The art of the bromance - a young man's post-college guide to friend making and social circle building

A guide for overly intense STEM-lords and founders / businessmen

I’ve wanted to write this piece for a while, because I feel like I’ve more or less lucked out in terms of friend quality and quantity compared to most people, and I think this was the result of deliberate choices and habits. And those friendships have stood the test of time, and are still going 10 and 15 years later - I am writing this from a place of retrospective success.

I’ve thought about writing this a couple of times, but always resisted because it seems so niche as to be practically irrelevant for a larger audience.

But then I thought - well, DO I have a larger audience, representative of most people? Ha! Nah, they’re probably all a bunch of weird nerds like me. So maybe this might help some incremental person out there.

In particular, the puzzle of “how to make friends outside of college” seems like a big one for many people, particularly as people move around a lot as their careers get off the ground.

One final note, I’ve written this as a “young man’s guide” because I’m a guy and for whatever reasons, pretty much everything I end up doing in life is 9:1 dominated by men,¹ so I’m fairly doubtful about whether my advice is applicable to most women - that’s not to say it couldn’t be!

Ah, the bromances! Bromancerae? Bromancii? Bromançopodes? Crap, I’ve conjugated myself into a corner here…

So let me level set, so you can decide if this post is relevant to you at all

The great majority of my friends have STEM graduate degrees (<4% of the US pop).

The ones that don’t (and some of the ones that do) are fairly rich entrepreneurs or founders or business people (<1% of the US pop).

I’ve met a fair amount of them while lifting very heavy pieces of metal in the gym, while rock climbing, while racing cars or at car shows, at Burning Man, or while doing triathlon training / triathlons.

And once more, they’re 9:1 men, for whatever reasons. Bromances.

The whole thing is impossibly selected and confounded every which way, and they have essentially zero relation to normal people on practically every relevant dimension.

But if you want to make friends with a bunch of smart, intense, rich, fit nerds, maybe this post is worth reading for you.

With that context, what’s the high level strategy?

Lots of “how to be social” or “how to make friends" guides tell you to go out regularly, to take public transport, to smile and spark up conversations regularly with complete strangers.

This is not that kind of guide.

I am a strong believer in selection and filtering, and the stronger the better.

The LAST thing I want to do is take public transport or spark up conversations with randos, and wouldn’t expect it to be interesting or rewarding in the slightest.

No, the key to finding and building good friendships is DOING THINGS.

My basic recipe:

1. Do more stuff

2. Find the weirdos and intersections

3. Make it regular

4. Go deep / intense when it feels right

And to that “selection and filtering” comment, it’s doing things in highly selected environments or ways.

You WANT big filters - on IQ, on income, on skill, on time invested, whatever you can get.

All of my best friendships are with people who do interesting things at a high level, and whether that’s communicated via their education, careers, hobbies, or wealth, you’re not going to find these people on public transport or in the grocery store line.

You should “own” the effort here

One point of order, it’s YOU who wants to build a friend circle and good social life, so you should make a clear decision right now to own all the effort.

This is for several reasons - people are flakier than ever, the world is full of distractions and superstimuli, schedules are busy, motivation isn’t always symmetrical, people are unimaginative, and more.

Broadly, you’re going to do a lot better in this process if you just decide that you’re going to be doing all the researching, inviting, coordinating and pre-event confirming. Yeah, it sucks, yeah, in a just world other people would pull their weight, but trust me, it’s a lot easier and more effective this way.

Think of it as both a relatively small investment for the huge bonus of having a social life with more fun and more high quality friends, as well as a good habit to instill from first principles.

But back to this “doing things” point, what do you actually like to do?

It seems pretty obvious that you need more than the median case of “I like to stare at screens all day at work, and then relax by spending another 7-9 hours a day staring at smaller and / or bigger screens.”

Friendships, particularly bromances, aren’t built via screens. You can’t scroll Tik Tok together.

• Bromances are built by challenging each other and egging each other on as you climb from a 3 plate deadlift to a 4 plate deadlift together, then palavering in the sauna for an hour after a boundary-pushing workout that maxed you both out.

• Bromances are built by getting wrecked at Art Basel or Burning Man together and generating crazy stories.

• They’re built helping each other do a quick driveshaft replacement at the track after you turn the boost too high and break it loose.

• They’re built sprinting full tilt down a mountain trail together after you somehow stumble across a rattlesnake nest, jump out of the way into another one, then start running down the switchbacks and hit yet another one.

• Friendships are built when you guys trust each other enough to go out and get the dance floor started all by yourselves, and inspire other people to join in and make it a real party.

• Bromances are made at a car show for hearses where you’re the only two who showed up driving built or heavily modified or exotic cars.

• Friendships are built with 2 or 3 of you doing an Iron Chef-style cookoff against each other, and having other friends judge via secret ballot. Let the power of competitive instincts among high achievers directly drive ever-greater deliciousness for everyone!

These are all weird and specific, but that’s kind of the point

Friendships (at least in my own opinion / experience) are triggered at weird conjunctions - you’re both high IQ nerds lifting heavy, you’re both into racing a certain type of car, you’re put into (or create) a crazy situation together, you challenge each other to compete on how many currently sitting people you can get to join the dance floor, you’re both trying to upstage the other (in a fun-spirited way) in a hobby setting like the rock climbing gym or the billiards hall or whatever.

That’s the trigger that you’re different in similar ways, and there could be fruit and mutual delight and benefit in an ongoing relationship. Friendships are a function of things in common and liking the same ‘games,’ with games drawn very widely.

I was going to put a bigger list of ideas here, but I suspect my own interests are weird and niche enough they’re not applicable for a lot of people reading this - but absolutely sit down and genuinely try to generate fun ideas, including asking AI’s to help generate unconventional-but-fun ideas along the lines of your interests.

Engagement is driven by hooks - if you’re proposing an Iron Chef dinner party, that’s a lot more interesting than trying a new restaurant (after all, anyone can judge, even if they can’t cook). If you’re proposing trying the new Ninja gym together, same. If you keep things surprising and interesting, you’re going to get a lot more uptake on your invitations.

Another under-utilized venue - traversing your friend network

Did you know that in a given friend network, transitivity is only .25? In other words, there’s only a 25% chance that a person’s friends are also friends. That’s a big deal!

So your existing good friends are already highly compatible with you - obviously, that pool of transitive friends-of-friends is much more likely to also be compatible with you. And prospectively, there’s a ~75% arbitrage opportunity there!

So what I like to do is explicitly request that invitees themselves invite other good friends they know who would be interested, to specific events. This is a good idea because it’s an additional compatibility filter itself - a FoF that also wants to go to a Ninja gym or to an Iron Chef cookoff party is even MORE likely to be compatible with you, so you’re really fishing in a rich pool then, and that’s where the magic is more likely to happen.

The other nice thing about this? You’re hanging out and building friendships in groups, which as Noahpinion points out in his own friendship post, is a smart idea in terms of optimizing people’s limited free time, and also a smart idea in terms of offering more value to everyone attending and keeping things interesting.

Also, back to the “filters” point - PAY MORE FOR STUFF.

It’s completely worth it to pay for a really exclusive / excellent gym, because then everyone else there is filtered and if you’re both lifting heavy, you probably have multiple things in common (or work out at your highly filtered workplace).

People usually don’t need to be convinced that your neighborhood matters, and that paying more for your place (whether rented or bought) is worth it, but that’s another point in favor here. If you’re all in a similar building / neighborhood and somebody else there is into raising puppies, or RV’s or boats or race cars or running or cycling or whatever, there you go - multiple points of commonality right off the bat.

Similarly, people don’t need to be convinced that highly selective careers are a good idea. People end up at FAA(N/M)Gs or in finance or in AI for a reason. Well, guess what - that’s a great environment for fostering friendships too, because everyone else there is highly filtered already too, and you just need to look for commonalities and weird overlaps in interests.

This sounds elitist, I know - that’s fine, I’m comfortable being elitist. Most of us in the Rational sphere have higher IQ’s and highly compensated jobs and hard-to-get degrees that put us easily into the <5% already. How well do you REALLY get along with “normal people?”

Keep in mind the “median American” is obese and sedentary and 100 IQ and doesn’t have any college degree whatsoever and makes like $50k or something. They’re the ones eating junk and fast food for every meal, putting in a solid 7-9 hours of phone and TV time, and driving gigantic SUV’s at 1.5x the speed limit as they swerve all over the road while yelling at their kids and trying to hit you while you’re out cycling. If that doesn’t sound like the kind of people you’d be friends with, you’re an elitist too.

My point is, don’t be afraid of filters or paying more, they’re absolutely on your side in terms of increasing your quality of life and personal networks.

Interact regularly

Friendships are sparked by commonalities, but bromances are forged with continued actions together. You keep doing the thing - you text about upcoming car shows or street races, you keep working out at the same times and build a rapport over time, you keep talking art or stay in touch about the costumes or art car you’re building, you invite people out to fun events, dinners, or to parties you throw.

A rule of thumb I like to follow for “regularly” is roughly weekly for the first month, then at least every 2-3 weeks for the next 1-3 months, then try to do something intense.

Most friendship posts will tell you something like “friendships are a function of consistency, proximity, and vulnerability.” That’s a pretty female-centric view, in my own opinion - I don’t think most men require vulnerability for friendship, although that’s probably an element over time for your closest, “ride or die” friends.

I’d say it’s more like “consistency, affinity, and intensity.” You guys click, you spend time and do things together regularly, and ideally you do intense / cool / interesting things, because that’s the crucible in which friendships are born.

How to stay in touch with careers and moving?

Yes, people absolutely move a lot for their careers, and it can feel like the end of an era when a close friend moves away, or when you move away from a great nexus of friends.

I’ve been there many times - I’ve lived many places, including living out of suitcases for years overseas.

The key here is staying in touch via text / email / Whatsapp / Discord, regularly scheduled video catchups (I like monthly or EOM), and big outside world Schelling points or in-depth visits to their city / place.

What are those Schelling points? It depends on your overlapped interests. If you both like racing, Texas 2k, if you like artsy party animals, Burning Man, if you like triathlons together, a given race. Use your mind - as a bonus, you schedule and do more fun stuff in your life overall if you have a regular set of distant friends. Those things are expensive? See “pay more for stuff” - sometimes that’s the point, it’s a feature, not a bug. Also, a strong friend circle and social life is a giant buff to quality of life and well being, to the extent it actually improves all cause mortality by 1.2 - 1.5x. That’s worth some effort and expense.

Go deep / intense

My dad has this crazy story about picking up a new plane in Alaska, and flying it back with somebody he’d hung out with for a few times / weeks, but didn’t know all that well. One of the engines started icing and stalling out while they were over the deepest, remotest possible wilderness. The engine died, and they looked at each other. Because of the distance to the next airport and their fuel level, their literal lives depended on getting it restarted (one engine at high power uses more fuel than two at low power), which after a lot of fiddling around and trying different things, they were able to do.

They’re still good friends and try to spend time together, because they stared death in the face together and overcame a high stakes problem together.

Some of my best friendships were forged while lifting very heavy, or while driving at more than 120mph together in cars or on motorcycles, while super drunk and getting up to hijinks, or while pushing each other in a gym or swim or race.

When you’re both at the limit of your capabilities, and you see you can trust the other’s capabilities, and that you work well together and can each respect each other, it’s a great environment for forging a powerful and lasting friendship. I’m sure all the neurotransmitters being dumped at “max” helps too.

Some other advice here? Don’t be so frigging uptight about everything!

One of the major failings of nerds and rationalists (in my own opinion) is they have no fun - they’re generally more gray, straightlaced, and boring than the normie population.

Maybe it’s because I was a delinquent in my youth, or spent so many years doing business in Asia where you literally HAVE to get blind-drunk hammered to do business, but there’s a lot of alpha in getting drunk or high with people, and being open to “vices” more generally.

I mean, most successful founders get this, and are big ole party animals - probably due to the risk appetite necessary to do a startup. I would like to argue to you that this is uncontroversially a better way of life.

First, on the dangers of drugs - I should write a post on this sometime, but the physical dangers of drugs are vastly, overwhelmingly exaggerated. Read David Nutt’s Drugs Without the Hot Air - the actual dangers of the vast majority of drugs are much smaller than say, horse riding or motorcycles or most sports, and the danger pretty much all comes from combining them with alcohol or other drugs. The correlation between “legal class” and actual risk of harms is 0.04.

One statistic I’ve harped on here before - the actual risk of full-on cocaine ADDICTION is something like half the risk of being obese OR of being sedentary, which is essentially 80%+ of Americans.

“What about fentanyl?” you might ask - and yes, as I talked about in my opiate crisis post, fentanyl is overwhelmingly more lethal than anything else, and drives nearly all drug deaths just by itself. Fentanyl contamination in “regular” drugs is a slight risk, yes - but smart people (and literally everyone reading this is way smarter than the average drug user) can entirely mitigate this by testing with strips or reagents, which are publicly available on sites like dancesafe.

Alcohol is probably more dangerous than every drug except fentanyl and even IT is prospectively very safe. Most 18-28 year olds go through a period of heavy drinking, and pretty much every one of them are fine, highly selected and emotional news stories to the contrary - roughly 1500 college students out of 15M die due to alcohol related causes annually, and most of that is drunk driving.

This is to point out that “yes and-ing” somebody’s invitation to get drunk or go to a rave or refreshment-enhanced party is prospectively a very low risk scenario overall, and should be taken up a lot more (and *offered* a lot more) than it usually is in the rationalist crowd.

To my “intensity” point, it’s an easy-mode intensifier in terms of deepening friendships.

Taking shrooms or acid together and jamming on some instruments in between having deep and wide-ranging conversations? Way more intense and memorable than playing a board game, or whatever boring people do.

So what are the takeaways?

1. Filter rigorously and look for weird / unique / rarer overlaps in those filtered places.

2. Put in the effort - make it regular, especially in the beginning. You should be owning the effort and researching, reaching out, and inviting people and coordinating, you can’t expect them to.

3. Put in the effort - make it regular with your more distant friends, schedule regular catchups so they actually happen, actually visit sometimes.

4. Look for fun Schelling points and invite people well in advance - then you do more fun things in life AND convince other people to do more fun things, while maintaining and deepening the friendship.

5. Go for intensity - nothing bonds like doing things together under high stakes or with depth and intensity - and on that front, be more open to fun stuff.

After all, think of the cost / benefit

In the best case here, you establish and maintain deep and high quality friendships that last for a decade or more, go out regularly, and do a lot of fun stuff.

In the worst case here, you personally did a lot more fun stuff, and occasionally had people flake on invites.

Sounds like a pretty great and one-sided trade!

Even the downside is pretty good, and the upside is a major differentiator and buff to quality of life.

1. Being a founder and doing startups, for one. I do more hobbies than most people, but I am unerringly able to find and enjoy hobbies that solely partake of a ~9:1 male / female ratio. Rock climbing, racing and modifying cars, motorcycles, wood working, triathlon, startups and mentoring, hackathons, weight lifting, boondock RV-ing, raising and training puppies, the list goes on and on.