I have long been fascinated by the topic of friendship, for various reasons including “The dissolution of some of my own” and “Shouldn’t this be a goal of life, vs. getting promoted at a job that doesn’t care about you?” Over the years, I’ve written a lot of stuff on the topic of friendship, and that varies from “horrible” to “pretty good.” I can spare you links right now, though. We’re not friends. Are we?
I also found Google’s NotebookLM to be interesting — basically, you upload a bunch of documents about a topic, and it will summarize the topic and ask follow-up questions and design curriculum (a-ha!) around the topic and all that. So I uploaded a bunch of friendship research and articles into there, and one of the options included spitting out an AI-generated podcast. So, I embedded that above. The podcast is hysterical because it’s two bots talking to each other, but they have the perfect cadence of a meandering modern podcast. Kudos on this work, Google.
PS — apparently the guy at Google who developed NotebookLM was recently promoted to basically run all their AI efforts, so it’s something to watch.
And hey, if you want to read something longer and more in-depth on modern friendship, here you go:
"Adults Prioritize West Elm Furniture, Not Friendship."
If you’re unfamiliar with the term “friendship recession,” it’s most associated with a guy named Dan Cox, and subsequently more associated with men than women. There’s been a lot of discussion, from nuanced to hand-wringing to superficial, about the state of friendships in America and beyond over the last five or so years. The normal culprits in this discussion are:
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