A LETTER FOR PEOPLE WHO LIVE HERE
THU · NOV 5 · 2026
Philadelphia's most quoted psychologist is at it again. Adam Grant, the Wharton organizational psychologist whose research ends up in every group chat in this city eventually, went on Hala Taha's Young and Profiting podcast and made a claim that will make you look at your phone differently: your frenemies are unhealthier for you on average than your enemies are.
Yes, the person who is fun sometimes and exhausting other times. That one. Grant says the research points at them, not your actual enemies.
WHY AMBIVALENCE IS HARD ON YOUR BODY
The mechanism is the unsettling part. An enemy is consistent; your body knows what it is getting. A frenemy is what researchers call an ambivalent relationship, warm one minute, a jab the next, and your system never gets to relax because it never knows which version is walking in. Grant says these relationships create more stress and bigger blood-pressure spikes than openly hostile ones, and in his telling: "The more ambivalent ties you have, the greater your risk of stress, also even cardiovascular disease."
Your enemy, it turns out, is at least honest work. Your frenemy is a coin flip your heart pays for.
THE HONEST CAVEAT
We like to be careful with podcast claims, and so does our recap desk: ListenerReader rates this one credible, with a podcast-sized haircut, meaning the underlying research is real and the podcast version says it a little bigger than the studies do. The direction holds. The drama is trimmed for the stage.
WHAT GRANT SAYS TO ACTUALLY DO
Not a purge. Grant's advice is not to start cutting people off dramatically over brunch. If the negatives genuinely outweigh the positives, downgrade the relationship or let it go. But most of the time the move is containment: "you try to accept their personality, but you contain their behaviors." You are not fixing them. You are deciding how much access they get.
THE FRAMEWORK BEHIND IT
The interview runs on the ideas in his book Vibe, which sorts your people into four types: associates for practical needs, allies for shared goals, pals for fun, and companions for real support. His finding that people who lean on one friend for everything are less happy than people who spread their needs across several will hit anyone whose entire emotional infrastructure is one person. His verdict on a friend who is great fun but unreliable in a crisis doubles as a whole philosophy: "Great pal, bad companion."
The full conversation is recapped at ListenerReader, if you want the whole thing before your next group-chat audit.
PHILA.FYI
This story links every claim to where we found it. Corrections welcome.