245: Allure of the Mean Friend

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is it about them, our mean friends? They treat us poorly, they don't call us back, they cancel plans at the last minute, and yet we keep coming back for more. Popular bullies exist in business, politics — everywhere. How do they stay so popular?

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Prologue: We hear kids recorded at Chicago's Navy Pier and at a public swimming pool discussing their mean friends. And Ira Glass interviews Lillie Allison, 15, about the pretty, popular girls who were her best friends—until they cast her out. (5 minutes)
Act One: Jonathan Goldstein interrogates the girls, now grown up, who terrorized him and his classmates years ago in school—and finds they can be just as scary as ever. (18 minutes)
Act Two: We conduct an experiment to test whether being nice actually pays by equipping two waitresses with hidden microphones to record their interactions. Each waitress is instructed to be super friendly with half of their tables while remaining aloof with the other half. We then compare the tips to see which approach was more profitable. (10 minutes)
Act Three: A case study in every word from a friend meaning its opposite. (4 minutes)
Act Four: An excerpt of Bernard Cooper's story about the bill he got from his own father, for the entire cost of his childhood. Actor Josh Hamilton reads. (19 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In a way, the story is always the same.
0:03.2	There was this kid.
0:04.3	She was mean.
0:05.6	She was popular.
0:07.4	It's such a fixture of childhood.
0:09.0	You can just walk up to a kid on the sidewalk or at a public pool, and they'll tell you.
0:12.8	The popularist is this girl.
0:15.6	She's in my grade.
0:17.7	She's really mean.
0:19.6	And she has a lot of friends.
0:22.5	I wanted to play with her, and then she had no friends, so she said, yeah.
0:27.1	The other day I wanted to play with her again, and her friends were there, and she said,
0:30.6	get lost.
0:31.6	Sometimes she'd be being mean to my sister, and I don't like that.
0:36.5	She's always telling somebody what they can and can't do.
0:39.3	She acts like she's bossy people.
0:41.3	She's real bossy.
0:43.3	She thinks she got the rhythm in the gear.
0:46.3	I'm mostly the popular one in my class, but I have a lot of other popular friends.
0:51.3	This boy in my class, he liked me, and every time he would come by me, I would
0:58.7	tell him to get out of my way. Everybody says that he's the, like, the nerdiest boy in our class.
1:05.7	He'll start bothering me and me and my friends. I'll tell him to leave us alone. My friends
	...

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