Taking a walk

Anyone can organize a walk-n-talk, and walk-n-talks can happen anywhere. We’ve done a couple in Japan, one in Spain, and one in China. We’ve found it most useful to do them where luggage forwarding is possible since it’s much nicer to walk with a simple day-pack than 10kg of gear. This also increases the breadth of folks able to participate. Kevin... See more

Orders taken, drinks in hand, everyone in place, the topic is then discussed. If a few people begin to drift off-topic be vigilant, pull them back in. It’s not only a single topic but also a single conversation. Everyone listens to everyone. Everyone who wants to speak, speaks. Foster a self-awareness of convo-monopolization.

Each day a topic is chosen by a member of the walk-n-talk crew. In China, some examples: friendship, the future of art, adventure, failure. In Spain, last year along the Camino, we had a fairly candid and revealing conversation about money and our individual philosophies around money therein.

12km a day is a good pace. You may think, 12km? That is nothing! But it is very much something. It allows for exploring small towns and villages along the way, for taking breaks as needed, brewing coffee in the home of a farmer who spontaneously invites you in out of the rain, tasting a few varieties of local wine at a pop-up Chinese winery, for... See more

The more diverse the group the better. Ideals aren’t always possible, but the greater the age range, the more even the gender split, the more wacky the backgrounds, the more varied the professions, the better conversations will be. For example: A couple of ex-convicts just released from San Quentin and the judge who commuted their sentences might... See more

A walk-n-talk works like this: gather 5-10 curious, kind, generous, patient, inspiring people and set a walking course through the countryside for a week, plus or minus a day or two. A week works well because it may take a day or two or three for people to open up, for the so-called “situational extroverts” to fully emerge from their shells, for... See more

We often associate loneliness with seniority, an image of elderly people cooped up inside. However, young adults are twice as likely to be lonely than seniors—a whopping 79 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds report feelings of loneliness.

“It’s such a big city,” Kohn tells me. “You live alone, you do things alone. People go to work, come home, and just want to relax...you’re not really meeting as many people as you’d like.”