Hello and welcome to The Upgrade, the podcast from the team at Lifehacker.com, where we help you improve your life one week at a time.

I'm Melissa Kirsch, editor-in-chief of Lifehacker. And I'm Alice Bradley, Deputy Editor of Lifehacker. Today we're

talking about awkwardness, how it plagues us in social situations, how technology makes it so much

worse, and how it can actually be beneficial to us in ways we haven't considered. We talked to

relationship expert Tai Tishiro, author of the new book, Awkward,

the Science of Why We're Socially Awkward and Why That's Awesome.

There's upsides to awkwardness, things like a sharp focus,

and especially this intensity and persistence.

And Lifehacker writer Beth Squeerke has a story for us about awkwardness in the digital age.

Every time I started to dial, my heart raced. I wished I could just chuck my cell phone and run away from this career.

So we're talking about awkwardness today. Yes. And that's not a topic I know anything about. I don't know about you.

Nothing at all. Always totally at ease, never awkward silence. You know exactly what

to say at all times. Always. I'm pitch perfect at all times. I recently was at a party and had an

extremely awkward evening and I feel the need to unload on you. Tell me. Bring it. This story.

Laying on me. Well, I was with some people I don't really know and we're sitting at kind of a

dinner thing, but people were kind of moving around. So it was kind of like a dinner party.

A dinner party. You're describing what sounds like a dinner party. A dinner party thing.

Was there food? There was food. So it was a dinner party. And I was sitting with people I didn't know

and I couldn't find a way into the conversation. And I kind of had

that realization, like, they're not going to let me in, but I didn't know where else to go. So I just

kind of hitched a ride with their conversation and nodded for what seemed like an hour. It was

probably 10 minutes, and I'm sure they didn't even notice. So you were sort of a spectator

...