• The Tiger Sisters shared advice on when to keep friendships and when to walk away.
• Cherie and Jean Luo are applying their signature analytical approach to emotional topics.
• They laid out four factors to consider in evaluating friendships.

The Tiger Sisters became top business podcasters by sharing their educational and career experience at Stanford, Goldman Sachs, and more. Now, the self-described "Silicon Valley and Wall Street big sisters" are applying their mindset to friendships.

"I think everyone privately has gone through a friendship breakup at some point in their life, whether it's passive or active," Cherie Luo said in an interview. "And it's something that doesn't get enough attention because when we think relationships, we mostly think the romantic breakup is the most traumatic."

In a three-part series on the subject this month, the hosts broke down how they audit relationships with pals and when they know it's time to break up with a friend.

The sisters, who just joined the Vox Media Podcast Network, started out in 2024 by sharing lessons from their school and work experiences and have since introduced more emotional content. It's a bet that their formula can extend to a broad array of topics and give them more staying power as they aim to grow into a larger media company.

"We did start Tiger Sisters with a very, very business-oriented approach," Jean Luo said. "It was more so our audience that kept asking us like, 'Well, what about how does this apply to friendships? Who are you guys dating? What's going on in your relationships, in your dating lives?'"

In the friendship episodes, the sisters took a data-driven approach, drawing on academic research and layering in their own experiences rather than just venting about breakups.

"I think it's kind of in our DNA of, 'How do we make sense of something that could potentially be very messy and emotional and bring a framework to help guide us through it?'" Cherie Luo said.

When to end a friendship

The sisters say people should consider four things when evaluating a friendship: who you are, where you are in your life, who the friend is, and how they'll fit into your life going forward.

"By providing this framework, it helps the listener and the Tiger fan take a step back from what is inherently an extremely emotional topic," Jean Luo said. "You can then decide if you want to go through an active or a passive dissolution."

Researchers have found that most friendship endings happen passively when people grow apart, Cherie Luo said. This leaves open the possibility that the friendship could be rekindled, whereas abrupt endings tend to be more acrimonious and permanent.

"It is less disruptive to a broader friend group," Jean added. "Friendships don't exist in a vacuum."

In the podcast, they also discussed alternatives to ending a friendship: distancing yourself or changing the role the friend occupies in your life.

They gave the example of a friend who was tired of always being canceled on by a pal. Rather than break up with them, they addressed the problem by double-booking them.

If you decide a friendship's run its course, you don't have to take the leap and break up with them immediately, the sisters said. It's important to take the rest of your life into account.

"Let's say you just had a baby, and you are starting a new job, and you are helping your parents with their health," Jean Luo said. "If there's a lot of things going on, maybe you actually don't need to address that friendship breakup right now. Even if the right decision is to end a friendship, there are a million different ways in which you can approach it."