This episode was originally broadcast over the KALX airwaves on April 22, 2026.
[Francis]: You’re listening to K-A-L-X Berkeley 90.7 FM.
[Miriam]: Here at KALX, we wanted to understand why modern life feels increasingly isolating. Where did all the casual places we used to just show up and meet people go?
[Sydney]: To answer this question, our team:
[Francis]: Francis
[Sydney]: Sydney
[Miriam]: Miriam
[Francis]: Together, we looked into third spaces: Places outside of school, work, and home that we go to for human connection.
[Miriam]: This is the second episode. You’re listening to Spaced Out from the KALX Discovery Internship team, a show about the places that hold communities together. This is episode two, “A Latte Community”.
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[Miriam]: Coffee shops and cafés are supposed to be the ultimate form of the 3rd place. A place where strangers become regulars, and regulars become community. So our team went to the iconic Caffè Strada, a Berkeley staple since 1989, on a sunny 70-degree afternoon. We sat down outside at one of the tables along College Avenue… and what did we find? A patio full of people, completely alone together. Heads down, screens up. Which got us wondering, what’s actually going on. Why do people show up to a place like this and still pull away from each other? I decided to speak to Dr. Juliana Shroeder, a professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business who studies why we misread other people’s willingness to connect. Because it turns out, the person hunched over their laptop next to you? They might actually want to talk. We just never give them the chance.
[Miriam]: When people show up in third spaces but still retreat to their phones or aren’t making eye contact or approaching others, um, what is happening psychologically? Is that avoidance for them? What does that look like?
[Dr. Schroeder]: I think that, that. It can be a mistake to infer that others don’t want to engage just because they’re on their phones. Um, so we find in our research something we call pluralistic ignorance, which is that people tend to infer people’s attitudes from their behavior, even if it’s incorrect. So if someone is not talking because they’re on their phone, you infer that they don’t want to talk. But it could be that they’re just mindlessly scrolling on their phone and they are open to talking. And we actually have data on this that people are more open to talking than other people expect. And so these digital devices can become barriers to having in person conversation, but a lot of that is because people mistakenly infer that people don’t want to connect even when they would be willing to do so. And, um, I think that is, when you think about this, the miscalibration that people have around certain types of social experiences, it’s not suggesting that you need to go out and be like massively social and like be engaging all the time. It’s more just like on the margin when you have these little decisions to make. Like should I go to that like event or should I just stay home? You know, maybe consider like making a different decision sometimes like going to the event, like turning to the person sitting next to you and just smiling. It’s like those little things that I think can make a really big difference in aggregate in your life. And so I do, I try to do it, you know, I try to like, live that research.
[Miriam]: You have a TED talk from 2023 on how to fight loneliness. That’s the theme. And you describe there’s a human choice. Um, we’re faced every day between connecting with others or actively avoiding them. And modern technology has become this crutch. So how has this idea like evolved in the three years since, um, you started thinking about that and gave that Ted talk?
[Dr. Schroeder]: I still think that there’s this critical part, I think the, of the framework that he introduced in that TED Talk on. Approach versus avoidance is still very useful to consider, because I still think that’s kind of the, the dominant is like, do, do we approach, and in what ways we approach. That’s gonna be the, that’s still the big question, but I think that one thing we’ve been discovering in the research is that sociality is like a very broad spectrum, right? And so there’s different rings of sociality. There’s, um, what I call like maybe the outer rings, so that’s like community and neighbors and, you know, stranger interactions. And then there’s kind of the inner rings, which is more of what people often focus on, like close friends and family members, loved ones. And I think what’s interesting is that the psychology is really different for the inner and the outer rings. So for the outer rings, people don’t necessarily. Think about prioritizing those for their, for their health or their mental health. They’re not thinking, oh, I really need to have a strong community per se. Some people are, but I, I think like, especially the, something like talking to a stranger, I don’t think people necessarily think, oh, this is really gonna be making me happy and be important for my health. Like, they’re not really thinking about that. In fact, if anything, we have a line of research where we find the opposite that people. Sometimes think that talking to strangers will be pretty unpleasant and they really would prefer not to do it. Um, but in, you know, in fact what we find in experiments is that talking to strangers can be pleasant. And that we think that this community level, this outer ring of social life is actually pretty important. Um, and it really helps to facilitate people’s social health in different ways. That’s not something that people should take for granted. And the concern is that technology allows us a way to potentially outsource and capitalize on our incorrect predictions, that these will not be pleasant interactions. And it allows us to be able to get rid of those, those interactions so we don’t have to interact with our, you know, delivery person. They can just drop it off, you know, we can do it through an app, you know, it’s also changed a lot of our closer relationships as well. It’s commodified a lot of these relationships and petrified, if you think about like what happened with the dating apps and how it’s completely changed the way romantic life looks for most people. And we’re also seeing this now happening with friendship apps. So I think, um, that. That’s one way to think about it is like, how can we save the outer ring of our social lives and still build community and neighborhoods, and how can we make sure that tech doesn’t completely get rid of those, uh, interactions? Um, so how you connect the conversation depth, you know, talking about shell things and superficial things versus like really deep conversations that sometimes people are a little afraid to have. There’s a lot of social interactions that people worry. About us being potentially a little bit awkward, like giving negative feedback, like talking with someone about something you disagree on, like a political conversation. Even just like reconnecting with old friends. These are all things that involve, like having to put yourself out there a little bit, having to exert a little bit of social energy. And again, this is a place where I think tech companies now are kind of starting to capitalize on people’s concerns and like their fears around these types of social, social interactions.
[Miriam]: You have mentioned, you know, personal connection and in-person connection cannot be substituted, but you know, all of us at some point have felt uncomfortable walking up to a stranger, walking into a room of people we don’t know. There’s this discomfort, do we push, how do we push through that? Or is that a signal worth listening to? How can we avoid leaning on our phones, for example, in public spaces as a crutch?
[Dr. Schroeder]: Yeah, that’s such a good question. So I think the best, um, resource on this, so Nick Epley has a book coming out. It’s called A Little More Social, and he is written very extensively about, um, this research that I’ve done alongside him on. The miscalibration that people have around certain types of social interactions. So you mentioned that, yeah, it feels a little bit uncomfortable and I’ve mentioned as well that some of that discomfort is actually exaggerated in our minds. It’s a little bit more in our minds than it is in reality. Um, and so there is a little bit of, just like I said, the social courage and social agency that’s necessary to push past that. Inaccurate psychology. It doesn’t mean that you should ignore your intuition entirely and like go out and do really dangerous things. I’ll give you a little bit more about the psychology of like what types of interactions we seem to misunderstand. So it’s the ones that have more to do with like our, um, like strangers, outgroup members, people. We might disagree with that whole, like basically we don’t have much experience necessarily interacting with those types of people. They’re not the types of people that we normally think about in our social networks, like. All of our social network is built, especially in these online environments, to just create these filter bubbles of like engaging with people that we already like and we already agree with. And so we just don’t get as much experience with like talking to strangers and things, especially if we don’t think it’s gonna be a good interaction. So those are what we call like psychologically wicked environments, which means that you just don’t have as much experience with them, and so you don’t learn as readily what they’re really like. And so those are ones where we see people being a little bit more miscalibrated. Um, and you can get experience, like you can talk to more strangers, you can have more disagreement conversations, and you can learn a little bit more about what those are like if you experience them, but you have to go out and try it. So that’s kind of the, the challenge I usually pose people is like, why not try it and try to. See what it’s like and, and you know, you’ll learn a little bit that way. And then the second psychology I’ll mention is that there’s a certain class of interactions where people focus more on their own competence or how they think they’ll be perceived by the other person. Um, like will, when I give a compliment, will it land in a way that the other person will really appreciate? Um, when I show gratitude, am I gonna be articulate? If I’m starting up a conversation, am I gonna be able to start with the right conversation topics? And people get really, when they’re thinking about this in a simulation, in their minds, they get kind of caught up on like the, am I gonna be really effective and articulate? And what they’re failing to recognize is that the recipients really just appreciate the warmth of the gesture. So they’re focused more kind of on the warmth aspect of it. Um, and so you, if you get too tied up with thinking about like your own competence and like the kind of exact nature, how a conversation will unfold, that can prevent you from even trying to start. Like you’re never gonna give the compliment if you’re really not sure about how it’s gonna land. And so I think that’s another type of. Interactions that people get wrong. And this also, like, I think this is also relevant to when people make mis predictions about a recipient. So when you, when you find yourself focused too much on how the other person is going to feel about something, you’re like, well, it’ll be fine for me, but I’m worried about the other person. You should recognize that, you know, perhaps they’re a little bit more like you. And, um, and that you shouldn’t get like too caught up in, in exactly like little concerns about what, what might be going on in the other person’s mind, because it’s easy to misunderstand another person’s perspective and to draw inferences that are unwarranted there for sure.
[Miriam]: So now we have a framework for what’s going on. When we look at someone scrolling, we assume that they don’t want to be bothered, when really they might just be killing time, waiting for exactly the kind of conversation we decided not to have. And when we do take that leap, people care a lot less about whether we said exactly the right thing. It all makes sense in theory, but actually going up to strangers is a different story… ________________________________________________________
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[Francis]: You’re listening to K-A-L-X Berkeley 90.7 FM.
[Francis]: So that’s the psychology behind why people aren’t approaching each other. But what does it look like in the real world? Sydney and I headed over to Caffè Strada, one of campus’ favorite third spaces, to find out. We talked to a bunch of people–
[Talia]: Hi, my name is Talia
[Rya]: Rya
[Elijah]: Elijah
[Haniya]: Haniya
[Siena]: Siena
[Hannah]: Hannah
[Isa]: Isa
[Francis]: —about what they’re doing right now at Caffè Strada.
[Isa]: doing a group project for my Haas class
[Siena]: Now I’m writing an essay.
[Talia]: I’m at Strada because my friend was sitting here doing work and I wanted to come say hi on my walk home.
[Hannah]: I’m procrastinating my essay a little bit.
[Rya]: I came to do work, although I will say, like, if I ever have something that needs to be done, I do not come here.
[Francis]: So clearly, Strada is a workspace for many people. But even in the midst of this work, there’s still a lot of socializing. Isa’s friend group, for example, uses Strada as a hangout spot as well as a study spot.
[Isa]: We’re here every day at Strada. Me and my friends just hang out, get a table, drink coffee, and then uh just sit and hang out, do our own work, and go on with the rest of our day. We come between classes so, that’s pretty much all we do.
[Francis]: But Strada isn’t just all work no play. Having fun is also something that a lot of people show up at Strada to do. Here’s Rya again about some of the fun that she has at Strada:
[Rya]: My favorite activity is coming to Strada at like 10 p.m. and just playing cards with my friends. So yeah, I feel like you can do anything here. Like someone can bring, like, literally, like, they could bring their whole set of knitting and like no one would bat an eye. That’s what I love.
[Francis]: This is great! People are hanging out, having fun, and happy. This is what third spaces are all about! But on a less social note, not everyone at the café was in groups. A lot of people also just show up to sit down and study—or to people watch, such as Haniya. Here’s Haniya on her people-watching practices.
[Haniya]: More people on their own. ‘Cause I feel like coffee shops are a common place for people to just go and get work done, so I think the ratio of people on their own is a lot higher than people that are either with another person or in groups.
[Francis]: In any case, whether alone or in groups, it sounds like people are having a good time lingering around Caffe Strada. But a lot of the vibes seem exclusive to Strada — not all cafés offer this atmosphere. For one, Strada occupies a really convenient location: it’s on Bancroft and College, right between campus and the residential areas on Southside. As such, people pass by Strada walking to class and walking home, making it an incredibly convenient place to pass by. Several of the people we talked to weren’t even sitting at Strada. They were passers-by who decided to stop by and say hi. But Strada also has a certain ambience that other cafés lack.
[Talia]: I feel like it’s very an antique like Berkeley type of thing. And it’s been around for a while, so I appreciate that.
[Francis]: And at other locations of cafés and drink shops in general, the drinks themselves, or the food, seem to be the main attraction, rather than the social space. Elijah was well aware of this tension.
[Elijah]: I did see something on Twitter a while ago. I was like, oh, that’s a good point. Like how people these days should focus more on like kind of like building relationships with places they go to and like go to one spot and like, you know, learn the servers, let them learn you. Let them remember like what your order is and stuff like that. And it’s kind of how that like brings a sense of fulfillment. So that kind of stuck with me. But yeah, I think mostly I go to places just for like the experience of whatever the food or menu might be.
[Francis]: Even at Strada, the socialization that does happen isn’t really about making new friends, it’s more about seeing people you already know. People aren’t reaching out to strangers, they’re reinforcing old connections. Here’s Hannah:
[Hannah]: I don’t know if people are necessarily looking to make new friends at Strada, because I feel like everybody’s studying. But I think you do kind of know that when you come here, you’re gonna see somebody, you know, and then so you can study with a group. But I don’t know if I’ve made any, like, new friends here.
[Francis]: Even though people aren’t necessarily making new connections, Caffe Strada survives as a social space, but other cafés might not retain those features that define a third space. And even at Caffè Strada, laptops and the free wifi there are intrusions on what other might be perhaps a more utopian third space where people can put distractions aside and just chat with each other. However, this hasn’t always been the case — Berkeley once had a very important role in coffee culture, and its cafés were once very important gathering places.
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[Francis]: You’re listening to K-A-L-X Berkeley 90.7 FM.
[Francis]: So now we’ve heard about the psychology of approaching people at cafés and we’ve been to a café itself to find out what people are talking about and what people are doing. But aside from that, the Bay Area has a very rich coffee culture, including a lot of coffee and café culture that’s unique to Berkeley.
[Miriam]: Do you want to start off by telling us, Francis, a little bit about what this looked like in San Francisco?
[Francis]: Yeah! So San Francisco actually has a rich history in coffee, and there’s a great book about it by Monika Trobits called Bay Area Coffee: A Stimulating History in which I found most of this information. Coffee first came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, when miners were looking for coffee and it quickly became one of the top coffee ports in the United States. By the year 1900, it was one of the top 3 US ports, after New York and New Orleans. Early on, the coffee industry in the city was a lot more about selling instant, ground coffee for miners who didn’t have time to make their own coffee. This is where you get brands like Folgers Coffee, which still exists today, that started off in San Francisco.
Later in the ’50s, and throughout the 20th century, actually, the rise in Italian immigrants in North Beach was something that really kickstarted the actual café culture here. So a lot of Italian immigrants would come and set up their own places where they would actually make coffee and serve it to customers. For example, Café Trieste, in San Francisco’s North Beach area, was an important place for this. And as this happened, as these cafés became more social gathering spaces, they also became home to important artistic and literary movements. For example, the Beat movement, which had iconic San Francisco poets like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, they started meeting a lot in cafés. And yeah, that’s kind of how it started and how it evolved from a coffee-based culture to a more social space that also just happened to have coffee in it.
[Miriam]: Yeah, so once people started meeting and connecting in these cafés, what did that look like in Berkeley? And you know, Berkeley also has a rich culture of social activism, so how has café culture contributed to that?
[Francis]: Berkeley actually has a very unique spot in café culture because of a lot of the cafés that were here but also because of one specific café, and that was the Caffe Mediterreaneum. The Caffe Mediterraneum was once located on Telegraph Avenue. It was around the place where Moe’s Books is now, and it was an iconic café in Berkeley, ever since it was founded in 1956. One of the cofounder, Lino Meioran, was actually the person who invented the latte. That classic café drink that we all know and love was actually invented right here in Berkeley! But aside from this caffeine innovation itself, there was also a lot of other stuff that was going on at Caffe Med. It was an important meeting space for all of the radical thinkers of the time, including people with the Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio, who was a leader of the Free Speech Movement, other activists were also there, the people who organized for People’s Park, as well as a variety of writers and other thinkers. In 2004, feminist Bay Area poet Alta Gerrey wrote the following in an editorial to the Berkeley Daily Planet: “When students used to ask me what they should do to become writers, I would always answer, ‘Hang out at the Med.’ In one afternoon, 15 years ago, I saw June Jordan, Gary Snyder, Robert Crumb, Jane Scherr, John Oliver Simon, Ruth Rosen and Ishmael Reed,” all at the Med. And so, the Caffe Med became this place for writers to meet, for activists to meet, and for students to meet. That continued until it’s closure in 2017.
[Miriam]: That’s a fascinating little history lesson you gave us just now. And you know, what really strikes me because, you know, when I pass a café on Telegraph for example I see these small boba shops, I see places where people don’t really have a chance to sit and to stay awhile. Can you maybe speak to what’s going on now? We’re not seeing the same gathering spaces anymore.
[Francis]: Yeah, so a lot of the mainstay coffeehouses that used to exist just aren’t around anymore and have been replaced. There was a 1998 article in the SF Chronicle that listed a bunch of different coffee shops where people would gather, it called these places “dark-roast hangouts,” including the Med, Wall Berlin Kaffeehaus, Odyssia Street Cafe Bistro, and of all the cafés on that list, the only one that remains is Caffè Strada. Instead, now what we have is a density of boba shops. There was recently an article about how the Telegraph has the most boba shops, the highest density boba shops in the Bay Area. The culture’s definitely different. It’s, to me it’s more of like a grab and go kind of thing rather than sit down and relax. It’s more like, oh, you order on Snackpass, and then you get a drink, and then you take it with you to your next class or back home or something like that.
[Miriam]: Certainly, Francis. Thank you for explaining this. I definitely agree, you know, people order to go, they take their disposable cups to go, they’re not sitting as long in these cafés, they’re not gathering. So I want to understand what this might look like in Europe, which has a tendency, people see it as this romantic place where people gather and, like you know, the streets of Paris, there are cafés all around.
[Francis]: Well, if only we knew someone who had been to Paris and had studied the café culture in Paris, perhaps studied abroad or something like that. I wonder if we could meet anyone like that.
[Sydney]: What are the odds—I have! And I’d love to talk about Paris café culture. So. Paris. I spent last fall there studying abroad, and I want to talk about something that happened to me that sounds completely mundane until you think about it for more than thirty seconds I walked into a café not a tourist spot, just a neighborhood place, the kind with three tables outside and a chalkboard menu that hasn’t changed since 2003 and I sat down. No laptop. No agenda. And within about ten minutes, the person next to me had pulled their chair a little closer and we were just… talking. Not networking. Not performing productivity. Just talking. And I remember thinking: when did I last do that?
Here in Berkeley, we have incredible coffee culture. We love our pour-overs, our matcha, our minimalist spaces with good lighting and plenty of outlets. And I mean that sincerely, there’s real craft there. But walk into most of our coffee shops and you’ll find something that looks less like a gathering place and more like a very aesthetically pleasing co-working space. Which, fair enough. That’s what a lot of us want from a café now. Paris made me interrogate. The café as a social institution is something Paris essentially invented. The first café opened there in the late seventeenth century, and from basically day one, these were not just places to get caffeine, they were meeting grounds. Writers, philosophers, revolutionaries. Voltaire was a regular. Hemingway. Beauvoir. Picasso. These weren’t people who occasionally popped in for a croissant, these were people who lived inside these cafés, who did their thinking there, who built entire intellectual communities around a shared table and a small cup of bitter espresso.
Simone de Beauvoir is a particularly interesting case, she used café spaces to access philosophical conversations and social circles that were otherwise closed to women. There’s something almost radical about that. A public table as a point of entry. And surrounding May ’68 student protests cafés became literal organizing grounds. People meeting, debating, finding each other. The café was a political space. That’s a lot of weight for a room with marble tables and no WiFi. Which brings me to Angelina. If you’ve done any research on Paris cafés, you’ve heard of Angelina. I went. Of course I went. And here’s the thing it’s beautiful. Genuinely. But standing in that line, surrounded by people with cameras out before they’d even ordered, I started to feel something a scholar named Dean MacCannell would call “staged authenticity.” The long queue, the multilingual staff, the gift-ready pastries. Angelina isn’t really a café anymore. It’s a performance of Paris. A very elegant, very delicious performance, but a performance nonetheless. In 2005, it was bought by a hospitality group, and since then it’s operated more like a cultural landmark than a local institution. The Mont-Blanc must be reproduced exactly, because visitors expect it to be part of the Paris they came to find. Which is fascinating and honestly a little melancholy when you compare it to what I found five minutes away.
My host family mentioned, almost in passing, that it’s now pretty common to walk into a Parisian café and find out it isn’t French-owned at all. And that made me ask them: what actually makes a café feel Parisian? And they didn’t say history. They didn’t say ownership. They said: routine. Regulars who know the barista by name. Conversations that drift from the table out onto the sidewalk. A menu that stays more or less the same year after year. These places don’t need to advertise Frenchness because they are Frenchness, they enact it through daily practice, through the same people showing up and the tables being close enough that you end up in someone else’s conversation whether you planned to or not. That’s the café culture that shaped philosophy and revolution. Not the gilded walls. The proximity. The habit. The fact that no one is plugged in. Paris has also changed, to be clear. Third wave coffee culture, the same movement that gave us Berkeley’s beautiful, $8 oat milk lattes arrived in Paris too. As recently as 2010, most Parisian espresso was, to put it charitably, aggressively bitter. Now there are specialty shops talking about their beans the way winemakers talk about terroir. There are laptop-friendly cafés catering to Paris’ younger generation who, like us, want somewhere to work.
So the tension is real. Traditional café versus modern café. Lived culture versus curated culture. The neighborhood spot versus Angelina. But what struck me sitting at that little table, in that unremarkable place, talking to a stranger, is that the third space isn’t something you design. You don’t get there through better lighting or a more thoughtful bean sourcing story, as much as I appreciate both of those things. You get there by putting the tables close together and leaving people alone long enough to remember how to talk to each other. Paris hasn’t forgotten that. At least not entirely. And i dont think berkeley has either
[Miriam]: Maybe the problem isn’t that people forgot how to connect. Maybe we just redesigned the places that used to make it easy.
[Sydney]: From Med to Strada, from North Beach to Paris, cafés weren’t just about coffee. They were infrastructure for conversation.
[Francis]: And when that infrastructure shifts toward speed, productivity, and isolation, something else quietly disappears with it.
[Sydney]: In places like Paris, the rules are different. No laptops. No rushing out. Tables close enough that silence almost feels unnatural.
[Miriam]: So maybe the question isn’t “why don’t people talk anymore?”
[Francis]: It’s “what kind of spaces actually make talking possible?”
[Sydney]: And if we’ve lost some of those spaces here…
[Miriam]: …can we bring them back?
[Francis]: Coffee has the power to energize us, but what do we do with that energy? Next time we’re going to look at how fitness fosters community
[All]: Talk to you soon!
