The Liz Moody Podcast - The One Habit That Will Instantly Make You More Likeable

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

Most of us want more (and better) social interactions, but being more social means more energy. Sometimes it’s easier to just stay home or not talk to someone, even though we KNOW connecting with other people is the best thing for our health and happiness. But what if you knew you’d be liked, have a good time, and a meaningful conversation? My guest today is Dr. Nicholas Epley, one of the most respected behavioral scientists in the world. He's a professor at the University of Chicago, the author of the phenomenal new book A Little More Social, and his research has changed the scientific community. Whether you want to know the one tool that will make you more likeable, how to go from small talk to a meaningful conversation in two questions, why people are getting so bad at asking follow up questions on dates, or why you’re probably not an introvert even if you REALLY think you are, we get into it. 🎧 What you’ll learn: • The #1 thing people actually judge you on and how it removes the fear of social situations • The surprising data that challenges everything you believe about your social battery • How to organically start a meaningful conversation with two questions • Why being an introvert might just be a story you're telling yourself For more from Nicholas Epley: • Website: https://www.nicholasepley.com/  • Book, A Little More Social: https://sites.prh.com/a-little-more-social  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-epley/ Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Midi Health: visit JoinMidi.com/LizMoody and book your first Midi Health appointment. • ZBiotics: Head to ZBiotics.com/LizMoody  and use code LIZMOODY at checkout for 15% off • LMNT: head to DrinkLMNT.com/Liz to get a FREE 8-count sample pack with any order. • Wildgrain: go to Wildgrain.com/LizMoody to get $30 off your first box + FREE croissants for LIFE. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 448. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do you account for the fact that I might want to leave a party three hours before my husband would want to leave a party? I've always said, I'm an introvert. So the party wore me out quicker. I'm going to go home, whereas it costs my husband less so he can stay out longer. So one thing that you'd want to know as a researcher is, are you choosing to behave differently at the party? You might just be exercising more. Oh, I definitely. Your husband might be just sitting down and chilling with a beer with the fellows on the couch.

No, I feel like personally responsible for the quality of everybody's conversation. That's tiring, right? So what you've just done is run a marathon, your husband just took the stairs to the third floor. That's no surprise that you're more tired. It doesn't mean you're an introvert. It just means you were exercising more. People tend to overestimate how introverted they are. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where we believe that there is always something that you can do to create a life that feels amazing.

And we help you figure out how to find the lever to pull at any moment to actually do that. Nick, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Liz. great to be here. So you performed one of the most talked about studies that exist in psychology. I've been talking about this study for years. And you had some really exciting findings that I think will change how we all interact with the world on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. So first, let me make sure I credit Juliana Schroeder, who was my amazing PhD student, who did all of the really hard work on this experiment. But this was one that really did change the way I live my life, too. And it actually

came from an experience I had one morning on a train on the way into the University of Chicago where I'm a professor behavioral science. And I was sitting there on the train, writing a chapter from my first book, which was titled Mindwise, describing how we're uniquely social on the planet. We've got brains there uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others, how we're made happier and healthier by connecting with the minds of others. And yet I looked around on the train that morning. It's not like I hadn't been on the train before. I've been on it many times, but he had just looked at it with a particular careful, insightful lens at that time. And I realized, we got this whole train of highly social people, and nobody's

saying a word, right? We're all sitting there ignoring each other, and that seemed weird. Why is it that highly social creatures like us can at times seem to be so unsocial? And so I had a lovely conversation with somebody on the train that morning. The conversation I had wasn't just positive, wasn't just good, it was surprisingly good, it went much better than I thought it would. And I thought that gap, particularly in understanding how other people might respond to us, that might be a common thing that I do a lot, maybe something a lot of us do. So anecdotes there aren't evidence. So a guy has a nice conversation on trains. So what, who cares?

So that was where we needed to get actually down to work and do an actual experiment. We went to a train station on the line that I take into the University of Chicago at Homewood, Illinois. and we actually ran two experiments. In one experiment, we asked people, we asked train commuters to imagine how they would feel on a ride into Chicago that morning if they did three different things. One, if they kept to themselves in solitude, just focused on their dayhead.

Second, if they just did whatever they normally did, which is typically keep to themselves, focus on their dayhead. And third, we asked them to predict how they'd feel if they had a conversation with someone who came and sat down next to them. They tried to make a connection. And here, people's beliefs were crystal clear. They believed that talking to a stranger was a bad idea, that they would have a more pleasant experience,

and it would be more productive if they kept to themselves in solitude or did whatever they normally did than if they talked to a stranger. And that sort of makes sense, because that's what everybody is choosing to do here. But as a psychologist, as a behavioral scientist, we know that those predictions, those expectations, we don't take them necessarily as facts. Those are bets. Those are guesses about how an event might unfold if you tried. We guess incorrectly all the time.

And there are reasons to think that maybe this might be systematically wrong. And so we ran another experiment where instead of asking people to tell us how they thought they'd feel if they did each of these things, we actually had people do each of these things to see how they actually felt at the end of their commute if they kept themselves in solitude, did whatever they normally did or connected with a stranger. And what we found there was precisely the opposite of what people expected. People actually reported having a more pleasant experience when they talked to someone who sat down next to them than they did when they kept to themselves in solitude or did whatever they normally did. And there were no differences in productivity between

between these three groups. So people's beliefs here about how this experience would go weren't just wrong. They were precisely backwards. But notice, those beliefs are really important because they guide our choices. If I want to know what you're going to do in any given moment, I don't want to know how something's actually going to make you feel. I want to know how you think something's going to make you feel because it's those expectations that guide your choices about whether to engage that people on the train thought that talking to a stranger would suck and they were just wrong about that. And I think we all relate to that. Like I've sat down on a plane on a train and been like, oh my God, I hope this person next to me does not open their way. Yeah, put your headphones on.

Like, please don't look at me. So you're suggesting that we're getting that completely wrong. We want to talk to people more than we think. And also hasn't your research found that people like to talk to us? Yes. More than we think. We're highly social. People don't like being ignored and overlooked and disregard. right? Sitting next to somebody and having them not see you or pay attention to you hurts. In fact, right? So Kip Williams, who's a psychologist at Purdue University recently retired, has this beautiful study where people are walking down the sidewalk and either they are looked at by somebody and acknowledged or they're ignored by the person. And it feels worse to just be ignored just when you're walking down the sidewalk to just be treated as invisible. This little

finding we had on the train is something we just see relentlessly. Places where our pessimism about how other people might respond to us if we reach that to connect with them, it's just misplaced. It doesn't mean we're completely wrong. What it means is that we tend to underestimate pretty systematically how well these things will go. Sometimes conversations do go poorly, just not nearly as often as we imagine that they will. And the upside tends to be much bigger than we imagine it will be. find this and everything from casual conversations on buses and trains and in cabs and waiting rooms to having deep and meaningful conversations with somebody, right, talking about really serious stuff, to, you know, reaching out and expressing gratitude or passing along a compliment or

asking somebody for help or being honest in our relationship. We find over and over again that when we reach out to engage with somebody in a positive way that creates, could create a meaningful connection. We tend to be overly pessimistic and therefore don't do it as much as we would imagine. And it not only makes us feel good, better to be connected with somebody else. Of course it makes other people feel better to be connected to us as well. Aristotle said that life is essentially worth living because we have friends for without friends no one would choose to live. And essentially what we're finding is life's better when you treat other people as if they're friends. We just don't seem to anticipate that beforehand. We're going to dig more into the gap between our expectation of how social interactions will go and the reality.

But one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you outside of just like being your fan for years is that I do think we're having a lot of conversations these days about why we're so lonely, the reason for this loneliness crisis. And to me, your work kind of suggests a different hypothesis for why we're so lonely. Yeah. I think it's a really important hypothesis and one that comes to you if you are a researcher that might not occur to you otherwise. social connection isn't something that just happens to us. It's a choice. It's a choice we make that we make over and over again over the course of our day, not just once, not twice, but many times where we have the choice to reach out and engage with somebody could be a little way. Like when I was walking around your neighborhood on the way to do this podcast today, right?

I'm saying hi to people when I'm walking down the sidewalk, smiling, saying hello, talking to the construction guys who are putting in new curbs in the neighborhood, right? Little moments like that to bigger opportunities where you could reach out and call an old friend. friend or talk to a parent or a family member, have a deep conversation with somebody. Over the course of our days, we have many opportunities to reach out and engage with people that we often choose not to take. And that belief part of social isolation is easy to overlook. It's easy to imagine that, you know, these phones are making us lonely, but notice we're choosing to use them. And what our research is highlighting probably isn't the only thing that's explaining all of this, but I think

explaining a big chunk of it, which is that when we get the choice to engage with others or avoid them, often we're choosing unwisely. We choose. The problem with loneliness isn't that it is being foisted upon us. It is that we are choosing it too often for ourselves. And we can choose differently. So why are we making that choice? Like for me, a lot of it comes down to judgment. My phone isn't going to judge me. I can't say the wrong thing to my phone. So it feels safer. It feels easier. Whereas I could mess up when I talk to another person. How big of a piece of the equation is that? So that's a sizable piece.

I think there are three pieces that at least we have identified. Surely there are more pieces, but this is what we've documented in our research. The first one relates to the piece you just described about judgment. It turns out that we judge each other on multiple kinds of dimensions. Psychologists have identified at least two kind of fundamental ones. One is we evaluate each other in terms of our warm, right? How kind, friendly, nice, trustworthy, honest are we? Are you somebody I want to approach?

Are you somebody I'm a little scared of and want to avoid? So warmth is one. The other one is competency. How capable are? How capable, effective, intelligence, smart, witty are you, right? That's competency. When we think about ourselves, we tend to judge ourselves in terms of our competency. And therefore, think that others are going to be judging us along the same dimension.

So when somebody sits down next to me and I think about having a conversation, I'm worried about, what are we going to talk about? Am I going to be able to carry this conversation on, right? Are they really going to want to talk to me? You sit down and write a gratitude to somebody who really did something meaningful for you. And you're thinking, man, how do I express this? Right? We're thinking about our competency.

Other people tend not to evaluate us in terms of our competency. Other people tend to evaluate us in terms of our warmth. What you want to know about somebody when you first meet them or actually interact with them almost any time is, are they a decent person? Are they somebody I want to be around? So when somebody sits down next to me on the train and I turn to them and I say hi, right? Hi, I'm Nick in a friendly way, right?

that is powerful because that's what the other person cares about, is your friendliness. When you write a gratitude letter to somebody, they're not wordsmithing, your grammar, right? They're caring about the amount of love and appreciation and gratitude you've expressed the warmth that you've passed on to them. So we do worry about judgment, but we worry about being judged on the wrong things. We worry about being judged on our competency. In fact, we're being evaluated on our warmth. I know there's other reasons.

But is that why I have 1,200 unanswered text messages? Because I'm worried about being judged for my competency. I don't know. I'm not that kind of psychologist, Liz. I don't do individual diagnoses. But look, if you think that's part of what's going on, it could be. It rings because I feel like I'll open it and then I'll be like, oh, I don't have the timer energy to craft the perfect response.

So then I close it and I never respond. Then that is the phenomenon. But I should just do like lots of emojis and vibes. And how do I convey warmth? Well, so pick up the phone and call somebody. That's the way it works the best. I'm real worried about being judged on the phone, though. So your voice, though, is what really carries warmth.

Your voice is what carries clarity, allows you to be understood. It also carries the sound of friendliness and kindness much better than typing does. Typing is just dead text. Your voice has life to it. It has kindness in it. There's also a thing that connects us. So that's one thing you can do. But the other thing is other people don't care that much.

Like just internalizing, I'm judging my competency in almost any social situation. Like they are not evaluating me based on my competency. Not as much as, yeah. And years ago, back when I was in graduate school, working with Tom Gillivich and Ken Sivitsky at Cornell University, one of the things we did when I was in grad school is we assessed how well can we anticipate how others are judging us, particularly when we're in situations where we're somewhat nervous about how we're being judged. And we found just over and over again that we tend to think that others are harsher.

in their evaluations of us, then they actually are. This shows up in a bunch of ways. Tom showed that people think they're being noticed much more than they actually are, particularly when you're doing something embarrassing. Wait, is he the guy that did that shirt test? Barry Manilow test. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, my gosh, that's so cool. Tom is the one who I learned how to do research from. Wait, just so to contextualize that for people, this is a really famous test where we basically had people wear a quote-unquote embarrassing shirt. I guess we can decide if a Barry Manilow shirt is embarrassing. To be fair, Tom, Tom ran this with many different kinds of T-shirts. One study was with Barry Manilow, but he also tested, you know, vanilla ice and John Tesh. But, like, the point was the participant had to be like, this is an embarrassing shirt, right?

But it even shows up when they're wearing shirts that they're proud of, too. But the effects are a little bigger when they're embarrassing. And the idea is that we think everybody's going to notice and be like, oh, my God, what are they wearing? It's so embarrassing. And, like, nobody did, right? People don't notice. Nope. And not even at above-chance levels in the experiment.

Which we can extrapolate to so many things in life. One of my biggest fears is having a whole conversation with food in my teeth. And I'm not saying I don't notice when somebody has food in their teeth. But if I tried to remember a single time I've had a conversation with somebody with food in their teeth, I couldn't remember at all. Yes. Two things there. One is you don't notice that they've got the food in their teeth.

But the other is that once you do, cut on some slack. Like it humanizes. Exactly. I'm like, oh, great, we're like two humans in a conversation. Also, always tell me if I tell anybody if they have food in their teeth. Of course, that is what friends do, right? that is what friends do. And it's not at all awkward.

Like I'll just give somebody, you know, a quick look. And of course you're grateful. Yeah. Like I'm sitting next to somebody. I got food in my teeth. Of course I want you to tell me. That's what it means to be a friend. I like you more, not less right when you tell me this.

It is interesting. So you wrote in your book and I promise, promise, promise, I'll get back to the other reasons that we're not doing this. But this is connected to this. You wrote, our self-esteem is actually a social alarm system monitoring how our relationships are going. Like a fuel gauge in your car monitoring how much gas you have, self-esteem is a social meter in our brains that keeps track of what other people think of us. So that means that, like, this perceived judgment is important because other people's perception of us is dictating our self-esteem. Yeah. In fact, psychologists think that self-esteem is really our sense of what

others are thinking of us and how well we're doing in the social world. So does that mean that, like, I'm like, of course I'm scared of being judged because if my entire self-esteem is based on what other people think of me and I want to have high self-esteem, there's no internal work? No, no, there is. So self-esteem really comes from certainty, being certain about who you are, confident in who you are, and that makes you less worried about what other people are thinking of you because kind of know who you are. So as you get older, for instance, you tend to be a little less uncertain when you're younger, a teenager, a young adult, you're a little more worried about this.

And so self-esteem also tends to be a little bit lower. You tend to be affected a little bit more by the slings and arrows that life can sometimes throw at you. the email somebody sent that you thought was a little not nice or the comment somebody made that was a little negative or something that somebody passed along to you, you know, heard secondhand can hurt you a little bit more. Self-esteem is highly sensitive to how we're doing with others. And so that means having close friends is good for our sense of ourselves. That's one thing. Because especially close friends feel more certain than strangers. But even with strangers, like I don't have anxiety about connecting with other people. I know that when I reach out to other

folks, it tends to go well. That makes me feel pretty good about not just other people, but myself, but myself too. So there are things that you can do. So if you just take the sociometer as given that, you know, others' evaluations of us matter, well, just reaching out a little more often and creating some positive connections is going to help with that. But the other thing is that getting a little more self-certainty, so you're not looking to others quite as much, also helps. Is there a way to do that outside of aging? There are. So lots of scientists have looked into the consequences of self-affirmation. So if you're someone of my era with a little more gray hair on top, you will

remember Stuart Smalley from Saturday Night Live, the self-affirmation guru, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it. Wait, that works. It feels so cheesy. That kind of works. Okay. So it's a little more complicated. So the most famous researchers who have studied this are actually Stanford, Jeff Cohen, Greg Walton, Claude Steele, find that if you ask people to write about the values that are most important to them, that's how people do this. Not the Stewart-Smalley-Quite version, but explain why this value is really important and meaningful to you. That self-affirmation makes you feel better about yourself, yeah.

Oh, that's interesting. Because it's like it's a certainty about yourself. You're like, these are my values. Okay. So bring us back to the reasons we're not doing this. We have fear of judgment. So, right. Well, one of these misplaced perspectives.

We're worried about being evaluated, and the perspective I have on myself is different than the perspective you have on me. The second is that social interaction itself is complicated. You and I are connecting with each other in some way. It's not a simple static experience. It goes back and forth. It's dynamic. A conversation is the clearest way to see this, right? Where, you know, I talk to you, we go back and forth for a period of time.

Talk about different things. I don't necessarily know where it's going to go. Our expectations, though, have a hard time representing those very complicated. dynamic processes, but it's those dynamic processes that really connect us. Dynamic processes like reciprocity, right? So I scratch your back, you scratch mine. That is just the dominant social norm on the planet. I poke you in the eye. You're going to poke me back in the eye, right? And so when I reach out to you in a positive way, you tend to reach back, right? Nobody waves, but almost everybody will wave back at you. But our expectations don't really

appreciate the power of reciprocity. And so we imagine our ourselves being more independent of each other than we actually are. We almost treat social interaction like we're bringing two marbles together and there's no real attraction between them, no force that connects them with each other in interaction. They can kind of go any way. So if we ask people to predict the outcome of a conversation, say, they predict just entire range of outcomes as possible. In fact, not an entire range of outcomes as possible.

When you bring two people together, it's not like bringing marbles together. It's like bringing magnets together because conversation itself has a lot of, you know, kind of magnetic processes that pull us together. So I start out with a kind word to you. What do you tend to say back to me? Mind word, right? I say a topic that's of interest to me. We start talking about. You tend to think about a topic that's similar, right, along those same lines. Then we start talking about things we have in common. You respond to me in conversation, right? You're looking at me right now, right? You're nodding at me. You're giving me affirmation right now. You smile. You'll do what's known is back channeling. Back channeling is uttering things that aren't usually like full words or

sentences, right, right, yeah, mm-hmm. That's just what you did right there, right? That's back channeling. That stuff is really important because it tells me that you are interested in what I have to say. You're giving me feedback. I know you're engaged with me. It's what allows us to synchronize in conversation. And that synchrony is what connects. But we find that when people anticipate how an interaction is going to unfold, their expectations are not very sensitive to the presence or the absence of that. It's instead very sensitive to things like the type of person I'm talking to or what we're talking about, things that you might be able to represent, say, in a snapshot of an interaction, but not in the movie version of it, a dynamic unfolding version of it over time.

So people think having an interaction where you're actually having a conversation with somebody, a dialogue. It's going to feel about the same as if we're just exchanging monologues. You're telling me about yourself. I'm telling you about myself. In fact, what really matters is is how we're connecting, whether we're actually in an interaction where we're having those reciprocal processes or not. Okay. And there's a third thing, right? But I have to ask you about this. I know there's so many women listening right now and they're like, yeah, I know conversation's supposed to be reciprocal, but I have gone on so many first dates where they do not ask me a single question about myself. What is happening there? These are not very wise men. There's a joke from

Marcelo Hernandez, who plays Domingo on Saturday Night Live, he's got a comedy special with a joke in it that I love. He's saying, you know, whenever he sees a very attractive woman with an older guy, all of his friends will say, oh, that guy's got a ton of money.

And he jokes and says, no, that guy's got follow-up questions. Right? His follow-up questions. But like, what is going on there? Why is this a valuable, rare resource? Allison Wood Brooks and other research have confirmed Hernandez's view of this and yours as well, which is that follow-up questions

make conversation much better because it keeps it going. I think part of it comes from the cognitive demands of actually having a conversation. You're maybe trying to think about what to say, and it is a skill you can get better at. Do you think societally we're getting worse at conversation? These are hard questions for psychologists to answer because in order to say how things have been going over time, we have to be measuring things over time. Right. And there are certain things we have been measuring over time. We know loneliness is on the rise. We know that time spent alone is on the rise.

We know time spent in conversation is declining. We know the amount of words that we're saying per day, in the United States, at least, is declining. So we are speaking less to each other. And it makes sense that we get better at what we practice more. It does make sense that we get better at things that we practice. That is absolutely true. Whether these changes are big enough to drive this in a powerful way, I don't know. But I would absolutely believe that with enough.

increase or decrease in practice, we would see increases and decreases in your ability to have these conversations. Dates are a little complicated, in part because sometimes this is a guy who's been married for 30 years, so I have no experiences, but I do have, I spent a lot of, I spent a lot of time with my wife in conversation trying to be a good conversationalist. I'm not always. You know, if you're trying to think about what to say and to put your best foot forward, you can often be very focused on yourself, right? And that can then just make it hard to shift attention to somebody else. So it's a sign of insecurity, perhaps. It could be. But certainly to the listeners of your podcast, the way to be a better conversationalist is to be willing to share meaningful things about yourself,

because it shows you you trust somebody else that you are warm, honest person. But then also to take an interest in somebody else. If you take an interest in somebody else, take an interest in getting to know them, that will often prompt you to provide more follow-up question. Is there anything that we can do in conversation that will make our conversation partner better? Or do we say, I really wish you would ask me one single question, sir? My research has mostly been focused on the fellas on these first dates who are bad at conversation. What can they do to be better? And it turns out if you take an interest in the other person, you will naturally, I think, be a better conversationist. If you're more willing to be open and

honest with somebody else, that tends to go much better than you would think. How we can make somebody else be better? That's a good question. I don't know. I think, though, I mean, Based on our work, mutual self-disclosure is what really creates meaningful conversation. And when you start sharing things about yourself with somebody else, that's likely to prompt them to start asking you questions, more questions. I think that's probably the margin you have for improvement. That's said. And these dating setups that you're thinking about, often you're trying to figure out things

about the other person. And people do take others' behavior as a sign of things. And if they're not asking questions about you, if they're not asking questions about you, if they're not acting like they are interested in you, well, that's maybe a good sign. I know. It's just hard when it's like the 15th sign. You know what I mean? Like it's like the 15th date.

The same thing has happened. But yes, I agree. It is a sign. And we're going to get more into like the depth of- Fellas ask follow-up questions. Just send this podcast to every man in your life, please. We're going to get into like the best conversation starters and how to move from shallow to deep conversation, etc.

But I want to let you say the last thing. Yeah, the last one. The last one is that once we have kind of pessimism in the, instilled from, you know, misplaced perspectives and also failing to appreciate the power of reciprocity and responsiveness in conversation. Some of our beliefs can then be self-fulfilling. Pessimism in particular is self-fulfilling because those beliefs tend to keep you from reaching out and engaging with other people in ways that keep you from getting the data you would actually need to calibrate your expectations. So if I think talking to you, Liz, would be unpleasant

on a train, or you sit down next to me, you know, on my flight back to Chicago, you're from San Francisco, and I think talking to you would be unpleasant or you put in your earbuds and I assume you don't want to talk, I won't try. And I won't find out, I might be wrong. Optimism gets calibrated because I'll try and I'll find out, right? Anything that encourages approach and experience will calibrate your beliefs, but anything that creates avoidance creates what my former colleague at Booth, Robin Hogarth, called a wicked or an unkind learning environment where the feedback that you get isn't actually an accurate reflection of reality. If I sit down next somebody, I believe that they're not going to be fun to talk to.

I might not try and then I might never find out I'm wrong. Is there any way to override that pessimism other than just remind yourself of this research? So the way to do it is to make it a habit, right? So it's to develop enough experience approaching others that you actually calibrate your beliefs. And it's important not to confuse different types of social interaction. So statisticians sometimes refer to this as confusing the conditional. Probability's outcomes are conditional. on what kind of context that you're in,

which means that the outcomes are different depending on the context that you are in. So when somebody approaches you, that person, the outcome of that kind of interaction might be different than what happens if you were to randomly select somebody to talk to yourself. Person who approaches you on the streets of New York or San Francisco might want something from you.

And the outcome of those interactions are going to be different than what happens when you randomly reach out to somebody else. So you're calibrating based on that perception, but that's not actually accurate for what would happen if you were to go talk to somebody. You can confuse those two things, right? So often when I talk about our research, people will say, but yeah, you know, people come up to me all the time and it's kind of terrible, right?

It can be terrible, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting. That could be, right? There's a selection bias for the kind of people who are approaching you, and that's different, right? But that doesn't mean that you going up to other people will be terrible. And that's what we're studying, right? we're trying to understand what is it that's keeping you from choosing to be social and connect

with people in ways that would actually our data fine be more rewarding than you would likely expect them to be. It's those expectations that are creating barriers, but it's important to understand. We're talking about cases where you have a choice to reach out and engage or to hold back and you're making that choice. Our research, I think, is fundamentally empowering that way because it highlights your margin for improving your life and making choices a little bit differently. So just to recap what we can do based on these three things that are preventing us from reaching out, one would be that we can know that people like us more than we probably think. Focus on your warmth a little bit, right?

In social interaction. Okay. And then the second is about how we're anticipating the interaction going. Is to remember that the context of an interaction matters a lot. An email is not talking to somebody. And we want to prioritize in person, in voice. You want to prioritize the context where reciprocity is possible, where I reach out to you and you can reach back to me in live conversations, say, or on the phone with somebody, or even asking people for help in ways where they can respond to you easily and quickly. When you send an email to somebody, they're much less likely to help you than if you talk to them in person because there's a lot more responsiveness in that interaction.

So prioritize the context where we're actually able to respond to each. other in real time. And then third is just recognize you might have a little bit of a negativity bias based on people who have come up to you, but that doesn't mean you going up to people won't be different. Some of that. And to recognize that your own choices are shaping your experience. And if you're avoiding other people, right, because you're worried about how things are going to turn out. Remember, you're not getting data there. You didn't just learn that a conversation is going to be bad because you chose not to have it. Okay. I want to ask one for the men because I feel like I already made them sound like they're terrible on first date. But what I hear from a lot of my guy

is that they want to go up and have conversations with people, but whether they are hitting on them or not, they feel like they're being perceived as creepy. Yeah. How do they get around that? Well, I worry about that too, right? So when I'm out having conversations with people, I don't want to make anybody feel uncomfortable, right? But notice that's also a fear that we have, that's an expectation that we have that I think is actually likely to be miscalibrated. If you are genuinely just trying to have a conversation with somebody, that will typically become clear in the conversation, right? if you don't want something out of somebody else.

If you do want something out of somebody else, that will also become clear in the conversations. So if you are going around and hitting on people all the time, they will figure that out because you'll behave differently towards them than if you're just trying to have a nice conversation with somebody. Okay, so speak to the guy listening who's like, I don't want to talk to anybody more, like, I'm scared of being perceived as creepy. What's their guidebook? What should they do specifically?

Don't be creepy. Right? Just try to engage, right? Just find out something. Everybody's got an interesting story to tell you. The conversation that you should have with someone shouldn't vary depending on whether it's a man or a woman. Right? I mean, that's one way to think about it.

Everybody's got an interesting story to tell you. Try to find that out. I had lunch just yesterday with a dear friend of mine, a younger faculty member who actually read my book recently. And he said, you know, Nick, I have to tell you, I've never told you this in person. But I've always been a little skeptical about the research, right? In particular about deep conversation. But I'm reading the book. and I just feel like I gotta.

I gotta try it. So he was on a, he was on a train in California actually, a long, a long distance train. A woman sat down next to him, and he's married, but a younger guy could be confused for, you know, somebody trying to hit on somebody else. He's a handsome young man, younger man.

Woman sits down next to him with a little, you know, a little Pomeranian kind of dog, you know, and like a track suit kind of outfit, you know, just so very quick, bleach blonde hair, very quickly kind of stereotypes her as a stand. sort of beach blonde in California, somebody like that. Nevertheless, he commented on how nice and friendly the dog scene. And then they started going.

And he said they just had the most amazing conversation. She had such a richer and more complicated background than, you know, the stereotypes that we put on each other would ever guess. I mean, people are so much deeper than the first instincts that we have, so much richer and interesting. She'd grown up in a very conservative relationship. family that she'd broken away from over the years and was going to be married off very young. I mean, she was in tears in this conversation.

They had a very meaningful conversation. And at no point did he tell me that, you know, there was some concern about being misperceived there because it was genuine, right? You bring two people together. It ought to be two people having a conversation with each other. And for the fellows who are listening to this podcast, be a person with somebody else. and I think you've got a lot more power there to come across as genuine as you might fear, right? Particularly if you are genuine.

You're legitimately trying to hit on somebody. Well, that's your own problem to deal with, right? Or your own issue, whatever. Maybe you want to make it clear that you are interested in somebody romantically that has its own set of challenges. But if you're worried about being misperceived, I think that's an exaggerated fear. And you should just get over it. Did you know that 80% of OBGYNs have no training, zero training in menopause, and 75% of physicians are uncomfortable even talking to their patients about it,

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And then when I meet people in real life, I'm like, oh, that's actually outdated information or new research shows this. And I'm like that really annoying patient that everybody hates. But every single person that I have talked to at MIDI is up to date on the most recent information, the information that the biggest experts in the world are sharing on podcasts like mine. They are reading my lab results and they are helping me apply. that information to my unique body. Here's how it works. You book a virtual visit and then you meet

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Middy is covered by major insurance plans in all 50 states. This is not some fancy thing that for celebrities or influencers. This is something that we can all use our insurance for. I used my insurance for it to get covered and to have access to. If you have been feeling like something is off and you're not getting real answers, book your first MIDI health visit at join midi.com slash Liz Moody. That is join midi, mid, I, slash Liz Moody. A lot of you guys know that four years ago I started being what I call an

intentional drinker. Basically, it means that I am not completely sober, but I've stopped drinking just because it's like Thursday night. I used to drink maybe four or five times a week, a glass of wine after work, a cocktail at a bar, which is insane to look back on now. Now I drink a few times a month at the most, which has improved my life in about 5,000 ways. But the only downside is that I have almost zero tolerance for feeling poorly after I drink now because I am so used to feeling energetic and good every single day, which is why I am so, so excited about zbiotics pre-alcohol. I tried these for the first time at my friend's birthday party in Vegas, and I have to say my expectations were very low. I was like, there's no way that this works. But it did. It did.

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That's to blame for those rough days after drinking. Pre-alcohol produces an enzyme that helps break that byproduct down. So the whole strategy is just make pre-alcohol your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, hydrate, get some sleep, and then you will feel like your best self tomorrow. Again, I did not think that these would work. I was like, there is no way that these would work, but they do. and it does make sense because the mechanisms of action all make sense. Whatever your next few months look like, if you have weddings or dinners or times that you want

to intentionally drink, you can keep the good times rolling into the next day, drink pre-alcohol before you go out and wake up ready for whatever tomorrow brings. Head to zbiotics.com slash Liz Moody and use code Liz Moody at checkout for 15% off. That's Zbiotics.com slash Liz Moody. use code Liz Moody at checkout for 15% off. Okay, I got to ask because you're like people aren't judging you as much as you might think. And there's so much research behind that. But what I hear from people often is, well, I kind of am judging people.

And that story is sort of like, oh, this person has like bleached bunch hair, so they're going to be this kind of person, etc. Is there any way we can catch our own judgments and quell them before they prevent us from talking to other people? Yeah. I mean, I think this is one where we're always going to have this. to some extent, but again, with experience comes wisdom. Practicing these things just makes you realize that people are much richer than whatever your first good instinct is likely to be about somebody. You just don't know what's in between somebody's ears. You don't know what experiences they've had. I was in a very memorable Uber ride not long ago in L.A., 23-minute ride. The driver, there's an Iranian

flag there, and he was clearly an older Iranian gentleman, but very crusty, rough, tough looking kind of guy, right? And older, older gentleman, and I sat down and I asked him, can you tell me how you feel about the war? And it was clear that I wasn't, you know, I wasn't making small talk like I wanted to know. How do you, I would really want to know. How do you feel about that? And he was a little slow to start, but once we got going, became clear he had no love lost for the regime. In fact, his son, his 15-year-old son was killed in a protest, was shot in a neck. He went back to Tehran to pick up his body against all the advice he was getting. He was in Doha running a company at the time. He went back to get his son's body against all advice. He was arrested, thrown into a prison,

a dark prison. He had to sell his business to pay ransom to get out of prison, never did get his son's body, eventually made it to the U.S. with his two daughters and his wife. Another son is in Europe. They applied for asylum for years, were denied during the first Trump administration, eventually got his asylum granted on the day when his wife died in the hospital. I'm standing in the back of this guy's car after that 23-minute ride were both in tears giving each other a hug. I don't think he'd ever told anybody that story in his car before. And when I sat down with him, it never occurred to me that this guy would be crying with me, 20 minutes, later that just never entered into my mind. And I've had so many conversations like this, like my friend did, right, with this woman on the train who had just so much richer background

experience than he ever would have guessed. Once you have those experiences a lot, you learn. You do learn. And then you do become better at this. Maybe not perfect, but you do become better. How do you square that circle, though, that we're like, okay, I got to remember other people aren't judging me, but we're judging other people, which is a proof point in our head that they are probably judging us. A little bit right at first. So we judge each other all the time, but one thing is we judge each other more favorably than we think. Right. So that's a big one. And conversation really clarifies a lot. We're very quick to evaluate other people. My colleague Alex Toteroff studies the impressions that we make just based on people's faces. We judge trustworthiness

within 50 milliseconds. That's faster than the blink of an eye, right? But as soon as I start talking to you, those snap judgments go out the window. Oh, so it's actually a reason to have the conversation. It is a reason to talk because conversation and interaction clarifies. If you are scared of being judged, even more reason to have the conversation.

Absolutely. Oh, that's so interesting. Absolutely. Okay, and then we're going to get into again, I promise all the conversation starters. But I have to ask, because I'm sure there are people listening and they're like, I'm an introvert. This sounds exhausting.

I don't want to cry in an Uber with somebody. But your research has found that regardless of how introverted you are, you benefit from being more extroverted. Yeah, yeah. So this has been some of the most fascinating research that I've learned about and also observed myself and our research in the entire book. Because there are very strong beliefs that people have about their personalities and what they like and dislike. And there's some accuracy to that. But when it comes to introversion and extroversion, what researchers consistently find, is that introversion and extroversion is really a belief that we have about ourselves.

The standard personality scales that we use measure people's beliefs about themselves typically. And that means that those beliefs about ourselves predict our expectations and our choices actually better than they predict our experiences. So the way to think about extroversion and introversion isn't as the type of person you are, but rather as the type of person you think you are. The type of person you think you are can become the type of person you are. So if you think that you don't like engaging with other people, you might choose not to and then might not find out that you could be wrong on those dimensions too. And what researchers find, including in our own research, is that, say before a conversation, extroversion tends to predict

people's beliefs about how the conversation will go and how much they'll enjoy it, better than it predicts how much they actually enjoy it, which means the biggest gaps between my beliefs about how this interaction is going to go and how I actually feel afterwards comes from those who are the most introverted, which makes sense because they also have less experience as well when more introverted. There are other beliefs about introversion and extroversion that are also miscalibrated a bit. One is about fatigue and tiredness. Yeah, this is the thing you hear always. Like, I can go to the party, but I'm going to be so exhausted after. Turns out everybody's tired after talking. Extroverts and introverts alike. That turns out to be true.

It's a very hard thing to learn, actually, because you only see your own introverted behavior. You don't see other people acting introverted, right? You don't see other people when they're missing the party. You don't see other people after the party when they go home and have to take a nap, just like you are. But when psychologists look, they find that this idea about, you know, social battery or getting tired, it just doesn't show up in the data. Extroverts and introverts report being equally tired, rather energized. conversation tends to be energizing for people, tend to report being equally energized by social interaction.

The drop in energy, like the fatigue that comes, tends to happen kind of with the same speed and same intensity for extroverts and introverts alike. It's like exercise. Everybody gets tired exercising, right? You go out for a jog, and everybody gets tired from that. Wait, so how do you account for the fact that I might want to leave a party like three hours before my husband would want to leave a party?

Yeah. I don't know. How do you account for that? Well, like, I've always said I'm an introvert, although I've had numerous podcast guests and people in my real life push back on that recently. And they're like, girl, you're an extrovert. But like I've always said, I'm an introvert. So the party has, I've loved it, but it wore me out quicker. I'm going to go home, whereas it costs my husband less so he can stay out longer. So one thing that you'd want to know as a researcher is, are you choosing to behave differently at the party? You might just be exercising more. Oh, I definitely. Yeah. My husband might be just sitting down and chilling with a beer with the, with the fellows on the couch. No, I feel like personally responsible for the quality of everybody's conversation. That's tiring, right? So what you've just done is run a marathon.

Your husband just took the stairs to the third floor. That's no surprise that you're more tired. It doesn't mean you're an introvert. It just means you were exercising more. There are so many confounds with introversion and extroversion that makes it hard to learn this. I mean, one thing we find two in our work is that people tend to overestimates. how introverted they are. The number of people who tell me I'm an introvert is just through the roof. You're not probably. That is so, you know, people. Do you think introverts really exist?

Well, it depends how you measure it. So there, so if you measure it behaviorally, right, if you actually look at how tired people get into social, that you can do. But the way people think about it is in terms of their beliefs about themselves. So introvert is a belief about yourself, not an actual reaction to being social. That is what you're describing. It's how scientists measure it. Is there, you know, self-report scales, how people measure it? And it describes the type of person you think you are, not the type of person you actually are. The other thing that I think is important realized about this is that it doesn't actually

explain a whole lot of your behavior. So over the course of any given day, only about 15% of the variability in what you're doing at any given moment is predicted by how you score on this extroversion, introversion dimension. Mostly, it's driven by what you're being asked to do, the context you're in. So when you're talking on a podcast, you're acting extroverted. When you're writing up the show notes afterwards, you're acting introverted, right? When I'm teaching, I am acting extroverted. When I'm writing my book, I'm acting introverted. About 85% of the variability in what people are doing moment to moment comes from what they are asked to do. And people's well-being, introverts and extroverts alike,

tend to come when they're interacting with other people, and they feel less good when they're not, which is one of the reasons why extroverts are consistently and much happier in their lives than introverts are. But if being introverted or extroverted really is just a belief we have about ourselves, then we can all be extroverts by changing the belief that we have about ourselves. The way to think about this is like exercise, right? We would all be a little healthier if we exercise more, right? Particularly folks who don't exercise much at all, right? You'd be a little physically healthier. The same thing is true with your social life, too, that we'd all be a little happier. Extroverts and introverts alike. Psychologists find that when they ask you to act more extroverted.

People report being happier when they do that over half hour, an hour a day, two weeks, as Sonia Lubramirsky psychologist at UC Riverside finds in her field studies. Acting extroverted increases people's mood, their satisfaction with life, their reported happiness. To a limit or forever? Is there a point where that tips? sure, just like there is with exercise. The data don't suggest you should be constantly talking. You got things to do. I got to write a book. You got to type the show notes, right? Whatever. We got other things we got to do for sure. The data just suggests that in those opportunities where you could choose to engage or hold back, you'd probably feel a little better if you chose to engage than if you

held back. Now, that doesn't always mean you choose to engage. I had to write a book, right? I got other things to do. But it suggests that we're miscalibrated and how we think about the pay-on. for reaching out versus holding back. And then that would probably change how you chose to behave sometimes. But it doesn't mean you should be doing it all the time, right? But it does suggest that, yes, if you'd like to improve your social life, you can. Even introverts too would be a little happier if they reached out a little more a little more often. Well, and I think my takeaway is I'm going to stop using it as an excuse. Like, oh, I'm an introvert. So I'm going to say no. I'm an introvert. I'm going to leave this party early, et cetera. I think that's a really,

really good way to think about it. That is a limit you're putting on yourself that you should just check. We find in our research over and over again that there are lots of psychological barriers that pop up in people's minds that keep us from reaching out and engaging with other people, fears about how other people respond, beliefs about yourself that might keep you from reaching out and engaging when you could, right? Our data don't suggest that you should be reaching out all the time, but it does suggest that maybe you want to test some of those flags, test some of those barriers, right? Those bars that are keeping you from reaching out, what we find in our research, when we do this in our experiments, we find that those bars aren't quite as strong as you think

they are. They're often mistaken. They're more like pasta noodles, wet ones even. And when we test them, rather than taking them as given, I'm an introvert, this is how I'm going to feel. Well, just let me see what happens when I have a conversation with this woman who's got this little dog in a track suit on this train. Let me just see what happens, right? Once you start testing those barriers, you might find that you're wrong in ways that you wouldn't have otherwise. And then how you choose to engage or the opportunities you have to engage or connect with people, that's going to vary across people, right? It's going to differ the contexts they live in, the opportunities that they have.

You might learn, for instance, that when you go to a party, maybe your husband's got some good practices here. Maybe you sit down and have a conversation with a person. You get to know them a little bit better, actually create a connection. Or take some of the pressure off of myself to perform and delay. Exactly. That's exhausting. That's not a social connection. That's about social exhaustion, right? Take opportunities to connect that you might otherwise be overlooking is likely to make your life a little bit better. But yes, thinking about introversion as a belief you have about yourself that might not be serving you well, might be a misplaced barrier, I think is a wise way to do it. Did your research find that there were better or worse conversation starters?

We have not studied that systematically. What we have found is that, conversations that tend to be deeper where you're asking more meaningful questions of other people, those conversations tend to be better. That's what we know about what creates differences in the quality of conversation over time. We have not looked systematically in different kinds of conversations started, but of course there are, right? I mean, you can imagine really bad conversation starters. You would probably never use them, right? Oh, my diarrhea is particularly bad today. Like you're not going to start a conversation with that, right? We can certainly imagine them. But among the conversations starters that we would often use, asking deeper questions tends to be

better than shallower ones, but mostly the big barriers we don't choose to start them at all. I strongly prefer deeper conversations. I hate shallow conversations, but I find I'm often in situations that it's really hard to go deep, like at a party or on a train. So how can we quickly go deep without being weird? Yeah. There are contexts where it is hard to go deeper, like at a party when you're a around a lot of other people. You just don't have time. That's just not a context that allows for that

kind of conversation. So there, it's a little harder to make that choice. But maybe your husband sitting on the couch with a beer with his buddy, that's a context where you can do that. And in those contexts where you've got time, you're in a diatic interaction, just a conversation with another person, then we can choose to go deeper if we try. And a lot of people believe that there's, they're like magic words that they can use and that they don't know what those words are. we find when we ask people, what are the questions you would normally ask somebody? They sit down and write down a couple questions that they would normally talk to somebody about when they're just getting to know them.

Set those aside. Now come up with some deeper, more meaningful questions you could ask somebody. We find people can come up with questions. We do this just in downtown Chicago in Millennium Park. People are just walking around in the park. They can come up with more meaningful questions that they could ask. They're just choosing not to. And when we then ask people to have a conversation based on,

on the deeper questions they came up with, they enjoy that conversation more than the ones that the questions that they would normally ask somebody about. You have more power, I think, to create more meaningful conversations if you choose to try. So that's one barrier.

Taking an interest in really getting to know somebody, how they're feeling about something, how they really think about something, what they believe, what their hopes and dreams are, something deeper about them rather than surface level. But in conversation itself,

if you want some practical things, thoughts about how to do this. I do have some of those. And our data suggests you can get deep really quickly in conversation if you try. So we give people in our experiments, you know, meaningful questions. We've done this now with over 5,000 people, have deep conversation with someone asking questions like, if I was going to become a good friend of yours, Liz, what would be most important for me to know about you? Or what are you most grateful for in your life? Can you please tell me about it? Or can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? Those are questions that go beyond the surface level stuff outside of you, what do you do, right? And go to

something more meaningful. Why do you feel a certain way? Or, you know, what are your hopes and dreams, real beliefs? And you can get to those pretty quickly in conversation if you try. I think you can get to this pretty easily in two steps. You want it? So often our first, you know, first conversation with someone will be out about what things, you know, what do you do for a living or where do you live? Things external to the person. The follow-up question to that, though, can go deep. pretty quick. You can go from a what question to a why question very quickly. So what do you do for a living? Why do you do that? Or is that your dream job? Is this what you've always dreamed about doing? I had a lift driver from the San Francisco airport last night to the hotel that I stayed at last

night. And he said he didn't like driving for a lift. I asked him, what's your dream job? And he told me, he's Turkish, he tells me about this Turkish coffee shop that he wants to run and all the coffees he would serve and all the different kinds of desserts that he would serve and how he likes to make Turkish delight and Baklava right away got to his hopes and dreams. I don't know the right way to say this, but my fear would be to make that person feel bad that they're not doing their dream job. Do you know what I mean? Do you worry about bringing up hot button topics or topics that will make people feel bad in some way? So mostly people like talking about things that matter to them, even if it feels a little bit negative at times. So, like in our deep

conversations, you know, we ask people talk about the last time they cried in front of another person, right? That's not necessarily happy, bubbly, right? Happiness, well-being in life isn't constantly feeling, you know, positive. It's doing meaningful stuff that connects you with other people that you think is valuable and worthwhile, even though people report some of those conversations being heavy. Like the conversation I had with the Iranian Uber driver. That was really meaningful. And that's really what we're focused. Good in the eudamonic sort of sense. This is a moment that was well spent. That was a good moment. And I feel good about that in a kind of a deeper sense. I do sometimes worry about this, but I think, too, those fears are often misplaced as well. Talk about this a little bit in the book.

This is a real barrier that comes up when people are going through grief or loss. We find that people are overly reluctant to reach out and express support to somebody who's in need, right, going through a hard time because you're focused on your competency. What am I going to say, right? How can I make this person feel better? They're not going to feel better. Their mother just died. They just lost a child, right? They just didn't get the dream job that they'd always wanted. They're not in their dream job. You're not going to make them feel better. But the feeling better part isn't necessarily what makes the interaction feel meaningful and worth having. It's, have you seen this person. Have you taken an interest in them? Have you really created a connection? That's what

people find to be really rewarding. And all too often, I think, we avoid asking people meaningful things because we're overly worried about how they'll respond. This happened to us. We lost a baby six months into my wife's pregnancy. July 11th of 2016 was when we got that news. And that loss was compounded by loneliness that comes after it as well as, you know, my wife is avoided by other parents on the way to school who don't know what to say, don't know how to acknowledge us, worry about bringing something up, right, that's going to make you feel about it. Are you kidding? People who go through this kind of experience who are suffering at the moment, I'm thinking

about it all the time, right? It's not like my lift driver wasn't dreaming about his Turkish coffee shop. Every moment he was sitting behind that wheel and a job he wasn't loving, right? He's thinking about it all the time. It's not like when we lost our baby, we weren't thinking about this all the time. You're not going to bring something up that I hadn't thought about. When somebody loses their mother, it's not like they're thinking about that all the time, right? They are thinking about it.

But by avoiding somebody, right, you're also isolating them, making them feel lonely. They're not seen by somebody else. And when you ask them, I am so sorry. about losing your mother. Tell me about her. I'm so sorry you lost your baby. Tell me about her. That's okay? Like I would just be so scared to devastate you to ask you that. They're already devastated. Now they're devastated and ignored. Yeah. Right? I have a colleague whose brother has cancer. They're going to make that go away. But I'll send him a note and say, I'm just thinking about you right now, and I'm sending along a hug here. Or I'll just go into his office. I'll just give him a hug.

and then just walk out. You don't connect with people just by the words you say, there aren't magic words in these moments. You're just connecting with people. You're showing an interest in them, right? You're trying to avoid the isolation that comes from not knowing what to say, and hence you say nothing at all. And we're trying to avoid letting our fear of competency get in the way of our expressing warmth.

Yeah. Give somebody a hug and I'm so sorry and I'll come by tomorrow with another hug. What did you say to the construction workers when you were walking here? Like, what's the conversation starter there? This morning. I just asked them, what are they doing? How long you've been working here? I thanked them so much for the work they're doing.

You're making the sidewalk look so great. This is an impressive work right here. That was it. Yeah, just acknowledge them as I was going by. I joked with one of them. Can I put a handprint in this one? Right. You know. And the idea is just like that, that's warmth, I guess, is the real.

Yeah. It's just a connection, right? It's easy to overlook these kinds of things and think they're not important, right? Because I'm never going to see these guys again. I'm never going to talk to. the lift driver who wants to open the Turkish coffee store or the Iranian who lost his son. And it's easy to think of those moments as we're traveling through life as kind of unimportant. It really matters.

I've been married to my wife for 30 years. I've got five kids who are amazing and complicated in all sorts of wonderful ways, come to us in all kinds of different channels. It's those big things that really matter for our happiness and our well-being. And those big things do matter, right? But happiness and well-being really is kind of, like a leaky tire. It just comes and goes. It's an emotion. It's a feeling, right? It's a feeling about connection with other people often. And that feeling comes and goes. A good way to think about it

is in terms of like exercise, right? The moments that you spend exercising really matter. And we all kind of get that with exercise. You can't run a marathon and then think, oh, good, I don't have to exercise for the next year. Right. I'm exercised up. But we tend to think about that with happiness, with well-being. That I do this one big thing. I get this great job. We get this great house. get this great partner, get the kids off to college and all settled, and I'll be good for a long time. That's not the way it works. On Monday, then you got traffic again, and that sucks, right? Or you read the news, and that's unpleasant. And what psychologists find is that our well-being, this comes from Ed Deiner in the mid-90s, an early discovery about happiness and well-being,

is that it's really better predicted by the frequency of positive experiences we have, not by the intensity of them. So that little moment when I was walking over here, to have this conversation with you, it made that walk better. Right? So my, you know, that half hour walk over here was nicer because I reached out and connected to some of your neighbors in the area. And, you know, when I'll walk back, you know, I'll do that again probably. That'll be better.

If I, you know, get to know somebody on a plane ride on the way home, even if it's just for a little bit, that'll make that plane ride better. If I have a conversation with a lift driver on the way to the airport, that'll make that half hour better. And you string those moments together and that's a good morning. You string some of them together in the afternoon. That makes a good day. You string some good days together like that.

That's what makes a good week, right? Good weeks make for good months, good months, make for good years and for good lives. And so paying attention to moments, the frequency of connection and all these opportunities to engage with folks, even with just a smile or hello, that you're overlooking, is a good way to just enrich your life. And it's easy to overlook those. And you talk about in the book how we're really misgates. and the things that are making us happy in life. I think I forget the exact statistic, but it was like these social connections

make us four times happier than an increase in income. Oh, so this comes from the consequences of feeling alone, right? So we can look to see what is it that really predicts variability moment to moment in people's well-being? Money actually has a pretty small effect, the correlation between how much money you make and how good you're feeling at any given moment is actually pretty small. It's correlated with beliefs about,

how good a life you're living. It's a really good metric of social comparison, but it's not very good determinant of your well-being. What really accounts for variance in well-being are the quality of your social connections in any one moment. And we all do understand this, that, you know, if you have a fight with your spouse in the morning before you leave, your whole day is just off, right? Even just a moment of road rage that sticks with you for a long time. That social conflict hurts. And when psychologists try to compare, how big is the effect of that social stuff compared to other things like money? Hard thing to do. But one estimate, if you ask people, as Gallup does, they survey about 3,000 people a day in their daily

well-being survey, you ask people, were you with other people yesterday or did you spend the day alone? the difference between spending yesterday completely alone versus with other people in terms of how good a day people essentially reported having, that difference is seven times bigger than the difference between being relatively wealthy versus relatively poor, right? That's a huge difference. I think it's really interesting because intuitively, I think a lot of us know that, like you said, and if you looked at the way that we spend our time, it does not support that at all. We spend so much time trying to make money and granted some of that is to just pay for our lives and things are getting increasingly expensive, et cetera. But like, we do not live as if that difference is supported by research.

There are lots of things we believe in the abstract that we don't actually believe in the moment. Yeah. We don't actually put into practice, right? So money is a very easy thing to quantify and calculate. So when you go to a job, you know, you apply for a job or somebody offers you overtime pay, right? Or this position you could get if you worked a little harder and you make a little more money, easy to tell, this is a $10,000 difference. And that's an easy thing to assess. It's very hard to assess what's an extra hour of connecting with my spouse over dinner. What's that going to do for me? It's not easy to calculate. So we tend not to calculate it. We don't think about it as much because it's hard to measure. And it's hard to quantify. And that can lead to a lot of unwise choices, for sure.

And is the secret there just like awareness? I think that is what it is, probably, because it's the awareness, it's the belief that then drives how you make your choices, right, how you set up your life to do this. But then the other thing that's, I think, really important, because there are things we recognize at the abstract that we don't realize moment to moment. So you might realize that it's good for you to exercise. But on any given moment, putting on your shoes and getting on the treadmill or going on, I'm so tired, I don't want to do it, right? So sometimes we can pre-commit to things that we know are important in the abstract, but that we would choose not to do in the moment, right? So get a running club that you've got to go to every Monday, Wednesday, Friday

with friends who expect you to be there, right? You pre-commit. You can do this with social stuff too. So with my colleagues at the university, I set up specific days. We have all of our faculty get together for a first Tuesday lunch now. We've been doing this all year. Paid four or five by the dean's office. Thank you, University of Chicago. First Tuesday, we pre-commit to that. We are going to have faculty lunches. It's just on the schedule. You don't have to think about it. You just go. My wife and I works great. We buy tickets to Broadway and Chicago, the season tickets. Any given Friday, we would not choose to buy a ticket to go to a show because we've got to find a sitter and it's hard, all that. We make the choice then to put it on the calendar and then

we're stuck with it. So even if we don't feel like we want to go at the moment, we go to Mrs. Doubtfire and learn that that's a really good play, it turns out, a really fun musical, right? So that's a way that you can help deal with some of these disconnects between things we seem to know the abstract, but don't put into practice in the moment. It also makes me think about the importance of the introvert, extrovert thing because we're able to take on habits better when we make them our identity. Like I am a reader. I am an exerciser. I've been able to exercise for the first time my life this year because I've taken it on as an identity. And so when we're saying my identity is that I am not a social person.

That would be very negatively reinforcing for that habit. Absolutely. It would mean you would not choose to do that because you don't think you would enjoy that. Yeah. So, I mean, it means these are like, they're funny. Like we're like, ha, ha, I'm an introvert, whatever. But it could be having these incredibly damaging impacts on your ability to make sociality a habit. It could.

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wildgrain.com slash Liz Moody. Is a compliment a really good conversation starter? That's the best one I know of. Okay. It's a really good one. Yeah. There are lots of ways you can think about how do I engage with somebody, given the importance of warmth, kindness, just a kind word. That tends to be really powerful to people. And compliments tend to have outsized impacts on people's experience. The way we respond to positive and negative events in our lives is often insensitive to the actual magnitude of them, not completely. Right. A really big loss hurts us more than a small loss and a really nice positive thing makes us feel better for longer than a really small thing. but even really small things tend to have effects

that are outsized compared to their magnitude. So the difference between how positive you feel over the course of your day when somebody passes along a kind word versus finding out in the morning you won an award.

Both of those things are going to decay, right? Both of those things are going to make you feel really good. And even just the small, kind word might, you know, leave you feeling just as good for just as long as this big thing, this award. That's what psychologists refer to a scope insensitivity. Our response to this is insensitive or some relatively insensitive to the scope or the

magnitude of the experience. And that means that kind words like compliments are often the places where we can get the biggest return on our investment, if you want to think about this in financial terms, right? These little things that we can pass along that really have a lot of power to lift people up. But when we ask folks, how often you have a kind thought that you don't share? They typically tell us around, you know, a third of the time. Wow. They won't share a kind thought. Right? You can understand why you might not pass along an insult to something. Yeah, for sure. But why wouldn't you pass along a compliment? People think it's not going to matter very much. It's going to be misinterpreted. But if you walk around looking for kind things to share with other people, it's a very positive experience for you and even more positive for them.

I live by the New York City subway system motto, which is if you see something, say something. Okay, good. Like I really, I mean, for bond threats and for compliments. I think it was really lovely that you were like, I walk by these. construction workers, and I thank them for the work they were doing on the neighborhood. They're doing good work. The sidewalk looks great. You'll appreciate it. Yeah, that's really interesting. As I was writing this book, one of the fun, really fun things about doing it as a researcher, because I spent all the time with data and experiments. But when you write a book, you also get to talk to people who are putting this stuff into practice. So I had a conversation with Celine McGee. She runs what she calls the Compliment Squad. It's kind of her passion project. And she learned

about the power of compliments years ago. She remembers this very vividly. She was having a garage sale. She put up signs, you know, around and advertisements like in the local newspaper. And one of them was things like come turn your, our trash into your treasure or something like that. And other ones were come by for your compliment. And what she said, she so vividly remembers that lots of people came by asking for their compliment. Nobody came by talking about turning trash into treasure. And she also found that when people came by asking for a compliment, she had no trouble coming up with one. As soon as she looked, like it was easy to, compliment somebody on something, right? Just when she was looking. And so she has now taken it on

kind of as a habit to go on compliment walks when she just wants to lift herself up a little bit. So she'll go around the city of Philadelphia passing along compliments to people, often about, you know, what they're wearing. She often gives compliments, she says, to women rather than men. She's a little worried about, you know, being misinterpreted. So that's fine, right? That's okay. She's still giving out a lot more compliments than she would otherwise. But I did ask her, even when she gives compliments to men, it tends to go really well, too. And she has nice conversations with people when she does that as well. But she then also hands out cards encouraging other people to pass that compliment along.

But she's learned that the way to have a good day is to go out and try to lift people up with some kind words. And the psychological research certainly confirms that that is a good way to have a good day is to think about how to lift other people up. I love that. That it's like, do it selfishly if for no other reason. You have a lot of power to affect other people, right? You can ruin their day by making them enraged. You can also lift them up for the entire day. And once you know that, why would you ruin somebody's day when you could make their day?

Is there research on the best types of compliments to give, like appearance-based or like you have a really warm smile or? My sense is that all of this is extremely context dependent and probably doesn't matter very much. There are big differences, and then there are littler differences. The big difference is, do I give you a compliment, tell you how much I loved our conversation, or do I not? That's big. And it's going to be dependent on the context you're in on the Southwest Airlines flight. I took care.

A woman was wearing these awesome red glasses. And I told her, you are killing it with those glasses. Holy cow. It looked like I just had made her day. She lit up. She's just this huge smile. You have a lot of power to do that when you start looking for that with other people. That's what Celine recognized. There are lots of opportunities. You just pass people and just not even

acknowledge them, right? And once you start looking for those opportunities to lift people up, you'll find a lot of them. And then it makes you feel pretty darn good. Well, and I like what you said because I do think in the wellness world and as we're trying to apply a lot of these things, we can let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of just doing it. And you're like, you're just, just do it. Yeah. I mean, there are certain filters you want to have, right? Like, probably best not to pass along every insult that comes to your mind, but you don't need to have a filter are on your compliment. That one you can just let you just let them fly. I've heard a hypothesis that men don't feel lonely because they don't have friends. They feel lonely because they have a hard time being

truly vulnerable with the friends that they have. So you talk about honesty and secrecy and revealing yourself a lot in your book. I'm curious. Do you think it's particularly hard for men to truly reveal themselves in a way where they get the benefits of being seen? So I share that hypothesis. I share that intuition. We have never observed it in our data, but it's not obvious that we're studying that in the right way to be able to detect that. Typically, we find very, very small gender differences in our experiments. And gender differences that can often be confused with other things, like at the party. For instance, you described how you get so tired because you're an introvert and your husband doesn't because he's an extrovert. Well, you're also behaving very differently.

Some of these things that look like gender may not actually be gender. But when it comes to being open and honest, I definitely share the sense that women tend to be more open and vulnerable with people than men do. We don't, though, find differences between men and women and how much they're going to enjoy, say, a deep conversation where they're required to be open and vulnerable with somebody. If anything, women are a little more pessimistic than men are here. But we're not doing the kinds of things where we're studying, you know, day-to-day life necessarily and the kind of choices we make. But in general, my experience from looking at tens of thousands of data points, so I think there are big differences and there are small differences.

The big differences are, am I engaging or not? The smaller ones tend to be things like gender and personality that tend not to matter as much as we might imagine them. Have you heard much about the male loneliness crisis that's happening right now? I have, but you don't find big differences between men and women in the surveys about loneliness. So then what's that about? Is that just media hype? As a psychologist, I study these misbeliefs for a living. I don't know where that one comes from exactly, but it's not coming from the data. It's interesting because it feels true to me in that a lot of the women, I know, are really sharing what's going on in their marriage, in their work, the things they're afraid of, the things they're afraid of, the things they're.

they have shame about. And then the men I know are not having those same types of conversations with their friends. And they're often relying on their partner for those types of conversations pretty much exclusively. Yeah. It's hard to know, right? I do share this intuition that men tend to do things with each other more than they talk with each other. Perhaps I just don't know how true it actually is. Is there a way to create an environment that encourages more vulnerability? So, shrinking your world a little bit so that you're having more one-on-one conversations, that's where you can actually get deep and have a meaningful conversation with somebody. And also giving yourself the time to do it is another one.

So making the space where I go for a walk with my colleagues, you know, we take a half hour, just two of us walk around campus a little bit. That does it. The other big thing, and this is where you really have power to do this, is ask about it. Don't ask, you know, how are you feeling and not really mean it. Ask, how are you feeling these days? How are you feeling about this? This seems like it could be hard.

Did this seem hard to you? This seems like this could be a wonderful experience. Was this feeling great for you? Ask people about their hopes and dreams or where they see themselves in 15 to 20 years. Ask them about stuff that matters. Ask people about who they love, right? Or what they love. That's a great way to get deep very quickly.

And you can choose to do that. So in our work, what I'm constantly interested in is trying to understand where we have power to create meaningful connection that we're not using. And I think the place where this really happens a lot where you could make your life better is choosing to take some of these opportunities by asking people meaningful things in conversation. If you are spending too much time in small talk, who's responsible for that? Right. Who can change that?

You can. How do you do that? ask meaningful stuff, offer up meaningful stuff, right? That's how you do that. Do you think a lot of people are keeping secrets about themselves? Yeah. Michael Slepian studies secrecy, and he finds that people, on average, are keeping about 13 secrets from 13 different categories from other people, things they're not sharing with others. And basically, everybody's got something. They're not telling someone about themselves. There certainly is quite a bit of this. And this really, and this really,

comes down to fear of harsh judgment. Like if I tell you how hard a time I actually have writing, right? I reveal that and just finish the book, right? It looks like you should be, should be easy for you. It's good. You just, you just managed it. It was super hard. It took me five years to put this thing together. That's a long time. If I share that with you, right? I worry you're going to evaluate me negatively because the content of that secret is somewhat negative. That's what keeps people holding these kinds of secrets from other people. Is it generally positive to disclose our secrets? So this is a thing that we find in our research that people misunderstand. It is more positive

than people expect to open up and disclose something to somebody else because opening up and disclosing something to someone else is a sign of warmth. It's an action that creates trust. But what we're mostly worried about is how we're being judged on these competency dimensions. we're worried about the valence of the content of the mission of the information that we're sharing with somebody else, not the signal that the behavior itself is conveying to another person. So when I tell you something, honest about me, right, reveal a negative secret that I haven't shared with you, the content of that is negative, right? But what we miss is that the action itself of revealing that information is positive, right,

that is trustworthy, is honest. signals to you that I trust you by sharing this information by passing this along to you. And so that's why it tends to be evaluated. People tend not to be judged as harshly as they imagine by another person because revealing itself is positive. So our shame is I'm not competent, but we're being judged on your warm for sharing. So it's not that people don't pay attention to the content they do. It's that in addition there's this other big signal, which is you're an honest person. And I like that. I appreciate that. How often are people keeping secrets from their partners? More than they need to.

That's what I'll say from our data. More than they need to be because of fears about how it will be judged about things. So if you're listening and you're keeping a secret, maybe it could be like a fun little practice to try today. Particularly if you're keeping a secret that is kind of burdensome for you, right? That's kind of hurting you in some way. Not all secrets are. Michael finds that positive secrets aren't burdensome for you. I'm throwing you a birthday party. I'll tell you that. That's the kind of secret I'm terrible at keeping. I'm like, I got it. I'm so excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The negative ones, the ones that are burdensome are the ones that people think about a lot, ruminate on or worried about, right? And if a secret is burdensome for you, finding somebody to share that with,

probably going to be a much more positive experience than you'd guess, and they're not likely to judge you harshly. I do want to challenge, if you're listening to this and you have a secret that's burdensome, go tell somebody. An easy way to practice that is with a stranger. Oh, that's like go to a bar, tell somebody, lift driver, yeah, try to get it off your chance. Somebody you're never going to see again. Yeah, you can. It does not as complicated right in your life and it will give you some practice to sharing it to see how other people respond. Psychologists find that simply writing about things in a, in a journal also helps like disclosing in any way. But I do think there's something really powerful about somebody

saying like, you're judging yourself this harshly and I'm not really judging you. harshly. Yeah. Oh, I've done that too. Somebody might say, right? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I've had that experience a million times where I've shared something that I'm so embarrassed about. And they're like, oh, I absolutely have had that experience. I'm there with you. Yeah. We underestimate how common these are. But of course, if people aren't sharing them, we're not going to hear about them either. And so we're going to feel like we're alone with whatever the secret might be. Do we get the benefits of sociality from being around family? In general, yes. But what we get benefits from are positive social experiences.

So not if it's not positive with your feeling. No, it's not, right? And this helps to explain, for instance, a lot of the variability that psychologists observed during COVID. During the COVID period when people were required to stay at home, there was a lot of variability in how people responded to that. And that depended a lot on what their home life was like versus work life. Right. So if you're home in an abusive relationship with somebody, your life just got a whole lot worse because you couldn't get away from it. If you're home with young kids trying to go to school, we had five kids going through school

at the time, you're like, got worse, because that's hard, right? It was hard to have them do that. But, you know, I have wonderful marriage. My wife is, Jen, is amazing. We got to spend a ton time together. That was really, really rewarding. What really brings happiness and well-being are the experiences we're having with other people. And friends, we tend to have, actually, the data suggests we enjoy spending time with friends more than we do with family. But that's mostly because the things we do with friends are different than the things we do with family. Oh. And so that difference between family and friends disappears when you just account for what you're doing together.

Right. So, you know, you do the dishes with your husband, right? And that's not as fun as what you do with the gal pals when you go out to a movie or you go to a show or something. Right. You're only going to a show with them. But you do that with your husband. You'll like it just as much. Or with our kids, right?

So sometimes we're doing hard things with the kids. We're having to work with them when they're home from school and keep them entertained while we're also trying to work. That's hard to do, right? Or we're disciplining them, which is hard to have to do or helping them struggle through their teenage years, right? But if, you know, if it was just going out and having a good time with them like you do with your friends, well, you enjoy that a lot more too.

Are there activities that are particularly conducive to getting the benefits of social connection? The big thing is, are you going through the experience together kind of with each other? That's an important one. So things that allow you to be in sync essentially with another person. This is why I think people like watching movies together so much is because we're going through this emotional roller coaster at the same time with each other. And then we can talk about it, you know, afterwards. Social experiences where we're competing with each other can be not quite as connecting with each other, but they're still fun if we're doing this fairly, right? So, you know, in sports, technically you're competing with each other, but you're doing it in a cooperative

environment where we agree on the rules and what the playing field is like and we understand what fairness looks. But the social experiences that are really powerful, the ones we're doing together with each other that are cooperative in some way. Are there activities that we do for social connection that aren't actually helpful for it? I would say typing to each other, right? The things that you like you do at parties where it looks like it's a little like the diet soda a version of social interaction where you're not really engaging meaningfully with anybody. You're just flitting around from one person to another person trying to get things. Yeah, I hate that.

So would you say, like, at a party, just like find a person and talk to them? So one good strategy. And I think this is actually a really sweet one. I have a dear friend Harold Pollock. He's an economist at the Brown School of Social Work at the University of Chicago. He's a lovely human being. He has a habit, which I just, I admire and think is wise too. When he goes to parties, he tries to find the person.

who's off by themselves and goes and engages with them. Because, I mean, that's where he's got, you got a lot of bang for your buck there. You're going to help engage that person, bring them into the conversation. And you'll be connecting with someone meaningfully there. And that's not a bad strategy. But yes, I mean, when it comes to social interaction, making a small, so you actually have the opportunity to connect with them, that's good. When you're at a party, you kind of, the reason why that's not so rewarding is you kind of all have

competing goals at the time. right? You're all, you're flitting around trying to talk to different people. No, but you're not all in this together. If you go with six of your friends to a play or to dinner, where you're all talking with each other, we're all having the same shared experience. Our goals are aligned right now. We're cooperating with each other in this. That's going to be way more rewarding than when you're at a party with those six friends, but you're all flitting around talking to different people with conflicting goals. Do you have any advice for me for taking this performance pressure off of myself? Because I do think it is the thing that keeps me from having the social experiences that I want is that I really want

other people to really enjoy their social experiences with me. Yeah. Yeah. Some of that is okay, right? So I wouldn't judge yourself too harsh. The extent that you are throwing a party or something and you're trying to make everybody else feel better, right? Enjoy their time here. That can be really rewarding to do. I mean, I think a lot of the self-help world, at least in the United States, has gotten things very backward. They try to encourage you to turn inward to make yourself have a good day, right? So go out and pamph yourself, get the massage, whatever. Eris Mouse, who's at Berkeley, your alma mater. She finds that when she asks people to go out and try to make themselves happy, they often come back feeling worse because they go out and do the wrong things. They focus on

themselves. Liz Dunn, who's a fabulous researcher at University of British Columbia, finds that when she gives people money and asks them to go out and spend it on other people, they come back feeling better than when they spend it on themselves. The way to have a good day is to go out and make somebody else have a good day. That's a way to very consistently do that. So I think you take some of the pressure off if you shift your focus to other people rather than on yourself. I do think research enables you to be a little wiser at times.

No research has changed the way I live my life more than the stuff I talk about in a little more social in the book. And even my advisor, Tom Gillivich's work on the spotlight effect, for instance, changed away in my life. You realize other people just don't judge you so harsh. If you go into a social situation with your interest on other people, it's going to make you a lot more at ease and likely make you enjoy the experience a lot more because you're not so self-focused. Psychologists in the like in the 70s and 80s, if they were running an experiment and they wanted to make people feel bad, like they were interested in what negative mood does to people, they had a very reliable way to do this, which is they would sit you down in front of a mirror

and ask you to think about yourself. And usually that made people feel like crap because they weren't living up to their ideals or their best self, right? Focusing on themselves is a pretty good way to feel bad. Focusing on other people is a pretty good way to feel good. And it takes some of the pressure off yourself and is going to make a lot of those social experiences, I think, better too. Okay, I have a question for you from Reddit. This is from Wooden Building. The older I get, the less I enjoy hanging out with people. Is this normal? What should I do about it?

I'm 25 and I recently realized I just don't like hanging out with people anymore. It leaves me feeling worse and doesn't really do anything for me. They say being alone is addicting and it totally is. Maybe I just haven't found the right people yet. But where I live, it's like I have nothing in common with anyone really. So first, is this common? The answer is no, it's not. And I suspect that's not actually about age.

There's no data that I've ever seen that suggests that people enjoy interacting with other people less as they get older, if anything, that's pretty constant. And actually, older people tend to be happier than younger people because they tend to interact with folks they like a little bit more. I think the key here, and he put his finger on it, which is, I haven't found the people who I really enjoy engaging with more. That's the key. I mean, you can have pleasant interactions with almost anybody for short periods of time, but friends that you have over the long run are folks you enjoy doing things together with and keeping looking for those kinds of people might be helpful. The other thing that I think you might want to keep in mind too is sometimes we can close

ourselves off to other people because we're not willing to bend so much and work with them a little bit. I think this happens a lot in relationships. A lot of whether a relationship goes well or poorly isn't a function of how well matched I am to you, but am I willing to make myself the right person for you in some way and find enjoyment in the things that you find. enjoyment in and keep working until we find things that we enjoy doing together, but also to make myself open to trying and enjoying some of the things that you are doing, making myself right for you. And so I think some of this both give and take could be helpful here, both, you know, keeping an eye out for folks.

You do have things in common, but also can you make yourself right for other people? If you can, you'll find it more rewarding. What would you say to somebody who says, I cannot find people I like where I live? I think you can. And I think you need to keep looking a little bit. But I would also encourage folks who think they can't find folks who they like where they live to ask. Is there something about me that maybe I'm not quite doing right? That I might be able to change. And we have a lot of power over ourselves. There have been times in my life where my marriage hasn't been as strong. Right. And it would be easy to blame my wife for that. But a lot of times I can look at myself too and think maybe I was doing things. that weren't ideal in our marriage. And I could make myself better for my partner. And as a result, make our relationship stronger. The place where you have power is with yourself. And so if you're having a hard time connecting with people, you might ask yourself, are there things that I could be doing to make myself somebody who can be connected with better? How important is it to have

things in common with people to form friendships? It is not that important, actually, not as important as people think. Eli Finkel, who's a psychologist at Northwestern University, has run all kinds of research, trying to pair people up with folks that they have things in common with beliefs and attitudes and personalities and stuff. And nothing actually predicts. We believe that what we want are to be with are folks who are like us. But in fact, quality of relationships, how connected people actually feel, really tends to come up kind of organically in the interaction itself. The people who we enjoy being with, the people we enjoy being with, and having things in common is less important than people expect. Part of it is that when you like being with somebody,

you will find things you have in common. I love being with my wife. It's not because we had all kinds of things in common when we met. I was a metal head, you know, college football player when we met the guy who, you know, one of her friends said, oh, you like the guy who swears all the time. We did not have a lot in common, but I loved being with her. And then we have, over the course of our 30 years of marriage, we have created all kinds of things that we love doing with each other. And of course, we still have our own things that, you know, I go hunting and I go fishing, and my wife doesn't come with me.

And that's okay. It's okay. We have things that we don't have in common that we like doing. But when you like being with somebody, you will find things to do with each other that you enjoy. Wait, so do we not know why we're drawn to some people and we're not drawn to other people? We don't know as psychologists. why you're drawn to some people and not to other people. It's very hard to predict.

We have strong beliefs about every dating app on the planet is trying to find, you know, match you up on these traits. It's all just, you're all just rolling the dice. So when I say, like, I'm vibing with that person. You guys are, like, over there in your labs trying to figure out why, but you don't know yet? We know what it means when you say you are viving with somebody. What does it mean? Is it chemicals firing off in my brain?

What it means when you're vibing is that you are in synchrony with somebody else. typically you're paying attention to each other for whatever reason in that moment. You're kind of with each other in the conversation. You're having a shared experience together to vibe with somebody essentially means that you're kind of vibrating together, right? And you can synchronize at a neural level, which isn't surprising. You and I are both looking at our book. We're going to be thinking about my book.

We're going to be thinking about the same thing. But that's what it means. What predicts that in any given moment? We are still struggling with it. So if, like, I meet Taylor Swift and I want her to be like, man, that girl's my girl. Like, she gets me. I want her to become part of my friend group. There's nothing I can do to necessarily, like, make her be like, oh, she's my girl.

I love her. Be nice and pay attention to her. Be warm. Overfocus on my warm. The synchrony part is, the synchrony is paying attention to each other. That gives us the best bet. That gives you the best bet. That's so interesting.

But that comes up in the moment, right? And it's not necessarily about these big things. Do you share the same hobbies, for instance? It's sometimes easier. I mean, it's nice we can spend time with each other if we like to do the same things, and that is really fun. It's certainly some relationships are easier if you've got sort of big things in common. Your families get along with each other and stuff like that. But the belief that we can match you up on traits and find, you know, the idea is that I find just the perfect Lego piece for you.

We just, we don't know what it is. I do think she would like me, though. I think that we would have a good vibe. Taylor, if you're listening. Is there anything else that you think we're getting wrong in the conversation about loneliness? So the big things I think we're getting wrong are that it's happening to us, right, rather than something that we're choosing to do, and that there's not much we can do to change it. You do have power to change your social interactions in your social life.

It doesn't happen all at once, right? It's a little like physical exercise, right? It's hard to change how much you exercise, but there are things that you, can do to make it more routine. And so thinking about sociality in terms of small moments, that you have some choice or control over, that you can turn into habits so that you're no longer really thinking about them. I think that's the key to finding the places in our lives where we can make them a little more socially enriching. I do think that was one of my big, big takeaways from your book and from this conversation is make it a habit. Try to do this every single day in person, whether it's a

small dose of that habit, like talking to the braced at my coffee shop or a larger dose of the habit, like going out to dinner with a friend. It's important to understand why the habit is important, though. What we've identified in our research is that these beliefs that you have about how other people respond to you can be wrong in ways that create barriers to reaching out in places that would make our lives better. When you turn something into a habit, you're doing it routinely, which means you're learning. So you learn what is it that's rewarding, right? And then when you turn something into a habit, you stop thinking about it beforehand. All those barriers, they're not coming to mind. You just are doing it automatic. It's automatic. It's automatic. So this is the way you get around

both mistaken beliefs and overthinking some kind of problem is you find a habit that works. If I go to a party, I find this person and talk to them and then you don't have to sit there and be like, oh, I'm at the party. What do I do? That is what habits do. Yes, as they kind of circumvent this mistaken belief problem that we find is endemic. keeping us overly isolated. This can be in the realm of sociality or anything else, but what is one habit that's changed your life? The habit, the thing I do routinely is what's known as the 10-5 rule. The 10-5 rule comes from the world of hospitality. It's ostensibly attributed to the Ritz-Carlton hotels, but I'm not sure that that's where it actually came from. But the apocryphal idea is that

Ritz-Carlton, you know, years ago, to create a more hospitable environment at their hotels, all of their employees to practice the 10-5 rule. And the 10-5 rule is when somebody's 10 feet away, you smile at them. And when they're five feet away, you say hello. And that seems like the kind of thing that's not going to maybe matter a lot. But everybody you're friends with now was a stranger to you at one point, right? Was somebody, you know, at one point you smiled with and you had a first conversation with? And doing that is something that you can apply just all over the place. You know, my walk over here, I'm saying hi to people as I'm passing, making that moment better. When I get in the car on the way, on the way to the airport today, when I'm in the airport,

it's the kind of thing that just changes kind of the atmosphere in your life, the social ecology of your life from top to bottom. Other people don't smile at you. You smile at them first. They will smile back. Other people tend not to say hi to you. You say hi to them. They'll say hi to you back.

Your world just becomes a friendlier place. place when you are a friendlier person. And that one thing has just made a huge difference for me. Because I'm, look, I'm kind of a big guy. I can kind of look, you know, kind of scary. Maybe I could at least. I'm a college football player at heart, so I got still that kind of, you know, toughness in me. I can be somebody who can look intimidating to people. And this just makes me much gentler, much softer. And when you do that, your life just generally gets nicer. It's just the world just becomes a little friendlier. And that one thing has made a huge difference for me. And then you tell me if this would be different than that. Maybe that is the

takeaway. But we always try to leave listeners with one takeaway, something they can do the second they turn off this podcast to begin to experience some of the benefits we talked about. Would that be yours or would it be something different? Probably the 10-5 rule would be the big one. The other big one is don't filter your kind thoughts. Don't filter your kind thoughts. If you see something, say something. Exactly. When it comes to kindness in particular. And you know, the other- something bad, keep it to yourself. Yeah, that's fine. But don't feel to your kind thoughts, right?

The other thing that's interesting is almost everybody who's listening to this podcast, anybody out there in the world, can think about someone or maybe multiple people. They know who they feel grateful to, who they've never reached out in total. They never said why they feel so grateful to them, never written down a letter or just told them how much they love them for whatever reason. And those people shouldn't exist, right? You filtered your positive thoughts. there. Stop doing that. That's such a good action step. Okay, so we have tell somebody a secret that you feel a little bit of shame about and also tell somebody that you're grateful for them if that is a

secret that you're keeping. I love that. Nick, can you tell us a little bit about your beautiful book, a little more social? The book describes a paradox that I think sits right at the center of human life, which is we're highly social creatures and yet we often choose not to be social, tries to provide an explanation based on a research or why we're doing that. We tend to underestimate how positively other people respond to us when we reach out to engage with them, and therefore we're keeping ourselves overly lonely. And I suggest how to live a little better life, which is to reach out and be a little more social than you might be otherwise. You also have some killer conversation starters in this book. So if you're looking for some inspo there, you'll find it in this

book. Thank you so much for this conversation. It was very warm. It was very competent, and I appreciated it. Thank you, Liz. This is great fun. That is all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening on Apple or watching on Spotify or YouTube. You can subscribe or follow so our next episodes get sent directly to your feed. If you like this episode, leave a comment or better yet, send it to a friend, a coworker, or a parent, or somebody else that you think might love it. All right, I love you. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast.

Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional.