EPISODE NOTES
In this episode of The Retired Mindset, Bob sits down with Dr. Jaimie Arona Krems, Associate Professor of Psychology at UCLA and Co-Founder/Director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research—the first academic hub dedicated to decoding and strengthening human social connection. This conversation is filled with warmth, science, humor, and wisdom you can put into practice today.
Retirement is often described as a “new chapter,” but no one hands us the roadmap for rebuilding community, belonging, and close friendships once the workplace’s structure disappears. As Dr. Krems explains, friendship isn’t just a bonus in our later years… It’s biological medicine. It supports longevity, mental health, resilience, and our sense of identity.
Together, we explore why friendships matter more than ever in retirement, why so many people struggle to build or maintain meaningful connections, and how the emerging science of friendship can help us create what Dr. Krems calls “anti-lonely brains.”
Key Takeaways:
• Why friendship is the “silver bullet” for health and happiness
Dr. Krems breaks down the research showing that strong friendships can improve physical health, support mental well-being, reduce stress, and even lengthen our lifespan.
• The Loneliness Epidemic + the Friendship Recession
We discuss why so many retirees experience deep loneliness—even when life looks “full”—and how cultural shifts, mobility, and workplace retirement contribute to shrinking social circles.
• What friendship evolved to do
Dr. Krems explains, through an evolutionary psychology lens, why our brains are wired for close bonds… and why modern society makes achieving them harder than ever.
• Why many retirees struggle to rebuild friendships
From lost routines to geographic distance, we explore the emotional and logistical reasons why connection becomes more challenging later in life.
• Practical science-backed ways to build “anti-lonely brains”
Specific, actionable strategies for creating and maintaining friendships in retirement.
• Quality vs. quantity
Why the power of friendship isn’t about having dozens of contacts—but having a small circle of people you can trust.
• Navigating the emotional vulnerability of making new friends
Dr. Krems shares insights on overcoming the discomfort, self-doubt, and social hesitation that many retirees feel.
• How to strengthen existing friendships
Retirement gives us precious time—but intentional effort is still required. Dr. Krems offers evidence-based ways to rekindle, deepen, or repair meaningful relationships.
Connect with Dr. Jaimie Krems:
UCLA Center for Friendship Research
Join us as we post new episodes weekly!
Connect with Bob: BobbyP@theretiredmindset.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, TheRetiredMindset.com.
VIDEO
TRANSCRIPT
Bob: 0:29
Hey Mindsetters, welcome back to The Retired Mindset. I’m your host, Bob Preston, and today I’m back on campus at UCLA to record a very special episode. And so to dispel the myth, it actually does rain in California, which brings me inside, but I’m still on location. And today from the UCLA James West Alumni Center. We’re going to be diving into a topic today that hits close to home for so many people entering or navigating retirement. And that is friendship. Seems basic, but it’s really, really important.Bob: 1:22
We hear a lot about financial planning, health, wellness, travel, hobbies, all the fun stuff in retirement. But the thing that actually predicts your health, your longevity, and even your happiness in retirement, sometimes even more than diet or exercise, is the thing that most of us don’t talk about enough: friendship. And yet, right now in America, we’re facing what experts call a loneliness epidemic.
Bob: 1:45
Every other American says they don’t have enough social interactions. One in five single men reports having zero close friends. And as retirees, this transition, no coworkers anymore, change in routine, kids out of house, magnify many of those same feelings. But today, we’re going to talk about how friendship is not just important, it may be the real silver bullet for a thriving retirement and long life.
Bob: 2:13
And to help us unpack that, I’m beyond thrilled to be introducing someone who is leading the charge in understanding the science behind friendship and human connection. Dr. Jamie Arona Krems, Associate Professor of Psychology at UCLA and co-founder and director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, the first academic hub dedicated to decoding and strengthening human social interaction and connection. Her work draws from cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, super interesting person, and she studies how our minds do friendship, why it’s so essential, why it sometimes goes wrong, and how we can build anti-lonely brains. She’s published in top journals funded by a major NSF Career Award grant, and her research has been featured everywhere from the New York Times to the Atlantic.
Bob: 3:07
She’s also, just from a personal standpoint, one of the most genuine, humble, and friendly individuals I’ve met in a long, long time. It’s going to be a fantastic episode. So have a listen and enjoy Jamie Krems. Hey mindsetters, I’m here on campus with my new friend, Dr. Jamie Krems, who’s a psychology professor here at UCLA. And one of her specialty areas is friendship. It’s going to be a really exciting episode here in her office, which is really special because God dang it, it’s raining outside, right? I was like, I have to wear my rain jacket to get over here. But I’m so excited for this.
Jaimie: 3:45
Thank you for having me
.Bob: 3:46
Jamie, may I call you Jamie? Okay. Dr. Krems, or Jamie. And we got a chance to meet last weekend.Jaimie: 3:52
Yeah. Right? Bruin Family Weekend.
Bob: 3:54
That’s right. And we started chatting, and I was introducing Jamie before her presentation to all these parents about friendship. Really great session. And so we got a chance to chat, but our listeners don’t probably know you. So I’m hoping you can just kind of kick things off by introducing yourself. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your gig here at UCLA, your research, your specialty, and you know, what makes you tick, I guess. Want to roll with that?
Jaimie: 4:20
Okay, that last question is a long one.
Bob: 4:23
That could that could get pretty deep. Yeah.
Jaimie: 4:24
Yeah. Let’s say. So my name is Jamie Krems. I’m an associate professor of psychology here at UCLA. I’m also the co-founder and director of the new UCLA Center for Friendship Research, which is a first of its kind and I think only of its kind centered dedicated to understanding and really strengthening human friendship. So what what do I study? I study friendship. Really, if I if I were giving the sort of elevator pitch, we don’t study adult friendship. It’s critical to understand.
Bob: 4:57
And you say we don’t study, you mean like collectively as human beings. Yeah, right.
Jaimie: 5:03
Yeah. Developmental psychologists are really good at it. Um but as soon as our population starts to be able to have sex, then they’re like, oh no, that’s more interesting. I know. You know, sometimes. Not all the time. But so I I study human friendship. I study how the mind does friendship, how we find friends, make friends, keep friends. And part of the the impetus for that is just to really help people survive the world today.
Bob: 5:34
And you are the founder of an actual, is it an institute or a research center here at UCLA? Or is it part of UCLA?
Jaimie: 5:41
It’s part of UCLA. It’s the UCLA Center for Friendship Research. Okay. Yeah. So with Victor Kaufman, Matt Lieberman, Carolyn Parkinson, and Naomi Eisenberger, we co-direct it, and together we sort of bring people in one place to talk about friendship, to understand it, get on the same page, do research on friendship, galvanize a community because it’s going to take a lot of us to understand this relationship. And it’s been great to have all of these grad students and postdocs and staff come together across disciplines. We have people from anthropology, communication, obviously psychology. And it’s been kind of a beautiful thing to become friends with these people.
Bob: 6:23
Well, and they are, there are cross, it’s a cross, I guess, dimensional and you know intellectual endeavor to talk about friendship, right? There’s so many psychology, like you said, anthropology. I’m sure there’s some sociology in there as well. Anyway, all these cool things. So how did you get into this, right? Was there a defining moment in your life where you woke up one day and said, I’m gonna be a specialist in friendship?
Jaimie: 6:46
There wasn’t exactly. Okay. But tell you the truth, which is that when I was in my 20s living in Philadelphia, I had a best friend of about 20 years, and she came up for a friendsgiving that I had. And a housemate I’d gone to Brynmarr with. They met each other and they were at a rough time in their lives. Fine. And I found a few days later that actually they’d had this long G chat conversation behind my back, though on my computer, exclusively about how much they hated me.
Bob: 7:17
Oh my goodness.
Jaimie: 7:19
Yeah, it was not great, you know. It started like, I don’t want to start anything between you guys, but I just think friends should know. I was like, mmm, this isn’t gonna be good. And of course I read it, and I of course I cut it and pasted it into a Google Doc that is still on my computer right now. And it’s 26 pages, but that’s fine.
Bob: 7:38
And how many years ago is this? I mean, because that happens today all the time, right? On social media.
Jaimie: 7:42
But I mean, this was this was oh 2007, eight, nine, around then.
Bob: 7:50
All right.
Jaimie: 7:50
And it got pretty dark. They were like, yeah, I wish something would happen to her mother so she’d be all alone.
Bob: 7:56
Online bullying before it’s time, kind of, you know. Oh man.
Jaimie: 7:59
It was really awful. And I I didn’t realize at the time that it wasn’t about aggression, it wasn’t about jealousy, it was about friendship. It was about competing for friendship. And one of the ways to hurt people the most, particularly women, is to destroy their closest friendships.
Bob: 8:18
Take away their friends, sure.
Jaimie: 8:20
And that can cripple anybody. So I ugly cried, I ugly cried to friends, and eventually I really came out of that wanting to know why friendships work, what makes them fracture, how people fight over them because we do. So that was one thread. And the the other thread is sort of how I found my field, which is through a friend who was the singer and main songwriter for this band, Okay Go, who did that treadmill video. And this gentleman, Damien, he studied semiotics at Brown, and he was a really brilliant guy to talk to some of the time.
Bob: 8:55
He was in the band.
Jaimie: 8:56
And he was the lead singer of the band. Yeah.
Bob: 8:58
It’s amazing how many Ivy League school kids start really successful bands.
Jaimie: 9:03
That is true. I mean, right?
Bob: 9:04
No, I mean like Vampire Weekend, uh Weezer.
Jaimie: 9:07
Weezer, yeah.
Bob: 9:08
Yeah, it was uh Columbia, I think, Harvard or something like that. I could go on and on. I mean, there’s tons of them, right?
Jaimie: 9:14
Yeah. I mean, technically Damien studied semiotics at Brown, Brown, I think. So that’s not a real major, but we’ll give it to him. Sorry, I’m so mean about that.
Bob: 9:23
Oh no.
Jaimie: 9:25
So he told me, listen, if you’re working in music, which I was at the time, I was playing poker, working in music, trying to.
Bob: 9:33
Were you trying to be a professional poker player?
Jaimie: 9:35
I mean, I survived by doing it. Did you really?
Bob: 9:37
Like the high-stakes tables and stuff?
Jaimie: 9:40
High stakes tables sometimes, but often online. My dad played blackjack for a living before. Oh my God.
Bob: 9:46
I’m never playing Texas Hold’em with you.
Jaimie: 9:48
I do not play with people I like. Oh, yeah. Absolutely don’t do that.
Bob: 9:52
I’m the guy at the table who usually crashes and burns in like the first 15 minutes.
Jaimie: 9:56
I’m the person that’s just like, oh, this is gonna be fun. But I I know numbers better than words from this. You know, I just grew up that way. And so my dad’s so cool. And so I was living in Philly doing these sort of weird things, and Damian said, you know, you really shouldn’t work in music because you’re not gonna have the best conversations. And he wrote down a list of books that I should read. And on that list was a book by Richard Dawkins and a book by the great Stephen Pinker. And it was how the mind works.
Bob: 10:29
Is it still back here in your collection?
Jaimie: 10:31
It’s somewhere down here. I definitely see the Dawkins ones, and I have some Pinker behind me for sure. His new book, Common Knowledge, is unbelievably cool. And I read that, and it’s another friendship thing in a way. I read this book and I realized oh my gosh, other people think the way that I think. I’m not alone. And I found my community, and now my best friends in the world are, for the most part, other professors who do evolutionary-minded work in psychology and anthropology.
Bob: 11:02
That is so cool.
Jaimie: 11:03
I’m really lucky. Yeah.
Bob: 11:05
Okay.
Jaimie: 11:05
To found what I love and and a community at the same time.
Bob: 11:09
And so you decide to get your doctorate and pursue that, huh?
Jaimie: 11:11
I did. I I sort of did a post back at Penn because my undergrad was in classics in Near Eastern archaeology. I was a Latin nerd. That is not really useful for understanding evolutionary biology, it turns out. So I did studies in the biological basis of behavior at Penn with Rob Kurzban. And then I went to Oxford to study with Robin Dunbar. Wow. And then, believe it or not, one of the best programs in the world for evolutionary social psychology was at ASU at the time.
Bob: 11:44
Okay.
Jaimie: 11:44
They were ramping up their research productivity. And there was a lab that, very importantly to me, got people jobs in academia, which is basically like getting a job in Hollywood.
Bob: 11:55
Well, ASU has some majors like that, huge um broadcasting and journalism. Yeah. I mean, one of the best. They’re like the tops in the country. Yeah. It’s Vanna Guthrie, right? She graduated from Arizona State.
Jaimie: 12:04
So it’s a great place. And now I sit before you at UCLA and I’m never leaving.
Bob: 12:10
Oh my gosh, I’m so glad we met. It’s so so great talking to you, and you’re such a great conversationalist. Oh my God, I could sit here and talk to you all day. So when when you gave your presentation last weekend, you talked about friendship being just incredibly potent and almost essential in our lives, right? For our physical health, mental health, and even our longevity, right? Like you could live longer if you have friends. So can you talk about that and what the research shows about friendship? And let’s start dialing this in towards retired folks if you can.
Jaimie: 12:40
Yeah. Okay.
Bob: 12:41
So I’m retired, I’ve been retired for about two years, and that’s our listenership, retired mindset. And it’s all about living your best life in retirement. And so I’ve been really into making friends in retirement, reconnecting, as we already talked about. So tell us about that. Why is it so important?
Jaimie: 12:56
I mean, friendship is a silver bullet in a lot of ways. And I can get on my soapbox all day.
Bob: 13:02
Oh, go for it.
Jaimie: 13:04
I mean having friends is associated with living a healthier life. So it’s related to your heart health.
Bob: 13:11
Because you go do stuff, right? You go you go do stuff with your friends.
Jaimie: 13:14
Do stuff together, but also the signal of having social support tells your body you’re safe.
Bob: 13:20
Right.
Jaimie: 13:21
Yeah. So challenges seem less threatening. The world seems less threatening. And so your heart is less likely to sort of go a little bit crazy on you. You sleep better. So lacking friends is actually related to the frequency and intensity of nightmares. You’re less stressed. Your immune system is functioning better. When you have friends, you’re more likely to recover from breast cancer surgery. You recover from issues like a little cut more quickly when you feel supported.
Bob: 13:52
Absolutely. I mean, your body can be all that, right?
Jaimie: 13:57
It’s amazing. So you’re like having a friend is almost like an external pool of resources.
Bob: 14:03
Yeah.
Jaimie: 14:03
So if I have a friend over here, I can count on, I can have my own energy dedicated to healing myself. And that is incredible for the body and for longevity. What the data suggest is that not having friends has the same effect on your mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Bob: 14:26
That’s incredible.
Jaimie: 14:27
That is mind-blowing.
Bob: 14:29
That’s mind blowing.
Jaimie: 14:30
Yeah. So you are going to live a longer life. And for older adults who are one in four older adults who are socially isolated. And that can absolutely increase in retirement because 100%, much of your community was at work every day. And you didn’t have to put in any effort to see them because the effort you were putting in for your job was also social for most people.
Bob: 14:53
Right.
Jaimie: 14:53
And when that gets taken away, especially if it’s abrupt, that can have a huge impact on your health and well-being, how you feel every day, if you feel supported. And then what you have to do is dedicate time to seeing people, prioritize seeing people and make the effort when before it was just rote.
Bob: 15:13
Right.
Jaimie: 15:14
You know? And if you have that in your life, if you have those friends in your life, if you have that support in your life, you’re less likely to have a heart attack. Even if you have a partner.
Bob: 15:25
Yeah.
Jaimie: 15:26
The friends matter. It’s not just the partner. And particularly today, for folks who are going to retire, people are getting married less and getting married later.
Bob: 15:36
Probably going to live longer.
Jaimie: 15:37
Probably going to live longer. Probably a longer time in retirement. But you know, the isolation component that friends combat is related to a 32% increase in risk of stroke, a 50% increase in risk of dementia. I think last year, older adults who didn’t have support were the victims of like phishing schemes and fraud to the tune of almost $2 billion. Exactly. And the last thing I’ll say about this, which I really love, is that the data suggest that both feelings of well-being and actual true objective health measures for older adults, people 65 and up, so people who might be most likely to be retired, right? I mean, I I want to say that I would retire tomorrow, but in reality, I’ll do this till they wheel me out of here. So for people who are 65 and up, having friends is the single best predictor of happiness over and above being close to your adult children, contact with your neighbors, and contact with other family members. It’s friends. Friends make you happy. And in fact, one study by my friend and colleague Bill Chopic.
Bob: 16:59
Which are UCSB friends?
Jaimie: 17:01
Bill is actually at Michigan State.
Bob: 17:03
Yeah, I forgot. I’ve heard you mention his name before.
Jaimie: 17:06
He’s an amazing friendship researcher, such a fun and irreverent guy. And Bill has looked at people who went to Harvard. So it was a group of men who went to Harvard, and he was able to follow up their progress through the Red Book, which is sort of like every five years they say how they’re doing. And so what he has found is that the quality and the quantity of their friendships while they were at Harvard, which was measured, I think, in the 1960s, and he got a hold of those data, predicted people’s positivity and well-being 50 years later. Wow. So the friends you make early can predict your friendship later, meaning that you can invest in them now and get returns forever. But I can’t help myself. One study that I’ll mention suggests that reconnecting with friends, which I know we’re going to talk about that.
Bob: 18:01
Yeah, we’re going to.
Jaimie: 18:02
That people are hesitant to do it sometimes. They’re as nervous to talk to a friend they haven’t connected with as they are to talk to a stranger.
Bob: 18:09
Yeah.Jaimie: 18:10
But when you reconnect with a friend, they are so happy to hear from you, more happy than you would imagine. And so if you just practice that conversation once or twice, that makes your anxiety go down, you reconnect, and then you realize these amazing benefits of friendship. Which by the way, redound not just to, you know, it’s not just for you, it’s for your loved ones too. When you have friends and you are better supported, you are a better friend and you are better able to support your lover, your family, and so on.
Bob: 18:42
And you’re touching someone else’s life. You are at the same time, right?
Jaimie: 18:46
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. That’s the sort of sine quant on of life for me. Yeah.
Bob: 18:52
Okay, Jamie, incredible description of the importance of friendship. I know one of the things when I retired, you you you touched on this. Kind of you I lost my identity, identity a little bit, right? I I was uh you know I owned my own business. I was really wrapped up in the job. I had a routine every day. I knew what I was walking into every day, and I knew the hours I was going to be working and who I was gonna be speaking with and the priorities on my day. I mean, these are all really important things. So and then you lose that, you lose your community, as you mentioned. I lost my identity, I lost you start ask asking yourself these questions. Well, who am I? And for me, that who am I turned into, wow, I’ve got this incredible network of friends from you know 50 years of childhood and college and high school, many of whom I’ve sort of cast aside along the way because I was working so hard. So, you know, really it was an eye-opener for me, and I just made it a priority to reconnect.
Jaimie: 19:50
Yeah.
Bob: 19:51
So tell us about that. I mean, does that have the same impact or the same power or potency as you you describe it in friendship as just like meeting someone new?
Jaimie: 20:00
Oh, absolutely. The quality of your friendships, that’s what matters. And so if you reconnect with somebody, that is just as valuable as making a new friend.
Bob: 20:10
Well, and you know what I found is that they’ve changed.
Jaimie: 20:12
Yeah.
Bob: 20:12
Right? So I is making a new friend. I had coffee here on campus last weekend with a friend of mine that I knew in college. And she had always had a little crutch on each other. So it’s really nice to see her, but I know, right? And here we are, you know, 40, 50 years later, whatever. And oh my God, you know, you and and she has this amazing career and all this kind of thing. So it’s just so fun. You know, and it felt like we had never even missed a beat.
Jaimie: 20:37
So one of the great mysteries in friendship research right now, and there are many, is really when do friends become family like that, where you don’t have to continue those touches. Yeah. And somehow you pick up where you left off. Is it a property of the friendship? Is it a property of the person that you are your stage of life? Exactly. Right.
Bob: 20:58
I mean, these things become more important, you know, as you start to realize, hey, I have a limited number of years left on earth. And while I’m here, I want to make the most of them and being connected with friends and family is I yeah, right at the top of my list. I guess.
Jaimie: 21:12
Yeah. And so we’d mentioned when we were talking before, I showed you this notebook with a frog on it that says nope. And there were some people who came into your life that you were like, nah, I don’t really want them in my in my convoy. And there’s something called the convoy model of friendship. So as we age, we keep some of our friends and maybe we jettison some friends. And one of the best things about growing up and sort of being of about retirement age is that people have fewer but better friendships. They’ve jettisoned those sort of instrumental friends, those ambivalent friendships that are, you know, maybe the kids call frenemies. Those are gone. And the friendships that we keep in older life, in older adulthood, in in later life are the ones that really nourish us. And I find that to be beautiful. There are so many people right now, and I actually have some data we’re about to publish on this, that wish they could end a friendship. And these are mostly people in their 20s, 30s, 40s that have these friendships. And oh, this person is friends with my other friends. I I I can’t get rid of them.
Bob: 22:23
Yeah.
Jaimie: 22:23
But they do not nourish me. If anything, they are a drain on my life.
Bob: 22:27
It’s incredible how long people will put up with that, right?
Jaimie: 22:30
They do, but at some point, you know, maybe it’s age, confidence, experience, you’re just like, nope.
Bob: 22:39
I couldn’t agree with that more. I think there’s a tolerance level I’ve found in me, and maybe it’s my patience with people, I’m not sure. But inside me, that the older I’ve gotten and the more the fewer years I’ve got left, I guess. I don’t want to say I’ve become less tolerant, but it’s been easier for me to kind of step away from friendships that I don’t that I know don’t nourish me. And some of those friendships were, you know, friendships that my spouse had. And I got dragged along to these ridiculous things and had to put up with people, you know, and it’s like, yeah, this guy is not somebody or woman I can’t relate to. So, you know what? I start choosing not to go. That kind of thing. Because I just I like being the best me. Yeah. And when I’m around people like that, then I’m not, you know, and I just can’t, I just can’t stand it. So let’s uh transition into kind of another cool twist on this. I mean, I know you look at friendship from an anthropology point of view, right? So from an evolutionary, I guess we could say, perspective, is there a foundation in friendship that is rooted to back, go back like the Neanderthal days or cavemen days, you know? And is there something deep in our brain that makes friendship essential in our lives?
Jaimie: 23:47
Yeah, I mean, I would say even earlier than that, okay. There are a lot of social mammals that have friendship.
Bob: 23:53
Oh, yeah.
Jaimie: 23:54
We probably diverged from our primate ancestors five to seven million years ago. And we know that primates like bonobos, chimpanzees, baboons, they all have what looks like friendship. Uh dolphins have it, giraffes have it, macaques have it, horses have it.
Bob: 24:11
Oh, horses are extremely intelligent.
Jaimie: 24:14
They really are. And I mean, cows have it too. So when you separate two cow friends, they’re stress spikes. And when you put them back together, their stress goes down.
Bob: 24:23
Elephants grieve over their lost family members who have been slaughtered by poachers. You see, you see these heartbreaking videos about that.
Jaimie: 24:30
I can’t watch those. I know. Yeah. And I think it’s absolutely the case that we’ve had what we’d call friendship for a very long time in our evolutionary history. And natural selection builds machines to solve adaptive problems. So, what is an adaptive problem? It’s a problem related to survival and reproduction. So, how do we get our genes into the next generation? Well, you might ask, what does friendship solve, right? But what friendship solves is the problem of getting help when we’re in need. So there’s this evolutionary theory of friendship we call the bankers’ paradox. And what it suggests is that friends have evolved to act, excuse me, friends have evolved to act as a kind of social insurance. And they give us preferential access to resources, and they act as that social insurance, ensuring we can get those resources when we’re most in need and might otherwise be unlikely to get them from strangers. And so here’s where the bankers’ paradox comes in. When we are most in need is when strangers are least likely to invest in us, the same way that banks don’t give loans to people who need the money, they give loans to people who are pretty wealthy and can pay it back, right? So illness, injury, and other hardships are inevitable, have been throughout our evolutionary history. And when we are most in need, that’s when our friends who have a stake in our welfare, they’re the ones who invest in us. And if they have a stake in our continued welfare, they might preferentially invest in us over other people who might be in similar need. Helping us stay alive and helping us survive so that when they inevitably face their own times of illness and injury, we’re alive, able, and willing to invest in them. Friends are an external social insurance. And so this theorizing suggests that friends should help us survive times of hardship and evidence from animal behavior, evidence from cross-cultural ethnography, so work done by anthropologists in the field with small-scale societies, evidence from historical disasters. I love some of this stuff. So if you were a member of the Donner Party, that probably didn’t go well for you, but you were more likely to survive if you had friends in the party. So same thing.
Bob: 26:51
More ways in one, but we won’t go there.
Jaimie: 26:53
True, true. And um even some work in sort of um modern climate disasters. So blizzards, hurricanes, if you have friends, you are more likely to survive, suggesting that friends really do fulfill this evolved function of helping us survive when it matters most. And other people might not be willing to invest in us, but our friends do.
Bob: 27:17
Incredible insight. And I and I love the examples. You know, it’s kind of like the phrase, you know, I got your back. You know, it’s like, it’s nice to know that that somebody has your back, right? Whether you’re a the Donner party or surviving or how people during natural disasters pull together, it kind of comes back to the basic human nature, helping people in other countries or other parts of the world and just rallying to support them. So it’s really, really interesting. They’re not necessarily, but the human spirit kind of can come together.
Jaimie: 27:44
Yeah, and you can think of them that way. And if you humanize people, you get this feeling of fellowship that can go beyond our sort of friend circles.
Bob: 27:53
Yeah. So I came in with a lot of questions I was going to answer. And sometimes during these recordings, I’ll like I’ll I’ll get a new twist on it because I’m curious, you know? And so this is kind of an example of that. I’m a pretty I’m pretty much of an extrovert. Like I’m a the personality type that I’m an Aries male, you know, so I tend to be a little impulsive. I I take risks with friendships that sometimes irritate people, but usually they like it because I, you know, I reach out, I make contact, and that kind of thing. But you know, some people will say to me, Well, you’re an extrovert, I’m an introvert. I I can I I can’t do that. I can’t do that like you do. Um that’s not me. And so I guess my question is, is is personality type part of it? Or because so many people retire and then they become lonely or they become isolated. And so then they’re sitting there going, Oh, this is so hard, what do I do? And so I guess I’m just kind of curious, is it, you know, is it personality, is it brain wiring, or is it just our modern life that’s changed, or is there kind of a mismatch between old brain and new environment? I’m so it’s kind of a broad question.
Jaimie: 28:56
There’s a lot of different things.
Bob: 28:57
But I think you get the drift, you know. And I’m just curious, like, do people who have different personality types, I guess, first question was kind of do they pursue this differently, or is it the same model for everybody that we should all follow?
Jaimie: 29:07
So let’s start with personality because we have good data there. Okay. And the data suggests that extroverts have more friends, they’re perceived as more friendly and they’d be more fun, right? Yeah. And they even have higher friendship satisfaction. So they seem more satisfied with the friends that they get. So we have some data there, which is a little bit surprising because there are really very, very few studies on friendship in general. And in fact, the study that I am thinking of that found that extroverts have more satisfying friendships in that study. It was like, why has no one studied this? This is kind of an important question. Sure, yeah that people want to know. So we know that personality does matter, but in addition, is that friendship involves teachable skills. So we think that friendship feels like breathing, right? Right. And it does, especially when we’re young. And that’s sort of an insight. Instance of what we would call in ep psych instinct blindness. So instinct blindness refers to how good we are at solving adaptive problems. We find friends, we make friends, we keep friends, we navigate conflict with friends, all in our youth without realizing it, right? It’s the air we breathe. Now in later life, when we realize, oh, I just moved, I have to make new friends, and this is kind of hard. That’s when we realize, oh, there’s a challenge to solve here. So we were blind to the instincts that helped us find, make, keep friends to realize friendship in youth. Now that we realize there are those challenges to solve, well, okay, how do we do that? And one of the ways that we might do that is simply by studying it. We don’t do that enough. I can’t say that enough. So there are teachable competencies, though, that allow us to solve it. Even though it feels like magic and innate, especially when we’re young, we can teach empathy in youth. We can help people just practice the script. So if you tell your introvert friend, just talk to me, pretend I’m an old friend and call me up. That practice, and then especially getting feedback on that, that can actually calm them down so that they make that reconnection. And that reconnection can be so important.
Bob: 31:28
And in today’s day and age, you know, you you might take a risk and send a text to somebody. And then you sit there, you know, is that person gonna text back? I wonder when. It might be a couple days, and you’re thinking, oh, this person hates me or something. And then lo and behold, you know, no, they were just busy and they get they and they, oh, thanks for reaching out. You know, and it’s like it’s like it’s so it’s so silly. It is because it’s like, you know, in in older times, it was probably instantaneous, and now we have to wait. You know, so this delay of gratification on just getting acknowledgement that, yeah, I want to I want to connect.
Jaimie: 31:56
I want to connect, I want to see you. And if you do it, you know, and then that’s all right.
Bob: 32:00
The other thing is don’t do it too fast because it seems like you’re creepy, you know. Like, like there are all these rules, right? You know what I’m saying? Like if all of a sudden you text somebody, it’s like bam, they respond right away. You’re kind of, oh you know. What are you doing on your respond so quick to me? You know, I mean, so I’ve learned also just not to read too much into that shit, you know.
Jaimie: 32:17
No, none of it really means anything. Um, but uh another component that I I should mention, you you said mismatch, right? So one of the ways that we ratchet up our friendships, one of the ways that we make friendships closer and richer is by asking for help, asking for favors, and by giving help in favors. This is how we avoid exploitation because friends can exploit us if they’re bad friends, right? So we give help, they give help. We give help, they give help. And this relationship becomes closer and deeper and closer and deeper over time. It’s what we’d call an upward spiral of valuation. So the more valuable you become to me, the more valuable I become to you simply because I value you and I’m gonna be the person who’s a lot of people.
Bob: 33:04
Well, you start to trust them more too. Like when like there was this uh podcast, I think it was Brene Brown, and it was talking about putting marbles in a jar, you know. Yeah. And the the the the trust issue, the trust marbles go in jars one at a time. And pretty soon you have a friendship where the marble jar is full. You know, and I thought that was a really cool analogy, you know. Because you can say, okay, well what friends of yours have full jars? You know, you can start getting into these really interesting topics that anyway.
Jaimie: 33:30
The ones that tell you the truth even when you don’t want to hear them.
Bob: 33:33
Right, to break you the bad news, you know.
Jaimie: 33:35
So there’s a book behind me by Dan Hrushka, an anthropologist from ASU, and he discusses some small-scale societies where that’s actually a conscious strategy to start with small trade and build up. The reason that this intersects with technology and mismatch is because today, instead of asking for a small favor, will you bring me soup when I’m sick? Will you give me a ride to the doctor or the airport? Will you help me hang my whiteboard or my television or my mirror? We have Instacart, we have Uber, we have Uber Eats, we have TaskRabbit, and it can feel so much easier than it’s ever felt before to just click a button and get help from a stranger. But when we are doing that, there’s the possibility, I don’t have the data yet, that doing that actually hinders that upward spiral of valuation because you’re not allowing someone to help you. And what we know, and this is called the Ben Franklin effect, one of my Philly homeboys, um, another Francophile, is that actually helping someone makes you like them more. So asking for help and getting it can make the person who helps you like you more. And so we’re going to do some work that actually uses that as a potential intervention.
Bob: 35:08
I love that. That last part you shared. I grew up in Southern California. Yeah, unlike you. And and uh so I was a big UCLA basketball fan.
Jaimie: 35:17
Gotcha.
Bob: 35:18
I’ve I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but sorry, I gotta I gotta tell about it.
Jaimie: 35:21
You had James Harden, right?
Bob: 35:22
What’s that?
Jaimie: 35:23
Did you have James Harden?
Bob: 35:24
We had Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and we had uh we had Jamal Wilkes, Bill Walton, you know.
Jaimie: 35:30
Love Bill Walton.
Bob: 35:31
Bill Walton was brought up last night, the event I was telling you about, because it was all Grateful Dead music, you know. So there was some Bill Walton narration in this thing.
Jaimie: 35:38
Did you have any Philadelphia 76?
Bob: 35:41
No, no, no.
Jaimie: 35:42
Okay, well maybe Dr. J.
Bob: 35:43
I’ll give you Dr. J.
Jaimie: 35:45
Okay, all right. You know what? You can do better.
Bob: 35:47
Anyway, my hero growing up was John Wooden. I mean, you can’t walk around campus without hearing or seeing, you know, images of John Wooden. And he was he had a lot of isms, isms, he had a lot of favorite quotes, and he had the pyramid of success and all this stuff. But one of my favorite quotes of John Woodens, and this goes to what you were saying, is that the biggest joy in life is to help another.
Jaimie: 36:09
Absolutely.
Bob: 36:09
Right?
Jaimie: 36:10
Yeah.
Bob: 36:10
The basic fundamental pleasure in life is connecting with someone and helping them and see what comes out of that. And I just think that is so powerful. And so I’ve tried to live my life that way, right? I do a lot of volunteering work. I mean, obviously you see me on campus doing that.
Jaimie: 36:23
Yeah, the parents council.
Bob: 36:24
Yeah, right. And so I don’t have to do that, but I want to. You know, I also get to be on campus and have separate, you know, kind of line for my daughter. But and and meet amazing people too. I mean, I I’ve got so many friends now in the Parents Council, all because my daughter chose UCLA. It’s crazy.
Jaimie: 36:37
One of the things I think people have to remember is that helping people is a joy.
Bob: 36:43
Yeah.
Jaimie: 36:44
So asking for help allows other people to be joyful. Yeah. It’s not a burden.
Bob: 36:49
Well, in today’s society too, I mean, there’s pride I think sometimes in saying, oh, I’m going to be self-sufficient. I don’t need any help. I can do this on my own. I can live by myself. I don’t need other people in my life, right? I mean, there’s it’s almost like this badge you wear that I’m like an independent. Yeah, I’m a lone wolf. And you know, I think maybe especially men maybe have that attitude.
Jaimie: 37:10
Yeah.
Bob: 37:10
But certainly driven women can as well. I don’t know. I’m just uh you’re the expert.
Jaimie: 37:14
Well, a lot of people have that attitude. And it’s a, you know, I love a lot of American values, including individualism, but it is a very individualistic value.Bob: 37:22
Yeah, yeah, right. Okay, let’s go on here. You you have a phrase I’ve heard you talk about called the anti-loonly brain.
Jaimie: 37:29
Yes.
Bob: 37:29
And you know, I if if uh we’ve already touched on some of this stuff, some of the questions might start to be be repetitive, but we can take different angles on it either way. So I guess where I’m going with this one is okay, if I’m feeling if I’m retired and I’m feeling stuck, I’m feeling lonely, I’m feeling isolated, and I’m just like, ah, this is so hard. I feel vulnerable. If I reach out to this person, I’m afraid of rejection. You know, so we touched upon this a little bit earlier, but like are there specific, like kind of like going to the gym, you know, specific routines or exercises. You you touched on some of that stuff, but are there things, I guess, that we could give our l listeners actionable things to do, like right away, like this week.
Jaimie: 38:08
Yes.
Bob: 38:09
Here’s here’s the recipe, or here’s the instructions, or here’s your workout for this week, you know?
Jaimie: 38:13
Yeah.
Bob: 38:14
Tell us. Okay.
Jaimie: 38:15
Okay. So here’s your workout for this week. Practice the script for when you want to text or call an old friend. And I would say call that person, because what the data suggests is that synchronous communication and particularly communication that’s at the same time where you’re allowed to laugh together, that is what connects people. So humor is a huge part of shared reality and coordination. We overlook humor with a research scientist in my lab, Dr. David Pinsoff. We have a theory of humor that really paints it as a coordination tool. So allow yourself to be a little nervous, sure. Practice what you’re gonna say so you can decrease your nerves, reconnect with somebody that was important to you. I was just talking to my good friend today, Lisa Diamond, who’s a world-famous sex researcher and does incredible work with trans folks in Utah, where there are a lot of Mormons and there’s a lot of shame around this. And she is just such a beacon, such a light. And she’s been a really good friend to me in hard times too. And I’ve I leaned on her this morning. And one of the things that Lisa Diamond told me this morning was that the most life-changing thing she has asked her students to do is to identify one or two people that you want to be closer to. And if you do nothing else this year, spend the time to make that happen. And she still gets emails from her students about how that has changed their lives. And that to me is so moving. So identify the people you want to be closer to and prioritize it. It looks like from time usage surveys that Americans between 15 and 65 spend about 44 minutes a day on average with a friend. The time we spend with friends is much decreased from 2003, about 20 hours less a month with friends. And the time that teens spend with friends has plummeted. What goes up is time alone, controlling, right? So prioritize friends.
Bob: 40:31
The pandemic didn’t help, right?
Jaimie: 40:32
The pandemic didn’t help, but it was a trend before that. It was really a trend in the smartphone era. So one of the things that we might suggest is that yes, time is rough. It is hard to make time for friends, particularly when you have family who might need you. But if you can prioritize friends, do it. And one thing that we have learned from small-scale societies is the amount of time that people spend doing bullshit, doing nothing. Time use surveys suggest that these people spend a lot of time just shooting the shit with each other. We don’t do that today because we consider that not productive or we don’t have time to do it. We don’t prioritize it. Understandable, if time is a problem, then use the time in such a way that you can, as people do in small-scale societies, do chores together. If you have to run errands, run errands together. Yeah, it’s not, you know, drinks at Felix or Bar Benjamin, but it’s still time together.
Bob: 41:45
Yeah.
Jaimie: 41:46
And doing time together, doing the shoot the breeze stuff together on your long drive to Beverly Hills, that’s not nothing.
Bob: 41:54
Yeah. You don’t have to have a moment that you’re going to share on Facebook, right? Like these party scenes and oh God, look at that person lives such a great life. And you know, why am I such a loser? You know, there’s this sort of no, just just you go talk to your neighbor at the mailbox or meet somebody for coffee in the morning or whatever. I think one of the things too, and I just thought of this this mor just now, because I it’s pretty funny, but is you know, maybe the risk that you take in doing what you’re talking about, you know, it’s hard. It’s hard to say, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna maybe it’s you’re you’re texting a person, picking up the phone and calling might at first be intimidating because you don’t know if you’re interrupting them or you’re you don’t want to intrude. But maybe that first text, I mean, is there a number that they should strive for? Maybe it’s one just this week, you know, to take your exercises you mentioned, practice, and then maybe reach out to, I mean, just one person, right? Might be the way to go, right? And then, okay, that was cool. Don’t send some mass email, right? Set, you know, it’s all got to be genuine and connect and talk and take the risk, I guess. That’s what my mind is. And if they don’t want to reconnect or if they don’t want to be friends, well, that’s on them. What do you got to lose? That’s kind of my attitude. Now I talked about being an Aries band, that’s my approach, but I know for other people maybe they’re a little bit more cautious. And that’s important too. But uh to get over that hump, I think is really critical, especially for my retired listeners. You gotta do it, you gotta get out there and you got to make something happen, right?
Jaimie: 43:18
Yeah, you know, one of the things that I tell my students, I teach a 350-person social psychology course. And sometimes students are reluctant to speak up and ask questions. They don’t want to be wrong or look dumb. And one of the things that I tell them is that if you have a question, someone else in the room probably has it too. And so after I gave that talk at Bruin Family Weekend, a woman came up to me and she said, you know, I’ve actually just made about 19 friends. I was like, What?Bob: 43:47
That is so cool. A parent said that to you? Yeah. Oh my god.
Jaimie: 43:50
How did you have to do that?
Bob: 43:51
It sounds like me on campus at UCLA. I mean, I just walk around and I stop, I stood and say, Oh, that looks interesting. You know, what’s going on? Right. I mean, yeah.
Jaimie: 43:58
So she was curious. And what happened? This actually wasn’t what she did, but someone else went on to next door, that app, and said, I’m lonely and I’d like to make some friends. And her loneliness was the impetus for other people to say, me too. And they ended up getting coffee, and they’re not all going to coffee every week together, but they established a routine that allowed for community and sort of the the ingredients to making friends are repeated contact and mutual attraction.
Bob: 44:29
Yeah.
Jaimie: 44:30
If you meet new people, you’re not going to like them all, right? There are going to be some nopes in there.
Bob: 44:34
Sure.
Jaimie: 44:34
Of course. But there are going to be some people that you do like. And if you see them repeatedly, you know, it’s a low-cost way to say, yeah, me too. I’m lonely too.
Bob: 44:46
Let’s get together. Yeah.
Jaimie: 44:48
Yeah.
Bob: 44:48
It’s funny too, because sometimes you’ll meet people that are quite judgmental, right? And you can sense that, and maybe they’re being standoffish, or maybe they’re being, you know, maybe the first they maybe they’re thinking you know, you’re a nope or something like that. But I’m a big Ted Lasso fan. And we were talking about this, I think it was before. I hope it was before. Yeah. Yeah. And it was kind of like uh this Ted Lasso quote in an episode where his quote was uh be curious, not judgmental. And then he can then he goes on, like, for example, they’re playing darts with this guy Rupert. And uh he says, Rupert, if you’d asked me, do I play a lot of darts? I would have replied, yes, sir. You know, and instead he took him, he underestimated him. And so that’s one of my mantras is be curious not judgmental. Like if you meet somebody and you’re, huh, that’s interesting, or you get a text from somebody you’re not sure about, or maybe it seems a little threatening or weird, just ask them. You know? Yeah. Hey, what’s going on with you? Yeah, what’s going on with you? Is it are you, you know, is this like, are you I I mean, I probably not bold enough to say, well, are you hitting on me? Or like, are you like you just want to be friends or where you want me for coffee? And then continue that questioning. And I think that gets that kind of build-up thing you’re talking about, right? That absolutely kind of climbing the ladder of developing friendships. But you got to take that risk, right?
Jaimie: 45:56
So it really, it’s someone does. And the thing is, if you want to take that risk, I cannot tell you how many other people are out there that want to as well. And we often misperceive that.
Bob: 46:07
For sure. You’re gonna laugh at this because as I was getting ready this morning to walk over here, I’m a big music fan. And one of the other areas where I give back to is to this organization called Playing for Change. I don’t know if they’re here in Santa Monica. Oh. Right. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them, but it’s a nonprofit organization, nonpartisan, that just believes that music can change the world. Yeah. That’s their whole thing. And so they do these playing for change videos where they have a song that they pick and they they record artists from all over the world in different parts of the world playing in their own, you know, local and native way of singing or or dancing or whatever. And the one this morning, the the old war song, Why Can’t We Be Friends?
Jaimie: 46:50
No way.
Bob: 46:51
And why can’t we be friends? I know, right? And I was like, oh my God, what a perfect way to start the day, going to talk to Jamie. So and I and that, so that’s the question. Well, why not? You know? Oh, you’re gonna reach out to the person? Yeah, why not? Why can’t we be friends? You know, I mean, why not? Yeah. Right? So I think that’s huge. Now, okay, let’s talk about gender differences here. Men and women, I think women, is it do you think it’s true that women are just kind of maybe a little bit more social from a from a like the Venus-Mars perspective, and then men are maybe not as reluctant to take that risk, or maybe more reluctant, excuse me, to take that risk and maybe, oh, you know, kind of we talked about it earlier. I want to be self-sufficient. I don’t need anybody in my life.
Jaimie: 47:29
So there’s part of that, but if that were the sole reason for men being hit harder by what we call the friend recession, so the quality and quantity of our friendships today are much less than they were in the year 2000, the year 1990. And men are particularly hard hit. So in the US, one in five single men has zero friends.
Bob: 47:51
That is shocking. I mean, it’s just like it’s very sad.
Jaimie: 47:54
It really is.
Bob: 47:55
And it might even be more for retired people. I don’t know.
Jaimie: 47:58
I think it’s possible isolation might play a role there. And if people aren’t married or reaching out, men are typically less likely to do the reaching out than women are, whether that’s to family or to friends. And so their women are a little bit better at reaching out and maintaining these relationships.
Bob: 48:17
You think their defense mechanisms in that regard are maybe a little lower? I don’t I don’t want to generalize. I mean, everyone’s different, and I’m trying, I’m not trying to put a generalization on women or men. But I mean, I’m just wondering if that’s more common trait in women to like, yeah, okay, I’ll be eat you for coffee. Whereas a guy might be, what’s this guy want out of me? You know, why is this why you think? I don’t know.
Jaimie: 48:36
So actually, if anything, there’s one study, and it’s just one study that suggests the reverse is true.
Bob: 48:42
Really? Okay.
Jaimie: 48:42
And that what makes women more hesitant to develop friendships is that they have lower trust in others.
Bob: 48:48
Oh.
Jaimie: 48:48
But there are some really long-standing sex and gender differences in friendship that might be related to that because women tend to form fewer, closer friendships. And if you’re going to be closer and sort of share this evaluative information that could be ammo against you one day, you want to really trust that person. So the bar for trust might be higher in female friendships. By contrast, men tend to have fewer looser friendships, sort of group-based friendships. And they find that really enriching. Um, they’re also considered shoulder-to-shoulder friendships. Let’s get some beer and watch the game, you know. Yeah. Exactly. Which is what I want to do. Wine and watch the game. But yeah, uh, go birds. And I couldn’t help.
Bob: 49:33
Eagles fly, yeah.
Jaimie: 49:35
So, but if men were more hesitant to form friendships because of this sort of learned idea of manliness, then we might see younger men’s friendships doing better. And if anything, we see their friendships doing worse. So I don’t think we’ve identified yet what is going on that is the stumbling block for particularly men.
Bob: 49:59
Interesting.
Jaimie: 50:00
And unfortunately, you know, as much as we don’t study friendships, we study men’s friendships even a little less.
Bob: 50:07
Interesting. And as you’re talking about this, it kind of makes me think that looking back on my friendships and relationships, and sometimes women have more drama in their friendships too.
Jaimie: 50:21
Yes.
Bob: 50:22
Right. And I think it’s the way you describe that. The women have closer friends, men are kind of like bros. Oh, let’s, you know, let’s go watch the game or whatever. And so when there’s conflict, you know, and I have three daughters, you know, so I hear about this kind of stuff. And you know, it’s like kind of dramatic, or it goes on for days or whatever. Where like when I have conflict with my friends, it’s kind of like, hey man, hey, bro, sorry, it’s all good, you know. And then it’s kind of like, okay, we we good? Yeah, we’re done, you know, and that’s it. And you move on. So it’s really, it’s so different, right?
Jaimie: 50:49
It really is.
Bob: 50:50
So talk about that.
Jaimie: 50:51
I mean, for the general, you are hitting on something that has uh really been backed by data, okay. Thanks to a woman named Joyce Bennenson at Harvard in particular. So Mark Wahlberg made a friend after he kicked him in the back. That’s how they met, was violence.
Bob: 51:08
Okay.Jaimie: 51:09
And then they became bros.
Bob: 51:10
Right.
Jaimie: 51:11
That would not happen among women.Bob: 51:13
Nope.Jaimie: 51:13
And in fact, you’re right, women’s friendships, at least among young women, are more turbulent, they’re more fragile, they’re more fraught. Men’s friendships are more likely to be long-lasting. And part of what’s going on there is that men are more likely to repair their friendships, they’re more likely to reconcile. And so there’s one really cool study that Joyce Benninson was a part of looking at men and women playing same-sex soccer games. And after the match, she looked at touch, which is sort of a cue of reconciliation and coming back together, even in non-human primates. The males in the US were more likely to touch after the game when they were on opposing teams than the females were, even though it’s a little bit more taboo among men to touch. And so what that seems to signal in line with other research is that men are more forgiving of their friendships. Women have more best friends by the time that they’re 30 than men do.
Bob: 52:15
Yeah.
Jaimie: 52:16
And that can be really painful, as I found out myself.
Bob: 52:20
Right. Yeah, exactly. Oh my God, this is so much fun. I’m having a great time. So, anyway, what’s the next frontier? I mean, you’re you’re here doing research at UCLA. What’s the next frontier? What are you most excited about to study in the field of friendship?
Jaimie: 52:33
Oh God. So here’s the thing. When you look at the work in social psychology, my field, and the top journals. So with my grad student, Hei Wan Hong, we’ve looked at almost 27,000 articles across seven top journals, and we oversampled journals that focus on quote unquote close relationships. So friendships, romantic relationships, and family relationships. And what we were looking for was the prevalence of studying friendship. And we went to those journals in particular because if people are studying friendship, they’ll be there. 4% of the articles looked at friendship. And by contrast, 16%, so a factor of four looked at romance, right? We are not studying friendship. So to answer your question, anything. I will take anything. But what I’m most excited about is trying to use the knowledge that we’ve developed about how the brain finds, makes, and keeps friends to actually help people find, make, and keep friends. And so what we’re doing right now, both in the center and in my lab in particular, we’re developing and about to deploy interventions that we think can actually help people make friends. So pair them up in certain ways using this algorithm developed by Dan Conway Beam. Dr. Carolyn Parkinson is a social neuroscientist here. She and her grad student, Lisa Shen have done work where they scanned people’s brains, grad student cohort before these grad students met. And the brain scans were looking at people in this magnet. So they’re in the machine, lying there watching movie clips, comedy, documentary, et cetera. And what they did was look at the synchrony of people’s brains. And what that synchrony predicts is whether or not people will become friends.
Bob: 54:27
Okay.
Jaimie: 54:28
So we might be able to use the tools that we have today, knowing people’s friend preferences, knowing how they react to certain films. And I would say things like humor and maybe music that produce synchrony and coordination to bring people together at this time when we need it the most.
Bob: 54:45
Yeah, that’s incredible. So yeah, I mean, almost like putting you just want to see a stake in the ground. Like hey, this is important. We got to raise awareness on this topic. Yes. Let’s make this happen. And you want to be a lot there, you’re going to have to be out there leading the charge. I know you’re going to be able to do that.
Jaimie: 54:59
I mean, I hope so. I I would love to galvanize a community. And I think I mentioned this to you once. I told a woman at the BBC, I feel like a pimp for friendship.
Bob: 55:07
That is that is so cool. Hey, this has been such an interesting conversation. I could talk to you probably all day long, right? In the interest of time, though, I have one final question, and then we need to wrap up. Okay. Well, there will be two questions because I’m going to ask you to wrap up too. But what’s your take on astrology? In predicting friendship or relationships, right? Because like, look, I mean, we all I sneak peeks at my my horoscope every now and then, and I feel so lame doing it, but like, oh, well, you know, who are you most likely to be a match with, or who are you most likely to ha, you know, be a good friend? What’s gonna happen today, or what’s your love life gonna be like, right? You know, and so I’m an Aries, you know, there are all these different signs I’m supposed to be the perfect match for, but I I don’t find much, you know, I don’t I I don’t take much about that. I mean, I just kind of move on with my life. But what do you what’s your take? Is there any validity to it?
Jaimie: 55:56
I will tell you two things.
Bob: 55:57
Okay.
Jaimie: 55:58
One is as a person, I came out to visit my aunt here in 2009, I think. Um, and I went to, it’s not quite astrology, but I went to a guy that does readings and kind of a psychic type. Yeah. Okay. And he said a few things. One, you’re gonna be married twice. I was like, okay, that’s interesting. Two, you’re this year’s gonna be a huge change for you. And it was, I started grad school and I put applications together to eventually go to Oxford. I met my then husband. Definitely true. And then the third was, oh, and you’re gonna live in Arizona and Southern California. Whoa. And I was like, no, I’m not, I hate those places. Here you are in Philadelphia, East Coast forever. And I did six years of grad school in Arizona, and now I live in Southern California. Okay, maybe. But at the end of the day, I am a scientist, and what the data suggests, and this is a study by Bill Chopic, too, okay, is that people cannot pick their horoscope out of a lineup.
Bob: 57:06
Oh, yeah.
Jaimie: 57:06
Yeah, it just there isn’t a there there, but my God, it would be so comforting if somebody could tell me what the hell is gonna happen to me in the next two years.
Bob: 57:15
Right.
Jaimie: 57:16
I would love it. Am I getting that NSF? Is NSF gonna exist? Please tell me.
Bob: 57:21
Yeah, yeah. Oh, that’s so interesting. Yeah. I mean, that I call that what you described kind of the universe is speaking to you. Yeah and I’ve had those kind of experiences where I get this nudge. And I call it the stars aligning, call it, oh, that’s my day for that in my astrology forecast. I don’t have, I don’t put a lot of credence in horoscopes personally, but yeah. And but I have in my life, kind of like you, you’re talking about I felt these nudges, or somebody says something to me that leads me in a different direction. And then you think, well, that was a random meeting. Well, no, it wasn’t. I don’t believe in randomness, right? Or quit I I don’t believe in coincidence. I think that people, you know, you people come in your lives, you meet people for a certain reason. I can always explain it. Call it something spiritual, call it the universe, you know, call it your your astrology. Whatever.
Jaimie: 58:06
Something something might be there.
Bob: 58:08
And I think that’s one of the things I’ve tried to do is just like listen to that more. You know, if I’m feeling nudges or if I’m feeling pointed in a certain direction, I think.Jaimie: 58:15
Yeah, listen to your gut.Bob: 58:16
Exactly. Right? Okay.Jaimie: 58:17
For what it’s for a themopy.
Bob: 58:20
All right. Here’s my real last question. Okay. Do you have any closing thoughts for our listeners? And then if someone wanted to learn more about you, your research, your work, how would they how would they find you, or how could they, you know, get it get a hold of that research, I guess.
Jaimie: 58:35
So the one thing I’ll say is to prioritize your friendships. We don’t realize it, but loneliness is more prevalent than smoking or obesity in the U.S. Every other American is lonely. That means other people want friends too. One in four older Americans is isolated. They want to meet people too. So prioritize your friendships. My God, it is the best investment that you can make in yourself and your future. And the second thing is my God, do we need to prioritize investment and friendship, both at an institutional level in terms of the government, right? We sort of subsidize marriage, but friendship is invisible in our policy. And that should change. Friendship doesn’t really come into play when we think about our healthcare system. But it takes two seconds to ask, you know, who are you supporting and who’s supporting you, right next to your blood pressure and your weight. Right. We need to be doing that. We need to make friendship cord our elder care strategy. Friendship has to be part of our infrastructure because it is a public good. It’s good for health, democracy, society, it lowers health care costs, it increases business productivity. Friendship is great. Okay, so I’m done soapboxing there. I am going to say shamelessly, please go to my lab’s website. You can look up my name. Jamie Krems, you’ll find the lab site.
Bob: 1:00:02
Can you spell your name for them?
Jaimie: 1:00:05
It’s a City in Austria, K-R-E, M is in Mary, S is in Sam. Please check out the work that we’re doing. There’s a link there to a paper written for the public about how we might take friendships seriously and how we might change policy if we do that. That’s a paper with Victor Kaufman. And just think about ways that you can support your friends, or if you are feeling really generous, friendship science. Because we don’t do it. And at UCLA, we are the world leaders, not just in the research, but in galvanizing the community and trying to make people understand how important friendships are.
Bob: 1:00:47
You’re easy to find online. I did like that. And I emailed you, right? That’s how I got your email. I she’s also on LinkedIn. You and I, thank you for the friend request or the connection on LinkedIn. We were now the dupe. Yeah, we’re now connected on LinkedIn, which is fabulous. And I’ll also put a link to Jamie’s website in the episode notes. If you’re listening on iTunes or Spotify or YouTube, you can find it there. Also, if it’s on our website, we’ll have a link in there so they can find you.
Jaimie: 1:01:14
Thank you for letting my shame s less plugs.
Bob: 1:01:16
Yeah, no, I wanted you to. It’s fascinating stuff that people need to know about. And I just find your work, you know, helping understand friendship is, you know, friendship isn’t optional. I think that’s your main message today, you know, and it’s a foundational, it’s medicine. It’s something that we have to do to live longer. And it’s one of the most important pieces that I’ve discovered from list thanks to you. I I knew it was there for me, but I didn’t really realize the science or data behind it, but it’s really important for that retired mindset. So when I heard you talk about what you do, I’m going, oh my God, I have got to get her on my podcast because it just is a perfect fit. So thank you so much.
Jaimie: 1:01:53
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Bob: 1:01:54
Yeah, absolutely. All right, to our listeners, in today’s episode, if this resonated with you, please share this with other people, maybe people that are struggling to make friends, maybe people who are tired, or maybe just because it’s a good message, you know, a feel-good message about making friends and the importance of that. Either way, share it. And better yet, follow some of the recommendations that Jamie gave us. Reach out to people that you haven’t touched for a while and reconnect, make new friends. And I think you’ll find that if you exude that positivity, more positive things are going to come back into your life. I know they did for me. And also remember in retirement, soul meets body. Hey, thanks for joining us today. Great episode. As we wrap up today, a quick plug to please pay it forward by sharing this episode with a friend. And if you like what you heard, please subscribe to get access to all of our future episodes. And always remember that in retirement, soul meets body.