Greetings to, I can't say the first, but probably one of the first fully solo episodes of

the Carlos Whitaker podcast coming to you from the passenger seat in my Toyota Tundra.

The reason why I'm doing this is because Heather and I just left a conference.

And the last session that we were in was on friendship.

And it just was so good.

I think everybody in the room felt like, you know, oh, we're going to talk about friendship.

And then at the end, everyone was like, oh, I'm so glad that we talked about friendship. Because what it did, I think for everyone in the room, is it made us evaluate our friendships, evaluate who we're friends with, are we really friends with them? What do we want in a friendship? And so I thought, you know, this is probably not something that just that room full of people is struggling with. It's probably something that we're all

struggling with. It's probably a pain point. I know it's a pain point because there's books being

written on the fact that we are the most connected generation ever to walk, generations ever to walk

the face of the earth, and also the loniest uh generations ever to walk the face of the earth

we're more connected but we've got i just think that we've got more people have followers they don't have

friends what does it look like to truly have friends and so uh what it was was that this last session was

was like a panel so everybody had like three minutes just to kind of share their, you know, what it, what friendship

means to them, what it looks like for them.

I happened to be on the panel.

I had three minutes to share three thoughts, but then there were a couple other thoughts

that left me like going like, wow, like I actually want that in a friendship.

So I'm going to try as Heather's trying to merge onto the freeway here.

To give you just some thoughts that you can sit with when it comes to how to build healthy friendships.

And so let me just go and give you like my three, the three things that I mentioned, I feel like are important when it comes to defining what a friend is. I think the first thing we have to do is define what a friend is because what I realized through my 50 some odd

years of life is I had a lot of people that I was close to. I had a lot of people that I loved

hanging out with. I had a lot of people that I spend a lot of time with.

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