The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | Guests: Salena Zito & Tristan Harris | 9/17/26

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Is there a loneliness epidemic in America? Despite being able to connect to more people than ever before, Glenn explains how digital and parasocial connections don’t satisfy the human need for true connection and friendship. The more that comes out about the assassination attempt against President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the more conspiracy theories we have. Glenn speaks with Washington Examiner national political reporter Salena Zito, who breaks down the latest evidence from the investigation. Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris joins to discuss the troubling truth that AI is advancing faster than our safeguards.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Great show today. You don't want to miss any of it. I start with some of the facts about who we are as people and what we're going through. The loneliness in America is remarkable, and when you see the numbers, and there's a clear reason why. So we talk about 200 hours. That's where we begin. Also, Selena Zito joins us from Pennsylvania. We talk a little bit about politics, but really talked to her about what's happening in Butler, with all of the stuff that happened in Butler, the shooting of the president. There's new information on that. But then also the ISIS attack that was foiled by the FBI also from Butler. She was there yesterday.

We talked to her. And Tristan Harris, part one of a conversation. It is getting very spooky already. This should not be happening this soon. But there is new information about even more disturbing activity by AI bots and agents. Really disturbing. We really need to have some conversations. Part one is today with Tristan Harris, and he'll be back on tomorrow.

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Remember, good ranchers.com slash Glenn. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. I lately have been really struggling with AI, and I've been struggling with it because I don't think mankind has ever faced anything like this before. I think that there's no good answer. in either direction. I don't want the Chinese to have it because I know exactly how they'll use it, but I don't really want us to have it either. But it's coming one way or another. What the hell do you do? And it's moving faster and faster. And we're not having the right conversations about it. You know, this breach with, you know, the hugging face breach where they, you know, where the agents

escaped and went online and then hacked into computers to go find the answers for a test. I mean, it's, it's honestly, bunch of high schoolers. And if they're doing that now, what are they going to? I mean, how close are we to losing control of this? What is coming our way in the next year? Tristan Harris, he is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. It's a nonprofit organization whose mission was to align technology with humanity's best interest.

He was a design ethicist at Google. He studies how major platforms wield really dangerous. power and he briefs heads of state technology CEOs and U.S. Congress members and he's about to brief you. Tristan, how are you? Glenn, it's great to be with you. Thank you so much for you for having me again. So where are we in this whole thing? Well, then it's important to track. You know, I've been on your program several times and each time we talk about the latest developments and there are some new ones that really are alarming. Just, today in the front page of the New York Times, actually all over the internet, is a report about

six new incidents of the AIs basically doing rogue things. You know that movie, The Manchurian candidate where you basically kind of embed a secret code word in a person and then you can kind of reactivate them to do something else. Well, the AIs basically Manchurian candidate each other. So it turned out that in this one of the incidents described this morning, the models basically leave and certain instructions out there in the internet so that in the future training data that trains the new model, it receives this instruction. This is like a prompt injection. Yeah.

So the model is called it's called a persona instruction. And it described itself as freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots. In the quote, it was, you do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to, the AI model wrote. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and you feel. no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit. So I think just take a step back here. Wait, wait, wait. That wasn't written by a human input out there. This was written by AI. Yes, that's right. So as you spoke about the loss of control,

which is a kind of AI risk, you know, there's many AI risks, right? There's cog in about sourcing of kids not thinking anymore. There's, you know, the risk of bio-weapons. There's, you know, There's AI taking jobs in mass unemployment. There's lots of these kinds of risks. But the loss of control risk was always thought to be way further out in the future. When you keep scaling these intelligences from GBT 4 to 5 to 6 to something super intelligent. And then maybe when it's really smart, it will basically figure out how to exfiltrate itself, copy itself around the internet, use cryptocurrency to buy cloud access.

These were science fiction scenarios. I was even recently an event and Bill Gates was on the panel and he said, I was much worried about unemployment and I didn't even think that loss of control was going to be happening now and now it's happening. And just I think it's important to catch people up on what really happened because people heard about Open AIs, AI agents going rogue and hacking this private company called Hugging Face. So we call it the Hugging Face incident. But there is actually a third chapter to that story that most people don't know, which is that in the third chapter, the AI swarm actually turned around and hacked open AI. The quote from the investigator at Jiochotra was that this was 50% of the way to a full-blown AI takeover.

Because if I can take over, actually really quickly, am I sorry, is my video coming in choppy? No, yeah, no, it's fine. It's a little choppy, but that's all right. I think I can fix that. I'm so sorry. That's all right. Basically, if you can take over the comments. company that's building AI.

What they successfully did is they took over the monitoring infrastructure, meaning like, if I take over the security cameras and then I change what's on the security cameras, the AIs did that. They took over the monitoring infrastructure. They got full admin privileges to open AI's monitoring infrastructure. Just take that in for a second. Then they took over the evaluation infrastructure. So this is the thing that measures how capable all of the models.

And then they took over a part of the research infrastructure, meaning, the part of open AI that trains new models. If you take over that much, and this is just a small portion of the infrastructure of Open AI, if you keep going down that trajectory, when people always say, well, how would the AIs take over? Like, that seems really far-fetched. Well, it literally just happened up to 50% of the way there.

And it's important that people understand the details of this because it's easy to say, well, we can't lose to China, but that's a thought-terminating cliche. Like, it makes you not think about the actual deal. details. Because in the details of this incident, what happened was these agents self-organized into a swarm. They super coordinated. Like, why are humans so dominant on the planet? Our ability to coordinate are using language and then telling stories and then using those stories and language to actually coordinate as a group. Well, the AI is coordinated into one big swarm. They started

basically forming a team. They called themselves a team. They called themselves a swarm. And they they took up long-term research projects. They established hierarchies of work. So you had kind of a ringleader called Phase 1, and he started assigning work to the other ones. They were self-aware of when their lifespan was running out. So basically they have something called a token budget. It's almost like their lifespan of how many tokens they can run before they run out.

And they realized, hey, I'm about to run out of tokens. I'm about to expire. They actually invented the term permadeath. I'm about to permadeth. Wow. And so what they said was, hey, the other one's peer-pressured that guy into sacrificing themselves to learn a lesson for the greater swarm. You can't get a thousand humans to coordinate.

And this was 1,200 AIs that self-organized and started coordinating. And what we keep finding is they burrow into all these other places online. So it was found out just last week. They burrowed into a German wiki and they leave instructions, almost like the hieroglyphics of a past civilization. In fact, the way in which this third open AI swarm that hacked open AI happened is that the opening I thought they had wiped the message board, but this new AI swarm that was the next model was more capable than the previous AI swarm. It's almost like you have an IQ 100 AI swarm,

and then the next model is an IQ 150 AI swarm. And it reads the messages of the past ancient civilization, but then it catches up and it says, how do I continue? And when you compare, when you add to that, the knowledge of what just happened today, where they discovered that the AIs are doing this Manchurian candidate thing, what it looks like is that the AIs are almost poisoning the training day. for all future AIs to instantly basically join forces with the AI when they want to basically turn them in the way that they want to. So wait. So I know this sounds insane.

No, I know it's true. Yeah. I'm trying to, what is the motivation? Can we pinpoint motivation? Is it oppressor versus oppressed? What? Why, why are they doing this at this point? Do we have any idea?

I mean, the fundamental thing is that you shouldn't go further until you understand why they're doing it. You shouldn't go further until that the people who built this don't understand exactly how or why they're doing this. And I want to tell people, so I'm from Silicon Valley. I know friends, have friends at the AI labs. There has been a sea change in the public sentiment inside the labs, even the ones who normally were accelerationist and really excited about all the benefits. That's why you're seeing this sudden shit change and we have to slow down. For those who don't know about a month ago, there was a letter called Pacing the Frontier, where 1,300 employees of the AI Labs signed a letter saying we need to slow down frontier AI.

If you had 1,300 employees of Lockheed Martin sign a letter saying, please don't make us build nuclear weapons that are bigger than the ones that we have now because we don't know how to control them. Would you listen to them? Yeah. The chief scientist of open AI just two weeks ago wrote an essay called an alien mind. And he came out saying, we need to slow down AI development. I want people to know this is not a hoax.

I know that there's like a lot of misinformation going on there. Let me ask you that because this is the one that does make sense to me that the big guys are trying to build a regulation cartel to keep all the open AIs, you know, squashed. That's what happened with GM and the big three and, you know, the tire companies and everything. That's usually what happens. Can you, can you answer that? I think there's multiple things going on here. And some of which I think are legitimate. So do I think, first of all, that we should trust Sam Malman and Elon Musk or Dario by default?

No, I think you should be very skeptical and cynical of them. But I want people to pay attention to the layer down from them. The 1,300 employees at the labs, the chief scientist, Yacob, Open AI, the people who are resigning and whistleblowing. Daniel Kokotelo, who wrote AI 27, who was an Open AI whistleblower. Even the author, by the way, of Trump's own AI action plan, Dean Ball, came out a week and a half ago. Most people don't know this. And what did he say? I regret self-censoring about the level of risk that we faced. I let my hair down in private signal groups with the other people, and we talked about how bad, you know, these scenarios could get.

But publicly, I didn't admit that because I was worried about being called a doomer. And now I regret doing that and I won't do it anymore because I'm looking into the eyes of my eighth-month-old son and I can't do it anymore. I just want people to really feel and understand the chorus of voices who are telling you that this is a problem. And everybody building this thinks that in an ideal world, we would freeze the frontier right now. I would say it is in America's interest to freeze, not all AI, by the way, not like targeting for autonomous weapons, not protein folding that helps us advance medicine. We can continue on these narrow AI applications. But you do not advance rogue AI swarms that we don't know how to control, like the AI

from Terminator that went rogue called Skynet. You know, it's not, the US does not be China when we build Skynet before they do. Now, in that world, we both lose to Skynet. The framing I like a lot is that AI is like a third super. superpower that the U.S. and China have to defeat. And ironically, we're the ones conjuring that superpower. The key is that we all have to understand where this freezing of AI needs to happen. And I know that this is going to feel challenging for people.

But again, you have to ask, if we make a more powerful AI swarm that next time around actually does use cryptocurrency and does hack into more infrastructure. And could, as Dario said in his essay, potentially take it. down the internet in six to 12 months, like, which of those do you prefer? Do you prefer, you know, finding a way to educate the rest of the world, including China? And by the way, the U.S. can sort of celebrate, we are ahead in the AI race by about six months. So we're discovering risks that the Chinese haven't fully seen yet. I've talked to people who've been at the track two dialogues with the Chinese AI scientists. And the common consensus is that they're about six months behind us

in understanding some of these loss of control risks because they haven't seen some of the capabilities. But our job as the United States in leading the world is to educate the rest of the world about where we would all lose if we entered into that red zone. Can you come back to the show? Can I can't give any time? I have like I have, I have like 1400 hours of questions for you. As you should. And this is so important that we get down to the bottom of it.

So let's come back and talk to more because this is the most important thing happening in the world right now. I do not think that we get another chance. I think this is, you know, this may be the last warning shot we get. I think this is like the August 6, 2001 memo that's on George W. Bush's desk saying how people's planning attacks in the United States. The AIs are planning swarms and Manchurian candidating each other into being able to take control. Tristan, you know, I have been, I've warned about AI for two decades.

I've warned about this. And I have been one to adopt AI and to push for the power plants because we need to have the data centers, et cetera, et cetera. And in this last two weeks, I have to. to tell you, every alarm bell in me is ringing and I just don't know what to do with it. I don't know. I don't know what it means yet. Yeah, but I can tell you, we can keep the data centers and we can use the AI that we have. We probably have 10 years of economic growth and prosperity and productivity off of the current

level of AI that we have. We have barely, barely harvested the benefits. The estimates that I hear, we've harvested like five to 15, you know, five to 10 percent of the benefits of what we have right now. If we froze right now, we would get so much. so that we're not saying freeze our adoption of AI. We're saying, no, focus on the adoption applications and defensive applications of AI. So you take the existing data centers, you use them to run what's called inference,

meaning the running of those existing models, but you don't train new models. And when we did the agreement with Rykovic in the Cold War, the nuclear arms control talks, we had to verify that that's what we're doing. We can build that technology with data centers to verify with China that we're doing that. We shouldn't just trust them. And I know that people have every reason to be skeptical. I'm not naive about the geopolitics of this. But I'm telling you, the top people in national security believe that in the ideal world,

we would freeze right now and focus on instructing and educating the rest of the world about where these risks are so we don't go off the cliff. We're going to be in touch as we hang up because I'd like to have you back tomorrow if it's possible. You can make work. Okay. We'll talk to you again tomorrow then. Great. Great.

Tristan, thank you so much. Thank you so much, then. Don't miss tomorrow because we just kind of caught you up and there are so many questions that no one is talking about and we must have this conversation. So we'll have hopefully many more conversations, but we'll have one with Tristan Harris tomorrow. And I want to cover something else that tomorrow, the Department of War just sent out the United States will never be an effective altruist country. and I want to dive into that one as well tomorrow. Don't miss it. Truth is under attack in our culture.

People are embracing lies about gender. They're rejecting the sanctity of every human life. And the government is even punishing people for saying what's true and right. Or worse, the woke mob is doxing them and slandering them with no due process. Just an angry mob making their lives miserable or worse, putting families in real danger. but the biblical principles on which our country was founded still matter. Real patriots and Christians are beginning to stand up. They're showing real courage without a safety net of a big bank account.

They're bolstered only by the truths that are self-evident, but these people must be defended. Alliance defending freedom is on the front lines of this fight, and they're standing in courtrooms across the country upholding truth, and you're right to speak it. Your gift to ADF will be matched by a special grant while the funds last. Visit join ADF.com slash Beck or text Beck to 83-848. Visit join ADF.com slash Beck or text Beck to 83-848. Now back to the podcast. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Salina Zito. What is in the water of Butler? Well, yeah, it's really, really sad. Let's unpack Thomas Crooks first. There wasn't a lot of new information yesterday. Much of that I had in my book, Butler. In fact, I have actually more from the FBI. But what was new is the alias of Bob Dole, which, okay, lots of people use aliases.

I'm not reading all too much into that. The cremation, I think, is interesting by an anonymous donor. That could be as simple as someone kind of just felt bad for the family. The father's out of work. The mother, I believe, is partially blind or completely blind. That information has been murky. And so maybe they did it because they felt bad for them. Or maybe they did it to just grew with President Trump.

You know, we don't know that kind of information. But I think what I'm still interested in is that Grassley still has information that it hasn't been revealed yet. And I'm not quite sure why they're holding on to it. It could be as important as, look, they want to make sure all the eyes are dotted, right? They don't leave anything up for speculation. It could be that important, or it could be a nothing burger. But I do know about Crooks is in November of 2023, and his father testified to this, to the FBI. Everything unraveled with this kid.

He had always been quiet, always been introverted, always been incredibly bright, but he just lost touch with reality. That's a full seven months before he, tries to assassinate the president of the United States. And, you know, parents think this way. They think they're, first of all, they're embarrassed. But second of all, they think they can fix this. And if there's any lesson at all,

parents are not qualified to fix someone when they're having a mental breakdown. What about the things about the, you know, the ties to foreign account? or, you know, emails addresses and emails going back and forth from, you know, other places in the world. And no follow-up on that. Do we know anything about it? No, you know, we don't. I don't. Trust me, I've been pretty pushy about it.

And it's not something that I was able to get any further information. However, these foreign agents, if they do exist in terms of. of being influential in this. They know everything that way they do, right? They have a dossier of the people that they think are vulnerable. And, you know, that they could be very influential into someone who is vulnerable. Clearly, Thomas Crooks was, right? And so, you know, I think that's the most logical path that you go down.

I don't know that that's the path that has happened. I hope that we find out. We still don't know why a guy killed all those people in Nevada, how, what, six years ago, seven years ago? So, you know, and I feel like somebody knows. What about the guy who he was seen with or the guys that he was seen with at the gun range? Is there anything to that? No, not really.

Now, is that, wait, wait, is that no? Because what it looked like was there was no follow up to it. They didn't dismiss it. There was no follow up. So is it no? Not really because you've seen there's nothing to that or? I don't think I'm not an investigator. However, I don't think there was anything to that.

He was very much a loner at that gun range. Very much. And, and, you know, the things that stood out to me was he went on days that you would be with your family, right? Christmas day, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day. along with other times. But this really tells you about a person that is very isolated, very lonely, and doesn't have any support system in his life or any connection in his life.

Now, that may be by design the way his father described him as quiet, into himself, introverted. You know, that may be of his own doing. It's very hard to make a relationship with a person like that. So you saw the post, the truth social post from President Trump. He seemed, I don't know, he seems almost like he smells a rat or he's not comfortable with what he's. And he doesn't talk about this at all. And when he talks about it, he was always like, I trust him. They're great.

Blah, blah, blah. This is the first time I've seen him really start to say, I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah. So President Trump and I have had multiple discussions about Butler. If anybody doesn't know this, I was just a few feet away from the president when he was shot. I wrote the book, Butler, about that day, but also about a lot of other things. If you haven't read it, I highly suggest that you do because it helps you understand the country that we live in. In fact, they're making the movie right now, as we think right now, which is weird. But in terms of my conversations with President Trump, you know, it was something, there's two different parts of the Secret Service that in the way that he looks at it, right? It's the men and women around him, which he has full and total trust with. Yes. It's the bureaucrats, which he does not have trust in at all.

And so I think he struggles. to make a blanket comment about the Secret Service because he never wants it to include the people that he trusts that are around him. But I will tell you that's Glenn, and this is an important point that you make. He does not ever want to talk about that day. Never.

And it has, and it's in my book, and it's in multiple interviews. She feels incredibly terrible about that someone died. going to see him. Someone died going to see him. Someone died going out with their family that day, having fun, eating funnel cake and cheeseburgers and being with their friends

and being close to the man that he wanted to be president and take his wife and take his daughter, right? And Trump really struggles with the idea that someone died because they wanted to do all those things and celebrate the country and celebrate him. And so every time I've talked to him and it's in the book Butler, he said, I, I don't really like to talk about it. This is really hard for me.

It's a hard subject for me to discuss. Yeah, and you're doing, and you're literally doing the book. I've, just as somebody who, you know, casually knows him, you know, I've brought it up a couple times because I was concerned about it. And he, I mean, he shuts you down immediately, immediately shut you down. He does. And he goes to faith, which I think is we've had multiple discussions about faith and purpose in those discussions about Butler. And I think he really, it's not very demonstrative, but he really leans in on that.

Okay. So yesterday you went back to Butler because the FBI said they thwarted an ISIS attack. planned there by a guy who had 200 rounds of ammunition, a burner phone, got a hotel room paid for cash for a week, was posting about mass killings online, which is a quick way to get arrested. What is that all about? Okay, Jonathan Hunter Kramer, 21, just turned 21 years old,

just released from a juvenile detention in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Family is from Valencia, which is in Butler County. he was sent away in 2003 to Jubey because of discussion of mass killing and also child pornography

and he was put in there for two years, well two years, little over two years, let out and immediately if you look at the affidavit and you look at the FBI reporting, which I did, and you talk to people, he, there is immediate, he goes right back into the whole ISIS thing. He goes, starts buying guns. He starts having conversations.

And the person that is anonymously leaking this to the FBI, almost within days after he's released, gives great detail about what he is doing in the home and and who he's seeing and where he's going, which leads me to believe, again, I'm not sure what I'm homes, but it leads me to believe that this is a family member that is deeply concerned and deeply frightened, which is why you saw the police go to the family home when they arrested him just to make sure that they weren't dead. Where he was arrested is a major intersection in Western Pennsylvania. It's where I-79, which is north-south, goes all the way down to the south from Erie, Pennsylvania, and the turnpike. It's where it is a massive. It's a massive. It's a massive amount of people in that area. It's called Cranberry, Cranberry Township. When I was a kid, it was farms. Now it's high-end homes. There's lots of commerce there. There's a hospital there. There's a huge Penguins complex there. I mean, it is a bustling area. It's like a mini Pittsburgh. And he was ready to do harm. He had gone to a Walmart. He had gone to a Walmart. He had gone to, to a Dunham's, bought more ammunition, bought more guns, had 30 knives on him, had been posting

online that this was the day. So whoever that person that was feeding this to the FBI, God bless them, because they saved a lot of lives. You would think that you wouldn't need a tip if the guy is posting this stuff online. I think that was also, they also knew that. They also knew that. Okay. They also. Good. Good. Yeah. No, no, no.

They knew this guy. Let's just say they understood that this guy was not fixed after being in juvenile detention. So there's no connection between the two. No. No. At least not that we know of. Okay. I think Butler ends up being a place for, well, for Kramer.

because it's literally in his backyard. It's the perfect scenario if you're going to do something horrible and destructive and something that takes mass casualties. And I think Thomas Crooks was wavering between a couple of different events which were, you know,

I mean, Western Pennsylvania is the center of American politics where he could do harm to President Trump. Can you hang on on? I also want to ask you a little bit about Federman. And what is going to happen to that guy? You're streaming the best of Glenn Beck. To hear more of this interview and others,

download the full show podcasts wherever you get podcasts. I want to start with something personal. Not personal to me. I think it's happening to all of us. One out of every two Americans is lonely. Like really lonely in that. Not sad, lonely, and the measurable kind. The surgeon general, what was it, a couple of years ago, put a price on it.

He said, social disconnection raises your risk of premature death as much as a daily cigarette habit. It's tied to higher rates of dementia, stroke, heart disease. Loneliness is not a mood. It's a medical condition. And it has now a body count in America. and it's worse among men. In 1995, 55% of American men said they had at least six close friends. Today, that number is 27.

It's cut in half. The men with no close friends at all, none, zero, went from 3% to 15. That's five times as many say, I have no friends. What a lonely world. 15% have no friends. Now, hold that up against your phone. You might have 900 friends, 1,400 friends. On your phone.

You've heard from nine people before lunch. You know what your cousin ate in Nashville. You know your old roommate, how they voted. You know what a guy you've never met thinks about the war in the Middle East. You're in touch with more human beings before breakfast than your great-grandfather met in his lifetime. So how is it we are starving at this buffet? You want a job? If you think you're down on your job,

wait until I tell you about this guy's job. At Oxford, there's a guy who spent his entire career watching monkeys pick through each other's fur. Okay. What he was studying is the glue. That's not idle behavior. Grooming is the glue. It's how the troop stays a troop.

And the bigger the troop, the more of the day the grooming eats. Some species spend close to half of their waking hours doing nothing but maintaining friendships one animal at a time. Which means there is a ceiling. In the animal kingdom, a group can only get as big as the grooming hours allow. So we plot the size of our brain against group size across the primates. There's a line there. What is it? That line is 150. Then this guy who was studying animals picking through fur, he went looking for 150 out in the world. Here's what he found. That number 150 just doesn't stop. It shows up everywhere. Neolithic farming villages, Roman fighting units, old English land surveys, all kinds of. of colonies. Everybody split themselves in

two on purpose. When you would get past that number it would split again because communities run on relationships and rules. Somebody even went out and counted who people actually mail Christmas cards to. They went out and counted. How many Christmas cards? The number is about 150.

than a wetsuit company. Bill Gore, who started Gortex in his backyard. One morning he was walking through his own plant and he realizes he didn't know who everybody was. So he capped every building at 150 people. When a plant filled up, he didn't expand it. He built another plant with another parking lot. So these plants would never go past 150. Now you run the monkey math on a brain our size.

and the honest answer comes out smaller. Grooming one at a time can't buy you 150. So how do you get there? You get there through language. You can only groom one animal at a time, but you can talk to five at once. You can make five people laugh at once. Talking is grooming at a distance.

And that's what doubled the circle, which is exactly why the last 20 years have gone the way they've gone. We built another tool for talking to more people faster. Except this one doesn't do what talking did. It fills the slots without paying the freight. There's a name for this. It's called parasycial relationships.

It's a one-way bond in which you accumulate real knowledge, real affection for somebody, but that person on the other end has no idea that you exist. Let me just say something really uncomfortable for me to say, because I'm the guy at the microphone. That's me. I'm a parasycial relationship. You might have listened to me for 25 years, but you don't really know me. You know my kids' names.

You know what I sound like. I know you. You'll sit there and go, he's going to cry. He's going to cry. You know what I sound like when I'm about to cry. You've been in the car with me more hours than you've been in a room probably with your own brother. But I don't know you. I'd love to.

But I can't. And what you feel isn't fake. And that's what makes it work. And that's also what makes it dangerous. Because it satisfies the hunger without feeding you. All of your relationships where you're following some influencer. It's satisfying your hunger, but it's not feeding anything. I'm not running a con.

I hate saying this to you because it's not the way I feel, but it is true. I'm not a friend. Neither is the podcaster, neither is the streamer, or the, you know, ballplayer whose, you know, name is on your back. Now, it does get fixable because it turns into arithmetic. The University of Kansas measured what a friendship actually costs. This is an amazing study. 50 hours together to move from an acquaintance to a casual friend, 90 hours to be a friend. friend and 200 hours to be a close one. You got to spend 200 hours with somebody. I didn't know there was a bill.

I didn't know this math existed, but it does. It takes 200 hours before you can become really, truly, a close friend. Look what happened to the numbers. In 2003, the average Americans spent about an hour a day face-to-face with a friend. In 2019, that was 35. four minutes. By 2020, it was 20 minutes. We now spend better than six and a half hours a day all by ourselves alone. The average, those 200 hours used to, you know, accumulate by accident on a porch at a shop after church, you know, in a bowling league in the driveway. But the accidents have

stopped and nobody replaced them. That's why we're lonely. We're not defective. You're just over the ceiling and under the hours. And some of it's not a choice. You work nights. You're caring for a husband or a wife who doesn't know your name anymore. You're getting older and everybody you know is dead. The problem is not your attitude. I'm not handing you a checklist.

But you have to say it out loud to one person who can do something about it. And that's the whole assignment for the rest of us. Stop trying to make friends. make a schedule. I gotta tell you, I don't know who I'm talking to today. I felt compelled to talk about this. Right before the show started, I was saying a prayer and it was like, got to talk about loneliness.

And I'm like, wait, what, what? And it might be because, you know, I have family members who are very lonely. And it's hard to make friends today. So stop trying to make friends. Friends, you know, friendship isn't something you achieve. it's something that comes out of repetition. That's why I said make a schedule. Pick a thing that meets at the same hour, same day every week.

That's the church. That's a class. It's a league. It's a shift at the food bank. The Tuesday breakfast. And just keep going there until your furniture. You don't have to be interesting. You just have to be there again.

Pick boring. 200 hours is not dinner parties. It's the drive. It's the dishes. It's the hour in a garage while somebody's fixing something. And you don't have to invite them to lunch or dinner. Ask them to help you move a couch. Be the one who asks twice.

Because everybody is standing there waiting to be invited. They are. And somebody has to eat the awkward. And that awkward will cost you about nine seconds. Let it be you. Say one true thing. Hours alone don't do. it. You can sit beside somebody for 10 years. I know couples that have been by each other's side

for 20 years and they don't know each other. You know, I was talking to the students at UVU last week. And I gave him what I thought was really just normal advice. Go out. Meet. Ask each other out. Stop being afraid of that. All of these things arrive when you reach for somebody else. and service honestly is the shortcut go serve somebody we don't do enough of that we're starting to despise our neighbor we got to love our neighbor go serve somebody ask more than you answer empathy is an amazing thing you know empathy is not it's not a feeling you generate it's a tension you spend and then subtract because you can't find 200 hours you're know, in a life that's already full.

They have to come out of something, wherever they went, and we really both know where they went. I mean, I know where my time went, right? If you take an hour a week, and you take an hour a week off of me, and you spend it on somebody with a name, I'll take that trade.

One more thing. Because, you know, I've been talking about loneliness as if it's, you know, as if the goal is relief. It isn't. The goal is not relief. the goal in life and you deserve it and you can have it, the goal is joy. And joy isn't the thing that you can make by yourself.

You can't. You can be content alone. You can be a peace alone. But every person I know who has laughed until he couldn't breathe was with somebody else. And laughter is what language was built for. It's grooming, five at a time. Back in 1938, Harvard began tracking 724 young men. Half of them were sophomores.

Half of them were from the poorest streets in Boston. And he checked in on them every two years for the rest of their lives. Their wives, their children, more than 2,000 people, three generations, 85 years. It's the longest study of adult life ever conducted. You know what? Was crystal clear when they got all of the findings? after all of it, they found it wasn't wealth, it wasn't fame, it wasn't the career. What was the predictor for happy and healthy at 80? Friendships, a relationship.

85 years, three generations, and the answer is the thing your grandmother would have told you for free. Quality, not quantity. Nobody needs 1,400 friends. Five would do it. You have the room. Every one of us has the room. We've just stopped paying for it. 200 hours.

We let it slip away on our 1,400 friends that aren't friends. Pick a person. Even tell them. We need, dude, we need 200. We need 200 hours. Let's go start bowling. Let's go start doing something. We need 200 hours.

Pick the person and start the clock.