Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black. And our topic on this episode is one that has fascinated us for many years. And we're talking about how we

interact with strangers. We're going to explore why we don't talk to strangers, how we can,

and what happens when we do. Our guest is veteran journalist Joe Cohane, who's written for

New York Magazine, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, Wired, and many other publications.

Joe's the author of a fantastic new book

called The Power of Strangers, the Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World. Joe, thank you so

much for joining us. Hi, Jan and Laura. Thanks so much for having me on. I'd just like to be here.

There are so many questions we want to ask. But first of all, why did you decide to write about this? A couple of reasons. For one thing, I realized a few years ago that I had just stopped talking to strangers, right? So I was raised by very chatty people. I grew up in Boston. My parents talked to everybody all the time. So I get to see, you know, growing up or being raised by them, I got to see the benefits of just like chatting with people all the time. They made friends. They had adventures. It worked out really well for them. But a few years ago, I one day, it just occurred to me that I had just cut out this entire category of human interaction from my life. I was just not doing it, you know, and I never did it as much as my parents, but I still did it enough that I, you know, I enjoyed it and I found it enriching and fun and interesting. And so I started to wonder why I had stopped doing. And for me personally, the reason was kind of twofold. So on one hand, I had a young daughter and I had a demanding job and I just didn't have time or energy, right? Because when you, when you have interactions with strangers, especially if you're out of practice, like it's, it's cognitively demanding, right? You have to pay attention on a number of levels. It can be kind of tiring, you know, it takes some work. And the other thing was just I had a phone, right? And so all of those little like moments of friction that we used to have while like asking for directions or ordering a pizza or just like, you know, buying something from a human cashier in a grocery store, all that stuff kind of became optional, right?

Like I just didn't have to do that anymore. I could have feasibly gone through my entire life without ever talking to a stranger again. Like really, you know, it's a horrible thought, but it was kind of true. Um, so once I, you know, once that occurred to me

that those two things were conspiring to like, to keep you from talking to people I didn't really know.

Um, I just resolved to do it more. And I've resolved to understand what kept us from doing it,

both me personally, but kind of society is large. And also dig into like what the benefits might be. Like, why does it feel good when it

goes well? You know, what stops us from doing it and see if there's any like sort of social

science research behind that as well. So that was the start of it. And then I just went deep from

there. We're told as children not to talk to strangers. So it's kind of like we have to rewire our brain.

Is that what you noticed as well?

Yeah, that's definitely a big part of it. I mean, I was raised in the 80s, the 90s, you know,

and we used to have cops coming to our school and tell us that every, like,

literally everyone we didn't know in the world was a threat to us, right? Like that's what's crazy. Right. You're the only safe person. Yeah, it's like you and your 15 people are the ones that you can count on them. Yeah. The rest of them, like, you know, beware. Which is a crazy, it's a crazy thing to tell a child, you know? It's nuts.

And it's bad for things like social trust, which are really important to, you know,

societies.

So, yeah, you definitely get that voice in your head of like the cop in your classroom,

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