Connecting with Purpose: Charles Vogl on Building & Cultivating Relationships

0:00And she said, and when you meet someone, don't ask them for anything, for at least three intimate experiences. because you've got to build a relationship, right? You've got to find shared values and you just have to find shared interests. And maybe they won't be there and you won't have three experiences. But Charles, as you're looking for support for this filmmaking, just know you're not going to ask for the first three intimate experiences. And since, Charles, you know you're not going to ask, don't worry about it. Meeting people in a large event, a cocktail party, an alumni event, a wedding reception, that's fine, but it doesn't count in building a relationship.

0:39You have to build a relationship and an intimate experience. All right, so today we've done something different here on the Big Success Podcast. Charles and I have become buddies. This is his second time on the Big Success Podcast. And we go deep, deep into the subjects of connecting. This is Charles Fogel. Imagine how my life changed when in my late 20s, I started creating over 100 intimate experiences a year, only doing things I like to do. The out of community. That's the work of this man, Charles Bowman. All right, Charles. Second time on the podcast. We're going to do something totally different today.

1:14Good. We talked as friends about the conversation about loneliness. And we discussed the whole thing of people not having many friends and that sort of thing. Can you just brief the audience on those stats before we get into the discussion around that stuff? Yeah, well, the recent research that the recent Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published widely is that half of Americans do not have four close friends. I believe the research is half of Americans have three friends or less, and about one out of six Americans say they have no close friends. And that is not old statistics. In a generation, we've seen a dramatic drop in the size of networks, and the number of friends people have and the number of close friends.

2:08And for the first time in American history, the research shows that younger generations are more lonely than older generations. And to put that in perspective, it was just taken for granted that as you get older and you have less mobility and your friends get sick and die, you become more lonely. That is no longer true. In fact, recent research shows that as much as 80 % of young people in America say they're experiencing loneliness. And the reason this is relevant in my work is when I'm training people in leadership roles to get better at connecting people they care about, I want us all to understand we don't have to go very far for finding people who want us to get better at connecting people and who are actually desperate to be connected with the people who can bring people together.

2:50Yeah, but I look at it and I wonder about relationships. Like my parents moved into not an old people home, but a resort style community for over 50s. And they made, you know, 50 new friends in six months because they knew how to make friends. Like they knew how to connect. How, I don't know, do people just lose that skill? What happened? And the research seems to indicate, Brad, at some level, yes, that our social contexts have changed so radically. One of the things that's happened is we're moving more through our lifetimes than ever before. Like moving physically? Yeah, physically moving. And whenever we do that, we're largely resetting the community we need to create to have the life we want.

3:39We also know that Americans are largely moving away from their home faith traditions. And while many people have very, very good reasons for doing that, it also means that we're not gathering with people who share our purpose and value in life over and over again and experiencing maturation together. Yeah. I remember when I first moved to Vegas, I didn't really have a group. And once I got a group of guys that I started to hang with, there was a Jimmy Kimmel skit called Handsome Men's Club. And I just nicknamed the group and created a group chat on the phone, Handsome Men's Club, and just said, all right, this is now my group.

4:16You're the gang. And it's interesting how, I don't know, I just sort of see my role as being almost a connector of people, if that makes sense. Well, it's funny that you should say that, Brad, because you and I were chatting earlier, and you perfectly exhibited a type of maturation in connecting people and being a person who convenes. And I just want to be really clear. I'm not inventing this myself. I learned this from Marissa King, who used to teach at the Yale Business School and now teaches at Wharton. And she wrote a fantastic book called Social Chemistry. And she talks about how there are different types of connectors.

4:53And one of the types of connectors is the expansionist, the person who just wants to meet more people, and they do the things that meet more people. And my guess is, Brad, if I met a 21-year-old Brad, he didn't yet have powerful business connections. He didn't know who would be helpful and what you wanted to do. And so he was just meeting people and was getting out there and wanted to make sure that they knew his name. And he was making sure that you went to places where you'd meet the people important to you. And so that's what an expansionist does. And that's a very, very important person because if you don't have connections into a field, then you got to expand, right?

5:28But at some point, Brad, you knew as many people as you could know. In fact, you knew more people that you wanted to know better and spend time with than you physically have time with. And I know you have a family and you probably want to spend time with them. So you don't want to spend every Saturday meeting more business people. Dude, today, my wife and I joke about this, that we just don't have room for new friends. It's like, who are we going to drop to add a new friend? That's exactly right. We don't have time. And honestly, I'm in a similar place. And that's a great place to be in the sense that you matured into it.

6:02You have enough friends that you want to spend time with them and you want to be available to them and you want them to call you on bad days and good days. And you didn't have those. we throw a lot of parties and it's why for sport we have a suite for like concerts and stuff because like we can't invite two people to a concert you've got to have we need the 16 people suite just to you know it that way we catch up with you know 14 other people at one time sort of thing okay so that that explains why for me okay i'm an expansionist no you were an expansionist you're now a convener okay now you convene the people that you want to know or that are important to you and i know that over a couple years there's some rotation in and out of that people move away some people's priorities change but largely you're bringing people together that you're already connected with or the people who they bring which is to say they're one degree away and if someone isn't one degree away or doesn't meet you directly they largely don't have easy access to you because you just physically don't have the time.

7:08Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a lot of the things. It's like some people think, oh, you know, Brad, now it's like I teach my kids, good friends reach out and they show up. That's right. Wow. That is powerful medicine to teach them. You know, it's like, I even said it in my phone to remind me to just reach out. Like it's like reach out time. And it's tough. But when you get in the car, just dial a friend, dial a friend, dial a friend. It's like, even my mom, I have a reminder every week to call my mom because otherwise sometimes I forget. Sure. Life happens. So let's go back to this loneliness thing, buddy.

7:49How did we end in this position? How do we get to this place? What got us there? I mean, people used to talk to their neighbors. So there is no single reason, at least none that I found in the research, but we've seen a lot of changes. So we talked about the fact that we're moving more. We talked about the fact that people have left their faith traditions, home faith traditions. And that's a big one because that was a big source of connection a generation ago. We look at the 1970s. Another one is that the wealth disparity has grown. And at least the United States, people are just working a lot.

8:24I like to point out people who are surprised by this, that when the Simpsons were released in the 1990s, by design, Homer Simpson was the median of the American wealth experience. Single earner, no college education, three kids, owned two cars, went on vacations, owned their own home. Neither you or I, Brad, think that if we tell our kids, expect to own a home, have one earner, two cars, and afford to raise three kids in America with one job without a college degree, that's going to happen. It's just not going to happen. So Americans are working more and more Americans are working in the household to keep that lifestyle going than it was just the 1990s.

9:07And guess what? There's less time for, as Bob Putnam put it, bowling leagues and picnics. and and we're and our kids are doing 10 times more stupid like we don't have our own bowling leagues we got our kids damn bowling leagues so we're busy what's one way to put it and then of course what you and i haven't yet touched on which we all know is the elephant in the room is uh social media and um the technology literally designed to grab our attention and it looks like connection but we know from the research that uh having connections on social media doesn't actually improve our life experience. We know that a single digit of real friends in our real lives dramatically improves the quality of our life.

9:54So we have Americans starting in their teenage years or earlier spending time on digital media that's not improving the quality of their life and connection. And there's a zero-sum gain at some level. And then you wake up in your mid-30s and you're in the loneliest era of American history and you haven't been, as I put, putting in the reps to have the conversations that lead to the friendships that make a really rich and rewarding life. Yeah. I got, I got one good friend of mine and he just doesn't do social media, but we have lunch every month. You know, he, he just will not do social media, but every month with all his friends and every Friday, every Friday, he's at the same restaurant for lunch and all his friends that ever, he just, everyone's invited every Friday.

10:38It's just his thing. It's like, and my guess is his life is truly fantastic. He, he definitely has a very high emotionally fulfilled life. That is, that is very true. How does someone start to move in the right direction then if someone says, okay, holy shit, you're talking about me, you know, that's me. Well, with some irony, you've already referenced such great role modeling just in this conversation without any effort. So you asked earlier, Brad, when you and I were talking about like, how did this start? How did I gain this certification? And also how it's relevant to business. So I was a young man living in New York City, and I wanted to be a filmmaker, except I'd never made a film before.

11:19And I didn't have a rich father who was going to pay for any film I wanted to make. And so I just had to start at the beginning. And I know you started at the beginning, Brad, right? And when you start at the beginning, you start thinking, well, who do I need to meet and learn from that's going to help me learn what I need to learn to do this thing? and one there was a friend in my community named lolita and she was a very powerful person in the new york political scene and i won't go into details about that for political reasons very powerful and she learned that i was working on making a film that would eventually become a pbs film about genocide survivors becoming americans and she wanted to help me succeed and so she mentored me.

12:01And she told me wisdom, Brad, that has carried with me now for well over 20 years. And she said, Charles, when you meet people, meeting people in a large event, a cocktail party, an alumni event, a wedding reception, that's fine, but it doesn't count in building the relationship. You have to build a relationship in an intimate experience, a walk in Central Park, a coffee in Upper East Side, a dinner, having a three-hour concert with Brad Sugars where you share drinks and laugh really hard together, sitting at a restaurant for lunch every month. And she said, and when you meet someone, don't ask them for anything for at least three intimate experiences because you got to build a relationship, right?

12:52You got to find shared values and you just to find shared interests. And maybe they won't be there and you won't have three experiences. But Charles, as you're looking for support for this filmmaking, just know you're not going to ask for the first three intimate experiences. And since, Charles, you know you're not going to ask, don't worry about it. And instead, you get just to ask about them and learn about them. Yeah, but don't worry about it. You're not worried about it. That's massive. Because you're not going to ask for anything, there's no there's no pressure exactly right and guess what brad i started gaining all these reps sitting down with people i want to know better who at some levels shared my interests which is why they wanted to have a lunch with me or a walk in the park and have these fantastic conversations and guess what not all of them were great but they didn't all need to be great i just got better and you know i'm often approached when i'm speaking well what if i'm an introvert.

13:50What if I don't want to have lots of events? I say, you know what? Introverts have friends. And if you like walking in a park, Central Park is a great example. You can invite one person to walk Central Park with you and have only the conversation you want to have. So there's one layer to this, Brad, that you're going to love because I know you like to get things done. You like strategies. And she said, so Charles, if you know that the community you want to build is going to happen from intimate experiences, coffees, walks in the park, or lunches with Brad Sugars, then you got to go to your calendar and you need to mark it.

14:26And if you have 12 a year, you're going to have less results than if you have 24 a year. And if you have 50 a year, you're going to have more results than if you have 24 a year. So starting that conversation with that mentor, I went to my calendar and every Friday night from six o 'clock to eight o 'clock, every Friday was blocked off in building friendships. And then every Sunday from five o 'clock to eight o 'clock was blocked off building friendships. And if I show you my calendar right now, Brad, I don't know what I'm gonna be doing in July of 2026, but here's what I do know. I've already blocked off two days a week in the evenings to make friendships.

15:04That can be building stronger friendships with my neighbors. That can be building new friendships that Brad Sugar has introduced me to. that could be exploring someone, a relationship I met, an alumni event, and it seems like there could be something interesting. Well, imagine how my life changed when in my late 20s, I started creating over 100 intimate experiences a year, only doing things I like to do. Walk in Central Park, have a burrito on the Upper East Side, right? With only people I want to know better. And guess what, Brad? Some of them thought I was boring or silly and never wanted to talk to me.

15:46Maybe I wasn't prestigious enough. Right? But that didn't matter. And you said, how does this work in business? Well, we know that when we're working in business, you can only create so much result on our own working hard. And maybe that's a ton, but we know it's limited. So one way to think of a business is how are we building a team? and if that team cares about each other's concerns, which the best teams do, high-performing teams do, that would be a community. And I write about brand communities, right? So if we want to build a team that's going to become a community, and let's pretend I'm as industrious as Brad Sugars and I got an alert on my phone that says, every day I need to make two phone calls to invite somebody to share Dim Sum sometime this week.

16:31Not spend all day, but 90 minutes on Friday. So I make 10 phone calls a week. right? Just to see if anybody's going to share them some with me. And let's pretend, Brad, that 90 % of those people say, Charles, I can't believe you called me to share a meal because you want to build a relationship that could be fruitful in my life. I'm sick and tired of you reaching out in this generosity you have, not asking me for anything. Never call again. Let's pretend that happens. Okay. Well, you know, Brad, at the end of the year, I'm going to have 50 new relationships. 50. And let's pretend that two thirds of them said, Charles, you know, you're a nice guy, but you're really boring.

17:14And I only want to know prestigious people, the kind of people that hang out with Brad Sugars and talk about expertise on his podcast. And you're not that guy. Right? So what's one third of 50, right? Half would be 25. So we're talking about 20, you know if from age 30 to age 33, you've created 60 professional contacts that know that you didn't ask for anything from them when you met them, you actually wanted to know them better, you actually took time to get to know them, that you actually learned what's going on in their lives and saw if you could help, you're going to be largely unstoppable in your field in three years.

17:52And all you have to do, air quote here, all you have to do is take the time to only talk to people that you want to know better, to do things that you want to do, and have a conversation you want to have knowing you're not asking them for anything for at least three conversations, and we'll see if it comes up on the floor. Buddy, when we first met, it was at my kid's school. The school is a great school. They invite great speakers in, and they invited you in to speak, and you taught me something that day, the difference between, I forget the word, but it was an invitation and an announcement. I'd love you to take more depth on that because I know when we throw, like when my wife barbecues a pig, it's a 21 hour cook.

18:40We have to invite literally every single human being we know to eat the 200 pounds of meat type thing. But then when we do a dinner in the wine cellar, it seats 10 people. There's a different invitation type thing. i think that too many people do announcements rather than invitations today is that a thing or is that i don't know it's definitely saying and that's why you know that's why brad i have to talk about this and i know that we're the same is that we literally fly around the world that say things that are relevant to audiences and these things are so obvious to us that we're confused that people need to hear it and this definitely counts as one of those things because once you know it, you're like, well, obviously that's true.

19:24So for the purposes of my life, of my work, an invitation is a request to spend time where the person invited knows that someone cares if they show up. I'll say that again because it's important. It's a request to spend time where someone knows if someone cares if they show up. And by the way, we just talked about creating 50 intimate experiences a year. Well, if nobody knows if you care if they show up, why would they want I'd come and walk Central Park or share a burrito or roast pork. So for the purposes of making that distinction, the opposite, where you say that you have an event, but nobody knows if you care, is an announcement.

20:05And this is so important because I go to organizations and they say, gee, we want to get more parents involved in the school, or gee, we want to get our employees to come and spend time and build relationships so that there's trust, or gee, we have these war fighters and we We want their families to connect better, support each other on the home side when they're down range. And I say, well, what are you inviting them to? And I've actually been in a conversation where it goes something like, well, in October, we send out a mass email to this event. And I say, okay, well, I see where the problem's starting, right?

20:37Now, maybe there's other things to handle, but if you're not inviting anybody to anything that they want to come to, Let us not be surprised they're not coming together and creating relationships that you're aspiring for them to create, be it among warfighters, parents, or highly technical, sought out professionals. Marketing is like that, Charles. I see people, they do their marketing and instead of inviting the perfect prospect to an event and giving them an actual invitation, which is a follow-up thing and inviting 10 perfect prospects, they send the thing out to 10 ,000 people and hope. Well, and this is a good point to go deeper on this, Brad.

21:17One of the things that makes an invitation powerful is it's inefficient. If Brad Sugars has to call me and say, Charles, I'm only inviting eight people to join me and my wife to my wine cellar. I've only got eight empty seats unless I asked my wife to stand, right? I'd love for you to come. I'm like, oh, wow, Brad really wants me to come, right? If I get an email with a CCs of 200 of Brad's favorite friend in Las Vegas area, and it says, we're roasting a pig, you should come. You know, I might have fun. My wife might love eating more roasted pig because she's Southeast Asian and everything with pork on it is better.

21:53But that's not a powerful invitation, right? And Brad, if he was lazy, and I know you're not, would say, yeah, Charles, but I don't want to call 200 friends. I'm like, yeah, I know. That's why when you call me and say, I'm roasting a pig and I really love you to be there. I haven't met your wife and my wife wants to meet her. Boom. Like, okay, whatever was happening on Saturday, I'm going to see if we can postpone that because Brad just called me. Now, it may not be a phone call, maybe some other way, but you get the idea. Invitations are inefficient. And so I hate it when business people call, you know, talk to me about bringing people together they care about, be that internally or externally the organization.

22:30And they say, yeah, yeah, but I want to make this cheap and easy. Yeah. And even team building, you must, as a leader, spend one-on-one time with your people. You got it. It kills me that I see leaders who, they're like, oh, I'm leading my people. Okay, well, when you do one-on-one meetings with them? Well, I don't do one-on-one meetings with them. We meet as a team. Then you're not building relationships with your people. Well, I totally agree with you, and I want to go deeper on that. The reason it's not happening is we're not creating a context that's safe enough for them to bring up the stuff they don't want to say in front of peers that might be competing with them.

23:11Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. That is important. Let's go into that one. If you're not having the one-on-ones, you're not creating a context safe enough for them to possibly share the things that they want to share that are so vulnerable they don't want colleagues who are competing with them to know or hear it. Yeah. And in our one-on-one meetings, we have a format called Lion. Last week, meaning the current week, Issues, Opportunities, and Next Week. So in Issues, there's an actual spot where we say, okay, what happened? What's going wrong? There's an actual time for bringing up negatives or issues.

23:54Well, and Brad, I know you've got several kids and I know that you're a high performer and you only hire high performers when you can, right? you and I both know when one kid gets a bad diagnosis um attention at work changes full stop do you want to know if the third highest performer in your global organization has got a sick kid at home that's involving blood tests and doctor visits you do and so if you don't give him a room to say hey I've got a seat on college this week we're waiting for blood tests you don't give him if you don't give him a venue to say that or create a relationship that's safe enough that that can be said.

24:30Like, you know, they're a high performer. You know that when they get past this, they're going to come back. But hey, these next six months are going to get kind of hairy. You got to create a venue for that. Yeah, I remember having one manager in one of my companies and she wouldn't approve PTO unless she had two weeks notice. And I walked in one day and one of the staff was like, I'm ready to quit. And I'm like, what do you mean you're ready to quit? Well, my kid needs a doctor and I have to go. And she won't give me time off. Just go. And I'm like, if you're kidding. And I walked over to the mat and I said, what's going on?

25:04Well, they didn't give two weeks notice. Who cares? Their kid's sick. Like, be human for a minute, you know? So, yes, I get that. I want to go back to where we started this whole thing. Someone's sitting in a space of loneliness. And I want to touch on it mostly for the people that it actually seems to hit harder than most, and that is men. Because they'll never admit to it. Men never admit that there's something happening. They don't admit that there's a loneliness or that there's a struggle inside until it's too late. Well, I'm going to push back on that. We see different cultures among men in America.

25:52and there is a subculture in America that's large called the honor culture. And this came out of research by Professor Brown out of Brandeis University. And that's where we find men who don't want to share vulnerability for fear of dishonoring themselves. And because they don't share that, of course, they don't get the support that they literally need. And we've seen very dire mental health and physical consequences out of that. So it's not that all men are that way. It's that some men are in a culture that don't give them permission to share the vulnerabilities that they need to share to get the support that's in many cases actually killing them.

26:33How does a guy understand that that's okay to step out of that then? What I understand works is creating a space where the rules change with men so that they can share that. And it's usually framed in the sense of coming together in a space that's safe to be strong. So, for example, there's wonderful work being done with veterans around the country where they go on retreats or they go to campfires, they go on hunting trips. and of course you know brad if we take uh i'm not a veteran i've obviously worked with veterans on this if if i go with veterans on a trip away from friends colleagues girlfriends spouses right and a leader a host is brave enough to say i want you to know that after what i saw down range i'm really wrestling with the stuff my marriage isn't looking good and my kids are angry with me and quite frankly, I can't even sleep a full night.

27:33And then they don't get beat up. Then it creates a space for others to say, well, actually, I don't sleep either, right? And whatever else comes up. And then the host needs to hold the line on what the rules of that space is that people don't get beat up for sharing that for the first time. And by getting away, then they're escaping the standards of the culture that say men can't share these things because this is a small group of men, an intimate experience of men in a space where they're setting new rules for that group. And that's an intimate experience. And then that's when someone can say this is a problem and help can count.