Where this was said
Sam Kiefer on Making Friends in Sobriety Over 40
At 59:50 · chapter starts 57:10
Jenna invites producer Sam Kiefer to share his sobriety journey as a real-world case study in adult friendship-making. Sam describes how making new sober friends over 40 was far harder than expected — he took fencing, cello, sign language, kickball, and bowling classes, stepping into rooms of strangers roughly once a week for a year [1] — Sam Kiefer "Producer Sam Kiefer describes the unexpected difficulty of building new sober friendships over 40 — taking fencing, cello, sign language, k…" 57:10 . It worked: he made genuine new friends through 12-step programs and hobby classes alike. But when Jenna asks whether he assumes people like him, Sam is candid: he is hardwired toward self-dislike, is actively working on it in therapy, and found the Snapchat advice almost absurd in its apparent simplicity [2] — Sam Kiefer "I'm naturally hardwired to not like myself. It's like a thing I'm dealing with in therapy and this, all this stuff. So that, I like threw m…" 59:16 . He describes the 'emotional hangover' of driving home from every social event, replaying everything he said and concluding no one liked him — despite nothing actually going wrong. Jenna affirms she understands, citing her own social anxiety and inner self-critic as roots of the same pattern.
Producer Sam Kiefer describes the unexpected difficulty of building new sober friendships over 40 — taking fencing, cello, sign language, kickball, and bowling classes, walking into a room of strangers roughly once a week for a year. It worked. But the emotional hangover afterward — spiraling on the way home — never fully went away.
Sam Kiefer described making new friends over the age of 40 as unexpectedly difficult, saying he 'way overestimated how simple it would be.'
Producer Sam Kiefer, on a sobriety journey, stepped into a room of strangers roughly once a week for an entire year to build new sober friendships.
Jenna and Angela trace the root of their two-decade friendship to a single fact: their desks backed up to each other on The Office set. Proximity created opportunity; shared day-to-day moments built the bridge. A journal entry Angela reads from those early days captures it perfectly — lunch in a trailer, arm weights, and hydrangeas.
