SXSW 2024: Culturally Confronting Loneliness—Ann Shoket, CEO TheLi.st & Justin McLeod, CEO Hinge

Hi everybody, you look gorgeous. Hi, hi, hi. Oh, it's so nice to see you all. Did you have a nice night last night? Exactly. All right, well, I hope you had some coffee. I hope you're ready to talk about culturally confronting loneliness. And I promise you that this is going to be a fun hour, even though it's a very serious topic. It really is nice to see you all. I thank you first of all for taking time in your schedule and prioritizing this conversation. I am so thrilled to be on stage with Justin McLeod. I want to tell a little story about what's brought us to this moment. So Justin and I met for the first time seven years ago in a completely inauspicious panel. It was a crunch day. I was working on a book, he was building Hinge, and we were in some kind of dingy corporate space. You don't even remember. But anyway, I'll tell you why this matters. I remember Justin told a story that morning about the founding of Hinge and said lovely things about his wife, which I always think is a good quality in a human being when you say nice things about your partner. I remembered this moment. And so seven years later, when I heard that Justin was launching a new initiative, which we're going to talk about today, to address the loneliness crisis, it was a spark. It was a remembrance. And so when I talk about life being long and the connections that you make along the way, this is one of those moments that set the stage for us to be here today. So I just want to say how thrilled I am to be in this conversation with you. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here with you.

Let me set the stage for everyone about what we are even doing here and why this matters. So last year, the US Surgeon General released a report about the loneliness epidemic that we are facing in America. And he said that loneliness was a crisis on par with the opioid crisis. Let that sink in for a second. That loneliness is as damaging to our health, to our mental health, to our financial health as opioid addiction. And so this moment, this light bulb went off for me about all the ways that we are lonely in our lives and how important it is to create community. My entire career has been about this drive to help women step into their power and create community and to be supported. And so I felt a real responsibility to use my power and privilege in this moment. I'm really grateful for you all to be here. Justin, talk about what brings you to this moment.

It is so refreshing that you can be so vulnerable about your own human need. This idea of connection and community is just a basic human need. One of the things that my hero, Dr. Vivek Murthy, our US Surgeon General, I'm like his number one fan, one of the things that he talks about is that loneliness is a signal that you need connection in the same way that hunger is a signal that you need to eat. And loneliness, they say that when you're feeling lonely, it lights up the same part of your brain as when you're actually in physical pain. It's that core to us and who we are. There are infants, young infants, if they are not touched, if they are not interacted with and played with, they can literally die. They call it wasting away disease, and they discovered this especially in institutionalized orphanages in the 19th century. But literally, little babies will die if they are not interacted with on that human level. And we carry that. It is a foundational human need, like water and food and shelter. What was the moment that you realized it was loneliness for you, that it wasn't something else, that it wasn't anxiety, that it wasn't depression, that it was actually this human need for connection?

I was thinking about my journey to come to this moment of loneliness. For me, I appreciate so much that you recognized this at an early age, but I didn't even see it in my own life until two years ago when I first heard Dr. Murthy talk about the loneliness epidemic. I was like, 'I'm not lonely.' I was like, 'I run a community of amazing people. We talk to each other all the time. We're in conversation. We're talking about really vulnerable things.' And I was like, 'Am I?' And I realized in looking back, you talked about this drive for success. I came up in my career in this era of 'never let them see you sweat.' I used to call it the 'and show catch show.' I would walk into a meeting and I would be like, 'Everything's great. How's it going? No problems here. No vulnerabilities. Nothing. I don't need help. No, I got it.' You talked about the rugged individualism. That was me. That was my corporate rise. But when I had this epiphany moment about loneliness, I looked back at some of what I thought was stress. When I became editor-in-chief of Seventeen, I was the youngest editor-in-chief at the time. I was single. I was suddenly separated from my team that had helped me rise. I had a whole new team to figure out how we were going to support each other. And I was so depleted at the end of the week that I would just sit on my couch and the tears would come because I didn't know what else to do. I didn't have the support system around me. And when I looked back through this lens of loneliness, I realized that's what it was. I thought it was stress and overwhelm, but it was lack of support and isolation. And I built the team, I built the support system I need, but it wasn't immediate. I didn't have it there already to turn it on. And so for me, it happened again when I became an entrepreneur. When I acquired The List and stepped into this role as a solopreneur, I found myself unsupported and isolated and lonely. There was an amazing coach who's a member of The List who said to me, 'Who's in your boat?' And I thought that was a really great question. I was like, 'I don't know who's in my boat.' She says, 'Is your husband in your boat?' I was like, 'Yes, my husband is in my boat. There's a couple of boats rowing alongside, but at least we're rowing in the right direction.' So all of this was like, 'Okay, get more people in your boat. How do you build the connections around you?' That was my realization of how loneliness played in my life. And I think that a lot of people would say, 'I'm not lonely.' Even all the people out there who didn't come into this room probably looked at 'culturally confronting loneliness' and they were like, 'Who's lonely? There's something wrong with you if you're lonely.'

When I came to your office and we were prepping for this conversation, I was so impressed about the way you talked about building your team. Will you talk a little bit about how you create connections on your team and what you feel like your responsibility is in that way?

Should we do a check-in? Do you want to talk about your gratitude, your anxiety, and your hope? Because I think it humanizes us. It's worth it. It just shows how much it... Yeah, so we can do it. Do you want to go first? You go first.

That's amazing. Should I go? Gratitude, anxiety, hope. I am very grateful for these folks right here in the front row who are members of my community at The List who showed up here today to support me and to be a part of this conversation. I really thank you very much for being there and nodding and smiling along. Thank you. You're very sweet. Thank you. I am also tremendously grateful for someone who's not in the room. I'm grateful for my husband. I have two young kids and I've been gone since Friday, and he has tremendously handled sports and hamburger spaghetti and all the things that come along with juggling when I'm out of town. So I'm really grateful for his support in this moment. My anxiety: I'm about to tell you about what we're launching. We're launching something new today, '10 Minutes to Togetherness,' which I will tell you about in a second. I feel like I'm standing at the precipice of something really important and really big. So my anxiety is equal parts anxiety and anticipation. They go together. I have tremendous hope that this initiative that we're launching is going to go out in the world and do its work and help people feel more connected, to give you the tools to feel more connected. And yet it's this unknown. There's an underlying anxiety: 'Did we do enough? Do we have the right partners? Are we reaching out to all the right people?' So my anxiety and anticipation come along with my hope.

Sometimes, yeah. Okay, can I pivot and talk about this new thing that we're doing, this new initiative? Let me back this up. Last year when we were here at South by, we did our first round of research to identify the problem. Because we are focused on helping women rise in their work, we did a round of research last year that identified this problem of loneliness. And it turns out that loneliness is preventing women from moving into positions of greater and greater power and influence because it's fraying their relationships around them. They are opting out of promotions and roles. This year, we are focused on the solutions. So we did a round of research. Turns out the numbers are worse this year. 80% of people are lonely because of their job. 43% of people say that being at work is the loneliest time of day. Now clearly they are not in Hinge executive meetings where you're talking about your gratitude, your anxiety, and your hope. But 43% of everybody else is lonely at work. So we also, thanks to my amazing partners, one of whom is here today, Natalie Lupiani of BSG and Jena Silva of Berlin Cameron, we were able to identify the solutions. There's a group of people at your office, at everyone's office, who are less likely to be lonely and more likely to feel connected. We call them the 'cultivators.' Sounds good, right? You are either a cultivator or you need to find one. Who here thinks that you're a cultivator? You are the person who is deepening their connections. I want to see you raise your hand. You really are all cultivators. These are the people who check in with the people around you. You do work that is collaborative. Your company also supports you by having transparency around what's being done. Nothing worse than feeling isolated and siloed and unseen in your company. They just walk around the office, it sounds so crazy to say, but to check in with people: 'How are you doing? What's going on? How was your event the other night? How was your game?' Whatever it is, to have a human connection. So we've identified these micro habits of the cultivators and the companies that support them. Thank goodness we found some solutions. We've put them together in a new program we are launching called '10 Minutes to Togetherness.' 10 minutes sounds a little random, but let me explain this very quickly. For the last 20 years, thanks to again my hero Dr. Murthy, we've had this huge decline in the amount of time we spend together. But if we each spent 10 minutes a day intentionally building your communities, nurturing your connections, we would decrease that by half. So '10 Minutes to Togetherness' is my anxiety and my hope to teach everyone how to deepen the connections around you. It's very simple. 10minutestotogetherness.com. Please help allay my anxiety about this launch. I appreciate it.

What do you do to stay connected? We heard about deepening the connections on your executive team, but in your personal life, how do you stay connected?

The check-in is so important, and it's really important in my life too. I will send a text. I'm not quite up to voice check-in, but I have to say that there's a member of The List here who's in the audience who told me about her 8-minute phone calls. I think that's amazing. If you say to someone, 'Listen, I'm going to call you for 8 minutes,' and you know you're going to do your high, you're going to do your low, you're going to do the most important question: 'How can I help you? What can I do to support you today?' Half the time someone says, 'Oh, thank you so much for even asking.' But just the asking. Once in a while when I do my check-in, someone will say, 'You know what, could you please help me unlock this something?' And yes, 'How can I be helpful to you?' I think that's really important. We talk about at The List, it's so interesting you talk about highs and lows. We talk about wins. I have really thought about this. Are we enforcing a culture of always being on, of always having a win? Sometimes those wins are that you dragged your butt to Friday. I think that can sometimes be a win, and to share that with a group of people who are there who are open to you. But one of the reasons that we like to talk about wins is that we are very often we don't want to pat ourselves on the back. We don't want to call it a win. We want to say, 'Oh, this is just a step in the bigger picture.' It's all part of that exhaustion culture, the hustle culture that we're trying to undo. But also those wins come with hurdles and long journeys. It's not the Instagram filtered version.

Win right, this is about saying, 'I've been working towards this thing for a year, and if I'm being honest, I've been working on it for like 12 years. I finally got the pieces in place to make this thing, to pull it across the finish line, and to have your community say, 'I see you, I see the hard work, I'm here to support you, and what can we do to move it forward?' That, to me, is like the next level of celebration.

One of the things that I appreciate so much about you is when you talk about that you've been doing texting, right? You have this community. And one of the things that came out of our research is that the connectors, these beautiful cultivators, they have diverse communities. People who they've worked with before, people that report to them, people that they report to. They keep these connections for a long time through their lives. Is that true of your networks too?

I have so much to say about this. And ironic, right, for someone who built an app that people spend time on. But I think our tagline, 'Designed to be Deleted,' gets down to the core of what I think an app should be doing for us. When we think about loneliness, loneliness is not a new problem that just popped up over the last 20 years. I think culturally we've been a very achievement-oriented, individualistic society for time immemorial frankly. But what has happened over the last 20 years or so is a dramatic... Oh, I'll say one more thing about that. There was a book that came out by this guy Robert Putnam in 2000 called 'Bowling Alone,' which seems very quaint at the time because it was, but he was already raising the warning sign about how we're deteriorating as a culture because we have individualized leisure time and we spend all our time watching television and being on the internet. That was in 2000. Now fast forward 20 years, and you see that he was starting there. He was looking 1950 to 2000. You look 2000 to 2024, and we've almost completely displaced time spent in real life together with time spent staring at screens. It's a thousand fewer hours among young people that they don't spend together in real life in person anymore. 70% of the time we're down to 30% of what we had just 20 years ago in terms of in-real-life connection. And as we were sort of talking about before, even when you are together in real life, the connections are shallower. There was a study out of Virginia Tech about what happens when there's a phone on the table and you're having a conversation. Just a face-down-on-the-table phone dramatically decreases the emotional vulnerability and the complexity of the conversation, because people are always just kind of aware that at any moment someone could pick up their phone and kind of exit the conversation like an escape hatch.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but yes. I'm infuriated for you, with you. And it's as someone who... I personally have never really used social media. I started to use it in the... I don't know, I tried to use it again in like 2012, 2013. I have a history with drug and alcohol addiction. I know what addiction feels like. I know what it feels like to constantly have that pull and that tug and to have yourself distracted. And I started using those services and I was like, 'I didn't get sober just to do this. This feels exactly like addiction. This is the exact same thing. My brain is always half somewhere else. I feel like I've always got to do the thing.' And when you think about what an addiction is, it's a destructive habit. It's something that you do, a habit that has a trigger and a response and a reward. We have lots of habits, and habits can be positive. But a habit that would be negative is something that doesn't make your life better. I think we have to think, 'Is all that time spent on Instagram versus the other things that I could have done with my life, am I better off for it or am I worse off for it? How do I feel 20 minutes after I put down the phone? Do I feel more connected and more sense of belonging and just more motivated and excited by life, or do I feel drained?' For me at least, I felt drained. And these devices... I think about them kind of like... Well, I can go on forever.

No, I was about to say that it's not the device, right? You're absolutely right. It's this... We want to check our health and wellness, we want to track our sleep. There's lots of things that can be really beneficial. But I noticed it in my own life when my daughter was saying to me, 'You're always on Instagram.' And I was like, 'I am not, it's work.' And then I was like, 'But is it really? And by the way, who am I working for? Am I working for Instagram?' So I do think however that technology can be part of the solution here, right? Talk to me about what you're thinking about when it comes to... You're someone who thinks a lot about how we use technology. How can we use technology to help solve the loneliness epidemic and to create or facilitate or support real connection?

I love that. I think it's great. And point being that there is a different way to approach the market, and I think to build a differentiated product especially right now. I think that there's going to be a whole new category of apps. I hope that there is an industry called social wellness. We know about personal wellness, we know about eating right and meditating and doing all these things. But as we said, connection and belonging are one of our most fundamental human needs, and there's not really yet what I would call a social wellness platform. Hinge is just trying to approach dating in a way that helps increase social wellness. But it'll be interesting to see what else emerges. If you were to create a social network that was maximizing for feelings of belonging and connection and depth, and not time spent in app, I think it would be a very different platform.

So one, I think it starts with your personal North Star, some of the things that we talked about before, because I think you have to really feel it and understand it to even know what we're talking about here. I spent most of my life... I didn't discover this young, I discovered this very recently, that my true barometer for what makes me happy is feelings of belonging and connection. I had to learn a lot of new habits that felt awkward. It feels awkward to just call a friend and be like, 'Hey, how's it going?' People don't even do that anymore. It's almost offensive to call someone without a warning. But aren't they so grateful? At first it's a surprise, but then they're like, 'Oh yeah, you just called to talk to me and tell me that you're really grateful for our friendship for this reason?' That's life-changing. So one, I think we have to do it personally. And we have this opportunity to build it within our organizations. It takes a real standing up... It was kind of a weird thing to ask my executive team to do a few years ago, to be like, 'Okay everyone, we're going to take 20 minutes and everyone's going to share this.' We have new members come into the executive team sometimes, and they're like, 'Okay, welcome to our little cult here, because we're going to do some weird personal rituals that are going to make us all feel more belonging and connected. But trust me, it's worth it.' It's a cult I'd like to be a part of, that sounds nice. So part of it is just build it for yourself and the people around you. It really makes a difference. It'll make a big difference in your lives, and I've seen it ripple effect through my executive team and to their teams. It can really be life-changing to be able to have those kinds of relationships in the office, to open people up to that possibility, and then see them go open it up for other people. So that's all great. And then if you work in a space that is social or tech or whatever, I think we have to think deeply about building what I would call a sustainable business model. A sustainable business model means that you are not just thinking about your near-term business metrics as your drivers. You have to think about what are the deeper, more sustainable metrics that we're achieving that are actually in service of our customers. Are we measuring whether we're making our customers' lives better off? Are we measuring that directly? If you're not doing that, well over time you might have a little blip of success, but over time I don't think it's actually going to be sustainable. There's a ripe opportunity out there in the world right now to be building new services, and AI is going to create a whole new wave of disruption. It's really interesting because I think we're at a point of a real precipice with AI. Because I think AI can very much stand behind us and help us to become better connected and coach us at how to be more relational and how to build better relationships, which is how I'm thinking about it at Hinge. Or it can stand between us. It can be the thing that we interact with instead of other humans. I think that's a pretty scary way to look at it. I think some people view that you can build an AI companion and that's just as good as another human, and I think we're missing something very fundamental if we believe that to be true.

One of the things I love is how you are thinking about your responsibility in your life, your responsibility to your team, your responsibility to your customer, and your responsibility in the world. I think that to recognize that everyone here has a role to play in helping to solve the loneliness epidemic, to create greater connection, I think that is one of the most important pieces that I want everybody to take away. That this is within your control, that this is something that you can have an impact on. I was thinking, do I how do I measure up to this test? You said my North Star is to help women step into their power in their personal lives, in their professional lives, and into their personal power. I do actually want women to step into greater positions of power in the world, but first I want everyone to step into their own personal power and their own personal responsibility. Then I think about how am I taking my personal mission, my North Star, and supporting my community? The women, non-binary, and underrepresented leaders of The List. This we are a small community. And then this new piece that we are launching is how do I take the magic of The List, right? How do we take this magic where 500 human beings are devoted to helping each other achieve and succeed with gentleness, with generosity? And then how do we take that and magnify that out into the world? Because not everybody can join The List, but everybody can create this community around them. So I feel like I'm doing okay on the test. I didn't know that you were going to walk us through, but as you were talking I was like, 'What is my North Star? How am I putting it in place around me and how am I putting it in place in the world?' This is a powerful group of people, and South by Southwest is a powerful platform to spread that message. But I think that we called this panel 'Culturally Confronting Loneliness' because we have a responsibility in our lives, in our companies that we run and operate, and at a larger level to create companies that are creating human connection. I love the way that you threaded the conversation from digital addiction and AI but thinking about it with great responsibility and thoughtfulness in fostering human connection. I also really love how you are thinking about real life connection, because I don't see my community. We see each other on email and then we get together and we like we've never seen each other and then we hug and it's fantastic, right? These people who have only ever seen each other digitally. But talk a little bit about what you are doing with One More Hour.

While we have these people here, one of the things that is a trademark of The Ann Show... I want you to give everybody in this room marching orders. What is the one thing that you want them to do when they leave this room?

All right, those are your marching orders. I have two things I want everybody to do. First of all, go to 10MinutestoTogetherness.com. Download the research report and the tools. When you think about the rituals that you can bring into your own life, that is in our toolkit. I have a little reminder band. These are part of a partnership we did with Little Words Project, Togetherness. So these are a reminder to spend your 10 minutes of togetherness. I'm going to give you... I see you're not wearing the one I gave you before. I'm giving you another right here.

We may as well... but that's actually part of it, is to give them away. When you need your moment of togetherness, you also give it away. So 10 Minutes to Togetherness, help us launch this program. Help us let everybody build the connection around them. Now my other thing... I don't know what you said, your phone on your desk is distracting? But what if it's under your butt? In any case, under the chair. Take out your phone, set up a text, and check in on someone who's in your community. Let them know that you are thinking of them. There's a really simple script: 'Hey, you've been on my mind. How did X go? Can I help you?' And that's it. I want to see phones. I mean, I know we talked about phones, but I want to see who's got phones out. Thank you. And an alternative script is sending a gratitude, or just something that you're grateful about someone or grateful for their connection. That's always... it doesn't even require a response. It can just be, 'Hey, I was reflecting and I'm just so grateful for X, Y, or Z, or this is what you did for me.' It's a nice way to stay connected and doesn't even need a response. I love it so much. I'm going to check in on you. I'm going to check in on you later today, even though I think we're going to see each other again. I want to say thank you to everyone in this room and express my gratitude for you being here, for bringing us so much good energy here. Thank you for nodding. We couldn't do it without you. We couldn't do it without you. So I thank you so much. I thank South by Southwest. I thank you, Justin, for being here with so much openness and generosity. Thank you.