Hello, welcome to the Matthiaschi Barker podcast.

My name is Matthias, and I'm a psychotherapist in Spokane, Washington.

And this is a podcast about mental health and moving towards what's meaningful, even

despite hardship.

You might notice that my voice is especially low in Bumi today, and that's because I got

a new microphone, which is very exciting, so now you get all the low-end in my voice.

Okay, I'll stop that.

I'm sorry.

Today's episode is about friendship.

I really took me a while to come across all this information in the sense that, well,

I moved every year of my life growing up and had to remake friends pretty often.

My dad was just kind of working his way up the ladder at his work and just kind of moving

from call center to call center, and I just had to restart a lot, and so I think there

was just kind of this rhythm that I got into around making new friends and trying to

find common ground with people and trying to build intimacy and closeness really quickly.

That later, once I kind of started studying psychology, I had words to be able to put

to that.

And really kind of what I centered in on was small talk, and the utility of small talk,

the utility of being able to have kind of these medium and small, seemingly insignificant

conversations and then scale those up into larger conversations.

And that's kind of what this episode is about.

It's about my process of being able to kind of assess and understand if someone is trustworthy

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