Listen, it is so good to be at the goose.

Oh my gosh, sweat and all.

It is good to be at wild goose with you all.

And we thought, you know, since we're all together, we're all feeling good.

We might talk about really sad things for the next hour.

And that would be the best thing.

Let's just get in our feelings and in our bodies and then try to act like normal people,

right?

That's life.

So we've been talking a lot about why we have a podcast at all.

If you know our work, you know, we started out of a simple origin story of mutual loneliness.

So two of us went to a faith transition, both of which were varying degrees of public.

And in the process of that faith transition kind of lost like our entire social communities.

And we became friends just because somebody else was as weird as we were theologically,

which is a word like we didn't even believe in anymore.

And I've always thought that like what makes the liturgist podcast great is the way we

try to deescalate different topics and really move into them.

And I've recently been looking at kind of the data about why people listen to this show.

And what I'm learning is you actually listen because you also feel that sense of loneliness.

And that in fact, when I look at data beyond the liturgist podcast, I see that right

now you could make a data driven case that the West is in the greatest loneliness epidemic

in human history.

...