#7 - How to Bridge the Gap Between Technology and Relationships [DR. JEFF HALL]

Chris Miller: I'm going to hit record, which means that we are officially live.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Congratulations.
Chris Miller: Yeah, but we're not at the dining room studio. So this is actually my first podcast where I'm in an official studio. Nice. But I know that I was mentioning earlier how if eat my academic vegetables more and more and more, there's a chance that I could get to your brain strength.
Dr. Jeff Hall: No, I think my brain strength is declining the longer I get. There's too much stuff in there. It's hard to extract. It the speed that I used to be able to.
Chris Miller: Did you ever watch Dragon Ball z growing up. Uh, no. It's like an anime and they have this over their eye. You can see their power. We would have like, different brain powers. But one of the main reasons I think you would be a stellar guest here is that this whole thing is about talking to people, right. And you and I, we both have studied communication to different degrees.
Dr. Jeff Hall: At the same place, in fact.
Chris Miller: Yeah, at the same place. You did it a little longer than me. I was a little nervous whenever I was in grad school because everybody was talking about PhD school and I was like, what? I hadn't even considered PhD school. I thought I was going to go be a big consultant in Philadelphia. Um, for some reason I'd never been to Philly, but I wanted to go to Philadelphia. What got you to go down that path of being the professor and staying in school?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah. Well, so that story starts kind of early on. When I was an undergraduate at USC, I took these first year classes which were basically, um, program, uh, within a program where you get to complete your general education through these faculty. They would call first year seminars now, but they weren't called that there. It was called Thematic Option, and it's kind of an honors program. And I was in that at the same time that I was a biochem major. So I had a biology class of 1200, a chemistry class of 300, and I was getting my butt kicked. These were hard classes and I thought I was really well prepared for college and but at the same time, I was taking these classes that were required me to read and think and discuss and write and I was like, oh, I'm actually pretty good at this. I'm not sure about that biochem stuff. So I was undecided for about a year and a half at USC as I kind of figured out what I wanted to do. And there was this guy who will come back into the story later named Coaches Davis, and he was a, uh, resident assistant and he was a graduate student in communication at Dannebrook School. And at the time he was an RA that was very involved in student life in a way where he would just sit down where students were eating and he'd talk to them about what's going on. And he's a little older graduate student, because he had done some things before he went back to college. So at the time, he says, well, have you considered taking this class that I teach? I teach nonverbal communication. And, uh, it's a really special class. It's hard, but you'll love it. It's rewarding. So the funny thing was, by that point, I had decided to become an English major, but my English professors were like, this is a bad degree. If you want to be a professor, don't do it in literature. So I had one professor who I'd really admired. She said, well, probably I should basically learn how to speak a foreign language immediately be able to write in multiple languages, and you should specialize in something in this way. And I'm like, Language, uh, is not my bag, so I don't think I can do that. But Coach at the same time was saying, we'll just come over here and take nonverbal. So I showed up to that class, and it was really the most transformative class I took in undergrad. I had classes as good at it. Um, I had classes that were as interesting to me. I had classes I did better in. But that class was transformative because I didn't think you could study nonverbal behavior as a thing like what you can do this. You can talk about what people call body language. Um, and he was a superb teacher. He put it on the role of the students to perform, to bring their knowledge, to teach the material to one another in a kind of a graduate like seminar for upper division undergrads. And some students rose to the occasion, and some didn't. But he also made us do things like read original research there as an undergrad. He made us think. And he introduced to a theory and ideas then, um, which were, uh, about human energy management. So when I left that class, I was in one hand, having my Shakespeare professor saying, english is a bad degree. Yeah, I had Coach saying, you know, communication is a pretty good degree. And he says, Why don't you go do the Ma somewhere and figure it out? And so I had a major in English. I had a minor in psychology. I, um, would have had a double major in psychology had I not taken a History of Rock and Roll class in my senior year. But I was like, meh, I'll just take that class instead. And a class with Leonard Moulton. Yeah, he taught a class they showed movies and brought in directors and movie makers. I was like, I'll trade a, uh, major in psychology for a rock and roll and movie class at USC. So I went to Wake because I applied to five places that all had Ma terminal programs. And Wake had the best at the time kind of lineage of being able to get people to go on to graduate school, but also was, um, really good at recruiting at the time. So I left Los Angeles, left everyone behind that I knew, and I moved to Winston Salem.
Chris Miller: Yeah, it's cool being a part of that grad program, because you show up and at Undergrad, the professor is this individual who's so, like, the power distance so far, and it's hard to even fathom that a professor eats lunch and breakfast and dinner. Like, all the stuff is different. And then you show up to grad school, and they're like, oh, hey, just call me Jeff, or just call me Jared. And you're like and, uh you see.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Them all the time? Yeah, they're around all the time. You see their daily habits. You kind of see what it's like to work. I think that's one of the things is I never understood what kind of job it was. And then I began to see behind the scenes for teaching, prepping for classes, doing things like writing and coaching, writing, how to get better at it. But you're right. Graduate school kind of is like an on the job training for being a professor if you want to stay.
Chris Miller: Yeah. Did you have a moment where you said, oh, this is for me. I want to be a professor?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Oh. I knew that when I was an undergrad. So what happened was, when I was undecided for a while, at the same time, I would go back to Kansas, where I grew up. And my mom was a public school teacher. She was a speech pathologist. And she said, if you essentially do substitute teaching during Christmas time, you can make some good money, and you could see what it's like to teach. And I did it. So for years, I would go back, I'd do some sub teaching, make some money. But I also found in that time that I think I didn't want to teach at that level. So I kind of knew I wanted to be a teacher, but I didn't think I wanted to teach teach at that level when I did that. Now, granted, if any teachers listen to this, I'm not trying to, uh, say that subs are the same thing as being a real teacher, because they're not. But it kind of got me an idea of what level I wanted to talk at. So graduate school felt like a way that maybe I would be able to teach, but at a level that was, um, a level that I was aspiring to, maybe what I thought excited about. I wanted to kind of be like, coach. I wanted to be a teacher like that, even though he was just a graduate student. And I'd say just a graduate student, but he was a very important one in my life.
Chris Miller: Yeah. And whenever you went to Wake, I imagine you went on that social science side of that.
Dr. Jeff Hall: I didn't. That was the weird thing. So my literature background trained me in rhetoric oh, yeah. Because I was like, oh, well, this is just literary criticism for speech. It's the same thing. And I really, to this day, I'm not totally sure the difference between literary criticism, rhetorical criticism, except for the object, is different. Like, I think they're probably about the same. They seem to influence each other. Students at University of Kansas take classes in literature at the PhD. Level in communication. And you could say the same about communication and social psychology for the kind of things that I do, there's really not a huge difference there. Um, maybe the object of inquiry is different, but not really. But I could go into that, but it's not important. The bigger issue is that I did rhetoric under master's degree. I did a rhetoric analysis of, um, an event that had taken place in Los Angeles when I was an undergrad, and I wanted to do a rhetorical criticism of it. And I took classes in social science, but my training was kind of equally in both at that time. So I didn't know at the time I was going to go do statistics or social science.
Chris Miller: Yeah. I did the rhetorical analysis over presidential farewell addresses. So looking at six of them, starting with Jimmy M. Carter, I think, and then going through and looking at the similarities and the differences and the trends, the themes right.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Genre. Yeah.
Chris Miller: Pulling all that apart. And that was really cool because I was really a big fan of Barack Obama, his, uh, ability to communicate, of course. Yeah. I was like, whoa. And I would watch his kind of like you watch Steph Curry whenever he's dribbling around, like, shooting deep threes. I'd watch Barack Obama give a address on this or that, you know? Yes. Seeing him, uh, in his element was really inspiring. One of the cool things about your search is looking into relationships, technology, how those relationships are affected by technology. And that's a big reason why I'm starting this podcast, is I think it's important for people to talk to one another. And then I think it's important, whenever we have all this technology in and around us, how to use it in a way that benefits the relationships we have. Where did you see yourself? Because you're going from doing a rhetorical ah analysis.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah. So that was a while into the future, so I took several paths. Uh, one of the best things about being an academic, uh, before we started, we were talking about, um, how hard it is to figure out whether you want to take the academic path, because there are a lot of hurdles you have to jump before you get there. And one of the hardest things about being an academic, and I say this to my students a lot, is that it's probably the best job that I could ever get. For me, it's perfectly suited to the kind of person that I am, because I love teaching, I love being in the classroom, I love learning, I love the process of starting new things. But it's a hard job to get and it's a hard job to keep. But, uh, one of the best things about this job, by far, is the fact you get to reinvent what you're interested in. If you lose interest in something, start something new. So when I first got started, I had a projects that had evolved out of graduate school that focused on masculinity, um, which influenced later topics that had to do with gender differences in friendship. I early on got an interest in flirting and research on flirting, because, um, part of it was just kind of coincidence that I got tumbled into a project that gave me a chance to have access to eharmony data, which at the time was pretty remarkable. It was 2004, so had a huge door open for me there. Um, technology would just start. If you remember, Facebook hadn't really even gotten launched until roughly about 2004, as I believe, when it was opened at Harvard. And a little bit later, 2007 or so, or by 2007, um is one of all universities across the country had access to it, so it was huge growing. But I didn't know that I wanted to study that at that time either. But I did do something on online dating and flirting, friendship, and then it kind of evolved for a while. I was doing one on humor and relationships, which is another project that I had an opportunity to study. So, long term relationships and humor, flirting and friendship. And so what was kind of fun was when I first started this job, I remember I started this job at Ku. I remember one of the new deans was going to our faculty meeting and everyone's introducing themselves, and people are giving different lengths of introduction to what the research does. And I studied flirting, friendships, and humor, and I'm just like, that's it. Everyone's sort of pauses and goes, wow, that's odd, right? That really was true. But all of it revolves around this idea that I was interested in the ways in which that people make connections with each other. I still think that flirting and friendship have a lot to do with one another. Um, the process of getting someone interested in you is kind of the same in both flirting and friendship development. But what's different is the end goal is a little bit different. People's openness to what happens next is obviously different. But the processes intrigued me and I wanted to know more. So I didn't really start studying social media until probably about 2010 eleven. And at that time, I did a project on texting that was very influential, um, partly because I had an amazing co author, Nancy Bam, who's now at Microsoft. She, um, was an incredible person to work with and a great researcher. And then I also did a project with Eharmony, as I mentioned, online dating which also kind of put me in a position to talk about these issues. But those technology issues really at that point what really kind of took off is I did a bunch of work on impression formation on Facebook issues around how do we figure out what people's personality are, what kind of things are indicative of their personality and their Facebook use. Then I uh, started doing work that had to do with what's called a social displacement hypothesis, which is the idea that if you spend time on social media you lose time face to face. So all of these topics kind of spilled out as I began to try to see the intersection between online and offline worlds. And to this day I would say that probably the thing that being a communication researcher with a background that was on relationships first rather than technology first. The reason that it led me to where I'm at is that I always started with the assumption that there was somebody else on the other end of a text. There was somebody else at the other end of social media. Social media is different now. Right, but remember, I'm talking about social media back 2010 where it was people who you had met and friended your social network like your MySpace that's right. And and friendster and then, you know, this you know, a lot of the things we think of now as social media are really kind of just a glimmer of what it once was. And now, um, in that time when I was researching it, it was really I select these people to be my social network, and then basically, I present myself to them and they respond to that. But that means there was always people there and people were communicating with each other through social media. The weird thing is you'd be surprised how little people think about the idea that when we use social media, in some ways we're using it in a way that's a relational act. So it's not necessarily taking away from our personal relationships, it is a relationally can sustain and build relationships if we choose to use it in that way. But it is not inherently one thing. Social media is not for one purpose, it's for at these days it's probably for 100 purposes of 200 purposes. But at the time, even back in 2010, it really could still be used in a lot of purposes for self advertisements, but also for learning about what's going on with other people. So the kind of focus of my research really has always been the ideas that we seek connection and we're just looking for different means of doing so.
Chris Miller: Mhm, why is that your focus?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah, that's a fair question. I've always been interested in questions and I remember one of the best things about being an undergrad and having good friends and having that kind of freedom of thought and openness to meet people and hang out with them endlessly and bring them in every part of your life. You go on road trips or go out drinking or hang out for hours and talk or go to classes together, go to football games. They were integrated into your world in a way that I think is really without replication ever another time in your own life. There's probably never another time like undergrad in that way. And I remember at the time, the question I was really possessed with back when I was 20 was, what's a good use of my time? What matters? What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to spend my time doing? And I hope that many people who go to school, but all people at some point in their life, get a chance to spend some time thinking about that question, because it's a pretty important one. But I was deeply invested in that question at the time. So my work since roughly 2012, 2013 has been focused on the question that I was asking myself when I was 20, but I never got a proper answer to, which is, what am I supposed to be doing? Right? Uh, and the answer that I came to was, I believe and still believe that the most important thing that we can do is witness one another's lives as they pass. We're all going to die. It's all temporary. And I have gone through different spiritual machinations in my life about what's going to happen next. But the bottom line that I know for certain is where we are right now is a reality that it is not permanent. So if we can only focus on the reality that we have now, and it's impermanence, we can even become overwhelmed by the reality that everyone that you love is going to die, and you will too, and it won't matter, or you can figure out what's the best way to live it while you're awake and you're attentive. And so my research focuses on this idea that the question to me has one important answer, which is that we are called to live a life of witness of one another. And communication and technology are both tools through which that we can witness one another's existence and say, you matter. I see you. I care about you. You're worth knowing. And to me, that motivates almost all of my work, and it has for probably about ten years.
Chris Miller: Yeah, that's awesome, because that's such a tough question, right. Um, you hear the motivational speakers, find your why, what's your why?
Dr. Jeff Hall: And I haven't heard that one. That's actually new to me. I haven't heard that. I'm not joking. I'm saying I guess I don't listen to much, motivational speaking.
Chris Miller: Yeah, it's that the who, what, when, where, why, how. The why seems to be the question that we really have to ponder. Um, there's no answer to it. Yeah, the what the means the how the method. But when you look at why and whenever I think about doing this podcast, I always say, everybody has value, everybody has a story. But sometimes, whenever I say that to people, it seems as if it's novel information, like they haven't thought about that. And to me, that's peculiar. Like, oh, you haven't thought about this. But it seems like not everybody is wired in a way in which they see people as just like an endless source of new data. That seems like a little robotic, but like you said, witnessing the life and what's happening here and now, and when you open yourself up to others, and you allow others to open yourself up to you, it completely changes, uh, and revolutionizes everything, compared to just doing it all by yourself. Now, social media has given us that opportunity to do that to the millionth degree. Right. Because I just got on TikTok. Have you looked much into TikTok? Yeah, and I'm seeing all the things that go viral. I'm like, huh?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah.
Chris Miller: The algorithm, how all that works. It's quite mystical, uh, to me, despite I would say I connect with people pretty well, and I can understand people to a decent degree, but sometimes social media is so far beyond me, uh, it's hard to understand.
Dr. Jeff Hall: What do you mean that it's far beyond you?
Chris Miller: Yeah. Ah. Like, whenever I'm interacting or connecting with people on social media, if I directly message them, then we have a decent conversation. Like, there was somebody whose content I saw, and I was like, hey, how did you get started? And it was good. But whenever I'm browsing through things, what seems popular to me, it doesn't seem like it's top quality content.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah, I see what you're saying. So remember when I said before that social media doesn't have a specific aim or purpose? Uh, it has 100 reasons for being, and TikTok versus Facebook, versus Twitter, versus Instagram, versus it can go on WhatsApp depending on your part in the world, it's even different what kind of things you have access to, what you rely on telegram right now. And if you think about the situation in Ukraine so, I think what's hard here is when people talk about what social media is, they are not talking about the same thing. So, a lot of times I find myself being like, what do you mean when you're talking about social media? And that's why I try to talk about when I talk about it, I talk about it and saying, social media at this time, social media during this period of its evolution, this platform, this part of its function, because it's manifold, it's huge in what it's possible. But what you talk about just there a second ago is social media is also a, uh, stream of, uh, entertainment content that is distributed in a way that allows for users to become the originator of that content. And that has been true that's a definition of social media has been true since YouTube was founded. Since MySpace was founded, because the concept is that as a distributed network, although you get to pick your connections between people by selecting, I want to follow this person, or M, I'm going to friend that person, depending on your platform. The deal is that they produce content that you view. So what's interesting is, go back ten years ago when you used Facebook. You actually had a timeline that started with the most recent thing, and it started with the, uh yeah, the most recent thing went down to the last thing since the last time you went. You always could see 100% of what everyone else put, and then there were buttons that allowed you to mute and unsubscribe and stop seeing certain content. But there was no advertisement. None, zero advertisement, almost no corporations, almost no, uh, influencers that was even a thing right? Now, if it was a thing, it was existing on different platforms, such as YouTube, for example, and um, as those things evolved in like, esports and otherwise. So when we talk about social media, you have to talk about what is it about it that you're not connecting with? What are the functions that don't make sense? And what you said is the functions that don't make sense to you is that the content that other people want to watch is not interesting to you. It does not appeal to you. Think of it this way. 20 years ago, when I grew up, almost everyone that I knew had a, ah, cable subscription. And this cable subscription had, I don't know, 50, 6100, 200 channels, I don't even know, because my family was one of the few that didn't have it. So I was a little jealous of what people got to see on TV because I had five channels. Um, but if you think about it, that's a ton of content, and most of it's not interesting to you.
Chris Miller: Right.
Dr. Jeff Hall: In fact, most people can understand what you say if you I just browse and click click, and nothing I don't stop on anything. Right.
Chris Miller: Nothing good.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Nothing good. And what's interesting, too, is I talked to a former graduate student uh, or a former undergraduate student of mine who went to graduate school, who works for Netflix now. I talked to her briefly, and one of the things she said, is that it's a very difficult problem for people who are aware of how to use TV from a click perspective to be befuddled about Netflix because they're like, well, the content still is nearly endless, but choosing it is now harder because it's not just on. And an enormous number of people just consume whatever's there, not intentionally pick it and watch it. Right? Which is interesting because Netflix started as a DVD rental service where you picked and watched something. You can only take three at the time. Or I think you could have like as many as seven at a time if you paid the special rate. But the point is the same. Social media, a lot of social media is more similar to television than it is to human connection. And if you start thinking about the idea that social media is and its similarities to television means that an enormous amount of content is not for you. It's for a huge audience of consumers that are not you, and that you are being profiled by the algorithm now and in the past by Nielsen or by broadcasters or whatever to try to catch your demographic. You are always the product that's being delivered to the advertisers now. So you have to rearrange your thinking when it comes to this. Ah, anything that's free in media, if you don't pay for it, it means you are the product, right? And you, Chris Miller, are being delivered to advertisers on social media by what you consume. Most of what you consume is not for you, or you browse through, or you skip through because you're like, this isn't for me. Of course it's not for you, because they're trying to capture, without much exaggeration, billions of people's attention to sell them stuff. And so all of that social media is not interesting to me. Uh, if you study things like I do, and you talk about social media, if you talk about any of the things related to mobile media, for example, too, which is now people watching on their mobile device streaming content, watching TikTok videos or whatever, you have to be familiar with these things. But I'm always really clear when I write articles or when I talk to people I'm like, I am not interested in consumptive practices or products. If you want to talk to an expert on consumption, media consumption, you want to trace that back to TV and move to the present. If you want to talk to me, you go back to telegrams and letters and you go to the present.
Chris Miller: Okay?
Dr. Jeff Hall: So that helps to arrange my thinking. I know this is a very long answer to your question, but at some level, when people like to say social media is bad for X, Y, and Z reason, I don't even know what they're talking about. I'm like, well, maybe, but it depends on which form of social media you're talking about, which practice of social media you're talking about, which element of social media you're talking about. So does radicalization enabled by social media a bad thing? Yeah, I'll buy that. Is misinformation on social media a bad thing? Yeah, I'll buy that right there's. The ability for people to be able to connect to one another and talk to one another and see what their grandkids are doing, and pictures of their dog before it goes into surgery, those are good things. So because all of it is lumped under this terribly unhelpful banner of social media, I'm very suspicious when people. Start in with a, uh, social media's bad philosophy, because I'm like, what are we talking about?
Chris Miller: Right? That person who says social media is bad, it's like, okay, pump the brakes, right? Like, there are so many different websites or platforms or right. That are providing. Like, on Facebook, I could message right now, it's about to do my ten year reunion for high school, and there's this Facebook group that's been put together, and everybody's popping on there and saying, hey, here's what I'm doing now. But then there will be people who pop on there and just promote something, right? It's like, what the heck? But that idea of being able to catch up with people, that's really cool. But then on Facebook as well, they have what, farmville, all of these different things. And that's just within that one site.
Dr. Jeff Hall: That's right.
Chris Miller: One of the things you had mentioned was you were in a fraternity whenever you're in an undergrad, and fraternities really intrigued me. I, uh, went through the pledge process at undergrad, and I remember there was these people that I had never met before, really? But it would be like, hey, brother, how's it going? You know what I mean? And it was a really interesting example to me of rapid self disclosure of, uh, these people that, I don't know, we just ended up going through these pledge activities together. I'm thinking about the question here, but it's just really intriguing to me how whenever you join a fraternity, like, you're someone's brother, they're your family.
Dr. Jeff Hall: I think I'll take the question a little bit different way to help, perhaps contextualize it and where my thinking is about this. Humans have an intense desire to affiliate themselves with groups of people. Um, those groups of people can be as small as me and my partner, romantic partner, me and my kids, my partner, my home, my family. And that can be defined in a lot of ways and variable ways, but oftentimes some combination of marriage and legal arrangements. But the thing is, people always want to feel like they're part of something. Something that actually has some sort of sense of social meaning, group meaning. And I say to people, for example, people, uh, in Lawrence have a great amount of pride for Lawrence. They love Lawrence. Well, who are these people? Have I pulled them? Have I asked them? Not really. But I'm sussing out a sense of community identity from what I observed about the way that people talk about Lawrence in my place I live. So I infer that the community has an identity that has some sort of value to me as a member of Lawrence community, but also that it actually includes me in a way that I'm getting something good out of, that I feel good about. The fact that I live in a place that seems to care about the city that we live in. And I do. Uh, I'm not saying those things as a hypothetical. I mean those things sincerely. I don't think fraternities or sororities or fire departments or Kawana's clubs or VA groups or even a kickball league or a softball league or a church or a synagogue or mosque are all that different. They all function by a similar sense of it's, uh, a segue into finding a sense of group identity that's sustainable, and that when it's in an ideal form that ideal form allows you to derive a sense of value and purpose from that that you may not be able to get in through your own life. Um, and in its best form, religion, religions, plural help us to look outside of ourselves, to sacrifice for a greater good of one another towards the goal of forgiveness, towards the goal of beneficence, towards the goal of eliminating a sense of loneliness or isolation with always an understanding that life is impermanent and it will end. That's a pretty powerful set of tools that it offers people, and then it also adds an identity. I am, um, catholic. I am Presbyterian. I am whatever. So the point is that group related social processes have an intense power, and they have in the way that we're built, but they're able to be really loosely applied to all manner of things, from a team at work to a kickball team to, as you mentioned, a fraternity. But I think that, broadly speaking, the language of you're my brother, or you're my family, or we're pledges, or we are all members of this organization. Uh, social psychology research has long demonstrated that those simple tools of saying we not I and you and I, which creates a we, then also tends to bind us and favor those people over other people. I favor you because we are a we. I prefer you. I would prefer to hang out with you. I prefer to spend time with you. So there's all that I find that interesting, but I'm also not I don't study that. What I do think is interesting about those organizations and this is true for college students, for adults, for older adults. You know, people at different parts of their lives is more about the way that they situate your time and your access to people. I I feel strongly that one of the saddest things about growing up and I'm you know, I'm 46 now, but one of the saddest things about growing up and all of the things that you lose as you grow up. One of the things that I'm, you know, I feel really, um, intensely about is that you don't have regular access to the people that you love for your whole life. Yeah, I went back to Los Angeles, um, and saw three I saw excuse me, four very close friends, and then worked with a work colleague who I'm very close to. And he and I worked together for four days on the book that we're writing. But in between, I went to Los Angeles and saw four friends, almost each of them for a day or a day and a half. And the process of renewing my sense of friendship with these people was profound. But I only see them every third year now because of pandemic, you know, because of kids, because of their own life. But they are so special to me. But they're gone, like, in my day to day life. A fraternity, uh, religious organization. What it does is it gives you access to people weekly, daily even, over and over and over again, sharing the things that matter in your life and also the things that are mundane and don't seem to matter until they're gone. Like having someone to eat with, having someone to watch a game with. What's weird about these mundane actions of sociality is that they actually build our sense of community and identity in a way that's very curing. It makes us feel connected to the world, but it also gives us a sense of we are interdependent. What I do matters to somebody else. People around me matter, and I matter to them, which is pretty significant. What I'm sad about as I grow up and I also watch it in society is a lot of people who are middle aged, but also a lot of Americans have no places to go for community. There's nowhere to go. You can go places, shop, that's for sure. Lots of places to buy stuff. But think about it. How many places exist merely for the sake of seeing the same people week after week and expect nothing from you financially from that? There doesn't exist. And I think that what's profound about when people study sociality or the decline of American institutions around social behavior or the increasing rates of loneliness in the country, which are all issues that I'm familiar with. And conversion is I often trace it back to the reality that there just aren't a whole lot of places where people are that you can go to repeatedly without a cost or expense that make you into a group member and make you into a place that you can feel connected that are not religious. Right now, there's a couple. I mentioned some of them, but there are not many. And religious attendance is declining. It's the lowest it's ever been in recorded history in the United States. People who identify as religion or go weekly is now down to its lowest rate. Wow. Uh, and the pandemic kicked it down like it was already on its way down because we're moving a more secular society. But it kicked it down farther because people are now afraid of COVID which makes sense, especially for older adult populations. But what that means is another place in which that we don't have a sense of social connection lost. So I know it in a very different direction than you asked about the process of calling someone your brother, but I think there's actually something bigger there, which is the way that we organize our time and the spaces that we share with one another.
Chris Miller: Yeah. In that family structure, I know that historically, I see myself being a part of maybe involved in a church. And it's the same verbiage there as you were discussing it. It's like, oh, you're my brother and sister in Christ. Uh huh. And it's like the week after you go through the whole process, it's like, oh, yeah, now you're my brother, now you're my sister, and we need to take care of that.
Dr. Jeff Hall: You're baptized into a church. Right. If you go through processes that have to do with, like, a Baptza bar mitzvah, you become an adult member of the synagogue. There are lots of what's wonderful about those rituals is that it says it's a ritual of acceptance, but also a ritual of becoming one with the institution. And again, there are many good things about religious practices and being, and there are things that are not wonderful about those things. That said, the process is actually incredibly profound. If you think about the value of ritual, of oneness, of identity, of time and space, organization, of memory, of what it's orienting you towards in terms of our obligation to one another. And I think we are going through a time, as our rise of secularism goes up, that, um, there aren't a whole lot of things to replace it. And I think that that's probably why it's also really hard for people to feel connected these days.
Chris Miller: Yeah, I've had a hard time feeling connected whenever Annie and I, we moved from North Carolina. It was in the middle of COVID right. And I had never been to Lawrence, Kansas, before. And then we got involved in the church, and I met some people there. But beyond that, it's like, where do I go to find these friendships? And even if I met some people who I thought were cool, right? It'd be like, oh, they're already doing this or they're already doing that on different pages. But I find myself playing sports. That seems to be the only way that I can find groups of people. I was looking up the chess club the other day, even though I'm going to get waxed at the chess club. But at least there are people there, um, who are looking for community. And it's hard to make friends. For some reason. It's really hard for me to ask people to hang out. It's like a really vulnerable thing to do. Uh, and I know I'm not alone in that. From your research, have you seen that a lot of people, like, in my instance, where after grad school, I moved to a new city, have a hard time making friends.
Dr. Jeff Hall: So my friends and I are working on a project academically called American Friendship Project. And one of the things that we have in our long study of this is the idea of a set of friendship killers. And you named a couple yeah.
Chris Miller: At the same time.
Dr. Jeff Hall: At the same time.
Chris Miller: And we got married.
Dr. Jeff Hall: There's actually four that you mentioned. You moved, you finished school. Right. And you got married. So what's interesting is, of those, none of those are inherently bad, and two of them are arguably really important. Marriage and finding someone that you love and being with someone that you love, um, whether marriage is involved or not. And also degree, getting a degree is a good thing. But the bottom line is all of those things require losing time, access to the same people year after year in a predictable manner. And so yeah. Does my research suggest or do other people's research suggest that it's hard to make friends? Definitely. Does it get harder as you get older? Yes. And is it an issue of access to people? Yes. Is it an issue of time? Yes. Is it an issue of priority?
Chris Miller: Yes.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Is an issue of work? Definitely. The bottom line is that it is excruciatingly difficult because unlike that moment in undergraduate particularly and I know I keep coming back to this because I think it's, um, kind of an environment par excellence for explaining why it is that people develop so many friends in that period of their lives. People open to making friends there year after year. Right. There you go. With time. And that's the other part that I keep coming back to. So it's very hard. And I am, um, deeply sympathetic to the realities that I read an article recently, and what it suggested was something that I thought was very important for us to think about is when institutions and rituals that are social in nature are in decline, that puts more and more focus on the individual to rebuild them. And so there's not some sort of nefarious mastermind who's preventing people from joining a Kawana's club. That's not happening. And there are obviously still sporting events, and there are still chess clubs, and there are still churches, obviously. So it's not as if those things are being taken from us. But it is true that as the centrality of things like that decline, we now become responsible for making our friends. We now become responsible for making those appointments and saying, hey, do you want to hang out? And what are we going to do? And that's a ton of work. And I think that if you think of it as work that's embedded in systems which are already making it hard to have time, it becomes even worse. So I know, Chris, that you started this podcast in part because of all the hours you were working. In my research, the number one predictor of people spending less social time is time at work. Well, number one, more so than social media, by a long margin, but more so than anything else. And the reason is that work does a couple of things it takes away from your energy to give to other people. It makes your, your schedules for a lot of Americans, makes your schedule erratic. So you can't make plans because you don't know when you're going to get a shift or if you're going to pick up another gig job here or there. And it expects total sacrifice to the institution the higher you have education or, uh, professionalism, which is insane. Leisure used to be defined by making enough money not to work. Now it's the reverse, where the more education you have, the less leisure you have because you're supposed to be working.
Chris Miller: Right.
Dr. Jeff Hall: That is insane to me. I can't deny it's true. I saw that in my cohort of people who graduated. I'm a firm Gen Xer, and I think for millennials it's also true. And they went through a period of maturation during, um, the Great Recession, which made jobs even more dire and difficult to get and keep. But the bottom line is we live in a world in which that it does not prioritize our time with one another, and we are made responsible for it. So even I always feel this kind of weird sense of confusion because people often ask me, because I did this paper on the number of hours it takes to make a friend, and I'm a sensible expert in friendship. What should I do? What should I do? And I have honest answers, and I'm happy to share them here, too. Please do. I will. But I would also say that I also give them with a sense of modesty and humility to say that I offer those answers, but also go, this is, this is just reinforcing a, uh, problem which is making other people responsible for problems which are bigger than them. Yeah, right. It's like the, the equivalent of this is one I like to use because my wife has studied sedentary, uh, behavior. We live in a world that makes us move a lot less. So it's your job to be exercising, or your job to get a standing deck or desk, or it's your job to add some 15 minutes of stretching and pilates in the middle of a day of work. I mean, that it's your job to do all those things is not untrue. But it's also kind of insane in a culture in which that we're already having to integrate so many other things into our life. So I worry at some level that when I say, here are the things you can do to make friends, what I'm also doing is just saying, yeah, we're part of a system that's putting this on you, and I'm just going to keep contributing to putting this all on you. Because I kind of feel it's not going to make it no one's going to make it better. No one's going to come in and make the situation better for all of us. We all have to come to terms with ourselves and say, I want to prioritize relationships and I'll do that.
Chris Miller: And you mentioned it's, the system. Yeah. Do you think in the past, maybe 50 years ago, it was easier for people to make friends?
Dr. Jeff Hall: No, I don't think people it was easier to make friends. I think the process of friendship is always hard and I still think friendship is hard. I think being a good friend is hard. I think caring for people is hard. I think taking on their burdens is hard. I think loving people is hard. And I think that work is the most important work we'll do in our lives. Yeah, it's all hard. It's always been hard and in some ways there's an argument to be made. It was harder in the past because your lives were so much more enmeshed in other, uh, people's lives because you're going to be geographically less mobile. Meaning if you never move away, you have to keep a good relationship with more people. Mhm, if your work life and your home life are totally intertwined like on a farm, right? You got to keep good relationships because, dammit, you're not going to succeed if you don't keep both the relationship and the work in good shape. And professional relationships these days are more disposable. And although it's good to make friends at work, they're not treated with the same level of integration that I think in the past. So I think that it wasn't easier because it's never been easy. It was more convenient in the past to have access to people that you met because people didn't move as much. So geographic mobility was lower. People were not able to be reachable at home after they worked, so there was less of the working off hours through your phone or through your laptop or whatever. But there's a third piece to this too, which is that the number of hours Americans are working has increased since roughly 1972. And it doesn't have to show any signs of stopping. People are working and working working. And part of that is women entering to the workforce, which is a good thing. And it gives women a choice to work in a way that they didn't have a choice prior to certain moments in history. But that means on average, everyone's working more. And it just goes on and it goes on and it goes on. So add the gig economy workers, the people doing Grubhub or the people doing Uber just to make ends meet. The reality of it is that the systems of work to me are a better explanation of time and friendship than most anything else.
Chris Miller: Well, I think about all of the hard times I have whenever I'm wanting to make friends. And within that industry I was a part of this healthcare it. I would see people, they would have a job for two years at one company and then they'd get a certain title like and then they'd switch to this other company, and they'd take a 40 grand pay pump, and it'll be like, Dang, you're making more money. And then you see on LinkedIn three years later, oh, hey, I'm transitioning to this one space, and it's this upward mobility. Like, you're making more money, but they're physically moving themselves over and over and over again. And I just think how hard it must be to be a part of community, right, to, like, have those friends. And I know that that's like a glorified thing in some sense, of like, oh, I went to like, on LinkedIn. If you go, it'll be like, I work at Netflix, but in parentheses, it'll say formerly Snapchat. You know what I mean? Like, this is my pedigree type of moving around. And you mentioned it's, like, the system of work and increasing them, um, hours of work. Do you think that the future of this system looks like less friendships?
Dr. Jeff Hall: The trends aren't looking good. The trends are not looking good? I can answer that. Um, you could have just described academia right there, right? You go to this graduate school, then you go to that graduate school, then you move to the first job. You move to the second job, then you move to this job. And you could only in academia, one of the maybe not so public secrets of academia is you really only get meaningful pay raises if you either move to administration or you move up to another university. You don't really have an opportunity to get paid more as a salary. You can get paid more in other ways. Um, but I digress. Yeah, the trends are bad, man. Like, bad. So I published an article in the Wall Street Journal this summer, and it was called The Age of Interiority. And one of the things I argued in that is that there is trends from Australia, UK, United States. The number of minutes that people are spending on an average week and social time with one another has been declined since the it keeps going down. And it's now down to the point where we have lost something to the effect of I think the estimate is somewhere around an hour and a half to 2 hours of time a week with people just socializing for the sake of socializing. And most of that time is lost for people who are working particularly lost for people who work gig jobs or two jobs. And it's lost in the sense in which that people are trading out time that they spend alone watching TV for those things. So is TV or streaming or social media taking away from our social time? No. People are not having access to social opportunities, and they turn to entertain themselves in the time that they have left because they're freaking tired, right? They're just tired. And I mean, Netflix is or whatever your favorite streaming is there for you in a way that bothering a friend can't be right. They can't be. Uh, you also describe this idea that your pedigree of your job placement becomes your reason for being absolutely. The truth in the sense that there is a class of people who are trying to either stay in middle class or to be upwardly mobile in middle class, um, built on a sense of economic anxiety and an expectation from their childhood and otherwise of constant success that says that sacrificing for the sake of work is a noble sacrifice. And one of the points that I make in the book that I'm writing is I write a part that says if we took a young person who was intelligent and capable of going to college, and they said, I'm just going to go to the one in town because I'm going to spend more time with my friends, we'd be like, what?
Chris Miller: Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Go to Harvard. Yeah, go to a better school. It doesn't even have to be Harvard, man. And it could be like, the school and the other state.
Chris Miller: Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Uh, you know, if a person said, oh, I just graduated from undergrad, but rather than leaving town to go to graduate school, I'm going to stay here, I'm going to spend more time with my friends because these people are awesome, we'd be like, you're foolish, right? Go get that better job. This is your chance to really make that pay increase happen, because right out of college is your time to shine. It's all seen in the lens of sacrifice towards a calling of work and success. And I know I'm kind of being bagged on it, but I did the same damn thing, man. My wife and I moved at once every 18 months for eight years. Wow. Yeah. And did it together seven of those times. So I think the thing is, is that I'm not pissing on this or looking down on it because it's something I didn't do. I was cognizant at the time that I was feeding a sense of my own wanting to accomplish and expand my horizons. And through a set of very fortunate circumstances, for most of that time, I was able to move with my wife now, but then my girlfriend or my fiance, and then move back to Los Angeles where I had a really good network of people after I had left, roughly four years after I left and then moved back to Kansas after having left Kansas for almost ten years. So there were people here to see I was not doing those things strategically. Those things happened by a combination of choice and luck. But I am deeply thankful for the fact that for some reason, 20 something year old Jeff made decisions that kept me close to the people who I loved and within geographic access to people that were friends of mine. Um, because I had the wherewithal to know that that was going to be important in the long run, because it has been.
Chris Miller: Yeah. And with less social time spent with others. Does that coincide with an increasing rate of loneliness? Definitely, yeah. What's the loneliness research look like? How do they do that? Is that self reported?
Dr. Jeff Hall: It's all self reported, but the research on self reported loneliness is that it's a very good indication of things such as they've done studies on people's brain scans. They've done different indicators that are more biological in origin to say, how much is self reported loneliness really indicative of a greater loneliness problem? And it's related, but as it stands, self reported loneliness is the most important thing because it's a subjective experience. So you may be a more introverted person, and you may like to only have a couple of times meeting up with friends and hang out with Annie, and you're good to go. Another person might be really much more happy if they had five or six of those things rather than two. And so loneliness is subjective in the sense that it's not meeting where you want to be. It's not meeting your needs. So it has to be subjective because there's no such thing as saying, well, did you go out twice this week? You are not lonely. It doesn't work that way. It may not be enough.
Chris Miller: That's a really good point. What's the harm of loneliness?
Dr. Jeff Hall: It's worse than smoking cigarettes. It's worse than not eating well. It's worse than, um, high BMI. Uh, you live fewer years. You are lonelier while you're alive. You have less meaning in your life. Your life is less satisfying. It's bad. Loneliness is very bad. And what's hard about it is that it's very, very pernicious. It's hard to stabilize once people are become lonely. Um, lonely people engage in a lot of behaviors that show other people that they don't want to talk, they don't want to hang out, they want to be alone. And people, a lot of times, choose to let lonely people alone because it seemed like the right thing to do. I don't want to interfere with you. It's not my role to mess with you. It just makes sense, right? At a certain point, if someone is signaling me, they don't want to be talked to, they don't want to receive my phone call, they don't respond to my text, they don't back in the old days, opened their door, right? And at some point, you just go, okay, that's fine. It's them, it's their call. It's not my business. Especially friends. Friends don't see their responsibility as telling another friend to stop, knock it off, and quit being lonely. They go, Well, I guess that's just where they're at, and that's okay. We have very accepting attitudes about the idea that someone may want to be alone. The hard thing is figuring out the difference between someone who's alone in a good way, solitude, and alone in a bad way, which is being lonely. And that's a hard thing to read from. The outside.
Chris Miller: Is the research on loneliness and social time spent together? Does it look different with more collectivist cultures?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Some. But generally speaking, there isn't good evidence anywhere that people are thrived by being lonely more. There just isn't good evidence. There's a study I read just last week in relation to the book that said that people, even with people who are with high social anxiety, like diagnosably, treatable high social anxiety, are still happier with people than being alone. Because you'd go, well, isn't a person's subjective discomfort with people indicative of their need to be alone? Weirdly not. It's actually indicative of an arousal system that's gone awry that makes people uncomfortable being with others doesn't mean they don't want to. Right. So what's strange is that introverts benefit just as much as extroverts being social. High people with high social anxiety still benefit from being social versus being alone. Um, there's even some research that suggests that introverts benefit more than extroverts from being social because they started at such a low social state to begin with.
Chris Miller: And whenever you are in a friendship or a relationship and it doesn't go well, it's a bit depressing. And you end up being lonely more because there's, like this positive reinforcement of, like, something goes bad, you're lonely, you get depressed, then you're more depressed because you're lonely, which can be, like you said, this really destructive, pernicious cycle. I like that word, pernicious. How do we become a good friend?
Dr. Jeff Hall: In which way? There are so many great ways to be a good friend. What way would you like to know?
Chris Miller: The best way.
Dr. Jeff Hall: The best way? Uh, you know better than I'm going to answer that question with one answer. There's lots of ways to be a good friend. Depends on the kind of friendship you want to have with somebody.
Chris Miller: Yeah. So we'll use me as a case study. Okay. Now, I've joined this basketball group monday, Wednesday, Friday, 06:00, a.m. 05:45 A.m.. Good for you.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah.
Chris Miller: Even though I can't really hoop, I can't really play basketball that well. I can make them laugh, and I'm getting better.
Dr. Jeff Hall: And you show up.
Chris Miller: And I show up. Exactly. And that was honestly, there's a group me for it, and they've been struggling to get numbers, so I had to essentially say, hey, I know I'm not the best, but at least I show up, and then they can play when I'm there. Exactly. Um, so I've started to show up there, and then I just joined the soccer league.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Right.
Chris Miller: So there's more people I have more of a captive audience than I can expect on a weekly, um, basis. So what would being a good friend look like for me, showing up to this basketball group every morning?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah. Um, that's a good question. I appreciate the specificity. I was on a softball team for a couple of years early on, and I was that person that was not good. Uh, not good. At softball, and I had maybe one season of the, I don't know, dozen that we played that I had a good batting average, and I just could not figure it out. I didn't play baseball growing up, so I didn't know what I was doing. Um, but I showed up, man. I showed up. I showed up. I cheered people on. I said, good job. When we were down, I said, we can do this. You know, I was that guy, and I didn't mean that. I didn't like losing as much as we lost because we lost a lot. I didn't enjoy that, but I definitely enjoyed the process of getting to know the guys in the team just to be part of it. Having something to do, being, uh, athletic is good for your body for a lot of different reasons. But to being a good friend in those cases, means showing up, man. It means showing up. It means if there's an opportunity with M one or some of those people to do other fun things with them, say yes and show up again. If you get together to play, uh, basketball, then afterwards you go out and have breakfast. Make time for that. Go hang out there, have some breakfast or get a smoothie or whatever the hell you do after basketball, if you have a chance to invite those people to go do something else fun together because you want them to know that you enjoy their company, do that. Make plans. Invite people be forgiving if they can't show up, but you show up. What's so strange is we live in this there's this phrase that we use in the United States that's comical to me because it means nothing, but it implies something. And it says, we should get together sometime. Yeah, Chris, we should get together sometime. We should do this again sometime.
Chris Miller: And I'm like, yeah, totally.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah, totally. And then what happens?
Chris Miller: And then I see you next year at the conference.
Dr. Jeff Hall: And then you go, yeah, Chris, we should get together again sometime. And then I see you next year at the same damn thing that I said that before. No follow up. You're not alone. In fact, there's, uh, been some funny subreddits and other places people like, what the hell does this mean? Apparently, um, it's actually one of the intercultural things, too, where people from other countries hear Americans say that, and they're like, what does that mean? Are they trying to get together? Are we close now? Are we friends?
Chris Miller: Right.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Um, so they're a little weirded out by the intimacy that it implies, but I think it's just pretty damn sad. If it's true that people really want to get together sometime, think freaking get together.
Chris Miller: Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Planet. Planet. Execute it. Make it happen. Make plans. Be that person. You and I talked before this started about the, uh, interview I did with The Art of Manliness, which is a neat website and I didn't know about it before I got interviewed by them all, and they wrote a nice article accompanying my interview. And one of the things in that article is that said be okay with the idea that you may initiate and other people may flake. Right. It's okay. That's always been true in friendships, but you have to be okay with that. I think a lot of people go, well, what does that mean? They don't like me? They don't want to spend time with me? No, it means that A, they're busy, which is reasonable, given all the things we talked about. B, they like you enough to continue to want to be there, but honestly, really couldn't come that time. Or C, they're a little flaky, and that's okay too, because we got to be forgiving our friends. But it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it again, because if you enjoy someone's company, enjoy their company, just do that. And I think that what's a shame is. On one hand, I am so sympathetic to the reality that keeping friends, making time for them with people's busy work schedules, and even more so when they have children, is very, very hard. People are tired and exhausted and burned out. On uh, the other hand, it is such a shame that people don't recognize the opportunities for social contact, friendship development, because they say, we should do this again sometime and never do anything about it.
Chris Miller: Yeah. I find in my life, it's like, dang, I don't really want to go to this thing, but then after it, I'm like, oh, it recharges my batteries. And do you think that's because I'm a self identified or an extrovert? Or do you think that's it for everybody?
Dr. Jeff Hall: No. I have a short, uh, explanation and a long explanation for this one. So I'll give you the short one. You can ask for the longer one if you're interested. The short explanation is that most things that require effort from us will avoid if given the chance. Sure. I, uh, don't want to go to the gym. I don't want to make dinner. I could just eat some crap out of the refrigerator. I can eat some Bull cereal. I don't want to go on a long run. I'll just put my shoes on. Or maybe not even that.
Chris Miller: Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Uh, when given an opportunity to choose a difficult or an easy or option, people will always choose easy ones. Not going is easier than going. Yeah. And I think weirdly, we imagine that the reason we don't want to go. And I've seen people do this for all kinds of reasons. Um, introverted, tired, I don't won't know anyone there. I won't have any fun. I think, actually, the impulses I don't want to because it requires things of me. And then the people will give a bunch of reasons. But those reasons aren't the real reason. The real reason is that it takes work. And so you have to choose. You have to choose to work. Yeah. Just like you have to choose to eat well, and you have to choose to exercise, and you have to choose to go to bed when you're supposed to, because it takes work, it takes discipline, it takes follow through. So the short answer is, you're like everybody else in that you have a social opportunity, and you're like, oh, I, uh, already had a long day at work. I'll take the easier route. I'll just hang out here, and I'll see what's on streaming media.
Chris Miller: I'll watch other people become friends on TV perfect.
Dr. Jeff Hall: And be envious of that. Uh, I don't have any friends, but they have friends.
Chris Miller: Do you think that the rise and the popularity of sitcoms there was an increase of loneliness because people saw people making friends, and they're like, oh, man, I want that?
Dr. Jeff Hall: No, not at all. I think that, if anything, the popularity of those sitcoms spoke to the reality that people wish for relationships they wanted.
Chris Miller: To have that way.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Nice. Right? It didn't cause it. For sure, it didn't cause it. They were popular because people wish they could have that.
Chris Miller: So I can't blame how I met.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Your mother for new or friends or seinfeld or, uh, two broke girls or pick your poison It doesn't matter. These are all indicative of things that we wish were true. Just in the same reason that people watched Maybury 70 years ago is they wish that they lived in towns like that, but that's wishful thinking. In the same way that we also want to see massively attractive people falling in love with each other right.
Chris Miller: Or with us.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Uh, we want that. Uh, it doesn't cause it. If that were true, then it would cause me to have friends out the wazoo.
Chris Miller: Yeah. Okay. I got to change my stance. All right. Now.
Dr. Jeff Hall: That's all right. Ask another question.
Chris Miller: Yeah. And then if I got so good at making friends, how many friends could I have at once?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Depends. I define it. Um, the best answer to this is that you can call a lot of people your friends, but you probably only have so many people you can really keep in touch with or be familiar with what's going on in their lives. There's a difference between those things. So from all the different iterations of my life high school, graduate school, undergraduate, working, professional things, living in Lawrence, friends for my kids I have a lot of people that potentially who at one time in my life were my friends, but very few people that I'm in touch with regularly enough to really call my friend now. Right. And I think that that's true for a lot of people. So is there a limit? Absolutely, there's a limit. Where that limit lies really depends upon how you define what counts. If I only talk to someone once a year, are you still friends, or are they my old friend. Um, if someone's super close to me at one time in my life, are they always my friend or are they a past friend? Right. So I tend to take a pretty, uh, generous attitude about this because I think there's value in keeping in touch with people who are a part of your life in the past. Even if you don't keep in touch with them. It's a good thing to just feel good thoughts about them and be happy for their successes. Because it builds an attitude of beneficence and openness to the world that I.
Chris Miller: Think is good with the idea of building friends. And there's different types of friends. I had heard you, you mentioned the, ah, automatic podcast. You categorized best friends, friends, casual friends. How long does it take someone to become a best friend?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Over 200 hours, according to my research. Takes a long time.
Chris Miller: That's a really long time. And then if I want so say I meet somebody at, uh, basketball, right? I'm like Dang, he can really shoot the ball. He's funny. Oh, I want him to become my best friend. But he already has best friends. Right. Then that's another factor I have to consider, too.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah. In fact, there's, uh, a great quote in an article by, um, Beverly Farrer, who's one of the experts on friendship and social psychology. And she says that people vastly overestimate their own choice making and friendship. They think that they did it. They don't really understand how the other person came around to being their friend. Like, you have to be open, you have to have time, you have to be convenient and critically. You have to actually both like each other enough to want to become that level of intimacy. But we can't really know really fully what another person thinks about us. And even after they become our best friend, we still may not know 100% what they think about us. Because, um, in some ways, unconditional positive regard is a condition of best friendship, not total 100% truth.
Chris Miller: Right. Yeah. Whenever we're talking about certain skills or woodworking, for instance, a way to get better at woodworking is to get to know different cuts of wood and different tools. What's something people could work on to get better at making friends?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah, that's a good question. Um, there's three things taking rejection. Meaning the person says no. Keep going at it. Even if they say no or not now. Or I'm too busy, or I love to, but not this week. Or if they don't return your phone call or your text, keep at it. So number one skill is accepting that it's not going to work out every single time you ask somebody to do something with you. Resilience in that way. Second is if you get somebody in conversation, get better at asking questions, get better at being able to wait for them to continue to talk rather than to use it as a platform for you to say, the next thing I'm, uh, guilty of this is the next person. But if you really take time to ask people questions and wait for them to answer, they'll often take all kinds of interesting things. We have to be patient for that. And I think the third is that recognize that there is a dynamic process that doesn't just involve you get better at the idea that people are going to suck. They're, uh, going to be disappointing, they're going to say things you don't agree with, they're going to have different attitudes. They may be off putting or say something mean sometimes. But if every little incident send us to the toilet of friendship, we wouldn't have any friends. And frankly, if people treated us that way, we would have anybody at all. Because we're all imperfect and we all make mistakes. So we have to hope that other people will see us as valuable people, despite the fact that we make mistakes. So see your friends as being complex people who have mistakes inherent to them and care for them anyway.
Chris Miller: You said questions. Ask questions. What's your favorite question to ask people? What are some of your favorite questions and asking whenever you're building that.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Friendship? That's a very specific question. I hadn't thought of that.
Chris Miller: Um, for some reason, I'm really intrigued by questions.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah. Well, if you're going to do podcasts, you got to get better at them, right? Yeah. Um, I think the best question that you can ask people, no matter what stage of friendship you're at, you just met somebody to someone who's really close to you. The best question is, what do you think about? And it adopts an attitude of openness. It makes you the person who's interested in knowing them. It doesn't put them on the defensive. Right. But the about part needs to be filled in with something that is relevant to them or they have expertise about or they know something about. Yeah. And so one of my go to tactics when I'm getting to know people is once I learn about their career or their profession, once I know about their place in life or where they've gone through, I'll ask a question like, what do you think about this thing pertaining to your career, your profession? What do you think about if you're a teacher in middle school? What do you think about this whole teacher crisis thing? Or is it true? Do you see that around you? What do you think about the idea that girls are maturing earlier, uh, in puberty? Do you see that? Is that true? Is that something you observe? What do you think about whether or not and I never try to ask them questions that are obviously like I have an answer to. I ask them questions that I really don't know I've heard some stuff about, and I don't know what the answer is to that. Because by treating other people as an expert on their own life, they will talk to a, uh, lot. But if you treat them as an audience, to your expertise, they tend to be kind of off put by.
Chris Miller: That right. Yeah. I've always thought something similar, like get people talking about what they're passionate about.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Well, passion is tricky because a lot of people don't even know what they're passionate about. Some people, if you ask them about work or whatever, they do not want to talk about it. That's true. If you ask people what they're passionate about, it might be something that is quite personal to them. And it's a pretty heavy question. But you're right that if you can get to a place where you know what someone is passionate about, then you can say, what do you think about DA DA DA? Right?
Chris Miller: Yeah. What do you think about, uh that is the question. And you ended this art of the man in his podcast in a really cool way, because he was asking along the lines of, like, what's the one takeaway? And you said, don't be a flake.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Don't be a flake.
Chris Miller: And I think that's really important. Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Don't be a flake. Show up, keep showing up, keep inviting people, keep trying, period. That's it, man. I tell people this all the time. I have list of things to do where I put things like write email to my friends who I write emails to make phone call appointment with, people who I talk on the phone to make a time to have lunch with. So and so I put them on my list of things to do. I'm an expert on friendship. Again, ostensibly. Yeah. But I got to remind myself to do this stuff. It doesn't come naturally. And it doesn't come naturally because I don't think about these people. It's because there's too damn many things to do. But if I make it a priority, it also means I got to put it on my list. And that's for me. Other people have other ways of getting things done, and list is mine. But whatever works for you.
Chris Miller: Yeah, it's so important. And people who have gotten to know me, like talking to people, showing up whenever the only way you can ever be a good friend is if you show up. People talk about leadership. The only way you can be a good leader is if you show up. All of these qualities, if you're not existing in that current space or yeah, wherever it's at, uh, you won't be able to showcase anything if you never show up, if you're never there.
Dr. Jeff Hall: And we don't show up in the United States culture because we're working, because we're watching TV, because the commute is too long, because parking is a pain in the butt, because we have children, we have a lot of obligations, so we can't even show up. But you're right, step one is showing up. And in the age of the online media, mobile media. Showing up can also mean making time to talk to somebody on the phone, taking time to actually have a good text exchange. So showing up can take different forms. It doesn't require face to face communication, although that my own research would suggest that's by far the best for developing relationships and feeling connected. Other things matter, too.
Chris Miller: Yeah, they do. And the cool thing about having you here is you have so much to talk about from digital stress I'm really interested in that. To, uh, communicate bond blonde theory. Like, all of this, it's so important. So where can people find your research? Where can people learn more about what you are meddling in every day?
Dr. Jeff Hall: Yeah. So the relationships and technology lab at Ku, it's easily searched. You can find it. I try to keep it updated with the newspaper articles that quote me or that I write or ones that are pertinent to my research. Um, there's a couple of videos up there when I have been on TV talking about friendship, or videos that we've created in my own lab about the research we've done. So you can see all the kind of stuff that's going on if you're interested in knowing more about that. And over time, we're going to develop an online presence for the American Friendship Project. Um, that's in the works. It's happening slowly, but eventually.
Chris Miller: That too cool. Well, thank you for being here. You're a rock star.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Not about that.
Chris Miller: Like I said, I love talking to people. And whenever I'm looking for a good goal to obtain, I look at your research. Thank you. You know what I mean? Because you've actually done it and you've researched it, but you're practicing as well. So thanks, uh, again, and we will see next time.
Dr. Jeff Hall: Paul. You know it! Be well.