Don't Talk To Strangers, They Say

Taking a risk with random conversation with and without technology

The Teardown

Tuesday :: November 21st, 2023

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Most of us grew up with this edict: don’t talk to strangers. Referencing my mention of “they,” the concept was often delivered by your parents. Plenty of other people reminded you of the same advice over time. Family members reinforced your parent’s rules, and teachers guided you in safe passage from home to school and vice versa. The image branded on the side of our brains is one in which an unsuspecting young kid is somehow coerced into the car of a person they don’t know, or worse, forced.

This sequence of events probably hasn’t happened in your lifetime, but the fear of such an occurrence was real, and top of mind today as (possibly) miniature versions of your intelligence (and idiocy) wander around nearby school sidewalks and playgrounds.

Over time, you grow up. You enter adult(ish) life. You (mostly) enter the workforce. And you are thrust into situations that require interaction with random people.

These situations are different than those in the past as you’re the primary driver of that randomness: you’re at a store an hour away from your house purchasing a coffee. Still capable of speaking an order, you might say:

• Your actual order, otherwise, get the hell out of the line? It’s getting weird

• Thank you (ideally before your order)

• You’re welcome

• How’s your day in the shop going so far?

Whoa! What’s that last one about? The coffee shop is a place of transactions, not a place of idle conversation. You are unbalancing the delicate equilibrium we’ve all worked hard to maintain.

And worse yet, if the person responds, you’re conversing! That’s uncomfortable. That wastes time. Get back to waiting for your coffee with your face glued to your Instagram account.

Or, try to keep that conversation going.

Random Conversation Experiments

A recent post on Willem.com highlighted a similar status quo in lots of public places:

While enjoying my fresh wok lunch in Amsterdam, I noticed something odd: other folks coming in for something to eat ignored the person standing at the counter, preferring to order through a digital kiosk. The crazy thing about this? They are just centimeters apart!

Buying lunch in any major American city exhibits similar trends. Just last week, I walked into Fields Good Chicken in Midtown Manhattan and ordered lunch from a kiosk. I chose to not speak to the person at the counter. One aspect of this sequence that Willem glosses over is waiting in line. I had a couple of commitments lined up just after lunch and did not want to spend time waiting to order simply for the joy of a face-to-face interaction.

But the trend is obvious. You walk into a fast-lunch location (i.e. Fields, CAVA, McDonalds, etc.) and see lots of folks staring into their phones. They could be interacting, but they’re not. The sea of reasons for this lack of conversation is vast, but I think it’s muscle memory. If you walk into CAVA for thirty days straight and speak nothing more than your order, you’ll probably do the same again on day thirty-one. Why change?

Willem describes some other examples of habitual anti-conversation behavior:

Now, with the rise of digital technologies, one can't help but feel something might be at risk, an intangible cost of modern efficiency: our ability to talk to strangers.

We shop online, scan our groceries at the self-checkout, order a taxi via an app, and sit behind our screens in the cafe or coffee bar. Contact with random strangers is becoming rarer and rarer. Yet there are surprising benefits to having a simple conversation with someone you don't know.

Perhaps you’re reading that passage and asking yourself why you need any of this interaction. You’re doing just fine without it. I scan my groceries because I do it quickly and leave without any unnecessary talking. I shop online because it often but not always saves my time. Time costs something.

The tail end of that quote mentions “surprising benefits” but doesn’t call them out. What are they? He continues:

Even a short and simple conversation can make you feel good. You might learn something unexpected, and without a doubt, it has the power to enrich your understanding of others. Like the author of the book about meeting strangers, I set out to see for myself if this was really true.

I once also set out to explore meeting complete strangers on purpose. My mandate wasn’t to spark conversation in a random setting but instead to purposely organize myself into a situation with random people.

Random Conversation: Powered By Technology

I didn’t have enthralling conversations over text, Zoom, or FaceTime with folks I didn’t know. Instead, I met them in person at a restaurant in New York City. A now defunct service called Greet facilitated our gathering. I wrote about it five years ago:

…Folks with and without friends alike sometimes want to meet people outside of their 1st and 2nd-degree networks. They want to practice their social skills. They miss the rush of talking with someone new. Often, they’re just new to a particular place and don’t yet know anyone else. Enter, Greet. Disclaimer: NYC only, for now.

Greet is a service that organizes hangouts for groups of people who don’t already know each other. Users answer numerous questions focused on their motivations and preferences and craft a short bio. Greet’s magical AI (i.e., a human) polishes the bio with some extra humor and often better spelling and grammar.

In further discussion of his experiments, Willem talks briefly about initiating random conversation:

Over the past few weeks, I have been engaging in conversations with random people: at the train station, in the supermarket, on the street, and in the city. I always start cautiously, simply greeting someone or making an 'easy comment' on things like the weather or something equally innocuous

Greet modified parts of Willem’s process, requiring a bio and a list of interests. Someone (or something) reviewed those data points, wrote some names on small strips of paper, and picked names out of a hat full of enough people with roughly similar motivations. You then met with as many as six of Greet’s selections.

I tried Greet twice. It was, in the first pass, entirely random (for me). In the second pass, the dossier was a bit more curated. Some of us were together again in a restaurant because we chose the other people as conversation partners. Might that have been the early days of friendship? Yes, certainly.

Greet wasn’t something I tried again, but not for lack of interest. As it happens, life with a six-month-old interrupted my free time, and Greet rather quickly imploded into small pile of assets for later liquidation.

There are other similar services out there today, shoving aside the entire dating app category from “other” in this context. One service called LunchClub landed in my inbox at one point. In contrast to Greet, LunchClub matches you with just one other person, obviously and again using AI because otherwise what is your business worth, really. I haven’t tried it, and maybe I will as a follow-up experiment to this post. There’s also Intro, a service that facilitates one-on-one meetings with “the world’s top founders.” You get the idea.

With that framing in mind, SoulCycle’s now-departed founders are operating again with a new business spun around the random-group concept, but with a twist.

Not Neighborhood, Peoplehood

The NYTimes title describing Peoplehood captures one view of platform’s essence:

SoulCycle Without the Bike

And, the intro:

For their second act, the fitness entrepreneurs Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler are building a company centered on workouts for the self.

For a moment, calm your tendency to react to a tech-vision take on group conversation. The concept “workouts for the self” causes a slight elevation in your eyebrows, right?

My last post was all about maintenance, and in this post, one related idea I’m thinking about is random conversation as maintenance. Perhaps Willem is right; a short and simple conversation can make you feel good. And repeated enough times, is proactive chit-chat a good and self-reinforced habit? I think so.

People thought SoulCycle was a cult in its earlier days. It was, in some sense, exactly that. Part of the appeal was building fitness, wearing spandex, and landing coveted superiority-signaling seats in front of the instructor. Another part of the appeal was building connections with other class members. I have good friends that met and chose to befriend each other as a result of repeated sightings at spin class. There are other examples out there as well, like CrossFit - perhaps stigmatized as a cult the most.

In Peoplehood sessions, Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler (SoulCycle’s founders) employ guides that lead people through their self-centered workouts. Those workouts focus on listening and talking but begin with breathing exercises. Said another way, Peoplehood is a modern take on group therapy, with a slick website, slick marketing, and slick founders.

Of course, some folks urge caution, and why not? Everyone should comprehensively understand what they’re getting into. From the NYTimes article:

The author Amanda Montell, who argued that SoulCycle played a “churchly role” in the lives of its customers in her 2021 book, “Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism,” said she was skeptical of the company in the works from Ms. Cutler and Ms. Rice.

“Putting your physical fitness in the hands of spinning instructors feels like less of a risk than putting your spiritual, psychological and emotional health in the hands of someone trying to build and scale a giant business,” Ms. Montell said.

There’s some nuance to think about. Facebook desperately wants you to believe it cares about connecting people to each other but it cares more (or only) about making money from advertising. That’s not wrong. It’s reality.

For Peoplehood, I think the reality is more complicated. The company is a business, yes, that strives to make a profit at some point. But unlike Facebook, Peoplehood’s business is divorced from its core offering.

When you sit with a small group of folks and talk about deeply interesting or personal topics, or coalesce around a group-led topic, that discussion might feel really good. Perhaps you’ll be immensely positive afterwards. Maybe you’ll scribble a note for something to research further. Maybe you are courageous enough to say something out loud that you’ve never described or admitted to anyone else.

None of this seems so bad, even if you have to fork over money to engage. Of course, the risks are there, and the real possibility of negative feelings or outcomes. Engaging a random group of people, guided or not, is courageous.

Possible Needs: Random Chat, Connections, Or Friends

The answer for most people is all three. Some describe themselves as truly introverted and disinterested in people. I’ve heard something like this many times: “I don’t like other people.”

That statement polarizes a conversation rather quickly but points to two personality types. They are:

1. People who do not consciously feel they need community to traverse day-to-day life

2. People who require community to help them navigate their days, stress, work, and more

I’m not so sure that I can bucket everyone into one or the other category. Some people seem to float between them. What I’ve realized over time is I am firmly and more than ever a member of camp #2.

It’s not that I need truly random conversation to feel human every day (coffee!), but I do need active and stimulating conversation every day to maintain some sense of normalcy. Fortunately, I speak to random people all day for work - one conduit through which I achieve the goal. And, I’m reminding myself more and more these days to engage with friends without an agenda, but instead simply to converse.

Is there a closing edict to all of this? Not exactly. But recent (from October) Pew Research into friendship in the US is illuminating. Pew describes what men and women talk about with their friends:

Women are much more likely than men to say they talk to their close friends about their family extremely often or often (67% vs. 47%).

Women also report talking about their physical health (41% vs. 31%) and mental health (31% vs. 15%) more often than men do with close friends. The gender gap on mental health is particularly wide among adults younger than 50: 43% of women in this age group, compared with 20% of men, say they often discuss this topic with close friends.

By smaller but still significant margins, women are also more likely than men to talk often about their work (61% vs. 54%) and pop culture (37% vs. 32%) with their close friends.

Men, in turn, are more likely than women to say they talk with their close friends about sports (37% vs. 13%) and current events (53% vs. 44%).

That men talk about sports more than women is a big nothing-burger. That much is obvious in nearly every setting. But the gaps for other topics are, at a minimum, worth internalizing.

Perhaps the goal in random connection is something simpler: making more people comfortable chatting about more topics. Conversation with a random group of people is scary, yes, but also carries no prior perception of what you know or don’t know and might divulge.

Let’s get women talking more about current events with friends. And let’s get men talking more about mental health with the guys. And, maybe, we’ll all collectively feel good because we’ve simply put our phones away, ignored work emails and Instagram, and started talking to someone wherever we happen to be.