Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode will be a longer one, part of my series where I interview fascinating people about how they manage their time

and how all of us can take our days from great to awesome. So I am so excited to welcome Anna Goldfarb to

before breakfast today. Anna is the author of the book Modern Friendship on How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections. So Anna,

welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Well, why don't you

tell our listeners a little bit about you? Yeah, I'm a journalist, and I've reported on friendships,

relationships, and pop psychology for nearly a decade. I've really gotten to dig

deep with friendship, but mostly from the New York Times. So from my reporting, I wanted something

more comprehensive to describe the strange waters that were swimming in.

Like, I really wanted to capture in a much deeper way than an article of,

guys, here's what's going on.

I want to orient.

Number one, like, okay, this is, this is the game we're playing.

It is very different rules than any other time before in history.

So here you go. Here's what's up. So are,

I mean, are we imagining? Are people feeling more isolated or lonely than in the past? And

what's going on? What has changed with friendship to make that happen? Yeah, well, we have a lot of

sociological factors that do not work in our favor. We live in a society

where we're more butterflies. We have unlimited choice on who we can befriend and who we can

associate with. But also, it's easier to shed those connections because we don't stay in one place

for too long. And, you know, our grandparents,

...