I think about this whole thing of like deaths of despair and, you know, not long ago you were talking about group selection. I feel like these two themes might be related. I feel like right now politically and culturally in this country, and now starting in Europe as well, it really is, it has become an us versus them kind of scenario.

There doesn't seem to be a middle at all, it's like a big trough. And even the suggestion that somebody could kind of switch between groups is kind of like a no, because they believe and have said and done this, no, because they believe and have said and done this, and very strong opinions from both sides.

So I don't think we're in a just hug it out kind of landscape right now. And so I'm curious what forms of non-physical affiliative behavior exist out there. There are social media accounts out there, like Upworthy, which, you know, just consistently puts out positive content. There are people who are very positive in their, you know, in their online behavior, and there's encouragement, it exists online, but it seems to be swamped by these like high salience like attacks, like what's the deal?

What can we do? Yeah, I mean, this is a fundamental question for our age, I think, and we're on a trajectory toward, well, I mean, I don't want to give the impression that I'm a complete pessimist, but I could, I was about to say toward oblivion, between like, the despair that has been driving people to either commit suicide, or to, you know, develop severe mental illness, or physical health issues, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc., that are, I think, a consequence of being, in some cases, a consequence of being isolated because you are not interacting.

That's part of who we are as a species, and we don't thrive. I mean, the work is very clear that like, being isolated, being alone is worse for your health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I mean, it's just really, really bad, and it scales, it's almost linear to how many contacts you have, you know, per week, or per month.

So that's all really bad, and I do believe that's also driving, that's a big driver for, not just the deaths of despair, but like, the lack of coupling, and the lack, you know, and crashing rates of fertility, which is also a real thing, and it is happening, and if we don't counter it, it's going to be bad.

Getting back to synchrony, one of the most effective ways to get in sync with somebody that you're out of sync with, or that you don't know, right, who's different from you, is through conversation, but deep conversation, okay, and there's a couple parts to this. You have to make the time and the space to do this, you have to have an intentional mindset, and we and other scientists have worked with, there are these structured sets of questions that have been developed.

There's one called Fast Friends, developed by the Arons in the late 1990s, there's commercially available decks online that you can get. And they're cool because they, each question, you know, you can kind of take it at a superficial level or a deep level, but they're designed to kind of like, break the ice, and then get you really fast into like really deep questions.

Is this like 100 questions to fall in love type thing that was published in the New York Times? Yeah, it's very similar to that, but in this case it's about connecting, like deep connection. I think it's more about deep connection than sort of romance part of this, and what happens during that, and my good friend and colleague Emily Falk at the Annenberg School had a really nice paper recently that showed that by measuring brain activity itself in people who don't know each other, as they work through these questions, and their brain, you know, one brain is in this space, another brain is in this space, and they over time come into really close alignment, and that's associated with all this good stuff.

Like I like you more, I feel closer to you, I value you more, et cetera, et cetera. And once you're in that kind of alignment, now you're set to sort of do things together. And now I think that gets back to your question, like, we can't hug it out, but we have to somehow create space, and when I say space, like give people the space to do that.

Like I'm going to talk to, you know, somebody from the other political party or from the whatever, that's not a bad thing, right? In fact, that's what we need to do, but instead we're, especially online, reinforcing and making the barriers harder to have those conversations, which are the necessary thing, I think, to establish the glue that keeps us together.