This is a eye-happard cost guaranteed human.
I'm Clayton Nackard, and 2020, too.
I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.
“But here's the thing, Bachelor fans hated him.”
If I could press a button and rewind it all I would, that's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract.
Agreed to date me, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to the love trapped on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to On Purpose. Today we're talking about something that affects every single one of us. Friendship. As kids, making friends seemed effortless. But why does it feel so hard to make a maintain friendships
as adults? I get it. Life gets busy, we move, we change, and suddenly, finding people who truly get us feels like an almost impossible challenge.
But the truth is, no matter how busy or how independent we are,
we all need connection. We need people who challenge us, support us, and remind us that we're not alone. So in this special episode, I've gathered insights from some of the best minds out there to help you build meaningful friendships,
strengthen your connections, and create a support system that truly lasts. Because the right relationships can change your life, and I believe everyone deserves to have those. Let's start with a challenge so many of us face,
but rarely talk about why is it so hard to make friends as an adult? When we younger, we see the same people every day. We share experiences and we grow together. But as we get older, life pulls us in different directions, and suddenly, finding and keeping close friends
feels like an uphill battle. To help us break it down, we have no robins, best-selling author, speaker, and expert on human behavior. She's here to help us understand why adult friendships feel so different, why connection matters more than ever,
and how we can take control of building meaningful relationships. Let's dive in. Now, why is it so hard to make friends as we get older? There is a massive shift that happens in adult friendship when you hit 20, that nobody sees coming.
The rules of friendship completely change when you're 20, and I'm going to explain the rules when you're little, and then we're going to talk about the rules of adult friendship.
“So, when you're little, your entire life is organized”
around friendship and making it possible, because you're with people, your age, all the time, and class, and sports. So, too. You move in groups, because you're on teams,
and you're in neighborhoods, and you're always together.
You also celebrate the same milestones. You're hitting the same birthdays. You're all talking about the next level of school, or this thing this summer. You're watching the same movies, because you're all the same age,
and so there's so much synergy and relevance, and the conditions to spend a ton of time together are there. Then you get to university, and you spend even more time together. And what happens when you hit your 20s, right, is that it moves from this big group sport,
where you just kind of expect to be around your friends all the time. You expect the group to get invited, because that's what's always happened. You expect to see them all the time, because you do always see them all the time. But then your 20s hit, the rules change, and what I call the great scattering happens.
Everybody moves in different directions. And friendship goes from group sport to individual sport. You can no longer expect friendship. You are no longer part of a group that is expected to be invited everywhere, because everybody scatters.
And suddenly, everybody's on different timelines. You're in different cities. You're moving in different directions. So there's no way to locate yourself inside your friend group.
“And the only thing that's keeping you together”
from your friends from your little is a text chain that's source to go quieter and quieter, as people start to focus on the people in front of them. And that brings me to two major shifts that I want you to embrace using the let them theory. Number one, you can no longer expect friendship. You have to take away more flexible approach,
and a more proactive approach. You've got to let people come and go. Super important. And then you've got to let me take the actions to create the friendships. I've got to go first.
I've got to be the one planning. I got to seek out new people. But there are three pillars of adult friendship based on research that are also going to help you understand that when people come and go in your life, 99% of the time, it's not personal.
And you actually haven't lost them as friend. One of the three pillars is missing. So the three things that need to be required to have a friendship happen
Are the same three things that were around all the time when you were a kid.
Number one proximity proximity matters tremendously. Proximity means who are you actually physically next to? In fact, they've done research, Jay. If you and I were in a dorm, and we lived across the hall, I don't remember the percentages exactly, but it's like 90% chance we're going to be friends.
Interesting. The poorer person at the end of the hallway, 10% chance that we're going to be friends with them because of proximity, even a matter of 50 feet makes a difference. And so when you were little, you were in proximity to people your age all the time.
All day. Exactly. The research also shows that to have as an adult,
“a kind of casual friend, you need to spend approximately 70 hours with something.”
To have a close friend, 200 hours. So when you're in an adult, that creates a big problem. Because who are you spending all your time with once you're 20? The American Time Study shows that it's with people you work with. So why aren't we best friends with people at work?
Because you have proximity and you're spending a lot of time together,
but here's the thing, timing.
When you were little, you were in the same timing of life with everybody. Yeah. When you hit your 20s, and it's now individual, everybody's on different timelines. Some of your friends are getting married, some are going to graduate school,
some are now pursuing jobs, other people are moving out of the city, into the city, everybody's timing is now different. And this also explains why you're almost never best friends with people at work. Because the timing is off. You're sitting next to people that are in very different times of their life.
You may like them a lot, and you may be friends, but you never spend time outside of work because they're at home with their family, and you're going out with your buddies, you're age on the weekends.
And then that brings me to the third thing that needs to be present for a friendship to truly click.
And that's energy. And the thing about energy is it changes. And you can have fantastic energy with somebody. And then if you decide you're not drinking anymore, the energy is off. Yeah.
If you decide to get really focused on fitness, the energy is off. If you have very different political beliefs, the energy is off. It's not personal. It's one of these three pillars, and it just helped me so profoundly, Jay, to realize that people come and go and it's a beautiful thing, and you should let them.
“And you should really, if you have a friendship that starts to dissipate, right?”
Ask yourself, before you blame them, or you blame you, are any one of these three pillars missing? Are we not near each other anymore? Is the timing of our lives off? Is there just something about the energy that hasn't clicked?
Because you can't force those things. But what I've found is that when you recognize that those are really important factors to your connection to someone else, that if a friendship starts to fade for me, it's so easy to say let them. And I don't wish anybody bad.
I literally wish people well, because the other thing that I've learned and, you know, being 56, I've had a lot of friends come and go in different phases of my life. That you would be startled by how many people from your past, that you no longer quote consider friends, because you haven't seen them in a very long time, or things just got weird. If you actually called them, they'd pick up the font.
They would. If you texted them, the research shows that when you get a surprise text from somebody that you haven't heard from in a long time, the amount of joy that you feel. And so I want you to consider, if you're very lonely right now, that there's actually probably hundreds of people from your past that still consider you a friend. And if you take the approach that I'm talking about, which is friendship is your responsibility.
“You need to go first, let me create the friendship and the connection that I want.”
And you can start by literally taking a look through your past and thinking about people that you remember fondly and just sending them a text. And you will be startled by what comes back. Because they're there. They haven't actually gone anywhere. The connection is still there. And oftentimes, even if you've had somebody where something's been off, again, let them, and wish them well. And there will be a time I promise you
where the timing or proximity or energy comes back around again. Yeah, and often you're so right when, as I'm listening to you talk, I'm just thinking of how conscious we have to be with all of our relationships, the ones that matter to us, the ones that we want to invest in. And is what you said, there was, we were actually
dealt such a tough card in the fact that basically from the moment you joined school at four,
till the moment you were 21 if you went to college, you basically didn't have to make really any major decisions or think about the next step. Because you went from seven
Grade to eighth grade to ninth grade to whatever it is.
in the world at 21 or 18, if you didn't go to college. And you all of a sudden now have to figure out what to do for the next 50, 60 years. Yeah. All structure of your life just, if I'm just disappears. It's hard to detect your life structure and it makes no sense. And as I'm hearing you talk, it sounds like to me that it would have been harder to watch your daughter have to practice the let them theory than it is for you to practice the let them theory. Yes. When she was going through
her work. Yes. When it comes to building meaningful relationships, we often put too much pressure
on one person to fulfill all of our emotional needs. But the reality is different relationships,
fulfill different needs. Some friendships may bring adventure. Others offer comfort. And some are simply there to listen. When we start seeing our relationships this way, we open ourselves up to a deeper, more fulfilling sense of connection. One where we can appreciate each friendship for the unique role it plays in our lives. To help us explore this idea further, we have Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University. He's dedicated his career to
understanding human behavior, brain function and the science behind connection. Let's hear his insights on how small intentional habits can help us build stronger, more fulfilling friendships. The
second thing you that I was reminded by as you were speaking was, I feel like writing down, I was
encouraged a lot of my clients to do this to write down a list of emotions they'd like to experience with people. So it could be things like adventure, discovery, comfort, humor, love, whatever it may be, just write down a list. And then for each one, write down the name of a different person ideally that fulfills that need in your life. Because often I feel like we put a lot of pressure on
“our romantic partners or one person in our life to be all these things. And the truth is no matter”
how phenomenal anyone is or how much they love us, they just can't be there. And so if you have, hey, I've reached out to this friend when I want some adventure because they love it too. If I want to see a sports game, this is the person I reach out to. And then do the same in the opposite way, which one of those do you fulfill for your friends? What emotions do you help other people create? And I feel like if you look at friendship as a spectrum as this broad
set of connection points rather than like this and my best friend as you are saying or this is my number one friend. And we get away from hierarchy and we move more into a spectrum. I feel like that mixed in with the text a day starts creating a much more healthier network of what connection means as well. It's also not just the same person doing the same thing every week. Yeah, I love the idea that by staying in contact regularly, we don't have to get caught up
and that then we can just drop into what's most meaningful on that particular day. And maybe even have more available to us to have a new experience, right, as opposed to just catching up. And then of course there are those friends that we catch up with and it feels like it was just yesterday. Definitely. But I'd be willing to bet that those were people that you spent a lot of dated a time activity with you. For example, University or you, you spent a lot of time just
in the kind of everyday shared experience for a while. And then when you see each other again, it's like being right back there. The neuroscience of this hasn't been explored nearly enough. But given that our very own surgeon general highlighted the loneliness crisis as one of the major
“crises in the world today, I think that in terms of simple solutions to big important problems”
developing more connectivity with people through simple practices. And again, we're talking
about a text here. I mean, I will be the first to say that if you can hop on a phone call or you can
get on a video chat with somebody that would certainly be better, but many people just don't have time for that. So in terms of spending time with people in a deeper and richer way, you know, getting the drop-in time as it were. I love that you mentioned adventure. I'm almost 49, I turn 49 in just over a month. And I would say that the first 49 years of my life have been marked by a real thirst for adventure, a ton of curiosity. Now I really feel myself entering a completely
different season of my life. I'm sort of hoping this would eventually happen. In part because I took some kind of dangerous turns, you know, I took risks with my life at points where I didn't really intend to do that, but you know, you seek enough adventure, you're going to find adventure
“and you have to be quite careful. I have friends with whom I had tons of adventure and then”
now the adventures are far more docile and quiet. And of course, the internal adventure is real as
Well.
with whom we can be all versions of ourselves is especially wonderful. That's the acceptance piece.
“Typically, I think we look more for that in romantic relationship. This notion of just like safety”
and acceptance being hallmarks of healthy romantic relationship. I think those are also the hallmarks of healthy friendship. It's just that with friendship, we can be a bit more segmented in terms of the number of different aspects of self that we need safety and acceptance with. I think with friendship also, you know, I've found it to be the case that really knowing what's going on with people has become a little bit more difficult. There's this kind of odd thing where we're more
interconnected in terms of availability of communication, but we're less aware of what's really going on for people. In fact, on the way here, I had a call with a friend and their headset was making a lot of noise. We agreed. They said, "How about I just turn mute mine?" For the next two minutes, I'm not kidding. This is what they said. They said, "Tell me what's on your heart or what's in your heart." Hopefully, it wasn't on your heart. Even your heart. I was like, "Wow, that's tough."
That's tough. I know that they're listening, but it's very silent on the other end. I'm kind of speaking into a vacuum there, because they're not hearing anything. And then maybe just two minutes before we curled up the hill, because of the reception in the area that we're in, as you
know, as always complicated, to just get feedback. It was very interesting. I realized that I felt
close to them before, but just the notion that they would ask me that. How do I feel? Not what's going on lately, not, you know, in my feeling good or bad, like a valuation of feelings, but just like, what's going on? And I stumbled a bit at first, but I can realize, in saying it now, like, I'm quite moved by the fact that they would ask that of all things, as opposed to like, what's going on? What's your next podcast about? I'm kind of visit that sort of thing. And so,
like, I'm taking a lot of cues these days from people that make me feel very seen and accepted. You're one of them. I must say, like, I don't just say that, because we're in front of these microphones and sitting here. Like, you and I have been in touch a lot lately. Through good times and
“hard times and a lot of different things, it's not a coincidence, though, that I think that we're here”
because I'm talking about this, because I think that ultimately the questions that we ask of the
people we care about are just as important as reminding them that we're there. Because when we ask a question, like, you know, what's in your heart? What we're really saying is, you know, what's really going on for you, as opposed to like, what's the next podcast about? Which is an interesting question to me, but, you know, so, you know, this is more your territory than mine. But I think, in the end, I think it comes back to the safety and acceptance. Simple behaviors, like a good morning
check-in, and then ask in questions that might feel a little bit challenging for the other person to answer at first, but that really show a depth of care and interest that go beyond just kind of like narrative and storytelling. And I think one thing that I'm also very eager about these days is breaking down some of the traditional stereotypes like, you know, for anyone that's listening to this and goes, oh, you know, I didn't, you know, men don't talk that way or something. It's like,
actually they do. They do, and if given the chance, they will open up about things that perhaps they hadn't even thought about. And I confess I'm one of those people. Maybe it was my, why
“chromosome got in the way of me thinking, like, wait, what do you want me to talk about? What's in my heart?”
Hey, actually, that's a really great question. Thank you. And so, I think this brings us back to these early circuits that are all about safety and acceptance, that are all about being able to predict things. And basically to say, okay, I don't have to be vigilant. That's really what safety is about is about turning off the neural circuits for vigilance. Yeah. When we turn off the neural circuits for vigilance, we can start to direct our neural circuits, vision, auditory, whatever
thoughts, towards an awareness of things that are both inside us and around us, that keep us in that calm state. I mean, vigilance is associated with stress, stress is associated with the narrowing of the visual field, the narrowing of the auditory fields. I'll just use this analogy because
my sister and I last, last summer, we always go in New York for our birthdays together. We went and
saw what the Harry Potter play. Oh, that's so good. Right. And that's where New York too is wild. I mean, the effects are so unbelievable. She's a bit Harry Potter fan. I'm not. But, but, okay, I mean, but just just spectacular effects. It was just so wild. I couldn't believe it. But there's this library in the play where it's a magic library where when one of the books is taken out about a particular subject, the books around it actually morph and change to reflect the same subject
Material.
works is a kind of pseudo hypnosis. Hypnosis is about context and context setting and narrowing
of context. All of us have such a wealth of historical present and future thinking cognition in our brains. But when we get anchored to a particular emotional state or topic, what ends up happening is that the available topics around it change in reference to how stressed we are. When we are stressed, all the topics, all the books on the shelf around that stress are about that thing and how to solve it. And actually, this is why stress enhances our memory for solving that, that things that
can help us solve that particular issue. But guess what is given up? All the other, distantly or not so distantly related topics that led themselves to creativity to thinking about
“novel combinations of things. This is why our friend Rick Ruben, I think, is such a spectacularly”
creative individual because he spends a lot of time putting his brain in body into a state in which he can
remain in contact with these other related or seemingly unrelated topics. Whereas when we're in a stressed mode, when we have to problem solve, when we are in visual vigilance, excuse me, we absolutely narrow our cognitive fields, our visual fields, our auditory field. We limit what we think is possible. And so I think great friendships to bring it back to it, great relationships of all kinds, have enough safety and acceptance in them that we can make our way through the practical constraints
of the relationship in the day, the week in the year. But that there's also a sense of creativity that there are new elements allowed to be brought in because there's enough safety and acceptance that we can turn down those visualance circuits. Absolutely. I'm Clayton Nackard, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.
Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first bachelor to ever have his final
rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would.
“But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines?”
It began as a one night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agreed to date me, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of he said she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. I'm done nothing to get breaking by the
**** Wrathsler. Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As adults, building meaningful friendships isn't just about finding people who have left us. It's also about how we show up for others. The strongest friendships are built on trust, joy, and a sense of community. And when we find that balance, our relationships become more
meaningful and can be life-changing. Robin Sharma, leadership expert and bestselling author shares his perspective on how the right friendships can shape not just our personal lives, but our growth and success as well. Let's hear what he has to say. And develop the idea that we can have a group of people that we grow around and then you have a
“group of people that you have to give to often. I think that's what our life is made up of. Life isn't”
just we're not just running by people that help us grow because we're obviously taking from them as well. And we don't want to be in a position where we're only giving, we want to be able to grow. So it's almost like we have two sets of groups in our life at any real given time. Would you agree with that? I would just say trust your joy. I think joy is a great GPS. And so I'm not in any way suggesting be around people only who fuel you and who help you become you at your best.
Yeah. I'm simply saying it's about what's healthy. It's about your joy. It's about being around people who you vibe with who understand you, who have similar values, who support you and who encourage you. So I think your community is definitely a key, an absolutely key form of well. And you mentioned this earlier. I want to come back to it with this three great friends rule. And I love that you do what having three great friends. I had recently somewhere I can't
remember. I was browsing on social media and someone said, you need three AM friends as well. Like
Friends you can call at three AM and they'll pick up the phone.
of a great long-term friend? What is a great friend? I'm not sure we even know anymore. A great friend is someone you can be yourself with and they still love you. Great friend is I had a line in the book, you know. You're in a foreign country in three AM. They hop on a plane and they come get you. A great friend is someone who you can laugh with. Great friend is someone who you're going through your most difficult times and they'll listen to you
for hours. A great friend is someone who accepts you. Someone who helps you be seen. A great
“friend is someone who when you're with them you feel joyful versus depleted. So I think it's really”
important, you know, in this world where we are maximalists. We want, we want to be all things to all people. We want to have so many different friends. Focus on three great friends. We want to read a hundred books. Master, three books. Maybe it's jobs is Isaacson's autobiography on jobs like you mentioned. Maybe it's the profit by Khalil Gerberon. Maybe it's the giving tree by Shell Silverstee. Maybe it's meditations of Marcus Aurelius. One of my favorite books of all time. You know, but
I think just being a minimalist is is so powerful. Build your life around a few things. Even
in work, I mentioned it rather than pushing out a thousand pieces of mediocrity. Do one thing incredibly well. You know, even if it takes five years, ten years, there's a chapter called make your project X in the wealth money campaign. And the example is the Duomo in Milan. You know, I'm the spent on it. In this world where we want to do something in an hour and they get the rewards or maybe a week, maybe a month. It took 600 years to create the Duomo. These are
values of an unspoken age. 600 years of calibrating, refining, optimizing to create the
“Duomo. And so that's what a project X is. Rather than doing lots of things, you do one thing.”
Maybe it's one work of art. Make a landjolo took four years of working on the chapel of the
16 ceiling. But he got the job done. So minimalism is very, very powerful. And one of the things
you said that this idea of we're almost trying to be so many things to so many people. That's hard to find the right friends. One of the things you talk about is do not be a Duomo. And I find that that becomes that people pleasing mentality, that ability that I can mold. And I can be whatever you want me to be. And I can be lots of things. And we feel validated that way. But in the end, we're just becoming a Duomo. Everyone crosses over a Duomo.
And a Duomo welcomes everyone in the same way. So when I read that, I was like,
“"How do we be kind, but not be a Duomo? How do we be service oriented, but not be a Duomo?”
How do we balance that art of being welcoming, but not being a Duomo?" Why, you know, for for many years, like you Jay, I've talked about the power of just being being kind. You know, and it sounds so simple, but being kind, staying in a hotel, remembering there's someone going to clean my room after I leave the room. So put the towels in the bathtub straight, note the bed, leave the room service,
tray clean, little acts of kindness. Not only are gift you give to someone else, it's a gift you give to yourself. You respect yourself more. So then people come sometimes say to me, "Well, if I'm kind, people will take advantage of me." And I would say, "People will only take advantage of you if you allow people to take advantage of you. Let's not confuse kindness with weakness."
There is a time to always be kind, but that doesn't mean you let people walk over you.
And that makes me think of another idea that I write about, which is the importance of in this world right now. It's so easy to live the same year, 80 times, and call it a life. And there's one chapter called "Be a perfect moment creator." And the story I tell in there is of Eugene Kelly. Oh, Kelly, excuse me. And Eugene, oh, Kelly, used to be the former CEO of KPMG, the accounting behemoth. And one day he walked into his doctor's office to get the results of a
routine medical and the doctor came out with an expression you never want to see on the face of your doctor when you go to get your results. And he was told he had 90 days left to live to
Get an interoperable brain tumor.
he had never in all his years as a corporate titan he had never taken his wife to lunch.
He had missed so many Christmas concerts of his daughter. He had never spent time with his friends walking through Central Park and having conversations. And so he decided to re-engineer his last 90 days. And he said, "I wanted to become a perfect moment creator." And he spent those last 90 days. He
“actually died roughly 90 days after the report from his doctor. But I think that's so powerful.”
You know, when you're with your family, when you're with your work, when you're with yourself, each and every day, find some way to create a perfect moment. Maybe it's giving a gift to someone through a compliment. Maybe it's taking some time to do something that fills you with joy. But being a perfect moment creator, I think, is a form of wealth money can't buy.
This episode is brought to you by eBay. I'd never owned a vintage camera before. There was
something about it that felt almost unnecessary in a world where everything lives on our phones. But I wanted to change that. So I started the hunt for a point in shoot camera. When I finally found the perfect one on eBay, I didn't keep it to myself. I left it out on a table. Always within reach, and that's when something interesting happened. People started picking it up without asking family, friends, everyone to take a photo of whatever felt important to them in that moment.
A laugh, a meal, someone they loved, something small. They didn't want to forget. There was no editing, no retakes, no scrolling back to see if it was good enough. You took the photo and that was it. The moment became real right away. What I loved most was that it wasn't about capturing everything. It was about choosing something, deciding this matters and letting that choice belong to whoever was holding the camera. Even if it came out blurry, the vintage camera dimmed along to one person.
It belonged to the room, to the moment, to the people in it. Over time, the photos started to pile up
on the fridge, on shelves tucked into books. Each one a reminder that meaning isn't always planned.
Sometimes it's noticed. The things we keep can do that. They can invite us to slow down to
“share ownership and to see what the people around us find worth remembering. That's what I”
appreciate about eBay. It's a place where you can find things that bring people together and pass along things you no longer need, so they can become part of someone else's memories. Visit eBay.com to shop your favorite finds. Find what you love, sell what you don't. eBay, things people love. Have you ever thought about what makes a truly good friend? Not just someone you can grab lunch with, but the kind of friend who truly sees you.
The version of yourself you might even forget sometimes. Trevor Noah has spent years navigating relationships in a world full of unpredictability, and his take on friendship is powerful. He shares how his closest friends act as his anchor, helping him reconnect with himself, especially in the loneliness of stand-up comedy and touring. Let's take a look. How are the friends? What are you talking to them about?
What's your consistency? I'm fascinated by that because So who are the friends? Predominantly my friends are from South Africa. Friends I met doing different things. All organic new things, which I'm a sucker for. I'm terrible at making friends, partially because I don't trust people easily. I exist in a world where I can be friendly with many people, but it takes me a while to accept that this person is actually a part of my life.
And I think for a long time it was because and still is sometimes because A, I have an idea of putting something on that person where I may need them means that they may disappoint me. And then on the other side of it, them needing me means I could be in the position to disappoint them. And so as we learn people, I find we learn what they can and cannot do. We learn who they are or not. It's always situational for me. That's when I will call you like a friend.
Is that I know how you are in most situations? It's a good definition. That for me is the definition of a friend. We use it loosely, but I can be friends with you and we always meet for lunch and always meet for me. But then I only know you in one way. My friends, I start to be able to, I almost almost store in a vault in my mind. I can say for a fact, if we're friends, if Jay was here, this would bother him. He would like that. He would probably save this and that's
“why he would act this way. And that's, you know, that's how I think of my friends. So they've been”
a major part of making me feel at home. My job stand-up comedy is really lonely career.
You know, and I remember talking to a comedian, there was a few weeks ago tal...
there was like a period where a lot of stand-up comedians were committing suicide, you know, and would be, you'd hear this devastating story of a comedian that everyone loved. They were in a hotel
room and then they committed suicide. And I was petrified because I, I always think it can happen to
me. You know, I go, if that happened to them, why did it happen? If I don't understand, then what is it? Another comedian, another comedian, another comedian, another comedian, and I think being a stand-up comedian is a really lonely job in that we're traveling often times alone. We don't have a band, we don't have backup dancers, we don't, we don't travel with a kid you imagine you're at your back at that. And yet every night you're going out there and you're making people love,
you're having fun with them, they come with their families, they come with their friends, they come with their loved ones, you leave alone. And it's this constant exchange of energy and what I learned was my friends became that hub, my friends became my recharge, my friends became the couch I could lie on and say nothing or everything. And thanks partly to technology, I've been able to keep in touch with them. There's no, there's no catching up for us. It's literally a running, we've got a WhatsApp
thread that is now, I'm going to say 15 years old. Yeah, like literally I can go back and search something from maybe 10 years ago, sometimes I can go back on the WhatsApp thread and go,
“what happened? And I can search and I can find it. That's how long we've had the same group and the”
same friends and the same everything. And obviously it's grown over time, but that core has kept me,
you know, I always think, did you end up reading Harry Potter? I didn't ever read
that. I watched all the movies. Yeah, I never watched it. Yeah, I watched all the movies. I know all that, I'm a big fan actually. Okay, so I feel like your friends in life are your hall cruxes. Oh, it's there, okay, you know. Yeah, I think as people what we do is we break ourselves into parts and whenever we meet people, we give them a part of ourselves and some people we give more than we give others, but we give everyone a different part of ourselves. No one in your life has the
same part that another person has. They may seem similar, but they're not your mother and father, whole different parts of you, your uncles, your cousins, your brother's sisters, your friends, whoever it is, they hold a different part of you. And the same way Voldemort could use that to come back to life. I feel like we can use that to come back to life. Wow. Do you know me? Yeah, you
“were at the different movie. Yeah, you read the book, my friend. That's what you missed in the movie.”
Yeah, yeah, and so I always think that as I, I, man, sometimes I can be at my worst. I can be,
sometimes I can be lost. Yeah. Really Jay, there'll be times when I'll be like, what am I doing? When I'm stressed, I'm tired, I'm burnt out, I feel lost and I can call a friend and no joke, they can say to me, well, the Trevor, I know, you know, and I love that they say that. They don't say this is who you are or not. They go, the Trevor, I know, found his joy here. Yeah. Hey, you know, I've noticed that you're always happiest when you do it this way. Yeah.
Hey, I've noticed that, you know, you stress more when you're in this position. Hey, and I go, man, I didn't know that about myself. I didn't hold myself that way, because I'm always experiencing all of me still through my lens. But thank you, you freed me, you encouraged me, you held me, you loved me. And what then happens is I start to find
“what I need to get back to my purpose, to my passion to whatever drives me. And that's why my”
friends are a big part of that. That is, that is the core of my world, you know. And it's funny, my mom even used to say that to me when I was growing up, you know, at a certain age, she said to me, you should say to me, my friend, you know, I'll be like, I'm not your friend. You're my mom. And my mom would say, just because I'm your mom doesn't mean I'm your friend. She said, "There are many mothers out there that don't friends with their child." She said, "I'm your mother."
And I will always love you as your mother. But you are becoming my friend. Wow. And that's stuck with me. I realize that friendship is a choice. Every other relation we have isn't. And so even your relatives can become your friends or may not be your friends. And I think understanding that illuminates a lot of how you interact with people in the world. Yeah, I really resonate with what, I mean, everything you said. But one of the things that stood out
was that kind of performance, loneliness. And my work mainly starts with coaching and working with people. And I work with a lot of musicians and people who tour and travel, not comedians, but artists and they're performing to like 100,000 people, 80,000 people. And then they would always
Talk to me about this.
theoretically. Yeah. And then because most of the events I used to speak out were like corporate events.
“So like a business event or things like that. And then a few years ago when I did my first ever event”
with my audience. And it was in LA, people who came because they followed my work, not because of anything else. There was only about 2,000 people in the audience. And I finished the event and I got into the car and it hit me. And I was like, oh, like, this is chemical. This is definitely chemical because you just had thousands of people shouting your name and loving everything you say and all this validation and everything else. As well as you were saying when you were coming like the dope
me and everything. And then all of a sudden I was like, well, I mean, this feels weird. Like, why do I feel like, you know, a sense of loneliness? And it was really interesting because I felt like that pretty much the whole and I felt like calling someone. Yes. And I couldn't because in London it was too early. None of my friends would be awake. And so they ate hours ahead. Because I'm in LA and I'm going, oh, I got way another hour for my friend to wake up two hours.
I'm not going to wake him up in the middle of the night. So I'm waiting there. And then all my friends in LA were just at the event. So I just saw them. And so they were probably like going home and it was a week night. And so maybe the end, I'm like, I don't want to, and then I get home. And my wife had organized this surprise party for me with all my best friends. It's like closest friends in LA. And it was like a relief. It wasn't even a celebration.
I was like, there's a sense of relief. I was like, oh, thank God. Because I don't know what I'm I don't know what I would have done tonight, man. Like, you know, I understand why people tend to drugs. I understand why people tend to, I understand. Like it was the first time I was like,
“because you need to numb it. Yeah, you need to numb it. You just don't know what to do about”
feeling. And that was the first time I'd felt that way. And I can't imagine, as you're saying, for somebody who's on tour and traveling every night. My friend, as I said, my drug was chocolate. Oh, I love chocolate. That was like my, I couldn't, it's like my team knew my people knew it's like, I'll do the show and immediately. And you probably relate to this more because, you know, coming from the UK in America, they don't really do it in South Africa. Our petrol stations,
our gas stations. Right? They have amazing stores attached to them. I can't, every gas station
looks like it's already been robbed. You don't want to pull gas. I don't, like, it looks terrible. They all look abandoned. Yeah, yeah, they all look like a ghost house. They really do, yeah, yeah. Whereas we're with from, it's like, oh, you're going, you buy a pie. You buy some, you do buy a few drinks. It's like cooked. Exactly. It's like, oh, this is life. You can get some groceries on though. It's a very normal concept. Yeah. And that would be me after every show. I would drive,
there would be the silence. I couldn't listen to music. I couldn't, my mind would just be, just like I could hear everybody, but they were gone. And then I would go in and then I would buy chocolate would be my thing. And then I, you know, over the years, I would read and I'd started learning that, you know, chocolate that dopamine, the sugar, one of these things, I was, I was correcting a chemical thing without realizing it. Right. Because it is a, it is a shock on your body.
Yeah. Everyone, nothing. Yeah. It's, it's so fascinating that that experience. And I'm sure people have that in different ways in their life. Like you don't have to be a performer in the thousand
“hundred and fifty, you should experience that. I think people like experience that in lots of different”
ways. It's beautiful that you've been able to continue this tenure, WhatsApp chat. Like that's, you know, that's like a brilliant achievement. [Music] One of the biggest shifts we experience as we get older is realizing that not everyone needs to be in our inner circle. And that's okay. As we grow, we start to see that when it comes to friendships, quality matters more than quantity. Mariana Huet, content creator, entrepreneur and co-founder
of Summer Fridays knows this firsthand. She's built a successful brand while also redefining what meaningful connections look like in both her personal and professional life. Let's hear her take on it. We talked about energy drainers and energy giveers before, walk us through that because I think everyone feels that whether it's people, places, projects, we all feel that certain people drain us, and projects give us energy, walk us through your version of that. Yeah, my energy
drainers are saying yes to too many things. So saying no to me is what gives me energy. And I know
that saying no might seem difficult at first, especially when you have opportunities that come to you,
and you want to say yes to everything. But saying yes to things I absolutely want to do has been so helpful. I am in a place now where I can say no because I feel like I worked hard in my 20s to get to where I am today that I have the ability to say no to things. But those knows also
Are important because it's gotten me to the jobs I want to do.
think if you say yes to too many things, you might dilute yourself, doing too many things. So saying
yes to the things that are in alignment with the content you want to create. The brands you want to work with, the long-term goals you have for yourself personally and professionally. Other energy drainers that I have are not doing my morning routine in my evening routine. So really setting myself up for the day sets me up for success. I get up in the morning. I usually meditate. I gratitude journal. I do like a little stretch. I drink my water. And even just a few things in the
morning set me up because if I wake up and I just instantly start doing things there just no time for me just like in myself to turn off. And then I'm kind of just thinking all day long. Other energy drainers sometimes it's work and people. And I know that that one's a really
“difficult one to have boundaries around because you may be cannot control who you have to be around”
with work or people that you have to spend your time with. So it's creating boundaries around those people and things to make you feel your best. So maybe it's at work you don't sit next to that person or you you know focus on working on yourself when you're at work so you don't have to be
near them too much because I know we can't always like eliminate energy drainers in our life.
And if it's someone in our life personally it's difficult but as I've gotten older I realize okay this person in this friend is draining my energy when I'm around them. I don't feel great. I don't feel better after I left them. I almost feel more drain just being around them and so I can love you from a distance. I still love you. I still like you but I don't have to spend a lot of time with you and that's okay. I can support you from afar but I know that if I'm around you I don't
feel my best. And I want more of those energy giveers in my life. Like who do I hang out with and I feel better after I leave them? Like who makes me feel happier and whole motivated and energized? And I always love being around you because whenever I see you you make us feel so great. You're such a great friend or for an Audrey is another one of them. I was going to say Audrey.
Yeah you guys might go to my mind with Audrey. I like Audrey. She's amazing we love you Audrey.
We love you Audrey. I mean she really is one of those people where you want to be around people who are good like that. You want people who make you feel your best. And so as I've gotten older it's less about quantity of friends. It's quality of friends and I choose to spend time with the people in my life who give me energy and make me feel my best because if you notice that after you leave a friend and maybe you're a little bit tired or drained or you're just like whoa and you left them like
it's okay to start like phasing out people and love them from afar. Yeah I can agree more with that.
“I saw this tweet that said my circle is shrunk in size but increased in value and I think that”
that's the mindset that you're sharing then I think that's something people struggle with. I think we feel guilty because we feel like we're leaving friends behind or we feel bad because we feel people are going to think we're better than like when you move on from a group you're often worried about the perception that those group of people are going to think or J. O. Mariana think that they're better and it's like well you're not leaving because you think you're better you're leaving because
you want to be better and you want to grow. How have you kind of outgrown groups or do you feel you've generally had a group that's grown with you but or have you had to let go of friendships, relationships and things like that. I have a core like five people who have been with me for like over a decade. So these are constants in my life like Audrey we met in 2006 so that's like 16 years ago so we're in friends for a very long time so it's like I had this core group of people
who are very cordy who I am they know me in my personal life this is who I want to spend my time with like it's not about content or online or anything it's just like who do I want to sit on my couch with like scroll on my phone or watch TV or just hang out with and those people are really important to me. I have a lot of acquaintances and people that we know just from work and being around people and I just know like I don't have to be overly close with a lot of people and that's okay and I
think a lesson that I learned now in my 30s was that a smaller circle is fine in my 20s I think you move to Los Angeles you want to make all these friends you want to be around all these people and then I'm like wait I don't feel great when I'm around them I don't feel like myself I feel like I'm trying to have to be someone I'm not or prove to them that I'm something and I don't want to do those things like I want to be truly who I am authentically and as I got into
my 30s I realize it's okay that my circle is smaller like it's okay to have these people who I know love me and are there for me no matter what and then everyone else is a bonus.
“Yeah absolutely and I love that you did they're like I think if we started seeing our relationships”
as degrees of connection as opposed to like friends and not friends yeah it becomes a lot easier to know how much time and how much energy to give someone we all know that staying active and eating well are key to a long healthy life but what if the real secret isn't just personal discipline but the people we surround ourselves with research shows our social circles shape our habits more than we think Dan butner national geographic fellow best selling author and founder of
the blue zones has spent years studying the world's longest living communities he's here to share how connection competition and collaboration can shape our well being let's listen it
I actually have one of my little social groups from Los Angeles here I used t...
I still have four people and I hardly know I've seen them once in my life but every day we email each
other our weight and it kind of keeps us doing it we we're accountable to somebody and every one of us our weight has gone down a little bit over the last decade or so and for the average American male and ten years you can expect a gain and extra ten years so even among my little focus group we've been it's worked really quite well competition and collaboration together are really fascinating
“really yeah yeah yeah it's why pickable works for me it's it's also why I think”
I have so many people I know do ten thousand step challenges within their family and most of those people are walking way over ten thousand steps simply because they're trying to beat someone in their family and then everyone's average is growing up and so I think that making something
competitive and collaborative is is the genius of the social network the fitness the fun in
life like so much of it comes from Dan I think we've lost that one of the strategies we deploying our cities it's an idea we took from Okinawa the notion of a Moai a committed social circle and we'll get four or five hundred people to show up to a gym we'll have them circle up according to what neighborhood they live in we asked them a bunch of questions about you know are they religious what their favorite food is what they listen for music and have them look at each other as these
questions are being answered and then we have them self-select in groups of five people and a lot of these people are completely lonely and once they self-select in these clusters we call Moai as we have them give themselves a name and then we organize them around walking together this everybody can
walk together and then we offer a little prize at the end of ten weeks what happens during
that ten weeks is not only are these people walking a lot more than the norm we would they're creating a social network or social circle around walking that in many cases we know about 60% are still around four years later so as you were starting to latch on to it's the power of
“collaboration but creating a social circle around a healthy behavior that's what's going to”
last and that's what's going to matter over time absolutely I wanted to quickly jump back to diet and food because there's this great technique that you have a new method mentioned and this was popular in parts of India that were teaching it from this perspective as well that the method you spoke about was being eight out of ten full when you're eating and when we were trained about that when we'd hear about it from a from an eastern or Vedic perspective the idea of how
breath is part of feeling full and so food is not the only thing that your stomach is full on was how I was introduced to that idea of being seven tens full or eight tens full and the rest would be covered by breath of course there's water as well walk us through the idea of how we can all stop eating at eight tens full because I think most of us wait till ten or twelve ten east yeah exactly yeah so and it has its roots in a Confucius the Okinawans have this saying Hara Hachibu which is a
reminder to stop eating when there's stomachs already present full and they'll say that like a prayer before a meal so instead of saying a grace or whatever that it's a reminder I believe though much of it is actually done at the table they tend to pre-plate their foods and put the leftovers away at the beginning of the meal instead of the end when you might be mindlessly eating they don't have a TV so they're not mindlessly eating to their favorite television show they're sitting around
with friends slowing the meal down it takes about 20 minutes from the full feeling to travel from your belly to your brain and if you're wolfing your food down if you're not breathing like you say not drinking water there's a pretty good chance you're going to overeat before you know it building a business with your friends sounds like a dream right but a success grows so do the challenges how do you protect those relationships while navigating the pressures of making tough decisions
leading with clarity and scaling a company to shed light on this we have Brian Chesky co-founder and CEO of Airbnb he's built one of the most recognizable brands in the world while staying grounded in the relationships that started it all let's hear his insights I mean treat you said something there that really stood out to me you said that the happiest thing
“and the best thing about being successful is that you get to choose the people you worked with”
you obviously built this with friends yeah and that's how it started it started in a place of being around people you love with what was the biggest point of challenge in building something with people you love as you grow it and what is it that you experienced and what was the biggest lesson that you took away that actually kept it going because I can imagine as you're describing highs and lows all of this change for 16 years but here you are still building it together
Think about how many stories you heard of founders that's like a band they co...
and then eventually the band breaks up and people don't stay together they resent each other maybe things end very ugly it's like a band except like it's becomes so much bigger than the band because it's not just the three of you imagine a band that starts three people and ends is 3,000 people and that amount of pressure the amount of spotlight the money the changes in like people status and positioning it can do a lot to break people up but also unlike a band where
maybe I'm not to say you just have to agree on like where you perform and what you're saying
“with a company you have to agree on like who we're going to hire we're going to call what”
Mark is we're going to go into what's the prioritization like who we're going to raise money for like and go down the list of like the thousands of things you have to agree to and with Joe and I I often say it's really good to start a company with friends not everyone has friends to start a company with but you want that reservoir of goodwill and we made a decision the decision was that no one decision is going to supersede our friendship and our relationship that we're
never going to have well debate we'll argue but we'll never allow a situation where winning
an argument is the most important thing because you think about a company as 100,000 decisions it could also be 100,000 arguments and if you get stuck on the first debate or you like somebody won the debate okay great you have 99,999 more things to discuss and so the lesson I learned is I mean first of all Jay I was lucky and a lot of people when I say I was lucky they think oh you were at the right place the right time with the right idea and I say well maybe but there's
something I was much luckier about and what I was most lucky about what made me most fortunate was I met Joe and Nate that we have this unbelievable chemistry one time we had to do like some personality test is like one of those core wheels and we took this like personality test to see about our chemistry and they plotted our like personalities and they formed a perfect equal
adult triangle not always you're going to find people that are perfect compliments to you I'd say
a couple of things number one you want to have a team with people that you are friends with or could see yourself becoming friends with that you have a deep love and respect for that you're going to probably spend more time of your co-founders than your spouse your family if it goes well if it doesn't go well then maybe not but that's the best case scenario that people that share values because you can debate anything so long as you're trying to climb the same mountain and the
same fully system you have different values eventually those going to become your reconcilable conflicts but you probably also want complementary skills the worst case is people with different values and same skills right we do the same job we step in each other's tools and we're trying
“to go into different direction and so I think and then I think the final thing is just this mutual”
love and respect and never losing sight you know one of the things I tried to make sure of is like
even as CEO I wanted to try to make sure that like Joe and Nate you know were included in things and I wanted to always make sure that people were for us together we thought of us as a as a unit when we when I like when public you write a founders letter and a lot of people write letter and they just signed the name of the CEO I made sure that it was from all of us and was representing all of us I feel like they are the heart and the soul of the company and
it's like you know parents like you know not every child has the fortune to have multiple parents not every company has the fortune to have multiple founders but if they're together they're not fighting they have a mutual love and respect for another that's going to permeate the company just like permeates the health of a child and Joe and Nate and I kind of thought ourselves as parents of the company as a child I'd never have had kids but you know there's something about that and I
think who you are in that relationship permeates every single thing if the founders fight the employees fight if they have what respect for one another that is going to be a role model that
“other people throughout the organization are going to copy and that's what I've learned from that.”
We all crave a sense of security not just physically but emotionally one of the greatest forms of protection comes from knowing that the people around us truly see us understand us and have our backs but as life gets busier careers grow and challenges arise friendships often take a back see how do we make sure we don't lose those connections along the way? Actress and entrepreneur Lala Anthony has built an incredible career while staying deeply connected
to her inner circle. She shares her perspective on maintaining meaningful friendships through every season of life. Let's hear her perspective. Last time you came we were tracking your whole career journey like you've done you've hustled you've worked hard you've done so much to get to where you are today and I want to get to that but for me as I've been on this journey I've been reflecting on what's changed over time as my external situations changed and what
makes me feel protected and used that word protection and I've realized that of course we have
To have our internal protection and how we feel about ourselves our confidenc...
but I found that the thing that makes me feel the most protected is knowing the people around me who really know me and how much closer we get through that process like I have to take so much strength and the fact that the people around me not only do they have my back but they actually know me and understand me at a core and I kind of take a lot of energy from that you do to say I take so much energy from that I don't like the people who know they know the people that
I need to depend on they're always there I'm blessed to have an amazing family amazing group of
friends that are like rider die that I know are there no matter what and it's something that I don't take lightly so it's not about proving to the world anything like if my core group gets it knows me inside and knows my ups knows my downs and are there for me that's the energy
“I pull from as well. I want to talk to you about friendship I think a lot of people feel”
quite even when you're close friends and I'm sure you felt this it's hard to open up about things that are going wrong in your life and I think a lot of people are listening or watching
that's something that they can relate to where it's like I have my friends but I don't know how to
tell them that I'm going through this or I know they'd care about me but I don't want them to feel sorry for me or maybe they're going through so much stuff that I don't want to put my stuff on them. How have you managed to keep strong relationships as you've grown in life as you've built your career. How have you managed to keep that core instead of losing it as you get more busy? I think that my friendships have gotten even stronger because of those moments.
I don't base my friendships off of you know this person has only been around when everything's been great or we only talk about sunshine and flowers and cupcakes like friends have to be there
“through everything and you have to be able to be okay with being raw and real with people that”
you consider your friend and don't throw that word around lightly. If you're saying this is my friend this is my go to you should be able to share whatever's happening in your life whether it's good or bad and those are the things that bond you you know through those I remember the friends that were there for me when I was going through my divorce when I was publicly you know going through what I was going through as a result of what happened in my marriage like I remember
my friends that were there. I remember when my son was really young and had to have surgery and who was there in that moment like I remember all of that and those were the strengthening moments of our friendship now the fun stuff is great too I remember my friends have been on vacation with me and got drunk and had a great time but it's a balance you know the real friendships had a mix of
“all of that stuff because that's what life is life is not always just fun and games life is up and”
down and up and down that's that's what life is. I don't friendships on just about who's been around the longest they're about trust and the people who truly show up who understand you and grow with you. If there's one thing these conversations make clear it's that strong friendships don't just happen they take honesty, effort and the courage to be vulnerable and in a world that often pulls us in so many different directions prioritizing connection is in just
important it's essential. I hope this episode gave you a fresh perspective on what it takes to build
a maintain meaningful connections if something resonated with you share it with a friend who needs to hear it I'll see you next time on on purpose remember I'm forever in your corner and always rooting for you. Hey everyone if you love that conversation go and check out my episode with the world's leading therapist Laurie Gottlieb where she answers the biggest questions that people ask in therapy when it comes to love relationships heartbreak and dating if you're trying to figure out that space
right now you won't want to miss this conversation. If it's a romantic relationship hold hands it's really hard to argue it actually harms your nervous systems just hold hands as you're having the conversation it's so lovely. This isn't a hard podcast guaranteed human.
