If you’ve never visited rural America, you might assume that the entire US population has equal access to high-speed internet. But some 8.3 million homes and businesses lack fast broadband, according to May data from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). That means tens of millions of Americans can’t stream…

Read more...

Last November, FDA inspectors found almost farcical conditions when they inspected an Indian manufacturing plant that supplies medical drugs to the United States. The plant, owned by Intas Pharmaceuticals, had hardly any working systems for ensuring the purity or sterility of its products. And its employees were trying to conceal evidence of these problems by shredding and hiding documents or, as one quality-control officer admitted, dousing them in acid.

Intas provided America with a lot of frontline chemotherapy drugs—half of the country’s supply in some cases—that are used to treat more than a dozen types of cancer. When the disastrous inspection led the company to halt production, other manufacturers couldn’t make up the difference. Hospitals are now reeling: In a recent survey, 93 percent of U.S. cancer centers said they were experiencing a shortage of the drug carboplatin, while 70 percent were low on another, cisplatin.

Even short delays in cancer treatment can increase a patient’s odds of death, and substitute medications may be less effective or more toxic, if they exist at all. Chemo drugs often run dry—“I can’t think of a year in the past 10 or 12 where we didn’t face some kind of shortage,” Yoram Unguru, a pediatric oncologist at the Herman & Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai, told me—but the current crisis is unprecedented in scale, for reasons that go beyond Intas’s woes. Fourteen cancer drugs are currently scarce, jeopardizing the care of hundreds of thousands of Americans. “I’ve been doing this forever, and this is absolute lunacy,” Patrick Timmins III, a gynecologic oncologist at Women’s Cancer Care Associates, told me.

By delivering drugs at lower doses or over longer intervals, most oncologists are still managing to treat most of their patients—but barely. “Patients often say to us, I just need a plan,” Eleonora Teplinsky, an oncologist at Valley Health System, told me, and the shortages riddle every plan with question marks. Some institutes have already been forced to ration care. Timmins no longer has enough cisplatin and carboplatin to treat patients with recurrent tumors, even though those drugs can improve one’s quality of life or offer decent odds of another remission. “A lot of people are going to be hurt,” he told me. “Lives will be shortened.” Such tragedies are especially galling because the drugs in shortage aren’t expensive, state-of-the-art treatments that patients might struggle to access anyway, but cheap ones that have existed for decades. “It’s just unfathomable that a patient wouldn’t be able to receive them,” Amanda Fader, a gynecologic oncologist at Johns Hopkins, told me.

Intas screwed up, but how could one manufacturer’s downfall trigger such widespread problems? The coronavirus pandemic made plain how reliant the U.S. is on brittle international supply chains, but this much-discussed fragility doesn’t explain the current shortages: Cancer drugs are not scarce for the same reasons that yeast, toilet paper, or couches were. They’re scarce because the market for some of our most important medicines—the ones that should be most accessible—is utterly dysfunctional, in a way that is both very hard to fix but also entirely fixable.

Many recent supply-chain problems were caused by an external force—a pandemic, a hurricane, a stuck ship—that throttled a product’s availability, leading to surging demand and dwindling stocks. But most cancer-drug shortages are caused by internally generated problems, created within the market because of its structure. In other words, “they’re self-inflicted wounds,” Marta Wosińska, a health-care economist at the Brookings Institution, told me.

Generic drugs such as cisplatin are sold at extremely low prices, which overall have fallen by more than 50 percent since 2016. These ever-tightening margins have forced many manufacturers to tap out of the market; for example, the U.S. gets all its vincristine, an anti-leukemia drug, from just one company.

Such drugs are also hard to make. Because they’re injected into the bloodstream, often of severely ill people, they must be manufactured to the highest possible standards, free of microbes and other contaminants. But quality costs money, and generic drugs are so unprofitable that manufacturers can rarely afford to upgrade machinery or train employees. If anything, they’re compelled to cut corners, which makes them vulnerable to spontaneous manufacturing problems or disastrous inspections. And because they usually run at full capacity, any disruption to production has severe consequences. The affected manufacturer might fail to financially recover and leave the market too. Its competitors might struggle to ramp up production without triggering their own cascading shortages. And the drugs, which were never profitable enough to manufacture in surplus, quickly run out.

These principles apply not only to cancer drugs but to generics as a whole, dozens or hundreds of which have been in shortage at any given time for the past decade. The markets that produce them are frail and shrinking. And even when a drug is manufactured by many companies, they might all rely on the same few suppliers for their active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs)—the chemicals at the core of their medicines. Mariana Socal, a pharmaceutical-market expert at Johns Hopkins, has shown that a third of the APIs in America’s generic-drug supply are made in just two or three (mostly overseas) facilities, and another third are made in just one.

The supply chains that link these chemicals to finished drugs are also frustratingly opaque. Consider fludarabine, one of the cancer drugs that’s currently in shortage. The FDA has approved 12 companies to make it, but only five actually market it; only because of a Senate-committee inquiry is it publically known that of those five, only one makes the drug itself; two others get theirs from Europe, and one of those used to supply the final two. Meanwhile, six facilities are registered to make fludarabine’s API, but it’s again unclear which ones really do, or which manufacturers they supply, or even, for one of them, which country it is in. The fludarabine market is clearly weaker than it first appears, but how weak is hard to gauge. The same goes for cisplatin and carboplatin, Socal told me: She and other experts thought their markets looked resilient, until the Intas shutdown dispelled the illusion.

This opacity masks not only the market’s weaknesses but also its strengths. Erin Fox, a drug-shortage expert at the University of Utah Health, oversees a drug budget of more than $500 million, and would love to spend it on manufacturers that make the most reliable medicines, even if their products cost a little more. But “we just don’t know which products are higher-quality than others,” she told me. The FDA has an internal scoring system that it uses to decide which facilities to inspect, Fox said, but because those data aren’t publicly available, manufacturers can distinguish themselves only through price. “We get a race to the bottom where companies undercut each other to get the lowest price, and then quit either because their manufacturing is so poor, or they can’t afford to make medicines anymore,” Fox said. As Wosińska and Janet Woodcock of the FDA identified in 2013, “The fundamental problem … is the inability of the market to observe and reward quality.”

The average generic-drug shortage lasts for about a year and a half. Many people I spoke with hoped that the current wave could abate more quickly if other manufacturers slowly ramp up. The FDA is also looking to import scarce drugs from international suppliers, and has temporarily allowed a Chinese company to sell its cisplatin in the U.S. But ultimately, “it’s very hard to solve a shortage after it started,” Allen Coukell, of the nonprofit Civica Rx, told me. They need to be prevented from happening at all.

Some commonly suggested preventive measures might not work very well, because they misdiagnose the problem. Politicians often focus on bolstering domestic manufacturing, but Wosińska, Fox, and others told me that many drug shortages have been caused by manufacturing problems in American facilities. Because American drugmakers are subject to the same flawed markets as foreign ones, moving the problem inshore doesn’t actually solve it. Nor does stockpiling generic drugs, though a worthwhile idea. These strategies work well against an external shock like a pandemic, Wosińska said: When faced with unpredictable external forces, it pays to build a large buffer. But because the shocks that cause drug shortages arise from predictable forces inherent to the market, the best bet is to reimagine the market itself—a “very difficult problem but a solvable one,” Stephen Colvill, the executive director and a co-founder of the nonprofit RISCS, told me.

A few new initiatives show how this could be done. Civica Rx, which was launched in 2018, sources generic drugs from manufacturers that it vets for quality; it then builds up rolling six-month inventories of those drugs, which it supplies to hospitals through long-term contracts. (Civica is also building its own generics-manufacturing facility in Virginia.) RISCS, founded in 2019, uses confidential data from manufacturers to rate generic-drug products according to the robustness of their supply chains. The FDA has also been developing its own rating system—the “quality management maturity” (QMM) program—that assesses a manufacturer’s quality-control practices; the program successfully completed two pilots but is still being developed and has no firm launch date, an FDA spokesperson said.

In theory, these initiatives should allow hospitals to make better purchasing decisions, and shift the market toward drug companies that are least likely to be responsible for shortages. In practice, Wosińska thinks that hospitals need to be pulled into such a culture shift. For example, she and her colleague Richard G. Frank argue that Medicare could reward hospitals for proactively choosing reliable vendors or participating in programs like Civica. The FDA could support such a scheme by finally launching its QMM program. Congress could require manufacturers to disclose more details about their products and suppliers, so that supply chains can be fully mapped. HHS could offer loans to generic-drug manufacturers for upgrading or expanding their facilities. The point, Wosińska told me, is to do all of this at once, and shift the market into a new stable state. The solution, she said, needs to be comprehensive.

It also needs to be coordinated. The drug-shortage problem lingers partly because “it’s not obvious who’s responsible for solving it,” Joshua Sharfstein, a health-policy expert at Johns Hopkins, told me. The FDA is a candidate, but economic matters sit outside its wheelhouse. Instead, Sharfstein and others suggest that the drug-shortage problem could be owned by the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response. It already works to shore up medical supplies in the event of emergencies such as pandemics or natural disasters, and ongoing shortages of generic drugs are effectively a perpetual state of emergency that we’re trapped in.

Meanwhile, the exact consequences of the shortages are hard to measure. Some of today’s cancer patients will suffer, or even die, because they couldn’t get treated in time, or were given lower doses, or were given more toxic drugs as substitutes. But it’s almost impossible to know if any individual person would have fared better in a world where shortages never happened: If they died, was it because of a few weeks’ delay or because their tumor was always going to be hard to treat? The impact of the shortages can only really be assessed at a population level, and that evidence takes a long time to collect. “I don’t think we’ll see the full downside for many years,” Yoram Unguru told me.

The measures needed to prevent such shortages will also take years to implement—if they ever are. The coronavirus pandemic revealed just how frail our supply chains and health-care system are, but it also showed how quickly attention and resources can disappear once a problem is thought to abate. But the drug problem isn’t abating, and is actually compounding the problems the pandemic created. When health-care workers can’t help their patients, whether because their hospitals are inundated by COVID or because their drugs have run out, the resulting moral distress can be unbearable. Such conditions during the pandemic drove so many health-care workers to quit that “you can feel the system shaking,” Patrick Timmins III said. He worries that this exodus followed by the current drug shortages are “a one-two punch” that will be visible to outsiders only when they have neither the drugs to cure them nor the health-care workers to treat them.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech is warbling, crackling, scratchy—sort of like Marge Simpson’s. His voice, he told me, is “fucked up.” The official medical diagnosis is spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary spasms in the larynx. He didn’t always sound this way; his speaking style changed when he was in his 40s. Kennedy has said he suspects an influenza vaccine might have been the catalyst. This idea is not supported by science.

He was telling me about his life with one arm outstretched on the velvet sofa of his suite at the Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan. It was the end of May, and a breeze blew in through the open doors leading to a private terrace. Two of his aides sat nearby, typing and eavesdropping. A security guard stood in the hallway.

Kennedy was finishing a plate of room-service risotto, and his navy tie was carefully tucked into his white button-down shirt. He’s taller, tanner, and buffer than the average 69-year-old. He is, after all, a Kennedy. His blue eyes oscillate between piercing and adrift, depending on the topic of discussion.

He told me that he’s surrounded by “integrative medical people”—naturopaths, osteopaths, healers of all sorts. “A lot of them think that they can cure me,” he said. Last year, Kennedy traveled to Japan for surgery to try to fix his voice. “I’ve got these doctors that have given me a formula,” he said. “They’re not even doctors, actually, these guys.”

I asked him what, exactly, he was taking.

“The stuff that they gave me? I don’t know what it is. It’s supposed to reorient your electric energy.” He believes it’s working.

When he was 19, Kennedy jumped off a dock into shallow water, which he says left him nearly paralyzed. For decades, he could hardly turn his head. Seven years ago, at a convention of chiropractors, a healer performed a 30-minute “manipulation of energy”—making chanting noises while holding his hands six inches over Kennedy’s body. The next morning, his neck felt better. “I don’t know if they had anything to do with each other, but, you know, it was weird,” he said.

Though he’s been a member of the premier American political dynasty his whole life and a noted environmentalist for decades, most people are just now discovering the breadth and depth of Kennedy’s belief system. He has promoted a theory that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer and “leaky brain,” saying it “opens your blood-brain barrier.” He has suggested that antidepressants might have contributed to the rise in mass shootings. He told me he believes that Ukraine is engaged in a “proxy” war and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”

Kennedy reached a new level of notoriety in 2021, after the publication of his conspiratorial treatise The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It has sold more than 1 million copies, according to his publisher, “despite censorship, boycotts from bookstores and libraries, and hit pieces against the author.” The book cemented his status as one of America’s foremost anti-vaxxers. It also helped lay the foundation for his Democratic presidential primary campaign against Joe Biden.

[Read: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet]

On the campaign trail, he paints a conspiratorial picture of collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. If elected, he has said he would gut the Food and Drug Administration and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.” His most ominous message is also his simplest: He feels his country is being taken away from him. It’s a familiar theme, similar to former President Donald Trump’s. But whereas Trump relies heavily on white identity politics, Kennedy is spinning up a more diverse web of supporters: anti-vaxxers, anti-government individuals, Silicon Valley magnates, “freethinking” celebrities, libertarians, Trump-weary Republicans, and Democrats who believe Biden is too old and feeble for a second term.

So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent. What had initially been written off as a stunt has evolved into a complex threat to both Biden and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Put another way: Kennedy’s support is real.

He is tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche. Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them. Falling down conspiratorial internet rabbit holes has become an entirely normal pastime. Study after study confirms a very real “epidemic of loneliness.” Scores of people are bored and depressed and searching for narratives to help explain their anxiety and isolation. Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.

Even though Kennedy remains a long-shot candidate, his presence in the 2024 race cannot be ignored. “My goal is to do the right thing, and whatever God wants is going to happen,” Kennedy told me. He now earnestly believes that in 12 months, he will be the Democratic nominee for president.

“Every individual, like every nation, has a darker side and a lighter side,” Kennedy told me. “And the easiest thing for a political leader to do is to appeal to all those darker angels.”

He was talking about George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor and subject of Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard.

“Most populism begins with a core of idealism, and then it’s hijacked,” he said. “Because the easiest way to keep a populist movement together is by appealing—you employ all the alchemies of demagoguery—and appealing to our greed, our anger, our hatred, our fear, our xenophobia, tribal impulses.”

Does Kennedy consider himself a populist? “He considers himself a Democrat,” his communications director, Stefanie Spear, told me in an email. The most charitable spin on Kennedy’s candidacy is that he aims to be the iconoclastic unifier of a polarized country. He looks in the mirror and sees a man fighting for the rights of the poor and the powerless, as his father did when he ran for president more than half a century ago.

Kennedy markets himself as a maverick, someone outside the system. But he’s very much using his lineage—son of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy—as part of his sales pitch. Now living in Los Angeles with his third wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, he nonetheless launched his campaign in Boston, the center of the Kennedy universe. The phrase I’M A KENNEDY DEMOCRAT is splashed across the center of his campaign website. Visitors can click through a carousel of wistful black-and-white family photos. There he is as a young boy with a gap-toothed smile, offering a salute. There he is visiting his Uncle John in the Oval Office.

[Alan Brinkley: The legacy of John F. Kennedy]

Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, with their seven children, in February 1963. (Ethel was expecting their eighth child in June.) The boys, from left, are Robert Jr., 8; David, 7; Michael, 4; and Joe, 10. The girls, from left, are Kathleen, 11; Kerry, 3; and Mary Courtney, 6. (AP)

In reality, his relationship with his family is more complicated. Several of his siblings have criticized his anti-vaccine activism around COVID. Last year, at an anti-vaccine rally in Washington, D.C., Kennedy suggested that Jews in Nazi Germany had more freedom than Americans today. In response, his sister Kerry Kennedy tweeted, “Bobby’s lies and fear-mongering yesterday were both sickening and destructive. I strongly condemn him for his hateful rhetoric.” (He later issued an apology.) In 2019, a trio of notable Kennedys wrote an op-ed in Politico pegged to a recent measles outbreak in the United States. RFK Jr., they said, “has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” Several Kennedys serve in the Biden administration, and others—including RFK Jr.’s younger sister Rory and his first cousin Patrick—are actively supporting Biden’s reelection effort.

Multiple eras of Kennedy’s life have been marked by violence and despair. He was just 14 years old when his father was assassinated. His second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, struggled with mental illness and died by suicide while the couple was estranged and in the process of divorcing. He told me he believes that “almost every American has been exposed, mostly within their own families, to mental illness, depression, drug addiction, alcoholism.” In 1983, Kennedy himself was arrested for heroin possession and entered rehab. He recently told The Washington Post that he still regularly attends 12-step meetings.

Kennedy maintains a mental list of everyone he’s known who has died. He told me that each morning he spends an hour having a quiet conversation with those people, usually while out hiking alone. He asks the deceased to help him be a good person, a good father, a good writer, a good attorney. He prays for his six children. He’s been doing this for 40 years. The list now holds more than 200 names.

I asked him if he felt that his dad or uncle had sent him any messages encouraging him to run for president.

“I don’t really have two-way conversations of that type,” he said. “And I would mistrust anything that I got from those waters, because I know there’s people throughout history who have heard voices.”

He laughed.

“It’s hard to be the arbiter of your own sanity. It’s dangerous.”

The morning before we met, I watched a recent interview Kennedy had given to ABC News in which he said, “I don’t trust authority.” In our conversation, I asked him how he planned to campaign on this message while simultaneously persuading voters to grant him the most consequential authority in the world.

“My intention is to make authority trustworthy,” he said, sounding like a shrewd politician. “People don’t trust authority, because the trusted authorities have been lying to them. The media lies to the public.”

I was recording our conversation on two separate devices. I asked him if the dual recordings, plus the fact that he could see me taking notes, was enough to convince him that whatever I wrote would be accurate.

“Your quotes of mine may be accurate,” he said. “Do I think that they may be twisted? I think that’s highly likely. ”

I wondered why, if that was the case, he had agreed to talk with me at all.

“I’ll talk to anybody,” he said.

That includes some of the most prominent figures in right-wing politics. He told me that he’d met with Trump before he was inaugurated, and that he had once flown on Trump’s private plane. (Later he said he believes Trump could lead America “down the road to darkness.”) He told me how, as a young man, he had spent several weeks in a tent in Kenya with Roger Ailes—they were filming a nature documentary—and how they had remained friends even though Kennedy disapproved of Ailes’s tactics at Fox News. He also brought up Tucker Carlson. I asked if he’d spoken with the former Fox News host since his firing earlier this spring.

“I’ve texted with him,” Kennedy said.

“What’s he up to?” I asked.

“He’s—you know what he’s up to. He’s starting a Twitter … thing. Yeah, I’m going to go on it. They’ve already contacted me.”

Kennedy told me he’s heard the whispers about the nature of his campaign. Some people believe his candidacy is just a stalking-horse bid to help elect Trump, or at least siphon support away from Biden.

One week before Kennedy entered the race, the longtime Trump ally and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” Roger Stone wrote a curious Substack post titled “What About Bobby?” in which he suggested the idea of a Trump-Kennedy unity ticket. In a text message to me, Stone said his essay was nothing but a “whimsical” piece of writing, noting that the idea had “legal and political” obstacles. A photo of the two men—plus former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a notable conspiracy theorist—had been circulating on the internet; Stone called it opposition research from Biden’s team. “Contrary to Twitter created mythology, I don’t know Robert Kennedy,” he texted. “I have no role in his campaign, and certainly played no role in his decision to run.”

I asked Kennedy about a recent report that had gotten some attention: Had Steve Bannon encouraged him to enter the race?

[From the July/August 2022 issue: American Rasputin]

“No,” he said. “I mean, let me put it this way: I never heard any encouragement from him. And I never spoke to him.” He then offered a clarification: He had been a guest on Bannon’s podcast during the pandemic once or twice, and the two had met a few years before that.

When I asked Bannon if he had urged Kennedy to challenge Biden, he said, “I don’t want to talk about personal conversations.” He told me he believes Kennedy could be a major political figure. “I was pleasantly surprised when he announced,” he said.

“He’s drawing from many of those Trump voters—the two-time Obama, onetime Trump—that are still disaffected, want change, and maybe haven’t found a permanent home in the Trump movement,” Bannon said. “Populist left, populist right—and where that Venn diagram overlaps—he’s talking to those people.” Bannon told me the audience for his podcast, War Room, “loves” Kennedy. “I think Tucker’s seeing it, Rogan’s seeing it, other people—the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right, obviously some of us are farther right than others—I think are seeing it. It’s a new nomenclature in politics,” he said.

“And obviously the Democrats are scared to death of it, so they don’t even want to touch it. They want to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Photograph by Chris Buck for The Atlantic

Perhaps more than anyone in politics, Kennedy is the embodiment of the crunchy-to-conspiracist pipeline—the pathway from living a life honoring the natural world to questioning, well, everything you thought you knew. For much of his life, he was a respected attorney and environmentalist. In the 1980s, Kennedy began working with the nonprofit Riverkeeper to preserve New York’s Hudson River, and he later co-founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is affiliated with conservation efforts around the world. Like many other environmentalists, he grew distrustful of government, convinced that regulatory agencies had fallen under the thrall of the corporations they were supposed to be supervising.

I asked Kennedy if there was a link between his earlier work and his present-day advocacy against vaccines. “The most direct and concrete nexus is mercury,” he said.

In the 2000s, Kennedy said, he read a report about the presence of mercury in fish. “It struck me then that we were living in a science-fiction nightmare where my children and the children of most Americans could now no longer engage in this seminal primal activity of American youth, which is to go fishing with their father and mother at their local fishing hole and come home and safely eat the fish,” he said.

As an environmentalist, Kennedy traveled around the country giving lectures, and about two decades ago, mercury poisoning became a focal point of these talks. He soon noticed a pattern: Mothers would approach him after his speeches, telling him about their children’s developmental issues, which they were convinced could be traced back to vaccines that contained thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative. “They all had kind of the same story,” Kennedy said. “Which was striking to me, because my inclination would be to dismiss them.”

[Read: Inside the mind of an anti-vaxxer]

He said that one of these women, a Minnesotan named Sarah Bridges, showed up on his front porch with a pile of studies 18 inches deep, telling him, “I’m not leaving here until you read those.” Kennedy read the abstracts, and his beliefs about vaccines began to shift. He went on to become the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a prominent anti-vaccine nonprofit.

When I contacted Bridges, she noted that she is a college friend of Kennedy’s sister-in-law and clarified that she had approached Kennedy while visiting his family’s compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, she confirmed that she gave Kennedy a stack of documents related to thimerosal, and that this likely was the beginning of his anti-vaccine journey.

Bridges’s family story is tragic: One of her children ended up in the hospital after receiving the pertussis vaccine. He now lives with a seizure disorder, developmental delays, and autism—conditions Bridges believes were ultimately caused by his reaction to the vaccine, even though studies have shown that vaccines do not cause autism. Bridges says she received compensation from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, colloquially known as “vaccine court,” for her son’s brain damage.

Bridges doesn’t consider herself an anti-vaxxer. She told me that she still talks with Kennedy once in a while, but that she was surprised to learn he was running for president. She’s a lifelong Democrat, and declined to say whether she would support him in the election. She did tell me that she has received two doses of the COVID vaccine. She views the extremity of her son’s reaction as the exception, not the rule. “I think the American public is smart enough that we can have a nuanced conversation: that vaccines can both be a public good and there can be—and there, I think, is—a subset of people who don’t respond to them,” she said.

Kennedy’s campaign manager, the former Ohio congressman and two-time presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, strongly objects to anyone labeling his candidate “anti-vaxx.” When I used the term to describe Kennedy, Kucinich told me that such a characterization was a “left-handed smear” and “a clipped assessment that has been used for political purposes by the adherents of the pharmaceutical industry who want to engage in a sort of absurd reductionism.” Kennedy, he said, stands for vaccine safety.

I asked Kucinich to specify which vaccines Kennedy supports. He seemed flummoxed.

“No!” he said. “This is … no. We’re not—look, no.”

At one point, Kennedy looked me dead in the eye and asked if I knew where the term conspiracy theory came from. I did not. He informed me that the phrase was coined by the CIA after his uncle’s assassination in 1963 as part of a larger effort to discredit anyone who claimed that the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, hadn’t acted alone. This origin story is not true. A recent Associated Press fact-check dates the term’s usage as far back as 1863, and notes that it also appeared in reports after the shooting of President James Garfield in 1881.

JFK’s assassination and Kennedy’s father’s, just five years apart, are two of the defining moments of modern American life. But they are difficult subjects to discuss with surviving family members without feeling exploitative. Kennedy doesn’t shy away from talking about either murder, and embraces conspiracy theories about both.

“I think the evidence that the CIA murdered my uncle is overwhelming, I would say, beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. “As an attorney, I would be very comfortable arguing that case to a jury. I think that the evidence that the CIA murdered my father is circumstantial but very, very, very persuasive. Or very compelling. Let me put it that way—very compelling. And of course the CIA participation in the cover-up of both those murders is also beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s very well documented.” (In a written statement, a CIA spokesperson said: “The notion that CIA was involved in the deaths of either John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy is absolutely false.”)

Two years ago, hundreds of QAnon supporters gathered in Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK’s assassination. They were convinced that JFK Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, would dramatically reappear and that Donald Trump would be reinstated as president. I asked Kennedy what he made of all this.

“Are you equating them with people who believe that my uncle was killed by the CIA?” he asked. There was pain in his voice. It was the first time in our conversation that he appeared to get upset.

[From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as pallbearer during his father’s funeral (Photo by Fairchild Archive / Penske Media / Getty)

Unlike many conspiracists, Kennedy will actually listen to and respond to your questions. He’s personable, and does not come off as a jerk. But he gets essential facts wrong, and remains prone to statements that can leave you dumbfounded. Recently, the Fox News host Neil Cavuto had to correct him on air after he claimed that “we”—as in the United States—had “killed 350,000 Ukrainian kids.”

I brought up the QAnon adherents who’d flocked to Dallas because I wanted to know how he felt about the fact that so many disparate conspiracies in America were blending together. I asked him what he would say to Alex Jones, the conspiracist who spent years lying about the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“There’s only so many discussions that you can have, and only so many areas where you can actually, you know, examine the evidence,” Kennedy said. “I’d say, ‘Show me the evidence of what you’re saying, and let’s look at it, and let’s look at whether it is conceivably real.’” He told me he didn’t know exactly what Jones had said about the tragedy. When I explained that Jones had claimed the whole thing was a hoax—and that he had lost a landmark defamation suit—Kennedy said he thought that was an appropriate outcome. “If somebody says something’s wrong, sue them.”

“I mean,” he said, “I know people whose children were killed at Sandy Hook.”

Who will vote for Kennedy?

He was recently endorsed by the Clueless star Alicia Silverstone. Earlier this month, Jack Dorsey, the hippie billionaire and a Twitter co-founder, shared a Fox News clip of Kennedy saying he could beat Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis in 2024. “He can and will,” Dorsey tweeted. Another tech mogul, David Sacks, recently co-hosted a fundraiser for Kennedy, as well as a Twitter Spaces event with him alongside his “PayPal mafia” ally Elon Musk. Sacks, whose Twitter header photo features a banner that reads FREE SPEECH, has an eclectic history of political donations: Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and DeSantis, to name a few.

Kennedy continues to win praise from right-wing activists, influencers, and media outlets. While some of this support feels earnest, like a fawning multithousand-word ode from National Review, others feel like a wink. The New York Post covered his campaign-kickoff event under the headline “‘Never Seen So Many Hot MILFs’: Inside RFK Jr’s White House Bid Launch.”

So far, Kennedy hasn’t staged many rallies. He favors long, winding media appearances. (He’s said that he believes 2024 “will be decided by podcasts.”) He recently talked COVID and 5G conspiracy theories with Joe Rogan, and his conversation with Jordan Peterson was removed from YouTube because of what the company deemed COVID misinformation. The day we met, Kennedy told me that he had just recorded a podcast with the journalist Matt Taibbi.

I asked Taibbi, who wrote for me when I was an editor at Rolling Stone and who now publishes independently on Substack, if he could see himself voting for Kennedy next year.

“Yeah, it’s possible,” Taibbi said. “I didn’t vote for anybody last time, because it was …” He trailed off, stifling laughter. “I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So if he manages to get the nomination, I would certainly consider it.”

Years ago, in a long Rolling Stone article, Kennedy falsely asserted that the 2004 election had been stolen. The article has since been deleted from the magazine’s online archive.

“I’ve never been a fan of electoral-theft stories,” Taibbi said. “But I don’t have to agree with RFK about everything,” he added. “He’s certainly farther along on his beliefs about the vaccine than I am. But I think he is tapping into something that I definitely feel is legitimate, which is this frustration with the kind of establishment reporting, and this feeling of a lack of choice, and the frustration over issues like Ukraine—you know, that kind of stuff. I totally get his candidacy from that standpoint.”

Kennedy’s campaign operation is lean. He told Sacks and Musk that he has only about 50 people on the payroll. He’s beginning to spend more time in the early-voting state of New Hampshire. I asked Kucinich about Kennedy’s plans for summer: large-scale rallies? A visit to the Iowa State Fair? He could offer no concrete details, and told me to stay tuned.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Despite the buzz and early attention, Kennedy does not have a clear path to the nomination. No incumbent president in modern history has been defeated in a primary. (Kennedy’s uncle Ted came close during his primary challenge to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.) Following decades of precedent, the Democratic National Committee won’t hold primary debates against a sitting president.

“We’re not spending much time right now thinking about the DNC,” he said. “We’re organizing our own campaign.”

Spokespeople for the DNC, the Biden campaign, and the White House did not offer comment for this article.

“Democrats know RFK Jr. isn’t actually a Democrat,” Jim Messina, who led Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and is in close touch with the Biden 2024 team, said in a statement. “He is not a legitimate candidate in the Democratic primary and shouldn’t be treated like one. His offensive ideas align him with Trump and the other GOP candidates running for president, and are repellent to what Democrats and swing voters are looking for.”

I asked Kennedy what he thought would be more harmful to the country: four more years of Biden or another term for Trump.

“I can’t answer that,” he said.

He paused for a long beat. He shook his head, then pivoted the conversation to Russia.

“I think that either one of them is, you know, I mean, I can conceive of Biden getting us into a nuclear war right now.”

Kennedy’s 2024 campaign, like Trump’s, has an epic We are engaged in a final showdown tenor to it. But maybe this sentiment runs deeper than his current candidacy. These are the opening lines of Kennedy’s 2018 memoir, American Values:

From my youngest days I always had the feeling that we were all involved in some great crusade, that the world was a battleground for good and evil, and that our lives would be consumed in that conflict. It would be my good fortune if I could play an important or heroic role.

[Read: The martyr at CPAC]

Since meeting Kennedy, I’ve thought about what he said about populism—how it emerges, how it’s exploited and weaponized. He seems to believe that he is doing the right thing by running for president, that history has finally found him, as it found his uncle and father. That he is the man—the Kennedy—to lead America through an era of unrelenting chaos. But I don’t know how to believe his message when it’s enveloped in exaggeration, conspiracy, and falsehoods.

The United States has grown only more conspiratorial in the half century since the publication of Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” There are those who refuse to get the COVID vaccine because of the slim potential of adverse side effects, and then there are those who earnestly fear that these innoculations are a way for the federal government to implant microchips in the bodies of citizens. The line between fact and fantasy has blurred, and fewer and fewer Americans are tethered to something larger or more meaningful than themselves.

Kennedy was raised in the Catholic Church and regularly attended Mass for most of his life. These days, he told me, his belief system is drawn from a wide array of sources.

“The first line of the Tao is something to the effect that ‘If it can be said, then it’s not truth’—that the path that is prescribed to you is never the true path, that basically we all have to find our own path to God, and to enlightenment, or nirvana, or whatever you call it,” he said.

He’s now walking his family’s path, determined to prevail in the battle of good against evil. He’s said he’s running under the premise of telling people the truth.

But as with so many of the stories he tells, it’s hard to square Kennedy’s truth with reality.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

The values of individualism that encourage us to go it alone are in constant tension with the desire for community that many people crave. But when attempting to do things on our own, we may miss out on the joys of coming together.

This season’s finale conversation features writer Mia Birdsong, who highlights the cultural and philosophical roots of Americans’ struggle to build community. In a culture pushing us to put our own oxygen mask on first, Mia argues for the quiet radicalness of asking for help and showing up for others.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

Be part of How to Talk to People. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip,” “Just Manners”), Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), and Yonder Dale (“Simple Gestures”).

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, do you remember the first time I approached you in the office?

Julie Beck: [Laughter.] Yes.

Rashid: I sent you a message from behind your desk, saying, “Hi, can I come to your desk?”—while…staring at you sitting at your desk.

Beck: From…let’s be clear…less than 10 feet away.

Rashid: Yes.

Beck: I was like, “Yes, you can?” I remember you being really tentative when you kind of crept up, and I was like, “You don’t have to ask permission to come say hi to me.” And then I was wondering if I looked really unapproachable or something. But I was really excited to meet you, because we’d been working together on Zoom for a while, but it was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: I promise that is not my usual approach. I think I just forgot how to human a little bit, and what it felt like to work with people in an office. So I think I thought I was being polite, but I maybe just made it a bit weird.

—

Beck: Hi, I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

—

Rashid: When Julie and I first got together to develop the series—after my awkward desk approach [Chuckle]—we talked a lot about how we wanted the show to explore how small, everyday conversations can become the deeper connections that we want more of in our lives.

Knowing how to talk to people isn’t simply for the sake of starting conversation or fighting through the awkwardness of small talk. The point is to ultimately reach a deeper understanding of the people around us.

Beck: What I’ve always wanted, and what I think so many people long for, is this sense that you are part of a rich, interconnected community. That you have an extended network of support and love, full of many different kinds of relationships that serve many different purposes. And the types of conversations we’ve explored in the podcast so far are the stepping stones that lead up to that.

And now, we’ve arrived at our finale episode. And this is a big one. We’re going to talk about how you build a community, and that can be a really complex concept. The barriers that can make that rich sense of community feel hard to find are not just psychological, within our own minds. There are cultural barriers, too.

Mia Birdsong: The American narrative about freedom—which is deeply individualistic—is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself.

Rashid: Reaching out may be exactly what we need to do to find the community support we need.

Birdsong: I’m just like, Ugh, I can’t figure this out, and I’m like, Duh! Like, ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it.

Beck: Mia Birdsong is the author of a book called How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. In our conversation, she explores how the injustices baked into our country’s history have limited people’s ability to connect with one another, and how we understand the definition of community.

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave, right, was considered unfree, was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Rashid: Mia argues that today, too many people equate freedom with independence, and that can lead us to go it alone when we don’t need to.

Birdsong: And I think we’ve been told, right? The people who are strong—the people who are achieving and are successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own. And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering.

Beck: I think we definitely tell ourselves a lot of stories about how other people must have it more together than we do.

Birdsong: And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person.

Rashid: Mia gets into all of it. She shares real advice about how to ask people for support…without feeling bad about it. And how that can actually bring us together.

—

Beck: Mia, there’s been a lot of research on how lonely Americans are, how disconnected people are from their neighbors. And a lot of people feeling like they don’t have anybody to confide in, even. What do you think is behind all that?

Birdsong: There’s a Harvard study; there’s been a couple of Cigna studies. The BBC did a loneliness experiment, which was a global study. And, you know, Americans are lonely. Loneliness has been increasing, and unsurprisingly, the pandemic made it worse. The BBC study was interesting because it found that loneliness is highest among young people, men, and those who are in an individualistic society—a.k.a., America.

Beck: What is the role that you think individualism plays in all this?

Birdsong: When I think about individualism in America, I connect that very strongly to capitalism—how America defines what success looks like and what it means to be a good person.

And part of what capitalism has done is: It has inserted the exchange of money. I didn’t, you know, get together with a bunch of my friends and build my house. I paid for it.

What’s interesting is that among people who don’t have money, don’t have as much access to money, you see a lot more relational childcare. Like, where your neighbor—or your best friend or your sister or your dad—takes care of your kids. And then that social fabric gets built in, because it’s not a transaction. It is what family does.

And then I think the other piece is that the definition of success is so much about the idea that one can be a self-made man, right? Or pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

So there’s this idea that as an individual, you’re going to work hard, and you’re going to make it on your own—which “invisibilizes” all of the help that people do get. Either from the systems that exist and the privileges and advantages you have, depending on your relationship with that system.

So I think about, you know: People who are born wealthy tend to stay wealthy. If you’re white, if you’re male, if you’re able-bodied, if you’re straight, there are all of these advantages that you end up having.

Beck: And there’s a sense, too, like acknowledging any help that you did get makes your success seem less impressive somehow.

Birdsong: And we think that asking for help is a form of weakness. The more attached you are to this version of what it means to be successful and happy and good, the less you are connected to other humans. Because you’re out there trying to make it on your own.

__

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave was considered unfree was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Beck: Wow.

Birdsong: And it added a whole other layer to how I think about the Black experience in America, from being kidnapped and trafficked from home. And if we think about our people as being not just the human beings around us, but also the land we’re from—our ancestors, right?

Through to: An intrinsic part of the way that America practiced slavery was about the threat or experience of being sold away from your family. To the prison-industrial complex, right?

And through all of that, there’s also been Black people’s resistance to it—from people jumping overboard slave ships because they’re like, I’m going home one way or another. Obviously, people running away from plantations.

After Emancipation there’s this archive where you can look at these online. There were all of these advertisements that we placed in newspapers, trying to find loved ones that we hadn’t seen for decades. Sometimes it was one of our children. Sometimes it was a parent. Sometimes it was, you know, a best friend. Sometimes it was a spouse.

They’re beautiful and heartbreaking, ’cause they’re all very short. But they’re people talking about how they’re looking for somebody and they were sold to this person. So their name might have changed. The limit on the kind of information they had about this loved one—but the determination that they had to find them—was just like…rejection of the ways in which slavery was making Black people unfree. It was this insistence, right?

Beck: And the freedom to reconnect.

Birdsong: Totally. And I think about how many Black folks I know who find out, you know, when they’re an adult that Uncle Bobby is not actually their dad’s brother, but is their dad’s best friend from elementary school.

I have a friend who told me about her and her siblings looking at these family photos and realizing they didn’t know who was chosen family and who was blood or legal family. And then also, ultimately, that it didn’t matter.

And all of that stands in such stark contrast to the American narrative about freedom, which is deeply individualistic. Which is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself. Which means that you need to hoard resources, so that you have everything that you need. You get everything through transaction, so that you don’t owe anybody.

It means you don’t ask for help. It means you’re not responsible for or accountable to anybody. The idea of freedom being you can do whatever the hell you want, and nobody can tell you otherwise, right?

And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person. Because we are fundamentally social animals. Like, we need care, right? And this American idea of freedom is so separated from that.

Beck: So when you say the American-dream narrative is antithetical to freedom, what do you specifically mean by the American-dream narrative?

Birdsong: So when I think about the fundamental ideals that were written into the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and who was articulating that...we had white, straight as far as we know, landowning men. Who represented a minority of the American population.

Women were not considered at all—that’s like half right there. No Black people. No poor people. So when I think about that, and I think about what the American dream is—that’s the ideal, right? And that you do that through working hard, not asking for help. And, you know, you’re amassing your kingdom.

Beck: Mm.

Birdsong: That is not being a person. That is not about being in community. It’s not about caring for others. There’s nothing in there about love. It’s such an existentially central part of the human experience—our pursuit of and desire for and need for love.

—

Beck: Can you tell me about a time your community really showed up for you?

Birdsong: Ooh, yes. In July of 2021, I got diagnosed with colon cancer. And Stage 3 colon cancer. And I was going to have to have surgery and ultimately went through three months of really intensive chemotherapy, very aggressive chemo.

Beck: Ugh.

Birdsong: Yeah, it was no fun. But 20 minutes after I got the news, I had a phone call with my friend Aisha. We were working on a project together, and I was all anxious. Not because I had been told I had cancer, but because I didn’t know when I was going to be able to, like, continue the project.

So I totally got on the phone with her, and I was like, “Girl, I’m so sorry. But I just found out I have cancer, and I have to have surgery. So I’m going to have to postpone my work on this project.” She was like, “Mia.” She was like, “Let’s take a breath.”

And in that breath, I moved from kind of hiding from what was scary about this—behind “I have to get this work done”—to being in this place of being able to feel how afraid I was. But also, like, not alone.

Before we got off the phone, she had the meal train set up that would ultimately make sure that my family got fed while I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, and then for the three months that I was going through chemo.

She then circled up with three other friends of ours. And this group of Black women who called themselves “Mia’s Care Squad” then basically coordinated all of the things with the rest of my community—like, my larger community—that I would need.

They made spreadsheets. They had email chains: a squad of people who would run errands for me. They collected everybody’s advice. So I wasn’t getting bombarded with like, you know, all kinds of advice. But I totally wanted advice, because I was like, “I’ve never had cancer before. I want the advice.”

I feel like there was this way in which they tended to my physical well-being—but they also were tending to my spirit and my heart. They created a “joy fund” for me.

Beck: Oh my gosh; what does that mean?

Birdsong: Which was like a pile of money for me to spend only on things that would bring me joy. I bought a lot of art supplies.

When I was having surgery, there was a group of people outside on the hospital lawn singing for me.

The way that this group came together. And I remember having this moment in the beginning of being like, I am absolutely going to tell my community what’s going on with me. I’m not going to be one of those people who secretly goes through chemo. I’m like, Everybody’s going to know. And I am absolutely asking for their help. I do not want to do this thing by myself.

Beck: What did it feel like to hear your friends singing outside your hospital room?

Birdsong: Well, I couldn’t hear them, because I was in the basement of the hospital having my part of my colon taken out. But I knew that they were there. And I remember as I was getting the anesthesia, holding—because I saw them when I was coming into the hospital.

I remember just holding them in my head. And oh, my God. Because, you know, I was terrified. It was so comforting to know that they were out there singing for me.

So I’ve now been cancer-free for more than a year. And when I look back on that experience, I mean: It sucked. It was terrible. Like, cancer sucks, chemo sucks. But there’s a way in which it wove the fabric of community together tighter for them. I mean—we have shared the spreadsheets with so many other people.

And I know that what my community did has been a model for other people who have also gone through cancer or just, you know, something terrible. I feel so grateful that I got to have that level of love and care, and that I didn’t have any shame about receiving it.

—

Beck: I want to talk more about asking for help and offering help, because I feel like that’s very loaded. Why are so many of us hesitant to ask for help?

Birdsong: I think that, one: We often don’t see people asking for help, so we think everybody else is doing it on their own. Which is a lie. Not only is everybody else doing it on their own, but that it’s easy, right? When in fact, all of us are just a hot mess if we’re doing it on our own. We’re suffering.

Beck: It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Birdsong: Totally. So there’s that piece: that we don’t have a lot of good modeling for it. And I think we’ve been told that the people who have their shit together—the people who are strong, who are achieving and successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own.

And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering. When I was in my 20s and 30s, especially: the way that people would say how they got no sleep and were really tired.

Beck: Yes.

Birdsong: As like, something they were proud of.

Beck: “I worked so much. I’m so busy. My calendar is so full. I’m so tired.” Exactly. Like—congratulations?

Birdsong: Yes. Exactly—that thing, right? That is like, I have suffered in order to be productive. I have suffered in order to achieve. So that there is some way in which we have tied together “suffering and pain” with “being a good person and achievement.” I feel I’m at this place where I’m like, No, I want ease. Just because I can do something by myself doesn’t mean that I should.

I absolutely have to remind myself of this. I often find myself struggling—usually it’s something that I’m thinking about, not so much a task I need to do—but I’m just like, Oh, I can’t figure this out. And I’m like, Duh! Ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it. And inevitably—even if it’s just sharing the anxiety or stress or hardness of the thing—I automatically feel better, just because I’m being witnessed.

Beck: Is there a right way to ask for help?

Birdsong: Well, I’ll tell you what works for me. I often find, generally, that casting a wide net is better, right? Especially if it’s hard to ask for help. Asking one person and them saying “no” means you have to go do it again. When I text my neighbors for a lemon, right, I text all of them. I’m not texting them one at a time. I think the other thing is to tell on yourself and to say.

Beck: To tattle on yourself? [Laughter.]

Birdsong: Yes! To be like: I need help with something. I’m finding it really challenging to ask for help. I don’t want to be a burden. I’m going to do it anyway. And then, ideally, you’re able to have conversations with people, and they can reassure you that you’re not a burden.

I don’t know anybody who is constantly asking for help, that other people are like, Oh my God, Like, stop. That’s not my experience. I feel mostly we don’t ask enough. Maybe practice with things that feel like less of a lift—that don’t feel so critical to you, but that feel like they would bring you some ease.

If you know a friend is going to the store, ask them to pick you up some coffee because they’re going to be there anyway. And then you can go by and get the coffee.

Beck: And if they say no to picking up the coffee, that doesn’t destroy my confidence in the same way.

Birdsong: Totally. Maybe I already have coffee, and I’m just going to pretend I need coffee and see what happens.

Beck: What are your thoughts on the right way to offer help? Because a piece of advice that I hear a lot is that you shouldn’t ask “How can I help?” or “What can I do for you?” Because that’s more stress on the person: to then find something for you to do when maybe they’re in crisis or something.

Birdsong: Right, ’cause it’s not specific.

Beck: And then the advice is: “You should just do something without being asked.” But then, what if that’s unwelcome?

Birdsong: Totally. So this is where I’m also like, we need to stop trying to get an A in asking and offering for help.

Beck: I feel very called out by that.

Birdsong: We’re going to mess it up. I know, all of the high achievers are like, I want to get an A in asking and offering help. I think if we really have no idea what we can offer, we can say to people, “I want to offer some help, and I don’t know what would be useful to you.”

Beck: Mm hmm.

Birdsong: “Do you have an idea about something that would be useful, or is there someone who is close to you who does know what might be useful? And can I talk to them?” We don’t want to offer help that is not useful, because it feels risky.

And I think this is where we have to like, tap into what we know about our loved ones and come up with—here are three things that you could offer, right? And offer those and see if they want any of them. Or do a thing and see what happens. And bring them food. The death of a loved one is not going to be made worse by the fact that you gave them bread and they’re gluten free.

Beck: Small potatoes at that point.

Birdsong: Exactly. When I think about something like a joy fund, right? There’s a kind of imagination that was required to come up with that, that I think is harder in times where we’re all grinding with work and shepherding children and commuting and all of that. There was something about the slowing down of the pandemic. And in my mind, that was the slowing down of the wheel of capitalism that gave people room to show up for me in a particular way.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And I’m saying all of that because—especially right now, like we’re not post-pandemic, but we’re capitalism—the wheel of capitalism has started winding along the way that it was before.

And our mental capacity gets sucked up by, you know, both our paid and unpaid labor. And keeping our lives going. So I want us to give ourselves some grace when we find it challenging to make the space that we need for community.

Beck: Right. Because it’s not entirely our doing.

Birdsong: Exactly.

Rashid: Julie, there was an interesting survey on time use showing that by 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends—which doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time to me. And there was an almost 40 percent decline from five years before that. So, it seems like there’s so much we’re pressured to squeeze into a week or a day that four hours per week is all many people can even manage.

Beck: That was even before the pandemic, too. So I can’t imagine it’s gotten better since. But you’re right, Becca, that time is finite, and life is full of demands. Which is breaking news, I know. I mean: It would be nice to see those stats go up. But also, no matter what, it’s never going to be possible to always be a perfect friend or a perfect neighbor.

Mia said, “You need to stop trying to get an A-plus in helping people.” And I felt very personally roasted by that, because sometimes I do think about community-building as…homework? [Laughter.]

Even though I want to focus on relationships more than personal achievement in my life, those values of hard work and perfectionism follow me into my personal life as well—where if I’m not living up to that ideal of creating a perfect utopian community for me and the people I love, then I’m subconsciously giving myself a bad grade. What a nerd!

Rashid: You’re not a nerd…you’re trying to stay on top of it! I now make it a point on Sunday evenings to kind of write out a list of things I want to do in the next few weeks. And then I try to actually set up social time with my group of friends—I actually started a little neighborhood supper club with my friends, where we do themed dinners every month.

I like that it’s created this routine for us—where I know we have this thing we like doing together, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Beck: I like that you attend to your correspondences on Sunday night. It’s very Pride and Prejudice of you. [Laughter.]

Beck: So Mia, we’ve been talking a lot about how communities show up for each other in a crisis. And I think most people are really ready to show up in a crisis. But how can we have that kind of interdependence when it’s not a crisis?

Birdsong: Right, because all of us are going to experience crisis. That’s just a given. I have met so many older white men who—their wives die, and they’re in this moment of crisis, and they have nobody. They have their therapist, is who they have. They will just start talking to anybody about what’s going on with them, because they are so lonely.

So I think about that as the opposite of what we want.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And part of it, for them, is that they’ve kind of put all of their social connection in the one basket of their wife. And when that person doesn’t exist anymore, they’re just set adrift.

Beck: So community is, by its nature, something that has to be built by multiple people, of course. But if you are feeling a lack of community in your life, what can you as an individual do to kickstart that process?

Birdsong: So, the advice people get is often to join a thing. And I’m like, that sounds lame in some way. But it’s also totally true. Especially as adults, right? We don’t have that built-in, kind of like a school situation—where we’re meeting people who we know we’re building friendships with.

Beck: Right. We have work.

Birdsong: Exactly. Which I feel is not actually where you should be centering your social life. Because despite what your boss might say, your work is not your family. I mean, people obviously build genuine relationships there, but that should not be your most important social interaction.

So I’m like: book clubs. Activism. If you have some kind of faith, a faith community. Because you’re not going to meet people sitting at home, like I’ve tried.

I think the other piece is that sometimes we know people, but we don’t allow ourselves to be known by them. We’re not having the kinds of conversations that allow people to see into the interior of our lives. We’re not really telling them what’s going on with us. We stick to small talk. Right?

It is a recounting of what happened that was interesting in your life. And, you know, you say that you’re “good” as opposed to what you’re struggling with, or how you’re actually feeling. Or something that you’re wrestling with that could even be, you know, an intellectual thing. It doesn’t have to be painful. But we keep things at this surface level, and we don’t allow things to go deep.

Beck: How do you figure out what you want a community to look like in your life and then bring that into the real world? It seems like a very basic question, but it also seems really hard to actually do it.

Birdsong: Yes. And part of it is to get quiet with yourself. Notice the part of you that is longing for something. And I think, to make some room for it, and to notice how you’re thinking about that part. Like, if it makes you anxious, or if you wish it didn’t exist, or if it’s beautiful in some way to you—sit and find that piece of you. And I think you have to ask it, right? What is it that it wants?

You don’t make a strategic plan for building community. So then it’s really about seeing what that leads you to, and seeing who it leads you to.

I think for many of us, it is like—we have people in our lives, but we want to bring them closer in some way. I think that we actually have more knowledge and wisdom about how to build relationships than we give ourselves credit for. And I think primarily what gets in our way is not “Do we know what to do?” but “Are we willing to do it?”

There is no way to be in close relationships without being seen in some way. And I think many of us—I am “many of us”—are terrified of being known. We want people to see the best version of ourself, because we think that’s the version that people will love. That’s the version that people will praise.

That’s the version that people will want to, you know, be around. But nobody is that version of themselves. We are all many things. Sure, we do good and we do well, but we also mess up and are unsure and insecure and have a hard time.

Beck: I feel like what I’m hearing you say is that if there’s a basic action to community-building, it is “not hiding.”

Birdsong: Totally. Yes.

Rashid: You know, one thing I have noticed ever since the pandemic, Julie, is that most of my socializing is now a lot more homebound, which is not a good or bad thing. Yeah, but: I established a lot of new traditions with my community, like cooking dinner at different people’s houses or movie nights, or things in my life that used to be oriented around going out and meeting at bars.

And that still happens, too. But I have established a sort of newness in the rituals I have with my circle of people. What about you? I mean, have you learned anything in the making of this podcast that has changed your approach to your existing relationships, or helped you build new ones?

Beck: I wish I had a big update for you that would illustrate my personal growth. But I don’t think a lot has really changed with my friends or in my community. I’m not best friends with my neighbors yet. I think what I’ve noticed more is just patterns in how I think about my relationship to my community.

Rashid: I feel like that’s what we’ve set out to do, right? Sort of break down these steps of just bringing people closer to us. The initial awkward small talk, the hanging out, the scheduling the hangouts, the tough communication with friendships, and ultimately the sort of selfless disposition that you need to have if you want your relationships to feel more mutual and not feel transactional.

Beck: I think another hallmark of life in our capitalistic society is the pressure to optimize and self-improve all the time. I fall into that trap of thinking things will be better if I change this or if I change that.

So it kind of strikes me that a lot of my angst comes from feeling like I need to optimize my community toward some ideal through my own hard work—which is actually a very self-centered way to think about it.

The point of a community is that it’s not just in one individual’s control. And as much as it’s good to put effort into your relationships, you also have to just let go and be curious and see what’s actually there, and enjoy what’s there.

Rashid: And I think when you do try to control the situation, you can end up with our messaging-behind-the-desk situation, where before saying “Hi” I thought it was maybe a better idea to message you first, and make sure that you were comfortable with the interaction and all of that.

Beck: But you know, an imperfect awkward beginning like that can actually lead to something great. Because we’ve really become friends while making this podcast! You’ve been to my house; we’ve had many long, rambly, chatty drinks together. You’ve met my partner, you’ve met my sister, you’ve met a bunch of my friends.

Some of that was the result of intentional effort and reaching out and scheduling. But it was also the result of easing up on overthinking, and just being together. So I think it’s a balance of effort and ease—or effort, but not to a neurotic degree.