Unlonely with Dr. Jody Carrington - Why Loneliness Can Shorten Your Life (and How to Build a Social Health Plan) - Ken Stern

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Loneliness isn’t just uncomfortable - it’s costly. And the scariest part? Most of us are living it without calling it what it is.Dr. Jody talks with Ken Stern (*Healthy to 100*, *Century Lives*) about the loneliness epidemic and the link between social isolation and mortality risk - plus the practical shift that changes everything: building your social life with the same intention you’d bring to nutrition or exercise.They get into what “lonely” actually looks like in real life, why we’re spending less time with friends than we did a generation ago, and how proximity, community design, and technology have quietly pulled us apart.This is a call back to connection - with a plan, not just a wish.Links & Resources:ABOUT CENTURY LIVES The Longevity Project: https://www.longevity-project.com/centurylivesHealthy to 100: Secrets from Countries Where Retirees Age Best: https://www.kiplinger.com/retirement/happy-retirement/healthy-to-100-secrets-from-countries-where-retirees-age-bestSocial Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review (PLoS Medicine, 2010): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2910600/Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon Generals Advisory (May 3, 2023): https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Unlonly podcast where today I'm going to dive in. I know some of you know that I turned 50 this year. And if you didn't know, you know now. And I've been pumping the breaks like it's my job. I feel like I'm questioning my mortality. I am wondering about, you know, I feel old. I'm one of the oldest parents on our respective hockey teams.

I had, Olivia was in the back of my daughter and she brought a friend with her. And her friend was like, yeah, you remind me of my mom. she's 36 and I was like no baby girl I don't think your mom is 30 shit it's 36 because you know I'm 50 and you know your mom and me like we have kids the same age and she's like no no no she's 36 I was like fuck my life so which is okay so my whole point is the guest today I am so excited about and I say this often around here but I got to tell you this this fellow blew me away when I read some of the work that he's been doing just launched a book I was like this is the most fascinating thing for me in this lifetime. Ken Stern, you're going to meet him today, is the founder and chair of the

longevity project, which fosters public conversation and research on the impact of longer lives on civil society. So Stern is also, he's the host of an award-winning podcast century lives. He's from the Stanford Center on longevity. He started as a lawyer. Like, so, like, this, this fella is so frigging brilliant. He has degrees from Haverford College, Yale Law School. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Beth, their son Nate. And he has just, just, jumped headlong into this conversation, you know, of how do we age well? What does it mean to live longer, but live better? And he's the CEO of Palisay's Media Ventures, a Washington, D.C. based thought leadership company. And he was previously the CEO of National Public Radio.

And during his tenure, NPR's audience more than doubled to more than 26 million weekly listeners. And among his achievements at NPR was to launch the award-winning podcast service as well as NPR music, mobile offerings, and the successful expansion of NPR.org. And during that period of significant sort of understanding of news media outlets, all of those conversations, he led the dramatic expansion, both domestically and abroad. And in its evolution, it just became key to sort of daily news sources to tens of millions of people. And you'll see in our interviews today that that expansive connection globally, really led him to sort of deep understandings of why certain people on this planet do better,

live longer, create systems within their communities that foster healthy well-being. And I, I don't know if you can hear my excitement, but like, I cannot wait for you to hear this conversation. We had a little bit of technical issues that I hope we're going to try to clean up in terms of, like, just a leg between my voice and his. But it is well worth a listen, I promise you. And I, I cannot. I cannot wait to hear what you think. Ladies, gentlemen, humans, Ken Stern. Oh, my, okay, so Ken Stern. The question that everybody has these days is, you know, how do we live longer? How do we live happier? In a world where we've never been more disconnected, more anxious, more depressed. Every time I have conversations with people around here, they're like, okay, we have no hope in humanity. It's all over. And your work is all about just a second. How do we stay on this planet a bit long?

and in a place where it's going to feel better, safer, healthier. Can you just take me from the week? Tell me about your work. Why you do it? And what's standing out for you the most these days? So I've been involved in the longevity field for about a little less than a decade now. And when I first got in, I thought the question was going to be, I thought I was going to get involved in aging.

I was getting older myself. So the question of aging was interesting. And for me, when I first started working, I thought the aging was a question was going to be. what do we do with all these old people? And then when I got involved, I thought it was about longevity, but how do we rethink our lives, our longer lives from birth on so that our longer lives are not just longer, but they're healthier, more productive, and more equitable? And that's, you know, that eventually has led me to focus on the topic that you love and I love, the role of social connection, healthy aging, because our challenge is not to just live longer.

We now live twice as long as we used to, but we don't necessarily live healthier. And social connection plays a huge role in both longer life and more importantly, longer, healthier life. I love that. Okay, so I'll just give you this insight. So on the heels of the death of my father. So my dad died at 74, 200 days ago, 201 days ago today, and of dementia. And I am so, since, you know, his demise, probably late 60s sort of went into it. I was like, holy shit, we need to do a 180 here because if we're going to work this hard and this long, I love that you say that age isn't a number because anybody can sort of make it there. We kept him alive in so many ways for the last couple of years. But how he lived was so different when he got sick, obviously. And so I'm fascinated. You know, I've long read about the blue zone and, you know, the greatest predictor of longevity of social relationship. I love Esther Perel's talking about, you know, the quality of social

relationships determines the quality of your life. And your research would say, amen to that. And you've doubled down significantly in really focusing on this work of relationship and connection, the place that I, like, I love the most. So tell me, tell me why that is so profoundly true in the work that you're doing and, you know, just what you're noticing the most in this lonely. And why loneliness is such a big, friggin problem right now. Yeah. So, so let me actually, so, let me actually tell you the creation story of my book, which is actually what got me focused on social connection. Because until a moment about three years ago, if you'd ask me sort of what are the major

ingredients of healthy aging, I would have said what most Americans would say, which is health care, nutrition, fitness, all of which are important. But I probably wouldn't have. And someone said me, what about social connection? I would probably said, okay, that too. But I wouldn't have really meant it. Really? Like just like three years ago because your book, Healthy to 100.

right? How strong social ties lead to long lives. That's 2025. And it's just blowing up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I have my own podcast called Century Lives. It's a documentary podcast. And we've, each season, we try to focus on one topic. So sometimes we do it on housing. We're going to do one on age tech. We've done one on why women live longer, but in more years and poor health. But one we did was sort of this blue zones. like one, which we looked at places in the U.S. where people live longer than the underlying demographic and information says they should. And the first place we went to is a little place called Presidio, Texas, which is a county right on the border with Mexico. You can walk across a bridge from Presidio to Chihuahua, Mexico. And Presidio is one of these weird outlier counties. It's one of the 10 longest-lived counties in the U.S. and also one of the poorest in Texas. So we wanted to go there and find out. And I didn't, when we went there, I really didn't know why.

I thought it might be health care. And it's not health care. They had just opened a clinic in town, 70 miles to the nearest U.S. hospital. It's not nutrition, as you see, is how people eat. It's not exercise. The principal is considered the local eccentric because he rides his bike to school. When we went there and reported on, it was a story of social connection to how people live their lives in multi-generational households. And if they weren't in multigenerational households, it was cousins living next to nephews, listening next to grandparents and in and out of their houses all day, people taking care of people.

And everywhere we went for the season, the story that we found was always about social connection and how people and sort of how those societies, those communities that were doing well were keeping people together in ways that were profoundly different than other areas. nearby. And that sort of began a sort of, that was a star's pistol for me for understanding the research on social connection and the, A, the sort of the ill effect of loneliness, equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And then thinking about why we've become so socially disconnect to this country and how other countries who have the same sort of technology challenge that we do have done better and are healthier and longer lived as a result. So that's really,

really for me, the challenge. And you could actually, you know, the U.S., and forgive me for us, getting all wound about this because it's just an interesting topic for me. In the U.S., people know that we live five or six years less than our peer countries overseas. We are the by far the have the shortest life expectancy of advanced economies in the world. And it wasn't always that way. As recently as like 1980, we weren't the longest lived among the, the, the, the, the those countries, but we weren't the shortest live.

It's only over the last 45 years as we've become so socially disconnected as we've lost social capital that we've started to fall behind. And now you can be counted on to live almost a decade longer in good health in Japan than you can in the U.S. And that's sort of a profound difference that we need to understand and try to solve. Yeah. Okay. So take me back to the beginning.

I want you to define for our crew here about loneliness. Because so many people just feel like it's an emotion, right? Like so how bad can it be? Loneliness is no big deal. Everybody's lonely every once in a while. How can we possibly be lonely when you got a thousand friends on the snap face? Can you talk to me a little bit about how that's defined in your work and what that looks like to people right now, what they would feel like. How do we know if we're lonely?

Yeah. So I can tell you how people, how we know that sort of people in society are lonely. I mean, we live in the big cities and loneliness in the big city. We're surrounded by billions of people. But we don't know them. We don't necessarily interact with them all the time. Let me first tell you, Jody, what has happened over the last, over the last 30, 30 years or so,

which is the amount of time, my son's 18, the amount of time he can expect to spend with friends every day is an hour less than I did when I was his age. That's a huge change over just a generation. The number of people who have, report having six or more friends has dropped by almost half over the last since beginning of the century, the number of people who report having no friends, let's just pause on that,

they say they have no friends, has gone up enormously over the last 25 years ago. I think it's gone up by about 600%. So we know that people are spending less and less of time with other humans and more and more time with technology. Right? It's the time, it's not a mystery. We're not less friendly as people, but technology, first television and now phones have interdicted the relationship we have as humans and we spend less time without each other.

And the things that bring us together historically could be, you know, churches or labor unions or sewing circles or PTA or Elks Club have all declined as we've said more and more time alone. And so you can see that whole sort of riveting all the way across society. I bet. And I'm also interested, too, sometimes I speak a lot about proximity. You know, I often think about the score of footage of the house that my grandfather was raised in, the size of the beds that, you know, my grandparents slept in. And my personal husband and I, we got a king-sized bed. I don't even know where he is most of the time, you know. And how proximity really affords this, this, you know, almost like it gives you the opportunity.

Now working from home all the time. Now, our schools are larger. You can take online classes. Do you see like that combined with? Because people just, I think, always blame technology, which I really think is an important conversation to have. But there's so many factors that have just lined up on the heels of the pandemic that I think have sort of created this perfect storm. Would you sort of agree with that? Or what is the data showing you there?

Yeah. So I do agree with it. I would start with the notion that it really is technology. I mean, if we really want a culprit, because we can trace almost in a straight line the rise of technology and the rise of loneliness together. Okay. But it is true that the way we've designed our communities, for instance, has sharpened the lowliness. So think about the sub. So over the last 70 years, we've created the suburbs, and then over the last three years, we've played the excerpts.

Bigger distance between houses, no sidewalks, you've got to get in the car, you whiz past people, all, you know, less time that people are face-to-face. Proximity, I mean, you're absolutely right. proximity, the research is you have to be sort of next to someone for 50 hours to be a friend, 200 hours to be a close friend. If you're driving past people and giving them the finger, which is sort of the way it works, you're not making friends in moral senses one. So it is technology, but it's technology plus. It's plus the way we've designed our lives to keep people away from each other. And so, you know, I mean, you'd mention like remote work, which I work remotely, but it keeps people away from the people.

Okay. Interesting. And now the impact of that, I mean, I just wanted to circle back to one statement you made, and I've read this, you know, in previous places, like the experience of loneliness, so the cost of technology keeping people in more disconnected spaces, almost stealing those opportunities to learn more about each other, to build that relationship, having those 50 hours, you know, of presence to learn about a friend. Is the equivalent of smoking, 15 cigarettes a day. That blows my mind because I'm fascinated by this. We are dying faster from emotional illness than we are from physical illness for the first time in history. And do you see what does that look like in terms of that connection? Doubling down on that, I think, is like, you know,

how do we talk about this louder? And those kind of numbers just like make me stop. Like, it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is crazy. It's scary, right? It's scary. Right. I do think because of, I do think people are beginning to realize that lowliness is a threat and that social connection is important. I mean, especially as you age, having, you know, you lose a lot of the social connections from work or school. How do you create new social connections? How do you create purpose in the second half of life? I do think that's a rising topic. But it's also, but I think the challenge.

is going to be more than just spreading awareness, which I think is being aware, which is how do you tackle some of the structural problems we have? Because all the things that kept us together are gone. They're not gone. They're diminished. They're decline. How do you create new ways to bring people together in an era of, you know, of loneliness, an era of, you know, you go to any subway. You may be next to someone, but everyone's in their phone. and that's, you know, how do we change and how do we create easy opportunities for people to stay connected, get connected with people as the age? And it's just so much easier and you get so much even more dopamine just by getting a hit on your phone when you're looking at somebody else's life or you're diving into a Netflix show. And I mean, what we know to be true historically, and I think about this all the time, is maintaining the depth of relationship.

he's been the hardest thing you ever do. If you ask anybody, he's been married for more than five minutes. The hardest thing you do is maintain that depth of relationship. And this accessibility of the breadth of relationship. You know, you can swipe any time. You know, I've been married to my husband for 18 years. But my gosh, I'm on Facebook and I see my ex-boyfriend from high school. And oh, my God, look at him.

He's divorced and he's been working out. Well, son of a bitch, it's easy to be able to do that. And so this depth of relationship and this breadth of relationship, I'm fascinated by because not only do we have less and less opportunities to do it, but it still is the hardest thing we will ever do to build those relationships. So now we've had all these exit ramps. It remains the hardest thing we will ever do to stay deeply connected to somebody. My question is, now what?

Now what? I love that. You know, we can be aware of it, but now what? And so what is the data telling you can around this stuff? And as we look at, I mean, I'm so fascinated about your new book. What do we do? Because we can't erase the technological advance. that have come out of the gate faster than we were ready for.

So now what? So I think, first of all, it's recognizing that social connection counts as much, and then it's work, right? We recognize that fitness is work. We recognize that nutrition is, you know, you have to make some choices in your life. You can't do those Big Macs. God knows I love the Big Mac. But you have to make some choices in your life. Social connection is work too.

And we have to, if we want to live longer and healthfully, we're going to have to, work at social connections just like we other work at other places. The second is we have to plan for it, right? They don't happen. You know, a lot of people ask me, say to me, I'm introvert. It's harder for me. Social connection is not about being the life of the party. I'm the worst person in the world of the party. I'm the guy standing in the corner. It's not about buying the rounds at the bar. It's putting your places, you know, Jody, you spoke about it. it's about putting in places where you're going to be proximate to other humans and build relationships naturally. So that may mean working longer because that creates social connection might be.

It's about thinking about the places that you want to be that will put you next to people who you might want to know. That could be at work. That could be around lifelong learning. It could be around volunteering. Could be around living in intergenerational community or picking a community or advocating for community. Yes, it's right. It could be any of those things, and it may be a menu of those things for you, but it takes work and planning to do it. Okay, so it's a choice. I love that because people, you know, ask me this quite a bit. You know, okay, so now what? The easiest part for me over the last 10 years and speaking about this stuff is like just really how we got here. It's really irrefutable around. You're right, the technology, the influence. We can look at those numbers. I love Vivek Murphy, you know, came out with this concept of the loneliness epidemic. You know, he was the former surgeon general of your country. And it, and I'm so, you know, just looking at what even kids these days talk about. about, you know, feeling so disconnected that nobody cares about them. And it's, I like this idea of,

okay, so a couple of things, it's work. Okay, it is going to be hard. You do have to know that. The payoff, though, is what I'm interested in, right? Is that how we entice people to, to step back into community more, to even though they're exhausted and overwhelmed? Because, you know, not only is it just about a choice, it's about like, I don't even have the capacity to make that choice because I just want to throat punch everybody. I have been in a day where, you know, I have everybody's problems. Everybody's dingin my watch. I got access to my phone. You know, I say this all the time, and I'm interested in this, Ken, because I looked at my dad before he died. He loved people and he built businesses and people. And even, you know, when he could no longer communicate, he was

the guy in the nursing home waving at people. And I assumed that I was going to be so much like him. I became a psychologist. I'm interested in humans. I'm the connector. And now at 50 years old, I like, I fight, I want to throw, punch everybody. Like, I'm so grateful when things get cleared out of my calendar. And I, and that makes me sat for me. And then I just remember, like, in one generation, he would come home from work and nobody could get him. Sundays were a day of rest. There was things built into his operating system, his neurophysiology that allowed those

micro doses of just coming back from that. If I think about it from a neurophysiological perspective, his prefrontal cortex came on and he refueled. Now we have such a paucity of refueling options, and we've never been the sleep deprived or this attention fragmented. So in addition to its work and we got a plan for it, like what's the answer? What can we start talking about on platforms like yours and mine and in this book that you have that's brilliant? How do we give people even more tips? Is there anything that is, is it just really, we have to get back to the basics? Is there anything more we can think about?

So I think such an interesting question, Jody. I'm going to actually sort of advocate for first before we even get into sort of the tips, thinking about it on a much broader societal level. So, you know, for my book, I traveled to Japan, Korea, Singapore, Spain, Italy, five countries that do a lot better with us than us on a healthy aging. And one of the things that came away, they're all very different places. They all have different approaches to aging. But one thing is they made, they make social connection a central part of the public health agenda. Right. So, you know, they worry about vaccines and they worry about hospital, health care, all stuff.

But right in the middle, they say, hey, we got to make sure that people say purposeful and socially connected to the age. And we're going to find ways to make that easier. And that's sort of a societal challenge, not just an individual challenge, right? So I write about work in Japan. And everyone gets sort of, you know, and I'm sort of advocate for rethinking sort of the rules of work. And everyone gets sort of worked up about that. But like in Japan, people want to work longer. First of all, they want to work longer because they think of it that says creating purpose and social connection for them.

And sort of the big fear is being alone and purposes of the age. But they don't work in the same way. they do when they're younger. There's an organization called the Silver Genzai Human Resources Organization, has a million members over the age of 65, and they place all of them in part-time jobs. So there's a whole economy built around part-time work, job sharing, new technologies. So it's not a choice between I'm going to work 80 hours a week or nothing. There's a much more sort of titrated approach to it.

And that's the same way. All these societies are thinking about different ways to put people together. So in Italy, they've got, they're starting to get rid of the idea of senior centers and create centers for all ages. So the idea of bringing young and the old together in new ways. So it's about reimagining the process of aging and not simply saying, hey, you over there, go out and get socially connected when you're exhausted and tired. They say, we're going to make processes easier for you, make more natural connections,

and allow you to be next to the person who you want to get to know. I love that. That is fascinating to me. So broader survival level in terms of like the public health agenda, what else are you noticing? So I do. I say, you know, I spent a lot of time in the book saying how great all these other places are and how big the challenges here in the United States. And it's true.

But there's also, I also want to say. say, I look around this country and I see, I see changes going on. Like, I see new, I see a lot of innovation happening. It's in small parts. It's not society-wide, but I see, you know, efforts to create lifelong learning opportunities for people. If you're over 60 or 65 in most states, tuition that there's no tuition at most of your public universities. People just don't know that. I mean, so what I see is now a little renewed energy around that. I see that the fact that the The fastest growing part of the labor force is people over the age of 80. And the second fastest is people over the age of 65.

And I see, you know, I see role models emerging. Mel Brooks, we're not going to all be Mel Brooks, but at 99, he just signed on for his next movie, Space Balls 2, which is delivered when he's 101. You know, that's optimism. So I see like, you know, I do see, you know, innovators and change happening here and role models emerging that helps sort of helps us rethink, you know, these rules of how we're supposed to live our lives that we inherited from, you know, a century ago and are sort of shackles on how we think about our lives. I really think that will create more, I hope that will create more opportunities for people to get out of their homes, these large. homes where we don't see each other and into community, which is really the challenge that we all face. And, you know, in your work, I'm interested, can you, can you dive deep a little bit more around exactly what does loneliness do to us from a physiological perspective, a neurophysiological

perspective? Like, what are the costs? What are you seeing? You know, that disparity between countries is so fascinating to me. And, you know, one of the things like, what is that role of loneliness, you know, what is that, how is that played into the American life expectancy? There's some very specific things we're noticing. Yeah. So it's a great question, Jody, and one that's sort of puzzled me. Like, you know, you can see like why tobacco is bad for you. You can understand why, you know, obesity is bad for you.

There's a lot of things that are sort of easy to see and understand. Loneliness is not easy to understand sort of the physiological response. So I always answer this sort of two ways. One is as a result of evolutionary biology. We were bred over millennia to know that lowliness is dangerous to us, right? Being part of the group meant safety in numbers. So we have a deep evolutionary response to being cut off from the group and being alone. That leads to stress, chronic stress, that leads to inflammation, that leads to release of cortisol.

And all that has a direct and specific response to reaction to heart disease, cancers, and all the sort of the plagues of our life. And there's actually new research that came out just like in the last couple months that shows you can actually see the impact of loneliness on the cellular level. So you can see the difference. I mean, you actually see cellular aging, faster cellular aging among people who are lonely as compared to people are socially connected. that's the that's the biological piece there's also a socialization piece which is if you're out in society if you're not stuck at home means you're a you're moving around and movement is so key to health and it means you're getting social cues about how to take care of yourself that you're not

getting if you're by yourself and those things i think are really important to healthy aging So that together is to me sort of the explanation a little harder to understand than smoking, but nonetheless as real about the importance of social connection to your actual biological agent. And what are some of the things that surprised you the most in this research? I mean, I love the fact that you were physically in all of these different countries. You know, I'm stepping into writing my next book and they're like, why don't we travel? I was like, oh my God, how hard can that be? What did you notice as you sort of soaked in some of these cultures

and really sort of felt and saw what it was like to create a sense of community that historically, I think, in America, you know, even when I go to visit Italy, I'm blown away. I feel healthier. I feel more connected. I, you know, we know this on the thing. Is there anything that surprised you in that experience of visiting all of these beautiful? places. So I would say lots of things surprise me. We can go into specific source, but I'll say two

themes emerge across the five countries, which kind of surprised me. One of which was, I think, just a very different attitude to the second half of life. I tell the story in the book of Table 23, which is in between my travels in Europe and Asia. I came back and I went to a wedding, and I was stuck at the table of all the old people. I'm 62. And we were all put at Table 23. And while everyone at the other 22 tables, we were the last table, we're talking about their big plans for the future and new homes and children and graduation and jobs and travel. We were talking about winding down. So there was sort of, I think, sort of a lack of ambition and expectation that the coming years were years of decline. And to a certain extent, their relevance.

I didn't hear that in any of the places. those places, which are super-age places and have a much higher percentage of older people, are dependent upon older people being contributor to society, and you feel that and hear that from older people. They think they're important to society, and they want to contribute to society just as they have in the rest of their lives. So that's one, and they plan for it. So that's one.

The other theme, which I hadn't necessarily expected, was the importance of intergenerational relationships to healthy aging. We haven't mentioned that in this interview. But the idea, as my friend Mark Friedman says, that the generations fit together like pieces of jigsaw puzzle. And that putting the young and the old together is good both for the development of the young, crucial to development and young,

but enormously helpful to sense of purpose, well-being, and meaning for older people. And each of those countries work very hard to keep the generations together in a place like Singapore where it's almost like a national mania where they actually they create tax incentives

for people to move, you know, for adult children to move closer to their elderly parents. They put elder care facilities with preschools together in one space to keep the generations together. It's a, you know, it's a rule of construction in all these countries that really impressed me.

That's blowing my mind. And it's making me think about, you know, one of the conversations I have recently when I speak a lot to corporate organizations and there is this divisiveness as there is in much of, you know, our respective countries right now. But I see this happening in the ageism experience in organizations. So we have senior leadership teams that are made up largely of, you know, very. established older, particularly still men, primarily white, and have a lot of conversations about like, this is the way it's always been done. And then we have these new millennials and we're labeling them, all of these gens and X's and Zs and Y's. And it's like a clash of the clans, you know, and I'm so interested, some of the conversations I've been having, and I don't even know how to articulate it just right yet. And I love this concept of even how that plays out in the boardroom because it's like, just a second, if you have this old, experienced group

of people that come with wisdom and understand how to seal deals on a handshake. And you have these young whippersnappers who like can whip together an Instagram LinkedIn profile with their eyes closed and can get you all the analytics that you want in a world that's functioning like that. Can you imagine if you sat in the same table? Can you imagine if you learned from each other if you were open to that process? And I think you're right. I think there's such a perception that, you know, you're old and washed up or you're young and too ridiculous and silly and you don't have that experience. how do we shift that cultural story, if that's true, first of all? And how do you notice?

I mean, is it just, I mean, they come with such a different history than, you know, Asian countries do or European countries do than we would. How do we start to do that here? How would we start to have those conversations with senior leadership teams? So it's such an interesting question. And I think it starts with like almost any diversity challenge. The first challenge is. getting people of different aspects to know each other, right? Ignorance is the fuel of division.

The problem is that we have made a national mania of dividing up the generations. People have called the U.S. the most age segregated society in history. You're more likely to have friends of a different race than you are to have a friend who's 10 years or younger or older than you. And we're the only country, which has sort of, to the extent we have, created the whole senior housing industry, the 55 plus communities. They don't really exist, certainly not the scale they do in other places. We've made an art of dividing the generations. And I think the challenge we face is not simply saying, hey, the generations should get along better because they fit together is to find ways to.

to make it more naturally happen. And it is to a certain degree. I mean, the whole idea that kids who don't move out of the house at age 18 or 21 or somehow defective is beginning to weaken. We have far more intergenerational households. It had started before the pandemic, accelerated during the pandemic, and it really hasn't backtracked since. So we're, you know, but it all starts, I think, with culture that, the idea,

what you're spreading, Jody, is that the generations can actually learn from each other if they spend time with each other. And that's, you know, I think we have to syndicate that view out before we make a lot of progress. And I, you know, I think often of Brne Brown's words when she starts to talk about, you know, people are hard to hate close up. And part of the, the conundrum that I then sort of struggle with, isn't that? Part of the conundrum then is, you know, if we are in this position now where we sort of give in the green light. And I mean, I would, work remotely as well. And in some of our global companies, that's something that has to happen. But it's this interesting piece of, you know, we can function so much easier without ever having to leave our

computers. We can, we don't have to go to the grocery store. I saw this research that 72% of all restaurant orders last year were not eaten in the restaurant. And I, and I find that so fascinating, right? Because it's the subtleties of human connection, of observing, of having your kid lose their friggin' mind in the grocery store and you have to haul them out by their ponytail, that you, you know, your server is going to have to screw up your order and you're going to have to say, okay, listen, baby girl, maybe write it down next time, you know, you're doing a good job. But, and when we're taking away those opportunities to sort of learn about each other, that people are hard to hate close up, I guess, you know, what I hear you say is we have to sort of do some

of those things on purpose, rewrite some of those things at a societal level, but also what is our individual responsibility? Is it for sort of awareness and then doing more of these things? I've You know, have you given some thought to that? I was so interested in that, Kim. So, so let me, first let me react to that story of the rest of it, because it actually brings up an important issue in social connection, which is a concept called wheat ties, which you probably know. You know, when we talk about social connections, we often are,

we often focus on close friends and close relationships. But there's actually, and that's important, but so is that. the constant wheat ties, which is the social connections and matter, not just the close ones, but also the people you see occasionally and interact with. I often say the butcher that you, you know, no one has a butcher anymore. You know, the bus driver, the people you sit next to on the, so semi-regularly on the on the bus, the people you see in the restaurant, the grocery store, having that sort of complex set of relationships, even if you don't know their name, but you have brief interactions with,

that's actually also a marker of good social relationships. And there's a lot of research that ties that to good health. It means you're out in the world. It means you're having different conversations, exercising different sort of mental muscles than you would around people who you're deeply familiar with. Those weak ties are actually really important in this sort of platform of social connection chat.

So intentionally, I actually think about it a lot. I was on a panel, on a conference in Tucson and on the panel with me was a professor at the University of Arizona and she said her way of dealing with sort of week, she actually started talking about week ties.

I thought I was the only one who got excited about week ties. She gets excited about week ties. And she said her way of dealing with it is instead of just saying, how you're doing, which is sort of what people are used to saying. She says, how's your day been

to everyone she sees? And people sort of stop and think and react differently to that. I started doing that. And instead of saying how you're doing, which everyone says good, people stop and you actually have a brief conversation. It's not much. You know, we're not close friends, but you have a human interaction on a different level

that you do if you ask that question. So I think we do have a sort of responsibility. It's good for ourselves, but responsibility to actually start connecting with other people as humans and not just sort of posts that we pass through. in our lives. Yeah, I, that's, that's fantastic. Like, this idea of, of weak ties, I think that, you know, it reminds me of some of this, this conversation about, like, that proximity affords you to do that where, you know, you, you know, you know the name of the postmaster, you know, you have to get your fresh milk every day. And I, like, I just think that that is so fascinating. And when, you know, I think Esther Perel has talked about this where it's like, you can have a thousand

friends on Facebook and nobody to take you to the airport. And it's that concept that, you know, we're just sort of spreading the breadth of relationship, but those depths of relationship, even if it's weak in a sense of like, can you just come over? I need to borrow the sugar is sort of something that I think, even with the technological advances, we're going to have to get really diligent around almost like the discipline of connection in this next generation. And, you know, is that something you would say? You know, what are the top things that sort of came out of your work around this longevity and aging well that you've noticed? in the people that sort of make it, if you will, into these places.

What have you noticed that these people, you know, is there a list of things that have sort of risen to the top of your data? Yeah. So one is, I think they plan for it. They plan for the idea of longevity and have meaning and purpose and second off life. They don't want an endpoint. Like, we have this idea that's around 65 or 60, we're supposed to start titrating, was turning the knob down.

When I was in Japan talking to all, we were talking to all. older workers, I would constantly ask them at sort of the end of the interview, I would say, so how much longer do you want to work? And no one would say, you know, two years, five years, I need to retire by 75. They almost invariably said, it was almost like a catchphrase until I can't because they associate the end of that social connection with death. So they were going to stay doing this because it was good for them. So I think the notion that there's a, there's no end to it of social connection until they're physically not able to. And I think the other thing I would say is the people who I met just had all had this sort of

genuine belief that their social connections matter to the health and mattered to the people around them, right? This wasn't just about them. It was about their health and the health of their communities. And one of the things, excuse me, Joey, sorry. One of the things that I think about a lot is the challenge of social connection is not just an individual challenge. It is, but it's also a community challenge. I mean, we have strong civic and social connections means healthy people, but it also means healthy communities.

And I think we see the impact of weakened ties not just on ourselves and our poor health, but on our poor civic health that we have in this country. I love that idea of pulling on that responsibility because I think a lot of times, you know, if I think about this from an individual basis, it's like, okay, we've got to get back to emotional regulation, to our own capacity to sort of get back to the best parts of us. If we are overwhelmed and exhausted, which many of us are, one and two would describe themselves as burnt out in their profession in this moment, you lose access to the best parts of you. So your shoulders are up, your cortisol is up, and you lose access to things like

kindness and empathy and worrying what is happening, you know, with your neighbor, why they came home late or what is happening. And so there's, to me, it's sort of a trans, I don't know what the word is. It's sort of like goes in a, in a continuum of you first. We have to get you back and regulated in this very noisy world and then giving it away that responsibility of, you know, one of the most vulnerable emotions on the planet or the most vulnerable emotion on the planet is joy. And when I think about, I ask people all the time, you know, how often have you felt that joy? When are you belly laughing with your babies or, you know, having a chat over the fence with your neighbors? And it's like that the prerequisite to that certainly comes internally in order for us to sort of live well and engage in the community sort of comes with this sense of internal focus on, are we looking after ourselves first?

And from a social perspective, I mean, I hear you saying, you know, like, let's think about how we allow for spaces where people interact more, encouraging our kids to, you know, or our school programs to invest in, you know, old folks homes and whatever. That's the very inappropriate term, I'm sure, in aging facilities and how we sort of engage in that process, you know? And I just, I think that is so brilliant, Ken, to sort of think about that even if we're not going to live long enough for, maybe the government to get it right. But how do we do that if you're the principal of a school listening? If you're the coach of a hockey team, if you're just thinking on an individual level, how do we do that in our own family systems? I think that's our only responsibility right now. Can you do the next best right kind thing in creating more of that social connection in your community? Is that where you sort of tell people to start? Yeah, for sure. This is not a, this is, I think, a situation where politics is downstream of culture, right? We can't count on the government to solve this problem until we understand it's a collective

challenge. And I think the, you know, and it's hard, especially as you're busy, high-stress life, to think about ways to operate differently than you've operated for the last so many years. the good thing is I think we have an increasing number of models even this country of how to how to act differently towards each other or how to organize ourselves. So one story I love to tell, you know, and again, I go off to these other countries and I come back and say they have it right. No one has it right. We have it all wrong. No one has it all wrong.

There are plenty of good things here. So a few months ago, I visited for my podcast a place. in the, I went to the town of Gorham, Maine. It was actually up in Maine with, on colleges with my son. I dragged him off colleges to go to a place called Gorham House, which is a nursing home and preschool. So it's a nursing home, and front of it is right in front of it in the lobby. There's a playground in front of it,

and the preschool is located just off the lobby. And it's the most fantastic place. You can imagine what joy, like these little kids do this like parade through the nursing home every day and what joy that brings to the elders. But the story that got me that I think was the most meaningful was when I met with the preschool teacher,

she told me that the elementary school teachers in Gorham tell her that the kids who come through this preschool are the most empathetic of the elementary school students. So like when a kid in a wheelchair ends up in the elementary school. None of the other kids know what to do with this kid. They don't understand the differenceness.

And these kids have seen wheelchairs all the time. They help those kids. They are empathetic towards differences because they have seen it from their very first years. These things are good for the kids. They're good for elders. They're good for us. I felt better just being there, right,

to know that this was something going on in people's lives. That kind of joy matters, in community. And we can find those things and make differences. Yeah. I love that so much because I think that we get frustrated with the overwhelming sense of the data. And as you say, we're in this loneliness epidemic. These numbers scare me. And I think it's necessary to have those conversations. But then the question is then what? And we almost panic. We almost freeze. Because it just feels so big, so quick. And it's this tsunami that has sort of taken us over. But my goodness, my hope for humanity has never been high.

because I think about, you know, those little things, those accessibility that we have just even the difference. The fun for me right now is the bar is so friggin low, okay? You don't even actually have to be great. You wave at your neighbor and they want to make out with you. You give somebody, I mean, which is also not a good choice, but the idea is how do we never underestimate your capacity right now to really shake the hand of the guy at the hockey rink and to, oh my gosh, how you're doing? What are your plans for the holiday? Like all of those things matter so much now more than they ever have before because that capital, that social capital is just so, so precious. And where are you at, Ken, in this process about, you know, what is your hope for humanity?

Where do you stand on sort of the future? What does your work look like now moving forward? So one of the things I would say on that is I also write a little advice column, weekly column, Ask Ken, about social connection. It's part of a newsletter I do. And the question I often get is, how do I make new friends, especially as, you know, my friends from college have gone away and I'm not working. I've fallen off this worklift. Everyone else seems to have friends.

I don't have friends. I always say, like, the person that you see who you think has a lot of friends is just a friend, is just waiting for you to be friends, to be asked, right? I mean, we all feel lonely. And we're just waiting for someone to make the first move. I think there are just tons of opportunities there if you're willing to stop and make out with your neighbor, whatever the way it works. But I think we have to, you know, again, I think we have to start with that culture of social connection. We used to have it.

You know, we had a much different society both 70 years ago and 150 years ago. that depended sort of both on the kindness of strangers and the kindness of neighbors. I think we're going to have to sort of rebuild that in ways that we didn't have, we haven't had for the last 50 years. You know, there's a, the phones are drugs to a certain extent. I, you know, I can flip through Instagram for hours and lose myself. But people want to be, they want to socially connect. I actually, it sounds like I talk to people in airports and places a lot.

I actually don't. But I was flying off to the West Coast a few weeks ago and stuck up a conversation with a guy who does training for kids who've lost a parenting combat. Quite a job, right? He does sort of engagement around him. And he thought like when he started them, like the hardest thing was going to be to do was trying to make kids. kids put away their phones. And he found it was the easiest thing for them to do because they wanted to put away their phones. They just didn't know how. So like it was easy once he told them, you can't look at your phones because they didn't want to. They just couldn't figure out how

not to. I think that's a lesson there, which is we're all waiting for solutions. We're all open solutions. We just need someone to sort of help us take that first step. I love that. And I think I think there is so much hope. I mean, I say this all the time. You know, I've never had so much hope for the next generation. When I look at my children and the conversations we have around, I have three. So our oldest is 15. Our twins are, we'll be 13 in January. And I, we have conversations that I was never safe enough to have around my kitchen table about anti-racism and inclusivity and, you know, what it means to be human. Right. So humans have not changed since, you know, I was born and multiple generations who've come before me. We've all been human. Our DNA has been 99.98% the same. Race is a social construct. Gender identities is a social construct, all of those things. But we've never been able to talk about it in a way that I think our kids have just really given the previous generation's permission to do. And I'm so excited about what that means for diving into breaking down some of these walls, these barriers, and these social connections that are going to be interesting.

And I love when you say it's permission. I was just thinking about that the other day, the hardest conversations we've had around this house, after I read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haight was like, hey, holy shit, like, I'm screwing you up. Everybody, like, shut your phones. Nobody gets a phone. Nobody gets an iPad. And they were like, you know, instant panic. And I was like, okay, fine.

We need to pick two screen-free days in this house. And you get to pick which days they are, but they need to be screen-free. And they hate it and they bitch about it. And they're like, it's the worst days of the week. But can I tell you, yesterday was a screen-free day for our 15-year-old. I am now an expert at Battle of the, no, clan. I don't even know the name of it. But like clash of clans,

some kind of computer game that my son's been playing since, like, three years now. And so he's now on the couch with me yesterday, explaining that I need to put the giant in so he can beat it. And if I follow him up with a minion and he shoots arrows, then we're all going to, like, I hated,

I hated every second of it. But he loves it. And it's that experience of, like, using these spaces to create that social capital around things that we, We don't necessarily love. We don't necessarily need to, you know, that we don't condone. We don't support.

But where do we meet people where they're at these days? And it's so much about that permission to just dive in, to shut off some of the things that keep us disconnected and even use some of those technological advances to bring us together. Show your grandma how to use an iPad. That's a good time. I got my mom on LiveBarns. This is an app where, you know, you can watch your kids play hockey wherever they are. my mom is so committed.

She was watching our twins play hockey this week, and she was watching the wrong team for two hours. She was watching some kid in Stetler cheer. She said, oh, my God, Evan just scored a snow mom. The game's over. Oh, she was cheered for some kid number seven in Stentler. She didn't even know. So I think there's so much opportunity here.

And Ken, I'm just blown away by your work. I cannot wait to dive in more. What's next for you? What's next for you? So, you know, that's a great question. I just finished the book. You know, I just got the book out to market six weeks ago. It still feels like I want to continue that conversation.

But it's all part, well, I think a larger commitment that I have to trying to foster greater public understanding around the challenges and opportunities of longer life. So I do that through, you know, my podcast, Century Live. I do through the book. I do it through. I have two weekly newsletters that focus on it, one called three not so bad things about aging and longevity, the other about social connection. We do it on Instagram and try to reach younger people in a channel called Grand People. I think, you know, I don't know what new I'm going to do, but I know that I'm going to keep pushing this conversation forward because it's the one that is critical to an aging nation. You know, 10,000 people turn 65 every single day in this country this year.

It's a, I won't say use the word tsunami because that has such a negative connotation. It's a, it's a wave. It's a wave that is changing sort of the demographic face. And we need to, we need to both grapple with it and also view it as a good thing. Because if it's not a good thing, then, you know, we're all going to be in deep shit. Amen. And we're all going to get there, which I think is the point. And I love that.

I love the wave. I love the wave of wisdom that we are so lucky to be a part of. in this North America place that I think just is only going to get better if we do it one step at a time. So listen, Ken, thank you. I'm going to, everything is going to be connected in the show notes.

I'd love all of our community to jump on board in Ken's community. It's such a safe, brilliant place to land when all of these questions are going to be a part of life for all of us. So Ken, thank you. Joanie, it's my pleasure. Yeah, it was great fun.

Yes, I loved it. Now, listen, everybody, I want you to take care of yourself, take care of each other. and just such an honor always to sit with you. I can't wait to meet right back again here next time. You know, the more we do this, people ask, why do you have to do the acknowledgement and every episode?

I got to tell you, I've never been more grateful for being able to raise my babies on the land where so much sacrifice was made. And I think what's really critical in this process is that the ask is just that we don't forget. So the importance of saying these words at the beginning of every episode will always be of utmost importance to me and this team. So everything that we created here today for you happened on Treaty 7 land, which is now known as the center part of the province of Alberta. It is home of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which is made up of the Siksika, the Kainai, the Pekini, the Tatina First Nation, the Stonyinakota First Nation, and the Métis Nation Region 3. Our job, our job as humans, is to simply acknowledge each other. That's how we do better, be better, and stay connected to the good.

The Unlonelly podcast is produced by three incredible humans, Brian Seaver, Taylor McGilvery, and Jeremy Saunders, all of Snack Lab productions. Our executive producer, my favorite human on this planet, is Marty Pillar. Soundtracks were created by Donovan Morgan, Unloney Branded artwork created by Elliot Cuss. Our big PR shooters are Desvinoe and Barry Cohen. Our digital marketing manager is the amazing Shana Haddon. Our 007 secret agent from the Talent Bureau is Jeff Lowness.

And emotional support is provided by Asher Grant, Evan Grant, and Olivia Grant. Go live! I am a registered clinical psychologist in Alberta, Canada. The content created and produced in this show is not intended as specific therapeutic advice. The intention of this podcast is to provide information, resources, education, and the one thing I think we all need the most, a safe place to land in this lonely world. We're all so glad you're here.