Is There A Loneliness Epidemic? - Noreena Hertz | Modern Wisdom Podcast 266

Noreena Hertz 0:00 Researchers have found that loneliness is as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If you're lonely, you have a 30% higher chance of getting heart disease. If you're lonely, you have a 40% higher chance of getting dementia. If you're lonely, you also have a higher risk of getting stroke. If you're lonely and you're already ill, you're less likely to recover as well. (wind blows)

Chris Williamson 0:26 You're an economist. What are you doing talking about loneliness? Why are you interested in that?

Noreena Hertz 0:32 So it was a, it was a few things happening pretty much at once that made me think, "This is what I want to research next." First, it was my students. I was noting that increasing numbers were coming into my office during office hours and confiding in me how lonely and isolated they felt. And this was a new phenomenon. Um, I'd been teaching for a few years and I hadn't experienced anything like it before, but it was notable. And the other thing that I really noticed was that when I set my students' group assignments, increasingly or significant numbers of them seemed to be finding it increasingly hard to interact face-to-face. And when I raised it with a colleague, um, an American professor who runs one of America's big universities, he said to me, "We're seeing exactly the same thing here. In fact, it's so bad here that we're having to run remedial 'How to read a face in real life' classes for our incoming students because they're spending so much time with their heads in their screens that they literally are unable to read a room in person." So, that was kind of one just piece of information which I guess I lodged. And then at the same time, I was really interested in my research in the rise of right-wing populism, the rise of people voting, um, for people like Le Pen in France or Salvini in Italy, or Trump, of course, in the United States. And so I started looking into this and I started interviewing, uh, voters and hearing from these kind of voters. And one thing that came out time and time again from their stories was how lonely they felt, or at least how lonely they had felt until they found community in this far-right populist kind of gathering. And I found that disturbing, but also really interesting and a kind of way of making sense of what was going on that I hadn't come across before. And then the third insight, these are all happening at roughly the same time, was I had bought... And I apologize already in advance if this is annoying for anyone who's listening, I had bought an Alexa. So I'm whispering it (laughs) in case she starts going off. And, um, and I noticed myself becoming increasingly attached to my own Alexa. And, uh, and it got me thinking about AI and social robots and the role that they were inevitably going to play in coming years in helping us feel more connected to each other and less... Or in helping us feel less lonely and, um, more connected. Maybe not to each other, but to something at least. And I started researching that, and started to realize

Noreena Hertz 3:33 that actually what we'd been seeing, and this is before the pandemic, and this may speak very much to you, Chris, was the rise of what I call the loneliness economy. An entire economy that had sprung up really speaking to people's need for what, um, the famous 20th century, um, sociologist Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence. The need for people to have shared experiences together in person. And I'm saying this might resonate with you because, of course, with your club promoting, um, history. And really... And we'd seen it whether in the rise of people who wanted to go to clubs or the rise in people who wanted to go to things like escape rooms, um, or the rise in people who were looking for community in things like SoulCycle. What we'd been seeing, um, in the years preceding the pandemic was really a rise in this appetite for community, whether it was in a non-paid-for form or in a paid-for commercialized form. So, it was those three different things together that made me realize that loneliness was a way really of making sense, perhaps a prism through which to understand what was going on in the world, the big societal, um, shifts and political shifts that had been going on.

Chris Williamson 4:58 How do you define loneliness?

Noreena Hertz 5:01 So, I define loneliness in a broader sense to the sense that some people listening might, um, think of it. I define loneliness as not only feeling disconnected from your friends and family and craving, um, connection with them, although it is of course that too. I also define loneliness as feeling disconnected from your employer, your government, from feeling uncared for and supported, not only from those who are meant to be close to you, but from your work, but by your workplace or your government too. So, for me, loneliness is political as well as personal, and its drivers are, um, economic, technological, um, demographic, not only to do with how we treat ourselves and each other.

Chris Williamson 5:53 I, I imagine one of the challenges that you're gonna come up against when researching loneliness is that all of that's very subjective. Now, we don't have... We can try and make an objective metric from a very subjective feeling, but it's like trying to rate happiness or trying to rate any other sort of emotion.... we don't know what it's like to be another person's consciousness.

Noreena Hertz 6:13 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 6:13 So that level of loneliness and ours, we can try and give it as best a scale as we can, rate from one to five if this statement, uh, somewhat agree, disagree, et cetera. But it's always going to be slightly messy, I imagine. And the statistics-

Noreena Hertz 6:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 6:25 ... around that must be similarly messy as well. What, what statistics did you find around loneliness levels?

Noreena Hertz 6:32 So, I think that's firstly such an interesting point that you raised because it's something that I grappled with so much as I was doing my research. And I ended up thinking about loneliness. And you're right, there is, with all emotions, that challenge. You know, I'm very lonely. Is my very lonely the same as your very lonely? But it's also, I realized, it's like pain as well, because if somebody says, "I'm in a lot of pain," physical pain, we also don't know whether their physical, their very pain, is equivalent to your very pain. Like, their stubbing their toe might be like you having a poker put in your eye. We just don't know. So there is that challenge with, with, um, these kind of metrics for sure, whether it's loneliness, depression, anxiety or physical pain even. But, um, assuming that we're in the ballpark at least with these kind of figures, um, and I think that's a fair assumption, what the research shows really clearly is that loneliness, even before the pandemic, was a really serious problem, with one in five UK adults saying that they felt lonely always or most of the time, and half of 18 to 24-year-olds saying that they felt lonely regularly. And that's an astounding figure. And in the workplace, that also an incredibly lonely place for many, 60% of UK workers say that they feel lonely at work. Um, one in five American workers say that they don't have a single friend in the workplace. So, um, loneliness really a very pervasive, uh, feeling throughout our society, which the pandemic has significantly amplified. Um, and research that's come out in the last few months, um, really shows that very clearly with especially, with three groups especially being, um, finding themselves even more lonely through the pandemic, the young, people on low income and women. So these are the three groups who, I mean, everyone on average feels lonelier, but those three groups in particular, um, feel especially lonely or have been feeling especially lonely.

Chris Williamson 8:48 I remember listening to a, I wanna say a podcast. I don't tend to dip in much into the sort of, um, women-on-women world of podcasts, but this one was really fascinating, and they were talking about sympathizing with women who are single and doing lockdown alone, uh, because of the need for the oxytocin release from being close, like physically close to people.

Noreena Hertz 9:14 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 9:15 Um, and that was a- an insight that I totally hadn't thought of. Um, you know, I'm a, a bloke. For me, like, hugs and stuff, yeah, that, I can, they're all right, but I don't really need them that much. And seeing it from that side, that made a lot of sense. Out of, out of every-

Noreena Hertz 9:31 I s- I thought you were, I thought you were meant to be warmer up north and like be more, be more into kind of hugging and stuff.

Chris Williamson 9:37 Salt of the u- salt of the earth up here, you know.

Noreena Hertz 9:39 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 9:39 Ev- everyone's terrified of hugging now. It's that weird, it's that weird elbow thing, isn't it?

Noreena Hertz 9:43 (laughs) Elbow bump.

Chris Williamson 9:43 Yeah, exactly. Um, so out of all of the different groups, it's surprising, I think, it might be surprising to some people, it was surprising to me upon reading the book, that, that the 18 to 24 age bracket is suffering, because you just presume between the age of 18 and 24 that everyone's just swimming in l- late night house parties and, uh, uh, morning book club and a ride to the gym with your friends and all this sort of stuff. But it seems like that's quite the opposite, especially given that that's the age that people are at university or higher education-

Noreena Hertz 10:16 Yes.

Chris Williamson 10:16 ... so that will be chunked into fairly... You know, you're forced to see people. Some of the lectures I had at Newcastle were 150 people strong. I wanted less people around me, not more. But it seems like that's changing.

Noreena Hertz 10:29 So, I think firstly, you can be lonely in a crowd. I mean, uh, so, in the same way that you are not necessarily lonely if you're on your own. Um, so I think that's one factor. But you're right. I think that was really surprising to me as well, how lonely the young are. In fact, the young are the loneliest generation. And when we think about loneliness, we often think about it being the elderly have the loneliness, but that just isn't the case. It is the young, the data is really clear on this, who are the loneliest.

Noreena Hertz 10:59 I think, you know, what differentiates the young in particular is their usage of mobile phones and social media. And I really began my research feeling really agnostic on this point, and, you know, I had no agenda beforehand. But as I dug into the academic research and as I interviewed many teenagers, what came out again and again was the really, um, destructive role that social media in particular was playing in their lives. Now, of course, again, this is on average, and so there are gonna be people for whom social media has been a lifeline. The LGBTQ kid in a small village somewhere who, you know, wasn't physically around anyone who was like them, um, may well have found their community on Instagram, say. But, um, but on average, it seems that these, um, platforms are really playing a significant role in the rise of young people's loneliness. And it's for a few reasons. I mean, the first is quite simply that these are platforms designed to be addictive-... to keep drawing us in with their kind of twinkly lights and color and flashing and endless scrolls and, um, and all the ways that they've kind of designed them to do so. And the more we're on the phones, I mean, the less present we are with those actually around us. And so the quality of our face-to-face relationships are diminished. And, uh, I've been guilty of it myself, you know, being scrolling on my social media feed in the room with my husband and, um, you know, not really even hearing him 'cause my attention's been on my phone. But there's social media playing oth- the role of, um, kind of being a weapon not only of mass destruction but also a weapon of... Sorry, not a weapon of mass destruction. Um, (laughs) that was a bit far I think. But social media, you know, not only playing a part of being a weapon of mass distraction, I'd rather, um... I, I, I mean, let me not go too far here. But, um, but also, um, being a very excluding mechanism for many young people, it turns out. Um, in my interviews with teenagers, I remember Peter, for example, a 14-year-old schoolboy, telling me very poignantly about how invisible he felt when he would post on Instagram and then be waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to like his post. And then when nobody did, asking himself, "What am I doing wrong?" Or Claudia, a teenager who told me about the pain she felt when she realized that her friends were out without her. They'd said that they weren't going out, and she was scrolling through her feed and saw them hanging out without her, and she had been excluded. Or a parent who shared with me the pain his daughter felt when she was in a café with her friends and everyone's phone pinged with a WhatsApp message inviting them to a party, and she didn't even get the message, but she had to pretend that she had the message so as to not appear so excluded. So, um, of course young people were excluded in the past too. This isn't a contemporary phenomenon, and yet what makes it different now is that because so much of their social interaction has migrated onto their screens, um, whereas an adult in their lives in the past might have seen this is going on and actually done something to intervene. So, a teacher might have seen a child not being asked to sit with others, or a parent might have noticed that their kid wasn't being asked to do something. Um, today, the adult typically isn't aware of it, whereas to all their peers, the exclusion is really all too visible.

Chris Williamson 15:02 Yeah, so there's a lack of visibility and there's some learned helplessness. Lack of visibility from a caregiver's perspective looking in, and then the learned helplessness. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to say, "Ah, just man up." You know, that people have been excluded for all of time. But there does seem to be a corner that's turned with social media, the fact that the ubiquity of it, the messiness of it. Jonathan Haidt's, uh, The Coddling of the American Mind, which I'm halfway through at the moment, is really fascinating and terrifying around this. There is a, like a great wall from teenagers around about 2012 to 2014, which is kind of when Instagram came around, and it's just this, the crest of this tsunami that's kind of moving through the demographic, and it's very much split into pre- and post- that time.

Noreena Hertz 15:52 Yes.

Chris Williamson 15:52 And, uh, I think that's-

Noreena Hertz 15:52 And when we, and when we look at rising, uh, loneliness figures amongst this generation, they also, like, massively shoot up from, um, from then onwards. But what's really interesting is that... So, we've been aware of that research for a few years now, but what we couldn't determine, um, definitively was whether this was just, um, correlation or was it actually causation? Was it because people were on their social media platforms that they were, um, lonelier? So, it was hard to disentangle that when all you knew was that there was a kind of... that the periods corresponded. But about two years ago, there was a really seminal new piece of research done at Stanford University, obviously a top university, where they got 3,000 students, um, where they put half of those into a control group. They were told to keep using their Facebook as usual. The other group were told to delete their Facebook for two months, and then they tracked how the different groups responded. And the group that were off Facebook, fascinatingly, it wasn't that they then just spent more time on other platforms. They actually spent less time on the internet overall and more time in person with friends and family. But they were also significantly less lonely and significantly happier. In fact, the researchers said that deleting Facebook is 40% as good for you as actually having therapy. (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 17:25 Shit the bed.

Noreena Hertz 17:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 17:29 That's a really astounding... I mean, I, I've been very sort of anti-social media, anti-technology for three and a bit years since I got introduced to Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology.

Noreena Hertz 17:41 Yes.

Chris Williamson 17:41 Um, and I've kind of been on this flex for a long time. But it does feel very much like... I, I, I don't know what the solution is here. I think, um, it needs to be emergent, bottom-up. It needs a social change. It requires people to be able to self-regulate despite the fact that there is billions and billions of dollars and an army of engineers behind every click. But it also requires perhaps some sort of top-down litigation. I know that we're seeing screen time finally got brought in.

Noreena Hertz 18:06 Yeah. Not... I mean, yeah. Not, not perhaps. I think that n- absolutely needs to be part of the package. And in many ways, I think we should think of social media companies as the tobacco companies of the 21st century. And as such, they really should be regulated as such, um, strongly, especially when it comes to children. And in the UK, there is actually, just in the last, um-... few days, there's been some real action on this front with the new bill going through Parliament, um, which will hold social media companies accountable for online harm, not only for the most, um, egregious hate speech, but also for when it comes to children, um, negatively, negatively affecting them psychologically. So that is actually a significant step, um, in what I believe is the right direction because although, of course, we can try and resist our addiction ourselves, I know how hard it is to do so. I mean, I, when I, I typically am not on social media but when I have a book out, I have to go on social media. And I've really seen the, how addicted, how quickly I've become once I've been, you know, going on it on a daily basis.

Chris Williamson 19:20 Yeah, the problem is once those neurons have wired themselves in, they're not going anywhere. They're there for the rest of your life. Um, I, I, I know what you mean about-

Noreena Hertz 19:29 Well, yeah. I mean, although, (laughs) although even with the addiction, I, um, one way that I manage to kind of break it is by being quite draconian and actually just having, like not keep putting my phone so that it's not actually in arm's reach. Like I have to physically distance myself from it.

Chris Williamson 19:46 Sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom is the number one hack for reducing your screen time. Um, but yeah, I, I, I saw the legislation that you're talking about.

Noreena Hertz 19:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:55 I am concerned that that involves a restriction of freedom of speech, and we get into a whole other conversation to be had there. It is going to be difficult to legislate top-down and restrict the bad, that is ubiquitously bad platform-wide around social media, whilst getting into a more nuanced discussion I think about what we should and should not be. Are they a publisher? Are they a pipeline? Are they the provider of information? Are they liable for what's on their platform? What does that mean? What do we... so on and so

Chris Williamson 20:25 forth. Um, one question that I had that I thought was kind of interesting. What was the last time in your research that you looked at that we didn't have mass loneliness? Are we going back to like the 1800s here or...?

Noreena Hertz 20:39 So it's only in the 1800s that you even read- start reading about loneliness as a phenomenon. So, um, so the phrase itself, um, the word lonely is something that really only entered the vedad- vernacular from the 1800, 100s onwards. But I, and I think, um, you know, it's partly because of how people conceived of themselves, um, in a religious context, you know, being kind of you weren't lonely if you were at one with God. And, um, so I think that's maybe part of the reason why we didn't see that, uh, ex- that sentiment expressed before. But I, that isn't to say that people weren't lonely before, uh, because I'm sure there were many people who felt lonely if you were, um, living in an abusive relationship, whether that was in the, um, 16th or 15th or 14th century. That probably felt lonely.

Chris Williamson 21:43 Imagine if, imagine if you were a, a, a, a LGBT-

Noreena Hertz 21:46 If you-

Chris Williamson 21:46 ... if you were a racial minority-

Noreena Hertz 21:48 Yes.

Chris Williamson 21:48 ... in a, in a way.

Noreena Hertz 21:48 If you were economically, if you were, you know, a peasant, if you were in a poor house, if you were, you know, I'm sure there were lots of circumstances that felt lonely even if it wasn't something that was talked about then.

Chris Williamson 22:01 So what's changed? Obviously, we've got this, uh, contribution of technology.

Noreena Hertz 22:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:05 What else has changed that's driving this loneliness?

Noreena Hertz 22:08 Yeah, a number of factors. Uh, for example, more people live on their own now than at any time before. It's not, as I said, that everyone who lives on their own is lonely. That, of course, isn't the case, but if you live on your own, you are disproportionately likely to be lonely and disproportionately likely to feel lonely more often. Um, we do less with other people than we did in the past. We go to church less. We are less likely to be members of trade unions. We are, um, less likely to do things like go to parent-teacher, um, evenings if we're a parent. So we just do less with others than we did in the past. And then there's what I would call the neoliberal mindset, which is really the particular capitalist mindset that has dominated the last few decades, ever really since the 1980s when it was promulgated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And this is really a mindset that firmly put the individual at the center, a kind of me, I-centric philosophy that, um, really valorized self-interest and selfishness. And we even see this in the way that pop song lyrics evolved from the 1980s onwards, where we see words like we, us, and our being steadily supplanted by words like me, myself, I, which is fascinating. And an I-centric, me-centric world was inevitably always going to be a lonelier one.

Chris Williamson 23:53 Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's important. I'm a massive champion of a meritocracy. I'm also a huge champion of upward mobility, personal sovereignty, taking agency and control of your own actions. But I can see how that taken to its extreme can lead to a loneliness. And, uh, kind of talking about, it's the same theme throughout all of this that we want the good bits of what we can get out that's good, but as soon as we start to push it to an extreme with technology, with independence, and sort of, uh, uh, sovereignty-

Noreena Hertz 24:26 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 24:26 ... of the individual, when you take it to the extreme, you also then get malignant effects that come as a byproduct of that too. And finding the messy middle, finding what's good of that without taking too much of it, I think, is a-... a real challenge.

Noreena Hertz 24:40 And also recognizing that there are trade-offs we sometimes have to make between individualism and community, between freedom and fraternity. Th- these aren't binary choices we have to make, but it's recognizing that we have to give probably a bit of one to get more of the other.

Chris Williamson 25:01 What about city design?

Noreena Hertz 25:04 Yes. That's something I look at a lot in my book and there's a whole chapter on that. Cities are, and again, some people are surprised by this finding, but cities, it turns out, are the loneliest habitats in which to live. You might think with all these people around you, you wouldn't be lonely. Well, it turns out, that isn't the case. It's partly about the speed of the city. You know, everyone rushing, go, go, go. In fact, (laughs) research, I found this fascinating, that the richer a city, the faster its citizens walk, and also, the denser a city, the less civil its citizens are to each other, (laughs) which I find fascinating as well. So cities, these rushing places where people are not really civil to each other or that civil to each other, um, you know, are inevitably going to be lonelier places. But cities also designed, in most cases, more really for cars, all too often, than people. The scale of a city can be alienating and isolating with increasingly what I call hostile architecture dotted around the city, so, um, benches, uh, lights, uh, spikes, grilles, designed with the expressed purpose of excluding certain groups. For example, there's, um, a shopping mall which, um, has a very special kind of pinky light in the, um, bathrooms to dissuade teenagers from hanging out there because it shows up acne. Um, there's also this kind of high-pitched sonic sound that some other shopping malls are using which apparently only young people can hear. It's something about what... there's something that happens in your ears as you get older when you, and you don't hear these frequencies as well, um, and also to dissuade people from, young people from hanging out there. We see it with benches even. Um, there's a bench near to where I live, the Camden Bench it's called, designed specifically, this kind of sloping bench, um, to really dissuade skateboarders to skate on it, homeless people to lie on it, but of course, then being a bench which no one really can sit on including the elderly woman who might have wanted to sit there, watch the world go by and chat to passersby. So cities, yeah, in many ways, being designed intentionally to exclude, thereby, um, making them lonely for significant swaths of people in them.

Chris Williamson 27:51 I went to Rome last year and I went to go see the Colosseum, and as a part of that, the tour guide showed us that, I'm gonna get this wrong, it's something like 100,000 people I think that the Colosseum at its absolute max could have in, and they could exit all 100,000 people in under 10 minutes. And one of the strategies that they implemented was that the steps as you were going down, they were sloped towards the exit so you couldn't slow down. As soon as you begin moving down the steps-

Noreena Hertz 28:19 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:19 ... your feet have to go faster to catch up. And I'm like, "Well," I- i- in a world that doesn't have suing and sort of litigative lawsuits around "I fell down your steps getting out of the gladiatorial arena," like when that, that isn't an option, I think it probably makes for a, probably makes for a good idea to get people out of a stadium quickly but not safely, and also probably a bit of a shit bench. Uh-

Noreena Hertz 28:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:40 ... what about... What, what are some of the most extreme examples of loneliness that you found?

Noreena Hertz 28:47 Uh, my... It's, it's probably Carl. So, I had heard that people, um, paid to be cuddled, that, that there was... that a growing industry, a growing part of what I've called the loneliness economy, was people paying to be cuddled. And w- and I started investigating this online initially, and came across a woman called Jean. Jean is a professional cuddler. Um, she is in Venice Beach in California, and she introduced me to some of her clients, and when I was in Los Angeles, I met with one of them. Let's call him Carl, and he came in, I met him in a Starbucks. Um, I think it was Johnny Cash playing on the, um, radio, and he, um, walked in, nice-looking man, early 50s, salt-and-pepper hair, chinos, button-down shirt, sat down and told me his story. And it turned out he'd moved to Los Angeles a few years before from a small town and didn't know anyone in the city, and he was divorced, and he didn't know anyone in the city and felt really lonely, and really craved intimacy. He'd tried online dating, um, but it really wasn't for him, he said. And he then heard about paid cuddling, and he started seeing Jean, and he said it absolutely transformed his life. Now, this, by the way, he's a media executive earning a six-figure salary working for a-

Chris Williamson 30:26 Single, I'm going to guess.

Noreena Hertz 30:28 Single, working for a big media corporation. Yeah. He started seeing Jean. He said it transformed his life. Um, he went from being really down, really depressed to feeling really positive. His productivity at work, he told me, shot up.... you know, a fascinating story. And so he told me he was seeing Jean once a week, and I said, "Gosh, that's a lot." And then he said, "You're not using my real name, are you?" And I said, "No." And he said, "Well, if I'm ... Let me then tell you something else." And I said, "What?" And he said, "Well, seeing Jean hasn't ended up being enough, and so I'm actually seeing other people to pay to be cuddled." And by the way, we w- I ... This was made very clear this was not a sexual thing. This was about intimacy, about wanting to be held, touched, not in a sexual way. And, um, and I said, "Gosh, that must be really expensive. How are you paying for it?" And he said, "I'm living in my car." This was s- somebody who was so craving connection and intimacy that in order to pay for it, he was living in his car, showering at the 24/7 gym that he was parking outside, leaving his food in the fridge in work. I mean, I found that such a disturbing story, such a sad story. Um, yeah, so I think that was probably one of the most extreme ones I came across. O- on the other end of the age spectrum, um, another story that I did find really moving was what's going on in Japan with elderly pensioners, who are the fastest-growing demographic when it comes to people being incarcerated, people going to jail. And the reason for it, researchers who've studied this phenomenon, is because they're so lonely, this group of pensioners, who are intent ... who are committing crimes like shoplifting in order to be jailed, that they want to be jailed in order to find the company and companionship that jail provides. You know, uh, 40% of these gelled pensioners, um, have no relationship with their families. 50% haven't seen any friends in recent months even. So again, a really sad story, but these are at the, these are at the extremes. It's important to again remember how pervasive lo- lo- loneliness is amongst all of us.

Chris Williamson 33:03 How do you get jailed as a Japanese granny?

Noreena Hertz 33:07 Shoplifting.

Chris Williamson 33:08 Yeah, of course. But just really badly done?

Noreena Hertz 33:13 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:14 Like, really obvious shoplift- like walking out with a huge teddy bear or, like, a TV under your arm or something?

Noreena Hertz 33:20 If you're elderly, you might not be able to carry the TV, so-

Chris Williamson 33:22 Something like, yeah. Teddy bears. Teddy bears are good options.

Noreena Hertz 33:25 So maybe, maybe the teddy bear. Maybe the teddy bear.

Chris Williamson 33:27 Marshmallows, uh, other light objects. Yeah-

Noreena Hertz 33:31 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:31 ... uh, I, I don't, I don't really know what to think about that. I mean, the, the, your man from LA, obviously-

Noreena Hertz 33:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 33:39 ... that's, that's a, a very bizarre example. I wonder how much of that is a pathology on his part and how much of that is a byproduct of loneliness. Um, and-

Noreena Hertz 33:47 Well, what was, what was interesting was I actually went to Jean's Cuddle Sanctuary as well when I was in, um, Venice Beach.

Chris Williamson 33:54 Oh, God. Is it like a ... Is it like a sort of a ... No, I don't want to use the word brothel because I know that we're steering clear of sexy stuff here, but kind of like a sort of a madam's house, but it's all different. Would you like to cuddle in the pink room today, or in the cloud, or in the unicorn lounge?

Noreena Hertz 34:09 So, I've got to say, before I went there, I was really nervous and I was thinking, "What am I letting myself in for?" But actually, it was much more akin to a yoga studio-

Chris Williamson 34:21 Oh my God. (laughs)

Noreena Hertz 34:22 ... with, with, with the people coming in-

Chris Williamson 34:24 Incense and the music.

Noreena Hertz 34:25 With the ... Yeah, yeah. It didn't have incense, but it kind of had, you know, beanbag-type things on the floor and, like, you know, those tubes that pe- that ... in gyms you can kind of use to lie on them and do your exercises. It was a bit like that, dotted around, and mats on the floor, kind of like those mats that you see in yoga studios. And the people attending ... So it was a group cuddle session. The people attending-

Chris Williamson 34:52 So you get paired up with random, random other humans for a cuddle?

Noreena Hertz 34:56 So, what happens is you pay to attend, and then you sit around, um, in a circle and you all meet each other. What was really interesting was everyone looked so normal. I mean, this d- uh, you know, I didn't know what to expect, but everyone just ... This really looked ... They looked like people who were going to their local gym class or yoga class, you know, wearing kind of comfortable clothes, tracksuits-

Chris Williamson 35:20 No obvious physical deficiencies or people sort of-

Noreena Hertz 35:23 No, not at all.

Chris Williamson 35:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Noreena Hertz 35:24 And then, um, what happened then was you kind of moved around with dif- to different people, and were cuddled, and cuddled them. And-

Chris Williamson 35:34 Oh, so it's like a car keys in the bowl-type job, but for, for that, and then you swap and you change and you keep on going. "Oh, I had a cuddle with Jeanie now."

Noreena Hertz 35:42 Yeah, but you keep your ... Yeah, but you keep your clothes on, and, and it's all very consensual. So you say, uh, "Would it be okay if I put my arm around you?" And then the person has to say yes or no. But what was really ... I mean, it wasn't really for me. I don't think it played well, so-

Chris Williamson 35:59 Did you not have a go?

Noreena Hertz 36:00 ... to my ... No, I did have a go, but it wasn't-

Chris Williamson 36:01 Did you have a go ... Did you have a go with Jeanie?

Noreena Hertz 36:04 I had a go. Yes, I had a go.

Chris Williamson 36:06 Yeah.

Noreena Hertz 36:06 I mean, I, I went, I, like, experienced it. And the experience was, I'd say, not really for me.

Chris Williamson 36:13 (laughs)

Noreena Hertz 36:13 I think my British reserve kind of didn't, didn't play well to the group cuddling, but I, I went for it. I, you know, I went for it to see what it felt like. But what was really interesting afterwards, 'cause this is speaking to whether Carl had some weird pathology, I don't think he did because, you know, this group of people who I chatted to afterwards, they were so normal, and their reasons for it were just quite straightforward. One of them, um, a woman from Texas. Again, an attractive woman from Texas. She'd moved to, um-... California. She was divorced. She said, you know, she didn't want to be in a relationship right now but she craved having some intimacy and some touch. Another woman, a university administrator in her 20s, she told me again that she... it was intimacy. She was missing connection, a feeling of connection in an increasingly disconnected world. So, um, it was actually interesting how not strange the people were, yeah, who were doing it.

Chris Williamson 37:21 What happens physiologically when someone's lonely?

Noreena Hertz 37:26 So, when we're lonely, we think of loneliness really as being something that only affects our mental health. But actually, loneliness does, you're right, affect us physiologically too. It's really because of how we've evolved, because we are essentially creatures of togetherness, hardwired to connect. Our bodies have been designed so that when we're not connected to others, when we feel lonely, um, it sends alarm bells ringing, kind of putting us into a really strong state of fight or flight. So our blood pressure goes up, our heart rate goes up, our levels of cortisol, which we can measure in our saliva, go up when we're lonely. All of us are s- all of these things just essentially telling our body, "Stop being lonely, go and find someone to hang out with and be with." Um, and the trouble is that even though in a many ways this is a great, uh, piece of evolutionary design, in the modern world when so many people are lonely for protracted periods of time, this actually makes you really quite unwell. Um, it's like if you were driving a car in first gear. Um, you know, for the first initial moments, that's great. That's what you (laughs) want to be doing. But if you're doing it over time, that's really going to damage your engine. And so too, when you're lonely for protracted of... periods of time are our bodies physically damaged. Um, in fact, researchers have found that loneliness is as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Chris Williamson 39:11 I'd seen that stat. How-

Noreena Hertz 39:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:14 ... how does that tie in? Because obviously I'm not gonna get emphysema, you know-

Noreena Hertz 39:18 Yes.

Chris Williamson 39:18 ... I'm not, I'm not gonna be impacting my lungs. Do you know-

Noreena Hertz 39:20 Yes.

Chris Williamson 39:20 Can you dig into that a little bit more?

Noreena Hertz 39:21 In te- Yes. So, um, so we know for example that if you're lonely you have a 30% higher chance of, um, getting heart disease. If you're lonely you have a 40% higher chance of getting dementia. Um, if you're lonely you also have a higher risk of getting stroke. If you're lonely and you're already i- ill, you're le- less likely to recover as well. So it's all those sorts of factors which is how-

Chris Williamson 39:51 Wh- why is that manifesting? Do you know? Did they look at why that's, that's coming up? Like you've got some pretty strong physiological adaptations-

Noreena Hertz 39:57 Very strong.

Chris Williamson 39:57 ... maladaptations.

Noreena Hertz 39:59 Yes. Well, it's really because of this continuous state of being on red alert, fight or flight, high blood pressure, high stress levels, um, a- are really bad for us when they're sustained because what they do is they dampen our ability to fight infection, and they increase our inflammation levels in our body, and both of those, our ability to fight infection and raised inflammation levels, um, are really bad for our life expectancy and for our health. So that's- that's why essentially.

Chris Williamson 40:34 I wonder how much... What we're talking about here are diseases which will tend to manifest in older age, but we're talking about a group of specifically young people i- across the spectrum, but some very young people. I wonder how much harm can be done and then undone, you know, like the person who used to party really hard when they're young and they've now decided to go teetotal.

Noreena Hertz 41:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:00 I wonder what sort of chronic changes we're going to see from young people who are maybe, um, who d- suffer with loneliness, then perhaps they get into a happy marriage and they have kids and they have lots of dogs and cats and live in the country away from a big city and stuff like that. I wonder, it'll be fascinating to look at that in, you know, sort of 50 years time and see what's actually going on.

Noreena Hertz 41:21 So the bad news is that researchers have looked at this-

Chris Williamson 41:25 Oh.

Noreena Hertz 41:25 ... and what they found is that even relatively short periods of loneliness, so under two years of feeling lonely, um, can have a significant impact on your life expectancy.

Chris Williamson 41:40 Shit.

Noreena Hertz 41:43 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 41:43 Shit the bed.

Noreena Hertz 41:44 But the good, the good news is... Okay, the good news on the other hand, let me get onto that then, is that, um, actively helping others, feeling connected to others, feeling part of a community is good for our health and actually is shown to improve our life expectancy. So even if you've had a period of loneliness, if you then invest, like actually invest in strengthening your relationships, in being part of a community and also in caring for others, because people who give no one else any help it turns out also have their life expectancy slashed. Whereas helping others makes you live longer. Um, so there are things you can do, um, to repair that damage from your past, if that was your past.

Chris Williamson 42:35 Sitting, sitting is the new smoking was a term that I coined when I bought this beautiful standing desk last year, but it's now loneliness is also the new. So sitting or loneliness are both the new smoking and you're not allowed... And smoking's also s-

Noreena Hertz 42:46 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 42:46 Smoking's the old smoking but it's still going, so you need to watch out for that. There is a, a number of ways that you can reduce your life expectancy. So moving through this, it, it seems like a common antidote here, just off the top of my head, is find a partner that loves you.... find a partner that loves you, build a family. Surely, that's one of the most robust solutions to not being lonely. I'm sure that there's many parents that are listening that wish that they could feel lonely having to take Cindy to school in a morning, and Joseph to football on a nighttime, and stuff like that.

Noreena Hertz 43:17 Well, again, just being in a relationship doesn't necessarily alleviate loneliness, and it can actually make you lonelier. One of the reasons women, um, is one of the groups which have become lonelier through this pandemic is because of the rise of domestic abuse that we've seen during the pandemic too. Um, and I'm loathe to make marriage the solution for the contemporary loneliness crisis. I think what your question does speak to correctly, however, is the importance of having strong relationships in our lives and investing in our relationships and our support structures, which don't have to be those, um, traditional ones of a marriage or a partner. Investing in our friendships also can alleviate loneliness very successfully too.

Chris Williamson 44:10 Can a friendship replace the level of contact that you get from a relationship, though? We're talking about someone that you get to spend some time with, but unless you decide to actually live in a house together, perhaps with this friend for a really con- uh, uh, expanded period of time, that compared with the number of h- the sheer number of hours, the time and attention that you're going to get in a marriage, surely there... I- I'm aware that, uh, time-

Noreena Hertz 44:35 Its quality. Its quality.

Chris Williamson 44:36 ... time together doesn't necessarily equal-

Noreena Hertz 44:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:39 ... the, the level of connection, but the presumption is, or at least I would hope, that most people who stay in a marriage for a long time, hopefully it's not abusive, hopefully it has got a level of connection. You're having kids. You're trying to support them, raise them, create a family that is meaningful and, and has purpose, and it moves towards a common goal of building a better life for everybody that's within that household. I wonder how many friends equal a good partner, if that makes sense.

Noreena Hertz 45:04 I think a good marriage is a wonderful thing for sure, but I'm not sure how many people are in a good marriage. And so that being the case-

Chris Williamson 45:14 Divorce rates probably suggests-

Noreena Hertz 45:15 Yeah. Exactly. And so that being the case, I would say that investing in good friendships, um, is really important to do too.

Chris Williamson 45:23 Yeah. The, the, the, I suppose good friendships are quite robust, aren't they? You tend to s-

Noreena Hertz 45:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:27 ... see people go in and out of relationships more quickly than they do lifelong friends.

Noreena Hertz 45:32 Yeah. I mean, my friendships, like, we're really there for each other. I, I really believe that, uh, and, and have seen it through the years.

Chris Williamson 45:41 Yeah. Let's talk about remote working. Obviously, uh, upon starting, whatever, three years ago writing your book and then hitting 2020, like, the loneliest year in history, the creation of the word lockdown, the creation of the word sort of tiered, uh, social isolation, you know-

Noreena Hertz 46:00 Social distancing.

Chris Williamson 46:01 Social distancing. Sorry. Yes.

Noreena Hertz 46:02 I mean-

Chris Williamson 46:03 Sorry. All right.

Noreena Hertz 46:03 Yes. No, no. Social isolation as well, but social distancing, that's such an kind of... it's almost like, I mean, that we were prescribing, telling people to socially distance.

Chris Williamson 46:13 Quarantine, isolate. Yeah. That, it's not, it's not been a, a year of a glossary-filled book of words that's nice, is it?

Noreena Hertz 46:20 No.

Chris Williamson 46:20 It wasn't like social cuddling or like house fun or so... It was all like sort of fairly nasty words. Thinking about that, I know that you talked about, um, the work industry, how people feel in the workplace.

Noreena Hertz 46:35 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 46:35 What's your thoughts on the, the new normal of remote working?

Noreena Hertz 46:38 So I don't believe it is the new normal, firstly, um, because I think there was this initial euphoria, uh, when remote working was introduced. But by and large, this is really wearing thin, and I think most people by now, um, are expressing quite clearly to their employers that they actually want to go back to the office. Um, especially young people, um, who, you know, maybe have got a really not that ideal work environment to be working from, um, and are missing the chats at the, um, water cooler and, and when you're making your cups of coffee in the shared kitchen. So, um, so where the idea that people actually really want to keep on working remotely, I don't think it's the case. Of course, some companies, you know, have been looking at how things have been unfolding over recent months, and they're looking at this with glee, thinking that this is a justification for them now massively reducing their physical footprint. Why provide offices if everyone can just work from home? But I would caution that, because what I discovered in my research was that lonely workers not only feel bad themselves, but lonely workers are bad for business itself, with lonely workers less productive, less motivated, less efficient than workers who are not, and also more likely to jump ship. Um, in a study of thousands of workers across a number of countries, um, they found that workers who were lonely were 60% more likely to quit.

Chris Williamson 48:26 Shit. I, I was really interested around the insights of open office spaces versus cubicle office spaces, and the fact that open office spaces actually cause people to feel more lonely. And you were saying, I think it was on Chris Evans or something, uh, that you sometimes go into the office, you got your, the noise-canceling headphones in because you're like, "It's gonna be loud in here, and annoying," and all the rest of it. And I can totally see how the openness of an open plan office actually causes people to open up less, because they know that everybody in the room essentially can hear what they're going to say. Um, yeah.

Noreena Hertz 48:59 Yes.

Chris Williamson 48:59 It's a, it's a... so perhaps the new abnormal we could call remote working. And I, I definitely get it as well that from the...... pure rationalist, utilitarian perspective. Well, look, you've saved 10 hours a week on your commute to work, and you've half an hour there and back each day, and plus, look, you get to work with pajama bottoms on. You only have to wear a shirt on your top half now-

Noreena Hertz 49:21 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 49:21 ... 'cause you do (laughs) Zoom calls. Or no pants at all as some of my friends have sent me selfies of just them in their boxers with a shirt and tie on top doing a Zoom-

Noreena Hertz 49:29 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 49:29 ... doing a Zoom meeting. Just never-

Noreena Hertz 49:30 I have no idea what y- I've got no idea what you've got on.

Narrator 49:33 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 49:33 Yeah, uh, look, well, that's, that's precisely why you can only see up to my waist. Um, (laughs) yeah, that, that is never gonna get boring, but not only does that not speak to necessarily the full gamut of requirements that we have as a human, but we don't even know what we want. A lot of the time we think, "Well, look, I've saved this time. I'm spending more time. I get to go to the gym, or I get to do this, that, and the other." But the, um, the thread of knowing what the inputs are in our life and how they make us feel, you know, uh, we'd never need a therapist or a doctor if we were-

Noreena Hertz 50:09 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 50:09 ... fully cognizant about those things, right? But we're not.

Noreena Hertz 50:12 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:12 We don't, we, we, we don't-

Noreena Hertz 50:13 Right.

Chris Williamson 50:13 ... know just how much we need to awkwardly say hello to the cleaner on our way in and our way out, or like the receptionist that we're not too sure, does she like me, does she not like me?

Noreena Hertz 50:23 Uh, I think that's one of the things interestingly that the pandemic and the past however many months it now is, um, has made us, however, recognize more than we were aware of before those little micro-exchanges and how much they m- actually matter, whether it is that chat in the café to the server, or whether it is the conversation you might have in your local bookstore, or whether it is, um, the, um, "Hello," um, those conversations (laughs) you might have at a club in the evening with those people who you don't ever see outside of the club-

Chris Williamson 51:05 Mm-hmm.

Noreena Hertz 51:05 ... but in some shape or form (laughs) , they are in some way who you'd consider to be your friends. I think, or even, um, those colleagues in the office who maybe you never really thought of as friends, but now as months have gone by, you're thinking, "Actually, they kind of were friends-"

Chris Williamson 51:20 Yeah.

Noreena Hertz 51:20 "... at least in some way." And then once the-

Chris Williamson 51:21 Actually, you miss, miss Smelly Bill, and, and, and, and-

Noreena Hertz 51:24 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 51:25 ... Dopey Joe, and, or whatever, you know, the weird nicknames that you've got for all of the people that are-

Noreena Hertz 51:28 I don't know where you've been working.

Chris Williamson 51:30 No. There's Smelly Bill.

Noreena Hertz 51:32 Um, but, (laughs) but, um, but yes, so I think one of the things actually that we are more attuned to is how important those micro-exchanges actually are. And when it comes to remote work, there was a big experiment done in China a couple of years ago where a big company, half of their employees were sent to work from home for six months, and at the end of six months, they were given the option, "You can either return to the office or, um, stay at home." And the vast majority rushed back even though they had really long commutes. The craving for face-to-face interaction was actually stronger.

Chris Williamson 52:10 That's really interesting. I'm reading The Happiness Hypothesis by Jon- I'm go- just Jonathan Haidt like down the rabbit hole at the moment, and, um-

Noreena Hertz 52:16 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 52:17 ... he says that the length of commute to work is one of the, um, easiest ha- reducing your commute to work is one of the easiest hacks to increase happiness across your life. But because people tend, uh, s- specifically in America, tend to prefer to have a big square footage house because it's impressive, and it gives them status, and it makes them feel important and so on and so forth, uh, they'll tend to live further outside of a city so they can afford a bigger house, which causes bigger commute. But the converse of that is that obviously the commute to work enables you to see the people who are at work.

Noreena Hertz 52:51 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 52:52 So perhaps that's a-

Noreena Hertz 52:52 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 52:53 ... perhaps that's a price, and it comes back to what we were saying before, right, like these gradations, what is the price-

Noreena Hertz 52:57 Yes.

Chris Williamson 52:57 ... that we have to pay to get ourselves to this particular situation? Something else I've been thinking a lot about this year, obviously, my industry, Club Promo, uh, I employ up to about 1,000 students every year who are 18 to 21, freshers arriving at university, you know, some fresh-faced, wet-behind-the-years young guys and girls who've arrived from Leeds or Manchester or Birmingham or something, and they come to Newcastle full of gumption and ready to do Geordie Shore, and-

Noreena Hertz 53:24 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 53:24 ... they have been through, like this year as a student must have been total hell. You've been locked down in your halls of residence. Birley Halls in Manchester, you'll have seen was 1,700 students socially isolated, not even able to go down to the front door to collect Deliveroo or Amazon, uh, Prime parcels for stuff that they needed, all manner of crazy, crazy situations. And I wonder, we- we've sort of talked about what the, um, more small gathering, interpersonal, one-to-one, one-to-two situation, but that collective effervescence that you spoke about, the way that people feel, sports fans feel when they get to chant their team's name when they're watching a, a game go on, the way that it feels when your favorite song come on, like when WAP comes on in a club or whatever it is (laughs) , and you, you're able to dance with your friends, and you have, you go up and you meet people, um, first off, I wonder what sort of an effect that's going to have, and secondly, I wonder how long it's going to be, it's a broader question, how long it's going to be before we look at the world we have now, social distancing, masks outside, um, limited social contact, no clubs, no bars, no mingling between groups, when we see, 'cause even now I see on TV the old world, the world from pre-2020, and think, "That looks alien. That looks bizarre. That obviously wasn't filmed this year. That's not the world that I inhabit right now." Um, so yeah, a, a whole host of potential sort of negative downstream effects from what's going on.

Noreena Hertz 54:50 So, I'm actually more, more optimistic on this front.

Chris Williamson 54:54 One of us needs to be.

Noreena Hertz 54:54 Um, I think if we look, I think if we look back historically, there's reason for optimism. If you think just a few years after the 1918 Spanish flu-... bars, nightclubs, cafes were heaving. The roaring '20s-

Chris Williamson 55:09 Is that so?

Noreena Hertz 55:10 ... after all. Yeah. The roaring '20s came after, right up the back of the 1918 Spanish Flu situation, very similar to this. If you think about how in Taipei, as soon as people were allowed to, 5,000 people were congregating each night to watch Phantom of the Opera. Now, like in the last few months, if you think about, if you've be- if you've been tracking what's going on in Sydney or Christchurch, um, so Australia or New Zealand, we're seeing music festivals packed with people, nightclubs packed with people dancing. In Israel, after yoga studios were able to open again people were circling the blocks. You know, I really firmly believe that our fundamental desire to be with others is going to prevail, and, you know, I'm in absolutely no doubt about it.

Chris Williamson 56:04 So you're saying that I can be very bullish about my industry over the next few years as soon as we get back out the other side of the... Well, that's good.

Noreena Hertz 56:12 I, I, I would, I would even, yes, and I would even go, I would, I would say be really bullish because in the same way that after a period of, um, fasting, we become more hungry, after this enforced social recession, I think our desire to be with others is going to be stronger than ever.

Chris Williamson 56:31 One structural limitation that we're going to come up against there is the F&B, nightlife, leisure industry is getting pounded, and it is not cheap-

Noreena Hertz 56:42 For sure.

Chris Williamson 56:43 ... to run. Um.

Noreena Hertz 56:45 For sure.

Chris Williamson 56:45 There's a big venue up he- You'll have been to a Tiger Tiger before at some point in the, uh, uh, in, in your life, and, um, they were purchased by a company called Deltic, huge big, uh, publicly traded company. They own a ton of different venues. They turned them into Prisms, and they bought Lava Ignite, and they bought Lumina that used to have Liquid and LQ.

Noreena Hertz 57:02 Uh-huh.

Chris Williamson 57:02 Big, big group. And on Saturday, I had to drive into the Newcastle one to pull all of our inflatables out before the administrators go in this week. And I turn up outside, and there's a queue of lorries, five lorries, 10 cars, all in this little side street that's usually, like, my secret parking spot. And there, anything that isn't stapled or drilled into the floor, and some things that are, are just being lifted out of this building before the administrators come in and put a big chain around the door in a couple of days' time. So you think, like, that is going to bring the guardrails in on what people can do. You know, how many yoga studios, how many gyms, bars, restaurants, little independents, plus the ones that you might have thought would've been able to weather the storm because they got deep pockets, someone like a big, publicly traded national company, like, there's no one that's safe from going pop at the moment.

Noreena Hertz 57:53 No, and it's absolutely tragic. I mean, my sister has a yoga studio, and she's experiencing this kind of firsthand. So I mean, it's ab- absolutely tragic. And yet, from the ashes of these businesses, new, um, pro-community commercialized ventures will inevitably rise. Inevitably.

Chris Williamson 58:19 Correct. As-

Noreena Hertz 58:20 And, and for those, and for those who can hunker down and weather the storm, I mean, there is light out there at the end of this tunnel, for sure.

Chris Williamson 58:31 I like that. If you were to give someone a prescription for how they can avoid loneliness as best they can, what would your best tips be?

Noreena Hertz 58:40 So, if you're feeling lonely yourself, um, is there something that you're into doing where you might be able to find other people to do it with? So, I, for example, I'm into improv. I do, I'm part of a week, I do improv every week. Um, in the old world, I would go and meet up with my fellow improvisers, but in the on-Zoom world, we've migrated to Zoom for now. But, um, but, uh, but it's really great having something that you're interested in. So whether it's improvising or singing or, um, I don't know, playing chess, collecting stamps, whatever it is, is there something that you're into where you could find other people? For now, it may have to be on Zoom, but hopefully afterwards in person. Um, is there something you can do to help others? Uh, helping others is a really good way of feeling less lonely yourself and feeling more connected to other people. Um, but you're also, of course, doing really good for someone else at the same time. You're also, as the helper, getting what's known as the helper's high, a physiological response, dopamine rush, um, (laughs) which, um, which feels good as well. So helping others feels good too. So, um, just a couple of practical things if you're lonely you could try out.

Chris Williamson 1:00:01 Yeah. The, uh, I have a friend who did Classics at Liverpool, crazy smart girl, and, um, she came out and she got a f- she walked her first, having done no preparation for the entire three years she did the degree, and started volunteering on, m- below minimum wage, at a dog's shelter, looking after-

Noreena Hertz 1:00:18 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:00:18 ... abandoned dogs. And I was like, "Well, and you've just dropped 40 grand on your degree. What are you doing?" And she's like, "No, like, I've never been this happy in my life, just, like, assisting dogs and, and..." I mean, anyone that's around that many dogs is gonna be happy, but she-

Noreena Hertz 1:00:33 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00:33 ... she, she took that as more valuable than doing a, uh, monetizing a 40,000 pound first in Classics from Liverpool. So you think, yeah, it, it, it makes a lot of sense. Surprisingly, being selfless is one of the most selfish th- things that you can do sometimes.

Noreena Hertz 1:00:50 Self-interested, yes. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00:52 (laughs) Self-interested it is. Uh, if people want to-

Noreena Hertz 1:00:55 Self-caring.

Chris Williamson 1:00:55 There we go. If people wanna check out more about you and, uh, find out more stuff, where should they go?

Noreena Hertz 1:01:01 Um, they can either go to my website, www.noreena.com. They can follow me on all my social platforms, which I am currently still on, and buy the book. Um, it's got lots more about what we've been talking about today, The Lonely Century, available in all good independent bookshops, as well as, of course, online.

Chris Williamson 1:01:22 Fantastic. That will be linked on Amazon in the show notes below. If you buy it through that, you will be supporting the show at no extra cost to yourself. And, th- it's anybody now that's able to get just their first name.com as their URL, like, that is such a rarity. You must be one of only a very few people that's able to do that, so I congratulate you on a fant-

Noreena Hertz 1:01:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:42 ... a fantastic URL.

Noreena Hertz 1:01:43 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:01:43 Noreena, today's, today's been really cool. Thank you very much for your time.

Noreena Hertz 1:01:46 Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Narrator 1:01:51 (instrumental music)