Hot Tub Talks and How to Find Them

The best way to feel not alone 🧖‍♂️

🎉Quick note: This is a special post because it’s my final project for a writing course I just wrapped up. It involved a lot of editing and co-creation, so big shout out to

Carly Valancy

,

Sam Spurrell

,

Zara Bogaski

,

Chris Wong

,

Michael Dean

,

Dhanesh Neela Mana

,

Ned Twigg

,

Ari

, Richard & Nick

It was January 2022 and I was cruising down the 101 South, taking inventory of my life:

✅Just taken a 3 week vacation to Portugal

✅Working at a company with a purposeful mission 

✅On my way back to friends and community in sunny Santa Barbara

✅Had a cloud of anxiety shrouding my every move

I knew something was wrong, but like the rattle in the back of my ‘02 Outback, I couldn’t quite place it.

Was it a quarter life crisis or work angst? Saturn returning or just a magnesium deficiency?

These were the questions swirling in my brain, summed up by a quote from

Ava

:

"Loneliness comes from being unable to communicate things that seem important."  

I knew I was craving connection, but I didn’t quite know how to get it. 

That was the headspace I was in when I called Richard, a buddy from college, to “catch up”. I had a 4 hour drive ahead of me, and he had a free afternoon, so when I tested the waters by admitting that I was having a hard time at work, we didn’t stay on the surface, we went deep. 

We talked about how both of us were burning out at our jobs, and how we were just a few rungs up a ladder, looking up and saying “Wait a minute… I don’t wanna go up there.” 

We kept pulling the thread, putting words to feelings we had been feeling for months (…years??) When we finally hung up over two hours later, all the voices of indecision and doubt had quieted for the first time in a while. I was able to hear the voice I needed to hear: my intuition.

And that cloud of anxiety? For a moment it had lifted, and I realized that I had finally started tending to the root of the stuckness. 

Haha jk. Guess what? I ended up leaving my job to take some much needed time off, but the cloud of anxiety came back, and now I had way more time to languish in it 😬

Also, turns out it’s a pretty rare occurrence to have a long car ride that coincides with a close friend’s unscheduled afternoon. Maybe I was expecting too much out of friendships. Maybe it was time for my therapist to put the team on her back. 

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had experienced some type of ✨magic✨ in that car ride conversation with Richard. Some life-giving force that stays circulating just out of reach, even though it’s what we crave in our relationships. I’d caught glimpses of it during long hikes, intimate dinner parties, and late night hot tub talks - where the conversation has enough space to expand and flow into the cracks of our lives that we usually hide away.

These convos were few and far between, but the deep connection that came with them was exactly what I felt was missing from my life. This begged the question:

How could I bring more hot tub talks into my life?

Moai

Right around the same time as my convo with Richard, I was internet stalking the new COO at my company and stumbled upon an article he wrote about resilience that referenced the concept of moai.

Moai is a Japanese concept that directly translates to “meeting for a common purpose”. In this tradition, you’re grouped up with a few friends in your childhood, and that squad is your squad for life, supporting you socially, emotionally, financially and being there for all the ups and downs of life. I know, damn 🥹

Moai originates from the island of Okinawa, a place long considered to be a Blue Zone¹ (a region where a lot of people are living long and prospering). Maybe it’s the green tea and purple yams they’re housing over there, or maybe this moai thing was tapping into the same magic I was chasing. Maybe the moai Okinawans were living proof that hot tub talks are essential to living a happy, healthy life. 

Kanpai, brother (YouTube )

I was sold. I started a group chat with Richard and our other friend from college, Nick, which would eventually be renamed Moai. I sent over the article and a feeler about the idea of us starting our own moai, meeting each month to talk about how fulfilled we felt in all the different categories of life. 

In the interest of keeping this post relatively short, I’ll save the details of starting and maintaining our moai for a future post. But the TLDR is that we’ve met for every month for the past 27 months to reflect on how we’re feeling about these categories:

Physical, Social, Emotional, Relationships, Spiritual, Environment/Community, Professional, Intellectual, Creativity.

Richy showing the moai his proprietary duvet attachment technique

Hot Tub Ingredients

27 moai meetings later, here I am trying to reflect on what I’ve learned about the ingredients needed to cook up a hot tub talk (ingredients that rarely come together in the world otherwise):

1. Time

   • Is it worth it for me to get into this right now? Am I talking too much about myself? These are the questions that can creep in and cause conversations among friends to stay surface level. Finding a couple hours to consistently catch up may seem impractical, but moai has shown me the generosity of time when you’re tubbing

2. Shared Context 

   • Last year I joined a men’s group affiliated with my local yoga studio that had a similar goal as moai. Getting deep with strangers was…difficult. Our moai is all guys of similar age and background, and with that comes a solid foundation to build on

3. Expectation of Vulnerability

   • Opening up is 1000% easier (still hard) when everyone shows up with the expectation that this is the time to bring up the vulnerable stuff (dating dilemmas, family wounds, existential dread, etc). Trust builds over time as people share and are received supportively

When these things come together, you got the ingredients for a hot tub talk, and what happens in that tub is something special.

I’ll give you a peek into our very first moai meeting:

“Wait, what? How did I not know this about you?”

“I dunno dude… you never asked?”

“Fair point.”

We had known each other for a decade, but 10 minutes of hot tub talk > 10 years of friendship.

I wish I could guarantee that setting up a moai with your friends will solve all your problems and make you a better person, but that’d be a lie and a bad look for the Hot Tub Talks™  brand.  

The truth is, I still struggle with anxiety and some of the other things that were weighing on me on that car ride over two years ago. The difference is that now I don’t have to wait to find myself in a hot tub to tend to the deep stuff. I have two other friends who I can reliably trust to see me - and as David Brooks puts it in How To Know a Person,

“Seeing someone well is a powerfully creative act. No one can fully appreciate their own beauty and strengths unless those things are mirrored back to them in the mind of another. There is something in being seen that brings forth growth. If you beam the light of your attention on me, I blossom. If you see great potential in me, I will probably come to see great potential in myself.”

So see and be seen, my people! Moai is one way I find more hot tub talks in my life, and my writing on Substack is an attempt to share hot tub talk worthy ideas with you all. So if there’s someone in your life that you wanna tub with, don’t just ask if they want to “catch up”, try asking if they have the time and space for a hot tub talk.

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What Blue Zones Has Right & Wrong About the Okinawan Lifestyle