling, I think, if they're feeling lonely or isolated and they want to fix that, I don't, I, what's the advice? Because it sometimes seems kind of vague, you know, go out and meet people, be connected. So what do you do? Yeah, well, I guess too, it's a little vague in the sense of, you know, if you want to be healthier, eat more vegetables, move more, exercise. If you want to be socially connected, what?

Starting point is 00:42:47 Yeah, absolutely, right? So this falls a little bit upon people like me who write about these topics, which is a pretty small group in the grand scheme of things. You can go down to your bookstore if it's that bookstore still exist and buy, you know, find 100 books on healthy eating and 100 books on exercise. You might find one or two on social connection. And those are, you know, generally have advice for you about how you can do better yourself. I'm a little bit different in the sense that I think this is a societal challenge.

Starting point is 00:43:22 There are things you can individually do. I describe some of this conversation. But really, the big goal should be to how can we create these opportunities for people to work longer or for lifelong learning or intergenerational relationships. How can we bring people together in community? And there are things that are going on, but there tend to be very small and isolated. How can we scale those opportunities and provide more people, more opportunities to be socially connected? We'll be a much better place if we do. You know, we're doing this interview and this episode around the holidays, and I bet everybody's been in this situation where there's probably somebody in your neighborhood or somebody you know at work or somebody that you, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:06 You want to reach out to, but then you think, well, it's really none of my business, but maybe you should go knock on the door and invite them over for, but I think people don't more than they do because it's just like it's awkward. So one of the things we go through life thinking we're the only ones and thinking those people over there, they're much better off than we are, they don't care about me, they don't want to be connected with me. It often takes someone to make the first step to building their relationships, because, in fact, most people say that they are open to new relationships.

Starting point is 00:44:40 They want new relationships. So knocking on someone's door can be a really meaningful thing for you and for them as well. One of the things I saw when I went was in Singapore is they have entire networks of people, older people whose jobs are to deliver meals to socially isolated seniors. And part of it is just to get meals in their hands. But the reason they have older people doing is because they want them to actually build relationships with the people whose doors they're knocking on delivering meals to. People, you know, we live in very lonely times.

Starting point is 00:45:16 And I think we underestimate the power of a simple gesture, the power of saying hello, the powering of office. to do something with someone because we're kind of all looking for those connections, whether it appears on the outside or not. You know, a common recommendation, and one you've even suggested in this conversation, is that people volunteer because that's a way to meet people. Is it a way to meet people because you're helping them, or is it the other volunteers?

Starting point is 00:45:48 Or what's the magic of volunteering as it relates to social connection? So volunteers often get the most value and the strongest relationship, not from the necessarily that people are serving, but from other volunteers. Those are actually the friendships that actually develop from those because people are together for multiple hours. So it's often a different set of relationships that emerge from this than you might think. Well, this is such an important topic any time of year, but certainly around the holidays. I think it's critical to shine a light on it because this need for social connection

Starting point is 00:46:21 of people being with people in the real sense of being with people is fundamental to our well-being and our happiness. Ken Stern has been my guest. He is the former CEO of NPR, a recognized expert on longevity and aging, and he's author of a book called Healthy to 100, How Strong Social Ties Lead to Long Lives. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Ken, thank you. Happy holidays. Thanks for coming on.

Starting point is 00:46:51 Mike, thanks for having me on the podcast. You sit down and what's the first thing you do? Cross your legs. Almost automatically. Everyone does. And just as quickly, someone will warn you that you're going to get varicose veins or ruin your circulation if you cross your legs. Is any of that true?

Starting point is 00:47:13 According to Dr. John Modral, a vascular surgeon at the University of Arkansas, the answer is pretty simple. No. Crossing your legs does not cause varicose veins. Genetics, age, pregnancy. Well, those things matter, but leg crossing does not. What about blood pressure? Well, there was a study back in 2007 that did show a small rise in blood pressure when people crossed their legs, which sparked some concern. But a closer look showed the bump is very small and very temporary, nothing that leads to long-term cardiovascular trouble. And circulation? Again, not a problem. Sitting still in any position for a long time isn't great, but most of us naturally shift around when we get uncomfortable,

Starting point is 00:48:02 which is probably what you do when you cross your legs for too long. So the bottom line is, cross your legs all you want. It's not harming your veins, your circulation, or your heart. And that is something you should know. So I imagine you're an influential person, so I'm going to ask you to use that influence. And in conversation, should the occasion arise that you could bring up this podcast and mention it to people and suggest they listen,

Starting point is 00:48:28 it is a great way to show your support for the podcast because it helps us grow our audience, listener by listener. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. The Infinite Monkey Cage returns imminently. I am Robert Inns, and I'm sat next to Brian Cox, who has so much to tell you about what. What's on the new series?

Starting point is 00:48:49 Primarily Eels. And what else? It was fascinating, though, the Eels. But we're not just doing Eels, are we? We're doing a bit. Brain computer interfaces, timekeeping, fusion, monkey business, cloud, signs of the North Pole, and Eels. Did I mention the Eels?

Starting point is 00:49:03 Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Segas O.C? Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

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