Concrete Ways To Make Interesting Friends

Two of the smartest people I've ever met are two of my best friends. Here's how that happened.

0 Introduction

Many influencers on the internet whose aim is to get other people to listen to them for cash explain that they have fancy cars, robust muscles, and often have sex with lots of young women. Following their fashion, I will boast that I have many extremely smart friends. Two of my closest friends are good candidates for the smartest people I’ve met—one of them remains secret, but the other has a blog (sadly with just one article). I also have, not to toot my own horn, quite a few friends, a particularly large number given that I’m a weird nerd who doesn’t go to parties and spends all his time reading and writing about philosophy. A buddy of mine was deeply shocked by the number of non-weird friends I have given how much of a nerd I am—somehow, miraculously I have friends in sororities, for example, which is a miracle on the order of the Calanda healing!

Now, making friends is hard. It’s especially hard after college (or so I’ve heard). I’d imagine that most advice about making friends is sort of generic—be nice to people and stuff. This, while good advice, is the kind of thing that’s hard to concretely implement.

I think that there are several things that one can do that make it easier to make friends that don’t require rewiring their personality and that are very specific. I thought enumerating them would be helpful. Given that one’s happiness is in large part determined by the quality of their friendships, making friends is ridiculously valuable.

1 Message random people on the internet

I think messaging random people on the internet is hugely underrated. Obviously don’t message completely random people that you know nothing about, but if there’s a person you find on the internet who is smart and interesting—try messaging them. I met Amos Wollen, one of my closest friends, because I saw on Twitter that he had, despite being young, written some cool philosophy papers, and shot him a dm, asking if he’d like to call to discuss psychophysical harmony. He did! Turns out we got along well, and now we’re great friends, going together like salt and pepper or Stalin and starvation.

(Fun fact—in this photo, it looks like Amos was letting out a furious roar. That’s because he was).

Or take another friend of mine, one who I’ve mentioned before but is shrouded in mystery (to you people—I know who he is!). I came across him years ago on a vegan discord server (he wasn’t vegan but was arguing about veganism). I recognized his name from somewhere else and he sounded interesting, so I shot him a dm. We had many chats—and thus gave rise to a friendship that has lasted ~5 years and is still going strong.

This isn’t just for random people—it can be done for public figures too! I’ve become friends with Richard Hanania, to at least some degree. I got his email because he reads my blog, so I shot him an email asking if he wanted to hang out, when we were in the same area. He did!

I have ~5 friends who I chat with for at least an hour per week. I met these people mostly by either them messaging me on the internet or me messaging them on the internet. However, I get more messages from random interesting people on the internet than is typical because I have a blog and YouTube channel. For others, this is much less typical—you’ll mostly have to be the one reaching out.

It really isn’t hard to do. For example, there were two interesting people I came across recently on substack, one named Mark, the other Philip. I messaged both of them, and have now spoken with each of them—and they’re both very interesting. If you come across an interesting substack commenter or substack writer or any type of person on the internet, be pretty willing to send them a message. Most people are pretty willing to chat, and if they’re not, the worst-case scenario is they ignore you.

I will note that this is generally more successful with men than with women. This is understandable—women generally don’t like to be hit on by random strangers, and given how rare it is for people to randomly message others on the internet just because they find the things they said interesting, women tend to perceive a random message sent by a stranger as hitting on them. Of the friends I’ve made by messaging random people on the internet, they’re basically all men, even though about half of my friends I’ve made in other ways are women. I find this fact sad, but it is a fact of life.

(I had one very slightly disastrous story that I will put below the paywall because if you are going to hear about my humiliation, you should at least pay me 7 dollars).