Remember the old hotel ice machines? The kind where you’d slide your bucket under the chute and hear the avalanche of cubes crashing into it? There was something so fun and strangely gratifying about that thing.

Or think about breaking an icicle off the edge of a roof. Such a gratifying feeling from such a small act.

My guest has written an ode to the outsized pleasures that arise from these kinds of everyday interactions with the physical world. His name is Ian Bogost, and his new book is The Small Stuff. Today on the show, Ian argues that a fulfilling life isn’t built solely by chasing the big components of happiness but also by embracing the small moments of gratification that are woven throughout ordinary life. We discuss how those moments can be found in tactile experiences like shifting a manual transmission, turning a well-made knob, or flipping through the pages of a real menu. We explore how these small opportunities for engagement — for contact, connection, and control— have been disappearing as the world becomes more digitized and automated and everything becomes a touchscreen. And Ian shares how opportunities for “sensory enchantment” can still be found in our increasingly dematerialized world.

Resources Related to the Podcast Ian’s previous appearance on the AoM Podcast: Episode #247 — The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Antidote to Excessive Irony * Ian’s Atlantic* article “The End of Manual Transmission” * Andy Rooney compilation

Connect With Ian Bogost The Small Stuff* website * Ian’s website * Ian’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming SoonThis article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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The comedian Sinbad had a bit where he talks about how much he hates standing in line behind people at McDonald’s. The fact that folks would be hemming and hawing about what to order left Sinbad shaking his head in frustration: “People act like they ain’t ever been to McDonald’s! They got the same menu! You know what they got!”

You’d think that by the time someone reached the front of a line at a restaurant, especially one that’s offered pretty much the same menu for decades, they’d be ready to shoot off their order. But instead, folks still seem to be caught flat-footed once they step up to the cashier.

Restaurants are hardly the only places where you see this phenomenon.

When you’re renting a car, you’ll often stand for ten minutes in a line, along which have been posted multiple signs indicating that you’ll need to show the counter rep a driver’s license, a credit card, and your return flight confirmation number to complete your rental. Yet, it’s only when people reach the desk that they start rooting around in their pockets and scrolling through their phones to retrieve what’s needed. They sometimes act surprised that they need to show the required information at all.

This kind of obliviousness is on display whenever I go to my local post office. They do passport applications there, but you need an appointment. It’s on the website, and there are signs everywhere that say “Passport by Appointment Only.” Yet without fail, there will be people who show up without an appointment to try to get their passport, only to be told they’re out of luck. They then get angry, cause a scene, slow things down for everyone standing in line to buy stamps, and generally spread bad vibes.

Everywhere you go, you can observe a lack of what might be called “social situational awareness.” People are looking down at their phones instead of what’s going on around them. And because technology takes care of so many details of our lives for us, we’re less vigilant about keeping track of them ourselves.

As a result, a lot of people are sleepwalking through their interactions with the world, which can cause delays and bottlenecks that muck things up. While every unnecessary delay is small, multiplied across hundreds of interactions, it becomes friction everyone has to bear.

The world would be a better place if we all committed to paying attention and knowing what we were doing.

Read any signage displayed behind the counter or on the wall while you wait in line for something. Consider what information you’ll need to have at the ready and what items you’ll need to have in your hand before you reach the front. Anticipate what will be required for the next step.

Pay attention to the interactions between other customers and service reps or cashiers to see if any friction points are causing holdups. If you notice something, figure out how to avoid running into that issue yourself.

If there’s a question about a protocol that you weren’t able to find out through prior research or from the signs, promptly ask the agent/cashier about it once it’s your turn. For example, different airports have different policies these days about whether things like laptops have to come out of your bag when you go through TSA. Listen for whether the agents are making announcements about that kind of thing as you approach the checkpoint, but if you haven’t heard anything, then as soon as you step up to the X-ray machine, ask the agent what the protocol is.

Cultivating your social situational awareness is a win-win-win for everyone.

The cashier or customer service rep gets an efficient interaction. You get what you need quickly. And other customers, passengers, and queue-standers can be on their way sooner.

And the art of paying attention doesn’t just apply to standing in line for a double quarter pounder with cheese. It’s about having the situational awareness that allows you to navigate the wider world more effectively. In my experience, the people who are “sharp,” or listo as they say in Spanish, have developed the skill of paying attention and creating mental models on the fly of how to handle themselves in whatever situation comes their way. If they can’t figure it out on their own, they’re quick to ask for clarification. It’s an element of agency.

Don’t be a clueless potato head. Be a high-agency man.

Pay attention; be prepared; don’t make the world wait on you.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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“Woodrow,” Gus McCrae says, lying in a bed dying, “quite a party.”

It’s one of my favorite lines from my favorite novel, Lonesome Dove.

Why?

Because it perfectly captures one of the richest portrayals of male friendship in literature: the friendship of Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call.

Like a party, Gus and Woodrow’s friendship is messy. It’s uneven and full of tension, punctuated by laughter and the occasional fight. And like a party, where you often find yourself shoulder to shoulder with people you didn’t pick to hang out with but have to figure out how to get along with, Gus and Woodrow were thrown together as young men and had to learn how to get on while being polar opposites.

To understand why their friendship hits so deep for me (and other men), it helps to look at what communication scholar Bill Rawlins calls the “tensions of friendship.” In his book Friendship Matters, Rawlins describes four opposing forces that exist in every close friendship. I talked to Bill about this on the podcast several years ago, and it’s one of my favorite conversations.

The four tensions of friendship, if not managed appropriately, can destroy the relationship. But these same tensions are what give friendship its unique tang. And if you look at Gus and Woodrow, you’ll see all four playing out throughout the sweeping story of Lonesome Dove.

Independence and DependenceUnlike family, marriage, and business alliances, friendships are not held together by blood or legal bonds. There are no clear cultural expectations or contractual obligations that set its terms. The bond between friends is purely voluntary and made only of will. You enter a friendship by choice and can end it by choice. That freedom is what makes friendship so rewarding, but also so fragile.

In my podcast interview, Rawlins said that friends “gift each other two freedoms”: 1) the freedom to live their own lives, and 2) the freedom to depend on each other when needed. These two gifts — the gift of independence and dependence — create a tension.

Gus and Woodrow’s friendship showcases that tension throughout the novel. They’re opposites in nearly everything. Woodrow is the stoic — all duty and discipline; Gus is the epicurean — content with a bottle of whisky and a game of cards. Each lives his own life on his own terms and mostly lets the other be.

Mostly.

Because they can’t help but meddle with each other. Gus ribs Woodrow for being joyless; Woodrow mutters that Gus is lazy. They tussle and irritate one another, but they know how far they can push each other. When the tension gets too high, they back off and give the other person some space. But then they always circle back to one another, because they both know they need each other.

That back-and-forth between independence and dependence is the heartbeat of their friendship and that tension is what kickstarts the main plot of Lonesome Dove. Woodrow, bored with life on the Texas-Mexico border, decides to drive a cattle herd from Texas to Montana. Gus wants no part of it; he’s happy enough sitting on his porch in Lonesome Dove and watching his pigs. Gus could have let Woodrow go off on his own and do his own thing while he stayed behind doing his.

But he knows Woodrow can’t do the drive alone.

“It’s your show, Call,” he says. “Myself, I’m just along to see the country.”

Gus gives Woodrow the gift of dependence.

While on the trip, Gus serves as Woodrow’s faithful companion. But he still does his own thing. And Woodrow lets him.

Woodrow gives Gus the gift of independence.

Good friends go back and forth in offering each other both dynamics — sometimes freedom, and sometimes attachment.

Affection and InstrumentalityRawlins notes that friendships hover between affection — caring for someone simply for who they are — and instrumentality — valuing them for what they can do. Men, he says, often lean toward the instrumental side. We bond by doing stuff with each other and for each other. We value guys for the concrete things they add to our lives — skills, resources, connections, advice, etc.

That tension runs through Gus and Woodrow’s friendship. One of the reasons Woodrow puts up with Gus is that he knows Gus is a cool operator. He’s proven his grit in their battles with the Comanches as Texas Rangers. Gus is useful . . . when he wants to be.

Woodrow’s got an undercurrent of affection for Gus as well — even if he just doesn’t have it in him to express it. Woodrow instead shows his affection the only way he knows how: through work. Woodrow demonstrates his love for his lifelong friend by hauling Gus’s carcass all the way back from Montana to Lonesome Dove. Everyone thought it was stupid. But Woodrow did it because he loved his friend.

Gus leans more towards the affection side. He expresses his love to Woodrow through words. He teases and provokes Woodrow in an effort to draw his buddy out of his shell. When Woodrow refuses to loosen up, Gus keeps talking anyway.

Their friendship lives in this tension. Woodrow’s practical devotion frustrates Gus, who wants warmth; Gus’s talk frustrates Woodrow, who wants deeds. Between the two, affection and instrumentality keep tugging at each other.

Judgment and AcceptanceEvery friend wants to be accepted for who they are. But real friendship also involves judgment. We choose friends because we admire them. When friends fall short of their own ideals, we notice. But do we call our friend out and risk a relational rupture? Or do we stay silent in order to maintain the friendship? It’s a fraught tension. Rawlins says one of the defining tests of friendship is “the moment when someone risks delivering the judgment that needs to be delivered.”

For the most part, Gus and Woodrow accept each other — warts and all. But the tension between judgment and acceptance comes to a head when Gus challenges Woodrow for not claiming Newt as his son. “Give him your name, and you’ll have a son you can be proud of. And Newt will know you’re his pa.” But Woodrow can’t do it. He’s too restrained by pride and the duty-first code that’s governed his life. Gus knows that, but he presses anyway. He cares about Woodrow too much to let him off the hook.

Gus doesn’t scold to feel superior. He does it because he genuinely cares about Woodrow. He knows Woodrow’s got more in him than orders and work, and loves Woodrow enough to say so. Woodrow accepts the rebukes because he knows Gus isn’t taking a cheap shot. He knows Gus loves him.

Real friendship lives in that uneasy space of accepting someone as they are while still asking them to be better.

Expressiveness and ProtectivenessThe last tension of friendship that Rawlins identifies is between expressiveness and protectiveness. This is the tension between the desire to share feelings versus the instinct to hold them back. Sometimes we don’t share our feelings because there are parts of ourselves we want to keep to ourselves — we want to protect certain aspects of who we are. Or we don’t share our feelings because they would poke someone else’s vulnerabilities too acutely — we want to protect them from being hurt. Women, generally, lean toward the expressive side; men toward the protective. We tend to want to keep more of our inner lives private.

Ol’ Gus isn’t afraid to express his feelings to Woodrow. It annoys Woodrow how much Gus shares his opinions with him. But he lets Gus yammer.

Woodrow, the stoic, keeps his feelings close to his chest. If he wants to let Gus know how he feels, he’ll show him. When Gus lies dying, this difference becomes heartbreakingly clear. Woodrow sits by his bed, silent. He’s thinking about how stubborn his friend is and how much they’ve quarreled over the years, but also about all the good times they’ve had together. But he can’t bring himself to say anything. Gus saves him the trouble: “Woodrow, quite a party.” That’s it. The line sums up decades of friendship.

Woodrow’s final act — hauling Gus’s body across a continent to bury him where he wanted — is the ultimate form of protectiveness. It’s Woodrow’s way of being able to say “I love you” without having to express his affection in words.

The Fruitful Tension of FriendshipThe thing that makes friendship special — its freedom — can also make it fraught. With no external scaffolding to hold it together, and no set expectations for how it’s supposed to go, tensions inevitably arise.

Gus and Woodrow’s friendship reminds us that the tensions in friendship aren’t problems to solve. Independence and dependence, affection and instrumentality, judgment and acceptance, expressiveness and protectiveness — these dynamics will always push and pull against each other. The trick isn’t to eliminate the tensions but to figure out how to live with them. That’s what mature friendship looks like: not a hope for frictionless ease, but a commitment to faithful grappling.

If you’ve ever had a friend willing to wade through the hard parts without walking away, you know how rare it is. It’s a friendship that lasts because you both keep choosing it again and again.

By God, it’s not always easy. But it’s quite a party, ain’t it?

For more insights on friendship, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast with Bill Rawlins (and be sure to check out this episode all about Lonesome Dove as well!):

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

In a wilderness survival situation, you may need to cut down a small tree. Maybe you need to make a debris shelter and need a long ridge pole to get it started. Or maybe you need some logs for creating a parallel fire lay (one of the 6 fire lays every man should know).

But what do you do if you don’t have an ax or a hatchet?

Well, as long as you have a solid survival knife on you, you can still fell a small tree.

You want to use a knife that’s sturdy and isn’t hollow ground. A simple mora knife is ideal for this job. It can take a beating.

You’ll need to find a sturdy stick too. Then, by pounding the back of the knife with it, you can cut small wedges out around the tree until its structure is sufficiently compromised for you to push it over.

This technique takes some time and sweat, but it works if you need to fell a tree in a pinch.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The Illustrated Art of Manliness: The Essential How-To Guide: Survival, Chivalry, Self-Defense, Style, Car Repair, And More!

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Note: I first published this post back in 2020. Five years later, I keep busting out this jacket each fall, and it’s still going strong, so I thought I’d give the article an update.

While the links in this post are affiliate links to Huckberry, through which we earn a commission should you purchase something, this endorsement was neither paid for nor solicited. I am a genuine owner and appreciator of the Flint and Tinder Waxed Trucker Jacket.

Fall is here, and that means crisp, cool mornings and evenings. For this season of chilly-but-not-yet-cold weather, you need a casual fall jacket — a segue piece that keeps you feeling warm and looking good before you start needing a heavier overcoat.

My recommendation is the Flint and Tinder Waxed Trucker Jacket. I’ve had mine for over ten years now, and it’s only gotten better with age. I’ve re-waxed it several times, and it’s developed a great patina. It’s still one of my go-to jackets when the temps dip. When it gets really cold, I’ll wear a pullover hoodie underneath it. That combo kept me warm and dry during a near-freezing, drizzly OSU-BYU football game that went into overtime a couple of years back.

Below I’ll share a bit of history behind the trucker jacket style, as well as why the F&T version is my own go-to jacket for fall.

The History of the Trucker JacketA trucker jacket is a style of workwear jacket. You’ve seen a trucker jacket if you’ve seen a classic denim jacket. The first iteration of the trucker jacket was made by Levi’s way back in 1905. The “Type 1” jacket was made of denim (natch) and featured a single pocket on the left breast and sturdy metal buttons. Because trucking wasn’t a thing in 1905, this jacket style wasn’t originally called a “trucker jacket.” It earned that moniker as the years went on, automobiles replaced horse-drawn carriages, and the jacket became a go-to piece of outerwear amongst truck drivers and long haulers.

Over the ensuing decades, Levi’s modified the original Type 1 style by adding pockets (another pocket on the right breast and two hand pockets on the sides) and changing the breast pocket and stitching styles on the front of the jacket. They also started making trucker jackets with sherpa collars. Cowboys working in colder climes took to this modification, and you still see ranchers sport denim jackets with wool or cotton sherpa collars today. Other denim companies like Wrangler and Lee started creating their own version of the trucker jacket, and workwear companies like Carhartt put their mark on the garment by swapping the denim for more weather-resistant materials like cotton duck. Today you can find the trucker in a variety of colors, styles, and fabrics.

Why the Flint and Tinder Trucker Jacket Is the Perfect Fall Jacket for DudesFlint and Tinder has made their contribution to the storied history of the trucker jacket with their own iteration of this classic piece of outerwear. They took the old school Type 1 style with the single breast pocket, made it with flannel-lined waxed canvas sailcloth, and updated it with a modern fit. Both the canvas material and the jacket itself are made in America.

Here’s what I like about the F&T Trucker:

Classic, rugged, masculine style. It just looks great.
Warm and weather-resistant. The canvas fabric is waxed on both sides for warmth and insulation. The material resists water and wind, and keeps me comfortable down into the 50s, maybe upper 40s (depending on what I’m wearing underneath). You can re-wax the jacket to keep the water resistance strong over time.
The flannel lining is super soft and comfortable, even (and especially!) when wearing short sleeves underneath.
Quality construction. After 10 years of heavy use, the jacket is holding up nicely.
Gets better with age. The more I wear the jacket, the better it looks. It takes on a nice weathered patina over time.

I wear the jacket with jeans + tees, short- and long-sleeved henleys, and sweaters. It’s the perfect casual coat.

The Flint and Tinder Waxed Trucker Jacket is available exclusively on Huckberry, and they’ve got a bunch of different colors to choose from; my favorites are the field tan and the moss. Check ’em out — a decade in, I can honestly say this jacket is the real deal.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Most of us grow up thinking of anger as a problem. We’re told it’s childish, irrational, and something to repress or rise above. As journalist Sam Parker, author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives, told me on the podcast, that assumption has left a lot of people more anxious and depressed than they need to be.

The reality of anger is more complicated. Anger is, in fact, a neutral emotion. Yes, it can make you snap at your kids or rage at a reckless driver. But it can also be a beneficial energy that helps you defend your boundaries, clarify your needs, and move forward on your goals.

The key is to learn how to work with anger, rather than against it — to make it your ally. The next time you feel your face get flushed and your pulse start to rise, here are four steps Parker suggested on the show to turn that heat into a positive force:

Name ItThe first step is to simply recognize that you’re angry. For years, since Parker thought anger was a bad thing, he didn’t acknowledge that it was something that was present in his life. Then one day, while pounding a heavy bag:

I felt this strange surge of energy kind of coming up from somewhere lower down in my body, and I just started punching and swinging away with this kind of energy that I’d never had before, but also this feeling that I’d never had before in my body. And this went on for however long I managed to box for. And afterwards I was kind of sweating and bent over, exhausted. But I felt better than I had in months.

And I realized that the feeling that I tapped into was anger. I was absolutely furious.

And I was thinking about the things in my life that were going wrong and the conversations I needed to have to put them right. And everything was kind of unfurling beautifully in my thoughts. Everything was looking like targets rather than things to be afraid of.

Parker’s realization that he was deeply angry dramatically changed his life. By giving something he had been feeling all along a name, he was able to begin to get a handle on it.

We’ve talked before about the power of labeling emotions. Naming your emotions doesn’t make them disappear, but it does give you a better grip on them. There’s nothing quite so disempowering as knowing there’s an influence working on your thoughts and behaviors, but not being able to register and recognize what it is. Labeling your emotions allows you to evaluate them from an objective distance and gain greater control over what often feels like an uncontrollable force. Once you know, “I feel angry,” you can decide what to do about that.

Figure Out What the Anger Is Telling YouAnger is a signal. It imparts information. Psychologists say it usually points to:
A boundary being crossed
An unmet need making itself known
An old wound being prodded

When anger shows up, ask: What does this say about the state of my life? What does this say about me? What does it say about my relationships?

Parker gave the example of feeling slighted at work. Maybe the jab was small, but your reaction feels out of proportion. Instead of brushing it off or blowing up, stop and ask: Why am I feeling so angry? Did that comment feel unfair? Am I feeling overlooked? Is this touching on some longstanding insecurity from my childhood? Once you figure out what anger is trying to tell you, you can figure out how to address its root cause.

Give Yourself 20 Minutes to Cool OffWhen anger hits, your brain gets scrambled. Parker describes it like this:

You become momentarily disoriented. You can struggle to articulate yourself. You can struggle to understand your own thoughts . . . It’s a sort of mental scrambling.

You don’t want to react when your brain is addled by a surge of anger; you can end up saying or doing the wrong thing and hurting others or your reputation. It’s best to cool off a little before putting the energy of anger to use.

You may have heard that you should count to ten when you’re angry, but the research says it takes a lot longer for your system to reset — about 20 minutes. During that time, rehearsing arguments or plotting payback can just amplify your anger in an unhealthy way. Instead, use the break to distract yourself; Parker recommends listening to a podcast or reading a book. Taking a walk very often helps too — solvitur ambulando!

Parker says that while it is helpful to let your anger diminish a little before you react, you actually don’t want to let it cool down completely; as we’ll talk about next, anger can be a positive source of motivation, and you want to use it to take action while it’s still providing you a little heat.

Channel the Energy Into Something UsefulParker calls anger the most energizing emotion. Once you’ve got it harnessed by labeling it, recognizing what it’s telling you, and letting its most volatile edge pass, you can channel anger’s energy into a productive force.

You might think that anger is like steam in a kettle that simply needs straightforward release. But punching or breaking things, yelling, or kicking over a wastebasket aren’t effective ways to deal with anger; venting without purpose usually just amplifies your rumination, which makes you more angry. Rather than releasing your anger in cathartic bursts, you want to direct it toward more sustained and constructive outlets.

If you’ve identified an interpersonal issue or boundary violation as the cause of your ire, use your anger to give you the boldness to have a difficult conversation with someone. While your anger can provide the push to initiate a forthright discussion, keep the dialogue itself calm and composed.

Even if an anger-causing issue isn’t within your power to resolve, you can still use your anger as a source of general energy; unleashing it during a workout can give you the drive to push yourself harder.

Parker notes that anger can also be used as a spur for tackling creative projects and reaching your goals. He calls it the “I’ll show you” energy. While seeking “revenge” for slights and offenses can sometimes be pursued in an unhealthy way, burning to prove the naysayers and critics wrong can be a very motivating and positive fuel for achievement.

Anger isn’t a bad thing or a good thing; it’s a neutral emotion that can be used for positive or negative ends. Aristotle had it right: the goal in life isn’t to banish anger but to purposefully direct it — “to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way.”

Do that, and anger isn’t dangerous — it’s a force for courage, growth, and greatness.

For more insights on anger, listen to this AoM podcast episode with Sam Parker:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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What does it mean to be a man? It’s a timeless question that’s been answered in different ways across the ages. For the ancient Romans, the word for manliness was virtus — the root of our word virtue. To be a man meant living a life of virtuous excellence.

Waller Newell takes up that same definition in his book The Code of Man, first published twenty years ago and now released in a new edition. Today on the show, Waller, a professor of political science, argues that we need to recover an older vision of manhood rooted in the traditions of Western antiquity. He shares the five paths that, in his view, form the classical code of manliness and how they can continue to be lived out today.

Resources Related to the Podcast* Waller’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #104 — The Code of Man With Waller Newell * AoM Article: What Is Manliness? * AoM series on the origins and nature of manhood * AoM Podcast #1,028: The 5 Marks of a Man * AoM Podcast #926: The 5 Shifts of Manhood * AoM Article: Got Thumos? * AoM Article: What Is a Man? The Allegory of the Chariot * AoM Podcast #871: Jane Austen for Dudes * Sunday Firesides: Climb the Ladder of Love

Connect With Waller Newell* Waller’s website * Waller’s faculty page

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A garage is supposed to be for cars. A workbench. A bike or two. Maybe a garage gym. But most of us end up using it like the junk drawer for the entire house. Big stuff you don’t know what to do with, or you think you might use “someday,” slowly ends up there: unused materials for DIY projects, that cheap futon you used in college (maybe your five-year-old can use it when he’s in college!), toys your now teenage daughter played with when she was four.

I think we hold on to stuff in our garage because we like to think of ourselves as frugal and resourceful and have that fantasy of being the dad who finally finds a use for the weird scrap of wood he’s been holding onto for twenty years. Unfortunately, the fantasy rarely becomes reality. That weird scrap of wood is never going to be used and just takes up space.

Eventually, the stuff in your garage accumulates to the point where you have to do archeological digs just to find the items you actually need. I’ve had that happen to me a few times in the 14 years I’ve lived in my home. The most recent experience of garage clutter realization happened this past spring. I was trying to get ready for a backpacking trip, but had to move around Gus’s little league bats from when he was seven (he’s a high school freshman now who hasn’t played baseball in almost a decade) and a box of short-circuited Christmas lights.

If your garage junk has gotten overwhelming, it’s useful to know the stuff you can and should get rid of — guilt-free. Below we highlight items to discard to free up space and remove potential safety hazards.

As you go about your garage decluttering, keep this overarching guideline in mind: you may have heard the rule that if you haven’t worn an item of clothing in your closet for over a year, you should get rid of it. A similar principle applies here, except since garage items tend towards more occasional use, make this the rule instead: if you haven’t used something in five years, get rid of it. Some exceptions — things you should discard sooner or keep longer — apply, which I’ll mention for certain items.

Old PaintEvery garage has a stack of old paint cans. You hold on to them thinking, “Well, I might need to do a touch-up or maybe when I go to repaint, I’ll need to be able to color match.” Those are legitimate uses — as long as your paint isn’t “expired.”

Unopened latex paint can last up to about 10 years if stored properly, though oil-based paints usually don’t hold up quite as long. Once a can’s been opened, you’ve got about two good years, maybe longer if it’s been sealed well. If you haven’t used those paint cans during those timeframes, get rid of them. They’re useless and a fire hazard. If you want to know the paint color you used in your home for future paint jobs, write it down in your butler’s book.

Old Fertilizer and PesticidesOld Miracle-Gro, weed killer, bug bombs. They get unstable with time and temperature swings. If the bag is sun-faded and crunchy, its contents won’t benefit your lawn anymore. Chuck it.
Expired Chemicals and FluidsMotor oil, antifreeze, and half-empty bottles of pool chemicals often sit for years on garage shelves, taking up space and creating fire or poisoning hazards. If you haven’t touched them in years, you’re not going to. Check your city’s hazardous waste disposal program for a safe way to dispose of them.
Oily RagsRags soaked in drying oils (like linseed oil) can heat up and spontaneously combust if they’re piled together and exposed to airflow. And while rags soaked in motor oil are less combustible, they’re still a safety hazard. And they’re taking up space. Toss them.
Broken and Duplicate ToolsIf you were going to fix that drill, you would’ve done it by now. The broken leaf blower? Same story. They’re taking up space needlessly. You can get rid of them. Same goes for the duplicate tools you’ve acquired over the years. Do you really need four hammers and three tape measures? Or two socket sets missing the same three sockets? The answer is no.
Leftover Building MaterialsUnused 2×4s, unused tile, bags of grout. Unless you’re actively repairing the exact project they came from, they’re just taking up space.
Random HardwareCoffee cans of screws and nails, cables to devices you no longer own, random brackets you can’t identify. If you don’t know what it goes to, you won’t miss it. And if you need it again, you can just make a trip to Home Depot. Screws and other thingamabobbers are cheap.
Outgrown Sports GearThe bike your kid hasn’t ridden since Obama’s second term. The youth baseball bats that have stood untouched, leaning in the corner for a decade. It’s time to pass them along to a family with younger kids.
Old Gym EquipmentAs a garage gym owner, I’ve accumulated several pieces of equipment that served me at one time, but I haven’t used in years. And all that stuff is just taking up precious real estate in your garage. If you haven’t used that specialty bar or squat rack attachment in the last five years, you’re probably not going to use them in the next five years. Sell them. And good news! You now have more space to put new gym equipment.
Old Camping GearOur family has accumulated plenty of camping gear over the years. Some of it proved to be useful and necessary and some of it not. Do an audit of your gear and keep the stuff you still use on the regular. Chuck the broken tents and the busted lanterns and find a happy home for that sleeping bag you ended up hating.
Old Holiday DecorThe inflatable Santa with a hole. The string of broken lights that you told yourself you’d fix back in 2020, but are still in a knot sitting in a box. If you haven’t put it out in years, you won’t. Get rid of it.
Old FurnitureFurniture is practically and psychologically hard to discard — it’s big, it’s expensive, and it’s often attached to old memories. So the garage is where furniture goes when you know you should get rid of it, but can’t quite bring yourself to do it. You tell yourself maybe the kids could use it when they’re older. They likely won’t; it will be out of style, or just not their style. And in the meantime, the temperature swings warp the wood, the cushions soak up smells, and all that furniture is just taking up a ton of space. Unless it’s a true heirloom piece (and if it is, keep it inside), furniture in the garage is just bulky clutter. Sell or donate it if it’s decent; have it hauled away if it’s not.
Spare Appliances and ElectronicsThink about how many “just in case” machines end up in the garage. The beer fridge that barely chills, the microwave from 1995, or the tube TV from your Halo LAN party days in college. Are you really going to bring that 30-year-old microwave back into the kitchen? Of course not. Sell, recycle, or junk that stuff.
Tires and Car PartsGarages were built for cars, so it’s only natural that car parts accumulate there. If you’ve got a stack of bald, cracked, or more than six-years-old tires sitting in your garage, get rid of them. They’re not safe to use, and they take up space. Same goes for car parts left over from vehicles you don’t even own anymore. Tire shops will recycle the rubber; scrap yards will take the old parts. Free up the space.
Paper and Pantry GoodsStacks of old newspapers, bins of files you don’t actually need, bags of dog food. Paper mildews; food attracts critters. The garage isn’t an archive or a pantry.

What to Do With All the JunkWe’ve already noted what to do with many specific items above, but here’s a general guide to help you clear things out efficiently:

For unused stuff that’s in decent shape, sell it. Facebook Marketplace is your friend here. I’ve sold lots of garage clutter there over the years, from old desks to gym equipment.

If you can’t sell your in-good-condition stuff, give it away or donate it.

For everything that doesn’t sell or donate easily — like broken tools and unusable furniture — calling a junk removal service can save you from making a dozen trips to the dump (if you even have a vehicle capable of getting stuff there). For about $150–$200, they’ll haul away as much junk as you can assemble. You can also check your city’s bulk-pickup schedule.

For hazardous materials like paint, fertilizers, oil and gas products, and old electronics, look up your local hazardous waste disposal facility. Many communities host drop-off events for these materials, ensuring they’re handled safely and responsibly.

The PayoffWhen you finally clear out your garage of all the unnecessary crap, you’ll feel like you’ve got a new lease on life. Nothing is more satisfying than reclaiming usable space. And it also makes finding the stuff you actually use easier.

And once the junk’s gone, you can start thinking about how to use the space well. We’ve got guides on how to organize your garage and the biggest key to keeping it that way (hint: get your crap off the floor!). Put “Garage Declutter” on your home maintenance checklist every spring, and it’ll never again get to the point where you’ll need to do an archaeological dig to find your workbench.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Your snoz is full of blood vessels, and nosebleeds happen when they incur some kind of damage. That damage can come from vigorous nose picking or blowing, outright injury (as in taking a punch to the face), or, very frequently, from exposure to dry air (whether via the outdoor climate or indoor heating). Nosebleeds are particularly common in children ages 2-10, but can occur at any age.

We don’t often see our blood outside of our bodies, so that when a nosebleed occurs, it can feel a little alarming. But unless nosebleeds are extraordinarily heavy, accompanied by other symptoms like high blood pressure and trouble breathing, last longer than a half hour, and/or happen more than twice a week, they’re almost certainly harmless. They’re just messy and annoying, so that you want to stop your own, or your kid’s, as soon as possible, by following the instructions above.

To prevent future nosebleeds, it helps to keep the nasal membranes moist by putting a humidifier in your home/office, using a saline spray 2X a day, and/or applying Vaseline inside the nostrils. More frequently occurring nosebleeds may need to be addressed through cauterization.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Bellroy Hanging Toiletry Kit. My old dopp kit finally gave up the ghost after years of faithful service, so I’ve been in the market for a replacement. I’ve carried a Bellroy wallet for years (here’s why it’s the best wallet I’ve ever owned), so when I discovered they made a toiletry kit, I decided to purchase it. The design is smart: it sits upright on a counter, hangs from a retractable aluminum hook that fits over doors and towel rails, and has a flat profile for packing in your luggage. Inside, there are well-thought-out pockets to organize your toiletries, like one just for your toothbrush so you don’t get shaving cream on it. It seems durable and capable of taking a beating. If you’re in need of some tips on what to pack in your dopp kit, check out our handy visual guide.

The Seven Samurai. I finally got around to watching Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1954 epic The Seven Samurai this past week. It’s been on my “to-watch” list for several years. Now I understand why film buffs never shut up about it. The story is pretty simple: a farming village hires seven ronin to defend them against bandits. But Kurosawa uses this simple story to explore honor, sacrifice, and what it means to be a warrior when the old ways are dying. Each samurai gets a distinct personality and fighting style, from the wise leader Kambei to the wild, unpredictable Kikuchiyo. The acting is top-notch, and the cinematography is awesome. For an American adaptation of The Seven Samurai, check out the Western The Magnificent Seven.

The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’ by Bill Zehme. I can still remember browsing the aisles at Barnes & Noble back in 1999 when I stumbled across this book. Sixteen-year-old me was deep into a swing music phase and obsessed with the whole ’50s Rat Pack era. I bought it on the spot and still have that same dog-eared copy on my shelf. Zehme drew on interviews with Sinatra himself, plus Tony Bennett, Don Rickles, Angie Dickinson, and others to capture how Ol’ Blue Eyes approached everything from friendship to fighting to the proper way to wear a tuxedo. It’s a fun read full of insights about living with swagger. Over the years, it’s inspired a few AoM articles, including Frank’s guide to tipping and talking. I still thumb through the book when I need a reminder that style isn’t just about what you wear — it’s about how you carry yourself.

The Right Kind of Stubborn. Paul Graham wrote an essay distinguishing persistence from obstinacy. They look identical (both involve not giving up), but they’re fundamentally different. When you point out problems to persistent people, they listen intently. The obstinate won’t listen at all. Graham argues that the key distinction between the two is that the persistent are attached to the goal; the obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it. The persistent are open to different ways to accomplish the same aim; the obstinate are not. Besides a focus on the overall goal, Graham lists four other qualities of the persistent: energy, imagination, resilience, and good judgment. Something to think about the next time you find yourself banging your head against a problem: Are you being persistent or obstinate?

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published The Passionless Game: Kierkegaard on Why Sports (and Life) Feel Flat and Sunday Firesides: The Common Denominator Is You.

Quote of the Week

There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousand truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.

—Henry Ward Beecher

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Over its long history, the whip has been tool for a variety of men.

Cowboys in the American West, South American gauchos, and herders around the world carried whips to move cattle and sheep. The crack wasn’t meant to strike the animals but to startle them with sound, nudging the herd along without contact. Out of this tradition came the “stockwhip” and the “bullwhip.”

Teamsters and coachmen once used whips to keep their horses in step. The lash might brush a flank, but more often the crack alone was enough to guide a team down the road. Cavalries often issued short whips to horsemen and pack drivers as part of their kit.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, the whip moved from utilitarian use into the realm of spectacle. Circus trainers used them to tame lions and tigers, while trick-whip artists developed flourishes that showcased control and precision.

Later, pulp heroes carried them alongside revolvers, turning the whip into a symbol of adventure. Half tool and half weapon, it was ostensibly useful for a variety of tasks: latching onto beams or branches to swing across gaps, coiling around small items to grab them, knocking an object out of someone’s hand, cracking to intimidate and keep foes at a distance, or lashing an opponent directly. (Some of these techniques, of course, work better and are easier to execute on screen than in real life.)

If you want to harness your inner rancher or treasure-hunting archeologist, this illustrated guide will get you started with the art of whip cracking. Whip cracking is just physics: you send the energy of your arm into the thong, it travels down the length, and accelerates until it breaks the sound barrier and creates that satisfying “POP!”

Every whip-hand starts with the cattleman’s crack. It’s a simple up-and-down snap that will give you a grin-inducing pop, and help prepare you to raid tombs and fight Nazis.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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You may have heard of hormesis — the idea that intentionally embracing small stressors activates the body’s repair and defense systems, building resilience, improving how the body and even the microbiome function, and ultimately protecting against the harms of chronic stress.

We typically think of these hormetic stressors in terms of things like exercising, taking ice baths, sitting in a sauna, and ingesting certain plant compounds. But you ought to consider adding socializing to that list.

As my guest today explains, while we tend to avoid socializing as we do all stressors — even the good ones — it’s something that can strengthen our health, resilience, immunity, and sense of meaning. Jeffrey Hall, professor of communication studies and co-author of The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us, joins me to discuss why relationships are harder to build in the modern world, how our adolescent approach to making friends needs to evolve, and why we must intentionally “exercise” our social muscles in a world where they’ll otherwise atrophy.

Resources Related to the Podcast* Jeffrey’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #772 — How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)? * AoM Article: 3 Things No One Ever Told You About Making Friends in Adulthood * AoM Article: The Importance of Developing and Maintaining Your Social Fitness * AoM Podcast #863: Key Insights From the Longest Study on Happiness * AoM Article: Love Is All You Need — Insights from the Longest Longitudinal Study on Men Ever Conducted

Connect With Jeffrey Hall* KU’s Relationships and Technology Lab * Jeffrey’s faculty page * Jeffrey on LinkedIn * Jeffrey on IG

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TranscriptBrett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You may have heard of hormesis. The idea that it intentionally embracing small stressors activates the body’s repair and defense systems building resilience, improving how the body and even the microbiome function, and ultimately protecting against the harms of chronic stress. We typically think of these hormetic stressors in terms of things like exercising, taking ice baths, sitting in a sauna and ingesting certain plant compounds. But you ought to consider adding socializing to that list, as my guest today explains. While we tend to avoid socializing as we do all stressors, even the good ones, it’s something that can strengthen our health, resilience, immunity, and sense of meaning. Jeffrey Hall, professor of Communication studies and co-author of The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us, joins me to discuss why relationships are harder to build in the modern world, how our adolescent approach to making friends needs to evolve and why we must intentionally exercise our social muscles in a world where the otherwise atrophy after the show’s over, check at our show notes at AoM.is/socialstress.

All right, Jeffrey Hall, welcome back to the show. It’s so good to be here. So you research human relationships from friendships to romantic relationships. We had you on the podcast back in 2022 to talk about your research on how long it takes to make a new friend, and the short answer is longer than you think, and we’ll let people listen to that episode to get the details on it. You got a new book out called The Social Biome that you co-authored. Let’s talk about that title. Social biome. What do you mean by a social biome?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. Well, I’m really glad to be back again. I always like our conversations and it’s an honor to be a multiple guest appearance. Yeah, Andy and I came up with this idea of the social biome back in about 2019, so pre-pandemic, and the reason that we started thinking about it is that people are very familiar with this idea of a gut microbiome and the idea is that there’s this interdependent system within your guts that make the ability to digest food easier or harder. It gets destroyed if you take antibiotics, but it affects everything from your mood to your sickness, your wellness, even your brain health is affected by our gut microbiome. Microbiome also happens then when we touch people it kind of affects how we are. Well, Andy and I thought, well, there’s also a social biome. It’s this interdependent system of relationships, social interactions, which we have with one another that we both occupy. We live in it, but we also are dependent on other people within it. So how people treat us, whether people accept us, whether people introduce their own germs, if you will, like negativity or conflict or whether they’re actually increasing things to increase our health. And what we know from social interaction research is that these things make a big difference in mortality, morbidity, just like your gut microbiome makes a difference in your health too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’m sure people have heard about the health benefits of a social life, but for those who aren’t familiar, can you just recap the benefits of having a robust, healthy social life?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. The thing that’s crazy about this is something that’s been building for about 15 years of momentum. Some of the earliest studies on these things began to say, well, let’s follow up with folks that we surveyed 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago and see whether they live longer or they live shorter lives, whether they had some disease or otherwise. And what they found was one of the most consistent predictors was whether or not people had strong social relationships, whether they had frequent social interactions, whether or not they could say, I have more quality friends or quality romantic partner relationships. So quality frequency and also social interaction all ended up being these important predictors. And what’s fascinating is you also look at the famous Harvard Men’s Study and other studies of longitudinal health. It finds that even if you change in the middle of your life, you can make it better later.

So let’s say that you are in your twenties and thirties, very career focused, and you’re really not making time for building relationships with other people and you move around a lot, but if you change in your forties and fifties, you can actually live a longer healthier life later too. So what’s fascinating about these different longitudinal studies is that it doesn’t really matter when you start investing in your relationships in other people. It’s always beneficial, at least it seems to be always beneficial to your health, your wellbeing, your sense of purpose and meaning, and of course whether or not you are likely to die earlier.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s the interesting thing is the longevity research on social relationships, how there’s really a tight correlation between the two.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, there are a couple processes that people think about are probably why the one that Andy and I spent some time exploring, so interesting is Hess’s idea of stress. So I was talking to a good friend of mine in California and she and I were talking about how lousy it is to approach 50 years old. We’ve been friends for a long time and we’re like, yeah, I exercise pretty regularly. I watch what I eat. I don’t eat a lot of bad food or bad diet, but the thing that my doctor’s always telling me is, you got to reduce your stress. And I’m like, dammit, this is so hard to reduce my stress. And I think that we all kind of have this intuitive sense that when we feel relaxed, when we feel truly at peace with ourselves or accepted, we can feel our stress levels go down.

I don’t know about you, but when I hang out with a friend over lunch or catch up over drinks or have them over to my home or talk to ’em on the phone, I feel like my body almost unwinding, relaxing, feeling safe.

So researchers believe that one of the most important processes of feeling close, connected and meaningful to other people is that it actually reduces our overall stress response. It kind of turns it off. It turns off our stress. And what we also know about that is our body cannot marshal the resources that it needs to fight off infection unless that it is able to kind of put those sort of stressors away. So there’s a famous study that actually found that people who had better social connections and relationships or people who were also able to fight off a virus that the researchers injected into participants to find out how sick they got. So folks who were really social and had really good relationships were able to fight off sickness better. So one of the main reasons we think that it actually contributes to longevity is that over your whole life when you have meaningful relationships, people, you can count on close connections with others. You’re basically living in a de-stressed environment a lot more frequently than you would if you had nobody. And we know that loneliness is extremely stressful for the people who endure it.

Brett McKay:

I want to go back to this idea of stress because okay, you’re saying here that socializing can reduce stress, but then later on in the book you talk about how socializing is a stressor. We’re going to return to that. I think it’s interesting. Definitely there’s a lot of metaphors we can extract from that. But before we do, so we talked about all these great health benefits, mental wellness benefits of regularly socializing with other people and avoiding loneliness. People probably know about that. There’s so many articles about the loneliness crisis, the loneliness epidemic, and you shouldn’t be lonely nonetheless, people are still hesitant to socialize. What do you think is going on there?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, Andy, and one of the things we really shot for when we were writing this book is to be sympathetic rather than to be sort of like a school marm shaking your finger at telling other people how to behave. You really should be more social for your own good. What we really wanted to do is try to explain, well, why aren’t we? What are the barriers why we don’t? And people have very good reasons for not being social. So I think there are structural reasons, there are personal reasons, and then they’re just sort of routine related reasons. Let’s start structurally, one of the strongest negative associations with time spent socializing is work. We are in a curious economy right now in part, not in 2025, but I mean in modern history where people in the top income brackets in the United States who don’t have to keep working work more.

So it doesn’t matter how success you are, people who are professionals and working harder work even more hours. We also have the emergence of gig economies where people are basically on call all the time to try to make money to Uber somebody around or to DoorDash. We’re in an environment in which we are constantly working in order to make time to be able to live. All of that is creeping into our ability to be social. And there’s really good evidence that the more that we’re working, the harder that we’re trying to make ends meet, the less time we have for being social. The other structural reason I think is really important is we don’t have a lot of third spaces, which are basically these places where we feel comfortable just gathering together and being together. Robert Putnam did amazing work in all the way back to 2000 or 2000 when he released bowling alone.

And at that time it was demise of bowling leagues, of rotary clubs, of Elks clubs and all these kinds of things. Since that point, it’s been the decline of churches and synagogues and places of worship where people aren’t showing up or not attending weekly. Although in the last two or three years we’ve had an uptick, which is good news for socialization. So there are these structural changes that are happening around work, around third spaces or around organized spaces for being social that are in decline. And the other reason is people suck. People are disappointing. People let you down, people hurt your feelings. And one of the things that Andy and I really want to communicate a message on here is, but we have a system of repair. We have a need to belong that pushes us towards continuing to work at those relationships even if they are frustrating.

And I think what people find and lots of researchers to confirm this is we imagine worse outcomes from relational mistakes or things that we feel hurt about or things we think we screwed up like we’re boring or we didn’t make a good impression or we said something wrong. We exaggerate those things in a way that make us feel like we can’t do it. We don’t want to socialize anymore, just not enough. So part of it is because people are disappointing. We don’t want to continue to work at having our relationships with people because we’re like, why bother? It’s just never going to get any closer or this person really stunk and I don’t want to be part of their lives anymore. But the last reason it’s so difficult is routine. One thing that’s been very healthy in my lifetime is I’ve seen people have a lot more consciousness about the importance of a good health routine around exercise.

I think I always knew it growing up, but I feel like people are even treating some exercise opportunities almost like in a religious way. They just really truly believe that this set of exercise routines that they have are going to help them be better. And there’s a very good reason to think that it will. People are only recently waking up to the idea of having a good social routine. And one reporter asked me, do you think there’s been a change of heart about whether or not people actually need to prioritize spending time with friends or create a routine about being social? And I’m like, I hope, but I don’t think so. I think our current way of thinking about it is being social is the very last thing we’re going to do if we have time for it, because we got to make time for exercise.

We got to make time for our families, we got to make time for work, our commute. And then of course, I think a lot of it is we want to make time for the things which are hedonistic pleasurable in the moment, but do nothing for a socially, which is I need to finish that next Netflix series so I can be up on the new episodes that I love. So there’s a sense in which of accomplishment and access to easy media as making it even harder for us to realize that those routines are worth fighting for and they are a fight. We have to find ways to make social life be part of our routines and people generally don’t.

Brett McKay:

Speaking to that idea of the decline of socializing as a routine, one of the things that I’m always struck by when I read biographies of individuals who lived in the first half of the 20th century was how busy their social calendar was every night. They were either at a dinner party or hosting the dinner party or they’re playing bridge or it was like every single night. And I think about, I don’t know if I could do that, but for them it was a given. That’s just what you were expected to do that, and we no longer have that expectation.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, the expectation part is key. I think you’re absolutely right, Brett. I mean, when I grew up, my parents hosted bridge events in our basement and I remember them pulling out the card tables. My dad told me this great story is when he was a bachelor for the first time, and this would’ve been in the late fifties? No, this would’ve been in the late sixties. Sorry. First thing he wanted to do was set up a bar at his apartment because that’s what you did. You had friends over to entertain them so that drinking wasn’t something you did alone. You had to have it so that you could entertain. I did actually research project recently that found that how many nights a week that people are going out to visit their friends has gone down a lot. But what’s even more surprising is when people idealize what a good night would be, they idealize a less social one.

So in the past when you ask them that question, what’s an ideal night? A lot of people say, oh, time with friends out doing interesting things or spending time together with people who I’m really enjoying or a visit from someone who I care about or visiting someone I care about. Now, when I did the survey just last year, what I found people were saying is spending time alone, quietly in a room watching my favorite program and relaxing in pajamas, there was this glorification of a feeling in which detachment is actually pleasurable. It feels better to be away from others. And so what’s curious is that we’ve had an expectation shift that’s so dramatic, not just I think from the early 19 hundreds, which is absolutely true, but even from the 1950s and 1960s, 1970s and eighties, it’s even palpable if you look at just how people respond to these survey questions from that time period.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean you see it sort of anecdotally when people tweet things or Instagram things, they talk about, well, I’m just so happy that people canceled the plans at the last minute. Now I don’t have to do that thing. And that’s the expectation. Now people, the expectation is I just want to be by myself, not be around other people. And you call this world we’re living in now the age of interiority.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yep. Yeah. The age of Interiority idea came up a while ago. I got a report for the Wall Street Journal on this topic of declining time spending being social, and then it was this time decline was not just in the United States. It happened in UK data and data from Australia and other less precise measurement throughout the global north, but also places like Japan and so industrialized world in general. And what’s interesting about this is this decline of sociality happens it seems over longer periods of time and kind of a pendulum swing. So on one side of the pendulum is this idea that being alone is something to be glorified. So we can see this in the romantic era where people are like, I’m wondering lonely like a cloud or to move away from civilization is the only way to find oneself and the monastery or the monk or the aesthetic who is completely in denial of social contact, almost to a hermit like status.

These people were glorified as being either closer to being divine, which kind of was the contemporary understanding of what it meant to be enlightened or maybe your full self, right, unencumbered by others. And then there were other periods of time. If you look at the discourse and the time, it was like people who are on the margins of society or outcasts, people who are hermits are misanthropes. People who are seeking their own time are selfish that we are obliged to one another and that obligation to one another carries incredible benefits in terms of democracy and discourse and comradery and a sense of purpose and meaning or community or I think people of faith talk about this as a brotherhood or a sense of this is what communion looks like. What’s interesting is when that pendulum swings back and forth, people seem to turn either towards or away from the idea of being solitary is a good thing.

I think we are in a time of interiority. The pendulum has swung towards Putnam forecasted it and his bowling alone time use trends are forecasting it. Now you offer that example of people having top Google searches, how do I get out of plans or how do I stop showing up? But we also see that at my daughter’s, one of my favorite places, her favorite places to shop for socks, and she’s a fan of fun socks, is a place called Attic Salt. And I took a picture of socks that say, friends don’t make friends hang out. It’s curious. It’s everywhere is the sense that not interacting with others is something to be celebrated. And I think when we think about this in one way, this normalization of being alone and isolated is something that I see everywhere throughout our media and our representations of what’s being valued, but in another way, it’s making sense of something.

We’re collectively trying to come to terms with the fact that we don’t have a social life, we don’t have opportunities to connect. We’re too tired, we’re too stressed out, we don’t have the bandwidth. So we need a remedy. We need a solution that makes us feel soothed and comforted by the fact that this is the reality we live in. And the age of interiority is also basically making sense of a situation we don’t like, but we need to make sense of it. We say it’s okay to be alone. It’s okay to spend more time away from others because other people suck and friends don’t make friends hang out.

Brett McKay:

We’re engaging in some ex-post facto reasoning, some after the fact reasoning because we find ourselves not having much of a social life. And instead of facing that fact and maybe letting ourselves be a little sad or disturbed by that lack, we tell ourselves, well, you know what? I’m glad I don’t have to socialize. I didn’t want to socialize anyway, okay, so the reason why things are so hard or people have social inertia to socialize the structural aspect of it, we’re working more. Our work schedules are completely different. It’s not like 50 years ago where everyone nine to five, then everyone’s got different schedules. I think related to that, the structural aspect too, I’ve noticed as a parent with pre-teen and teenagers, kids are just doing all sorts of different stuff. It used to be maybe 60 years ago you either did boy scouts and you did the little league in your town and that was it. Now your kids can be involved in volleyball and dance and student council. And so you have parents who are trying to shuffle their kids to these different things. And because these things are all out of sync, parents can’t get together and hang out and the kids can’t get together and hang out. That’s another structural aspect to that.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, I think you nailed it, man. I think you nailed it. And I’ll point out something I will tell you is a bright spot in the data. So the bright spot in the data is that people who are families who are married with children are spending as much if or more time at home with their kids in social time. And that’s a good thing. We know that strong bonds with children are good for children. We know that strong bonds with children are good for parents, and we see a particular uptick, and I would say this for your listeners out there, for men, it looks like married men with children are spending more time with their kids than they have in the past. And this is a good thing and it’s something to celebrate. I think it’s kind of one of those things you don’t often hear good news about men and boys, and I think this is something that’s really great.

Fathers are more invested in the context of a married relationship with their children, and I think that what’s important about that is where does that time come from though? And you’re alluding to the ideas that time has to come from maybe time parents went with each other. And that’s what cracks me up when I think about it. I’m like, well, where was I when my parents were down in the basement playing cards with their friends or when my parents did stuff, did they expect to be entertaining me? We’re in this kind of curious time where I think a lot of parents, especially ones who are upper class or upper class aspiring, are trying to cultivate this sort of perfect experience for their kids because they’re concerned in a broader sense. Their kid won’t have every opportunity that they need to be successful to get into college or six career-wise because they have felt this broader sense of social anxiety or economic anxiety, and frankly, the age of AI and the kind of conversations like pretty soon we won’t even have any jobs because AI will take all of ’em, does not help.

As a parent of a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old, I’m like, God, I have no clue what’s coming to pass. So it makes you feel more anxious that you need to be making your kid is studying and learning and engaging in extracurriculars. As a consequence, this cultivation of childhood has the positive consequences of parents spending more time with their kids, and that’s good, but has the negative consequences of us trying to micromanage a perfect experience, which means parents aren’t spending time with each other, they’re not going out with their friends. They feel like they can’t prioritize their own time one-on-one with their own friends because in some ways that’s really not a good long-term economic decision for their families. So one of the pieces of advice that I give a lot in these things is couples should support each other. Having friends that are not couple friends that are individual friends.

So if you are in any kind of marriage or long-term relationship, you should encourage your partner to have friends and go spend time with their friends. And that may seem obvious, but there’s actually a lot of counter discourse that say, don’t go out with your friends because maybe they think that their friends are going to have a bad influence on them in early parts of relationship, or you’re not spending enough time with your own kids. If you’re married with children or you shouldn’t be going out, you should be at home with us. But what’s interesting is there’s lots of good research that says A happier marriage is also one where couples, each member of that partnership has friends.

Brett McKay:

I’ve seen that in my own life. Whenever I hang out with my friends, I just show up better with my family.

Jeffrey Hall:

And it also shows that you’re being cared for and nourished by the folks. As a person who actually studies friendship a lot, I’ve thought very deeply about the idea that one person can’t provide everything for you. You need a community of people to help you feel a fully robust and rich person. And frankly, my wife is wonderful, but my friends provide different advice. They have different stories. They’re willing to talk about NBA basketball with me, they’re willing to shoot the shit about politics in a way that my wife and I just don’t. So there’s a different communication. There’s a different topic, there’s a different depth, there’s a different way of knowing me, and I think all of those things make me better in my relationship and more able to have a long-term meaningful relationship with my partner.

Brett McKay:

So barriers to socializing the structural aspect, work intensive parenting. Then the other barrier is just people suck. People let you down. They can disappoint you. And then the third one, third obstacle is just routines of socializing. We don’t have them anymore. There’s no longer the expectation that there socialize regularly. What’s interesting though, so socializing is hard, as you said, you’re trying to be very sympathetic and letting people know, yes, yes, it’s good for you. But yes, it’s very hard to come by. But what’s interesting, I still think a lot of people have the expectation that socializing should be easy even though there’s all these obstacles. How do you think that mismatch between expectation and reality also gets in the way of socializing?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, it plays a big role, and I am very sympathetic to this because I have a group of high school friends that we try to get together and it is really hard to schedule something. There’s five of us. We have very different schedules. Some of us work jobs that have to commute a lot. Some people have busy travel schedules or family schedules. It’s hard. So it’s legitimately difficult to get people together. Part of the reason that we have this weird expectation that should be easy though, I think comes from the fact that during developmental times in our life where we found the most friends, which tend to happen during elementary school to high school period, and then for some people go to college, that’s also an important time as well. During all of those times, the structure created time. So I’ll just give you enough, for instance, I went to a high school that I knew a lot of the folks that went to high school with me from middle school and some of them from elementary school.

I lived within driving distance of most of them as most people who go to high school in the United States do. I did activities with them during the day, such as we took similar classes, but I also did activities with them After the day was over, we did cross country or swimming. The creation of a school system necessitated lots and lots of my time being spent with the same people over and over again. That is the recipe for friendship. So when I say that those times your life were easier to make friends, that’s just fact, but it’s fact because it was necessary to spend time together in order to do any of those things. What’s interesting is if you think about or you disaggregate what school does and put that into your regular life, what would that mean? That would mean you would see people during the day, you would pick activities you enjoy together and do them together.

You would also date from that same group of people and be single, which is usually characteristic. Not only high school students have a partner. What that means though is you’re open to the possibility of new relationships. As we mature and move into emerging adulthood, which is roughly between 22 and 30 and then later middle age adulthood, what we start doing is closing off all of those avenues. We say, I’m now living with a partner, so I’m not going to go out without her or him. We say, now I have children, so I can’t go out because I need to be a good parent. We say, well, I have to work extra hours because I’m committed to this. All of those foreclosures of our time and openness to making friends makes it harder and harder to make friends. But we don’t remember that school was a time in which you had tons of time, tons of people available to be made friends with lots of activities to do together, and this is critical.

You were in a time of your life where it was developmentally important to be connected with other people that were not people from your family of origin. What happens in later life is your developmental period focuses on new family, new connections that you now solidify and bring into fruition. So what’s interesting is that people don’t see the developmental changes, and frankly, academics like myself do a very bad job of talking about adult development. We just don’t talk about it very much. We don’t think about it, but essentially that means is people don’t even understand. The reason it was so easy in the past was the circumstances created that ease and we just can’t see it, So when we’re young, we’re brought together with peers by default, it’s automatic. It’s built into the structure of our lives. We don’t have to try. It’s just really easy to make friends, but then we carry that expectation over into adulthood even though we’re in a very different stage of life, and that old pattern from our youth where we don’t have to be intentional doesn’t work anymore. We’re going to take a quick break for you word from our sponsors, and now back to the show. I’ve seen this mismatch of expectation and reality when it comes to socializing, making friends and different groups that I belong to, and it’s frustrating for me people’s inflated, inflated expectations.

Brett McKay:

I was in charge of the men’s group in our church, I think it was 10 years ago, and a common complaint was there’s not enough fellowship. So okay, well let’s do something about it. Let’s plan some events. We plan some events, and we would do a lot to communicate that this isn’t the time we’re doing it. Here’s what’s going to happen, who’s going to come? And we get show of hands and we get this buy-in, and then the day of the event would show up and it would just be the leaders there. You’re like, okay, then. So you’d go like, oh, hey, we had this event. People couldn’t make it. And the common excuses were like, I was just busy, or I was just tired. I had something else going on, and well, okay, we’ll plan another event, and no one would show up. And then people would just continue to grouse. Well, there’s no fellowship. And you’re like, okay, guys, we’re trying to create this for you, but it’s going to take some effort to make this happen. And they just get upset. It’s like, why don’t we have fellowship? And it’s like, well, it’s hard. You got to show up. You got to make the effort. You got to make it a priority. And if you don’t, then you’re not going to have that thing you want.

Jeffrey Hall:

You have to make it a priority. And what does that mean to make it a priority? It’s very something we should really dwell on in the sense that people think about, oh, I prioritize friendship, but what does that actually mean in practice? One thing is showing up. Because I wrote this book, I’m very aware of showing up, so I really work hard to show up. If people invite me to a wedding, I’m like, I’m going, it’s going to be uncomfortable or difficult, or maybe I want to do something that day, but I’m going to go anyway. And I tend to have a better time than I thought. People invite me to a going away party or retirement party or a baby shower. I show up, I show up because it sucks to have a party and no one comes. I mean, is there something more insulting to someone to have a party that no one shows up to?

I’m going to be the person that shows up. I show up to funerals because I figure that I would want someone to come to my funeral if I was to pass away. I show up to everything that I possibly can, and I almost in some ways work with my wife because we almost joke with each other and my wife will be like, I don’t really want to go. And I’m like, come on, show up. Because showing up means that you show your care and concern for other people. But fellowship is showing up, right? Friendship is showing up. You cannot have the benefits of conversation, friendship, or fellowship without showing up. And so the key part of what it means to make it a priority is to show up for others when invited and say yes, not to make excuses and go anyway. And one of the things that I think is critical here is that the research evidence bears out that this is good for you.

There’s plenty of excellent research that says that people way overestimate how bad of a time they’re going to have at these things and underestimate what good things are going to come from it. So they are negatively forecasting something and it’s not true. It’s a false belief that’s not helping. But the other thing they forget about is showing up once makes it easier to show up the next time. So one thing we talk about in this book is this idea of a social battery or basically your social energy. And what we know is the more familiar you are with people, circumstances and conversations, the less work it takes from you. So every showing up is easier. So in the case of your men’s group, let’s say that you’re a person who shows up the first time and you’re a little uncomfortable. You’re worried that people don’t think you have to say is good.

Maybe you haven’t done the reading. If you’re having a Bible study group or something like that. I didn’t do the reading, maybe I couldn’t come. And then you go, and then you’re feeling those anxieties. They work themselves out. The next time you go, the research would suggest that you fill all of them less. It’s less work. So what’s happening is simultaneously, as your brain and your social behavior adapts to a new circumstance, it becomes less work. What’s also happening, which is great, is you’re actually contributing an investment of time into a relationship with other people. So each time you show up is more time kind of put in the piggy bank of investment towards friendship. So what’s fascinating about this is when you start thinking about it as I’m showing up over and over again, makes it easier to keep showing up and there are additional benefits of comradery, friendship and all those things, you begin to realize that this routine has this wonderful self-sustaining ability. In the same way that we talked about the negative feedback loops. There’s also a positive feedback loop, but you have to start with showing up.

Brett McKay:

Well, this idea of showing up, this goes back to that idea that I wanted to explore further. We mentioned earlier where, okay, socializing actually reduces stress in your life, but this idea of showing up in overcoming these barriers to socializing, it makes socializing sound like a stressor. It is stress. That’s why a lot of people avoid it. It’s like, well, there’s all these obstacles. People are terrible. It takes a lot of effort to socialize. So in that sense, it is socializing is a type of stressor.

Jeffrey Hall:

It absolutely is, and people are a major source of stress. But there’s also some fascinating research that suggests it’s maybe good stress, it’s good stress for you. I’ll give you an example which I find really fascinating. There are several studies that have found that they count up questions of who are your close friends or who are the family members you can count on? And then survey researchers will ask another question, which is, so who’s a stressor in your life? Who are family members that are really stressing you out and frustrating you? And what’s weird is that even the people who are frustrating or difficult are also people who help abate loneliness or keep it at bay. And what that means is, is that even when we’re contributing to people who are difficult, we are still feeling important to a community. I’ve actually also started to rethink when people stir up stuff.

I don’t know if you have a family where there are members of family who are stir something up, create conflict when it’s not there or get mad about something. In some ways, what’s curious is now that I’ve kind of taken some time to step back from it, I’m like, well, part of this is that they understand by engaging in this, they’re actually getting people to talk to them to have something to talk about. They have emotional drama to be able to resolve, and it makes them feel connected to part of a broader system. Now, it’s not a particularly functional way of doing it, but that stress interestingly also probably makes them feel valued and connected by the group because they’re trying to work on something in that family or in that dynamic that’s struggling. And we need people in those communities. In my mind, people like my mom who worked really hard to keep everybody engaged with one another and it’s a thankless task, but if she wasn’t doing it, my brothers and I probably wouldn’t talk to each other as often as we would otherwise.

So what’s interesting is social stressors are not necessarily bad things in the long run. They bring us into a community of connection. But the other thing I think is important for us to keep in mind is that’s also the good stuff. Being important to other people means you also have to see them through difficult times. One thing that Andy and I talk about in the book is if I’m a good listener to a close friend and they’re struggling and I have had friends go through divorce, I’ve had friends go through major losses in their life, I’ve had friends struggle with their parents, ill health and all of these things I imagine will continue to come as my life continues on. It is work for me to listen on the phone. It is work for me to show up for them and know that they’re going to do 80% of the talking, and it’s mainly going to be about them.

It’s work for me to check in on them and send a message and sometimes send a message that they won’t even respond to because they’re overwhelmed with the circumstances they’re in. But guess what? Every action of putting that work in is good for you as the giver, but it’s even better for them. It’s even better for them to feel cared for better for them to feel like they have someone they can talk to. And you might be the only person in their life that’s reaching out like that. When we begin to realize that our actions to put work into and the stress into these relationships are actually things we do for other people, it reorients our thinking rather than going, well, I got to do this for myself. I need to go to the gym so I’m not unhealthy. We begin to go, I am engaging in social activity, good for other people, and it’s giving to other people to check in on them and make plans with them and care for them and listen to them. It warrants our thinking, I think, in a way that really helps us get out of our own sense of interiority and towards another people which is healthy.

Brett McKay:

No, I love this idea of socializing as a good stressor. It made me think about how exercise is a stressor in our physical life. Exactly. And so when we exercise, we stress our bodies, but by stressing our bodies acutely regularly, we actually diminish chronic stress in our lives. And I think the same thing goes with socializing. So if we think of socializing as a good stressor, if you get doses of it every single day, it reduces our overall chronic stress and increases our overall wellbeing. And like you said, it’s something we can do for the good of others, but at the same time, it does do a lot of good for us.

Jeffrey Hall:

Absolutely, there’s a quote that I have in the book that I really like Nick Cave, for those of you who may or may not known, Nick Cave was actually a member of a pretty hardcore kind of post punk band. And at the time, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and then there was one before that as well. And he lost his teenage son to a tragic accident. And he talks about the importance of communication. When you’re at your worst, you feel, I mean, I cannot imagine the grief of losing my own son. And Cave says, it seems to be essential even if just a corrective for the bad unexpressed ideas, we hold in our heads to communicate with others. And what I really love about that quote is that he’s conveying this idea that it is healthy for us to get out of our own heads and relieve our stressors that are internal by being stressed socially.

So I’m stressed out about all kinds of stuff, my kids, my work, my situation, and whatever it is, there are stressors in my life. There’s plenty of really good data and excellent research that says when we express those stressors to other and share them and laugh about them and see them outside ourselves, they actually have this wonderful restorative power to not only bring people together and sharing that burden, but also you actually feel less stress in the long run. So it’s like the stress in the moment of caring for others is not only great for building a relationship and a sense of belonging, which prevents long-term chronic stress and loneliness, but the stress of thoughts unexpressed in our head that we’re not sharing with others because we’re afraid of being vulnerable or afraid of admitting weakness also can be benefited by communication, by talking about it and by talking about it, we can laugh about it and see perspective. And another person says, oh yeah, I’ve gone through the same thing and it stinks and it’s not fair. And then you go, oh, I’m not alone. My ideas are not just corrosively sitting inside of me, but they’re actually being expressed in a way that another person can see me more clearly and I can see them.

Brett McKay:

And also the reason why I like this idea of socializing as a stressor and kind of relating it to exercise as a physical stressor, it made me think of that theory of an evolutionary biology of evolutionary mismatch.

So people talk about, it’s so weird that people go to gyms and walk on these treadmills and lift these weights. Why do we do this? Well, we live in a world where you don’t have to do a lot of physical work to live. You just sit at a desk all day. So we need physical activity. So we have to intentionally put our bodies under physical stress by going to these weird buildings with these contraptions that look like torture devices to get that stress. And it’s the same thing with socializing. We are evolved to socialize, to connect with the group. We now live in an environment where there’s a mismatch. Opportunities to socialize aren’t as automatic and built into modern life as they used to be. They’re not going to happen by default. So we have to intentionally inject social stress in our life the same way we intentionally inject physical stress into our life.

Jeffrey Hall:

I think that’s really brilliantly said. We’re living in a time where it seems conceivable that you can be in a room, never interact with another human being, have all of your food delivered to you as long as you’re making enough money to pay for it, never socialize even with another person. And in the age of ai, have your therapist, your girlfriend, and your best friend all be an AI program. We have created an environment where we can take all of the friction of human society and take it away and replace it with technological affordances of being delivered our food, our comforts, even our social life. So we are at a very huge evolutionary mismatch right now. And it wasn’t even all that long ago in the past where the concept of friendship was deeply born by the fact that we are in the world making exchanges and building trust with one another.

Brett McKay:

So how can we socially exercise?

Jeffrey Hall:

There are simple steps. So if you think about the idea of first thing is enough reflection of where you’re at, where are you at in the continuum? Are you a person who have plenty of social life? You’re given out to everybody around you. You’re the person that people can call on. You’re very busy. And in that case, the book probably is just in some ways just kind of patting in the back and saying, good job. We also do say in the book, you can be overtaxed, you can go too far. You can get to the point where you’re spread too thin and you need some time alone. You need solitude also to balance that out.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s a good point. So socializing is a good stressor, but any stressor, it’s on that U-shaped curve exactly as you go up, it’s good. And then at a certain point you have diminishing returns and actually is bad. Same thing with physical exercise, moderate exercise is good, but if you go past a certain point, it’s going to be detrimental.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I give a talk recently in Kansas City about social, and I was surrounded by young women professionals who were social networking professional reasons, but also to give back to the community. And I said to them, I’m like, I’m guessing I’m in a room of people who are such deeply committed to their social life that they actually need to hear the solitude part of my talk. So I’m going to start with the solitude part of my talk, and I really want to reinforce for folks out there. I’m not saying if you are on the far end and the reaches of being socially stressed to keep doing what you’re doing, nourished solitude is critical for restoring our sense of connection to one another, that shutting off and letting go of our social responsibilities, particularly the social responsibilities that come through our phone is really important. We need to find time to restore restorative, solitude, critical.

And that use shape curve, you describe exactly in the middle part of the curve. Small acts of sociality are probably all you need for a person kind of in that middle part. You’re not too social and you’re not totally alone. Things like talking to your neighbor, talking to a stranger, making small talk at work, making time to make sure that you meet up with friends once a month. Recognizing that small talk gets such a bad rap that we have to reorganize our thinking about it and realize just checking in with another person and showing them dignity and respect, whether that’s your barista or the person that works at your office or a neighbor, is critical in building community. So small steps, nothing big. Some things once a day, like checking in with a stranger or person in your world, something once a week, checking in with a close friend or with someone that you want to really talk to. And once a month, maybe that’s a longer sort of, if you have time for it and you should make time for it, like a dinner together or out together to do something fun, whatever it is that you like. So you can make that work. But it’s really important to realize you have to know where you are to start. So the big thing about breaking social inertia is knowing where you begin.

Brett McKay:

One thing you’d also do in the book, you talk about different ways we can communicate with others and socialize with others, and we have the internet. It’s just so many different ways you actually create a hierarchy on which ones are better than the others. If you’re going to reach out and connect with someone, walk us through that hierarchy. What are some of the ways we can and which ways are better?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, I do a lot of research on social media, on texting, on phone calls. It’s one of my major areas of research. And there’s a hierarchy essentially. And when we think about what that hierarchy is, is I’m encouraging people to move up the ladder of connection, is what I call it. And at the very, very bottom of this ladder of connection is actually scrolling mindlessly on social media. There are mixed studies. I don’t think the evidence is unequivocally that this is harmful for you, but there’s plenty of research that say, depending on the type of content that you’re consuming, it is, it can be very harmful in the sense like doom scrolling. I also think that for certain demographics, like younger adults seeing things that are constantly making them feel that they’re being left out fomo or they’re not as good or they’re not as accomplished, they’re not as successful as other people, those are all pretty bad for you.

And if you can think about ways to minimize the amount of time you’re doing those things, it’s good. So that one is not more or less. The next level up from that is texting. Texting is actually I think kind of an unsung hero of connection. There’s a lot of fun studies that have been done recently that finds that even people you haven’t talked to for a while appreciate a text that just says, Hey, I’m thinking of you people don’t use email anymore. But if you are of the demographic and also of the age group or email’s comfortable, send one of those. One step up from texting would probably be a phone call or a video chat, scheduling a time to check in, have a longer conversation back and forth, whatever. Also, a lot of young adults, interestingly, are more adept at using video chat just to hang out together.

So they just leave it on and then they go about what they’re doing. People long distance relationships do that as well. And then the top of that hierarchy is face-to-face communication. So if you are a person who finds themselves just lacking for time to do any of these things, all I’m asking is one step higher. Maybe if you’re pretty good at keeping in touch on text and you have group chats going on with lots of folks, you can have one you want to check in with and call in the next week, make an appointment to call them. And that’s the only way I keep in touch with my friends, by the way, is by an appointment. So it’s not like I’m just seeing if my friend Craig’s going to pick up the phone. I know he’s a busy guy with kids. We make it time to do that. So I’m just asking one step up, one step up at a time and to recognize that any step up is actually shows empirical evidence to be beneficial.

Brett McKay:

I thought it was interesting the research about the difference between video calls and just regular phone calls.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, that one’s interesting too because I think that’s an evolving norm. Some stuff suggests that video chat actually makes you feel a little more lonely because it actually makes you feel perhaps that you’re missing that person more when you see them. And some people really love talking on the phone. I would include myself as one of them. The sound of another person in my head makes me feel so close and connected to them. But when I’m on video chat, I get distracted and confused and I feel like I need to be more aware of my facial behaviors, which makes me feel weird. So I think kind of think a jury is still out. A lot of people are stuck on video chat all day long at work, which I think also degrades its sense of efficacy. But young adults have taught me that they seem to really get it. That video chat’s a good opportunity to just kind of have someone in your room while you’re doing other things.

Brett McKay:

It might be a generational thing. I don’t like video chat.

Jeffrey Hall:

Me neither.

Brett McKay:

And it’s a reason why on the podcast, I don’t do video. I just like to do audio only.

Jeffrey Hall:

Hey, can I give you a shout out for out? Thank you. It’s a lot less work on my part. I think I can watch my words a lot more closely and really think about what you’re saying, but if I’m watching the interaction, I’m way too attentive to what I’m doing.

Brett McKay:

And you don’t have to worry about the lighting or what your hair looks like.

Jeffrey Hall:

I’m having a good hair day though, Brett.

Brett McKay:

The tricky thing about socializing is it requires other people. And so it’s a collective action problem. So if you want to socialize, that’s great, but if the other person doesn’t or there’s no one else to socialize with, well then you’re kind of out of luck. It’s like wanting to play catch. There’s no one to play catch with. That’s what a conversation is.

Jeffrey Hall:

Totally.

Brett McKay:

So what do we do about that? Because that collective action problem, it’s structural, the way our time is scheduled up, how our space is arranged, what can we do to improve the structure of our lives so that socializing is maybe a bit easier, can’t be completely easy or completely frictionless. I think the effort is part of what makes it good for us, but how can we approach it to facilitate it being a bigger part of our lives?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. One of my good friends from high school, she had this phrase, she went to social work and she talked about the idea that you need to basically follow the weaker impulse. And I love that phrase because it gives you kind of a sense in which that how you need to be alert to the tendencies to not do this stuff. And what I mean by following the weaker impulse when it comes to being social is you had a hard day, there’s a social event that you haven’t been planning for a while, and you’re like, oh, I don’t want go. You need to follow the weaker impulse, which says it’s a good thing to go another way. Encourage the people in your life to be social. Maybe that’s your partner, maybe that’s your kids. Encourage the people around you to set a norm and an expectation that being social is something that’s worth fighting for and worth doing.

I think structurally and socially, this is a very, very hard problem. Robert Putnam, who I’ve mentioned before, has been counseling every president since Bill Clinton about how to build social interactions and build social community. And they have not been able to reverse the trend. I don’t know how our trends around work can be fixed, but some of this is about acknowledging that we are also engaging in trends that we have probably more control over than we perceive. And I think the big one is how we choose to use our leisure time around media entertainment. I think we have to reorganize the way that we think about what’s valuable about consuming media and say that maybe this is really not the thing that needs to be occupying my time the whole time. And if I make an exception by saying, this night of the week, I’m going to reserve for catching up with a friend or otherwise, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to do so.

What’s hard is I wish for a world in which we could return to a sense of social obligation to one another. I wish for a world in which that it became more normative, that people would reach out and care for the people, especially those who are needed and isolated. But the biggest thing that I got to recommend is the only change that I think you really have control over is to recognize that making it a priority in your life means showing up, doing so consistently and taking your knocks when people can’t be there for you. People can cancel on you, you forgive them, and you try again. If people don’t text you back It’s okay. It doesn’t mean the text didn’t matter. You chit chat with the bagger at the grocery store and that 16-year-old rolls their eyes at you because some middle-aged white dude telling them this or that. That’s okay. I take my knocks. I recognize that every social interaction is not going to be a great one. But the fact that I’m trying in my world and my community, I think makes me a person who’s trying to build a healthier biome for living for everyone.

Brett McKay:

So exercise your agency to change the environment around you.

Jeffrey Hall:

You got it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And I think the idea is if you start making it a priority in your life, hosting parties, hosting, even just small get togethers with your friends reaching out, the idea is that it can act as a social contagion. People are like, oh wow, this guy’s having a get together where he just has beers and sodas and it’s nothing really big, but I had a really good time. Maybe I could do that.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I think what’s curious about this is that we also know from other research on social norms and contagion is this is how it happens. People begin to understand that this is something that can be done and they see pathways to doing it. Any major social change happens because enough people have modeled it and demonstrated how it works to make it work again. And I’m hopeful. I mean, I think there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful.

Brett McKay:

So if listeners were to take one small action this week to build up their own social biome and the social biome around them, what would you recommend?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. I would say make a plan with somebody that you love. If that’s your romantic partner, if that’s your best friend, if that’s your family member or brother or sister, make a plan to talk to ’em. Make a plan to have lunch. Make a plan to check in, make a plan to make a phone call. Put it on your calendar and do it. And even if you’re just listening right now, send that text. Say, Hey, we haven’t caught up for a while. Would you like to get together? Or, we have this thing coming up. Or When are you available to have lunch? Again, do it while you’re listening to this conversation that Brett and I are having. And then keep being persistent. If that person says, oh yeah, definitely, but I need to get back to you. Get back to them. Follow up, keep working at it. And once you have that opportunity to connect with them, the best piece of advice is to say, let’s do it again. And not just do it out of politeness, but actually put it on the calendar to do it again. And once you start doing it, it becomes easier and easier.

Brett McKay:

It’s true. After I read this book, I told you this in the email that I sent you before this interview, it inspired me. I set up a ruck with some guys here in town. Very cool. Saturday morning, eight o’clock, eat some donuts along the way.

Jeffrey Hall:

That’s awesome.

Brett McKay:

And it was easy. I could have done this so many times, but that social inertia. But looks like a lot of guys are going to show up and it should be fun.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I would also say, if not all of them show up. Do it anyway. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

Do it anyway.

Jeffrey Hall:

Do it again. And maybe new people will show up next time because they weren’t available this time. I think we’re too quick to assume that social failure means it’s not worth doing, and that’s just not the case.

Brett McKay:

Well, Jeffrey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jeffrey Hall:

Absolutely. So my run of relationships in technology lab here at the University of Kansas, and my research is posted there, but also on LinkedIn. I’m really active on posting about research related findings on LinkedIn. The social biome specifically is something I promote on Instagram and I’m Jeffrey Hall, PhD at Instagram. So those two kind of places are in which people can kind of see updates on what my work is being doing. So I’d love to have you there too. Fantastic.

Brett McKay:

Well, Jeffrey Hall, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Hey, thank you. My guest today is Jeffrey Hall. He’s the coauthor of the book, The Social Biome. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/socialstress. You can find links to resources and we can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the A one podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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If you’ve been following AoM for a while, you know that strength training is a central part of my daily life — the thing, other than my faith and family, that brings me the most joy and satisfaction.

Back in my 30s, I trained to hoist as much weight as possible. I did some amateur lifting competitions, so my goal was to maximize my one rep max on the main barbell lifts. My workout sessions would often last an hour and a half. I really enjoyed that season of my life, but the intensity of the training started to take its toll on me physically and psychologically as I entered my 40s.

I’ll be turning 43 here in a few months. I’m not the man I was a decade back. Life’s busier, and I have a body that’s not quite as forgiving as it once was. Long sessions leave me rundown instead of built-up. Training at this stage of life requires a different approach.

My longtime coach, Matt Reynolds, has helped transition my training for midlife. Since I know many of you reading AoM have grown up with me and are entering your 40s too, I thought it would be helpful to share what my training has looked like lately. Maybe it will give you some inspiration for your own programming.

The Program FrameworkI do a strength-training workout 4X a week, using an upper/lower split, with each workout capped at 60 minutes. And I do a cardio workout 2X a week. Sundays I rest, except for taking low-key walks.

Here are the components of my routine:

Strength workouts:1. Heavy main lift. Every session starts with a big compound movement: squat, deadlift, bench press, or shoulder press. I go heavy — something in the 3-5 rep range. I’ll occasionally do a heavy single. It scratches the itch to keep strength as a central part of training without beating me up with endless sets. 2. Backoff volume. After the heavy top set, I do 1-2 backoff sets at a lighter weight. This allows me to accumulate volume while staying within a recoverable zone. 3. Supplemental Lift. I’ll then do a supplemental lift. If it’s squat day, I’ll do a hamstring-focused supplemental lift like Romanian deadlifts or good mornings. If it’s bench day, I’ll do a shoulder-focused supplemental lift like dumbbell shoulder presses. Enough load to matter, not enough to wreck me. 4. Circuit. Each session finishes with a circuit — upper or lower, depending on the day. A mix of dips, chins, curls, rows, split squats, leg extensions, or whatever I have equipment for. The goal is simple: get the heart rate up, build some muscle, and walk out with a sweat.

CardioAs I’ve gotten into midlife, I’ve put more emphasis on heart health. Three mainstays: Zone 2 cardio two times a week for long-term conditioning, rucks for a blend of endurance and load-bearing strength, and one weekly HIIT session to keep the higher gears sharp and to improve my V02 Max (I’ve got an article about VO2 in the works).

Adding Weight and Reps for Progressive OverloadOn the heavy lifts, I add about five pounds a week. When I stall out, Matt will lower the weight, and then I start working my way back up.

For the supplemental lifts and circuit work, my goal is to be able to do three sets of 10-12 reps. Once I reach that goal, I’ll add weight to the lift and then do as many reps as possible until I get three sets of 10-12 reps again, and then I add weight again, and the cycle repeats.

Here’s what programming looks like specifically right now for me:

Monday (Lower Day)Deadlift

1 set × 3 reps @ 500 lbs
Backoff set: 1×5 @ 455 lbs

Box Squat

4×3 @ 365 lbs

Lower Circuit

On all circuits, I do the 3 exercises back-to-back, then take a 2.5-minute break, then perform the next circuit, repeating the circuit 3X

Leg Press: 3×12 @ 285 lbs
Leg Curl: 3 x AMRAP (as many reps as possible) @ 140 lbs
Kettlebell swings: 3×20 @ 70 lbs

Tuesday (Upper Day)Shoulder Press

1×3 @ 195 lbs
Backoff sets: 2 x AMRAP @ 180 lbs

Machine Incline Bench Press

I use iso arms on my squat rack for this

3 x AMRAP @ 170 lbs

Pendlay Row

3 x AMRAP @ 260 lbs

Upper Circuit

Cable Fly: 3×12 @ 250 lbs
Overhead Cable Tricep Extension: 3 x AMRAP @ 150 lbs
Dumbbell Curls: 3×12 @ 100 lbs

WednesdayZone 2 Cardio

One hour walking on an incline treadmill

Thursday (Lower Day)Hatfield Squat

1×6 @ 350 lbs
Backoff sets: 2 x AMRAP @ 325 lbs

Good Morning

3×5 @ 95 lbs

Lower Circuit

Leg Press: 3×12 @ 290 lbs
Seated Leg Extension: 3 x AMRAP @ 160 lbs
Hanging Knee Raise: 3×12 @ bodyweight (195 lbs)

Friday (Upper Day)Bench Press

1×3 @ 270 lbs
2 x AMRAP @ 235 lbs

Dumbbell Press

3 x AMRAP @ 145 lbs

Upper Circuit

Lat Pulldown: 3×12 @ 285 lbs
Lateral Raise: 3×12 @ 35 lbs
Incline Dumbbell Curl: 3 x AMRAP @ 70 lbs

SaturdayCardio

30 minutes of Zone 2 cardio

HIIT Workout

4×4: 4 minutes hard, 3 minutes rest (repeated four times)

I sometimes substitute a one-hour ruck for this Zone 2 + HIIT routine. Just depends on what I’m feeling.

Daily Morning Routine* 1-mile morning walk every day to take care of heart health

Lessons From Midlife TrainingA few takeaways I’ve learned as I’ve adjusted my training for midlife:

Strength still matters. I like keeping a heavy barbell movement at the center of each session.
Adjust the main lifts as needed. Barbells can be hard on a middle-aged body. Feel free to adjust your technique for the barbell lifts as needed. For example, I no longer do traditional barbell squats and instead use a Hatfield squat due to issues with my shoulders and knee. If you can’t do a conventional barbell deadlift, swap it with a trap bar deadlift. Can’t barbell bench? Do dumbbell bench presses instead.
Efficiency is king. I don’t need marathon sessions. Short and focused beats long and meandering.
Make time for cardio. Adding consistent cardio has been a game-changer for my overall health and energy levels. It’s helped lower my resting heart rate, and it’s given me more work capacity. I don’t gas out anymore. Walk a lot for that cardio base and include one session of HIIT a week.
Don’t be afraid to take time off. I’m still really religious about my training, but I’ve learned not to be afraid to take time off. If I’m feeling beat up or tired due to increased stress, I’ll swap out my usual training session for a walk or a ruck. If I’m on vacation, I don’t train; I just enjoy myself.

This isn’t the strongest I’ve ever been. But that’s alright with me. My thirties were about building a base of strength. My forties are about maintaining it while making sure I can still hike with my family, play pickup ultimate frisbee without wheezing, and avoid slipping into soft suburban dad syndrome. I train to stay healthy and because I enjoy it an awful damn much.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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I’m a suburban man. Born and raised.

I grew up in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. I now live in the suburbs of Tulsa.

Suburban manhood has its own meaning and archetype — one that’s a weird and complex mixture of other archetypes of American manhood.

Homeownership gives suburban men a chance to harness a bit of the genteel farmer archetype of American manliness. Like the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, you’ve got a little plot of land that’s yours, and you can do what you want with it. But unlike the republican yeoman farm or the ancient Greek oikos, where property produced food and raiment, suburban homeownership is mostly consumptive. Suburban men spend money to maintain their homes instead of their homes maintaining them. In many ways, suburban manhood is a simulation of the ideal of the country homesteader.

Suburban manhood also mixes in the archetype of the urban man. Urban manhood is characterized by ambition, professional success, style-consciousness, adaptability, and social sophistication. The urban man excels in commerce, culture, or professional fields, embracing dynamism, networking, cosmopolitanism, and competition. The suburban man embraces these energies, too, but to a lesser and more ambivalent extent; living in a less densely populated area, and perhaps even working from home, he has fewer opportunities to rub shoulders with others, attend cultural events, demonstrate wit, knowledge, and style, and exercise interpersonal skills.

The archetype of the heroic artisan is present in the ethos of suburban manhood as well. While few suburban men earn their living crafting tangible goods, there’s still an expectation for manual competence. A suburban man might handle household repairs or engage in DIY hobbies, though often at a basic level.

In addition to this mixture of ideals in the suburban manhood archetype, there’s also a general tension between public achievement and private investment. There’s this idea that your primary job is to go out into the world of work so you can bring home the bacon. You’ve got to be high agency and competitive and willing to bump elbows in the ladder-climbing world of work. But there’s also an expectation that a suburban man should be domestic — in a manly way. He’s the involved dad who fixes up the house so it looks nice and grills burgers on the patio on the weekend.

The other day, while tackling some chores around the house, I was pondering these tensions and what it means to be a man in the suburbs. I felt a sense of masculine competence by getting things done, but at the same time, couldn’t shake a nagging thought: “What exactly am I accomplishing by puttering around the house? What kind of life am I up to here?”

Wanting to make better sense of the contradictions of suburban manhood, I went digging through history. Below I’ll unpack how suburban manhood came to be a strange hybrid of public navigator and domestic homesteader — and what it means for suburban men today.

A Brief History of the Rise of the American Suburbs and Their Influence on Our Ideas of ManhoodIn his book Crabgrass Frontier, historian Kenneth Jackson outlined four defining features of the American suburb: low-density housing, high homeownership, separation of work and home via commuting, and middle-class affluence. Over the last two centuries, these features of the suburb have waxed, waned, and influenced our ideas of modern manhood along the way.

The 19th Century: The Birth of Suburban ManhoodAmerican suburbs first emerged in the middle of the 19th century. Unlike European cities, where the wealthy stayed in the urban core, America’s elites moved to the outskirts of cities to escape the hustle and bustle of urban life. Advances in transportation made this possible. Rail lines and later street cars allowed men to live in the pastoral charms of the suburbs and then commute to the city for work.

This marked a profound shift: for the first time, work and home became physically separated for most men. Before this period, men’s working lives and domestic lives were closely intertwined. Farmers worked their land at home, and craftsmen operated workshops adjoining their residences.

With the rise of white-collar and factory work in cities, work and home life were severed. Work outside the home began to be seen as the exclusive domain of men, while the home was seen as women’s sphere. This shift was reinforced culturally by what historians call the “cult of domesticity.” Under this ideal, women were seen as the moral and spiritual caretakers of the home, while men participated in the workplace and in civic and cultural organizations. After toiling in the “dirty” urban world of public and professional life, men could return home to the renewing and refining oasis cultivated by their wives.

Yet toward the end of the 19th century, there was a movement among suburban men to reclaim the home as part of their masculine identity. They began to get more involved in home life when they were off the clock. They started gardens in their backyards and wood shops in their garages. They were doing things that allowed them to exercise masculine competency — but in a domestic way. Instead of spending time with the fellows at the pub or at the fraternal lodge, many suburban men started spending more time with their families. Scholars call this social movement “masculine domesticity.”

The 1950s and 1960s: The Golden Age of Suburban ManhoodThe Great Depression put the brakes on the spread of the suburbs in America, but after World War II, they boomed. The interstate system and the rise of the automobile allowed homes to be built further away from cities while still enabling men to commute downtown relatively quickly. The GI Bill provided low-cost mortgages to returning vets, opening homeownership to millions of men. After years of actively participating in the carnage of war, many American men welcomed the tranquility of the suburbs.

Masculine domesticity went into hyperdrive in the 1950s. There’s a reason why, when we think “suburban man,” we typically picture some mid-century illustration of a 1950s guy in his backyard, grilling burgers while wearing a “Kiss the Chef” apron. Do-it-yourself-ism exploded. Magazines like Popular Mechanics became staples in suburban homes. Cooking, once the near-exclusive domain of wives, became a manly pastime — so long as it involved meat and fire. Dads volunteered to coach Pee Wee baseball and lead Boy Scout troops.

The rise of mass consumerism in the 1950s shifted the meaning of being a provider for suburban men. Instead of fulfilling that role by providing food grown or raised through their own labor, suburban men provided for their families by bringing home a paycheck to purchase the bacon at the grocery store. What’s more, the scope of providing expanded. It wasn’t enough just to provide the basic necessities for living; suburban men needed to provide middle-class luxuries for their families, like nice cars, clothes, and vacations.

Television shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet showcased the ideal of domestically masculine suburban manhood. Life magazine labeled 1954 as the year of the “domestication of the American Man.” It seemed like suburban men had it all in terms of masculine identity: a sense of being a capable producer and provider at work and of being a competent, creative DIY-er at home.

The 1970s-1990s: Cracks Start to FormThings began to shift in the 1970s. Economic stagnation put a strain on many American suburban families. Job growth moved away from central cities and traditional manufacturing hubs, undermining the older “commute-to-the-city” suburban model. Suburban office parks began appearing, allowing men to work closer to home. The rise of urban decay also led men to spend less leisure time in the city.

It wasn’t just urban areas that experienced decline; suburbs that grew rapidly during the 1950s and 1960s began encountering problems traditionally associated with cities: congestion, strained infrastructure, and rising crime. Consequently, people started moving even further out from traditional suburbs into areas now known as exurbs.

With more women entering the workforce, men began to play a larger role in childcare and other domestic responsibilities, and both sexes had less time for hobbies, household maintenance, and general domestic investment. The stress of juggling multiple roles increased. Cultural portrayals of suburban life during this period began to highlight these emerging cracks in suburban manhood, exposing tensions between traditional expectations and modern realities.

The 2000s to Today: A Return to Oikos Manhood?Advances in technology and an uncertain economic landscape have eroded two of Jackson’s defining features of the American suburb: separation of home and work via commuting, and widespread home ownership.

Digital technologies have allowed many men to work from home, and they’re having to figure out how to blend family life and work life. One minute, they can be on a Zoom call with their boss; the next, they’re driving a kid to baseball practice. In some ways, this is a return to the Greek idea of oikos manhood, where the home functioned as a place of production.

Opportunities have arisen with this shift: men can invest commuting time back into their families, communities, and hobbies. But there’s a downside, too: without clear boundaries between work and home, everything tends to bleed together. Suburban men may feel stuck in a cycle of half-working and half-fathering, never feeling fully present in either.

Homeownership has long been central to suburban manhood. But rising home prices, stagnant wages, and investor-owned subdivisions are changing that. Renting in the suburbs is becoming more common for younger men. This has shifted the old suburban script of being the master of your domain. Property stewardship becomes negotiated. Men can still DIY in their rented homes, but they have to talk to their landlord first. Perhaps they can’t remodel their kitchen, but they can build raised garden beds in the yard or create a makerspace in a spare bedroom.

Even when modern men do own their own homes, they were less likely to learn DIY and handyman skills growing up and are thus more likely to outsource maintenance tasks to professionals. And rather than hands-on hobbies, today’s men are apt to spend their leisure time in digital pursuits — playing video games, scrolling their phones, and watching television. As their professional jobs often involve manipulating digital modalities too, this further blurs the line between work and home, giving men a feeling of lopsided development and lending life an ethereal, unreal quality.

A New Old IdealThe reason I — and I would imagine other men — feel ambivalent about being a man in the suburbs is that there’s an inherent tension in suburban masculinity. It incorporates various archetypes of manhood but doesn’t fully embody any of them.

The suburbanite archetype still retains something of the self-reliant homesteader — the man who fully provides for himself and his family — but only as a faint echo of that ideal. Sure, you can raise backyard chickens and grow vegetables, but you’re far from self-sufficient. You’re kind of playing at being a self-sustaining farmer.

The suburban man has professional ambitions, often strives for some cultural sophistication, and maintains a network of colleagues and friends, but doesn’t have the cosmopolitan sophistication of a city dweller. He’s more isolated and has fewer chances to dress up and make conversation with different kinds of folks; when he does socialize it tends to be with his family and in the context of youth sports leagues and church functions.

The suburban man is still expected to have a little of the heroic artisan in him, but typically doesn’t possess all that much manual competence and only engages in a nominal amount of concrete hands-on tasks — either in terms of home maintenance or his hobbies.

Despite these tensions, there’s value in embracing the contradictions of suburban manhood. Living in the suburbs has a lot of perks. You don’t have to worry about drought killing your crops. You don’t have to wake up at 4 am to milk the cows. You have ample free time (more free time than ever before) to pursue hobbies and be involved with your community.

You just have to embrace the idea that it’s worthwhile to dabble in the various archetypes of manhood, even if you’re not all-in on any of them. You don’t have to be a genuine farmer or cosmopolitan or artisan to get satisfaction from gardening, being well-read, or staining your deck.

Embracing the tensions of suburban manhood also requires investing in domestic life without losing your edge. Avoid succumbing to soft suburban dad syndrome. Stay ambitious about your work. Keep fit. Get out into the wild every now and then. You can live in the suburbs without being entirely of the suburbs.

Perhaps suburban manhood today is less about mastering a specific role and more about navigating an amalgamation of responsibilities with resilience and purpose. At least that’s what I tell myself as I shoot off emails from my home office, check on the brisket cooking in my wood pellet smoker, and finish up a workout in my garage gym.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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In 2019, Arne Murke and his brother were sailing off the coast of New Zealand, about to head east for an ocean-crossing trip that would eventually land them in Brazil. But they soon ran into bad weather. Massive swells and problems with their mainsail made the boat unstable, and Murke went overboard. His brother tried to toss him a life jacket, but it was quickly lost in the rough water.

Without a life jacket, and faced with the prospect of having to tread water for hours, or possibly days, Murke knew he was in trouble. So, he turned to a survival skill he had heard about years before: turning his pants into a flotation device. Four hours later, search and rescue teams found Murke, a little tired, but calm, bobbing in the waves with his inflated pants buoying him up.

Turning your pants into an ad-hoc life jacket seems a little funny, but is actually quite effective, and something that the US Navy and SEALs actively teach their sailors as a lifesaving technique. If you find yourself overboard without a means to stay afloat, pray you’re wearing pants, and follow these steps.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book *The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.*

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone? I almost didn’t click on this article, since “why are men so lonely/don’t have friends” pieces have become a tired dime a dozen over the past several years. But I’m glad I did. By dint of a compelling and relatable personal story and excellent writing, Sam Graham-Felsen manages to make the topic feel fresh and engaging. He explores what’s become of the friendships he had with other dudes in his younger years, which carried the depth and near-intensity of romantic love. The usual suspects are fingered: post-college busyness, marriage, family, the norms of modern masculinity. Sam initially tries to fill the social void in his life with self-improvement podcasts and fitness before realizing their inadequacy in compensating. As with all pieces like this, it’s worth noting that the desire for deep, emotionally-rich friendships isn’t something all guys keenly feel — it’s more personality-dependent than universal. The reason you get so many of these “I wish I had more deep male friendships” essays is because writers are disproportionately likely to have the temperament that craves them. Still, whether a guy longs for close bonds or is content with looser ties, the basic need for companionship remains — and so does the solution Sam lands on: be more proactive about making and maintaining it.

Pendleton towels. These are my favorite beach/pool towels. I’m a sucker for a Southwestern print, but what really makes them great is how big and thick they are. You can stake out a generous patch of beach real estate with one of these oversized towels, and they’re nice for wrapping around you when you get out of the water on a chilly day. Made with 100% cotton, they’re super smooth on one side for softness and looped on the other for absorbency.

“Motorcycle Drive By” by Third Eye Blind. Among ’90s artists, Third Eye Blind never got the artistic cred of, say, Radiohead or R.E.M., but they were a lot more interesting and taken more seriously than, you know, Smash Mouth or even Matchbox Twenty. Everyone knows Semi-Charmed Life, but it’s easy to forget just how many other bangers were packed into their 1997 self-titled album. The best of the bunch actually didn’t get as much attention: “Motorcycle Drive By.” The song captures the bittersweet intensity of youth — heartbreak, freedom, loneliness, and aliveness all at once. Its slow build to an emotional shout-out-loud crescendo is dang cathartic. Kate thinks it’s among the best songs of all time.

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. This was one of the key sources for our social status series, which remains one of my favorite deep dives we’ve done on AoM. In this book, de Botton gets at something we all feel but rarely admit: that constant worry about how we stack up compared to others. To help readers understand status anxiety, he looks to centuries of philosophy, art, and history. He then offers solutions to it taken from the Stoics and Renaissance thinkers. It’s one of those books that once you read, you’ll continue to think about often because social status shapes so many parts of our lives; it’s the underappreciated hum beneath life’s hood, driving our actions and reactions.

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published The Four Ages of Communication: How Changing Media Transforms the Human Experience and Sunday Firesides: Stop Sending Out Your Smaller Man.

Quote of the Week

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,

These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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This Friday is the summer solstice. It’s the longest day of the year. Afterward, the days will start getting shorter.

We’re big advocates of embracing seasonality. It’s a powerful antidote to what C.S. Lewis called the horror of the same old thing. Acknowledging the summer solstice is a great opportunity to inject a seasonal tradition into your life.

Although ancient pagans often participated in rituals to mark the solstice, for most people in the West, there aren’t built-in traditions associated with the occasion. So, I decided to create my own, using it as a day on which to conduct a personal life audit.

The summer solstice is the midpoint of Earth’s annual journey around the sun, making it a perfect moment to pause and reflect on how things have been going in your life so far this year.

I’ve sketched out an audit that I plan on working through on Friday. It focuses on three areas: my roles, “sharpening the saw,” and goal setting.

Maybe this audit will become an annual tradition for me. But even if it doesn’t, at least this year I’ll gain valuable insights into how I’m doing as a man.

If you’d like to do your own summer solstice audit, here’s a breakdown of the setup I’ll be using.

How Am I Doing in My Roles?In our article about creating a blueprint for your life, we recommended writing out the various roles you occupy. To become a complete and well-rounded man, we need to thrive in each of them, as so much of our happiness depends on our success in carrying out their respective responsibilities.

Here’s a list of potential roles you might have:

Husband/boyfriend
Father
Son
Brother
Friend
Grandfather
Grandson
Manager
Employee
Disciple
Student
Landlord
Coach
Teacher
Citizen
Mentor
Mentee

Grab a journal and list four or five roles you’re playing right now, in order of their importance to you.

Next, spend five to ten minutes reflecting on how things have been going in each role so far this year. What’s going well? Where could you improve? Be brutally honest with yourself.

Finally, identify one concrete action for each role that you can start doing today — something that’ll help you step fully into it and lengthen your stride.

Sharpen the SawAfter you’ve reflected on how you’re doing in your roles, you may notice you’re showing up tired and unmotivated in one or more (or all) of them. You feel like you’re not firing on all cylinders.

This could be a sign you need to “sharpen the saw.”

We explored this idea from Stephen Covey extensively in our series on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Sharpening the saw is about taking time to renew yourself so you can keep showing up as the man you want to be. Saw sharpening is easy to skip when life’s busy, but if you don’t make time to restore your edge, you can’t do anything else effectively.

As part of your solstice audit, ask yourself:

Which elements of my life are feeling most worn down? What needs sharpening?

Look especially at these four key areas:

Physical: Am I sleeping well? Moving regularly? Eating healthy?
Spiritual: Do I feel anchored in purpose? Am I spending time in reflection and prayer?
Mental: Is my mind engaged and refreshed, or just overloaded?
Social/Emotional: Am I connecting with others or isolating myself? Am I emotionally steady or reactive?

Pick one practice in each domain to add (or recommit to) for the next six months of the year. Make them simple and doable:

Take a 30-minute walk each morning
Start and end your day with prayer or meditation
Read a book for 15 minutes a day
Call a friend each week for a catch-up
Establish a weekly marriage meeting with your spouse

Make these practices a part of your daily checklist. Do them. Use the solstice to recommit to this kind of regular, meaningful self-renewal.

Set One Big Goal for the Rest of the YearOnce you’ve clarified your roles and renewed your energy, you’re in a good position to think about direction. Don’t overwhelm yourself with a dozen new objectives. Just pick one big thing you want to move the needle on before the year ends.

Ask:

What project or change would make me feel proud if I accomplished it by December?
What challenge would stretch me in a meaningful way?
What’s something I’ve been putting off that I now feel ready to start?

It could be:

Launching a side hustle
Losing 20 pounds
Starting a career change
Writing the first draft of a book
Repairing a strained relationship
Deepening your spiritual practice
Taking that first backpacking trip
Remodeling a room

Whatever the goal is, write it down. Then, work backward to outline the steps you’ll take over the next six months to accomplish your aim.

The summer solstice is the year’s high noon. Use the extra light to look clearly at where you stand — and where you’re headed.

Check your roles. Sharpen your edge. Set your sights on big goals.

Then, get to work. See you at the winter solstice.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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What if the traits you’ve been taught to suppress your entire career are actually the very qualities that separate those who get what they want from those who stay stuck waiting for recognition that never comes?

Today on the show, Jenny Wood argues that most of us are living in what she calls “an invisible cage” created by an overabundance of caution, and that the biggest lie you’ve been told in your career is to keep your head down and let your work speak for itself.

Jenny is a former Google executive who developed a career development program used by 56,000 people in nearly 100 countries, and she’s the author of Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get It. In our conversation, Jenny explains how traits that have a negative rap can be used for positive ends that will advance your career. We discuss how being shameless, reckless, nosy, manipulative, obsessed, and more can help you overcome your success-hindering fears, take bolder action, and achieve your goals.

Connect With Jenny Wood* Jenny’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming SoonThis article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Catching a fish with your bare hands sounds like the sort of story you’d hear around a campfire, a tall tale, to be sure. But, hand fishing works, and lots of people do it. You may have heard of noodling for catfish, but other types of fish can be caught with just your hands, too, and in fact, hand fishing is common enough that some areas have specific fishing regulations dedicated to it.

Far more than an incredible party trick, learning to fish with your bare hands is an invaluable survival skill, allowing you to harvest food with zero equipment. But, even when your back is against the wall, mind the fact that hand fishing comes with risks: A hand dangled in the water can be nibbled on not only by fish, but alligators, beavers, snakes, and turtles, and standing in cold water for extended periods of time can lead to hypothermia; whenever fishing with your bare hands, keep just your arm in the water to limit exposure.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book *The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.*

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Your contact is somewhere in this sea of faces, but you can’t be seen talking to him — can’t even acknowledge his existence. One wrong move, one glance from the wrong person, and years of careful work — not to mention your life — could be over in an instant.

This is where the brush pass comes in. A technique perfected during the Cold War, it allowed spies to exchange documents, money, or other small items without ever appearing to interact. Two operatives would simply walk past each other, and in that brief, choreographed moment, critical intelligence would change hands.

You may not be running clandestine ops behind the Iron Curtain, but the brush pass remains one of the most elegant and discreet ways to transfer something unnoticed. Requiring subtle technique and magician-like sleight of hand, it’s a master art of secret-agent subterfuge.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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You don’t have to buy Dad more stuff this Father’s Day. Chances are, he doesn’t need another tie, mug, or multitool. Instead of giving him something that’ll end up in a drawer, give him an experience or service that’ll make his life a little sharper, smoother, or more enjoyable.

Here are six non-material gifts your old man might actually appreciate — and as a bonus, they’re all things you can grab at the last minute.

Professional Car DetailingWhen you’re a dad with kids, your car’s interior takes a beating. Everything gets all scuffed up from kids putting their feet everywhere, and the backseat turns into a graveyard of crumbs and half-eaten snacks. One of life’s underrated pleasures is climbing into a freshly detailed car. I treat myself to a professional detail a couple times a year and am an evangelist for its ROI. I use a mobile service, and would recommend you do likewise when gifting the service to Dad; they’ll show up and restore his vehicle to like-new condition right in the driveway.
A Professional MassageWhether your dad works a physically demanding job or spends his days hunched over a desk, he could use a massage to work out his body’s kinks. While a basic Swedish massage can be relaxing, consider getting Dad a gift certificate for a masseuse who specializes in sports massages. A sports massage feels less foo-fooey, and more importantly, it targets real physical issues — loosening tight muscles, increasing mobility, and leaving Dad feeling noticeably better.
Knife Sharpening ServiceKnife sharpening is one of those to-dos dads tend to perpetually put off, even though getting it done perceptibly enhances your life. So gift Dad a professional knife sharpening service. There are even mobile ones that will come right to your house and sharpen everything from kitchen knives to pocket knives to axes to mower blades right in your driveway. Once the job is done, Dad will find everything from chopping onions to chopping wood more enjoyable.
A One-on-One Skill LessonHas your dad ever said, “I’ve always wanted to learn ____” but never gotten around to it? Help him finally make it happen with a one-on-one lesson from a pro. Whether it’s a BBQ class with a local pitmaster, a private fly-fishing session, a blacksmithing workshop, a tactical pistol course, or a basic woodworking class, there’s a hands-on experience out there to match just about any interest.
A Barbershop ShaveAn old-school straight razor shave with all the trimmings is the male grooming equivalent of the pedicure. The hot towel on your face, the warm lather . . . take it from me, the experience is so dang relaxing. And just a unique, memorable experience all around. Buy Dad a gift card for a straight razor shave at a local barbershop, and he’ll leave the chair feeling like a million bucks.
Tickets to an EventIs your dad a baseball fan? A diehard Springsteen guy? Get him tickets to an event that he’ll really enjoy. And then go with him to it. The thing fathers want most is to spend time with their children — even when they’re grown.

Personally, my dream is for my kids to score me backstage passes to a Killers’ concert. A dad can dream . . .

Bonus: Books are material objects, but they’re more experiences than “stuff.” If you’re looking for a great book to gift Dad — especially one who’s into history — check out these nine suggestions.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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It doesn’t have to be when you join The Strenuous Life.

Let The Strenuous Life be your portal to the kind of active, memorable summers you used to enjoy as a kid. Enrollment is now open and for this week only!

Take the Strenuous Life ChallengeNew members of TSL are enrolled into the 12-week Strenuous Life Challenge, which is designed to induct initiates into a life of strenuosity and help them form new, health-boosting, mindset-enhancing, life-improving habits. You’ll be asked to hit certain benchmarks in terms of daily physical activity and good deeds, earn at least one badge, and complete a diverse range of weekly “Agons” or challenges.

The Strenuous Life Challenge is designed to push you outside your comfort zone, get you having new experiences, and help you become more than you are now in body, mind, and spirit. Those who complete the Challenge earn an exclusive TSL challenge coin, as well as a new outlook on life.

Finally Put Your Long-Standing Intentions Into ActionThe Strenuous Life is like a scouting program for grown men, and its structure — which offers a set of 50+ badges and clear requirements to earn them — facilitates learning new skills, having new experiences, and forming new habits. It’s designed to help you put your long-standing intentions — all those times you’ve said, “I’d really like to start doing _____” — into action.

TSL can be just the kick in the pants you need to finally make good on your goals. Here’s a small sample of some of the stuff members have done as part of The Strenuous Life in the last six months:

If you’re finally ready to move from point A to point B with your goals, TSL will provide the map and guide you on your journey.

Meet Like-Minded Individuals (In Person!)Are you looking for a way to meet up with like-minded individuals and form more real-world friendships? The Strenuous Life can help you make those connections.

One of the features of TSL are local chapters that members can use to organize real world, in-person meet-ups. The third Saturday of every month is designated as “Strenuous Saturday” and members get together to work on badges, ruck, or do community service. Members can meet up to work on the weekly challenges as well.

The Strenuous Life is meant to be shared — come and join a tribe of men who want more out of life!

Summer ’25 Enrollment Is Open Until Friday, June 13, 2025 Once again make the summer a time for getting outside, trying new things, and creating great memories by joining The Strenuous Life.

Enrollment will only be open until Friday, June 13, 2025 at 8PM CT.

For those enrolled, the 12-week Challenge officially begins on June 14th.

The next enrollment of TSL will not occur until the winter of 2026. This is the last enrollment of the year.

I hope to see you on The Strenuous Life!

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When Rick Burgess was growing up, his father, Bill Burgess, was also his football coach. But Bill was a mentor on and off the field not only for his own son but for the many young men he coached at both the high school and collegiate level. Though Bill has passed on, his lessons remain timeless and valuable for all men. Today on the show, Rick shares some of his old-school wisdom with us.

Rick is a radio host, a men’s ministry leader, and the author of Men Don’t Run in the Rain: A Son’s Reflections on Life, Faith, and an Iconic Father. In our conversation, he discusses what his dad taught him through football and beyond, including why men don’t run in the rain and why you need to get out of the stands, avoid being stupid, refuse to rest on your laurels, understand the difference between confidence and arrogance, and take full responsibility for your life without making excuses. We also talk about how Rick drew upon his father’s wisdom when tragedy struck his life.

Resources Related to the Podcast* Bill Burgess * Sunday Firesides: Quit Acting in Bad Faith * AoM Podcast #849: Live Life in Crescendo

Connect With Rick Burgess* The Man Church

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Hey, before we get to today’s show, I want to let you know that enrollment for The Strenuous Life is now open. Summer is the season for movement, challenge, and growth, and there’s no better time to embrace it than right now. The Strenuous Life is our membership program that helps you put into action all the things we’ve been talking about on the AOM Podcast, and writing about on the AOM website. You’ll take on weekly challenges, earn skill-based badges, and work towards becoming a more capable, well-rounded man. Whether it’s fitness, craftsmanship, service, or personal development, there’s something here to push you forward. Join over 11,000 members who are done just thinking about change and are actually doing the work. Enrollment closes Thursday, June 12th at 10:00 PM Central, so don’t wait. Sign up at strenuouslife.co. That’s strenuouslife.co. I hope to see you on The Strenuous Life.

Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. When Rick Burgess was growing up, his father, Bill Burgess, was also his football coach. But Bill was a mentor on and off the field, not only for his own son, but for the many young men he coached at both the high school and collegiate level. Though Bill has passed on, his lessons remain timeless and valuable for all men.

Today on the show, Rick shares some of his old-school wisdom with us. Rick is a radio host, a men’s ministry leader, and the author of “Men Don’t Run in the Rain: A Son’s Reflections on Life, Faith, and an Iconic Father.” In our conversation, he discusses what his dad taught him through football and beyond, including why men don’t run in the rain, and why you need to get out of the stands, avoid being stupid, refuse to rest on your laurels, understand the difference between confidence and arrogance, and take full responsibility for your life without making excuses. We also talk about how Rick drew upon his father’s wisdom when tragedy struck his life. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/rain.

All right, Rick Burgess, welcome to the show.

Rick Burgess: Thanks for having me, Brett. Excited to talk about this topic today, ’cause this is one that you and I both have a lot of passion about.

Brett McKay: Oh, for sure. So, you got a new book out. It’s called “Men Don’t Run in the Rain: A Son’s Reflections on Life, Faith, and an Iconic Father.” And this book is all about your father and college football coach Bill Burgess. So your dad, he was a football coach in Alabama. He played football for Auburn from 1958 to 1962. After that, he became a high school football coach and athletic director. He coached at Woodlawn High School and Oxford High School there in Alabama. Then he became the coach of Jacksonville State University. Had a lot of success there. He took his team to three National Division II championships, won one of those, won multiple Gulf South conference titles. He was named, National Coach of the Year, was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. So he had a very successful coaching career. And it seems like your dad, he was born to coach. Like, this was his calling and he filled it.

Rick Burgess: Yeah, there’s people that maybe wanna be a coach, and you just put it best Brett, then there’s people that were born to coach. And he just, because it came so natural to him, it was kind of like breathing. I don’t think he even put a lot of effort into saying, I must do this and I have to do that. And I think it’s just what he was born to do. And he was one of those people that if he came into a room, he would influence people whether you wanted him to or not.

Brett McKay: What I love about this book is, we were talking before we got on the show, I played high school football here in Oklahoma, and your dad, he reminded me of some of the football coaches that I had. And his sayings that he had, he’s like, witty one-liners that he had without even trying to be witty, the way he carried himself. And I love how you start off the book, this physical description you give your dad. Because I think it really captures the way he dressed and carried himself. It captures his philosophy towards coaching and life. So what was the Bill Burgess uniform that you knew like, that’s dad. When you think about your dad, that’s what you remember.

Rick Burgess: He wasn’t really, when I look back, he wasn’t, I don’t think over six foot tall, but he seemed like he was seven feet tall. But he was very muscular and he was old school. So he always had the trucker cap on with the team logo right on the front. He wore a coach’s shirt, the standard with the team logo then Cigna on the left chest. And then he would wear these black coaching shoes. You probably remember these, Brett. They were, I think Rodale made them?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Rick Burgess: They were black, and then of course he would do tube socks of course, and he would pull those up to his massive calves, which were legendary. And those calves would kind of break the elastic of the tube socks and then the socks would fall down around his ankles, never staying up. And then of course he had his whistle on, had kind of a piece of leather around it and it had a whistle. And then on the end of the whistle, was athletic tape.

My dad believed that athletic tape could cure any problem. And of course it would have that on the end, tobacco juice, and sometimes blood would be stained on the athletic tape. And then of course the final part of the uniform was always the bike coaching shorts. They were super, super tight. And that’s the way he was standing in that Alabama sun. He was just the iconic portrait of those classic football coaches from that era that had influence on everybody they coached.

Brett McKay: How do you think that exemplifies his philosophy or sort of his stance towards life?

Rick Burgess: Dad was always about keeping it simple. He probably was one of the most humble people that I’ve ever known for the… Considering the leadership role that he was constantly being put in and the accolades. And he was never an I person. He was always a we person. He always complimented the staff, complimented the players, everybody who worked, the equipment person, the trainers, the janitor, whatever the case may be. And so, I think if you looked at the way he dressed, he dressed in a way that shouldn’t really it did, but it shouldn’t have really. The intent was not to bring attention to himself. He felt like if I was gonna be coaching, this is the things I need to coach. And I’m certainly not trying to make a fashion statement or bring any attention to myself. I’m here to work.

Brett McKay: It made me wanna go get some bike shorts for myself.

Rick Burgess: Oh, goodness. Could we bring them back?

Brett McKay: Let’s bring them back.

Rick Burgess: Could we bring them back?

Brett McKay: I think that’s the next trend that’s gonna happen here. Coach bike shorts. All right, so let’s talk about some of these lessons that you highlight in the book. And the first lesson that you highlight that you got from your dad was, it’s the title of the book, “Men Don’t Run in the Rain.” It’s a very evocative phrase. What does that mean?

Rick Burgess: It meant more than what it literally means. In the intro, I tell you the story about me being with my dad, and it was actually one of my friends. Dad was, “This doesn’t surprise you.” He was our biological father, but he was a father figure for so many of our friends and, of course, the multiple players that he coached. Because they either didn’t have a father at all, or they may had fathers that were not great people. And so, dad became kind of a pseudo father for many, and one of my best friends in school. And in growing up, his father, was not involved in his life and unfortunately was actually eventually murdered. And so, he looked to dad as his dad. He was at our house all the time. And he was the first one that said to me, when we were little boys, we weren’t very old, and he saw dad in a downpour and dad wasn’t running. He was just walking methodically. He wasn’t picking up his pace, he wasn’t slowing down. As if the rain wasn’t really hitting him. And he looked at me and he said, “Your dad doesn’t run in the rain.”

And I thought, okay, and I didn’t think anything much about it. And maybe dad’s just odd. I didn’t know. So when I got a little older, somewhere around 12, 13, something like that, I was leaving his office and one of those classic Alabama afternoon downpours came with the daily thunderstorm, with all the humidity. And so, I went to run to his truck and he put his arm out and he stopped me and he says, “No, men don’t run in the rain.” And I remember thinking to myself, I don’t think I fully grasp it, but almost what he was saying is, men should never be frantic. Men should not make a big deal out of things that aren’t a big deal. It’s just rain. And I don’t wanna see you nor any man scurrying like the rain falling on them is going to hurt them. And he said, we walk to the truck. And he’s teaching something there about steadiness. He’s teaching something there about not being fearful of things that we shouldn’t be afraid of. He’s speaking about a confidence, a calm that a man should bring to a chaotic situation. So he was saying something much bigger and it took me a while to realize that, but I see now, he was starting to teach that as soon as he could.

Brett McKay: That phrase, that advice, men don’t run in the rain, it reminds me of this Nassim Taleb quote. Are you familiar with Nassim Taleb, Antifragile, Black Swans, he’s this economist guy?

Rick Burgess: Sure.

Brett McKay: But he has this line, “I don’t run for trains.” And I think it’s very similar. And he says this about why he doesn’t run for trains. He says, “I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics and behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life.” And also, just yeah, so it’s just like your dad didn’t run in the rain because he was in control. The rain’s happening, no big deal, I’m still in charge. Nassim Taleb doesn’t run for trains because, first off, you look kind of silly when you’re running in the rain or running for a train. But it also just asserts your agency, hey, you know what, this doesn’t bother me.

Rick Burgess: That’s exactly right. And I think sometimes that’s what’s missing in our homes. See, I always had this sense that as long as this man was here, then we’re good. And if I had looked up and never saw him panic in situations that might have been fearful or scary, it would have caused the entire family to lose all hope almost. He was a calming factor, a steadiness, a foundation in his family’s life, and you’re right. They’re both saying the same thing. If we cast a different vision, it doesn’t just affect us. It’s not about them, it’s the impact it has on all those you influence.

Brett McKay: All right, so you actually played for your dad when he was a high school coach at Oxford. What was that like?

Rick Burgess: My dad was probably the best that I ever have seen or heard of. When you see all these movies, anytime there’s the, here’s the authoritative dad, and he’s coaching his kids, and then he makes them run sprints, like the great Santini that Pat talked about in his famous book that went on to be a movie. It wasn’t that at all. Dad really separated the fact that he was the coach and that he was our father. He never mixed the two. It wasn’t any harder on us than it was anybody else who played for him. It wasn’t any easier on us. Our playing time was earned. That was understood. Now, probably the only thing that was a little bit different, and I understand his caution on this, is he had to be careful about patting us on the back publicly, in interviews and things like that. I think that was difficult for him, and I think at times he might have said maybe you and your brother deserved.

He was more apt to do it for my brother than me because of our personalities, but is that maybe there were times that I could have gotten a pat on the back publicly about a game, and if he wasn’t my dad, the coach probably would have done more of, but that was no big deal, because we didn’t have any of the bad stuff. Hey, I didn’t like the way you played today. What were you doing in practice? Get out in the yard, and let me show you again how to do that. There was none of that. Even if there was something wrong with the team, and he was at home and we were eating dinner, he would never bring it up. And then we got back to the field the next day, he’d bring it up. So he never mixed the two and never made it weird, and playing for my dad was actually a very positive experience, and I’m glad I got to do it.

Brett McKay: I think there’s a lesson right there for men learning how to separate work from home. A lot of guys, they bring work home, all the stress and whatnot.

Rick Burgess: Oh, yeah.

Brett McKay: It just makes their family miserable, and that’s a skill. I think it’s a skill you have to practice and develop. It doesn’t just happen, I don’t think.

Rick Burgess: No, I think he was intentional about it. I think it would have embarrassed him if he’d have done it any other way, and I think he found, and there were some of these men around, like through youth league and things like that, and I remember dad was always repulsed by the Little League Dad. My dad was not a huge fan of Little League. He didn’t keep us from playing it, and he didn’t try to encourage us to play it, but he knew that there were a lot of men that were putting themselves in positions with influence over boys that probably were not gonna be a great influence. Luckily, I had a dad that could kind of offset that, but I remember him being very repulsed by the coach dad that was screaming at his son on the mound, and the son’s obviously upset, and here’s this dad who’s coaching the whole team, and he’s focused on traumatizing his son in front of everybody, and my dad really, really disliked that.

Brett McKay: So one of the lessons you learned from your dad when you played for him, was nobody cares about last year. What’s the story behind that lesson?

Rick Burgess: Yeah, my dad ran a program, and you being from Oklahoma, you saw big programs, and it was very rare that there would be someone younger than a junior to actually play and be in the starting lineup, and in those days, and I’ve even seen in my home state of Alabama, this has changed a lot. Even the biggest schools will still take what we used to call the B-Team. Some people call it junior varsity, and they combine them, and I’ve always wondered why that is, because dad didn’t have near the coaching staff as these big schools have now in high school, but he still made sure the B-Team had it’s own coach, had it’s own practices, it’s own games. You didn’t practice with the varsity and then go play like I saw my sons doing, even at big schools. So he didn’t do it that way, and so for you to be on the team as a sophomore, be on the varsity was almost unheard of. So the year that I was coming up, I had four other friends that we were sophomores that had had good.

We were always playing a year ahead, and his senior class that year was weak, and the numbers were weak, their win-loss record wasn’t very good, and so he pulled five sophomores up to the varsity, which was unheard of, and I got to start. He was not my position coach, but the position coach made me the starter. So I had a good year for a sophomore, and so I was coming back my junior year going, well, I know who’s the starting, defensive or tackle. I know what that is. And so, the first play of the two-a-day practices for the new season my junior year, he erupted, and he pulled me out of the lineup. He told me to go sit on the bench, and they were gonna get somebody in there that was ready to play, that was hungry, and then as that player is running on the field, he walks over to me as I’m confused and standing on the sideline, and he said, “Nobody cares what you did last year, and if you think you’re gonna come out here and start on what you did last year.” He said, “Nobody cares what you did last year, that’s in that year, and today is a whole new day. And you’re gonna have to earn the starting position on this team, just as if you’ve never played a down for me.”

And I even remember thinking, Brett, I don’t think I was given a bad effort. But he knew that was his opportunity, and he was not gonna let a sophomore’s head blow up and was never going to make me think or anyone on that field, that you played for any other reason than you earned it. And he was letting me know, that if I phoned it in and leaned on last year, that I would probably find myself on the bench.

Brett McKay: How have you carried that lesson over to other areas of your life beyond football?

Rick Burgess: Yeah, I don’t want to get overly spiritual, even though the book does have a spiritual component to it, as you saw. But I think a lot of times people and men in their spiritual life, in their careers or whatever, it’s sad for me to think that a man ever has already lived his best year. I’m 60 years old as I’m talking to you, and I remember doing the research, and somebody making me aware of it asked me had I seen it, and I said I had not. And I found out that research shows that if a man has his mental and physical health, that 60 to 70 is the most influential decade of his entire life. Well, if I’ve maxed out in high school, and wanna tell you about me making All State in high school for the rest of my life, and I’m doing that to the point that I’m not even remotely attempting to accomplish something right now, I use the example in the book of Philip. When he had the Ethiopian and he had this big moment where he baptizes this Ethiopian and interprets the book of Isaiah, and I said, a lot of people would have just the rest of their life they would have been Philip, and that would have been the last thing you ever heard.

But it says in Scripture, that Philip immediately left that area and began talking to other people about Christ and interpreting Scripture for them. He didn’t rest on the Ethiopian story. And I think a lot of times men, tell these same stories when there’s a lot of life left as if they’ve maxed out. That was my greatest moment, and I think it also makes us lazy that we think, well, I’ve done enough. And that’s not true. Until we take our last breath, there’s still value to our lives, and we should be having impact and influence and making a difference. And dad was teaching me a life lesson that you don’t rest on your laurels. Nobody cares what you did in 1982. What are you doing in 2025, 2026?

Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea that when you’re 60, you still might have 20 years left, that’s a long time to get a lot done. And just that idea that you can still keep doing things and trying to be better. Reminded me of a conversation I had a while back ago with Cynthia Covey. She’s the daughter of Stephen Covey of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People fame.

Rick Burgess: Oh, yeah.

Brett McKay: And she finished a book that her father had started. He passed away, and then she finished it. It’s called “Live Life in Crescendo.” And it’s all about your most important work is always ahead of you. And she talked about her father. Like, this is a guy who has written one of the most influential self-help books in history, but he always thought, I can do something better than that, and he was always striving more. And he says, “I might not be as well-known for my later work as I was with Seven Habits, but I still got something important to do, and I got to keep working at it.” And he was doing that until his dying day.

Rick Burgess: Yeah, no doubt. Even at 60, I did the same radio show for 31 years, and when that show ended in December, and I sensed that it was time for it to end. I thought it’s best days were behind it, and I started getting a feeling that we were an oldies act. We were starting to rest on the things we’d done in the past, and we had a very successful career, and I decided that it was time for me to do something different. So literally, I’ve been as you and I are doing this interview, I’m four or five months into a brand-new show, and I host a radio show for my day job, and I’m loving it. And I’m talking about, in January, I was sitting down listening to research. They put research in the field. I wanted to know what I was doing poorly, what I could do better, and it would have been real easy to be at 60, say, hey, I’ve been in radio for over 40 years. Y’all have nothing to tell me. But that’s not true.

I still need to bang on my craft and continue to get better at what I do, and as you just stated, I don’t know that I’ll be remembered in my industry, as much for what I’m doing now, as what I did in the past, but if I’m looking in the mirror and I think I’m better at what I was doing and I’m actually doing this job better, then that’s good enough for me. Because I think that I can still improve, there’s no doubt about that. But am I willing to improve? You could come to the reality, you could still improve and still be too lazy that you won’t do it. Not only do I know I can improve, I am trying to improve, which is the second half of it.

Brett McKay: I love this lesson, another lesson you got from your dad, because my dad told this to me. I had football coaches say the same to me, and I’ve told this exact same thing. I coach flag football for my son and his team. I said the same thing to my flag football players that I coach. Don’t be stupid. What did your dad mean by being stupid?

Rick Burgess: My dad was obsessed with removing all stupidity from the planet. He hated for you to do stupid things, and then he had all these analogies. If I’d have ordered a truckload of stupid people and all I got was you, I would have got my money’s worth, which is one of my favorites. But dad thought that a lot of things in life could be avoided if you just wouldn’t be stupid. What you just decided to do was stupid, and if you would minimize the stupid things in your life. For instance, it’s third down. It is third and long. And they throw a pass for eight yards when they needed 12, but I tee off on the quarterback late, and now they get an automatic first down. That’s stupid. We had this handled if you had just not been stupid. And he would say things like, be smart. “Hey, be smart.” Like if he saw us starting to elevate a little bit on the field, you’ve got to think this through. Be smart right here. Hey, they’re probably gonna go on two, or they’re gonna change the cadence.

If it’s fourth down and a half a yard, you can bet they’re gonna try to draw you off sides. Don’t be stupid and jump. You can actually watch the ball. You shouldn’t even be listening to what the quarterback is saying because we move on the ball. It’s stupid to listen to him. And a lot of these things were very simplistic, and that’s why he marveled that we would still do them when it seemed so obvious that these were bad decisions.

Brett McKay: No, I think you’re right. A lot of the problems that people have in life are just the result of being stupid.

Rick Burgess: No doubt. I look back at my life and the problems that I have brought on myself, really, it’s because I just made a stupid decision. That far outweighs anything that happened to me that I said, I don’t think I had anything to do with that. A lot of it is just if I had just stopped and said, let me use logic, which is now common sense is a superpower. Let me just think this through and just don’t be stupid.

Brett McKay: That reminds me of a Charlie Munger quote. He says, “It is remarkable how much long term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

Rick Burgess: That’s good.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Rick Burgess: Yeah, that’s good. And I’ll tell the story about us setting, the woods behind our house on fire by just being stupid. We thought that we would take dried out pine limbs and suddenly we could turn those into torches like we saw in all the adventure movies. They’ve always got a torch. And so, we thought, let’s make torches out of dried out Alabama sun dried out pine. There’s nothing more flammable than pine straw. So let’s pick up limbs that are brown and let’s light them, and pretend like we have torches in the woods in a drought. That’s just stupid. And then of course it didn’t take long for somebody to go, oh, mine nearly burned me and threw it over to not be burned. And then it set that on fire and off we go.

Brett McKay: How do you not be stupid? Let’s say you’re a 40 year old guy, you feel like, man, am I being stupid? How do you know? How do you stop being stupid?

Rick Burgess: Well, I think the first thing we need to do is to not make decisions without, there’s, have you ever heard the term, and I know it’s been used quite a bit, if you take a rifle, let’s ready ourselves, let’s aim, and then let’s pull the trigger. Well, a lot of times, somebody will shoot ready aim. I’m just squeezing the trigger, and I didn’t take any time to think about what I’m doing. So a lot of times, if you’ll just stop for a minute and go, okay, I’m thinking about taking action on this. Let me go ahead and look ahead of that potential regret. Okay, if I had not done this, then I wouldn’t be sitting in the situation I’m in right now. A lot of things are avoidable in life if you’ll just stop for a minute, reason it out, and then take action. We tend to take action, then think about it later, and that’s a huge mistake. The five Ps, prior planning prevents poor performance. Maybe do a little more thinking and a little less reacting.

Brett McKay: Yeah, something that I told my players when I coached them, and I tell it to my kids too, it’s like one of those things I’m trying to get into their head. I want them to develop this stance towards life. It’s just situational awareness. Pay attention to what’s going on around you. I feel like a lot of the mistakes that happen on the field or even when your kids do something stupid, they just weren’t paying attention. They were just kind of off in la-la land. And I’m like, hey, just keep your head on a swivel, pay attention to what’s going on, know your business so that you can make good decisions. It’s a tough lesson to teach young people.

Rick Burgess: It is. And do you think too, Brett, when you think about this, another thing I would say is look at the history of people who made this same decision. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been counseling men, and I’m like, okay, so you started a relationship with a woman at work when you’re married with three kids. Did you not… There’s quite a bit, if we can look, we can see a lot of examples, that this never ends well. There’s a lot of times you can just look at the history, how many people who’ve made this decision that it turned out well for. And I don’t know why people always think, well, maybe this time I’ll find a way to maneuver through it. And in the very serious scenario I just mentioned, that man is only thinking about one thing. He’s thinking about satisfying some sort of desire, and he’s not even thinking about the mess he’s about to make.

Brett McKay: All right, so another lesson there, to not be stupid, or an antidote to not being stupid. Read, read literature. That includes the Bible. There’s a lot of examples of people being stupid there. But even like The Odyssey, The Iliad, there’s just so many examples, and just history books, so many examples of people being stupid. And you’ll learn, you know what? I’m not gonna do that.

Rick Burgess: That really is helpful.

Brett McKay: Yeah. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So, at the beginning of every season, your dad would give these epic speeches to kind of set the tone, particularly for the new players. And during those speeches, he would throw the gauntlet down by telling the players to get out of the stands. What does that mean? How have you taken this advice and applied it to your life?

Rick Burgess: Don’t we all want to be on the field? It’s amazing to me that men, especially when they’re watching sports, they’re disgusted by the thought that they would not want to be in the starting lineup. But then we get into life, and men in life seem to be perfectly comfortable with being third string, not participating, not accomplishing anything. And a lot of men are like, nah, I’m just gonna farm that out to somebody else, and I’m not gonna do that. I don’t wanna get involved. I don’t wanna have to get my hands dirty. But if you were to say to them, would you like to be on a sports team and sit the bench, they’d go, “Absolutely not.” But yet we’re sitting the bench on the important things in life. And so, dad’s deal was, and he would add a little caveat to that, he would say, “Now, if you can’t handle the way things are gonna go here, then leave right now and go sit in the stands and then tell everybody how great you could have been if Coach Burgess hadn’t been so difficult.”

And men do that, and that kind of gets into another thing we’ll talk about, but they’ll sit in the stands and then talk about all the coulda, shoulda, woulda if life just hadn’t been so unfair. And that is just so counter to how men were made. That’s how we act in our fallen state. And the one thing that always gets me, I’ll have people sometimes that’ll be critical of how I’m doing things, and I always ask a man, say look, before I want to listen to what you have to say, what do you do? Because I found being a Christian doing secular entertainment, I don’t do Christian radio, I’m a Christian who does radio, but most of the complaints that I get in the way that I’m in the world but not of the world and try to use entertainment to earn the right to share my faith, the most critical people I deal with are not people who disagree with my belief system. It’s usually people within all the denominational garbage of the Western Church. They complain the most. It’s more of the, “You’re not doing it right.”

Now before somebody, because sometimes I do need to be held accountable, so I’m not saying I’m perfect, but one thing I always wanna know, Brett, what do you do? Tell me, what impact have you had for the faith? How do you use the gifts that God’s given you to advance the kingdom of God? I’d like to hear that first, or are you just some guy who sits in the stands, and tells the rest of us on the field what we’re doing wrong? How about get out of the stands and get on the field and let’s see you make a play?

Brett McKay: Yeah. And he also talked about in that same chapter, a lot of men, or even you see this in high school sports, a lot of boys, they want the perks of playing football or a sport. They want to wear the cool uniform. They want to come out of the tunnel on game night. They want to be cheered, but a lot of people, they don’t wanna do the work that is required in order for you to do that, the two-a-day practices and the practice every day after school for two or three hours. And your dad had this saying, sometimes he’d stop practice, and it’s like 3 O’clock, and you see the buses leaving, taking kids home, and he’d tell the players like, “Hey, there goes those 3 O’clockers.”

Rick Burgess: Yeah. He would tell us, ’cause you remember this, Brett, there’s a lot of days you’re out on that field, you wish you was on that bus. You kind of want to go home and watch Andy Griffith reruns and eat a snack too. And he was basically letting us know that the sacrifice we’re making now, will pay off in the end because he would say, now, we come Friday night, and this isn’t high school, you can change it to Sunday or Saturday if you played at even a higher level, but he said, “Come Friday night, all those on the bus that don’t wanna be you right now.” When the band’s playing, the stadium’s full, the cheerleaders are cheering, and you’re walking out of that tunnel onto the field, every one of them would switch places with you. So what you have to understand is they’re not willing to make the sacrifice you’re making, but when it gets to the reward, they’re gonna wish they would have been you if they could have somehow avoided sacrifice, and he said that doesn’t exist. And so, we think about that all the time.

I remember a very, very jolting statement that was made by Vance Havner. Vance Havner was an old school pastor, and he said this. He said, “The Western church would stop praying for revival, if they had any idea what it was really going to cost.”

Brett McKay: It reminds me of that whole line about, you aren’t willing to pay the price. This is a line from Ronnie Coleman, he’s a bodybuilder. And he says, “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights.” [laughter] And it’s true. Like everyone wants the big muscles or whatever, but no one wants to do the stuff you have to do to get there.

Rick Burgess: Oh, I’ve said this recently ’cause I’ve always struggled with my weight after football when I stopped playing, ’cause when I walked out of that last workout, I said, well, I’ll never do that again. And eventually, I just came into conviction that this was not fair to my wife. This wasn’t fair to my children. And it certainly made me less effective in men’s ministry because it looked like I had no discipline. So I started committing myself and lost weight, got myself in better shape. I wanted to hit my 60s wide open. And I’ve done that. And then people will ask me, and you can tell they don’t wanna hear it. They’ll say, “So tell me how you’ve lost the weight and got yourself in a little better shape. What have you done?” And I know what the reaction is gonna be. And I looked at them, I say, well, I practiced good nutrition, I don’t overeat, and I exercise. Who knew? And I’m admitting that I spent most of my life knowing that, and I wasn’t willing to do it either. So I’m not being hypocritical, but you can tell that is not the answer they wanna hear to your statement that you just made about the bodybuilder, is how can I somehow not be overweight and be in better shape and not be so sick, but I don’t wanna have to put any effort into it?

And that’s why these shots and these pills and all this stuff is so popular right now, because people are trying to find a way to be healthier without ever doing anything. And you may lose the weight with these things, but there’s a bigger question. Are you really healthy? But when somebody says, “What would you suggest?” And you go, I would suggest good nutrition, less eating and more exercise. That does not draw a crowd.

Brett McKay: No, it doesn’t. So get out of the stands, get more involved in life, in your marriage, in your family, in any organizations you belong to, even at work. A lot of guys just kind of stay on the sidelines at work and just carp about things that have been like, “Hey, what can I do to make things better here?” But recognize, there’s a price. There’s gonna be some sacrifice involved in not being in the stands. Another mantra your dad had throughout his career was no excuses.

Rick Burgess: No.

Brett McKay: And I’m sure everyone listening at a football coach probably heard that. No excuses. What did that look like for him as a coach, that mantra?

Rick Burgess: This drove him as crazy as stupid things. People making excuses. And one of the things my dad never did, never, if we lost a game, he never made an excuse. You could have the worst call in the game ever that went against you by the officials. And I can remember some dillies, some good ones. And he would never bring that up. He said, “If we played the way we were supposed to play, then the calls would have made no difference.” There were moments throughout the game we could have won the game and we just didn’t get the job done. And then, he would take most of the responsibility on himself. He would never. I thought one time he was gonna just completely lose control when he started watching these college head football coaches that if it didn’t go well, they would send one of the coordinators to the postgame press conference. They wouldn’t go themselves as if they were blaming the coordinator. That infuriated him. And I remember the first time that I was playing for him and we had a defensive end that let containment be broke.

They bounced outside of him. And he said, “Where were you? You’re supposed to, this funnel that play back inside.” And the defensive end said, “Well, I slipped coach.” And he looked at him. He said, “But you can’t slip. Don’t make an excuse, just tell me you didn’t get the job done. If you’re the person in charge of containment, slipping is not an option. Just say you didn’t contain. And then we work with that. But please don’t make an excuse about it.” And so, he felt like that you should ultimately just admit there was nothing more freeing than if you didn’t have success, is to actually say you didn’t get the job done, not blame it on something else. You didn’t have any responsibility. Well, now he’s teaching more than football there. ‘Cause people are always willing to blame other people for really things they need to take responsibility for. And he taught that lesson. He taught it hard. I never heard him make an excuse. I do remember one time, and this is in the book, and you probably read that when he had the game where they beat a team really bad in college and it was in a torrential downpour.

So he was leaving the house on Sunday after we’d gone to church and was headed back to the office for the next week game. And the other coaches coaches show was on TV. And that guy was talking about how hard it rained and how they couldn’t move the ball because how bad the weather was. Now, dad’s team had beaten the other man’s team 35 to nothing. And so, my dad looked at me as he went out and he said, “Boy, I’ll tell you, listen to this guy, you would think it only rained on one side of the field.” And that’s all he said, but he was making the point, there he is making excuses. He didn’t make them and he didn’t have much respect for other people who did.

Brett McKay: So how can taking, it sounds like your dad was advocating for something like just radical ownership of your life. How can that change a man’s life?

Rick Burgess: Well, if I’m always justifying everything in my life and I’m always making an excuse for the things that are in my life, then ultimately, I’m never gonna go anywhere. I’m sorry if you’re listening to this and you had a bad family life. That’s terrible. I’m sorry if you had a rough go of things. I’m sorry if you’ve had a kind of a rough time. But at the end of the day, that can’t be used as an excuse for you not to succeed. If you saw bad examples in your life, then why don’t you be a good example? We are in control of the things that we do. We may not be able to control what other people do, but my dad always taught, control what you can control. So ultimately, you got to take ownership of how this turned out. And if it didn’t go well, at the end of it all, it’s probably because you didn’t do the job as well as you should have.

Brett McKay: Yet in existential philosophy, there’s this idea of living in bad faith. When you’re living in bad faith, you’re denying the responsibility. You can make decisions that change whatever situation you’re in. You still have the ability to make decisions. Like that can’t be taken away from you.

Rick Burgess: Exactly.

Brett McKay: And so, whenever you try to make excuses, you say, yeah, you’re living in bad faith. You are denying your agency.

Rick Burgess: Yeah, whatever happened to, that’s on me. And I will tell you this, one of the biggest obstacles that I face every single day is myself. I’m my biggest enemy. And so, I try to get myself under control. And if I can do that, what’s coming after that usually is not near as difficult. [laughter]

Brett McKay: So something else, a sort of thread throughout this book, is your dad teaching about the difference between confidence and arrogance. Your dad sounds like he was a confident man, but not an arrogant man. What’s the difference between confidence and arrogance, according to your dad?

Rick Burgess: Well, there’s no doubt he was confident. I think my dad truly believed that there was nobody alive that could take him and that he would overcome anything. And there’s a thing out right now. I don’t know if you’ve been seeing it where, could a hundred men defeat a silverback gorilla? Have you been watching that?

Brett McKay: I’ve been watching that. Yeah.

Rick Burgess: I think my dad thinks he could. And I don’t think my dad… My dad would be like, me, I’ll handle that. That’s not a problem. You think a gorilla could take me? But his confidence was not arrogance. Because also, the same man that was confident that he could stand against anything that life could throw at him, was also the same man that an equipment salesman found cleaning the bathrooms when he was athletic director and head coach. And so, when he went in to find my dad in a stall cleaning a toilet. And he asked my dad, “What in the world are you doing, coach, cleaning the toilets?” You’re the athletic director, you’re the head football coach. And dad said, “I’m cleaning the toilets because it’s my turn.” He never thought he was above cleaning toilets. So yes, he was confident, but he wasn’t arrogant. He always kept that servant’s attitude. My ultimate leadership is actually to serve the assistant coaches, to serve the players, to let them know that though I am confident in my abilities, I would give myself for your benefit. And I remember he had the attitude of he could get onto us, but nobody else could.

He became our advocate if others tried to get on us. And talking about teams and even talking about us as his children and his family. So my dad was confident, but then arrogance is something that I struggled with. And you see in the book, he tried to teach me ’cause I was a bit of a hot dog, which drove him crazy. And of course, he would always try to take me down that road and tell me about that fine line between being confident in your job and being arrogant about what you can do. And the point that he always tried to make, is that if you are not willing to put the work in, if you’re not willing to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of the team, that’s not confidence, that’s arrogance. And when you’re arrogant, you’ll get us beat.

Brett McKay: Let’s shift themes here. It’s not football related, but your dad, he was a hunter?

Rick Burgess: Yes.

Brett McKay: He’s a big time hunter. And one year when he was older, and you were older, you’re an adult, you gave him a GPS device ’cause you thought, hey, this would be handy for my dad to have when he’s out hunting turkey or whatever. But the thing is, he never used it.

Rick Burgess: Never. I have it in my office. I still have it.

Brett McKay: Why is that? Like, what lesson did you take from him?

Rick Burgess: Well I thought I was gonna give him the greatest Father’s Day gift ever. I would shame my siblings, because I got this new technology and knowing that he loved the outdoors, I thought, well, he can go anywhere he wants to go now, by just entering in. These were the old garments, still they were a little bulky and you had to put them in your car and all that. These were the early days of the GPS. But what dad said back to me, I’ve never forgotten. He asked me what this thing was. And I said, dad, that’s a GPS. You just enter in wherever you wanna go. It’ll take you right to it. So he doesn’t even take it out of the box and he kind of pushes it to the side. And I see him doing that. And he even asked me for the receipt. And I said, dad, what’s the deal? Do you not want that? And he goes, “I’m not trying to hurt anybody’s feelings or anything.” He goes, “But I don’t need it.” I said, you don’t need a GPS? And then he said, “No, I don’t go anywhere that I don’t know where I’m going.”

And I thought, my goodness, I don’t even have a response to that. His point was, I always know where I’m going. I don’t wonder where I’m going or need someone else to figure out where I’m going. I always know where I’m going. And boy, what a lesson, right, Brett? How many men right now are just kind of making it up as they go? They think that somebody else needs to tell them where they’re going when they need, if you don’t know where you’re going, I don’t know how we expect anybody else to tell us where we’re going.

Brett McKay: Your dad’s story reminded me, I just recently finished Moby-Dick. I finished a couple months ago. Have you read Moby-Dick?

Rick Burgess: I have.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, there’s this famous scene with Ahab, and he’s got this quadrant. That’s what the sailors use to navigate.

Rick Burgess: Sure, yeah.

Brett McKay: And there’s this moment where he just destroys it, ’cause he realizes the quadrant can’t tell him where he wants to go. It’s like, that’s on me. And so, he smashed it. He’s like, I’m in charge here. So yeah, your dad’s story, the GPS reminded me of Ahab a little bit.

Rick Burgess: Oh yeah. What’s exactly the same thing? Ahab is realizing this can’t help me decide where I wanna go. I got to figure that out. And of course, then dad was adding the other part, figure out where you wanna go, but you also need to know how to get there.

Brett McKay: So how can a man figure out where he’s going in life? I’m sure you deal with a lot of men who have no clue where they’re going.

Rick Burgess: Yeah, I think first of all, what is your passion? Is there anything you feel called to at all? Is there something that kind of keeps you awake at night? Is there something that’s down in like their guts where you’re like, man, I really feel like this is where I should go. I think this is what I need to do. I’d love to have more impact with my life. But until you figure out where you wanna go, then there’s no way to put together a plan on how to get there. But then you have guys that do the other. They know where they wanna go, but kind of we’ve already touched on this, but they’re not willing to figure out what it takes to get there. And then sometimes they figure out what it takes to get there, and they’re just not willing to give that to go, but somehow they still expect it to happen. So I think that the thing that I find with men a lot, Brett, and I remember this period of my life, if you’re listening to this right now and you’re just kind of making it up as you go, news today for a time to change.

Rick Burgess: I’m gonna stop just making it up as I go. I’m gonna figure out what is important to me, what I think I’m supposed to be doing with my life, and then I’m going to put together a plan to do it.

Brett McKay: In 2008, your two-year-old son tragically drowned. Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent. How did the lessons you got from your father help you prepare for that moment?

Rick Burgess: Well, the thing that you’ve already heard is, men don’t run in the rain. And boy, it was pouring and storming and raining when that happened. And I immediately began to draw on the things that he taught me about, right now your whole family is looking to you. Everybody needs to feel steady. Everybody needs to feel calm. They don’t need to see you panic. You don’t need to become an apart. Now, I didn’t take that to the point that is unhealthy where I didn’t mourn. But there was a moment in the beginning, where your wife is falling apart, your children who are the siblings are falling apart. And frankly, whether you like it or not, we don’t have that luxury. Because if we don’t hold this thing together until everybody can get back on their feet, then it’s all gonna fall apart. And I had been taught, that I don’t run in the rain, that I stand sturdy and I go, and I minister to my wife, and I pull the children together and I start talking to them about life and who God is in these situations. But I would challenge every man, and it’s kind of what we just talked about, about a game plan.

It’s impossible for me to tell my wife and tell my children, who God is when a two-and-a-half-year-old little boy dies, or what’s going on in the world when a two-and-a-half-year-old little boy dies if I don’t already know those answers. See, I didn’t know that this was ever gonna happen, but I had spent a large portion of my life preparing for whatever was coming. For me, it was the word of God. I went there, I wanted to know everything about God I could possibly know. And you say, well Rick, how do you do that? I don’t like studying. I was the same guy. The early days of our family after I was redeemed, my wife was the spiritual leader. I’m not gonna act like that wasn’t true. But that radically changed in my life when I realized that I was actually quite knowledgeable about everything that I deemed of value, and everything that I loved. I knew about hunting. I knew about fishing. I knew about football. I knew about how to run a business. I knew how to do a radio show. I knew how to run that equipment.

Well, if I don’t have good study habits, how in the world did I learn all this? I learned it because I was passionate about it and I cared about it. And I had to come to a terrible conclusion, that I didn’t know who God was and I didn’t know the word of God, because I didn’t deem it of value and I didn’t love it. So I changed that, and began to seek God in a way that I never had and began to study His Word. Well, when this moment arrived, I had the answers. Now, I didn’t come up with them. They had been provided to me by the very God that created me. But in that moment, what the family and my wife can’t see, is me falling apart and running in the rain. And I’ll never forget the words of my wife when it was all kind of clearing and we were reflecting, and it’s always with us. But she said, “That night, at Children’s Hospital, our pastor couldn’t comfort me, our friends couldn’t comfort me, our family couldn’t comfort me, ’cause we all knew one thing. They couldn’t be my husband. They couldn’t be the children’s father, so we waited on you, because no one could replace you.”

Brett McKay: How did your father help you during this time?

Rick Burgess: My father helped me by confidently encouraging me, and telling me that I was doing a good job. And the thing I think that I’ll never forget is, my father and I and our interaction at my son’s memorial service, when I got up to speak and didn’t expect to speak the way it went. It was a supernatural moment. But when it was over, he and I had an interaction. And that was that we were both kind of redefining what it looks like to be a man. And I won’t give it all away. You can read the book. But he basically is telling me that, he knew it was raining. He knew it was storming, and he watched me. And he let me know that I didn’t run.

Brett McKay: Yeah, when I read that scene, basically your dad was telling you, you’re a man. Like, you’re a man. And I think every man, they crave that from their dads. They want that recognition from their dads.

Rick Burgess: Yeah, my dad didn’t patronize me, but my dad never robbed me of hearing, I’m proud of you. And then in that moment, it was the thing that even goes beyond I’m proud of you, is does he see me as a man? Does he see me as his equal? And I remember that moment vividly because he looked at me after it was over, and like you said, and he just looked at me and said, “Now that right there is a man.” And to hear that in that moment, he gave me the confidence I needed to continue on.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think there’s a great lesson there of a father’s blessing or a father’s recognition. I think that’s something you got to think about as a father. You might not be thinking about that when your kid is five, even 10, maybe even 15, but once they start getting into adulthood, you got to start thinking about that.

Rick Burgess: Yeah, and I think before that, ’cause they’re not men yet, but you definitely need to find these moments to tell them you’re proud of them. Don’t ever assume that your son or daughter knows you’re proud of them. Don’t ever assume that. Don’t ever assume that your wife knows that you love her, if you have a wife. These things need to be vocalized by us clearly, and it really, really has an impact when we do so.

Brett McKay: If there’s one lesson you got from your dad that sort of encapsulates all the wisdom you got from him over the years, what would that be?

Rick Burgess: I think the thing that I take away the most, is that though you are in the leadership role, be someone that is still fun to be around. My dad was intimidating. My dad was clearly in charge and had influence, but he also was fun. It wasn’t just the, I’m whipping everybody into military shape and you never see him. I’m always stoic. He wasn’t like that at all. My dad was a huge cut up, and he picked and chose his moments correctly on when he needed to kind of let the pressure off a little bit and let’s lighten things up a little bit. And so, I looked at him, and I realized that I learned from him, how to love a wife, which he did with my mother incredible, how to be authoritative but still be close to your children, to still be able to cut up and have a laugh with them. And I think that probably of all the lessons we talked about today and talked about in the book, I believe the lesson of being steady, the lesson of not panicking, the lesson of let your family and let society see that you’re there, you’re at your position, you’re watching, you’re over them, and ultimately take responsibility for the mistakes you make in life, and own them, and then change and don’t make those same mistakes again.

So taking full responsibility for who you are, and leading while at the same time encouraging with the same amount of power. Don’t just be strong to correct, also be strong to encourage and take responsibility for when you mess up.

Brett McKay: Well, Rick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Rick Burgess: You can go to themanchurch.com. We’re a men’s discipleship strategy. All of our resources are there, but this new book will be there too, themanchurch.com. And you can also contact us if we can help you in any way with your men’s ministry, if that’s something you’re interested in. But if not, at least get this book, and it’ll be right there on the homepage.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Rick Burgess, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Rick Burgess: Thanks for having me, Brett. It means a lot.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Rick Burgess. He’s the author of the book “Men Don’t Run in the Rain.” It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, themanchurch.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/rain where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When my kids were little, I was an involved dad. I changed diapers, did middle-of-the-night feedings, and took the tykes to the doctor.

I wouldn’t say I was inherently drawn to doing these tasks. There wasn’t some paternal urge to nurture our kids when they were newborns and toddlers. I did it because I loved them and Kate, and I didn’t want Kate to carry the entire burden of childcare while also working full-time.

But as my kids have gotten older, into their pre-teen and teenage years, I’ve noticed something interesting happening. I suddenly have an intrinsic impulse to be more involved in my kids’ lives.

I have an instinctual urge to teach them how to do stuff in the adult world.

Here’s an example: A while back, as I was sitting on the couch reading, a thought occurred to me: “I need to help my kids open their own bank accounts.” So I took 14-year-old Gus and 11-year-old Scout to the nearby bank branch and had them talk to the teller about opening a checking account. In the process, I had to teach them about Social Security numbers and had them memorize theirs. I also taught them about debit cards and how to check their balances online.

It turns out that this shift I noticed in my fathering isn’t just anecdotal. In my podcast conversation with anthropologist Anna Machin, she noted that across cultures and throughout history, fathers have had a unique role in preparing their children for life outside the home.

Dad’s Outward OrientationC.S. Lewis once observed that while a mother fiercely prioritizes the immediate interests of her own family, the father’s role is to consider the family’s connection to the broader community: “The relations of the family to the outer world — what might be called its foreign policy — must depend, in the last resort, upon the man . . . A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world.”

Research backs up Lewis’ observation. Sociologists have consistently found that one of the things that separates moms and dads in how they parent is that dads typically have a more outward-facing orientation. While mothers tend to focus on the intimate, nurturing aspects of home life, fathers think more about their children’s place in the wider world.

Fathers are more likely to encourage risk-taking, independence, and exploration, while mothers are more apt to prioritize safety and caution. For example, fathers are likelier than mothers to push children to engage with strangers. They’re also more likely to nudge kids outside their comfort zones.

This is completely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but I’ve noticed that when parents use those chest baby carriers, moms typically have their baby facing toward them, while dads often have the baby facing out. That’s how I did it with my kids. A father’s outward orientation shows up in a lot of places.

The outward focus also appears in how dads communicate with their children. Fathers tend to use more complex and varied language, often referring to events and ideas beyond the immediate home environment. This serves as what researchers call a “linguistic bridge” to society, expanding children’s vocabulary and worldly knowledge.

The Younger Years: Father-Child Roughhousing Prepares Kids for the Outside WorldResearch shows that fathers consistently engage in more physical play than mothers, and roughhousing has a positive impact on children’s development. One key benefit is that it helps kids learn emotional regulation, which is essential for successful social interactions. Through roughhousing, kids learn to read cues indicating when someone has had enough and how to calm down if play becomes too intense. Consequently, children who regularly engage in rough-and-tumble play with their dads tend to be more socially adept with their peers. They’ve learned the unwritten rules of getting along with others: taking turns, recognizing limits, and resolving small conflicts.

The Teenage Era: Dads Build the Scaffolding to IndependenceAs children grow into teenagers, Dad’s role as a bridge builder to the outside world becomes even more critical.

During adolescence, kids naturally seek greater autonomy and begin facing the challenges of adult life. At the same time, anthropologists like Machin have noted that dads often feel a growing impulse to play a bigger role in their children’s lives. During a child’s adolescent years, a father’s job is to teach their children the skills they’ll need to survive and thrive in the world beyond the bounds of the familial home.

The content of this teaching will vary, depending on the environment the dad is sending their kids out into.

In environments where physical survival is the primary concern — say, where hunger or violence are common threats — fathers focus on teaching their children how to hunt and how to defend themselves.

In societies where economic hardship is the main risk, fathers teach practical skills: how to tend livestock, negotiate prices, or build trade relationships.

In the modern West, where physical and economic survival is generally assured, fathers tend to focus on cultural and social survival — helping kids get into good schools, handle “life admin,” make the right connections, and navigate complex social hierarchies.

This explains the sudden urge I have to teach my pre-teen and teenage kids how to do stuff like open banking accounts. I want them to have the skills necessary to be a functional, independent adult in suburban America. My dad-instinct is kicking in, telling me, “You’ve only got a few years to get these kids ready to head out on their own. Get busy teaching them all the skills they’ll need so they don’t end up living in the driveway in a van!”

The Fatherly Art of Launching KidsYou’ve got the instinct to teach your kids to get ready for the outside world — follow it. But if you’re seeking concrete ways to help build the scaffolding that will support your kids’ transition from dependent childhood to independent adulthood, here are some suggestions:

Bring them along on errands.
Have them order their own food at restaurants.
Let them see you confidently talking with strangers.
Take them to work with you occasionally.
Include them in conversations about what is going on at work.
Have them ask store clerks questions.
Give them pointers on driving as they prepare to get their driver’s license.
Let them help you with your weekend chores and expect them to complete age-appropriate chores of their own.
Start paying them an allowance.
Teach them basic maintenance for cars and bikes, like how to change flat tires on both.
Teach them age-appropriate lessons about personal finance.
Help them open a savings account at the bank, and encourage them to interact directly with the teller when they do so.
Have them memorize their Social Security number.
Have them be the one to call a business to ask a question they have.
Take them to community activities you’re involved in, like church/community service projects.
Show them how to file their own tax return when they get their first W-2 job.
Explain how insurance works the next time you have to renew a policy.
Have them schedule their own haircut appointments.
Have them fill out their own applications for camps and sports.
Get them our book Heading Out On Your Own — it covers lots of other life skills they’ll need in adulthood.

Fatherhood is about gradually launching the next generation into the world, equipped with the tools they need to thrive. This guiding role may be more crucial now than ever, given the complexities of our modern world. There’s a lot kids need to learn to manage in order to successfully live on their own.

Thankfully, nature has given dads the fatherly urge to teach their children how to do stuff. Lean into it, and help your kids become capable, confident, functioning adults.

For more insights into dads’ unique and essential role in childrearing, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Heading Out On Your Own: 31 Basic Life Skills in 31 Days

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When it comes to holidays that don’t get a lot of hype, Flag Day must be at or near the top of the list. You may not have known it was this Saturday, that it’s celebrated every June 14th, and that it commemorates the adoption of the Stars and Stripes as the official flag of the United States on June 14, 1777, by a resolution of the Second Continental Congress.

Though Flag Day is not a federal holiday, it’s observed with patriotic flag-raising ceremonies, and citizens are encouraged to display the American flag outside their homes and businesses. The day also serves to educate people on proper flag etiquette.

One of those points of flag etiquette is how to properly fold the American flag.

The American flag is folded into a triangular shape as a show of respect and dignity during various situations. This practice is performed after lowering the flag, particularly at sunset, to prepare it for proper storage. The triangle fold is also used in military and patriotic ceremonies, such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day events, and is a key tradition at military funerals, where the flag is presented to the family of a fallen service member. The folding process is designed to honor the flag’s significance, with the triangular shape representing a tricorn hat, a nod to soldiers of the Revolutionary War.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Gattaca. Kate and I recently introduced our kids to a film we’ve long appreciated that deserves wider recognition: Gattaca. The film is noteworthy for several reasons: its distinctive color palette and unique retro-futuristic aesthetic, Michael Nyman’s hauntingly beautiful score (try “The Other Side“), and a plot that’s both philosophically rich and uncannily prescient. Gattaca anticipated the bioethical dilemmas we’re now beginning to face, while also delivering a powerful message about the human ability to struggle against and transcend the dictates of fate. In a society where genetic engineering determines your destiny — leading to rigid societal strictures that often become self-fulfilling prophecies — Ethan Hawke’s Vincent refuses to accept the limits imposed on him and instead decides to do whatever it takes to reach the stars.

Rich 90’s Dad Cologne. I spotted this cologne on Huckberry, and its name cracked me up. Rich 90’s Dad. Who wouldn’t want to smell like a rich 90’s dad? I picked up the 10ml bottle to give it a shot, and I’ll be darned, the scent is great and really captures its eponymous archetype. Bergamot and lemon give it a fresh opening, while lavender, sage, and geranium add sophistication in the middle, all grounded by a rich base of musk, sandalwood, and amber. When I’m wearing it, I feel like I should be driving my BMW, chatting on my Motorola car phone, and heading to a racquetball match with my fellow rich ’90s dad, Troy. I love how this cologne doesn’t take itself too seriously yet still delivers a quality fragrance.

10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management by Hyrum Smith. I picked this up partly for nostalgia — Smith is the guy who created the Franklin Planner, which I used religiously back in the ’90s and early 2000s. Before smartphones took over our lives, that leather-bound planner was everything for me: calendar, task list, and note-taking system, all rolled into one. Smith later teamed up with Stephen Covey to form Franklin Covey. This book lays out the philosophy behind effective time management. There are lots of solid reminders about prioritizing what matters and aligning your daily actions with your long-term values.

Training the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts. I came across this study that goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom about dealing with unpleasant and unwanted thoughts. For decades, therapists and self-help gurus have warned against trying to suppress unwanted thoughts, citing the famous “white bear” phenomenon — also known as the rebound effect — where deliberately trying not to think about something paradoxically increases the thought’s frequency and intensity. But this new research from Cambridge suggests the opposite might be true. Researchers trained 120 people from 16 countries to actively suppress their fearful thoughts about future events over three days of online sessions. Instead of the predicted rebound effects, participants showed reduced anxiety, depression, and negative affect. And the benefits lasted for three months. Participants didn’t just benefit during the study; 82% continued using the suppression techniques on their own afterward, reporting better mood and less anxiety.

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: You Make the Magic and Dying Breed Dialogues: Ron Jones on Reviving Classical Physical Education.

Quote of the Week

A fool at forty is a fool indeed.

—Edward Young

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management

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Grenades are diabolical little devices that go back as far as the 8th century when soldiers from the Byzantine Empire began putting incendiary compounds in small stone or ceramic jars and hurling them at their enemies. Today’s grenades aren’t a whole lot more elegant.

There are a few kinds of grenades, with time-delayed fragmentation grenades being the most common in modern armies. Frag grenades are made of steel or some super-hard synthetic and filled with explosive material. When you pull the detonation pin and release the handle, the fuse is triggered to ignite the charge.

Despite their explosive power, it isn’t the explosion itself that’s harmful. It’s the shrapnel. When a grenade blows up, the steel body disintegrates into a multitude of tiny pieces. Those fragments hurtle through the air in all directions, like a shotgun blast. The bumpy texture on the outside of many grenades (hence their “pineapple” nickname) helps them erupt into more effective shrapnel. If one of those pieces catches you wrong, it can be deadly.

Most grenades will detonate about 3-5 seconds after the trigger is released, giving you a few critical moments to react. The kill radius from a grenade’s explosion is about 15 feet, and the casualty radius is about 50 feet, though pieces of shrapnel can still fly much farther than that. You’re not likely going to be able to completely outrun the explosion (and don’t try picking up the grenade and throwing it back!), and because the blast will be cone-shaped in trajectory, with more shrapnel flying upwards and less along the ground, you don’t want to be caught in an upright position when it hits. So the moment a grenade lands in your vicinity, you want to sprint forward a few steps and then immediately hit the deck.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book *The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.*

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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David Protein Bar. We’re always in the process of trying out and rotating through new and different protein bars, and a few months ago, we highlighted the best we’ve found so far. Of those picks, the one that’s stuck with me the most and become my go-to is the David bar. The reason? The calorie-to-protein ratio is incredible: 150 calories and 28 grams of protein. It allows me to hit my protein macros for the day, while not eating into my carb and fat macros. And the taste has increasingly grown on me. My favorite flavor is the Blueberry Pie.

What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction? I love a good contrarian take, and Daniel Immerwahr’s recent New Yorker piece delivers. While everyone’s wringing their hands about smartphones destroying our attention spans (including us at AoM!), he points out dynamics that don’t get delved into. Like the fact that the people telling you to pay attention are often authorities and elites wanting you to do things in their interest (e.g., it’s old-school media types that want you to pay attention to their old-school content . . . so they can continue to make money). Or the fact that attention spans aren’t actually measurable independent of context, and that we’re arguably in an era of obsession as much as distraction; from four-hour YouTube deep dives to 75-hour video games, people are clearly capable of sustained focus when something captures their interest. I don’t agree with all of Immerwahr’s arguments, but they’re a thought-provoking counterpoint to the typical “smartphones are melting our brains” narrative.

90s Country Music. The McKays have recently been enjoying the nostalgia of cueing up 90s country music. George Strait, Tim McGraw, Deanna Carter . . . everyone thinks the music they grew up with was the best, but really, 90s country was peak country.

Alone by Admiral Richard E. Byrd. Need the perfect read for the frigid, introspection-inducing days of February? Alone is explorer Admiral Byrd’s firsthand account of his harrowing five-month solo stay in Antarctica during the winter of 1934. While manning a remote weather station, Byrd faced daunting cold, extreme seclusion, and a near-fatal carbon monoxide poisoning incident, which tested his endurance and psychological resilience. The riveting book explores his struggle for survival, reflections on solitude, and the profound insights he gained about human nature and the limits of endurance from being “perhaps the most isolated human on earth.” For a taste of those insights, check out this article.

Over on our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: The Life That Lives Is the Life That Moves and A New Kind of Monasticism: The Power of Community to Shape the Soul.

Quote of the Week

The joy of feeling fit physically is reflected in a clearer and more useful mind. You may read and study forever but you come to no more important truthful conclusions than these two: 1. Take care of your body (eat and exercise properly) and your mind will improve. 2. Work hard, and be polite and fair, and your condition in the world will improve. No pills, tablets, lotions, philosophies, will do as much for you as this simple formula I have outlined. The formula is not of my invention. Every intelligent man of experience since time began has taught it as a natural fact.

—E.W. Howe

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Every time I stand at my cutting board, poised over an onion with knife in hand, the same question pops into my head: “Um, what’s the best way to dice this thing again?” I’ve watched cooking shows where chefs effortlessly transform these layered bulbs into perfect, uniform cubes. And I know I’ve seen the proper technique described before. But then when chopping time comes around once more, my mind perennially draws a blank. I end up using some improvised, haphazard method where the onion slices inefficiently slip around, and the final result is some very rough and irregular chunks.

I decided it was time to finally ingrain the code for properly dicing an onion into my brain. The method in this illustrated guide is the same one taught in culinary schools and used in professional kitchens worldwide. It will give you a nice uniform dice, every time. Read it over. And then read it over again. And the next time you and I are standing at a cutting board, staring at an onion, we’ll know exactly what to do.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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A lot of people go into marriage with a 50/50 mindset. Everything in the relationship — from tangible things like childcare and chores to intangible things like the effort and energy needed to keep the partnership going — is supposed to be divided equally.

The 50/50 approach to relationships is all about fairness. And that seems sensible and rational.

But, my guest says, it actually sabotages relational happiness.

Nate Klemp is a former philosophy professor and the co-author, along with his wife, of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Today on the show, Nate shares how cognitive biases skew our perception of our contributions to a relationship, what happens when couples get stuck in the 50/50 mindset of domestic scorekeeping, and how shifting to an 80/80 model of “radical generosity” can create an upward spiral of connection and appreciation. And we discuss practical ways to divide household responsibilities, decide how much time to spend with each spouse’s respective parents, and establish values that will guide your partnership as you navigate life changes and work towards a spirit of shared success.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM article and podcast on how to hold a weekly marriage meeting * AoM Article: Towards a Philosophy of Household Management * AoM Article: Beware the Tit for Tat Trap

Connect With Nate Klemp* 80/80 Marriage website * Nate’s website * Nate on LinkedIn * Nate on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. A lot of people go into marriage with a 50/50 mindset. Everything in the relationship, from tangible things like childcare insures to intangible things like the effort and energy needed to keep the partnership going, is supposed to be divided equally. The 50/50 approach to relationships is all about fairness, and that seems sensible and rational, but my guest says it actually sabotages relational happiness. Nate Klemp is a former philosophy professor and the co-author, along with his wife, of the 80/80 marriage a New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Today on the show, Nate shares how cognitive biases skew our perception of our contributions to relationship what happens when couples get stuck in the 50/50 mindset of domestic scorekeeping, and how shifting to an 80/80 model of radical generosity can create an upward spiral of connection and appreciation. And we discuss practical ways to divide household responsibilities, decide how much time to spend with each spouse’ respective parents, and establish values that will guide your partnership as you navigate life changes and work towards a spirit of shared success. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/8080. All right, Nate Klemp, welcome to the show.

Nate Klemp: So good to be here with you, Brett.

Brett McKay: So you co authored a book called the 80/80 Marriage with your wife, and in this book you both propose a new framework for thinking about marriage. And you start off the book with a story of what kickstarted the idea of the 80/80 marriage. Tell us that story.

Nate Klemp: Yeah, well, I’ll give you maybe even a more complete story than what we say in the book, which is to say that when we first got together, we had this fairytale, like, beginning to our relationship. So we met in high school. We were both seniors in high school. We were chemistry lab partners. We went to senior prom together. And then we pragmatically broke up before we went to college. And seven years later, it magically came back. We started dating again, we got married, and if you had asked our friends at the time, they probably would have told you we were like the perfect couple. And in some ways, that ended up becoming a trap for us because a year or two into marriage, as anybody who knows who’s been married knows, like, things got real. And for us, that looked like I was in my final year of getting a PhD, struggling to get a job as a professor. I had a serious bike accident. We were just locked into all sorts of conflict to the point where we almost got divorced at the time. Luckily, we didn’t we were able to push through that. But over the decades, it’s now been 19 years since then, we started to just ask this question, like, what was the fundamental essence of our conflict? And what we arrived at is that essentially we were fighting over whether it was fair and the it being all sorts of things like childcare and housework and finances and all the different things that go on in our life.

And so we decided to see were we the only people experiencing this? Were there others out there locked in this battle for fairness? And that’s what ultimately led us to write the book. And we interviewed a number of different couples, and what we found is that on some level, most modern couples seem to be stuck in this conflict over fairness for what is or isn’t fair. This practice of keeping an elaborate mental scorecard of all the wonderful things you do juxtaposed against all the things your partner doesn’t do.

Brett McKay: And, yeah, you call this framework of thinking about fairness in a marriage. You call it the 50/50 marriage. And on paper, it seems like that should be a good idea. But you found that it doesn’t work. It just makes things worse. Why doesn’t it work? Why does focusing on fairness in a marriage make things worse? Because people might be thinking, that doesn’t make any sense in a 50/50 marriage. You’re trying to be fair. And isn’t that a good thing?

Nate Klemp: Yeah, well, and. And this is so surreptitious. Like, it’s happening all the time, mostly under the radar of awareness. For example, just the other day, I think it was last night, actually, I was unloading the dishwasher, and I thought to myself, man, this is like the third time in a row I’ve unloaded the dishwasher, and I could feel the agitation. And. And that’s just a micro example of how this shows up. It’s this thought things aren’t fair, which is then followed by some experience of anger or resentment. And the reason this doesn’t work, it’s actually kind of interesting. There’s this, like, really cool science coming out of the field of marriage research, where they do these time survey studies. And they found a couple things. The headline here is that we’re basically really bad at assessing what is or isn’t fair. So if you’re saying, man, I contribute 60% or 70% to my relationship, that number is based mostly on pure delusion. And there are, like, two things that contribute to this. One is what psychologists call availability bias, which is basically just A fancy way of saying, in my marriage and my relationship with my wife, Kaley, all of the wonderful things that I do, like all those contributions are available to me.

I see them happening in real time when I’m taking our daughter to her violin lesson or whatever it might be. When it comes, though, to what Kaley’s doing, all of a sudden things get a little bit blurry and foggy, like she’s contributing. But I don’t really see any of that happening in real time. And most of it I don’t see happening at all, and I don’t even know about it often. So there’s this tendency, then, to systematically underestimate what our partner is doing. You add on top of that, one other cognitive bias, the overestimation bias, where they found in researching couples that people tend to radically overestimate the amount of time they spend on household labor and on childcare. So what that means is if I say, like, hey, I spent an hour yesterday cleaning up the kitchen. It was probably more like 30 minutes. And you put these two together, and you start to see, okay, we’re systematically underestimating what our partner does. We’re systematically overestimating what we do. And then we’re having this conversation about trying to make things fair. And you start to see that the numbers are just based on delusion. And that’s why we think this idea, this mindset of 50/50 fairness just doesn’t work, and it leads to perpetual, constant conflict.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So we’re keeping a mental scorecard when we have a 50/50 marriage. But the problem is the scorecard is probably not accurate.

Nate Klemp: Yes. Wildly inaccurate is the way I would put it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And you talk about some of the reoccurring problems or conflicts you see in couples that you interviewed when they try to do everything. 50/50. You mentioned one in your own marriage, the domestic scorekeeping fight. It’s like, well, man, I’ve done dishes three nights in a row. What’s going on here? What are some other common areas in a marriage where people try to do things? 50, 50. And it just causes a lot of tension.

Nate Klemp: I’m so glad you asked that, Brett, because it was really interesting when we would ask couples, do you fight about fairness? Most couples said, no, we never have a fight like that. And then we would ask them about things like who does the chores around the house or money, and they would reveal all of these different conflicts that were, in essence, conflicts over fairness. So that’s what I was saying earlier. Often this is happening beneath the Radar of awareness. So seeing the kind of classic archetypes of this fight can be really useful just as a way of cultivating awareness. So, yeah, you mentioned domestic scorekeeping. That’s one way it shows up. Another way it shows up often for couples is trying to make the balance of time spent with each extended family or each set of friends equal. So, for example, in our life, we used to live in Los Angeles, and we’d come back to Colorado, where both sets of parents lived for the holidays, and we would have these epic, explosive fights over trying to figure out the right balance of time spent with my family and then spent with Kaley’s family. And many couples that we’ve interviewed have something similar going on.

There’s also a fairness fight for many couples around money. So a lot of couples fight over who’s saving more, who’s spending more. And then another way this shows up, especially with couples who have children, is as anyone who knows who has a kid, once you have a kid, all of a sudden free time and leisure time becomes like, we like to call it domestic gold. It’s this insanely scarce resource. And so we were interviewing one woman, and she was telling us about how she went to Target. Right. And she spent an hour at Target, and she got home and her husband was like, oh, cool, you had your hour of free time. Now I’m going to go to the gym. Which of course, triggers this huge fight over again, this balance of the amount of leisure time that each person in the partnership gets.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And for the wife, she. She’s probably a Target. Not for leisure. She’s probably buying stuff for the house. So, like, for her, it’s just a chore.

Nate Klemp: Exactly. Yeah. For her, it was a chore. And that was the essence of the fight that she was talking about, is that she’s like, that wasn’t leisure time. Like, that was me buying a bunch of crap for the family. Are you kidding me? And you can imagine then how that fight would ensue from there.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the 50/50 split on time with in laws or family. I remember when we first had kids, that. That can actually get exhausting. Because you do try to be fair because you want your parents to see the kids and you want your wife’s parents to see the kids. But then trying to do two Christmases in one day, it was exhausting. Just, like, wore you out. I mean, we were fair, but in the end, it was like, I’m tired. That was not fun.

Nate Klemp: It’s funny that you mentioned that we had a similar experience I’ll never forget it. We were. Had just gotten through the holidays, and our system was my parents got Christmas Eve and Christmas, her parents got the next four days because they didn’t get the real holiday. They got a bonus two days after. And we got to the end of that one year. And I remember we had the same experience of just, like, this is exhausting. Like, this is just torture.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And what’s interesting is that everyone’s definition of fairness is going to be different because everyone’s got a different calculus going on in their head. So you’re like, well, we didn’t get to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas with my family, so we get to add an extra two days. And then the other person’s like, well, no. Why would we do that? I only got to spend two days with my family. So you only get to spend two days with your family. Like, that’s fair.

Nate Klemp: Yeah. Well, and what’s also interesting is that it’s not just you and your partner generally. The families are also in on the whole game. Right. There’s a lot of guilt and a lot of pressure coming from each set of families or each set of parents saying, like, hey, we need you. How could you miss Christmas this year? So it becomes this very complicated thing to navigate.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And this can also happen with friends, too. It’s like, well, we spent time with your friends. Now it’s time to spend time with my friends. And then there might be this negotiation that goes on back and forth and just causes conflict.

Nate Klemp: Yeah. And I think it’s just important to mention here that there is nothing inherently wrong with this effort to achieve fairness. I mean, it really is a noble goal, but the problem is that it can become such a pervasive mind state that it really starts to pit people in relationship against each other, and it starts to create a culture in a relationship that’s very individualistic. That’s very me versus you, what I want versus what you want. Right. It. It kind of turns the relationship into a negotiation which ultimately isn’t very loving, isn’t very sexy. So that’s why I think it starts to break down for most couples.

Brett McKay: And one of the things that heightens the conflict over fairness In a modern 50/50 marriage is that there’s a lot of role confusion. When you talk about this in the book, like in an older model of marriage, like a 1950s model of marriage, it had its downsides, but it also had its benefits in that everyone knew what they’re supposed to be doing. It was like, well, mom, does this. Dad does this. And there was no confusion. Now, today, most people, they want a more egalitarian relationship. Both spouses might be working, Both are taking part in childcare. But then the question becomes, okay, well, how. How do we divvy all this stuff up? There are any set roles, and they’re just kind of winging it, and then this just causes all this conflict.

Nate Klemp: Yeah. So one of the big shifts to our current state of relationships and this mindset of 50/50, is that we are now both equals in this relationship. And that means we’re both equally capable of being a rock star or an amazing scientist. But it also means that we’re both equally capable of cleaning the dishes or unloading the dishwasher or doing the laundry. So what that creates, to your point, is this state that we like to call role confusion, where it’s like, wait, we could both be doing all of these different things, so whose job is it to do them? And when we would interview couples about this, it was really interesting because we’d ask them how did you decide on your structure of roles in your relationship? And basically, everyone we talked to had the same reaction. They kind of looked confused for a moment, and then they said some version of, I don’t really know. I guess we just are kind of winging it. And we actually started to call this the wing it approach to roles, which is the standard approach that most couples take to creating a structure of roles.

You know, one guy I remember I talked to, he was like, somehow I’m the toothbrush guy with our daughter. Like, every night when it’s time for us to put her to bed, I’m the guy who brushes her teeth. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know how I ended up in that role, but that’s just, like, the role that I ended up in. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with this accidental approach to roles, but we think there’s a better way to think about this, and that is this shift from accident to something more like design to actually having a conversation with your partner. And most couples have never done this, where you take a step back and you say, like, hey, let’s look at the structure of what we do. Let’s look at what we enjoy doing, what we don’t enjoy doing, what we’re good at, what we’re not good at, what we might be able to outsource, and let’s actually, like, design this thing to work for us. So that can be a huge thing for most couples to do.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we’re going to talk about some questions you can ask to figure this out. But before we do, let’s talk about the 80/80 marriage. So you and your wife proposed. Instead of looking at marriage through the rubric of 50/50 fairness, we need to have an 80/80 marriage. So what does an 80/80 marriage look like?

Nate Klemp: The first thing you’ll probably notice is that the math doesn’t work. There’s no such thing as a 160% hole. That’s just a mathematical impossibility. But the basic idea behind 80/80 is shifting the expectation or shifting the goal from just doing your 50%, which locks us into that mindset of fairness, to striving to contribute at something more like 80%. And that’s a mindset shift from what we call fairness to what we like to call radical generosity. And we know that it’s not going to work. Right. There is no way that you and your partner can both contribute at 80%. But it’s kind of this radical, illogical goal that’s really meant to uproot this habit in our thinking that most of us have developed. And the idea is that if we approach our life and our marriage together with this goal of striving for 80%, all of a sudden we start to radically change the underlying culture of the relationship. And I will say here that usually when I get to this point, there are many people who start voicing objections, like, wait a minute, you’re saying I should do 80%. That is just a recipe for my partner to totally take advantage of me.

Why would I do that? And so I think there’s a really important response to that objection that I just want to get to briefly, which is we like to say, and this is validated by psychology, that your mindset is contagious. So if you’re operating in that 50/50 mindset where there’s a lot of resentment and a lot of anger and a lot of scorekeeping, your partner will generally mirror that back to you at every turn. You’ve created a kind of contagious atmosphere of resentment. If, on the other hand, you and just you shift to something more like the 80/80 mindset of radical generosity, that is also contagious. Your partner might be like, what is happening? Are you on drugs? Like, did you go to a yoga retreat? What is wrong with you? But what also tends to happen is that your generosity opens up a space for your partner to also be a little bit more generous, and you can start to create this Virtuous Upward Spiral.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the 50/50 mentality can get you stuck in a tit for tat trap. It’s like, I’ll do this if you do that. And if that’s how you approach the relationship, your spouse is going to. Is going to start syncing up with that pattern you set up, and it just becomes this vicious downward cycle. And it. And it’s all just unsolvable conflict. Try to make things exactly fair, because how do you decide if work done outside the home is weightier than work done inside the home or if this chore is harder than that chore? I mean, it’s, it’s all just unsolvable conflict. So instead of trying to make your responsibilities and contributions mathematically equal, just operate with an attitude of generosity, and then that can become contagious. It’s like, well, if you do that, then your spouse will see it and she’s like, oh, wow, he’s doing a lot. I appreciate that. I’m going to do something for him. And then it becomes a positive tit for tat.

Nate Klemp: Totally. And it’s kind of a fun experiment to do. If you’re listening to this podcast and it’s just you without your partner, try the experiment of taking a day or a week where you just really consciously start to live into this mindset of radical generosity and just see if your partner’s behavior doesn’t. Doesn’t change in subtle ways. We call it, like stealth 80/80. It’s a fun experiment to try.

Brett McKay: And one of the big takeaways I got from the idea of the 80/80 marriage, or the overarching principle, is that it’s about, if I win, we both win, or if you win, I win too. It’s like you see your marriage as a team effort, whereas the 50/50 marriage, you’re mostly thinking like, well, what can I get out of this relationship? Like, how can this marriage help me become a better me? Which, I mean, marriage can do that, but like, that, if that’s your goal, then you’re just going to get stuck in this. These tit for tat traps. But when you kind of approach it from like, hey, we’re on the same team. What can we do so that we can both succeed? Everything just goes so much more smoother.

Nate Klemp: That’s exactly right. I mean, it’s really interesting that many couples do get stuck in this trap of basically thinking, like, what can I do for me? How can I stand up for number one here? And I don’t think it’s an accident that this happens. You Know, we are raised in a culture that celebrates individual excellence. For me and Kaley, we went to college, and the message we received was, you need to do something amazing. You need to achieve success as an individual. And so then we got married, and the expectation becomes, okay, now you’re supposed to shift from individual success to this collective project together where you’re sharing your life and your space and your money. And that shift is really radical. And most people aren’t really able to make that shift quickly. So that’s where there is this more conscious effort that I think we all need to make in our relationships to see if we can shift the emphasis in our own thinking from individual success or how do I win alone, how do I win in my career, in my life, to a goal that’s more like shared success. How do we win together?

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that because, like, sometimes it might mean one person gets to achieve, like, their personal goal because it helps the family out in the long run. And then sometimes it means the other person gets to do that. And, like, you just, maybe you take turns. It’s not like fairness, but it’s just like you kind of intuitively know, okay, well, it’s time for me to do this thing, or it’s time for you to do this thing. Let’s marshal the our resources. We make this happen. And then it can change as the relationship progresses.

Nate Klemp: Exactly. Yeah. You can alternate between whose background, who’s foreground. And that’s a really cool thing to do. Kaley and I do that a lot. You know, if I’m writing a book, I’m foreground. When it comes out, if she’s doing a big engagement, she’s foreground and I’m background, kind of holding the house together and our daughter together. And so that alternation can actually be really quite fun and just a way to grow together. And I would say, like, the main shift to try to aspire toward is when your partner has a big win, even if there is, like, a little tinge of jealousy or envy, which happens in a lot of partnerships. See if you can really celebrate that, because ultimately, if your partner wins big, that is a win for both of you. And so. So it’s like that shift of just trying to celebrate the wins together rather than as individuals.

Brett McKay: As I was reading about the 80/80 marriage, it made me think about pioneer days in America, like living out on a farm on the prairie. You know, back then a couple had to be this real unit the husband and wife. They had roles, the kids had roles. Everyone had responsibilities. But everyone pitched in with everything. I mean, if one person couldn’t do something, then the other person had to pick up the slack. It wasn’t about fairness. It was just like, okay, what do we need to get done to survive? Let’s all work together here.

Nate Klemp: I love that. It’s actually funny. I was just interviewing a couple in Australia. We’re writing a new book on busyness and love, and they were farmers in rural Australia, and they were basically living what you described. Like, the guy was telling me his calves had pink eye, and they were out there trying to get the pink eye treated while they were feeding the calves and getting them ready for taken down for purchase or whatever it was. And it’s a cool analogy. The other analogy that I really like here is if you can imagine your family as something like a business. We like the name Family Inc. For this. In fact, this was something we ended up cutting from the book. But the reason I think that’s helpful, and some people resist that because they’re like, no, it’s about love and spontaneity. And I don’t want to think of my family as a business. But what’s helpful about that is just thinking, hey, if we were a kind of collective business, then it doesn’t really matter who’s making more money or who’s achieving more success. What matters is that we’re lining up what we each do such that we maximize the success of the collective enterprise.

And that’s a really different way of thinking of it. You know, we also use the analogy of basketball sometimes, right? Like 50/50 is kind of like playing basketball where you and your partner are on the same team technically, but you’re both trying to drive up your stats and maximize your individual numbers, win the MVP award or whatever. Whereas when you shift to 80/80, the goal is just like, how can we win this game? And if that means that I’m shooting more three pointers than you are, that’s okay, right? If that means you’re passing more or I’m passing more, that’s okay. It’s a very different way of thinking about a partnership together.

Brett McKay: We can even go further back. I like this business analogy. So if you go back to the ancient Greeks, Aristotle, he talked about household management and our word economics oikos, comes from that. But for the Greeks, it wasn’t like economics, like businesses and countries trading for them. Economics was centered in the home. And so he wrote a lot about, like, how do you manage a home properly so that everyone in the family can flourish? And so he talked about there’s. There’s a lot of practical stuff when it comes to home management. You have to manage resources, know where your stuff’s at. You have to think about the income coming into the household so that you can buy things, that you can continue to grow the household. But then also part of economics or home economics for Aristotle is it was like, how do we rear our children so that they can become productive, active participants in Athenian democracy? So I like that idea because the husband and wife. And for Aristotle, there was a lot of gender disparity, of course, because, like ancient Greece. But he did see the husband and wife, they had to work together on this thing to make sure the home had good oikos or good economics, so you could achieve this eudaimonia, or flourishing for the family.

Nate Klemp: Can I just say, you talking about Aristotle is like the highlight of my year so far. I don’t know if you know this, but my background is in political philosophy. That’s what I got my PhD in. And my wife actually cut. I had some passages on Aristotle that I was going to put in the book, and she’s like, nobody cares about Aristotle. We’re cutting that. Right. So that was one of our conflicts in the book. But to get to the content of what you were saying. Yeah, totally. And the other piece of Aristotle that I think is really interesting here is if you think about his conception of the ideal political regime he was the one who came up with our typology of monarchy, oligarchy. And what was his other name for it? Polity, I think was the. Or democracy, I guess was the third one.

Brett McKay: Democracy yeah.

Nate Klemp: And as I recall him, the key distinction between good and bad regimes in politics was really about is this focused on the individual’s interest or is this focused on the common good? And I think that’s another way of thinking about what we’re trying to aspire toward here. In the 80/80 model, in 50/50, we are focused on individual interest, individual success. It’s all about me. But when we shift to something more like 80/80, we’re looking at, like, the common interest. How do we win together as a collective, the two of us? Or if we have kids, maybe it’s the three, four, five of us.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so let’s talk more about the 80/80 marriage. You say there are three elements to an 80/80 marriage. What are those three elements?

Nate Klemp: Yeah, so that mindset of radical generosity is kind of an overarching term for a way of thinking about the world, a way of seeing the world. And the question then becomes, how do you operationalize that? If you just say I’m going to be radically generous, that doesn’t really give you much to do practically. So the three pieces to this, the first is about what you do, and that’s contribution. Contribution is really in many ways the essence of generosity. And I like to think of contribution in a marriage. The most useful forms of contribution as these small micro acts that are just reminders to your partner that you’re thinking about them, that you care about them, that you love them. So it’s great to like get your partner a trip to Fiji or get them concert tickets for some amazing artists. Those big acts of contribution are fine and definitely useful. But the essence of contribution is really about what are the daily acts of contribution you can do that are small but significant in terms of building connection. So things like writing I love you on a post it note, putting it on your partner’s computer, things like just getting them a cup of coffee in the morning, filling their car up with gas. Right. These are very simple things.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the filling up your car with gas. So a long time ago on our website when we had comments, someone left a comment. This is like 15 years ago. It was like always fill up your wife’s car with gas to bless her. And so I always, that stuck with me for some reason. So I’ll. Whenever I see the, the car it’s almost empty. Like I got to bless my wife. Going to, going to go fill up the car with gas at QT.

Nate Klemp: I love that. Yeah. And it’s just like such a simple thing. It takes you what, five minutes on your way home?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Nate Klemp: But it’s just one of these actions that reminds your partner, like, wow, there’s a spirit of love happening here. So that’s the first one. The second piece is appreciation. And we like to think of this almost like the response to the call of generosity. So in music there’s this idea of call and response. And generosity is an amazing thing. It’s a contribution. But it often is sort of asking for some sort of response. And that is what we call appreciation. The other thing I would say about appreciation is that this is really counter habitual that most of us have this tendency of seeing our partner through the lens of what they’ve done wrong. Seeing where they fell short or seeing where they didn’t quite do what they said they were going to do. And appreciation is basically just flipping the glasses that we wear in our relationship so we’re actually looking for what our partner did. Right. And then we’re expressing that, like, hey, I noticed that you did this amazing thing with our kids. You took them out yesterday afternoon and took them on an adventure. Thank you. Right. So that’s the act of appreciation.

And there’s all sorts of research in the field of marriage science showing that appreciation is perhaps the most powerful thing you can do to create more connection in your relationship. The final thing, the third piece of radical generosity is what we call revealing. And what we mean by revealing is basically just expressing your full truth in your marriage. There’s two sides to this. So on one side, it’s expressing what’s happening in your inner world. So there was this interesting study they did at UCLA. They found that the average couple with kids spends 35 minutes a week talking to each other. And they didn’t really study what they were talking about, but if I had to guess, they were probably talking about logistics or, like, the news or the weather. And so one aspect of revealing is just shifting the way you talk to one another, such that when you’re at the end of the day updating each other on your day, you’re revealing what’s actually happening in your inner world, like, what’s really going on with you. The second piece to revealing is when you have those moments of disconnection or misunderstandings or somebody’s feelings got hurt, using that as an opportunity to reveal as a way to get closer. And that’s not that easy to do for most couples, but it ends up being really powerful. If you can start to transform those moments of disconnection into opportunities to get closer.

Brett McKay: How do you reveal that second thing? Because oftentimes, if you try to tell your spouse, like, hey, you did this, it can just. It’s an opportunity to get resentful.

Nate Klemp: Yes.

Brett McKay: Any ways to do that where it doesn’t cause more bad feelings?

Nate Klemp: Yeah, absolutely. And this is another one of those areas where we want to see if we can shift from our accidental habits, which mostly aren’t that skillful, to a more skillful way of approaching it. So let’s say Kaley’s late for dinner. She said she was going to be there at 6:00, and she’s not there till 6:15. The actual dental way of approaching that is. Is for me to just lash out at her, Right. To just Be like, are you kidding me? I’ve been sitting here for 15 minutes. Like, who do you think you are? You think you’re more important than I am? Right? And you can imagine I could continue that conversation. She’ll get defensive, we’ll get in a big fight, It’ll be a terrible dinner together. So that’s kind of how things go down by accident. What we recommend is an approach that we call reveal and request. And the basic idea is to start by just revealing what we like to think of as your inarguable truth. So what’s really going on with you? What emotion are you feeling in that moment without blame? Just like, hey, I’m feeling X. And then offering some sort of request for how they might be able to make it right in the future.

So that would look something like, hey, I’ve been here for 15 minutes and I noticed that I’ve just been feeling kind of frustrated because you didn’t text me to let me know that you were late. In the future, would you be willing to just send me a text if you’re going to be 15 minutes late? So it’s a pretty significant difference if you just start to think about how the other person’s going to respond to those two approaches.

Brett McKay: Okay, so 80/80 marriage. The overarching principle is radical generosity. It’s like, hey, we’re a team. If you win, I win. Three attributes. It’s contribute. So find little ways you can contribute to your wife throughout the day. It could be small things. Fill up the gas tank, write her a note, pick up her favorite drink from QT on the way home. Show more appreciation throughout your week, and then reveal. So could be problems that are coming up. Or reveal. Hey, this is what I’m doing. This is what’s stressing me out. Here’s what I’m thinking about. Let them know. One thing you talk about too, in sort of being more intentional about creating a culture in your marriage is establishing common values for the family. Just like any team or any business. I love this business analogy. They have a mission statement, for example, that guides all the actions within the business. You argue a family, a marriage should also have something similar. So how do you recommend couples establish sort of this overarching mission statement, or going back to Aristotle, an overarching telos for the family?

Nate Klemp: Yeah, the family telos. I like the sound of that. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really important thing. And it’s really interesting actually to notice that almost every business has a very clear set of values and yet most relationships don’t most relationships are winging it, doing it by accident. So we think that’s really important. And it was interesting, actually, when we had all of these interviews with various couples, what we discovered is that there are no better or worse values for a marriage. So the expanse of different possibilities is really wide. We would talk to some couples where their value was adventure. So there was one couple we talked to, they basically lived out of a van for seven years and just drove around the country, going to different national parks and having adventures. That was their value, and they were aligned on it, so it worked for them. Other couples were more concerned with things like building wealth or security. And you could imagine if you took a partner from the wealth couple and you put them in the adventure couple, where they had, like, quit their jobs in New York and were living out of a van, they totally freak out.

But all that’s to say values aren’t better or worse. What is a problem is when you’re in a relationship and you’re not aligned on your values. That’s where a lot of conflict comes from. So we think it’s really helpful to just sit down and think about as a couple. What are the three to five values that we want to guide our life together? The way we parent, the way we show up with each other, the way we show up at work. We think it’s really cool, once you’ve done this, to actually make an artifact out of it. So we have our values right on the outside of our kitchen table on another counter, and we put them on a little whiteboard. And so it’s something we see all the time. And I think that’s important because some couples will actually do an exercise like this. They’ll come up with values, and then the values won’t actually be used in their relationship. So you want to see if you can use these values for, like, big decisions around money or big decisions around your career. And what’s cool about that is instead of getting into that trap we’ve been talking about of what’s best for me versus what’s best for you, values give you a different way to make decisions.

They give you a kind of rubric for running your life decisions through, where it’s like, well, in terms of that career move, what’s going to align most closely with our values? That’s a really different question than what’s best best for me versus what’s best for you.

Brett McKay: And these values or this telos, it can change as the family progresses or as the marriage progresses. So Keep having that conversation about your telos and your marriage and your family. It’s an ongoing thing. Make sure it’s front and center there as you’re making decisions that affect the entire family. Let’s talk about some more brass, tax things. So we talked about one of the biggest sources of contention in a 50/50 marriage is role confusion. No one knows who’s supposed to be doing what. There’s a maybe a sense of unfairness and how things are divvied up. You mentioned most couples, the way they divvy up roles in a marriage, to wing it just sort of like, I’m the toothbrush guy for some reason. I don’t know why I’m toothbrush guy, but I’m toothbrush guy. Or you’re the grocery person. Any advice on how to be more proactive in assigning roles in a marriage so that it’s a win-win for everybody?

Nate Klemp: Absolutely. We actually in the book have a pretty elaborate practice that you can walk through with your partner. But here’s the shorthand version of that that you can do. It’s as simple as take a couple pieces of paper and step one is just write down all of your roles as individuals. And this is a really interesting step because a lot of times we’re not even clear on what our roles are. Right. Like, most couples couldn’t tell you really quickly off the top of their head, hey, yeah, I do these 20 different things. So that exercise is really important. There’s a trap there, which is there can be a tendency when you write those down to start to get into that fairness mindset and compare. Wow, like, your list is really long and my list is really short. This is unfair. That is not the goal at all. Right. The goal in that first stage is just like, get it all down on paper, create awareness of what’s happening today. And then the second step to this is get out two more pieces of paper and have a conversation about, hey, like, if we were to actually design this and not just do this by accident, what are the things you enjoy doing? So, for example, I have like a weird enjoyment for taking the trash out.

It’s just not a thing for me. My wife has an enjoyment of folding laundry and doing laundry. It’s just like not a thing for her. So those are obvious no brainers. Like, those should be on each of our respective lists. But that can be a useful process because you start to ask, well, what am I good at? What do I enjoy? And then importantly, what can we outsource? So for some couples There are things that nobody wants to do. Like in our house, nobody wants to clean the toilets. And we’re fortunate that we have the resources that we’re able to bring somebody in once a week who helps us clean our house. And it’s amazing. And actually in our budget that’s under, like marital, like a contribution to marriage, not cleaning. I mean that’s, that’s how we think of it. Like this is a contribution to us because it saves us from all sorts of conflict and fights around who’s going to clean the toilets.

Brett McKay: No, I love that we’ve done that in our own family. Like for me, a weird one. I like going to the doctor’s office or the dentist’s office. I don’t know why I like doing it. Like filling out the forms.

Nate Klemp: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And so I’m the guy, I’m the one who takes the kids to the, the dentist and the doctor and make appointments for them. That’s my, my wife hates it. She hates going to the doctor, hates going to the dentist. [0:40:13.0] ____ I’m like, hey, yeah, I’ll take that one. It’s great. So I like that. So talk about what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and then delegate. And that delegate piece you talked about, this is really important because sometimes what often happens, let’s say your wife delegates something to you because it’s important to her, but she doesn’t have the time for it or something like that. But then you just keep putting it off and you have these check ins. Your wife’s like, hey, have you done that thing? You’re like, no. And the reason why you don’t do, it’s like for you it’s just not that important. It’s like, I just don’t, it’s not that in the grand scheme of things and important, but it’s important to her. And that can be a big source of tension because, like it’s really important to her. And it feels like you’re disrespecting her because you’re not doing it because it tells her, like you don’t think it’s important either. So the solution to that is just outsource that to somebody else, like a third party so it gets done.

Nate Klemp: Yeah, if it’s possible. That’s such a great solution because you can have a conversation that goes like, hey, I know this is really important to you. It’s hard for me to complete for whatever reason, or it’s not very important to me. Can we bring somebody else in who can help you? You know, like in our house. My wife is really like, it’s important to her that our yard looks really good and I could care less. And I hate mowing lawns and all that sort of thing. So that’s one of those areas where it’s like, I want to honor that. It’s really important to you that our yard looks great. I also just like, that is not on my priority list at all. So maybe we can see about getting somebody to come in and help us with that.

Brett McKay: One issue you talk about in a marriage, that can be a source of conflict. And the 80/80 approach to marriage can help with this is this idea of over functioning and under functioning. What is over functioning and under functioning? How does that cause conflict?

Nate Klemp: Yeah, this is a dynamic that shows up in a lot of relationships where there’s an over functioning or over contributing partner, statistically speaking, that’s probably usually the woman, but that’s not always the case. And then there’s also often an under functioning or under contributing partner, which statistically speaking is often the man. And a couple things about this. First of all, it seems like it would be awesome to be the under functioning partner, the under contributor. But I was that partner in our marriage for probably a decade. I’ve interviewed a number of people who have found themselves in that role. And what I hear consistently is that it actually sucks. Like you think, oh, it’s cool, I don’t have to do as much. But it sucks to be in a position where it feels like you’re not actually contributing. Nothing you do is right. And so what often ends up happening is there’s a gap between how much each of these partners is doing. The under contributor feels like nothing I do is right, so I’m just going to stop doing anything. So the gap just starts to widen and widen and widen. And when you approach that kind of a distinction between over contributing, under contributing partner from a 50/50 mindset, it actually makes the inequality grow, paradoxically because like the more the over contributor is begging the under contributor to contribute, the more they just sort of pull back, the more they withdraw, the less they do.

So that strategy just doesn’t really work very well. What does work we found is for the under contributor or the under functioning partner, there’s a responsibility there to really see if you can lean in and see if you can contribute, knowing that you might do it wrong, knowing that it might not be perfect. But then the more interesting role is for the over contributor, the over functioning partner. A lot of times they’re stuck in that position unconsciously because there’s like this weird gift that comes from being the over functioning partner, which is that you have control. Like, you know when all the play dates are where all the money goes, you know that you’re getting the right brand of dishwasher cleaner from the grocery store. And so from the perspective of the over contributor, the unlock there is you actually do have to start letting go of control. And your partner might do it wrong, they might get the wrong thing at the store. But that’s kind of like the movement of each partners that you have to make to start to dissolve that dialectic between the two.

Brett McKay: Let’s circle back to something we talked about earlier that I know caused a lot of tension in a marriage. And that’s how to decide whose family to spend the holidays with or how often to visit each spouse’s parents and stuff. Do you have any advice on how to navigate that conflict?

Nate Klemp: This is such a huge source of tension for a lot of couples. Certainly it has been for us. I think the first thing to notice is that many times when we’re having this argument, we’re having this argument as our parents, kids. What I mean by that is we’re having the argument from the perspective of I’m my parents, kid, my parents really want to spend time with us. We need to make sure that the amount of time we spend with my parents and with your parents is fair. And what that does is it totally takes out of the conversation what’s best for you and your partner. Right. And so there’s almost like a shift here from being your parents kid to being the adults. And if you approach this question from the perspective of, hey, now we’re the adults, then I think there’s a really different perspective, which is rather than thinking of this question of how are we going to divide the holidays from the perspective of what’s best for our parents, like, how do we make our parents happy? How do we be good kids? To shift to a different question, which is what’s best for us as a couple? So in other words, you’re putting your priority on you as a couple rather than on pleasing your parents.

And when you’re able to do that, all of a sudden the answers might really change to these questions. So for example, you might say, hey, yeah, let’s go back and visit our parents, but let’s stay in a hotel this time, or let’s make sure that we have a few hours every day that’s for us. You might also notice that from that perspective, you actually end up with A somewhat unfair solution, like you may voluntarily say, hey, let’s actually spend less time with my family, because that’s not what’s best for us. So there’s a way in which you can make that fairness fight almost dissolve by just shifting the priority from what’s best for your parents and how do we satisfy them to what’s best for us as a couple and really stepping into that position of we are the adults, we get to decide what’s best for us.

Brett McKay: I like that. I imagine that’s a tough shift for people to make.

Nate Klemp: Yeah. And I think particularly early on, Kaley and I got married when we were 26, and we really took on the role of our parents, kids. And that caused so much conflict between the two of us because it was almost like we were each the representative of our respective family. And we were having these fights where we were sort of like the proxy representative for our family. And that started to dissolve the moment we said, wait a minute, we’re actually the adults here. We’re going to create our own life. We’re going to do what’s best for us. And that doesn’t mean we’re never going to visit our parents. Doesn’t mean we don’t care about our parents. Just means that we’re going to act like we are adults and autonomous rather than being our parents, kids.

Brett McKay: So at the end, you talk about some rituals that you can take part in to sort of bolster this 80/80 marriage. What are some of those rituals that you recommend?

Nate Klemp: Yeah, we have five essential habits that I think are worth trying out as a way to just build habits of connection versus habits of disconnection in your relationship. And they’re all based on this idea of living in a more 80/80 structure and mindset in your relationship. So the first one is just creating more space for connection. I mean, when I talk to couples these days, the primary thing I’m seeing is that there’s no space. And so thinking about ways where you can have space together as a couple. And we think about this in three ways. One is just like daily micro habits of connection, some sort of check in every day. Another is having some sort of medium habit of connection. So it might be going on a date night or going on a date hike. That’s our favorite, like something you do every week. And then there are more macro habits of connection where maybe you take a weekend together once every quarter, once every year, maybe you go away for a week. So that’s number one. The second is what we’ve been talking about throughout the podcast, which is this idea of really leaning into radical generosity, so contributing that whole idea of daily acts of contribution.

They can be really small, seemingly insignificant, but then also creating a habit of appreciation. My wife and I, we do this every night before we go to bed. It takes like three minutes. It’s just like such a great way to end the day. The third thing is what we were talking about with revealing. So when issues arise, revealing what’s going on for you, revealing that you’re feeling that disconnection and seeing if you can turn those into opportunities for connection. The fourth piece is what we call the shared success check in. So this is basically an idea of having some sort of. Maybe it’s a weekly or a monthly check in where you’re able to talk through all of the complicated logistics of your life, think about what’s working well, what’s not working so well. We found that couples that do this, they save date night from being all about logistics because if you don’t do this, then you end up on date night or whatever your time together is, and you’re talking about, like, who’s going to pick up the kids next week. And then the final piece is creating space from digital distraction.

And this I think is really important because when I talk to a lot of couples these days, what I hear is not that they’re in like, really deep conflict or they’re having affairs or things like that, but there’s this, like, subtler force of disconnection where they’ll talk about. At the end of the day, one of us is sitting on one side of the bed going through Instagram. The other person is doom scrolling the news. And there’s this way in which our devices are just like subtly pulling us away from each other. So really seeing if you can create those spaces from digital distraction. Maybe you kick your cell phones out of your bedroom, maybe you kick them out of your dinner, maybe you buy a case safe so you can lock them up for like two hours at night. Whatever you need to do. That can be like a really powerful unlock.

Brett McKay: No, I love that. A ritual that my wife and I have been doing for a long time now. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast before. We’ve written an article about it. But it’s been a game changer for us. And I know the people who have done it has been a game changer for them. It’s having a weekly marriage meeting.

Nate Klemp: Yeah.

Brett McKay: This was introduced by this marriage therapist named Marcia Berger. And you have this Meeting once a week. And there’s a few parts of the meeting. The first part is you spend time appreciating each other. So you just talk about all the things that you noticed throughout the week that your spouse did. Appreciate that, hey, I saw that you took the kids to this thing. I appreciate you doing the laundry. I appreciate you, whatever. And then you do to do’s. So you talk about all the stuff that you have to do in the household just to make sure the household’s running smoothly. You assign tasks. You follow up on assignments. The next part is plan for good times. So you’re planning for good times as a family or as a couple or even planning individual good times. So it’s like, hey, I want to go to this thing with my friends this weekend. Are you available to watch the kids? Is that okay? So you can kind of coordinate good times. And then the last part, it’s problems and challenges. So you talk about. This is when you bring up like, oh look, Johnny is misbehaving in school. What do we do about it? Like, who are we going to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with? It’s stuff like that. And it only takes about 20 minutes. So it’s sort of our weekly family business meeting that just makes sure we’re staying connected and are both on the same page.

Nate Klemp: I love that it’s such a great idea. And I’m sure you find that by having that meeting, then when you have time together outside of that, you can actually just be together and not have to, like, go through all those logistics all the time.

Brett McKay: Oh, it’s great. Well, Nate, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Nate Klemp: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Best place to go is 8080marriage.com. So that’s 8080marriage.com. That’s where we have a lot of information about the book. Also, you’ll find there that we have a newsletter called the Klemp Insights Newsletter, which goes out once every couple weeks. And that’s really designed to give couples tools that they can use in the midst of everyday life. And we just try to make it fun. We were talking last week about how to use ChatGPT in your relationship. And so just kind of like practical tools for being more skillful in your relationship.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Nate Klemp, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Nate Klemp: Thanks so much, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Nate Klemp. He’s the co-author of the book the 80/80 Marriage. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website 8080marriage.com. Also check at our show notes @aom.is/8080, where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship

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Your friends saw the red flags. Your family voiced their concerns. But you were so caught up in the excitement of new love that you missed all the warning signs. Now you’re stuck in a relationship that’s making you absolutely miserable.

Why does this happen? According to researchers at University College London, “feelings of love lead to a suppression of activity in the areas of the brain controlling critical thought.” In other words, love can not only make you blind, but stupid.

So, how can you keep your brain switched on while dating and dodge potential bullets in the realm of romance? According to relationship expert Dr. John Van Epp, author of How to Avoid Falling in Love With a Jerk, it’s about using both your head and your heart by taking the time to understand your partner’s F.A.C.E.S.

F.A.C.E.S. — The 5 Key Areas You Should Know About Someone Before Making Romantic CommitmentsOver decades of clinical experience working with couples as well as decades of research, Van Epp found that there are five areas — represented by the acronym F.A.C.E.S. — that a couple should know about each other before making romantic commitments: 1) family dynamics and background, 2) attitudes and action of a mature conscience, 3) compatibility potential, 4) examples of previous friendship or relationship patterns, and 5) skills for relationships. These five areas can give you an idea of the individual and relational character of the person you’re dating to help you decide whether you want to get more involved with them or not.

Below, we offer some questions, including ones recommended by Van Epp, that can help you more objectively view what your significant other is like in these key areas, spot potential red flags, and assess your compatibility.

(F)amily Dynamics and BackgroundFamily experiences strongly influence our attitudes and behaviors in romantic relationships. Gender role expectations, communication patterns, and approaches for dealing with conflict or stress are all shaped by the experiences we had in our families of origin. So in the beginning of a relationship, ask someone about her family. As it gets more serious, meet her parents and other family members and observe the dynamics that exist between them.

Just because a dynamic exists in her family, doesn’t mean she’s bound to repeat it; while patterns do tend to carry over from generation to generation, sometimes the apple does, in fact, fall very far from the tree. But seeing a dynamic in her family may help you recognize it in her behavior and can simply prompt revealing conversations as to what she wants out of life and how she imagines her future family.

As you’re figuring out the dynamics that exist in someone’s family, explore questions like:

What’s the state of her parents’ marriage? Even if they’re still married, are they happily married?
Did both her parents work, or did one stay home with the kids?
What was her parents’ parenting style?
How did her parents split household tasks and childcare responsibilities?
How were finances handled between her parents?
What was her relationship like with her father? Her mother?
Is her family affectionate or more stand-off-ish?
If she has siblings, does she get along with them? Does she still stay in touch with them? Why or why not?
Was her extended family highly involved in her life?
What family traditions were important in her family growing up? Does she want to continue them?
Has there been any family cut-offs or estrangements?
What was the mood or atmosphere of her home growing up?
Were there any addictions in the family?
How similar or dissimilar are your families?
Does she like to spend time with her family? Does her family like to spend time with her?

(A)ttitudes and Actions of a Mature Conscience This is all about figuring out if the person you’re dating is a healthy, mature adult. Unlike the family-related questions above, which are more neutrally exploratory, these are questions where you’re looking for a certain kind of answer: one that indicates that the person you’re dating is more mature, rather than less.

Does she have a personal code or set of principles? What is her sense of right and wrong, and where does it come from?
Does she make wise and kind choices or just consider her own needs and wants?
Does she show that she has a sense of how her words and actions affect others?
Does she try to see the perspectives of others?
How does she handle stress and setbacks? Is she resilient?
How does she handle being in the wrong? Does she get defensive, or is she open to feedback?
How stable versus moody is she?
Is she impulsive?
Is she neurotic? (Neuroticism is the personality trait most correlated with unhappiness in relationships.)
Does she respect boundaries?
Does she take the initiative or wait until someone tells her to do something to take action?
Does she set goals for herself and work to achieve them?

(C)ompatibility PotentialAccording to Van Epp, the strongest relationships have both similarities and differences. What matters most is alignment on the big things — values, life goals, and lifestyle preferences, especially around family, religion, and money. While you don’t need identical interests, sharing some leisure activities strengthens bonds, too. And when differences exist (like one partner being more spontaneous, the other more organized), they should complement rather than clash. The key is finding someone different enough to help you grow but similar enough to build a stable, harmonious life together.

Here are some questions to explore as you figure out your compatibility potential; the more questions you can say yes to, the more likely you are to be a good match:

Do you share the same values?
Do you share the same religious beliefs?
Do you share similar political positions?
Are your long-term goals compatible?
Do you have similar ideas on how many kids you want?
Do you have similar ideas on family roles?
Do you share a similar sense of humor?
Do you have similar ideas about how to spend and save money?
Do you have hobbies or activities that you share in common?
Do you have a similar level of interest in travel?
Do you have a similar level of interest in health and fitness?
Do you have similar energy levels?
Do you have a similar inclination toward socializing?
Do you desire a similar level of physical affection?

(E)xamples of Previous Friendship or Relationship PatternsHow we act in one relationship typically demonstrates how we’ll show up in others. Healthy relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and even strangers suggest that an individual has developed the skills to maintain a strong, respectful, and fulfilling connection with a romantic partner.

Here are some questions to explore as you figure out if the person you’re dating exhibits healthy relationship patterns:

How does she treat service people—restaurant servers, cashiers, attendants, and so on?
Does she have road rage?
How does she get along with people at work? How does she treat subordinates? Her boss?
Has she been fired from a job before?
Does she have close friends? How does she treat them? Do you like her friends?
Does she gossip about others and criticize them beyond their backs?
Did she date others seriously before you? Why did those relationships end? Were the breakups acrimonious?

(S)kills for RelationshipsRelationship skills are connected with the attitudes of a mature conscience. You’re looking to see if your partner has the ability to navigate the ups and downs of a relationship maturely. Relationship skills include communication, conflict resolution, empathy, and emotional regulation.

Look for the following when assessing your partner’s relationship skills:

When you’re talking, does she pay attention to you or check her phone?
Does she interrupt you when you’re talking?
When you speak with her, does she ask follow-up questions to ensure she fully understands you?
Does she show compassion and genuine concern for others’ feelings?
Does she open up to you when you sense she’s got something on her mind or does she clam up?
When she has a problem, can she talk to you calmly, or does she blow up or get passive-aggressive?
Does she stay composed when you have disagreements?
Does she take responsibility for managing her emotions rather than blaming others?
Does she make compromises and seek win-win solutions?
Does she apologize when she’s in the wrong?
Does she respect others’ needs, time, and autonomy?
Does she communicate her boundaries without being aggressive about it?
Does she express gratitude?
Does she lie?

Know Someone Through Talk, Togetherness, and TimeThat’s a lot of stuff to learn about someone you’re dating. And we just scratched the surface of what Van Epp talks about in How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk.

So what does this getting to know each other process actually look like?

According to Van Epp, you get to know someone through talk, togetherness, and time.

As you’re dating, ask thoughtful questions about your potential partner’s life, values, and character. These conversations shouldn’t feel like an interrogation but should emerge naturally as the relationship progresses.

Van Epp also encourages couples to spend time together outside the traditional date. You want to see how you handle different situations, particularly when stressed or overwhelmed. Also spend time with her friends and family to observe her existing relationship patterns.

We often don’t reveal our real selves right away. People are usually on their best behavior during the early stages of a relationship, so that someone’s true patterns and behaviors don’t manifest themselves for three or more months. That’s why Van Epp encourages couples to take their time before escalating a relationship. You need time to have those crucial conversations and to see how each of you behaves in different situations.

Love needn’t be blind, or stupid. By taking time to understand someone’s F.A.C.E.S., you can make a clear-eyed choice about whether they’re right for you. This doesn’t mean finding someone perfect (we’re all works in progress) but finding someone whose habits, values, and character align with what you need in a partner. Remember, it’s all about loving with your heart and your head.

For more insights on how to avoid falling in love with the wrong person, listen to our podcast with Dr. Van Epp:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When packing a suitcase for a trip, proper folding will go a long way in ensuring that your clothing arrives as wrinkle-free as possible. For everyday items like t-shirts, underwear, and shorts, the Ranger roll is an effective method for packing as much as possible in as small a space as possible. But while the Ranger roll does a decent job in minimizing wrinkles, for garments like dress shirts that you want to unpack at your destination in as smooth and pristine condition as possible, you’ll need to take a different folding approach.

In this illustrated guide, we highlight one way to fold a dress shirt for packing. It’s easy and does a good job of reducing wrinkles. If your shirt does have a few wrinkles when you pull it out of your suitcase, hang it up in the bathroom while you’re taking a hot shower; the steam will help release the creases and crinkles.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book *The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.*

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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The Anti-Social Century. Derek Thompson’s latest Atlantic piece highlights a fascinating paradox about American culture: while Americans are spending more time alone than ever before, they’re not reporting increased loneliness. In fact, many of us seem to prefer keeping to ourselves. The comfort of Netflix, food delivery, and remote work is winning out over the messiness of real-world interactions. Thompson suggests that while we may feel fine with this arrangement from day to day, over the long term, we’re missing out on a part of life that makes us fully human and leads to a happy and flourishing life. Our ability to handle disagreement, build community, and even sustain democracy itself might depend on all those small, sometimes uncomfortable social interactions we’re increasingly avoiding. There’s been a lot of coverage of loneliness and disconnection for the last several years, but this piece offers plenty of fresh insights into a topic you think you know well.

Cinderella Man. History books can explain the Great Depression, but watching Russell Crowe’s James J. Braddock give his last slice of bologna to his hungry kids makes it real in a way statistics can’t. We watched Ron Howard’s 2005 boxing drama as a family recently, and 11-year-old Scout’s reaction — “The Great Depression was so sad, Dad” — shows how film can transform distant history into something real. Braddock’s true story of fighting his way from the welfare line to heavyweight champion captures both the desperation and dignity of 1930s America. The boxing scenes are thrilling, but it’s the quiet moments like Braddock telling his wife that he’s “all prayed out” or returning welfare money after his comeback that make this more than just another sports movie.

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. After reading countless picture books to my kids (Chicka Chicka Boom Boom still haunts my dreams), this deadpan story about a bear searching for his missing hat stands alone. Klassen’s humor works on two levels: kids love the simple mystery and expressive illustrations, while parents appreciate the perfectly-timed comic beats and the hilariously dark ending. It’s the rare picture book that doesn’t make you want to “accidentally” lose it behind the bookshelf after the hundredth reading. A masterclass in doing more with less.

Vuori Sunday Performance Jogger. I’ve had these for years now, and they’ve become my Swiss Army knife of pants. Perfect for chilly morning workouts, coaching flag football games, or just lounging around the house reading. The material hits that sweet spot between structure and comfort. They’re substantial, yet so soft you look forward to putting them on. I also like the special pocket on the leg for your smartphone. Yes, they’re on the pricey side for joggers, but considering how often I reach for them (and how well they’ve held up), they’ve well earned out the cost.

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: Be Someone’s Atmospheric Getaway and Increase Your Agency By Increasing Your Affordances.

Quote of the Week

Truth as old as the hills is bound up in the Latin proverb, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention.’ It is surprising what a man can do when he has to, and how little most men will do when they don’t have to.

—Walter Linn

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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For several decades, people’s reported sleep quality has declined. This, despite the fact that specially optimized sheets, mattresses, and sleep trackers have emerged during that time, and despite the fact that the amount of time people are sleeping hasn’t decreased for over fifty years.

In other words, people aren’t sleeping less than they used to, but are less happy about their sleep than ever before.

My guest would say that to improve our experience of sleep, we’d be better off looking past the reams of modern advice out there and back in time — way, way back in time.

Today on the show, Dr. Merijn van de Laar, a recovering insomniac, sleep therapist, and the author of How to Sleep Like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest, will tell us how learning about our prehistoric ancestors’ sleep can help us relax about our own. He explains that the behaviors we think of as sleep problems are actually normal, natural, and even adaptive. We talk about why hunter-gatherers actually sleep less than we think we need to, how their natural wake periods during the night might explain our own sleep patterns, the methods they use to get better sleep, and why our modern efforts to optimize sleep could be making it worse. Merijn shares when it’s okay to use a smartphone before bed, the myth that you have to get eight hours of sleep a night, how to intentionally use sleep deprivation to improve your sleep, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: 22 Ways to Get a Better Night’s Sleep * AoM Article: What Every Man Should Know About Sleep * AoM Article: What to Do When You Can’t Sleep * AoM Article: The Importance of Building Your Daily Sleep Pressure * AoM Podcast #661: Get Better Sleep by Stressing About It Less * AoM Podcast #736: Could Sleeping in Separate Beds Improve Your Relationship? * Study: Hadza sleep biology — Evidence for flexible sleep-wake patterns in hunter-gatherers

Connect With Merijn van de Laar* Merijn’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For several decades, people’s reported sleep quality has declined. This, despite the fact that specially optimized sheets, mattresses, and sleep trackers have emerged during that time, and despite the fact that the amount of time people are sleeping hasn’t decreased for over 50 years. In other words, people aren’t sleeping less than they used to, but are less happy about their sleep, than ever before. My guest would say that to improve our experience of sleep, we’d be better off looking past the reams of modern advice out there and back in time. Way, way back in time.

Today on the show, Dr. Merijn van de Laar, a recovering insomniac, sleep therapist and the author of How to Sleep Like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest, will tell us how learning about our prehistoric ancestors’ sleep can help us relax about our own. He explains that the behaviors we think of as sleep problems, are actually normal, natural, and even adaptive. We talk about why hunter-gatherers actually sleep less than we think we need to, how their natural wake periods during the night might explain our own sleep patterns, the methods they use to get better sleep, and why our modern efforts to optimize sleep could be making it worse. Merijn shares when it’s okay to use a smartphone before bed, the myth that you have to get eight hours of sleep a night, how to intentionally use sleep deprivation to improve your sleep, and more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/cavemansleep. All right, Merijn van de Laar, welcome to the show.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, thanks.

Brett McKay: So you are a sleep therapist. You got a new book out called, How to Sleep Like a Caveman. And what you do for a living is you help people who have sleep problems like insomnia, they can’t sleep. What’s interesting about your background is you yourself experienced sleep problems throughout your life. Can you tell us about your troubled sleep and how it influences your approach to helping patients?

Merijn Van De Laar: I think I was 28 years old when I first developed insomnia, chronic insomnia. So I was suffering from chronic insomnia for three years. And, well, the main thing I found was I was feeling very hopeless and helpless because I was trying to control the sleep problem and checking my alarm clock and it actually pushed me further away from a good sleep. So at one point I even tried taking a sleeping pill and it didn’t work. So that was extra frustrating. So it was a combination of many things, but I think hopelessness and helplessness were really on the foreground.

Brett McKay: When you experienced your sleep problems, was it having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep or waking up earlier than you wanted? What did that look like?

Merijn Van De Laar: I think it was both. Sometimes I had difficulty falling asleep. It would take me about one and a half hours before I fell asleep. And at other points, I was having difficulty maintaining sleep. So I woke up in the middle of the night, checking the alarm clock, not able to get back to sleep again. So it was very different.

Brett McKay: So with your book, How to Sleep Like a Caveman, you look to our evolutionary history to figure out, well, maybe there’s some things we can learn from our ancient ancestors about how to improve our sleep. Starting off, like, how do we know what caveman slept like? Because you know we can’t.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s a good question. Because we don’t exactly know. Because if you want to study rhythm, sleep rhythm, you have to have people that are alive. So it’s very difficult to find any clues on how people really slept, like a rhythm from archaeological findings. But what we can do is we can look at people that still live in the same circumstances like we did when we were cavemen. So a lot of research is done in the Hadza tribe, that’s a tribe in Tanzania, and they have been studied a lot and also looking at sleep. So we know a bit more about their rhythm. And their rhythm is much more influenced by their environment, their natural environment. So light, temperature, and that’s how we got clues from the past.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about some of the sleep problems we have today, a lot of people experience today, they might have their origin thousands of years ago with our caveman ancestors. Talk about that.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Well, I think one of the main problems nowadays is insomnia, so problems in trying to fall asleep or maintaining sleep. And actually, if you look at evolutionary theory then, they say that being awake during the night was actually kind of a safety thing, because when you’re awake during the night, you could wake, and you can see whether there’s impending danger. And so what we see in the hunter tribe as well is that they’re awake for over two hours on average during the night. And I think that’s the thing that we’ve lost during the past hundreds of years.

Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s dig in deeper into what we can learn from hunter-gatherer sleep and how we improve our own sleep. And I think this question I’m about to ask piggybacks off of what you just said about they’re awake in bed for two hours sometimes while they’re sleeping. Let’s talk about sleep duration first. If you read most articles about sleep these days, it’s like you have to get eight hours of sleep. And if you don’t get eight hours of sleep, you’re gonna have health problems, you’re gonna die early, you’re gonna get dementia, and it’s scary.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, it is.

Brett McKay: So how many hours do hunter-gatherer tribes sleep?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, I think first of all, there’s a big difference between popular articles and scientific articles because they say different things. So what we usually see in the scientific articles is that actually seven is the magic number, and between six and eight is quite average if you look at sleep duration. But if you look at the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, then they sleep between 6.2 and 6.5 hours on average per night. And once in two days, they nap for like, on average, 17 minutes. So that’s their total sleep time.

Brett McKay: Okay, so they’re in bed, you said about eight hours. And they’re just, they sleep actually for six hours?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, they’re in bed maybe above nine actually, nine and a bit. So they’re awake a lot. So during the night it’s like two, two and a half hours awake. Yeah.

Brett McKay: And that discrepancy between hours in bed and then how many hours you actually sleep, that produces what’s called sleep efficiency, right?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s true.

Brett McKay: Right. So if you sleep most of the time while you’re in bed, like, you’ll have a higher sleep efficiency, but if you sleep less than you are in bed, then you have a lower sleep efficiency?

Merijn Van De Laar: Your sleep efficiency drops. Yes, that’s true. And I think what we’ve done in the past couple of years, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on the sleep efficiency. And in the media, they usually say that you have to have a sleep efficiency above 85%. But that would mean that the whole Hadza tribe would actually be a bad sleeper while they themselves don’t see themselves as bad sleepers. So that’s very interesting. So I think that a lot of that sleep efficiency is also based on what we think is good around sleep. But that’s not what everybody experiences. And you cannot generalize that to other people and other countries.

Brett McKay: Yeah, for us, living in the West, we want to compress all of our sleep in just one… We want to get it done in one fell swoop. And so our goal in the West typically is something like, I go to bed at 10:00, I’ll fall asleep in 10 minutes and then I’m going to stay asleep for the rest of the night until my alarm goes off in the morning.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah. That’s what people want and that’s what is frustrating because a lot of people don’t get that. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And that’s what causes insomnia. It’s like, well, I’m in bed but I’m sitting here staring at the ceiling for an hour, hour and a half and then I wake up an hour, hour and a half before I actually wanted to wake up. And that just causes a lot of frustration.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s true. It causes a lot of perfectionism around sleep. And it’s also, I think a lot of things are caused by the things we read in the media and what is coming towards us when you look at information. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about definition of insomnia we’ve been talking about. I think people have an intuitive understanding of what insomnia is. Like you can’t sleep when you want to sleep.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Is there like a subjective insomnia and an objective insomnia? Is there a difference between the two?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, usually if you look at insomnia disorder then it’s actually always a subjective complaint. So what you see is that people have difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep. To speak of chronic insomnia, you have to have three bad nights during the week. So three nights with sleep problems and also suffer from daytime consequences. Because if you don’t suffer from daytime consequences, then we don’t speak of insomnia. And I think there’s a very big difference between subjective and objective sleep. Because objective sleep is actually the sleep measured by polysomnography or actigraphy. And polysomnography is like a sleep study. So we measure brain waves, but also other indices, body indices. And an actigraphy is a wrist worn band in which you can see what the activity level is. And it’s a medical device, so it’s not to be compared to like an app or a watch. And it can give an indication of how somebody has slept. And there is often a big discrepancy between the objective and the subjective sleep.

Brett McKay: Yeah, some people who have sleep problems, they go to a sleep doctor, they get a professional sleep study done and the results say, yeah, you slept seven hours, like you had great sleep. And the person’s like, no, I slept awful, that was not good sleep. That’s where that discrepancy can come from.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I saw a lot of those patients and the thing is that they did a research, a couple of years ago. It was actually from the town that I’m from in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. And what they found was that in general it takes about 20 to 30 minutes for a person to realize that they are sleeping, if they are sleeping. So if you wake people up before those 20 minutes, then more than half of people say, I wasn’t sleeping yet. So that’s really strange. So our brain is sometimes playing tricks on us.

Brett McKay: So the Hadza tribe, do they experience insomnia?

Merijn Van De Laar: If you look at, there’s been a study by Samson and he asked whether they experience sleep problems and between 1.45 and 2.5% actually experience sleep problems regularly. But if you look at the West, that’s around 20%. So that’s 10 times bigger. The amount is 10 times bigger than in the Hadza tribe.

Brett McKay: And that’s because the Hadza tribe, if someone’s waking up for an hour or two, they don’t see that as a problem. They go, okay, this is normal.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, it’s quite average.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then in the West, we’re like, oh my gosh, I wake up. This is a problem. So you have more people reporting sleep problems than the Hadza tribe.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And so in the Hadza tribe, when they do wake up, like what do they do? They just lay there?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, sometimes they talk with tribe members or they just, they stay in the bed usually. So they don’t really get out of the bed. Sometimes they do, but it’s not like they’re really, really active during the night. So they are quite low in activity level usually. Yeah.

Brett McKay: And so like, what’s the takeaway from that for us, someone experiencing insomnia and getting really frustrated that they can’t sleep or stay asleep?

Merijn Van De Laar: I think if you’re in the bed awake and you feel quite relaxed, then I think a good thing is to be aware of the fact that being awake is actually quite normal. So it is easy to say, but don’t frustrate immediately. But if you feel frustrated or if you feel that your tension builds up, then sometimes it’s best to go out of the bed and do something else that really relaxes you and then go back to the bed when you feel sleepy again.

Brett McKay: Okay. Okay. I think that’s really good advice ’cause I know earlier this year, well, it’s actually last year in 2024, for some reason I just started waking up sometimes at 4:30 in the morning. This never happened to me before, I started waking up at 4:30 and sometimes 5:30. And I remember it freaked me out. I was like, oh my gosh, something’s wrong with me. I might have to go see a sleep doctor. And I was worried I wasn’t getting enough sleep. But then I got to the point where I was like, you know what, I’m okay. Like if I get up and I do something kind of relaxing and then I’ll fall back to sleep and I feel fine in the morning, everything’s fine.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that gives a lot of reassurance. And that’s why you don’t have the buildup that usually people have that have insomnia. They really fear the night before they go to bed.

Brett McKay: So one takeaway from hunter-gatherers is don’t stress out if you wake up in the night, ’cause that’s normal. And another takeaway with sleep duration is that you don’t need to obsess about getting eight hours of sleep. The Hadza, I mean, they’re getting just about six hours of sleep and anywhere between six and eight for most people, you’re gonna be fine.

Merijn Van De Laar: I think it’s very important to look at your sleep need. I mean, it’s also very important to give yourself enough opportunity to sleep. So some people say, well, I only need five hours and then they’re sleepy during the day. So I think it works both ways. So on one end you have to really look at your sleep need. So how much sleep do I need. And really give yourself enough opportunity to sleep. But if you’re tense around sleep and if you can’t sleep and you experience insomnia, then sometimes it can help to really shorten your bedtime. So that’s one of the strategies you do to enhance your sleep.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we’ll talk about that in a bit. Sleep deprivation is really interesting. Yeah. So that’s something I saw with my own sleep this past year, when I started waking up earlier. I just kind of embraced it ’cause, like, I would wake up at 5:30 or 5:00 and I would feel fine during the day. Like I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t taking a nap. And I just kind of like, well, maybe I don’t need as much sleep as I thought I did.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay: And I think one of the things too, I had to embrace, you talk about this in the book, as you get older, you know I’m in my 40s now, you have a natural tendency to want to sleep less. What does evolution tell us about that? Like, why do we have this tendency across humanity to sleep less as we get older. What’s going on there?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think the main difference when you’re getting older is that, your quality of your sleep changes. So what you see is that people who get older, they actually have less deep sleep and they tend to wake up more during the night. So that’s what we usually see when people age. And there’s one hypothesis, it’s called a sentinel hypothesis, and it says that as people age, they’re actually better able to wake during the nights. So if older people lose their function of more hunting and gathering, then they have more function during the night because they are more awake during the night. So they can wake for the rest of the tribe.

Brett McKay: Okay, so I’m waking up early ’cause I’m looking out for my family.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s it.

Brett McKay: I’m gonna reframe it that way. That’s a good way to reframe it. So we’ve talked about the fact that you don’t necessarily need eight hours of sleep, but in the media or online, you see these articles saying if you don’t get those eight hours, if you don’t get enough sleep, there’s all these dire health consequences. You know it can increase your chances of getting diabetes, it can increase the chances of getting dementia, it can increase weight gain. So what does the research actually say if you don’t get those eight hours of sleep, are the consequences as dire as you often hear?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, if you look at mortality, then you see that people who sleep less than five to five and a half hours and more than nine hours are actually at risk of dying sooner. So it’s not like if people sleep less than eight hours, this happens. They say that seven is actually the magic number here again. So around seven, the mortality is lowest, but those are only associations. So we don’t know anything about causality ’cause these are big population studies. And if you look at chronic disease, then you see a very clear association between objective sleep problems like sleep apnea, which is a sleep disorder in which you have, breathing stops during the night and desaturation, so lower oxygen in the blood. And that is really associated with things like higher cancer risk, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease. But if you look at insomnia, then this association is not there or much lower. And what you usually see in the media is that it is said, sleep problems lead to, but they don’t define what kind of sleep problems they’re talking about. So this is a lot of confusion going around what they are talking about. When you say sleep problems.

Brett McKay: Oh, I think that’s heartening for people who, you know their sleep problem is they just have a hard time getting to sleep or staying asleep, so they have insomnia and they think, oh, my gosh, I’m going to die of a heart attack. I’m going to get dementia. The research says, yeah, there’s not really an association. If your sleep problem is insomnia, you don’t have to worry as much. But if you have a sleep problem, like sleep apnea, where you basically stop breathing while you’re sleeping, then that’s a concern.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, tell me more about the dementia thing ’cause I’m getting in my 40s now, and that’s something I’m thinking more about. I’m like, oh, my gosh, what can I do to make sure I don’t get dementia? What does the research say about the connection between sleep duration or sleep quality and dementia?

Merijn Van De Laar: Here, it also says that if you suffer from sleep apnea, then the dementia risk might be bigger. So I think it’s always important if you snore very loudly, if you have breathing stops during the night, it’s very important to see a physician because sleep apnea is actually a disorder that is often not recognized and it has very severe consequences, very severe physical consequences. So I think that’s a very important thing.

Brett McKay: Okay, so if you do have sleep apnea, you might have to get like a CPAP machine, help you breathe during…

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. For example. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So I think this is actually really good information because I think a lot of… One of the things that can contribute to the stress of wanting to get to sleep and stay asleep, you know the stress of insomnia, is that these headlines are going through people’s heads like, oh, my gosh, I’m laying in bed here, I can’t sleep.

Merijn Van De Laar: And that’s what makes them even sleep worse. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So, yeah, I think this information is useful. So it just kind of calms you down a bit and you won’t freak out as much if you’re having problems sleeping. Let’s talk more about cavemen and hunter-gatherers sleep and what we can learn from them. You mentioned at the beginning that hunter-gatherers and potentially our caveman ancestors, their sleep schedule was guided more by their environment. So the physical environment. So we’re talking light, temperature, even seasons affected their sleep. What do we know about that?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, what we see is that, for example, in the Hadza tribe, there’s a bigger difference between the sleep in summer and in winter. So what you see is that there is almost an hour difference between the seasons. And what we see in the West is that actually that difference is not that big. And I think that’s also because we use heating, we use a lot of light. So the differences between the seasons are not that big for us. But what we can learn from these people is that, for example, in the morning they get a lot of bright light, and in the early afternoon, they get a lot of bright light. And you get more bright light if you go outside, because outside light is much brighter than the light you get when you’re in an office. And I think that what a lot of people do is they go to their work, they’re in the office, and then at night they put the lights on in their living room. And there’s not that much difference between the evening and the morning or the afternoon. And I think that we can work with light by being more outside, I mean, and even a walk of 20 to 30 minutes might do, just not sitting behind your desk, eating your sandwich there, but going outside might do the trick already. So it’s not like you have to be outside all day. And another thing is dim the lights in the evening is very important. And also use temperature. So don’t make it too hot, the ambient temperature too hot during the evening, because that is very unnatural.

Brett McKay: Okay. So get more light in the morning and then in the afternoon. So get outside, that can help. And if you live in an area where there’s not much light. So if you live in the extreme northern parts of the world during the winter, there’s things you can do. You can introduce things like the light lamp, you can do that, that can help. There’s things you can do to help with that.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, it’s very important to look at the lux, so the amount of light that comes from the light lamp. And if it’s… Usually we say at least 10,000 lux would do the trick.

Brett McKay: And something you talk about, too, another myth about sleep that you debunk, you hear a lot of people say, well, if you want to improve your sleep, you have to wear blue light blocking glasses or turn your smartphone screen yellow. And the research says that actually doesn’t do much because your smartphone doesn’t emit that much light.

Merijn Van De Laar: That’s true. Yeah. A lot of smartphones don’t exceed 10 lux, and you need more than 10 lux, usually to stimulate your biological clock. So, I mean, the light is more blue, and we are more sensitive to blue light. But the amount of light that is emitted from a smartphone is just too little to stimulate the biological clock. Now, if you look at light around you, so that is very important. And also to make it not too bluish, but I mean, you can also dim the lights a bit so that it doesn’t really have effect on your biological clock. You don’t have to wear orange glasses to have the same result.

Brett McKay: And you still recommend people not to use their smartphone right before bed because it’s not for the light. It’s just that smartphones can get you amped up and kind of stress you out and get you just thinking more.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s right.

Brett McKay: And that can prevent you from falling asleep.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s right. And a recent review in 2024 by Gretasar shows that actually, for some people, using a smartphone might even help to fall asleep. I think it really depends on what type of person you are. If you’re very busy in your head, you have difficulty finding enough rest, then sometimes a smartphone can get you off your thoughts, so distract you a little bit. And that might help you sometimes to fall asleep. But that’s… It’s always… You always have to look at the personal circumstances.

Brett McKay: Well, you talk about in the book one thing that you did when you’re having sleep problems that helped, I think a therapist or a doctor recommended, like, turn on the TV. And it did, like it worked. It relaxed you and you were able to fall asleep.

Merijn Van De Laar: It worked for me. Yeah, definitely. Because I’m somebody with a very busy head. For me, it works. Yeah.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So going back to temperature, you wanna keep it cool. Is there an ideal temperature you wanna keep in your room to help facilitate sleep?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Usually in your bedroom, they say between 16 and 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

Brett McKay: Okay. Or is that Celsius? I think It’d be like 60.

Merijn Van De Laar: Oh, Celsius. Sorry. Yeah. Celsius. Yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay: See, I think it’s like 68 degrees Fahrenheit is the number that I hear.

Merijn Van De Laar: Fahrenheit, that’s true. Because otherwise it would be very, very cold.

Brett McKay: That would be very cold. Yeah. And something that I do, it’s interesting, my wife, she likes it warmer and I’m a hot sleeper. And so something that’s helped me is I’ve got a chilipad. It’s a thing you put underneath your mattress and kind of runs cold water beneath you.

Merijn Van De Laar: Oh, yeah.

Brett McKay: And that keeps things down to about 68. And it helps me fall asleep. Something I noticed though is I’ll, right before I wake up, so like 4:30, I’ll wake up and I’m like, this is too cold. I actually wanna be warmer now. And I think you talk about research, we want it cooler when we fall asleep, but then as we get closer to wake up time, we actually want it to be warmer ’cause it helps us wake up.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, it helps us wake up. Yeah, yeah. The body warms up again. That’s true. Yeah. And also it’s very good to have a cooler environment before falling asleep. But sometimes people have very cold feet and hands and that might prevent you from falling asleep because then you have this vasoconstriction. So the blood vessels, they really contract and that creates more difficulty for the body to lose body temperature. And that’s why some people with cold feet and cold hands cannot fall asleep properly.

Brett McKay: So if that’s you, wear socks, maybe wear some mittens to bed?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, sometimes that works. Yeah.

Brett McKay: And then seasonality, I mean, you mentioned that in the West our seasons are pretty much the same. But I’ve noticed I tend to sleep more during the winter ’cause it’s darker and longer. I just wanna go to bed earlier than I do during the summer.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. And that’s a natural thing. That’s a natural thing. So people tend to sleep like 12 to 25 minutes longer during the winter because it’s more dark. So they get less active during the evening. And their biological clock also gets less stimulated in the evening. So that’s why they fall asleep earlier or lie in the bed longer in the morning because the morning light is getting up later.

Brett McKay: Again and that’s useful information to know because if you feel like you’re sleeping less as it progresses through spring and summer and you think, oh my gosh, something’s wrong with me, it’s like, well, maybe not. Like this is just your natural rhythm where you wanna sleep less ’cause it’s lighter out longer.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So another thing you talk about hunter-gatherers do, is they move a lot during the day. How does that influence their sleep?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, if you look at the relationship between exercise and sleep, then you can say that being more active builds up more adenosine. And adenosine is a neuromodulator and it creates sleepiness. So if you have higher levels of adenosine, then you get more sleepy. And so being more active actually makes you more sleepy and tends to give you more rest, so you fall asleep more easily. And have less problems maintaining sleep.

Brett McKay: Okay. So adenosine that builds up what’s called sleep pressure or sleep drive in you.

Merijn Van De Laar: That’s right, yeah.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so something you can do to increase the sleep drive is just move more throughout the day, get some physical activity in.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s the first thing. Yeah.

Brett McKay: What about something I read a lot about when it comes to sleep, is that you shouldn’t exercise right before bed. Is that true?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, studies show that if you exercise too much, like one to two hours before going to bed, that might create more problems falling asleep, so that’s right. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Okay. Yeah. And going back to movement and sleep. I know if I look at my life, the times where I’ve slept the best, it’s when I moved the most. I remember the best sleep I ever got. And I think about it still, I’m chasing that high. I’m still chasing it. Is when we, my wife and I went to Rome for vacation. And you know in Rome, like you walk everywhere. It’s not like here in Tulsa where you have to drive everywhere. Rome, you had to walk everywhere. And I remember we got back from a day and we just laid on the bed and we both just fell asleep and then we slept, I think 12 hours. I mean, I’m sure there was some jet lag going on with that, but it was the, I think the movement, like the amount of physical activity we did that day, it just… It was like the best sleep. It just felt refreshing and reinvigorating.

Merijn Van De Laar: It’s a lot of sleepiness. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And so, yeah, I’ve noticed in my own life when I don’t move a lot, I tend to not sleep as well. So I just try to make sure, not only keep my regular exercise up, make sure I’m getting up throughout the day from my job and doing some push ups, taking walks, because that, it really does help.

Merijn Van De Laar: Those are things that work. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about the sleeping environment of hunter-gatherers. You know, they didn’t have fancy mattresses. They slept on beds of leaves and grass on the ground. What about sleeping with other people? Did they sleep with other people by them?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, actually, we think… Well, if you look at the Hadza tribe, they sleep with 20 to 24 people around a fire. And we think that the same thing happened in the past, so in prehistory. So, yeah, I think they slept with a lot of people and they could easily take watch during the night for each other.

Brett McKay: How did that influence their sleep? Like did that disturb them at all?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, if you look at the research on sleeping together with a partner or with somebody else, then you see a very, very interesting thing. Because on the one hand, people subjectively feel that they sleep better. But sometimes if you sleep with your partner, they find that objectively you sleep worse. So there’s a big difference in how people experience sleep and how sleep objectively is. And possibly that has to do something with safety, with built in safety. When you sleep with somebody else, then you feel more safe.

Brett McKay: Okay. But then it can also mess up your sleep ’cause your sleep partner elbows you or takes all the covers or whatever.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Any recommendations for that? Let’s say your spouse, the person you sleep with, like they’re just a really restless sleeper and it’s interrupting your sleep. Any advice on how to handle that?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think it depends on what the restlessness is. Because if it’s like turning and tossing and turning, then you might think about two mattresses, possibly two duvets. And if a person really snores, sometimes earplugs might help. But in some cases I’ve seen patients who were so tired because of the sleep problems that I advise them to sleep in separate rooms. And sometimes sleep really improves. And I think there’s a really stigma on that in western society, not sleeping together. But then again, if you have a partner that’s totally tired and worn out, then I think that’s not a good thing either. So I think it’s very important to discuss that with your partner to see whether you can make arrangements on that or maybe sleep a couple of nights separately from each other. But I think it’s very important to discuss it with each other.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about sleep hygiene and like what hunter-gatherers do to improve their sleep hygiene. An important part of sleep hygiene is winding down before bedtime. Do hunter-gatherers kind of have a wind down time before they hit the sack?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, they do. They actually sit by the fire, tell stories to each other. They are stories that are not too upsetting. So not about conflicts or things. And what you see is that a lot of people have different rhythms like we have. So we have morning people, evening people and everything that’s in between. And yeah, so they really wind down before going to bed. They are not too active anymore. And I think sometimes the thing with us is that we run to the bed and then expect for us to sleep immediately. And I think that’s not how it works.

Brett McKay: So what do you recommend your patients you deal with, who are having sleep problems? Like how early should they start getting ready for bed? Like when should the wind down time start?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, usually I say one to one and a half hours before going to bed. So don’t do anything anymore that has to do with work. Don’t be too active anymore. I think those are things that can really work. Maybe watch a series, something that’s a bit boring maybe, not too exciting. I think those things might work.

Brett McKay: All right and then dim the lights and cool down the house or your bedroom. That can help out a lot.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Cool down the house. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Something that’s come up more with people in sleep when they’re paranoid about sleep, something they’ll often do is resort to a sleep tracker. So maybe on their Apple watch or they get, the Oura ring or something like that. Do you recommend people use sleep trackers to improve their sleep?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, it depends on what kind of person you are. If you’re a bad sleeper, I would not recommend it. Because first of all, if you look at the measurements of sleep, these trackers are completely unreliable. So sometimes they say you had 30% deep sleep and 20% REM sleep. And the thing is that they are very inaccurate when it comes to measuring types of sleep. What they can do in people who sleep well is they can make an estimation on how long you’ve slept and how long you’ve been awake. Just it’s a rough estimation and that’s actually the only thing they can really do well. So I would not recommend them to people who are already experiencing insomnia.

Brett McKay: Okay. Yeah. ’cause it can actually exacerbate the problem. There’s like a new type of sleep disorder.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Orthosomnia.

Brett McKay: It’s driven by the devices, to be like, oh my gosh, my sleep score was terrible. And they just freak out even more and it makes sleep even harder.

Merijn Van De Laar: That’s how it works. Yeah.

Brett McKay: I’ve noticed that. I’ve used some of those sleep tracking devices and they’re interesting. I just kind of used it as I just wanted some information about my sleep. I didn’t really put much credence to it, but I had a few moments where the device said I had really poor sleep. But I’m like, I feel fine, I feel great, I’m energetic. And then there was moments where it said I had great sleep. And I’m like, man, I’m really, I’m groggy, I’m tired. I had to end up taking a nap during the day. So, yeah. Not incredibly accurate.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah. And so for some people, it’s very important that sleep score and it really leads the day and how they feel. And then if you have a poor score, then it can really influence your day negatively. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Do you recommend maybe keeping a sleep diary in some cases, just like kind of manually tracking your sleep?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think so. I think for insomnia, it helps very well. I think one of the treatment steps we do in cognitive behavioral treatment is using a sleep log, so sleep diary. And it is to create a better picture of how somebody’s sleeping, at what time they go to bed, at what time they wake up, and how many times they wake up during the night. So I think a sleep diary sleep log may help very, very well. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about some potential solutions. Let’s say someone’s listening to this and they’re having a hard time sleeping. They’re not happy with their sleep. I think oftentimes people resort to, okay, is there a supplement I can take? Is there a new mattress, I can get a new pillow? You know whatever. Even sleep medication. But what you found is the most effective tools to help with insomnia is cognitive behavioral therapy-I. So CBT-I. Yeah, that’s for insomnia.

Merijn Van De Laar: The I stands for insomnia.

Brett McKay: And then sleep restriction, which we mentioned earlier. Let’s talk about CBT-I. What does that typically look like for a patient in broad strokes?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. So the full cognitive behavioral treatment, sleep restriction is usually a part of the cognitive behavioral treatment for insomnia. And the full cognitive behavioral treatment starts with psychoeducation. So about what is normal sleep? What can you expect? So those are the first steps. Then you talk about relaxation techniques, and then you start looking at behavioral techniques. And the behavioral techniques are things that people can do to really give their sleep a boost and not be awake stressed out during the night. So the first one is a sleep restriction method, and the second one is stimulus control. We’ve been talking about that before. That’s going out of bed when you’re really tense, doing something that relaxes you, and go back to bed. And what we see is that sleep restriction is actually highly effective. That’s the other method, and that’s shortening your bedtimes to create more sleepiness. You get a better buildup of adenosine or adenosine. And what you see is that people have less difficulty falling asleep and maintaining sleep. So those are actually the steps of the CBT-I. And sleep hygiene is also a part of it. So you look at light, you look at temperature, and especially not watching the clock. I think not watching the time is also very important.

Brett McKay: Okay. So CBT-I, you’re gonna start off with psychosocial education. So this is the things we’ve been talking about today. It’s like, hey, you know what? You don’t need eight hours of sleep. You’re not gonna die if you get less than that. If you get six hours, you’re gonna be fine. Even if you get five hours occasionally, you’re gonna be okay. And it’s just reassuring people like, you’re fine, you’re not gonna die. And then, and also just telling people like it’s normal to wake up, that’s gonna be okay. You just got to go back to sleep. And then the sleep restriction aspect, once you start helping people reframing their problem, what they think is problematic sleep. The restriction is like you’re actually telling people, okay, instead of going to bed at 10:00, we want you to go to bed at maybe midnight.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So that you wake up your normal time of 6:00. The goal is to actually make you sleepier during the day, the next day, ’cause we wanna build up more sleep drive.

Merijn Van De Laar: The sleep pressure.

Brett McKay: The sleep pressure, and so you fall asleep. That sounds like a hard sell to people. It’s like, yeah, you’re actually going to be tired for a couple of weeks to improve your sleep.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Especially the first three to four days are very, very intense because for a lot of people, the problems, they get bigger during the first three to four days. People tend to get more sleepy during the day because of the buildup of sleepiness. Sometimes they get more tired, more concentration problems, that kind of thing. And then after four to seven days, you usually see slight improvements in sleep. So people have less difficulty falling asleep and have less problems maintaining sleep. And then after two weeks, usually people say that they sleep much better. And you also see that the daytime consequences of the sleep problem, they disappear after two to three weeks. So I think it’s a very powerful method that usually works within a couple of weeks.

Brett McKay: Okay. And then as you’re… What’s interesting about the sleep restriction, you’re gradually over time, maybe after two weeks, you’re going to increase the time you’re in bed. So maybe you start off going to bed at 12:00, waking up at 6:00, and then two weeks later, it might be, well, you’re gonna go to bed at 11:30 for a while.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, usually we work with a quarter of an hour. So you expand the time with a quarter of an hour.

Brett McKay: Okay. So this process could take a few months. Correct? To kind of get you back on track?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, usually what we see is that people… What I’ve seen in practice, is that sometimes people come in, they’re in the bed for like nine hours and they sleep for five and a half or six hours. And then what you usually do is you start out with total bedtimes that are similar to the sleep times they reported last week. So if they say, I’ve slept for five and a half hours, then they go to the bed for a maximum of five and a half, usually plus a half hour. So around six. So they’re in the bed for a maximum of six hours. Then you wait a week to two weeks. Usually sleep improves in 80 to 85% of cases. And then you start expanding the bedtimes again with a quarter of an hour. And sometimes people feel that when they’re in the bed for maybe seven, then they’ve actually reached their optimum because if they go past those seven hours, they have more sleep problems again. So actually, usually it takes about four to six weeks to treat a person with insomnia.

Brett McKay: Wow, that’s fast. That’s really great. Any advice on how to figure out how much sleep you need to get?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think the most important thing to do is to look how you sleep when you’re on holidays. So the second week of your holidays, you have to find out at what time you start getting sleepy and at what time you spontaneously awaken. If you do that, you find that out, then you really know how much sleep you need, but also which chronotype you are. So whether you’re a morning person or an evening person or somewhere in between.

Brett McKay: What do you do if your chronotype, let’s say you’re an evening person, but you have a job that requires you to be a morning person. Anything you can do to mitigate the consequences of that?

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think there are some things you can do is you can work with bright light in the morning, if that’s possible. So that really pushes your rhythm a bit more back. And what you can do is you can create a more dark environment before going to bed and go to bed on time. So I think that’s very important because for evening people, it’s sometimes very difficult to go to bed on time, but still your natural rhythm will always be leading. So you can do something with that, with these methods, but it’ll never change you to being a morning person. So what people sometimes do in the weekends, is they’re in the bed a little bit longer. So one to one and a half hours to compensate a bit for the hours that they missed during the week. And sometimes this may help. But it’s very important to not overdo it.

Brett McKay: Right. You don’t wanna sleep in too much because that’s just going to throw off your sleep schedule for the rest of the week. What we’ve talked about a lot of things people can do to help them get a better night’s sleep. Is there one thing you recommend people start doing today that will immediately improve their sleep?

Merijn Van De Laar: I think not watching the time. I think that’s a very important one. We know from research that if you watch the time, then it takes up to 20 minutes longer to fall asleep again. So I usually pay a lot of attention to that. And a lot of people with insomnia find it very difficult to not watch the time when they’re awake. But I think it’s a very, very powerful method to decrease insomnia.

Brett McKay: All right, so just get the clocks out of your room.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: And for me, the big takeaway from the book is like, just don’t freak out as much about your sleep if you are having problems with sleep, ’cause that just causes more problems. And, when you wake up at 4:30, it’s like, okay, well, you shouldn’t know it’s 4:30 because you don’t have a clock in your room in the first place.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s true.

Brett McKay: But if you do wake up earlier, you’re just like okay, it’s okay. I’m gonna pretend like I’m a Hadza tribe member and just kind of sit here and relax and doze back to sleep.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, just let the perfectionism go a little bit and, yeah, be more relaxed around being awake during the night. We need to be more relaxed about being awake during the night.

Brett McKay: I love that. Well, Merijn, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Merijn Van De Laar: Well, first of all, the book, I mean you can already order the book, so it can be ordered from Amazon, so Sleeping Like a Caveman. And I also have a website, Merijn van de Laar, I think you have to spell it out in the details.

Brett McKay: We’ll link to the show notes.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah. So that’s where they can find more information.

Brett McKay: All right, Merijn van de Laar, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Merijn Van De Laar: Yes, thanks, same for me.

Brett McKay: My guest’s name is Merijn van de Laar. He’s the author of the book, How to Sleep Like a Caveman. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our shownotes at aom.is/cavemansleep, where you’ll find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed. You sign up at dyingbreed.net, it’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Over the Christmas break, our family took a trip to New York City. While we were there, we visited two of NYC’s most famous museums: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History.

We had a great time but found the experience pretty overwhelming. There’s a lot of great art and exhibits in these museums, and they’re freaking huge. After spending a couple of hours at each museum, we were all pooped, though we hadn’t even scratched the surface of these cultural institutions.

It got me wondering if I could improve my approach to visiting a museum. What was the best way to do one?

I knew just who to ask to get the answer to that question: Nick Gray. Nick was on the AoM podcast a couple of years ago to discuss his book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. Besides encouraging people to host short cocktail parties, he’s spent part of his career as a private museum tour guide in New York City and has led hundreds of tours. The man is passionate about museums. One of his life’s slogans is: “Museums are F***ing Awesome.”

I hopped on the horn with Nick to get tips on how to get the most out of your next museum visit. Here’s his field-tested battle plan.

Preparing for Your Museum VisitDownload the museum’s app. Nick told me that most big museums these days have their own app that you can use to enhance your visit, so check if they have one before you arrive. Many of these apps provide interactive maps as well as self-paced tours right on your phone. For example, the Museum of Natural History’s app has a map that can help you navigate its 1.2 million square feet. This would have come in handy on our visit; we got lost trying to find our way from the space section of the museum to its human history area.

Consider joining a tour group (but don’t be afraid to ditch it). I asked Nick if he recommended signing up for a guided tour at a museum. He told me that guided tours can make the experience more enjoyable, but he did provide this surprising caveat: “If you decide to join an in-person guided tour, you need to think about it like a magazine. Just like you can pick up a magazine and put it down without finishing it, you don’t need to stay with a tour for the entire time. Feel free to leave that tour if it’s no longer serving you.”

Nick did advise that you should leave with tact and grace. Just sort of fade away without making a big scene of it. Like an Irish goodbye.

Pack like you’re going on a day hike. A museum visit is more physically demanding than most people realize. You’re going to walk about two miles during a typical two-hour visit at a large museum. One of the biggest mistakes Nick sees people make is underpacking for their visit. He recommends you gear up for a museum visit like you would for a day hike or a trip to an amusement park. His essential packing list:

Comfortable shoes
Water bottle
Light snack
Headphones (for audio tours from your phone)
Light layers (museums are climate-controlled and often chilly)

Nick especially emphasized the importance of bringing some snacks like nuts or a granola bar on your museum visit. “There’s an actual known phenomenon called ‘gallery fatigue’ where you just feel really wiped out mentally and physically from looking at exhibits,” Nick told me. Gallery fatigue seems to be caused by a combination of walking a lot and your brain having to choose what to pay attention to and process an endless stream of novel stimuli. Nick always kept snacks on hand for the folks in his tour groups to help stave off this condition.

Arriving at the MuseumBeat the crowds. If you’re looking to avoid the crowds, Nick recommends not visiting museums on Sunday afternoons (especially rainy and cold ones). That’s when museums are the busiest.

If you want to visit a museum when it’s less crowded, Nick suggests arriving when the museum first opens, but with this caveat: “Get there about 20-30 minutes after the museum opens. If you get there right when it opens, you’ll be standing in a long line, but usually 20 minutes after opening up, that line is gone.”

Don’t look at the exhibits (at first). Once you’re inside the museum, the first thing Nick counterintuitively recommends is to NOT look at the art. Instead, you’re going to do this:

Get a map from the front desk.
Walk the entire floor plan of the museum without stopping.
Keep moving even when interesting pieces catch your eye. Don’t read any wall text or take photos.
Complete this initial walkthrough in 10-30 minutes.

This quick initial walkthrough will give you a mental map of the museum, which will help you plan the rest of your visit.

Nick did have a caveat to his initial walkthrough advice: “For large museums like the Met or the Louvre, even a quick walkthrough would take an hour and a half, so don’t do this for those types of museums. This strategy is great for medium-sized museums.”

Take a short break and plan your visit. After your walkthrough, head to the café and have a seat to recharge for a bit. During this time, have a drink and a snack. Study your map and plan which galleries you want to revisit and spend more time in.

When planning, Nick recommends focusing on eliminating things you won’t see. If there’s a type of art or an era in history that doesn’t interest you, don’t visit that wing. It’s okay to not like or be interested in certain things.

Also, Nick recommends avoiding special exhibits: “If you’re just visiting for the day, don’t waste your time with special exhibits. These are better for locals who can come to the museum regularly. If you’re on vacation and only have two hours to visit a museum, stick to the permanent section highlights.”

Download an audio tour. Once you’ve winnowed down what you want to see on your visit, Nick recommends downloading an audio tour to your smartphone. They’re a great way to stay engaged on your visit and learn more about exhibits than you would wandering around on your own.

As mentioned above, many museum apps have these pre-loaded. Nick also told me that Bloomberg Philanthropies offers free and very well-done audio tours for your phone for many of the big museums in the United States and even a few in other countries.

If you’re visiting the Met, Nick recommends Bloomberg’s “Highlights” tour, which will take you on a guided tour of some of the Met’s most famous pieces.

Enjoying the ExhibitsOnce you’ve established your game plan, start enjoying the art/exhibits. If you’re visiting an art museum, Nick offered the following tips to make your viewing more enjoyable:

Ask yourself, “What’s your favorite piece in this gallery?”
Play “Buy, Burn, or Steal” with companions (which piece would you want in your home, which would you rather never see again, and which would you steal if you could?)
Give yourself permission to dislike certain pieces or galleries. You don’t have to like everything you see!
Take note of a piece’s accession number. You’ll find this on the placard next to the piece. It’s a unique identifier for an object in a museum’s collection. If a piece really interests you, you can look it up on the museum’s website for more information.

Talk to the museum guards. In most museums, you’ll find guards patrolling the galleries. They’re there to make sure people don’t touch the art. Nick told me that the guards often have deep knowledge about the collections they protect. Don’t be afraid to strike up conversations with them — they can offer unique insights and perspectives you won’t find in any guidebook.

Take breaks! While you’re touring the museum, Nick recommends taking regular breaks every 45 minutes or so to avoid gallery fatigue. Sit down, drink some water, have a snack.

Practice good museum etiquette. To help ensure everyone has a good experience at the museum, practice good museum etiquette:

Follow any rules the museums have about photography. Most museums these days allow you to take pictures, but it’s always good to double-check.
Don’t be loud. Don’t touch stuff. Duh!
Only eat and drink in designated areas. While you should bring snacks, make sure to only bust them out in designated areas. Most museums prohibit food and drink in the galleries.
Be aware of your backpack radius. If you’ve got your backpack on your back, be aware of your radius. The last thing you want to do is swing your backpack into a priceless vase from third-century China. The risk of bumping into art with your backpack is why the Met asks patrons to wear their backpacks to the front.

If you’ve been avoiding museums because they seem overwhelming or boring, give Nick’s approach a shot. Pack some trail mix, download an audio guide, and play “buy, burn, or steal.” Focus on what interests you, take plenty of breaks, and maybe chat up a security guard or two. You might be surprised to find that museums are, indeed, pretty f***ing awesome.

Make sure to check out Nick’s website for even more tips on how to get the most out of a museum. He’s also got a great travel guide to visiting NYC in general, including additional advice on how to make the most of the Met.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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It’s easy to imagine hypothermia as the type of malady that can only affect people who get trapped in disastrous conditions, like being lost in a frozen Alaskan wilderness or falling into an icy river. But it’s something that can happen to you even under far less extreme conditions.

Imagine a simple day hike, starting at low elevation in sunny weather. As you ascend the mountain, you work up a good sweat in your cotton t-shirt and don’t take breaks to hydrate or eat. At the top, the weather turns, rain or wind settles in, and you twist your ankle. Your cotton shirt is now acting like a refrigerator, and the wind only serves to pull your body temperature down quicker. At first, symptoms are seemingly minor. Shivering and a lack of coordination set in, but with time and more exposure, the symptoms change. Severe confusion, a surprising lack of shivering, and inexplicable feelings of being too warm begin to take over. You may even take clothes off because you feel too hot, which only speeds up the process. A day hike has quickly turned into a very dangerous scenario.

While the risk of developing hypothermia increases significantly as the temperature drops below 32°F, you don’t need to be in freezing temps to get it; hypothermia can set in at any temperature below 50°F if you are exposed to cold conditions for an extended period, especially if you are wet, improperly dressed, or unable to move to generate heat.

You can prevent hypothermia by wearing synthetic or wool clothes, checking the weather forecast, keeping dry, and staying nourished and hydrated. But if you find yourself on the brink, knowing what to do at that moment could mean the difference between life and death.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Thirty-two. That’s the number of eggs Ross McCurdy can crack in one minute with one hand. If you think that sounds impressive, you’re right. McCurdy holds the Guinness World Record for his feat. The secret to his success? Lots and lots of practice. McCurdy is the owner of a diner in Washington state where an average day has him cracking open a few thousand eggs.

While you might not need to crack a thousand eggs in a day, there are benefits to learning how to crack an egg open with one hand. In the kitchen, where multitasking is critical, being able to keep your other hand available while you crack eggs is a big advantage. You can use that other hand to whisk your eggs into a delicate hollandaise sauce, flip a sizzling pile of hash browns, or lift a mug of steaming coffee. Plus, cracking an egg with one hand looks a lot cooler and more elegant than ham-fisting it apart with both of your mitts.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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How to Think About the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization by Mortimer Adler. I still remember stumbling upon this book in high school at my hometown public library. It’s what introduced me to the idea of the Great Books and set me down a path to study classics in college and to continue reading Aristotle and Kant throughout adulthood. The book is a collection of essays by Mortimer Adler that tackles hefty concepts like freedom, justice, and happiness with remarkable clarity. What I love about Adler’s approach is how he strips away academic jargon to reveal the practical core of philosophical ideas. He shows how wrestling with questions like “What is truth?” isn’t just intellectual gymnastics, but essential for navigating daily life. It’s like having a wise professor walk you through life’s big questions without making you feel small for asking them.

How can busy people also keep fit and healthy? Here’s what the ancient Greeks and Romans did. If you think balancing health with a hectic schedule is a modern problem, flip through Roman physician Galen’s treatise “Hygiene.” He saw firsthand how Rome’s professional class sacrificed their well-being for work, from philosophers holed up writing books to fellow doctors working themselves sick. His solution? A flexible daily routine of one evening meal (intermittent fasting!) and some form of movement — even if that meant just wrestling at the local gym. Other ancient fitness hacks were surprisingly practical. Athenian businessman Ischomachus turned his commute into a workout by alternating running and walking to get to work. The key takeaway: health isn’t about following some rigid ideal, but finding sustainable habits that fit your life.

Anonymous Ism Seasonal Crew Socks. I recently acquired a green corduroy suit. I feel like 1970s Robert Redford when I wear it. I came across these winter/holiday-themed socks (made by the oddly named company, Anonymous Ism) on Huckberry that I thought would go well with the suit. While most holiday clothing veers toward the tacky, these socks hit the Goldilocks zone between holiday kitsch and class. They’re also really dang cozy. Very hygge.

30 Rock. We’ve been rewatching 30 Rock lately, and this 15-year-old comedy still holds up and remains truly laugh-out-loud funny. While other sitcoms from the 2010s have aged poorly, 30 Rock’s manic satire of corporate culture, media consolidation, and celebrity narcissism still seems relevant today in our streaming/tech/influencer age. But what really sets it apart is how the show’s creator, Tina Fey, managed to be both absurdist and sharp. Instead of relying on 2010’s era “cringe humor” where the punchline is just things being awkward (I’m looking at you, The Office), the quick, witty jokes in 30 Rock are actually jokes and come at you like a machine-gun barrage.

Quote of the Week

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.

—Alexander Smith

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In the Know Your Lifts series, we’ve covered the high-bar back squat, the low-bar squat, the power jerk and split jerk, and the overhead press.

It’s been a minute since we last published an entry in the series, but I had to bring Mr. Know Your Lifts (and his signature singlet) out of retirement to show you how to do one of my favorite accessory lifts for the conventional deadlift: the Romanian Deadlift (aka the RDL).

Unlike a conventional deadlift, where you lift the weight from the floor, with the RDL, you start the movement from a standing position and lower the bar slowly without bringing the bar down to the ground. Think of it this way: a conventional deadlift is like picking up a heavy box from the floor, while an RDL is like hinging at your hips to set that box down on a coffee table. Both are hip hinges, but they serve different purposes and hit your muscles in different ways.

Because you slowly lower the bar, the RDL really hammers your hamstrings and glutes. It’s not only a great supplemental lift for the conventional deadlift, but it also helps you build thick, meaty hamstrings and glutes. The RDL has been in heavy rotation in my programming this year. I love it. I typically do RDLs on the days I do squats. As the bar gets heavier, don’t be afraid to use lifting straps so that you can keep adding intensity to the lift without having to worry about your grip.

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Think about a hot loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.

There’s a lot going on with that loaf.

On one level, it’s a literal food that’s been created through chemical processes. A delicious — your mouth might be watering right now — form of sustenance.

But there’s also more to it than that. There’s something about bread, the so-called staff of life, that’s different from other foods and resonates on a deeper level. There’s a reason bread has been a rich symbol throughout times and cultures and figures prominently in religious scriptures.

Today on the show, Peter Reinhart will take us on an exploration of the many facets of bread, from the spiritual to the scientific. Peter is a baker, educator, and the author of numerous books, including The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. In the first half of our conversation, Peter unpacks the deeper, mystical meanings of bread by walking us through the twelve steps of how it’s made. We then get into why sourdough is the future and final frontier of bread, and the technical secrets to mixing, fermenting, and baking a killer loaf.

Resources Related to the Podcast* Peter’s books * Peter’s recipes for overnight fermented lean dough and more * Peter’s TED talk * AoM Article: Bread Baking 101 for Beginners

Connect With Peter Reinhart* Peter’s Pizza Quest website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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The Bread Baker's Apprentice, 15th Anniversary Edition: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread [A Baking Book]

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Does the approach of the holidays fill you with a bit of dread?

Do they seem more like a forced march than occasions that are supposed to be joyfully anticipated and whose ostensible purpose is rest, celebration, and a break from the labors and banalities of one’s everyday routine?

Maybe there’s something wrong with our holidays, at least in their currently constituted form.

As Brian Earl, author of Christmas Past, explained on the podcast, while how we do our holidays (specifically Christmas, but really all of our holidays) seems eternal and set in stone — the way things have always been done and should be done — most of our current traditions are in fact quite recent; the majority only emerged and crystallized in the last 200 years. They have greatly changed over time and will continue to evolve into the future.

Evolutions in our holidays arise from the intersection of capacity and desire; changes, whether technological, cultural, or economic, make something doable, and that something becomes a tradition when it also scratches a societal need — it works for people, it makes sense to them.

For example, prior to the mid-19th century, Christmas was more of a public holiday — more akin to Halloween or the Fourth of July — than a private, domesticated one. It was celebrated with drunken revelry on streets and in town squares rather than in the familial living room. But with the rise of railways, people could both move farther away more easily, and more readily return home. And so Christmas became a time of homecomings, when the fragmented family could all get back together and reconnect around the household hearth.

Christmas only became a major shopping and gift-giving holiday relatively recently as well. The holiday’s heavy focus on exchanging presents was spurred by the rise of industrialization and the proliferation of material goods; as production outstripped demand, demand was inflamed by the rise of another new technology-facilitated phenomenon: print advertising. But this wasn’t simply a top-down dynamic, fueled purely by commercial interests; people were genuinely eager to procure the new trappings of the middle class, and there was real delight in seeing them sitting beneath the tree on Christmas morning.

Partaking in sweet treats at the holidays has a longer history, and yet was also created by the particular circumstances of history. During the Middle Ages, sugar, spices (like cinnamon, ginger, and cloves), and dried fruits (like raisins and figs) became more accessible in Europe due to trade, but were still expensive, and so were saved to elevate occasional festivities. Breaking out these rarer commodities at the holidays made these occasions feel special. When sugar and spices became more accessible during the Victorian era, sweets became an essential part of the holidays and were used to make cookies, candies, puddings, and cakes that still felt like novel indulgences in a time when diets were less varied, and there weren’t grocery and convenience stores on every corner, stocked with thousands of desserts and snacks.

While much has changed over the last 150 years, we’re still in many ways living out the holiday traditions that were created a century and a half back. Unsurprisingly, while some of our traditions still resonate and generate joy, others seem thin and stale. We’re not sure why we’re doing what we’re doing, but we do it because it’s what we’re supposed to do. Born from the specific needs of a certain time, we live out traditions that no longer fit our own.

Brian Earl uses a metaphor from the historian Bruce David Forbes, who compares the evolution of holiday traditions to a snowball: “Roll a snowball, and three things happen. First, it grows larger as it accumulates snow. Second, it picks up pieces of anything else that lay in its path. And third, pieces periodically fall off as the mass of snow changes shape and buckles under its own weight.”

It seems easier to accumulate traditions than to slough them off, and we may need to help the process along, intentionally dropping some rituals and practices and replacing them with ones that meet the unique needs of our age — traditions that will help us refresh our spirits, recalibrate our perspectives, and celebrate those aspects of life that get neglected the other 360 odd days a year.

What Are the Holidays We Need Now?What form might those new holiday traditions take? (While all of our holidays could use some revamping, we’ll here focus on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.)

The possibilities are innumerable. These are just a few spitballed ideas:

Travel (somewhere different and fun) for Christmas. While Americans used to be a more mobile people, the number of folks who move each year has been declining for almost a century and hit the lowest level ever recorded, 7.8% of the population, in 2023. Even those who move don’t go far; only a fifth cross state lines. So while far-flung family members might have relished a Christmas homecoming in the 19th century, many people today already see their families fairly regularly. And, while a worker in the 1800s might have spent 12 hours a day, 6 days a week laboring in a factory, and thus relished a day off to luxuriate around the house, more people today work from home, and are already tired of and saturated with its surroundings.

Thus, it might make sense to create a tradition of traveling at Christmas. Not traveling to another family member’s house, but traveling either with your own immediate family or with your extended family to a location where no one necessarily lives. Somewhere fun and different.

To help fund this trip, you could decide to put the budget you were going to use for gifts toward your trip, because another tradition that could be introduced is:

Swap gift-giving for note-giving. When you start seeing holiday ads in October, does it give you a little pukey feeling inside? It’s not only a reaction to a premature start to the season’s crass commercialism, it’s a feeling of, “Man, nobody needs this.”

Getting gifts used to be more exciting when you didn’t know about the existence of certain products or where to get them, and buying things was an effortful pain that required going from physical store to physical store. It was neat to receive something you didn’t know existed and didn’t have to schlep to a mall to get for yourself.

Today, the online marketplace has put any and every product in the world at your fingertips, and with the click of a key, Amazon Prime will have it to your doorstep in just a day or two. Whatever you’ve wanted, you’ve probably already searched for and bought for yourself.

At the same time, today’s kids are less interested in toys than electronic devices and digital accouterments — things that are impossible to put in a stocking and less thrilling to find underneath a tree, than, say, a Red Ryder BB gun.

“Stuff” has lost its shine.

But even though the appeal of exchanging material presents has declined, there’s still something valuable that lies underneath the practice that’s worth preserving. In giving someone a gift, you have to think more intently about them than you typically do; you have to think about who they are and what they like. It pushes you to be a little more other-focused and a little less self-focused than you usually are.

That benefit might be replicated, while dropping gift-giving, by swapping the exchange of gifts for the exchange of notes. What about a tradition in which everyone gave family and friends a note that shared a favorite memory of the person from that year or something they appreciated about the person that year? Instead of opening up presents on Christmas morning, everyone would open up envelopes and get to read some life-affirming words.

Of course, grown-ups would be much more open to this idea than children. But children could be offered the idea of going on a trip in lieu of gifts.

Fasting (and physical feats) before feasting. From harvest rituals to religious celebrations, feasts have been central parts of holidays since time immemorial. But the satisfaction of eating your fill and then some was premised on the fact that your diet, outside of these special occasions, was otherwise more meager and plain because the circumstances of a hardscrabble life dictated that condition and/or because the liturgical calendar prefaced days of feasting with prescribed days of fasting. A day of indulgence was uniquely pleasurable because it was exactly that: a rare and luxurious loosening of restraint.

Today, almost everyone overeats, at least a little, every single day. We indulge in more sweets, treats, and diversified delicacies each week than our ancestors enjoyed in a lifetime. When the holidays come around, we don’t go from empty to full, but from full to bursting. It’s hardly a recipe for savoring and relishing our seasonal smorgasbords.

Yet, there is still something special about eating foods that only come around once a year, and the practice of cooking, of making things by hand when so much of what we eat is packaged and store-bought, seems like something that’s needful and still worth preserving in the modern day.

To maintain the benefits of homemade feasts at Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, while increasing their pleasure, we ought to precede them with a day of fasting and physical feats. What if folks abstained from food for 24 hours before these holidays? While fasting doesn’t seem “fun,” it adds meaning and texture to occasions, and when participated in communally, it becomes a bonding device. And, of course, as hunger is the best spice, it increases the taste and pleasure of the meal that breaks the fast.

To take people’s minds off the fast, while also increasing the meaning-making challenge of it, the day before/morning of Thanksgiving or Christmas could be filled with physical activities like races, obstacle courses, or hikes. Even our ancestors, who lived very active day-to-day lives, filled their holidays not only with rest, but sports, games, and dances. How much more do we moderns, who putter through extraordinarily sedentary existences, need holiday traditions that involve us exercising our bodies? If holidays are breaks from the norm, then what we desk drones need most are opportunities to move and play. And work up an appetite for the imminent feast!

Disconnect. In the 19th century, communicating with others was a challenge; hence the popularity of returning home for visits when you could and sending Christmas cards when you couldn’t. Even in the 20th century, long-distance telephone calls were expensive, and less common, so that calling your loved ones on Christmas was a nice, special gesture.

Today, we have the opposite problem. We often feel too connected. There’s never a time when you can’t be reached, and you’re ever inundated with texts and emails. The rare, needed commodity isn’t communication of any kind, but the face-to-face variety. We need a holiday from digital distractions and for the radical act of complete presence.

So how about a tradition in which everyone turns off their phones and devices at sundown on Christmas Eve and doesn’t turn them back on til sundown on Christmas Day? A holiday shabbat.

There’d be no Zoom calls with Aunt Myrtle on Christmas. You can beam into people’s lives any other day of the year; there’s nothing special about doing it on a holiday.

If you’re there, you’re there. If you’re not there, you’re not there.

There’d be no taking pictures on Christmas, at least with your phone, either. The only pictures that could be taken would be those snapped with an actual camera — you know, one that uses real film. In fact, when you turned off your phone and dropped it into a basket on Christmas Eve, you’d get to reach into another basket to take a disposable camera that would be your visual record-keeping device for the next 24 hours. Then you’d get the fun of having those photos developed later.

There’d be no checking Instagram to see how other people’s Christmases went and how yours measured up.

If you’re not there, you’re not there. If you’re there, you’re really, 100% there.

NYE regrets and hopes. From the beginning of time, holidays have frequently involved drinking and getting absolutely smashed. It made sense, at least for our ancestors. When you’re laboring as a serf on a farm or working 12-hour shifts in a mine, when you have time off, you want to forget about all the hardships of your labor-intensive, disease-ridden, death-filled, hardscrabble life and become completely numb to the world.

But in an era of unbelievable prosperity, a time of comfort and abundance that would have amazed anyone anywhere in the world up until a century ago, it makes less sense to use our holidays to become less conscious. The great need in our own time, when our material goods are abundant but our inner lives are impoverished, is to become more so.

In the modern world, we have the luxury of asking life’s big questions, but rarely take advantage of it. We need a holiday from putting out fires and exclusively thinking about day-to-day tasks; we need a time to actually think about our lives — what we’re currently doing with them and what we’d like to do with them.

So on New Year’s Eve, instead of getting sloshed, why not gather around a campfire with friends to share two things 1) A regret from the previous year (which can be written down on paper and tossed into the flame), and 2) A goal for the year to come.

———

While it might seem inconceivable that we could ever alter our holiday traditions in the ways described above, as Earl observes, holidays are far more malleable than we realize; “Our familiar version of Christmas would be barely recognizable to our ancestors, just as Christmas in the far future will only vaguely resemble that of today.”

Some classic, once-ubiquitous holiday activities like caroling and sending Christmas cards have already seen significant declines in the last few decades. Even the number of people putting up Christmas trees has decreased by a double-digit percentage. Earl thinks that in the future, even these “timeless” traditions will go extinct, “just as the day came when the Christmas tree replaced mistletoe and holly as the main Christmas decoration, or when serving a boar’s head for Christmas dinner became a historical relic.”

The holidays are always changing. They evolved more slowly before the rise of mass media, and more quickly after it, when images of how the holidays were supposed to be done could be standardized and disseminated across the country and the world. Today, we’ve perhaps reached a point of tradition stagnation because we’re waiting for the kind of externally-dictated mass shifts that marked the last couple of centuries. But we no longer live in the era of mass media; we’re increasingly residing in our own niches. So rather than waiting to be swept up in a tide of cultural change, perhaps we should re-embrace the more localized, regional forms of traditions that existed before industrialization. Perhaps we should find traditions that work best for our particular communities, and even just our particular families.

As we do so, it can be tempting to make a clean sweep of things, to throw most everything out in the name of simplification. But the desire to simplify can sometimes just be a cover for laziness. The creation of fun, meaningful texture, and lasting memories always requires effort and inevitably involves some stress. The idea is not to get rid of effort-requiring traditions altogether, but to replace those that seem stale and pointless with those that are genuinely looked forward to and generate real joy — traditions where the effort feels worthwhile.

Exactly what holidays we need now is up for debate and may come down to personal taste, but one thing is for sure; the last thing we need in our modern age is more empty, forgettable days that are just like all the rest.

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It’s not uncommon for former law enforcement officers and intelligence agents to write self-help books where they share how the lessons they learned in their professional careers can apply to people in any walk of life.

What is rare is for one of these officers-turned-authors to publicly prove they know what they’re talking about and that their tips work, as Derrick Levasseur did by winning the reality show Big Brother.

Derrick is a former undercover detective, current private investigator, and the author of The Undercover Edge: Find Your Hidden Strengths, Learn to Adapt, and Build the Confidence to Win Life’s Game. Today on the show, Derrick shares how he became an undercover police officer, what he learned from that job, how he applied those lessons on Big Brother, and how you can use similar techniques to influence others, know when someone is lying, and bounce back from adversity.

Resources Related to the Podcast Derrick’s season of Big Brother * Derrick’s podcasts + Crime Weekly + Detective Perspective* * The Johari Window * AoM Podcast #830: How to Read Minds and Detect Deception

Connect With Derrick Levasseur* Derrick’s website * Derrick on IG * Derrick on YouTube

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In the world of hand-to-hand combat, there are few tactics more brutally effective than throwing a powerful elbow to an assailant’s face. The elbow is one of the hardest and sharpest parts on the human body. It can deliver blunt force trauma to your target as well as cut their skin. Elbows can be thrown with devastating force even if your attacker has you close to him or if you’re on the ground. An elbow strike can also be used as a back-up to a missed punch. Thanks to the multiplicity of benefits, the elbow strike should part of every man’s self-defense arsenal.

In this illustrated guide, we highlight three ways to throw an elbow strike: horizontal, reverse horizontal, and vertical. As with the punch, remember that the power of the elbow strike comes primarily from the rotation of the hips and torso.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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TheraGun Massage Gun. Well, my journey into the art of middle-aged manliness continues. For the past few months, I’ve noticed that I’ve been slower to recover after my heavy leg days. Quads have been particularly sore. I picked up a TheraGun deep tissue massage gun after reading a study in Michael Easter’s Two Percent newsletter about their effectiveness in helping recovery. Massage guns work better than sports massage and foam rolling. I’ll hit my quads with the TheraGun before my leg workout. The percussive vibrations are intense! But it hurts so good and seems to help loosen and warm up my muscles.

The Meaning of Anxiety by Rollo May. I’ve been doing a deep dive into books written by existential psychologists from the mid-twentieth century and recently finished Rollo May’s 1950 book The Meaning of Anxiety. While some of the book’s psychoanalytic language does feel dated, overall it’s surprisingly fresh and relevant; while we tend to think of anxiety as a distinctly modern problem, people were plenty anxious 70 years ago, too. Instead of treating anxiety as just a problem to be solved, May digs deeper, arguing that it’s fundamental to human existence and creativity. Through case studies and references to existential philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tillich, May shows how anxiety can be both constructive and destructive. He makes the case that the goal in life shouldn’t be eliminating anxiety, but learning how to channel it towards productive aims. The core message that anxiety signals growth opportunities rather than weakness remains just as needed today.

L.A. Noire. I’m not a big video gamer, but when I do play video games, I’m typically drawn to games that line up with my tastes in literature. My favorite book of all-time is Lonesome Dove; consequently, my favorite video game is the Rockstar Western Red Dead Redemption II. (I even did a whole podcast about it!) Besides Westerns, I really enjoy hardboiled detective novels from the 1940s and 1950s. So it’s no surprise that my second favorite video game of all time is Rockstar’s 2011 detective game L.A Noire. In the game, you play a straight-arrow L.A. cop named Cole Phelps who solves crimes in 1947 Los Angeles. While the chase-and-shoot mechanics feel clunky by today’s standards, the moody atmosphere and intricate murder mysteries hold up beautifully. It’s like stepping into a Raymond Chandler novel.

Out of the Landscape, into the Portrait. Tech critic (and AoM Podcast guest) Nicholas Carr recently published an article exploring how smartphones may be changing our view of reality. While movies and human vision naturally favor wide, horizontal landscape-like frames, our phones force us into an unnaturally vertical portrait perspective. Think Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. Carr argues that horizontal views connect us to the bigger picture, provide context, and check our vanity and hubris, while the phone’s vertical frame isolates us, creating a kind of visual form of solitary, self-worshiping confinement.

Quote of the Week

A fool may be known by six things: anger, without cause; speech, without profit; change, without progress; inquiry, without object; putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends.

—Arabian Proverb

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Note: The following is an excerpt from The Building of Boyhood: A Manual for Parents, published in 1933.

“Some Reasons Why Some Men Are Successful Fathers”

By Frank H. Cheley

They Believe that being a father is the greatest privilege given any man, and so take their fatherhood seriously.

They Believe that all boys are mostly good, but realize they often get bad handling — especially by fathers.

They Are Convinced that it is worth while to study boy-behavior, as well as the stock market, the baseball score, or the trend of politics. They have become convinced that they need such study in their business of being fathers.

In Addition to Providing their families well with the creature comforts, they give them generously of themselves also — often at great personal inconvenience and cost of time and money, but always counting such cost as among their very best investments.

They Strive Always to Make the Right Thing pleasurable and the wrong thing costly, and thereby teach their boys that character is not only desirable, but that it also pays.

They Have Conceived the Idea that, in addition to being comrades with their boys, they must also serve as instructors, interpreters, and guides — even when they find it a life-sized job.

They Never Try to Bluff their boys — they know it is useless, for as boys themselves they were always shrewd detectors of all hypocrisy, and despised it.

They Recognize that even boys have rights and that they should be respected by elders. For this consideration, the boys are always most grateful.

The Realize Fully That No One, no matter how good his intentions, can satisfactorily interpret the Fatherhood of God to boys as a good father, or make plain to them the real message of their Elder Brother, the Man of Galilee, and so set their best selves to the challenging task of religious education.

They Always Try to see the funny side of every situation, and know that their sense of humor saves many a needless tragedy — for the boy himself — and for his mother.

They Graciously Recognize, nevertheless, the fact that Mother can accomplish certain things with the boys that they cannot — so consistently refuse to unload their own rightful responsibilities onto her.

They Have a Clear Conception of what they are trying to accomplish with the boys, by way of training, so that every day’s activity is used to good advantage as definite construction material.

They Believe That Directed Fun is the most effective antidote for evil thoughts and temptations, so help the boys to keep everlastingly busy and happy at something all the time.

They Are Wise Enough to Know That a Few Tools and a place to work are more of a home attraction than temporary rewards, and more desirable than going to the circus or the movies.

They Are Profoundly Impressed with their duty to the boys as well as their responsibility to society, and, as good citizens, try to earnestly discharge both obligations.

They Abhor Weakness in any form whatsoever and refuse to excuse it. “Victory is to the strong,” is their slogan, whether referring to mental, physical, spiritual, or social life and activity.

They Count It Their Sacred Privilege to give the boys, step by step, the intimate information that they need. Best of all, they themselves practice physical fitness and have no patience with a double standard of morals for anyone.

They Recognize, too, the fact that a boy’s books are his “Silent Comrades,” and so take as much pains in seeing that they are as carefully chosen as are their new clothes, that they fit as well, wear as well, and make the boys as self-respecting.

They Are Real Sports, these fathers, and play the old “Game of Life” for all that is in them, but always according to the rules that every boy understands as “being square.”

They Believe in Team Games as an educator in sportsmanship and social living, and insist that the bleachers are rarely the place for real boys, but rather “Every Boy in the Game” is their watchword.

They Are Friendly With Everybody, rich and poor alike. All the boys and dogs in the neighborhood know them and like to hang around them. Boys often want them for “umps” and to be “IT,” because they have confidence in them and enjoy them.

Their Instructions are always of the positive sort — and backed up by personal demonstration too. They despise “Don’ts,” while “nagging” is strictly against their principles. “Let’s do ‘so and so’” is magic medicine.

They Are Invariably Interested in Dogs and chickens and stamps and stars and electricity. They believe that a boy without a hobby is likely to be no boy at all, and that the making of collections is one of the chief joys of being a boy.

They Believe It Is Worth While to know how to build a campfire, and to cook an appetizing meal over the glowing embers, but when it comes to roasting corn or making flapjacks they endeavor to be “real prize winners.”

They Believe in Boy Gangs and, instead of forbidding their sons the privilege of such experience, they keep themselves worthy to be elected honorary members of the bunch, rewarded with the “password,” the “secret grip,” and even the “whistle.”

They Believe That Cleanliness is next to godliness, and practice it consistently themselves — inside and out, to their mutual benefit.

They Abhor Cheap and Vulgar Things, but keenly appreciate harmony wherever they find it; in tone, in movement, line, or color, and in so far as possible, surround their boys with the best of such influences.

They Study to be Good Listeners and are always given to generous appreciation of real merit in whatever realm it presents itself, whether it be in batting up flies, making good examination grades, the winning of a debate, or the exhibition of real character.

They Maintain a Live Acquaintance with “birds and bugs and things,” and love nothing better than to introduce their boys to such simple secrets of Old Dame Nature as they themselves know, and, through such an acquaintance, lead them on to a finer, larger appreciation of God.

They Constantly Remind Themselves that their sons came, honestly enough, by certain “peculiar traits of character,” which they occasionally exhibit, and endeavor to crowd these traits out by strong cultivation of the more desirable ones, rather than the usual process of “repression.”

They Are Convinced That Vital Character is as contagious as the measles, and never lose an opportunity to “expose” the boys, or themselves, to it.

They Do Not Blame the Boys for falling in love with the girls. They did it themselves once, and are convinced that comradeship with the right sort of girls, under reasonable supervision, is the greatest tonic in the world to right living.

They Do Not Compel Respect of their boys, but rather strive to be eminently worthy of it. Consequently, it never occurs to such boys to even think of their father as “the old man,” or “the old gent,” or “the governor.”

They Believe that boys must actually both earn and spend money in order to learn practical thrift; so take pains to provide them with ample opportunity for both, not forgetting to have them give, too, in keeping with their means.

Their Supply of Stories Is Endless. They seek them like precious jewels, with discrimination, of course; but keep them forever their own by often giving them away to their boy friends.

They Understand Perfectly that a broken will is a greater misfortune than a crippled body to a boy, and that directed will is the greatest of all boy possessions, making possible the only real success, so guide instead of drive.

They Believe That the Practice of brutal thrashing belongs to the savage past; that reason and self-control, if started early and followed consistently, are much more efficacious in producing quality boyhood.

They Believe that it is a far greater thing for a boy to make a life than to make a living, and that what a boy is, is after all his only just claim to greatness — and train accordingly.

They Would Rather Be Known any time as a successful father than as a successful business or professional man, because to be so known is to be measured by much the larger “measuring stick.”

These Are but a Few of the Reasons why many boys, grown tall and straight and true, declare that they wish to be men “just like their dear old dads.”

Is Not That Better by Far than having a whole column in “Who’s Who in America,” a cigar named after you, or even a statue erected to your memory in the City Park?

Such Men Are Real Fathers, true to themselves, true to their son, true to their country and their God.

Are You Such a Man?

The Boys Know!

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With the holidays coming up, I’ve been thinking about hot cocoa, how to get into the spirit of the season, and . . . home security.

A 2022 study found that burglaries increase during the holidays due to more people being away from home because of travel and the presence of more high-value items in the home in the form of gifts to be given and gifts received.

One area in which I’m focusing on beefing up security is my garage. I tend to forget about it as a home access point, but criminals don’t. Every few years, our neighborhood gets hit with a string of garage burglaries. People get stuff stolen from their garages or thieves enter the home through the garage and burglarize the house.

Below, I outline some easy measures to take to make your garage more secure.

1. Don’t Leave Your Garage Door Opener in the Car (Duh!)If you park your car in the driveway, don’t leave the garage door opener in it. This may seem like a no-brainer, but people sometimes forget. Burglars often break into a parked car in the driveway, grab the opener, use it, and clean out the garage.

2. Keep Your Garage Door Closed (Double Duh!)Sure, this seems like a no-brainer as well, but people neglect to close their garage doors all the time. An open garage door with bikes, tools, and toys screams “Rob me!” A burglar can run into the garage, take what he wants, and get away, all while you’re unawares, sitting in the house watching Elf.

3. Upgrade Your Garage Door Opener to One With Rolling-Code TechnologyCriminals can access garages by buying a universal garage door opener that works across different older units. They just pull up to houses and click the remote to see if the garage door opens.

Another way thieves can get into your house is by using a “code grabbing” device. Think of your garage door opener like a TV remote. When you press the button, it sends a signal to your garage door receiver saying, “Hey, it’s me! Open up!”

The problem? Bad guys can grab that signal from the air.

Here’s the criminal play-by-play:

When you get home from work, you press your opener.
A nearby thief uses a code grabber to catch your signal.
Later that night, they replay your signal from their grabber.
Your garage door opens, thinking it’s you.
The thief cleans out your garage.

A garage door opener with rolling-code technology prevents both issues. It generates a new code every time you use it. It’s like a new password for every Gmail login, making it harder for intruders to crack.

4. Use Your Garage Door’s DeadboltWhen you’re gone for long periods, use your garage door’s deadbolt. It’s installed on the inside and slides a metal bar into the track, preventing the door from opening. Most deadbolts need to be engaged and disengaged manually. Some openers allow you to set up a system for automatic deadbolting when you close the door.

5. Secure Your Garage Door’s Emergency Release CordSee that emergency release cord dangling from your opener? A bad guy can gain access to your garage by breaking a window or sticking a wire hanger through the top of your garage door and pulling it.

To prevent this break-in method, thread a zip tie through the release lever and secure it. This makes it much harder for a bad guy to release the latch because he doesn’t have adequate leverage from the position in which he’s reaching into the garage. If you need to release the latch in an emergency, pulling down hard on the cord will break the zip tie.

6. Secure Garage’s Side DoorIf your garage has a side door, remember to keep it secured. Install and use deadbolt locks.

7. Secure the Garage-to-Home DoorIf a criminal breaches your garage, ensure they can’t enter further into your home. Install a sturdy door from your garage into your home and deadbolt it at night. Make it part of your 9 PM Security Routine.

8. Tint WindowsIf your garage door has windows, tint them so burglars can’t see inside.

9. Install Exterior Lights and CamerasMost burglars are criminals of opportunity. They’re typically only going to hit homes they can access easily without being detected. The presence of lights and cameras is one of the factors that make your home a less enticing target.

Install motion-activated floodlights next to your garage door and other access points, and combine them with a wireless security camera. I’ve used these Ring floodlights/cameras for years. They work great.

10. Utilize Smart Tech SolutionsGarage door openers have evolved since the 1980s. Most integrate with your smartphone and offer features for home security, like issuing alerts when the door opens or allowing you to check if you left the door open after, say, leaving on a family road trip to Santa Fe (guilty, guilty).

11. Maintain Your Garage DoorRegularly inspect your garage door and its components for wear or damage. Keeping everything in good working order can prevent vulnerabilities that burglars could exploit. Make checking your garage door part of your yearly home maintenance list.

Follow these measures, and your garage will be a more secure and less attractive target for would-be burglars.

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When it comes to weight management and all-around good metabolic health, we most often think about what to eat. But my guest would say that it’s also crucial to think about when to eat,

Emily Manoogian is a chronobiologist and clinical researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Today on the show, Emily shares how to create an optimal schedule for a healthy metabolism by aligning your eating schedule with your circadian rhythm. She explains when to start eating after waking, when to stop eating before bed, the importance of sticking to a set schedule, and what happens to your metabolism when you don’t follow these timing guidelines. We also talk about how to best distribute your calorie intake throughout the day and how to eat to mitigate the metabolic problems that come with being a shift worker.

Resources Related to the Podcast* The Salk Institute * My Circadian Clock app * AoM Podcast #1,016: Unlock Better Sleep and Health by Harnessing Your Circadian Rhythm

Connect with Emily Manoogian* Emily on LinkedIn * Emily on X

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Welcome back to Classical Music 101! In this series, we’re breaking down the world of classical music to make it approachable for the average joe.

In our last article, we toured the Classical era, a time when composers moved away from the intricate, layered sounds of the Baroque period to embrace clarity, balance, and melody.

Today, we’re jumping into the Romantic era — a period when music went from orderly to emotional, from restrained to downright passionate. If the Classical era was a period that can be symbolized by symmetrical, pristine Greek pillars and temples, the Romantic era can be visualized as dark, mysterious German forests and crumbling, moss-covered castles. Art critic Walter Pater got to the essence of the era when he wrote that Romanticism is “the addition of strangeness to beauty.”

Let’s dig in.

The Characteristics of Romantic Era MusicThe Romantic era encompassed nearly the entirety of the 19th century. As in previous musical eras, the music of the Romantic era was heavily influenced by the cultural shifts that occurred alongside it. This was the period that gave birth to philosophers like Nietzsche and Emerson and poets like Byron and Wordsworth. Romantic philosophers and writers reacted against the rationalism of the Enlightenment in favor of an emphasis on imagination, individuality, emotion, and mystery.

Instead of focusing their search for inspiration on ancient Greece and Rome, Romantic artists also turned to the medieval and the Gothic, the supernatural and the sublime. They wanted to connect with forces larger than themselves and particularly found these energies in wild landscapes. Romantic thinkers believed that nature was a conduit to overwhelming experiences of awe — moments that mixed beauty and fear and elevated life into the transcendent.

Romantic composers sought to create and convey those same feelings through music.

The shift from the Classical to the Romantic era wasn’t an overnight break but a gradual transformation in which music increasingly incorporated these characteristics:

Emotional intensity. While Classical music aimed for structure and clarity, Romantic music dove into the depths of the human experience, breaking traditional forms to create music that was emotional and dramatic.

Composers of the Romantic era weren’t afraid to crank up the passion, sorrow, and joy. They wanted listeners to feel the music, whether it was delicate and tender or bold and thunderous. With richer harmonies, longer melodies, and greater dynamic range, Romantic music could capture a whole world of emotion in a single piece.

Around 1844, French composer Hector Berlioz described his response to the visceral, moving effect of listening to Romantic music in a quintessentially Romantic way:

I feel a delicious pleasure in which the reasoning faculty has no share; the habit of analysis arises spontaneously later and brings forth admiration . . . emotion, increasing proportionately with the energy and loftiness of the composer’s inspiration, soon produces a strange commotion in my circulation, my arteries throb violently; tears . . . indicate an advancing condition that is far from having reached its peak. In such cases, there are spasmodic muscular contractions, a trembling of all the limbs, a total numbness of feet and hands, a partial paralysis of the optical and auditory nerves: I cannot see, I barely hear; vertigo . . . a half swoon.

Individuality and personal expression. Romantics extolled the value of human beings, which they believed to have infinite, godlike potential. Romantic composers saw themselves as singular individuals and embraced styles that were intensely their own. Instead of fitting into a particular mold, each composer created music that reflected his unique vision.

Beethoven, who is considered the father of Romanticism, infused his Classical works with personal passion and self-expression and epitomized the idea of the Romantic genius when he wrote in his diary that he wanted to “grab fate by the throat.”

Bigger and bolder orchestras. Increased efficiency in instrument-making during the Romantic era allowed for orchestras to grow in size and scope. While a Classical ensemble might have had thirty to forty musicians, a Romantic orchestra had 100+. (Many of the great orchestras that exist today, in fact, began during the Romantic era.)

Composers used this expanded palette to create fuller music with more dramatic contrasts, vivid texture, and the power to convey the scale of human emotions, from intimate whisper-like moments to explosive, all-encompassing soundscapes.

The rise of program music. While Classical music aimed to be “absolute” — music for music’s sake — Romantic composers began to compose “program music,” which told a story or painted a picture. Inspired by literature, nature, and legend, they created pieces that could represent a thunderstorm, a love story, or a folktale.

Nationalism and folklore. During the Romantic era, composers began to draw on their cultural heritage to add a local flavor to their music. Romantic composers like Smetana and Dvořák incorporated folk melodies and rhythms from their homelands, celebrating their national identities in sound. The result was music that felt deeply rooted in a specific place and people — a significant departure from the cosmopolitan tone of the Classical era.

The supernatural, the macabre, and the mysterious. The Romantic era had a fascination with the eerie and mysterious. Composers like Wagner and Berlioz embraced this dark side, creating music that evokes haunted landscapes and supernatural forces. In the Romantic era, beauty wasn’t just something to be gently sighed over; it was a force that could elicit a shiver of fear.

Key Romantic Era ComposersThe Romantic era produced a ton of great composers, but here are five that will give you a good overview of the period’s ethos and output:

Franz Schubert (1797-1828). If you want to experience the essence of Romantic music, look no further than Franz Schubert. Schubert was an Austrian composer known for his lieder — German art songs that captured poetry in music. His melodies were haunting and his harmonies rich. Schubert’s music is like reading a Gothic novel; it’s intimate and personal, yet darkly beautiful. Tragically, he died young, but he left behind gems like Der Erlkönig, a thrilling song about a supernatural creature pursuing a child. Schubert’s Symphony No. 8, also known as the Unfinished Symphony, showcases his hauntingly beautiful expressiveness.

Take a listen to Symphony No. 8:

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). Hector Berlioz was a French composer and one of the first to embrace “program music” — composing pieces based on narratives or themes. His Symphonie fantastique is legendary for its storytelling and drama, chronicling an artist’s wild, psychedelic journey fueled by obsessive love. The finale’s “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” is spine-tingling stuff.

Give Symphonie fantastique a listen and prepare for a wild ride:

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849). Born in Poland, but spending much of his life in Paris, Frederic Chopin was the poet of the piano and composed almost exclusively for that instrument. Chopin’s pieces are tender, lyrical, and technically demanding. Works like his Nocturnes and Etudes reveal an unmatched sensitivity, while his Mazurkas and Polonaises echo his Polish heritage.

Check out Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2 for a glimpse into his dreamy, intricate world:

Richard Wagner (1813-1883). A German composer who took opera to an epic level, Richard Wagner was one the of the Romantic era’s most controversial composers due to his anti-semitic beliefs. He didn’t just write operas; he created “music dramas” that lasted for hours and were filled with complex themes, mythical characters, and endless musical ideas. His Ring Cycle, a series of four operas, is over 15 hours long and tells a tale of gods, heroes, and betrayal. Wagner’s use of leitmotifs (musical themes representing characters or ideas) was revolutionary and became a staple in film scoring.

Take a listen to the most famous of Wagner’s works, “Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre:

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). If there’s one Romantic composer whose music you probably recognize without even realizing it, it’s Tchaikovsky. This Russian composer had a gift for creating sweeping, heart-on-your-sleeve melodies. His Nutcracker Suite and Swan Lake are household names, but his symphonies and concertos are equally powerful. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture captures the passion and tragedy of Shakespeare’s story with incredible emotional weight.

You’ve probably heard Nutcracker Suite before, so give Romeo and Juliet a go for a taste of something different:

The Romantic era began a shift to music driven by the subjective, but it was still restrained by the forms of past musical eras. In the 20th century, Modern composers would remove those classical standards completely and create music that was abstract and weird. To their period is where we’ll turn in our next and final installment in the series.

Read the rest of the series:

Classical Music 101 — The Origins of an Illustrious Art
Classical Music 101: The Baroque Era
Classical Music 101: The Era That Put the Classical in Classical Music

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In 18th century America, this book was second in popularity only to the Bible.

It was a favorite of many thinkers and leaders throughout history, including Emerson, Napoleon, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and even President Truman.

Yet, you probably haven’t read it.

It’s Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.

If you’re not familiar with Plutarch’s Lives, you’re in for a treat, as today’s episode offers a great intro. My guest, Alex Petkas, found that even though he’s a former classicist and professor, Plutarch’s Lives is still a tough read, which is why he started a podcast, The Cost of Glory, to make it more accessible to people. He does the same thing on today’s episode, sharing the background on Plutarch’s set of biographies and its major themes. Alex explains why Plutarch thought that biography was a powerful way to transmit morals and how the Homeric virtue he had in mind differed from that of just having good, upstanding character. Alex then gives us a taste of Plutarch as we discuss the lives of two obscure Greek and Roman figures. We end our conversation with how to get started studying Plutarch yourself.

Resources Related to the Podcast Cost of Glory website * Alex’s resource on how to read Plutarch’s Lives, with links to the mentioned Penguin editions * Alex’s recommended episodes of the Cost of Glory podcast: + Pompey I: Kid Butcher + Crassus I: Richest Man in Rome * AoM Article: An Intro to Envy * AoM Article: Envy, Ressentiment, and the Inversion of Values * AoM Podcast #949: Unpacking The Emotion No One Likes to Talk About * Sulla * Eumenes * Sertorius * Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West* by Hampton Sides + AoM podcast episode about the book

Connect with Alex Petkas* Alex on LinkedIn * Alex on X * Alex on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In 18th century America, this book was second in popularity only to the Bible. It was a favorite of many thinkers and leaders throughout history, including Emerson, Napoleon, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and even President Truman. Yet you probably haven’t read it. It’s Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. If you’re not familiar with Plutarch’s Lives, you’re in for a treat as today’s episode offers a great intro. My guest, Alex Petkas, found that even though he’s a former classicist and professor, Plutarch’s life is still a tough read, which is why he started a podcast, The Cost of Glory, to make it more accessible to people. He does the same thing on today’s episode, sharing the background on Plutarch’s set of biographies and its major themes. Alex explains why Plutarch thought that biography was a powerful way to transmit morals and how the Homeric virtue he had in mind differed from that of just having good, upstanding character. Alex then gives us a taste of Plutarch as we discuss the lives of two obscure Greek and Roman figures. We end our conversation with how to get started studying Plutarch yourself. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/plutarch.

All right, Alex Petkas, welcome to the show.

Alex Petkas: Great to be here, Brett. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are the host of a podcast called The Cost of Glory, which takes listeners through the Greek historian and philosopher Plutarch’s work, Parallel Lives. For those who aren’t familiar with Plutarch, can you give us a thumbnail biographical sketch of this guy?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. So if you’ve ever been to Athens, there is a monument there that overlooks the Acropolis and the Pnyx. It’s called the Philopappos Monument. And so this was built in the second century AD in honor of one of Plutarch’s friends and clients, who he actually addresses a treatise to. So Plutarch is a philosopher, historian, he’s thought of as a historian today that was living around the time of Seneca, Epictetus. His grandson was a teacher, tutor to Marcus Aurelius. So he’s kind of in that era around St. Paul, first and second century AD. And Plutarch was a local politician, a local kind of leader from Boeotia near Thebes, a little town called Chaeronea. And he lived most of his life there. He visited Rome. This is the period that we’re in is when Rome rules all the Mediterranean, including Greece. So he’s a Greco-Roman, but he’s a Greek speaker. And he was in later life made a priest of Delphi. So he’s a kind of a religious figure too. But what I think is really, he’s famous for is writing this biography that you mentioned, The Parallel Lives. It’s a biography collection. And it’s one of the most famous works of antiquity. And in various periods of history, it was probably the most popular of all the books from the Greco-Roman period in the 18th century in America. Plutarch’s lives, The Parallel Lives, was more popular than Homer or Plato or Cicero. It was just second only to the Bible among ancient works.

So it’s an incredibly popular book. And he wrote these biographies out of a general conviction that this was an effective way to transmit virtue. So he wrote a bunch of other moral essays, but the biographies were kind of the centerpiece of this. And they were written for people like his friend, Philopappos, who was actually a client king of the Romans. He was from Syria and was visiting Athens because I think he was in political exile from his homeland. So it’s kind of written for leaders of society. And those are like Plutarch’s clients, as it were, the people that he taught, that he instructed in philosophy that he’s trying to add value to in his life. But that’s him in a nutshell.

Brett McKay: So yeah, he’s first a philosopher. We think of him as a historian today. And I think most people, when they think about history, they think history is a science where the goal is to create as accurate a description of the past as possible. And Plutarch, he sought for accuracy in his works. But as you said, his primary goal with biography and history wasn’t fact. His main telos was teaching, virtue, morality. So why did he think biography was the most effective way to teach morals?

Alex Petkas: Yeah, well, and I do wanna defend him, and you gave him credit. He is a serious historian, like he does sift through sources, and he tries to discern fact from fiction. But he distinguishes his project from history in, for example, the introduction to the life of Alexander the Great, one of his characters. And he says, I’m not writing history, so my audience will have to excuse me if I do not recount every single battle and every deed done publicly by Alexander, because I’m writing lives and not histories. And a chance remark said at a dinner party or a joke made among friends might do more to elucidate character than battles in which thousands died. And so his goal in writing these biographies, which we could call, we sort of think of as histories, is really to portray the essence of a man, the character, not just what they did, but more importantly, who they were.

And for that reason, he sees his mission as much as anything, one of selection finding the most illustrative examples from the life. So he’ll tell you the narrative of the life of a man, but he’ll try to get the best quotes, the best illustrative anecdotes. He’s a great storyteller. So there’s all these kind of Hollywood scenes, but he tries to stay concise. And the longest of his biographies is less than 100 pages in modern editions, and a lot of them are 30 to 60 pages. But like you said, it was because he thought biography was not just interesting and entertaining, but contained this really powerful moral juice that he wanted his readers to get. It’s why he chose this genre.

Brett McKay: And the way he did it, the book is called Parallel Lives, is he would find someone from Greek history and someone from Roman history and do a compare and contrast between the two.

Alex Petkas: That’s right. Yeah. So, for example. Julius Caesar and Alexander, the greatest all-around figures of either culture, and Demosthenes and Cicero, the greatest orators of the Greeks and Romans. And one of his missions is kind of cultural. He’s writing for Roman readers who know Greek, Greeks who live under the Roman Empire. And he’s kind of trying to help Greeks and Romans appreciate each other. That’s like a kind of side mission of his. And because I think he recognizes this thing that Rousseau would talk about, that heroes are, in a lot of ways, the embodiment of a culture, that they’re the sort of, the way that a culture becomes one is by having the same heroes. And so he wanted people to share their heroes in his sort of meeting of two cultures world that he lived in. The reason that I think this is important, this is this genre of biography is because, and the way that you appreciate heroes in general is by wanting to be like them. This is how they structure society and how they have this impact on your life by producing this emotion that Aristotle talks about called zeal.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Tell us more about Zelos. Is that how you pronounce it in the Greek?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Zelos, Zelos or Zelos. It’s an eta in Greek. So it kind of depends on your pronunciation. So Aristotle defines zeal as an emotion felt when a man sees present among others who are like him by nature, things good and honorable, which he himself is capable of attaining. And Plutarch talks a lot about zeal in the biographies. We might translate zeal, Zelos, as emulation today, although that’s not like a word that a lot of people know the definition of very well. It is where we get the word zeal in English, actually, but it’s that feeling that you feel when you see somebody doing something great, and it inspires you to imitate, basically. And so Plutarch talks about how other deeds or other achievements of men will maybe fill you with admiration. Like if you see a great statue or a well-crafted building, it’ll fill you with admiration, but it won’t necessarily make you wanna go and make a statue or go and build a building. But achievements of virtue, of excellence, like the kind that he depicts in the biographies, that these will have a sort of natural, almost magnetic effect and make you wanna imitate them somehow. And he recognizes this thing that, he’s a student in his philosophical views of the philosopher Plato, who lived four centuries earlier.

And he also quotes Aristotle a lot. And Plato talked about the power of stories, mostly in a bad sense in the Republic, the power of bad stories to shape a bad character. Aristotle was a little bit more optimistic about the power of story, but they both kind of recognize that stories that you tend to gravitate in your own character towards the people that you admire in a story. And so I think Plutarch is kind of basing his whole literary biographical project on that premise that you depict the best people and you’ll make great citizens as a result.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like zeal is kind of the opposite of envy a little bit.

Alex Petkas: That’s how I’d say it. It works. And that’s how Aristotle sees it. And so Aristotle defines envy as if zeal is a pain that makes you want to do great things when you see them being done or being achieved. Envy is the pain that at the fact that other people have achieved great things. So it’s a kind of a negative passive response for Aristotle. The Greek word is thanos which just sounds bad to me but at thanos is always bad in Greek and it’s the emotion that makes you want to see the mighty fall purely for the fact that they are mighty and it’s what Nietzsche would define as uses this French word when he talks about a ressentiment like resentment it’s a passive destructive emotion it’s the tall poppy syndrome emotion that all people will feel the pain of, will feel the results of when they achieve greatness. There’s always gonna be envious people around you trying to bring you down. So for Aristotle and for Plutarch, zeal is productive and creative and envy is destructive.

Brett McKay: So zeal says, you did that so I can do it too. Envy is like, you did that, I can’t do that. So I’m gonna take it away from you somehow.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, exactly. And both are divinities in Hesiod and the kind of early Greek mythology. They like to personify these natural forces. And zeal is one that Zeus uses to conquer the older order of wicked gods and titans. And envy has all kinds of destructive power, causes wars and so on.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned Plutarch wrote these with the goal of helping leaders lead well. What influence did Parallel Lives have on great leaders throughout Western history?

Alex Petkas: Well, He’s popular all throughout antiquity, and he gets rediscovered in the West in the Renaissance. And so a guy like Machiavelli is reading a lot of Plutarch. A lot of the examples that he cites from the prints are from Plutarch. Plutarch, I think Emerson put it best. He was a great devotee of Plutarch. He calls Plutarch a Bible for heroes. Plutarch is in a way like an encyclopedia of great figures from antiquity. And he served that role as a sort of gateway drug for people to get enthusiastic about ancient greatness ever since the Renaissance and even before that in antiquity. And so in the 18th century, I already mentioned his popularity among in the Americas. Another figure that was really influenced by Plutarch is Rousseau, who talked about getting his spirit of liberty from three sources, mainly his father, his country, and Plutarch. And so, Rousseau was reading Plutarch as a young boy and just obsessed with the heroes of antiquity. Whatever you think of Rousseau’s influence on politics.

I think he’s a more interesting figure than a lot of people get him credit for. Alexander Hamilton is another great devotee of Plutarch in the winter of 1777, I think it is, at Valley Forge. He’s a 25-year-old aide-de-camp for George Washington. And during the day, he’s conducting the business of the general. He’s trying to get money from the Continental Congress ’cause they’re starving out there at Valley Forge. But by night, he’s staying up in his tent late reading Plutarch’s lives.

He’s reading the lives of Solon and Lycurgus, these great state founders of Greece and Romulus of Rome. And he’s taking notes in his paybook. We actually have his paybook. He took like 50 pages of notes that winter. And the list, you could go on and on multiplying examples. Napoleon’s supposed to have had a copy of Plutarch often by his bed, and he would reread the life of Caesar before famous battles. And I think the most interesting modern political figure who’s a great devotee of Plutarch is Harry Truman, who was our last self-educated president, didn’t have a BA. And he encountered Plutarch as a young man. And he speaks about in a biography that interview series that was done of him later in his life, he speaks about returning to Plutarch again and again as he was going through his political career. And he kind of used Plutarch as like a library of character, like when he would meet somebody that he couldn’t quite figure out or he’s trying to decide as the executive, this comes up a lot, like who to put in charge of what and who to trust with what sort of duties.

He would go back to his bookshelf and open up Plutarch and kind of thumb through and try to think of who am I dealing with now? Is this like an Alcibiades character? Is this a Cato kind of character? And he would often be able to nail somebody’s personality by consulting Plutarch, who according to him, knew more about politics than any of the books that he’d ever read. So I think Truman’s a really great figure that illustrates how Plutarch is great for self-educated people and kind of lifelong learners.

Brett McKay: No, I like that a lot. And then another big influence. Plutarch had on Western culture, Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays like Julius Caesar based on Plutarch.

Alex Petkas: Absolutely. His play Coriolanus is based on Plutarch’s Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra on Mark Antony. The Life of Alcibiades contains a character, Timon, the misanthrope, so Shakespeare’s Timon. Yeah, that’s probably the most influential Plutarch reader of modern literary history, for sure.

Brett McKay: And yeah, it’s crazy. Such a big influence on Western culture, but I reckon a lot of people haven’t read any Plutarch.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, it’s funny because I think that for all that he was incredibly popular for the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, he kind of went out of fashion in the 19th century. Although even in Lincoln’s day Lincoln was, there was an article written about Lincoln one time where the journalist said, ah, a great devotee of Plutarch is Abraham Lincoln. And Lincoln actually wrote to him and said, as a matter of fact, I never have read Plutarch, but since you published that article, I decided to make up the deficit. And so he’s, acquired a copy of Plutarch and started reading it. It’s enjoying it. So he was so popular that it was just assumed that a leader would have been familiar with him. But he went out of fashion in the 19th century when, kind of like you alluded to at the beginning our education in history started this idea that history should be a science, became more popular, that history was about discerning facts and assembling a kind of true account of things. And even though Plutarch is a pretty good historian, he became sidelined because the whole project that he represented of history as self-help, in a way, history as moral formation in philosophy, just went out of fashion. It was seen as sort of not objective. And I don’t know. I think that our kind of modern sort of bureaucratized academic culture just doesn’t really have a lot of room for the high agency men that Plutarch depicts and just kind of unproblematic admiration of them.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think we’re poor for it.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, for sure.

Brett McKay: So when you take a look at Plutarch’s work as a whole, are there themes that you see that he returns to again and again?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Well, many. The envy of the kind of challengers in the political sphere as a man rises through the ranks in politics, the importance of honesty and justice in one’s dealings. You see so many themes across the board with the wages of vice are often… Like often it’s through a leader’s vice that somebody’s able to affect their downfall by tempting them with, whether it’s wine or women or riches. So yeah, Plutarch is a moralist at heart, but he doesn’t let his moralism cloud his judgment of people. I think that’s one of his great virtues. He doesn’t make saints out of anybody and he doesn’t make villains out of his main characters either, even though he sometimes strongly disapproves of them. And so it’s just a whole kind of library of morals.

Brett McKay: So one theme that I’ve seen that I’m particularly interested in that Plutarch tries to figure out. Is sussing out whether outcomes, whether it’s a war, someone’s rise or fall, whether that’s dependent on virtue or fate. I’ll do some definitions, like what did Plutarch mean by virtue?

Alex Petkas: This is a really interesting question that I thought a lot about because… So Plutarch is admired by a guy like Machiavelli and a guy like Nietzsche who… You know, Machiavelli defines virtue as something like… Well, virtu is what he calls it. Something like prowess or just competence in politics and war. I wouldn’t say that it’s amoral, but it’s definitely not the virtue of virtue signaling. It’s definitely… Like it’s something a little different from being an upstanding citizen, right?

Brett McKay: It’s like skill.

Alex Petkas: Right. Right. And this idea is sort of intention with maybe what you would see represented as a virtue in an author like Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, like the stoics. So Plutarch is also a moralist and his definition of virtue as a philosopher would be some kind of harmony of the four cardinal virtues, maybe like justice, temperance, wisdom and courage. Something like close to good citizenship, close to the philosophical idea you find in Plato and Socrates. But he also, I think as an artist, he’s dealing with these men who really exhibit this kind of earlier almost Homeric sense of virtue. Like in Homer, arete, the Greek word for… Well, what gets translated as virtue a lot. Arete is really prowess. It’s really skill, a competence. And it’s a form of sort of manly overwhelming excellence.

It actually derives from the Greek word for man, aren, just like virtu derives from the word vir in Latin for man. So they both kind of mean manliness etymologically in both languages. And Plutarch has these figures that he depicts fairly and sympathetically who really exhibit that frightening virtue. Like a guy like Alexander or especially a guy like Caesar conquering all of Gaul, outsmarting all of his enemies. Themistocles, another great example of outsmarting your enemies. So for Plutarch virtue, I think as a philosopher, he would define it as something more like being an upstanding citizen, a harmony of soul. But as an artist, he has this earlier kind of primal sense of manliness, which is one of the reasons why he’s been so appealing to people like Napoleon who kind of are looking more for that than for the good citizenship version of virtue.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s this idea that you can conquer fate through your greatness basically.

Alex Petkas: Absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: I mean… Yeah. What did Plutarch have to say about that? What did he have to say about the intersection between this prowess and luck or fate in life?

Alex Petkas: Well, I do like this formulation that the harder you work, the luckier you get. You can kind of increase your surface area for being struck by good luck if you’re a hardworking, virtuous person. I think Plutarch would agree with that in general. There are some interesting figures that bring out this tension. I think that… I look at a guy like Sulla, who I recently did a series on in my podcast. Sulla was an incredibly competent in the old sense of virtue, the virtu politician in the generation before Julius Caesar at Rome. And he was kind of a problematic figure for Plutarch because he’s a sexual omnivore. He indulges in drinking parties after he wins a civil war that he largely provoked. He slaughters all of his enemies in a great political purge.

And yet Sulla was… After he won the Roman… The first Roman civil war, he renamed himself the lucky. And he liked, even though he was incredibly competent, he liked to speak of how the best decisions that he made, for example, were not the ones that he arrived at by calculation or forethought, but that he just kind of intuited and just took on a whim as if he were blessed by the gods. And I think for a guy like Sulla, the more you believe in yourself, the more kind of faith you have both in yourself and in the gods, the luckier you get. There’s something kind of almost mystical about a guy like Sulla. So even though he’s… We don’t normally associate a Machiavellian, if you were conqueror figure like that with great piety. Sulla was quite pious actually. He would thumb his amulet of Venus before battles.

He’s always talking about having dreams in which the gods speak to him. And he’s a lavish dedicator of votive offerings to the gods. So this is kind of… He has this very public piety and I think he really believed it. And so on the other hand, for a guy like Plutarch who’s a philosopher, a lot of what philosophy is supposed to give you, and I think you see this a lot in the stoics too, is this kind of fortification against fate that really the reward of virtue, the greatest reward of virtue is not having success in life. It’s the kind of peace and contentment of mind that you get from cultivating excellence.

Like virtue is its own reward for Plutarch. And he has a whole essay on this, on tranquility of mind that is… That’s one of the upshots of that treatise. Like even if you get exiled, even if you’re being tortured, like there is some solace, the greatest solace of all perhaps in having a good character. And often like that means that some of the best figures, some of the most compelling figures of Plutarch end up dying these tragic deaths. But you can sort of pronounce at the end of the day that they lived a good life nonetheless.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So let’s give our listeners a taste of Plutarch’s lives and then what you’re doing with it on your podcast. So two lives that you cover in your show that I found particularly interesting were those of the Greek Eumenes and the Roman Sertorius. So start with Eumenes first. This guy’s really interesting. Can you give us like a thumbnail biographical sketch of this guy?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Eumenes of Cardia, a town that nobody has ever heard of today and barely anybody had heard of in antiquity. He’s from this backwater at the fringe of the Greek world. But he ends up becoming the royal secretary of the Macedonian King, Philip II. And then after Philip is assassinated, he becomes the royal secretary to Philip’s son, Alexander the Great and follows Alexander the Great on his campaigns, conquering the Persian empire. He goes all the way to India with him. And Eumenes becomes this figure since the fourth century BC and he’s Greek and not a Macedonian, which is important for his story, but he becomes this after Alexander dies sort of tragically very young without designating a successor, Eumenes becomes one of the most important people in the conflicts that arise shortly after. There’s these great wars of succession that go on right after Alexander dies.

And Eumenes proves that he wasn’t just a talented administrator, secretary, numbers guy, bureaucrat, but he’s like one of the best generals of his day. And he defeats great generals like Antigonus and Craterus. He like slays some incredibly mighty men in single combat on the battlefield. I mean it’s an incredible sort of rags to riches guy comes out of nowhere story that… It’s one of the reasons I started my podcast, honestly, because he is such an obscure figure. Even classicists today… When I was reading Plutarch’s Lives, I decided to go through it kind of late in my career before I left academia. I stumbled upon Eumenes and I’m like, oh, I should read this biography probably just so I could say I read all of the lives, even though he’s probably not that interesting ’cause obviously I would’ve heard of him if he were that interesting. But he’s one of the most amazing characters of all antiquity to me. And so I was like, Oh. How good are the rest of the lives gonna be if this obscure figure is so compelling?

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, I’ve read a lot of biographies about Alexander the Great and Philip, and I’d never heard of this guy until I listened to your podcast and I read the biography and Plutarch. And yeah, what I found so intriguing about this guy, he’s an outsider, right? So he’s Greek, but he somehow is able to work his way up to be like the second in command. And when there was all that turmoil about who was gonna take over the empire after Alexander died, like he had that sort of political instinct where he knew how to navigate things so that he could be considered like, oh yeah, this guy. This guy, we’re gonna make this guy in charge.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. I think that it was a great foresight on his part because the Macedonians are… They like to advertise themselves as Greeks, but it’s kind of like us, like the English and the Scots or like think of if you’ve ever met somebody from Glasgow, like they kind of speak English, but they’re kind of unintelligible depending on if they’re amongst their friends. And that’s what the Macedonians were to the Greeks and vice versa. And so as an outsider Eumenes saw that his weakness could be a strength. That if he rose up through the ranks, nobody would ever suspect him of trying to take over because oh a Greek could never rule over Macedonians. I’m just the secretary. I’m just the guy you can trust with your secrets. And so for that reason, he gets very close to Alexander.

He’s very clever and charismatic. You know, he’s probably there when Alexander’s getting tutored by the philosopher Aristotle. Eumenes is keeping Philip of Macedon’s correspondence. So he’s writing these letters to these Greek cities, like he’s kind of Philip’s ghost writer diplomatically. Eumenes gets very close to Alexander’s mother, the very difficult woman Olympias, which I think is a real probably the best evidence of his incredible people skills, that he’s able to preserve good relationships with Olympias, who was an incredibly difficult person to get along with, especially for Philip. But because of that so when Alexander dies, Eumenes is… There’s this conclave that the generals meet in to try to sort out who’s gonna take over or who’s gonna be regent. Alexander has this newborn son, I think maybe he wasn’t born yet, but he was… His mother was pregnant. And so, no, Alexander’s wife was pregnant that is.

And so Eumenes in this conclave of great generals, he says, I’m just gonna be the note taker, guys. So that means he’s in the room as the most important decision is being made. He knows all of the figures. He’s standing on the sidelines recording everything. He has full intelligence of whatever is going on. He’s very, very, very close to power, but nobody suspects that he’s gonna be a big player. And because the regent that eventually gets chosen, Perdiccas, trusts him the most, he ends up giving Eumenes this important job as the governor or the satrap of Cappadocia, some kind of important province in Asia Minor. And he gives him some money and an army and makes Eumenes a military commander after all. And so it’s because Perdiccas felt like he could trust Eumenes and Eumenes, of all the people left standing when Alexander died, he’s not a Macedonian, so Perdiccas doesn’t see him as a threat. And so that allows him to be in this very strong position when the war begins.

Brett McKay: Okay. So I’m trying to think of some lessons we can extract from that for the modern day. One is if you’re a young person, a young man, and you’re starting off in your job at a company, do not downplay opportunities to be like a scribe or like just sit in on meetings where you don’t actually talk, but you’re there just to observe, maybe take notes for the boss. That can actually be really powerful.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. I think that’s a great lesson. And something that I saw… I talk a little bit about this in the life of Pompey, The Great. When Pompey was making his own rise in the chaos of the civil war, he always… He took pains to be close to the most important person, which is Sulla. And one of the things that I heard a venture capitalist talk about one time on a podcast I thought was really insightful is if you’re at a company, you should try to get really close physically to the people who are the real power in the organization. And if you can manage it, either don’t have an official position, just be the boy, the wonder boy who does all kinds of stuff. And people are like, what is that guy’s role exactly? Or, don’t let yourself be limited by your role.

So Eumenes isn’t just the royal secretary, he develops that relationship with Olympias. He develops the personal touch of being the trusted person. Somebody you can go to with secrets. And that’s a great way to rise through the ranks and kind of pole vault over other people who are just working their way through the proper channels.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. And also people skills. It seems like he had that in spades, so develop those as much as you can.

Alex Petkas: For sure.

Brett McKay: So this guy acquired a lot of power in this sort of power vacuum that existed after Alexander the Great, but eventually he had a downfall. What led to his downfall?

Alex Petkas: Well, he finds himself in this position. The wars of succession start getting on and in full swing, Perdiccas gets assassinated and Eumenes ends up sort of, not accidentally, certainly not accidentally, but he finds himself in this coalition of loyalists. So the cause that he kind of represents is securing the legitimate succession of Alexander’s son. This is what Olympias wants. There are other generals that just wanna say, let’s do away with this whole kingdom of Alexander farce and just carve it up and we can all have our own little kingdoms. And Eumenes is leading a coalition of loyalists, and he recognizes the weakness of his position because all of these guys wanna be the CEO and, but he’s the most competent guy on the battlefield. And so he ends up as the de facto general. And one of the ways that he ends up having charge of the whole army is by, he tells the men that he has this dream where Alexander the Great visits him and tells him that if he and the generals will pray for the favor of Alexander, who they kind of regard now, maybe, certainly this was part of Alexander’s myth when he was alive, like maybe he’s the son of Zeus, right?

There’s a kind of divine aura around him. So Alexander visits Eumenes in the dream and says, pray to me and I’ll guide the army. And so Eumenes erects this tent in which the genius of Alexander is supposed to kind of spiritually reside. And he says, well, why don’t we all meet in this tent and burn incense to the genius of Alexander, and he will guide our group decisions. And surprisingly, the generals say okay to this. And so he knows if he gets them alone in a tent, and it’s like a group decision, that he can sort of sway the conversation in the right direction. But he’s dealing with a lot of envy rising as he’s leading this coalition of men, de facto the boss of them.

And he has a few successful battles, and this is happening in the mountains of Iran, amazingly, and there’s elephants involved. It’s just really epic. But what ends up happening is in this battle that he wins tactically, one of his envious subordinates, this guy Peucestas ends up throwing the fight. And in the chaos, even though Eumenes wins the battle, his enemy Antigonus captures the base, the camp, the baggage train, which is a few miles from the battle scene. There’s a big cloud of dust that gets kicked up. They’re like fighting in a big salt flat. And when this happens, essentially Eumenes has this contingent of super elite infantry, the Silver Shields fighting on his side. And these guys are really, really… I mean, they’re very talented like the Navy Seals of the Macedonian army, but they have their wives and children with them.

They’ve sort of been accustomed to getting coddled they’re professional soldiers and since they’re so good, the generals sort of give them a lot of leeway and let them cart around their families with them as they’re fighting, which ends up, I think being a sort of, I mean, it ends up being a great weakness and liability. So Antigonus captures the camp and he captures the wives and children of the Silver Shields, and he’s able to kind of force them against Eumenes once he has these hostages. And they give him up really willingly. These guys just don’t have a lot of principles at this point. They’re old men. And so I think the lesson for me there is Eumenes, I do like to think that he faced his fate willingly, but also he didn’t have subordinates at that point that will really ride or die with him. He was able to command a lot of loyalty through his charisma and his championing of the cause of being loyal to the dead king’s memory. But when you’re the best man on the battlefield and in an organization, sometimes you just can’t trust the people that aren’t ever gonna be able to be committed to that cause as much as you are. And so I think that was part of his downfall.

Brett McKay: All right. Let’s talk about Sertorius. So he’s the Roman in this parallel life. Who was this guy?

Alex Petkas: Sertorius, another obscure figure, but Sertorius, I describe him as the greatest Roman rebel. So Theodor Mommsen, this famous Nobel laureate winner, Roman historian, characterized Sertorius as one of the best of the Romans that ever lived. Perhaps in different circumstances, he could have been a savior of his country, a liberator. But Sertorius ends up on the losing side of the Roman civil war with Sulla. Again, this is the generation right before Julius Caesar. And he ends up retreating to Spain in the end of the civil war in Italy, and holding out for nearly 10 years against general after general that the conservative regime throws at him. And so he’s an incredible inspiring figure of the will to survive and military competence.

Brett McKay: Can you tell us more about what happened when Sertorius got to Spain? Like first, like how did he end up there and how did he manage to build a power base and hold out against Rome for so long?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. So when Sertorius retreats to Spain, basically there’s a incredibly bloody civil war going on, raging in Italy. And Sertorius is on the populist side of the civil war. Sulla is on the optimate conservative side of the civil war, the old aristocracy. Well, one of the last dying things that the populist senate does before Sulla captures the city and has them all executed, is they make Sertorius a governor of Spain. They make him a praetor. And this gives him some legitimate authority. I think they kind of wanted to get rid of him ’cause he was complaining. He’s a sort of junior officer complaining about how incompetently the war effort was being handled. So they’re like, why don’t you just go to Spain? We’ll just give you a job to get rid of you. And they think that he’s not gonna do much good there.

They’re just trying to get him out of their hair. But he manages to win a couple of battles against generals that Sulla sends at him. And he sees an opportunity there because the Romans have, in Spain, by that time, they don’t control the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. They just control the coastline. And mostly they’re kind of exploiting the province for silver mines and plunder. This is just not very scrupulous administration on the part of success of Roman governors. And so Sertorius is like, alright, we’re gonna do this differently. Instead of trying to exploit the natives and extract their silver to try to fund my Roman army so that I can win this civil war, I’m gonna build a bridge with them, and I’m going to recruit them, and I’m gonna not just recruit them to liberate themselves from the Romans, I’m gonna promise them, I’m gonna attract them with the hope of becoming true Romans themselves.

So, he basically recruits and trains a Roman army out of the natives. He kind of promises to make Romans out of them. He trains their boys in Latin and Greek. So he inspires them with this greater hope of eventually taking back Rome. And he gets very close to doing that, which is a story we’ll get to in a second. But I think that the way that he builds this coalition is by rethinking that these natives are not, they’re not a fertile ground for us to exploit, but rather for us to make allies out of. And this is our most valuable resource, the human resource of these people that live in this province. And he treats them with respect. He has this history of being a spy in the Cimbrian wars. He went undercover under Gaius Marius a few decades earlier and learned the native Gaelic language and went incognito and gathering intelligence. So he’s a very culturally flexible person, like so many of the great British empire heroes. And so that’s really the secret to his power is he kind of goes native.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So he kinda like, he’s a fox. He’s sneaky, wiley.

Alex Petkas: Very much. I compare him to the swamp fox, Francis Marion in the…

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Petkas: In the Revolutionary War because what he ends up doing is he not only… Okay, he makes Roman soldiers out of them, but he adopts a lot of native fighting techniques that they’re very suited for, which is to say guerilla warfare. So he says, here’s what we’re gonna do. They’re gonna have the advantage in these pitched battles that happen in the planes. We’re gonna go to the forest, we’re gonna cut off their supply lines, we’re gonna strike and then just fade into the wilderness, and they’re just not gonna be able to do anything to stop us. And he’s incredibly talented at specifically this kind of sneaky form of guerilla warfare where you’re just everywhere and nowhere whenever you wanna be. And because he does this, he’s able to fight off Metellus Pius, one of the greatest commanders of his day. He cuts Pompey’s story short as a young man. He really like spanks Pompey like a schoolboy with these guerilla techniques that Pompey just has no answer for. It’s an incredible story.

Brett McKay: So what do you think are the takeaways for us living in the 21st century and not fighting in guerilla civil wars?

Alex Petkas: I think Sertorius is, and Eumenes alike, one principle that I see in him is he’s a figure that illustrates how important justice is and legitimacy is when you’re playing in these spaces where there’s not a lot of law and order and there’s chaos. Like in a disruptive startup maybe, or if you’re in a place where civil order is breaking down, those are the places where justice is rare and all the more valuable if you can embody it. And so one of the things that Sertorius does is he says, we’re not gonna, we’re not just a rebel army. We’re the true Rome. And so he has elections. He establishes a rival senate and he appoints officers. He takes the time to really legitimize himself through law and order, through justice. Eumenes has his own version of this as well.

So that’s one takeaway. Another is to fight with the tactics that advantage you, always fight on your own terms. He knows that the Romans have this advantage in full frontal warfare, but that’s not the only way to play. You can be creative and use tactics that say, a big incumbent company is not going to be able to beat a startup on speed and innovation often, right? They’re very set in their ways. They have this kind of slow bureaucracy, even though they have maybe unlimited resources, there’s often a deficit of creativity that allows contenders to get advantages over them and in particular circumstances. I think Sertorius really illustrates that too.

Brett McKay: So this guy, Sertorius, rose to power but eventually had a downfall too. What led to his downfall?

Alex Petkas: I think two things, for Sertorius. One is that it was very difficult. It was easy to train the natives to adopt this mode of guerilla warfare. They’re kind of used to it. They’ve been fighting, freedom fighting rebellious war against the Romans for decades, maybe centuries. But his Roman subordinates don’t like this. And he ends up, he has explicit instructions to his subordinate commanders, do not engage Metellus or Pompey in a head-to-head battle. And two times or more this happens and it’s disastrous. So he has to rely on other people to fight like he does, but he can’t really convince them. They’re kind of set in their ways. And this ends up weakening his position militarily. But what ends up destroying him is a coup among his officers, among some of his most trusted lieutenants who were resentful of him.

Again, I think you can see this with both Eumenes and Sertorius, envy is what ends up bringing them down. People think that they could do it as well as he could. So Sertorius is kind of low born, and he ends up getting undermined and assassinated by a higher born man who back in Rome would’ve outranked him. But now that they’re in Spain, he’s having to take orders from this gruff, Sabine, hill country guy. And Sertorius got intelligence about this man, Perperna. People said, Perperna is plotting something against you. We have evidence. And Sertorius just didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t wanna… He’s an incredibly competent military commander, but I think maybe he was a little bit too trusting in politics. He just didn’t have the stomach for the, for really sleuthing out the conniving wickedness of his subordinates. And so they lured him to a dinner party, started a brawl, and in the chaos, they stab him. It’s very, very unfortunate and kind of unworthy ending for the man.

Brett McKay: So the way these parallel lives work, is like Plutarch will spend some time talking about the Greek, they’ll spend some time talking about the Roman, and then he’ll have an ending piece where he does a kind of compare and contrast. What does Plutarch say about these two guys? Like, does he favor one between the two?

Alex Petkas: Well, I think Plutarch’s very fair handed. He says that Eumenes probably succeeded in more difficult circumstances because Sertorius was a legitimate governor of Spain and he had the legitimacy of the Roman authority behind him. And the natives didn’t really have a better alternative than him. Eumenes, on the other hand had to contend with Macedonian egos, these great egoistic barons that are commanding armies and get them to follow him, which he managed to do. Plutarch says that’s a more remarkable achievement, actually. But he assigns a kind of moral advantage to Sertorius because Sertorius, when he kept getting attacked in Spain by these successive generals that Sulla and the regime after Sulla died, were sending, he offered many times over to lay down arms if they would just let him return and be a private citizen and never seek office again.

He didn’t want to keep fighting. He didn’t want to war, but he was constantly refused. They said, no, you’ll get no corridor. We’re gonna hunt you down till we kill you. And so he says, Sertorius is warlike. But Eumenes on the other hand, really did have an opportunity to recede into private life. He could have gone back to being a secretary or retired to some kind of sinecure minor position of authority and not gone on fighting. But Eumenes unlike Sertorius was not only war-like, he was a lover of war. And I think the Plutarch is kind of right there that somebody like Eumenes really stuck his neck out. He really intentionally put himself into a position where he would be commanding armies and fighting for a cause that he found meaningful. And so Plutarch sort of prefers Sertorius on that count because Plutarch’s a man of peace. He’s a philosopher, right? But I think he portrays both of them pretty fairly.

Brett McKay: Alright, so that’s a taste of what Plutarch does in these lives. How many parallel lives does he do in the complete work?

Alex Petkas: There are a total of, I believe it’s 48 parallel lives. He has a few more biographies, four more that are not part of the parallel structure, but so there’s 24 Greeks and 24 Romans.

Brett McKay: For those who want to dig more into this, do you have a translation that you prefer?

Alex Petkas: I have a rundown on my website on plutarch at costofglory.com. It’s hard to find a single volume with all of the lives in a kind of updated modern translation. There are older translations available. I like the Penguin editions. They tend to group them by time periods, so they’ll group a bunch of Romans around the death of Caesar together, or a bunch of Greeks around the Peloponnesian War together. And I think that’s a pretty effective way of reading. Just, I do like the parallel structure and the idea of comparing these two figures that are comparable, but if you’re just trying to get your head around the history, sometimes it does help to just read a whole series of lives that interconnect very concretely. So Penguin does a pretty good job there.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, do you know of any modern biographers that take a Plutarchian approach to biography?

Alex Petkas: Well, I have to say that I don’t know modern biography quite as well as ancient. I’ve been enjoying Brian Kilmeade’s book on Sam Houston lately. I live in Houston, Texas. So it’s kind of close to home and that is definitely a man straight out of Plutarch’s pages. It’s often not the academic historians who work on historical figures, but journalists tend to have a more free hand in taking a moral kind of self-improvement approach to biography. I think of Robert Greene in a lot of ways as a… Even though he doesn’t do biographies, he relies a lot on the biographical tradition, and he’s a great storyteller. He’s drawing out lessons. 48 Laws of Power is good. I really like his book Mastery. My friend Ben Wilson, How To Take Over The World Podcast does a lot of this kind of thing with historical figures, but I’m always open to suggestions. I love to find new biographies. It’s just, it’s not so much in style right now to give you the kind of Plutarchan snapshot of a person. So many of our biographies, the way that people go about it is they produce these 800, 900-page tomes, which are very informative, but often it’s really hard to make it all the way through, I find.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think the historians who do more like narrative history, so the one that comes to mind, Hampton Sides, he wrote Blood and Thunders, the biography of Kit Carson, did some stuff about the war, Frozen Chosen in North Korea. He does more of that. Like he’ll tell a great story, it’s really well researched, but then he’s trying… You kind of get glimpses of these people, warts and all, and seeing how their character had an effect on the events. Another one, S. C. Gwynne, he wrote Empire of the Summer Moon about Quanah Parker. I think it’s another, so yeah, like narrative history, I think.

Alex Petkas: Did he do Stonewall Jackson as well?

Brett McKay: Yeah, he did the Stonewall Jackson biography.

Alex Petkas: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Petkas: You’re the second person in this week to recommend Hampton Side’s, Kit Carson. So I guess I gotta get it now.

Brett McKay: It’s a good one. Yeah, we got, we did an episode on that, so we’ll link to that in the show notes. Well, Alex, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the work you do?

Alex Petkas: Well, costofglory.com is my website. You can find the Cost of Glory Podcast anywhere you get your podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, all the other players, YouTube. I would suggest if people want to get into the Cost of Glory or Plutarch, try one of the more recent biographies I did, like Crassus, the Richest Man in Rome, or Pompey, the Kid Butcher, Caesar’s Friend and then Enemy. Those are two that I did more recently. I always do them in three parts. So start with part one.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Alex Petkas, it’s been a pleasure.

Alex Petkas: It’s been a pleasure myself. Talk to you soon.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Alex Petkas. He’s the host of the podcast, the Cost of Glory. You find it wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find more information about his work at his website, costofglory.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/plutarch, where you can find links to resources as we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. The Art of Manliness website has been around for nearly 17 years now, the podcast for almost 11. And in both I have always had one aim, to help men take action to improve every area of their lives, to become better friends, citizens, husbands, and fathers, better men. If you’ve gotten something out of the AOM Podcast, please consider giving back by leaving a review or sharing the episode with a friend. As always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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“My name’s Maverick. Named after my pappy. He’s the one who said, ‘Hell has no fury like a man who loses with four of a kind.'”

Thus mused the famous riverboat legend, Bret Maverick.

To ensure you’re not the sad sap that loses with a four of a kind, we’ve put together this illustrated guide that lays out exactly which poker hand beats which other poker hands. We walk you through every combo, from the lowly high card to the coveted royal flush. Whether you’re prepping for Vegas or just trying to hold your own at the regular poker night you host for your buddies, this guide has got you covered.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

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Imagination is the ability to form mental images and concepts that don’t exist or haven’t happened yet, think outside of current realities, and form connections between existing ideas to create something new and original.

If the number of movie sequels and the outsized popularity of music made decades ago is any measure, our current age is suffering from a deficit in imagination. And indeed, tests show that creativity, which takes the possibilities generated in the mind and produces something with them, has been in decline for many years now — a phenomenon that has repercussions for our personal edification, professional advancement, and societal flowering.

But if our imagination has indeed atrophied, the good news is that it can be strengthened. So argues my guest, Albert Read, the former managing director of Condé Nast Britain and the author of The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (And How to Have More of Them). Today on the show, Albert shares his ideas on how our imagination can be built back up. We discuss how to get better at observation and how to use a commonplace book and the way you structure your reading to cross-pollinate your thinking and generate more fruitful ideas. We also discuss how to overcome the unthinking habit, resist stagnation as you age, and embrace imaginative risk.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Podcast #432: How to Achieve Creative Success * AoM Podcast #683: How to Think Like a Renaissance Man * AoM Podcast #357: How to Be a Creative Genius Like da Vinci * AoM Podcast #874: Throw a 2-Hour Cocktail Party That Can Change Your Life

Connect With Albert Read* Albert’s website

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Back when I lived in Mexico in my early 20s, I came across a document (its author unknown) entitled “ANTROPOMÁXIMOLOGIA.”

It roughly translates to “the study of maximum human development.”

It’s all about how to develop yourself to the utmost. It contains 20 attributes of individuals who make a difference in the world and do great things. In other words, the attributes that make for high-agency men.

The attributes are simple and somewhat cliche, but there’s something about how they’re written in Spanish that really fires me up. I’ve turned back to my copy of “ANTROPOMÁXIMOLOGIA” several times in the past two decades, and every time I read it, I feel ready and raring to take on the world.

I translated ANTROPOMÁXIMOLOGIA into English below. Even in English, it’s stirring. Makes me want to be more of a self and exercise my agency; to act, instead of being acted upon. I’ve added the Spanish version beneath the English translation for those who want to read it in Spanish, too.

ANTHROPOMAXIMOLOGYFew people reach the full extent of their ability during the course of their lives.

It has been shown that most people do not use more than 5% of their intellectual capacity.

In recent years, many scientists have dedicated themselves to the study of human capacity. This has been termed “ANTHROPOMAXIMOLOGY”:

ANTHROPO: HUMAN BEING

MAXIM: MAXIMUM DEVELOPMENT

OLOGY: STUDY OF

We have all noticed that there are outstanding individuals in the world. What is it that makes the difference between them and the rest of us? This small group (0.5% – 1%) are those who move or impact others.

All the great figures in history have been of this caliber.

Although this possibility is not limited to those who have excelled, every person has the same potential; we all must, and indeed, have the grand opportunity to at least try to achieve the maximum development of our capacity.

To evaluate and analyze our own development capacity, here are some characteristics of those who reach certain degrees of distinction. The knowledge, and above all, the application of these attributes in our own lives will help us to join this select group of achievers.

Here are the attributes that make the difference, “the added value” that distinguishes people who achieve success in their endeavors.

They are never satisfied with their level of development; they always want to exceed what was previously done.
They avoid comfortable situations. They do things they may not like because they understand the importance of doing them.
They have pressing goals. They not only feel they SHOULD do something, but they are driven by their own will that they HAVE to do it.
They never blame others. They solve problems. Any task is a challenge to be overcome.
They like and encourage taking risks. However, they take these risks judiciously and in moderation—never recklessly or without calculation. They evaluate and proceed with tact and without fear.
They have VISION; they can foresee in their minds the outcomes before embarking on the execution of the proposed plan.
They are not slaves to work. However, if they need to accomplish something, they will work 24 hours a day if necessary.
They handle pressures well. They recognize that no one is interested in whether they are nervous or pressured. They know that only they decide what to do with their lives. They need the tension of demand but trust in their decision-making capacity.
They are objective. They are not selfish. They let others receive recognition for an achievement when it is deserved.
They understand the nature of energy. They know that if they apply enough energetic force, they will be capable of moving anything.
They know the meaning of nurturing. They build and nurture others, always leaving things better than they found them.
They understand sociability. They enjoy others but do not depend on them, stepping away from friends and fun if there are more important or higher-priority tasks to handle.
They use and understand self-discipline. They do not let habits, desires, and faults control them because they have developed the ability to control themselves.
They have COURAGE. They are not reluctant because others do not dare to do something. They make decisions and do not hesitate.
They have confidence in themselves. They do not doubt or waver. Their confidence is nourished by action and deeds.
They understand the importance of living in the present. They do not live on the laurels of yesterday nor with the aspirations of tomorrow; they aim for the best in the present.
They do not worry about past mistakes and never base today’s decisions on yesterday’s errors. They expect and live for the success of the present.
They recognize that experiences come individually and not in groups. When they receive training, they apply the lessons to themselves and do not hide behind or dwell on the mistakes of others.
They are quick to forgive, forget, and move forward from where they are. They know how to forgive their own faults.
They understand the importance of empathy; they are capable of interpreting the feelings of others, developing this quality to the fullest.

ANTROPOMÁXIMOLOGÍA (EN ESPAÑOL)Hay pocas personas que alcanzan la total extensión de su capacidad durante el transcurso de sus vidas.

Se ha demostrado que la mayoría de la gente no utiliza más allá de un 5% de su capacidad intelectual.

En años recientes, muchos científicos se han dedicado al estudio de la capacidad humana. Esto se ha denominado “ANTROPOMÁXIMOLOGÍA”:

ANTROPO: SER HUMANO

MÁXIMO: DESARROLLO MÁXIMO

LOGÍA: ESTUDIO DE

Todos hemos notado que hay personas sobresalientes en el mundo. ¿Qué es lo que hace la diferencia entre éstas y el resto de nosotros?

Este pequeño grupo (0.5% – 1%) son los que vibran o conmocionan a los demás.

Todos los grandes personajes de la historia han sido de este calibre.

Aunque esta posibilidad no está limitada a los que han sobresalido, cada persona tiene el mismo potencial. Todos debemos y, de hecho, tenemos la grandiosa oportunidad de por lo menos intentar lograr el desarrollo máximo de nuestra capacidad.

Para que podamos evaluar y analizar nuestra propia capacidad de desarrollo, aquí se detallan algunas de las características de aquellos que alcanzan ciertos grados de destaque.

El conocimiento y, sobre todo, la aplicación de estos atributos en nuestras propias vidas nos ayudará a lograr integrarnos a este selecto grupo de triunfadores.

He aquí los atributos que hacen la diferencia, “el valor agregado” que distingue a las personas que logran el éxito en sus emprendimientos:

Nunca quedan satisfechos con su nivel de desarrollo; siempre quieren exceder lo realizado anteriormente.
Evitan las situaciones cómodas. Hacen las cosas aunque no les gusten porque saben de la importancia de su realización.
Tienen metas apremiantes. No sólo sienten que DEBERÍAN hacer algo, sino que los impulsa la voluntad de que TIENEN que hacerlo.
Nunca culpan a otros. Resuelven los problemas. Cualquier tarea es un desafío que hay que superar.
Les gustan e incentivan los riesgos, pero toman estos riesgos con juicio y moderación. Nunca toman riesgos con descuido y sin calcular. Evalúan y proceden con tacto y sin temor.
Tienen VISIÓN. Son capaces de prever en sus mentes los resultados antes de embarcarse en la ejecución del plan propuesto.
No son esclavos del trabajo, sin embargo, si deben llevar a cabo algo, trabajarán las 24 horas del día si es necesario.
Se manejan bien con las presiones. Reconocen que a nadie le interesa si están nerviosos o presionados. Saben que sólo ellos deciden qué hacer con sus vidas. Necesitan la tensión de la exigencia, pero confían en su capacidad de decisión.
Son objetivos. No son egoístas. Dejan que otros reciban el reconocimiento de un atributo cuando se lo merecen.
Comprenden la naturaleza de la energía. Saben que si aplican suficiente fuerza energética serán capaces de mover cualquier cosa.
Saben el significado de nutrir. Edifican y nutren a otros, siempre dejan las cosas mejor de como las encontraron.
Entienden la sociabilidad. Disfrutan de los demás, pero no dependen de ellos. Se alejan de sus amigos y las diversiones si hay cosas más importantes o prioritarias que realizar.
Utilizan y entienden la autodisciplina. No dejan que los hábitos, deseos y faltas los controlen, pues han desarrollado la capacidad de controlarse a sí mismos.
Tienen CORAJE. No son reacios porque los demás no se atreven a hacer algo. Toman decisiones y no vacilan.
Tienen confianza en sí mismos. No dudan ni titubean. Su confianza se nutre de acción y obras.
Entienden la importancia de vivir en el presente. No viven de los laureles del ayer ni con las aspiraciones del mañana; ellos apuntan a lo mejor en el presente.
No se preocupan por los errores pasados y nunca basan las decisiones de hoy en los errores de ayer. Esperan y viven por el éxito del presente.
Reconocen que las experiencias vienen individualmente y no por grupo. Cuando reciben alguna capacitación, aplican las enseñanzas a sí mismos y no se escudan ni están pendientes de los errores de otros.
Son rápidos para perdonar, olvidan y siguen adelante desde donde están. Saben cómo perdonar sus propias fallas.
Comprenden la importancia de la empatía. Son capaces de interpretar los sentimientos de otras personas, desarrollando al máximo esta cualidad.

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In an age that doesn’t think too much about history, you might be forgiven for thinking that a culture of exercise only emerged in the 20th century. But the idea of purposefully exercising to change one’s body — what folks used to call “physical culture” — likely goes back to the very beginnings of time.

Here to unpack the origins, evolution, and future of fitness is Dr. Conor Heffernan, a Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport at Ulster University and the author of The History of Physical Culture. Today on the show, Conor takes us on a fascinating and wide-ranging tour of physical culture, from the ancient Egyptians, who made their pharaohs run around a pyramid to test their fitness to rule, to the ancient Greeks who used their gymnasiums for both bodily training and intellectual philosophizing, to modern strongmen who became proto fitness influencers, and many periods and societies in between. We discuss how training practices changed over time, where they may be going next, and the evergreen principles from past eras that we could still learn from today.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast #988: Of Strength and Soul — Exploring the Philosophy of Physical Fitness * AoM Podcast #939: What Lifting Ancient Stones Can Teach You About Being a Man * Rogue documentaries on stone lifting in Scotland, Iceland, and Spain * AoM Podcast #39: Eugen Sandow, Victorian Strongman * AoM Podcast #624: The Crazy, Forgotten Story of America’s First Fitness Influencer, Bernarr MacFadden * AoM Article: An Introduction to Indian Club Training * AoM Video: Intro to Indian Club Training * De Arte Gymnastica* * Johann GutsMuths * Friedrich Ludwig Jahn * Turnvereine gymnastic system * The Strongman Project

Connect With Conor Heffernan* Physical Culture Study website * Conor‘s faculty page

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The image of a car dangling over a cliff is one of Hollywood’s favorite go-to moments of suspense. In real life, finding yourself in that situation is quite a bit rarer, but it’s certainly not unheard of. When you consider the number of human-made “cliffs” like highway overpasses and bridges, there are ample opportunities for a basic fender bender to turn into a serious cliffhanger. If you find yourself behind the wheel of a precariously positioned car, the key is to avoid any sudden movements and plan your route of escape with everyone else in the vehicle. Be aware that opening doors shifts a significant amount of weight toward the front of the car, so take caution before immediately bailing out. With that in mind, here’s how to get out alive.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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Skilcraft U.S. Government Ballpoint Pens. My dad was a federal game warden, and when I’d go visit him at his office as a kid, I’d swipe office supplies to take home as souvenirs. The pens at his office were Skilcraft U.S. Government ballpoints. I picked up a box a few weeks ago for old-time’s sake and have been impressed with them. Unlike Bic ballpoint pens that skip, smear, and prematurely stop working, I’ve been able to mark up books in preparation for the podcast without the ink ever faltering. Crafted by the visually impaired since the 1960s, they’re built to Uncle Sam’s demanding specs and will write for a mile and work in extreme temps. Kate would register a dissent on these, saying they’re too skinny and thus don’t feel comfortable to grip. But I don’t mind that; to each their own!

Jaws. The McKay family recently watched Steven Spielberg’s classic 1975 shark thriller. We figured the scares and violence would be modest given its PG rating. Ha! The naiveté! We quickly discovered that a 1970s PG was basically what goes for borderline R/PG-13 today. Saw a barenaked lady get ruthlessly devoured by the shark within the first five minutes of the film. The gore aside, it’s a masterclass in tension, with John Williams’ iconic score doing plenty of the heavy lifting (Spielberg said the movie would have only been half as successful without it). It’s amazing that Spielberg directed the film when he was just 26; what a precocious genius. After the movie, I had to look up whether Quint’s harrowing, haunting story about the USS Indianapolis was true; it is.

Sex Life in Marriage by Oliver M. Butterfield. We enjoy collecting old advice books from the 19th and 20th centuries and recently picked one up that was first published in 1937 and remained popular for a couple decades after: Sex Life in Marriage. I think we were expecting it to be laughably prudish, only to be surprised at just how sound, evergreen, and useful it was. Full of frank talk and practical advice, the book is straightforward without being super explicit and on the level without the attempts to be cool and relevant you’d get from a modern author; the tone is refreshing. It’s like having a friendly midwestern doctor answering all the questions a couple newly embarking on a sexual relationship might have, from how to achieve mutual satisfaction to what to do about PE. With boys seemingly getting their sex education from porn these days, it would actually be a good text for an older young adult to read.

Is Anyone Out There? There’s a conspiracy theory called the Dead Internet Theory that claims that most of the content and traffic on the web is created by bots rather than people. Well, turns out, Dead Internet Theory isn’t so far-fetched after all. This deep dive into the AI takeover of our online world is equal parts fascinating and disturbing. From Facebook’s bizarre AI meme epidemic to clickfarms, it’s a sobering look at how humanity’s becoming irrelevant to the internet’s business model. The kicker? Big Tech doesn’t seem to care since they’re making money from it all. It’s a wake-up call for anyone who thought the web was still primarily for humans. Time to reclaim our digital spaces, folks. Start a blog on your own domain!

Quote of the Week

Do not think it wasted time to submit yourself to any influence that will bring upon you any noble feeling.

—John Ruskin

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At the beginning of the summer, my gas grill bit the dust after 13 years of dutiful service.

So I was in the market for a new outdoor cooking apparatus.

I figured I’d just get another gas grill, but my brother-in-law suggested a wood pellet grill. His family had one and really liked it. I did really enjoy the burgers he grilled up for us on his pellet grill; they just tasted better than the ones I made on our gas grill.

But at first I was pretty dang resistant to the idea.

I liked gas due to the convenience. You just turn the knob, ignite, and grill. I didn’t have to worry about stocking a fuel source, and I didn’t have to worry about my flame going out (my gas grill was connected to my home’s natural gas line.)

My conception of the pellet grill was that it would just complicate things. I’d have to buy pellets and fill the grill with them. While grilling, I’d have to constantly check the grill’s stock of pellets to see if it needed replenishing and monitor the grill’s temperature. Then I’d have to clean out the ash.

I thought of myself as a set it and forget it kinda guy when it came to my outdoor cooking and didn’t want the hassle.

But after a few weeks of fruitlessly searching for a new gas grill that seemed like the right pick, I started to reconsider the pellet grill. So I asked my buddy and AoM’s resident BBQ consultant, Karl Engel, what his opinion of the wood pellet grill was.

Here was his response:

“Oh man, they’re awesome. I love mine. It’s a game changer for your outdoor cooking because they’re so dang easy to use, and they’re versatile. You can grill and smoke with them. I even use mine to cook pizzas. It just opens up a lot of options for you.”

The prospect of smoking meat, in addition to grilling, especially intrigued me. Ever since I did the videos with Karl a decade back about smoking meat, I’ve wanted to get into BBQing, but didn’t pull the trigger on it because I didn’t want to have to buy a separate smoker. So the idea that I could have an appliance that allowed me to both grill and smoke was enticing. And his praise of the wood pellet grill’s ease of use made the idea all the more appealing to this lazy outdoor cook.

I asked Karl which wood pellet grill to get. He said they’re all pretty good. Traeger is a popular brand and will get you good results. I’ve got several friends who have Traegers, and they’re happy with them. I’ve had some mean pork butt smoked on a Traeger.

I then asked him, “Which pellet grill do you own?”

“Oh, I got a Yoder. It’s a beast, but I love it.”

After researching the Yoder, I decided to become a Yoder owner myself. I liked its quality and heft. (This isn’t a sponsored post; Yoder is just the brand I personally decided upon.)

After a summer of cooking meats with my Yoder, reader, I can stand before you this day to testify that I know the pellet grill is the one true outdoor cooking apparatus.

Here’s why you, too, might consider getting yourself a pellet grill/smoker.

The Benefits of a Pellet Grill/SmokerIt’s a jack-of-all-trades (and master of most). Karl was right. You can do pretty much anything with a pellet grill/smoker. It’s the Swiss army knife of outdoor cooking.

You can crank it up to 700 degrees to sear a steak or grill a burger, or you can set it at 225 degrees to smoke brisket low and slow.

I’ve also used my pellet grill to roast veggies like corn, potatoes, and asparagus.

The pellet grill has significantly increased the dinner options in the McKay household.

I still haven’t scratched the surface of what I can cook with this thing. On my to-cook list are pulled pork, turkey, and pizza. Karl says you can even bake cookies and pie with it. (When you bake with a pellet grill, you’re running the temperature hotter, so there isn’t as much smoke, so you’re not smoking your pies. They’ll still have a bit of a smokey flavor, though; it gives your desserts a little twist.).

The one downside of grilling with a pellet smoker is that your grilling space is more constrained; you’re limited to grilling over the firebox since that’s where the flame is at. With my gas grill, I could use the entire length of the grill to grill; with the pellet grill, I have half that.

It hasn’t been too much of a problem, though, at least with cooking just for my family. I reckon if I were to have a cookout for a big group of people, I’d have to break up the grilling into segments in order to get it all done on the smaller space. It will just take a bit more planning.

It’s easy to use. My fears that a pellet grill would be more complicated to use than a gas grill turned out to be unfounded. Modern technology has mitigated many of the former downsides.

Yes, you’ve got to buy wood pellets, but they’re readily available. Most grocery and hardware stores carry them along with Kingsford charcoal. And a bag of pellets lasts a while, so I haven’t had to restock that often.

The grill/smoker itself is super easy to operate. You just load the pellet hopper with pellets. Set the digital control to the temperature you want, and that’s it. The onboard computer takes care of the rest. It will feed the burner with pellets to keep it at your desired temperature. This allowed someone like me, who had never smoked a brisket before, to smoke a first brisket that was amazing. I’m still getting compliments from my father-in-law about that brisket. You don’t have to spend all day tending to a fire to make sure it’s at the right temperature. The computer does it for you.

Most pellet grills also have an accompanying app that allows you to control the temperature of your grill while you’re away from home. You can also monitor the temperature of your meat using internal probes. This feature comes in handy when you’re smoking a brisket because you can keep tabs on when you need to foil it or take it out to let it rest.

Now, cleaning a pellet grill does remain a bit of a pain. If you’re using it regularly, you’ll want to deep clean it once every two to three months. The big thing to clean out on the regular is the ash. If that gets too full, it can cause an explosion when igniting your grill. Also, if you’re doing a lot of smoking, your grates and heat diffuser will accumulate a lot of grease and gunk that you’ll want to scrape off every now and then. One hack I picked up from Karl to make cleaning a bit easier is putting a layer of foil over my heat diffuser. The grease falls on that, so cleaning is just a matter of removing the greasy foil and replacing it with a clean sheet.

It imparts flavor! Ever since I’ve switched to the pellet grill/smoker, everything I cook has this amazing smoky flavor. No more bland, gas-grilled chicken breasts.

There’s also a variety of wood pellets you can use to customize your flavor profile. I haven’t tried them all yet, but it’s cool to know that I can experiment with hickory, apple, or mesquite as I please.

Cooks meat evenly. While I liked the convenience of the gas grill, one of my biggest complaints about it was that it didn’t cook evenly. At least on my gas grill, some burners burned hotter than others, and I’d get a lot of flare-ups. The result was burgers and steaks that were a motley mixture of burnt and undercooked. I’d get a lot of complaints from my family about this.

This was a typical burger night conversation at the McKay dinner table:

Scout: “Dad, my burger is all burnt on the outside.”

Gus: “Dad, is it safe to eat a burger this red?”

Ever since switching to the pellet grill, I haven’t heard those complaints. That’s because pellet grills use convection heat, which circulates hot air evenly around the food. This results in more efficient and uniform cooking, preventing hot spots and reducing the risk of burning or undercooking.

Makes meal prep easy. You can cook an entire meal for your family in a pellet grill/smoker. A favorite in the McKay household is roasted chicken and corn on the cob. I put the whole chicken in the smoker about five hours before dinner, and then about an hour and a half before we eat, I put in some ears of seasoned, foil-wrapped corn. Bam! A meal! (Just add tater tots.) And I tell ya, corn on the cob has never tasted so good.

It’s also given me another option for my personal weekly lunch meal prep. Just today, I smoked some burgers and sweet potatoes that will last me a week.

If you’re in the market for a new grill that can do it all, check out the pellet grill/smoker. I like my Yoder, but you can’t go wrong with a Traeger or one of the other brands out there. BBQ aficionados will praise/criticize various idiosyncrasies in each, but for the average joe, they all pretty much work the same. Which is to say, game-changingly great!

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Do you have trouble feeling comfortable when socializing? Maybe sometimes you do fine, but other times you feel nervous, shy, and awkward. Or maybe socializing always feels like a struggle. Either way, you know how frustrating and even debilitating social anxiety can be. It cannot only lead to avoiding potentially enriching experiences and a failure to make desired connections, it can sometimes be hard to understand.

So what’s going on when you socially misfire?

Here to unpack that question is Thomas Smithyman, who is a clinical psychologist and the author of Dating Without Fear: Overcome Social Anxiety and Connect. Today on the show, we get into the dynamics of social anxiety in both romantic and platonic contexts. Thomas explains what defines social anxiety, how it exists on a spectrum from mild shyness to an outright disorder, and what causes it, from genetics to faulty thinking. We talk about the protection strategies people often use to avoid the pain of social judgement, and why they actually backfire. We then get into what you can do to be more socially comfortable and confident, including a key to effective flirting, why you should try to make a “mediocre first impression,” and how to find your way into what Thomas calls the “warm social world.”

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM series on overcoming shyness * AoM Article: Introversion as an Excuse * AoM Article: How to Overcome Phone Shyness * Sunday Firesides: Want to Solve Your Social Problems? Get Over Your Self

Connect With Thomas Smithyman* Thomas’ website * Thomas’ YouTube channel

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F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

We believe it.

Fall is our favorite time of the year. It’s a season where things are dying and transitioning into dormancy. But there’s also a last gasp of physical and psychic energy in the air. It’s like our minds and bodies know that we’ll soon be holed up for the winter and need to get out and get stuff done — and have a whole lot of fun — before the cold weather arrives. It’s harvest time!

To help you make the most of this fall, we’ve put together a list of 18 things every man should do before the leaves are all the way off the trees.

Complete each one before the winter solstice, and you’ll have created a bunch of memories to get you through the cold, dark months ahead.

Let the fall adventures begin!

There’s something satisfying about plucking a crisp apple straight from the branch. Find a local orchard and take your family to fill up baskets with a haul of fruit that can be bitten into directly or turned into apple crisps. While you’re there, see if they have a slingshot you can use to launch fallen/rotten apples into the air.

In many areas of the country, fall is when state fairs are held. And, by our lights, they’re must-do affairs. Where else can you see prize-winning pigs, eat deep-fried Oreos, and buy airbrushed t-shirts of Tweety Bird all in one day? Take a spin on the Gravitron, try your luck at the midway games (here’s how to win 5 of them), and pet a goat. It’s a sensory overload of sights, sounds, and smells that only comes once a year.

When the leaves start falling, it’s time to break out a big pot and get your chili game on. Better yet, round up your buddies for a chili cook-off (and a debate over whether beans belong in the mix or not). Winner gets bragging rights and a bellyful of everyone else’s attempts.

Sure, it might seem childish, but who says being a grown man means you can’t have a little fun? Raking leaves is a necessary evil of homeownership, but it comes with a built-in reward. Once you’ve got a decent pile, take a running start and dive right in. The satisfying crunch, the earthy smell, the feeling of being covered in foliage — it’s fall distilled into one light-hearted act.

Fall and football go hand-in-hand. There’s a raw energy to game day you can’t replicate — the anticipation in the air, the sea of team colors, the collective holding of breath as the ball sails towards the end zone. This season, make it a point to catch a game in person, whether it’s your college alma mater or the local high school team. Even if you’re not a die-hard fan, the sheer spectacle of it all is worth experiencing.

Don’t miss out on the year’s only chance to turn produce into luminescent, hand-carved art. Rather than picking up your orange gourd from the bins outside a big box store, head to a veritable pumpkin patch to make your selection. Then, when it’s time to carve, mix things up and challenge yourself a bit. You can find plenty of pumpkin carving designs online, including these 6 manly stencils we’ve got available here. And don’t forget to roast those pumpkin seeds. Waste not, want not, gentlemen.

Fall’s prime time to get out in the field, whether you’re after deer or ducks. Hunting requires patience, skill, and a healthy dose of respect for the great outdoors. If your hunt is a success, you’ll have a freezer full of meat that will last you all winter. And if you come home empty-handed? Well, that’s why they call it hunting. Pursuit is happiness!

As the air gets crisp, it’s time to build up that woodpile. Grab your maul or splitting axe and get to work. There’s something truly satisfyingly about taking an axe to a log — the rhythmic thwack and the gratifying crack as it gives way. Not only does splitting firewood get you practical results, but it’s also a good workout to boot. Be sure to read our guides on how to correctly split firewood and how to stack and store it.

Growing up, one of my family’s fall traditions was to put together a puzzle featuring the American folk art of Charles Wysocki. Many of his paintings depict fall scenes of harvest time in turn-of-the-20-century New England. My idea of what fall should look and feel like arises from these paintings. And come each September, putting together a puzzle emblazoned with one of them puts me in the mood for autumn.

Fall’s the perfect time to dust off the tent and head into the wild. The bugs are mostly gone, the foliage puts on one hell of a show, and the cool air means that you can hike without sweating up a storm and that the warmth of a campfire will be optimally satisfying. To really immerse yourself in fall’s full beauty, go backpacking (here’s how to take your first trip if you’ve never been!).

Don’t just watch football; play football. Round up some friends, mark out end zones in somebody’s backyard, and toss the ol’ pigskin around. It’s not about gridiron prowess; it’s about having fun and getting some of that crisp, fresh air smell on you. A backyard football game is a great way to start your Thanksgiving celebration — it works up an appetite! Make sure to have some ibuprofen ready afterward.

Nothing says fall quite like bumping along in a wagon full of hay. Many apple orchards and pumpkin patches offer hayrides, so you can kill two birds with one stone by picking produce and getting in a hayride on the same day. Or, if it’s close to Halloween, take a haunted hayride (be sure to watch out for those saw-less chainsaws!).

While Americans may not be aware of this autumnal tradition from the U.K., it’s worth giving it a try. Conkers is a game played by British children in the fall. Hunt down some horse chestnuts, drill a hole through them, and thread them on a string: you’ve now made a conker and are ready for conker combat. Take turns swinging your stringed nuts and trying to smash your opponent’s conker.

Fall’s the perfect time to gather around a fire. Just sitting around a campfire is highly enjoyable, but toasting some food on a stick adds to the fun. Invite your buddies over to your backyard firepit, roast up some hot dogs, debate the perfect marshmallow toasting technique, and assemble those s’mores.

Thanksgiving is the biggest autumnal holiday in the U.S., and eating turkey is its main event. If you’re tasked with the important job of carving up the bird, rather than fumbling around and ending up with a mangled pile of meat, impress your family by creating a platter of cleanly cut pieces. We show you how in this classic Art of Manliness guide.

Fall’s the best season to break out the cords. Donning that warm, cozy, ribbed fabric just feels right when the leaves start to turn. Whether you go for a classic jacket or a pair of pants, corduroy adds a touch of 1970s college professor charm to your look. If you’ve been hesitant to embrace the corduroy, read our complete guide on how to wear it well.

As the nights get longer and colder it’s time to embrace your inner Dane and get hygge with it. What’s hygge, you ask? It’s that cozy feeling you get when everything’s just right. Think warm socks, a crackling fire, and a steaming mug of hot apple cider. This fall, create your own hygge haven. Throw some extra blankets on the couch, light a few candles (yeah, a dude can enjoy scented wax), and settle in with a good book or your favorite show. And if anyone gives you grief, just tell ’em you’re practicing an ancient Scandinavian art. They can’t argue with that.

Fall offers the year’s last arboreal hurrah before everything goes mono-color, so drink in the foliage fireworks while they last. Hop in the car, hit the back roads, and drive to some scenic lookouts. New England’s the classic spot for leaf peeping, but anywhere with deciduous trees will do.

Big shoutout to The Strenuous Life members Stephen H., Joel T., Zach S., Michael M., Will K., and Tim D. for helping me generate some ideas for this list. TSL members recently completed a StrenGames — a competition amongst members — where the challenges were based around our 18 Things Every Man Should Do This Summer list. Maybe the next StrenGames should have an autumnal theme.

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With over 300 million books sold, Louis L’Amour is one of the bestselling authors of all time. All 120 of his books remain in print. But the greatest story L’Amour ever penned was his own. He spent the early part of his life traveling in a circus, working as a lumberjack and miner, circling the world as a seaman, winning over 50 fights as a professional boxer, and serving in WWII.

Today on the show, I talk about both the personal and professional aspects of Louis’ life with his son, Beau L’Amour. We discuss some of Louis’ adventures and the autodidactic education he gave himself by way of a voracious reading habit. We then turn to how Louis got started as a writer and how he cut his teeth writing for pulp magazines before breaking through as a Western novelist and becoming a blockbuster success in his sixties.

Resources Related to the Podcast Louis L’Amour works mentioned in the show: + Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir + Hondo + Yondering + No Traveller Returns + The Walking Drum + Last of the Breed + Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures*, Volume 1 and Volume 2 * “Holding Her Down” by Jack London * AoM Article: How and Why to Become a Lifelong Learner * AoM Article: The Libraries of Famous Men — Louis L’Amour

Connect With Beau L’Amour* The Louis L’Amour website * Beau’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. With over 300 million books sold, Louis L’Amour is one of the best-selling authors of all time. All 120 of his books remain in print, but the greatest story L’Amour ever penned was his own. He spent the early part of his life traveling in a circus, working as a lumberjack and miner, circling the world as a seaman, winning over 50 fights as a professional boxer and serving in World War II. Today on the show, I talk about both the personal and professional aspects of Louis’ life with his son, Beau L’Amour. We discuss some of Louis’ adventures and the autodidactic education he gave himself by way of a voracious reading habit. We then turn to how Louis got started as a writer, and how he cut his teeth writing for Pulp magazines before breaking through as a Western novelist and becoming a blockbuster success in the ’60s.

After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/l’amour.

Alright, Beau L’Amour, welcome to the show.

Beau L’Amour: Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: So you are the son of the famous Western author, Louis L’Amour and we’re gonna find out he was more than just a Western author today in this conversation. I know a lot of our listeners are familiar with your dad and his prodigious work, but for those who aren’t familiar with Louis L’Amour can you give us a thumbnail sketch of his career? What was he famous for and how many books did he publish?

Beau L’Amour: Sure. Dad was one of the bestselling authors of the 20th century. He’s wrote maybe 200, 250 short stories, novels, over till today, we’ve sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 330 million copies.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Beau L’Amour: We’ve never had a title go out of print, that’s actually even more impressive.

Brett McKay: That is.

Beau L’Amour: And dad’s still in probably the top 50 authors in the world when it comes to yearly sales.

Brett McKay: That’s impressive. And he was mostly famous for his Westerns.

Beau L’Amour: That is correct. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then I think some people might… Some of his work, his stories and novels, they got turned into TV shows and movies, correct?

Beau L’Amour: About 40 of them, if you include all the TV adaptations. Dad, he did a lot of business in early television in the 1950s and ’60s, so he sold a lot of stories as episodes to Tales of Wells Fargo and a really, really, really early TV series called Cowboy G-Men, if you can believe that, was really one of the first television series that was ever produced.

Brett McKay: And one Western that people probably seen, it’s a John Wayne one, Hondo.

Beau L’Amour: Yes.

Brett McKay: That was based off of a short story by your dad, correct?

Beau L’Amour: That was, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When did you realize growing up that your dad was a famous bestselling author?

Beau L’Amour: He wasn’t really famous when I was a kid, so dad really started to hit in the mid 1970s, like the big bestseller kind of things, autograph lines around the block and that kind of thing. And so when I was a child, when I was a very young teenager he was still kind of struggling. And we were… We always lived comfortably, but he had to write three or four books a year to let us do that. And by the mid 1970s, the number of backlist titles, the number of titles that were still in print and still in distribution kind of reached critical mass. And every time he had a new book come out, it boosted sales on everything in his backlist. And so there was… Since the backlist was just bigger and bigger and bigger and nothing was going out of print, the money turned up, the sales turned up and it became quite a thing, but he was in his 60s, late 60s by that time.

Brett McKay: Well, and he had been writing a long time too, like since the ’30s.

Beau L’Amour: Yes, yes.

Brett McKay: So that’s a great example of sometimes a career success, it takes a long time to develop, it’s not gonna happen overnight. He was not an overnight success.

Beau L’Amour: He was not an overnight success, not at all.

Brett McKay: So your dad, he wrote incredible stories, but I think his greatest story was probably the life he himself lived and he tells this story in his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, it’s one of my favorite books. ‘Cause every time I read it, I just get super inspired, I also feel convicted, I’m like, “What am I doing with my life? I’m wasting it. I need to be more like Louis.” So let’s talk about your dad’s life ’cause it’s really fascinating and I wanna offer kind of a thumbnail sketch of his early adventures. So your dad was born in North Dakota in 1908, his family faced some financial difficulties starting in the 1920s, so they pulled up shop and went on this eight year journey, crisscrossing America, looking for work and trying to start a new life. And during that time, Louis, like he was only 14 or 15 years old, he got separated from his family somehow. There was some kind of miscommunication about where he needed to be.

So he was looking for them, but he was also working, he skinned cattle, he bailed hay, joined a circus, he rode the rails a bit as a hobo and worked in some mines and then he even went out to sea as a merchant seaman. And he was also doing some boxing during this time.

Beau L’Amour: He started boxing back in North Dakota.

Brett McKay: Okay.

Beau L’Amour: So his older brothers were pretty good boxers, he had friends that introduced him to a couple of professional boxers. And so as a kid, he was a pretty good amateur fighter, I don’t know when his first professional fight was. I know a very, very early professional fight was when he and his parents and adopted brother got to New Mexico they were out of gas money and he and John, his adopted brother, both went on the ticket of this local fight and there’s actually posters for this fight and everything else. My dad was fighting as Jack Leonard because all of the cool fighters in the early ’20s were Jewish, and he faced a young guy from Mexico who he later learned had had something like 200 fights in Mexico. He said, “I never saw so many gloves in my life.”

But they got their gas money and were able to continue on.

Brett McKay: After one of his stints working the mines, he heads to California, what does he do at this point?

Beau L’Amour: Yeah, he went out to California and he met some people, he made some connections through boxing with some people who were in the movie business. And he kind of got to know some of those people as a wannabe or up and coming boxer, but he really wanted to go to sea. So went down to San Pedro, signed up to get aboard a ship, but it was in the middle of a time, I can’t remember if there was a strike or something was going on and the opportunities for shipping off the West Coast were not particularly good. I think he said there was something like 400 seamen ahead of him on the list. And so he lived on the streets of San Pedro in very, very rough conditions, sleeping in lumber piles and abandoned houses and things like this for three or four months. And just accidentally got a ship to the Far East and it was a ship that nobody really wanted to sign onto, it was kind of a crumbling ship.

But he went all the way around the world, Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaya, Egypt, Arabia, and got off of it in New York, spent some time in New York and then got on another ship headed for Los Angeles, down the coast through the canal and to Los Angeles, that was a tanker.

Brett McKay: And all these experiences that he had, riding the rails, the mine work, going out to sea, this showed up later in his writing, like he wasn’t doing all this stuff to get fodder for stories. But later, when he did start writing, he called upon these firsthand experiences.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. He was just trying to work. The idea of going to sea wasn’t so much for the adventure of it, but if you got on a good ship, you could stay on that crew for years. And he was looking for something that would basically allow him to just relax about having to make money just to have a job that he could keep doing.

Brett McKay: As I read about this part of your dad’s life when he was a teenager and his early 20s, it reminded me a lot of Jack London. Like Jack London rode the rails, he was a boxer, he went off to sea, he was the Seawolf. Was your father a fan of Jack London?

Beau L’Amour: He was, very much.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Do you think he was like purposely trying to follow the steps of the Seawolf or it was just like, that’s just what boys did back then.

Beau L’Amour: No, I think there may have been a… There was certainly a lot of other romantic literature that dealt with going to sea. It was also the only way that you could possibly see the world, number one, no air travel, number two, in my dad’s case, no money. So you had to do it as a worker, that was a way of working your way to foreign places. And certainly in my dad’s day, if you had been to Canada or Mexico, that was as foreign a place as an awful lot of Americans ever got. And certainly if anybody traveled farther than that on vacation, they were amongst the one tenth of 1% of the wealthiest people in the country.

Brett McKay: Right.

Beau L’Amour: So not only because it was expensive, but because it took a lot of time, LA to Yokohama, the first leg of my dad’s journey west from San Pedro was, I think, 22 days. Travel was just very slow, a liner would do it, a passenger liner would probably do it in five, but even so, maybe seven. So it was a different time, but I think he did have a vision of wanting to do certain things, but more of it was financial, he wasn’t really looking for adventure. Just on the Jack London front, London wrote an essay, you couldn’t really call it a short story, but he wrote a piece on riding the rails called Holding Her Down. And it is one of the best examples of the kind of work you had, you didn’t just jump on a boxcar and go someplace. It’s like as you started into any place where the train stopped, you had to get off while the train was still moving and then run as fast as you could to get to the track where the train was gonna depart.

Because if you were on the train while it was stopped, the train crew would throw you off. And so you had to get off while the train was still moving and you couldn’t get on until the train was moving because the train crew had to be on the train. And so it was quite a physical adventure, it wasn’t… And I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this, but you don’t sleep in a boxcar while the train’s moving, the ride is horrific, you will beat yourself to a concussion if you do that. And so a boxcars ride very, very hard and you wanna be in them with your knees broken a little bit, and you’re just like… It’s almost like riding a horse in some cases. So it’s a very physically demanding way of travel.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and for sure. So after your dad’s that one stint at sea, he comes back and then in his early 30s, he served in World War II.

Beau L’Amour: That is correct.

Brett McKay: That’s pretty old for a serviceman, were they calling him like grandpa?

Beau L’Amour: He was old. Yeah, well, they were calling… So as the… Before the war, but as it looked like the United States was gearing up its military, he tried to get in the Navy because he’d had not like full-time professional experience in the merchant marine, but he’d had one decently sized trip to sea and one extraordinarily long trip to sea and figured that he knew something about that and that was something that he’d like to do. But he wanted to be an officer and the Navy wasn’t accepting officers who didn’t have any college and so he backed off of that. The first draft call up came and it included, gosh, everybody under a certain age, I don’t know what it was, but he was definitely in that category, and he went in and they basically looked at his mouth and they looked at his heart and they decided he wasn’t soldier material. So he didn’t have good teeth and they didn’t wanna spend the money fixing soldiers teeth in those days.

And they thought he had an… He did have kind of an enlarged heart because he’d been an athlete, he’d been a prize fighter and he was drinking a lot of coffee. So I think his pulse was very fast and they were sort of like, “Oh, you’re at death’s door, you’re gonna have heart problems, go home and deal with it.” And he went and saw another doctor and the doctor said, “You’re a boxer, right?” “Yes.” “You drink a lot of coffee?” “An awful lot of coffee.” Well, he’s like, “Stop it with the coffee and you’ll be fine.” And so then Pearl Harbor happened and everybody was called back, anybody that hadn’t been taken. And at that point, all you had to do is have a pulse, they didn’t care. And so he went, he was drafted into the army, he went in as an officer candidate to the tank destroyers. So he was in officer’s candidate school for the tank destroyers, which was kind of a special warfare outfit. They were definitely the prestige armor outfit in the US army.

He got a very, very good education. They had lots of map reading, lots of artillery training, lots of stuff that was pretty sophisticated. And as an aside at this point, my dad’s interest in doing research and getting the locations right and everything else, if he hadn’t been to a location, my dad was really able to extract a tremendous amount of info from a map and a lot of it came from his artillery and tank destroyer training. So while he was in the tank destroyers, he turned 34, there was a cutoff that they established later on after he had… This was very early in the war and all these different rules were being figured out, they didn’t quite know what age they wanted different people. But anyway, by the time he graduated from tank destroyer school, they didn’t want combat soldiers who were over 34. So they sent him on, he went into the transportation corps.

And in the transportation corps the first thing he did was he went up to the upper peninsula of Michigan in the winter to test winter gear, they thought he was equipped for that because he was from North Dakota. Luckily for him, he spent a fair amount of the time that he was up there coaching a Golden Gloves team an Army Golden Gloves team, so he spent a lot of that time in Milwaukee and Chicago. And then they sent him west to San Francisco, where he was supposed to be a cargo control officer in San Francisco sending Army Cargos out to the Pacific, that lasted a really short period of time. He was hanging around the office late one Friday and an order came in for a bunch of officers and they just said, “You, you, you, you.” He was one of them, get on this train and they put him on this train and I don’t think anybody had any idea what they were doing. The train went all the way south to Los Angeles, all the way east into Georgia, all the way up the east coast of the United States.

And it was just collecting soldiers the whole way, very secretive. Well, these were the, like the last wave of guys that were gonna go over for the invasion of Normandy. And so he got to England and during the invasion, he was a… Like a traffic control officer putting stuff on ships in England. That sounds kind of passe, but wow, I went over and looked at the area where they did this, they would have the ships in a place called Portland Island, in this case. And parking lots full of trucks and tanks and landing craft, whatever they were using up this long causeway in England itself, not really on the island. And if you didn’t sort out exactly what had to go on the ship before it hit that causeway, there was no room to straighten anything out, it was an incredible job. They had vehicles backed up for dozens of miles and everything had to be perfect or the wrong stuff would arrive at the wrong time.

And then when he got to… Finally got to France, he was in charge of a platoon of gasoline tanker trucks that were delivering fuel to the front lines.

Brett McKay: Okay. So first part of his life, that first part of his life, lots of adventures, picking up experiences that he would put into his stories later on when he started writing. And then also he was just talking to people and getting stories from the people he talked to. And then another thing he did, the other thing I just, I find so inspiring about your father’s life, not only the adventures he went on, he was also just reading all the time when he was on these adventures. He was a prodigious reader and this he accounts all the stuff that he reads in Education of a Wandering Man. In the back of the book, he has this, a list of bibliography of books and plays he read from 1930 to 1935. And it’s just, it’s a ton. Like it just… It’s like pages and pages of stuff he read, everything… Okay, just kind of looking at it, Frederick Nietzsche, he read Ralph Waldo Emerson, a lot of Eugene O’Neill, he was reading Voltaire.

Let’s see here, Upton Sinclair, he would just, he’d also read detective stories. Like he was not… It seems like he wasn’t very discriminatory on what he read, he was just like, “If I got something to read, I’m gonna read it.”

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. Well some of it was what was available, some of it late… If you look at a lot of the titles in the late 1930s, he had a job. It wasn’t much of a job, it didn’t really pay him very much, but he had a job reviewing books for a newspaper in Oklahoma. And so he would just read whatever they sent him and they let him keep the books. So he really did it for that. And so, yeah, he just… Anything he could get his hands on. I mean, if you were to go to my mother’s house today, you would see a library with, I don’t know, last time we bothered to count we were over 17,000 books.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah.

Brett McKay: That’s like a bookstore. That sounds like Larry McMurtry. Like Larry McMurtry had that giant book collection that he turned into a bookstore.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah, no, it was the only thing that my father was the least bit materialistic about. He just loved his books and collecting books and having books on different subjects and very, very wide ranging subjects and incredible collection of weird periodicals too. So all kinds of magazines on like strange aspects of science and nature and history and things like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. My favorite books that he would sometimes talk about were these like really obscure books about specific locations in the Southwest. Like there’s probably only a 100 printed, but he wanted to learn about the history of this particular area of New Mexico. I like that style there.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Do you think there are any writers or philosophers who had a big impact on his thinking? If you look at his work and his writing?

Beau L’Amour: No, I’m gonna say, look at what today people would call like the great books. They’re real classics, the Greeks, things like that. Yes, for sure. He was very interested in the development of science and philosophical thought in the Renaissance era. And then in the 1930s, a lot of the people who were making the world at that time, so he read Marx and Engels and all those. It’s like think what you want about them. But they were definitely the most very historically important writers. And so, yeah, I don’t know too many that I would say too many philosophically or something like that. But he was definitely interested in everything he could get his hands on.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think the big takeaway from that his reading is you don’t need to go to school to get an education. I think 10th grade was his last bit of education.

Beau L’Amour: He didn’t even finish the class.

Brett McKay: Didn’t even finish 10th grade. But he… I mean if you look at his reading, like he knew a lot and it enriched his life. Again, your education doesn’t end with schooling. You can keep reading like he kept reading ’till the day he died.

Beau L’Amour: Absolutely. Absolutely. The downside of not getting schooling is you don’t get a chance to talk about your ideas with other people who’ve been exposed to the same ones which he had issues with. Another one of… I just mentioned Marx, one of the interesting things about his life, especially in the 1930s, was at least you could get the commies to talk to you. It’s sort of like you could throw around ideas with these people and if you were out in the middle of a bunch of… With a bunch of laborers, you could always end up finding somebody who could talk about kind of communist philosophy and things like that. Whereas you couldn’t find that other places and those people couldn’t talk about anything else, is the only thing they’d really been educated in a lot of times.

And there were some subjects that came up like that history everywhere, but it was always local. You could always find somebody who would tell you about the local history. You might not be able to talk to them about the impact of the French and Indian War or something like that. But you could get ’em to tell you about when this area was settled or this thing happened or what their great-grandfather did. And so these were the places where he had an opportunity to involve himself with other minds as a young man. Whereas a lot of the stuff he studied was just more… He was kind of on his own. It was just whatever he had the opportunity to read, he had the opportunity to read.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So just looking at this bibliography he wrote in Education of a Wandering Man, it seemed like each year he was reading about 120 books a year. I mean that’s impressive. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So when did your dad decide to become a professional writer and what was his first work like?

Beau L’Amour: Well, he had worked as a sports writer in Prescott. He had written a couple of things when he was there. He wrote a column on boxing for a newspaper in Oregon for a while. I mean, these are… This is not impressive writing even for sports. I mean sports writing in those days was actually kind of a high art. And this didn’t reach even the low art of sports writing. But he was doing it. Later on, I’m gonna guess he got back together with his parents and they all moved to Oklahoma. They moved into a little farm that his oldest brother owned and he lived there with him throughout the 1930s. And I think once they stopped in a particular place, he really had to do something with his life. He was getting older and he was in the house with his dad who was always a really hardworking guy and he needed to do something.

And he didn’t have any skills. He didn’t have any other skills. And so he had been writing poetry for a while. I mean, to a certain… So the thing about poetry is because the meter and the rhyme are like mnemonics. If you got a mind like my dad, you can write it without any paper. The meter and rhyme help you remember what you’re doing. And so he had been doing that. I think he started lecturing on his travels and things of that sort. And he wanted to be someone. And I think at first he more wanted to be someone than he wanted to be a writer. But then he realized he had to kind of sit down and do it. And he wrote a series of stories that now exist in the book Yondering and the novel No Traveller Returns.

This is… I kind of jokingly call this Louis 1.0. This was the first version that he had of his life as a writer. And they were adventure stories, but they were personal and they were realistic. They weren’t overly romanticized or melodramatic. And he got pretty good notices for them. He got good reviews, he was in good magazines, but the type of magazines he was in were so good. They didn’t pay anything. They were like literary journals and things like that. And that wasn’t gonna cut it. And so eventually he started writing more melodramatic stuff for the Pulps. Now maybe I should kind of talk about the magazine market, like what the Pulps really were.

Brett McKay: Yeah, let’s talk about the Pulps. ‘Cause like a lot of, I mean a lot of famous writers that we know about today, like they got their start in the Pulps, Dashiell Hammett. All these guys. So tell us about the Pulp business and how did the Pulp Magazine business kind of craft or shape your dad as a writer?

Beau L’Amour: Okay, so first off, kind of the business of it, there were really three different types of magazines that were published in the early 20th century, even the late 19th century. And they were what they called the literary magazines, which is what my dad had been publishing in. And those were magazines that came out of college campuses and various literary, some of ’em were literary journals, things like this. They didn’t pay anything, but they often had very good writing. Then there were the slick magazines. They’re called slick because the paper was shiny and slick. So it could take colored advertisements and those magazines generally published fiction, but kind of a minimum of it. And they paid very, very well. But they would take forever to figure out what story they wanted to have in what magazine. They always wanted a very artful collection of stories in each magazine.

And they only paid when they actually published. So they could take your story mess around with what edition it was gonna go in, what month it was gonna appear, and keep your story for months and months and months and months without ever paying you. And then there were the Pulps and the Pulps were pure fiction. They were published on Pulp paper, like newsprint. And it didn’t last particularly long. It was only good for black and white ads. So these magazines were less expensive, but the Pulp magazines paid when they accepted your story. So as soon as they said yes, we want this, you got a check. And that was something that was the saving grace for the Pulps. And many a writer’s life ’cause nobody wanted to lose a story for six months while Colliers figured out which month they wanted to put it in.

And the Pulps weren’t incredibly demanding editorially, you could be a writer of modest skill and still get published. They were very, very much a volume operation. There were hundreds of magazines on, hundreds of subjects and each one published quite a few short stories. And some of them published short stories and novels at the same time. And so they were a place where a writer could make a living and get better. All you had to do is be able to write fast ’cause they didn’t pay very well. And so in my dad’s case they really taught him to write quickly and to write in a very, very entertaining manner. They were into the blood and guts, they were into the plot moving quickly. In his case he wrote a lot of short stories. So the material was relatively 10 to 20 pages. And it was a terrific training ground because he could train himself and survive at the same time and get better. In today’s world we’ve got a lot of winner take all industries. You can come in as a genius and do really well, but there aren’t too many places where you can kind of develop your talent and still make a living. It’s very rare these days, especially in the entertainment arts.

Brett McKay: Yeah. There’s like no place to be like a middle class writer. It’s harder to do that.

Beau L’Amour: It’s very hard to do that. I mean the music business is one place ’cause you can play bars until you get good, but there’s nothing like that for a writer. And so it was a wonderful opportunity. Most important for my dad was it trained him to write directly from his unconscious. Instead of sitting there going, okay, what am I gonna do now? He was able to kind of open the doors to his unconscious and just write what showed up. And this does not come easily. It’s not something that’s normal. I think that the thing that I’ve always thought it was most like was improv comedy where you just, if you can kind of learn to open your mind and free associate from one thing to another, once you get pretty good at doing it, good stuff comes out. But very important for my dad, very important for his later work ethic.

You do not wanna stop because when that conduit to your unconscious gives itself an opportunity to close, there’s something about it that wants to stay closed. And so I’ve experienced this in my life ’cause I tend to work on a creative project that, or work on a project where it’s very creative, but then I go off and do all kinds of technical details that have to do it. And that technical detail period really kind of allows me to close down creatively. And it’s very, very hard to get started again for the next one.

Brett McKay: So the Pulps helped him to be productive ’cause like he had… He ate what he killed basically. And he had to…

Beau L’Amour: That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay: He had to sell a story like at least once a… That was sell a story, not just finish a story. It was like sell a story every week to get paid. So what was his workday like? Was he up from 8 o’clock in the morning and then just riding ’till 8 o’clock at night? What was a typical workday like for your dad?

Beau L’Amour: More like 5:30 in the morning.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Beau L’Amour: So up very early, butt in chair, sit at the typewriter work until the kids are ready to have breakfast, go into the next room, have breakfast with the kids. He would read to us every morning. A lot of times it was stuff he was interested in. Sometimes it was stuff we were interested in. But when we were little kids, he read to us every morning. And then when we went to school, he was back at work, work until lunch, lunch, back at work for an hour or two. Then he generally took an hour or two off to exercise and clean up from that dinner. After dinner, he often worked another hour or two, seven days a week, 365 days a year, pretty much only taking off when the publisher sent him off on a publicity trip or something like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Or you said that if he needed to do some research, he would travel then maybe to maybe go scope out a little bit.

Beau L’Amour: Yes. But he’d still work.

Brett McKay: Yeah, he’d still work.

Beau L’Amour: He’d take a typewriter with him and he’d still work.

Brett McKay: Alright. So just a really strong work ethic. Did he enjoy it? Like did he have to struggle and was just this tortured writer? Or did he genuinely love being there on the typewriter? Just click clacking away, cranking out a story?

Beau L’Amour: He loved it. I think one of the magic for a reader is reading something that just the person who was writing it, the joy of creating it is just seeped into every letter of what he’s doing. So I think the energy with which he wrote translates out to the reader in incredible energy and incredible happiness that he’s doing this. So the tortured thing was not something that got him anywhere that he was really… That really was doing him any favors. And he wasn’t tortured. He was just very, very, he was thrilled to be doing it. And another important thing about how he worked, I mean actually what he put on the page, dad wrote in a very abbreviated style. And in many cases the details were very sketchy. And what this does was, it’s just enough to inspire the reader’s imagination.

So your job as the writer, especially if you’re one of these writers that came out of the Pulp world of writing short stories and things like this, is to put just enough on the page to turn the reader into a partner in the imagination of the story. And that’s really what makes a lot of that writing so wonderful. You won’t hear too many people in the kind of more literary side of the business talking about this. In fact kind of more literate writing tends to write down absolutely every single thing. But that’s not really a way to engage an audience. You really engage an audience by giving them just enough. It’s a trick. You got to be able to give them just enough without giving them too little. But it creates a wonderful reading experience.

Brett McKay: So in the first part of your dad’s career, when he was writing for the Pulps, he was writing all sorts of different stories, adventure stories. I think he did a few boxing stories. When did he become known as a Western writer? How did he become the Western author that we know him today as?

Beau L’Amour: Yeah, so Westerns had been a part of the Pulp Magazine market since the 1880s. I mean, really since the dime novels, but not huge. And what happened, especially related to my dad who had written a lot of adventure stories kind of based on his travels or very melodramatically based on his travels. Before World War II, nobody traveled internationally and exotic places were very interesting to people after World War II. Well, everybody had seen their children, their buddies die in exotic places. The adventure genre kind of created a certain amount of PTSD or something like this. And people were recognizing it in the magazine business as my dad was recognizing it to a certain extent, maybe unconsciously in his own world. And I think that the Western boomed after World War II, because it was an adventure environment that you could have writing and movies and everything else in, but it was sort of safely in the past and it was at home.

And so he went to a, I think New Year’s Eve party, 1946, he wasn’t even out of the military yet with a publisher’s party, a publisher that he knew very well. And the guy told him he says, we think now Westerns and you know something about this. You kind of grew up in that environment you should do this. And so throughout the mid ’40s, so ’46, ’47, he started transitioning to more and more Westerns. By ’48 or ’49, he was going full-bore writing Western short stories for the Pulps. In many cases, he was selling… In probably three or four years, he sold 50 stories a year, which means he had to write like 60 or more to do that. He was writing more than a story a week, going full out and just able to make due, he could buy himself some nice clothes.

He had a tiny little… He had a little room in the back of somebody else’s apartment, didn’t have a car, wasn’t gonna be able to afford anything like that on what he was doing. And then the Pulp magazines, because of radio, because of television, because of the rise of the paperback, the Pulp magazine started to collapse. And he had a very difficult few years. I remember him telling me that he would go to the park in the morning at breakfast time so that his landlady wouldn’t realize he didn’t have enough money for breakfast and start getting worried whether he’d pay the rent or not. And during that time, he wrote a story called The Gift of Cochise, which he sent to his Pulp editor and they didn’t want it. And he had kind of a sleazy agent who hadn’t really been good for much and kind of in desperation, he sent it to that guy and that guy sold it to Colliers, which was a top market.

And he made a bunch of money. I mean, it wasn’t life changing money, but it was four or five times what he would’ve made for a Pulp story. And that was placed in Colliers magazine and then it was optioned by John Wayne. This became the movie Hondo. And as soon as it was optioned, he took the Option money. Option is like you rent a story for a while to see if you can get the pieces together to make a movie out of it. He took the Option money and flew to New York and just barged into the face of like every editor at every paperback house he could find. And he had some manuscripts he hadn’t been able to sell, various things like this. And he kind of stuck stuff in front of them and just said, I’ve got a movie coming out with John Wayne, I’ve been writing Westerns, I wanna be your Western writer. And just fired the full force of his personality onto them. And he sold four books on that trip. And that basically started him writing paperback original Westerns, that was like 1954, 1953.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And at this time, he hit the wave like the America, that’s what they wanted. They wanted the Western and he was able to ride that wave.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. Although I would say that he didn’t really start distinguishing himself. I think he wrote some… Actually some of the best writing that he wrote was in the, maybe the early 1960s. But I don’t know that he really necessarily distinguished himself from the pack. What was interesting was is as the Western started to decline a little bit and he started writing more and more different Westerns, this would’ve been again towards the end of the 60s, early 70s, right before he really exploded sales wise. That’s when the material gets particularly interesting and he starts doing different things with it.

Brett McKay: Why did it explode in the 70s, you think?

Beau L’Amour: Well, first off critical mass of backlist titles, he just had so many titles in the marketplace. None of ’em were going out of print. All of ’em were making money all the time. So that’s the big one. I think something that’s important at this moment is that once he’d written 12, 15 Westerns, he felt that he wanted to go back and write in other genres because that’s what he’d done as a Pulp writer. And he didn’t really realize that the paperback business isn’t organized that way. They don’t like you to change genres because the books are in the bookstore, organized by genre. And so when a writer starts writing in one particular genre, the publishers want him to stay there. And dad didn’t really wanna stay there and he kept trying to break out. He wrote some stories that had other… In other genres, Ii was actually, the Walking drum was written in 1960.

It wasn’t published until the 80s, but it was written in 1960. That’s a set in like, year 1200 Europe. It’s a between the Crusades Adventure story in Europe. And he did some other stuff like that trying to break out of it. Last of the Breed, his Cold War thriller was conceived at that time. It’s based on the Gary Powers U2 incident. But nobody wanted this stuff. So he went back to writing Westerns, but he decided he was gonna change the Westerns. He was gonna write different kids of Westerns. So he would write Chaco, which was a Western about Europeans on Safari in the West, something that happened, but people don’t really know about it too much. He would write The Broken Gun, which was a contemporary Western.

It was set at the time, late 1950s when it actually occurred. But it was about a mystery set further back in the west in the 19th century. And other stories, he did a little bit of science fictiony stuff with the Californias. He started changing it up and by the early 1970s, the audience for Westerns wasn’t so brittle any longer and it was open to different experiences as a lot of things were in the 1970s. And so he was able to do various different things. All the backlist titles were doing very well. The Centennial was coming up and he started writing stories about the early frontier, which meshed with people’s interest in the Revolutionary War because, 1976 was the Bicentennial of 1776 and things all really came together right about that time.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So he had this plan. He didn’t like being pigeonholed as a Western writer, but he had to figure out a way to transition without upsetting one the audience, ’cause they expect a certain type of thing. And then two, the publisher. So he played around the margins with the Western to do what he wanted.

Beau L’Amour: Correct.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Beau L’Amour: Very correct.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, when you look at your dad’s writing, the stories are… They’re very entertaining. I love reading your dad’s novels, the short stories, but it seems like subtly there’s like a message there. Do you think your dad had a message that he was trying to convey with his stories as besides just being entertaining?

Beau L’Amour: Not consciously. I know sometimes when you read this stuff you go, really, that was unconscious, but dad, he just wrote so fast. And like I said, he opened up his unconscious and just let it happen. He had things that he cared about. And if you… Look, if you’re writing Westerns, there is no alternative. Westerns are about the friction between civilization and the wilderness. It’s just a fundamental. And so you get a big thematic thing just by saying, I’m writing a Western after that, I’m sure you’re quite aware of this. There’s this issue with families and family connections and the solidity that comes from having a good family that will help you out and things of that sort. It’s odd. It’s ironic because my dad spent a lot of time, not… Getting away from his family, not getting away from it because he didn’t like it, but just wanting to go off by himself and explore and do different things.

Brett McKay: And so there’s this interesting push pull friction in his work where a lot of his work is about the solidity of family. And yet that wasn’t necessarily what he was all about, especially earlier in his life. He certainly was when I was a kid, but not earlier. There’s an interesting theme about adopted parents, a older man will adopt a boy and raise that boy. Now orphans are a thing in literature. This is all Jungian stuff, there’s a lot of orphans in mythology. And so maybe he just clued into that unconsciously and was dealing with it. But one further level to that, my mom and dad were like surrogate parents for an awful lot of my friends and my sister’s friends. I think, we lived… We were growing up in the 60s and 70s and times were turbulent, especially in families. And my family is very solid. And it’s interesting how my parents became secondary parents to an awful lot of our friends.

So you are overseeing your dad’s legacy and you’ve worked to publish some of his unpublished writing. Can you tell us about some of the work you’re doing with your dad’s estate and his legacy?

Beau L’Amour:Well, we’ve just about finished this, Louis L’Amour’s lost Treasures series. So Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is, it’s the story behind the story or it’s a bit of a professional biography of my dad. So I took about 30 of his previously published books and added a postscript, which talks about different aspects of the book. Sometimes I have alternative drafts of part of the book or a correspondence that tells part of the story of how it came to be. Sometimes I’ll do a postscript on how the movie was made or wasn’t made because it failed. A lot of things like that. There’s a series of stories where dad was working out editorial issues with Bantam books and you can see the push pull between what they wanted in the book or what he wanted to see in the book.

And so I described those things. There were a couple of stories that really came out of a friendship that he had with Katharine Hepburn, and they never ended up working on a film together, but their discussion of what he wanted to do and what she wanted to do led certain stories to be written. So there’s that. And then there’s also, part of this series is two new books, Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures Volume One and Volume Two. And these are mostly beginnings of stories that dad never finished, but a lot of times I will have… He left behind an outline or he left behind notes for what the story was gonna be. And so I’ll give you the beginning of the story or whatever I’ve got of it, and then I will, give you the notes and explain what he was trying to do with his story, what he was trying to do with his career, how I think the story would’ve ended.

There’s a few finished short stories in that also. And then last of all, there’s a novel No Travel or Returns, which is one of those early yondering stories. It was really dad’s first novel, but he never really finished it. He started it in 1937. He worked on it on and off until he was drafted. And it was a pile of chapters and episodes that hung together, just barely. And so I went in and did a bunch of research to try and figure out what he was up to and how he might have finished that. And I rewrote that and we published that a few years ago. So Louis L’Amour’s lost Treasures that… You don’t have to read it in any particular order, but the wonderful thing about it is that because the story is there, because you’ve read the story, then what I have to say about the story is, easily understandable. If I was to try and write the professional biography of Louis L’Amour in a book separate from all this stuff, it would be very difficult ’cause I’d have to describe each individual story. And so this is a… I think we have one or two more of the Postscripts to do and maybe one more larger project in that. And then it’s, it’s onto something else.

Brett McKay: Well, Beau this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about, Louie L’Amour and your work?

Beau L’Amour: Louis lamour.com. L-O-U-I-S-L-A-M-O-U-R.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Beau L’Amour, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Beau L’Amour: Thank you very much. Take care.

Brett McKay: My guest name is Beau L’Amour. He’s the son of the author Louis L’Amour and he’s also the manager of his estate. You can find more information about Louis’ work@louislamour.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/lamour. You can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’ve done so already, I’d appreciate it. If you take one minute to give us review on podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with our friend or family member who would get something out of it. As always, thank for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Not just listening on the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Shock occurs when the body’s internal organs aren’t getting enough blood flow. A person can go into shock for a variety of reasons including severe bleeding, vomiting, heart attack, spinal injury, or even certain drug overdoses. The symptoms of shock are fairly broad, but usually include weakness, clammy skin, fast heart rate, quick breathing, sweating, and thirst. If untreated, a person in shock may start to feel confused, lose consciousness, or go into cardiac arrest. That’s why it’s important to treat anyone who may be in shock as quickly as possible.

Keep in mind that when shock occurs as the result of an injury, it may not set in immediately. If you suspect someone is going into shock, call 911 as soon as possible and be prepared to initiate CPR if the person becomes unresponsive or loses consciousness. While you wait for emergency services to arrive, use the above tips to get a handle on the situation.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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Oklahoma’s Onion Burgers. Many regions of the country lay claim to a signature burger. For Oklahoma, it’s the onion burger, which is made by pressing thinly sliced onions directly into the patty while it cooks. It’s delicious. In back-to-back weeks, the McKays sampled burgers that are considered two of Oklahoma’s best. We got one at Sid’s, which has been around since 1989 and is located in El Reno, the Route 66 town where the onion burger was born in the 1920s (also the location of the climatic scene in Twisters). And we tried Tucker’s, which has several locations in Oklahoma City. Both were tasty, but I’ve got to give my nod to Tucker’s.

Philosophy for Creators and Entrepreneurs. Luke Burgis put out a list of philosophy books for creators and entrepreneurs that spans 2,000 years. It includes books not just from philosophy, but also theology and literature. The goal of the list is to help entrepreneurs and creators reconnect with the big questions in life and how their work can help others reconnect with those big questions, too. From Homer to Kierkegaard, this list isn’t light reading, but Burgis thinks it’ll help you “see the form of something new.” I’ve added several books to my to-read list, particularly ones from the Desert Fathers.

The Twilight Zone’s “The Lonely.” With ChatGPT rolling out a new voice feature that allows you to engage in a back-and-forth conversation with a surprisingly lifelike bot, people have been saying it reminds them of the movie Her, in which a man falls for his artificially intelligent virtual assistant. But it’s reminded me of an even further back reference — a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone. In “The Lonely,” a convicted murderer is sentenced to solitary confinement on an asteroid. When he’s given a robotic woman for company, he falls in love with her. The episode is a reminder that, for quite a long time now, we’ve been worried about what will happen when we’re given artificial companions that are shaped in our own frictionless image. And the closing dialogue between the characters offers an excellent coda on the danger of losing our grasp on what is and isn’t real.

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. I read this gritty war epic back in a college class called “The Novel as American History,” and I still think about it today. Norman Mailer wrote this book when he was just 25 and based it partially on his own experience serving in the Philippines during WWII. He takes an unflinching look at soldiers’ psyches and the brutal realities of combat. It’s considered one of the greatest novels ever written.

Quote of the Week

Getting an idea should be like sitting down on a pin; it should make you jump up and do something.

—E.L. Simpson

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Every now and then I have days where I just don’t feel like doing a damn thing.

The idea of being productive makes my brain hurt. These little funks can be extremely frustrating, especially when there’s a lot I need to accomplish.

I haven’t quite figured out why I get hit with these bouts of “don’t-want-to-do-anything-itis.”

Maybe it’s burnout. Maybe it’s the vagaries of fluctuating mood. Maybe it’s the stars. It’s a mystery.

While it might be nice to lean into the feeling and take the day off, I typically don’t have that luxury.

So, over the years, I’ve developed a toolkit for myself to help me get through those days when I feel like doing nuthin’. There’s no single silver bullet in my bag of tricks. Some days, one tactic works; other days, it doesn’t. Sometimes I have to put together a cocktail of different approaches to get myself going.

Also, the goal on these days when I don’t feel like doing anything isn’t to heroically overcome my inertia and knock the day out of the park; rather, my expectations are much lower. I’ll take a metaphorical ground ball that dribbles into the outfield for a single. I’m just trying to keep the gears of life greased and moving while my motivational faculties come back online.

Go Through the Motions“Going through the motions” gets a bad rap.

There’s this idea that if your actions aren’t imbued with passion and excitement, then you shouldn’t do them at all.

But based on my experience, going through the motions is completely fine on those days you don’t feel like doing anything.

Going through the motions keeps you consistent. Consistency in the long term is the key to success in life. Going through the motions when you don’t feel like doing the thing helps keep the habit in place. I’ll have days when I don’t feel like working out, but I go through the motions of working out anyway. My workout isn’t super awesome on these days. In fact, I’ll lower the weight and even shorten the workout. But I get the workout done. I keep up the identity of a dedicated exerciser.

In addition to maintaining and strengthening a habit, going through the motions might also catalyze a resurgence of motivation. We’ve talked about this idea before: Feelings often follow action. You might not initially feel like working on your taxes, but once you begin, you might start feeling more dialed in because you see yourself getting closer to being done with them.

Go for a Walk OutsideSolvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.

Yes, just about anything can be solved by a walk. Even a lack of motivation to clean out the garage.

When you feel stuck, head out the door and take a stroll around the neighborhood. Physical activity can increase neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine, which play crucial roles in motivation.

Change Your SurroundingsSometimes, a change of scenery is all it takes to reignite your motivation. This could be as simple as moving to a different room in your house or finding a new workspace altogether. On days when I don’t feel like doing anything, I’ll sometimes take my laptop to a coffee shop or the public library. Something about the change in environment scrapes off the barnacles of psychic lethargy and helps me get working again.

Leverage Positive Peer PressureHumans are inherently social creatures, and we can use this to our advantage when motivation wanes. Setting up accountability partnerships or joining group challenges can provide external motivation when internal drive is lacking. Just working around other people who are working can be motivating. I think this may be one reason why I find working in a public library helpful: I’m around other people who are working.

I’ve also seen students who will join a virtual study group — a Zoom call — with strangers. Just the feeling that there are other eyes on them (whether or not other people on the call are really paying attention to them) helps them get to work and stay focused.

Journal and Goal ReviewI gave up on daily journaling several years ago. But I still journal whenever I think it would be helpful. Days when I don’t feel like doing anything are one of those times.

When I journal on days I don’t feel like doing anything, I avoid using my journal as a toilet in which to vomit my ennui. That just feeds a cycle of rumination that makes the angst feel worse. Instead, I use my journal to help constructively work through my lack of motivation. We unpack how to do this in our article “The Right and Wrong Way to Journal.”

I’ll often use these journal sessions to review my big picture goals in life. Taking a wider-lens perspective sometimes helps me slough off my inertia.

Practice Productive ProcrastinationOne thing I’ve learned is that when I have days when I don’t feel like doing anything, “anything” usually means the things I planned to do — the big tasks at the top of my to-do list. But if something’s not on my prioritized agenda, then for some reason, I’m game for it.

So when I have those days I don’t feel like doing “anything,” I put those bigger tasks on hold and see if there’s smaller stuff further down my to-do list that I’m in the mood for tackling instead.

I practice “productive procrastination.”

Maybe I don’t want to write an article; so I clean out my bookshelves instead.

Maybe I don’t want to do my taxes; so I prepare some package returns instead.

Productive procrastination does two things:

First, taking action, even on trivial tasks, can get the flywheel of motivation going. Cleaning out your bookshelves can provide a sense of progress, potentially boosting motivation for bigger tasks.

Second, even if it doesn’t goose your motivation for bigger things, it still allows you to get some stuff done. Maybe not the most important stuff, but stuff nonetheless. It’s stuff that needs to get done anyway and has practical and mental-load-lightening benefits.

So on those days where you don’t feel game for working on the things you had intended to tackle, rather than declaring the day a wash, just content yourself with knocking out some lower-hanging fruit. You’ll get the sense of satisfaction that comes from completing any task and set yourself up for better-organized, better-focused days to come.

I’m a big believer in using the power of motivation as the driver to success. But motivation isn’t a constant state – it naturally ebbs and flows. When motivation wanes, it pays to have a repertoire of strategies you can draw upon to recapture its energy and get yourself back in gear. Try some of the tactics above and experiment with your own to find what works for you.

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When you’re out plinking with your pistol, you’re likely going to encounter trigger pulls when the gun goes “click” instead of “bang!”

There are three common reasons why your semiautomatic pistol could malfunction. Today, we’re going to show you how to handle them.

General Safety GuidelinesWhen diagnosing and correcting a pistol malfunction, continue to practice good pistol safety.

Maintain trigger discipline. When diagnosing and correcting a malfunction, keep your trigger finger off the trigger and place it outside the trigger guard. You don’t want to accidentally squeeze the trigger while trying to figure out what’s going wrong with your pistol.

Keep the barrel pointed downrange. One type of misfire you might experience is a hang fire, which is delay between when the firing pin strikes the primer and when the gun fires. You don’t want the barrel pointed at yourself if that’s the case. Keep your barrel pointed downrange.

Type 1 MalfunctionA Type 1 malfunction occurs when you pull the trigger and you hear “click.” It’s the most common malfunction you’ll encounter. A type 1 malfunction is typically caused by one of two things: 1) failure to feed, or 2) failure to fire. Failure to feed can be caused by the magazine not being fully seated; failure to fire can be caused by bad ammo.

The remedy for a Type 1 malfunction is simple: tap, rack, bang.

Type 2 Malfunction: StovepipeA Type 2 malfunction occurs when an empty casing gets stuck in the ejection port, which prevents a new round from being chambered. The spent casing kind of looks like a stovepipe sticking out of your ejection port, so this type of malfunction is often called a “stovepipe” malfunction. The telltale symptoms of a stovepipe malfunction are a mushy trigger and the lack of the gun going “bang.”

Stovepipe malfunctions typically occur because your grip isn’t firm enough on the pistol, which doesn’t give the slide enough resistance while moving back and forth. If stovepipes happen to you a lot, you may need to work on your pistol grip.

The remedy to a Type 2 Malfunction is the same as a Type 1: tap, rack, bang.

Type 3 Malfunction: Double FeedA Type 3 malfunction, also known as a double feed, is less common but still important to understand. It occurs when a round attempts to enter the chamber while another round is already there. A sign of a double feed is a mushy trigger when you squeeze it.

If you experience multiple Type 3 malfunctions in a single shooting session, it might be time to have your pistol inspected. A damaged extractor could be the culprit. However, if the issue only happens with one specific magazine, you’ve likely identified the problem: time for a new mag.

The remedy for a Type 3 malfunction is more involved than tap, rack, bang. The extra steps are necessary because there’s pressure built up from the round trying to enter an already occupied chamber, which can cause the magazine to stick.

Practicing How to Handle Pistol MalfunctionsYou can practice how to handle the three types of pistol misfires using dummy rounds. Just use the dummy round to set up the different types of malfunctions and practice the clearing methods we discussed above.

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What if there was a supplement that could build muscle, maintain bone health, fortify the brain against cognitive decline due to age and stress, and alleviate depression, has been proven safe, and comes with almost no side effects? Well, there is such a supplement, it’s been around a long time, and it isn’t even expensive. It’s creatine.

Here to unpack the myths, benefits, and recommended ways to use creatine is Darren Candow, a professor of exercise physiology and nutrition who supervises the Aging Muscle and Bone Health Laboratory at the University of Regina. Darren specializes in studying creatine and has published over 70 papers on the subject. Today on the show, Darren explains how a supplement often associated with bodybuilders may actually be beneficial for just about everyone — athletes and non-athletes and the young and old alike. He unpacks what creatine does in the body, and how its benefits extend beyond the body and into the brain. He offers recommendations on the formulation of creatine to use, a suggested dosage and whether it should increase with age, and how to avoid the bloating effect. He also shares what we know about creatine’s safety, including its effects on the kidneys, and whether it can cause hair loss.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: Creatine — A Primer on Its Benefits and Use * AoM Article: A Primer On Muscle-Building Supplements — Which Work and Which Don’t? * AoM Podcast #878: The Fitness Supplements That Actually Work * AoM Podcast #585: Inflammation, Saunas, and the New Science of Depression * AoM Podcast #852: The Brain Energy Theory of Mental Illness * Darren’s studies

Connect With Darren Candow* Darren’s faculty page * Darren on IG

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Taking your kids hiking is one of the best ways to get them into nature (and the many benefits associated with that exposure). And, if the hike is a bit strenuous, it offers them one of the few opportunities in modern life to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

But, kids aren’t always excited about hiking. Especially younger ones who have a shorter attention span and haven’t yet caught the vision that walking down a trail can be a good time.

To get your kids more interested in hiking and help them enjoy the experience more, avail yourself of these 7 tips:

1. Prepare to take it loose and slow. Young children get less satisfaction from simply moving from point A to point B than adults. The “point” of the hike for them is less about getting to the end than just enjoying themselves. So adjust your expectations accordingly, and forget the idea of a hike as continual movement. Be prepared to move pretty slowly and take breaks to sit, play in the dirt, balance on a log, throw rocks, pick honeysuckle, etc.

2. Hike to a body of water. Young kids also tend to be less excited about stunning views than older folks. So your hike doesn’t necessarily need to include a dramatic lookout. But kids do love bodies of water. Streams, ponds, lakes, waterfalls — whatever it is, it makes them 10X more interested in the hike. Our kids stay more motivated to keep hiking when they know a pond is ahead. Because once there, they like to look in the water at what’s swimming around and skip stones. There’s just some kind of magnetic attraction between kids (and adults!) and water; use it to increase your children’s compliance.

3. Pair a hike with a picnic. This is another tactic that significantly ups the interest/compliance factor for our kids. Make some special picnic foods at home, or let the kids pick out some special stuff at the store, and the outing magically feels more special. When the days are longer, we’ll have our picnic dinner first at the trailhead, and then take a hike. When the days are shorter (but not yet freezing cold), we’ll go for a hike at sunset, and then come back to the park to eat our picnic dinner by lantern light.

4. Have a nature scavenger hunt. To heighten your children’s powers of observation and keep them more engaged in the hike, consider doing a scavenger hunt in conjunction with it. Give them a checklist of things to look for; these can be general things you know to expect along the way or centered on a theme like “Signs of Fall.” In Ultimate Wilderness Gear, Craig Caudill offers this list of ideas of things your kids can hunt for as they hike:

A leaf that is rounded on the end
A leaf that is pointed on the end
A nut
A hole in the ground (ask them what they think lives there)
A smooth rock
A rough rock
A piece of bark that has fallen from a tree
A dead branch that looks like something else (let them use their imagination here; they will find a branch that looks like a dog, a pencil, or something they are familiar with)

5. Try to identify flora/fauna/rocks. Studies show that children today can identify more corporate logos than native species where they live. Knowing/learning the names of plants, animals, and even rocks can help children engage more deeply with nature. Of course, it’s probable that your own identification skills are pretty faulty; luckily, there are apps that can help you figure out what it is you’re looking at, whether that’s a plant on the ground or a constellation in the sky.

6. Try to identify animal tracks. It’s fun not only to identify things that are actually present, but the clues that indicate something was once there. See if your kids can figure out what animal left a particular set of tracks. (There are apps for this, too.)

7. Activate your kids’ senses and ask them questions. As you hike along, point out things for your children to touch, see, smell, hear, and even taste (as appropriate!). Then ask them questions, especially along a line in which they’ve already shown interest: “What kind of animal do you think left that track?” “What kind of bird do you think that is?” “Why do you think it’s shaped that way?” They’ll of course ask you questions too, and while it’s easy to just spout off the answer (if you know it!), try turning the question back to them first: “What do you think it is?” As Scott D. Sampson observes in How to Raise a Wild Child, “Counterintuitively, children are often looking for our engagement more than our answers, hoping that the focus of their attention will become ours too. By turning the question back on them, we crack open a learning opportunity, a chance for them to actively participate in solving a mystery.”

As you strive to make hiking a bigger part of your family’s culture and go more regularly, don’t feel you have to look far afield to find trails to trek. While you might associate hiking only with state and national parks, almost every city has smaller wilderness areas, nature preserves, and municipal parks that include plenty of trails and are easily accessible by those who live in cities and suburbs. You very likely don’t have to drive more than a half hour to get a good dose of nature, and you’ll find exploring your hometown’s little nooks and crannies strangely satisfying — even more satisfying in some ways than visiting a well-known wilderness area. To find these urban trails, use an app like AllTrails and peruse lists of “things to do” in your town on travel websites and blogs.

Don’t feel like the setting has to be “perfect” for your hikes, remembering that kids, especially little ones, will be less interested in a big scenic payoff than the “ordinary” flora and fauna they encounter along the way. The most important thing is to just get out there!

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How to Raise a Wild Child: The Art and Science of Falling in Love with Nature

Ultimate Wilderness Gear: Everything You Need to Know to Choose and Use the Best Outdoor Equipment

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Although they may call it different things and approach its attainment in different ways, many of the world’s religions and philosophies have a similar goal: achieving a life of virtue, peace, and flourishing.

In his new book, Seriously Happy, Ben Aldrige explains how anyone can use the wisdom of ancient traditions to improve themselves and live the Good life. Today on the show, Ben offers a thumbnail sketch of Buddhism, Cynicism, Taoism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelianism, along with practices and challenges inspired by these philosophies, including walking a banana, listening to a music performance without music, and taking a Wu Wei adventure, that you can use to put ancient wisdom into action and become a better and happier man.

Resources Related to the Podcast Ben’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #640 — Weird and Wonderful Ways to Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable * AoM Podcast #148: Trying Not to Try * Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment* by Robert Wright * John Cage’s 4’33” * Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Connect With Ben Aldridge* Ben’s website

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Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

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If you’ve been lifting weights for a while, you’ve likely come across programming described as “bro splits” — a training method that focuses on one muscle group per workout. You’ll also see bro splits referred to as body-split workouts.

Bro splits rose to prominence in the 1960s thanks to bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Franco Columbu, and Frank Zane, who used body-part-focused workouts to pack on slabs of muscle. Joe Weider helped popularize bro splits amongst average joes by publishing body-split routines in his fitness magazines. Bro splits became the de facto way most bodybuilders trained in the second half of the 20th century. It was believed that by dedicating the entirety of a workout to a single body part, you could blast it with a ton of muscle-growing stimuli while giving your muscles plenty of time to recover before you trained them again.

But starting in the 2000s, you began seeing some pushback against the bro split. The biggest criticism levied at body-split workouts is that because you trained a muscle group so infrequently (often just once a week), you didn’t stimulate the muscle enough to initiate muscle growth or increase strength. These days, the effectiveness of the bro split can be the source of lively debate on the interwebs.

So what’s the deal with bro splits? Are they effective, or are they just a relic of bodybuilding’s past? To clear up this confusion about the bro split and help you figure out if you should use it for your programming, I talked to Greg Nukols from Stronger By Science, an online publication that breaks down the scientific literature on training and nutrition.

What Exactly Is a Bro Split?Bro splits are classically defined as programming where you focus on a single area of the body in a single workout.

A typical bro split program might look like this:

Monday: Chest
Tuesday: Back
Wednesday: Shoulders
Thursday: Legs
Friday: Arms
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: Rest

Greg pointed out that there’s some debate about what constitutes a bro split. “You could conceptualize a bro split as any programming where you don’t do full-body workouts. So a classic push, pull, legs program could be a bro split because you’re not training the full body in a single workout,” he told me.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is often put out there as a bodybuilder who used bro splits to mold a mighty physique. But if you look at his programming, he didn’t focus on a single body part in his daily workouts. His split looked like this:

Monday: Chest, Back, Abs
Tuesday: Shoulders, Biceps, Triceps, Forearms, Abs
Wednesday: Legs, Calves, Abs
Thursday: Chest, Back, Abs.
Friday: Shoulders, Biceps, Triceps, Forearms, Abs
Saturday: Legs, Calves, Abs
Sunday: Rest

So he was working multiple body parts in a single workout, but it’s considered by many to be a bro split.

For this article, we’ll be using the classic definition of a bro split: a program where you train a single muscle group in a single weekly workout.

Are Bro Splits Effective in Building Muscle and Strength?As mentioned above, bro splits were popular among bodybuilders in the second half of the 20th century. However, at the start of the 21st century, there was some pushback against bro splits because research showed that training muscles more frequently than once a week could lead to more strength and muscle gains.

For example, Greg mentioned that a 2016 meta-analysis suggested that training muscles at least twice per week was more effective in driving muscle growth than training just once per week. Research has also shown that training muscles more than once a week increases strength.

So it looks like bro splits are less effective in muscle and strength growth, right?

Well, a 2020 meta-analysis found no statistically significant difference in muscle growth when training frequencies varied from one to four times per week, provided the total volume was equal.

Basically, this study showed that as long as you did the same amount of volume for a body part in a week, it didn’t matter if you did all that volume in a single workout or broke it up across two or three workouts during the week.

So you could do a bro split leg day workout and do 20 total sets for legs in a single workout or you could split those 20 sets into two different workouts and do 10 sets on one day and 10 sets on another. You’d get about the same results.

Greg did note that despite the 2020 meta-analysis, there’s still research that indicates that training a muscle group more than once a week could provide a slight edge in muscle growth and strength.

(For a deep dive into the research on training frequency, check out Greg’s articles on frequency and muscle growth and frequency and strength.)

So what’s the bottom line?

Greg sums it up this way:

“I still think the balance of evidence suggests that higher training frequencies might be a little more effective than bro splits, but bro splits are still totally fine. And for most people, they probably wouldn’t even notice a difference between the results of the two types of programming.”

Practical Benefits of Bro SplitsSo, as long as you’re getting sufficient volume, bro splits can be effective in growing muscle and increasing strength. How do you decide if bro splits are right for you?

Greg highlighted the following practical benefits of the bro split:

Enjoyable: Some lifters simply enjoy the concentrated intensity of hammering one muscle group per session. It’s simple and focused. This resonated with me. I did a classic bro split workout a long time ago, and I really enjoyed it. It was fun spending an hour just getting after my biceps and triceps. I loved the pump I got after these workouts.
More Time For Recovery: Bro splits offer more time for recovery since you only train a body part once a week. A lot of people dread leg day, so they like the fact that they can hit their legs hard in a single workout and then not have to worry about training them again for a week.
Joint-Friendly for Older Lifters: Anecdotally, Greg has noticed some lifters in their 40s and beyond report better joint recovery with lower frequency training. Again, this goes back to the fact that you only train a single muscle group a single time per week.
Sport-Specific Scheduling: If you’re a runner or play another sport, bro splits can allow you to plan your lifting around competitions or sport-specific training. For example, if you have a 5k race on Saturday, you can do your leg day strength workout on Monday, giving your leg muscles plenty of time to recover before the race.

Potential Drawbacks to the Bro Split Time Commitment: Traditional bro splits often require 5-6 gym sessions per week. So if you don’t have time to train for an hour five to six times a week, bro splits probably aren’t for you. * Injury Risk*: Greg noted that, theoretically, doing a lot of volume for a single muscle group in a single session could potentially increase acute injury risk due to fatigue.

A Sample Bro Split WorkoutThinking of giving a bro split workout a try? Here’s a sample program to use:

Monday: Chest Day

Bench Press: 3 sets x 10 reps
Cable Flys: 3×10
Incline DB Bench Press: 3×10
Dips: 3xAMRAP (As Many Reps as Possible)
Push-ups: 3xAMRAP

Tuesday: Leg Day

Barbell Squat: 3×10
Romanian Deadlift: 3×10
Hack Squat: 3×10
Leg Curls: 3×10
Leg Extensions: 3×10
Calf Raises: 3×10

Wednesday: Shoulder Day

Shoulder Press: 3×10
Lateral Raises: 3×10
Seated DB Shoulder Press: 3×10
Bent-over Dumbbell Rear Delt Raise: 3×10
Face Pulls: 3×10

Thursday: Back Day

Deadlift: 3×10
Lat Pulldown: 3×10
Barbell Row: 3×10
Pull-ups: 3xAMRAP

Friday: Arm Day

Barbell Bicep Curl: 3×10
Rolling Tricep Extensions: 3×10
Incline Dumbbell Curls: 3×10
Rope Pushdown: 3×10
Hammer Curls: 3×10
Dips: 3xAMRAP

ConclusionBro splits can be an effective training method, especially if you enjoy them. While the latest research hints that higher frequencies might offer a slight advantage, the difference is likely negligible for most lifters. The most important factors remain consistency, proper volume, and progressive overload — regardless of how you divvy up your training.

Remember, the best training split is the one you can stick to consistently. If you like bro splits and you’re making progress, there’s no need to change based on minor theoretical optimizations. If you don’t like the current way your strength training workouts are organized, then give bro splits a try.

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After 16 years of selling AoM merch, we’ve made the decision to get out of the merch business.

Over the past few years running the store has proven to be an expensive endeavor with extremely slim profit margins. Stuff is just more expensive — both making it and shipping it. And the number of operational and logistical headaches has grown.

There just isn’t enough ROI in sustaining the store to justify its suck on bandwidth. The older I get, the more I see the wisdom in simplifying — putting greater and greater focus on the stuff that really matters.

We’ll continue to sell our ebooks in the store (did you know we sell a number of super good ebooks?), and if the right idea for a really cool product or t-shirt comes along, I’m game for offering it to our fans. But, effective indefinitely, we’re going to stop selling physical merchandise.

Consequently, we’re having a big liquidation sale to get rid of our remaining inventory.

We’ve marked down the prices on our physical products by 50%. They’re priced to move! Everything must go!

Grab yourself a Get On Your Horse and Kick AND AoM Retro t-shirt for the price of a single tee!

Get the few remaining copies of our signed books!

Stock up on our manly stationery before it’s gone!

Get the last few of our classic Ben Franklin’s Virtue Journal Refills. We have the original size available too!

Browse all available items here. And act fast. Because when something is gone, it’s gone for good. Because these are marked for clearance, there are no returns on these items. All sales are final.

It’s been a pleasure offering merchandise to our fans over the years. Thank you for supporting AoM’s content and mission through your purchases!

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When you depress the brake pedal on your car, it pressurizes fluid in your brake lines which transmit force to your brake pads, forcing them to squeeze against your car’s wheel. The resulting friction is what brings you to a nice, comfortable stop. When your brakes fail, it’s typically because you’ve lost a substantial amount of brake fluid, or because your brake pads are incredibly worn out. The best way to deal with your brakes going out is to practice preventive maintenance on your car. Make sure to have your mechanic check your brake system whenever you go in for an oil change, or before a long trip.

If you are driving and think your brakes have failed, don’t panic. And certainly don’t just turn the car off — doing so while it’s moving could cause your steering wheel to lock. Fortunately, you’ve got other options; use the tips above to avoid an accident, slow down, and ultimately come to a safe stop.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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Everything Isn’t Terrible: Conquer Your Insecurities, Interrupt Your Anxiety, and Finally Calm Down by Kathleen Smith. I’ve been taking a deep dive into Bowen Family Systems Theory this year. The theory is all about learning how to become a differentiated self within groups consumed with chronic anxiety, and I’ve found understanding it very useful in becoming a more calmly assertive man. One book that I found really helpful in understanding Bowen Family Systems Theory is Everything Isn’t Terrible by Kathleen Smith. Kathleen is a psychologist who specializes in Bowen Family Systems Theory, and her book offers a great overview of its big concepts. It’s also pretty dang funny. Her follow-up book, True to You: A Therapist’s Guide to Stop Pleasing Others and Start Being Yourself, is also very good. It’s packed with actionable advice on how to stop people pleasing. Highly recommend picking up both. For an audio intro to Bowen Family Systems Theory, listen to my conversation with leadership consultant Steve Cuss.

DreamSky AM/FM Portable Radio. Our 13-year-old son Gus recently acquired an AM/FM radio and loves it. He likes to listen to jazz and classical music on our local public radio stations as well as AM sports talk radio. He says the static-y AM radio at night is nice to fall asleep to. It’s interesting to see my Gen-Z teenager gravitate towards old-school tech. I reckon we’ll be seeing more tech choices like this from younger folks who feel oversaturated with digital screens and just get those nostalgic longings, as every generation does, for the accouterments of bygone days.

The Cost of Apathy. Jack Raines makes the case that modern life’s comforts can lead to a dangerous sense of apathy, especially in stable jobs where ambition fades. It’s not just about laziness but the quiet erosion of drive and purpose. The article is a wake-up call to live with intention and avoid the modern adult’s slow, all-too-common drift into complacency and mediocrity. If you’re feeling stuck, it’s worth a read.

12 Angry Men. We recently watched this classic film as a family. You wouldn’t think a movie that’s about something many consider burdensome and banal, jury duty, and takes place almost entirely within the confines of a deliberation room, would make for a compelling flick, but it’s a great watch. Some of the mid-20th century’s best actors turn in supreme performances as their characters fight against apathy, prejudice, and personal biases and get, well, angry as they strive to give their fellow citizen a fair trial. It’s an engaging ode to the American judicial system and to having a moral backbone amidst the pressures of group-think.

Quote of the Week

The right use of leisure is no doubt a harder problem than the right use of our working hours. The soul is dyed the color of its leisure thoughts.

—Dean Inge

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Everything Isn't Terrible: Conquer Your Insecurities, Interrupt Your Anxiety, and Finally Calm Down

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Meal prep — preparing a bunch of meals altogether ahead of time — is a handy way to increase your chances of eating healthy during the week, save money on buying takeout, and save time and bandwidth by batching your cooking.

We’ve previously covered how to make easy, high-protein meal-prep breakfast casseroles.

But what about lunch? Are you tired of buying pricey frozen entrees or getting fast food burgers for your mid-day meal?

Well, I’ve got a recipe for a lunchtime (or dinnertime) meat that’s stupid easy. Really, you’ve got to have every one of your last marbles loose to mess this up.

Crockpot Italian shredded beef is what’s on the menu today, and I’m going to fill you in on how to make it and why it’s the ultimate lunchtime meal-prep meat.

Why Italian Shredded Beef Makes for an Awesome Go-to Lunchtime Meal-Prep MeatIt’s cheap. This recipe calls for a chuck roast. As of 2024, a pound of chuck roast is going for ~$7.50 a pound. Let’s say you buy a 3-pound chuck roast for $22.50, and you divvy that 3-pound chuck roast into a week’s worth of seven 150-gram servings of shredded beef. You’re looking at about $3 per meal (plus the small cost of adding a carb like rice). That’s pretty dang good.

It’s high in protein. A-150 gram serving of chuck roast will give you about 37 grams of protein along with essential micronutrients. The one downside of chuck roast shredded beef is that it’s high in fat. A 150-gram serving includes 23 grams of fat. But the fat makes it tasty and satiating.

It’s easy to make. It takes less than five minutes to make Italian shredded beef. You just put the chuck roast in a crock pot, dump in three other ingredients, and then let it cook for 6 to 8 hours. Stupidly easy!

It’s versatile. You can eat Italian shredded beef for lunchtime or dinnertime and accompany it with a variety of sides. It’s delicious on a sandwich roll, but I often eat mine with some rice or roasted potatoes, or put it in a tortilla.

It’s tasty. It’s slow-cooked beef. Of course it’s tasty and savory.

How to Make Meal-Prep Italian Shredded BeefHere’s how to make easy Italian shredded beef. You’ll naturally need a slow cooker/crockpot.

Gather the Ingredients

3 lbs of chuck roast. The best cut of beef for this, due to its marbling, which helps in creating tender, easily shreddable meat. Alternatively, round or rump roast can also be used.
1 cup beef broth. Opt for low sodium if you want to reduce the saltiness of this dish.
1 16 oz jar of pepperoncinis, liquid included. (For less spiciness, use less of the liquid.)
2 packets of Italian dressing mix

Add Ingredients to Crockpot

Like I said, this is stupid easy. Just put all of your ingredients in the slow cooker. Set to cook on low heat for 7-9 hours. Set it and forget it. Cooking on low ensures the meat becomes perfectly tender and shreddable.

Shred the Meat

Once the beef is tender and easily falls apart, it’s time to shred. Grab two forks and shred the beef in the pot. After shredding, let the beef sit in the juices for a few minutes to enhance its flavor and moisture.

Using Your Crockpot Shredded BeefThree pounds of chuck roast will give you about seven 150-gram servings of shredded beef. A week’s worth of lunchtime meat.

I put all the meat into one container and store it in the fridge. When it’s lunchtime, I just portion out 150 grams of the shredded beef and pair it with whatever starch I have at the ready or feel like eating that day. That could be rice, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, or a sandwich roll. The possibilities are many.

Alternatively, once your shredded beef has been prepared, dole it out into seven separate dishes along with your preferred starch. For example, you can put 150 grams of beef into seven meal prep containers along with a scoop of rice. Now they’re all completely ready to go. This makes it easy to grab in the morning and take to the office if you don’t work from home. Even if you do work from home, it’s nice to be able to simply grab something from the fridge, heat it, and eat it.

If you’re looking for a cheap, easy, high-protein meal-prep lunch, make yourself a batch of slow-cooked Italian shredded beef, and you’ll never have to reach for a Hot Pocket again.

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Note: This excerpt, condensed from the original, was taken from Masterful Personality by Orison Swett Marden, a book which was published in 1921 and is worth reading in its entirety.

“A man is not all included between his hat and boots,” said Walt Whitman.

There is something in a man which does not inhere in his flesh, which is not in his brain, not in his body, something which eludes the biographer and evades the camera, something we feel, something which radiates from his presence, a real vital force, as mysterious as that of electricity and as difficult to understand. We call it a man’s atmosphere, or magnetism, and it extends beyond his physical body.

In some personalities it is much more pronounced, more extended, than in others. When we go near some people who are very magnetic we positively feel their impelling presence before we get near enough to touch them. A subtle radiation of real force surrounds them like an aura.

There are people who claim that what they term the “human aura” is an electrical emanation from the body which takes various forms according to the character and personality of the individuals.

Call it aura, magnetism, or whatever you please, this indescribable, indefinable, mysterious, personal atmosphere is a tremendous power. It draws people to or drives them from us. A famous blind, deaf-mute said she could feel a distinct force when certain people came near her which either attracted or repelled her, according to the character of the person. She could sense their moral status and, her attendants said, would instinctively shrink, as though something was going to harm her, whenever an evil person came near her. She could feel their character.

Everyone has an atmosphere peculiar to himself, pervaded by all of his characteristics. We cannot radiate anything unlike ourselves or our ideals. The qualities you radiate will either attract or repel people. Your atmosphere will affect your career.

We all know how vividly we feel the personality of certain persons after they have passed out of our homes, or even have passed out of life. There remains in the homes of those who have left us and in the places they habitually frequented, a certain something, a presence which we cannot explain, but which we feel very keenly. The ideal mother lives long in the home after her body has been laid away in the grave. Members of the household distinctly feel her presence, sometimes for many years. A similar thing is true of a loved child after death. This is not mere imagination. There is something left from the personality which we feel for a long time after a dear one is taken from us.

Those of us who have visited the homes of great characters like Washington, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Roosevelt have felt their personality very decidedly. An individualized something seems to radiate from the furniture, the draperies of their sanctums—the desk, the chair they occupied, the library table, the silent piano, or other musical instrument.

There is, indeed, an atmosphere, an aura of personality around strong, magnetic characters which time cannot erase. With my children I have been privileged to visit the home of Theodore Roosevelt since he passed away (as I had often done when he was alive) and in viewing the wonderful articles in the celebrated Trophy Room, I could feel this great man’s presence among his treasures almost as plainly as though he were indeed present in life. His remarkable personality seemed to cling not only to everything about the home, but even to the great outdoors he so loved—the grounds, the woods where his marvelous energy was so often employed in wielding the ax and in athletic sports; it even pervaded the little church where he had habitually worshiped.

We all have felt the quickening of ambition, the subtle influence due to the active, forceful, positive vibrations which fill the atmosphere of the places of business of successful men. If a business office is dominated by a powerful personality, we feel the dominating force all through the establishment. If, on the other hand, the head of the concern is a weak, undecided, vacillating character, if he lacks force, energy, and push, everyone who enters the place feels the negative vibration.

Remember that the world will feel you if you are a real force. If you generate power you will radiate it. Others will know whether you are a little picayune dynamo or a powerful one, whether you can pull a big load or a little one, whether you are a giant or a pygmy, a winner or a loser. You can only radiate the force which you generate.

Nothing but weakness can come from a weak man, no matter how much he poses or tries to make a favorable impression.

Many people are like the moon, cold, lifeless bodies with no atmosphere, nothing which attracts. They do not radiate warmth or soul sunshine. Their personalities seem to be auraless. Other personalities are like the sun, radiating warmth and light, joy, and gladness.

William Dean Howells said of Longfellow, “He never came but he left our house more luminous for his having been there.” This radiation of spiritual warmth and light that characterized Longfellow was true also in an eminent degree of two of our greatest and best loved American divines, Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks.

One could not be in the same room with Beecher without feeling that he was in the presence of some powerful, spiritual force that radiated good cheer, hope, courage, love. It used to be said in Boston that no matter how gloomy or depressing the weather, when Phillips Brooks passed by on the street people felt as if the sun had shone out and dispersed all the clouds. There was something that radiated from this marvelous personality which was felt by everyone who came near him. I have often seen strangers passing him in the street, turn round and look at him, with wonder and admiration in their faces, conscious that they had seen a magnificent specimen of manhood.

“What a gift it is,” said Beecher, “to make all men better and happier without knowing it! These roses and carnations have made me happy for a day. Yet they stand huddled together in my pitcher, without seeming to know my thoughts of them, or the gracious work they are doing. And how much more is it to have a disposition that carries with it involuntary sweetness, calmness, courage, hope, and happiness. Yet this is the portion of good nature in a large-minded, strong-natured man. When it has made him happy, it has scarcely begun its office. God sends a natural heart-singer—a man whose nature is large and luminous, and who, by his very carriage and spontaneous actions, calms, cheers, and helps his fellows. God bless him, for he blesses everybody!”

We all know people in whose presence we experience a sense of peace, of harmony and well-being. We feel the benign influence of these poised, radiant souls enveloping us. Everybody who comes in contact with them is enriched by the graciousness and charm of their personality. If you have not developed such a personality, at least in some degree; if people do not feel the fragrance of a beautiful character radiating from you, then you have not lifted your life to the level of your highest expression. No matter how much money you may have piled up, or what you have achieved, you have not been a success in the fullest sense, because your character is not balanced, your life is not a real masterpiece. You may have made a success as a specialist, but not as a man.

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As you get older, you can start to feel like you’ll never achieve your dream or receive recognition for your contributions to a field, or that your best work is behind you.

Mo Rocca has compiled stories that demonstrate that you shouldn’t give up hope, and that no matter your age, the best may yet be to come.

Mo is a humorist, journalist, and the co-author of Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs. Today on the show, Mo shares the stories and lessons of entrepreneurs, artists, actors, and more who achieved greatness or adulation in their twilight years or had a new spurt of creativity when they thought the well had run dry, including KFC founder Colonel Sanders, the artist Matisse, a couple of guys who didn’t receive their first war wounds until they were old enough to qualify for the senior citizen discount at Denny’s, and even a virile 90-year-old tortoise.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast #849: Live Life in Crescendo * Samuel Whittemore * John L. Burns * Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater * Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum * Henri Matisse’s The Swimming Pool* * Documentary about Tyrus Wong * Mr. Pickles the Tortoise

Connect With Mo Rocca* Mo on X

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Even in the age of smartphones and GPS, stories of hikers getting lost in the wilderness still regularly appear in the news.

How do people get lost even when carrying their devices, and what should you do if you ever find yourself in that situation?

To answer those questions, I called up Creek Stewart, a wilderness survival expert and instructor and a longtime friend of AoM. Creek is the author of numerous books on wilderness survival and has been the host of several Weather Channel shows on the subject, including S.O.S.: How to Survive.

Besides his over two decades of survival experience, Creek told me that hosting S.O.S. gave him a unique perspective on how people get lost in the wilderness and what separates those who survive and get rescued quickly from those who flounder. When he hosted the show, he interviewed dozens of folks who had gotten lost in the wild, often in popular national parks filled with other people.

Below Creek shares his insights on how anyone can become disoriented when traversing the great outdoors and, more importantly, how to stay safe if it happens to you.

Pre-Trip Preparation: How to Ensure Your Quick Rescue in the Event You Get LostCreek says there are three things you can do before your trip that, should you manage to get lost during it, will dramatically increase your chances of a quick rescue and a safe return:

1. Tell people where you’re going and when to expect you back. Do this even if you’re going on a simple day hike near your home.

2. Ensure your phone is fully charged and bring a power bank. If you plan on using a digital app/map to guide your hike, you’ll of course want to make sure your phone is fully charged and has a backup power source as well. A phone is of no use if it doesn’t have power. People get lost, their phones die, and they can’t figure out where they are and how to get back on track.

A dead phone not only contributes to getting lost, but prevents a quick rescue as well.

Creek told me the one thing that all the people who had a slow rescue had in common was that they went out into the wild without a fully charged phone and without a way to power it back up. “The people who got found quickly typically had a fully charged phone, so when they got lost, they could make a call or at least put out a distress signal with GPS,” he told me.

If you’re looking for a power bank for outdoor excursions, I like and use the S.A.B.A.N.I. Portable Charger 35000mAh Power Bank. You can charge your iPhone up to five times with this power bank.

3. Consider carrying a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB). Creek recommends buying a PLB or satellite communicator. While they’re pricey and require a subscription, they will allow you to send a distress signal and share your GPS location even when you don’t have cell service.

Garmin makes two satellite communicators:

Garmin inReach Messenger Handheld Satellite Communicator. This device is also a Personal Locator Beacon, and it works with your smartphone, so you can text even when you don’t have cell service.
Garmin inReach Mini 2. It allows you to text and also has maps and weather forecasts. It’s more expensive than the original inReach due to those additional features.

Doing those three things before you leave for your trip will ensure you get found within 24 hours of getting lost in the wild.

In addition to doing those three things, Creek also recommends that you dress appropriately for the climate and bring some essential gear for any wilderness outing, even a short day hike.

Pack the essentials we list here.

Having those things on you in the event you get lost will help you stay safe and comfortable in the outdoors while you’re waiting to be found.

The Psychology of Getting LostIf you stay on marked trails when you’re out in nature, your risk of getting lost is very low. Before you begin a hike, download an offline map on your phone in case you don’t have cell service. Again, make sure you have a power charger. And carry a paper map as a backup, too.

According to Creek, the common thread amongst people who get lost in the wild is that they step off the marked trails, and then things snowball from there:

People who get lost typically go to the off-beaten paths of wilderness areas. They get off the trail a bit and start recognizing that they’re getting off track but haven’t really admitted to themselves that they are. So they start getting panicky, and they keep moving in an effort to get their bearings, which only takes them further off track.

One surprising insight that Creek gleaned from interviewing people who got lost in the wilderness is that a big thing that drove people to keep moving when lost was the overwhelming fear that they might have to spend a night in the wilderness. As Creek observes, this fear can grow to a disproportionate size and actually increase the risk to someone’s safety, rather than mitigating it:

Spending the night in the woods typically isn’t a problem. If you’ve been camping, you’ve done it. But for some reason, when people are out for a day hike, there’s a real aversion to having to spend the night outside even though they’d probably be better off if they did since they wouldn’t get more lost.

So the knee-jerk reaction to keep moving when you find yourself lost in the wild is what gets you more lost.

Besides getting you further off track and making it more difficult for rescuers to find you, continuing to walk while lost 1) increases the chance of injury, and 2) depletes important resources like water and energy.

The First Step When You Get Lost: Stop Moving!Because the thing that gets people really lost is continuing to move when they realize they’ve gotten a little lost, Creek emphasizes that the most critical action to take once you get this realization is to stay put. It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly difficult for most people.

In the survival world, there’s a mnemonic that emphasizes the importance of this course of action, which is aptly rendered S.T.O.P.

Stop. Stop moving when you’re lost so you don’t get more lost!

Think. Think about your surroundings. Take some time to try to get your bearings. Use your maps.

Observe. Notice your surroundings. Can you hear vehicles? People? Do you see trail markers nearby? Can you smell fire?

Plan. Calmly make a plan for your next move. Based on your observations, you might decide you have enough information to try to get back on the trail. But you also might decide that it’s too late to make a self-rescue attempt and that you don’t have enough information to get your bearings. In that case, plan to stay put until rescuers can find you.

For more mnemonics that could save your life, check out this post.

The Three Priorities of Survival in the WildIf you’ve decided to hunker down until you’re rescued, Creek recommends focusing on three key priorities:

1. Shelter. The type of shelter you build will depend on your specific situation. Generally, build something that will keep you safe from the elements. Here’s how to build a simple lean-to survival shelter.

2. Signal: Make yourself visible to potential rescuers. See below on how to do that.

3. Water: Find a water source or conserve what you have.

The order of these priorities may change depending on your specific situation, but addressing all three is crucial for survival.

Signaling for HelpWhen it comes to signaling, Creek suggests several effective methods:

Fire: Three fires in a triangle is a universal distress signal.
Visual markers: Create large X’s on the ground using sticks, rocks, or other materials.
Reflective objects: Use anything shiny, even your phone screen, to catch attention.

Getting Comfortable With Being UncomfortableAs we wrapped up our conversation, Creek hit home the importance of getting comfortable with being out in the wild:

Again, a lot of the panic that people who got lost experienced was due to being afraid of having to spend the night outdoors. With some minimal gear and some know-how, a night outdoors isn’t a big deal. Get comfortable with spending the night outdoors by going camping. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It can go a long way in reducing the panic if you get lost.

With a bit of preparation, you can avoid getting lost in the wild. But even if you do, following these tips will ensure you get rescued as quickly as possible.

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Your relationship with your mother is likely the first and most foundational connection in your life. At its best, this bond can be a source of comfort, strength, and love that lasts a lifetime and changes in healthy, appropriate, and adaptive ways as you mature into adulthood.

But sometimes, the attachment between a mother and her son can become unhealthy, resulting in a phenomenon called mother-son enmeshment, in which a man can become a kind of surrogate husband to his mom.

Here to unpack this complex issue is Dr. Kenneth Adams. Ken is a clinical psychologist who has spent much of his career working with what he calls “mother-enmeshed men” and is the author of When He’s Married to Mom. Today on the show, Ken unpacks the characteristics of mother-enmeshed men and how to know if you are one, and he explains what can happen in childhood that would cause a mother to enmesh with her son. We discuss the problems enmeshment can create in men’s relationships and other areas of life and how it can lead to things like compulsive porn use. And we unpack what it means for a man to become independent and emancipate from his mother, how it’s different from cutting her off, and what it looks like to have a healthy relationship with your mom.

Connect With Ken Adams* Overcoming Enmeshment website

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When He's Married to Mom: How to Help Mother-Enmeshed Men Open Their Hearts to True Love and Commitment

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To the uninitiated, a Marine Corps fighting hole appears to be nothing more than a basic burrow in the ground. But it is in fact one of the most effective defensive positions you can make. It requires only a shovel (even just the military-issue, folding kind) to create, and it helps protect you from a variety of environmental and enemy threats. This fighting hole or foxhole features several elements that help keep you dry, warm, and out of the wind. It also keeps you out of sight and protected from shrapnel and gunfire. As Corporals Corner points out in his instructional video on the subject, an additional bonus of a fighting hole is that it acts as an excellent base for a variety of other shelters.

As digging a foxhole is labor intensive, he also advises that you never attempt to make one unless you have adequate calories and water. It’s not a project to undertake when you’re low on energy.

While creating a Marine Corps fighting hole is fairly simple, there are several key components necessary to include if you want to reap all its benefits. Above, you’ll find the scoop, or I guess, the shovel, on how to make one that’ll fit two people.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. We recently finished reading this book aloud as a family (nothing relaxes kids before bed like a tale of serial murder). Having sold over 100 million copies, And Then They Were None is not only Christie’s most popular novel but one of the bestselling books of all time, and it lived up to its renown. Christie manages to make a plot that might seem ridiculous — ten people are invited to an island and killed off one by one — not seem ridiculous, and keeps you guessing whodunit til the very end.

Huckberry Icons of Style. Fall is just around the corner, so it’s a good time to start thinking about picking up some new items for your wardrobe. Huckberry has published “30 Icons of Timeless Men’s Style,” which offers short profiles of figures from Steve McQueen to Johnny Cash describing what made their signature styles distinct. They’ve also put together a shop of modern smart casual clothes that draws inspiration from these icons to help today’s men put together some classic-looking outfits of their own.

“Ladyfingers” by Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. My dad was a big Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass fan back in the day. He owned all the albums, including the iconic Whip Cream and Other Delights, which featured a pretty gal seemingly dressed only in whip cream. Lots of great songs on that album, but my favorite is “Ladyfingers.” This song features Herb Albert’s signature trumpet playing that blends cool jazz with Latin flair. Surprisingly, my 13-year-old son Gus is a big fan of this song. He loves to cue it up during sunset drives.

An Ode to Old Bay, the Great American Condiment. In a previous edition of Odds & Ends, we highlighted one of the McKay’s favorite seasonings: Old Bay. We put it on eggs, meat, and sandwiches. I like to use it when I make this healthier, at-home version of the classic crispy chicken sandwich. Well, Old Bay recently got the hagiographical treatment in The New Yorker. Casey Cep takes us on a historical tour of this Maryland staple and why you, too, should make Old Bay a standby in your spice rack. Long live Old Bay!

Quote of the Week

To find one’s work in the world and do it honorably, to keep one’s record clean so that nothing clandestine, furtive, surreptitious can ever leap out upon one from ambush and spoil one’s life, to be able, therefore, unafraid to look the world in the face, to live honorably also with one’s own soul, to walk life’s journey unhaunted by the ghosts of people from whose ruin one has stolen pleasure, and so at last to be a gentleman, one, that is, who puts a little more into life than one takes out—gather up the significance of such character, forty years old, sixty years old, eighty years old—one may well celebrate the solid satisfactions of such a life.

—Henry Emerson Fosdick

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If we’ve learned one thing this year about what the ladies find attractive in men, it’s forearms: forearms sticking out of rolled-up sleeves; forearms gripping steering wheels; forearms handling tools. Women love the look of a man’s well-developed forearms.

Strong forearms are functional too: they improve your throwing capacity and help you lift, carry, and hold things better.

If you’ve wanted to build bigger, stronger, more defined forearms, today we’ll get a tutorial on how to do so from someone who raised forearm development to an art: Bruce Lee.

A Dragon’s ForearmsLast month, we detailed the all-around physical training protocols Bruce Lee used to build his strong and chiseled physique.

But there wasn’t room in that article for delving into how Lee worked his forearms, an area of his body he was especially committed to developing. Lee believed that forearm strength was essential to punching power and grip strength, capacities that were fundamental to his life’s great goal: becoming the best martial artist in the world. And, as someone who desired to fully express the beauty of his body, he appreciated the aesthetics of muscular forearms as well.

Lee’s wife Linda called him “a forearm fanatic.” The martial artist Bob Wall remembered: “Bruce had the biggest forearms proportionate to anybody’s body that I’ve ever seen. I mean, his forearms were huge! He had incredibly powerful wrists and fingers—his arms were just extraordinary.” Another friend said that “If you ever grabbed hold of Bruce’s forearm, it was like grabbing hold of a baseball bat.”

Bruce Lee’s Forearm ExercisesThe forearms include numerous muscles that can be broadly categorized into two groups: the flexors (on the underside of the forearm) and the extensors (on the top of the forearm).

To develop truly meaty forearms, you’ve got to do exercises that work both of these groups of muscles. As you do so, your forearms will not only develop in size, definition, and strength, but you’ll improve the stability, endurance, and stamina of your wrists and grip as well.

Lee only lifted weights three times a week, but he trained his forearms every single day, doing a variety of exercises that trained all of their muscles.

While Lee commissioned the creation of several special forearm-training apparatuses, most of the exercises he did, which we’ll detail below, can replicated by the average joe:

Wrist Roller. Lee was a big fan of this classic forearm exercise, which targets both the extensors and the flexors of the forearms. To perform it, you need a wrist-roller device: a bar/rod from which a rope hangs that attaches to a light weight (usually 5-10 pounds).

To perform the wrist-roll exercise, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and hold the wrist-roller rod straight out in front of you with both hands, palms facing down. Begin rolling the weight up by rotating your wrists; focus on using your wrists to roll the rope around the bar, rather than moving your arms or shoulders. Don’t bend your elbows. Continue rolling until the weight reaches the top, near the bar.

Slowly lower the weight in a controlled way by reversing the motion.

Lee could perform push-ups with just two fingers (the index and thumb), of one hand.

Fingertip push-ups. Fingertip push-ups are performed as you would traditional push-ups, but instead of placing the entirety of the palm-side of your hand on the floor, you support the weight of your body with only your fingertips. As you get stronger at this exercise, try to progressively subtract a finger from each hand; Lee eventually got to the point where he could do this exercise with just two fingers from one hand.

Reverse Curl. The reverse curl targets the brachioradialis, a muscle of the forearm that flexes the forearm at the elbow; it will hit your forearm extensors as well.

Usually when you’re doing a curl, your palms are facing up; with a reverse curl, your palms are facing down. You stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, gripping the barbell or dumbbells with an overhand grip, hands about shoulder-width apart. Let your arms hang down in front of you, fully extended, with the barbell or dumbbells resting against your thighs.

Keeping your upper arms stationary, curl the weight upwards by bending your elbows. Focus on using your forearms to lift the weight, not your shoulders or upper arms. Raise the weight until your forearms are fully contracted and the weights are at shoulder height.

Now lower the weight slowly to the starting position, maintaining control throughout the movement. Fully extend your arms at the bottom of the movement to complete one repetition.

Seated Barbell Underhand Wrist Curl. The barbell wrist curl is an effective exercise for targeting the forearm flexors. Perform the exercise by sitting on a flat bench or on the edge of a seat with your feet flat on the floor.

Grip a barbell with your palms facing up, hands about shoulder-width apart. Rest your forearms on your thighs, with your hands projecting 2-3 inches in front of your knees. Curl the barbell up by flexing your wrists. Focus on using your forearm muscles to lift the weight, not your shoulders or elbows; only your hands should be moving. Raise the barbell until your wrists are fully flexed and the barbell is close to your forearms.

Slowly lower the barbell back to the starting position, extending your wrists and lowering the barbell as far as possible, without over-extending them to avoid unnecessary strain.

Seated Barbell Overhand Wrist Curl. Same as the above, but your palms should be facing down when you grip the barbell.

Zottman Curl. Named after the strongman George Zottman, the Zottman curl combines a standard bicep curl with a reverse curl and targets both the biceps and the forearms. To do a Zottman curl, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and hold a pair of dumbbells with an underhand grip (palms facing up), arms fully extended by your sides. Keep your upper arms stationary and curl the dumbbells up towards your shoulders by bending your elbows. Keep the motion controlled and squeeze your biceps as you lift the weights.

When the dumbbells are at shoulder height, rotate your wrists to an overhand grip (palms facing down).

Slowly lower the dumbbells back down to the starting position with your palms facing down. Once your arms are fully extended, rotate your wrists back to the underhand grip to start the next repetition.

Do not use momentum to lift and lower the weights and don’t swing them. Ensure you complete the full range of motion during all phases — fully extending and contracting your arms.

Leverage Bar Curls. In his forearm training, Lee made frequent use of leverage bars. You can, too. A leverage bar is any implement that you grip off-center. By performing standard exercises, like curls, with the weight thus unequally distributed, you work your muscles in a different way.

To do a leverage bar curl, grab a loadable dumbbell in one hand. To get the lever effect, hold the dumbbell closer to one end. This will make the lift much harder. Your arm should hang naturally at your side with your wrist in a neutral position. Slowly curl your wrist upward as far as you can go. Then slowly lower the dumbbell to the starting position. That’s one rep. You can add weight to the end of the dumbbell that you’re not holding for added resistance.

Reverse Leverage Bar Curls. This is the same thing as above, but you point the end of the dumbbell behind you. Curl wrist up and lower. This will work a different part of your forearm.

Leverage Bar Twist/Rotations. Hold a dumbbell by one end with your arm bent at 90 degrees. Rotate the dumbbell side to side.

Isometric Squeeze. Isometric exercises played a big role in Lee’s overall fitness routine, including when it came to building forearm strength. One of Lee’s exercise rules for himself was “Carry sponge gripper and use daily as much as possible.” While we don’t know exactly what this “sponge gripper” was, it seems to be something he could squeeze, using isometric resistance to build his grip and forearm strength. Similar results can be achieved by using a classic spring-loaded gripper or even a tennis ball.

Bruce Lee’s Forearm WorkoutBruce Lee performed a dedicated forearm workout every day. Here’s an example of one of his typical routines:

Underhand Wrist Curl: 4 sets x 17 reps
Overhand Wrist Curl: 4 x 12
Leverage Bar Curl: 4 x 12
Reverse Leverage Bar Curl: 4 x 12
Reverse Curl: 4 x 6
Wrist-Roller: 4 complete windings
Leverage Bar Twist: 3 x 10

In addition to doing his daily dedicated forearm workout, Lee also did forearm exercises at random times throughout his day, whether he was at home or on a movie set. According to his wife Linda, he did Zottman curls whenever he had a spare moment, often performing them with one arm while he read a book with the other.

He also used a gripping machine he had designed and kept in his office and cranked out reps on it when he had moments of downtime in between tasks and squeezed his sponge gripper as he went about his daily routine. You can replicate these exercises by keeping a gripper (I like these from Captains of Crush) in your desk drawer and squeezing out a few reps whenever you have a chance.

With a little dragon-like passion and a dose of Lee’s dedication, you’ll be filling out your shirt sleeves in no time.

Source:

Bruce Lee: The Art of Expressing the Human Body by John Little

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Bruce Lee The Art of Expressing the Human Body (Bruce Lee Library)

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You probably know your body follows a circadian rhythm, and probably think of it as primarily regulating your sleep/wake cycle, which it certainly does. But your body’s internal clock also regulates many other physical, mental, and behavioral changes that occur every 24 hours, and working with your circadian rhythm, rather than against it, can boost your health and happiness.

Here to unpack how to do so is Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience and the author of Life Time: Your Body Clock and Its Essential Roles in Good Health and Sleep. In the first part of our conversation, we discuss some science and background on circadian rhythm and its connection to light exposure. We then turn to the practical implications of having an internal clock, including whether you need to worry about viewing blue light at night, the significant mental and physical harms that can accrue from working the night shift and what can be done to mitigate them, what influences your chronotype and whether you’re a morning lark or a night owl, whether you should be concerned if you’re waking up in the middle of the night, why you wake up to pee in the night, the best times of day to exercise, and how the circadian rhythm can influence when you should take medication.

Connect With Russell Foster* Russell at the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Male friendships tend to last longer than female friendships.

Male friendships generally have less tension than female friendships.

Male friends are more tolerant of their friends’ foibles and idiosyncrasies than female friends are.

Male friends are better at being fun and enjoyable companions than female friends.

Male friends experience less “friendship jealousy” and are more open to adding others to their group.

If an alien scientist came to Earth, looked at the data on male and female friendships (see the study references below), and was asked which were better, he’d reasonably conclude that men’s friendships were superior. On paper, it seems like a clear win for the guys.

Yet our society elevates female friendships as the ideal. We’re constantly told that men have a friendship problem and should strive to be more like women in this regard.

This hasn’t always been the case; in ancient Greece, for example, it was male friendships that were held up as the ideal.

To understand why women’s friendships are now elevated while men’s friendships are denigrated, we have to go back a century to ol’ Siggy Freud.

Freud and the Birth of the Hydraulic Theory of EmotionsFreud introduced a lot of ideas that have shaped our understanding of how we think about the psyche. His ideas continue to influence how we think about ourselves and our relationships with others despite the fact that many of his theories have been challenged by modern psychology.

One of Freud’s ideas that has indelibly seeped into popular culture is that of emotional repression and its potentially adverse effects on mental health. While Freud theorized that repression helped a person maintain psychological equilibrium, he also thought that lying on a couch and talking to a therapist about these repressed thoughts and feelings could help people resolve their internal conflicts, leading to better mental health.

Freud’s ideas led to the development of the “hydraulic theory of emotion,” which suggests that emotions build up inside us like pressure in a steam engine. If the emotional pressure becomes too great, the thinking goes, it will create maladaptive behaviors, anxiety, and depression. Thus, we need to “let off steam” by venting: releasing our emotions and expressing them freely.

The hydraulic theory of emotions gave us things like yelling therapy and the encounter movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In encounter sessions, participants were encouraged to be as open and transparent as possible with the other participants so that they could free themselves of emotional repression.

While encounter groups have gone out of fashion, their influence is still seen today.

The hydraulic theory of emotions — the idea that happiness is born from emotional liberation — has become a primary part of our culture and the dominant theory as to how to stay emotionally and physically healthy. As a consequence, we’ve come to place a high value on emotional disclosure and vulnerability in the West.

And this is exactly where female friendships shine.

The Female Friendship AdvantageIn general, female friendships emphasize disclosure, vulnerability, and the sharing of deep secrets.

Why is that?

Well, evolutionary psychologists argue that it all goes back to what prehistoric women needed in a friend thousands of years ago.

The biggest thing women needed help with was raising their kids. This was especially true because many ancient societies were patrilocal, that is, when a woman got married, she left her home and went to live in her husband’s village. Removed from her family of origin, she needed to turn to replacement kin, i.e., friends, for support.

Women looked for friends who could be “alloparents” — individuals other than the biological parents who help care for and raise one’s children.

A woman wouldn’t want just anyone to be involved in her kids’ lives. She had to do a lot of vetting to figure out if she could trust someone to be a good surrogate mom for her children. All this vetting, based on mutual self-disclosure and secret-sharing, created deep, intimate bonds between women.

While women today aren’t typically consciously looking for alloparents in potential friends, this evolved pattern of mutual self-disclosure persists in the modern day.

Emotional Disclosure Is Not the Be-All, End-All of Happiness, or FriendshipsOur culture values emotional expression as the key to health and happiness.

Female friendships are generally superior as to emotional expression.

Therefore, while male friendships have their own set of advantages, because our culture disproportionately values disclosure, it gives this quality disproportionate weight on the friendship scale, and thus elevates female friendships as the ideal kind.

But the reasonableness of weighing things this way and making that assessment depends on whether the “sharing feelings = happiness” theory is proven and universal.

And, despite how deeply ingrained it is in our particular culture, this isn’t the case.

Research does show that various forms of talk therapy can benefit individuals’ mental health, and getting things off your chest can be a big relief and a healing help.

But studies also exist that suggest that it’s possible to be perfectly content in life without talking about your feelings with other people. Research that compared different cultures has found that in some societies, less emphasis is placed on emotional disclosure, yet individuals in those cultures do not necessarily have worse mental health outcomes.

Other studies have found that talking about your emotions all the time can actually make your mental health problems worse.

For example, studies have shown that depressed or anxious individuals who talk about their negative feelings with their friends – a process called co-rumination – often actually exacerbate their depressive or anxious feelings.

Studies have also found that Stoic practices like reframing emotions and cognitive distancing can help individuals maintain a healthy emotional equilibrium without requiring one’s feelings to be divulged and vented to others.

If releasing emotions and sharing your feelings was the fundamental key to happiness, then women, who enjoy friendships that are high in vulnerability and disclosure, should be significantly happier than men. But, in fact, they are diagnosed with depression twice as often.

Once you realize that the frequent sharing of emotions and secrets is not essential to happiness, and thus that the degree to which a relationship facilitates emotional disclosure isn’t the deciding factor in what makes it “better” or “worse,” you realize that men’s friendships are not necessarily inferior to women’s.

They’re just different.

And there’s a reason for that: evolution shaped male friendship with a different set of influences.

During the earliest years of human history, men primarily formed friendships that centered on cooperative activities — like hunting and fighting. To succeed at hunting and fighting, you wanted to have as many other guys helping you out as possible. Dudes in your hunting party or war gang were replaceable. If one guy died, you could always get another guy to replace him. Ancient men weren’t that concerned with developing deep, intimate relationships with their bros. You just needed a comrade who had your back, who you could get things done with. Consequently, men formed larger networks of shallower relationships.

You still see the evolutionary legacy of this pattern today. Modern men’s social networks tend to be larger and less dyadic (one-on-one) than women’s, and their friendships, while not as emotionally intimate as women’s, have less fraught tension and more cooperative chill.

Men and women’s friendships aren’t “better” or “worse.” Each has their strengths. And indeed, males report being just as satisfied with their friendships as females are.

The problem is, no one seems to believe them.

Telling Men Their Friendships Need to Look Like Female Friendships May Be Contributing to the “Male Loneliness Crisis”Men today find themselves in an evolutionary mismatch with their social environment. They’re not as suited for emotional self-disclosure and vulnerability compared to women, but they’re constantly told by the broader culture that if they want to be emotionally healthy and have robust relationships, they NEED to share their emotions and be vulnerable with their friends. They need to make their friendships more like female friendships.

Ironically, all this emphasis on encouraging men’s friendships to mirror the intimate, dyadic friendships of women may be deepening the oft-discussed “male loneliness crisis,” rather than mitigating it.

Because here’s the interesting thing about loneliness: it’s a subjective feeling.

One person can be alone and feel entirely content. Another can be surrounded by friends and feel very lonely.

How lonely we feel depends not only on the objective state of our social life but on how we think our social life should be. Unmet expectations that arise between the two can lead to feelings of loneliness.

Constantly being presented with the idea that their friendships should mirror the deep, intimate, dyadic friendships of women alters men’s expectations in a potentially unhelpful way.

Guys see memes about how it’s dysfunctional to spend hours with their buddies without discussing personal issues, or read a reddit post about how sad it is that men don’t have friends they can completely open up to, or listen to a podcast about how they need to be vulnerable with other men if they want to be happy and healthy, and start wondering if their social life is subpar and they’re missing out.

“Man, maybe I don’t have good friends after all. Maybe I am a lonely sad sack because I don’t have a bosom buddy to share my deepest emotions with.”

Guys get the message that a good friendship looks like a female friendship; because their friendships don’t look like female friendships, men who might otherwise have felt content with the state of their shallower-but-still-satisfying social lives feel dissatisfied — and lonelier — instead.

We think men are unhappy because they don’t have friendships that look like female friendships. But there may be other reasons men are unhappy, and getting the message that they’re failing on the friendship front simply makes them even more unhappy.

Celebrating and Embracing Male Friendship on Its Own TermsIt’s not that men can’t have deep, dyadic relationships with other men, don’t like to have a particular buddy they’re particularly close to, and don’t want to share their deepest emotions with a male friend from time to time. They can, and they do. It’s just that evolution didn’t shape men to make these kinds of intimate friendships a primary need.

Many men prefer relationships that are “shoulder to shoulder” rather than “face to face.”

Many men are content to have friendships that center around participating in activities rather than sharing feelings.

Many men are perfectly satisfied with playing golf with a buddy for hours, cracking jokes and talking about who knows what, without delving into the intimate details of what’s going on in their lives.

Many men are truly fine with not seeing their best friend for weeks or even months before getting back together to catch up.

Instead of the culture at large arguing that men can’t really be happy with the kinds of friendship dynamics they prefer, maybe we should believe the men who say that they are.

Instead of wives and girlfriends pushing their husbands and boyfriends to invest themselves as much in their friendships as they do in theirs, maybe they could recognize that their male partners don’t experience that need in the same way.

Instead of trying to force male friendships into a female mold, maybe we should just let men make the connections that feel the most natural to them.

Now, if men not only don’t have bosom-buddy type friendships but don’t have that “superficial” network of friends they can hang with from time to time either, then that is a problem. That is a recipe for poor mental health. Relationships are the primary driver of our happiness.

But developing this kind of social circle is a lot more accessible and achievable than telling men they need to go out and find other men who want to confess their deepest secrets to each other. Setting the friendship bar where most men would like to set it will lead to more relational success, not less.

Ultimately, the key to satisfying friendships isn’t about conforming to any one model but about finding connections that feel authentic and fulfilling to you.

For many men, that might mean less talk and more action—and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

In fact, men should take some healthy pride in their approach to friendships. Men’s friendships have their own strengths that are worth celebrating: they’re fun, they’re chill, they’re lasting. Dude friendships may be different than lady friendships, but honestly, they still really rock.

For more on the differences between male and female friendships, listen to our conversation with Dr. Jaimie Krems, who runs UCLA’s Social Minds Lab:

Studies

The greater fragility of females’ versus males’ closest same-sex friendships
Males’ greater tolerance of same-sex peers
Sex (similarities and) differences in friendship jealousy
Sex differences in friendship preferences
The social tasks of friendship: Do boys and girls excel in different tasks?
Exploring the East-West divide in prevalence of affective disorder: A case for cultural differences in coping with negative emotion
Co-rumination, anxiety, and maladaptive cognitive schemas: when friendship can hurt
The Western origins of mindfulness therapy in ancient Rome

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A fair amount of gear is involved in making a camping or backpacking trip a success, and choosing that gear can be a little intimidating as there are lots of options, and it’s expensive to boot.

Here to offer some tips on selecting gear and getting the most out of it is Craig Caudill, an avid outdoorsman, the director and lead instructor of the Nature Reliance School, and the author of Ultimate Wilderness Gear: Everything You Need to Know to Choose and Use the Best Outdoor Equipment. Today on the show, Craig and I discuss some things to know when purchasing things like boots, tents, sleeping bags, and more, and we offer some specific recommendations as to the gear that’s worked for us respectively. Craig also offers tips on using outdoor equipment, including how to dry wet boots without damaging them, whether you should put a tarp under your tent, what to do if you get hot and sweaty or cold in your sleeping bag, a hack for sleeping more comfortably on the ground, and the best kind of knife for an outdoorsman to carry.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: How to Filter and Purify Water for Traveling, Camping, and Survival * AoM Article: The Benefits of Hammock Camping * AoM Article: How to Pack a Backpack for Backpacking * AoM Article: Two Things You Should Be Doing to Take Better Care of Your Camping Gear * AoM Article: Outdoor Hydration Showdown — Nalgene Bottle vs. Water Bladder * AoM Article: How to Choose the Perfect Survival Knife * Craig’s books * Native Summit in Edmond, OK * Brett’s Tent: Hubba Hubba 2-Person Backpacking Tent * Hennessy Hammock Tent * Warbonnet Hammock Tents * Military Modular Sleep System * Brett’s Sleeping Pad: Big Agnes * Kate’s Sleeping Pad: Therm-A-Rest Trail Prolite Apex * Backpacking Cot * Brett’s Backpacking Pillow: Sea to Summit Aeros * Brett’s Water Bladder: HydraPak Shape-Shift * Craig’s Water Filter: Sawyer Mini * Brett’s Water Filter: Katadyn Hiker Pro Hand Pump Water Filter * Sawyer Squeeze Water Filter * Brett’s Backpacking Stove: Jetboil Stove * Fire-Maple Backpacking Stove * MSR Backpacking Stove * LT Wright Handcrafted Knives * Fast Fire Firestarters * Hill People Gear Backpacks

Connect With Craig Caudill* Nature Reliance School * Craig on IG * Craig on LinkedIn Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Heat Factory SP128 Mini Water Filtration System

Katadyn Hiker Pro Transparent Water Filter, Lightweight, Compact Design for Personal or Small Group Camping, Backpacking or Emergency Preparedness, one Size (8019857)

Sawyer Products Squeeze Water Filtration System

Jetboil Zip Camping Stove Cooking System, Carbon

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Man who catch fly with chopstick, accomplish anything. — Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

The Karate Kid taught kids of the 80s a lot about bravery, integrity, and — of course — rad chopsticks moves. The scenes where Mr. Miyagi and Daniel-san try to catch houseflies between the tips of their chopsticks are among the most exciting moments in utensil movie history. To get to that level of chopstick zen mastery, you’ll need a lot of practice on easier targets, like sweet and sour chicken. But, with time, you may just find yourself tossing out your fly swatter. Be patient; remember, it even took Mr. Miyagi himself until Karate Kid II to finally snag a fly himself.

Of course your chopstick skills won’t only allow you to get rid of household pests, but to deftly eat Asian cuisine at restaurants and when traveling without resorting to asking for a fork.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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When we think about purpose, we typically think of our life’s overarching aim; our true calling; the thing we were put on earth to do.

But each individual’s purpose encompasses more than this, and in fact exists across three horizons that stretch from the imminent and concrete to the distant and transcendent.

In the first horizon of purpose, our aim is to turn anarchy into order. We live to push back on a universe that is ever moving toward entropy. By engaging in small daily acts of upkeep — making the messy clean, the disheveled neat, the chaotic organized — we hold back the decay and disarray that would engulf us and others. While everything will endlessly revert to disorder, we live to create brief but shining moments when the world is set right.

In the second horizon of purpose, our aim is to convert intentions into actions. We live to transform potential energy into kinetic. Each of us regularly has ideas, both big (“I should start a business”) and small (“I should text so-and-so”), that we can either fulfill or ignore. We live to minimize life’s woulda, coulda, shouldas and maximize the satisfaction of following through.

The third horizon is where we find Purpose with a capital P. Herein lies the big why of our lives, the hope of making a unique, meaningful contribution to the world. This purpose arises from the intersection of a need and one’s particular gifts. That might involve creating a revolutionary invention or writing a bestselling book, but it could also take the form of being the parent of excellent humans, the buoyer or corraler of loved ones, the leader of a community.

While it can sometimes be difficult to find the third horizon of purpose, there’s one definite prerequisite to discovering it: laboring diligently in the other two.

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Seiko SRPG33 Field Watch. About four years ago, I embraced the Apple Watch. But lately, I’ve decided to go back to plain old analog watches. Why? For one thing, smartwatches don’t look very good, in my opinion. For another, they’re distracting. I’m a big proponent of putting away one’s phone during meals and conversations, since checking your phone makes you less present, and research shows that even the presence of a phone on the table makes people engage in shallower conversations, simply from the subconscious recognition of the potential to be interrupted. But I had to admit that checking the notifications that came across my watch had the same interrupting effect. I could turn them off, of course, but still wondered if the mere presence of the checkable device on my wrist siphoned off some mental bandwidth. Consequently, I’ve lately put the Apple Watch away and busted out some of my old wristwatches that I’ve had stored away in my treasure box. I also acquired a new field watch from Seiko. I’m a big fan of field watches, and Seiko makes a handsome one at a reasonable price. It’s been nice not being buzzed on my wrist by my Apple Watch and sporting a sartorial accessory that looks respectable to boot.

The Unending Allure Of High Mountains. It’s been said that people are either mountain people or beach people. I’m definitely a mountain person. I’ve always been drawn to the earth’s rocky peaks — gazing at them, hiking them, camping amongst them. One of my favorite things is driving west and watching the Rocky Mountains start to rise from the horizon as you get closer and closer to them. In an article for Noema, Henry Wismayer sets out to explain the allure of high mountains. You might think an article on mountains would be dry, but this longform piece was truly one of the best things I’ve read lately and kept me engaged from beginning to end. This bit resonated with me the most: “Sentinels of geological time, the peaks are often seen to embody a reassuring impassivity, aloof to the human ants playing in their shadow.” Whenever I look up at mountains, I always think, “These things were here for millions of years before me, and they’ll be here for millions of years after me.” Mountains are existentially humbling.

The Adjustment Bureau. In a time of conspiracy theories, here’s one you can get lost in without stress and partisan bickering. In this film from 2011, Matt Damon stars as a congressman who wants to be with the seeming love of his life (played by Emily Blunt), but is thwarted by a mysterious organization of operatives who are hellbent on keeping them apart. It’s a flick that combines a romance story with an action-thriller set-up and an unusually thoughtful plot that raises questions about fate, agency, free will, and divine providence. All with a whole lot of trilby hats.

Eating well and exercising may be as effective for treating depression as going to therapy. Numerous studies have shown that exercise is as, if not more, effective than both therapy and antidepressants in treating depression (and anxiety), and a recent study only confirmed this finding. In the study, half of participants participated in sessions in which they received guidance on nutrition and physical activity, while the other half participated in sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy, often considered the gold standard form of therapy for treating depression. Both groups saw a significant and about equal reduction in their depression symptoms (the reduction was actually a bit higher for the lifestyle intervention group). Depression is a complex thing, and diet/exercise may need to be combined with other treatments in a holistic, multi-prong approach to treating the disorder. But these studies demonstrate the connection between mental and physical health and may point to the veracity of the metabolic pathway theory of depression. As someone who’s struggled with depression myself, what I always like to say is that if you’re suffering from depression, but don’t regularly exercise, you haven’t yet begun to fight.

Quote of the Week

It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.

—Sydney Smith

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Note: In the 1930s, the Cleveland Academy of Medicine held a contest that solicited submissions for the best set of rules for mental health. The winning set of rules, which we share below, was penned by psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Fetterman and published in the academy’s bulletin.

MENTAL HEALTH RULES

HAVE A HOBBY: Acquire pursuits which absorb your interest; sports and nature are best.

DEVELOP A PHILOSOPHY: Adapt yourself to social and spiritual surroundings.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS: Cultivate companionship in thought and in feeling. Confide, confess, consult.

FACE YOUR FEARS: Analyze them; daylight dismisses ghosts.

BALANCE FANTASY WITH FACT: Dream but also do; wish but build; imagine but ever face reality.

BEWARE OF ALLURING ESCAPES: Alcohol, opiates, and barbitals may prove faithless friends.

EXERCISE: Walk, swim, golf — muscles need activity.

LOVE, BUT LOVE WISELY: Sex is a flame which uncontrolled may scorch; properly guided, it will light the torch of eternity.

DON’T BECOME ENGULFED IN A WHIRLPOOL OF WORRIES: Call early for help. The doctor is ready for your rescue.

TRUST IN TIME: Be patient and hopeful; time is a great therapist.

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What man hasn’t imagined what it would be like to be a cowboy on the open range?

And when you think about being a cowboy, you probably imagine yourself swinging a lasso above your head to round up wayward dogies

The lasso, or lariat, that we know today originated with Mexican vaqueros back in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the fluid social world of the American West, American cowboys picked up the lasso from their Mexican counterparts to aid them in their own cow punching.

North America isn’t the only place where the lasso has been used. Ancient Egyptians and Mongolians used lassos to herd animals, and ancient Persian warriors employed them in battle.

Yes, the lasso is indeed a manly implement. And today we’re going to show you how to tie one.

At the heart of every lasso is the honda knot. It’s a knot that creates a small, secure loop through which you pass the rope in order to create a large loop that can be tightened and loosened easily.

The rope you use for lassos needs to be a bit stiff so that the loop maintains its shape when you throw it. Traditionally, lassos were made with stiff rawhide or manila rope (check out our article on rope material!). Today, cowboys use nylon or polyester ropes which offer great durability.

Follow our illustrated guide and soon you’ll be ready to hit the Lonesome Dove trail with Gus and Woodrow.

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You may know Nate Silver as an election forecaster. But he’s a poker player as well. And his experiences operating in a world of competition and risk led him to explore what his fellow gamblers, as well as hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and many other kinds of maverick types do differently than other people.

Amongst the findings Nate shares in his new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, are the “13 habits of highly effective risk-takers.” Nate and I discuss some of these habits today on the show, including exercising strategic empathy, avoiding the pitfalls of resulting, taking a raise or fold stance toward life, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Podcast #685: How to Decide With Annie Duke * AoM Podcast #840: When to Quit With Annie Duke * Sunday Firesides: Careful Kills

Connect With Nate Silver* Nate‘s Substack * Nate on X Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Welcome back to our series, Classical Music 101! Our goal with this series is to provide an approachable, non-intimidating introduction to classical music so you can start appreciating this timeless musical genre.

In our last article, we explored the rich and intricate music of the Baroque era, a period marked by elaborate ornamentation, expressive melodies, and the rise of instrumental compositions. We took a look at the works of composers like Vivaldi, Handel, and JC Bach, who defined the Baroque sound with their dynamic and complex compositions.

In today’s article, we’ll explore the Classical era, a time when music got more natural, refined, and elegant, and you’ll meet composers like Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. These musical giants set the standard for Western instrumental music, so much so that we now refer to all Western concert music, regardless of the era in which it was composed, as “classical” music.

The Classical Era (1750-1820)The Classical era began roughly around 1750 and ended around 1820 with the rise of the Romantic era.

The transition from the Baroque to the Classical era marked a fundamental shift in aesthetics. Music moved away from the intricate polyphony and intellectual rigor of composers like Bach and towards the accessible melodies and emotionally expressive style championed by the likes of Haydn and Mozart.

While Baroque music sought to capture the grandeur and complexity of the natural world in an objective, almost mathematical manner, Classical music aimed for a more subjective ethos. The goal was to create music that expressed the inner thoughts and emotions of an individual through vocal lyricism and easy-on-the-ear melodies.

Bach’s sons played a pivotal role in the transition from the Baroque to the Classical era (Fun fact: Bach had 20 – 20! – kids; the guy not only birthed a ton of Baroque bangers but also sired a prodigious passel of progeny.) During the 1750s, sons Johann Christian, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Wilhelm Friedemann took Baroque ideas and began modifying them slightly into a style that would lay the groundwork for Classical greats like Haydn and Mozart.

Just as larger socio-political trends shaped Baroque music, Classical music was also influenced by cultural changes in the West at the time, specifically the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment era thinkers emphasized reason, individualism, and humanism, and they looked to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration on cultivating these ideals. This emphasis on classical Greek and Roman culture during the Enlightenment was called Neoclassicism.

During the Enlightenment, political philosophers used the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to support their arguments for individual rights and republican forms of government. Architects emulated the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome with its emphasis on simplicity and order. Artists would create paintings depicting classical myths. All these Enlightenment thinkers held the optimistic belief that one could achieve excellence politically, morally, and artistically through reason and discipline.

Thanks to advances in industrial production and the rise of governments that emphasized individual rights, a burgeoning middle class began to develop and started flexing its economic power by seeking entertainment that resonated with their democratic and individualistic ideals.

Instead of the complex and ornate Baroque art that appealed to royalty, Enlightenment middle classers wanted art that was accessible, inspired personal edification, and was emotionally direct.

Musical composers that were alive during the Enlightenment responded to these changing tastes and ideals by creating a musical style that became known as Classical.

Characteristics of Classical Era MusicClarity. When you listened to a Baroque tune, it was often hard to distinguish different parts of the song. There was a lot going on. The components of classical music are much clearer. Instead of creating songs with mathematically intricate parts that worked together to create a unified whole, Classical composers produced music that had much more clearly defined elements, making it easier to listen to.

Emphasis on melody. Part of what made Classical era music easier to listen to was its emphasis on melody. In contrast to the intricate, interwoven melodies of Baroque music, Classical music predominantly uses a homophonic texture. This means that a single, readily appreciable melody takes center stage, supported by harmonic accompaniment in the form of chords. The result is music that has a lyrical feel to it.

Emotional expressiveness. The piano rose to prominence during the Classical era, opening new opportunities for emotional expressiveness. Unlike the harpsichord, which was popular during the Baroque era and can only be played at a single volume (really loud), the piano can be played softer or louder. This was the birth of crescendo and decrescendo. This ability allowed composers to create dynamic, emotionally expressive music that can truly move you. If you want to get wistful, you play the piece soft. If you want to get bold, you play the music loud. And you could do both in the same piece of music.

Accessible. Music during the Classical era became accessible in a few ways. First, thanks to its emphasis on clarity and harmony, Classical music appealed to individuals beyond the highfalutin aristocracy and resonated with the democratic tastes of the burgeoning middle class.

Moreover, thanks to advances in industrial production and rising standards of living, musical instruments became cheaper and more accessible. This allowed for more musicians to get into the music biz, which resulted in more public performances and more people being able to attend them.

Because musical instruments were cheaper, middle-class parents would buy their kids a piano or violin. These kids would learn how to play the simpler Classical pieces and perform them for their families. Music was something anyone who dedicated themselves to the craft could create. It wasn’t just for an elite few.

Classical Musical FormsJust as the Baroque Era gave birth to specific musical forms like the oratorio and cantata, the Classical Era saw the development of musical forms, including the sonata, symphony, and string quartet.

Key Classical ComposersJohann Christian Bach (1735-1782). Johann Christian Bach was a German composer and the youngest son of the famed Johann Sebastian Bach. Known as the “London Bach” due to his significant career in the British capital, he was a crucial figure in the transition from Baroque to Classical music. His music is celebrated for its elegance, clarity, and melodic charm. His style became known as Rococo.

His most famous works include his keyboard concertos and operas, which showcase his ability to blend Italian operatic style with the emerging Classical form.

Take a listen to Keyboard Concerto in E-flat, Op. 7 No. 5. You’ll notice a mixture of Baroque and Classical elements in it:

Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787). Christoph Willibald Gluck was a German composer who reformed opera to make it more expressive and dramatic. His works emphasize the integration of music and drama, with an aim of enhancing the emotional impact of the narrative.

His most famous operas include Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, which showcase his innovative approach to opera composition.

Take a listen to Orfeo ed Euridice:

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). Franz Joseph Haydn was an Austrian composer who is known as the father of the symphony and the string quartet for the crucial role he played in developing each. His compositions are celebrated for their inventive structures, rich harmonies, and lively melodies.

Haydn’s prolific output includes 104 symphonies, with the “London Symphonies” being among his most famous works. Haydn’s oratorio, “The Creation,” is another masterpiece depicting the world’s creation as described in the Book of Genesis.

Give these Hadyn pieces a listen:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). If you had to pick one composer who symbolizes Classical music, it would be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The guy was a prolific musician who cranked out symphonies, operas, and concertos like nobody’s business.

Mozart is known for his clarity, balance, and melodic brilliance. When you listen to a piece from Mozart, you’re struck by how effortlessly beautiful and emotionally captivating it sounds.

Here are a few Mozart pieces to check out.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Mozart’s classical supremacy is rivaled only by that of Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven was a German composer whose innovative compositions bridged the Classical and Romantic eras. His music is known for its dramatic contrasts, emotional depth, and structural complexity.

Beethoven had a Romantic sensibility, and his works hit on themes of human genius triumphantly overcoming human frailty to express the individual’s uniqueness and grandeur. He wrote in his diary that he wanted to control his destiny by grabbing fate by the throat. How Nietzschean!

Out of all the composers I read about, Beethoven was the most fascinating character. Composing didn’t come easy to him like it did for Bach or Mozart. He had to grind away for days on end to produce something. Tragically, he became deaf towards the end of his life, but ever the Romantic genius, he turned suffering into beauty and didn’t let his disability get in the way of continuing to produce great art.

Beethoven produced several notable bangers during his career, including Symphony No. 5 in C minor with its iconic four-note motif (“da-da-da-dum”) — one of classical music’s most recognizable themes:

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (“Choral Symphony”) is another great one, which includes the “Ode to Joy” chorus. This symphony was groundbreaking in its use of vocal soloists and a choir alongside the orchestra. It’s so damned stirring. It perfectly encapsulates Beethoven’s ideal of human progression:

Finally, check out Moonlight Sonata, renowned for its expressive first movement, which has a dreamy, contemplative quality. It’s something you listen to when you’re feeling like a tortured poet:

The romantic sensibility Beethoven injected into his music provided the segue to the next great period in classical music, the Romantic era, which we’ll turn to next time.

Read the rest of the series:

Classical Music 101 — The Origins of an Illustrious Art
Classical Music 101: The Baroque Era

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To train the body, strengthening its muscles, increasing its cardiovascular health, and improving its agility, you need to do exercises like stretching, running, and lifting weights.

To train the soul, expanding its capacity, you likewise need to perform exercises, in this case, what are called “spiritual disciplines” — practices like fasting, silence, self-examination, study, and simplicity.

As a pastor, John Mark Comer approaches the spiritual disciplines from a Christian perspective, as the habits and practices from “the way of Jesus” that allow individuals to make deeper layers of themselves available to grace and access the transforming power that’s necessary to become what John Mark calls “a person of love.”

But the practices that are considered spiritual disciplines can be found across different religions, and even philosophies like Stoicism, and can be utilized by people from varied backgrounds to deepen their inner life and strength, center themselves in chaos, find greater purpose, and subdue baser desires to reach for higher ideals.

Today on the show, John Mark offers an introduction to the spiritual disciplines, and the way they can be an act of resistance, a way for us to form our own values and rhythms in life, instead of allowing our lives to be formed by the defaults and external forces of our age.

Resources Related to the Podcast The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer * Practicing the Way* by John Mark Comer * AoM’s series on the spiritual disciplines: + An Introduction to the Spiritual Disciplines + Study and Self-Examination + Solitude and Silence + Simplicity + Fasting + Gratitude * AoM Article: How and Why to Take a Tech Sabbath * AoM Podcast #503: The Case for the 24/6 Lifestyle * AoM Podcast #708: Overcome the Comfort Crisis

Connect With John Mark Comer* John Mark’s website

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The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World

Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did.

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In a classic scene from the 1993 movie The Fugitive, Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) appears to be trapped in a drainage tunnel; Deputy Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) is approaching and a dangerous waterfall looms behind. Gerard of course believes that the fugitive is trapped; a plunge down that waterfall is surely a death wish.

And yet Kimble does what everyone knows he’ll do: he dives right off and survives.

While he doesn’t have safe form, and appears to flip over once or twice no less, it is indeed possible to survive a fall like that — especially with improved technique. Just last month, in fact, a man survived a 170-foot plunge over Niagara Falls.

The reason folks perish when they fall into water from a significant height is because the speed of the fall combined with the surface tension of the water makes it akin to landing on concrete. But with a waterfall, the force of the water coming down breaks some of that tension and makes for a “softer” landing. That said, it’s still a highly dangerous endeavor. Colliding with rocks and drowning from not being able to get up to the surface in time are just a couple of the potentially fatal risks involved. So, never attempt for fun, but if you find yourself in a situation where you’re unavoidably about to tumble down a waterfall, utilize the above tips to increase your chances of survival.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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“No word is oftener on the lips of men than Friendship,” said Henry David Thoreau. “All men are dreaming of it, and its drama…is enacted daily.”

Given Thoreau’s misanthropic, taciturn reputation, it may seem surprising that he spoke so loftily of friendship, and especially that he associated it with “drama.”

But, in fact, few men have ever thought and felt more deeply about friendship than Thoreau. And while he indeed had little appetite for drama in the modern, colloquial sense — overexaggerated emotions, conflict for the sake of conflict, talking about the relationship — he thought that friendships were filled with drama of another sort.

What makes friendship unique is the voluntary nature of the relationship.

Familial ties are dictated by fate and bound by blood; no matter the tensions that arise between family members, their lives remain forever connected.

The bonds of friendship, however, are volitionally entered into, and can be volitionally left behind.

Though the expectations of friendship are never codified, or typically even spoken aloud, they must be lived up to.

The perpetuation of a friendship is premised on each party continuing to find value and worth in the other — in the perpetuation of mutual affection and admiration. Its bond must ever be earned and re-earned.

Thus, the continuance of even the most long-standing and steadfast friendships can never 100% be presumed upon.

While the necessity of effort, the risk of falling short, and the uncertainty of permanence make friendships feel less certain and secure, it’s also what lends them their tang, their excitement, their charge.

This was the “drama” of which Thoreau spoke.

This is why he said, “Friendship is evanescent in every man’s experience.”

This is why an electricity exists between current friends, and why, even when time, distance, and strife intervene, friendships are remembered like “lightning in past summers.”

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Lawerence of Arabia. I recently watched the classic 1962 film Lawerence of Arabia during my Zone 2 cardio sessions. It had been on my to-watch list for a while since it’s my father-in-law’s favorite movie. It did not disappoint! The movie chronicles the life of T.E. Lawrence (played brilliantly by Peter O’Toole), a British officer who unites and leads Arab tribes during World War I in a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The film does a great job exploring the nature of power, ambition, and idealism, as well as the complex geopolitics of the British empire. Amazing acting and amazing cinematography. Highly recommend.

“No Name” by Jack White. Jack White released a new album a few weeks ago, and it’s been getting a lot of rotation during my weightlifting sessions. This is a good, old-fashioned rock album full of electrifying guitar riffs and songs with a nice mixture of rock and blues. “That’s How I’m Feeling,” “Old Scratch Blues,” and “Bless Myself” are three of my favorites on the album.

Abercombie & Fitch Woods. The other day, Gus asked me what my go-to cologne was in high school. Answer: Abercrombie & Fitch Woods. Which is funny because I generally loathed A&F clothing (too preppy!) and opted for wearing vintage bowling shirts or 1970s golf shirts I found in thrift stores (punk rock!). For some reason, I made an exception for my antipathy towards A&F when it came to fragrance. Anyways, Gus’ inquiry got me curious about whether they still make Woods, and lo and behold, they do! So I bought a bottle and have been wearing it the past few weeks. I’m enjoying it, and it reminds Kate of when we first dated. Whether from its legitimately nice citrusy/woodsy smell or from the nostalgia factor (even if you didn’t know someone who wore Woods, the A&F stores smelled of it), I bet this is a cologne that makes a lot of Millennial women swoon.

Why I Hate Instagram Now We’ve been on Instagram since 2010, and it’s been interesting to see how the platform has changed in the past 14 years. Conor Friedersdorf articulates the lamentable shift Instagram has undergone from a fun, organic platform that allowed you to share life’s goings-ons with friends and family to a platform that’s dedicated to entertaining you with algorithmically-driven, revenue-generating content created by influencers and brands. I’ve noticed that I’ve been using IG less and less because the content that shows up in my feed is mostly reels (do not like!) from accounts I don’t follow and ads. Bring back personal blogs for sharing life’s ephemera with friends and family!

Quote of the Week

Decide! There is nothing in the world so pitiable as an undecided man, who wavers between two feelings, hoping to reconcile them, and does not understand that nothing can unite them.

—Goethe

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If you’re trying to lose weight, one of the challenges you’ll face is what to do about those times when you find yourself at a fast-food restaurant.

The offerings at these establishments are typically incredibly high in calories. A Big Mac meal at McDonald’s can set you back 1,300 calories. Damn! If your calorie goal for the day is 2,400 calories, that’s more than half your daily calories in a single meal.

The typical advice for people losing weight is to just avoid fast-food restaurants altogether. And with some preparing, thinking ahead, and good decision-making, you can accomplish that most of the time.

But not 100% of the time. Sometimes, life throws a wrench in your plans.

Maybe you’re on a road trip, and your friends decide to stop at Carl’s Jr. for lunch.

Maybe your kid’s soccer team decided to go out to dinner to Chick-fil-A after the game.

Maybe you’re just really pressed for time and need to grab something fast at a drive-thru on the way from work to another engagement.

What to do?

Well, what if I told you you don’t have to choose between convenience and your fitness goals? You can have your fast-food burger and eat it too—all while staying on track with your weight loss.

When you want to lose weight, you want to choose foods that are lower in calories and higher in satiating, muscle-building protein.

Thankfully, most fast-food restaurants now offer options that meet this criteria. With a bit of creativity, you can easily select meals at pretty much all the major fast-food restaurants that will give you 30+ grams of protein (which is a good minimum goal for a meal) and only clock in at around 600 calories.

Below, we provide some suggestions for meals that meet these metrics that you can get at five popular fast-food restaurants. One thing to keep in mind is that while you can reduce the calories in your fast-food orders, it’s hard to reduce the amount of sodium. These are going to be sodium bombs. So they’re not great for everyday dining, but they’ll do in a pinch.

Whether you’re looking to shed a few pounds or maintain your hard-earned gains, this guide will show you how to navigate the pitfalls of fast-food menus and stay on track with your goals.

General Guidelines to Keep Your Fast-Food Meals Lower in CaloriesBefore we get into specific meals, here are some general guidelines to follow that will allow you to keep your meals lower in calories, regardless of the fast-food establishment you visit:

Food tracking apps like MyFtinessPal are your friends. I use the app all the time when I’m at fast-food restaurants. Quickly look up the calorie and macro count of foods and piece together your meal with that info.
Choose grilled over fried meats.
Choose lean proteins. While you can still enjoy a beef burger, protein sources like turkey or chicken breast generally have fewer calories.
Ask for extra protein. Adding extra protein, like extra meat, can help increase satiety while keeping calories low.
Skip the fries. If you’re looking for a side, get fruit or salad instead. Also, hot take: fries aren’t that good anyway!
Skip the high-fat sauces, dressings, and condiments. Ask for lower-calorie options instead.
Load up on veggies. Satiety is premised in part on volume; calorically dense foods won’t fill you up and will leave you feeling hungry. To increase volume and nutrition, add low-calorie veggies to your meals like extra lettuce, tomatoes, and onions.
Choose water or unsweetened drinks like diet sodas.

Finally, don’t be afraid to enjoy yourself with a no-holds-barred high-calorie fast-food meal every now and then. I love getting a double cheeseburger on occasion. You can just adjust your macros and calories accordingly and eat less the rest of the day. Or just chalk it up to an anomalous indulgence, and get back to your diet the next day. You don’t have to eat perfectly 100% of the time to still lose weight and stay healthy.

Fast-Food Meals That Are 600 Calories or Less With More than 30 Grams of ProteinMcDonald’sMcDonald’s is a tricky place to get a high-protein meal that’s low in calories. They used to offer grilled chicken and salad options here in the United States, but they got rid of them back in 2020.

You can still get a meal that’s a little more than 500 calories and 30 grams of protein by pairing a McDouble burger with an order of McNuggets.

McDouble + 4-Count McNuggets

On the burger, ask for no cheese and extra pickles, lettuce, and onion for added volume.
Don’t eat the bun if you want to bring the calorie count down by 100 calories.

Total calories: 530

Protein: 30 grams

Fat: 27 grams

Carbs: 43 grams

Taco BellDo you want to Live Más but without all the extra calories? Try the Cantina Chicken Bowl at Taco Bell. Choose grilled chicken instead of roasted chicken to keep the calories down but the protein high.

Cantina Grilled Chicken Bowl

Ask for three servings of grilled chicken.
Ask for it with no rice and no avocado ranch sauce
Keep the black beans, cheese, and low-fat sour cream.
Ask for extra lettuce, pico de gallo, and cabbage for added volume.
Use hot sauce packets to add flavor.

Total calories: 460

Protein: 56 grams

Fat: 18 grams

Carbs: 20 grams

Chick-fil-ABoy, do I love Chick-fil-A. My usual go-to is the spicy chicken sandwich with extra pickles. I usually get two of them as a meal.

If I know I’ll be having Chick-fil-A for dinner, I’ll cut back on my other meals during the day to make room in my macro budget for those two spicy chicken sandwiches.

But sometimes we have nights where we have Chick-fil-A unexpectedly and getting my regular two-fisted sandwich order would put me way over my calorie count for the day.

Thankfully, Chick-fil-A offers some tasty high-protein, lower-calorie grilled options.

Here’s an order with just 420 calories and a whopping 50 grams of protein.

Grilled Chicken Cool Wrap + 4-Count Grilled Chicken Nuggets

Use buffalo sauce to add some low-calorie flavor.

Total calories: 420

Protein: 50 grams

Fat: 15 grams

Carbs: 30 grams

Panda ExpressA lot of take-out Chinese food is loaded with fat. But you can get a solid meal at Panda Express that has 600 total calories and 72(!) grams of protein.

Plate Meal: 2 servings of Grilled Teriyaki Chicken + 1 serving of Super Greens

Total Calories: 600

Protein: 72 grams

Fat: 30.5

Carbs: 25 grams

SubwaySandwiches are a great fast-food option if you’re looking for something high in protein, but lower in calories. At pretty much every sandwich chain, you can create a custom sandwich that’s loaded with satiating, lean meats like chicken or turkey and plenty of filling, high-volume veggies.

Subway isn’t the tastiest of the sandwich chains, in my opinion (we’re bigger fans of Jersey Mike’s around here), but its outposts are ubiquitous. Here’s an example of a nutritionally solid sammie to get there:

Grilled Chicken Sandwich

6-inch artisanal bread
3 servings of grilled chicken
2 servings of provolone
Lettuce, tomato, onion (ask for extra)
Sweet teriyaki sauce

Total calories: 540

Protein: 70 grams

Fat: 16 grams

Carbs: 47 grams

Allowing for fast food in your weight loss journey isn’t just about damage control—it’s about creating a sustainable strategy for long-term success.

By being flexible with your diet, you’ll be more likely to stick with it in the long run. Research shows that a flexible approach to nutrition, allowing yourself to enjoy a variety of foods—yes, even fast food—can lead to better adherence and, ultimately, better results.

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If you’re a parent, teacher, coach, or manager who lives, loves, and works with tweens, teens, and 20s-somethings, you know that young people sometimes act in seemingly head-scratching ways, that you don’t always feel like you’re being listened to, and that it can be frustrating to try to guide them in acting towards positive ends.

The source of these challenges is often chalked up to the underdeveloped brains and hormones that tweens through young twenty-somethings possess. But my guest would say that what’s more to blame is the ineffective way mentors often approach young adults.

David Yeager is a developmental psychologist and the author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation—And Making Your Own Life Easier. Today on the show, David and I discuss the “mentor’s dilemma” — the idea that you either have to be a tough authoritarian who holds young adults to high standards or a softie push-over who doesn’t crush a kid’s spirit — and how to navigate through this unnecessary dichotomy. David explains the critical importance of understanding what really drives young adults, what approaches cause them to shut down and disengage, and the best practices that parents, teachers, and other mentors can take to leave young adults feeling inspired, enthusiastic, and ready to contribute.

Connect With David Yeager* Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute * David’s faculty page

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If you’ve driven on America’s highways, you’ve likely encountered a long line of military vehicles.

That, my friends, is a convoy.

In the military, convoys are used to move personnel and equipment long distances. Doing so in a group provides support to each individual vehicle.

While a convoy looks like just a bunch of vehicles following each other, there’s actually a lot of planning and preparation that goes into it to ensure everyone arrives safely, on time, and together.

Civilians often engage in convoys themselves. If you’ve ever gone on a big camping trip in a remote area that required multiple vehicles to follow each other to get there, you’ve taken part in a convoy. I did many of these convoys back in my Boy Scouting days when our troop would drive from our homes in Oklahoma to camp in Colorado. My 13-year-old brain caught on to the fact that the adults talked about our vehicular caravan as a “convoy” and had designated a “convoy leader,” but I didn’t really pay much attention to how the whole thing went down.

It wasn’t until I became an adult youth leader and started taking boys on camping trips myself that I realized it might be helpful to learn some tips on how to effectively plan, organize, and execute a convoy. So, I talked to Harrison Anderson, a former Green Beret who did 12 years of active duty service in the Army, about how it’s done.

Here’s what I learned.

Pre-Departure Briefing: The Foundation of SuccessBefore wheels hit the pavement, a thorough convoy brief is essential. Convoy leaders, truck commanders (see below), and drivers should attend this pre-departure briefing. Here’s what it should cover:

Establish the Chain of CommandHarrison recommends having the following chain of command for your convoy:

Convoy leader. The convoy leader should be in the first vehicle. His job is to oversee the planning and execution of the convoy, ensure the safety of everyone in it, and make navigation decisions like route adjustments.
Second-in-command (2IC). A convoy should have a second-in-command who should sit in the last vehicle in the convoy. His job is to support the convoy leader in his responsibilities. By being positioned at the end of the convoy, the 2IC can monitor its length and respond to any issues, such as a vehicle in the line getting a flat tire. Harrison also told me the 2IC monitors the weather and informs the convoy leader of any inclement conditions that could affect the convoy’s safety.
Truck commander (TC). Each vehicle in the convoy should have a truck commander who sits shotgun to the driver. The TC’s job is to monitor the communications line with the convoy leader to stay abreast of updates and keep things coordinated. Drivers, of course, shouldn’t handle communications for safety reasons!

Vehicle ChecksConvoy leaders should check with drivers to ensure that vehicles are completely fueled and tire pressure is at a safe level. Harrison also likes to check with drivers to make sure their vehicles have a filled spare tire and a working jack in case they get a flat. Also, check that the drivers have adequate supplies to manage an emergency situation, like being stranded away from civilization for a bit. See our article on what every man should keep in his car.

Communications CheckAfter establishing a chain of command for the convoy, the next part of your pre-departure briefing should be a “comms check.” Communication is a key part of a successful convoy. It allows for adjustments to be made on the fly while ensuring the convoy stays together.

Again, truck commanders of each vehicle will be in charge of communications.

If you’re using radios for communications (see our guide on walkie-talkies), Harrison recommends checking the following items on your radios:

Radios are fully powered
Everyone has backup batteries
Everyone is on the same channels

If you’re not using radios, establish a group text chat that everyone will use for comms. The convoy leader sends a text to all the truck commanders and has each truck commander send a text to the group to ensure everyone is sending and receiving messages.

After establishing a group chat, the convoy leader ensures that all truck commanders have the cell phone numbers of the convoy leader, the 2IC, all the other truck leaders, and emergency contacts programmed into their phones.

Route Overview and Navigation AlignmentAfter the comms check, the convoy leader goes over a general, big-picture overview of the route the convoy will be taking to its destination with all the drivers and truck commanders.

After verbally sharing the route, the convoy leader ensures that all truck commanders will be using the same navigation app on their smartphones. “Some people are using Google Maps, and some people might be using Apple Maps, and these apps might use different routes to get to the same destination,” Harrison noted.

After the convoy leader has verified that everyone is using the same map app, the convoy leader will text all the truck commanders a pin to the destination and verify that all truck commanders have the same route on their app.

As a redundancy (Two is one and one is none! Always be antifragile!), the convoy leader should print out paper directions to the destination and hand them to the truck commander of each vehicle.

Review Planned StopsAfter discussing the route, the convoy leader will communicate planned stops to the drivers and TCs. At planned stops, vehicles will refuel, and members of the convoy can get out, go to the bathroom, and grab something to eat.

Establish Emergency ProceduresThe convoy leader should establish emergency procedures in the event of a car breakdown, accident, or other event that separates the group and communicate these procedures to the drivers and TCs.

Harrison offered this example of a procedure for addressing a flat tire:

Have the affected vehicle and the last vehicle with the 2IC pull over to handle the flat tire.
The rest of the convoy proceeds to the next safe stopping point while staying in communication with the affected vehicle and the 2IC.

“If you’re on a freeway, you don’t want everyone pulling over if one vehicle has a flat tire because it’s just dangerous to have that many vehicles on the shoulder of the road. You want to minimize your footprint as much as possible,” Harrison told me.

If the convoy leader thinks it’s appropriate, he can direct the rest of the convoy to continue to their final destination while the affected vehicle and 2IC stay behind to fix the flat tire or address another issue. They can catch up with the rest of the group later. If this is what the convoy leader decides to do, the truck commander of the last vehicle of the remaining convoy becomes the 2IC of the segment of the convoy that continues to advance.

On the RoadOnce you’re moving, keep these guidelines in mind:

Vehicle Positioning: Place the convoy leader in the front of the line and the second-in-command in the last vehicle.
Spacing: Maintain 2-3 car lengths between vehicles to balance cohesion and safety. On dusty roads, you’ll want to increase your space even more.
Lighting: Keep headlights on even during the day for better visibility and easy identification.
Lane Discipline: Stay in the right lane to avoid unnecessary separations. No passing!
Regular Check-ins: The convoy leader should provide regular updates on upcoming turns or potential hazards to TCs. 2IC communicates weather conditions to the convoy leader.

Post-Trip DebriefAfter reaching your destination, take a moment for a quick after-action review (AAR):

Address any issues that arose during the trip.
Check fuel levels and vehicle status for return trip planning.
Discuss any lessons learned for future convoy operations.

Key Takeaways From a Special Ops on Running a Successful Convoy1. Preparation is paramount: A thorough pre-trip briefing sets the stage for success.

2. Communication is key: Establish clear channels and protocols for staying in touch.

3. Flexibility matters: Be ready to adapt your plan to changing conditions or emergencies.

4. Safety first: Always prioritize the well-being of your convoy members and other road users.

There you go. How to execute a convoy like a Green Beret. Use these tips on your next multi-car trip to ensure everyone gets to the destination safely and efficiently, and don’t forget to play the soundtrack of convoys everywhere.

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When many people try to lose weight, they choose a specific, cookie-cutter diet that claims to be the one true way to shed pounds. My guest says that approach is bound to backfire, and that there’s a better way to lose weight and change your body composition.

Alan Aragon is a researcher and educator, a pioneer of evidence-based nutrition, and the author of Flexible Dieting: A Science-Based, Reality-Tested Method for Achieving and Maintaining Your Optimal Physique, Performance & Health. Today on the show, Alan offers an intro to his method of flexible dieting, in which, as long as you stay in a caloric deficit and hit your daily protein target, you can decide on how much fat and carbs to consume according to personal preference. We discuss what to keep in mind as you create your own individualized nutrition plan, including how much protein you need a day, the minimum amount of fat to get in your diet to avoid a decrease in testosterone, and the minimum of carbs to consume to maximize muscle gain. And, because flexible dieting is also about not rigidly sticking with your diet 100% of the time, Alan shares how often you should take a break from your diet to eat what you want.

Resources Related to the Podcast* Alan’s diet calculator * AoM intro to tracking macros * AoM Article: How I Used the AoM Podcast to Lose 20 Pounds in 3 Months * AoM Article: Why Carbs Don’t Make You Fat * AoM Podcast #475: How to Lose Weight, and Keep It Off Forever

Connect With Alan Aragon * Alan’s website and research review * Alan on IG * Alan on X

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When you’re in the wild, protecting and properly storing your food is critical if you want to make sure that those beloved meals don’t get grabbed by Yogi Bear and the like. In some instances, it’s also critical to your safety. An overnight in the woods could prove deadly if your midnight snack lures a grizzly bear into your tent.

Keeping animals out of your food is a matter of making it impossible to access and/or putting it out of reach. At many car-camping sites, metal food lockers are available for you to store your food (some parks have rules against storing food in your car; bears can do serious damage to your vehicle trying to get in). If those aren’t available, you can purchase a bear canister (often required at particular parks in the West) or special bag to store up your goodies. Bear canisters and bags are strong plastic or fabric containers that have been designed and tested to stop bears and other creatures from getting inside. If you don’t have a canister or a bag, or access to food lockers (this is especially the case when backpacking), then the hanging method shown above is your best choice. You’ll want to put the bag high enough to be out of reach of bears, without being so close to a tree branch that squirrels can get at it.

Remember to clean up any crumbs, and to pack anything that has an odor, including toothpaste and deodorant, in the bag with your food.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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The more we’ve become a modern, industrialized, artificially-lit world, and the farther we’ve gotten from our agricultural past, the more we’ve lost the sense of how little of life moves in a linear, always-on/always-off manner, and how much of it moves in cycles.

We experience cycles in our moods, our relationships, and our motivation and productivity.

The writer Madeleine Dore helpfully divides that latter area into two oscillating phases: sponge time and squeeze time.

During sponge time, we’re soaking up ideas. Gathering intel and insights. Pondering options. Sketching out visions.

During squeeze time, we’re executing our ideas. Creating. Taking action. Forwarding our own insights. Moving on things.

Each phase feeds the other. Each is essential in keeping the cycle of personal advancement turning round.

A problem arises, then, when we stay in one phase when we need to shift to the other.

There are times when we’re stuck in research mode, when we feel we still need to do just a little more planning, reading, thinking, and weighing before we can launch a project or make a decision. Yet, in reality, we have all the information we need to move forward; all that’s left to do is pull the trigger.

There are other times when we believe we must be ever productive — always generating ideas, always crackling with spiritual insights, always sure of what to do next with our lives. Being content to rest, to be still, to be porous and absorptive, seems too passive, almost lazy. Meanwhile, our attempts at continuous outputs face diminishing returns.

When it’s time to soak, soak; when it’s time to squeeze, squeeze.

If you never compress a fully saturated sponge, it will start to molder.

If you don’t stop to mop up some moisture, you’ll never have anything to wring out.

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The Truman Show. Our family just finished watching The Truman Show. I hadn’t seen it since it originally came out 26 (26?!) years ago, and it was as good as I remembered. It was fun to see how into it our kids were, too. Everything about the film is nearly pitch-perfect, from the casting to the humor (I’m still chuckling about the “It Could Happen To You” poster at the travel agency). The film was so prescient; it’s hard to believe it came out before reality television’s heyday, and its themes about surveillance, voyeurism, turning private lives into entertainment and profit, and the ways viewers are complicit in transforming humans into disposable commodities have only become more salient in the social media age. Add onto that several other existential themes — I think the whole thing can be read as a riff on Plato’s allegory of the cave — and you’ve got quite a compelling flick.

Your therapist wants you to go outside. We’re big advocates for spending time in nature. It’s great not only for your physical health, but your mental health as well, as a meta-analysis by the University of Utah recently confirmed. It found that spending as little as 10 minutes in nature can benefit adults with diagnosed mental illnesses. Water-based outdoor spaces and activities like camping and gardening were especially beneficial. If you haven’t added the 20-5-3 Rule to your health regimen, all the more reason to start now.

Battery Daddy. Last Christmas, my mom got our family what has turned out to be a surprisingly useful gift: The Battery Daddy. It’s a case that stores various sizes of batteries. She even stocked it with batteries for us. It’s solved what had been a perennial problem: I couldn’t find the batteries I needed when I needed them, and when I did find them, they’d sometimes have dislodged from their original packaging and be hanging out in the junk drawer, leading me to wonder if they were new or used. Now, all our batteries reside in one well-organized go-to place. Whenever I see myself getting low in one size of battery, I just fill the Battery Daddy back up.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. I bought this book over a decade ago and have turned to it again and again over the years. Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a collection of wisdom and insights from the late Charles T. Munger, a renowned investor and Warren Buffett’s business partner. The book compiles Munger’s speeches, lectures, and commentaries, emphasizing multidisciplinary thinking and practical wisdom for investing and life. His insights about mental models have been particularly useful to me over the years.

Quote of the Week

We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.

—Seneca

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My 10-year-old daughter, Scout, has taken an interest in fishing recently, so I’ve been taking her to some of the municipal ponds here in Tulsa that the city has stocked with crappies and sunfish, like bluegills. It’s been a great way to spend time with my daughter in nature.

It’s also been an opportunity to review my own angling skills, as it had been a while since I’d gone fishing, and I’m the one who gets the fishing poles ready. The one thing I’ve had to brush up on is tying hooks to the fishing line.

There are three basic knots that are good for every fisherman to know.

The clinch knot is the first fishing knot I learned growing up and the one I’ve used the most over the years. It’s a strong, easy knot that has a low profile.

The Palomar knot is new to my fishing repertoire, and I wish I would have learned how to tie it sooner. It’s super easy to tie. It’s basically an overhand knot that you slip over the hook. But it’s super strong. It will probably replace the clinch knot as my go-to.

The blood knot is used to tie two pieces of line together. I admittedly haven’t had to tie this one too many times because you typically use it in fly fishing when creating leader lines. Since my daughter and I just use spincast rods in our pond fishing, we don’t use it. But I did take Scout fly fishing for the first time last week, and she seemed to catch the bug (in addition to 11 fish!), so I can see myself having to use this one more often.

Print out the illustrated guide above on how to tie all three knots and keep it in your tacklebox (along with these 10 essentials) so you don’t have to ruin the serenity of fishing by pulling out your phone.

Note on the illustration: The “tag end” of the fishing line is the part of the line that you manipulate to tie the knot. It’s also known as the “working end” of the knot.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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When we think about anxiety, we typically think of something that is generated and felt within an individual. But Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist of the mid-20th century, argued that anxiety was also created by the interactions between individuals and could spread like a contagion in a group, an idea known as “Family Systems Theory.”

Here to offer an introduction to Family Systems Theory and how its implications extend far beyond the family is Steve Cuss, who is a former hospital chaplain, a pastor, the founder of Capable Life, which offers coaching and consultation, and the author of Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs. Today on the show, Steve and I discuss how individuals in both families and organizations can “infect a situation with [their] own assumptions and expectations” and create a sense of anxiety that permeates a group. Steve unpacks the false needs that create chronic anxiety in an individual, how this anxiety spreads to others, and the unhealthy ways people deal with this tension, including becoming fused together. And we talk about how to put this anxiety back where it belongs, and how a single person can change a group dynamic by differentiating from it and becoming a rooted self.

Resources Related to the Podcast Murray Bowen * A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix by Edwin H. Friedman * AoM Article: The 5 Characteristics of Highly Dysfunctional Groups * AoM Article: Becoming a Well-Differentiated Leader * The Cornerstone Concept* by Roberta M. Gilbert * Sunday Firesides: You Are Not Responsible for Other People’s Feelings

Connect With Steve Cuss* Steve’s website

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A Failure of Nerve, Revised Edition: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix

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To countenance the statistics on divorce is to recognize that happy, lasting marriages do not happen by default.

In strong marriages, each spouse, rather than sinking into indifference and complacency, makes an effort to do things that leave their partner enamored and appreciative.

To find out what kinds of things tend to have this effect when coming from the man in the marriage, I talked to Kate and some other married women about what husbands do on a day-to-day basis that make them swoon. Below, I’ll share what I learned from them and from the many relationship experts I’ve interviewed on the AoM podcast.

If you’ve already got a good relationship with your wife, these suggestions can help strengthen that bond and further boost its happiness.

If your marriage has been struggling, then engaging in these behaviors might help change the course of its trajectory. There can sometimes be a tendency in these situations for someone to think, “Why should I make an effort if she isn’t?” But often all it takes to get a relationship back on track is for one person to take the initiative in acting in a different way. Once one person starts sowing positive behavioral seeds, the other person becomes less defensive and instinctively starts acting in kind. A stalemate is broken and a virtuous cycle begins that turns the relationship around. If your wife doesn’t reciprocate by leveling up her own relational game, then, yes, that probably means your marriage needs a more serious/professional intervention.

But why not try the simple behaviors below first?

10 Ways to Be Better Husband Today1. Be an interesting conversationalist.Marriage is essentially one long conversation, and when the quality of the conversation between spouses sags, so does the quality of the relationship.

When you come home from work and your wife asks how your day was, don’t just say, “Fine,” and leave it at that. Even if not much happened, dig up a detail or two to share.

Intentionally collect conversational fodder during the day to share when you and your spouse catch up. Remember some interesting tidbit of office gossip you heard around the watercooler at work. Read interesting articles that catch your eye and file away some details you can talk about later. Be mulling over ideas you’ve heard so that if your wife asks, “What have you been thinking about lately?” you’ll have something to say.

While one of the privileges of a close, long-standing relationship is the ability to comfortably sit in silence, in the healthiest relationships, you enjoy conversing so much that you rarely want to.

Leave love notes.Through years of watching marriages fall apart, divorce lawyer James Sexton has learned a thing or two about how to reverse engineer things and keep a relationship together. As he shared on the AoM podcast (his episode is such a good one; be sure to listen to it), his strongest suggestion for avoiding ever having to see him in his office is to simply “leave your wife a note every morning for a couple of weeks”:

just leave her a note, just a little, ‘Hey, Babe, thanks for last night on the couch watching TV. It was so nice, like the smell of you just makes me so happy. I fell asleep with it on me.’ Or ‘you looked so pretty when I woke up this morning and I’m so glad to have such a wonderful woman in my life. I love you.’ And that takes you 30 seconds, and I’m telling you that little tiny investment of time and effort will pay dividends like you wouldn’t believe.

If you want to really challenge yourself, leave your wife a love note every week for a year, like this guy did.

Be a man with a plan.One woman I spoke to said she really appreciates it when her husband comes up with a plan for a date night or family outing and then executes it without her having to worry about anything.

“Plans really turn me on!” she declared.

Don’t wait around for your wife to plan your next date or family microadventure. Come up with an idea for a good time and then carry it out.

Perform small acts of service.Years ago, AoM had something called the “Library of Random Man Knowledge” where readers could submit and browse through, well, random man knowledge (stay tuned, we’re working on bringing it back!). One reader submission said: “Bless your wife. Fill up her car’s tank with gas.”

For some reason, this really made Kate and I chuckle, and it’s become a running schtick in our marriage; if Kate gets in the car and the gas tank is on E, she’ll text me, “Hey, how come you didn’t bless me by filling up on gas?!”

But our joking aside, it’s actually good advice! Filling up the gas tank, and doing other little acts of service, is something your wife will really appreciate.

The women I spoke with mentioned this idea a lot. They said they really appreciate it when their husbands notice things they need and just take care of them (naturally without being a martyr about it, wanting a lot of credit, or using it as a way to keep score). It’s funny; a lot of the things they appreciated their husbands taking care of were car-related: Getting the oil changed. Filling up the tires with air. Getting the car washed. Chicks dig husbands who take care of their vechicles.

Pay attention to what your wife needs and values. If you’re not sure what sorts of things you could do to help her out, just ask.

Be the rock.The women I spoke to all said they appreciate it when their husbands act as a rock when they’re stressed out. Here’s what one gal had to say:

I really appreciate my husband’s ability to maintain and create calm in chaotic/intense situations. He takes a difficult problem and breaks it down into manageable tasks and calmly organizes things to get it done. He really shines when he sees me getting stressed out and takes control.

We’ve written about how to be the rock in a relationship. The key is to not catch your wife’s anxiety when she’s stressed and instead be an oasis of calm stability. While most couples today want an egalitarian relationship, there are still times, especially when things get crazy, that most women would like a man to take charge and stand between her and a real or perceived threat.

Be the researcher and offer a solution.It’s a common trope that women just want to be listened to when venting a problem and get annoyed when men try to offer a solution. There are certainly times this is true, but usually there’s also a point where she’d welcome some specific suggestions.

Sometimes that problem-solving can take the form that my friend mentioned above, where you help break down an issue into action steps.

Other times, you can be the person who looks into an answer to a question your wife has or some issue she’s worried about.

Matthew Dicks thinks people can be categorized as either eagles or mice; mice are very attentive to small details, while eagles take an overarching, birds-eye view of things. Both approaches can have their strengths. Anecdotally, it seems like men, on average, tend to be eagles, while women are often mice.

Kate and I would say that’s the case in our relationship. She’ll tell you that she tends to get lost in the weeds and overwhelmed by details, and for that reason, when she has an issue or is having trouble deciding between options, she really appreciates when I’ll research it for her, as she knows I’m better at plowing through a ton of scientific studies, product reviews, or travel sites, synthesizing the information, and offering a suggestion; “I think you should take X supplement.” I’m like her personal ChatGPT (as the technology improves, I’ll probably be replaced by ChatGPT).

Exercise competence. Napoleon Dynamite famously said, “Chicks dig guys with skills.” And it’s true! Research suggests that women find competency (combined with warmth) incredibly attractive in a guy. The women I spoke to all said it makes them swoon when their husbands know how to handle a variety of situations and get stuff done.

One woman I spoke to shared this example of how her husband displayed this trait:

We went on a bike outing with our extended family, and all the bikes available were in disrepair. Their brakes needed to be repaired or gears realigned, etc. My husband spent hours cheerfully tuning them all up and teaching the kids about their bikes. He also tended to several medical situations—a cut hand, a rash, etc. I love to see him confidently and competently handle those situations. He takes care of the people I love and that makes me love him even more.

Have skills (knowing all 100 of these is a good goal) and put them to use.

Offer frequent non-sexual affection.Sex is awesome. Research suggests that’s how guys connect emotionally with their wives.

Women like sex, too. But they also like non-sexual affection like hugs and kisses. It’s one of the ways they connect emotionally with you.

So offer your wife frequent gestures of physical affection that aren’t deliberately designed to initiate sex.

Be generous with your appreciation.One thing I hear again and again from the leadership and relationship experts I’ve interviewed on the podcast is that people want to be recognized for the contributions they make.

When you’re married, it’s easy to take for granted all the stuff your spouse does for you and the household. Clean laundry magically appears in your drawers. Your fridge is refilled each week. Dinners show up on the table.

Besides taking for granted the stuff your wife does, it’s easy to stop recognizing all the amazing qualities she has that attracted you to her in the first place. You become habituated to the stuff that used to make your heart swell with gratitude at the beginning of your relationship.

Take time and effort to remove the blinders time has accumulated over your eyes and notice the little things you love and appreciate about your spouse afresh. Then, voice your appreciation for those things — even for the routine stuff she does every day. It’s all still a gift that helps make your life.

Always offer appreciation at the time your wife does things for you or soon after if you’re not together. But also just randomly shoot her a text during the day to express your gratitude for something she did or who she is.

It can also be helpful to have a set time each week where you and your spouse appreciate each other, which brings us to:

Have a weekly marriage meeting.AoM readers/listeners are probably tired of me mentioning this suggestion, because I do it a lot in our articles and on the podcast. But having a weekly marriage meeting is one of the most helpful habits Kate and I have adopted.

Having a once-a-week marriage meeting will help your relationship run more smoothly and stay strong. It lasts about 20 minutes and has four parts: expressing appreciation, going over chores/to-dos, planning for good times, and discussing big issues. Here’s exactly why and how to execute it.

It’s All About the Small StuffAs you look over the list above, you’ll see a common thread in these suggestions: they’re all small behaviors and practices.

It’s easy to think that keeping a marriage together is about the big stuff — the date nights and romantic getaways. But it’s really about the small things you do day to day to stay connected.

It’s about continuing to do the little niceties you did for each other when you were first dating.

It’s about how you and your spouse show up for each other on a Tuesday morning.

A story divorce lawyer James Sexton shared on the podcast has stuck with me ever since and couldn’t be a better way to end this piece:

[There was a] young woman I was divorcing who had two children, and we’d been a lot of miles, and I said to her, “Was there a moment where you knew that your marriage was over?” And she said that there was a granola that she liked to eat that she used to put in her yogurt, and her husband used to always notice when she was running low on it, and he would always get a new bag of it for her. I guess it was only sold at a particular health food store or something. And she’s like, “I never told him that that meant so much to me, but it was just such a sweet thing that he would just notice that I was running out of my granola; he didn’t need it, but he would notice I was running out of my granola, and there’d just be this new bag. And he didn’t come to me and say like, ‘Oh look, I got granola for you.’ He didn’t want credit for it; it’s just something he did. It was this small gesture that I’m paying attention, that I see this detail, and that I love you, and I want to just extend this kindness, this courtesy to you.”

And she said that one day, she ran out of granola, and she thought, “Oh well, maybe he’s busy and he didn’t notice or whatever.” So she left the empty bag in there, and after a week or two, he still hadn’t replaced it, and she thought, “Okay, this is over.”

And she said it became apparent in the weeks that followed that this distance was coming between the two of them.

And I thought to myself, “What if that is it? If it’s just granola, it’s just these little tiny gestures of, ‘Oh, they use this milk, so let me put it on the table,’ or ‘Oh, they don’t like the sound of the garbage disposal, it jars them when it’s loud, so I go, ‘Hey, babe I’m gonna turn on the garbage disposal real quick. Don’t be afraid when I turn it on.’” Like the small considerations. You know them about your wife; I don’t. Your wife knows them about you; I don’t. And those, to me, those intimacies, those little things, the things you love, the things you’re afraid of, the things that get on your nerves, your partner theoretically has the ringside seat to those, and they can leverage them in the most beautiful ways.

I see it when they weaponize them, so by the time you get to my office, you go, “Okay, I’m angry at this person, and here’s where their soft spots are. So here’s where we can stab them.”

But I really think that if you can identify those things while you’re happily married, you can use them without a massive amount of effort — just small little efforts to build this abundance of happiness and goodwill between the two of you and maintain it.

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Would you get lost while driving downtown if you didn’t use GPS? Do you find yourself struggling to read a book for more than five minutes without checking your phone? Would you have trouble writing a grammatically-correct email without Google’s auto-suggested corrections?

Do moments where you run up against your dependence on modern technology get you wondering about the ways some of your personal capabilities seem to be atrophying?

Graham Lee has spent years thinking about this idea. While he’s a digital skills educator who appreciates the way technology can enhance our abilities, he worries that our ever-increasing reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence may be robbing us of elements that are vital to the core of who we are.

Lee is the author of Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology, and today on the show, we talk about some of those dozen endangered skills, including navigation, reading, writing, craftsmanship, and solitude. Lee offers case studies on how these skills enhance our humanness, why their loss matters, and how we can reclaim these capabilities and a greater sense of satisfaction and self-efficacy.

Resources Related to the Podcast We, the Navigators, The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific by David Lewis * AoM series on learning how to navigate with a map and compass * AoM Podcast #534: How Navigation Makes Us Human * AoM Podcast #793: The New Science of Metabolism and Weight Loss * AoM article on the benefits of solitude * Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition* by Peter Nabokov * Watchmaker Geoge Daniels * Castaway Alexander Selkirk * NotebookLM

Connect With Graham Lee* Graham on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition

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There are countless ways to use everyday items to make a fire in survival situations. From short-circuiting cell phone batteries to refracting light off the bottom of a soda can, makeshift techniques using what you can scrounge up from your environment can save your life. Creating fire with a water bottle is similar to making a fire with a magnifying glass: the water bottle acts as a lens that focuses sunlight into a super-bright point which quickly heats up paper or other tinder to the point of combustion.

The first thing to know about making fire with a water bottle is that it’s not easy. It takes time and practice to get the bottle’s position just right, and if the sun isn’t at its full strength because it’s late in the day or behind clouds, your efforts might go unrewarded. To maximize your chances of success, use clear bottles with smooth, curved tops that are filled with clear liquid. Colors absorb light and textures hinder your ability to focus the light. For tinder, paper with dark ink works best — the dark ink absorbs heat and ignites faster.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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Some people have experienced an interesting phenomenon: when they were actively and eagerly looking for a romantic partner, they couldn’t find one; then, once they stopped looking, someone came into their lives.

One of the paradoxes of life is that the more you desire something, the less suited you can be to have it.

A man with an overweening desire for a significant other not only evinces a desperation that’s unattractive to the opposite sex, but, should he manage to land a girlfriend anyway, will seek to hold onto her at any cost, engaging in the kind of subservient behaviors that will curdle the relationship in the end.

A man who must be a success falls prey to making ethically questionable decisions or implementing cringe-inducing strategies that, though they generate short-term gains, will doom his efforts in the long run.

A man who has an immoderate longing to make a friend betrays a neediness that repels the very companions with whom he hopes to connect.

To win and secure the thing you seek, your desire must be potent enough to energize and animate, but not so all-consuming it smothers and corrupts. You must want it, but not need it.

A man is most likely to attract a partner when he already finds his own company companionable.

A man is in the best position to succeed when he can still be happy and whole if he fails.

A man is only fit to have a friend when he can live contentedly without one.

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Beach Vacationers Are Doing It Wrong. Psychiatrist Richard Friedman makes the case that vacations where you do a lot of lying and idling around may “work against the very things a trip is meant to cultivate: a mental reset, a sense of relaxation, happiness.” He argues that what most of us really need a break from is the anxiety-creating “tyranny of self-absorption,” that leisurely vacations only enhance this preoccupation with our thoughts, and that it would be better to take active vacations full of the kind of physical exertion that creates endorphins, absorbs your focus, and takes you out of yourself. As someone who dislikes the beach (especially sitting on the beach), and just got back from spending a couple days in Colorado hiking, biking, and fishing, I endorse this message.

The Material Review. OG men’s style blogger Michael Williams (check out my podcast interview with him and David Coggins about developing your “personal uniform”) has resurrected a sister website that he had with his site A Continuous Lean. The Material Review is a bi-weekly Substack in which Williams and his co-conspirator, Taylor Stacey, highlight cool stuff they’ve come across on the world wide web related to gear, travel, sport, food, and life. You’ll find links to interesting articles and products (many of which are American-made). This is how the web should be: human-curated links rather than algorithmically-pulled-together content goo.

St. Thomas Aquinas’ Prayer Before Study. Andrew McLuhan, grandson of famous media intellectual Marshall McLuhan (the guy who originated the idea of “the medium is the message“), tweeted this prayer penned by St. Thomas Aquinas that his father Eric McLuhan (another deep media thinker) kept pinned next to his desk. It’s a prayer to offer before engaging in study. I really like the idea of infusing soul into your intellectual pursuits.

Legendary Protein Toaster Pastry. I’m always on the lookout for tasty and convenient high-protein snacks. One that I’ve been enjoying lately is the Legendary Protein Toaster Pastry. They’re a high-protein, low-carb Pop-Tart alternative. They’re just 180 calories and have 20 grams of protein and only 22 grams of carbs (a lot of which is fiber). They come in a variety of flavors, including brown sugar cinnamon, chocolate (my favorite!), and strawberry. Do they taste exactly like a Pop-Tart? Definitely not. Are they a “frankenfood” that bears little resemblance to actual food and should only be consumed on occasion? Surely. But they’re great for when you need something high in protein and low in calories on the go and have become one of my go-to road trip snacks.

Quote of the Week

A man is already of consequence in the world when it is known that we can implicitly rely upon him. I have frequently seen in life a person preferred to a long list of applicants for some important charge, which lifts him at once into station and fortune, merely because he has this reputation — that when he says he knows a thing, he knows it, and when he says he will do a thing, he does it.

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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Bruce Lee is a legend.

He revolutionized movies and martial arts.

He also boasted incredible strength and all-around physicality.

Lee could place his fist one inch from the chest of a man twice his size and unleash a quick, cobra-like strike that’d send his opponent flying.

Lee could perform push-ups using just two fingers of one hand.

Lee wasn’t huge, but his lean, chiseled, defined physique was widely admired, and bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Flex Wheeler, Shawn Ray, and Dorian Yates all acknowledged the impact it had on their careers.

Co-star and fellow martial artist Chuck Norris described Lee’s ripped physique as “muscle upon muscle.”

A woman who asked if she could touch Bruce Lee’s flexed bicep (a common request he appreciated receiving) described it as “warm marble.”

How did Lee develop his strength and physique? Was he simply a genetic freak?

Nope. If you look at early pictures of the Little Dragon, he was a pretty scrawny guy.

Instead of genetics, Lee systematically and relentlessly built his body with physical training.

Thanks to the meticulous research of martial artist and writer John Little, we know exactly what Lee did to achieve his results. Little shares the details of Lee’s fitness training in his 1998 book Bruce Lee: The Art of Expressing the Human Body. The book is an absolute gold mine of fitness history and information, and I highly recommend picking up a copy.

In today’s article, we take a look at the principles that informed Bruce Lee’s training and the components of his regimen that turned a man into a legend.

The Moment Bruce Lee Got Serious About His Physical TrainingThroughout his childhood, Lee was incredibly active. He got in trouble at school, and his spiritedness drove him to mischief and street fights. If Lee had grown up in the 21st century, he probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD. His hyperactivity inspired his family to call him “never sits still.”

To channel Lee’s energy into less destructive activities, his father signed him up for kung fu instruction under the tutelage of master Ip Man. Thus, at age thirteen, Bruce began the lifelong practice that would make him a worldwide legend.

By the time Lee was in his twenties, he had developed enough physical conditioning to excel as a martial artist, but remained a skinny guy.

Then came a moment that would take his physical training to the next level.

In the early 1960s, Lee lived in Oakland, CA, and had begun teaching kung fu. Lee didn’t discriminate in who he took on as a student, and according to some accounts, some traditional Chinese kung fu masters in the area weren’t happy with him teaching the martial art to non-Chinese. So in 1964, they presented an ultimatum to Lee: take part in a kung fu battle against their best fighter; if Lee lost, he had to shut down his kung fu class.

While different versions of exactly how the fight went down exist, according to Bruce, the fight lasted three minutes and primarily involved him chasing his opponent around a building until he forced him to submit.

Despite winning, Lee was disappointed with how he performed. He was unhappy about the shape he was in and had begun to feel that the parameters of traditional martial arts were impractical for street fights. He concluded that to realize his full physical potential and become the best martial artist in the world, he’d need to move beyond kung fu and expand his repertoire of physical modalities.

This moment of discontent not only inspired Bruce Lee to get serious about his physical fitness, but birthed a martial art and overall life philosophy he called Jeet Kune Do or the Way of the Intercepting Fist.

The Sources of Bruce Lee’s Physical Training PhilosophyIn moving forward from the fight, Lee sought to develop a physical training system that emphasized “practicality, flexibility, speed, and efficiency” and drew from a wide range of training methods.

While Jeet Kune Do sounds like a formal martial art style like Tae Kwon Do, Lee intended it to be “the style of no style” — a martial art that transcended formal rules and incorporated the best ideas from various disciplines.

To find these ideas, Lee became a devoted student of the art and science of physical training.

Even though Bruce had struggled in school, he had a strong commitment to continuous learning and was a voracious reader throughout his adulthood. Over his life, he amassed a huge personal library of over 2,500 titles.

He trained his mind by reading Eastern and Western philosophy (Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas; The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi), as well as American self-help (As a Man Thinketh by James Allen; How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie).

He also religiously studied everything he could get his hands on about training the body.

Lee thought there was something to be learned from all combatives and read books about boxing by Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Rocky Marciano, texts on karate and aikido, and over sixty volumes on fencing.

In the 1960s, bodybuilding magazines were the primary sources of information on strength training, and Bruce Lee subscribed to them all. If he found an article that contained useful information, he’d clip it and put it in his filing system.

Lee also browsed used bookstores and bought copies of health and fitness books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Strength and How to Obtain It by bodybuilder and strongman Eugen Sandow and The Application of Measurement to Health and Physical Education written in 1945 by H. Harrison Clarke.

Lee continued to add fitness books to his extensive library throughout his life and never let a set lens contort his reading choices; if a book or magazine had some useful info in it, he bought it and read it.

Besides magazines and books, Lee would ask his friends and students for training advice. Two men who had a huge influence on Lee’s physical education were James Yimm Lee and Allen Joe. James Lee (no relation to Bruce Lee) was an Oakland-based martial artist and weightlifter, and Allen Joe was the first Chinese-American bodybuilding champion. Both men introduced Lee to the way of the iron and helped develop his first weightlifting program.

For a fuller list of the varied books in Bruce Lee’s personal library, check out this article.

The Elements of Bruce Lee’s Physical Training

If you’re talking about combat — as it is — well then, baby, you’d better train EVERY part of your body.

— Bruce Lee

Lee’s study of all aspects of physical training led him to experiment with different fitness modalities, including barbell training, isometrics, plyometrics, circuit training, running, and stretching.

His practice of these diverse modalities all had a single goal: becoming a better martial artist.

While Lee only chose exercises that would help him improve as a fighter, because martial arts require the full spectrum of physical capabilities (strength, power, speed, endurance, and flexibility), Lee systematically trained all these capabilities; he didn’t specialize.

Below, we’ll look at the main components of his physical training:

Weight LiftingThanks to his research and his own experience, Lee developed a deep appreciation for physical strength and believed it was the foundation of all other physical capacities. If you get stronger, you can move faster, with more power, for longer periods of time.

And the most effective and efficient way to get stronger is through resistance training.

In the early part of his training career, Lee used isometrics to build strength. Then he discovered the effectiveness of barbell training and began to pump iron.

While Lee’s weightlifting programming evolved throughout his life, if you look at his programming as a whole, five key elements emerge:

Compound Movements: One of the principles of Jeet Kune Do was economy of motion — using the shortest and most direct path to achieve the desired outcome and minimizing wasted movement and energy.

Thus when Lee chose an exercise for a workout, he looked for ones that could give him the most bang for his buck, like compound lifts, which work several muscle groups concurrently, promoting overall strength and power. Lee was a fan of squats, clean and presses, bench presses, and rows, feeling that these movements not only had high ROI for building strength, but also achieved the harmony between muscle groups that was essential for optimal power generation in martial arts.

Low Volume: While many sources claim that Lee used extremely high repetitions, John Little’s extensive review of Lee’s workout records showed that he typically employed a moderate rep range of 8-12 reps per set for most exercises. The exception was leg training, where he did favor higher repetitions and aimed for 12-20 reps per set.

Lee also kept the volume of his workouts low, doing only 1-2 sets per exercise. Lee was doing Mike Mentzer’s Heavy Duty program before Mike Mentzer.

Progressive Overload: Lee firmly believed in the overload principle and consistently strove to increase the demands on his body for continuous improvement. Depending on his fitness goals at the time, he’d try to achieve progressive overload by adding weight, increasing repetitions, or reducing his workout time.

Focus on Velocity: Lee prioritized speed and power because they often distinguished a great fighter from an average one. He understood that power is the ability to express strength quickly. To that end, he often incorporated velocity work into his weight training. Instead of using slow, controlled movements, Lee would make the concentric part of the lift quick and explosive.

Minimalist Approach: Another principle of Jeet Kune Do was simplicity, and this was reflected in Lee’s continual refinement of his weightlifting programs; he worked to eliminate unnecessary exercises to optimize results from minimal work. If you look at the evolution of Lee’s weightlifting workouts, they got shorter and shorter; he went from doing hour-and-a-half long workouts with a bunch of exercises to a workout with just a few movements that could be done in less than 30 minutes. By focusing on an effective selection of compound lifts, done at low volume, he got the results he wanted in short, intense workouts.

While Lee’s barbell training workouts evolved over time, he eventually settled on a program in which he did a 20-minute session 3X a week (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays) that often looked like this:

Clean and press: 2 sets of 8 reps
Squat: 2 sets of 12 reps
Barbell Pullover: 2 sets of 8 reps
Bench press: 2 sets of 6 reps
Good Mornings: 2 sets of 8 reps
Barbell Curl: 2 sets of 8 reps

In addition to general weight training, one area of his body that Bruce Lee took time to do special exercises for was his forearms; we’ll be dedicating a whole post to his forearm-training routine down the road.

CardioLee caught the jogging bug in the 1970s. He thought running was an effective and safe way to improve his stamina and endurance. He’d jog two to six miles on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and would always have a pair of sneakers with him so he could get a run in even when he was away from home.

Lee incorporated the progressive overload principle into his running by increasing his speed or distance. He was also an early practitioner of the “heavy hands” method of aerobic activity and would hold light dumbbells or wear ankle weights while running.

Lee would sometimes supplement the running he did for cardiovascular health by cycling or jumping rope on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

StretchingYou’ve likely seen pictures of Lee displaying his phenomenal flexibility with one of his high kicks. That flexibility came from his commitment to daily stretching. Upon rising and before he got out of bed, he would do his “Wake-Up Routine” — a set of six stretches and body activation exercises:

Full-body stretch: 5 times, maintaining stretch 3 seconds, rest 2 seconds
Arch back: 5 times
Leg tensing: 12 times, 3 seconds tensing, 2 seconds rest
Abdominal tensing: 10 times, 3 seconds tensing, 2 seconds rest
Sit-up, touch toes: 5 times
Bent-leg raises: 5 times

Later in the morning, Lee would spend 15 to 20 minutes on a full stretching routine. He even created special equipment that would allow him to progressively overload his stretches.

Here’s an example of what one of his stretching sessions would look like:

Seated straight leg stretch
Side stretch
Hurdle stretch
Seated groin stretch/butterfly stretch
Thigh stretch/standing quad stretch
Front pulley stretch. This stretch required a pulley and rope set-up. While standing, Lee would place one foot in a strap connected to a rope and then pull on the rope, which would raise the leg into a stretched position.)
Side pulley stretch. Same as front pulley stretch but the leg was placed in a side kick position.)

Besides his dedicated stretching sessions, Lee would stretch throughout the day. While he was reading, he often propped his leg up on a table or desk so he could get in some stretching while he developed his mind.

Core WorkLee believed that the abdomen was the “center or generator” of the body because it was the place in the body that coordinates all its parts and contributes to both punching and kicking power. Consequently, Lee trained his abs every day. The result was a powerful core and a tight, trim, 26-inch waist.

In addition to the famous dragon flag exercise, which Lee popularized, he did numerous other exercises for his stomach and waist. Here’s an example of one of the daily ab routines Lee did:

Sit-ups: 4 sets of 20
Side bend: 4 sets of 15 to 20. Lee would hold dumbbells in his hands to increase the intensity of this movement.
Leg raises: 4 sets of 20
Twists: 4 sets of 50. To perform this movement, Lee would hold a stick across his shoulders, bend forward at the hips and twist right, aiming the left stick end toward his right foot. After returning to the upright position, he would then twist left to bring the right stick end toward his left foot.
Frog kicks: 4 sets of 20. Lee performed this exercise by hanging from a pull-up bar and raising his knees up to touch his chest.

Punching and Kicking Of course, martial arts training was part of Lee’s physical regimen. He’d alternate days where he’d work on combative leg moves with days he’d focus on arms and hands. He often aimed to do 500 punches a day and threw some of these punches while holding light weights. He’d focus on speed and endurance with his kicking and punching sessions, but would also train power by incorporating work with a heavy bag.

Below is a kicking and punching routine that Lee used in 1970:

Kicking

Side kick: left and right
Hook kick: left and right
Spin kick: left and right
Rear front thrust: left and right
Heel kick: left and right

Punching

Jab: speed bag, foam pad, top and bottom bag
Cross: speed bag, foam pad, top and bottom bag
Hook: speed bag, foam pad, top and bottom bag
Overhand cross: speed bag, foam pad, heavy bag
Combinations: heavy bag, top and bottom speed bag

An Example of Bruce Lee’s Training RoutineLee trained throughout the day, nearly every day. He did several hours of daily exercise, scheduled into morning, afternoon, and evening sessions that were each focused on training a particular modality.

What he did during those sessions evolved over time, according to what he had learned in his studies, the particular movie he was next to star in, and his personal goals.

But to give you an idea of how he brought together the above elements and incorporated them into his daily routine, here is an example of one of his training schedules from 1970:

Monday

7 AM to 8 AM: Ab work and Flexibility
12 PM to 1 PM: Run
5:30 PM to 6:30 PM: Punching

Tuesday

7 AM to 8 AM: Ab work and Flexibility
12 PM to 1 PM: Resistance Training
5:30 PM to 6:30 PM: Kicking

Wednesday

7 AM to 8 AM: Ab work and Flexibility
12 PM to 1 PM: Run
5:30 PM to 6:30 PM: Punching

Thursday

7 AM to 8 AM: Ab work and Flexibility
12 PM to 1 PM: Resistance Training
5:30 PM to 6:30 PM: Kicking

Friday

7 AM to 8 AM: Ab work and Flexibility
12 PM to 1 PM: Run
5:30 PM to 6:30 PM: Punching

Saturday

7 AM to 8 AM: Ab work and Flexibility
12 PM to 1 PM: Resistance Training
5:30 PM to 6:30 PM: Kicking

Sunday

The Overarching Secret of the Jeet Kune Do Way to Physical Fitness: Self-Expression

Absorb what is useful; reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

—Bruce Lee

Perhaps the most important component of Bruce Lee’s approach to physical training is that he made it uniquely his own.

Each practitioner of Jeet Kune Do is encouraged to develop his own “personal style” within its framework. For Lee, both fighting specifically, and physical training generally, was not some rote habit you went through the motions with and rotely checked off your to-do list each day. Instead, movement was something you put “emotional content” and “passionate meaning” into. For Lee, physicality was existential.

To reach the heights of his potential, Lee created ever-changing training protocols that were suited to him and his personal goals. He didn’t follow cookie cutter programs. He didn’t follow exactly what the experts told him he was supposed to do.

He experimented. He acted. He felt into his training until he had discovered his personal training style — his way to “fully express the human body.”

Source:

Bruce Lee: The Art of Expressing the Human Body by John Little

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You have a relationship with family, with friends, with a romantic partner. You may not have thought about it this way, but you also have a relationship with your job — a quite serious one, in fact; after all, you spend a third of your life working.

Just like the relationship you have with your significant other, there are ups and downs with your relationship with your job. It can start out with exciting honeymoon feelings, but along the way, you can end up drifting apart from your job, lose interest in it, or not feel appreciated. And there can come a time when you start wondering if you and your job should part ways.

Here to help you figure out if you should break up with your job is Tessa West, a professor of psychology and the author of Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. Tessa interviewed thousands of people who have recently switched jobs or undergone career changes and found that there are five forms that job dissatisfaction typically takes. Today on the show, Tessa shares those five job dissatisfaction profiles, and how to know when you need to try to move into a new role within your company, or move on altogether and even change careers.

Resources Related to the Podcast* Tessa‘s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #834 — The 7 Types of Work Jerks (And How to Deal With Them) * AoM Article: 30+ Questions to Ask Yourself Before Leaving a Job * AoM Podcast #578: Figuring Out If You Should Change Careers (And How to Do It)

Connect With Tessa West* Tessa‘s website * Tessa‘s research lab

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You’re on vacation, sitting on the beach, watching your children play in the water. Everyone is full of sunshine and smiles. You think to yourself, “I’ve got a great family here. We’re doing alright.”

Then, you have another thought. You remember being a kid on vacation with your family growing up and the fun you had on those trips. But, your parents ended up getting divorced, and you and your sister no longer talk. Those good times by the ocean didn’t presage good times ahead.

We typically take stock of the state of something — our life, a relationship, an organization — at significant moments in time. Sometimes those are celebrations and successes, where we observe the extent to which feelings of warmth and momentum are in residence. Sometimes they are crises and emergencies, where we witness just how much a group does (or doesn’t) pull together.

These kinds of peaks and valleys can tell you something, to be sure. But a more accurate gauge of health is found in life’s more mundane moments.

It’s great that you and the wife are feeling a renewed attraction on your trip to Barcelona, but how often are you feeling the spark on a workday evening?

It’s great your church rallied around a bereaved parishioner, but how often are folks showing up to regular Sunday services?

It’s great when people are happy when everything about a situation has been designed to elicit that emotion, and are engaged when external forces prompt them to action, but how are things going amidst life’s ordinary routines?

It’s the little daily habits that predict how the future will unfold. It’s how you show up in run-of-the-mill interactions that foretells if a relationship will last. If you want a crystal ball as to what’s to come, just check how you’re doing on a Tuesday morning.

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The Knotty Death of the Necktie. Adam Gopnik explores the decline of neckties that began some 20 years ago and was accelerated by the rise of WFH thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides reflecting on the necktie’s cultural significance throughout history, Gopnik uses this article to discuss what fashion in general tells us about our culture and how we use style to signal our values and beliefs to other people. Make sure to also check out our 2021 article, where we asked some style experts whether the necktie is obsolete.

The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life, and Achieve Real Happiness by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. I recently listened to this book on my morning walks and enjoyed it. The authors use a dialogue between a fictional philosopher and a student to explore the psychological theories of Alfred Adler. Some key takeaways I got from the book: all problems are interpersonal problems, and most of those interpersonal problems are the result of us or others trying to do other people’s “life tasks.” I liked this book because it was all about increasing one’s sense of agency in the world.

Beulah. This is a band I recently re-discovered and have been enjoying on car rides. Beulah got heavy rotation in my 5-disc CD player in my 1992 Smurf-blue Chevy Cavalier back in 2000. They’ve got a unique, upbeat indie sound that includes horns and stringed instruments. I’m a big fan of horns and stringed instruments in pop-rock music. Great band to listen to during the summer.

Greyson Sweater Polo from Marine Layer. Sweater polos are having a moment right now. They offer a laid-back but sophisticated shirt option for summer smart casual. And I’m really digging my recent acquisition of a particularly handsome entry in this sartorial category: the Greyson sweater polo from Marine Layer. I feel like Frank Sinatra in Palm Springs when I wear it.

Quote of the Week

In the presence of danger man often finds salvation in action. To dull emotion he must do something; to remain immobile, to stagnate in mind or body, is to surrender without terms. Whereas movement, work of any kind, helps to deliver him from those feelings which are traitors to his better nature. In the last war, the man in the observation balloon, with little to do but sit in the middle of a target, was more liable to break down than the observer in an aeroplane, while the observer was more vulnerable than the pilot. To sit still under bombardment in the trench was more testing than to fight in the open.

—Lord Moran

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Soldiers often need to operate in complete silence to maintain the element of surprise and avoid detection by enemy forces.

But they still need to communicate with each other.

So, how do they do it without telegraphing their position?

With hand signals.

During the past century, the military has developed hand signals that allow its members to communicate with each other while in stealth mode. The hand signals also allow communication when things are too loud for their comrades to hear oral communication.

The U.S. Army first developed uniform hand signals during WWII. As time went on, the vocabulary of this visual language expanded. Other branches of the military also developed hand signals, typically following the Army’s lead. The most recent standardized hand signals from the U.S. Army are codified in TC 3-21.60. There are many of them for different situations: patrol, convoy control, ground-to-air communication, etc.

To find out which military hand signals might be useful for a civilian to know, I talked to fellow Okie and former Green Beret Harrison Anderson, who did 12 years of active duty service in the Army. He’s now a retired colonel in the Army Reserves and finishing up his business education at OU (Boomer Sooner, baby!).

A Guide to Military Hand SignalsWhile you might not find yourself in Nam trying to sneak past Charlie, it can still be useful for civilians to know a few military hand signals.

As Harrison noted, “Hand signals can come in handy if you’re out hunting and need to keep quiet.”

If you’re not a hunter, you can use them when paintballing, playing capture the flag with your bros, or attempting to avoid being detected by a horde of baby-eating barbarians during the apocalypse. Plus, they’re just cool to know.

Here’s a rundown on some of the main military hand signals:

NumbersBecause one of a soldier’s hands may be occupied with a gun, the Army has developed a system to indicate numbers with just one hand.

Basically, the hand signals for numbers 1-5 are straightforward, with one finger extended up for each numeral. Then when you get to 6-9, you turn your hand to the side and extend out the number of fingers you’re adding to 5, e.g., two fingers out is 5 + 2 or 7. A closed raised fist is zero.

Useful Patrol Hand SignalsSlow down. Tell people to slow their pace by extending your arm horizontally to the side, palm to the front, and waving your arm downward several times.

Halt. Signal for someone to stop by raising your hand above your head, palm facing forward.

Freeze. Use the same signal for halt, but make a fist. Freeze tells someone to not only stop, but to not move at all to avoid detection.

Stop, Look, Listen, Smell. Place your open hand behind your ear to tell your crew to pay attention to their environment.

Assemble. Raise your arm vertically above your head, palm open, and make a circle with your arm. Use this signal when you need your buddies to rally around you so you can talk shop.

Double time. Use this signal to tell your crew to hurry the hell up. It’s a lot of fun to do. Just pump your fist like you’re trying to get a truck driver to blow his horn.

Understood. The U.S. Army actually codified this common civilian gesture. Flash a simple thumbs up like the Fonz to indicate you understand the communication.

I Don’t Understand. This was my favorite one because it’s so funny. Just shrug your shoulders like you have no clue what’s happening, which indicates you don’t understand the communication.

Useful Vehicle Hand SignalsHarrison shared a few hand signals that can be used when you’re communicating with the driver of a vehicle. He told me he actually uses these a lot out in the civilian world when he or someone else is backing up a big truck with a trailer hitched to it and the driver’s visibility is compromised.

When your friend’s behind the wheel, you can use these signals to help him maneuver his vehicle safely (or vice versa).

Indicate How Far a Driver Has to Back Up. Use this hand signal when someone is backing up a vehicle and doesn’t want to run into something behind it. As the signaler, place yourself behind the vehicle but in sight of the driver’s side mirror. Extend your forearms to the front, palms separated and facing inward. As the vehicle backs up, bring your palms progressively closer together to indicate to the driver the shrinking distance between the vehicle and the object behind it.

Stop a Vehicle That’s Backing Up. When you need to indicate that the driver of the reversing vehicle needs to stop, make an “X” with your forearms.

Stop a Vehicle at Night. Harrison said knowing this signal can come in handy for civilians when a disaster like a tornado or wildfire strikes. Often, the National Guard will be sent to these areas to help with rescue and clean up or to enforce an evacuation order. If you approach a road closure barricade at night, you might see a guardsman moving a flashlight from side to side; that’s a military signal to stop.

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If you’re new to the AoM podcast, or maybe have missed a few episodes in the last six months, here’s a look at the 10 most popular episodes we’ve published so far this year. Hope you find some you really enjoy. Be sure to subscribe to the show to never miss a new episode; we’ve got some great guests coming in the second half of the year!

955: The Power of NEAT — Move a Little to Lose a Lot

People often dismiss the efficacy of physical activity in losing weight, or think you have to do tons of exercise to get its effects. But Dr. James Levine explains that activity, even small movements, can, in fact, have a big impact on your health.

959: Come Alive Again by Having More Fun

When was the last time you had fun? If it’s been a while, listen to my conversation with Catherine Price about why you need to put more fun in your life and what you can do to make that happen.

968: The Secrets of Supercommunicators

Looking to up your communication skills? Charles Duhigg provides some research-backed advice on how to become a “supercommunicator” so you can handle even the most difficult of conversations with ease.

973: A Butler’s Guide to Managing Your Household

Former professional butler Charles MacPherson offers lessons for regular joes on how to manage your household like it’s Downton Abbey, white gloves not required. One of my favorite bits of advice was creating a Butler’s Book for your home (here’s how to do it!).

972: Down With Pseudo-Productivity — Why We Need to Transform the Way We WorkRegular guest Cal Newport always has some good thoughts to share, and in this episode, he discusses why you need to ditch mindless pseudo-productivity and embrace a more sustainable, humane, and fruitful way of working.

978: Want to Be Happy? Give Yourself Reasons to Admire YourselfRyan Bush explains his theory that to heighten happiness and reduce depression, you have to give yourself reasons to admire yourself.

993: The Shadows Over Men’s Hearts and How to Fight ThemJon Tyson walks us through the sources of malaise in the lives of modern men, including despair, loneliness, unhealthy ambition, futility, and lust, and offers suggestions on how to fight them.

1,000: Rules for the Modern ManTo commemorate the 1,000th episode of the AoM podcast, I brought back Walker Lamond of Rules for My Unborn Son fame to wax nostalgic about the internet back in the 2000s and discuss the rules we think every man should live by. This episode was a lot of fun! Highly recommend.

1,002: The Fascinating Differences Between Male and Female FriendshipsEvolutionary psychologist Jaimie Krems shares research on the differences between male and female friendships, including how men and women differ in friendship formation, friendship jealousy, and managing conflict within a friendship.

1,003: Books, Routines, and Habits: The Founders’ Guide to Self-ImprovementConstitutional historian Jeffery Rosen shares the books and routines the Founding Fathers used for their personal development. Lots of inspiring takeaways from this episode.

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The journey of personal development, of becoming a more excellent and extraordinary individual, can sometimes seem a little abstract. That’s why it’s helpful to imagine it as Mark Divine does, as a set of five metaphorical mountains to scale.

Mark is a retired Navy SEAL Commander, a professor of leadership, a yogi, the creator of fitness and mindset programs like SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind, and an author. He combines his two decades of military service with his study of martial arts and zen meditation to create the holistic warrior monk development philosophy that informs his work, including his latest book, Uncommon: Simple Principles for an Extraordinary Life.

Today on the show, Mark acts as a guide to the topography of the five mountains of personal development and the daily practices that will help you summit them. We talk about why mastering the physical mountain comes first and climbing the intuitional mountain comes fourth, the Navy SEAL breathing practice that will help you develop your metacognition, how the Japanese concept of ikigai can help you find your purpose in life, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast Mark’s previous appearance on the Art of Manliness podcast: Episode #60 — The Way of the SEAL * Box breathing * Unbeatable Mind by Mark Divine * Staring Down the Wolf* by Mark Divine * AoM Article: 4 Key Insights From the Bhagavad Gita * AoM Podcast #616: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling * Sunday Firesides: You Don’t Have the Time, Not to Take the Time * F3 Nation * Ikigai

Connect With Mark Divine Uncommon* website * Mark’s website * Mark on IG

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Staring Down the Wolf: 7 Leadership Commitments That Forge Elite Teams

Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level (Third Edition)

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In the 1991 comedy What About Bob?, Bill Murray plays Bob Wiley, a highly neurotic and anxious guy who seeks the help of an egotistical and ambitious therapist named Dr. Bob Marvin (played by Richard Dreyfuss).

Dr. Marvin wants to be the next Dr. Spock — a psychologist who’s a household name. He thinks his recently published book, Baby Steps, is just the ticket to fame and fortune.

When Bob visits with Dr. Marvin about his numerous psychological issues, Dr. Marvin gives Bob a copy of Baby Steps. Bob embraces the Baby Steps philosophy wholeheartedly and proceeds to take literal and figurative baby steps out of Dr. Marvin’s office. Comedic hijinks ensue when Bob crashes Dr. Marvin’s family vacation and baby steps over the boundaries between therapist and patient.

While What About Bob? uses the idea of “baby steps” to poke fun at the world of therapy, it does capture an idea that can sound cliche but is nevertheless true: small actions, when pursued consistently, are typically the most effective way to affect big changes in our lives.

You know—

Kaizen.

Little strokes fell great oaks.

Pound the rock.

But here’s something I’ve noticed in my own life: While I cognitively understand that change typically comes through small actions, I still often find myself balking at taking the necessary baby steps to start the change process.

I’m sure some of you reading have experienced the same thing.

In today’s article, we’ll look into why we often hesitate to take baby steps and what we can do to embrace them.

Why We Give Up on Taking Baby Steps Towards ChangeThere are two main reasons why we’re often reluctant to take baby steps towards a goal: 1) baby steps can make us feel inadequate, and 2) baby steps seem too small to work.

The Sense of Inadequacy, or “This Makes Me Feel Like a Big Dumb Baby” EffectA big reason why we might be reluctant to take baby steps to change is that doing so can make us feel inadequate.

Psychologist Dr. Ross Ellenhorn talks about the indignity of baby steps in his book How We Change (And Ten Reasons Why We Don’t). Ellenhorn observes that small steps can demoralize us because they constantly remind us of the distance between our current state and our desired outcome. Each baby step can feel like a mini-disappointment that highlights the work that still needs to be done to reach our goal, amplifying our feelings of inadequacy and ineptitude. Taking baby step after baby step forces you to repeatedly face the fact that you’re not where you want to be.

To counter the constant mini-disappointments that often come with baby steps, we just stop taking them altogether. We avoid baby steps because baby steps make us feel bad.

I’ve noticed this in my own life.

I have a tendency to catastrophize things. I have a negativity bias that can make me Eeyore-like. I don’t like it, so I’ve made efforts to get a handle on my Eeyore-ness for most of my adult life.

One of the tactics cognitive behavioral therapists recommend using to overcome catastrophizing is to catch yourself doing it and then take a minute or two to question the assumptions you have that are contributing to your downer mood.

But I find myself balking at putting this habit into practice on the regular. Why? It makes me feel stupid that I have to question my erroneous, overly pessimistic assumptions over and over again. Every time I question my negative view of a situation, it reminds me that I have a melancholic mentality.

Here’s the inner dialogue that goes on when I start taking the baby step of questioning my negative assumptions and feel grumpy about it:

“Man, look how dumb I am. I’ve got to go through this list of questions to see if my negativity bias is correct or not. It makes me feel so stupid because usually the answer to these questions is that my assumptions are distorted. Other people I know don’t have to do this. Why do I have to do this? Oh yeah, because my brain is broken.”

I go into a spiral of doom and gloom. I start feeling bad about feeling bad, all thanks to taking the proven baby step of questioning my cognitive distortions.

Because the baby step of questioning my distorted outlook makes me feel bad, I just stop doing it to avoid those frequent “mini-disappointments.”

How dumb is that? I’d rather experience the long-term pain of having an Eeyore-like brain than experience the short-term pain of doing some cognitive restructuring by questioning my erroneous assumptions — even though the latter option will lead to less pain overall, and maybe even an ultimate end to the pain.

You might see this same dynamic in yourself if you’re, for example, trying to lose weight.

You make small changes to your life. Maybe you start taking a morning walk or tracking your macros.

But when you weigh yourself or look at yourself in the mirror after a couple weeks of effort, you’re reminded that you’ve still got a long way to go to reach your desired weight. It demoralizes you. Every time you take your walk, and you’re huffing and puffing, you’re reminded that you’re out of shape. Every time you agonize over the choice of getting seconds or not, you’re reminded that you have difficulty controlling your eating.

To avoid these mini disappointments on the path to losing weight, you just give up altogether. You’d rather be overweight, and not have your overweight-ness thrust in your face as often, than be constantly reminded that you’re overweight as you take baby steps towards shedding the pounds.

Pride, or the “Baby Steps Are Too Small to Work” EffectWhen people decide to make a change or pursue a goal, they tend to take a “go big or go home” approach.

Instead of establishing a weekly date night, you spend $5,000 to attend a couples retreat in California.

Instead of paying off a little of your debt each month, you invest in a bitcoin scheme that promises outsized returns.

Instead of taking a 30-minute walk each evening, you decide to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to take 10-mile long runs. Carry the boats, baby!

Why do we do this?

One factor (which colors all the rest) is pride. We think simple solutions aren’t for us, because we’re not simple creatures — we’re elite, extraordinary beings. Taking small steps is for plebes. We’re sure we’re smart enough to figure out a solution that will allow us to speed up the process and leapfrog ahead.

Another factor at play is impatience. We think about paying down our debt over five years time or shedding fifty pounds by losing two pounds a week for six months, and it feels like it will take for-ev-er. We want to skip as quickly as possible to the final result.

And then there’s the fact that committing to big steps makes us feel good. When we decide on an audacious plan to change our lives, we get a rush of excitement. In getting to see ourselves as the kind of person who’d do something difficult and/or uncommon, we get some of the rewarding, self-affirming feeling that comes from achieving a goal, even though we’ve yet to begin tackling it.

Finally, we frequently choose big actions over small ones simply because we think that baby steps seem too small to catalyze the change we want to bring about. We tend to equate complexity and difficulty with efficacy and worth. It doesn’t seem like small steps can really get us where we want to go. Small steps aren’t flashy, and they don’t manifest immediate, obvious results. It’s hard to hold in your mind, and believe, that small strokes will, eventually, fell great oaks. Small steps derive their power from the compounding effects of effort over time, but on a day-to-day basis, it can feel like nothing is happening.

Getting Over the Indignity of Taking Baby StepsYou can overcome the indignity of baby steps by changing your attitude about them.

Get in the humility zone.If you want to change, there are a couple of things you have to settle in your soul.

The first is that you are, right now, not where you want to be. You need to accept where you are on the map.

Be frank in assessing your current position, but don’t make any value judgments about it.

If you’re overweight, don’t say, “I’m a big fat dumb dumb who lacks willpower.” Instead, tell yourself, “I’m fifty pounds overweight.”

If you’re grumpier than you’d like, don’t say, “I’m a negative Nelly who’s got a dumb Eeyore brain.” Rather, tell yourself “I’ve got a negativity bias.”

Once you accept where you’re at, you can start moving somewhere else.

The second thing you have to accept is that nearly all lasting change requires small, incremental steps taken over and over again. There is a part of yourself that is constantly wondering, “Isn’t there some other way to get where I want to be?” You must quiet that question and absolutely settle this truth in your soul: There is no other way.

You are not that special. You, yes you, will, like every other human, have to take consistent baby steps to reach your goals.

How do you go about accepting these two realities?

It’s easier said than done, to be honest.

What works for me is just silently thinking or meditating about where I’m at and the inevitability of the way forward. Other people find writing these realities down in a journal to be helpful. If you don’t mind feeling a bit like a weirdo, you can say out loud: “I’m fifty pounds overweight and I can take small steps to slowly reduce my weight.”

Do whatever works for you.

Regardless of the option you choose, exercising it will require an ample dose of reality-affirming humility.

Learn to enjoy the process.Instead of seeing baby steps as reminders of your shortcomings, flip the script and learn to enjoy taking them.

We’re big proponents of using the power of “like” instead of willpower to reach a goal.

If you want to exercise more, choose an exercise you like doing. You’re more likely to stick with it.

If you want to eat better food, find healthy foods that you enjoy eating.

If you want to lose your temper less, make it a game to see just how stoic you can remain when your kid is having a meltdown.

When you succeed with your small steps, acknowledge it, appreciate it, and reward yourself for the win. It will help you stay motivated to keep going.

Ultimately, overcoming the “indignities” of small steps requires a shift in mindset. By accepting and embracing the inescapable realities of transformation, you can use the underappreciated power of baby steps to bring about some very grown-up changes.

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How We Change: (And Ten Reasons Why We Don't)

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Filling out paperwork. Making travel reservations. Paying bills. Shopping for groceries. Returning packages.

These are all examples of life admin — the little tasks we have to do to keep our lives moving along.

Life admin is typically pretty tedious and annoying. But staying on top of it is essential to reducing the stress and chaos that would otherwise burden our relationships, muck up the gears of our schedules, and prevent us from participating in all the fun and fulfilling parts of life.

Fortunately, there are ways to better manage your life admin. Here to share some of them is Dinah Rowe-Roberts, the co-host of the Life Admin Life Hacks podcast and the co-author of a book of the same name. Today on the show, Dinah explains what lists you should be keeping, including the 10-minute time killers list, why you should do a regular “hour of power” to stay on top of things, how to schedule your life admin, how to keep track of and divvy up chores between you and your spouse, how to get all your meal planning and grocery shopping done in less than 15 minutes a week, how to streamline your kids’ schedules and your vacation planning, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM article on shadow work * AoM article and podcast on how to have a weekly marriage meeting * AoM article on how to have a weekly family meeting * AoM article on how to use Todoist to get things done * AoM article on how to manage your life admin * AoM article on how and why to have a reset day * AoM article on 8 lists you should be keeping (besides the to-do list)

Connect With Dinah Rowe-Roberts* The Life Admin Life Hacks website * Life Admin Life Hacks on IG * Dinah on LinkedIn

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In late August of 2018, a woman was walking her dog at a golf course on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. As she approached the 13th green, an alligator appeared and attempted to attack the woman’s dog. When she tried to protect the dog, the alligator turned on her instead, dragging her into the water and killing her.

Over five million alligators live in the United States, occupying a territory that stretches from South Carolina to Texas, with the majority residing in Florida. The good news is that gators typically don’t go after people. They primarily eat smaller prey like fish, raccoons, birds, turtles, and sometimes deer. If they attack a person, it’s likely a case of mistaken identity; in the above story, the woman’s dog was the original target.

The bad news is that gators are incredibly powerful if they do get a hold of you. With 150 million years of evolution to back them up, alligators are pure killing machines. Some are over eleven feet long, weigh up to 1,000 pounds, and can bite down with a PSI of nearly 3,000 pounds. But for all that power, gators do have some weak points. Understanding how to exploit them could save your life if you ever get attacked.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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Some people have no problem attracting others. Everyone wants to work with them, to be their friend, to have them on their team.

Other people have little luck in making and keeping relationships. Their overtures for connection are routinely rejected, and they typically cannot understand why.

We often think that the formation of relationships is based on mysterious vibes and ineffable chemistry.

And there’s certainly a lot of that at play.

But at its core, the decisions people make as to whom to befriend, hang out with, and prioritize in their lives come down to a much more straightforward calculus: the visceral judgment as to whether someone will be a benefit or a burden.

The human experience is difficult. The load each individual must carry is heavy. Thus, people look for others who will lighten their load, rather than increase it.

People like people who listen at least as much as they talk.

People like people who forward more compliments than complaints.

People recoil from those who underline life’s ugliness, passively wait to be filled and entertained, and drift around as morose, mood-darkening storm clouds.

People move towards those who offer beauty (whether in the appearance they were born with, the style they cultivate, the homes they adorn, or the art they create), provide new knowledge and fresh fun, and are able to look on the bright side of life.

People value those who in their friendly visage, abundant humor, and light-casting perspective are the bright side of life.

In every relationship, people take turns giving and receiving. But everyone looks for those who feel like a net gain, rather than a net cost.

So, if you struggle in making connections, instead of wondering, “Why don’t people like me?” ask yourself, “What can I do to add more to people’s lives?

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SABANI Portable Charger 35000mAh Power Bank. I use the downloadable maps on the AllTrails app to navigate on backpacking trips. The problem is that if you’re out for more than a day, your phone’s battery will die, and there’s nowhere you can charge it in the middle of a national forest. To solve that problem, I bought this power bank before our last backpacking trip to New Mexico. It worked like a champ. Used it to charge my phone and Apple Watch twice while we were out. You can charge your iPhone up to five times with this power bank, and it comes with four built-in cables. The one downside is you can’t bring this charger on a plane, so save it for outdoor excursions.

The Founder. After watching this movie when it first came out in 2016, we watched it recently as a family. The Founder shows how Ray Kroc, played by Micheal Keaton, went from a struggling, middle-aged, Willy Loman-esque salesman to building an international fast food restaurant empire through doggedness, ruthless cunning, and a dose of motivational Norman-Vincent-Peal-esque self-talk. Keaton was fantastic, and the best scenes in the film are the tense phone calls between him and Dick McDonald, McDonald’s original co-founder, who’s played by Nick Offerman. After watching this movie and also The Social Network recently, I’ve been thinking about my own business philosophy, which is a paraphrase of the counsel George Washington gave in his farewell address: avoid entangling alliances.

The Enduring Appeal of “Mr. Brightside.” You all know I’m a die hard Killers fan. It’s the 20th anniversary of their breakthrough album Hot Fuss, which includes some of the Killers’ biggest hits, including my go-to deadlifting PR pump-up song: “All These Things That I’ve Done.” But the song on that album that has become the biggest cultural touchstone is “Mr. Brightside.” As soon as this timeless anthem is played in any large group, like at a stadium or party, everyone starts singing it. What’s the lasting appeal of this song? Mike Hilleary attributes it to its universal theme of romantic betrayal and its catchy sing-along structure. After you read the article, go give the song a listen. Destiny is calling you.

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay. I read this book over a decade ago, but still think about its ideas today. In Obliquity, economist John Kay makes the case that big, complex goals are often best achieved through indirect approaches rather than straightforward paths. Kay argues that problem-solving, success, and happiness are often the result of adaptability, experimentation, and flexibility — a process that he calls obliquity — rather than rigid, linear strategies. Lots of food for thought in this book.

Quote of the Week

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

—Francis Bacon

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Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly

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I’ve done the traditional barbell squat my whole life. It’s a great exercise for overall lower-body strength. I’ve also experimented with other squat variations: the front squat, the goblet squat, the belt squat.

This year I’ve been doing a squat that’s become my favorite ever: the Hatfield squat.

I love this exercise. I originally switched to it because long-standing problems with cranky shoulders and knee pain were making the traditional barbell squat uncomfortable. The Hatfield squat has made squatting fun and productive again after years of frustration trying to make the barbell squat work for me. What’s also great about the Hatfield Squat is that it’s an excellent movement for quad hypertrophy, which lines up nicely with my new fitness goal of getting more ripped. It’s been a game-changer in my training.

If you’ve had trouble with barbell squatting or are looking for a different squat variation to mix into your programming, here’s everything you need to know about the Hatfield squat.

What Is the Hatfield Squat and What Are Its Benefits?The Hatfield squat, named after powerlifting legend Dr. Fred Hatfield, aka Dr. Squat, is a back squat variation that requires a safety squat bar, which is a type of barbell that looks sort of like an ox yoke.

When you do the Hatfield squat, you place the safety squat bar on your back. Then, instead of holding on to the safety squat bar with your hands, you rest your hands on an additional barbell or a set of handles that have been placed at navel level on the barbell rack. As you descend into the squat, you keep your hands on the support in front of you, using it to maintain your balance and an upright torso.

This increases the stability of the exercise, allowing the Hatfield squat to offer some unique benefits:

Great for quad hypertrophy. If you’re looking to grow legs as big as tree trunks, the Hatfield squat can be a helpful tool. Its increased stability allows you to overload your quads more than a traditional squat. Instead of focusing on keeping your balance during the squat, you can just focus on the movement, which means you can be a bit more aggressive in adding reps or weight.

Great for squatting around injuries. The most significant benefit that the Hatfield squat has given me is that it has allowed me to squat heavy again despite the niggling physical issues I’ve had on and off for years.

Because I have shoulder tendonitis due to bench pressing and struggle with shoulder flexibility (despite the amount of time I’ve worked on developing this capacity), the bar position on the traditional low-bar squat just exacerbated my shoulder pain. Because you use a safety bar with the Hatfield squat, you don’t have to use your hands to hold the bar on your back. It completely removes the stress on your shoulders.

The Hatfield squat has also allowed me to work around some pain I’ve had behind my knee since 2020. The pain only happens during the descent part of a traditional barbell squat. I still don’t know what the source of the pain is despite talking to an orthopedic surgeon and getting an MRI done. I reckon it’s some sort of overuse injury on a tendon back there. But at any rate, the increased stability of the Hatfield squat allows me to squat heavy and below parallel without any pain behind my knee.

People with lower back issues have also found the Hatfield squat helpful for squatting without exacerbating their injury.

Due to the Hatfield squat’s pain reduction ability, I’ve also been calling them “Midlife Man Squats.”

It is a great accessory lift for the barbell squat. You don’t have to replace the traditional barbell squat completely with the Hatfield squat. Instead, you can use the Hatfield squat as an accessory lift in your barbell programming. On deadlift day, you could do the Hatfield squat for 3 sets of 8-12 reps for hypertrophy and increased work capacity.

Or you could use the Hatfield squat for overload training to build strength and confidence in hoisting heavier weights, doing 3 sets of 3 reps with weight that is heavier than you typically lift on the traditional barbell squat.

Here’s a hypothetical barbell program that would incorporate the Hatfield squat:

Lower Body Day A

Squat 3 x 5 (squat is the main lower body lift)
Rack pulls 3 x 5 (rack pulls are the accessory lift for the deadlift)
Good mornings 3 x 10

Lower Body Day B

Deadlift 1 x 5 (deadlift is the main lower body lift)
Hatfield squat 3 x 8-12 (Hatfield squat is the accessory lift for the squat)
Lunges 3 x 12

How to Perform the Hatfield SquatThe Hatfield squat is pretty dang easy to perform. You just need to get the right set-up.

Equipment Needed:

Safety squat bar (SSB)
Barbell or handles

Place the handles or barbell on the squat rack at about belly height.

Get under the safety squat bar and unrack it.

Keep your hands lightly on the handles or bar in front of you. You’re not using the handles/auxiliary barbell to assist in pulling yourself up. You’re just using them to maintain your stability throughout the lift.

Squat with an upright torso. The Hatfield squat should be done with an upright torso. You don’t need to bend over like you do on a low-bar squat.

Lower yourself until slightly below parallel and then rise back up. Remember, just use the handles for stability. Do not use the handles to pull yourself up.

Like I said at the beginning, the Hatfield squat has been a game-changer for me. It’s allowed me to keep squatting without any pain. If you’ve struggled with incorporating the barbell squat into your workout due to pain, try the Hatfield squat. I think you’ll probably like it as much as I do.

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There has been a lot of media coverage and dialogue about the struggles men are facing in the modern day. There’s been some solutions forwarded to these struggles as well. Among these, Dr. Anthony Bradley has a more surprising idea that you don’t hear every day: revitalizing college fraternities.

Anthony is a research fellow and professor and the author of Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America. In the first part of our conversation, Anthony offers his take on the state of men in the modern day, the difference between heroic and disordered masculinity, the insights that a writer from the mid-20-century can shed on the forms that disorder can take, and why many men today are choosing the path of resignation. We then turn to Anthony’s idea that college fraternities can be the training ground for virtue. We talk about the loftier origins of fraternities, why, at some universities, they devolved into organizations that have become symbolic of the worst traits of masculinity, and Anthony’s six principles for reviving the potential of fraternities to shape great men.

Resources Related to the Podcast Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization* by Karen Horney * AoM Podcast #758: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather * Anthony’s framework and list of resources for the course he teaches on the masculine journey

Connect With Anthony Bradley* Anthony’s website

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Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization

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Because of the coincidental confluence of two books coming into my life at the same time — Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson and Economics by Aristotle — I’ve been thinking a lot about household management this year.

Part of that reflection has been philosophical. I’ve contemplated the Greek idea of household management, what they called oikos, and how the way you take care of your home has a deeper importance than is normally thought and can set the foundation for eudaimonia or flourishing.

Part of that reflection has also been practical. In our 19 years of marriage, Kate and I have done a pretty decent job running our household. We largely keep our home clean, tidy, and well-maintained, our family organized, and our budget in balance. But there’s always room for improvement, and I’ve been looking for ways to become a better householder.

One such improvement presented itself when I interviewed Charles MacPherson, a former professional butler, for the podcast. MacPherson recommended creating a tool that’s part of every top-notch butler’s arsenal: the Butler’s Book.

The Butler’s Book: The Instruction Manual For Your HomeBack in Victorian times, the Butler’s Book was where the butler kept all the information about the household: staff and maintenance schedules, inventory of china and silverware, food preferences, measurements for clothing, etc.

Today, butlers or household managers of wealthy households have something similar to a Butler’s Book; they just call it “a household procedures manual.”

A modern-day butler uses a household procedures manual to keep track of all the contractors used to maintain the home, information about the utilities, inventories of possessions and supplies, and maintenance schedules of major appliances. Many of these books will also have emergency preparedness protocols as well as instructions on how to plan and execute parties and dinners.

After I learned about the Butler’s Book, I wanted to create my own.

One of the main issues I’ve run into with managing my home is that I’m always doing a kind of scavenger hunt to find information about household issues:

Where’s the main sewer line access again?
Who do I call to fix the Trane furnace? What about the Carrier one on the other side of the house?
When did we replace those windows, and who did it?
Do we still have Sternos left from the last party to use at the upcoming one?

A Butler’s Book helps you stay on top of these kinds of questions and everything else you need to know and do to run your home efficiently. Instead of spinning your wheels trying to find where things are, throwing away money repurchasing something you didn’t remember you already had, and wasting time figuring out who to call to fix a problem, you just turn to your Butler’s Book.

I looked online to see if there were any digital services you could use to create a Butler’s Book for your home. There are quite a few household management apps out there, but I found them to be clunky and overwhelming to use. They all try to do way too much. You can track your appliances, manage home maintenance schedules, pay your kids’ allowance, manage your family schedule, and keep track of your meal prep. Too much!

I also didn’t like having to tappity-tap stuff into the platform on my smartphone keyboard. That’s so tedious.

MacPherson recommended creating a physical version of a Butler’s Book, and seeing the wisdom in that suggestion, that’s what I did. I like it because I can customize it with the info I want. I also like how easy it is to access. I just pull it out and flip to the page I need. Don’t discount the advantage of tactile information that you can physically heft!

While many Butler’s Books/household procedure manuals discuss standard operating procedures for running the household (e.g., how to open the pool), I wanted my Butler’s Book to mainly contain information about all the major systems and appliances in my home. That’s it.

I’ve broken my Butler’s Book into the following sections:

Water/Plumbing
Natural Gas
Electrical
HVAC
Windows and Doors
Roof
Gutters
Safety and Security
Home Network
Swimming Pool
Appliances
Entertainment Inventory (Kate and I host a couple of big parties each year and have accumulated a large number of folding chairs and tables and other party supplies that we need to keep track of.)

For each of these categories, I’ve created pages in my Butler’s Book to record information like the date an appliance was purchased, when it was last serviced, and contact information for who did the servicing. I also have places to record the last time a smoke alarm was tested, the color code for the paint used in different rooms, and more.

Make Your Own Butler’s Book With This FREE Butler’s Book TemplateI created a template for my Butler’s Book in Google Docs. You can download it and modify it however you want. It’s free. You don’t even have to subscribe to our newsletter or comment BUTLERS BOOK on an Instagram reel to get it. The Art of Manliness is here to save you from wanting to stick a pencil in your eye. You can print it off and use it as is or if you want to modify it, just click “File” and then “Make a Copy” to save a copy to your Google Drive. From there, you can modify the template however you want in Google Docs.

Lessons Learned From Making a Butler’s BookA few things I’ve learned while creating my Butler’s Book:

Creating your Butler’s Book will make you more familiar with your home. I know a lot more about my house now after I’ve filled out all the information about my home’s various services and appliances. Even if you don’t reference your Butler’s Book much, you’ll get a lot out of making it.

A Butler’s Book is a living, breathing document. As I’ve been referencing my Butler’s Book, I’ve been adding and taking away info that I’ve found more or less useful. I’ve also been looking at my home and thinking, “Is there any info that would be useful to add to my Butler’s Book?” Use a pencil to fill in the book’s pages. It will make it easier to update.

I initially entered my home maintenance schedule in my Butler’s Book, but I found that keeping it in Todoist was more to my liking, so I scratched that section.

If you’re looking for some ideas for home maintenance schedules, check out this article.

I also tried keeping an inventory of things like toilet paper, paper towels, and cleaning supplies in my Butler’s Book, but found the process to be extremely tedious and low in ROI. Instead I just schedule doing a quick inventory of household supplies every two weeks in my Todoist. If it looks like we’re low, I will order some more from Amazon. I don’t need to know that I have exactly 13 rolls of toilet paper.

The only inventory that’s come in handy is our entertaining supplies. When we host a party, it’s nice to know that we have 20 folding chairs in the basement instead of having to go down there to count them because I forgot that we have 20 folding chairs.

I reckon that I’ll continue to modify my Butler’s Book as I use it over the years.

A Butler’s Book is a gift to the next homeowner. When I bought our house 13 years ago, the previous homeowner handed me an envelope with a bunch of yellowed instruction manuals for some of the major appliances. That’s all the information I got about my house. I had to figure out where the main water shut-off valve was, who to call for furnace repair, etc. I would have loved it if the previous homeowner handed me a Butler’s Book filled with all the information about the house. It would have saved me a ton of time. I’m considering my Butler’s Book as a gift for the next person who lives in this house.

I highly recommend creating your own Butler’s Book. The time investment in creating it was worth it; there’s great benefit in becoming your own butler.

For more insights from butler Charles MacPherson on how to better manage your home, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast:

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Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House

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You probably think of the health effects of sunlight as a mixed bag. On the one hand, sun exposure helps your body make vitamin D. But on the other, it can cause skin cancer.

To get around this conundrum, dermatologists frequently recommend avoiding sun exposure when you can, slathering on sunscreen when you can’t, and taking a vitamin D supplement to make up for the lack of sunlight in your life.

Yet in seeking to solve one problem, this advice may open up many others and be contributing to ill health in the West.

Today on the show, Rowan Jacobsen, a science journalist who has spent years investigating the health impacts of sunlight, will unpack the underappreciated benefits of sun exposure, and that, crucially, they’re not primarily a function of the production of vitamin D and can’t be replaced with a pill. We talk about what else is at work in ultraviolet radiation’s positive effects on blood pressure, autoimmune diseases, insulin resistance, mood, and more. We also get into how to weigh these benefits against the risk of skin cancer, why health officials in Australia, which has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, have changed their recommendations around sun exposure, and if there’s a role sunscreen should still play in your routine.

Resources Related to the Podcast Rowan’s article in Outside magazine: Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? * Rowan’s article in the Atlantic:* Against Sunscreen Absolutism * AoM Article: Why You Should Become a Sun Worshipper * Dermatologist Richard Weller’s TED talk: Could the Sun Be Good for Your Heart? * Australian recommendations on sun exposure

Connect With Rowan Jacobson* Rowan’s website

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The culinary delight that is the hot dog may have its origins in German sausages, but it’s become a beloved symbol of America — especially the American summer. Once associated with the street carts of New York City, the popularity of the hot dog spread its way across the country, getting modified in condiments and serving style along the way.

To inspire you to branch out from the basic hot dog with mustard (ketchup does not belong on a hot dog!), we’ve created this illustrated field guide to 8 of the tastiest regional weiners you’ll find in the US of A. Make it a goal this summer to take a frankfurter-focused culinary tour of the country, whipping up each of the variations above (and others — many more exist!) from the comfort of your own backyard. Ex multis hot dogibus, unus. Out of many hot dogs, one.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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A lot of self-improvement advice and content feels empty. And there’s a reason for that. It often offers routines and habits to practice, but doesn’t offer a strong, overarching reason to practice them.

That’s why the self-improvement advice of the Founding Fathers is particularly compelling. Though they were imperfect men, they had a clear why for trying to become better than they were. For the Founders, life was about the pursuit of happiness, and they equated happiness with excellence and virtue — a state that wasn’t about feeling good, but being good. The Founders pursued happiness not only for the personal benefit in satisfaction and tranquility it conferred, but for the way the attainment of virtue would benefit society as a whole; they believed that political self-government required personal self-government.

Today on the show, Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law, the president of the National Constitution Center, and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness, shares the book the Founders read that particularly influenced their idea of happiness as virtue and self-mastery. We talk about the schedules and routines the Founders kept, the self-examination practices they did to improve their character, and how they worked on their flaws, believing that, while moral perfection was ultimately an impossible goal to obtain, it was still something worth striving for.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM’s series on Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues * Ben Franklin Virtues Journal available in the AoM Store * AoM Article: Young Benjamin Franklin’s Plan of Conduct * AoM Article: Thomas Jefferson’s 10 Rules for Life * AoM Article: The Libraries of Famous Men — Thomas Jefferson’s Recommended Reading * AoM Article: The Best John Adams Quotes * AoM Article: George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation * AoM Podcast #366: Teach Yourself Like George Washington * AoM Article: The Spiritual Disciplines — Study and Self-Examination * Tusculan Disputations* by Marcus Tullius Cicero * The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

Connect With Jeffrey Rosen* The National Constitution Center website * We the People podcast * Jeffrey’s faculty page * Jeffrey on X

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Doing all this, inspecting these minute burglar-alarms, did not make him feel foolish or self-conscious. He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession. Routine precautions were to him no more unreasonable than they would be to a deep-sea diver or a test pilot, or to any man earning danger-money. Satisfied that his room had not been searched while he was at the casino, Bond undressed and took a cold shower. —Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

When James Bond was out on assignment around the world, he sometimes stayed in nice, swanky hotels. Yet while 007 always got some pleasure out of these stays, he couldn’t afford to relax and drop his guard; when on the job, Bond was in constant danger of being counter-spied on and ambushed. Thus, when he stepped out of his room, the vigilant secret agent always left “minute burglar alarms” that would detect the intrusion of his antagonists and alert him to the fact that someone had gone through his belongings while he was away. A hair (plucked from his head; you could use thin thread or lint) here, a faint dusting of talcum powder there, left telltale evidence of a disturbance.

Whether you’re at home or in a hotel, in the business of earning “danger-money” or just a teenager who wants to know if your parents have been snooping in your room, the tactics above — all drawn from Bond’s various adventures — will help you know if someone’s been poking through your things.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

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Casino Royale (James Bond (Original Series), 1)

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We probably think we use social media as an entertaining distraction.

But the deeper drive underlying our urge to keep scrolling is the simple fear of missing out.

We ever feel we’re one swipe away from finding ideas that will help advance our careers, inspire our creativity — maybe even allow us to live forever — and that if we step away from our feeds, we will end up left behind and left out.

As an antidote to that (often subconscious) worry, it’s helpful to think of someone like, say, Benjamin Franklin, who lived before social media existed, and yet still managed to invent, create civic organizations, write books still quoted today, and help found a country.

When we consider Franklin’s social-media-free-yet-still-fully-flourishing life, certain assurances arise that we may lay hold of:

Trust that over thousands of years, humans have developed avenues — conversations, books, podcasts — that offer sufficient exposure to ideas that will optimize your thinking and creativity, while not sabotaging the attention span necessary to synthesize those ideas into something useful and original.

Trust that if you do have a problem in your life, you will feel prompted to seek out an answer, and can go directly to it, rather than wading through hours of TikToks for the solution to randomly arise.

Trust that if a scientific discovery was made that significantly enhanced human well-being, beyond the standard protocol of eating right, exercising, and getting sufficient sleep, it would be all over the news, and you wouldn’t have to watch a hundred reels to hear about it.

Trust that if social media was essential to living your best life, then given the proportion of the population who uses it, and the amount of time people spend on it, society’s health, happiness, and innovation would be leapfrogging forward, and it’s safe to say this isn’t the case.

Trust that Benjamin Franklin, as well as Plato, da Vinci, Tolstoy, Eisenhower, and every other eminent artist, philosopher, and leader of the past millennia (and your dad in 1990, to boot) was fine without Facebook, reddit, TikTok, X, and Instagram, and, if you decide to cut out or cut back on using these platforms, you’ll be fine too.

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The Federalist Papers. With Independence Day in the U.S. being next week, I thought it would be a good time to revisit some civically-minded founding documents. So I picked up a cheap copy of The Federalist Papers and gave it a read. The Federalist Papers are a series of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay between 1787 and 1788 to support the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. The Federalist Papers argue for a strong central government to replace the weaker Articles of Confederation, emphasizing the need for a unified nation capable of managing defense, trade, and other national interests. My favorite parts of the essays were when the authors delved into group psychology and how to best deal with “factions.” They concluded that you can’t stop factions, but you can at least mitigate the potential damage they can cause. The Federalist Papers is surprisingly readable despite the dense political philosophy and sometimes archaic 18th-century language. If you’re an American, pick up a copy and read it this week. It will give you a better understanding of the Constitution.

Hitch Hair Clay. One of the issues I’ve run into with growing my hair out long is that it can get really poofy and frizzy. I’ve used a few drugstore products with some success, but none of them hold a candle to Hitch Pomade. Hitch was developed by barber Thad Forrester. If you’ve been following AoM for a while, you know Thad from way back when I did some YouTube videos with him on how to talk to your barber. I’ve been one of Thad’s beta testers for Hitch for the past few years, and he’s finally released it to the public. What I love about Hitch is that it gives my hair some hold, while still maintaining its laid-back flow. And because it adds a bit of moisture, Hitch also reduces the frizz. My favorite is the All Day Clay. Pick yourself up a jar.

The Fall Guy. Our family recently watched The Fall Guy and enjoyed it. Ryan Gosling plays a stuntman who has to track down the movie star he stunt doubles for who’s gone missing. The whole plot of the movie basically exists as a premise for setting up awesome stunts. The film is funny and action-packed, and the on-screen chemistry between Gosling and Emily Blunt is great. There’s no heady message with this movie. It’s just fun. It feels like a throwback to the popcorn-y summer action movies of the 80s and 90s. We need more of that.

No evidence sperm counts are dropping, researchers find.In the past decade or so, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing and alarmism about declining sperm counts among Western men. Books have been written about how it will doom the human race. What’s funny is that I’ve come across articles in issues of Esquire from the 1970s saying the same thing, along with predictions that by the 2000s we’d be living in Children of Men. Well, a new research paper challenges the widely held belief that sperm counts in men are declining globally. Analyzing data from 6,758 men who applied to be sperm donors between 2017 and 2022, the researchers found no significant change in sperm concentration over this period. However, they did observe a decline in motile (swimming) sperm from 2019 onwards, possibly linked to lifestyle changes during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Quote of the Week

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make a good use of it.

—John Quincy Adams

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Note: From the 19th through to the mid-20th century, educational institutions — from elementary schools to colleges — sought to not only develop students’ academic abilities, but to cultivate, as one textbook from 1849 put it, their “virtuous and noble sentiments.”

In 1916, the Character Education Institution, a kind of think-tank for research on moral education in schools, held a contest for the best morality code for children — a code which explained the fundamental basics of living a moral life. The winning entry was penned by William J. Hutchins, a college president. It was then checked against lists of 650 potential moral acts, 92 “desirable human characteristics,” other contest entries, and literature on moral education, and subsequently revised and expanded accordingly. “The Children’s Morality Code for Elementary Schools” was published in 1926 and students were encouraged to uphold its tenets by forming classroom clubs dedicated to its support.

THE ELEMENTARY MORALITY OF CIVILIZATIONBoys and girls who are good Americans try to become strong and useful, worthy of their nation, that our country may become ever greater and better. Therefore, they obey the laws of right living which the best Americans have always obeyed.

I. THE LAW OF SELF-CONTROLGOOD AMERICANS CONTROL THEMSELVES

Those who best control themselves can best serve their country.

I will control my tongue, and will not allow it to speak mean, vulgar, or profane words. I will think before I speak. I will tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
I will control my temper, and will not get angry when people or things displease me. Even when indignant against wrong and contradicting falsehood, I will keep my self-control.
I will control my thoughts, and will not allow a foolish wish to spoil a wise purpose.
I will control my actions. I will be careful and thrifty, and insist on doing right.
I will not ridicule nor defile the character of another; I will keep my self-respect, and help others to keep theirs.

II. THE LAW OF GOOD HEALTHGOOD AMERICANS TRY TO GAIN AND KEEP GOOD HEALTH

The welfare of our country depends upon those who are physically fit for their daily work. Therefore:

I will try to take such food, sleep, and exercise as will keep me always in good health.
I will keep my clothes, my body, and my mind clean.
I will avoid those habits which would harm me, and will make and never break those habits which will help me.
I will protect the health of others, and guard their safety as well as my own.
I will grow strong and skillful.

III. THE LAW OF KINDNESSGOOD AMERICANS ARE KIND

In America those who are different must live in the same communities. We are of many different sorts, but we are one great people. Every unkindness hurts the common life; every kindness helps. Therefore:

I will be kind in all my thoughts. I will bear no spites or grudges. I will never despise anybody.
I will be kind in all my speech. I will never gossip nor will I speak unkindly of any one. Words may wound or heal.
I will be kind in my acts. I will not selfishly insist on having my own way. I will be polite: rude people are not good Americans. I will not make unnecessary trouble for those who work for me, nor forget to be grateful. I will be careful of other people’s things. I will do my best to prevent cruelty, and will give help to those who are in need.

IV. THE LAW OF SPORTSMANSHIPGOOD AMERICANS PLAY FAIR

Strong play increases and trains one’s strength and courage. Sportsmanship helps one to be a gentleman, a lady. Therefore:

I will not cheat; I will keep the rules, but I will play the game hard, for the fun of the game, to win by strength and skill. If I should not play fair, the loser would lose the fun of the game, the winner would lose his self-respect, and the game itself would become a mean and often cruel business.
I will treat my opponents with courtesy, and trust them if they deserve it. I will be friendly.
If I play in a group game, I will play, not for my own glory, but for the success of my team.
I will be a good loser or a generous winner.
And in my work as well as in my play, I will be sportsmanlike—generous, fair, honorable.

V. THE LAW OF SELF-RELIANCEGOOD AMERICANS ARE SELF-RELIANT

Self-conceit is silly, but self-reliance is necessary to boys and girls who would be strong and useful.

I will gladly listen to the advice of older and wiser people; I will reverence the wishes of those who love and care for me, and who know life and me better than I. I will develop independence and wisdom to choose for myself, act for myself, according to what seems right and fair and wise.
I will not be afraid of being laughed at when I am right. I will not be afraid of doing right when the crowd does wrong.
When in danger, trouble, or pain, I will be brave. A coward does not make a good American.

VI. THE LAW OF DUTYGOOD AMERICANS DO THEIR DUTY

The shirker and the willing idler live upon others, and burden fellow-citizens with work unfairly. They do not do their share, for their country’s good.

I will try to find out what my duty is, what I ought to do as a good American, and my duty I will do, whether it is easy or hard. What it is my duty to do I can do.

VII. THE LAW OF RELIABILITYGOOD AMERICANS ARE RELIABLE

Our country grows great and good as her citizens are able more fully to trust each other. Therefore:

I will be honest in every act, and very careful with money. I will not cheat nor pretend, nor sneak.
I will not do wrong in the hope of not being found out. I can not hide the truth from myself. Nor will I injure the property of others.
I will not take without permission what does not belong to me. A thief is a menace to me and others.
I will do promptly what I have promised to do. If I have made a foolish promise, I will at once confess my mistake, and I will try to make good any harm which my mistake may have caused. I will speak and act that people will find it easier to trust each other.

VIII. THE LAW OF TRUTHGOOD AMERICANS ARE TRUE

I will be slow to believe suspicions lest I do injustice; I will avoid hasty opinions lest I be mistaken as to facts.
I will stand by the truth regardless of my likes and dislikes, and scorn the temptation to lie for myself or friends: nor will I keep the truth from those who have a right to it.
I will hunt for proof, and be accurate as to what I see and hear; I will learn to think, that I may discover new truth.

IX. THE LAW OF GOOD WORKMANSHIPGOOD AMERICANS TRY TO DO THE RIGHT THING IN THE RIGHT WAY

The welfare of our country depends upon those who have learned to do in the right way the work that makes civilization possible. Therefore:

I will get the best possible education, and learn all that I can as a preparation for the time when I am grown up and at my life work. I will invent and make things better if I can.
I will take real interest in work, and will not be satisfied to do slipshod, lazy, and merely passable work. I will form the habit of good work and keep alert; mistakes and blunders cause hardships, sometimes disaster, and spoil success.
I will make the right thing in the right way to give it value and beauty, even when no one else sees or praises me. But when I have done my best, I will not envy those who have done better, or have received larger reward. Envy spoils the work and the worker.

X. THE LAW OF TEAM-WORKGOOD AMERICANS WORK IN FRIENDLY COOPERATION WITH FELLOW-WORKERS

One alone could not build a city or a great railroad. One alone would find it hard to build a bridge. That I may have bread, people have sowed and reaped, people have made plows and threshers, have built mills and mined coal, made stoves and kept stores. As we learn how to work together, the welfare of our country is advanced.

In whatever work I do with others, I will do my part and encourage others to do their part, promptly.
I will help to keep in order the things which we use in our work. When things are out of place, they are often in the way, and sometimes they are hard to find.
In all my work with others, I will be cheerful. Cheerlessness depresses all the workers and injures all the work.
When I have received money for my work, I will be neither a miser nor a spendthrift. I will save or spend as one of the friendly workers of America.

XI. THE LAW OF LOYALTYGOOD AMERICANS ARE LOYAL

If our America is to become ever greater and better, her citizens must be loyal, devotedly faithful, in every relation of life; full of courage and regardful of their honor.

I will be loyal to my family. In loyalty I will gladly obey my parents or those who are in their place, and show them gratitude. I will do my best to help each member of my family to strength and usefulness.
I will be loyal to my school. In loyalty I will obey and help other pupils to obey those rules which further the good of all.
I will be loyal to my town, my state, my country. In loyalty I will respect and help others to respect their laws and their courts of justice.

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When you stop to think about it, eyebrows are pretty dang weird. On our otherwise smooth upper faces, we’ve got these two strips of hair that sit above our eyeballs.

One theory as to why we have eyebrows is that they keep rain and sweat from running into our eyes. But their primary purpose seems to be for communication; they convey the subtleties of our emotions. If eyes are the windows to the soul, eyebrows are the signposts to our mood.

As for my own eyebrows, I’ve got quite the set of thick and furry ones. Kate and my kids say that my brows, coupled with my Roman nose and serious disposition, make me resemble Sam the Eagle from the Muppets. I’ll take that. Sam the Eagle has gravitas!

My thick, distinguished eyebrows seems to be a distinctive feature of my mom’s side of the family. A few years ago we went to a family reunion where Kate got to meet my aunts, uncles, and cousins. She observed that we all sported the same characteristically bushy over-eye fur. Must be a dominant gene.

I never had to maintain my thick eyebrows that much in my youth, but now that I’m in middle age, they can get pretty gnarly. As you get older, long-term exposure to hormones causes the follicles for your eyebrows, as well as those for nose and ear hair, to grow thicker and longer.

Nowadays, if I don’t take care of my eyebrows, instead of looking distinguished, they get to looking like like big, furry, unsightly caterpillars. Consequently, I’ve had to start regularly trimming my brows.

If your eyebrows could similarly use a trim, here to show us how its done is none other than Sam the Eagle. It was only proper that he’d be our guide in the way of distinguished, dignified, well-groomed brows.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

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Friendships are a central part of the lives of both men and women. But from personal observation, you’ve probably noticed that the dynamics of male and female friendships aren’t always the same. You may not, however, have been able to articulate what those differences are or have known what’s behind them.

While there’s still a lot of facets of friendship that haven’t yet been researched, Dr. Jaimie Krems, who runs UCLA’s Social Minds Lab, has a lot of interesting insights about what we do know about how and why men and women approach friendship differently. Today on the show, she explains why men and women form friendships and the differences in the size and nature of their social circles, how long their friendships last, and what they look for in friends. We also discuss why men have a greater tolerance for their friends’ flaws than women do, why men and women would want to be friends with each other, and how each sex experiences friendship jealousy.

Resources Related to the Podcast* The Banker’s Paradox * Joyce Benenson’s research on “Males’ Greater Tolerance of Same-Sex Peers” * Jaimie’s research on women’s interpretation of disgust faces * Jaimie’s study: “Friendship Jealousy: One Tool for Maintaining Friendships in the Face of Third-Party Threats?” * AoM Podcast #229: How Men and Women Socialize Differently * AoMPodcast #360: Understanding Male Friendships * AoM Podcast #726: What’s Causing the Male Friendship Recession? * AoM Podcast #772: How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)? * AoM Article: How Not to Be Disappointed With Your Friends

Connect With Jaimie Krems* The Social Minds Lab at UCLA * Jaimie’s faculty page * Jaimie on X

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There’s nothing like getting into the great outdoors to refresh your spirit.

But not all doses of nature are created equal.

According to the sage 20-5-3 Rule, you should ideally aim to spend at least 20 minutes in green space three times a week, 5 hours in a semi-wild environment once a month, and 3 days completely off-grid each year.

The best way to fulfill that last requirement is to go backpacking.

What’s great about backpacking is that when you pull into a state or national park, you’ll see tons of people fishing, picnicking, RV-ing, picture taking, and day hiking at accessible points close to the parking lots. But once you get deeper into the park, the crowds fall away, and you’ll often only see a few other people. It can feel like you’ve got thousands of acres of wilderness all to yourself. Just beyond the slipstream of comfort, you find an experience that’s wilder and more satisfying than car camping and really does body, mind, and soul a great deal of good.

Of course, the same reason backpacking is a less popular and more solitary experience — the fact that it’s harder to plan and carry out than other outdoor activities — also makes it more difficult to get going with.

If you weren’t a Boy Scout as a kid and didn’t backpack with your family growing up, the idea of taking a trip into the woods, carrying everything you need on your back, can feel a little intimidating and overwhelming.

That’s where this guide comes in.

If you’ve always wanted to get into backpacking, but haven’t known how to start, below we’ll outline exactly how to take your very first trip — and make it a big success.

Plan Your ItineraryThe overarching principle behind this first-time backpacking trip is that you want to make it as enjoyable and successful as possible, giving yourself the best shot at getting hooked on this activity.

To that end, you’re going to plan an initial trip that has a bit of challenge, for interest, but is largely accessible and low-key. You can achieve this, by following these steps:

Make it an overnight outing.For your first trip, you’re only going to be camping out one night. You might have an idea in your head that only multi-day backpacking trips count as “real” backpacking trips. But 1) This isn’t the case; even though we’ve been on several multi-day trips, we still enjoy popping off for a quick overnighter. There’s no right or wrong way to backpack. 2) Adding days adds complexity, and for your first trip, you’re going to keep things as simple and low-stakes as possible.

The purpose of this first trip is just to acquaint yourself with the general dynamics of backpacking and the use of your gear. It’s simply to get your feet wet and build a little comfort and confidence with the endeavor.

Download the AllTrails app.We’re not affiliated with this app, but are fans of it, and it will make planning your trip a whole lot easier. Amongst other handy features, you can filter your searches for trails by which ones are good for backpacking.

Pick your route/trail.As you pick what trail you’re going to backpack, take into consideration these factors:

Choose a loop if possible. It will make your hike more interesting than an out-and-back route.

Choose a trail with a “payoff” — a waterfall, lake, scenic view, etc. — if possible. This will also add interest to your hike.

Choose a moderate/hard trail. The trails that are rated “Easy” on AllTrails are typically short, flat, and/or even paved. You’ll want a bit more challenge. Even some trails rated “Hard” can be doable for your first time out. There isn’t a strict criteria for what makes a Hard trail Hard, and some Hard trails are harder than others. Elements that make a trail easier/harder include its rockiness/smoothness, the steepness of its slopes, the altitude, the total elevation gain, and the elevation gained per mile. And the difficulty will also depend on your personal fitness level. But don’t get lost in the technical weeds in figuring out how hard a trail is; looking at the AllTrails reviews will generally give you a good idea of a trail’s difficulty. Also see if the reviews mention first-time-out buzzkills like the fact that the trail is overgrown, hard to follow, offers minimal sun cover, or includes lots of downed trees. Overall, opt for a trail that’s easier rather than harder and looks like a good time.

Choose a trail/route that’s about 10-15 miles long. That distance might not seem like a lot if you’re thinking of regular walks around your neighborhood, where you might be able to go a mile in 17 minutes. But when you’re wearing a pack and particularly when you’re hiking uphill, you’re going to be moving a lot more slowly; plan on averaging about two miles per hour + time for breaks.

You can break up the mileage according to preference and where campsites are located along the trail (AllTrails will sometimes indicate this on the map). For example, if you’re taking a 12-mile trail, you can get to the trailhead at noon, hike 8 miles in four or five hours, make camp and relax for the night, and then hike 4 miles out in the morning.

Be sure there are adequate water sources along the trail to refill your water bladder as you hike. You will need around 1 liter of water for every 4-5 miles you hike.

Go for a longer trail if you’re physically fit and/or the terrain/trail is easier; choose a shorter one if you’re less physically confident and/or the trail/terrain is harder. Note that whatever trail you choose, you’ll need to be in reasonably good shape to enjoy backpacking; if you’re not fit, you’ll struggle, and even when you are, rucking with a heavy pack can be strenuous (especially if you’re hiking at higher elevations). Be working out regularly and taking lots of walks in the months before you go.

As you select a trail using the above considerations, don’t get too hung up on finding a “sexy” trail. Something local that’s flat and more pedestrian is more appropriate for a first-time trip than heading into the alpine environs where the weather and wildlife are more unpredictable and you’re not acclimated to the elevation.

Get a permit/reservation.Some parks (particularly of the national variety) require getting a permit ahead of time. They typically also reserve some slots for walk-up campers, but know the regulations, and get an advanced reservation if you can.

Go on a weekday.With backpacking, you can hypothetically camp anywhere in a park (unless the park has particular restrictions). But practically, there aren’t often a lot of good spots (i.e., flat, open areas where you can pitch a tent and make a fire) along the trail, and you’ll want to make camp at the rustic-but-established campsites you’ll only find in certain areas along the way. Unless there’s a reservation system in place, these spots are taken by backpackers on a first-come-first-served basis, and you don’t want to hike 10 miles into the mountains, get to your planned-on camping area, and find that all the good spots are occupied. So rather than taking your first backpacking trip on the weekend (especially a holiday weekend), go on a random weekday when it’ll be much less crowded — like a Monday or a Tuesday.

Check the weather.Remember, the names of the game for this initial outing are enjoyment, simplicity, and low stakes. Inclement weather and very hot/cold temps make things significantly less fun — and potentially dangerous.

Ideal backpacking weather resides between the low 80s for the high and above freezing for the low. The 80s may not seem too hot when you’re lounging in the backyard, but when you’re schlepping a heavy pack uphill with the bright alpine sun beating on you, it feels very hot indeed. 50s, in regular life, seem chilly, but again, when you’re moving under weight, that actually feels perfect. When the temps dip below freezing at night, it can get pretty uncomfortable and make it hard to stay warm when you sleep, necessitating a better sleeping bag.

In many areas of the country, the best time to take a backpacking trip is in the shoulder seasons (spring/fall), as the temps will be ideal, and it’ll be less buggy. But there are places in the mountains where you have to wait for summer for the snow to melt and the ideal temperature range to arrive.

Shortly before you go on your trip, check the forecast for rain. While you can look up national parks on weather apps, with state parks, you have to make do with checking the town closest to the park; either way, remember that storms in the mountains can be unpredictable, and it will get significantly colder as you go up in elevation (dropping ~3.5 degrees F for every 1000 ft increase). So the forecast isn’t foolproof, but you can pick a day to go that looks to be almost assuredly balmy and clear. If bad weather crops up in the forecast for the day you were planning to go, reschedule for another time.

Gather Your GearYou do need a lot of special gear for backpacking, and backpacking gear is expensive. So for this first trip, borrow as much of it from friends and family as possible; once you’ve established that this is a hobby you’d like to stick with, then you can purchase your own.

Here are the essentials you’ll need to pack:

Tent
Sleeping pad
Sleeping bag
Backpacking stove (see note on food)
Spoon (see note on food)
Food*
Sunscreen
Paper map and compass (as backup navigation; learn how to use them)
Bug spray
First aid kit
Firestarters
Matches
Backpack rain cover
Water filter (learn about the different kinds of filters and how to use them)
Knife/multitool
Plastic/ziplock bag for trash (be prepared to pack out what you pack in and be sure to Leave No Trace!)
Jacket/hoodie (depending on weather/environment)
Rain jacket (ditto)
Water bladder or Nalgene bottles (here are the pros and cons of each option)
Headlamp
Bear bag/canister (if you’re hiking somewhere with bears; learn how to hang a bear bag)
Bear spray (ditto; learn how to use it)
Trowel + toilet paper (it may be possible to dig a proper cathole with a rock or stick, but a trowel will make it much easier)
Hat
Sunglasses (can be essential or nonessential depending on how wide the brim of your hat is)
Power bank for phone (if you’re going to be using your phone for navigation/reading, its charge won’t last the trip)

Here are some things that are nice to have, but aren’t essential:

Backpacking pillow (if you don’t have one, you can just use a rolled-up sweatshirt or go without)
Extra socks. If you’re going to be in a warmer environment, where your feet will get sweaty, and you’re worried about blisters/hot spots, change your socks every few hours, taking the sweaty ones off your feet and clipping them to your backpack to dry as you hike, and putting on the dry pair. This can really help. (Here are some other tips on taking care of your feet while hiking.)
Advil PM. It can be hard to sleep while camping, especially at high elevations, and this can help with that, as well as with the soreness you may develop from your hike.
Camp shoes. It feels really good to be able to take off your hiking boots and put on some comfy slip-ons or sandals when you make camp for the evening. Plus, Tevas are handy to have if you need to cross streams during your hike.
Wet wipes. For cleaning hands/freshening up.

No need to bring a toothbrush; you can skip that habit for a day (we won’t tell your dentist). No need to bring contact solution either; you can sleep in your contacts for a night (we won’t tell your optometrist). But if you wear contacts, do bring an extra pair, in case one pops out.

You also don’t need to bring a change of clothes. And the clothes you wear don’t have to be special, either. There’s lots of slick outdoor clothing out there, and we have a good write-up on how to properly dress for a hike here. But you really don’t need anything high-tech for this first-time trip. As long as you’ve got a rain jacket/poncho to stay dry, and a tent/sleeping bag to warm up in, and you’re hiking in a non-extreme environment with temperate temperatures, if you fail to wear just the right clothes or layer optimally, you may get uncomfortable, but you won’t die. Your dad probably backpacked in cut-off denim shorts and a tank top. Don’t overthink what to wear. You can invest in more technical clothing later.

You’ll need hiking boots, of course. Some prefer trail running sneakers, even for longer hikes. Either way, your shoes should already be broken in; do walks in them around the neighborhood before your trip.

*A Note on Food: This easiest menu for a first-time overnight trip is to bring snacky stuff (dried fruit, trail mix, energy bars, beef jerky, etc.) for actual snacks and for lunch on Day 1 and breakfast on Day 2, and a dehydrated meal for dinner on Day 1. Having at least one warm meal during your trip is a morale booster, but if you don’t have a backpacking stove, then you can subsist entirely on heartier snacky stuff; in addition to the already mentioned, try crackers + cheese + summer sausage or packets of tuna fish.

Bring a lot more food than you think you’ll need; backpacking will make you hungrier than you imagine. Pack about double the amount of calories you typically eat in a day, erring on the side of bringing too much over too little.

Finally, once you’ve got all your gear gathered, learn how to pack it for optimal carrying comfort.

Hit the Trail!Before you leave for your trip, download an offline map of the trail from AllTrails. You may not have reception during your hike.

Also let a friend or family member know where you’re going and your itinerary.

Enjoy yourself on the hike! You don’t need to prove anything or push yourself hard. Allot plenty of time to get to your targeted campsite while there’s still daylight and move at your own pace.

Above all, don’t worry: you may forget something or something may go wrong, but you can tough out anything for 24 hours. You’ll survive, and you’ll have learned something that will improve your next experience.

Speaking of which, you may want to do another overnight trip for your next go-around to further get your backpacking feet under you. Or you might want to add a day, which really just involves a little more planning of your route and doubling your food.

Backpacking just might become a lifelong love of yours, so get out there and try it! Happy trails!

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Businesses and individuals often feel overwhelmed and stretched — that they can’t get done all the work they need to. The solution they frequently turn to is finding a new app to use or hiring more employees to spread the load.

But my guest would say that you can steal back hours of productive time simply by using the tools and teams you have now, if you learn to use them in a more efficient way.

Nick Sonnenberg is the founder and CEO of Leverage, an efficiency consulting business and the author of Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. Today on the show, Nick explains how people spend almost 60% of their time doing work about work, and why hiring more people can actually make the problem worse rather than better. He then shares his “CPR Business Efficiency Framework,” and how making changes in how you communicate, plan, and manage resources can open up hours of time. We talk about how to organize your communication channels so your work day isn’t taken up by what Nick calls “The Scavenger Hunt,” one of the most underutilized tools for taming your inbox, how to stop wasting time on meetings, and tiny changes that will add up to many hours saved each year. Along the way, we talk about how some of these tactics can save you time in your personal life as well.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast #689: Email Is Making Us Miserable — Here’s What to Do About It * AoM Podcast #972: Down With Pseudo-Productivity — Why We Need to Transform the Way We Work * AoM Podcast #973: A Butler’s Guide to Managing Your Household * Teach Your Wife to Be a Widow by Donald I. Rogers * “Saving Seconds Is Better Than Hours” — Time* article by Nick * Texts.com * Workona tab manager

Connect With Nick Sonnenberg* Come Up for Air website * Leverage website * Nick on LinkedIn * Nick on IG * Nick on X

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Do you remember the scene in The Road where the boy and his father discover an untouched, perfectly stocked survival bunker? The hungry nomads happily gape as they take in crate after crate of canned goods, an unbelievable oasis in an otherwise desolate, apocalyptic landscape. The pair liberate the contents of the cans with a can opener, and make a dinner of canned pears and peaches; “They licked the spoons and tipped the bowls and drank the rich sweet syrup.”

But what if father and son hadn’t found a can opener amongst the supplies? Fortunately, as long as they knew some alternative opening methods, they wouldn’t have been out of luck.

Despite how impenetrable they may seem, cans of food are made from fairly thin aluminum. Exploiting the can’s weakness with a variety of tools is easy. Here are three ways to get at your next meal if ever you find yourself without a can opener.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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Human. Alive. Immortal.

We think of these as set, binary states. Things you either are or aren’t.

You’re either human or nonhuman. Dead or alive. Mortal or immortal.

But in truth, these states exist on a continuum, the ends of which you are always moving towards or away from.

If humanness is defined by those traits and behaviors most unique to our species, then the more you practice critical thinking, creativity, compassion, craftsmanship, control, inventiveness, humor, wonder, and awe, the more you embody your humanness; while the more you stay in the shallows and live reflexively and impulsively, the more you step into a reptilian frame.

If aliveness is defined by consciousness, palpable breathing, and coursing blood, then the more things you do that widen the eyes, fill the lungs, and quicken the pulse — running fast, climbing mountains, making love, hoisting weights, taking risks — the more your aliveness is awakened; while the more you remain inert and sleepwalk through your days, the more you’re already entombed.

If immortality is defined by life without end, then the more you embrace timeless, evergreen truths and exercise influence in the world, forwarding a Promethean flame, the more you move towards immortality; while the more you focus on the passing and ethereal, and fail to make the tiniest ripple in the landscape, the more you underline your perishability.

You can live like a lever-pressing rat while still putting on your people pants each day. You can be dead long before the grave. You can wait for an eternity to come rather than realizing that eternity is now. Or, you can seek to transcend the bounds of what seems given, recognizing that humanness, aliveness, and immortality are not fixed, static states of being, but alterable, never-ending pursuits of becoming.

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How the Seasons Change Our Sleep. Do you feel like your sleep’s been crappier lately? Shorter and less restful? Well, the summer season may be to blame. Research published last year found that sleep is subject to seasonal variations. Study participants slept an hour longer in the winter than they did in the summer, and experienced 30 minutes less REM sleep in the summer than the winter. The human body seems to need less sleep this time of year. (The study was done with people who were already experiencing sleep disturbances, and further research will be done as to whether it holds true for people with normal sleep, but there’s a good chance it will.) Our perception of our rested-ness is a product of both the objective physiological quality of our sleep, but also our subjective expectations around sleep; if we think we slept less than we should have, we may feel more tired than we actually are. So, if you’ve been worried about your sleep recently, take heart (and adjust your expectations!). You may be getting enough sleep, for this season of the year. As the researchers postulate, we may need to change our sleeping schedules seasonally, planning (and expecting) to spend more time in bed in January than in June.

Charles Bronson Japanese Mandom Cologne Commercials (1970s).Charles Bronson was a manly dude. Back in the 1970s, he did a series of extremely manly commercials for an awesomely-named Japanese cologne called Mandom. They’re amazing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t inspire the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World and the Old Spice Man You Wish Your Man Smelled Like brand icons. If someone were to ask what my ideal aesthetic was, I would show them these commercials. I want my life to look like Charles Bronson in the 1970s splashing on Mandom.

The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. AoM podcast guest Jon Tyson gifted a first edition copy of this book to me last year after our interview about “the 5 shifts of manhood.” It’s a biographical novel about the life of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo. I really enjoyed it. Not only did I learn a lot about Renaissance history from reading The Agony and the Ecstasy, but Stone’s insights about the discipline needed to develop great works in any domain were inspiring. Stone paints a picture of an artist who fused spirituality, genius, grit, and cunning to produce some of humanity’s greatest paintings and sculptures. Highly recommend.

Fage 0% Nonfat Plain Greek Yogurt. If you’re looking for a low-calorie, high-protein food that can be used in a variety of ways, look no further than Fage 0% Nonfat Plain Greek Yogurt. I go through two 32-ounce tubs a week. A single serving has 90 calories and 18 grams of protein. That means 72 of the 90 calories in Fage 0% come from protein. Amazing! It’s basically like a spoonable protein concentrate. Plus, you get some gut-friendly probiotics to boot. It tastes like tangy sour cream, and I use it as such, putting it on my tacos and mixing it with a splash of milk and some adobe chipotle peppers to use as a sauce in my burritos. But I also eat Fage 0% yogurt with a bowl of oatmeal and blueberries for my daily mid-morning snack. I’m still exploring all the ways I can use this versatile high-protein food. Get ya some!

Quote of the Week

Have no fear of change as such and, on the other hand, no liking for it merely for its own sake.

—Robert Moses

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Since March, I’ve been waking up earlier.

Before that time, I’d typically go to bed at 11 p.m. and naturally wake up between 7:00 and 7:30 a.m.

Then, for some reason, regardless of what time I went to bed, I started spontaneously waking up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. Consequently, I moved my bedtime earlier, too.

I’m not sure why the shift happened; maybe it’s my circadian rhythm changing in middle age.

When I first started waking up early, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I mostly read and took care of admin work before the rest of the family woke up.

But then at the start of May, I decided to take a two-mile walk right after I woke up at the buttcrack of dawn. Why? I don’t know. It was something to do mostly. Also, I knew I needed to walk more. I’ve got a pretty dang sedentary job as a blogger/podcaster. I’m on my butt reading, writing, and answering emails for hours every day.

I’ve had plenty of guests on the podcast who talked about the research on just how bad being sedentary is for your health — even if you make time for regular, strenuous exercise every day like I have for over 15 years. An hour of dedicated exercise each day can’t make up for sitting on your butt for the rest of your waking hours.

So, I figured I’d use my newfound time in the morning to move more and get my steps in.

I had zero expectations or specific health goals when I started the daily walking habit.

But I could soon tell from both personal observation and the fitness trackers I use (the Oura ring and the Apple Watch) that it was creating some positive changes in my health.

Here’s what happened after doing a month of my morning walk routine:

My daily steps increased.My daughter Scout likes to check my Apple Watch stats each night when I tuck her in. >Back in March, she looked at my daily steps and saw that they were consistently in the 4k to 5k range. “Dad, you really don’t move much during the day,” she’d observe. “You’re kind of a lump.

Convicted!

Ever since I’ve started walking every morning, I usually get 12k to 15k steps a day. Much better. The boost hasn’t come from my morning walk alone; that habit has also had the unintended benefit of getting me moving more in general. I’ll intermittently take 10-minute walking breaks during the day just because I like how it feels to walk. I also get the Scout vote of approval each night when she looks at my watch.

Winning!

My resting heart rate dropped.Resting heart rate has been shown to be a good indicator of overall fitness and cardiovascular health. A lower resting heart rate means your heart is working more efficiently. Higher resting heart rates have been associated with cardiovascular disease.

A normal resting heart rate for adults is between 60 and 100. Well-trained athletes have a resting heart rate closer to 40.

Before I started walking in the morning, my resting heart rate was usually between 60 and 55. Not terrible.

But after a month of daily walking, my resting heart rate started hovering around 45 — closer to elite athlete level. And I got there just by leisurely walking for 35 minutes every morning.

My heart rate variability increased.Heart rate variability (HRV) is the variation in time intervals between consecutive heartbeats, reflecting the autonomic nervous system’s regulation of the heart. You actually want a lot of variation in your heart rate. High HRV indicates a healthy balance between the sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) systems. Individuals with a high HRV are less stressed and more resilient physically and emotionally. You’re able to perform better physically and mentally when your HRV is high.

Low HRV indicates that your body is under stress due to factors like fatigue, dehydration, overwork, or illness.

Physical exercise, like walking, lowers your HRV by enhancing the parasympathetic (rest and digest) activity of your nervous system. Physical activity also helps your body manage overall stress levels and improves blood flow, two factors that contribute to a lower HRV as well.

Before I started walking every morning, my HRV hovered between 36 ms and 40 ms — not great. Now it’s hovering between 45 and 55 ms. An improvement!

My V02 max improved. VO2 max, or maximal oxygen uptake, is the maximum rate at which your body can consume oxygen during intense exercise. It’s a key indicator of cardiovascular fitness and aerobic endurance. Higher VO2 max values indicate a greater ability of the heart, lungs, and muscles to utilize oxygen, reflecting better overall fitness and endurance levels.

You can improve V02 Max through consistent HIIT or steady-state cardio. The only cardio I’ve been doing this past month is walking every morning.

According to my Apple Watch, at the start of May, my estimated V02 max (emphasis on estimated; I’d need to take an actual V02 max test to get an accurate measurement) was 38.5. Today it’s 42. It’s only a small change, and there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but taking a stroll each morning seems to have helped!

I sleep better at night. While I’m still waking up earlier than I used to, my sleep overallhas improved since starting the morning walk habit.

According to my Oura ring, I fall asleep faster and have more deep sleep and REM sleep. During deep sleep, your body releases hormones to help you grow and recover, and your brain flushes out toxins. REM sleep is when we dream, and as we’ve discussed on the podcast, our brain uses dreams to consolidate memories and make sense of all the stuff we experience during waking time.

I reckon the morning walk has improved my sleep in two ways. First, walking is a great way to build up your sleep pressure. Physical activity helps create adenosine in your brain, which makes you sleepy. The more adenosine you’ve built up during the day, the sleepier you feel at bedtime. When it’s 10 p.m., I’m ready to hit the hay, and as soon as my head hits the pillow, I’m out.

The early morning walks have also likely helped my sleep thanks to the exposure it provides to early morning sunlight.Exposure to sunlight helps regulate our circadian rhythm. Research suggests exposing yourself to sunlight first thing in the morning can get your circadian rhythm in a good groove so that you’re ready to go to sleep when you go to bed and experience better quality sleep when you are sleeping.

I’m in a better mood. We’ve talked about how physical activity is the antidote to both anxiety and depression. It’s all thanks to the endorphins that are released when you move your body.

I’ve noticed an improvement in my mood. I just feel better when I get my morning walks in.

I’ve lost some weight. From January to March, I did a short bulk to go from 185 to 200 pounds. In April, I started cutting calories to get my summer shred on. The goal was to get back down to 187 pounds. Why 187? I feel and look good at that weight. In April, I was able to lower my weight by five pounds by just reducing calories each week. In May, I continued to lower my calories slightly each week, but added in my daily walks. I was able to drop the remaining 10 pounds in just four weeks, and I never felt starved because my calories didn’t get crazy low. Combining calorie restriction with increased energy expenditure from walking turbocharged my weight loss.

ower heart rate, increased HRV, improved V02 max, deeper sleep, better mood, and reduced body weight.

Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. Damn straight.

I can’t recommend taking a daily walk enough. Two miles takes me about 35 minutes. With just 35 minutes a day, I was able to make some pretty significant improvements in my health in just a month. A small change in your daily routine will net you an outsized number of benefits.

If you haven’t started a regular exercise routine because you feel like you don’t have the time or because you think you have to do a really hard, strenuous workout to get any benefit from exercise, try going for a two-mile walk each day.

Don’t have time or aren’t ready for two miles? Then just do a mile. Something is always better than nothing.

Think you’ll be bored? Listen to a podcast (might I suggest AoM’s?). Improve your mind as you gently but significantly improve your body.

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Fifteen years and more than 200 million downloads later, this episode marks the 1,000th installment of the Art of Manliness podcast! It begins with a bit of a retrospective on the podcast and then segues into an interview with one of the show’s earliest guests: Walker Lamond, author of Rules for My Unborn Son. Walker and I revisit the origins of the book and the early days of the internet and have a fun discussion of which of his rules have become obsolete and which remain evergreen. Tune in and enjoy!

A big thanks to our listeners for helping us reach this cool milestone. The support is deeply appreciated!

Resources Related to the Podcast Rules for My Unborn Son by Walker Lamond * Rules for My Newborn Daughter* by Walker Lamond * Walker’s Motel: The Starlight Motor Inn * The podcasts Walker writes/produces for: + Anatomy of Murder + Cold Blooded * Related AoM articles: + Dressing for Others + Flying Is for the Birds + My New Favorite Summertime Shoe + Why Every Man Should Have 3 Signature Dishes + In Praise of the Postcard + The Art of Thank You Note Writing + The Importance of Developing and Maintaining Your Social Fitness * Related AoM Podcasts + #1: We Who Are Alive and Remain + #7: Rules for My Unborn Son + #78: The Myth of Following Your Passion + #174: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Style + #708: Overcome the Comfort Crisis

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Plenty of famous explorers and frontiersmen emerged from America’s periods of expansion and exploration, and today the likes of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett remain household names.

You’re probably not familiar, but should be, with the name of another prominent pioneer: Jedediah Smith. Smith was a hunter, trapper, writer, cartographer, mountain man, and explorer who notched a lot of firsts: He was the first to lead a documented exploration from the Salt Lake frontier to the Colorado River and was part of the first parties of U.S. citizens to cross the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, and the Great Basin Desert. Having survived three attacks by Native Americans and one mauling by a grizzly bear, Smith’s explorations became resources for those who followed after and led to the use of the South Pass as the dominant route across the Continental Divide for pioneers on the Oregon Trail.

In the new book he co-authored, Throne of Grace: A Mountain Man, an Epic Adventure, and the Bloody Conquest of the American West, my guest, Bob Drury, uses the oft-forgotten Smith as a guide to an oft-forgotten period in American history. Today on the show, Bob paints a picture of a volatile American landscape in which trappers and Native Americans collided and clashed in the early decades of the 19th century. We discuss how the Lewis and Clark expedition created a lust for adventure among young men, how the humble beaver played an outsized role in settling the Western frontier, and how warfare changed amongst Native American tribes with the introduction of the horse. Along the way, Bob shows us how the life of Jed Smith intersected with all these historic trends and shares the epic exploits that he and other mountain men took part in while exploring and mapping the American West.

Resources Related to the Podcast* Bob’s last appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #469 — How Valley Forge Turned the Tide of the Revolutionary War * AoM article about mountain men * AoM Podcast #681: The Epic Exploits of Kit Carson * Hugh Glass

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Have you ever been in a hotel room with your spouse and kids, tucked away in this liminal space, enjoying the feeling that no one could find you (and kind of hoping that no one ever would), and thought to yourself: “This is all I need in the world”?

There has been some lament in recent decades over the dissolution of the extended family — the fact that most people no longer live in close proximity to grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. This is indeed a loss. Yet in making this lament, it’s possible to lose sight of just how brilliant the nuclear or atomic family really is. Indeed, it is in part because of its stand-alone luminescence that we have not fought harder to preserve a wider familial network. While the extended family adds to it, the atomic family is not itself impoverished.

Pairs of parents + their children form the smallest intergenerational units of society. What Edmund Burke called “little platoons.”

And how very serviceable these tiny troops truly are.

Agile and mobile, when the sh*t hits the fan (like, say, during a pandemic), the atomic family can contract into a self-sustaining unit, prepared to navigate through.

Independent and idiosyncratic, when society’s ways seem stale, dumb, and wrong-headed, the atomic family can cultivate its own distinctive, us-against-the-world culture.

Safe and protective, when life in the trenches grows weary, the atomic family can become the hearth around which spirits are rallied.

Warm and close-knit, when the world feels cold and indifferent, the atomic family can be a refuge of counted-upon affections.

All hail, then, these merry bands of compatriots.

All hail these rogue gangs of battle buddies.

All hail these crews that hold together when everything falls apart.

All hail our little platoons.

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Has life been feeling a little abstract, unsatisfying, unreal, and/or rudderless lately? If you’re looking for a way to get in touch with the concrete, harness the energy of tangible accomplishments and progress, and find some traction, it’s time to join The Strenuous Life.

Enrollment in TSL is now open and for this week only!

TSL can be just the kick in the pants you need to finally make good on your goals. Here’s a small sample of some of the stuff members have done as part of The Strenuous Life in the last six months:

If you’re finally ready to move from point A to point B with your goals, TSL will provide the map and guide you on your journey.

The Strenuous Life is meant to be shared — come and join a tribe of men who want more out of life!

Summer ’24 Enrollment Is Open Until Thursday, June 13, 2024 Develop real habits, build real skills, have real world experiences, and find joy in riding a wave of real momentum by joining 10,000+ other members in The Strenuous Life.

If you’re still not sure if TSL is for you, you can read hundreds of testimonials as to its life-enhancing, life-changing power here.

Summer enrollment will only be open until Thursday, June 13, 2024.

For those enrolled, the 12-week Challenge officially begins on June 15th.

The next enrollment of TSL will not occur until the winter of 2025. This is the last enrollment of the year.

We hope to see you on The Strenuous Life!

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As compared to mothers, fathers are sometimes thought of as a secondary, almost superfluous, parent.

But my guest says that fathers actually saved the human race, and continue to do so today.

Anna Machin is an evolutionary anthropologist, a pioneer of fatherhood science, and the author of The Life of Dad. Today on the show, we talk about the role of fathers in human history and how their main role continues to be teaching kids the skills they need to take risks, become independent, and navigate the world beyond their family. We also talk about the physiological changes that happen when a man becomes a father and how dads are just as biologically primed as mothers to parent. In the second half of our conversation, we talk about the experience of being a dad. Anna shares how long it typically takes a man to bond with a baby and transition into the role of fatherhood, how roughhousing is key in building that bond as well as developing your child’s resilience, and how your personality and background will affect your parenting. We end our conversation with the difference in how the relationship between Mom and Dad affects how they parent, and the implications of that for building a strong family.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: The Importance of Fathers (According to Science) * AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Pregnancy — Getting Ready for the Baby Bomb * AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Pregnancy — Your Progeny Enters the World * AoM Article:New Dad Survival Guide — The Mindset * AoM Article: New Dad Survival Guide — The Skillset * AoM Podcast #119: Why Fathers Matter * AoM Article: You Don’t Have to Be Your Dad — How to Become Your Family’s Transitional Character

Connect With Anna Machin* Anna’s website * Anna on X * Anna on IG

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Thanks to its versatility, the t-shirt has been a style staple since the middle of the 20th century. You can exercise and do chores in a t-shirt, and you can also wear it as part of a smart casual get-up for a first date.

I love t-shirts. It’s what I wear most days working from home.

For most of my life, I never tucked in my tees.

Like many people my age, I thought tucking in your t-shirt was something that only your dad or the dorky kid at your school who had no fashion sense did.

Well, I don’t know if there’s something that happens in brain development when you hit 40, and turn into your father, but I’ve been tucking in my t-shirt a lot more these days.

And I’ll be damned; I think it can look pretty sharp in certain situations. Even if you’re not middle-aged or someone’s Pops.

Below, I offer some guidelines that I follow when tucking in my t-shirt so that the vibes it gives off are more 1950s Marlon Brando than 1990s Bugle Boy.

The Evolution of the Tucked-in T-ShirtWhile we wear t-shirts as a regular piece of clothing these days, they were originally underwear. Because they were underwear, men would tuck their t-shirts into their briefs or boxers to create a seamless undergarment beneath their outer clothes.

During WWII, GIs would often remove their buttoned uniform top and just wear their undershirt with their uniform trousers. They kept their tee tucked in to maintain a clean, disciplined look even though they weren’t in full uniform.

After WWII, veterans continued to wear their undershirts with trousers while working around the house. They kept their t-shirts tucked in because, well, that’s how they’d done it during the Big One.

That’s how most men in the United States wore their tees from the 1950s onward: tucked in.

As time marched on and style became more casual in the U.S., more and more men stopped tucking in their t-shirts. Wearing their t-shirts untucked was a way to separate themselves from the more uptight generation of their parents. Contributing to the trend was the fact that fewer men served in the military after the Vietnam War, and thus didn’t get into the tucked-in tee habit while in the service.

There was a short resurgence of tucked-in t-shirts in the 1990s, but then it faded along with Beanie Babies.

You’re starting to see more people — particularly young people, of both sexes — tuck in their t-shirts again. A lot of it is driven by Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s nostalgia for the 1990s. My ten-year-old daughter tucks in her t-shirts (emblazoned with the Vans logo — didn’t see that resurgence coming either). She loves that “90s vibe.“

The Benefits of Tucking in Your T-ShirtSince I started tucking in my tee more often, I’ve discovered three benefits to the practice:

A tucked-in tee accentuates your v-shape. Having the masculine v-shape — broad shoulders that taper to a narrow waist — is attractive. When you tuck in your t-shirt, you accentuate your v-shape; it gives definition to your waist and makes your shoulders look broader.

A tucked-in t-shirt looks put-together. A tucked-in t-shirt provides a clean line between your torso and your legs. It looks a little sharper than an untucked tee, which bunches and wrinkles as it drapes over your waistband. When you tuck in your t-shirt, it looks like you mean business.

A tucked-in t-shirt is practical. Your untucked t-shirt can get snagged on things in your environment. When your t-shirt is untucked, you no longer have to worry about that. This is why I’ve even been tucking my t-shirts into my gym shorts when I work out.

Guidelines for Tucking in Your T-ShirtGet a properly fitting T-shirt. A t-shirt that is too big won’t look good tucked in. It will give you that early 1990s Bugle Boy dork look. You also don’t want to go too tight either. We’ve got the guidelines for proper fit here.

Note that a tucked-in t-shirt looks best on those with a fit physique. If you’ve got a paunch, a tucked-in tee will only accentuate it, and you’ll probably want to keep your shirt untucked.

Keep it simple. Opt for t-shirts without prominent patterns, text, or busy designs. Go for simple stripes or a solid color. It will just look sharper. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever tuck in a graphic tee. I’ve got a few graphic tees that I tuck in occasionally, but the designs are simple.

Stick with long pants for your bottom garment. I’ve tried tucking in my t-shirt with a pair of khaki shorts and it didn’t look good. Too 1990s dad-ish. Stick with tucking your tees into long pants — jeans and chinos. The one exception for shorts that I make is when I’m working out. Tucking my tee into my shorty gym shorts makes me feel like a Golden Era bodybuilder.

Layer with a jacket. Layering your tucked-in t-shirt is something that I like to do. It adds some depth and interest to your look. I like to wear a cotton field jacket when I tuck in my t-shirt. A jean jacket, chore coat, or unstructured blazer would work as well.

Get a cool belt. Wearing a cool belt gives you an excuse to tuck in your t-shirt: you’re tucking in your tee so people can see your rad belt. My go-to belt when I tuck in my t-shirt is the Cowboy belt from Zilker (that’s what I’m sporting in the left pic above). I also like to rock a thicker, more traditional leather belt, which has a cool Thunderbird belt buckle that I found on eBay (right photo). Besides adding some visual interest to your tucked-in t-shirt fit, a belt also accentuates your waist a bit more, enhancing your v-shaped silhouette.

Like I said above, I don’t tuck in my t-shirt all the time. But it’s nice to have it as a styling option to mix into my get-ups. Give it a try yourself, and see if it just might be one of those things that Dad got right.

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Everyone has heard about the incredible benefits that come to mind, body, and spirit from having strong relationships. The quality of our social ties has a huge impact on our physical and mental health and our overall feeling of flourishing.

Yet many people still struggle to create these strong relationships in their lives, and often figure that things like weakening communities and digital technology are to blame.

But my guest says that the barriers to establishing bonds with others may actually be more psychological than physical, and he shares research-backed tips for breaking through them in his new book, The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network. Today on the show, David discusses how we can feel lonely even when we’re surrounded by people if we don’t have what he calls a “shared reality.” We then discuss ways to build that shared reality with others. We talk about why frenemies are so bad for you, how to overcome the “liking gap,” why you might want to interrupt someone to connect with them, the need to be aware of the novelty penalty in conversations, why you should stop telling white lies, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast* David’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #803 — How Your Expectations Can Change Your Life * AoM Article: Why Ambivalent Relationships Are Terrible for You (And How to Deal With Them) * AoM Podcast #949: Envy — Unpacking The Emotion No One Likes to Talk About

Connect With David Robson* David’s website * David on IG * David on X * David on LinkedIn

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Nothing caps off a day quite like a roaring campfire. But, one of the cruel ironies of summer is that even though we spend more time outside, the warm weather makes those perfect day-ending fires less comfortable to be around. Luckily, there’s a smarter way to build a fire that suits the season, so you can enjoy its crackle, smell, and glow, without having to break a sweat.

Building a summer fire starts with sourcing the right wood. Unlike most fire-building techniques, a summer fire demands that you start with some green, unseasoned wood. Ideally, your green logs come from a slow-burning species of wood like white oak, ash, or birch. It’s also useful if they come whole and unsplit. Such wood won’t blaze as big, bright — or hot. Use the above tips to enjoy a cozy fire even in the heart of summer.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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There’s an interesting dynamic to be observed in the Gospels.

Often, before Jesus will heal or bless someone, he makes them answer a question: “What do you want?”

This is true when the request someone wishes to make isn’t immediately apparent, as when Jesus is approached by the mother of James and John or when two of the disciples of John the Baptist start following after him. But it’s also true when the thing someone wants is obvious and wouldn’t require omnipotence to figure out, as when Jesus encounters a blind man. Even when Jesus learns that a man has been sick for almost 40 years, before he steps in to help, he asks the man to affirm his intent: “Do you want to get well?”

Perhaps this points to the pattern of prayer; there may be several purposes to that practice, but surely one of them is to get a petitioner to articulate that which can be hidden even from themselves: what it is they want.

Yet this pattern also applies beyond the religious realm.

Many people feel restless and dissatisfied with the current state of their lives. But, when you ask them what a better life would look like, they can’t exactly say. They yearn for something, but aren’t sure what that something is. They don’t like what they do, but don’t know what they’d like to do instead. They long for a change, but can’t articulate what that change should look like.

Because they want things to be different, but can’t envision what they should be doing differently to get there, their life remains everlasting the same.

It’s been said that faith precedes the miracle. But to bring about any transformation — whether supernatural or everyday — there is something that must precede even that: the crystallization of desire.

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Society of the Snow. Based on the true story of the crash of a Uruguayan plane carrying a rugby team in the Andes in 1972, this intense and disturbing film (I’m not kidding, it’s not for the faint of heart . . . or stomach), is a real-life survival story at its most unromantic. While the thing that most people know about the story is that survivors of the crash had to turn to eating the bodies of dead passengers to sustain themselves, it’s really about much more than that — finding meaning in hardship, the bonds and brotherhood formed in adversity, and the infinite human capacity to endure. (The film was made in Spanish; watch the original with English subtitles rather than the overdubbed verision.)

Huckberry’s Father’s Day Shop. Father’s Day is next Sunday, and if you’re looking for a gift for dear old dad (or looking for ideas for others to gift you), check out Huckberry’s online shop, where they’ve curated a collection of gift ideas for all types of dads. A few standouts:

Flint and Tinder Cotton Hemp Polo Shirt. I’m wearing one right now as I write this. It’s been my go-to polo shirt for the past few months. Lightweight, breathable, and casually cool.
Bellroy Hide and Seek Wallet. My wallet for the past few years. It’s thin, but allows you to cram a lot of stuff in it. It’s still going strong. See my full review here.
Skeletool CX. I’m always on the lookout for new pocket knives and multi-tools. The Skeletool from Leatherman is going to be my next acquisition. It’s a lightweight, stripped-to-the-bone version of their iconic multi-tool.

Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli. I enjoyed this short book about why you should stop reading the news and following the news on social media. A few of the reasons: keeping up with the news destroys your attention span, you can’t act on 90%+ of it so it just makes you anxious, and it can suck up all your time. Dobelli also responds to potential objections people have about ditching the news, such as the idea that keeping up with current events is an obligation of a responsible citizen. We’ve made similar points to Dobelli’s in this article and Sunday Fireside and have been spare consumers of news for a long time now. But the book’s inspired me to ditch X/Twitter (again!). I fell off my don’t-read-X bandwagon a few months ago, and I could definitely feel myself getting dumber.

Every Day Do Something That Won’t Compute. In a commencement address given at a prep school, Jeffrey Bilbro encouraged the young grads to prepare for failure by having things in their life that they do that are “beautiful and totally useless.” He quotes a line from a Wendell Berry poem that can help you make sure you’re not living your life only in achievement/productivity mode: “friends, every day do something / that won’t compute.” It’s made me think of things I do or could start doing that don’t compute: reading a good book for the sake of reading a good book, playing basketball with my kids, catching up with an old friend. Do more things that don’t compute.

Quote of the Week

A light supper, a good night’s sleep, and a fine morning, have sometimes made a hero of the same man, who by an indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning, would have proved a coward.

—Lord Chesterfield

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12,000 aircraft. 7,000 ships. 13,000 paratroopers. 150,000 troops from a dozen countries. The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 was the largest amphibian invasion in history. The epic scale of the operation is hard to grasp, as is its historic consequence. D-Day paved the way for the liberation of France and, ultimately, the end of the war. Victory came at a high cost: over 4,000 Allied troops lost their lives on D-Day itself, and tens of thousands more were killed in the battles that followed.

80 years on, we’ve dug deep into the photo archives to bring a bit of D-Day’s sweep and significance back into our cultural memory. Below, you’ll find 25 amazing, rarely-seen photos from D-Day, along with their original captions. For more amazing photos of WWII as a whole, check out this post.

Four ‘stick’ commanders of 22nd Independent Parachute Company, British 6th Airborne Division, synchronising their watches in front of an Armstrong Whitworth Albemarle transport of No 38 Group, Royal Air Force, at about 11 pm on 5 June 1944, just prior to take off from RAF Harwell, Oxfordshire. This pathfinder unit parachuted into Normandy in advance of the rest of the division in order to mark out the landing zones, and these officers (left to right: Lieutenants Bobby de la Tour, Don Wells, John Vischer and Bob Midwood) were among the first Allied troops to land in France.

British Airborne troops admire the graffiti chalked on the side of their Horsa glider as they prepare to fly out to Normandy as part of 6th Airborne Division’s second lift on the evening of 6 June 1944.

Members of an airborne unit make a final checkup of equipment before taking off from a British air base on the invasion of Fortress Europe.

Set to be flown to spearhead the beginning of the battle for the liberation of Europe, men of an infantry paratroop regiment are shown inside a Douglas C-47 of the Ninth Air Force Troop Carrier Command, over France, June 6, 1944.

Thumbs up from these British paratroops before they left England in a glider to reinforce Allied troops in France. Their slogan, to match their camouflaged faces, and names of their girls, adorn the side of the glider.

A few minutes before they embarked for the invasion of Europe, American assault troops kneel on a British pier, with their assault boats in background, and received benediction from Major Edward J. Waters, Catholic Army Chaplain from Oswego, New York. A few hours later these men were hitting the beaches of France in the first attack on Hitler’s fortress.

English Channel…Some are grim-faced, some are smiling, but all are eager in their own way to come to grips with the enemy. These American soldiers were photographed aboard a Navy LCI (landing craft, infantry) on their way to the invasion coast of France. They were anxious to do the job for which they had been trained for and for which they had been waiting. They made good, too.

Packed in assault craft completely ready to fight as soon as their feet touch land are these Canadian troops pictured when Allied armies, including Canadians, landed on the French Normandy coast to start the invasion of Hitler’s Europe.

One of the many B-26 Martin Marauders of the Ninth Air Force is shown over the coast of France during the early morning, giving cover to the landing craft shown on the sandy beaches below.

This Coast Guard landing barge burst into flames when it was hit by Nazi machine gun fire, and a soldier’s hand grenade exploded, but its crew steers it toward the beach despite the rising smoke and flame. Choppy waters in the Channel didn’t make the job any easier, either.

Canadian soldiers land on Courseulles beach in Normandy.

Christians Praying in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on D-Day .

Allied troops from the 8th Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division of the British Second Army come ashore on Queen Red Beach, Sword Beach area from Landing Craft Infantry (LCI). In the foreground are sappers of 84 Field Company Royal Engineers, part of No.5 Beach Group who are identified by the white bands around their helmets and behind them medical orderlies of 8th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), can be seen assisting wounded men on the shoreline.

A German soldier lies dead outside a pillbox that he had defended on Utah Beach.

Paratroopers land on La Manche coast on June 6, 1944, after Allied forces stormed the Normandy beaches during D-Day.

A crowd reading news of the D-Day invasion, on the “Zipper” news ticker at One Times Square, New York City, New York, USA, June 6, 1944.

American soldiers eat near a supply truck in France shortly after US troops landed on the beaches of Normandy.

D-Day — Coast Guard Ferries Reinforcements — Grim and determined, these American soldiers head towards the French coast as the American flag flies from the stern of their US Coast Guard landing barge as it speeds toward the invasion shore.

A wooden cross, a soldier’s helmet, and flowers mark the grave of an American soldier who was killed in battle during the invasion of Normandy, Carentan, France. A sign posted by French civilians reads ‘Mort pour la France’, or ‘Died for France.’

To learn more about D-Day, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast:

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On D-Day, June 6, 1944, 160,000 troops participated in the invasion of Normandy. Today just a few thousand of these veterans are still alive, with the youngest in their late nineties. As their voices, and those of the million combatants and leaders who swept into motion across Europe 80 years ago, fall silent and pass from living history, Garrett Graff has captured and compiled them in a new book: When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.

Drawing on his project of sifting through and synthesizing 5,000 oral histories, today Garrett takes us back to what was arguably the most consequential day in modern history and helps unpack the truly epic sweep of the operation, which was hard to fathom even then, and has become even more difficult to grasp with the passage of time. We talk about how unbelievably involved the planning process for D-Day was, stories you may never have heard before, a couple of the myths around D-Day, and the sacrificial heroism born of this event that continues to live on.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast Episode #1: We Who Are Alive and Remain * AoM Article: The 70th Anniversary of D-Day — Remembrances from the Brave Men Who Were There * AoM Podcast #514: Remembering D-Day 75 Years Later * The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw * AoM Article: How Eisenhwoer Made the D-Day Decision * The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11* by Garrett M. Graff

Connect With Garrett Graff* Garrett’s website

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The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

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Walk into any commercial gym, or even a hotel fitness center, and you’ll probably see a cable machine and/or a functional trainer.

A cable machine features two weight stacks connected by a cross-beam. The weights in each stack can be adjusted by the user and are lifted through a system of pulleys and cables that travel up and down a track.

A functional trainer sports a similar system, but is more compact in design, with the weight stacks sitting closer together. Most functional trainers also have a pull-up bar between the two weight stacks.

Cable machines/functional trainers are pretty dang versatile. While a downside of weight-training machines is that they lock you into one position, a cable machine allows for movements that are more dynamic and exercise your balance and stability more than other machines. And with one machine, you can do multiple strength-training exercises and use movements that effectively isolate muscle groups and work them from a variety of angles. It’s possible to use cable machines/functional trainers to get an effective full-body workout.

This advantage is particularly beneficial when you’re traveling. Most hotel gyms are pretty basic: it’s typically a small, poorly lit room with limited equipment. But they do often offer a functional trainer, which means you can get in a good all-around strength training session while you’re on the road.

To learn a full-body cable workout that can be used either at regular or hotel gyms, I turned to Chris Contois, my physical therapist at Vitality Therapy and Performance here in Tulsa, OK. He’s also a competitive bodybuilder and has been doing some bodybuilding programming for me the past year.

Chris created a simple upper body/lower body split that can be done with a cable machine or a functional trainer. He noted that in the last two hotels he’s stayed in, the functional trainer had fixed handles; you couldn’t swap out attachments and put on a rope handle, for example. So he designed this functional trainer workout assuming you might only have fixed handles available.

Also, one of the downsides of functional trainers is that they’re not great for training legs. While you can do some leg exercises with a functional trainer, your options are limited. If you feel like you need a bit more lower body work, Chris recommends adding some plyos or some bodyweight movements, like air squats.

Upper Body/Lower Body Cable WorkoutFor a full-body workout, do all the exercises for both the upper and lower body, resting 90 seconds to two minutes in between each set.

Upper Body Mid Back. Mid-Handle Position Single Arm Mid Row: 4 sets x 8-12 reps * Upper Chest. High-Handle Position Cable Crossovers: 4 x 10-15 * Lats. High-Handle Position Half Kneeling Underhand Pulldown: 4 x 10-15 (video shows an overhand grip, just switch to underhand) * Mid/Lower Chest. Mid-Handle Position Single Arm Chest Press: 4 x 8-12 * Shoulders. Low-Handle Position Cable Laterals: 4 x 10-15 * Biceps. Low-Handle Position Single Arm Cable Curl: 4 x 10-15 * Triceps. Low-Handle Position Single Arm Behind Head Tricep Extension: 4 x 8-12 * Abs.* Mid-Handle Position Rotational Chop: 4 x 10

Lower Body * Quads. Low-Handle Position Cable Goblet Squats: 4 sets x 10-15 reps * Glutes and Hamstrings. Low-Handle Position Cable Pull Throughs: 4 x 12-15 * Quads and Glutes. Low-Handle Position Split Stance Lunge: 4 x 8-10 * Hamstring and Low Back. Low-Handle Position Cable Romanian Deadlift: 4 x 8-10 * Outer Leg. Low-Handle Position Hip Abduction: 3 x 10-12 * Inner Leg. Low-Handle Position Hip Adduction: 3 x 10-12

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Over a decade ago, I remember reading a story that stuck with me. I think it was connected to the famous Harvard Study on Adult Development that studied a group of men across their lifetimes, but I can no longer find the reference. A much-beloved doctor, upon his retirement, was given a notebook filled with letters of praise and appreciation from his patients. After he received it, he put it up in his attic, and never opened it or read the letters.

I’ve often thought of this story since I first heard it, wondering about what motivated the doctor’s behavior, and the larger question of why praise is typically welcomed and makes us feel good, but can also make people feel uncomfortable or embarrassed.

In today’s episode, I take a stab at answering this question with Christopher Littlefield, a speaker and consultant who specializes in employee appreciation. But first, we talk about the power of recognition, why we can be so stingy in giving compliments, how compliments can go wrong, and how we can offer them more effectively. We then turn to why getting compliments can make you cringe, how people deflect them and how this deflection affects relationships, and how to get better at receiving compliments graciously.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article:Why and How to Offer More Compliments * AoM Article: How to Accept a Compliment With Class * AoM Article: How to Avoid Giving a Backhanded Compliment * Sunday Firesides: Compliment Deflection Is Gift Denial * Sunday Firesides: Give Them the Cream * HBR Article: Do Compliments Make You Cringe? Here’s Why by Christopher Littlefield

Connect With Christopher Littlefield* Beyond Thank You website * Chris on YouTube * Chris on LinkedIn

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What makes for a fulfilled life, a meaningful life?

Many answers have been offered to this question. But Otto Paul Kretzmann, a professor and pastor of the mid-20th century, articulated what is perhaps the truest and pithiest formulation of the good life.

Kretzmann said that if man is to survive, flourish, and stay sane in the modern world, he must have “something to live by, to live on, and to live for.”

Something to live on. Kretzmann may have listed this element second, but it serves as the prosaic but essential foundation of the good life. Fulfillment is hard to grab ahold of amidst a paycheck-to-paycheck existence; something above a grinding, subsistence-level income is required. Money may not directly buy happiness, but by keeping the specter of worry and stress from darkening one’s doorway and providing a springboard to interesting, adventurous, and joy-inducing pursuits, it provides the conditions that make it far easier to obtain.

Something to live by. It’s hard to find your way without a map, a compass, a set of signposts. It’s hard to generate the force so primary to human happiness — momentum — when every decision must be made and remade from scratch. Every man needs a set of non-negotiable principles, born of well-earned convictions, to guide him. Every man needs a code.

Something to live for. Life becomes an empty slog when it consists merely of the maintenance tasks necessary to perpetuate it. A man needs a purpose larger than himself. Ideals he can never reach but finds satisfaction in striving toward. A compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning. Work that makes a difference. People who need him; indeed, having something to live on and something to live for often mean very little, unless you have someone you love to live with.

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Reach Ultraclean Dental Floss. PFAS are “forever chemicals” that have been linked to thyroid disease, obesity, immune suppression, reproductive problems, and cancer. They’re used in things like carpets, cookware . . . and, we recently learned, dental floss. A study found that those who use PFAS-containing floss have higher levels of the chemical in their bodies. This is, of course, correlational, and the use of such floss has not been proven to cause health effects. But heck, why keep using it if you don’t have to, since there are floss brands/types that don’t contain PFAS that might leech into your body? The trick is to find one that doesn’t feel like crap on your gums (PFAS are what give floss its nice glide). After deciding to switch from our old standby, PFAS-containing Oral B Glide, we discovered a winner of a replacement: Reach Ultraclean. Strong and rubbery, it doesn’t shred between your teeth, and it moves in and out of their gaps with a satisfying twang that makes flossing just a bit more enjoyable.

If you’ve wanted to, but haven’t yet made flossing in general a habit, you can bet we’ve got an article on that.

The Social Network. I hadn’t seen this film since it originally came out almost 15 years ago and recently rewatched it with the family. It’s a great flick, which shrewdly frames the founding of Facebook as a story of a man seeking status (at the heart of everything, you’ll always, always find the fight for status). Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg is so well-acted, and Aaron Sorkin’s snappy dialogue of course crackles. Even though the main characters in the story don’t come off very well, it made me nostalgic for the early days of the web, when things were still new, exciting, and fun, people were scheming and dreaming about doing something big on the net, and college students could create things in their dorm room that became billion-dollar empires. It was a time for launches. (AoM debuted two years after FB opened to the general public. Memories.)

“The Ambling Mind” by L. M. Sacasas. For some reason this year, I’ve naturally been waking up earlier. Instead of sitting around the house until the kids get up, I go out and take a two-mile walk around my neighborhood. I really enjoy it. This article by L.M Sacasas highlights one of the joys of walking outside: it’s a great way to think through things. There’s something about walking that juices your cognitive gears. Which is why many of history’s great philosophers like Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche were walkers. For more on the all-around powers of walking, check out this article we published a decade back: “Solvitur Ambulando: It Is Solved By Walking.”

The Anatomy of Courage by Lord Moran. Charles McMoran Wilson, 1st Baron Moran, commonly known as Lord Moran, is most famous for being Winston Churchill’s personal physician from the period of WWII until Churchill’s death. But back in WWI, he served as a medical officer in the Royal Fusiliers for two and a half years. During that time, he closely observed how soldiers responded to the stresses of war. Moran offers interesting insights and opinions on what qualities make men more or less vulnerable to fear and susceptible to cowardice, and what conditions are apt to lead men to break down or hold together.

Quote of the Week

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

—Benjamin Disraeli

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The Strenuous Life is an online/offline platform that helps members learn new skills, pursue new interests, and improve themselves in body, mind, and spirit. Each month, members create and publish a newsletter — The Bugle — to highlight what’s going in the TSL community.

If you’ve wondered what The Strenuous Life is like, below we share a recent edition of The Bugle. The next TSL enrollment, and the final enrollment of 2024, will open in June. Click here to get on the email list and be the first to know when enrollment opens.

The Strenuous Life Bugle is the newsletter for participants of The Strenuous Life, which highlights the strenuous going-ons of our intrepid members. This Bugle brought to you courtesy of: @averyb, @clouden1, @eburres, @gwalliman, and @S-C-Hughes.

Badge WorkWhat badge requirements have you been working on? Here’s a sample of how your fellow members got action recently:

For the Astronomer Badge, @marcusraider is using a book and his telescope and binoculars to identify the stars in the night sky over the year. For the Backyard Chef Badge, @maverick-man smoked a brisket for his family’s Easter dinner. @Fahey learned to string his bow during a lesson for the Archery Badge. @prometheus has been harvesting a cup of mulberries a day from his tree to satisfy the Backyard Farmer Badge requirement. As part of the Art Badge, @russjack has created several paintings of his backyard over the seasons.

@boots1164 read The Daily Stoic for 30 days for the Monk Badge. @flurry demonstrated holding a pen correctly, for lefties, for the Penmanship Badge. @jameshxn read Edmund Morris’ trilogy of biographies on Theodore Roosevelt for the Rough Rider Badge. @mrmeyers99 paid off all debt except for his house for the Personal Finance Badge!

In the Handyman Badge, @roseman76 replaced some damaged slats in his fence. @ChrisZelihsen had fun checking off a Host Badge requirement as he hosted a “beer gathering” for friends at his home, where they played a quiz game while tasting various craft beers. For the InfoSec Badge, @timmydee got a free annual copy of his credit report. @repetition8932 made sushi for himself and his wife for the Kiss the Chef Badge. Finally, @russjak finished writing all of the required letters to earn the Letter Writing Badge.

@Brendan created a cool-looking bookshelf for the Craftsman Badge, and @Mickyjohn signed up for his first BJJ session at a local gym for the Fighter Badge. @Mickyjohn also purchased a first aid kit for his First Aid Badge — he’s been busy!

@Stewart has had a few automotive adventures lately for the Gearhead Badge. He helped his son change all the fluids for his recently-acquired Jeep Cherokee, along with brakes, tires, battery, and starter. He also recently came to his daughter’s rescue when she got a flat tire, only to find that the spare was flat too! An important lesson was learned — when you perform your regular tire pressure check, make sure to check your spare’s pressure too!

In the Scout Badge, @ofcaerbannog and @wpcopland practiced knowing their environment by using a compass to measure the height of a tree a river’s width and using their thumbs to measure far off distances. At the Sharpshooter Badge, @captcm54 completed the 5×5 handgun skill test. Over in the Shaving Badge, @tkrhanna restored a safety razor and @jtorres079 completed 30 shaves with a safety razor. @jgemerson snuck close enough to 4 different wild animals and snapped pictures of them for the Tracker Badge.

Chapter MeetupsThe success of TSL is dependent on members not waiting for others to take the lead, but choosing to take the lead themselves. Organize a meetup in your area! Here are some activities that local chapters have done lately:

In the Germany chapter, several members gathered at Gut Berthelsdorf, an old manor with a rich history that the proprietor is trying to turn into a destination for local clubs and festivals. The men assisted with various chores, such as moving and stacking firewood and removing clutter, to help get the venue ready for action. In the spirit of the Rough Rider Badge’s natural history museum visit requirement, @ofcaerbannog and @wpcopland of the Tri-Cities Hotsteppers visited a mammoth dig site, where fossils and artifacts dating to the Ice Age were being excavated less than a mile from their town.

In the Maryland chapter, @petesoldgoat, @averyb, @clouden1, @hussle, and @shawmutt and son met up at a local fishing shop for a fly fishing lesson, getting a crash course in the terminology and equipment of the sport, along with some hands-on experience tying flies and dry-casting. Elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic Alliance, @nimbilus and @the_mountain92 of the Washington DC chapter met at a local park to review Scout Badge requirements and plan for an upcoming 16 km hike. The men increased the strenuosity by leaving their cars at home and rucking to the park and back. And in Southern California, @jtorres079, @matty.harer, and @amie met at Eaton Canyon Natural Area Park for a morning hike in cool and foggy conditions and had an enjoyable experience among good company.

In TSL Alberta, @smitty-eng, @danielbraun, and @kunzy134 met in Calgary for a “Meat and Greet,” smoking some meat over plenty of good conversation. The Texas Hill Country Mavericks have been busy lately, with @chriskohl, @JPRhoads, @bhart, and @colbyjack meeting to take the AGFT together. On another occasion, the group met at a local high school track to knock out the Scout Badge’s physical fitness requirements. Finally, the Utah Mountain Division held their own mini GoRuck event, starting with a 5k ruck and ending with some sandbag work.

Upcoming Festivals of StrenuosityFestivals of Strenuosity, aka “StrenFests,” are member-organized, regional, weekend-long+ meetups/campouts for skill-building, badge work, and all-around fun. StrenFests are easily the best meetups of the year for the chapters and regions that hold them. Don’t miss out if you can make it! Here are links and dates for upcoming StrenFests:

2024 Southeast Festival of Strenuosity (June 7-10)
Inaugural Alaska StrenFest (July 20-23)
6th Annual East Coast Festival of Strenuosity (August 8-12)

Upcoming StrenGames VIThe sixth installment of the popular StrenGames will be taking place this summer, from June 22nd to August 2nd! StrenGames is a unique, member-led event where individuals and self-formed teams earn points for doing TSL-related activities over a course of 6 weeks. The purpose is to provide a boost of motivation to keep up with strenuous living while providing a fun challenge and outlet for camaraderie. If you’ve been falling short of your Strenuous Life goals lately, StrenGames can be the perfect way to get back on track and have fun while doing it! To make sure you’re in the loop, be sure to join the dedicated forum group here, and be on the lookout for an email with an official announcement and enrollment information.

Keep living strenuously, everyone!

“In this life, as a rule, the job that it is easy to do is not very well worth while doing.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. It’s a peculiar book, especially for a bestseller. Not a lot of it is actually about zen or motorcycle maintenance, it combines a travelogue, a father/son story, and philosophical musings, and the structure of its narration makes it hard to follow. Thus, it’s the kind of book people often buy, start, and then put down without finishing.

That’s initially what happened to Mark Richardson, an author and automotive journalist who was born in the UK but has lived most of his life in Canada. But when the book finally clicked for Mark, he was so inspired by it that he actually undertook Pirsig’s motorcycle pilgrimage himself. Mark shares that story in Zen and Now, which intersperses stories from his own road trip with an exploration of Pirsig’s life and famous book.

If you’ve wanted to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but haven’t been able to get into it, today Mark will offer an introduction to what it’s all about. We discuss Pirsig’s ideas on the metaphysics of quality and our relationship to technology, and how he tried to combine the ethos of Eastern and Western thought into a unified philosophy of living. We also get into why Mark wanted to recreate Pirsig’s road trip, the joys of traveling by motorcycle, and what Mark learned along the way.

Resources Related to the Podcast Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig * Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Mark Richardson * Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig * Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Ron Di Santo and Tom Steele * Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work* by Matthew Crawford * Honda CB77/Super Hawk * The Robert Pirsig Association

Connect With Mark Richardson* Mark’s website

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Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

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Started in 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development represents the longest longitudinal study on happiness ever conducted. It set out to follow a group of men through every stage of their lives, from youth to old age, and continues to study their descendants.

The Harvard Study aimed to discover what makes human beings flourish, and its overarching conclusion was this: it’s all about good relationships. The Harvard Study has found that the quality of a person’s relationships has the biggest influence on their health and happiness.

Robert Waldinger, the current director of the Harvard Study, uses a great phrase to refer to this relational factor: social fitness. However, in the book he co-authored, The Good Life, he never directly explains and unpacks what the concept of social fitness involves.

Below, we’ll take a stab at doing so.

What Is “Social Fitness”?We typically talk about fitness in terms of physical fitness, but it’s a very apt way to describe our social lives as well. We’ll get into the parallels between the two concepts in a moment, but let’s first explain what social fitness is.

“Fitness” can refer to a couple of things.

One is a person’s current state and condition. (“He is fit.”)

The other is a person’s capacity to perform a certain role, task, or function. (“He is fit enough to ____.”)

Physical and social fitness each encompass both of these qualities.

When you’re physically fit, you’re in good shape. Your cardiovascular system is healthy, your weight is normal, your muscles are toned. You are also sufficiently fit to perform certain athletic activities, like running a certain distance or lifting a certain amount of weight.

Likewise, when you’re socially fit, your relationships are in good shape. You have a sufficient number of ties and a sufficient amount of contact with them. Your relationships are marked more by intimacy and warmth than stress and strain.

To assess the state of your social fitness, ask yourself how much you agree with statements like:

I don’t often feel lonely.
I’m happy with my number of friends.
If I had an emergency, there’s someone I could call for help.
If I had a bad day, there’s someone I could talk to about it.
I feel like I can be honest in most of my relationships.
I feel generally supported and loved.
If I need advice on a practical matter, there’s someone I could talk to.
There is at least one person in my life who challenges me and encourages me to grow.
There is at least one person in my life who makes me laugh and helps me have fun.
I’m happy and fulfilled in my romantic relationship.
There is at least one person in my life who knows nearly everything about me.

Social fitness not only encompasses the state of having healthy relationships, but also the capacity to show up well in these relationships.

To assess the “fit for” element of your social fitness, ask yourself how much you agree with statements like:

I would feel comfortable walking into a room where I don’t know anyone.
I feel comfortable making small talk with a stranger.
I can listen intently to someone without getting distracted.
I am able to cultivate genuine curiosity about anyone.
I’m adept at reading social signals and adapting my behavior accordingly.
I know how to ask questions that facilitate conversation and deepen relationships.
I am able to offer feedback and advice in an appropriate way.
I am able to empathize with others in a helpful and comforting manner.

Of course, both of the elements of fitness are inextricably connected. In both the social and physical realms, you become fit by exercising your capacities, and the more fit you are, the more capacities you can exercise.

The Parallels Between Physical and Social FitnessTo better understand the concept of social fitness, and how it’s developed and maintained, it’s helpful to think through its parallels with something we’re more familiar with: physical fitness.

Physical and social fitness were once defaults, but now require intention to maintain. In our primitive past, people had to move their bodies by way of necessity. Physical activity was built into the tasks of daily life.

In the modern world, it’s possible to perform most of life’s necessary tasks from a seated position. Exercising takes intentional decisions and will.

In the same way, social fitness used to be an automatic part of life. Primitive peoples lived in small communities, which were filled, morning to night, with face-to face interactions. Today, with the rise of technology and work-from-home jobs, it’s possible to go very long stretches without talking to someone in the flesh.

Just like the physical movements that arise naturally during the day (like walking to and from your car in a parking lot), are not enough to maintain your physical fitness, the amount of spontaneous social interactions that crop up in your routine are typically not enough to maintain your social fitness.

Social health does not happen by default; it requires dedicated effort.

Ignoring your physical and social fitness results in serious health consequences. You know the potential health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle: cancer, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, anxiety. You’ve probably also heard that many of those same maladies are linked to loneliness.

The Harvard Study found that “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.”

Thousands of years of human history has designed us to move, and to socialize. If we ignore these hardwired needs, both our physical and our mental health deteriorates.

Physical and social fitness offer freedom from and freedom to.Related to the idea of fitness as both a state and a capacity is the fact that in both its physical and social forms, fitness offers an individual freedom from and freedom to. It’s both a protective and proactive quality — something that prevents the bad and allows us to do more good.

Physical fitness gives you freedom from diseases, fatigue, poor sleep, and mental malaise, while also granting you freedom to navigate varied environments, play sports, climb mountains, play with your children, and so on.

Social fitness likewise offers freedom from bodily and mental maladies and also keeps the burdening stresses and sadnesses of strained relationships at bay. At the same time, it provides the freedom to enjoy rich friendships, get ahead at work, feel confident at parties, find love, and experience joy in a happy and long-lasting marriage.

If you don’t use your physical and social fitness, you lose it.Have you ever been out to a social engagement after a long hiatus from face-to face interactions and noticed that all your behaviors came out cringe-inducingly creaky? You felt like a social Tin-Man who’d gone too long without an oiling.

Even if you lift weights for years and years, once you stop, your muscles will begin to atrophy. Likewise, if you fall out of the socializing habit, your interpersonal skills get rusty.

Some people are more inclined towards physical and social fitness than others, but everybody needs them all the same.Some people are more physical. Some people are less. Some people truly enjoy working out. Others highly dislike it. Regardless of what category someone falls into, getting exercise is equally important for their health.

Some people are more social. Some people are less. Some people are naturally inclined towards extroversion; some people are more introverted. Regardless of what category someone falls into, socialization is equally important for their health.

In the case of both social and physical fitness, a minimum amount of exercise is needed to maintain good health. But the amount someone needs beyond that minimum to be at their best will vary.

Some people need to work out an hour every day to not go bonkers. Others only need to do 30 minutes of dedicated exercise several times a week to stay trim and feel copacetic.

Some people need to be out socializing multiple times a week to feel happy; others are content with far more occasional gatherings.

Dr. Waldinger says that one of the questions he’s asked most frequently is how many friends someone needs to have. He says there’s no set answer; it depends on the person. Some people are perfectly happy having just one good friend; others need a dozen.

In a similar way, different people are drawn to different forms of social and physical exercise. Just as some people like playing tennis and others like yoga, some people enjoy small talk and others like deep, emotion-exploring conversations. But just as someone who likes running but dislikes weightlifting may need to lift weights in order to stay healthy for running, even people who dislike small talk must engage in it as an on-ramp to more intimate exchanges.

While the natural desire for socializing, optimal social circle size, need for interactions, and inclination towards certain types of socializing will vary from person to person, everyone needs a quality stream of socialization in their life.

Cultivating physical and social fitness constitutes both a self-interested exercise and an act of service.Working on your physical fitness offers personal advantages: you look and feel better and are capable of engaging in life’s most fun and adventurous pursuits. But it also confers a benefit on society: you’re prepared to assist others in an emergency, are less of a burden on the healthcare system, and have the vim and vigor to do as much good as possible in the world.

In the same way, working on your social fitness is both a self-interested and an altruistic act. Socially fit people enjoy a richer life themselves, while also benefiting others by providing a listening ear, supportive companionship, and nourishing recognition.

As David Brooks argues, the moral fabric of a society frays when people stop feeling seen and heard; the resentment that results moves them to act out and act badly. Witnessing this bad behavior prompts people to interact with and trust others less, which only makes folks feel lonelier and less recognized, which leads to more behavioral ruptures, and the negative cycle continues. Being adept at socializing pushes this cycle in the other direction. It’s an act of service.

Maintaining physical and social fitness requires endless monotonous exercise, but when you need it, you’ll be glad you have it. You don’t typically see immediate benefits from working out, besides an elevated mood. Health benefits accrue slowly and subtly. You don’t need to typically put the strength and physical skills you’re building to use. You put in hours each week and don’t experience an obvious payoff.

But, when you need your physical fitness for something fun or in an emergency — a friend invites you on a backpacking trip; a family member needs help moving a couch; you have to walk a marathon all over Disney World; you need to run from a burning building — you’re surely glad you have it.

The same thing is true of social fitness. A lot of the conversations and exchanges you engage in may be fairly mundane. But, when you find yourself meeting an important client, going on a date with someone you’re nuts about, or getting to know a friend you can tell will turn out to be special, you count your lucky stars that you’re prepared.

By consistently exercising your interpersonal fitness in mundane, day-to-day ways, you ensure that you’re socially agile, confident, and adept when the interaction really counts.

You’ve got to regularly exercise your physical and social fitness whether you feel like it or not.People typically understand that even if you don’t feel like working out, you have to do so anyway, for your health.

Socializing, however, seems more optional — something you only do when you feel like it.

We recognize we shouldn’t give much credence to our mood when it comes to deciding to exercise, but frequently let our mood dictate whether or not we’ll attend a party.

But the same consistent commitment should prevail in both areas. Sometimes social exercise is something you look forward to, and sometimes it’s akin to eating your spinach — something you do, even though you don’t feel like it, because it’s good for you.

Regularly getting in social “workouts” means saying yes to after-work drinks or a networking event, not because of an innate desire to go, but simply because you recognize you need the exercise to stay interpersonally limber. It means striking up a chat with a coffee shop barista simply to practice your chit-chat. It means asking a couple to go out to eat, even if you’re not terribly excited about their company, to keep your conversational muscles in tone.

To maintain your social fitness, you’ve got to get in the reps, whether you feel like it or not.

Even when you don’t feel like exercising your physical and social fitness, you’re always glad you did.When you don’t want to exercise, but get after it anyway, by the time you’re done and all red-faced and sweaty, riding that post-workout high, you’re invariably glad you decided to fight through the inertia.

When you don’t want to socialize, but you put in the effort anyway, you’re almost always glad you did and walk away feeling better and even a little buzzed — a little more human, a little more alive, a little more healthy.

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If you’re having a BBQ this summer, you’ll probably ensure your guests’ thirst stays slaked by stocking a big cooler full of soda and beer. While there’s obviously not much to that, there are in fact less and more effective ways of making sure these drinks are cold and accessible.

The less effective way is to place the bottles and cans atop a big mound of ice. They won’t get thoroughly chilled that way. You also don’t want to bury them in the ice; people’s hands will get cold and cut up when they try to dig through the pile to grab a drink.

The more effective method is to fill the cooler with a 80/20 mixture of ice and water. Then put the bottles/cans in so that the body of the vessels sits in the ice, but their tops/necks stick out; this lets your guests grab the drinks without getting their hands wet, cold, and nicked.

If you’re in a hurry to chill your drinks, gently (very gently!), spin the bottles/cans around every few minutes; this will distribute the liquid that’s already been chilled throughout the vessel.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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In late midlife, a man tends to look back on the preceding decades, assess the standing of his health, relationships, professional achievements, and experiences, and determine whether or not his life has been a success.

But the timeline used in this assessment should be significantly longer — extending much farther back and far further forward.

Part of success rests on what you’ve made of a past that began long before you were born. Have you been true to the best that previous generations passed down to you? Have you been faithful to all the good your forebearers bequeathed? Farmers toiling in fields; workers laboring in mines; pioneers trekking in storms; soldiers dying in trenches . . . have you made good on the blood, sweat, and tears — the centuries of sacrifices — that have allowed you to be living and breathing in the current day?

Part of success also rests on how you’ve set things up for a future that will continue to unfold long after you die. Have you left behind the shadows of your lineage to become a transitional figure — the one who has finally freed your posterity from inter-generational burdens? You may not have been a perfect parent, but have you improved, at least a little, on the parenting you received? Have you planted seeds in your children, and all those you mentor and come into contact with, that will allow them, and their children and their children, to live with greater strength, meaning, and virtue?

Success is not only premised on what you accomplish within the relatively small blip of your existence, but on whether you build on your inheritance, investing it in such a way that it will produce fruitful, ever-echoing dividends for millennia.

Success is becoming the kind of man your ancestors would be proud of, and your descendants will be grateful for.

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Antonio Vivaldi: Recorder Concerto RV 443 / Maurice Steger, Cappella Gabetta. For some reason, when you get to fourth grade here in the United States, the school gives you a recorder, and you learn how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on it. Of course, what most 9-year-olds do with a recorder is just randomly blast full-force shrills around the house, driving their parents insane in the process. A while back ago, when I was telling my youngest to knock it off with the recorder blasts, I was thinking, “Is the recorder actually a legit instrument, or is it just some dumb ‘practice’ instrument we give children?” Well, when I was researching our article about classical music during the Baroque period, I came across this Vivaldi piece that was written for the recorder. Reader, the recorder is a legit instrument, and this piece absolutely shreds. Take a listen.

How to Wear Light Wash Denim Now (and Why We Need to Stop Being Afraid Of It). If you’re a Millennial like me, dark denim likely had a chokehold on your personal style. Light wash denim was what your dad wore or what you wore with your No Fear t-shirt back in ’95; dark denim was sophisticated and harkened back to your Greatest Generation grandpa. When I look back on a lot of our style articles on AoM, there are a lot of suggestions to “wear dark denim.” Primer Magazine (with the help of one of my favorite menswear dudes, Daniel Baraka) makes the case to 40-somethings that light wash denim can have a place in your wardrobe. I’ve gotten some white jeans; might be time I pick up a pair of stonewashed ones. No fear!

The Odyssey. I’ve read Homer’s Odyssey dozens of times for pure pleasure. There are a couple of reasons I keep turning back to it. First, the Odyssey is just a grade A adventure story. Simply a fun book to read. Second, and more importantly, the character of Odysseus is incredibly relatable, especially if you’re a middle-aged dude like me, because Odysseus is a middle-aged dude. The story is about a guy trying to survive in a crazy, topsy-turvy world so he can spend time with his family. I can relate to that. Odysseus also teaches us that you can be in your 40s and still maintain your edge. Be sure to read our article about the lessons you can learn from Odysseus.

bluegrass cologne.With warmer weather here, it’s time I switch up my colognes. My go-to spring/summer fragrance for the past few years has been bluegrass by EastWest Bottlers (the same company that makes my favorite fall/winter cologne, Sportsman). bluegrass is a refreshing scent that includes notes of fresh-cut field grass, Spanish moss, and deep, woodsy amber, all with a hint of peppery spice. Smells like summer if you ask me.

Quote of the Week

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

—George Bernard Shaw

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Note: We recently came across this old poem and dug it. Enjoy.

“Thought”By Berton Braley

You say “I think” ten times a day

Or fifteen times or twenty

And even more. Well, anyway

You sure repeat it plenty.

But pause and ponder half a wink

And start your brain-cells clinking;

“I think” you say, but do you think

Or only think you’re thinking?

How often is the thing you’ve thought

Out of yourself created

And not a dictum you’ve been taught

And simply imitated?

Into a reverie you sink

And like an owl you’re blinking,

But do you actually think,

Or only think you’re thinking?

“I think” you say—and ladle out

Some fusty old opinion

That probably was known about

In Pharaoh’s dominion.

Do new ideas ever slink

Into your cranium’s chinking?

I wonder—do you really think

Or only think you’re thinking?

Traditions, customs, fill your head

And some of them have virtue,

But most of them have long been dead

They fester there and hurt you.

Son, chuck that clutter in the drink

Wake up—don’t sit there blinking!

Wake up! And then perhaps you’ll think

And not just think you’re thinking!

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The summer season is just about upon us, and its warmer weather means switching up your wardrobe towards a lighter summer style.

When people typically think about dressing for the summer, they think about dressing for trips to the lake or beach or for backyard BBQs with friends. Getups for those sorts of events are pretty dang easy: a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, or a polo shirt if you want to be a bit dressier, will usually do the trick.

But what about situations that require a little more polish? How can you summer-fy your smart casual outfits?

Our buddies over at Huckberry have updated their smart casual offerings to include options for warmer weather. Below they’ve put together three summer smart casual outfits that will cover you for the office, date night, and a wedding.

All of these outfits keep things light, breezy, and casual, while adding an element of stylish intentionality that will ensure you look sharp and elevate the occasion.

Be sure to check out all of Huckberry’s summer smart casual offerings in their Smart Casual Shop.

Summer Smart Casual: The OfficeFor a summer smart casual office outfit, find a light casual jacket. It will add a bit of professionalism, while still keeping things casual. Pairing it with a knit polo can really bring texture to your outfit, and texture is one of the easiest ways to introduce visual interest to a plainer getup.

Flint and Tinder 365 Utility Blazer
Flint and Tinder Cotton Linen Sweater Polo Shirt
Flint and Tinder 365 Chino Pant
Flint and Tinder 365 Belt
Timex Marlin Manual Watch
Luca Terra Low Sneaker

Summer Smart Casual: Date NightThe goal here is to build something that gives off confidence and interest — all while looking like you haven’t tried too hard. Luckily this outfit provides a more relaxed look while also showing you’ve put in some effort! The unbuttoned camp shirt over a plain white tee will make you look like a chill dude and the huarache slip-ons are casual, but a big step up from flip flops.

Flint and Tinder Camp Collar Short Sleeve Shirt
Flint and Tinder Vintage Soft Wash T-Shirt
Flint and Tinder 365 Pant
American Optical Hazemaster Sunglasses
Miansai Annex Pull Bracelet
Luca Huarache

Summer Smart Casual: WeddingA blazer and a pair of chinos of the same color and lightweight fabric can become two of the most versatile pieces in your wardrobe. Each can be worn separately with a variety of other tops and bottoms. Put them together with a white button-down, and you’ve got a killer summer suit, perfect for a laid-back wedding.

Flint and Tinder Linen Blazer
Wills Wrinkle-Free Linen Long Sleeve Shirt
Flint and Tinder 365 Cotton Linen Chino
American Optical JFK Saratoga Sunglasses
Corridor Braided Leather Belt
Astorflex Patnoflex Loafers

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There are a lot of unspoken challenges and hidden battles that men face in modern society. They often manifest themselves in a uniquely male malaise where a man feels apathetic, frustrated, cynical, and lost.

Jon Tyson has thought a lot about the problems men face and has been on the ground trying to help them as a pastor in New York City. In today’s episode, I talk to Jon about the sources of this male angst that he explores as the co-author of a new book, Fighting Shadows: Overcoming 7 Lies That Keep Men From Becoming Fully Alive.

Jon and I discuss how men often try to solve their malaise and why those approaches don’t work. We then explore some of the shadows men fight in their lives, including the shadows of despair, loneliness, unhealthy ambition, futility, and lust. Jon offers some advice to overcome these shadows, including sitting around a fire pit with your bros, taking time to develop your telos or aim as a man, and injecting a bit more playfulness in your life to counteract grumpy dad syndrome.

Resources Related to the Podcast Jon’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast: + #810: How to Turn a Boy Into a Man + #926: The 5 Shifts of Manhood * AoM longform article/short “ebook”: A Roadmap to Manhood in the 21st Century * AoM Article: Create a Blueprint for Your Future * Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl * AoM Podcast #702: One Man’s Impossible Quest — To Make Friends in Adulthood * AoM Podcast #867: Dante’s Guide to Navigating a Spiritual Journey * The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry * Theology of the Body* by Pope John Paul II

Connect With Jon Tyson Jon’s website * Fighting Shadows* website * Forming Men website * Primal Path website

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Man's Search for Meaning The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust

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In our last article, we looked at the origins of classical music, beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending with the Renaissance. Western art/concert music, what we now popularly call classical music, began with simple monophonic chanting and developed more complexity with the introduction of polyphony as time progressed. A primary feature of early Western music was that it was voice-based — instruments were used sparingly. It wasn’t until the end of the Renaissance that Western music began shifting to become predominated by instruments.

In today’s article, we’ll take a musical tour of the Baroque era. Put on your powdered wig, and let’s get going.

The Baroque Era (1600-1750)The Baroque era began roughly around 1600 with the composition of the first opera and lasted until the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750.

The word “baroque” comes from Portuguese and means “irregular pearl.” It was originally used to unflatteringly describe the art, architecture, and music produced in the 17th and 18th centuries. Early critics thought the art, music, and architecture of the 1600s and early 1700s were too ornate and too flamboyant. But with time, “baroque” lost its reproachful meaning.

Baroque music is big, elaborate, intricate, and emotional while being governed by logic and order. The logic and order of Baroque music laid the foundation for musical notation and theory that we still use today.

It was also during the Baroque period that Western music began to be primarily instrumental. The harpsichord was a favorite instrument of Baroque composers. If you hear a classical piece with a harpsichord, chances are it’s from the Baroque era.

A funny aside about harpsichords: Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who wasn’t a fan of the instrument, once compared the sound of a harpsichord to “two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.” Lol. Sir Beecham has no chill.

What was behind the bigness, the ornateness, and the orderliness of Baroque music? Well, a few things:

First, the Baroque period saw the rise of monarchs with absolute power — think King Louis XIV of France. This centralization of power into a single individual led to a demand for architecture, art, and music that could enhance the prestige of a monarch and their royal courts. Composers were hired to write music that glorified the king and added to his larger-than-life image.

Second, during the Baroque era, you saw significant scientific advances. Newton discovered that laws and mathematics governed the universe. Musicians began to apply this scientific view to their music by writing pieces governed by logic, order, and math.

Third, in response to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church began the Counter-Reformation that saw the embrace of music as a way to win souls. You start to see a shift away from plainchant music in churches towards elaborate, dramatic, highly emotional musical pieces designed to inspire religious awe in the listener.

Characteristics of Baroque Era MusicCounterpoint. Counterpoint is a technique of composing with interdependent yet independent melodic lines. A piece with counterpoint will have two lines of melody that can be played independently, but when put together, form a complex and cohesive piece of music rich in texture. The fugue is a musical form developed during the Baroque era that used counterpoint. Here’s an example of a fugue that showcases counterpoint beautifully. Note how complex and textured it sounds:

Basso continuo. Basso continuo is a continuous bass line that provides a rhythmic backbone for all the variety and complexity in a Baroque piece. Here’s an example of basso continuo (it’s Dutch; the cello and double bass provide the basso continuo):

Rhythmic patterns. Baroque music frequently features a driving rhythm that continues persistently throughout the piece. Rhythmic patterns established at the beginning are usually maintained to provide momentum and underpin the ornamental melodies.

Unity of mood. Baroque music typically has a single mood throughout the piece from start to finish. It isn’t until the Classical era that you see fluctuating emotions in a single piece.

Baroque Musical FormsThe Baroque period saw the development of specific musical forms. We mentioned the fugue above. Other Baroque forms include the sonata, oratorio, cantata, and the concerto grosso.

The opera was the most important musical form developed during the Baroque era. Italian composers sought to revive the emotional resonance of the ancient Greek chorus with a stage spectacle that tells a dramatic story set to continuous music.

Key Baroque ComposersClaudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). Monteverdi is considered the bridge between the Renaissance era and the Baroque era. His most significant contribution to the Baroque era was the development of Italian opera. His most famous piece is his opera “L’Orfeo,” which premiered in 1607. It’s based on the Greek myth of Orpheus going to the underworld to save his beloved Eurydice. You can watch the whole thing here:

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741). Antonio Vivaldi was an Italian composer of the Baroque period and is best known for his vibrant and inventive instrumental compositions, particularly his concertos. His music is characterized by its energetic rhythms, bright melodies, and bold use of harmony and texture. Besides being a genius composer, Vivaldi was a violin virtuoso.

His most famous work was “Four Seasons” — a set of four violin concertos that depict scenes appropriate for each season of the year, complete with bird calls in “Spring,” a thunderstorm in “Summer,” a hunters’ dance in “Autumn,” and icy winds in “Winter.” Take a listen:

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). If you had to pick one composer who symbolizes Baroque music, that composer would be Johann Sebastian Bach. The guy was a prolific musician who pumped out fugues, cantatas, and oratorios like no one’s business.

Bach is known for his complex counterpoints, rhythmic variety, and emotional expressiveness. When you listen to a piece from Bach, you’re taken aback by how technical and ornate it sounds.

Here are a few pieces from Bach to check out:

George Frederic Handel (1685-1759). Handel was a contemporary of Bach who made a name for himself with his beautiful melodies and stirring use of choruses in his operas and oratorios. His most famous piece is his oratorio, Messiah. Its famous “Hallelujah” chorus captures the dramatic flair that Handel brought to his music.

Take a listen to the “Hallelujah” chorus from the “Messiah.” Boy, do I get a swelling feeling in my chest every time I hear it:

If you’re looking for more Baroque era music, take a listen to this great playlist on Spotify.

That’s it for today’s crash course. In our next article, we’ll take a look at the Classical era.

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General George S. Patton is known for his aggressive, action-oriented tactical brilliance.

His character was also marked by a lesser-known but equally fundamental mystic piety.

Those two qualities would come together in the lead up to and execution of Patton’s greatest achievement during WWII: the relief of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

Alex Kershaw tells this story in his new book Patton’s Prayer: A True Story of Courage, Faith, and Victory in World War II. Today on the show, Alex shares how, when the Third Army’s advance into Germany was stalled by plane-grounding clouds and road-muddying rain, Patton commissioned a prayer for better weather that was distributed to a quarter million of his men, and how that prayer became even more urgent after the commencement of the Battle of the Bulge. We also talk about Patton’s qualities as a leader and a man, including his reading habits, how he combined a profane assertiveness with a pious faith and a belief in reincarnation, and what happened to him as the war came to a close.

Resources Related to the Podcast Alex’s previous appearances on the AoM Podcast: + #361: The Untold Story of WWII’s 45th Infantry Division + #514: Remembering D-Day 75 Years Later + #806: The Humble Heroics of Four of WWII’s Most Decorated Soldiers + #953: Duty, Honor, and the Unlikely Heroes Who Helped Win the Battle of the Bulge * AoM Article: George S. Patton’s Rules on Being an Officer and a Gentleman * AoM Article: The Libraries of Famous Men — George S. Patton * AoM Article: The Maxims of General George S. Patton * AoM Article: General Patton’s Strategy for Winning in War and Life — Keep Punching * Chaplain James Hugh O’Neill * Patton movie * Patton’s* opening speech * The story and a look at Patton’s prayer cards

Connect With Alex Kershaw* Alex’s website * Alex on X

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Quicksand has held an interesting place in our cultural zeitgeist. Particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, it played a role in nearly one-third of Hollywood movies. Lawrence of Arabia, winner of seven 1962 Oscars, features a dramatic scene in which actor Peter O’Toole races across the desert sands in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to save a young boy from quicksand. In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech, and used the line “lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice” to implore the crowd and nation. When scientists were debating the safety of landing on the moon, plenty of smart men argued that lunar quicksand could envelop the lunar lander entirely and ruin the mission. Even the Vietnam War was often described as and compared to being a quagmire or pit of quicksand.

Quicksand was once something that kids feared, and adults thought was a seriously dangerous real-life scenario. Today, that’s not so much the case (unless the kid in question has discovered The Princess Bride, and been watching it over and over). There isn’t any research as to why this is; it’s possible that the idea of quicksand simply ceased to cause fear once the culture was flooded with it, folks got inured to the trope, and fewer and fewer movies featuring this danger were made. In the 90s, the fear of quicksand was supplanted by that of ghosts and zombies. Then we passed “peak zombie,” and that cultural fear fixation passed from the scene too. (For some more discussion about this interesting phenomenon, take a listen to this Radiolab podcast.)

While quicksand is indeed real, it’s not nearly as dangerous as Hollywood once made it out to be. First, this natural phenomenon can’t happen just anywhere; it requires some sort of underground water reserve, so in the U.S., you’re most likely to find it in the swamps/marshes of the Southeast, or the canyon regions of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Also, you won’t sink to your death unless you really panic. As long as you make slow movements, and know some basics about escape tactics (provided above), you’ll in all likelihood be just fine. In fact, death by quicksand is most often not due to drowning in it, but because escape isn’t made quickly enough and the person succumbs to the elements. Using the tips above, you can rest assured that won’t be you!

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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We often talk about time in economic terms. We speak about what we choose to pay attention to and how we spend our time.

When we look at our budget of time, and decide we don’t have enough of it to do X activity, we think we are prudent, frugal managers of our minutes, hours, and days.

But, in many cases, we are actually terrible spendthrifts.

What we fail to realize, is that all the goods in our lives are provided to us on loan. If we fail to pay down these loans, the interest on them steadily accrues — and they can come to avenge themselves upon us a hundredfold.

If you don’t have time to do a thorough quality check of your new product . . . how will you have time to deal with the angry customers, returns, and PR damage that follows its recall?

If you’ve got too much to do to engage in the kind of socializing that keeps your depression at bay . . . just how much will you be able to get done when you can’t get out of bed in the morning?

If you’re too behind at work to exercise each day . . . how will you dig yourself out of the hole created when you’re laid up in the hospital from a heart attack?

If you can’t fit date nights and Mom-and-Dad-only trips into your schedule . . . how will you fit in sessions of marriage counseling . . . the emotion-wrecking, bandwidth-sucking fallout of separation . . . meetings with a divorce lawyer?

You may think you don’t have enough time in the present to invest in life’s vital relationships and activities. But, flip a few pages forward in that ledger and check the numbers again; for there isn’t enough time in the world to deal with the regret you’ll experience when your debts are finally called in.

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SMRTFT NÜOBELL Adjustable Dumbbells. Last spring, I tested out different sets of adjustable dumbbells to find the best one. The winner was the NÜOBELL. A year later, I’m still loving them. They’re expensive compared to other adjustable dumbbells, but the ease-of-use factor is worth the premium; to adjust the weight, all you have to do is twist the handle. Kate and I use them multiple times a week and haven’t yet experienced any quality issues. Get a set for yourself and start doing a whole body workout at home.

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio. This has got to be one of the quirkiest things I’ve come across online in a long time. Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio is a podcast that features full-length radio broadcasts of fake baseball games. Yes, all the games called by announcer Wally McCarthy (look at this guy’s profile pic; he means business) are completely made up. Episodes sound exactly like you’re listening to a baseball game on an AM/FM radio. The low din of the crowd combined with the slight radio static and Wally’s soothing play-by-play commentary creates an incredibly relaxing listening experience that can help get your restless mind to sleep.

Most People’s Musical Taste Is Stuck. Adam Singer highlights research done by Spotify that’s found that our musical tastes typically solidify between the ages of 13 and 16. After that, we stop trying to look for new artists. Adam makes the case that you’re missing out on a lot of great artists by getting stuck in a musical rut. It takes an open mind and a bit of work and patience to seek out new artists. The algorithm on Spotify is a start, but it only serves up stuff that’s very similar to what you already like. Ask your friends for recommendations on bands you might not otherwise have come across. One thing I admire about Kate is how she’s continued to look for new music to listen to (and has decided opinions about how to create a soundtrack for your life), even in our middle-age.

The Transparency Society. I’ve been plowing through the books of South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Hul Chan. He’s an interesting cat. He writes about life in our fast-paced, technologically-driven society. His prose can be hard to follow sometimes, but it’s different from other stuff that I read, which makes it compelling He refuses to give interviews and is incredibly protective of his private life. One book of his I’ve been thinking a lot about is The Transparency Society. In it, Chan critiques our modern drive and obsession with transparency. We typically think more transparency is good because it can reduce corruption and the like. But transparency can be used to surveil and control people. He also argues that transparency eliminates the need for trust in a relationship since you can just follow your kid with an AirTag and not have faith that they’ll do and go where they said they would. There’s power in secrets.

Quote of the Week

Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!

―Ernst Jünger

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When you have a license to kill, you’ve got to keep yourself in tip-top shape.

So what did James Bond do for his workout?

From the James Bond novels, we know that 007 liked to do all sorts of physical activities that could count as exercise: boxing, judo, swimming, and skiing. He was also a golfer, so he got some activity in that way.

As a Commander in the Royal Navy Reserve, Bond likely incorporated some of the calisthenics he learned from the military into his workout routine. It’s possible that he even drew inspiration from the Cold War HIIT workout, 5BX.

You can see these influences in the workout 007 does in From Russia With Love. In that novel (one of the 5 best books in the Bond canon), Fleming describes a short calisthenics routine that his secret agent does that’s capped off with a “James Bond shower”:

There was only one way to deal with boredom — kick oneself out of it. Bond went down on his hands and did twenty slow press-ups, lingering over each one so that his muscles had no rest. When his arms could stand the pain no longer, he rolled over on his back and, with his hands at his sides, did the straight leg-lift until his stomach muscles screamed. He got to his feet and, after touching his toes twenty times, went over to arm and chest exercises combined with deep breathing until he was dizzy. Panting with the exertion, he went into the big white-tiled bathroom and stood in the glass shower cabinet under very hot and then cold hissing water for five minutes.

A pretty quick and straightforward bodyweight workout, that we’ve illustrated for reference above. With one adaptation: Bond scholars and aficionados have never figured out exactly what Fleming meant by “arm and chest exercises.” We substituted chair dips; they work both the arms and chest. You can imagine in your own arm and chest exercise if you’d like. Performing that portion of the workout, and all the rest of them, in a tux with a pistol and martini glass on hand is optional, but highly encouraged if you’re an operative training to face the unique challenges of international espionage.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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We often think happiness will be found in the completion of a goal. We often think happiness will be found in ease and comfort. My guest says real joy is found in the journey rather than the destination, and that if difficulty and discomfort are part of that journey, that’s all the better.

Dr. Adam Fraser is a peak performance researcher and the author of Strive: Embracing the Gift of Struggle. Today on the show, we talk about what Adam calls the “strive state,” where we have to grow and be courageous to tackle a meaningful challenge, and why this state is the source of the greatest fulfillment in life. We discuss why we often resist embracing the strive state and what happens when we don’t have to struggle in life. We also talk about what successful strivers do differently.

Resources Related to the Podcast Adam’s previous appearance on the AoM Podcast: Episode #909 — Master Microtransitions to Improve the Happiness, Success, and Flow of Your Life * Sunday Firesides: Pursuit as Happiness * Sunday Firesides: No Bad Feelings * AoM Podcast #708: Overcome the Comfort Crisis * AoM Podcast #108: The Upside of Your Dark Side * AoM Podcast #868: Escape the Happiness Trap * “Pass the Parcel” episode of Bluey*

Connect With Adam Fraser* Adam’s website * Adam on LinkedIn * Adam on IG * Adam on FB

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The other day, I was staring blankly at my bookshelf in my office while thinking about something related to the Art of Manliness.

As I semi-zoned out, a book caught my eye: Fire in the Belly by Sam Keen.

I hadn’t cracked that book open in over a decade.

When I first started AoM back in 2008, I poured through all the books about manhood and masculinity that were out there. Fire in the Belly was one of them.

(Here are the 13 best books about manhood and masculinity that came out of that study).

Fire in the Belly was published in 1991 and is part of the “mythopoetic” male literature that was popular around that time. Think Robert Bly and Iron John and drum circles and the like.

In the book, Keen argues that one of the problems facing modern men is that they lack, well, “fire in the belly.” It’s a spiritedness that drives men to do great deeds. Thumos,in other words.

After I noticed Fire in the Belly on my shelf, I took it down and thumbed through it, recollecting that I considered the book a mixed bag. Keen takes a compelling idea — fire in the belly — and tries to make it jive with a New Age pony-tailed nice guy ethos. He wants men to have spiritedness, but in a non-threatening Age of Aquarius sort of way.

A lot of the mythopoetic men stuff is like that. It forwards some good concepts, but they’re often framed in a way that doesn’t resonate with me personally. I’m sure people have the same reaction to AoM. That’s how the let’s-talk-about-being-a-man cookie crumbles.

One section that I did think was interesting in the book is called “Recovering Your Personal History of Manhood.” In it, Keen lists a series of questions to help you reflect on and better understand your idea of manhood.

Again, the content is a mixed bag. In typical mythopoetic male fashion, there are snicker- and eye-roll-inducing questions like: “Trace the history of your penis. When did you first become aware that you had a dangling destiny?”

But there are also some questions that I thought were useful, which I list below.

They’ve given me some things to think about. They could be good conversation starters next time you’re hanging out with your bros. They might even be good to talk about with your teenage son.

Collect photographs from your childhood and use them to tell a story of what you learned about being a man in your family of origin.
What was your father’s ideal of masculinity?
Who were your early heroes and role models?
What books, movies, or television programs presented you with images of men you imitated?
What kind of ceremonies or symbolic activities marked your passage from boyhood into manhood?
Who initiated you into manhood? Father, brother, uncle, grandfather, teachers, religious leaders, friends?
How, ideally, would you initiate your son into manhood? What would you say to him about the difficulties and joys of being a man? What advice would you give him?
What men do you most admire today? Despise?
What is hardest about being a man? What do you resent?
How competitive do you feel with other men?
Are you afraid men would despise or take advantage of you if they knew your hidden weaknesses?
What do you enjoy about being a man?

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If you didn’t grow up doing your own laundry, once you headed out on your own, you probably just figured things out on the fly, hoped for the best, and have been doing things the same way ever since. But, while you may be getting the job done okay, you also might be making some mistakes that are costing you time, money, and cleaner clothes.

In this episode from the Art of Manliness department of essential life skills, we’ll cover all the things you should have learned as a young man but never did, and how to do your laundry effectively. Our guide is Patric Richardson, aka the “Laundry Evangelist,” a laundry expert who runs how-to-do-laundry camps, hosts the television show The Laundry Guy, and is the author of Laundry Love. Today on the show, Patric shares the one cycle and water temperature you should use for all of your clothes, exactly how much detergent you should be using (which is a lot less than you think), how often you should wash your clothes (which is less often than you think), why you shouldn’t ever use dryer sheets (and what to throw in your dryer instead), how regardless of what the tag says, you can wash anything at home (including a wool suit), how to easily get rid of stains (including yellow pit stains), and many more tips that will save you time, money, and hassle in doing your laundry.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: How to Do Laundry * AoM Article: The Simplifying Step Missing From Your Laundry Routine * AoM Article: How Many Times You Can Wear Your Clothes Between Washes * AoM Article: How to Get the Stink Out of Synthetic Workout Shirts * AoM Article: How to Remove and Prevent Yellow Armpit Stains * AoM Article: A Guide to Shrinking Levi’s 501 Shrink-to-Fit Jeans

Connect With Patric Richardson* Patric’s website * Patric on YouTube

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Laundry Love: Finding Joy in a Common Chore

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Life revolves around learning—in school, at our jobs, even in the things we do for fun. But we often don’t progress in any of these areas at the rate we’d like. Consequently, and unfortunately, we often give up our pursuits prematurely or resign ourselves to always being mediocre in our classes, career, and hobbies.

Scott Young has some tips on how you can avoid this fate, level up in whatever you do, and enjoy the satisfaction of skill improvement. Scott is a writer, programmer, and entrepreneur, and the author of Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery. Today on the show, Scott shares the three key factors in helping us learn. He explains how copying others is an underrated technique in becoming a genius, why, contrary to the sentiments of motivational memes, we learn more from success than mistakes, why experts often aren’t good teachers and tactics for drawing out their best advice, why you may need to get worse before you get better, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast Scott’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #557 — Grow, Adapt, and Reinvent Yourself Through Ultralearning * The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich * AoM Podcast #896: The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck * AoM Article: Want to Become a Better Writer? Copy the Work of Others! * AoM Podcast #927: Beyond Lazy Learning — The Keys to Gaining and Retaining Knowledge * AoM Article: The Secret of Great Men — Deliberate Practice * Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation* by Paul F. Berliner * “Stroke of Genius” by Scott Eden

Connect With Scott Young* Scott’s website

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The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

Thinking in Jazz : The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology Series)

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When you’re lifting weights, you might be thinking about setting a new PR or doing your curls for the girls.

But throughout history, philosophers have thought about physical fitness on a deeper level and considered how exercise shapes not only the body, but also the mind and the soul.

My guest today, Joe Lombardo, is a strength enthusiast who follows in this tradition and has explored the philosophy of bodily exercise in his writing. Today on the show, Joe and I discuss several different ways the philosophy of strength has been expressed over time.

We begin our conversation with how the ancient Greeks thought of physical training as a way to develop personal as well as social virtues, and why they thought you were an “idiot,” in their particular sense of the word, if you didn’t take care of your body. We then discuss early Christianity’s relationship with physical exercise and the development of the muscular Christianity movement in the 19th century. We end our conversation by looking at the philosophy of physicality espoused by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and what he had to say as to how strength training moves us out of the life of the night and towards the light of the sun.

Resources Related to the Podcast “The Soft American” by JFK * AoM podcast and article on the La Sierra P.E. program * AoM Article: When Christianity Was Muscular * The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton * Yukio Mishima * Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima * Joe’s writings on Quillette * Joe’s writings at the European Conservative*

Connect With Joe Lombardo The Ultraphysical* journal Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When you’re lifting weights, you might be thinking about setting a new PR or doing your curls for the girls. But throughout history, philosophers have thought about physical fitness on a deeper level. They considered how exercise shapes not only the body, but also the mind and the soul. My guest today, Joe Lombardo, is a strength enthusiast who follows in this tradition and has explored the philosophy of bodily exercise in his writing. Today on the show, Joe and I discuss several different ways the philosophy of strength has been expressed over time. We begin our conversation with how the ancient Greeks thought of physical training as a way to develop personal as well as social virtues, and why they thought you were an idiot, in their particular sense of the word, if you didn’t take care of your body. We then discuss early Christianity’s relationship with physical exercise and the development of the Muscular Christianity movement in the 19th century. We end our conversation by looking at the Philosophy of Physicality, espoused by the Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, what he had to say as to how strength training moves us out of the life of the night, and towards the light of the sun. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/lombardo.

All right. Joe Lombardo, welcome to the show.

Joe Lombardo: Hey, thanks so much, Brett.

Brett McKay: So you are a writer and a strength enthusiast who explores the philosophy behind strength training, bodybuilding, and fitness in general. Tell us about your history and your relationship with physical fitness.

Joe Lombardo: Sure. So I just turned 40. I grew up in North Jersey in a fairly pleasant suburb outside of New York City. Good childhood. I remember it being filled with biking everywhere, playing a lot of pickup games of basketball, football. Never joined the team sport, never really was into it. But I just enjoyed using my body in that way. And so in some ways, physical fitness was instinctive, and I think that’s something that’s definitely there when you’re a kid. You just use your body, and you can wake up from a dead sleep and run three miles. I remember that in high school and stuff. And definitely at 40, that’s not the case at all.

So I began to realize, even during the process, that as I was getting older and I went to college, went to grad school throughout my 20s and 30s, that some of that was starting to kind of disappear, some of that physicality of my body. I was finding myself sitting a lot more, whether it’s studying or working or anything like that. And I think the seriousness of adulthood unfortunately eclipsed the joys of childhood activity, to the point where really it was in my early 30s, I suppose, where I just looked and felt like garbage, to be quite honest. I put on a lot of weight. I started… I was always a cigar guy, but I was smoking way too many cigars. Definitely drinking a lot, and just becoming very irascible, not very pleasant to be around. I was doing my dissertation. Just not a really good person or human being. And I think a lot of that was just due to the fact that I wasn’t paying attention to a long-term goal that I had for myself, both maybe spiritually, as well as physically, if you will.

And I remember being a PhD student living in New York and being around all sorts of guys who also really didn’t care to lift or do anything. And they were very saturated with the ironies of life, always making very self-deprecating comments or even deprecating comments towards others. If there was a guy at the bar, it looked like he was jacked or something, someone would make some joke about it. There was just this bitter acidity, if you will, I guess, towards people like that. And it just felt very bizarre. I don’t know. It didn’t really leave me with a very good feeling about who I was becoming in that crowd, I suppose.

And so at one point, I was engaged to this woman. I’d broken it off. I was doing my research abroad. I was doing research in the Middle East. And I came back to Jersey, got a job, quit that, moved back with my parents and realized that I just was not doing very well. And I remember there were two instances. One, my mom was pretty disappointed. I remember one day she looked at me, and she just had this sigh of despair, like, what have I become? And that hurt, when your parents see you like that. [chuckle] The second one though was, I was working on third shift at UPS at a storage facility outside of New York. And I remember there was this guy. He must have been in his early 60s or so. Big, tall guy. I remember I accidentally crashed the Hi-Lo into all these sacks of dye, and they just went everywhere. It was like that Indian celebration with all the colors, except it was at work and it wasn’t supposed to be like that. And so this guy, palm to forehead, says, “Oh my God, what an idiot.”

So he helps me pick up these, I don’t know, 30, 45-pound sacks of dye to reload onto the Hi-Lo, and I was just having a hard time lifting them. Here I was at the time, I was, I think 33. And this guy was just taking one sack after another, just walloping them right out back onto the Hi-Lo like it was nothing. And he just goes over me and he says, “How old are you?” And I said, “I’m 33.” It’s like, “You are one weak 33-year-old. You really got to go to the gym.” This guy was unfiltered. And honestly, that was probably… Although I didn’t like to hear it at the time, that was the best thing someone could have ever said to me in my state, because that really stuck with me. And soon thereafter, I really did some thinking. And I had this dissertation, I wanted to finish it, I did not want to be one of these grad students who had a dissertation for years and years. I wanted to get this thing over with. And I wanted to do it in a semester, which is unheard of, typically, although it can be done, but that’s how desperate I wanted to be out of school and to really turn my life around.

So after that, I started going back to the gym and probably first time in, I don’t know, maybe eight, seven, eight years. In doing so, I started to cut down on some of the habits. I had no idea what nutrition was or dieting or anything like that. I just started lifting. And of course, I had no technique. I had no idea what I was doing. And so that’s when I started to go online and look up stuff in these different communities. And I very quickly realized that the people that were into stuff like bodybuilding or powerlifting, they just seemed to be… This almost saccharine sense of happiness, which I found so irritating at the time. They almost seemed too happy and positive.

And at the time, like I said, I was in this crowd where it was the brooding intellectual type. And I just didn’t like it. It didn’t really speak to me. But at the same token, the more I was exposed to it, the more I read up on their protocols and stuff, the more I realized, “I can see why they have this sense of mirth.” And so when I would go back to class or I’d go to some place where I was writing and maybe a friend was there, that sense of excitement just wasn’t echoed, I suppose. It’s kind of like you pick up a new hobby and you’re excited about it, but your friend’s like, “Okay, cool, man. That’s great.” They don’t really share the same excitement. That was kind of with me and lifting. But it felt like it was more than a hobby. It felt as if I was transforming my life. And I think a lot of guys feel that way when they start seriously lifting. They feel like they’re making this precipice of change in theirselves.

And I remember at one point, I was picking up some papers in my department in the city, and this one friend, young woman, saw me and she says, “Oh, I heard you started working out.” And she kind of rolled her eyes and she said something to the effect of, “Oh, that’s so hyper-masculine.” And it just… At the time, I was annoyed, but I laugh now because it’s such a silly term. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be more masculine than they are? [laughter] But at the time, it was seen as a derisive remark. And I thought, “This is… ” I realized I was coming to the point where these weren’t really my people, and I really wanted to unmoor myself from that particular coast of thought. And to really start to explore this other side. Even if I didn’t necessarily jive with the kind of happy-go-lucky attitude of the online bodybuilder community, I felt like it was a lot better than being miserable and being this kind of arrogant intellectual type, I suppose.

Brett McKay: Okay. So this experience you’ve had, you started feeling better, not just physically, but also, you can say, spiritually, emotionally. That caused you to start exploring, like, “What’s going on there? Maybe philosophy can help me explain why I feel better in my soul when I started exercising.”

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. It’s interesting. There’s a quote I remember reading a while ago by Emerson. It goes something to the effect of like, “God offers to everyone his choice between truth and repose. Take which you please. You can never have both.” And so I began to think, “Well, that’s interesting.” When I was reading and writing and studying and all that stuff, you always want to get to the truth of things, and that was a very active sense of exploration. It gave me a lot of pleasure. It still does. But at the same token, isn’t that physical fitness? Isn’t that, also in some ways, tending towards something that we could consider as the truth of the body or somatic truth if you want to be like, I don’t know, fancy about it. And the more I looked into it, I saw two camps at play. One was the kind of antibody body camp within academia. So these are people that are interested in the body, calling it stuff like the meat, for example, is a term sometimes they use in academia instead of the body, which is, again, weird and derogatory. And they just see the body as something that’s just there, and we can change it as we please, and we’re always reinventing ourselves, and it just seemed, to me, very banal. It was also a discussion mostly revolved around the sexualization of the body. It didn’t really have much to do with the active body, which is what I was interested in.

On the other hand, the place where I felt as though the body was being spoken of in terms that I can understand was Greek philosophy. What’s interesting about the Greeks, and in particular, Plato and Socrates and folks of that nature, Aristotle, of course, is that they never really wrote long treaties the way philosophers typically do on a certain subject. If you read the Socratic dialogues, most of the time, it’s about what is the law? What is it to be brave? Or what is courage? What is the truth? What is the best form of government? Like the Republic, and so on. But there’s only snippets or glances of what physical activity is and the importance of it. So it’s interesting. You read about it, Pythagoras, for example, was a trained boxer. Socrates was someone who trained every day. He was also a military veteran. Plato’s Academy was not just a bunch of guys in togas reading books or scrolls, maybe. They were actively engaging in wrestling and sports, sprinting, throwing javelin, all those kinds of activities.

Brett McKay: Of the writing that we do have from Greek philosophers on fitness, what were some of their underlying ideas? Let’s take Socrates. For him, what role did fitness or training play in living a virtuous life?

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. So Socrates was… Again, he didn’t write a whole lot about it. There are snippets in The Republic. Xenophon’s, Memorabilia, probably is where he talks about it a little bit more, although, again, that was more of a secondary source from his student, Xenophon. But really, it was… Physical fitness boils down to an ethical imperative or an ethical problem. To not train your body, to not purposefully exercise it with a goal of getting stronger or to even just look better is not just a problem where it’s an immoral problem, it’s actually, in some ways… Socrates was very blunt about it. It’s to be an idiot. The term idiot, of course, in English is… People immediately bristle at that because it just basically means you’re a moron. But actually in the Greek context, idiocy is very particular to a definition of being excessively interested in your individuality. And so people who are idiots are people who are not interested in helping others. They’re not interested in being good citizens. They’re not interested in helping their neighbor. They’re strictly concerned within the parameters and confines of their immediate pleasure. That’s what an idiot is. And everybody has these tendencies. An idiot can be the person who sits on the couch all day, whatever, eating chips and watching videos. An idiot also could be a person who moves out into the woods and decides to say, “To hell with society.” These are both categories of idiots.

So the body physical training is to not make yourself into an idiot for others, is to be useful towards others. And that’s where physical fitness tends towards virtue or wisdom or knowledge. Now, that said, in the final Socratic dialogue in Phaedo, for example, Socrates is about to drink his own death, basically exhorts the body, chastises it, saying, “Oh, the body is nothing but the prison house of the soul. The flesh is something that guides the soul by the nose, dragging around into overly-sexual activities or into slovenliness or gluttony or excessive predilection towards luxurious living.” But if you really do look at the entire corpus of works, no pun intended, you do start to see a much richer detail and relationship between the body and soul in the Greeks, where the soul is obviously the more important one, but the body is expressive of the soul. Not very politically correct, it’s like when we see someone who’s obese, and I speak as someone who was obese, by the way, unfortunately, the first thing that comes to our minds is, “Oh, that poor guy. There must be something wrong.” That’s basically what it is, because it’s an expression of the soul. So for Socrates, that’s why physical training is so important within his line of thought.

Brett McKay: Okay. Just to unpack that, so there is a personal element to physical fitness and how it can help you achieve personal virtue. And then there’s a social element. And to unpack that first part, how fitness or physical training can help you develop personal virtue, you talk about in the, Memorabilia, so this is written by Xenophon, he said this about physical fitness. I’m going to quote it. When you aren’t physically fit, this is what Socrates says happens. He says, “Who does not know that even here, many greatly falter because their body’s not healthy.” And he says, “And forgetfulness, dispiritedness, peevishness, and madness frequently attack the thought of many due to the bad condition of their body.” And it sounds like you experienced that. When you were a grad student, you felt that peevishness, dispiritedness, and that changed once you started physically training the body.

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. The body is not really meant to be a subject of ironic mockery or observation. The body really is meant to be something that we train, that we condition, that we discipline. In academia, I think, writ large, I mean, of course… Yeah, sure, there’s going to be the physicist out there who’s a PhD student who’s like, Jack. Okay, I’m not talking about that guy. I’m talking about your kind of run-of-the-mill, maybe a little socially awkward PhD student, which was me, maybe I still am, that doesn’t really feel very confident in the flesh. And of course, it’s not just a body problem, it’s a mind problem. I think of Jay Cutler. I think he’s four or five time Mr. Olympia bodybuilder. And he said… People always said to him, it’s like, “Oh, wow, look at his body.” He says, “The problem for me wasn’t the body per se, it started with the mind. I had to train my mind in order to train the body.” And I think that that really speaks, by and large, to cultivating a sense of personal ethic or personal virtue there, is that you want to… You could be very intellectually disciplined, for example. You could be very smart at calculating certain theorems, reading over certain methodologies, whatever discipline you happen to be practicing. But at the same token, shouldn’t that discipline extend into your very mortal being? What allows you to be on planet Earth in this moment is your body.

Martin Heidegger, infamous, I would say, probably philosopher, German philosopher of the 20th century, once said, “We don’t have bodies, we are bodily.” And I think that that’s the way to look at it, is that we exist in this body. We’re not just… As one of my friends once said, “We’re not a brain driving the meat robot, we’re the entire sum of our being there operating.” So I think the discipline that we lack for our bodies is obviously going to be a certain lack of discipline that we cultivate in our souls or our intellectual capabilities, I would say.

Brett McKay: I want to quote some more because you have some essays where you quote from Xenophon that I think are really interesting from Socrates.

Joe Lombardo: Sure.

Brett McKay: Talking about this idea of how exercise and physical health can help you attain personal virtue, he says this, “For those who maintain their bodies well are both healthy and strong, and many, due to this, are saved in a seemly manner in the contest of war and escape all the terrible things. Many bring aid to their friends and do good deeds for their fatherland and due to this are deemed worthy of gratitude, acquire a great reputation and obtain most noble honors and due to these live the rest of their life in a more pleasant and more noble manner and leave their children with more noble resources for life.” So exercise is nobility. It’s how you gain nobility.

Joe Lombardo: I agree. It comes down to an extension of, “The coward is the one who dies a thousand deaths.” I think lack of training, lack of that initiative echoes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that. And then also, the opposite of that, if you don’t keep your body in good shape… There’s this famous quote, I’m sure people… It gets posted on Instagram and the internet a lot, by Socrates. He says this, “It is also shameful, due to neglect, to grow old before seeing oneself in the most beautiful and strongest bodily state one might attain.” So I think it’s interesting, this idea that it’s noble to want your body to look beautiful. That was a very Greek ideal, and we kind of lost that today.

Joe Lombardo: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, the Western mentality or Western civilization is something that’s not necessarily strictly in the geographic parameters of Greece or Rome or Europe or the United States. I mean, I think one of the greatest exponents on what I would imagine is probably the best philosophy track on the active bodies by a Japanese man, an author, his pen name was Yukio Mishima. He was the person, who I think, in the Sun and Steel, this long essay, short book, depending upon what your definition of either, I suppose is, was thoroughly Western and Greek in his conception of the body in spite of being from East Asia. And I think the Greeks really spoke to this very biologically rooted instinct, at least in men. I can’t speak to women, but at least in men, to excel in their bodies, to be dynamic in their flesh and to look good regardless of their abilities or how they happen to have been born. I think that that instinct is there for each of us. And it’s something that the Greeks were maybe a little bit more successful than others at unpacking and exploring.

Brett McKay: And Socrates always talked about, as you train physically, it’s gonna help develop this more… I don’t know, I would say call them abstract virtues, conscientiousness, fortitude, discipline, moderation. By doing the physical act, it allows you to enact these abstract virtues that can play out in other parts of our lives.

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. One article that I had written last year or so was on this man, Ryan Belcher, probably still alive, I imagine he’s not that old, but he was an elite level powerlifter from Michigan. I can’t quite recall where. But anyway, there’s an interesting story that was picked up in the news maybe about five or six years ago, and that was around the time I started seriously training. And this guy’s going to pick up his kids. It’s late afternoon, it’s Valentine’s Day, it’s probably utterly freezing in Michigan at that point, I have no idea. And he passes by a car accident, I guess there’s a Cherokee that flipped over and there’s another car. And the man who had been in the flipped over Cherokee was pinned between a stop sign and the car itself.

And like everybody, we have this pedestrian instinct to, say, “Hey look, I’m gonna keep moving on.” It’s like the parable of the Good Samaritan. Before the Samaritan, all these other folks, even the holy ones, just walked on by. Belcher didn’t, he stopped, and he realized the man’s position and he managed to effectively partially deadlift a two or three ton vehicle off of this man to basically save his life. Now, of course, that’s an extreme example of strength that fractions and fractions upon a percentage of a population even possess. But I think that there’s something ethical and very “Greek” about that, is to use the body and the service to others to build that virtue, to express it, to not be an idiot, basically, in your flesh. I think Belcher exemplifies that almost perfectly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And so this goes to this idea that physical fitness allows you to develop those social virtues that we’re vitally important to Greek life. You talk about to be an idiot in Greek life was to be a very private person. And for the Greeks, the Polis was the main social, that’s how you organize yourself. And Aristotle talked about, “The only way you can actually develop yourself fully as a human being is to be actively engaged in Polis life.” And so Socrates says, “In order to be a useful active participant in Polis life, which is vital to our very existence as a Greek, you had to be physically fit.”

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. It’s something that nobody today wants to hear. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, when we talk about fitness, we think about it just for ourselves. You never hear people think, “Well, I’m being physically fit so I can be a better citizen of the country.”

Joe Lombardo: Sure. I think everybody in modern society, and maybe this is more of a commentary about modern secular society than anything else, but it’s sex appeal. First of all, we wanna look good, attract a mate. Maybe there’s a health aspect too, but I think first and foremost, a lot of guys wanna lift because, “Hey, I wanna look good for girls,” and that’s fine. We all start from there. I’m not necessarily against that, but I think that there are higher iterations of thought, the more and more you get into it. And I think that there is an interesting cleavage in between modern fitness or secular fitness where it is about discipline, but it’s a very kind of warp discipline of being antisocial. “Oh sorry, I can’t help you today. I’m training,” or “I have to get to bed at 8 o’clock. And I wake up and six and I go to work and I train and I don’t really care about my family and I don’t really care much else.” “Oh, maybe I should look into this drug now, this enhancement.” That’s kind of a form of decadence that I think is not particularly healthy and doesn’t really breed the virtue that I think the classical Greek, or even for that matter, theological Christian virtue would have the body prepared for.

Brett McKay: It’s another form of idiocy.

Joe Lombardo: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think there have been periods, in at least American culture, where this idea of physical fitness was seen as part of being a good citizen. Back in the ’60s, JFK, that whole, “We gotta get fit,” the soft American. And usually that happens during times of war where there’s this idea, “Okay, we might have to go to war against the Soviets, so we need to have a citizenry that’s able to do that.” And then you see that marshalling of we’re gonna get fit. We talked about on the podcast, the La Sierra High School, physical education program in the ’60s was a response to that call for physical fitness as to be better citizens. But typically it fizzles out. And we just go back to the… Just focusing on the self. So the Greeks physical fitness was a way you can develop your personal virtue, your social virtue, the mind and body were not separated. The Greeks thought they were connected, healthy mind and healthy body. What about the Romans? Did the Romans have a philosophy of physical fitness?

Joe Lombardo: The Romans, I think… Well, it’s interesting. I think when you talk to people who are… And I’m not an expert in Greek philosophy or something, but I think when you talk to people who are, the Romans are at bottom of the ladder there. The Romans didn’t have, I think a real complex understanding of just even an approach to philosophy relative to the Greeks. And I say that by the way, as someone who’s of Italian descent, so I hate to say it, but the Greeks were far superior than Romans were. For them, physical fitness was military training. That’s what it was tended towards. Yes, of course there were some that did become fascinated with the Grecian ideal of aesthetics and beauty and all that stuff. And they were often kind of taunted or made fun of in Roman society.

Romans saw the Greek understanding of fitness as effeminate, and Romans thought it was more proper to war to become proficient in javelin throwing and sword play and that kind of thing. I think in some ways it’s unfortunate because I think really the Greeks stand out amongst really all civilizations as being those who tended to take play in sports seriously. I mean, you think of the Olympic games. The Olympic games united entire Hellenic worlds, in fact, they induced peace treaties and ceasefires. If they knew that one boring sitting state had athletes from another come over, they would stop battle, they would ceasefire, they would let them pass the enemies, athletes, pass through unharmed. So it’s a real interesting ancient civilization that way where I think you see it in probably most other civilizations, maybe East Asian, Aztec or yeah, there was always sports and games, but the Greeks just… Or Romans for that matter.

But the Greeks just had a much more intense philosophical explication of that. So for me, the Romans never really impressed me. I know that they’re probably a lot of Ryan Holiday fans out there. I just can’t get into them. I think also too, because I tend to get my sense of ethics and purpose and stuff, I tend to see that more in my Christian faith, I guess. So for me, I’m not interested so much in what the stoics felt is how we should approach life. And so much as I feel I should be doing God’s will for my life and what he wants me to do. But again, I’m sure there are people who are Christians who love the stoics, and I’m happy to stand corrected, but I tend to see them as a little bit distant from my interests, I suppose.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The stoics would use fitness analogies to explain philosophy. They talk about you have to be a wrestler or a runner training, you have to take that same approach to your own philosophical development and training the soul. But yeah, they don’t say too much about exercise itself. And I like that idea that you talked about how the Greeks injected this idea of play into their fitness or their exercise. And Edith Hamilton wrote a really good book about the Greeks, where she captures this, I think really beautifully. She describes a culture that’s vital, it’s effervescent, it’s fun, but also serious at the same time. It’s just alive.

Joe Lombardo: For sure. Yeah, there’s something unique about, I think, the Greek experience and their natural curiosity that is really unparalleled. They didn’t look around the world and just adapt themselves to it. I think they tried to really see the world as a means to propel themselves to become better and more virtuous. So I think that’s fairly unique.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for you. Word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So in a couple of essays, you’ve talked about how you returned to your Catholic faith and you mentioned how you’ve been thinking about fitness and faith together. Let’s talk about that. What was the early church’s view on physical fitness and taking care of the body?

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. Pretty negative. Unfortunately, I will have to say that when the Greeks were becoming Christianized under the Byzantines, one of the things that I think was maybe Theodosius II, someone maybe could verify that. He basically had outlawed and banned the Olympic games because it was a form of pagan worship, but then it was, it had pagan rituals to it. So anybody kind of associated with the Olympic games or training and stuff like that… Even though Paul writes, for example, the testament about, “Faith is like running a race,” and talks with the bodies, the temple, Holy Spirit, all these things. Obviously they knew of athleticism in similar ways that the stoics were quoting about comparing training to train the soul. There was some of that a little bit to a less extent, certainly in the New Testament, but the early church was not really much of a fan of that to my disappointment, I think initially. Maybe there were some exceptions.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So speaking of Paul, I know Paul… Before he was Paul, he was Saul and he was a Roman citizen, and he was trained in Roman philosophy. So he knew stoicism and I’m sure he took these stoic lessons he took and these analogies of physical fitness and training his soul and brought that into his epistles. Another thing that was going on too with early Christianity, highly influenced by Platonism, particularly Augustine. So this idea that the soul’s the most important thing, the body, not so much. And that probably got mixed into that as well.

Joe Lombardo: I think too, what’s important though is that very early on, and even today, some would say, the Gnostic tendencies were very strong in the ancient world. This was one of the first heresies in the first century that the early church had to combat. Basically thinking that the material world was inherently sinful. The flesh was a sinful punishment. It’s all about kind of liberating the soul from the flesh. And so the church did have to very strongly rebuke this line of thinking that was coming out of Egypt at the time. And so they had to kind of pause the bodies, to be… As St. Thomas Aquinas says, “To be as good,” to have a body is great. We have to sanctify the body, of course, we have to do things with it.

We don’t just have a body and then that’s it. There are things that Christians have to do with their body. And of course a lot of it tends to be not just ritualism, but also sexual purity and things of that nature. But I think that as an extension of that, certainly physical fitness being helpful, carrying one’s cross, for example, if you will, all these kinds of physical and spiritual tasks, I think that you can easily draw from that a whole corpus of ideas that are pretty interesting to go down. So yeah, I mean, Christ wasn’t in his earthly ministry saying, “Hey, you gotta start lifting here,” nor were the apostles per se. But I do think at the same token, that a lot of the importance of the body that the Christians really used and fought against Gnostics, not just in Egypt, but also against the Albigensians in the 13th century in France, the Waldensians in Switzerland.

I mean, there were a lot of kind of heretical movements that cropped up that did kind of put the body or position the body as this just sinful carcass that we have. And we’re carrying around from a Catholic point of view. Even the kind of development of the rosary, for example, by St. Dominic was supposed to remind people of Christ’s incarnate earthly ministry, the crucifixion, the kind of corporeal sense that he was here and is on earth doing these things as his earthly ministry. Those were reminders and they were purposely used in some ways to counter the Gnostic effects in heretical viewpoints that were spreading in Bulgaria, Egypt, and France, and in parts of Switzerland at the time too. So I think that there’s a lot that Christianity says to the body, it’s just not in the sense of Socrates saying, “Hey bro, maybe it’s time to live.”

Brett McKay: Yeah. Christianity, it’s a incarnate religion. So yeah, God comes, takes on a physical body, he dies, takes up his body again, and glorifies it, resurrects and promises disciples the same will happen to you. Okay. So for early Christianity, physical fitness exercise, kind of like, “Well, body’s good and bad. We have to use it for good purposes, but you don’t need to be spent any time training it, specifically.” When do you see that change in Christianity?

Joe Lombardo: So I can’t speak to a long breadth of history. I will say that I think one of the more noteworthy periods that some folks know, Brett, I’m sure you’re aware of too, is this whole muscular Christian movement that was sort emerging in the latter half of the 19th century, particularly in the Anglophonic world, in England. At that point you’re at the higher golden arc of industrialization. Anglicans in England were noticing that the men populating their pews were fairly sallow looking, kind of exhausted, distancing, very virile, if you will.

And so there was this big discussion within high church Anglicanism about, “Well, what do we do about this? Men are kind of losing the very physical aspects or attributes that is to be a man.” And so there’s a lot of petty debate, I’d say mostly amongst the Protestant world. Interestingly enough, the kind of Catholic iteration comes from a man, St. John Henry Newman, who is Anglican. He converts to Catholicism and he wrote a book on the university in education. And one of the things he does is picks up on these debates and he says, “Part of a proper education is to have physical fitness and the spiritual importance of that.” So the 19th century was a time of spiritual and religious zeal. Of course, that’s when you have Coubertin who starts to resurrect in his idea the Olympic games. You start to have all these old-timey health clubs and strongman stuff. Eugen Sandow was around at the time. All these kinds of, in some ways, critiques of the effects of industrialization on man’s spirit and body. I think fitness is there, or that industry comes as an answer to that. And also to make a buck off of it too for that, no doubt.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So we did a whole mini book about the Muscular Christianity movement. It’s a really fascinating period. So yeah, you said late 19th century, it reached America and it kind of went on to the early 20th century. But a lot of things going on, a lot of different cultural currents just crisscrossing. And so yeah, Muscular Christianity movement, that’s what gave rise to the YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association. What was developed in the YMCA? Basketball was developed there. Volleyball was developed there. You see churches starting church leagues. Not just Protestant churches, but Catholic churches. You all see this in Judaism. A lot of synagogues were starting basketball leagues, boxing gyms would be at these places, and they were seen as a way not only to inject some more virility in the church, but it was a way… It was a missionary arm of the church, is how you could get young urban men who might’ve been committing crime. “Well, let’s get them to church boxing and maybe they’ll come to the pew as well.”

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. I think it’s an incredible part of history. I think there was one Canadian Presbyterian missionary out in the prairie area of Canada. And as he was going about, he’d see these prairie towns and these guys were hard drinking, that kind of stuff, that lifestyle and really started to kind of develop an athletic program for them. It wasn’t anything complicated, but it was similar to what you were saying. It was echoing the fact of, “Hey, let’s get you off the street, get you off the bottle, let’s do this,” and closely tie it to a sense of faith, not just like, “Hey, lift and look good, but this is [0:35:39.3] ____.”

Brett McKay: Yeah. You were supposed to exercise so you could be a better servant in the kingdom of God. And you started seeing these books come out. There’s this one book that I read, The Manliness of Christ, written in 1903, and it just talked about how Jesus was actually this really manly dude. He wasn’t this effeminate, kind of waify-looking guy you see in stain glass. He was actually really manly. And they’d look at the Bible and the New Testament stories and say, “Look how Jesus… “. He fasted for 40 days and then was able to battle the devil. And then he was able to just walk all over Judea and deal with thousands of people and healing them. And he had the stamina to do that. And he says, “We need to be like that. In order to do that, we have to exercise so that we can go forth and spread the gospel.”

And then he brought in the progressive movement into this, the social gospel where we had to not only develop ourselves spiritually, but the goal was to develop… It was to go out and change the world, bring the kingdom of God here on earth through missionary work, through eliminating poverty, increasing literacy, and improving health. And it’s sought not only to improve the health of people in society in general, there was also this idea that you as an individual needed to be healthy in order to do all this good work.

Joe Lombardo: That’s a fascinating time period.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay, so I wanna move on to… You mentioned this guy, Yukio Mishima. You mentioned him earlier, you’ve written some essays about him. This is a controversial figure, but if you’re in the body building world, you’ll probably come around to some Mishima quote, or you’re gonna see some guy, he’d be like, “Sun and Steel.” He wrote this treatise called Sun and Steel, and he explores his own journey into body building. Give us some background on Yukio Mishima.

Joe Lombardo: Sure, sure. So Mishima was a very interesting guy. He was, in some ways, born a little bit too young to participate fully in World War II as a Japanese, and that’s something that I don’t think he really let himself… He didn’t really forgive himself for that. I think he wanted to fight. As a student, I think he was working at some munitions factory in Japan, and basically saw his country’s defeat. I think for him, one of the turning points was when he noticed that on the day of defeat, it was a very sunny day, it happened to be beautiful outside. And in some ways, he became kind of angry at that because he felt like, well, how cruel it is the empire’s fallen, and again it’s so beautiful out. And I think that really stuck with him, this them of dark and light, the night time and the day time. These are certain themes that are very prevalent in his book, the Sun and Steel. Mishima was a complicated guy. He was a semi-enthusiast, although I think that’s kind of putting in a very hobby-like way. I think he was in fact a very brilliant supporter of Japanese imperialism and the kind pre Meijji modernization that a lot of his books often touched upon, mocking the ways that Japanese would attempt to mimic the West or bring Western traditions in. So he really held close to his heart the samurai tradition, and I guess he, at one point, maybe claimed some lineage to them. I’m not particularly certain if that is true or not, or if he was just saying that.

He was a man of a pretty small stature. I think he might have been 5’0″ or 5’1″, and he was very thin. And so he was also mocked for being so small. And so I think there was a lot that was building up into his interest in lifting and weights. I don’t think it was a pure intellectual adventure. I think it was also a confidence building exercise. But he was first and foremost a writer and poet. He was also gay, he was someone who certainly struggled I think with that in some of his books, that becomes evident. And all this kind of transpires for him, maybe in his 30s or so, probably at the same time I started lifting, maybe a lot of people do often. When he realized that, he became a man of the night. He was up late night reading, burning the midnight oil.

This is all things that he documents in the Sun and Steel. And for me, I think, to be self-referential, I suppose, I saw a lot of that when I was doing my PhD. It’s just a lot of burning the midnight oil, not really getting good sleep, up until 3 AM writing, drinking coffee, maybe having a cigarette or a cigar or what have you, and not really wanting to go into the day time, really to more enjoy the night and to find a lot of intellectual productive activities then. So I think for him, he was very much a creature of the night there. Eventually, I think he comes to a point where he wonders to himself, in the essay, “Why is it that with words they can soar to the greatest heights, and yet here my body still remains as it were in a room, not going anywhere?”

And I think he saw the dissonance between poetic flourish or metaphorical flourish against that of his body, which was just this very skinny thing. And I think he wanted to make that [0:40:41.3] ____. I think he wanted to kind of rebalance himself in that way. So for him, he was already very fluent, obviously, in writing prose, but he was not very fluent in what he would call learning the language of the flesh. And that is to train the body with steel or… Obviously in America, we call the iron.

Brett McKay: So there’s a lot of things there. So just to talk about it, he was a good writer. He was actually considered for the Nobel Prize in literature five times for some of the stuff he wrote. So he was a very good writer. This idea of the nocturnal life, I think that perfectly describes… It was the life of the mind. He talked about it just like, “I was just inside my head.” And it sounds like when you were a grad student, you were there, and your other grad students were just inside their head. And that’s as far as it went. Like you said, you could do these amazing lofty things with words, but then when you actually looked at your lived experience, it was like, “Oh, something’s not matching here, something’s off.”

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. For sure, for sure. I think for Mishima, there was something very noble. As I mentioned before, he’s very thoroughly Greek thinker when it came to the body. And a lot of his books, which are fantastic, I think he actually might be my favorite author, at least close to it, just incredible writer, or he’s just got very good translators, it could be both, but he talks a lot about the Greek understanding of the body. He has an incredible grasp on Western literature and culture. He’s East Asian, obviously, but he doesn’t really have a lot of reference to what Buddhism or Eastern thought might say to it. In fact, he even characterizes learning language of the flesh is almost kind of revivifying a dead language like ancient Greek or Latin. And he talks about sculpture, of course, that’s the eternal metaphor that every guy who lifts uses, is to be a self-sculptor, to carve yourself out of the flesh, the fat and all that stuff. So he has a very kind of interesting outlook. The sun is something that at first presents itself kind of as an enemy. It’s very merciless. The sun comes up, it doesn’t matter what happens or what is happening, it’s still out, it’s still a gorgeous day, whether it’s your country’s defeat, or whether you’re just this kind of slovenly grad student or a writer. There’s something that he wants to bear himself towards, to ascend to the heights, and I think that that’s kind of the metaphor of the sun. It reveals all.

In one of my essays that I write about, there’s something interesting about fashion, even athletic fashion, or athleisure, they call it, where there’s kind of a sleight of hand going on with some of these kind of trends. For Mishima, it’s like, yeah, exposing your body, its muscles, in the sunlight. People will see the imperfections, they’ll see the beauty of it, that what you brought from your training. And I think that there’s something incredibly invigorating about building a body and being able to look at. So I think that’s kind of what he meant by learning the language of the flesh, was to explore the threshold of his body through struggle, through pain. Exactly how the Greek sort of it in their concept like agon, or what we get, agony or agonistic, which of course is very negative in the English language. But agon meant struggle. It meant something that you encounter to reach a higher plane, to explore something else. And Mishima’s concept of pain is thoroughly Greek in that way.

Brett McKay: All right. So pain is how you learn, it’s like it’s a way to reveal who you are.

Joe Lombardo: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This idea of this language of the flesh, there’s intelligence inside our body, it’s not just in our head. You talk about how this is similar to what Nietzsche wrote in, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He says, “You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this, although you would not believe it, is your body and its intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.”

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. I think this goes back to a very banal truism that we all hear, it’s actions speak louder than words, I suppose.

Brett McKay: And then this idea… What Mishima found in the steel, or pumping iron and building your muscles, he had this to say about what it can do in training or helping you learn the language of the flesh. It’s a great quote. He says, “The steel gave me an utterly new kind of knowledge, and knowledge that neither books nor worldly experience can impart. Muscles, I found, were strength as well as form, and each complex of muscles was subtly responsible for the direction which it’s own strength was exerted much as though they were rays of light given the form of the flesh. For me, muscles had one of the most desirable qualities of all. Their function was precisely opposite of that of words.”

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. What an incredible quote. I mean, talk about the power of words right there. Yeah. I think he’s able to really leech a lot of what I think people who lift may not necessarily approach as a clear thought, sometimes maybe peripheral. I think sometimes our sense of talking about the body… To go back before about the online body building, where it just seems to be a very sugary sense of enthusiasm or optimism or a pop definition of discipline. I think these are our attempts, I think, to get close to what Mishima so brilliantly puts in that quote about muscles and what they are and what they do. The opposite of language, what the steel does for us. I think all these things are ways of… All of our thoughts about the body approximate, what I think Mishima put so brilliantly, and I think that’s why he’s probably the greatest exponent of a very Greek understanding of the body.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think there is a language of the flesh. Whenever you exercise, what I’ve noticed with strength training is that you develop a bodily awareness. I know when I’m getting to failure. And a lot of people, they might think they’re getting close to failure, but actually they’re not to failure, because they haven’t pushed beyond that initial feeling. But you can train, you can learn. Listen to your body, it’s like, “Okay, it might feel not great right now, but you can actually do three, four or five more reps if you wanted to.” You can’t get that without training.

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. Right. And pushing yourself beyond a self-perceived limitation. I think that that’s the hardest mental barrier, because really, for a lot of people, it’s about safety. If I get into this squat rack and this bar, what if I can’t make the last lift? Let’s say the pins aren’t adjusted properly, there’s no one to spot me. People immediately think of severe injury or death, and of course, that does happen. So I think kind of living on that edge of life, if you will, just in your garage squatting, is an experience that I think very few people will understand, maybe short of obviously serving in the military, or being a cop, or firefighter or something like that, or paramedic, I guess.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When I was really in powerlifting, I’d post videos occasionally of me squatting or something, like a PR. And people in the comments would ask, “What were you thinking when you were doing that?” And it’s like the only thought that’s going through my head is like, “Don’t die.” That’s all I’m thinking, “Don’t die.”

Joe Lombardo: Exactly. Exactly. But also in that moment of perhaps avoidable pre-death, you are also much more conscious of all the muscles you’re using. You realize, oh, wow, if I’m getting up out of a hole, for example, if my core is in tight, I’m not gonna make it out. So I think this bodily awareness, it expands. You begin to become more fluent, I think, in your body when you’re in these situations, which is why I do love powerlifting even though I’ve kind of departed from it for past couple of years now.

Brett McKay: And Mishima liked the Greeks, he thought that the body, how the body looked, it also revealed what your mind or your spirit was like as well.

Joe Lombardo: Yeah. For sure, for sure. And I think that whole beginning part of the essay where he’s emerging out of this intellectual cocoon of the night, if you will, I think that that’s just extremely apt, not just for a writer like him or a grad student like me or… I was a grad student… But really for anybody who just has that kind of profession where it’s a lot of sitting and thinking. I think a lot of people can identify that with that.

Brett McKay: So Mishima, he was a Japanese romantic, he loved samurai culture. He was also a nationalist who was extremely critical of the post war materialism that he saw in Japan and also the democratic government. And then after an unsuccessful coup, he attempted… Well, he committed seppuku. It’s harakiri, ritualistic suicide by disembowelment and then they chop your head off after that. And he was very famous for that death. But he thought a lot about death previous to it, so what role did death play in his philosophy of the body?

Joe Lombardo: It goes back to kind of this rejection of the idea of the body is not being an ironic or properly ironic subject object. If there’s something that Mishima muses about, it would be so bizarre and strange to have this flabby body upon death. So I think as far as I understand it, through his words, working out the body training was in some ways to prepare oneself for death, it was to fight to the death. There’s kind of this idea, I think in some Japanese literature, from what I understand, of the heroical loser. It’s the samurai that fights to last breath and then he dies by the enemy or something like that. There’s that theme, I think, that’s fairly rife in certain literature in Japan, from what I understand. So I think he was tapping into that aspect. It would just be kind of weird or silly to have this big, fat guy and he’s holding a sword, trying to defend himself. I think that there’s less of a romantic image versus a guy who’s jacked or something and he’s fighting to his last breath. I think that’s kind of what he’s getting there too. So to have a trained body is to prepare oneself for the final fight for effectively to fight to the death.

Brett McKay: Maybe Socrates would get that. Socrates said… Or someone said, “Philosophy is about preparing for death, preparing to die.”

Joe Lombardo: It is. And this is something that I think too. When you look at… Mishima’s writing here, when you look at the Socratic ideas as well, something that Martin Heidegger talks about in various areas being in time, is that we live in a society that avoids talking about death, we live in a society that just assumes that death isn’t there, that we’re about a full maximal enjoyment. And so what happens is that if we don’t have this clear understanding that we will die, and that’s something that we should think about, life becomes whatever you want it to become. It doesn’t have really a purpose, it becomes very amorphous, and in some ways it becomes very destructive, ironically. So I think for Mishima, having that clear aim of having a body to fight and prepare for death gives him that resolve and discipline to then train, similar to how the Greeks or even the Romans for that matter, to train to be able to fight the enemy, to go towards death. At one point, I kind of took a lot of these ideas so seriously. I ended up joining a fire rescue academy in Virginia because I wanted to really test my metal.

So I was probably the oldest guy in the academy at the time. I didn’t pass because I actually injured myself doing deadlifts, ironically. But I did notice something though, that in those paramilitary or somewhat martial environments, PT or going through evolutions, these were things that for the most part, we’re not fun at all. They were extremely taxing on the body, they were exhausting. And it wasn’t like when I was training where I can just stop and I can get a glass of water, something like that.

You had to keep going on and on. And so oftentimes, I would think about Mishima, most of the time thinking about God because I wanted to just get through the day, but there was something about that marshallness of the body that did kind of help push me through until eventually I did get an injury. So I often wonder what that’s like for other folks who went through those academies or are in the military and what their perspective is. And I think it mirrors closely to what Mishima goes about.

Brett McKay: So how has looking at exercise through a theological, philosophical lens, how has it changed how you approach your own training?

Joe Lombardo: Very simply, it’s just that the limits that I think I have aren’t really limits, they’re kind of reprieve on climbing the mountain, it’s to stop temporarily but realizing that there’s more to go. It’s to, in some ways, step out of the immediacy of my own comforts of kind of what Socrates would say about the flesh, where it’s always looking for the next high, if you will. And it’s to kind of pick myself up, physically pick myself up, but also spiritually or intellectually pick myself up to keep going a little bit more. And I think the quote that you had passed by Socrates or from Xenophon’s, Memorabilia, “It’s a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the strength and beauty of which his body is capable,” that famous bro-lifting quote. I think it’s amazing because I think that also gives me feel on sustenance to go on there. So it’s nothing incredibly worked out in my mind, it just provides [0:53:48.5] ____ of intellectual nourishment on days where I either do not want to lift or if I’m lifting, I want to stay safe and not lift as heavy.

I guess that’s, for me, what the importance of how that relates. And in terms of just bible in general, or how that might even… Or working out, I should say, works on the opposite in my life. My day job, so to speak, is that, yeah, you have to… It pushes you a little bit more, you’re healthier. I see a lot of folks get into just eating garbage food and stuff, and for me, it kind of trains me to be healthier at work, if you will.

Brett McKay: For me, it makes training… It just gives another dimension to your training, it makes it more fun, it gives it more texture, I guess. That’s what it does for me at least.

Joe Lombardo: I think so too. I think that it’s awesome to… I have two friends, Chris and Jason, we’re all the same age, all in our early 40s, married, kids, and all that. We go to the gym, train, and honestly, it’s better than meeting at any bar or craft brewery or having a cigar even. To me, that’s the most fun I’ll have with other guys, is lifting with them, joking, and there’s just something incredibly uplifting and pleasurable about that that I hope to continue on in my life as I get older.

Brett McKay: You got that Greek element of vital play.

Joe Lombardo: Yes. Yes.

Brett McKay: When you’re with them, it’s good.

Joe Lombardo: That’s exactly it.

Brett McKay: Well, Joe, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Joe Lombardo: Yeah, sure. So I co-edit an online journal of the active body, it’s called Ultraphysical… I think it’s ultraphysical.us, if I recall. We publish infrequently, but often quarterly, conversations from people who think about their bodies and the way that you have been thinking about it, the way I’ve been thinking about it, adding kind of an intellectual and philosophical capacity. It’s heterodox. Even though I, myself, are more conservative, the co-editor is liberal. So we have different perspectives as well, I think that are in there, because we don’t feel that talking about the body is necessarily the prominence of the left or right. It’s something that as human beings we all have. So we do that on a more, I guess, individual level. For me, Quillette… I’ve written about, I think, three essays for Quillette, an Australian-based journal. Recently in March, I came out with one from the European conservative, that’s another journal. And I think there might be something else, but I’d say Quillette, European Conservative, and of course, ultraphysical.us are domain clearing houses for all things Lombardo, I suppose.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Joe Lombardo, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joe Lombardo: Brett, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Joe Lombardo. He’s the editor of the online journal, Ultraphysical. You can check that out at ultraphysical.us. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/lombardo where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. If you’d like to be part of an organization that takes seriously both the practicality and the philosophy of physical fitness, consider joining The Strenuous Life. It’s an online/offline program that challenges men to be their best in body, mind, and soul. A new enrollment of The Strenuous Life will be opening up next month, go to strenuouslife.co and sign up for an email list to receive an announcement letting you know when enrollment has began. As always, thank you for the continued support, and until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to all listen to AOM podcast and put what you’ve heard into action.

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Existentialist philosophers were very big on the idea of free will.

They believed that while circumstances could limit your choices, there were always choices to be made.

Existentialists also argued that while many people make a show of loving freedom, most experience it as a dizzying burden and seek every opportunity to flee from it. To recognize the possibility of possibility, to countenance your personal accountability in every situation, to take radical responsibility for your life, is, in fact, a terrifying prospect.

Faced with this anxiety, people attempt to narrow the scope of their freedom, positing that they are bound by external circumstances to make certain choices; that in such and such a case, their hands are tied.

You might say, for example:

“I can’t change jobs.”

“I can’t lose weight.”

“I can’t break up with her.”

“I can’t go back to school.”

“I can’t move.”

Existentialists said that holding these kinds of beliefs constitutes the exercise of “bad faith.” It is an act of self-deception, an attempt to escape accountability for your actions by arguing that only one possibility is open to you.

The truth is that you can do these things, and an infinite number of others, but have decided not to. You are unwilling to face the pain necessary to catalyze a change; you like safety more than you dislike the status quo; you hold comfort as a higher value than courage; you feel the potential reward does not exceed the potential risk.

It’s fine to make these determinations — after all, these choices, too, are exercises of your agency. But to be made morally, they must be made honestly. You must face the fact that in choosing to deny your freedom, you have only demonstrated it, and if you are free to choose your current path, you are free to choose another.

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Huckberry’s Mother’s Day Shop. Mother’s Day is May 12. If you’re looking for a gift for the moms in your life, check out Huckberry’s special gift shop. A few standout items amongst their curated collection include this cabana robe for moms who plan on doing a lot of lounging by the pool this summer, classic Birkenstocks for moms who wore them with their socks in 1998, and this Western blanket from Filson for pistol-packin’ mamas.

If you need another Mother’s Day gift idea, pick Mom up a copy of Stacy Lyn Harris’ Love Language of the South. It’s a cookbook full of both tasty Southern recipes and stories from Stacy’s life and a culture of hospitality; it’s inspiringly wholesome. For a taste, check out this recipe for black pepper burgers.

Our Entire Society Is Becoming Addicted to Sports Gambling. Whenever I watch professional sports on TV, I’m always dumbfounded when I see online gambling sites as sponsors of the NFL, NBA, and MLB. If I remember my sports history correctly, we used to keep a significant distance between sports leagues and gambling to avoid scandals like the 1919 “Black Sox.” In this article, Alex Shephard argues that a partnership between professional sports and gambling has given rise to an even bigger scandal than thrown games: a huge rise in gambling addiction, particularly among young men. We’re already seeing an increase in bankruptcy and relationship problems due to online gambling. I suspect we’ll be reading more about the problems of online sports betting in the coming years.

Discover Your Genius: How to Think Like History’s Ten Most Revolutionary Minds by Michael Gelb. I first read this book back when I was in high school and a lot of the ideas have stuck with me. Gelb takes a look at 10 “revolutionary minds” from history like Plato, Shakespeare, and Thomas Jefferson and extracts lessons from them on how to think better. He also provides exercises you can do to think like these great individuals. This is where I first learned about Jefferson’s 10 rules for life. It’s a fun book that’s also edifying.

How Does Kodak Make Film? I’ve enjoyed the videos Destin at Smarter Every Day has made for the past 10+ years. A series that I found particularly captivating was his tour of a Kodak film factory and the complicated process that’s involved in making a roll of old-school photography film. One of my takeaways watching this series is that Kodak is more of a chemical company than a photography company. I never would have imagined the amount of chemical engineering that goes into making a roll of film.

Quote of the Week

When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take — choose the bolder.

—Field Marshal William J. Slim

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Now that warmer weather has arrived, mosquitos are beginning to show up as well.

I’ve done battle against these detestable bloodsuckers for some years now.

Thanks to treating mosquito breeding grounds (i.e., standing water) around my property, I’d significantly reduced the number of mosquitoes bugging us.

Then, early last summer, I came across a new weapon in my war on these infernal pests: the mosquito bucket.

Once I put a mosquito bucket on my property, the number of mosquitoes I encountered during the rest of the summer dropped to almost zero. We could enjoy being outside by the pool without getting bit or play pick-up basketball games in the driveway without constantly slapping away mosquitoes.

The mosquito bucket is cheap and simple but highly effective. Put one on your property and watch the mosquito population around your home dwindle to near extinction.

How to Create a Mosquito BucketThe mosquito bucket is a trap for mosquitoes.

To reduce mosquitoes around your property, you must disrupt their breeding ground: standing water.

Mosquitoes lay their eggs in standing water. Still, stagnant water provides mosquito larvae with the bacteria and microorganisms they need for food.

You can kill mosquito larvae by placing mosquito dunks in any standing water on your property. Mosquito dunks are cheap and safe and only kill mosquito larvae.

Eliminating and treating mosquito breeding grounds can go a long way in controlling mosquitoes around your home. But it’s not foolproof. Mosquitoes are wily suckers. They can find not-so-obvious places on your property to lay eggs. The bit of water that collects in the depression of a leaf is sufficient for a mosquito to lay its eggs.

With a mosquito bucket, you purposely create a hyper-attractive, but fatal, standing water environment to lure mosquitoes to lay their eggs there.

Creating a mosquito bucket is cheap and easy; here’s how to do it:

Get a 5-gallon bucket, fill it halfway with water, add grass, leaves, and other organic matter, and toss in a mosquito dunk.

Place your mosquito bucket near areas where you spend a lot of time outdoors.

That’s it. You’ve now created a weapon of mass mosquito destruction.

As the grass and leaves rot in the water, carbon dioxide is released, which attracts mama mosquitoes that are ready to lay eggs.

But what the mama mosquitos don’t realize is that you’ve put a mosquito dunk in this incredibly luxe mosquito birthing center. Any mosquito larvae that emerge from the eggs she lays in the mosquito bucket will die an instant and ignominious death.

No new blood-sucking adult mosquitos will emerge from the mosquito bucket. The mosquito bucket destroys the mosquito lineage that would otherwise haunt your property.

Every thirty days, add a new mosquito dunk and some fresh grass and leaves to your bucket.

One mosquito bucket should cover the average-size house lot in the United States. If you have a larger property, consider adding more mosquito buckets as needed.

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Jim VandeHei didn’t have an auspicious start in life. His high school guidance counselor told him he wasn’t cut out for college, and he went on to confirm her assessment, getting a 1.4 GPA at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and spending more time drinking beer than planning his career.

Eventually, though, Jim turned things around for himself, going on to co-found two of the biggest modern media outlets, Politico and Axios.

Jim shares how he started moving up the rungs of success and building a better life for himself in his new book Just the Good Stuff: No-BS Secrets to Success (No Matter What Life Throws at You). Today on the show, Jim shares the real-world lessons he’s learned in his career. We discuss the importance of matching passion to opportunity, making your own luck, surrounding yourself with the right people, keeping the buckets of your happiness matrix filled, understanding the difference between wartime and peacetime leadership, harnessing the energy of healthy revenge, and more.

Connect With Jim VandeHei* Jim at Axios

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White jeans are a nice way to mix up the sartorial staple that is denim.

Not everyone is a fan of white jeans on dudes, though. They don’t like how high maintenance they seem — that you have to keep them clean, since spills and stains will show up prominently on the white fabric. Or they think the look is too bold, too Euro, or too 80s.

It’s true that white jeans are harder to keep spotless, but you don’t avoid wearing a white dress shirt just because it’s prone to stains, do you? Just be a little more vigilant. The intentionality and non-practicality of white jeans are part of what makes them look a little dressier and more stylish and refined than blue jeans, which makes them a great choice when you’re putting together a “smart casual” outfit.

It’s true too that they’re different, but they needn’t be different in a way that conforms to off-putting fashion stereotypes.

If you’re an average guy who’s thinking about trying white jeans for the first time, you’ve already summoned up the confidence to wear pants that will draw some extra attention, and probably don’t want additional attention due to the fact that you’re not wearing them well.

If you want to wear white jeans in a way that will stand out, but only in a good way, just follow these guidelines:

1) Don’t wear them if you’re on the heavier side. Black is slimming. White is widening. White jeans on a big dude will just enlarge his legs and make him look bigger. Only wear white jeans if you’re on the trimmer side.

2) Choose white jeans with some heft and structure. There are other white pants out there — white chinos and trousers. But these are even harder to pull off than white jeans and can feel too country club and foo-fooey or too much like the garb of the neighborhood ice cream man or an asylum employee. It’s the texture and structure of white jeans that tip white pants into pull-off-able territory. So lean into that when choosing a pair, opting for ones that have some heft and structure (and won’t show your underwear).

3) Only wear them in the spring and summer. Some fashion-forward style gurus will tell you you can wear white jeans year-round. And it’s true that the “no white after Labor Day” rule has loosened in modern times. But white still reads very much as a warmer weather color. If white jeans attract attention in any season, they’re going to garner some head-scratching stares in the dregs of February. So only bust them out in spring and summer. It’s actually nice to have some seasonal clothes you take out and put away as the year progresses; it’s a hedge against the horror of the same old thing.

4) Wear them with a blue top. White jeans are a blank canvas; you can pair them with a top in pretty much any color, except white; a white tee or dress shirt + white jeans creates a look that’s too homogenous, unless you’re also wearing a colored jacket on top (but then you won’t be able to remove the jacket without turning the outfit into a full-on white-out).

While you can pair your white jeans with a variety of colors, for the most foolproof, eye-pleasing combo, wear them with a blue top. You’re simply inverting your standard blue-jeans-on-bottom, white-shirt-on-top look.

This pairing can take the form of white jeans + a casual shirt like a blue henley or a blue and white striped tee. A navy polo + white jeans is a particularly good look.

Another can’t-miss combination is white jeans + a blue button-down. Choose a light blue Oxford (you have added an OCBD to your wardrobe, haven’t you?) or a denim or chambray shirt.

To up the formality level, add an unstructured blue sports jacket over your lighter blue button-down. A brown jacket works as well.

Once you’ve gotten more comfortable wearing white jeans, you can branch out to different color tops. Neutral colors (black, brown, gray), earth tones (tan, moss, olive), and pastels (mint green, pink) work well. Black or another solid, bold color does create a starker look, but this kind of color blocking can also draw the viewer’s eye upward, making you appear taller.

As far as footwear for any of these get-ups goes, it’s fine to wear white sneakers, though this monochrome look can create the visual effect of your pants melting into your shoes; if you go white/white, it’s best if your shoes are a different tone than your pants. Navy canvas sneakers, like Converse, look good when you’re wearing your white jeans with a blue top. When you’re wearing a button-down shirt, nicer sneakers still work for a more casual look, but when you’re trying to smarten the outfit up, opt for chukka boots or loafers.

If, even with the above confidence-increasing guidelines in your back pocket, you’re still not ready to wear bright white jeans, but want to dip your toes into the world of light-colored denim, try a pair in cream or off-white instead.

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There are different philosophies one can have when it comes to money. Jared Dillian’s is built around eliminating as much anxiety around it as possible, so you hardly think about money at all.

Jared is a former trader for Lehman Brothers, the editor of The Daily Dirtnap, a market newsletter for investment professionals, and the author of No Worries: How to Live a Stress-Free Financial Life. Today on the show, Jared talks about the two biggest sources of financial stress — debt and risk — and how you can eliminate the stress they can cause. We discuss how three big financial decisions — buying a car, buying a house, and managing student loans — ultimately determine your financial health, and how to approach each of them in a stress-eliminating way. We also talk about how to minimize risk by creating what he calls an “awesome portfolio,” a mix of assets that has nearly the return of the stock market with half its risk. And Jared shares whether cryptocurrency fits into his “no worries” financial philosophy.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: Why and How to Start an Emergency Fund * AoM Article: Start a Debt Reduction Plan * AoM Article: What Every Young Man Should Know About Student Loans * AoM Article: How to Buy a Used Car * AoM Article: How to Negotiate the Best Deal on a New or Used Car * AoM Podcast #536: How to Achieve a “Rich Life” With Your Finances * AoM Podcast #963: Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend

Connect With Jared Dillian* Jared’s finance website * Jared’s personal website * Jared on X

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Download this episode.

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Igniting a fire requires more than a spark. Sweating through a bow drill session to create an ember or grinding away at a piece of flint to make a shower of sparks is wasted if you don’t have a good home for the flicker of fire that’s produced — a place that will help turn the spark into a real flame. Tinder bundles are that home.

Made of very dry, fibrous materials, a tinder bundle maximizes surface area and air flow to encourage combustion. Dried grass, shredded bark, and unraveled jute twine are perfect examples of tinder bundle-making materials. Those same materials are typically used in a bird’s nest, which means you could use an actual bird’s nest as a tinder bundle. But for the bird’s sake, learning how to make your own is a worthy skill. A bird’s nest tinder bundle is not only effective because of the materials it uses, but because of its shape. Larger materials on the outside, finer materials on the inside, and a hollowed out center to protect your spark or ember from wind and rain.

Once you’ve landed a spark in the bundle, loosely fold it closed (careful not to smother the spark); then gently blow through the tinder with almost closed lips. Once the bundle starts to ignite, move it to a pre-prepared pile of kindling.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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What does it mean to be cool?

Philosophers have long pondered this burning question.

There are different types of coolness, with some related to affect, style, or talent.

But one type is connected to how we show up in relationships. It’s the type that underlies the feeling expressed when you think to tell someone (or yourself), “Just be cool, man.”

When individuals embody this way of being cool, their relationships, instead of being marked by tension and drama, are filled with a paradoxical combination of easy warmth and abundant chill.

This kind of coolness requires the development of three qualities:

1) The ability to charitably tolerate the weaknesses of others. Everybody’s got their stuff. Everybody’s trying to get their needs met. Everybody’s just trying to make it in the world. The cool individual recognizes that everyone is imperfect, just as he is imperfect. In fact, he recognizes that the flaws in another are usually just the flip sides of their strengths, and he focuses on his gratitude for those strengths, rather than their cost.

2) The ability to diplomatically communicate how others’ weaknesses affect you. Rather than believing that other people should read his mind as to what’s bothering him, the cool individual openly talks about what’s on it. The majority of relationships end because people passively stew on their resentments until they air them at explosive, point-of-no-return levels, or because they walk away having never voiced them at all.

3) The ability to readily acknowledge your own weaknesses. The cool individual is entirely self-aware of his own shortcomings, so that when someone points them out, he’s able to say, “You’re absolutely right! I do do that! I’m sincerely sorry and will keep working on it.”

Tolerance. Openness. Self-awareness. Cultivate these qualities, and you, too, can reach certified cool dude status. Sunglasses recommended, but not required.

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Why Public Health Should Attend to the Spiritual Side of Life. When analyzing what factors affect health, researchers rarely factor in the influence of religion and spirituality. Tyler J. VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Harvard’s School of

Public Health, thinks this is a mistake, as this area of life can have a dramatic impact on physical and mental well-being. To wit, while much of the cultural discussion around increases in depression and anxiety, especially among young adults, has centered on smartphones, research has shown “that about 40 percent of the increasing suicide rate in the United States from 1999 to 2014 might be attributed to declines in attendance at religious services during this period. Another study suggested declining attendance from 1991 to 2019 accounted for 28 percent of the increase in depression among adolescents.” There are a lot of benefits to going to church — even when you’re not sure of your beliefs.

The Handbook of Style: A Man’s Guide to Looking Good. Back in the 2000s, Esquire would put out special editions of the magazine called The Big Black Book. My favorite part of these issues was their handsomely illustrated guides on men’s style. Back in 2009, they compiled all these guides in a book, The Handbook of Style. Despite being published over 15 years ago, the advice is still relevant today. My 13-year-old son has a burgeoning interest in upping his style game, and this has become one of his favorite bedtime reads.

Dial M for Murder.Compared to entries like Rear Window and Vertigo, Dial M for Murder is a lesser-known entry in the Hitchcock canon, but it’s still an enjoyable and suspenseful watch. A retired professional tennis player (Ray Milland) plots to kill his cheating wife (Grace Kelly), but his plans go awry. Adapted from a stage play, all the action, such as there is, takes place within the couple’s home, but despite the claustrophobic, dialogue-driven backdrop, the unfolding of the plot and the quality acting (especially from the detective who works the case) draws you in.

KIND Protein MAX Crispy Chocolate Peanut Butter Bar. We’re always on the lookout for new protein bars in the McKay household. They’re great for road trips or when you need some extra protein during your day to hit your protein count. The latest bar we’ve been enjoying is from KIND. Sweetened with low-calorie allulose, it doesn’t have the sugar alcohols of many bars that can cause digestional difficulties, nor the weird stevia flavor of bars like Quest. The first ingredient is peanuts, and these filling bars have a pleasant, nutty, almost granola-bar-esque taste.

Quote of the Week

A good man doubles the length of his existence; to have lived so as to look back with pleasure on our past life is to live twice.

—Marcus Valerius Martialis

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The cowboy is one of the great archetypes of American manliness.

He embodies many of the virtues Americans prize, such as grit, freedom, and independence. The cowboy followed a code of honor that, rather than being set by an aristocracy, came from the ground up and worked itself out within a posse.

While many of our ideas of cowboy life are a myth, the romantic ideal of it has had an outsized influence on American culture, including in language.

Because the cowpuncher was typically uneducated, he often used slang to communicate with his horse-riding, steer-roping peers.

In 1936, American folklorist Ramon Adams published an ethnography called Cowboy Lingo that focused on the unique language of American cowboys. In it, he cataloged the colorful slang words used by cowboys in the American West from the 19th century to the early 20th.

According to Adams, cowboy slang is characterized by the use of picturesque metaphors. The cowboy drew from his everyday life to create phrases and words that could be used more broadly. For example, a cowboy might have noticed that when a bull gets angry, it starts aggressively pointing its horns at would-be targets. To tell a fellow cowpoke to quit looking for trouble, a cowboy might say to his compadre: “Pull in your horns!”

Below, we give you a sampling of common cowboy slang words. You might notice some of them sprinkled in a Western movie or novel, and you’ll even notice some that are still in use today.

Ace in the hole. A hideout or a hidden gun.

According to Hoyle. Correct, by the book. “Hoyle” is a dictionary of rules for card games.

Acknowledge the corn. To admit the truth, to confess a lie, or acknowledge an obvious personal shortcoming.

Addle-headed. Empty-headed, not smart.

A hog-killin’ time. A real good time. “We went to the Rodeo Dance and had us a hog-killin’ time.”

A lick and a promise. To do a haphazard job. “She just gave it a lick and a promise.”

All-fired. Very, great, immensely; used for emphasis. “He is just too all-fired lazy to get any work done around here.”

Amputate your timber. Go away, run off.

Apple peeler. Pocket knife.

Apple pie order. In top shape, perfect order.

Attitudinize. To assume an affected attitude.

Bach (pronounced “batch”). For a man to keep house without a woman’s help.

Backdoor Trots. Diarrhea.

Ballyhoo. Sales talk, advertising, exaggeration.

Barber’s cat. Half-starved, sickly-looking person.

Barber’s clerk. A conceited, over-dressed fellow who tries to act like a “gentleman.”

Barkin’ at a knot. Doing something useless; wasting your time, trying something impossible.

Barrel boarder. A bum.

Between hay and grass. Neither man nor boy, half-grown.

Biggest toad in the puddle. The most important person in a group.

Biggity. Large, extravagant, grand, haughty.

Black-eyed susan. A six-gun.

Blue devils. Dispirited. “I have the blue devils today.”

Bone orchard. Cemetery.

Bosh. Nonsense. “It was absolute bosh what he said.”

Boss. The best, top. “The Alhambra Saloon sells the boss whiskey in town.”

Buckaroo. A cowboy, usually from the desert country of Oregon, Nevada, California, or Idaho.

Buckle to. Set about any task with energy and determination.

Calico queen. Prostitute.

California widow. A woman separated from her husband, but not divorced. (From when pioneer men went West, leaving their wives to follow later.)

Cash in. To die.

Catch a weasel asleep. Referring to something impossible or unlikely, usually used in regard to someone who is always alert and seldom or never caught off guard.

Clodhopper. A rustic, a clown.

Cotton to. To take a liking to.

Cowboy up. Toughen up, get back on yer horse, don’t back down, don’t give up.

Dash. Euphemism for damn.

Dead-alive. Dull, inactive, moping.

Didn’t have a tail feather left. Broke.

Docity. Quick comprehension, usually used in a negative way. “He has no docity.”

Don’t care a continental. Don’t give a damn.

Dry gulch. To ambush someone, especially when the ambusher hides in a gully or gulch near a road and jumps the passersby.

Dude. Commonly, the term applied to an Easterner, or anyone in upscale town clothes, rather than plain range-riding or work clothes.

Dull music. A term applied to anything tedious.

Eatin’ irons. Silverware.

Eventuate. To issue, come to an end, close, terminate.

Exfluncticate. To utterly destroy.

Fair to middlin’. Feeling pretty good.

Fandango. From the Spanish, a big party with lots of dancing and excitement.

Fat in the fire. To have one’s plans frustrated. “If I don’t get this job completed, the fat’s going to be in the fire.”

Fine as cream gravy. Very good, top-notch.

Fix one’s flint. To settle a matter.

Full chisel or full drive. At full speed, executed with everything you’ve got.

Get my/your back up. To get angry. “Don’t get your back up; he was only joking.”

Get the mitten. To be rejected by a lover. “Looks like Blossom gave poor Buck the mitten.”

Go boil your shirt. Take a hike, get lost, bug off.

Goney. A stupid fellow.

Gospel mill. A church.

Gull. A cheat, fraud, or trick. Also, refers to a stupid animal or person, one easily cheated.

Gully washer. A hard rain.

Hair in the butter. A delicate situation.

Hang up one’s fiddle. To give up. The opposite would be to “hang on to one’s fiddle.”

Hard row to hoe. A metaphor derived from hoeing corn, meaning a difficult matter or job to accomplish.

Hay seed. Derogatory term for a farmer, also called a hay shaker.

Heeled. To be armed with a gun. “He wanted to fight me, but I told him I was not heeled.”

Hitch in the giddy-up. Not feeling well, as in: “I’ve had a hitch in my giddy-up the last couple days.”

Hobble your lip. Shut up.

Hot as a whorehouse on nickel night. Damned hot.

Iron horse. A railroad train.

Keep that dry. Keep it secret.

Keep the pot a boiling. Keep it going.

Leap the book. An illegal or false marriage.

Lickfinger. To kiss ass. Also called “lick-spittle.”

Like bricks. Quickly, with energy.

Like a thoroughbred. Like a gentleman.

Lunger. Someone with tuberculosis.

Mail-order cowboy. This was a derogatory term used to chide tenderfoot, urban “cowboys” who arrived from the East all decked out in fancy but hardly practical Western garb.

Mormon tea. Liquor.

Mouth-bet. A gambling man who only gives verbal promises to pay.

Mush-head. A stupid, witless fellow.

Old stager. One well initiated in anything.

On one’s own hook. On one’s own account, for himself. “He is doing business on his own hook.”

Paintin’ his nose. Getting drunk.

Peckish. Hungry.

Petticoat pensioner. A man who lives on a prostitute’s earnings. Also called a Sunday-man.

Piece of pudding. A piece of luck, a welcome change.

Poppet. Term of endearment. “Come along, poppet.”

Pop your corn. Say what you have to say; speak out.

Porch percher. A town loafer.

Pull in your horns. Back off, quit looking for trouble.

Rib. Wife.

Ride for the brand. To be loyal to the ranch and rancher that pays a cowboy.

Sand. Guts; courage; toughness. “You got sand, that’s fer shore.”

Saphead. Blockhead, a stupid fellow.

Savage as a meat axe. Extremely savage.

Sawbones. Surgeon.

Schruncher. One who eats greedily.

Set her cap for him. To direct her attentions to him, to endeavor to win his affections.

Shoot the crow. Obtain a drink in a saloon and leave without paying.

Skin a razor. To drive a hard bargain.

Slipe. A distance. “I’ve got a long slipe to go.”

Sodbuster. Farmer.

Sold his saddle. Disgraced.

Someone to ride the river with. A person to be counted on; reliable; got it where it counts.

Sonofabitch stew. A cowboy concoction that contained cow heart, testicles, tongue, liver, and marrow gut.

Spooney. A stupid or silly fellow, also a disgusting drunk.

Sure as a gun. Absolutely certain.

Take the starch out. Extinguish one’s conceit, widely applied to weakening, refuting, or deterioration.

Ten-cent man. A small, narrow-minded, trifling man.

Texas cakewalk. A hanging.

Three ways from Sunday. Moving quickly; high-tailing it out of there.

Tin-horn lot. A term used to express contempt towards a small-minded or mean fellow.

Tin. A slang word for money. ‘Kelter,’ ‘dimes,’ ‘dough,’ rocks,’ and many other words are used in the same manner.

Twisting the tiger’s tail. Playing Faro or poker. Also referred to as “bucking the tiger.”

Treed. In difficulty, cornered, unable to do anything.

Wheel-horse. An intimate friend, one’s right hand man.

Definitions taken from Legends of America’s dictionary of Western slang. Used with permission.

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Have you ever noticed the guy in a fighting stance on the Art of Manliness logo? That’s not just some random symbol; it’s an actual dude: John L. Sullivan, the greatest bare-knuckle boxer of the 19th century.

While most people think bare-knuckle boxing came to an end during Sullivan’s era, in fact, it never entirely went away. In his new book, Bare Knuckle: Bobby Gunn, 73–0 Undefeated. A Dad. A Dream. A Fight Like You’ve Never Seen, Stayton Bonner charts bare-knuckle boxing’s rise, fall, and resurgence, as well as the improbable story of its modern chapter’s winningest champion. Today on the show, Stayton describes bare-knuckle boxing’s incredible popularity a century ago, and why gloved boxing took its place while bare-knuckle got pushed into a shadowy, illicit underground. Stayton takes us into that secret circuit which still exists today, revealing the dark, sweaty basements and bars where modern bare-knuckle fights take place and the ancient code of honor that structures them. And Stayton introduces us to a dominant figure in that world, Bobby Gunn, an undefeated bare-knuckle fighter who combines a love of faith, family, and fighting and has helped turn bare-knuckle boxing into what is now the world’s fastest-growing combat sport.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM series on honor * AoM Podcast #41: Honor in the Civil War — The Gentlemen & The Roughs * Podcast #54: The Life of John L. Sullivan * AoM Podcast #111: Why Men Fight & Why We Like to Watch * AoM Article: America’s First Popular Men’s Magazine — The National Police Gazette * Videos of Bobby Gunn fighting and talking about bare-knuckle boxing * Tom Molineaux * John L. Sullivan * The Sullivan-Kilrain fight * William “Bill the Butcher” Poole * Gangs of New York bare-knuckle fight scene * Far and Away* bare-knuckle fight scene

Connect With Stayton Bonner* Stayton on X * Stayton on LinkedIn

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Have you had two different experiences, one where you were dumped by text message, and one where you were broken up with in person? While similar sentiments were probably conveyed in both instances, the context of each likely changed your feelings about the experience and even how you then assessed and now remember the relationship.

This example begins to get at what media philosopher Marshall McLuhan meant when he famously said “The medium is the message.”

When we think about the message of a communication — the aspect of it that can change a recipient’s thoughts and behavior — we typically think of the content of the communication. But McLuhan argued that communication is shaped not only by its content, but by its character. It’s not just what is said that’s important, but how it’s said. This how, the medium of the message, can, in fact, be the most influential part of communication; it is the message.

The character of a message changes minds just as readily as its content. A medium’s message, McLuhan said, is the “change of scale or pace or pattern” it introduces “into human affairs.” The nature of communication mediums changes the structure of how we think and do things, and have second and third order social, psychological, and religious effects. While we often think of the technology of communication as neutral, it isn’t; it invariably alters individual psyches and collective culture.

This makes intuitive sense when we think about how the medium of digital communication — which often takes the form of bite-sized, endlessly varied, always-on nuggets — has shrunken and fragmented attention spans and altered the pattern and pace of our habits. No one on social media is explicitly saying, “Don’t read for as long” or “Be more distracted when you’re talking to someone,” but the medium has conveyed that message, and we have absorbed it, nonetheless.

The shortened, rapid-fire character of modern media affects not only our cognitive and real-world rhythms, but also the significance we lend to the content it carries.

In describing the structure of broadcast news programs in 1982’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, media theorist Neil Postman noted that “the average length of any story is forty-five seconds” and observed that “While brevity does not always suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does. It is simply not possible to convey a sense of seriousness about any event if its implications are exhausted in less than one minute’s time.” Likewise, we unconsciously feel that anything that can be conveyed in a 60-second TikTok video or short tweet can’t really be that important.

But arguably the most significance-draining aspect of the medium of modern media is the way that each piece of context-less content is sandwiched between other context-less and entirely unconnected pieces of content.

Postman said the phrase “now … this” was one of the scariest phrases in our language. He was again referring to news programs and the way the phrase allows newscasters to abruptly segue between two completely unrelated stories, as in “The missile strike killed over 100 civilians. Now … this. A koala bear was born at the zoo!”

Postman said: “The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously.”

The “now … this” phenomenon has only accelerated in the modern age. As you scroll through social media, you see a reel of a funny sports blooper, followed by someone making nachos, followed by someone explaining a Bible verse, followed by someone working out, followed by someone giving relationship advice, followed by a car crash.

Because the medium of social media presents all of these things on an equal plane, each seems to possess equal significance. A great flattening takes place. The baser content isn’t brought up to the loftier’s level; the loftier content is brought down to the base. Everything begins to feel as if it has equal weight . . . and then begins to feel weightless. Everything starts to seem equally trivial. Everything starts to seem equally unworthwhile.

Because the medium inescapably remains the message, it’s worth considering not only what you say, but where you say it, and not just what messages you choose to consume, but how you consume them.

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Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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Do you sometimes walk to another room in your house to get something, but then can’t remember what it was you wanted? Do you sometimes forget about an appointment or struggle to remember someone’s name?

You may have chalked these lapses in memory up to getting older. And age can indeed play a role in the diminishing power of memory. But as my guest will tell us, there are other factors at play as well.

Charan Ranganath is a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and the author of Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters. Today on the show, Charan explains how factors like how we direct our attention, take photos, and move through something called “event boundaries” all affect our memory, and how our current context in life impacts which memories we’re able to recall from the past. We also talk about how to reverse engineer these factors to improve your memory.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: 10 Ways to Improve Your Memory * AoM Podcast #546: How to Get a Memory Like a Steel Trap * AoM Podcast #750: The Surprising Benefits of Forgetting * Reminiscence bump

Connect With Charan Ranganath* Charan’s website * Charan on IG * Charan’s faculty page

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Of all the places to take a tumble, an underground subway platform is one of the most dangerous. What makes a fall onto subway tracks so fraught is that it’s often not easy to get out on your own. Steep, tall walls can make it nearly impossible for an average person to get off the tracks before the next train approaches. And, because subway systems are built for one purpose and one purpose only, the tunnels don’t have a lot of extra space built in just for the heck of it. Subway cars can whip through sections of track where they only have inches of clearance on any given side. So, how should you respond if you do happen to fall (or get pushed) onto the tracks? Use the tips above to survive.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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In the present age, the word “cult” is used in a pejorative sense.

But it didn’t always carry this negative baggage.

Cult derives from the Latin cultus, which was originally an agri-cult-ural term referring to the cultivation of the land. The Romans, who participated in both state and private cults, used the word to describe the committed cultivation of the rites, habits, and sacrifices attendant to showing religious reverence.

In subsequent centuries, cult retained this religious connotation but was also used more generally to mean “devoted attention to a particular person or thing.” People spoke of those who belonged to “the cult of the soul,” “the cult of honesty,” “the cult of creativity,” “the cult of strenuosity.”

Today, we could all benefit from joining a cult in this older sense of simply being unwaveringly, even “excessively,” dedicated to a set of beliefs and practices. In a world in which healthy, virtuous ways of life are uncommon and unconventional, maintaining one’s ideals requires a single-minded, almost religious devotion.

It takes fanatical commitment to make exercise a daily non-negotiable when life rarely necessitates getting out of your chair.

It takes fervent dedication not to overeat when food is available at every time and in every place.

It takes zealous conviction to stay in a marriage when everyone around you seems to be throwing in the towel.

It takes unrelenting vigilance to think for yourself when the landscape is full of regurgitated, algorithmically-driven chatter.

In a world where standard norms tend towards deterioration and decay, you cannot hope to swim upstream with a middling, milquetoast allegiance to healthy habits and higher principles. Staying sane requires going at things a little crazy; adopting stand-apart beliefs, bright-line rules, and sacrosanct rituals; embracing the cult of fidelity, reviving the cult of strenuosity, and joining the cult of life.

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If you read most first aid guides, the last step in treating someone who’s gotten injured or sick is always: get the victim to professional medical help.

But what if you found yourself in a situation where hospitals were overcrowded, inaccessible, or non-functional? What if you found yourself in a grid-down, long-term disaster, and you were the highest medical resource available?

Dr. Joe Alton is an expert in what would come after the step where most first aid guides leave off. He’s a retired surgeon and the co-author of The Survival Medicine Handbook: The Essential Guide for When Help is NOT on the Way. Today on the show, Joe argues that every family should have a medical asset and how to prepare to be a civilian medic. We discuss the different levels of first aid kits to consider creating, from an individual kit all the way up to a community field hospital. And we talk about the health-related skills you might need in a long-term grid-down disaster, from burying a dead body, to closing a wound with super glue, to making an improvised dental filling, to even protecting yourself from the radiation of nuclear fallout.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Article: How to Use a Tourniquet to Control Major Bleeding * AoM Article: The Complete Guide to Making a DIY First Aid Kit * AoM Article: How to Suture a Wound * AoM Article: What Every Man Should Keep in His Car * AoM Article: Improvised Ways to Close a Wound * AoM Podcast #869: The Survival Myths That Can Get You Killed With Alone* Winner Jim Baird

Connect With Joe Alton* Doom and Bloom website * Doom and Bloom on YouTube * Doom and Bloom on FB

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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you read most first aid guides, the last step in treating someone who’s gotten injured or sick is always get the victim to professional medical help. But what if you found yourself in a situation where hospitals were overcrowded, inaccessible, or non-functional? What if you found yourself in a grid-down, long-term disaster and you were the highest medical resource available? Dr. Joe Alton is an expert in what would come after the step where most first aid guides leave off. He’s a retired surgeon and the co-author of The Survival Medicine Handbook: The Essential Guide for When Help is NOT on the Way. Today on the show, Joe argues that every family should have a medical asset and how to prepare to be a civilian medic. We discuss the different levels of first aid kits to consider creating from an individual kit all the way up to a community field hospital. And we talk about the health-related skills you might need in a long-term grid-down disaster from burying a dead body, to closing a wound with superglue, to making an improvised dental filling, to even protecting yourself from the radiation of nuclear fallout. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/medic.

All right, Joe Alton, welcome to the show.

Joe Alton: Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, Brett.

Brett McKay: So you are a retired obstetrician and pelvic surgeon, and you’ve stayed busy in your retirement by helping families prepare medically for long-term disasters. How’d you end up doing that?

Joe Alton: Well, Brett, I was exposed to disaster medicine very early in my career as a volunteer DMAT member, Disaster Medical Assistance Team member for the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew down here in South Florida in 1992. And that led me, like many Floridians honestly are now, to become what you would call a hurricane prepper. And that means instead of the three days worth of food and supplies the average American has on hand, we’d have a couple of weeks worth. But I really have to say, it was Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that opened my eyes to medical preparedness, serious medical preparedness. I mean, it was then that I saw what happens when the ambulance isn’t just around the corner. And that’s not because we didn’t have hundreds of medical personnel converging on the Gulf Coast. I knew it was going to be a big disaster. So that was going on even before the storm was completely through. But the providers and the technology were just not able to get to victims due to all the flooding. I figured that any number of disasters could actually do that. An earthquake, for example, could make roads impassable and people couldn’t get to you, for example.

Really, any disaster with enough casualties can overwhelm the existing infrastructure. If there’s a three car wreck in a two ambulance town, I mean, you could have a bad outcome. So I figured if I can teach the average person how to deal with injuries and illness and put some supplies in their hands, well, then maybe some tragic outcomes might be avoided. So my mission became to place a medically prepared person in every family before a disaster occurs.

Brett McKay: All right. So you co-authored a book called The Survival Medicine Handbook. And this is a tome of a book. It is, I think it was 700 pages. You co-authored this book with your wife, who’s also a nurse practitioner and a midwife. And your goal is, again, it’s a comprehensive guide to medicine in a situation where it’s a grid down situation. You might not have immediate medical access. And so how to manage things you might encounter in that period. I’m sure a lot of people have read first aid books on, say wilderness first aid or maybe prepper first aid, but you argue that those books will only get you so far in a long-term disaster scenario. How so?

Joe Alton: Well, there are a lot of books on first aid, even for wilderness settings. And many of them are really quite good, but they fail to take into account that in a true survival, long-term survival scenario, there’s no access to medical medicine, modern medicine, rather, for the foreseeable future. And that becomes a problem when every chapter of your first aid book or your medical book ends with, and get to the hospital or, and seek a qualified medical professional. Because in real terms, no such thing exists when the medical infrastructure is collapsed. And so our entire book is pretty unique in that it assumes that some disaster has happened and you no longer have the option of accessing modern medical care, maybe for the long run. And the book addresses the average citizen in plain English, as if they were the last line of defense when it comes to your family’s wellbeing in a disaster. That’s because it’s a real possibility.

Brett McKay: So a lot of the first aid books out there are geared towards taking care of the situation so you can get to medical help. But in a long-term disaster, professional medical help may not be available. So what considerations do you have to think about to deal with that situation?

Joe Alton: Well, let’s take an injury for an example. I mean, what is the difference between today and in a grid down situation when it comes to encountering somebody who’s sick and injured? Let’s say even in the normal times, let’s say they broke their leg in a car accident. What do you want to do? You want to stabilize that person, do what you can for them and get them to the nearest medical asset. That makes sense. So you’re not a doctor after all. And once you ship the patient off, your responsibility has been discharged and you’re on your merry way. But what if that’s not an option? I mean, grid down, your responsibility extends from the point of injury to full recovery. Will you be able to provide daily wound care for this person? Would you be able to identify if a wound infection is occurring? Would you have a plan of action to rehab that person and get them on their feet again, make them productive as a group member as they most certainly would have to be in an off-grid disasters type setting. I mean, you have to do this and that’s the difference. You have to be ready to be the highest medical asset left and be effective in that role.

Brett McKay: And another thing we’re going to talk about in detail later on in a bit, another thing you have to think about as the medical asset in your family is you have to think about preventative medicine. It’s just basic things you don’t have to think about because we live in the 21st century, sanitation, hygiene, things like that to prevent sicknesses.

Joe Alton: You’re absolutely right. The important thing to know is that you can prevent headaches and heartaches as the family medic if you have a plan to enforce sanitation and water disinfection and food preparation, things like that. And these are sort of part of your job description.

Brett McKay: As part of the medical asset. So one of the things you talk about in the intro of the book in the first few chapters is before you start thinking about buying medical gear, I know guys love that. It’s the one thing I think a lot of guys love about survival or prepping is buying gear. It’s fun. But you say before you even do that, there’s two things you probably need to think about in order to become a medical asset. One is establish a community, put yourself in a strong community and then two, get your personal health in order. So first, how can being part of a robust community help with medical care or healthcare in a long-term survival situation?

Joe Alton: Well, I mean, as a community, let’s take some examples from TV. Have you seen the show, Alone?

Brett McKay: Yes.

Joe Alton: Well, there you go. In Alone, they drop you off alone with some supplies, probably as much as a person might be able to reasonably carry a fair distance. And they plop you off into the off-gridest of off-grid locations. And that person has to find water. They have to make it drinkable. They have to find food. They have to cook it properly. They have to make a shelter. They have to worry about personal protection. They have to deal with injuries and other medical issues that occur along the way. I mean, how much easier would it be to have a group of like-minded individuals with that common goal of surviving? I mean, these guys survive and they survive for an extraordinary amount of time in my opinion, but it’s not for a normal lifetime. I mean, they’re there for 90 days. And when at the end of the 90 days, they look pretty ragged. I mean, a person can survive alone for a time, but you can see on Alone, on the show Alone, that it’s a pretty miserable existence. So that’s something that I think is so important to have people that can thrive.

And how about skills? I mean, I have medical skills, but I have very few tactical skills. For example, I probably couldn’t take a part in AR-15. I probably wouldn’t be very good in a firefight, but there probably are people that would be. And having people with skills that can complement each other would make for the possibility of the existence that could make a village.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Now we had an Alone contestant, a winner on the podcast a while back ago, Jim Baird.

Joe Alton: Oh, yeah.

Brett McKay: Him and his brother won. And one of the big takeaways from that conversation I had with him and also watching the season that he was on, on Alone, it was amazing to see how little tiny injuries could just devastate you. That actually ended people’s time on the show. You just, you sprang an ankle and then you’re done. Even having another person there, it wasn’t enough. You needed to have maybe two or three more people because that one person couldn’t do, you’re basically working for two people now and they just didn’t have the energy for it.

Joe Alton: Yep. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So have a community. What about personal health? What parts of your personal health should you have in order in order to be ready medically for a long-term grid down scenario?

Joe Alton: Well, what I hope people are doing now, I mean, eating a healthy diet, exercising, staying away as much as possible from addictive substances that wouldn’t be around in a grid down situation, like maybe alcohol or tobacco on top of that. And this is something that people are surprised to hear me say is that you should be using the high-tech available today to fix issues that would be a problem off the grid. I mean, if you have a bum knee, that’s not going to be very helpful off the grid and would certainly not increase your chances of survival. So see an orthopedic surgeon now, get it fixed. You have terrible vision, consider a LASIK procedure. For example, I had classic near sightedness blind as a bat. I got it done probably 30 years ago, probably one of the first people to get it. And now I have the eyes of an eagle, a very old eagle now, I’ll admit, but still.

Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, get your health in order. So you’re ready for that scenario. So you talk about becoming a medical asset in your family. And when you’re a medical asset, it means you take on different responsibilities. You’re not just providing first aid, but there’s other roles you take on. We mentioned one of them. You’re sort of the chief sanitation officer of your family. Any other responsibilities that a medical asset needs to take on in order to take care of the healthcare of their family?

Joe Alton: Well, Brett, I mean, of course you’re the chief medical officer, but you’re gonna have to deal with a lot of other things too. You’re gonna have to deal with dental issues as well. Now, I’m not talking about a week without power due to a storm. I’m talking about a long-term scenario, a few months off the grid. And you’re going to wind up facing as many patients on a daily basis with dental problems as medical problems. And you’ll even have to extract a tooth now and then. 90% of dental emergencies in the past were treated that way. I’m not talking about Roman times. I’m talking about the early to mid 20th century. And you’re going to be responsible also for making sure we talked a little bit about water disinfecting. You got to make sure water is disinfected properly. Foods prepared and cooked thoroughly. Human waste is disposed of safely. These are things that are part of your job description. You’re also the chaplain. You may not have to deal with bullet wounds on a daily basis. I hope, at least I hope not, but you’re going to see anxiety and depression on a daily basis of some major disaster hits.

You need not only to be sympathetic and understanding, but you’re going to also have to be confidential as well. Nothing loses the trust of a group than a non-confidential medic, somebody that doesn’t keep people’s private things to themselves. Well, one other thing, you also actually going to be the quartermaster who decides when your limited supplies of medical items are dispensed. It’s not a committee decision. It should be the medic.

Brett McKay: You also have in here medical archivists. So you got to keep track of people’s issues.

Joe Alton: Yes, that’s right. That’s another thing. And that’s something you should probably do now. If you knew who was going to be in your extended family or in a mutual assistance group, you should probably interview them beforehand and keep everything of course, confidential, as I mentioned, and you should definitely learn what their medical issues are, what their family history is, what vices they might have. I mean, are they heavy smokers or do they drink a lot? And you should try to sort of steer them in the direction of getting healthier. And the fact that you would know what medicines, let’s say a person is on, would help you sort of encourage them to get more of these medicines, stockpile some of them so that you don’t have somebody with very high blood pressure showing up at your retreat with their last three days of blood pressure medicine and that’s it.

Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s get into skills and gear here. Do you recommend people like just a lay as an average citizen, take any sort of formal intensive training to get ready for a grid down disaster scenario when it comes to healthcare?

Joe Alton: I think a good start is just go through your municipality and see what courses that they have available. Many times they have free courses available for first responders or CERT members, Community Emergency Response Team members, other people that will be willing to volunteer in disaster settings. Sometimes they’ll have stop the bleed courses. Seek these out. And like I said, they might even be free. And there are, of course, a lot of wilderness first aid courses out there, a lot of companies that put forth these kinds of courses. You can find them online. I’m sure your experience may vary with them, I have to say. But all of these courses do prepare you to do what you need to do, stabilize and transport victims in normal times, but not so much for long-term care. So therefore, what I recommend to people is that when you take each class, think about what you would do if transport to a modern medical facility was not an option. What would you do with that particular individual, that particular sickness or that particular injury? And that’s the key is to have the right mindset and a plan of action in situations where you’re not going to be able to take that person to a higher medical asset.

Brett McKay: One of the most useful things that I’ve done, I really enjoyed it, too. I need to go back and do it again. I took like a first aid CPR certification class. It was done at one of the community colleges here in town. It was a couple hours, I believe. But not only did you do the CPR, but they just went over like basic first aid, what to do about burns, head injuries, big wounds. And I remember I learned a lot. But what I realized is that knowledge and like we actually practice some skills, like how to how to bandage things and things like that. But I realized that stuff, that knowledge and those skills, they degrade if you don’t use them. Like you have to constantly refresh yourself on it.

Joe Alton: You’re absolutely right. We teach wound care class and wound closure class. And I teach people how to suture close simple wounds and things like that. And more importantly, when to close a simple wound and when to leave it open and provide open wound care. And I always make sure I give people extra sutures to take home and they keep their instruments so that they can practice. Now, whether they all do or not, that depends. But you have to develop muscle memory for just about any of these things. And the more you do it, the more effective you’ll be at.

Brett McKay: Okay. So take some sort of class that’s out there. You can find different things out there, but as you do kind of keep in mind, well, how can I take this further and how would I apply this in a long-term grid down situation?

Joe Alton: It’s a mindset.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk about medical supplies now. And you’ve got, I love this section because I love checklists. You have these checklists for different medical kits. You think people should start building up so they’re ready for that long-term situation. The first kit is an individual first aid kit. What are some of the things that you would recommend people keep in this individual first aid kit? So every person in your house or your group is going to have one of these, correct?

Joe Alton: Right. Ideally, you would want everybody in the group to have it. In the military now, everybody carries, every infantryman, for example, carries an IFAK kit and the medic carries a more advanced kit that allows him to put an IV in and things like that. But these guys will carry things like a tourniquet to stop bleeding, maybe a burn gel and dressings, elastic wraps to wrap orthopedic injuries, things like that. And I think that that would be a good start for a first aid kit. We have a number of kits on our store that we designed that are very compact, but they manage to deal with a number of different issues that are most commonly seen. So an individual first aid kit, I think for every member of the family would be good, especially in situations where you have to be on the road. So it just depends on the situation. Does your 10-year-old have to carry a first aid kit to school? No, probably not. But in a true long-term disaster situation, which is what I write about, this is something that everybody should have.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This is good just to have if you go on a hike or backpacking trip. I always carry one and it’s got things, band-aids, got Benadryl in there. We got pain relievers, so Tylenol, Advil.

Joe Alton: Right. Moleskine, things like that.

Brett McKay: Moleskine, things like that. And you also have, I thought it was in raw honey packets. What’s the raw honey packets for?

Joe Alton: Raw honey has actually very strong and actually accepted medically antibacterial properties. And so you can use raw honey for a number of things. And of course you can use it to treat hypoglycemia, low blood sugar cases, but you can also put it on burns and other injuries and it actually would have an antibacterial effect.

Brett McKay: That’s interesting. Alright, so that’s the first kit. Start building up a basic individual first aid kit. The next one is the vehicle kit. What’s the vehicle kit for and what kind of stuff are you keeping in that?

Joe Alton: Well, the vehicle kit is more extensive and it really allows you to carry things that you might not be able to carry. Like in other words, a sturdy pair of boots if you found yourself stranded in a blizzard or something like that. And you have to actually go somewhere, although of course it might be better to stay in the car. It has changes of clothes, it would have foldable, multi-tool, shovels, tow ropes, flares, rock saw, things that would help you in situations where you’re in your vehicle. And also it has more of every item.

And the reason why is because you’re not physically carrying this. And so you have the ability to deal with not only things, but do you deal possibly with multiples of things, more than one injury?

Brett McKay: Yeah, we got an article on the site about what to keep in your car. And people are like, that’s kind of a lot of stuff. Like, when would you ever use that? It can come in handy. So my dad, I remember it was this probably 30 years ago. He was driving from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque on I-40 and in the middle of the Texas panhandle. He got stuck in a blizzard, and he was in his car, I think, for a while. I mean, I think it was like a day, but it was well stocked. He had blankets and he had some stuff. And so he was able to ride it out until he’s able to get towed out.

Joe Alton: It’s something that can be a serious thing if you have to make the right decisions. There’s one guy who got stranded. He decided he was going to go for help, and they found him the next morning and he did not make it.

Brett McKay: All right, so the third kit is the family kit. You’re going to keep this at your home, or if you got a retreat somewhere, you’re going to keep it there. And this thing is massive. This was a lot of fun to look through because it’s so big. You break it up into different modules. So what sorts of modules do we have in this family kit?

Joe Alton: Well, of course, we talked about dental situations, so a dental module would be there. You would have, depending on the makeup of your group, you would have maybe a module for a delivery of a baby. You might have your surgical modules with the ability to do more extensive things like sewing some tendons together, things like that. A lot of daily wound care items, because this is something that you can easily do if you are able to stay in place.

Eye care modules, things like that, in case there’s foreign objects. And a lot of people, when they do activities of daily survival that they’re not really accustomed to, they can injure themselves. And so you could be chopping wood and you wind up getting a splinter in your eye. So we have the ability to deal with foreign objects that could get caught in your eye. Just a lot of different things. We’re beginning to get to kits that have hundreds of items. And indeed some of our biggest kits in our entire line will have hundreds of items in them.

Brett McKay: Yeah. One potential module you might have, if you’ve got small kids, a pediatric module. So you have… Make sure you have medications for them.

Joe Alton: Yes, exactly. So you have all sorts of stuff in these situations. You want to have maybe growth diaries, and then you can identify basically how well your young people are doing by, if they’re growing in a normal fashion. And so that’s something that they might have. You have a lot of different sized things, like a CPR mask for an infant would be different than a CPR mask for an adult, and blood pressure cuffs, things like that. So there are a lot of items that are sort of size differential.

Brett McKay: So the fourth kit is… This is if you’re going all in, you want to actually have a field hospital. What sorts of items are in this kit?

Joe Alton: Oh, boy, that’s… I got about 10 pages of…

Brett McKay: I’m looking at it right now.

Joe Alton: And each page has 50 items each. So, I mean, you would have everything from, gosh, biohazard suits to operating tables to… I mean, we’re talking about a real mash unit kind of deal.

Brett McKay: When would you want to do that? I mean, you have a question in the book that you try to answer, which is, how much is enough? When do you know? Well, yeah, maybe I’m good at the family kit and I don’t need to go field hospital.

Joe Alton: Well, I think that it’s probably very few people that will reach the point where field hospital is what they’re going to wind up being responsible for. So I think that people really just need to get the items that are going to be able to deal with the most common issues that they’ll expect to be confronted with. And what we have here, I mean we’re talking about medical…

I’m looking through my list right here because I don’t remember all 500 things that are on here, but we’re talking about automatic portable defibrillators, and we’re talking about oxygen concentrators and things like that. Things that you would need if you had… You would have to have some solar power, for example, to get enough power to, let’s say, do some oxygen concentration. These are some of these items that you’re going to need a little power. And if you’re ready to put together a field hospital, you will have taken power into account. So at least if it’s solar power.

Brett McKay: Another point you make, kind of a broader mindset point you have to take when it comes to medical care in a long term disaster scenario, is that you have to adjust your expectations of what’s possible in this situation. I think today we take it for granted. It’s like, well, if something happens to me, I just go to the doctor and I’ve got medicine. Or if even like a serious thing happens. It’s not so serious. There’s things we can do. I mean, I guess what I’ve read is that people are surviving gunshot wounds more often because our skill and technology has gotten better.

One of the points you make is that in a long term situation, long term disaster situation, the best you can do is maybe just make people feel comfortable and you might not be able to cure them. You have to be okay with that.

Joe Alton: We have to be very, very realistic about what can be done and what can’t be done. In an off grid situation, you can expect a gunshot wound to the abdomen or a gunshot wound to the chest to probably have a 70% death rate. And it’s a terrible thing to say and certainly not the case today with modern medical facilities, but it’s what’s going to happen. And if it’s not the actual trauma from the injury itself, it’s the chances for infection.

Again, remember, your skin is your armor, and so once you have breached that armor, you have that chance of infection.

Brett McKay: That brings up a point I want to talk about. In the book, you talk about how you can plant a garden with herbs and plants that have medicinal purposes. But what do you do about prescription medicines like antibiotics for infection? Is it possible to stockpile antibiotics?

Joe Alton: There are some companies that are beginning to offer, “emergency antibiotic packs” with a televisit, as long as you fill out an application and do a televisit. So these are becoming more popular. They’re just popping up now. And I believe that there’ll be a thriving industry in this probably in the next few years, or at least until the state medical boards get a hold of them.

Brett McKay: What about special medications like insulin? Say someone’s diabetic, is that tough to stop…

Joe Alton: Brett, insulin like that are basic insulins like regular and NPH are actually over the counter in most states these days. You can get them as you need them.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. We’ve talked about supplies, we’ve talked about getting some training, hoping we can talk about some specific skills here in a bit. But I want to turn to this idea of hygiene and sanitation, because if anyone’s read any history book about war, war up until the 20th century, really, most of the casualties came from poor sanitation. Men were dying of dysentery, cholera, things like that. In a grid down scenario, there might be a situation where you no longer have flushing toilets. So you have to think about human waste. So what do you do about human waste in a grid down scenario?

Joe Alton: Well, human waste should always be buried if you don’t have a toilet. Now, if you have a toilet, you have two gallons of water. Even if it’s wastewater, you can actually flush that toilet, if it’s the typical configuration of the toilet in your home today, by flushing two gallons of water into the toilet, and it will actually flush. But if you’re out, let’s say you’re on the road, you’ve been driven from your home, you’re on the road, human waste, you’re in a retreat in the forest somewhere. Human waste should be buried no closer than 200ft away from the main water source to prevent contamination.

And the medic, if you’re in a community, let’s say you’re the medic for an actual community, that you should have an idea of how to put together a community latrine. And so the dimensions would depend on the length of time, of course, that’s needed, and the number of people in your group. If you had a small group, an 18 inch wide by about 24 inch deep, several feet long, that probably would work pretty well. A longer trench in some kind of partition sheet. If your group is big enough to have more than one person using it at a time, and you keep the dirt from the trench that you dug in a nearby pile with a shovel, and that covers up the waste after each use. So that’s something that would be good for dealing with human waste.

But you’re absolutely right about the importance of sanitation. In the past, entire populations succumbed to diseases that cause diarrhea, leading to severe dehydration. You mentioned cholera and dysentery. Those can be very, very lethal. I mean, more soldiers in the civil war died of these issues than from bullets or shrapnel. So, again, this is probably the third or fourth time we’ve mentioned already, but the medicine has to strictly enforce water disinfection, proper food preparation, waste removal, and more, or infection’s gonna run rampant among other people.

Brett McKay: So here’s something I’m sure people may have thought about if they’ve kind of do these hypotheticals in the head of, like, a long term disaster scenario where you’re not gonna have access to the comforts of modern life for a long, long time. What if someone dies? What are you supposed to do with the body? ‘Cause, like 200 years ago, when someone died in your family, you knew what to do today, you call the funeral home and they take care of everything, so what are you supposed to do?

Joe Alton: This is something that most people have absolutely no idea what to do, and you have to figure out what to do with the body. The body should be placed in a body bag. These are currently commercially available, by the way, and some of them actually have handles to facilitate transport. But if you don’t have these, you can found items like plastic sheeting, bedsheets from abandoned homes. These are things that you can use. Choosing a place to bury them is important. I mean, it should be at least 200 to 250 meters. That’s about 800ft from any water that might possibly be used by the living. That’s very important.

But the funny thing is that if you can properly dispose of the dead body and in that type of location, it doesn’t have the ability… It doesn’t really cause major contamination of the environment. So that’s something that’s important to know.

Current grave guidelines suggest a depth of about five or 6ft. That’s 1.5 meters, and preferably that amount of space above the water table. In some places, that’s really difficult to achieve. Down here, our water table is like 6 inches below the ground. That’s why you see in this area, the older crypts are either concrete and they bury them in the ground, but they’re buried in concrete. Or if you go to places like New Orleans, you see that everybody’s buried above the ground.

Now, you also use something called quicklime, and that’s calcium oxide. It’s been used in burials for centuries, but people think that it’s being used to speed the decomposition of the body, but it actually preserves tissue, which is funny. So why is it useful? Because it actually eliminates odors that attracts flies and animals. And there’s actually a formula for that. 1 kg or 2.2 pounds of lime per 10 kilograms of body weight.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned dental issues. You might not think that you have to take care of a dental problem in a long term situation, but you would. I mean, what are some of the dental issues you think are treatable in a long term disaster scenario?

Joe Alton: Well, the grand majority of dental issues can be dealt with by extraction, as I mentioned earlier, including dental decay. You also need to learn how to fasten loose crowns, replace loose fillings, lost fillings, broken teeth, knocked out teeth, tooth abscesses, gum inflammation. These are all things that you can easily deal with, with the right materials, but you can definitely take care of dental decay. Lost fillings you could put together with clove oil, two drops of clove oil and zinc oxide powder will put together a hardening filling material, material type of cement that will last for a pretty good long time. And you can use it to fasten a loose crown. And of course, you need to have extractors. There are extractors for different types of teeth. And there are probably as many different types of extractors as there are different types of teeth.

Brett McKay: And of course, with dental care, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cures. You gotta take care of your teeth. Even in a grid down scenario, brush your teeth, floss, and avoid all the sugary foods. Don’t eat too much of that raw honey. Save that for the…

Joe Alton: Right. Save that for the hypoglycemic patients.

Brett McKay: So in this book, you cover lots of different medical care skills that you think someone might need to know in a long term situation. What do you think are, let’s say, five skills you recommend people prioritize learning, either because, they’ll be especially common or because they’re not the kind of things you’ll have time to consult a textbook or your book to figure out how to do it in an emergency.

Joe Alton: Oh, boy. Well, I have like 40 that I’d like you to know. But if I had to pick five, of course there’s a sexy, sensational stuff like how to stop bleeding. That is, of course, always very important. And there’s a whole stop the bleed apparatus nationally that will help you learn that. But we, of course, we talk about it in detail, and we also describe all the different tourniquets and things like that in our book. And they’re good. There are pros and cons.

You can also expect to deal with a lot of orthopedic issues, ankle sprains and things like that. Of course, there’s going to be respiratory infections. That’s going to be very, very common. Open wounds. You need to deal also how to deal with significant problems. I think the ability to use a flexible splint to treat a bunch of different issues, I think that’s a big skill. The use of cravat or bandana or triangular bandage. We have videos to show you how to use that in seven different ways for different things. I think those are good skills to have because they handle different issues. So I think that’s important.

And of course, as we mentioned before, maybe the most important skill to obtain is how to enforce preventative strategies against injuries and illnesses. And to do that, you have to actually get the knack of observing simple things, such as whether your people are dressed for the weather and enforcing the use of hand and eye protection during work sessions. I mentioned you can really save yourself a lot of headaches as a medic and maybe heartaches if you can keep these people protecting themselves and adequately dressed for the weather. I think that’s important.

Of course you want to be able to treat burns and you want to treat open wounds, and you want to be able to close a wound if you absolutely have to. But more importantly, you need to know when to close a wound and when to not close a wound because you can lock in some bacteria and could cause some major issues.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we got know how to stop a bleed, know how to use different splints for orthopedic bone breaks, sprains and things like that, knowing how to do preventative medicine, and then how to deal with wounds. On the wound issue, like how do you know if you should leave a wound open or close?

Joe Alton: Well, if a wound is obviously dirty, in which a lot of wounds will be, if you happen to be on the road and in a situation where you know you’re not in a controlled environment, your wound is going to be dirty. And so if it’s an animal bite, for example, it’s going to be dirty. And these days, in the emergency room, they’ll actually close some of these wounds, but off the grid, you should definitely not close them. You should treat them as an open wound and just make sure that you keep them clean.

And we talk about, in detail, the ability to perform that daily wound care. And that’s why I think that’s a very important thing to be able to know. And you have to be able to identify when a wound is not getting better and when you may need to break out that last course of antibiotics that you’ve been saving, because in the end, that could save a life.

Brett McKay: Can you superglue a wound shut? I’ve seen that. If you decide you can shut this wound, can you superglue it?

Joe Alton: Yes. I’ll tell you exactly how. Take superglue, and I want you to use the gel version of it. It’s much easier to handle than the liquid version. So take superglue gel and hold the skin together, the cut edges of the skin together, and apply a line of superglue gel on top of that, holding it together, wait for it to dry, and then take a second layer, put a line over the first layer, and then go around and around in an ever widening oval for a couple of layers, then hold that together and let that dry, and then do it one more time on top, and even a little wide, a more widened oval. And if you do that and allow that to dry properly between, then you should do okay… It should be okay.

And the good news is that we’ll have an even less chance of infection than if you close it almost any other way because of the sealing of the superglue. Now, if you don’t hold the skin together properly, you’re going to put superglue in between the two cut edges, and they’re not going to close. It’s something that you just have to do. You might practice on, make a cut in a pool noodle and try to practice with that until you get that right.

Brett McKay: In regards to tourniquet, I know tourniquet use can be controversial. People have really strong opinions about it. Anything people should take into account when they think, well, maybe I need to use a tourniquet here?

Joe Alton: Well, I’ll tell you that the committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care has stated recently that if you know that you’re dealing with heavy bleeding, that the use of a tourniquet should be your first course of action. Normally they recommend direct pressure with your hands and with either gloved hands or a hand with a barrier between the wound and the hand, but some sort of cloth or something like that. But they’re saying if you know you’re dealing with arterial bleeding or the bleeding is just of a volume that is serious, then use that tourniquet as the first course of action.

And that is a departure from previous eras. And in World War I, they actually called it The Devil’s Instrument because a lot of people just left it on too long and wound up causing nerve damage or even amputation. But you can definitely keep a tourniquet on for a period of time, at least two hours without permanent damage.

Brett McKay: I mean, okay, so the idea of a tourniquet, you’re supposed to put that on there so you can get to professional medical help. What do you do if you have severe bleeding in a long term situation?

Joe Alton: What I would say is you would transport that person to where the bulk of your medical supplies are. And there is a way to transition from a tourniquet to a, let’s say a compression bandage that you can actually do. Now, in normal times, you want to just get that person to the hospital. But if you don’t have the ability to get somebody to a hospital, then you might just have to transition that tourniquet to a pressure dressing by itself. And if you do, then you want to use on the actual wound itself something called a hemostatic dressing. And a hemostatic dressing is impregnated with material like kaolin or chitosan. And this is a blood clotting material. And so what you do is you apply it directly on the bleeding vessel, and you hold it in place for three full minutes, and it actually will stop the bleeding, even arterial bleeding, if you apply pressure and do it for the right amount of time.

I actually was talking to somebody who was a follower of our website, and he was a purchaser for the Navy in Hampton Yards, and he talked about a study that they did in which they basically hung up a pig and they shot it with a 9 millimeter and severed its artery, its femoral artery. And so they used the quick clot material, which is a brand of hemostatic dressing, held the pressure on it, and it stopped the bleeding. And then what they did is they shot the other leg, and they took the dressing out, the hemostatic dressing out, and then put the hemostatic dressing in the second wound and actually stopped it the second time around.

So it is something that, if you know how to use these things, when you have the right materials, the right hemostatic dressings, you can actually stop the bleeding in, at least from the standpoint of the emergent bleeding.

Brett McKay: Related to this idea of bleeding like gunshot wounds, are there any special things you got to think about there?

Joe Alton: Gunshot wounds, of course, are going to be difficult to treat off the grid. You have to remember that there’s things that happen when there is a projectile that enters the body and it forms a permanent channel, which is where the bullet actually went, physically went through. That’s called permanent cavitation, but it also forms something called temporary cavitation. And temporary cavitation is a shockwave that occurs as a result of the bullet passing through with speed through the body. And so if you shot me just under my liver, for example, I would have a channel that went through the area just under my liver, but there would be liver damage, and I could bleed to death as a result of the temporary shockwave that went through and disrupted liver tissue.

Brett McKay: Okay, I’m sure everyone’s thought about this at one point. What do you do in the case of a nuclear disaster? Because I think people have heard about radiation sickness. Are there things you can do to mitigate that?

Joe Alton: Well, nuclear disasters, believe it or not, if you’re not standing at ground zero, you actually have a pretty good shot at surviving. In Hiroshima, they lost more than 100,000 people total to the bomb. But it was a city that included the military that was there at the time, had swelled to 450,000 people at the time of detonation. So you have a shot to survive this. In the early going, your goal is to prevent exposure, and you want to prevent exposure over 100 rads, let’s say. Rad is the amount of radiation that’s absorbed by a living thing. So you might want to have a radiation dosimeter, and that gauge is radiation absorbed. And it’s widely available online. You can find it anywhere. This item predicts the likelihood that you’re going to develop it. But there are three basic, different ways to decreasing the total dose of radiation.

One, limit time spent in the open. Radiation damage is dependent on the length of exposure. So leave areas where high levels are detected and no adequate shelter is available. That’s important. The activity of radioactive particles decreases over time, which is great. After 24 hours, the levels have dropped a 10th of their previous value or less. Then you want to increase the distance from the radiation source. A lot of this is common sense. Radiation disperses over distance. And the effects will be decreased in proportion.

Nuclear reactor meltdowns common evacuation patterns include a complete 10-mile circle. Or if you looked at the pattern, it looks like a keyhole or an old timey keyhole comprising of, let’s say, a two mile circle and an additional three miles radiation radiating from the direction of the prevailing winds. So that’s something that’s important to know.

And then shielding, shielding, shielding, shielding. Shield your people to decrease radiation where they are. In many cases, they’re going to have to shelter in place, and the shielding is going to decrease exposure exponentially. So it’s important to know how to construct a barrier between your people and the radioactive source. And denser materials will give greater protection. Now, let me talk about halving thickness for a second. When I say halving thickness, I’m saying H-A-L-V-I-N-G. Shielding effectiveness is measured in terms of this. This is the thickness of a particular material that will reduce gamma radiation, the most dangerous kind, by one half. And when you multiply halving thicknesses, you multiply your protection. So let’s say the halving thickness of concrete is 2.4 inches or 6 cm. So a barrier of 2.4 inches of concrete is going to drop between you and the radiation.

It’s going to drop the exposure by half. If you double that and make it 4.8 inches, it drops it to 1/4th, one half times one half. Tripling it drops it to 1/8th. And 10 halving thicknesses drops the total radiation exposure to one in 1024th. So if you’re in a concrete bunker that’s 24 inches thick, you are 10 halving thicknesses thick. And so you’re exposed to only 1/1024th of the outside environment. So that’s something that’s important. Now, treating radiation thickness. You treat them as you would burn patients. But once you’ve received four to 500 rads, however, there’s not too much that can be done. You either survive or you won’t.

Brett McKay: And there’s like a medication you take for your thyroid?

Joe Alton: Yes. Well, that’s a also protective thing. For one thing only. And that is thyroid cancer. And you would take… An adult would take 130 milligrams of potassium iodide once a day or 65 milligrams a day if you’re a child. And it’s very useful to prevent thyroid cancer down the road, then the people that are getting thyroid cancer from Chernobyl, those people were children when they were exposed. So if you have a limited amount of this, the brand is called Thyrosafe. We have it on our store. And this is something that you would only give… If you had limited amount, only give it to the kids.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Well, Joe, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Joe Alton: Well, we’ve written several books. The main one now is called The Survival Medicine Handbook: The Essential Guide for When Help is NOT on the Way. And it’s now in its fourth edition. You can find it in black and white on Amazon, in color and spiral bound versions at our site, at store.doomandbloom.net, along with an entire line of medical and dental kits for the serious medic in times of trouble. Now, our website at doomandbloom.net now has over 1500, 1500 articles, videos, podcasts and more on medical preparedness. We also have a YouTube channel called Dr. Bones, Nurse Amy. That’s a nickname of mine, Dr. Bones, that has about 300 videos. You also find my articles on the newsstand in Backwoods Survival Guide, Off Grid Recall, Backwoods Home, Prepper’s Survival Guide and other magazines in the homesteading and survival genres.

Oh, and on Facebook we have survival medicine, Dr. Bones, Nurse Amy groups. We have a group that’s 8000 strong there. You’ll get all my articles and videos on that too. Also have presence on PrepperNet and [0:47:03.0] ____.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Joe Alton, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joe Alton: Same here, Brett. Thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay: My guest today was doctor Joe Alton. He’s the co author of the book The Survival Medicine Handbook. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, doomandbloom.net. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/medic, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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I’ve enjoyed listening to classical music for most of my life. In high school, I’d tune into my hometown university’s radio station at night to listen to Bach and Beethoven while I did my homework. It made me feel smart.

I still listen to classical music today when I work. I also listen to it on Sunday mornings when planning my week.

While I’d listened to classical music since I was young, I didn’t know much about it. Sure, I knew who the great composers were and was familiar with their most famous compositions, but I couldn’t tell what made Bach’s music different from Beethoven’s. Heck, I didn’t even know that calling what I thought was classical music “classical music” was really a misnomer. More on that below.

So, I decided to change that this year. Starting in January, I began reading books on classical music and listening to an audio course on the subject from The Great Courses. It’s been a revelation! While it didn’t make me an expert, when I listen to classical music now, I get more out of it because I know what I’m listening to. It’s made me appreciate what I’m hearing. I’ve also enjoyed learning about the lives of great composers like Bach and Beethoven. Bach was a workhorse, and I admire Beethoven’s Romantic bent (he once wrote that he wanted to “grab fate by the throat” — what an amazing, thumos-filled phrase!).

If you’ve wanted to get into classical music but have been intimidated in knowing where to start, today we begin a two-part series that introduces the genre. The goal is to help kick off your listening journey and appreciation for the music that we call classical.

Which is a nice segue to the first thing I learned in my own listening journey…

Why Classical Music Isn’t Classical MusicIf you’re like me before I took this musical deep dive, you likely call all music made with flutes, pianos, and violins, written by dudes who wore powdered wigs and had German last names, “classical music.”

But, yeah, that’s a misnomer.

Technically, Classical music, with a capital C, is a style of Western music that was composed between approximately 1750 and 1827. Beethoven was a Classical composer, but Bach wasn’t (he was a Baroque composer).

If you want to be more precise, you’ll want to call what you call “classical music,” “Western concert music” or “Western art music.”

With that said, I don’t worry too much about using “classical music” colloquially to describe the spectrum of formal, harmonically complex Western orchestral/instrumental music that people typically put under that umbrella. I’ll be using it in that sense in this series.

Western art music/classical music is typically broken into the following eras:

Greek, Medieval, and Renaissance Eras (2,000 BCE to 1600)
The Baroque Era (1600-1750)
The Classical Era (1750-1825)
The Romantic Era (1825-1900)
The Modern Era (1900 – today)

Each era had its unique style and innovations.

When you imagine “classical music,” you probably imagine music from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras. And for good reason! These periods produced the giants of Western music like Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. When you tune into your local classical music radio station, you’ll likely hear songs composed during these three periods.

Another thing to point out about classical music is that we typically think of it as “pure music” — music composed for art’s sake rather than for filthy lucre or the masses. You listen to classical music in the background when doing math problems or contemplating Platonic Forms.

Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but even the greats wanted to get paid and be famous. Many great classical pieces were written to get rich and attract an audience. And some of it was downright vulgar (Beethoven composed a song about his digestive issues that mimicked farting).

The fact that great classical music was composed for money and fame shouldn’t take away from its illustriousness. These composers also worked to create art that glorified God and inspired humans to live with virtue. Great classical music transcends time and geography.

Listening to it makes you feel more human and more alive.

The Origins of Classical Music: Ancient Greek, Medieval, and Renaissance MusicTo appreciate the most popular styles of classical music, we need to examine the history of Western music before the Baroque Era.

Ancient Greek MusicMusic played an integral role in Greek culture. The Greeks believed that music could shape and mold a man’s character and help him understand the cosmos. Music’s power is why Plato thought it was an essential subject for a young man to learn in his youth.

Epic poems like the Iliad were sung and accompanied by lyres and reed flutes, and Greek tragedies were punctuated with music. The music was designed to increase the emotional impact that the words of the poem or tragedy had on the listener.

We only have a few remnants of ancient Greek music notation, so it’s hard to say exactly how it sounded. From the papyrus fragments that have been recovered, we know it was chant-like and monophonic — it had a single melody. The only instruments they used were lyres, cymbals, and reed flutes.

The chanting and simple melody gave Greek music a foreign and frightening vibe. To get a taste of what Greek music likely sounded like, listen to this reconstruction of the Stasimon Chorus from the Greek tragedy Orestes:

Western music maintained this simple, chant-like characteristic for centuries. The ancient Romans adopted Greek music without making innovations to it. It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages that we started to see things change.

Greek music would influence classical music during the Baroque Era. The opera was created to revive the ancient Greek chorus.

Medieval MusicAs Christianity rose to prominence in the early Middle Ages, clergy used music to worship God and put people in a contemplative and prayerful mood. The plainchant became the most widely composed and performed music during the so-called Dark Ages. You probably know this style of music as Gregorian chant. Like Greek music, it was monophonic. Unlike Greek music, it was unaccompanied by instruments. One of the defining features of medieval music was that it was primarily voice-driven.

Here’s an example of plainchant music:

Between the years 900 and 1000, musicians developed polyphony, a mixture of two or more melodies heard simultaneously. Organum was the most common type of medieval polyphony. One melody would act as the voice of God — it sounded like traditional plainchant — and the second melody would add flourishes that represented humanity.

Listen to this organum entitled “Pastra nostrum.” Pay attention to the two different melodies:

I really enjoy listening to plainchant music when I’m contemplating or meditating. It does a great job of putting you in a reflective mood.

Another musical innovation was introduced in the 1300s: isorhythm. Isorhythm involves repeating a fixed pattern of pitches and a separate, repeated rhythmic pattern within a musical piece. These patterns might not necessarily be of the same length, so their repetitions could go in and out of sync with each other, creating a rich and complex texture. Isorhythm music in the medieval period was mostly voice.

Here’s an example of isorhythm:

Renaissance MusicRenaissance musicians sought to recreate the ideals of antiquity. Instead of being primarily about worshiping and praying to God, music was seen as a way to evoke emotions in the listener. To accomplish this, Renaissance musicians emphasized vocals that would be heard clearly. They also used the music to reflect the words being sung using a technique called word painting. So, if the lyrics in a song were about someone falling down, the music would try to evoke that image.

New instruments and notation schemes allowed musicians to create more complex and sophisticated music, and the printing press allowed music to spread more quickly and easily.

The most important musical genre that developed during the Renaissance was the madrigal. The madrigal was secular music based on poems that had the following characteristics:

Polyphonal: madrigals usually consisted of six to eight voices singing simultaneously.
Word painting: the music mirrored the meaning of the words.
Emotional expression: the music is composed to make you feel different emotions.

Initially, madrigals were primarily vocal compositions, but as the Renaissance progressed, musicians began substituting some of the voices with instruments like lutes and viols. We’re starting to see the shift away from classical music being primarily voice driven to becoming more instrumental.

Here’s an example of a Renaissance madrigal. Notice the different melodies going on at the same time.

For some reason, I imagine Robin Hood: Men in Tights when I listen to a madrigal.

Here’s an English madrigal entitled “As Vesta Was from Latmos Hill Descending.” It’s a good example of word painting. Notice when the singers sing the word “descending,” the tune sounds like they’re going down a hill:

Well, there you go. A crash course in 4,000 years of Western musical history in about 750 words. We’re now ready to take a look at the big three eras of concert music that produced timeless pieces that we still listen to and perform today: the Baroque, the Classical, and the Romantic.

We’ll turn to them, as well as the Modern Era, in our next piece.

Sources

The Vintage Guide to Classical Music: An Indispensable Guide for Understanding and Enjoying Classical Music by Jan Swafford. Very good introductory book to classical music. Swafford, himself a composer, does a good job showing how the lives of famous composers shaped the music they produced.

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music by Robert Greenberg. This is an audio course from the Great Courses. I highly recommend it. The lecturer, Robert Greenberg (who is also a composer), is incredibly engaging and made learning about classical music fun. He sounds like the comedian Lewis Black. The best part is that he includes samples of the music that he’s talking about.

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Over the last decade, there’s been an increase in the number of people, particularly young adults, who struggle with low moods, distractibility, and anxiety, and consequent difficulties with getting their life on track and making progress in work, friendship, and romance.

In addressing these difficulties, people are often given or adopt a mental health diagnosis, and look for a solution in therapy and/or medication.

My guest isn’t opposed to these remedies. She is herself a clinical psychologist who’s maintained a practice for a quarter century that specializes in treating clients in their twenties. But Dr. Meg Jay, who’s also the author of The Twentysomething Treatment, believes that a lot of what young adults, and in fact adults of all ages, struggle with, aren’t disorders that need to be treated, but problems that can be solved.

In the first half of our conversation, Meg explains what’s behind the decline in mental health for young adults and how it’s bigger than just smartphones. We discuss the dangers of self-diagnosis, the potential downsides of using medications to treat mental health issues, and why she advocates for “skills over pills.” In the second half of our conversation, we talk about how mental health gets better when we get better at life, and what skills twentysomethings, and many older adults, need to develop, including the skills of thinking, feeling, working, socializing, and even cooking. We also discuss how porn is affecting the young men in her practice and an alternative to being a self-assurance junkie.

Resources Related to the Podcast* Meg’s last appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #51 — The Defining Decade * AoM series on not wasting your twenties * Study on whether antidepressants work better than placebos * AoM series on depression * Sunday Firesides: Congratulations, You’re a Human! * AoM Podcast #741: The Exercise Prescription for Depression and Anxiety * AoM Podcast #772: How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)?

Connect With Meg Jay* Meg’s website

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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Over the last decade, there’s been an increase in the number of people, particularly young adults, who struggle with low moods, distractibility and anxiety, and consequent difficulties with getting their life on track and making progress in work, friendship, and romance. In addressing these difficulties, people are often given or adopted mental health diagnosis and look for a solution in therapy and/or medication. My guest isn’t opposed to these remedies. She’s herself a clinical psychologist who’s maintained a practice for a quarter century that specializes in treating clients in their 20s. But Dr. Meg Jay, who’s also the author of The TwentySomething Treatment, believes that a lot of what young adults and in fact adults of all ages struggle with, aren’t disorder that need to be treated, but problems that can be solved. In the first half of our conversation, Meg, explains what’s behind the decline in mental health for young adults and how it’s bigger than just smartphones.

We discussed the dangers of self-diagnosis, the potential downsides of using medications to treat mental health issues, and why she advocates for skills over pills. In the second half of our conversation, we talk about how mental health gets better when we get better at life, and what skills 20-somethings and many older adults need to develop, including the skills of thinking, feeling, working, socializing, and even cooking. We also discuss how porn is affecting the young men in her practice, and an alternative to being a self-assurance junkie. After the show’s over check at our show notes at aom.is/megJay. All right, Meg Jay, welcome back to the show.

Meg Jay: Oh, it’s so great to be here, Brett.

Brett McKay: So I was looking, the last time we talked to you was 2013. You’re one of our first podcast guests. You’re in episode number 51.

Meg Jay: Oh, I love it. Well, I said I feel like we’re old friends. I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the Art of Manliness.

Brett McKay: Well, thank you so much. We talked about your book the last time, the Defining Decades, about your 20s, when that book actually inspired a few articles that we wrote on the site and it really resonated with me at the time, ’cause I was in my 20s when I first came across that book.

Meg Jay: Nice.

Brett McKay: And you got a new book out. It’s called The TwentySomething Treatment, A Revolutionary Remedy for an Uncertain Age. So, background on you, you are a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with 20-somethings young people.

Meg Jay: Yep.

Brett McKay: And one thing we’ve been seeing in the zeitgeist a lot recently in blog post articles, news articles, etcetera, is that young people today, we’re talking teens, people in their 20s are in the midst of a mental health crisis. What do the statistics say about the mental health of young people today and what are you seeing with the patients you are encountering?

Meg Jay: Yeah. Well, I’ve been specializing in 20-somethings for 25 years, believe it or not. And you might remember from your 20s. It’s a tough time. So I think people hear, oh, these are gonna be the best years of your life, really, I’m sorry to say. They’re actually empirically speaking a mental health low point. That has been the case for a while. I think now. I mean, that’s why I’ve always been working in the space. I think people are talking about it more now, which is potentially a good thing. But I think part of the conversation about young adult mental health too quickly becomes, what’s my diagnosis? What’s the medication that I need? So a lot of what I do is really normalize a lot of the problems that 20-somethings and adults of all ages have, and talk about strategies for looking at those that aren’t just necessarily therapy or medication.

Brett McKay: So yeah, we’re seeing a lot of young people and a lot of people, just even older people talking about anxiety, depression, ADHD, things like that. When psychologists try to explain like what’s behind this uptick in mental health, what are the reasons they give?

Meg Jay: I mean, I think what you hear people saying a lot is phones and the pandemic. And those certainly played a role. I think what I see a lot with young adults and adults of all ages. But everything that I see is just sort of more acute with young adults is just how uncertain, 21st century life is. The brain really doesn’t like uncertainty. So in your 20s, everything is uncertain all at the same time. You’re uncertain about work and love and friends and where you’re gonna live and who you’re gonna be. And that’s a lot. The brain doesn’t like that. And it tends to respond to uncertainty by perceiving it as danger and then therefore feeling stressed and anxious. But that doesn’t mean that you have an anxiety disorder. It means you’re feeling anxious. There’s a lot in your life that’s uncertain. So let’s help you sort of pin some things down and feel more sure of yourself.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You call uncertainty a trans-diagnostic stressor.

Meg Jay: Yep. That’s a mouthful of a word and maybe a boring label. But, in the research, that’s what uncertainty is known as. And what that means is that it’s a stressor that shows up differently in different people. So when people are feeling overwhelmed by uncertainty, some people get anxious, some people feel hopeless and lay in their bed and feel depressed. Other people reach for substances, other people eat too much or eat too little. So it’s definitely a stressor for most human beings. And how it manifests depends on the individual.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah. I can see that in my own life. Uncertainty causes so much stress. When I remember when I was in my 20s, one stressor that I had that’s caused by uncertainty was when I was in law school and I took my final exam, ’cause your whole grade depended on one exam.

Meg Jay: Right.

Brett McKay: For the semester.

Meg Jay: No stress.

Brett McKay: No stress. So you took the test and then after you’re done, you do these postmortems in your head ’cause you didn’t know how you did.

Meg Jay: Right.

Brett McKay: And then you’d go down this spiral where you’re just like, oh my gosh. I probably…

Meg Jay: What is this? What is that? Yeah.

Brett McKay: Basically, it all led to like, we’re gonna end up… I tell my wife like, we’re gonna end up, homeless and bankrupt.

Yes, of course. And that’s really… I mean, that’s such a great example of really the big picture of the 20s is that people don’t… Like it probably took you a week or two to find out the results of that exam.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Meg Jay: But in your 20s, in terms of what am I gonna be? Is my life gonna work out? Will I be happy? Will anyone love me? Will I be successful? Can I pay my bills? Those are things that remain uncertain for a good five to 10 years of time. And so that’s a lot to cope with. And it does tend to make people feel anxious and stressed until they have those data points that give the feedback that, okay, you’re gonna work this out. This is moving in the right direction, but the brain just doesn’t like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And this uncertainty that causes things like anxiety or feeling depressed and just down, this can happen later on in life when you’re in your 30s, 40s, 50s, when you have those moments of uncertainty in your life, maybe you get laid off from your job and you think, oh my gosh, what’s gonna happen to my family? Or maybe there’s something with your kids you’re worried about same sort of thinking happen to you.

Meg Jay: Yes. I mean, I actually, I had a health issue last year and I was really feeling for my 20-somethings because suddenly there was this new piece of uncertainty in my life. And at this point in my life, my career is pretty sorted and my love life is sorted and I have kids and I know where I’m gonna live. So there’s not a ton of uncertainty in my life anymore. But I had this health issue come up and suddenly there was all this uncertainty. And it was really difficult until I got some information of, okay, this is the deal and this is what we do. And then I noticed how, sort of like with your law school exam, suddenly I was like, great, I know what to do now and I know what this means. So you’re going to have those periods again and again throughout life. Whether it’s health or changes in work or changes in your relationship, we usually get better at handling them over time, ’cause we have more experience of, okay, I’ve been here before. I’ve gotten through this. I’ll find a way, you feel like you can count on yourself. And the hard part about being in your 20s is you don’t feel like you can count on yourself yet. And you don’t have a lot of data points for how this works.

Brett McKay: And I can see this idea of uncertainty causing all this distress. I can see why the pandemic would exacerbate that. She was like, oh my gosh, what’s gonna happen? I don’t know if I’m gonna have a job. Is this ever gonna end? And I can also see how smartphones can exacerbate that ’cause you’re just constantly plugged into this thing that’s showing you all sorts of different information. You’re not exactly sure like, what should I act on? What’s the good stuff that can probably just cause even more uncertainty.

Meg Jay: Right. And it’s, we’ve all heard by now the social comparisons, that phones induce. We’re always looking at people on vacation or skydiving in Dubai. I mean, they’re having amazing time and amazing lives and amazing relationships. And so it’s hard when you feel like, I don’t really know if my life is going to work out, but look at all these other people’s lives who are working out beautifully. Your brain knows that this is not a fair fight in terms of the data being presented, but it still has to go through that process of, ugh, you can’t believe everything you see. And, maybe I’m not doing as badly as I think and that’s a lot. So I think, people of all ages have to decide what platforms they’re going to use, what makes them feel happy, what makes them feel unhappy or how they use them and how much they use them.

Brett McKay: Okay. So uncertainty. We don’t like uncertainty, can cause us to get anxious, feel just low and depressed. It can even cause us or nudge us towards using substances to alleviate some of the bad feelings we have when we’re facing uncertainty. We experience a lot of uncertainty in our 20s ’cause we’re figuring life out. But people in their 30s, 40s, 50s can also experience this. And one way people have tried to cope with the feelings of angst that come with uncertainty is they turn to psychology, which makes sense, right? Psychology’s there to help you deal with those sort of things. But you note in your book that there’s been a trend of young people, and I’ve seen this not just with young people, but even people my age in their late 30s, 40s, people self diagnosing themselves with mental health disorders. What are the dangers of self diagnosing?

Meg Jay: Yeah, I mean, I think when we’re feeling uncertain, we’re casting about for gimme something I can act on. I mean, it was a bit like what I was talking about with my health issue last year of, let me understand what this is and what we do. So I think it’s very tempting to say, what’s wrong with me? What’s my diagnosis? What’s the three point plan? Although, most mental health problems don’t have a three point plan or what’s the medication required? And the truth of the matter is, most young adults, most adults of all ages don’t have diagnoses. They have problems they’re trying to solve. They have changes they need to make, they have skills they need to build. And I think one of the drawbacks of looking for certainty in a diagnosis is that your identity can become pretty wrapped up in that. And then you see everything through that lens rather than through the lens of, Hey, I’m in a transition, or this is a tough time and what are the skills I need to build? What are the changes I need to make, rather than looking for, what’s the medication I need to take?

Brett McKay: Yeah. You talk about, giving yourself a diagnosis can cause a nocebo effect in you. What do you mean by that?

Meg Jay: Yeah. The nocebo effect is the opposite of the placebo effect, which of course is if you think you’re going to get better, you’re more likely to get better. The nocebo effect is really the power of negative expectations. So I have a lot of people come in my office and they say, I have this and I’m gonna have this all my life. And I’ve read this is a lifelong problem. And they see everything through that lens. And so it can get in the way of people actually getting better or having hope that, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not doing something wrong, I’m just having a hard time. So what is it I need to do to move forward? And people who have hope are more likely to take action to kind of move their lives ahead. They’re less likely to feel anxious and depressed, less likely to think about ending their lives. So I think sometimes people look for certainty and diagnoses and which they may not really have. And believe it or not, that can actually get in the way of finding hope that life could be better six months or a year from now.

Brett McKay: Yeah, ’cause you take on that, like you said, you take on that identity like, I’m depressed, I’m a depressed person, I’m always going to be depressed. And yeah, you might… Like you said, you might be feeling low ’cause you’re going through a hard time in college, or you just had a breakup, a lot of uncertainty. So, if you open up the DSM-5, the diagnostic tool, and you look at the sentence for depression and you say, well, I got that. Now like, you just kind of look at everything as like, well, I’m depressed. There’s nothing I can do about it.

Meg Jay: Right. Or, great. Now on top of, being laid off, now I’m also depressed. Rather than saying after loss, whether it’s loss of a job, loss of a relationship, loss of anything, it’s normal to feel sad and depressed. It doesn’t mean you have a disorder. I mean, that’s grieving. And so it helps often to say this is a normal reaction to a loss in your life. And what does that tell you about what it is that you value, that you wanna get back in your life? Meaningful work, close connections, what did you lose that you want to get back rather than let’s just alleviate the symptoms.

Brett McKay: How has social media exacerbated the problems of self diagnosing?

Meg Jay: Well, when I first started doing this 25 years ago, for better or for worse, the DSM, the kind of psychiatrist bible you were talking about a minute ago, that that was only available or, no one would go out and purchase that. It was a $100 door stop of a book and extremely boring and dry. So no one really had access to what are these mental health disorders and how do you diagnose them? And now, for a lot of reasons that are good, that information is widely available on the internet or on social media in quick little tidbits and quick videos. And it’s actually what we used to call medical student syndrome, that people would go into medical school and they would read about illnesses and disorders and decide they had all of them because, they could see themselves in so many. So something similar happens on social media. People hear about anxious attachment style and they decide they have it or, panic disorder and they decide they have it, or bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder, which is very rare, but people decide they have it. And so then, it’s sort of a misunderstanding of what’s going on. They’re locating the problem in their brain rather than in their everyday life.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You say about the social media mental health stuff that goes on on TikTok and Instagram reels, whatever, there’s a fine line between social awareness and social contagion. What do you mean by that?

Meg Jay: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s cool that people are becoming more aware of, Hey, the 20s or many points in adulthood are difficult and people have these struggles and this is very normal, but it’s not so great when everybody decides that, oh, I have this disorder. Or we’ve even seen how “disorders” can literally spread on social media. There was a lot of research done around during the pandemic around these ticks. Like, that people were developing in terms of, squinting or saying words over and over again that young adults or teenagers would see these videos of people saying, I can’t stop doing this. And then they started doing it. And so there was this unprecedented number of people going into neurology clinics with ticks that were specifically the ones that were circulating on TikTok. So that was a very concrete example. But I see the same thing with right now, I can’t tell you the number of people who keep coming in and telling me they have anxious attachment style, and they don’t. They’re just feeling, uncertain about, gosh, I don’t know if this person likes me or I’m not sure who my friends are. And that’s a pretty normal way to feel in your 20s. It doesn’t mean that you have anxious attachment style.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve seen… I get this like mental health stuff that pops up in my Instagram feed. And when I look at this, ’cause I’ve read… I’ve talked to enough psychologists and I’ve read enough books about this ’cause of the podcast, I can look at some of the stuff like, this is not legit. Like, this is just some person who maybe had some problems and now they’re trying to like help other people, whatever. One thing I’ve seen is like this idea that procrastination is a trauma response. And I’m like, ah, I don’t… Maybe, but probably not. You’re probably just… You’re like anybody who procrastinates, it’s just, you don’t like doing the thing. It’s not pleasant to do, so you’re putting it off.

Meg Jay: Right. And I think, I actually haven’t even seen that, Brett, so I’m curious of A, what’s the connection? And B how is that helping people to say, oh, great, not only do I procrastinate, but I’m also traumatized. So I’m not sure what’s going on there. But yes, I see procrastination in my office all the time. And I think sometimes people panic and say, oh no, that means I have ADHD or that means I have, fill in the blank. And often, like you’re saying, it’s young adults and adults of all ages trying to grapple with the reality that they have to do things they don’t wanna do. And the brain would like to avoid that as long as possible. But eventually, hopefully we learn through experience much of it painful, that it’s actually just easier to not procrastinate to do stuff in small bits starting sooner rather than later. That this is part of growth and development.

Brett McKay: Okay. So instead of being quick to take on a mental health diagnosis, if you’re feeling anxiety, just feeling depressed, maybe scattered brained, etcetera, you try to help people figure out, they come to you, whether those feelings they’re having can be attributed to some situational stressor, like, maybe you’re not depressed, maybe you’re just… You’re feeling low ’cause you got a bad grade this semester in college, or maybe you lost your job or maybe you’re having some problems in your relationship.

How do you… I mean, one thing I’ve noticed when it comes to mental health, people can get really touchy about questioning diagnostic labels they’ve given themselves, because it’s like tied up with their identity. So how do you do this as a practitioner, help them maybe look at things differently and kind of nudge them to look at maybe the feelings or problems they’re having can be attributed to a situational thing and not to a disorder?

Meg Jay: Yeah. Well, I mean, it may be because I do this day in and day out. So I usually just very, matter of factly with a smile say, well, I’m not so sure this is a disorder. Maybe this is something going on in your day to day. So let’s talk about your day to day. And I usually ask people to tell me a lot of detail about their work and love and life and health and sleeping and substances and porn and everything. I get real familiar with the details of people’s lives. And then I start to maybe help them connect the dots between what’s going on day to day and how they’re feeling. And then obviously only can go off of what clients tell me, but you’d be amazed. Most people tell you what their problem is, even if they don’t realize they’re telling you that they tell you, where the gaps are, where things are going sideways. And then they end up basically suggesting their own solutions. And so, you say, well, why don’t we start there? Why don’t we start by addressing this issue or having this or that conversation or changing who you live with or talking to your boss at work? And then just sort of work on it on the ground through a life intervention rather than through a medical intervention.

Brett McKay: And you make it clear in the book, you’re not against mental health diagnoses, but you’re only going to provide one if you think it’s going to be useful for the person.

Meg Jay: Yeah. Yep.

Brett McKay: You’re going to try these life interventions first.

Meg Jay: Yeah. I mean, I’m thinking, I’m always thinking with a client, do I need to diagnose this person in order to help them? Because oftentimes, what difference does it make? What you do or don’t call it, the question is what you do about it is really the important thing. And so, I’m thinking, do I need to diagnose this person in order to help them? How could a diagnosis help them understand what’s going on? Or how could a diagnosis limit their understanding of what’s going on? And I mean, these are not black and white issues. I mean, I’ve been doing this 20 years, so there’s some finesse involved in trying to decide when is a diagnosis helpful, when might it be limiting. And I’m also not for or against medication. I’m just for people understanding that medication has upsides and it has downsides. And I like for people to be educated about what those are when they make decisions about whether to start or continue or to stop a medication for a mental health problem.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about mental health medication because that’s another thing you’re seeing an uptick in. People turning to psychoactive medication to relieve feelings of sadness, angst, feeling scatterbrained. Do we know how many people are taking psychoactive medication today?

Meg Jay: Yeah, about one in five are taking a mental health medication. And actually, among adults of all ages, antidepressants, this is a kind of a shocker of a data point, are the most likely prescription medication to be in your medicine cabinet from the age of 20 to 60. If you’ve got a medication in your medicine cabinet from age 20 to 60, it’s most likely to be an antidepressant. So, they’re quite widespread. They have upsides and they have downsides. And I think about 80% of prescriptions for mental health meds are made by general practitioners. And I don’t have anything against general practitioners either, but they don’t specialize in these medications. They don’t specialize in young adults. And often because of no fault of their own, they’re limited to 15-minute appointments. And so oftentimes young adults and adults of all ages are given medications after very brief conversations where you’re not able to get a lot of context of, Hey, what’s going on in your life? Is there something we might wanna work on there before we give you medications that do have side effects?

Brett McKay: What does the research say about the efficacy of these drugs, like the upsides and the downsides of it?

Meg Jay: Yeah. So antidepressants are not a silver bullet. They’re estimated to work about 50% of the times, and by work, I mean, the effects that people appreciate, so the upsides of them is they can make people feel less sad. They make kind of the lows less low and the anxiety less intense. So that’s why people take them. I think what many people don’t realize is that they don’t just work on one end of the emotional spectrum, that they basically kind of turn down the volume on emotions in general. So they make the lows less low, but they make the highs less high. So you’ll hear people say, yeah, I’m less depressed and anxious than I used to be, but I’m also, I don’t really enjoy my life much. I’m also not that happy. I don’t have a lot of motivation. They can really cause a lot of sexual side effects. So people just aren’t that interested in sex or don’t feel like they could get much pleasure out of it. And they can also cause some weight gain, which is, you know, a big issue, especially for young adults while they’re trying to kind of start their life and have relationships. So, most young adults don’t know about the negative side effects when they go on the medications. And often, there isn’t a plan for, well, how long am I going to be on this? So most people go on mental health medications thinking like, maybe I’ll do this six months to a year, whereas in the end, the majority of people end up staying on these medications for five to 10 years.

Brett McKay: Okay, so antidepressants work 50% of the time, like it’s 50-50 chance that it could work.

Meg Jay: Yeah, it’s not… They’re not a silver bullet. They’re absolutely not. You know, some people find that they are. Somewhat helpful. And just as many people find that the side effects really outweigh the positive effects. So, I think people have heard or imagine there’s this kind of like, well, why not? We know it’ll work. We know it’ll help. There’s no downsides, but none of what I just said is the case. So we don’t know they’re going to be that helpful and there are downsides.

Brett McKay: Yeah. We had a podcast guest a few weeks ago who said that antidepressants don’t work much better than a placebo. And I got a couple of comments from some listeners who said something like, Hey, you shouldn’t have let him say that. That was misinformation. But that’s what the evidence shows. I mean, you can Google, are antidepressants more effective than a placebo? And you’ll find articles on it. And in a recent study, this was a reanalysis of a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of antidepressants. And I’m going to link to it in the show notes. This study concluded, it is unclear whether antidepressants are more efficacious than placebo. And as you said, it works for some people. What I’ve read, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that antidepressants, they particularly work well for people who have severe depression, like they can’t even get out of bed depression. And then you take the antidepressant, they’ll hopefully get you going. So you start doing the things like exercising, socializing, doing those things that’ll help you start alleviating your depressive symptoms.

Meg Jay: Right. Yes. I mean, I think at this point, physicians who really know what they’re doing, that’s… That is the suggestion. However, I mean, I see all the time that the first hint of, I feel anxious, I feel depressed, physicians saying, well, try this. Why not? I mean, that is the medical model. If you diagnose something and you give someone medication, I mean, it is not their model to say, let’s talk about lifestyle interventions or what’s happening in your relationship or what’s going on at work. That is not what they’re trained to do. That is not what they have time to do in 15 minutes. But I am not a anti-medication person, and it’s not misinformation. The data is there that if you look at all the studies that have been done on antidepressants, they work about half the time.

And it’s very unclear who they’re going to help and who they’re not going to help. So they’re just… They’re really not a silver bullet. So I think at this point, people who are careful and really know what they’re doing, they reserve them for those whom you feel like we’ve got to really try everything. For me, I mean I’m a psychologist, so prescribing meds is not my lane in the first place, but I’m looking at what else, I’m looking at skills over pills. What are the skills this person needs? What are the experiences they need to be having, the changes they need to make? Because oftentimes there’s plenty to work with there, and those sorts of interventions have no negative side effects.

Brett McKay: Okay. So there’s downsides to things like antidepressants. You also talk about other drugs, benzos for anti-anxiety, but those are extremely addictive. And you said, yeah, the group most likely to wind up in a hospital, emergency department, young adults because they took too many benzos. Another one I’ve been reading about is stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall for ADHD. I guess there’s like a shortage in the country because everyone wants these things. What’s going on there?

Meg Jay: I mean, there’s no question. I have worked with so many ADHD folks over the years in college, young adulthood, very difficult time for people with ADHD. And there’s no question if you have a real diagnosis of ADHD, stimulant medication will help you. And I’m the first person to say, let’s do skills plus pills in this situation for students, especially with ADHD. College is very difficult to get through without stimulant medication if you’re neurodivergent. However, there’s some really interesting research just very recently about when you’re a neurotypical person and you take stimulants, they found that people will work harder and longer. So there is that feeling of, oh, if I take stimulants, I can pull an all-nighter, I can study more, I can really lean into my paper or my test more. You will study or work longer and harder, but the quality will be lower. It’s like going to the SAT, jacked up on too much caffeine if you don’t usually drink caffeine. It’s not actually what the neurotypical brain needs. So, this article is talking about how smart drugs aren’t that smart for people who have neurotypical brains. It’s not what your brain needs. And so you’re not probably going to get the results you’re going for.

Brett McKay: Okay. So medications, not always the best medicine. They can be useful in certain circumstances, but you need to be working with a trained practitioner with this. And again, you talked about how social media has exacerbated the problem of people relying on medications to treat these underlying mental health disorders because of uncertainty, not even disorders just feeling not great, because with this… Again like on my insta… I don’t know what my instagram feed thinks about me the algorithm thinks about me but I get these ads for like ADHD medication and like you just got to have like a 15-minute consult online and then in a few days you get and pick up a prescription at Walgreens.

Meg Jay: Yeah, it’s a big problem. We talk about social media as not being great for mental health in terms of all the comparisons and looking at other people’s lives. But not enough is said about how much it’s really funneling people into diagnoses and medications where they’re really not getting the best information about whether that’s really the right treatment for them.

Brett McKay: Okay, so instead of spending time diagnosing themselves or looking for a doctor to give them a prescription or even spending lots of time in therapy, you mentioned this phrase earlier, you recommend skills before pills. And you argue that people who are feeling distressed might be better served in developing skills. Why is that?

Meg Jay: Yeah, well, like I said, I specialize in young adults. So, they still have a lot to learn. A lot is new. People are in their first jobs, first relationships, first apartments, first conflict resolution. So there’s a lot that 20-somethings don’t yet know how to do. And that’s okay. This is not a judgment. This is just developmentally normal. So when you ask people what’s going on in your life, they often can point to areas where they’re struggling, areas where they’re not feeling confident or competent, or where they’re not sort of feeling able to gain ground. And usually if you take on those areas, then people start to feel better. Without medications that, you ask people about the ins and outs of their lives and what does a day look like? What does a week look like? What’s going on? And you can see that there are areas for growth.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, when you develop skills, you’re able to reduce the uncertainty in your life. It’s like, well, I know how to handle this because I got the… I know how to make a decision. I know how… I know what I need to do to fix the problem that I encounter at school or my relationship.

Meg Jay: Yeah, that it’s… I say a lot to my clients, mental health gets better when life gets better. And also when we get better at life. And so, I try to work with people to help them improve their situation and or improve how they’re handling their situation that, if there’s a lot of uncertainty out in the world that you can’t change, one thing you can change is feeling more sure of yourself of saying, oh, I can count on myself that I know I can get through this, or find another job or have a better relationship next time or handle this distressing situation that you start to feel just more sure and more certain of yourself. And that’s a normal thing to be developing in your 20s. I mean, I would say by the time you’re where you are in life Brett, you probably feel like you can’t control everything that happens in the world, but you probably feel pretty confident that you’ll manage, you’ll figure it out, you can handle it. And that is amazing. And that’s not the way 20-somethings feel. So they feel like they can’t control anything out in the world and they have very little confidence that they can handle. Anything from, I don’t know how to ask my boss for time off to go to a wedding to, I don’t know how to find love or make friends. I mean, there’s just a lot they’re learning. They’re on a very steep learning curve.

Brett McKay: Is this idea____ this confidence, is this identity capital? You’ve written a lot about identity capital.

Meg Jay: That certainly helps. So in my previous book, In the Defining Decade, I talked about identity capital as a lot of 20-somethings talk about they’re having an identity crisis. They need to figure out who they are and who they’re gonna be and, what life is going to be like. And you really can’t, you can’t really forecast that. But one thing you can do in your 20s is get out there and have experiences, especially at work is the leading driver of positive personality change in the 20s. Because, there’s so much skill building that goes on at work. And so a lot of those skills that we gain, not just at work, but also in experiences, life, hobbies, etcetera, is what’s called identity capital. And it’s just this feeling of, okay, I know how to do things. I feel confident, I feel competent. My job can go sideways, but I’ll find another one. Or this relationship may not work out, but, there are other people in the world that might love me. It’s that sense of that I know how to do things.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so in your book you talk about various skills that 20-somethings need to develop, but as I was reading it I thought, man these are skills all people need to keep working on even as they get older.

Meg Jay: Absolutely, yeah.

Brett McKay: And the first skill is how to think. How do people mess up their thinking you?

Meg Jay: Yeah. So, people may hear that and think, well, I know how to think. I think all the time. But, if you really dig into it, thinking is complicated that when we’re in an uncertain situation, the brain is wired to think negatively. So, your brain is wired to keep you alive, not happy. So if it’s not sure what to think about a job interview or like you said, the law school exam you took or a first date that you’re going on. It’s going to assume the worst, and that’s kind of the better safe than sorry approach to life, which we really can’t stop our brains from doing. It’s evolutionarily programmed to do so, to keep us alive. But what you have to do after that is to say, okay, I see how my brain just did that. Those are my fears. Those are my what ifs. But can I spend some time thinking about some facts, some what is? So what do I actually know about this situation? Have I ever been in a situation like this before? What happened last time? What if this difficult thing came to pass?

Meg Jay: What would I do about it? How could I solve that problem? So it’s really helping our brains not just get stuck on the catastrophic what-ifs, which is the first place they’re going to go, but to say, I’m going to force my brain to spend some time also thinking about what is, what is happening in this situation or what else, what else might be happening. Besides the worst case scenario. But that takes work. Your brain is not going to want to do that naturally. The older you get, the more data points and experience you have, the more your brain will feel like, yes, I can think more flexibly about this situation. But when people are younger, it’s very difficult. They have a lot of negative thoughts and feelings.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you gave a lot of examples of patients you’ve worked with. You changed the names or maybe there’s an amalgamation of different people. But what you do is when they come in with the problem, they’re like, oh my gosh, I’m depressed. And here’s this thing. And then you just, what you do is you just walk them through as well. Let’s find out the situation, what’s going on in your life. And then you help them just by asking questions. Like, are you just getting stuck in creating these hypotheticals in your head that aren’t going to happen? Let’s just focus on what are the facts on the ground?

Meg Jay: Exactly. And that is, it’s something that I’m helping someone do, but something that you don’t need a therapist to do that. You just need to recognize that as a good, coping mechanism or a good skill to practice of, okay, I often jump to the worst case scenario and I cause myself a lot of stress and anxiety, hanging out there. So what else could I be saying about this situation? And sometimes people, thumb type that onto their phone. Sometimes they write it down on a piece of paper in a journal or talk it through with a friend who can often help you say, well, okay, that’s one possibility. What are the other possibilities? And just to sort of let it be a little bit more open until we find out what is actually going on.

Brett McKay: One thing you try to do… Another tactic you use to help people when they get stuck in this catastrophic thinking, ’cause that usually happens when we’re in our default mode network, and it’s kind of like we’re mind wandering.

Meg Jay: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And that’s why at night, that’s why you usually feel like the most angsty and existential… Existential angst is at night time you’re laying in bed and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, what am I doing with my life?” That even happens to me still ’cause you’re in that default mode network, but one thing you try to do is you help people shift over to the task positive network.

Meg Jay: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Where it’s basically your brain… It’s focused on something. Not mind wandering.

Meg Jay: Right. Exactly, well, that is… So one thing you can be focused on in the task positive network or, okay, what are other possibilities? You’re giving your brain a job, which is let me think about something else other than the worst case scenario. Sometimes the task positive network can be distraction by focusing on something else of, “You know I’m gonna go run an errand. I’m gonna watch something on Netflix. I’m going to call a friend on the phone”. You just wanna give your brain something else to do besides just going down the rabbit hole of the worst case scenario and hanging out in that default mode network. Your brain’s default mode is to imagine the worst. And then even better is when the task positive network is focusing on, “Well, what else could be happening here? What are the facts? How can I problem-solve?” And so you give your brain something to do that’s constructive rather than just imagining the worst.

Brett McKay: Okay, so another skill people need to develop is how to feel. How do people mess up managing their emotions?

Meg Jay: Yeah, so when we’re feeling uncertain, not surprisingly, because we tend to think negatively, this happens in a nano second, we also feel negatively, so we feel anxious or stressed or overwhelmed or depressed. That’s normal. I think oftentimes when young adults are struggling, they panic of, “I shouldn’t feel this bad, something is wrong, I need to… ” Like these sort of feelings shouldn’t exist, and oftentimes you see that their parents panic of, “my kids crying, this is terrible. Something bad is gonna happen”. And so, just helping people understand that emotions are a part of life, and so-called negative emotions aren’t necessarily negative, their sources of information, so they’re telling us, this is something you’re worried about, this is something that’s important to you, or this is something you’re sad that you’ve lost in your life. And so helping people just accept even the negative emotions in their life as sources of information, not as something they need to panic about, actually, it paradoxically helps emotions pass more quickly.

So it’s, when we stop kind of wrestling with our negative emotions and say, “Okay, part of life, what is there for me to learn here?” Those negative emotions tend to move on along, whereas if we get into this fight with them where we panic and keep trying to get rid of them, they actually tend to hang around longer.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you call this, you’re just kind of being comfortable with the negative emotions, paradoxical intervention.

Meg Jay: Yeah. Because it’s… When you say, I don’t need to get rid of this feeling, it actually tends to pass more quickly, so you’re sort of doing a mind trick on negative emotions, but it really is just about not being upset about being upset, or anxious about being anxious, or sad about being sad, or stressed about being stressed, but just to say, okay, you are not going to get through your life and certainly not through your 20s without having these emotions quite often, that’s normal, 20-somethings have more negative emotions than older adults, and so it’s really about understanding what are they trying to tell me? What am I worried about? Where do I need to gain competence or what am I sad about? What do I need to get more of into my life.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and again, you’re also trying to normalize these feelings instead of saying, “What’s the diagnosis, ’cause I’m feeling anxious, depressed, whatever”. It’s like, “well, no, congratulations, you’re a human being, you’re feeling things that all human beings feel and have felt”.

Meg Jay: Well, right. And again really everything that I do with 20-somethings, like you’ve said, it’s adult development, it’s relevant to us at all ages, I just am the kind of person that, I try to get in there as early as possible in that trajectory, but if you think about going to the doctor for something in your 30s or 40s and you’re having a pain here or a flutter there, and the doctor says, “Oh yeah, that’s normal. It’s this thing that happens when X, Y, Z. It doesn’t mean anything or it’ll pass”. We forget how helpful that is, that that is very helpful. When someone says, “Oh yeah, I know it hurts. But it’s normal. Nothing to be worried about”. That also has a function. My daughter actually had a sports injury a couple of years ago, and it really persisted, so I took her to a specialist, and the guy said, “Oh yeah, I’ve worked with big tough ice hockey players, and this can hurt for months, but trust it will get better”. And I thought, “Great, that’s all I needed to know”. And I think we forget the value of telling someone, “I believe that what you’re experiencing is real, I know it hurts, I know it’s difficult, but I have every confidence that things are going to get better”.

Brett McKay: You also talk about the skill of working, how can work help us become emotionally healthy?

Meg Jay: Yeah, well, work actually is the number one driver of positive personality change in your 20s, and I think if we think about at any age, it’s a pretty important source of confidence and competence, so it’s probably what we spend more hours doing per week than anything else, so there are lots of opportunities to learn new skills and gain new competencies, become more confident, everything from the concrete skills you need for work to the social skills of dealing with bosses or interns or co-workers, I mean, there’s just so much growth happening on the job when you’re in your 20s. Or it should be, and if there isn’t, you need to go find a job where you feel like you’re going to have those growth opportunities. I know from the research, it’s the number one leading source of stress and anxiety in the 20s, but it’s also the number one source of growth and change, and those two things go together obviously, because if you’re gonna be growing and changing, you’re gonna be putting yourself into situations that are new and uncomfortable. And that you don’t know how to do.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think all of us have this idea like, “Man, I wish I didn’t have to work”. But then when you look at the studies of people who get laid off from a job, they’re unemployed for a while, this happen to middle age, like depression just… It’s off the chart, it’s one of the most debilitating things that can happen to someone when they’re unemployed.

Meg Jay: Yeah, there was a lot of talk a couple of years ago about young adults are quiet quitting, and what did I think about that? And what I thought is I want to help them find jobs they don’t wanna quiet quit, because maybe people imagine, “Oh, my life would be so great if I didn’t work”. But like you said, it actually usually isn’t, people feel quite bored and under-stimulated, and so I think the idea is to find work that you feel good about, and now with hybrid possibilities, I think that’s more possible than ever, that people can find work that really works for them.

Brett McKay: Okay, so another skill that you think people need to develop is how to be social, and then, this is another thing we been hearing a lot about that might be contributing to the mental health crisis in the United States, is people are lonely, they’re isolated. Why do you think we’re having such a hard time making friends and socializing these days?

Meg Jay: Yeah, I think that it’s a little bit like working from home, it has upsides and has downsides of that when people feel like they can sort of semi scratch the edge of connecting with people over their phones or on their screens, then they’re less likely to get out there and do that in person, even though we know that in-person interactions are different than interactions that we’re having on screens. And so I think a lot of young adults, they moved to new cities, they need to meet new people. And that’s a different skill set than picking up your phone and texting someone or DMing someone on Instagram, you’ve gotta sort of get out there and figure out, “Where are my people and how do I make conversations with them”. But that most people don’t realize this, but your 20s are actually the loneliest decade of life. We imagine 20-somethings are, they were having so much fun, they have so many friends, are just out and about all the time, it’s really not true, you’re most likely in that age group to be “between families.”

So you wake up in the morning alone in an apartment or in an apartment with people that you may not know well, or may not get along with that great, and it’s a lot of work to be constantly trying to find someone to go out with on Friday night or find somebody to go shopping with on a Saturday, so most young adults are actually quite lonely.

Brett McKay: And I think part of the problem is when you’re in high school, your friends are just pretty much given to you, you show up to school every day…

Meg Jay: There just right there.

Brett McKay: And they’re right there, and then when you’re an adult on your own, it’s up to you, you have to make it happen.

Meg Jay: Right. And that’s same for college, you have people in the hall, you have people in your classes, but then you may go to a workplace where there aren’t that many young adults, or you may be working from home where you really aren’t interacting with anyone, and so people have to sort of figure out, how do I meet people? Is it… Okay, what is it through joining a gym? Well, that’s one step, but then you have to figure out how do I talk to people or say, “Hey, do you want to get coffee or let me give me my number”. That there’s a lot of steps in there and it requires… There’s a lot of uncertainty involved in that, and it requires a lot of courage.

Brett McKay: So yeah, one of the things you do is you do social prescribing. So if you have patients that come in saying, “I’m feeling anxious, I’m feeling depressed”. One thing you might turn to is like, “Hey, why don’t you go out and try to make some friends”. So what kind of things do you tell them to do or recommend that they try doing?

Meg Jay: Yeah, this probably just sounds so obvious or so basic to someone listening, but you would be surprised at how many people will say, “I’m so lonely”. And then you ask about their day and it’s… You can easily see, now some relatively low hanging fruit of, “Well, why don’t you try this?” But I think I write in the book about a guy who came in my office who I really liked a lot, he was a great guy, and he had a steady girlfriend, but she had moved state for a job or something, and so ever since she left, I think she was sort of his leading form of social interaction, which often happens with young males, so she left and he was spending a lot of time on his phone. So, I said, “Well, let’s pull it up, let’s see how much on his screen time”. I believe it was 10 hours a day, because he was eating all of his meals in front of his phone, he was lying in bed on his phone, that’s where everything was happening.

And I said, “Well, what are you doing on your phone?” And he said, “Oh, I like sports, I’m watching this and this game, those stats”. Whatever. And I said, “Well, what sports do you like to do?” He said, “I like to play basketball”. So I said, “Okay, I prescribe your homework between now and the next time I see you is to get out and go play basketball with other people”. And so it wasn’t very long that he was doing that, that he said, “Yeah, I feel better now. I think I just needed to adjust better and differently to my girlfriend leaving and find healthier ways to get through my day”. So it may seem pretty obvious and pretty basic, but you would be surprised how many people aren’t sort of trying the solutions right in front of them.

Brett McKay: And another thing you point out is that young people and even adults need to realize that making friends, it’s gonna take a long time. You cite research from Jeffrey Hall, we’ve had him on the podcast.

Meg Jay: Nice.

Brett McKay: And yeah, he talked about it takes like about… You have to spend 50 hours with somebody to be considered as kind of a casual friend, and it takes about 150 hours or more to make that person a best friend.

Meg Jay: Right.

Brett McKay: When you’re in high school and college, that was easy to do ’cause you’re probably… You get those 50 hours in a few weeks, right?

Meg Jay: Right. You might get five hours a day with somebody.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And when you’re an adult, you might just get an hour a week with somebody. So it’s gonna take… It could take a year or two to make a really good friend, so you gotta be patient.

Meg Jay: Right, and people are often saying, “How do I make friends?” And you know the best way to make friends is to go out and live your life, outside of your house whenever possible, that you usually make friends over something. So friends from grad school or friends from the playground when you’ve had little kids or friends at your job or friends in the wine tasting class that you decided to take, or in the running club. So rather than people imagining there’s some separate program of things they need to do to make friends, the best way to make friends is to get out and do you, and you will meet people who are interested in the same things, have the same values, have the same interest, that’s where friends come from, but to your point, it takes a while.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and one of the side effects of getting out there and making friends is it can actually help you find love. You talk about a lot of young people you’re seeing, they wanna get married, but they can’t find… Having a hard time dating, but what the research shows, and people know this anecdotally, if you’re hanging out with lots of different people, you’re gonna be put in the path of people who might be a potential partner for you.

Meg Jay: Right. Friends are great practice for being partners, if you don’t know how to be a good friend, I find it hard to imagine how you could possibly be a good partner.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Meg Jay: So, it’s great practice because you start to think about, “Hey, it’s not just about me, it’s about… This is a two-way street here. And I need to think about another person, sometimes I need to resolve issues”. So friends are great practice for being partners, and they are also a great way to meet partners that, the more you’re getting out and interacting with people, and again, I think… I don’t have anything against online dating, I’ve had plenty of clients meet people online, but it’s a little bit to what I said about making friends, is that rather than imagining there’s a separate program or a separate app or avenue for finding a partner, often get out and live your life, spend time with friends, and you’re likely to meet people who are interested in the same life, in the same future that you are.

Brett McKay: Okay, so making friends can help you practice the skill of love, of romantic relationships. Related to this idea in these chapters on the skills of love, and you also have the skill of sex, you devote a lot of time to an issue you’ve seen more and more in your patients in the past 15 years, I think it’s really relevant to men, porn use, how have you seen porn use change in your 20-plus years of working with young people?

Meg Jay: Yeah, people always ask me, “How are young adults of now different than when you started 25 years ago?” I would say as human beings, they aren’t very different, what’s different is the technology available to them, and so that’s created situations and problems maybe we didn’t have 25 years ago, but a couple of decades ago, everybody had seen porn, but it was harder to come by, you had to sort of have a Play boy or a penthouse or see it maybe on Cinemax, I mean, it just wasn’t that available. So watching porn was not something that came up a lot in sessions on either side of the room. Now it’s actually a routine intake or screening question that I have for all my clients. Young males are more likely than females to say, “Yes, I watch porn and probably too much”. But I ask every client how much porn they’re watching and whether that’s working for them, not working for them, to kind of take a look at that. And what I’ve really learned from listening to my clients, especially to my young male clients, is that what kind of started as a curiosity or as entertainment kind of became more consuming and maybe even a compulsion, and that people spend a lot more time watching porn than maybe they really want to.

And that it has created for a lot of young men this anxiety about getting out and being intimate with someone in person, having sex with a real person, because watching porn doesn’t necessarily translate to dating or to starting an intimate relationship with someone.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you talk about some issues that they’re seeing amongst young men who are habitual porn users, erectile dysfunction, performance issues, and also a lot of the patients you talk to who have a porn addiction or just use porn too much, depression and anxiety. What do you think is going on there? Why is there a connection between depression and anxiety and habitual porn use?

Meg Jay: Yeah, that’s really to me, the biggest connection because whether people can be addicted to porn or not is up for debate. But what I definitely see is that people will say, “I’m watching porn every day, and I don’t wanna be, so it makes me feel depressed about myself, why am I doing this? What’s wrong with me? I feel weird walking around knowing that I’m doing this thing that I wish I wasn’t doing, it makes me feel bad about myself, that I’m kind of watching other people have sex rather than figuring out how to go out there and have it myself”. And then there’s the anxiety piece where whether consciously or unconsciously people imagine, “Well, I’m supposed to know how to do all that, I’m supposed to be able to perform like that”. And the longer you spend watching sex rather than trying to participate in having sex, the more likely you are to have that sort of stage fright or performance anxiety. So I’ll have young male clients say, “Well, I just don’t even know how to start. What if I go out with someone and I can’t perform?” And I say, “Well, let’s take it back a few steps, what if you just go out with someone and get to know them, or go out with someone and make out, and don’t worry about sort of performing.”

Not to mention performing like a porn star, “Don’t worry about that on the first day, let’s just spend some time with someone and see what happens”.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you talk about how porn use can get in the way of a healthy sexual relationship once that’s part of your life with somebody, is that you have these weird expectations of what sex is supposed to be like, ’cause you’re trying to perform. You’re trying to mimic what you’re seeing there, and I’ve seen surveys with young people where, there’s a lot of young people who are doing things in the bed because they saw it on their TV screen or their computer screen, but they’re actually not comfortable with it, but they think, “Well, this is what I’m supposed to do is what I see”. And you are… You instead of trying to perform and trying to mimic what you see in these videos or whatever, sex and love should be like a jazz collaboration, you’re working with the other person to figure out what works for you two.

Meg Jay: Right, that it’s don’t try to imitate something you’ve seen other people do, just be in the moment with the person you’re with and figure out what that person wants to do and what you want to do, the best metaphor or comparison I ever heard… I think I heard it on NPR. It was someone, and I wish I could credit them ’cause I don’t remember who said it, but they said, learning how to have sex from watching porn is like learning how to drive by watching Fast and Furious movies, that is just not… It’s not gonna give you the best sort of scripts or playbook in terms of how most people actually want a sexual relationship to go.

Brett McKay: Do you have any advice on… Say that someone’s listening like, I got… I’m watching more porn than I want, any advice on helping them stop?

Meg Jay: Yeah, I mean… Well, that’s a spectrum. So I’m hearing more and more from men who are saying, I have a hardcore porn addiction, I’m in deep, and so I think if you’re feeling that that’s your situation, that I think people are treating that the way they treat other addictions, so look for addiction resources that specifically gear to this. But what is more common is young males, and I see this all the time who are just saying, I don’t think I’m addicted to porn, but I’m really watching it too much, and so we come up with solutions together. When you’re leaning on a substance too much, no matter what it is, the first sort of line of defense is to figure out, well, how can we make this a little less available and how can we do something else?

And so that may be, I don’t bring my phone in the bedroom or I got rid of my desktop, depends on where are you accessing this, when are you most likely to look at it and can you kind of busy yourself at other times, and that may sound like not big interventions, but that’s a great thing about working with young adults, is that these are when difficult habits tend to crop up, but they also haven’t often been around all that long, and that they can be easy to shift and so sometimes you make some lifestyle adjustments, and they’re able to act on that pretty quickly, I have a client right now who came in a month ago and said he was getting high half the day, noon to midnight, and I was like, Well, that’s probably a problem.

So can we reduce that? And so he’s already been able to say, Okay, I’m gonna get my day done, I’m gonna get my work done, and maybe I’ll just be a night-time smoker, and for now that’s where he is, will he eventually become… Well actually, he said over the long haul, three to five years from now, he would rather be a weekend smoker or a not-at-all smoker, and he’s moving in that direction quite quickly and effectively without much intervention on my part, except saying, I think you can do this let’s talk about how.

Brett McKay: Two other skills that I was surprised to see pop up in the book was the skill to move, exercise and the skill to cook, why those skills? How do they help our mental health?

Meg Jay: Well, I think… I hope everybody’s heard by now that exercise is always great for mental health, and there really aren’t any downsides, so unlike medications, which can be a mixed bag, getting out and moving more, it’s good for our physical health it’s good for our mental health, it can be good for our social lives, it can be good for our work lives and creativity, there’s really no downside to moving more, and about a third to a half of doctors will prescribe movement for mental health struggles, but that also means a half to two-thirds don’t, and they should be, because often times clients are coming in and they’re saying, I wanna feel better right now, immediately, and that makes people think, Oh well, maybe medication, but if you wanna feel better right now, probably the quickest thing you could do to feel a little bit better is to move a little bit more, and you don’t have to exercise, you don’t even have to play a sport, it’s just whatever you’re going to do and enjoy, so maybe you walk your dog more, maybe you play frisbee, maybe you play pickle ball, or maybe you go for a hike, maybe you do salsa dancing on the weekend, the best kind of “exercise” is Whatever it is you’re going to do.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and we’ve had people on the podcast talk about that exercise as effective or even more effective than antidepressants without the downsides, without the side effects, cooking. Why cooking?

Meg Jay: That might sound like… That’s funny. Everybody’s commented on that, that I’ve got cooking in my book. A couple of reasons I do. One is young adults, they just eat like crap. Pardon my french, they really do not eat well, and so that’s not helping that we’re learning more about how processed foods, junk foods are not great for your mental health, not great for your brain, that the gut is called the second brain because it’s second only to the brain, in terms of the number of neurons that it contains, so what you put in your body matters, there’s also the issue of, I think just… And people who cook are more likely to eat more healthily, but just knowing how to cook, I think helps people feel more competent and more confident rather than feeling like they’re running around trying to get some of their most basic needs met by another person or that they don’t know how to do it, knowing how to make a breakfast smoothie in the morning or pack a sandwich, Or make a meal at night really does help people feel like there’s something that I can follow the instructions on and have a win on today, it also helps your social life ’cause you’re more likely to have people over or have a barbecue or a potluck. So again, no downsides to learning how to cook, and it can be incredibly grounding.

Brett McKay: Okay, so another skill, last skill I wanna talk about is the skill of how to decide, your 20s are filled with lots of big important decisions, how do 20-somethings and maybe even people beyond 20-somethings, how do they get decision-making wrong?

Meg Jay: Well, your 20s are when you move from what are called small world problems to big world problems, because it’s when you sort of move from school, of there are right answers and clear ways to get an A or a B to life after school where there isn’t a right answer to, who should I partner with? What should I do? Should I take this job or that job? Where should I live? There aren’t any right answers, there’s no algorithm, there’s no way you’re going to be able to sort of gain this or find out from another person what you should do, the good news is there aren’t any wrong answers, it’s really just what’s right or wrong for you, and I think when we’re looking for that answer, that’s where the asking your therapist or asking your parents What should I do, when really only you can decide, and I think that can be freeing when people recognize that there isn’t a wrong choice to make here, there’s only your choice, so you gather the best information that you can and you make it based on your own values and priorities.

Brett McKay: You talk about one problem that 20-somethings have is constantly looking for reassurance and that can actually get in the way of making progress in life.

Meg Jay: Yeah, actually in the psychology world, they have seminars now about reassurance junkies, people who sort of always want to know, Am I doing the right thing? Is this gonna work out? Am I okay. And when you reassure people, it’s actually a little bit like a drug that you’re giving them a hit of something that makes them feel better for about five minutes and then they come back and they want more, so rather than reassure people, I actually recently, and I think I wrote about it in the book, that this happens to me all the time. I will say something that is meant to inspire confidence, and people will say, Well, that’s very reassuring, and I said, No, no, no, I’m not trying to reassure you, I’m trying to say, based on the evidence, I believe in you, you’ve gotten through this situation before I think you can do it again. Recently, I was on a podcast and someone said, My life has been okay in my 20s, but what if it all goes sideways in my 30s? And I said, Well, why would that happen? And we talked about how she had already made progress at work and was in a healthy relationship and had some nice friends, so she clearly had the skills to be off to a great start, so I really couldn’t understand why everything would just go to pot in her 30s, and she said, Oh, that’s so reassuring.

And I said, No, I’m not trying to reassure you, I’m trying to give you confidence that based on the data, on the evidence, there’s no reason to believe your life is gonna go sideways, and that’s different from saying, Oh, everything will be fine. But that’s just sort of empty.

Brett McKay: Well, Meg, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Meg Jay: Let’s see, the book is sold everywhere I hope, and on socials, I’m at Dr. Meg Jay. And then my website is megjay.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well Meg Jay. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Meg Jay: You too Brett, always great to talk to you.

Brett McKay: My guest here’s Dr. Meg Jay, she’s the author of the book, The TwentySomething Treatment, it’s available on Amazon.com and book stores everywhere, you can find more information about her work at her website, megjay.com, also check out our shownotes at aom.is/megjay where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AoM podcast, make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can our podcast archives, as well as thousand of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of, and while you’re there, sign up for our email newsletter, it’s completely free, and there’s both a daily and weekly option, as always, thank you for your continued support, and until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

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In the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” What does putting away the ways of childhood and stepping into manhood look […]

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Earlier this year, I changed up my strength training, transitioning from using barbells exclusively to combining them with dumbbells. This was due to a series of injuries over the past few years. My coach, Matt Reynolds, has done a great job accommodating my new normal and has programmed some great dumbbell-based workouts that have allowed […]

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While there may be some heated rivalries in today’s NBA, the ferocity of competition doesn’t compare to the hard-hitting contests that took place during the 1987-1988 season, when four rising and falling dynasties — the Celtics, Lakers, Pistons, and Bulls — battled it out for supremacy.

Here to illuminate that epic era in basketball and share what can be learned from it is Rich Cohen, author of When the Game Was War: The NBA’s Greatest Season. Today on the show, Rich makes a case for why there’s never be a season before or since like the one that played out in ’87 and ’88, and he profiles the players — Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, and Michael Jordan — who dominated that season and changed the game. Along the way, we talk about the life lessons that can be taken from these players and their teams, including the rules legendary coach Phil Jackson gave the Bulls, which were inspired by the jazz musician Thelonious Monk.

Resources Related to the Podcast Rich’s last appearance on the AoM podcast:Episode #817 — Life Lessons From the World’s Greatest Negotiator * The Last Dance on Netflix * Winning Time* on HBO * AoM Article: Competition — The Fuel for Greatness * Sunday Firesides: Your Worst Competitor Is You * AoM Podcast #790: Kierkegaard on the Present (Passionless) Age * “The Moods of Ernest Hemingway” by Lillian Ross

Connect With Rich Cohen* Rich’s website * Rich on Twitter

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #925: When the Game Was War — Lessons From the Greatest NBA Season of All Time appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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A sucking chest wound occurs when the chest cavity is punctured by some foreign object. Bullets and bits of shrapnel are common culprits.

Your lungs consist of delicate sacs that fill with air when you inhale. Your chest cavity, including your ribs, protects your lungs and maintains an open space for them to expand into. When something pierces your chest cavity, outside air can flood in and cause your lung to collapse. A collapsed lung will leave you gasping, or sucking, for air as your lung tries to fight against the increased pressure coming in through the wound. That pressure only builds as you try to breathe harder.

Sucking chest wounds typically cause blood to foam or bubble near the wound site. Treating such a wound quickly is critical, so you should assume any severe wound to the chest is a sucking chest wound. Apply treatment immediately and get the injured person to medical attention as soon as possible. The key to treatment is to seal off the chest cavity to prevent outside air from putting pressure on the lungs while still allowing air to escape as the lungs inflate. To accomplish this, you want to create a valve that allows air to exit, but not enter, the chest cavity.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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For thousands of years, autumn was a time for harvest. It was a time to pick fruit and reap grain. It was a time to process and preserve produce for storage in attics and cellars, cribs and silos. It was the most labor-intensive season of the year — the big push before the fallow months that followed.

Even before the era of agriculture, ancient peoples used this season to hunt and trap, forage and gather, building up caches of food in anticipation of the arrival of winter.

Today, autumn is more likely to find people gathering data rather than grain and bagging groceries instead of game. But the rhythms of our ancestors remain embedded in our bones.

Pay attention, and you’ll notice that as the leaves start to fall, your energy begins to rise. In the coming weeks, you’ll experience an upwelling in animation. The lethargy of summer’s heat breaks; cooler air stirs the spirit. Even in our modern world, the ardor of autumn lives on, and you should be prepared to take advantage of it — to bring in a harvest of your own.

All year long, you’ve been planting seeds — intentions for a new product, a piece of writing, a household project. Ideas have been growing in your consciousness. Now is the time to thrust in your sickle upon them.

Harvest wasn’t an individual endeavor, but a communal one, and you’ll likely recognize a greater drive to reach out to others. Take advantage of this stirring as well. Send that text. Host that party or get-together you’ve been meaning to.

Use the crisp, fire-tinted vigor of the season to bring all you can into the barn of your life; create a storehouse of successes, satisfactions, and connections that will warm and sustain you in the cold, dark months to come.

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“In Praise of Heroic Masculinity” by Caitlin Flanagan. The phrase “toxic masculinity” has been thrown around a lot in our culture the past several years, particularly when high-profile men use their power and strength to take advantage of women. But Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan argues that “If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective.” Her choice for that adjective is “heroic,” and she argues that all the talk about the wrongs men commit overlooks the fact that they often use their physical strength and courage to protect and serve the vulnerable. Heroic masculinity manifested itself big time on 9/11 as male firefighters rushed into the World Trade Center, and, Flanagan says, it shows up every day when a young man stands up for someone getting picked on at school. She argues that if we want boys to become good men, we need to talk more about their potential for heroic masculinity and show them examples of what it looks like.

“Dream of Mickey Mantle” by Bleachers. We’re big fans of the Bleachers in the McKay household. They were one of the best shows I’ve seen at Tulsa’s famed Cain’s Ballroom. All of their songs are great, but one I particularly enjoy is “Dream of Mickey Mantle.” The music and lyrics convey a sense of nostalgia and longing for childhood. I always get chills down my spine when the song hits its crescendo. Frontman Jack Antonoff is definitely one of my generation’s greatest song-smiths.

Philips Norelco Nose Trimmer 5000. As a middle-aged man, I’ve got to pay more attention to hairs growing out of my nose and ears. I’ve written about how to manage this hair before. My old nose and ear hair trimmer bit the dust a few months ago, so I picked up Philips Norelco’s latest. It’s just $20, and it gets the job done quickly and painlessly. You can also trim your eyebrows with it, which comes in handy if you have Sam Eagle eyebrows like me.

Paddington. Our family finally got around to watching Paddington this summer. Can’t believe we waited so long to watch it! It’s such a delightful and charming movie, with lots of truly laugh-out-loud moments. Paul King did a great job of injecting whimsy in the movie without going overboard with it. It’s a great movie for the entire family, and you’ll wish you had a Paddington Bear friend in your home to eat marmalade with when you’re done.

Quote of the Week

Trust him little who praises all; him less who censures all; and him least who is indifferent to all.

—Johann Kaspar Lavater

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Sunday is the traditional day of rest and an edifying opportunity to knock off from your typical jobs and tasks (and perhaps from your devices as well).

But Sundays are also awesome days to prepare for the resumption of work and weekday busyness come Monday morning. They are very profitably used as a day to get all your ducks in a row — a chance to lay the ground for a smooth, productive week ahead.

Here are six things we do each Sunday that help us prepare to tackle the coming week and that we highly recommend:

Plan Out Your WeekI’ve been planning my week out every Sunday morning for the past 15 years. I still roughly follow the format I shared in an article a decade back. First, I review my calendar for the week, so I’m aware of any appointments I have. Then I perform a big mind dump: I go over this Getting Things Done Trigger List to help prompt my brain to think of all the things I need to do in the coming week. As these personal and professional tasks surface in my mind, I put them into the Todoist app, setting dates for when I want to complete them. (Make sure to read this article for more details on how I use Todoist to get things done.)

My planning session takes about 15 to 20 minutes and puts me in a position to have a productive marriage meeting with Kate. Which brings us to . . .

Do a Marriage MeetingThis is a practice we’ve been doing every week for seven years now and couldn’t more strongly recommend to the married folks out there. It’s incredibly beneficial for your relationship and individual and shared lives.

To do a marriage meeting, you and your spouse sit down together to dedicate some time to reconnecting, catching up, and getting onto the same page. The meeting is broken into four parts:

Appreciation: You and your spouse tell each other everything you appreciate about them/about the things they did over the last week.
To-Dos: Discuss what household chores/tasks need to be done, the next steps in tackling them, and who’s taking them on.
Plan for Good Times: Discuss what kinds of fun things you want to do as a couple, as a family, and individually in the coming week(s) or month(s) — you can do vacation planning here too.
Problems and Issues: Discuss big issues in your lives concerning finances, sex, in-laws, parenting, changing schedules, health worries, etc.

A marriage meeting only takes about 20 minutes, and it’s a game-changer; the appreciation section helps you, well, remember how much you appreciate your spouse, and the other parts help you maintain a strong partnership and run a household that’s more harmonious and fun.

For more details on how to do a marriage meeting, check out our article and/or podcast on the subject.

Clean Out and Back Up Your ComputerMy computer accumulates a bunch of crap during the week. To free up space, I do a weekly digital “decluttering” session. I delete any files I’ve downloaded throughout the week but no longer need. After that, I run CleanMyMac. It cleans up the invisible cache junk that accumulates in your computer and runs maintenance scripts to keep my MacBook humming along.

After that, I back up my computer onto an external hard drive. This ensures that I have redundancies for my business and personal life. Backing up your hard drive also frees up space on your computer.

Conduct a What-Do-I-Need InventoryHopefully, as soon as you realize you’re in need of something (eggs, socks, toothpaste) during the week, you make a note of it somewhere; the “To Buy” list is one of the 8 lists you should currently be keeping.

But realistically, you don’t always have a chance (or the will) to write down something you’re out of as soon as it crosses your mind. So it’s helpful to do an intentional inventory on Sundays.

It’s hard to think of what you need simply by searching your brain. Instead, conduct an intentional inventory by physically looking through your stock of things in the different rooms in your house — especially your kitchen and bedroom. Looking over the contents of your bathroom counter, shower, cabinets, fridge, pantry, etc. will trigger you to remember what you need to restock. “Right, we need more toilet paper. I’m out of pepper. The printer needs ink.”

Write these things down on your “To Buy” list. You may want to separate this list into categories like “Stuff to Buy on Amazon” and “Groceries.”

Plan Out Your MealsThink about what you’re going to be eating during the upcoming week. Plan out some meals. Make a list of the ingredients you’ll need for the meals and the groceries you need in general. Add these to your “To Buy” list.
Order What You NeedOnce you’ve got your “To Buy” list filled out, order those items you can online and cross them off. If you do online grocery shopping, put in an order set to be delivered/picked up the next day. Or you can pull out the list the next time you go to the store.

Use your Sundays to reorganize and reboot, and when the sun rises on Monday morning, you’ll be able to hit the ground running and have a much more productive and fulfilling week.

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Some dress codes are pretty easy to understand.

When you get an invitation that says the dress code is “black tie,” you know that means you wear a tuxedo.

“Semi-formal?” A suit and tie. Easy-peasy.

The “business casual” category is a bit more ambiguous. But it’s been around long enough that we have some pretty good rough-and-ready guidelines for what it calls for. Business casual is a step down from semi-formal; you trade the suit for khakis or trousers and a sports jacket or blazer, swap the button-up dress shirt for a button-down, and drop the tie. The look still says “dressy” and “professional” but is more laid-back. Business casual is how dads dressed for work in the 1990s. You know it when you see it.

“Casual?” Well, that’s simple. It’s pretty much whatever you want. Shorts, polo shirts, jeans, t-shirts, sneakers. Whatever.

There is a dress code category that’s emerged over the last twenty years, however, that’s more of a head-scratcher: smart casual.

Today, with help from our buddies at Huckberry, we will unravel the mysteries of smart casual dressing and provide examples of smart casual outfits that can work for the office or for a night out with friends.

What the Heck Is Smart Casual?An invitation may or may not explicitly state the dress code is “smart casual,” but for any event that doesn’t have an air of formality but isn’t entirely run-of-the-mill either, showing up in the smart casual style is a good bet. It’s right for after-work hangouts, social events at business conferences, casual workplaces, dates, and dinners with friends.

Smart casual is a dress code that strikes a balance between formal and casual attire. It’s a style that’s got the relaxed and comfortable feel of casual, but looks more put-together. It’s less professional than “business casual” but more sophisticated than “running to Costco.” With smart casual, you’re not dressed up, but you’re not letting it all hang out, either.

A smart casual outfit incorporates things we typically associate with casual clothing like denim, t-shirts, and sneakers and combines them with dressier, more structured items like collared shirts and jackets.

It’s casual, but looks sharp.

How to Dress Smart CasualThe key to mastering smart casual dressing lies in finding the perfect balance between formal and casual elements. To do so, start with a casual base outfit and then swap out one or two pieces for more polished alternatives.

For example, replace a jean jacket with a casual blazer or swap out your typical running shoes for a pair of nice, minimalist sneakers.

Another smart casual outfit could be khaki pants (casual) combined with a nice button-down shirt (more formal).

By making these simple adjustments, you can create a smart casual ensemble that offers polish and sophistication without sacrificing comfort.

Layering is an essential styling technique for smart casual dressing, as it allows you to adjust the formality of your outfit with ease. By layering different pieces, you can create depth and contrast in your get-up, adding visual interest and ensuring that your outfit is suitable for a variety of settings.

For example, you can upgrade a casual t-shirt and khakis to smart casual by adding an unstructured blazer. You can also add a sweater over an oxford shirt and jeans for a smart casual outfit that’s perfect for fall.

An important point to keep in mind is that smart casual is a spectrum and how far you go towards smart or casual will depend on the context you find yourself in. If your office allows for casual dressing, lean towards adding more polish to your smart casual outfit in order to look more professional. If you’re hanging out with friends, lean more towards the casual end of things. You got to use your style phronesis with smart casual.

3 Examples of Smart Casual Get-UpsThe guys at Huckberry recently launched a whole shop dedicated to the smart casual category, and we asked them to put together three looks drawn from it to give readers concrete examples of what smart casual can look like:

This is how to casualize smart casual. Put on a great pair of sneakers for a fresh take with a blazer, yet still look ready for the office.

Forty Five Supima Crew Tee
Relwen Flyweight Flex Blazer
Huckberry x Opie Way James Hi Court Sneaker
Relwen Flyweight Flex Chino

Wardrobe essentials every man needs. A great pair of pants and a slim shirt. Classic and timeless.

Flint and Tinder Donegal Architect Shirt
Flint and Tinder 365 Pant
Astorflex Dartflex Loafer
Shinola Runwell Quartz Watch

A modern take on smart casual. You can look put-together easily with these iconic pieces.

Flint and Tinder Bone Button Western Shirt
Le Mont St Michel French Moleskin Work Jacket
LUCA Terra Moc Toe Sneaker Boot
Flint and Tinder All-American Stretch Denim

There you go. Now you know how to be smart about smart casual. Be a bit less casual about your casual, and it’s easy to look a big cut above everyone else.

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Change is a constant. Changes big and small are always happening in our lives, while the world also changes around us. We can either resist these changes as unmooring threats to our sense of self, or embrace them as chances to get better and stronger. The key to taking that second approach, my guest says, […]

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When someone is dissatisfied with a product, group, or relationship, how do they remedy that dissatisfaction?

A German economist and political scientist, Albert Hirschman, laid out a theory of how people respond to dissatisfaction in his influential treatise Exit, Voice, Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.

Hirschman observed that people who find themselves in diminishing, less-than-ideal circumstances have three options: 1) leave the declining group, company, or relationship (exit), 2) express discontent to improve the situation (voice), or 3) stay in the organization and passively hope things get better (loyalty).

Since the initial publication of Exit, Voice, Loyalty in 1970, other social scientists have added a fourth option to Hirschman’s framework: neglect.

Which option a person exercises will depend on many factors, and the path they choose can help reverse, stem, or exacerbate a group’s deterioration.

The exit, voice, loyalty, neglect (EVLN) framework will help you understand why people stay in or leave a relationship (including friendships), why people stay in or leave a job, why people stay in or leave a church, and many more of life’s interpersonal and institutional dynamics.

Let’s unpack it.

Exit, Voice, Loyalty, NeglectI read Hirschman’s book a few months ago and went on a deep dive into related research that’s been done since it was published. The EVLN framework has become a fundamental mental model in my brain. It’s a decidedly simple paradigm and is something people already intuitively know, but once you see it spelled out explicitly, you start to see it everywhere.

ExitThe exit option is exercised when an individual is dissatisfied with something and decides to quit it altogether.

You use the exit option all the time as a consumer. If you’re dissatisfied with shaving cream brand A, you stop using it and start using shaving cream brand B.

You can also use the exit option when dissatisfied with a job, relationship, or group.

Not happy with your job? You can quit it.

Not happy with your relationship? You can break up.

Not happy with the state of your congregation? You can stop going to that church and start going to another.

What’s interesting about the exit option is that it often accelerates decline in groups. According to Hirschman, the people most sensitive to a decrease in quality are typically those with the most resources, skills, and talents that could be used to effectuate improvement. The people who are the least sensitive to quality usually have fewer resources, skills, and talents. When the people who have resources leave, it results in a “brain drain.” With fewer well-resourced members, the quality of the group further declines; it thus has even more trouble attracting new members (especially well-resourced ones); as a result, even more people leave. Things go from bad to worse, and the group or organization enters a death spiral that can be difficult or impossible to recover from.

To illustrate this phenomenon, Hirschman uses the example of parents pulling their kids out of public schools and putting them into private schools. According to Hirschman, affluent parents are much more sensitive to education quality than less affluent parents. It’s not that less affluent parents don’t care about their children’s education; they just don’t have the luxury of being hyper-sensitive to deficits in quality. Because they know that private school isn’t an option for them, they don’t spend as much time wondering if the grass is greener at another school as affluent parents do.

Because school is a matter of optionality for wealthy parents, they notice perceived flaws in their children’s education more acutely. If these parents become dissatisfied with the education being offered in a public school, they’ll switch their child over to a private school. When these affluent families leave a public school, they take their resources, and their possibly greater propensity to push for improvement, with them. As a result, the struggles of the public school deepen.

VoiceSometimes people find themselves in a situation where they’re dissatisfied with a group or relationship, but they don’t want to leave it. They still see good in it. It’s still working for them on some level, or they see potential for how it could work if things were done differently. They may feel they can do more good being an agent on the inside than being a critic on the outside.

In these cases, people may decide to stay around and exercise the voice option — complaining, offering feedback, and agitating for change to improve things.

An unhappy employee can talk to his boss about changing the company’s culture.

An unhappy husband can tell his wife about his concerns for the relationship, or together they can talk to a therapist.

An unhappy customer can contact customer support to raise concerns and seek redress.

Unhappy parents can talk to their child’s teacher about an issue with their kid or join the PTA to advocate for broader changes.

LoyaltyWhile Hirschman clearly defined exit and voice, he was ambiguous about loyalty. It’s one of the biggest criticisms he received for his work. Many social scientists since Hirschman have described loyalty as a “passively positive” response in the face of dissatisfaction. Instead of taking action (exit or voice), the loyal customer, employee, spouse, or church member will stay aboard and not raise a stink, hoping things will get better on their own if they wait long enough.

Take an employee dissatisfied with his job. Maybe he’s decided he can’t quit, and perhaps he’s also decided that voicing his concerns to his boss will only increase the animosity between them. So he chooses to stay with the company, thinking, “Well, maybe things will improve. Maybe we’ll get a new supervisor. Maybe I’ll get moved to a new division. I’ll just keep working and wait and see.”

NeglectSocial scientist Carly Rusbult added a fourth option to Hirschman’s exit/voice/loyalty options for dealing with dissatisfaction: neglect.

Neglect is similar to loyalty in that the dissatisfied person decides to stay on board with the declining job, relationship, or group, but instead of thinking things might improve if they’re patient, the person who adopts the neglect option has decided things won’t get better and chooses to take a “negative passive” approach to the situation by putting in less effort or not taking action to prevent the relationship or group from further falling apart.

Rather than helping an ineffectual organization continue to limp feebly along, this individual stays but withdraws their support, with the idea that by letting the group collapse, its leadership will finally be forced to take action to change and improve it. The neglect approach is: “I’m not going to actively put out fires. I’m just going to let this thing burn to the ground so we can start fresh.”

Consider the overworked church member in a struggling congregation. He’s juggling multiple roles and dealing with a cadre of difficult people. Leaving isn’t an option because his wife grew up in that church and would never consider it. He knows raising his concerns to leadership would be ineffective because he tried that in the past. So exit and voice are off the table.

He also doesn’t think things will get better if he sticks around and just keeps plugging away. Goodbye loyalty.

Hello, neglect.

This burned-out church member may start doing the bare minimum in his responsibilities, if that. He’ll say no to requests for his time, money, and talent. If he sees an issue or problem, he won’t do anything to correct it. He thinks that those who remain loyal are only perpetuating a state of dysfunction. By withholding his help, he hopes to push the congregation to a critical level of failure, which will require the leadership to fix the underlying issues.

Predictors of Response to DissatisfactionSo, in the face of dissatisfaction, people can respond with exit, voice, loyalty, or neglect.

A person in declining circumstances conducts an explicit or implicit cost/benefit analysis in figuring out which path to take.

In Predicting Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect, researchers Michael Withey and William Cooper fleshed out the factors that go into this analysis when people consider how to respond to dissatisfaction:

Cost of the ActionExit, voice, loyalty, and neglect all come with costs, both direct and indirect.

Exiting a job can result in the loss of income and health benefits; divorcing a spouse can result in emotional and financial distress; leaving a church can result in spiritual and social isolation.

Raising your voice at work could create rancor with your boss; speaking up in a marriage could create resentment with your spouse.

Whether you’re exiting or using your voice, there can also be a loss in the thing humans hold most dear: status. In leaving or dissenting, you risk jeopardizing your identity.

Staying loyal to a relationship or organization comes with costs, too. If you keep your job in a toxic office, you’ll have to continue to weather the stress and debasement that comes with going to work each day. Same thing with staying in a struggling, conflict-ridden marriage or church.

If you decide to be neglectful in your job, it could result in discipline or blocked opportunities. Neglect in a marriage will only lead to increased resentment and tension.

The exit option tends to have the most dramatic consequences, and is thus much more reluctantly exercised and typically used as a last resort.

But there’s no option in the EVLN framework that doesn’t carry downsides; each has its own pros and cons, and part of how people weigh their choices comes down to which path they think has more of the former and less of the latter.

Efficacy of the ResponseIn deciding between exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect, people will also consider which response will be the most effective at resolving their dissatisfaction.

A big factor in whether someone thinks a particular response will be effective is whether they believe there’s hope for improvement. If someone has this hope, they’re more likely to choose voice or loyalty; if they don’t, they’re more likely to choose exit or neglect. If an unhappy employee thinks things would be a lot better at work if their supervisor moved on, and there’s a rumor they’ll soon be replaced, the employee is more likely to stick around. If a church member thinks their concerns will be listened to and addressed, they’re more likely to stay and raise their voice; if they think their concerns will be dismissed, they’re more likely to leave.

A significant element in whether someone has hope for a better future is their prior satisfaction with the group or relationship. If someone’s marriage is struggling now, but was great for the first decade, they’re more apt to keep working on it and believe there’s a chance of returning to those happier times. If someone’s marriage was rocky from the start, they’re more likely to choose divorce.

Internal vs. External Locus of ControlIf an individual has an internal locus of control, they’re more likely to choose a response that’s proactive. That is, if they believe they have control over their actions and outcomes, they’re more likely to use voice or exit.

Someone who has an external locus of control — a belief that their life is controlled by external circumstances — is more likely to passively endure a bad situation (loyalty or neglect).

Attractiveness of AlternativesIf someone feels like there are better options outside their current job/relationship/church, they’re more likely to leave.

If someone’s in a job they dislike and has been fielding hiring interest from another employer, they’re more likely to quit.

If, on the other hand, someone feels they won’t be able to do much better in an alternate situation, they’re more likely to exercise the options of voice, loyalty, and neglect.

An individual who’s sixty and in a so-so marriage may not feel bullish about their prospects of finding another partner and decide they’d rather be with someone, anyone, than alone.

CommitmentThe decision to go, stay, or otherwise is also rooted in one’s inner values.

Someone in an unhappy marriage who’s deeply committed to the sanctity of the marriage vow is more likely to choose therapy over divorce.

Someone who is disturbed by recent trends in their church but deeply believes in the tenets of their faith, is more likely to stay than exit.

Someone who prizes loyalty will stay longer in a job they dislike than someone who doesn’t.

Will Someone Choose Exit, Voice, Loyalty, or Neglect?In a series of studies, Withey and Cooper used the above factors to create a rubric that helps predict which response a dissatisfied employee will use. It likely carries over to people dissatisfied with other situations as well:

Exit More Likely When:

costs of exit are low
costs of voice are high
prior satisfaction is low
belief in improvement is low
commitment is low
attractive alternatives are available
individual has an internal locus of control

Voice More Likely When:

costs of exit are high
costs of voice are low
prior satisfaction is high
belief in improvement is high
commitment is high
attractive alternatives are not available
individual has an internal locus of control

Loyalty More Likely When:

costs of exit are high
costs of voice are high
prior satisfaction is high
belief in the likelihood of improvement is high
commitment is high
attractive alternatives are not available
individual has an external locus of control

Neglect More Likely When:

costs of exit are high
costs of voice are high
prior satisfaction is low
belief in the likelihood of improvement is low
commitment is low
attractive alternatives are not available
individual has an external locus of control

Something that Withey and Cooper didn’t explore, but Hirschman did, is the phenomenon of people who exercise the option of exit and voice.

Hirschman argued that you see people use both exit and voice in situations where even if they leave a group due to dissatisfaction, they’re still affected by the group’s actions.

You see this phenomenon with people who become disaffected with a church or religion. They may leave a faith, but they still have friends and family members who belong to it. Because the disaffected individual still interacts with these people, whose faith informs these interactions, the disaffected person is still impacted by the faith, even if they no longer practice it. At the same time, an individual who leaves a religion may feel that the religion damaged them somehow, and, though they have removed themselves from its direct influence, they don’t want to see other people get hurt in the same way.

Consequently, people who leave a religion sometimes become its most vocal critics.

ConclusionAs I mentioned at the start, once I learned about the exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect paradigm, I started to see it everywhere. If you’re a business owner, it can help explain why customers react to a dissatisfying experience the way they do. If you’re in a bad relationship, it can help you think about what action you want to take. If you’re a leader in a church, it can help you figure out why some people leave your congregation while others stick around.

It can also help you understand why struggling groups often continue to struggle: If a group loses enough good people, it’s apt to enter a death spiral.

As you go about dealing with people in all kinds of situations, the ELVN framework is one mental model you’ll want to keep in your back pocket.

The post Exit, Voice, Loyalty, Neglect: Why People Leave, Stay, or Try to Burn It All Down appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Exit, voice, and loyalty;: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states

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Do you ever get to feeling kind of down, dejected, and anxious come Sunday evening? People refer to this phenomenon as the “Sunday Night Blues,” and it’s a common experience. You may have chalked it up to rueing the fact that your fun and restful weekend is over, and that you have yet another workweek ahead.

But my guest would say that your Sunday night sadness may also be rooted in the feeling of regret — the regret that you didn’t put your weekend to good use, that it wasn’t restful and fun, and that it was instead busy, draining, and, once again, a big letdown. Her name is Katrina Onstad, and she’s the author of The Weekend Effect. Today Katrina shares how the idea of the weekend, of having two back-to-back days off from work, came about, and how it’s been challenged and subsequently eroded in the modern day. We then talk about how to take back your weekends, so that your invaluable Saturdays and Sundays feel more the way they did when you were a kid — filled with a sense of possibility.

Resources Related to the Podcast* Saint Monday * Haymarket square affair * AoM Podcast #602: The Case for Being Unproductive * AoM Podcast #450: How to Make Time for What Really Matters * AoM Podcast #748: Time Management for Mortals * AoM Podcast #743: How to Get Time, Priorities, and Energy Working in Your Favor * AoM Article: How to Better Manage Your Life Admin * AoM Article: The Rise of Spectatoritis * AoM Article: The Lost Art of Cheap Recreation

Connect With Katrina Onstad* Katrina’s Website

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Read the Transcript!Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Now, do you ever get to feeling kinda down, dejected, and anxious come Sunday evening? People refer to this phenomenon as the Sunday Night Blues and it’s a common experience. You may have chalked it up to ruing the fact that your fun and restful weekend is over and you have yet another work week ahead. Well, my guest would say that you’re a Sunday night sadness may also be rooted in the feeling of regret. The regret you didn’t put your weekend to good use, that it wasn’t restful and fun, that it was instead busy, draining, and once again, a big let down. Her name is Katrina Onstad, and she’s the author of The Weekend Effect. Today, Katrina shares how the idea of the weekend, having two back-to-back days off from work came about, how it’s been challenged and subsequently eroded in the modern day. We then talk about how to take back your weekends so that you’re invaluable Saturdays and Sundays feel more the way they did when you were a kid: Filled with a sense of possibility. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/weekend.

Alright, Katrina Onstad, welcome to the show.

Katrina Onstad: Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you’ve got a book called The Weekend Effect, and this is all about the benefits of actually enjoying those two days that we get for a weekend and how to make the most of them. I’m curious, was there a moment in your own life where… Of life of weekends where you realized, “Man, my weekends, they’re not great. I could probably do these better?”

Katrina Onstad: Well, it’s funny now, post-COVID because, of course, a weekend looked pretty different a few years ago when I wrote this book. So I’ll dig back into the moment where… The before times. And yeah, I was raising two kids, married, very busy work life, and we were packed. I think our calendars were like the calendars of CEOs, even though that’s not exactly what we did professionally, and certainly not what our kids were. But they were scheduled, we were scheduled, and my son on a Sunday night would turn to me every Sunday and say, “So was that it? Was that the weekend?” With this kind of disappointment as if we had withheld something from him. And it was kinda clear that the pace wasn’t changing, that there was nothing in the texture and the tone of the weekends that differentiated those two days from the other five days. And it was a problem and I was really worried about losing this time as a family and also about my own rate of burnout, which was palpable, and a kind of sharpness and unhappiness was emerging that I think often happens with people in our overwhelmed lives and I wanted to really take a look at it. So that was kinda the spark for the book.

Brett McKay: Well, that comment by your son, “Was that it? Was that the weekend?” A lot of people experience that. In fact, there’s a name for this phenomenon, the Sunday Blues, Sunday Evening Blues.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, it’s actually something that… There’s been lots of surveys and research, and people will actually report a negative feeling on Sunday night, a kind of upcoming panic about the week ahead, and also a sense of regret that the weekend wasn’t what they had hoped it would be. And I think that that’s kind of a universal feeling. We know that it’s supposed to be different, we know it’s supposed to be set apart, and we remember probably, hopefully, from our childhoods, we were lucky enough to have those kinds of weekends where we were free and we were kind of off a clock. And getting back to that feeling or being reminded of that feeling and not having it on a Sunday night is something I think we all kinda grieve.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I remember my weekends as a kid compared to as to now as an adult, weekends, they often just feel like any other day, except the kids don’t go to school.

Katrina Onstad: Exactly, [chuckle] exactly. Yeah, that sense of wander and possibility and bottomless adventure. That Friday feeling you have when you’re young, that’s the feeling I think we’re all yearning for.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about the history of weekends because I think we take weekends for granted. Everyone listening to this podcast has lived in a world where there’s always been weekends, unless there’s some 120-year-old person listening to this podcast.

But it’s a pretty recent idea that you get two back-to-back days of no work or school. So let’s do a crash course in the development of the weekend. When did we first start seeing this push where you would get some time off at the end of the work week just to do whatever you want?

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, well, it’s kind of a fascinating history and it’s not an accident, it didn’t just happen. People fought and people actually died for us to have these two days off, to have a reasonable relationship to our work. So really, the idea of time changed with the industrial revolution. Okay, let’s go back there where people went from what used to be called task time to clock time. So before, with work in an agrarian society, you’d have three cows to milk, the amount of time that would take you is three cows time. But then, industrialization takes place and the clock changes, time. Time becomes measurable, it’s the beginning of data. So now you have 20 minutes to milk three cows and you’re paid for the time, not the task so time gets commodified.

And with the industrial revolution, of course, workers’ conditions, and we have this Victorian images of Victorian factories with people starting in the dark and ending in the dark and limitless, limitless amounts of work in the service of these new factories and productivity, productivity, productivity. So organized labor kind of rises up out of that, in the 19th and early 20th century as a response to this mass industrialization and this shifting relationship to time and we see an era of protest. So the weekend is one of the victories of organized labor. So yeah, fighting for an eight-hour day, that was the very beginning of the labor movement that fought for the weekend. The big event in Haymarket in Chicago in 1836, I hope I’m getting that right… It was ’76 rather, 30,000 people marched for an eight-hour day. And bombs went off, police fired shots, eight people died, there was a court… A massive trial. So sacrifices were made, blood was spilled, that was for the eight-hour workday.

The eight-hour workday slid into the two-day-a-week, the idea that people didn’t need to work seven days a week and could get two days off back-to-back. And that of course, is even farther back, rooted in the Sabbath. That idea that there needed to be one day a week, this kind of edict from God that people didn’t have to be indentured servants to the pharaoh. That’s in the Bible, that the slaves were building granaries for the pharaoh endlessly and needed a day off. So Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all of these monotheist religions have one day a week that’s supposed to be a break. Depending on which religion, of course, that it’s executed in different ways, but the idea that there is time where… To tend to spiritual self, a self outside of work where one’s identity isn’t just tied to productivity, but expanded. So these things have collided to give us those two particular days, the Saturday and the Sunday. But now, of course, things look quite different.

Brett McKay: Right. Okay, so we have Saturday and Sunday. I think that was because there’s basically was… Well, Jewish people, they’re gonna take Saturday off, Christian people, they’re gonna take Sunday off, so to accommodate, we’ll just make it Saturday, Sunday is the weekend. ‘Cause there was a moment where there was… The weekend was Sunday, Monday. Monday was the unofficial second weekend. People were supposed to go to work but they were like, “I’m not doing that.”

Katrina Onstad: “I prefer not to.” Yeah, it’s actually funny, there was a fake saint invented called St. Monday and in England people would not show up on Monday and they say, “I am honoring St. Monday.” This is not a real saint and what they were is probably hung over. Benjamin Franklin actually wrote about that and was very irate about the slovenly Monday holiday takers. So yeah, eventually, things kind of reverted and that Monday became part of the work week. But you’re right, there was a long tradition of people just… If they got just the one day off, they made it two anyway.

Brett McKay: And then also, you saw this movement as well after the labor movement, where you saw some factory owners or company owners embrace the idea of a weekend ’cause they thought, “Well, actually our employees are happier and they’re more productive when they take those two days off.” Henry Ford, is famous for paying a decent wage, but he’s also, “Hey, you don’t need to work all the time. So you can go enjoy yourself and buy cars from me.” And they caught on the idea and they really bought into it.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, that’s a great example of that shift because it’s true. Employers know that workers who are overworked are not great employees. People who are overworked and burnt out, introduce more errors into the work that they do, they aren’t more productive. And so it benefits workplaces to manage the spread of work hours. And yeah, Henry Ford realized that, and he needed his employees to not only be working reasonable hours, but to have time off to buy the products that they were making. So it’s a kind of tricky dance of capitalism, the idea of the weekend because it is so tied to consumerism. So yes, on one hand, it’s very altruistic of him and other business leaders to give people time off, but also really benefits them to have consumers out in the world because when it was just a Sunday, then of course that’s a true date for Christians anyway, like a true Sabbath, and you’re not supposed to be shopping. So give them the Saturday, they’ll go buy their cars. So you’re right, this has been a long kind of evolution to get to where we are now.

Brett McKay: Alright, so by the early 20th century, the weekend was established that this is a norm that you do, but then towards the end of the 20th century, you start seeing the weekend wane. So what do the numbers say? How many… What’s the state of the weekend starting at the end of the 20th century and today?

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, well, so first of all, I would say it’s hard to measure, and I think that right now, particularly, and in the last decade, it’s getting harder and harder to really understand how much people are working because of the borderless-ness of work. Because we are so… Literally, our bodies are wired to our workplaces 24/7, so even if we are in an office, maybe now it’s a virtual office, nine to five-ish, most people will probably… Particularly in white collar creative class jobs, report that they are taking emails and texting outside of that conventional work time frame. So it’s hard, but here’s what I think we know, or here was the research that stood when I wrote my book. Which was that overall hours have remained pretty steady in North America for about about 30 years, which is around 35 hours a week. But what we see is that educated and high-wage earners are working much longer than 50 years ago. Self reports suggest some up to half of white collar workers are working 50 hours a week or more, not that 35 hours or more.

And then on the service side, we have underemployed and less employed workers. So it kinda averages out to this 35 per week. So are we working more or are we working less? It depends what the work is. It depends what kind of work you managed to get. And particularly now in this gig economy, many people in lower paid fields are working several jobs at once. And then, of course, there’s the side hustle. So it’s a slippery, amorphous thing, this question, “How much are we’re working?” We’re working a lot, and certainly, anecdotally, we hear this all the time, that when people are asked to rate the quality of their lives, one of the first things that comes up is “Concerned about being busy.” And that has actually endured through COVID, which I find really interesting because there was that moment at the beginning of COVID where I think we all thought, “Oh, we’re gonna get a break. Now, we’re really gonna back away.” And our quality of life is gonna improve so vastly. And I’m not sure that that has borne out. I guess we’ll be finding that out, I hope.

Brett McKay: So, okay, pretty much everyone across the spectrum, they’re doing some type of work on the weekend. If you’re in a white collar office job, you might be answering emails, Saturdays, Sunday taking care of things while you’re shuttling kids to sports. But then if you’re in a service sector job, a lot of… That’s the stuff like weekend is when you’re probably working, restaurants, movie theaters.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, retail.

Brett McKay: Amusement parks, retail, Uber driver. And so, people in service they might get some days off, but it might not be Saturday, Sunday, it could be Tuesday, Thursday. So there’s an asynchrony going on with weekends in our culture, everyone’s not having the weekend at the same time, basically.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, for sure. Yes, this conventional 40-hour Work Week that maybe our parents had, this Monday to Friday, nine to five, it really does feel like a thing of the past. Basically, you kind of never know when people are working anymore, don’t you find this? I find like if I’m contacting someone, I’ll get out to… I’m off this Wednesday, but I’m working Saturday or I’m not working Thursday or I work every second… And I’ve had that myself and I’m actually working in a podcasting company, and I was working four days a week, and then it shifted to five and then some weeks it’s three. And that’s also a real result of contract work, right? This shift from a full time staff salaried positions to contracts.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And that affects us on a cultural level. If you can’t hang out with your friends, if you guys aren’t off at the same time or you can’t do things as a group if everyone’s working different days of the week.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, there’s not a kind of collective experience of the week, right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Katrina Onstad: What is our shared time off when everyone is on a different calendar? Yeah, it really does change the kind of social fabric of our communities for sure.

Brett McKay: So we’re working more on the weekends, but any other things that have encroached on the weekend that makes the weekend like, your son’s like, “Man, was that it?” What else is happening besides work?

Katrina Onstad: Well, I mean, I think secularization is a big piece of this, right? Like with that idea. And I think whether you’re a religious person or not, it’s kind of a beautiful concept that there’s a time in the week where you can hit an off switch, and remember who you are outside of your work identity. And of course, without a religious motivation for that, it becomes… It’s no longer an edict, and it’s no longer even a kind of social norm. So we lose something in terms of our kind of spiritual self, I really think that and I don’t mean that in a necessarily organized religion way. But that kind of space in which to ponder and wonder and just be kind of, in the world, and rather than in the workplace, or even so mentally distracted and mentally kind of compromised or compartmentalized, that you can no longer kind of just be in the moment.

So I think that’s one thing that’s happened with the advent of a more secular world. I think technology is what we keep circling here and maybe haven’t kind of said out loud, which is just that having our offices in our pockets is a completely different way to live. To live and to work, right? And life and work that line between the two is pretty much non-existent now. And of course, we lived this to its fullest during COVID, when many people were working from home and literally had their workplaces in their bedrooms. So, where are those boundaries between workspace and personal space, they literally don’t exist for many of us anymore.

Brett McKay: But there’s an expectation to I think that comes with this moment of total availability and total commitment to work. This is a status symbol, to be busy, to be overworked. It still has a lot of currency. And that’s something that I’ve always been kind of interested in, why are our identities… And I actually think for men, maybe for your listeners, this is something that they are probably thinking about, that success and acquisition, workplace status. Now I hear a lot about legacy from the older men that I know. And all of these things are bound up to work, not necessarily bound up in the same way to our accomplishments as human beings, how loving of a parent or a partner or a valuable member of the community, but how much money did I make? How far did I advance in my workplace? In my work life? And I think that this kind of fetishization of success which is ongoing now for a long time is another one of the big pieces of why we lost the weekend or decided that it wasn’t a priority anymore.

And for me too, when I’m not working. There’s also I feel like Saturdays are like the ketchup day. It’s where you do… My wife and I we call them doodads. So you do all the stuff like the admin, life admin, pay bills, fix things, go to Home Depot five times because you always forget the one thing, or then you’re taking kids to sports and when Saturday’s over you’re like, “Man, that was not fun.”

Katrina Onstad: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Don’t feel refreshed.

Katrina Onstad: No, I mean, the two most common things that people do on weekends are shopping and chores, right? [chuckle] I don’t think either of those things are necessarily… I mean, sometimes shopping could be fun I suppose, for some people, but neither of those things are, as you say, a lot of fun. Yeah, and kids, I think in busy families and the scheduling of kids. Kids are so, you know, over-scheduled. This is something I really… My kids are getting older, and I… And of course, COVID, but one thing I’ve really noticed is how much time I have back, because they’re more independent and I don’t have to hover as much and do as much schlepping of the children, and that is those kinds of things really do eat up a weekend, and it’s what we have to be on guard against. Or the whole weekend could go like in the blink of an eye.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you talked about it in the book with your experience, your, I guess your kids play hockey, and that just seems like, man, that seems like so time-intensive, you got all the equipment you gotta buy and then like you gotta be early at the games, and that was something you struggled with like your weekends were eaten up by hockey games. I’m sure a lot of parents who their kids play soccer or baseball can relate to that as well.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I’m in Canada, so it’s hockey [chuckle] but everyone… I think everyone with kids has some version of this. Yeah, it was an issue for us so much that actually we made a decision or… And our… One that our son in particular was happy to go along with and our daughter who also plays hockey, which was… We’re sticking with house league because we dipped a toe into the world. You know, this is a, I think actually like where we see a transposing of some of the things we were just talking about, about this urge for success and status. I think a lot of that is kinda being projected, you know, with the best of intentions, mostly onto the lives of kids. So playing house league isn’t really enough, like we gotta get the kids the private coaching and the weekends away, and they’re in select or they’re more competitive with tiers with more games, more practices, driving them in and out of the city.

I mean those are… The true hockey parents will be up at 4:00 AM during the week, and then it’s hockey all weekend. And, you know, I think there are kids for whom that is… It’s a passion that can’t be denied, I’m not suggesting that anyone [chuckle] punish their children unduly, or whatever. But if you’re a family where this has taken over, it might be really good to look at it and just say, “Is this the childhood that I want my kids to have?” Because there usually does come a point in adolescents, many of these kids are gonna burn out, they’re not gonna take pleasure in it anymore, they’re gonna notice that it’s been kind of professionalized and that the measure of their engagement is about succeeding rather than playing and taking joy in it. And I think it can be kind of an infection in families, this high-level over-achievement, so what we did eventually, and maybe it’s also just some kind of laziness, I don’t know, you can judge me if you want, was like we said house league only. We just can’t let… We don’t wanna live like that. And it bought us back some time, which I think was worth it. I think it was worth it, but maybe you should ask my son. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So let’s talk about how we take back our weekends because you highlight the research, you know, if you wanna… If you’re worried about, if I take two days off, is it gonna like, I’m gonna get behind in work. I’m gonna set myself up for failure. If you’re a business owner, it’s like man, if I, if I don’t… If can’t reach my employees during the weekend, we’re gonna fall behind in the competition. The research shows that that’s not gonna be the case, in fact, working more hours, there’s a declining benefit, at a certain point, they’re just diminishing returns on working.

Katrina Onstad: Long hours without breaks introduce errors, it can cost companies money and on a personal level, of course, there’s burnout and health and all of those expenses are often incurred by employers ultimately, right? And countries with really long work hours report depression and high suicide rates among their workers. So, yeah, like 40 to 50 hours is pretty reasonable, above that people will start introducing errors into their work, and it doesn’t mean that they’ll be making more widgets if they’re working 60 hours a week. It means they’ll probably be making less, and more of them will be of low quality, whatever those widgets are. And fatigue and overwork are often causes of medical malpractice suits. The Challenger space crash had an element, there was the cause, there’s an element of fatigue in their oil spills, like all… We see over and over that there are serious ramifications for overwork that employers will bear out, not to mention the personal and the social toll of climate in which people are expected to work to the point of utter exhaustion. So yeah, productivity is not actually that closely tied to number of hours worked.

Brett McKay: Okay. So you make the case one of the things you can do to start making your weekends more refreshing, enjoyable, reviving is, one thing you should make your… Focus your weekend is, it’s all about connecting. So what are some ways that you’ve added more social connection in your weekends?

Katrina Onstad: I mean one thing we really know about the erosion of the weekend is that it coincides with the erosion of personal and social connections. And when we look at what makes people happy, it’s actually not the things that correlate with work, right? So it’s not a higher salary, it’s not success. Yes, I think they say, what is it, $70,000 a year, that’s a salary at which people will be able to maintain a decent lifestyle and also their anxiety will be a swage anxiety about money. Anything below that, of course, will affect happiness, but say you have that kind of average decent salary and a decent job, that’s not the thing that’s going to really affect your happiness. What it is, is your connections to other people, right? Your social life, who you’ve loved, who loves you back, how much you matter in your community and to the people around you.

Our happiness is intrinsically bound, it’s a sense of belonging, right? Not wealth, not status, and if we don’t have time, it’s very… Like it’s a kind of a simple equation, if we don’t have time to strengthen those bonds, then we are less happy and less fulfilled as people. So yeah, on the weekends, I usually, when there’s not a pandemic on, would try to see somebody outside of my family, for sure, just make sure that I’m checking in on people. Remind myself, and I tend to be kinda introverted, that being introverted is not necessarily the best way to move through the world, and also to give something back to my community if I can. So periodically, we’ll try some kind of volunteer exercise or just engage in a community meeting or I do… I’m involved with a writers group where we do workshops in under-served communities with… Doing creative writing exercises. And these things are kind of small and maybe sometimes they feel or they might seem from the outside, like meaningless gestures, but they kinda give me a profound sense of value. And then I have like that kind of physical buzz, like there is something, a definite correlation, biological connection between altruism and feeling good, like you get like a rush, right. Don’t you think?

Brett McKay: I think so, yeah.

Katrina Onstad: From doing things for other people. Right? Coming out of yourself a bit.

Brett McKay: Yeah, no, yeah, for sure.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And you also talked about, for people who are religious, the weekend is they have like a baked in social connection, ’cause if you’re a Christian, you’re gonna go to church, you’re a Muslim, you’re gonna go to mosque on Friday, if you’re Jewish, you’re gonna go to temple. And they got that there, but you also highlight people, not religious people, you gave an example, there’s like you found this group being like secular humanists who… They’d get together at Panera Bread and they just chat about pretty much anything.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, that’s right, I love that group. Well, yeah, so here’s an upside of technology, it’s like you can kind of find anyone who shares an interest that you have, right. Like the meet-ups and social media and Facebook, and if you can migrate some of that online connection into real-world connection, hobbies are a really great place to meet people. And hobbies, I think are one of the other… Another kind of collateral damage of the erosion of the weekend, we have a lot less… People seem to have fewer hobbies than we used to, and hobbies are fantastic for that again, that feeling of coming out of yourself and hitting that kind of flow state, like that deep immersion in any activity that’s not monetized. It’s not for profit or personal gain or status, but just something that you love and lose yourself in. That feeling, that hitting that kind of flow state and falling down, it’s just something… And if you’re doing in a room of other people who are into this thing too, even better, right. Like I know that, like where I live, there used to be whole bunch of knitting clubs and people really love this stuff, then it kind of awakens something in you that’s sort of spiritual, that’s definitely creative, definitely pulls our humanity forward and reminds us that we are people outside of work. Our identities are just tied to our workplaces, in our work cells, that we are fully flesh humans.

Brett McKay: Right, so make connection the top priority. If you’re going to church, go to church, if you don’t do that, find a group or even just like use it at the time just to connect with your family or re-connect ’cause you guys have been crazy all week on different places, just have a day where, we’re just gonna hang out. We’re not gonna have anything planned, but we’re just gonna be around each other.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, yeah, I think not having anything planned is a really great phrase and I’m glad you reminded me of that because I do think this compulsion to schedule, even our leisure. And I’m a little bit guilty of this myself, where I’ll be like, “Boy, I have to work out.” Everything becomes an obligation, but sometimes just meandering with your family, if getting in the car or we’re getting over to a park and just being together without an agenda is really powerful. Boredom is really powerful, it opens up all manner of kind of pathways in our brains and our hearts. But yeah, I think we can take our families for granted because they’re around us a lot these days, [chuckle] and so we assume that we’re connected with them, but we’re often heads bowed over our devices, everyone in their own corners in the same building or the same apartment or same house, but not really together together. So taking that time, putting away the devices and having a cooking together or doing something active together. Is there a sport you at all play or some kind of physical active engagement with one another just to remind each other that you’re more than just co-workers in a family structure, but actually people who’s… Who you wanna spend time with, getting to know. And it sounds very basic, but I feel like I definitely need a refresher on that sometimes, ’cause you’re just so caught up in the panic of getting through contemporary life that you forget who’s by your side.

Brett McKay: You mentioned that just get in the car and drive. That was actually a thing. My mom talked about doing that when she was a kid, like The Sunday drive, you just get in the car and the… And you you’re just, “What are you doing?” “We’re just gonna drive.” In fact, we’ve been reading… We just got done reading Cheaper by the Dozen with our kids.

Katrina Onstad: Oh yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah, classic novel, written in the ’40s, and one of the chapters is about how they take a Sunday drive with all 12 of the kids, take a picnic, and that was it, that was like, that sounds… I’ve done that before. And it just sounds… It’s just really relaxing. You don’t have a destination you’re trying to get to, you just kind of drive around and look around, it’s enjoyable.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, I love that. And also, it doesn’t cost too much. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Katrina Onstad: Because I think so often we think we need to pay for our experiences, and that idea of getting in a car and driving or, if you don’t have a car. I lived in a city when our kids were younger, sometimes we would get on the subway and go to a neighborhood we’d never been to and just walk around, and it doesn’t always mean shelling out to curate a perfect afternoon. Sometimes just spontaneous and cheap and dirty is a way to do it on the weekend, for sure.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned hobbies are a great way to spend the weekend. So that leaves me… You have a chapter about recreation, and you make this case that oftentimes when we think about recreation, we do it wrong. You said there’s two types of recreation, there’s passive and active recreation, and you… You are you mostly when we choose recreation, we go with passive, so what’s difference be passive and active, and why should we choose active over passive?

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, so passive recreation is you know when you’re doing it, it’s the kind of… What we do when we tune out and binge-watch a series or just check out emotionally or and physically. One of the phrases that someone used for this was spectatoritis, watching rather than doing, which is great, like, we all need that sometimes. But if that is if you’re operating at such an amped up level all the time, and then when you have that downtime, you just unplug completely and crash into that mindless consumption of entertainment or sports or whatever it is, you actually don’t come out feeling super rejuvenated, right? It’s like a sugar high, right. It’s like eating a lot of chocolate or something like feels good in the moment but it doesn’t actually help with a reset. So active leisure in contrast, is something like we’ve been talking about where you’re connecting with people, or you’re participating in an activity that’s purposeless and not really based necessarily on success or money, but brings you a lot of pleasure and joy. And hobbies of course fall, I think fall really nicely under that idea of active leisure, where you can be creative and engaged with something and maybe within a community that feeds this part of yourself. That often goes really un-nurtured during the workweek.

Brett McKay: And you’re saying it’s okay to do passive recreation, but don’t make it all that you do. And then you also said if you’re gonna do it, do it with somebody else. If you’re gonna like, play video games. If your kids are gonna play video games, make sure they’re playing with their siblings or with you even.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, well, I think that’s nice ’cause it’s such that’s social, right. So you’re bringing back in that element of connecting with another person and coming out of the self. But yeah, like, listen, we all need to just tune out and like have the pint of ice cream and the binge-watch or whatever from time to time. But what’s alarming is when it becomes the only way in which we unplug. And I think because we… So many of us have so little free time. That’s feels like all we… The energy that we have, like that’s the most that we can pull off in our free time is that really passive, watching, not doing, but it’s a vicious cycle, because you actually end up feeling more burned out at the end of it. So I think we have to be as vigilant with our leisure as we are with our work, right. Like we’re really, most of us are good workers, we wanna do well at work, and that’s great. But I think we need to shift that emphasis a little bit and become excellent at play as well, and take as much joy and pride in our successes at doing nothing.

Brett McKay: Right. So one thing that happened with weekends, particularly or now it’s we use weekends to shop, like you said earlier. But there was a time in our history in America. And I’m sure it’s the same as in Canada, where on Sunday, they had these things called Blue Laws where if you had a store, you had to shutdown, you couldn’t shop on Sunday, it wasn’t an option. You make the case that you might get something out of your weekend if you institute a personal Blue Law day, where you don’t do any shopping. How has that made your weekends? Or how can that make your weekends better?

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, well, we’re talking about a late-stage capitalist condition, right. This lust for work. This veneration of work. And of course, work is tied to consumption, right. It’s been called by economists, the work-spend cycle, we work a lot so that we can spend a lot. And then because we’ve spent a lot we have to work more, so we go round and round on the hamster wheel. So breaking that pattern, that neural pathway is I think really important to, again, to just be reminded that there’s a larger world out there. So if we don’t engage in the shopping and the consumption on a weekend, then we get that space back, we get the time back and that’s so much… You know that I think if there’s anything that people might get out of this book, I would hope that it’s a kind of fierce impulse to protect their time and consumption. Does it make us happier? I don’t think so.

I certainly haven’t seen any research that suggests that buying more stuff fills the hole that many of us have inside. So maybe don’t for a while. Take a break for a couple of weeks. See what’s… You know there are lots of these experiments online when people will talk about not shopping for two days or a week and seeing what it feels like. And I think we’re all so mildly addicted to consumption that it can be quite a shock to our systems and all these other ways of being in the world might open up if we break that habit. So yeah, I think it’s a really neat idea to try and recreate your own Blue Law day here and there if you can swing it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I hate shopping because it’s the time factor. Even online shopping. It doesn’t save you any time because especially if you buy clothes, you’re like, “Well, I gotta… ” This doesn’t fit. I gotta got to take it back. It’s like, Well, I gotta got to box this up. I gotta got to drive over to UPS or some [0:38:14.8] ____…

Katrina Onstad: Totally.

Brett McKay: It’s just like… I’d rather just… I don’t even… Books are the one thing I buy where like, I enjoy a book.

Katrina Onstad: Right. It does feel like books online, at least you’re in like its words you’re already in a word kind of world online, so it makes sense. But yes, I totally agree. And God, the online shopping, again, this borderless-ness, right. Like at least with shopping, before we used to have to leave our houses to do it so we would be… We’d at least be sort of outside but now you can literally go back and forth between working and spending in a two-minute period without leaving your chair, and I do feel like it’s dangerous and become sort of habit forming, and yeah, sucks up all of that time.

Brett McKay: Alright, so try not to shop, or at least do less shopping on the weekends ’cause so that will free up some time for you. You also recommend trying to tame the amount of chores you do on the weekend, because for a lot of people, the weekend can easily turn into just doing chores and that’s it. And you can do that in different ways, one way is spreading the chores out throughout the week, or if you got the budget for it, maybe outsource some of your chores. So overall, the advice is, take time to connect, engage in active recreation and then limit shopping and chores.

So, how do you approach your weekends in a way, so that you feel like you’re gettin the most out of it, but it doesn’t become another project and you feel like, “Oh, I didn’t do this weekend right ’cause I didn’t allow enough time for spontaneity and relaxation.” So how do you, like, how do you avoid that while getting the benefits of a good weekend?

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, I mean listen, I certainly don’t want to turn the weekend into another feeling of failure for people, I don’t think there is a one way to do the weekend. But I think making that space, that space physically like noticing if that calendar is filling up being really thoughtful in the week leading up to the weekend to say, “What is this weekend? What’s the balance of my weekend here?” Yes, of course, we’re probably all gonna have a bit of work to do, but what’s the balance? Like… Is it… Am I looking like at a day and a half of work, or work every hour. Can I log off for 24 hours straight and then do something, on that second day. But just above all vigilance, really about how precious this time is, how fleeting it is, it’s funny, when I wrote this book, my son was, I think 12, or you know, it’s published he was probably 13, and now he’s finished high school. [chuckle] And a lot of the concerns that… And I have a daughter who’s still in high school, but I, you know, was really plagued by, when I was writing this, aren’t really relevant to us anymore, and I have never once sat around and said, “Gee, I really wish we had done Select Hockey, and I had done more chores that year.”

You know, all I think now is, “Oh, God, that time is gone and I can’t get it back.” So I would just say those weekends, if you’re lucky enough to have a work life that gives you those two days to guard them, to look at them with the same, as kind of a sacred space, the way that religious people look at an actual Sabbath. To approach them with the same kind of sense of honoring that time and making the most of it with that’s, kind of, clear eyed, and not being hard on yourself, but really taking it seriously that this time is gonna go and this is your life, and is your life gonna be filled with experiences and other people, and joy, and love, and laughter, all those cheesy things. Or is it going to be… I got a really big paycheck and I never turned my phone off. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Yeah, I know.

Katrina Onstad: Maybe somewhere in the middle. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Somewhere in the middle.

Katrina Onstad: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Well, Katrina, it has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Katrina Onstad: Yeah, the book is available everywhere, I hope. It’s called The Weekend Effect and my website is www.katrinaonstad.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Katrina Onstad, thanks for time. It’s been a pleasure.

Katrina Onstad: Thanks so much.

Brett McKay: Well, I guess that was Katrina Onstad. She’s the author of the book, The Weekend Effect, it’s available on Amazon.com and book stores everywhere. Make sure to check out her website at katrinaonstad.com where you can learn more about her work. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/weekend where you find the links to our resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years, about pretty much anything you can think of, and if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLINESS at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review in Apple Podcast or Stitcher, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you, please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding everyone listening to AOM podcast, to put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #753: Take Back the Weekend appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The Weekend Effect: The Life-Changing Benefits of Taking Time Off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork

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When nature calls and you’re in its house, no toilets are going to spring up out of the ground ready to use. A good outdoorsman knows to dispose of his waste properly, using Leave No Trace ethics to dig a cathole in an appropriate location. Properly executed, a cathole ensures that your business decomposes quickly so your favorite trails and outdoor havens stay clean and tidy.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

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Benchmade Bugout Knife. I’m always on the lookout for new pocket knives. I recently picked up the Benchmade Bugout based on reviews that I’ve read about it, and I’m digging everything about this simple folding knife. It’s a great EDC knife — slim and lightweight but incredibly sturdy and strong. You can open the blade easily with one hand, and holding the knife feels great. The length of the blade is perfect too.

“How Chuck Norris Facts Gave Birth to the Modern Meme.” If you’ve been on the internet for more than 15 years, you remember Chuck Norris Facts. Notable examples:

When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he’s pushing the Earth down.
Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.
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This article from ESPN takes a deep dive into the history of Chuck Norris Facts and makes the case that they gave birth to the modern-day meme. Make sure to check out our podcast episode about 1980s action heroes, including Chuck Norris.

Concluding Unscientific Postscripts by Søren Kierkegaard. My deep dive into Kierkegaard this year continues. I just finished his beast of a book entitled Concluding Unscientific Postscripts. It’s been on my to-read list ever since Jacob Howland mentioned the book in our podcast episode about Kierkegaard’s The Present Age. Kierkegaard’s big idea in this book is the distinction between objective and subjective truth. Objective truth consists of facts about the world that we can all agree on. The world is round, 2+2=4, etc. Subjective truth consists of personal, religious, and existential experiences that can only be experienced by a person individually. Feeling passion about life, love for a child, or faith in God are examples of subjective truths. For Kierkegaard, life is about cultivating those inner subjective truths. To be clear, Kierkegaard’s idea of subjectivity isn’t that truth is relative or whatever you want it to be; rather, it’s about experiencing life with vitality and passion. Concluding Unscientific Postscripts is a long book and hard to read, but packed with some great insights about life, faith, and being a human being.

Did People Look Older? If you’ve ever looked through your parents’ high school yearbooks, you probably felt like the 17-year-olds in 1962 looked like they were 30. I’ve got some magazines from the 1940s called Pic: The Magazine for Young Men. They feature “young men” on the make, and the guy will look like he’s 45, but the caption says he’s only 29. What gives? Did people actually look older in the past or do our brains think they look older because we’re looking at old pictures? YouTuber Vsauce investigates in this fascinating video.

Quote of the Week

Labor is one of the great elements of society, the great substantial interest on which we all stand; not feudal service, or predial toil, or the irksome drudgery by one race of mankind subjected on account of their color, to another; but labor, intelligent, manly, independent, thinking and acting for itself, earning its own wages, accumulating those wages into capital, educating childhood, maintaining worship, claiming the right of the elective franchise, and helping to uphold the great fabric of the State—that is American labor; and all my sympathies are with it, and my voice, till I am dumb, will be for it.

—Daniel Webster

The post Odds & Ends: September 1, 2023 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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You notice white flakes on your shoulders when wearing a black t-shirt or dark suit. You’ve got dandruff. You’re not alone. 50% of adults have dandruff. I’m part of that 50%. I’ve got a more severe type of dandruff called seborrheic dermatitis that I’ve been managing since my early 30s. While dandruff isn’t a symptom […]

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When an organization wants to get more productive and better reach its goals, it typically looks to retool its leadership, trying to find lone figures who can apply more effective top-down control. But my guest says there’s a much more effective strategy for getting things done: creating and empowering teams of self-starters. Kyle Buckett is […]

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Time was, if you wanted advice on how to improve or address some problem concerning things like health, finance, relationships, and work, your options for where to get that advice were limited. You could pick up one of the few books on the subject, ask a friend, colleague, or pastor, or send a letter to […]

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Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is often designated as one of the greatest books about war ever written and has appeared on the Marine Corps recommended reading list. Today on the show, I unpack For Whom the Bell Tolls with Hemingway scholar Mark Cirino. We discuss the background of the novel, […]

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The post Skill of the Week: Survive Inside a Plummeting Elevator appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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We typically sort feelings into two categories: the good (calm, contentment, lightness, elation) and the bad (anxiety, shame, disappointment, grief). Believing that the good help happiness and the bad hinder it, we cling to the former and avoid, ward off, and theraputize the latter. Yet, while feelings can be lighter or heavier, easier or harder, […]

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“Søren Kierkegaard versus the Internet.” You’ve likely seen an internet “pile-on” where someone says something stupid online only to have hundreds or thousands of people criticize and humiliate said individual. But how much is too much? When does public shaming cross the line and become detrimental to society? Søren Kierkegaard might have some insights into […]

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It’s estimated that more than a third of Americans have found a mouse in their house in the last year. The sight of these small rodents may not drive you to shriek and stand on a chair, but having mice in your home is problematic. A single mouse can drop up to 25,000 stinky, potentially […]

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In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, there are certain principles like timing, leverage, and positioning that practitioners must master to successfully overcome an opponent. My guest has found that these same principles that allow someone to be successful on the mat, also apply to being successful outside of it. Rener Gracie is the co-owner and head instructor of […]

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Everyone is required to wear different hats throughout their day. You move from generating spreadsheets to brainstorming product ideas; from the office to your home; from coaching a Little League team to talking to your wife about a problem with your household budget. Sometimes we have to make these shifts between tasks and responsibilities at […]

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Over the last decade, cannabis use has been legalized in more states. At the same time, the idea that marijuana is a safe drug has steadily increased. But is this an accurate perception? Recent research by my guest, Dr. Ryan Sultan, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, casts some doubt on a universally […]

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The post Skill of the Week: Make a Bed appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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The parent-child relationship is unique. Sometimes you’re looking at someone half your height and thirty years your junior and viscerally feel: “You’re my best buddy.” But is it good to think of our children as friends? It is. And it isn’t. Friendships are based on equality. Children relate to their parents as dependents. Some parents, […]

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Book Signing at Hudson / Hawk in Tulsa on Thursday, August 24th, from 5 PM to 7 PM. If you’re in the Tulsa area, I’ll be at Hudson / Hawk Barber and Shop’s grand opening next Thursday to sign books. Co-owner Thad Forrester has been a consultant for AoM’s barber content for the past decade. […]

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An important part of your fitness is conditioning. There are two types of conditioning: anaerobic and aerobic. Anaerobic conditioning refers to your body’s ability to use glycogen or creatine phosphate to create ATP. The more anaerobic conditioning you have, the more efficient your body is at creating ATP from glycogen or creatine phosphate. You condition […]

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If you want insight on how to make love last, you might ask friends, family, a therapist, or a pastor for advice. You probably wouldn’t think to turn to a divorce lawyer. But my guest, James Sexton, who does that very job in New York City, says there may be few people who have a […]

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What is the ideal man? This is a question that philosophers have pondered over and riffed on for millennia. Many philosophers have sketched out a vision of an ideal man who, unsurprisingly, encompasses the values that represent the pinnacle of their philosophical beliefs. These conceptions of ideal men are similar in that they all require […]

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There are tons of podcasts, blog posts, and books about how to get more focused. Focus is seen as the key to greater productivity and success. While focus is important, my guest says there are also amazing powers to be found in something that gets a lot less attention: the unfocused mind. Dr. Srini Pillay […]

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Courage is the willingness to face risk, discomfort, and intimidation. The modern world offers scarce opportunities to exercise courage. Few will ever see combat, and danger has largely been removed from work, travel, and the procuring of food. Whereas artistic and intellectual courage was once required in flaunting dominant paradigms, it is seldom called upon […]

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Note: This is a rebroadcast. When most people think about losing weight, they think about the details of a diet plan — what food to eat, how much of it to eat, and when to eat it. What they don’t spend enough time working on, are the mental and emotional habits that can sabotage their efforts, regardless of the […]

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The post Skill of the Week: Throw a Devastating Left Hook Punch appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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As a young man, Jack London joined the crew of a schooner bound for seal hunting in the Pacific. When his ship pulled into port in the Bonin Islands, Jack gazed with wonder upon the jungle-covered volcanic peaks and breathed in the exotic scent of the tropics. “It was my first foreign land,” he remembered. […]

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“The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church.” We’ve talked about the rise of religious “nones” on the podcast with political scientist Ryan Burge. The author of this article highlights a new book coming out that uses Burge’s research to explore what the book’s authors call the “dechurching” of America. The book argues […]

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How was your last weekend? Pretty ho-hum, again? Tired of the same go-round of restaurants, landscapes, and entertainment options in your town? Why not take a road trip this weekend? Drive somewhere, say, eight hours away? Does that strike you as nutty? Do you find yourself thinking, “Oh no, that’s too far. I couldn’t possibly!”? […]

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Personality tests sometimes come in for criticism these days for not being very accurate or helpful or for putting people into boxes. And it’s true that no test can ever entirely peg the complexities of personality, and they shouldn’t be applied with too much rigidity. But what these tests are useful for is serving as […]

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Let’s say you have a chance to become a vampire, where you’d get the immortality and the supernatural powers, but you wouldn’t have to hurt anyone. Would you do it? It would be a hard decision to make. Not only will the transformation involve a radical change in your habits — moving from sleeping at […]

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We often suppose that wars are fought over things like resources, border disputes, and ideologies. My guest calls this “the spreadsheet approach to war” and argues that, in reality, such factors only come in as justifications for the much deeper drives at play. Mike Martin is a Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of War […]

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In the Orthodox Church, Easter and Christmas are preceded by 40-day seasons in which adherents forgo certain meals and abstain from particular foods. These fasts not only serve as a means of spiritual preparation; they also add poignancy to the feasts that follow. Our culture’s secular feasts, like Thanksgiving, are not preceded by fasts. Instead, […]

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“More Scrolling, More Marital Problems.” There’s been a lot of talk about the detrimental effects of excessive smartphone use among teens. Well, it looks like adults aren’t immune to the issue either. Particularly married adults. A recent survey from the Institute of Family Studies found that spouses in a marriage where one or both have excessive […]

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If you’re considering attending your first auction, you’re in for an experience. Auctions are not only a way to find unique items — sometimes for a steal — but also an opportunity to witness the purest form of free market capitalism. You get to see, in real time, the price of an object being decided […]

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When someone asks us to do something we don’t want to do, we often say yes even though we want to say no, because we think that saying no will feel terrible. But my guest, Dr. Vanessa Patrick, says the opposite is true: we actually feel great when we say no. So why do we […]

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In the comedic, dystopian film Idiocracy, set in 2505, all water in the United States has been replaced with a Gatorade-like drink called Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. They even water the crops with Brawndo because Brawndo supposedly “has what plants crave”: electrolytes. Well, replacing plain H20 (which, in Idiocracy, is only used in toilets) with Brawndo kills the […]

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As you move through time, you exist as a present self who makes decisions, an in-between self who should carry out those decisions, and a future self who will benefit from those decisions. Yet as we all know, in-between self often fails to follow through on what present self resolves, leaving future self pretty bummed […]

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The world can be divided into agents and objects. Things that make stuff happen, and things that have stuff happen to them. The shaper, and the shaped. The mover, and the moved. The driver, and the screw. No one is ever entirely one or the other, and you should be open to allowing positive influences […]

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“Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just Four Generations.” This article takes a look at four generations in a family and sees how far the kids were able to wander from their home. As expected, the range of roaming shrunk as the generations progressed; a boy in 1926 could walk six miles from his […]

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When Kate and I were shopping for a home more than a decade back, I remember feeling clueless about what I should be looking for during an open house. Sure, I could assess if the kitchen layout was attractive and whether or not the office seemed cool, but I didn’t know what other kinds of […]

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While studying history back in the 1990s, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss noticed something: there seemed to be a pattern to history that repeated itself again and again. Howe and Strauss developed a theory that history moves in 80-100-year cycles divided into four 20-25-year “turnings”: the High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. Neil Howe […]

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Like many American boys who grew up in the 1980s, I loved The Karate Kid. For months when I was five years old, I demanded that my family call me “Daniel-san” instead of Brett. Besides instilling in me a desire to crane-kick everyone, The Karate Kid also implanted a nascent interest in Japanese culture. When I […]

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Lately, I’ve been talking to my son Gus about considering a career in the trades. A lot of the white collar jobs out there don’t seem very fulfilling, and A.I. is going to make more and more of them disappear. But skilled tradesmen are in demand, and that demand is only going to grow. One […]

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The post Skill of the Week: Eat a Lobster appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Recently, there’s been increased interest in extending the human lifespan — not only making it to the century mark (and beyond), but spending those last decades healthy and strong. In one way, this interest in living longer isn’t very surprising; no one welcomes death. Yet in another, it is a strange thing, given that so […]

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“Developing Self-Reliance.” During the 1950s, studios like Coronet Films (created by the founder of GQ and Esquire, David Smart) produced “social guidance films,” instructional movies designed to be shown in schools and help young people become happy, well-rounded citizens. While many of these instructional films are cheesy and outdated, there are some real gems among them. Our favorite is Developing […]

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In the last few years, the crispy chicken sandwich has taken the world by storm. It seems like nearly every restaurant these days, from fast food joints to more upscale establishments, offers a crispy chicken sandwich on its menu. There’s a good reason for this foodstuff’s widespread popularity: crispy chicken sandwiches are freakin’ delicious. They’re […]

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When you’re taking a trip on a nautical vessel, you may hear the crew talking about seeing something off the starboard side of the ship. And when you’re reading about famous naval battles, you may come across lines like, “The ship started taking fire on the port side.” Hopefully, these terms don’t have you scratching […]

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If you’re an athlete, you know that it can be helpful to get psyched up before a big game. But getting in the right mindset is important in any kind of high-stakes scenario, whether you want to perform your best in a big meeting, presentation, interview, audition, or conversation. My guest has some tips he […]

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In your quest for self-improvement, you’ll likely encounter moments of despair where your current self isn’t anywhere near the ideal self you’ve created in your head. Maybe your ideal self is 50 pounds lighter than your current self. You’ve started working out and watching what you eat, but after three months, you’re only down 10 […]

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The last time we had entrepreneur, professor, and author Luke Burgis on the show, he discussed the concept of mimetic desire, which says that we want the things we want because other people want them. Since that time, Luke has continued to explore the idea of mimesis, and how to resist its negative consequences, in his Substack: […]

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Have you ever had an interaction with someone where you asked them question after question about themselves, but they never asked you a single thing? What was supposed to be a cooperative, back-and-forth dance, became a one-sided monologue. They did all the talking; you did all the listening. There’s a name for this all-too-common phenomenon: […]

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Declining Sperm Count: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. There’s been a lot of talk about the fact that studies show that sperm count has been decreasing in men around the world for the past few decades. We’ve written about it before. But Scott Alexander took a deep dive into the research and found […]

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I went to my garage to work out this afternoon and realized, “Man, I don’t feel like working out today.” But I still started my warm-up on the deadlift anyway, knowing that sometimes motivation follows action and all that jazz. As I worked through my warm-up sets, things just felt heavy. Weight that should have […]

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Throughout each day, all of us make little shifts in our roles and responsibilities; we take off one hat and put on another. Sometimes these shifts are physical, as when we commute from home to the office. Other times, the shifts are mental, as when we finish working on an administrative task and start working […]

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When Americans think back to the War of Independence, most are apt to feel that, had they lived back then, they would have been Patriots for sure. In retrospect, the decision to rebel and get out from under the thumb of British rule seems inevitable. Yet only around a third of colonists ever declared themselves […]

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The post Skill of the Week: Grill the Perfect Burger appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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You come home from a hard day at work feeling like you could use a stiff drink. You contemplate sleeping in and skipping your morning workout because you stayed up a little later than usual last night. Your kid is throwing a tantrum in a store because he wants you to buy him a toy. […]

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When penning lengthier-than-usual correspondence, men from Blaise Pascal and John Locke to Benjamin Franklin and Henry David Thoreau all offered a similar apology to its recipient: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.” As a rule, it’s actually more difficult to create quality shorter content than it is longer […]

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When you’re walking in the woods, you’re often surrounded by trees. But you probably don’t notice them much, and when you do spot some irregularity, like a strange bulge in the trunk of a tree, you likely don’t have any idea how it got there. But my guest says that these trees you’re passing by […]

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Henry David Thoreau never had a standard professional life (though we can still learn much from his ideas about work). Yet he was productive in his own way, keeping to a daily routine that was broken into two main chunks: in the mornings he read and wrote at his desk; in the afternoons he sauntered […]

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My flight was awful. The restaurant’s service was terrible. The traffic was horrible. My boss is the worst. Our culture is the stupidest. Whenever we get together with other people, we hear lots of complaints, and plenty come out of our own mouths. All this complaining may be ubiquitous, but it’s not entirely innocuous. Complaining […]

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The post Skill of the Week: Make a Torch appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When you welcome a child into the world, folks often tell you: “Savor this time. The days are long, but the years are short!” This is certainly sage and accurate counsel. There are moments as a parent when you can’t believe how quickly your kids are growing up. Yet, the fact that a culture of […]

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Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Looking to get started with reading Dostoevsky but don’t want to wrestle with a beast like Crime and Punishment right off the bat? Pick up Notes From the Underground. It’s a short novella that can be read on an airplane flight or in an afternoon. While it’s short, it packs an existential […]

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Whenever weightlifting comes up among a bunch of dudes, someone will eventually ask a question like, “How much ya bench?” We know what the interrogator wants to know with this question: What’s the heaviest weight you can lift on the bench press for a single repetition? He’s asking about your one-rep max. While not the […]

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Working out at any time of day is great. But my guest says there are distinct benefits to doing it in the a.m., and he’s going to walk you through everything you need to know, from mindset to habits, to become a morning workout person. Anthony Arvanitakis is a bodyweight training coach and the author […]

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Think summers full of exploring outside, going on campouts with friends, working on arts and crafts, pursuing new hobbies, and getting lost in good books is something you left behind with your boyhood? It doesn’t have to be when you join The Strenuous Life. Let The Strenuous Life be your portal to the kind of active, […]

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I turned 40 last December. No, I haven’t had a midlife crisis. But that number did cause me to self-reflect. How did the first 20 years of adulthood go? What can I do to make the next 20 years great? Around that same time, I happened to watch a documentary about one of my childhood […]

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Note: Cormac McCarthy died last week at the age of 89. To commemorate his passing, we’re rebroadcasting one of my favorite episodes about one of my favorite books: The Road. Please enjoy. Once a year, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a cathartic annual ritual for me. What is it about this novel that has […]

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The post Skill of the Week: Catch a Souvenir Baseball appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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For almost the entirety of the history of media, gatekeepers controlled what content made it into the purview of the public. Editors and station managers determined what programs were broadcast on the air, what articles were included in magazines, and what books were published. Today, the influence of these gatekeepers no longer dominates the media […]

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“What Makes a Truly Great Basketball Player?” I recently stumbled across this 1965 New Yorker article by John McPhee about basketball player-turned-politician Bill Bradley and haven’t enjoyed an article so much in a long time; it’s a long but wonderful read and really so well done. McPhee explores what made Bill Bradley such an exceptional […]

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Like every modern consumer, before I buy new sneakers, book a hotel room, or make a restaurant reservation, I check the reviews for the product/business. While doing this in this past, I would sometimes think to myself: “I don’t know what kind of person takes the time to write a review for a $10 alarm […]

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When we think about Stoic philosophers, we typically think about the thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But my guest, Mark Matousek, says there was an incredibly insightful Stoic philosopher who lived on the American continent in more modern times: Ralph Waldo Emerson. Matousek is the author of Lessons from […]

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Sleep is a weird thing. For several hours at night, we temporarily become unconscious and immobilized while having intermittent bouts of hallucinations. Weirdness aside, sleep is essential for our health and well-being. It repairs and restores our bodies. People who don’t get enough sleep tend to be physically and mentally sicker than those who do. […]

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In 1980s America, gritty streets were filled with crime, the threat of Cold War hovered in the air, and action movies starring tough guy heroes dominated the box office. This was a time in cinema when muscle, martial arts, and the perfect weapon were the keys to saving the day; when the likes of Arnold […]

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“I Love Being a Dad” by Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. Rapper Can’t Stop Wont Stop (aka David Eff) wrote a song for his kids about how much he loves being a dad. It’s super catchy and incredibly wholesome. It’s been getting a lot of playtime in the McKay household this week. He even turned the […]

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When people think about survival and preparedness, they tend to think of dealing with an end-of-the-world kind of scenario. But lots of bad things can happen, and are more likely to happen, that fall short of the apocalypse. My guest can help you prepare for any worst case scenario, whether it’s the worst thing to […]

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When you take a step back from it, modern war is genuinely bizarre. Nation-states, formed by drawing arbitrary lines on a map, fight it out over abstract principles of sovereignty, democracy, fascism, etc., and do so by trying to conquer pieces of one another’s territory and having young men in the prime of their lives kill each other until one party cries uncle.

If modern war is strange to contemplate in general, nothing feels quite so surreal as wrapping your head around World War II. The weight, stakes, and drama of it. The extent it transformed everyone’s lives, from the average joe to the well-known celebrity. The millions of people and tons of material involved. The sheer sweep of it. What a truly staggering thing: a world at war.

There’s a reason that modern books and movies perennially return to WWII for their plots. Nothing else inspires awe — that distinct mixture of both fear and wonder — in the same way. Reflecting on the war — which is ever worth doing — serves as a dizzying reminder of just what human beings are capable of: enormous death, depravity, and destruction on one hand, and great humanity and heroism on the other.

To bring an event that can seem far away and yet remains in the living memory of thousands of people back into focus, we dove deep, deep, deep into the photo archives from WWII. When the war is covered and remembered today, there are a few classic pictures that repeatedly reemerge. But, of course, tens of thousands of photographs were taken during the war, and we wanted to find and resurface some lesser-known snapshots from the Big One.

The photos’ original captions have been retained.

9/23/1943: Detroit, MI — Scene at Detroit’s Central Station as three post-Pearl Harbor dads say a fond farewell to their offspring as they leave for training at Fort Custer after induction.

Corporal James Gregory (left) holding a M1 Thompson submachine gun and T/5 (Technician fifth grade) Omer Taylor of Headquarters Company, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division of the United States First Army smoke cigarettes while taking cover from incoming enemy fire behind an M4 Sherman tank on 11th December 1944 in Geich near Duren in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany.

View of an American gun crew as they man a 75mm Pack Howitzer M1 (M1A1) emplacement for the defense of Torokina air field, Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea, mid December 1943.

An RAF Lancaster bomber over the German city of Hamburg during a bombing raid.

An alleged Soviet spy laughs at a Finnish soldier who is executing the spy in Rukajärvi, November 1942.

Swinging from one bar to another on an overhead ladder is a muscle toughener to be reckoned with, and when these WAACS do the course in competition as part of their training, it is quite an obstacle. It is part of the intensive physical training regime at the WAAC training camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.

Coast Guardsmen on the deck of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Spencer watch the explosion of a depth charge which blasted a Nazi U-boat’s hope of breaking into the center of a large convoy. Sinking of U-175, April 17, 1943.

7th June 1943: US film actor Clark Gable, who is serving as a gunnery instructor with the US Army Air Force ‘somewhere in England’, manning a weapon aboard an aircraft.

Bomb damage in Manchester.

American soldiers from the 503rd parachute ski battalion rest in sleeping bags on the snow after hiking and skiing over rough mountain terrain during training exercises.

Two bomber aircrew, Sergeant J. Dickinson from Canada and Sergeant F. Gilkes from Trinidad share a joke while waiting to board their aircraft for a raid on Hamburg. Britain, 1943.

11/12/43 — Darwin, Australia: Three p.m. is siesta time in Darwin, Australia, and flying Captain R.N. Skipper dreams up a date with a dream girl. Since their flight missions usually encompass a distance of 3,000 miles, personnel of B-24 squadrons in the Darwin area are only allowed four or five raids a month. Thus, in between times, they lead a hum-drum existence, and 3 p.m. is official nap time, although the heat usually makes it impossible to sleep.

An American tank goes forward with infantrymen following in its cover, searching for Japanese that infiltrated American lines the night before. Bougainville, Solomon Islands, March 1944.

Approximately three of the seven weeks training course of the U.S. Marine recruits at Parris Island are spent on the rifle range where the future leathernecks are trained in the use of weapons with which a Marine is normally armed. This is followed by a week of advanced instruction in combat work and practice with the bayonet. Here, recruits undergo calisthenics under arms.

Sharing a joke at the wartime dance hall, 1944.

The dead body of a GI who has not been picked up is on the beach. 7th June 1944. Vierville-sur-Mer (Omaha Beach, White Dog), Normandy, France.

A French civilian woman pours a drink of cider for a British soldier with Bren gun in Lisieux, 1944.

Infantrymen of the U. S. First Army silently move through the snow-blanketed Krinkelter woods in Belgium on their way to contact the enemy during the current Nazi counteroffensive on the First Army front.

Two Navy dauntless dive bombers are poised to plunge through the thick cloud in left foreground. They carry thousand pound bombs to be dropped on Japanese installations on Wake Island.

Assault troops leave “alligator” as it hits the beach of Morotai Island.

A YMCA mobile canteen serves soldiers next to an anti-aircraft battery. November 1940.

Easter morning finds Technician Fifth Grade (T/5) William E. Thomas and Private First Class (PFC) Joseph Jackson preparing a special Easter egg basket for Hitler, March 1945.

18th September 1944: A white phosphorous shell explodes as soldiers run across the street in Brest to plant explosives in enemy positions.

The British Army in Athens, Greece, October 1944. Sergeant R. Gregory and Driver A. Hardman on the Erectheum during a tour of the Acropolis.

A group of American soldiers has gathered around a piano and sings a song in the street Montéglise. 10th August 1944. The two GI’s on the right wear the insignia of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Division, which has just arrived in Barenton, Normandy, France.

8/23/1944: Leap to free France. Thousands of vari-colored parachutes, some holding equipment, some carrying men, fill the sky over Southern France between Nice and Marseilles after dropping from their C-47 carrier planes.

617 Squadron (Dambusters) at Scampton, Lincolnshire, 22 July 1943. The crew of Lancaster ED285/AJ-T sitting on the grass, posed under stormy clouds.

Soldiers from the 331st Infantry Regiment, 83rd Infantry Division of the United States First Army run across a road to take cover from enemy fire in the bocage hedgerows near the village of Periers during the Normandy Campaign on 21st July 1944 near Periers in Normandy, France.

CB’s of 50th Battalion sitting on sandbags in a Canvas, NCB, Chapel, bow their heads in prayer during candlelight Holy Communion service, at Tinian, Marianas Islands. December 24, 1944.

Assault troops crossing river, Rhineland Campaign, Germany, 1945.

American Marine Corps Private First Class Natalie Slack and American Marine Corps Corporal Dean L Stidham, both wearing so-called ‘peanut suits’, overalls named so for their tan color, on the deck of the troop transport taking them to Hawaii, location unspecified, in the South Pacific, circa 1943.

Fourth Division Marines charging from their landing craft onto the beach in the battle at Iwo Jima, Iwo Jima, Japan, March 2, 1945.

In London during World War II, on July 30, 1944, an English soldier rescues a little girl named Barbara James from the ruins of her home after a series of aerial bombings.

Member of Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron checks .30-caliber machine gun, Ardennes-Alsace Campaign, Battle of the Bulge, 1945.

German patrol exploring the Egyptian desert while blowing the ghibli. El Alamein, September 1942.

A British soldier in battledress kneeling in prayer at a Service of Intercession for France which took place at Westminster Cathedral, London, 14th June, 1940.

Soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 165th Infantry Regiment from the United States Army’s 27th Infantry Division landing at Yellow Beach on Butaritari Island against the incoming defensive fire from naval ground troops of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 6th Special Naval Landing Force during the Battle of Makin Atoll on 20th November 1943 at Butaritari Island, Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands.

Infantrymen advancing under enemy shell fire, Ardennes-Alsace Campaign, Battle of the Bulge, 1945.

Black members of a Marine division on Iwo Jima.

1941: Red Army troops storming an apartment block amidst the ruins of war-torn Stalingrad.

Using an unexploded 16-inch naval shell for a resting place, Marine Pfc. Raymond Hubert shakes a three-day accumulation of sand from his boondocker. July 4, 1944.

USS LSM(R)-190 (MacKay) a United States Navy LSM(R)-188-class Landing Ship Medium (Rocket) fires a barrage of rockets in salvos on to the shores of Tokishi Shima in a prelanding bombardment during the Okinawa Campaign on 27th March 1945 at Tokishi Shima near Okinawa, Japan. USS LSM(R)-190 (MacKay) was attacked and sunk by 3 Japanese Kamikaze aircraft off Okinawa on 4th May 1945.

U.S. soldiers aboard Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP), approaching Omaha Beach, Normandy, France.

Company F, 145th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division soldiers move past the General Post Office building on their way to assault the walled city of Intramuros, Feb. 23, 1945, in Manila, Philippines.

Vertical aerial photograph taken during a daylight attack on an oil storage depot at Bec d’Ambes situated in the Garonne estuary at the confluence of the Rivers Garonne and Dordogne, France. An Avro Lancaster of No. 514 Squadron RAF flies over the target area while dense clouds of smoke rise as bombs burst among the oil storage tanks, 4 August 1944.

Scene of cheering crowd in the streets of Paris during the Liberation. Civilians waving at French tanks.

Parisian women welcome soldiers of the allied troops, on August 25, 1944 in Paris, after the battle for the Liberation of Paris.

Circa 1945: GIs stand at the ruins of the great living room window of Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden, the so-called Berghof.

A battle-weary soldier from George S. Patton’s Third Army sleeps on the luxurious bed where Hermann Goering once slept.

A boatload of soldiers aboard a liner arrives in New York City from the Pacific front, US, circa October 1945.

The post 50 Amazing Rarely Seen Photos From World War II appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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To be successful at their craft, magicians must possess the well-honed technical skills to pull off their mystifying tricks and clever sleights of hand. But as magician Steve Cohen observes, they must also be “masters at attracting interest, holding attention, and leaving audiences with fond memories of their time together” — skills that everyone can use to persuade audiences, charm dates, own a room, and influence others.

Steve, also known as the Millionaires’ Magician, is the author Win the Crowd: Unlock the Secrets of Influence, Charisma, and Showmanship. Today on the show, Steve shares the insights he and his fellow magicians know on everything from taking command of a room to creating a compelling character to making a magical entrance. Steve shares how to build your boldness through “put pocketing,” develop “spontaneous resourcefulness,” get people wrapped up in the magic of your message by suggesting rather than stating, increase your confidence by having a place for everything and everything in its place, and much more. At the end of our conversation, he shares two of his most interesting tips and explains how to influence people to do what you want by using “layered commands” and the “trailing or.”

Resources Related to the Podcast Steve on the Late Show with David Letterman * A look at what the Chamber Magic show is like on Good Day New York* * AoM Article: Command a Room Like a Man * AoM Podcast #306: What a Magician Can Teach You About Being More Successful * AoM Podcast #890: Toastmasters, Aristotle, and the Essential Art of Rhetoric * AoM Article: A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place * What’s the Deal With Mickey Mouse’s Ears?

Connect With Steve Cohen* Chamber Magic website

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #901: A Magician’s Secrets for Becoming More Commanding, Convincing, And Charismatic appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Win the Crowd: Unlock the Secrets of Influence, Charisma, and Showmanship

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If you’re heading out to the beach or lake this summer, be sure to know the 10 “quieter” signs of drowning — they’re easy to miss.

Source: Mario Vittone

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You want to make your move. Launch your idea. Throw your hat in the ring.

But your competitors look awfully intimidating.

They got there first. They own that space. And if their social media feeds are any indication, they’re absolutely killing it in every possible way.

From afar, your rivals seem to possess a mythical, insurmountable strength that is qualitatively different from your own.

Of course, they put on their pants one leg at a time, just like you do.

They’re not always confident they’re making the right decisions. They wonder if they’re on the right track. They worry about who’s coming up behind them, eager to take their place.

They’re just as human as you are — and just as vulnerable to disruption.

This is a lesson Ulysses S. Grant learned in the opening months of the Civil War.

Grant had been out of the army for seven years and working in a leather goods store when he was commissioned a colonel and put in charge of an Illinois militia.

He had served in the Mexican-American War, but as a quartermaster.

He had never held command.

Thus as Grant marched his men towards their first attack, “my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt as though it was in my throat.”

Yet as he reached the top of a hill, expecting to see the enemy assembled in the valley below, he was surprised by what he saw instead:

“The place where [the Confederates] had been encamped was still there . . . but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that [Colonel] Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.”

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Reading Notes on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.Democracy in America was written nearly 200 years ago, but Tocqueville’s insights about America still seem fresh and relevant today. Democracy in America is a giant tome of a book, so if you’re looking for the highlights to dip your toes into this classic, check out the extensive reading notes that writer Jonathan Bi has published online.

True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. Eric Hoffer was an interesting cat. He worked as a longshoreman in San Francisco in the 1940s. He wrote his first book, True Believer, while living in the railroad yards. It became a bestseller after Dwight Eisenhower quoted from it during a press conference in the 1950s. In True Believer, Hoffer grapples with the question of why people get caught up in destructive mass movements like Nazism or Communism. One of his insights that has since been validated by modern research is that for some people, just being bored with life is a big reason they get involved in political movements. Check out my podcast on the psychology of boredom with psychologist James Danckert where we discuss this finding.

PBfit Peanut Butter Powder. Want the taste and protein of peanut butter without the fat? Check out PBfit peanut butter powder. A single serving will give your smoothie the taste of peanut butter and 8 grams of protein but only has 60 calories. I’ve been adding PBfit to my oatmeal and yogurt, as well as my afternoon protein shakes. Tastes pretty dang good.

Almost Famous: I Was the Next Colonel Sanders. KFC Had Other Plans. H. Salt Fish & Chips was a fast food empire in the 1960s. At one point, there were 500 restaurants around the United States, and the company’s founder, Hadson Salt, was a celebrity. But that all came to a sudden halt after he sold his company to KFC. This short video gives a poignant retelling of the rise and fall of H. Salt Fish & Chips and is a reminder that while you might be on top of the world one day, the wheel of fortune can spin you to the bottom the next. Hadson Salt seems to have taken the spin gracefully and offers some Kierkegaardian advice at the end of the doc.

Quote of the Week

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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True Believer Thoughts on the Nature Of Mass Movements

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In the mid-1980s, David Hemery set out to answer a burning question: “What makes a winner?”

Hemery was a winner himself, having taken the gold in the 400-meter hurdles at the 1968 Olympics. He was curious as to what contributed to this achievement, and to the achievements of others. Were there common qualities amongst those individuals who attained the highest levels in their field?

Hemery knew that innate talent and inborn traits (especially physical traits when it came to sports) had something to do with it. But why didn’t all who possessed these potential advantages make it to the elite level? And among the equally gifted people who did, what allowed one of them to best the others and come out on top? Talent, Hemery recognized, was necessary but not sufficient for greatness. He wanted to know what other factors were at play.

To discover the answer, Hemery interviewed 62 of the highest achievers in the world of sports — amateur and professional athletes who had won competitions consistently, earned Olympic gold, set world records, and/or become champions. To these athletes, who hailed from twelve different countries and were drawn from twenty-two different sports, Hemery put a set of 88 questions. He sat down with them for hours-long interviews, seeking to unearth the backgrounds, mindsets, and habits that had contributed to their success.

Hemery chose to study athletes because their achievements are easily quantifiable. But he believed that the bulk of what made for greatness in athletes would also apply to attaining excellence in “all fields of human endeavor.”

While not every athlete shared every attribute, many distinct commonalities did emerge. Some were based on circumstances that individuals cannot control; others were qualities that can be cultivated with intention. It’s unclear whether these factors cause greatness, or are merely correlated with it, but they’re interesting to consider regardless.

Hemery unpacked his findings in 1986’s Sporting Excellence: A Study of Sport’s Highest Achievers. Below we share some of the noteworthy attributes he found in common amongst elite champions:

Late specialization. When David Epstein published Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World several years ago, his observation that top athletes often pursued several sports as children before choosing to concentrate on one later in their youth seemed to be hailed as a new discovery. Yet Hemery found this exact thing amongst the high achievers he studied nearly forty years ago.

While a few sports like swimming and gymnastics “had a definite bias towards a younger starting age,” on average, the athletes Hemery studied didn’t specialize in a single sport until they were sixteen. Instead, they played a variety of sports (with an emphasis on having fun) through the first years of high school, only deciding to focus on a single sport in their late teens to see how far they could take it.

Stable home life. While the participants in Hemery’s study were drawn equally from middle-class, working-class, and outright poor backgrounds (interestingly, only 3% came from affluent families), they almost unanimously reported that their home life had been happy (93%), secure (94%), and stable (98%).

Only “6% had either a parent die or parents who were divorced” (a statistic that’s all the more remarkable given that the divorce rate peaked in the 1980s), and more than two-thirds had a close relationship with their parents.

As Hemery observed, “Crops grow better in good soil.”

Non-competitive, non-pushy parents. While we often think that behind every superstar athlete is a set of parents who drove their child to succeed, 95% of Hemery’s participants said their parents hadn’t been over-ambitious and pushy about achieving success. Only half of the participants said that their parents had high expectations for them, and even among this half, over a quarter of them said that these expectations concerned their education, not their achievement in sports. 92% characterized their parents as simply being “supportive and encouraging.”

By and large, the high achievers had reached for lofty goals because they themselves wanted to, not because their parents had pushed them to do it. While 92% of the athletes considered themselves competitive, and this competitive streak manifested itself early in their childhoods, less than half described their parents as competitive. As Hemery observed, “It is interesting that this is an attribute not acquired by example.”

Late or early puberty. 66% of the athletes Hemery studied went through puberty at a later-than-average age; 22% hit puberty early; only 12% had gone through it at an average age. It might be theorized that this is a case of correlation rather than causation, i.e., late puberty doesn’t lead to high achievement in sports; instead, these athletes were high achievers because they trained intensely, and intense training can delay puberty, at least in females. That may be the case, but most of the athletes in Hemery’s study were males, and remember, they did not begin training super intensely in their youth.

Hemery admitted that the statistics here may be misleading given the small sample size. But he theorized that those who hit puberty late are overrepresented among high-achieving athletes because the delay in their development gives these athletes something of a chip on their shoulder; they have more to prove and work harder to prove it. Hemery himself was the smallest in his grade when he was fourteen, though he later grew to 6″ 2′. Another example of an athlete who didn’t grow and fill out until later in life was Gene Upshaw, a pro football hall of famer and two-time Super Bowl champion; when “he left school at eighteen, he was 5 ft 10 in and between 175 and 180 lb. Yet he grew to 6 ft 6 in and 260 lb during his college days.”

On the other end, those who hit puberty early have an obvious athletic advantage in becoming physically developed before their peers, and may also be looked to as leaders on the field.

Introversion. 89% of the sports achievers classified themselves as introverts, 6% said they were extroverts, and the rest described themselves as being somewhere in between. While some of these introverts were also shy, most said they “had no problems getting on with anyone.” They were socially adept, but also didn’t mind spending time in solitude.

The finding makes sense: even in team sports, elite athletes must spend a good amount of time training by themselves and be willing to forgo parties and other social opportunities in dedication to practices and competitions.

As mentioned above, Hemery thought that the same attributes which contributed to the success of top athletes would contribute to success in other fields of achievement as well. But in this case, he found that among individuals who became what he called “double achievers” and achieved success in both sports and another area like business, most were extroverts.

Sensitivity to what others think. There’s a popular idea in the modern world that not caring about what other people think is a superpower — that if you could just free yourself from thinking about the opinion of the crowd, it would unlock the limits on your potential.

Yet, nearly 90% of Hemery’s high achievers, the sporting world’s best of the best, “felt it was important what others thought of you.” And 92% said “they wanted to please others through their sports participation.” Who were these others they wanted to please? Their parents, coaches, spouses, teammates, friends, managers, sponsors, owners, or fans . . . often some combination of all the above. By and large, these elite athletes were acutely sensitive to criticism and the expectations of those around them. Only five athletes said “they were not aiming to please anyone but themselves.”

While public pressure might seem like an impediment to performance, it drove these athletes to the highest levels of success. The thought of letting others down was anathema; when they stepped into the arena, they would not, and could not, allow themselves to fail.

Sense of humor. Nearly 90% of the athletes Hemery studied felt that humor was important in day-to-day life. Because so much of the training and competitions they engaged in were conducted with seriousness, the ability to sometimes cut up, laugh, and see the funny side of life was a vital outlet for building camaraderie, reducing tension, and getting perspective.

Emotional intensity + high control. These top competitors unanimously agreed that true greatness came from possessing both high emotion and high self-control. Without intense emotional arousal, athletes don’t have the level of investment to put in their best day in and day out and compete with animation and energy. But without intense self-control, their emotions would get the best of them and sabotage their performance.

The best athletes were able to maintain “a calm and controlled approach while ‘fired up.'”

Ability to cope with pre-competition stress. Whereas some people collapse under the pressure of competition, these high achievers thrived under it. They did their best when the stakes were high. They enjoyed being under the bright lights. The comment of squash champion Jonah Barrington summarized the attitude of these athletes: “I love competing. I get fired up, no panic.”

All of the athletes Hemery interviewed reported either not feeling stressed out before an event or being able to cope well with any stress they did feel. 77% said they could “shut themselves off from their problems or concerns once they entered the sports arena.” Hockey great Wayne Gretzky spoke for many of the athletes in saying he was able to “block out” everything but the game.

Those who did get nervous before a competition experienced this feeling as a positive, energizing force that would only strengthen and fuel their performance.

Part of their adeptness in dealing with stress may have been inborn, but these athletes also cultivated practices that helped them manage their nerves. Almost three-quarters of them cloistered themselves before an event and disengaged from involvement with other people and “from distractions either mentally, physically, or both.” Some needed days of isolation; for others, it was enough to spend a quiet half hour alone before the start of a competition. Those who were going to be participating in a more periodic event like the Olympics tended to need more “monk mode” time than those who participated in a game every week, like professional athletes.

Said Olympic long jump champion Lynn Davies, “I think it’s part of the process. You train very hard and you withdraw into yourself. I think you seek inner strength and you can’t share yourself with people.”

Use of visualization. 80% of the participants in the study said they used a visualization practice as part of their mental training. They would mentally rehearse how they would perform during an upcoming competition, cognitively running through possible scenarios and what they would do under various conditions. They would often visit the stadium or course where the event would take place to add the landscape to their minds and make these mental rehearsals more detailed and realistic. Some so immersed themselves in these simulations that their heart rate would rise to around the level it would be during the competition.

By engaging in these sensory-rich visualizations, when the time of the competition arrived, the atmosphere felt more familiar, giving the athletes the sense they’d been there before and a greater feeling of being in control of their performance. Having mentally prepared ahead of time, changes in circumstances did not throw them off, and they were able to respond proactively instead of reactively. “Perhaps most important,” Hemery theorized, “the individual is convincing himself or herself that an improved and successful action is possible. This means that one is working not only on an improved physical action but also on an improved self-image.” Visualization allowed the athletes to conceptualize themselves as winners; embed the possibility of mounting the medal stand in their minds; generate the feeling that they belonged in the circle of champions.

High self-confidence. In answer to the question, “Did you always have the self-confidence that you could produce your best effort when you asked that of yourself?” 87% of the athletes said yes.

While this self-confidence derived from a variety of sources, one of the primary themes across the athletes’ responses was that they drew their confidence from the belief that they had done more or worked harder than their competitors. The decision to do a little extra practice on their own after their teammates had gone home or to train in the kind of inclement weather they knew would keep most of their rivals inside built their self-assurance.

Champion rugby player Barry John reported: “I still went out on my own when I felt I needed sharpening up, even in the snow and ice on the field by the river. I’d clear a little path through the light snow of about 100 yards, and I’d do twenty to twenty-five minutes to prepare my mind for the weekend game.” Another rugby great, J.P.R. Williams, ran the sand dunes near where he lived, feeling that his “work there gave him more stamina than most other rugby players.”

Ed Moses, who won Olympic gold in the 400-meter hurdles, found confidence in the fact that he could fast from food for up to a week and still train hard. Other athletes derived satisfaction in training on holidays like Christmas, knowing that most of their competitors had taken the day off.

By engaging in above-average preparation, the athletes gained a psychological edge when they competed. Hemery observed: “Knowledge that the work had been done to the best of their ability gave a strong sense of confidence and provided a sense of calm; all that could have been done had been done.”

High tolerance for discomfort. Much research over the last several decades has shown that the pain and discomfort athletes experience when pushing themselves, which seem to signal that their bodies can physically go no farther, is actually an illusion, the product of a cautious, scarcity-minded brain that puts the brakes on exertion well before one’s physiological resources have in fact been exhausted. Athletic excellence has thus been linked to the capacity to tolerate discomfort — to feel the pinch and the pain and keep going anyway.

This ability was evident in the athletes Hemery studied. 97% consistently trained hard and believed that the intensity of their training made a significant difference in their ultimate success. Many of the athletes believed that it wasn’t so much the physical intensity of their training that made the difference but the effect that the physical training had on their mental resilience. By pushing themselves in practice, the athletes learned that they were capable of much more than they might have otherwise thought.

Commonly made were observations like that from swimmer Duncan Goodhew, who earned a gold and bronze medal in the 1980 Olympics; he said that two or three times a week, he wouldn’t feel up to training, but when he did it anyway, “I found that 95 percent of the time it was psychological. I would get in, and forty-five minutes or an hour later, I was knocking out amazing times.” Another gold medal winner, Herb Elliott, who’s considered the greatest middle-distance runner of his era, put it this way, “In retrospect, my training wasn’t to improve my physical strength or stamina; those came along as a secondary result, but the primary purpose of every training session was to toughen up mentally. A training session was totally useless until it started to hurt. That was the point when it started to be worthwhile.”

Gene Upshaw said, “If you don’t push yourself that way, you’re never ever going to move higher than you are.”

Hemery wrote that Ralph Doubell, a track athlete who won a gold medal in the 800 meters, didn’t even “like the term pain. He saw it more as a willingness to push oneself, and that was both a mental and physical exercise. He referred to the classic comment of the Oxford University coach who spoke to an athlete who was sweating while running round the track, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only pain.'”

Enjoys their pursuit. Even though Hemery’s athletes subjected themselves to what at least most people would consider pain, practiced with great intensity, and had to give up social opportunities, leisure time, and indulgent habits to strive for excellence in their domain, nearly two-thirds did not think they “had sacrificed anything in order to pursue their sport.” Those things they had to forgo to attain their elite-level success did not feel like sacrifices because it was what they wanted to do, and because they felt amply compensated by what they received in return. They had liked it, all of it — the training, the competitions, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. They felt it had enhanced, not detracted from, their lives.

Because the athletes had chosen a pursuit they truly enjoyed, it wasn’t discipline but intrinsic motivation that kept them going. Olympian Lynn Davis said, “I believe if you spend two or three hours a day over a long period of time at something which you enjoy doing, you become very good at it regardless of what it is, but you have to tap what it is that motivates you, that you enjoy doing.”

Rod Laver, who won the most singles titles in tennis history, including 11 Grand Slams, told Hemery: “It was tennis morning, noon, and night. You slept it, you ate it, but that was never forced on me. I would get up at 6 o’clock in the morning to ride my bike, eight or nine miles sometimes, to get to the club matches. We’d play all day, and people would say, ‘Weren’t you tired after cycling all that way?’ Well, that wasn’t even thought of. It was just the opportunity to play.”

While it’s true that no greatness is ever achieved without doing hard things, it’s a misconception to think that hard things are always unpleasant. For each person, there are particular hard things that, though most people would find them a self-flagellation-requiring grind, he actually enjoys doing. As David Epstein put it, “What looks like grit, is often fit.”

Feels in control of their destiny. Nearly 90% of the participants said they felt in control of their destiny. At the same time, when asked, “Do you consider yourself lucky to have been in the right place at the right time?” 88% answered yes.

There is no contradiction in their belief in a strong internal locus of control and the power of luck. These high achievers felt lucky that they had found a sport so well-suited to their interests, motivation, and abilities. They felt lucky that they happened to be in the right spot at the right time to find the right coach and wind up on the right team with the right organizational and parental support. They felt lucky to have been given the opportunities that they were.

At the same time, they had decided to make the most of those opportunities. They had invested their everything into the chances they were given. As Hemery observed, these top performers didn’t “simply let things happen . . . [they] made things happen . . . they contributed to their own good fortune. The proverb that God helps those who help themselves was in evidence.”

Hemery shared the perspective of Olympian Duncan Goodhew, who “had a view that each individual has talent and the lucky ones are those who find it.” Goodhew said: “I think you are lucky to discover it and are extremely lucky and may be shrewd to recognize it at the time, and then the rest is the follow-through.”

The post 14 Attributes of Greatness appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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You might think we’re heading into a low time of year for suicides because they peak during the cold, dark months of winter. But, in fact, suicide peaks during the spring and early summer.

This is just one example of the popular beliefs around suicide that turn out to be myths. Here to unpack more of these myths, as well as the truths around this poorly understood subject, is Rory O’Connor, the leader of the Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory and the author of When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide and What We Can Do to Prevent It. Today on the show, Rory discusses possible reasons for why suicides go up in the warmer months and why men die by suicide more often than women. He explains that suicide doesn’t happen without some warning signs and why someone’s improved mood might be one of them. In the second half of the show, Rory walks us through the real reasons people move from having suicidal thoughts to acting on them, and what works to prevent suicide.

Resources Related to the Podcast The Suicide and Crisis Lifeline * The Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory * Atlantic* article: “The Troubling Link Between Springtime Allergies and Suicide” * AoM Podcast #585: Inflammation, Saunas, and the New Science of Depression * AoM Podcast #886: What the World of Psychology Gets Wrong About Men * AoM Podcast #756: How the Desire for Status Explains (Pretty Much) Everything * “Why Men Kill Themselves” by Will Storr

Connect With Rory O’Connor* Rory’s faculty page

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #900: The Myths and Truths Around Suicide appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide and What We Can Do to Prevent It

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Have you been languishing in the same role at work, frustrated that you haven’t been promoted to a higher position with more pay and different responsibilities?

My guest can help you level up in your career. His name is Randy Ornstein, and he’s the author of Grow: The Essential Guide to Getting Promoted. Today on the show, Randy explains why getting promoted is more beneficial to your paycheck than getting a raise and his case for why you should stick with working for the same company for a long time. We then talk about the things you need to do so that management thinks of you the next time a higher position opens up. We discuss how promotable employees participate in meetings, execute their communication, study their work, and develop best practices. We also talk about when to bring up the idea of being promoted to your boss and a couple of the challenges that can come with advancing up the ranks.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: How To Become the Go-to Guy at Work * AoM Article: How to Be Manager to Your Friends and Peers * AoM Podcast #273: How to Get a Job Promotion This Year

Connect With Randy Ornstein* Randy on LinkedIn

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Nothing says manly Americana like standing in front of charcoal grill that’s spewing flames like the upturned end of a rocket ship. But creating a massive fire doesn’t always equate to properly prepping a charcoal grill. At the end of the day, you’ll earn more admirers by serving up great tasting brats and burgers than by offering a low-budget pyrotechnics show. Learn to light your charcoal grill using one of these two methods, and you’re sure to get the praise you deserve.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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“The Purple Testament” episode of The Twilight Zone. Wednesday’s episode of the podcast about the 11th Airborne Division during WWII led me into reading this interesting article about the combat experience of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, which then led me to watching an episode of the classic television show I hadn’t watched before. Serling was a member of the 11th Airborne Division’s 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which lost a third of its ranks during its fighting in the Pacific. Serling, who earned the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, was haunted by his harrowing experiences after the war, and these ghosts served as indirect and direct inspiration for episodes of The Twilight Zone. As an example of the latter, the article referenced “The Purple Testament” (Season 1, Episode 19), which depicts an officer fighting in the Philippines who has gained the ability to predict soldiers’ deaths by looking into their faces. It’s a pretty good episode — especially once you know about Serling’s personal connection to the story’s backdrop.

Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness by Walter J. Ong. Walter J. Ong was a Jesuit priest who spent his career as an academic studying and writing about how humanity’s transition from an oral to written culture changed human consciousness. In Fighting for Life, he looks at how competition — particularly male competition — shaped that process. He focuses on how the male drive for competition influenced philosophers and academics from ancient Greece through the Enlightenment to create a learning environment that was agonistic. Ong argues that after the Romantic Era, education became more feminized, and an emphasis on cooperation rather than competition began to pervade classrooms.

“Experiences Won’t Make You Happier Than Possessions.”You’ve probably heard that research has found that spending your money on experiences rather than things will lead to greater happiness. We like this kind of scientific finding; it seems “right.” But as the author of this piece convincingly explains, that finding is based on the particular (and potentially misleading) way studies on the subject have been framed, and when you look at the question from other angles, it’s not so clear that experiences are superior to possessions in the happiness-generating department. Some people may get more enjoyment from the former than the latter, and vice versa. So the conclusion is to not make your spending decisions based on pop psychology, but what you personally enjoy.

Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate Powder. We’ve written about the benefits of creatine. Besides aiding in muscle and strength building, it can also boost cognition. It’s one of the most research-vetted supplements out there and has been shown to be effective and safe. It’s also pretty dang cheap. You don’t need any of those proprietary blend creatine powders; plain old, straight-up creatine monohydrate is perfectly effective. I’ve been using this creatine monohydrate powder from Nutricost for awhile now. It’s a good price and gets the job done.

Quote of the Week

The dead are living all around us, watching with eager anticipation how we will handle the opportunities they left in our hands when they died.

—Theodore C. Speers

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I recently discovered my new favorite knot.

It’s known as the lineman’s loop or the alpine butterfly knot.

Why is it my new favorite knot? A few reasons: First, it’s just a lot of fun to tie. It’s really easy, so easy, my 9-year-old picked it up in a minute. Now I have a rope with a bunch of alpine butterfly knots on it.

Beyond that, it’s just an incredibly useful knot. It creates a loop in the middle of the rope that is capable of withstanding heavy loads from any direction, making it an excellent choice for mountaineers, rock climbers, and rescue professionals who demand a knot that won’t give under pressure.

You can also use the alpine butterfly to create loops mid-line so that you can clip gear to it to keep your stuff off the ground while camping.

The alpine butterfly can be used to isolate damaged sections of rope as well. Let’s say you got a bit of frayed rope. Make that the loop of your alpine butterfly, and you’ve removed the frayed portion of the rope.

While this knot is incredibly strong and secure, it can be untied easily, even after being subjected to intense strain.

Whether you’re embarking on a climbing expedition, preparing for a rescue mission, or simply setting up a hammock in your backyard, the alpine butterfly offers a strong, secure, and easy-to-tie knot for getting the job done.

The post My New Favorite Knot appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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It’s been a few years since we’ve had new Art of Manliness t-shirts. Figured it was time we dropped some fresh designs.

Introducing two new AoM Tees: The AoM Retro and the Get On Your Horse and Kick. Both were designed by the fine folks at Anderson Bros Design & Supply.

Pick one up to rep your support of AoM! Both also make great gifts for the men in your lives who embody the art of manliness.

The AoM Retro Made from 100% spun cotton and featuring a simple, clean, 1980s-inspired design that harkens back to the days when Magnum P.I. rocked a mustache and your dad wore tube socks and jorts to mow the lawn. Whether you’re pumping iron in the gym or just kicking back with friends by a campfire, the AoM Retro Tee will keep you looking chill like the chill dude you are.

The t-shirt has a classic fit and comes in either black or natural white.

Get On Your Horse and Kick TeeWhen a character in the novel Lonesome Dove faces a tough setback, the advice cowboy sage Augustus McCrae gives him is to mount up and move on: “There’s nothing you can do but kick your horse.”

Life can only be lived forwards: Feet in the stirrups. Hands on the reins. Eyes towards the horizon.

Made from 100% spun cotton in an antique gold color, the cowboy-inspired design of our Get On Your Horse and Kick Tee challenges you to get back in the saddle; to embrace the ever-onwards ethos embodied in Gus McCrae and the American West; to honor the past while leaning into the promise, and adventure, of tomorrow.

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When people think of the paratroopers of World War II, they tend to think of the European theater — the 101st Airborne Division and the Band of Brothers.

But paratroopers were also deployed in the Pacific, and here to unpack their lesser-known but equally epic and heroic story is James Fenelon, a former paratrooper himself and the author of Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts, Grit, and Brotherhood. Today on the show, James tells us about the formation, leadership, and training of the 11th Airborne Division, the role they played in the campaigns of the Pacific — which included being dropped one by one out of a tiny plane described as a “lawnmower with wings” — how they built a reputation as one of the war’s most lethal units, and the division’s surprising connection to the creation of The Twilight Zone. At the end of our conversation, James shares what lessons we all can take away from the exploits and spirit of the 11th Airborne.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Podcast #1: We Who Are Alive and Remain * AoM Article: Motivational Posters — Band of Brothers Edition * Lieutenant General Joseph Swing * Colonel Orin “Hard Rock” Haugen * Medal of Honor citation for Private First Class Manuel Perez Jr. * “Combat in Twilight: Rod Serling’s World War II”

Connect With James Fenelon* James’ Website

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #898: The Heroic Exploits of WWII’s Pacific Paratroopers appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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We’ve written about the importance of making and maintaining friendships in adulthood and the benefits of face-to-face interaction.

After reading one of these articles, maybe you tried to get your friends together to do something.

Perhaps you threw out a text to them, and the resulting conversation went something like this:

You: Hey, that new pizza place just opened up. Let’s get together for dinner there next week. What night would work for you guys?

Friend 1: I’m free Saturday night!

Friend 2: Reese has a basketball game that night.

You: What about Friday night?

Friend 2: I’m going out for my and Cheryl’s wedding anniversary that night. How about Thursday?

You: I’ve got Boy Scouts that night.

Friend 1: Thursday wouldn’t work for me either. How about Wednesday?

Friend 2: I’ve got to work the late shift that night.

And on it went until the discussion devolved into a vague commitment to try to get together some other time.

Not only is it hard to corral your friends for a simple hang out, but if you belong to any civic or church groups, you’ve likely encountered a similar difficulty in getting people together. You plan an event for which hundreds of people might potentially attend, but only a handful show up. Folks just have all kinds of other conflicting events going on.

A lot of ink has been spilled on what’s causing the decline in in-person socialization in the West. Technologies like television and the internet have undoubtedly played a role. But an oft-overlooked factor is that in our modern, hyper-individualistic world, people no longer have schedules that sync up. When everyone is living in their own timeline, there are fewer shared areas that overlap, and getting together becomes increasingly difficult to do.

The Soviet Nepreryvka: A Case of Top-Down Social DiscoordinationThere’s a telling lesson from history on what happens to individuals, families, and society when there’s no longer a shared calendar or schedule: In 1929, the Soviet Union adopted a continuous workweek plan called nepreryvka. The plan aimed to increase the productivity of factories to speed up industrialization.

First, they rejiggered the calendar so that a week only had five days instead of seven. Next, workers were assigned to five different color groups. Each group was assigned a weekly work schedule where they’d work four days and have one day off. Which days were work days and which day was an off day differed between each group. On any given day, 80% of the population was at work, while 20% was at home.

While this arrangement allowed factories to run non-stop, it also had immediate social consequences. Friends, family members, and even husbands and wives were often separated into different color groups. Socializing became nearly impossible because everyone had different schedules. Clubs and church congregations began to atrophy, friends stopped seeing each other, and families became distant and stressed. From the point of view of the Soviet commissioners, this disruption of organic social life was only another benefit of nepreryvka: keeping people atomized made them easier to control.

By 1931, the Soviet Union gave up on nepreryvka because production began to slow down, likely due to a plunge in morale amongst rightfully resentful employees. But the social damage had been done. Those two years of schedule discoordination created tears in the fabric of society that took a very long time to mend.

Western Hyper-Individualism: A Case of Bottom-Up Social DiscoordinationIn the modern West, we see a similar thing happening as happened during the Soviet nepreryvka. Instead of some giant bureaucracy jacking up everyone’s schedule from the top down in the name of collective efficiency, our social discoordination is coming from the bottom up, as individuals choose different schedules to make a living or pursue interests, often for the sake of personal efficiency.

Due to the changing nature of work, the traditional Monday to Friday, 9-5 job is no longer the norm. Many people not only work during the day but also in the evenings and/or on weekends.

Not only does modern work create syncing problems, but the abundance of choices in leisure and extracurricular activities (for both children and adults) can keep people apart as well. Whereas a hundred years ago, maybe the only game in town on Wednesday night was a meeting at the Freemason lodge, now someone might be at a CrossFit class, movie, church youth group, or any number of their children’s sports games.

Oliver Burkeman wrote about this issue in his book Four Thousand Weeks. He pointed out that what usually keeps people from getting together with friends isn’t an outright lack of time, but the simple inability to sync up schedules.

How to Mitigate and Manage Social DiscoordinationThis challenge of social discoordination is a stinker of a problem to solve. Here are some suggestions that have worked for me and that I’ve seen work in other people’s lives, which can at least help manage and mitigate the issue:

Accept that getting together with others is going to be hard. The expectations you set for something play a primary role in how you experience its result. If you’ve got it in your head that getting together with people should be fairly easy to do, when it isn’t — which is very often the case — you’ll end up feeling frustrated and resentful. Instead, accept the fact that any kind of socialization in the modern world will include friction and take effort and won’t always work out. When it does work out, count it as a great win. When it doesn’t, just shrug it off and try again some other time.

Create a set, recurring date for get-togethers. One effective way to mitigate social discoordination is to create a shared schedule with your friends and family by setting a recurring date for get-togethers.

People often can’t fit in an event with only a week’s notice, but when an event is recurring, they can start planning their calendar around it.

A few years ago, I belonged to two different social groups — one a scripture study group and the other a book club — that got together regularly by using this practice. With the latter group, we met the third Wednesday of every month at 6 p.m.; with the other, we got together every other Thursday at 8:30 p.m. We all agreed to the schedule and stuck to it and were able to plan the rest of our lives around it. It worked wonderfully for a couple of years. (Both eventually disbanded due to people moving. Sad!)

We’ve seen success with this tactic on The Strenuous Life. Early on, we noticed that local chapters had trouble planning and organizing meet-ups because members couldn’t sync schedules. So we introduced the idea of “Strenuous Saturday” and designated the third Saturday of every month as the official day for meet-ups. Groups don’t have to have their meet-ups on the third Saturday of the month, but setting that as the general norm certainly helped make events easier to plan and more frequent.

The recurring events you set don’t have to be things that you do weekly or monthly. They can be annual traditions too. Maybe every year you throw a Memorial Day BBQ for your friends. They always know it’s coming, and always know to save the spot on their calendar for it.

Try a 2-hour cocktail party on a Tuesday night. People’s weekends are pretty booked up. On Wednesdays, some people have church youth group. Thursday nights are a great night to attempt to get folks together — people are already transitioning into the weekend mindset but aren’t as busy as they are on Fridays and Saturdays. But if you really want to plan an event where the preponderance of people will be available to attend, Tuesdays are where it’s at. Tuesdays are dumb. Hardly anything goes on on a Tuesday, and a fun social event would be an accessible and welcome break from the norm.

You could plan any kind of get-together for a Tuesday, but to maximize the fun and effectiveness of the event, you can’t go wrong with a “2-hour cocktail party”; Nick Gray goes into all the details of how to execute one in this episode of the podcast.

Get rid of the “maybe” mentality. Manners expert Thomas Farley says that “we’re living in the age of maybe.” We get invites to weddings and parties and never commit to yes or no because we think there might be something else going on at that time that will conflict (and that we’d rather do). This makes planning an event harder for hosts and social initiators, which makes them more reluctant to plan future events, which makes in-person get-togethers more and more infrequent.

Instead of saying “maybe” to social invites, make a firm commitment to either yes or no. If you say yes to an invite, stick to it, even if something else comes up.

Embrace “Downton Abbey” sociality. There have been other times in human history when logistical factors prevented people from socializing very often. On the Western frontier, people who lived on far-flung homesteads sometimes didn’t see any non-immediate family members outside of a long trek to church on Sundays and very occasional visits from extended family and friends. It was the same deal in many rural areas up through the 20th century.

In Downton Abbey (hey, don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it — it was a good show, man), the characters live in homes and manors spread out across the English countryside. Set in the early 1900s, when automobiles and telephones were coming on the scene but not yet common, friends and relatives could go weeks and months without seeing each other and communicated largely by letter. In the show, when characters do have the chance to meet up, they tend to blurt out their deepest feelings for each other, without much preliminaries. Some of this is, of course, the product of screenwriters who are looking to condense and gin up the drama. Yet it also feels authentic to what these kinds of interactions would have really been like; when it might be weeks before you’d see someone again, when you did see them, you’d skip the idle small talk and get right to the nitty-gritty.

In our own age, we’ve returned to a time of Downton Abbey-esque sociality. We “talk” to people more often via text than we see them in person, and we can go quite awhile between the times we interact with them in the flesh. When we do get together, then, we might take a page from the post-Edwardian era and really make these meet-ups count, spending less time on trivialities and more time on the deeper things we’ve been thinking and feeling since the last time we rendezvoused.

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The charge to be well-mannered, to treat others with civility, kindness, and respect, is perennial. But the rules for how to carry those manners into action, the rules of good etiquette, change over time.

Given all the cultural and technological changes modern society has experienced, it’s not always easy to know the best practices for a contemporary gentleman. Here to offer some guidance on that front is Thomas Farley, also known as Mr. Manners. Today on the show, Thomas offers some answers to the frequently asked questions around modern etiquette, including when to send a handwritten thank you note, whether “no problem” is an appropriate response to “thank you,” if it’s okay to ghost someone, how to deal with our ever-proliferating and out-of-control tipping culture, whether it’s okay to exclude kids from your wedding, if you should still open a door for a woman, and more.

Related Resources From AoM’s Extensive Manners and Etiquette Archives* How Manners Made the World * The Importance of Good Manners * How to Acquire Good Manners * The Art of Thank You Note Writing * The Unclassified Laws of Etiquette * How to Accept a Compliment With Class * The Ins and Outs of Opening a Door for a Woman * A Primer on Wedding Etiquette * How to Tame the Timing Anxiety Around Texting * Podcast #718: How to Use Digital Body Language to Build Trust and Connection * Podcast #162: Digital Manners & Etiquette For the Modern Man * Podcast #422: Men & Manners — Tipping, Emojis, and Much More

Connect With Thomas Farley* Thomas’ website

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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. The charge to be well-mannered. To treat others with civility, kindness, and respect is perennial. But the rules for how to carry those manners into action, the rules of good etiquette change over time. Given all the cultural and technological changes modern society has experienced, it’s not always easy to know the best practices for a contemporary gentleman. Here to offer some guidance on that front is Thomas Farley, also known as Mister Manners. Today on the show, Thomas offers some answers to the frequently asked questions around modern etiquette, including when to send a handwritten thank you note, whether “No problem” is an appropriate response to “Thank you,” if it’s okay to ghost someone, how to deal with our ever proliferating and out-of-control tipping culture, whether it’s okay to exclude kids from your wedding, if you should still open a door for a woman, and more. After show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/etiquetteFAQ.

Alright. Thomas Farley, welcome to the show.

Thomas Farley: Brett, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are Mister Manners, you’re an etiquette expert, a communication expert, you do trainings for businesses around the world and around the country, and I wanted to bring you on to talk about manners and etiquette in general, but also hopefully we can answer some common questions that people have about etiquette and manners, ’cause it seems like it’s constantly changing, especially with the introduction of new technologies that we have. So I think this will be a fun conversation. Let’s talk about manners in general. I think a lot of people listening might think, well, manners, it’s contrived, it’s artificial, it’s phony, it’s not authentic. Why do you think it’s still important to know and follow rules of etiquette?

Thomas Farley: Sure. And I think just for the listener’s benefit, it’s really important for us to distinguish between manners and etiquette because they actually, they’re used often interchangeably but they do mean different things. So etiquette, it derives from the French word for ticket. So think about etiquette as your ticket to getting more and better interactions. So when you’re speaking with someone, when you’re in an unfamiliar situation, by following the rules of etiquette, you’re guaranteed less embarrassment and more satisfaction for both parties to the interaction. That’s etiquette. And etiquette changes. It evolves over time. So people think, oh, etiquette, they immediately go to someone drinking out of a teacup where they’ve got their pinky raised in the air or they think about dining etiquette. But the fact is there’s etiquette that governs just about everything we do throughout the day. So etiquette in an elevator, etiquette for who steps to the right when you’re on a sidewalk, and so on.

And so without rules of etiquette similar to the rules of driving, we’d have more accidents, we’d have more upsetting situations. So etiquette really is valuable and important, and it evolves. Manners on the other hand is a general sense of kindness and consideration toward others, which of course can incorporate etiquette. But manners doesn’t come so much with rules, it’s more just a general sense of empathy and kindness and consideration towards others around us. So they’re both important, and I’m so glad to be able to spend this time with you because this idea that etiquette is some crusty old thing that only your grandma still cares about, couldn’t be farther from the truth. Without etiquette, we would have no civilized society. So it’s really important.

Brett McKay: I like that distinction between manners and etiquette. So manners is just thinking about making the other person feel good and comfortable.

Thomas Farley: Yes.

Brett McKay: And that might require some, the Greeks will call it phronesis or practical wisdom, kind of judgment. It might differ from person to person. Etiquette is more like the rules of the road. I really like that analogy of traffic rules. If there were no traffic laws, there’d just be chaos. The same goes for our social interaction. If there aren’t any guidelines to follow, then it would just… Everything would just be friction filled and not fun.

Thomas Farley: That’s exactly right. And sometimes the rules of etiquette can seem a little bit arbitrary, and in fact, in some cases they are very arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not important. So in the same way that in the US, we drive on the right-hand-side of the road, and in most situations that works quite well. Whereas in the UK, they drive on the left side of the road, and in most situations, that works perfectly well. The fact is that there is a set of guidelines that everyone is aware of so that we can all interact and focus on far more important things than what side of the road do you drive on or what side of the table setting your fork is. So etiquette really does play that vital role, although it can seem quite arbitrary.

Brett McKay: Well, I think everyone’s experienced social interactions where etiquette isn’t practiced. And you see these videos on the internet a lot now, just people just yelling at each other, and it’s like if they just would have practiced a little bit of etiquette, they could’ve avoided all that.

Thomas Farley: Yes, it’s true. And I think there are a lot of reasons for what we’re seeing, and literally seeing, and I think one of the primary drivers of it is the fact that we all have an independent television studio in our pockets wherever we go. So an interaction that might not have been caught on camera, that happens on an airplane between somebody who wants to take more than their share of an armrest can easily go viral in ways that it wouldn’t have before. So there’s definitely this perception that etiquette is worse than ever, that manners are worse than ever. But frankly you can read news accounts and textbooks from a hundred years ago, 600 years ago, where you hear people saying, “Gosh, people have no etiquette anymore, people have no manners anymore.” I think there were definitely throughout recorded history, there are times where if you think etiquette is bad today, boy, it was really horrific in the Middle Ages when for example, no one was able to afford their own napkin, and if you were at a banquet, there was a towel that hung on the wall, and that was the napkin for everyone to use for throughout the meal, so you didn’t even have an individual napkin.

Or where something as seemingly simple as a fork was seen as an affectation, and the only utensils that were used up until even pre-colonial times in the United States were a spoon and a knife, and anything else that required more dexterity than that, you were using your hands. So we might think etiquette is really at all-time lows right now, but the fact is we’re more refined than we sometimes give ourselves credit for, and history is certainly a guide to the fact that times have not always been so mannerly, despite what our memories or our history books might say otherwise.

Brett McKay: Alright. So let’s get into some specific etiquette and manners questions. Let’s talk about thank-you notes. When do you think a handwritten thank-you note is appropriate?

Thomas Farley: I would say a handwritten thank-you note is never inappropriate. So I get this question quite a lot. Is it okay if I send a thank-you note? And to that question, I say it is so much more than okay. In an age where everything is digital, we’re texting, we’re sending DMs on Snapchat or TikTok, the idea that someone actually took the time to remark on a courtesy or something that we did for them that was a kind gesture with a handwritten note that they licked the envelope and they put a stamp on it and put it in the mail, I think it’s a wonderful way of expressing thanks. So I would say there is… Frankly, there is no… The only occasion I would say a thank-you note is just kind of ridiculous is to send someone a thank-you note for sending you a thank-you note. But all other instances, the job interview, the dinner party that you were invited to, certainly the birthday gift or the holiday gift that someone gave you, I’m fond of saying, text messages don’t get pinned up to refrigerators or cork boards, thank-you notes do, they get saved. And if you wanna be that person who shows that you truly appreciated the gesture of the individual, no matter how small, a thank-you note is a wonderful way of doing so.

Brett McKay: So you still recommend a handwritten thank-you note after a job interview? ‘Cause I remember that was the advice that I got 15 years ago, but is that still applicable today, you think?

Thomas Farley: Yeah, I would highly recommend it if you care about getting the job. And here’s the reason. Think about it, you may be up against five, six, seven other candidates. If all things are equal, and one of those candidates actually sends a thank-you note, I guarantee you, it’s gonna help you to be set apart. The person is gonna see that you’re detail-oriented, especially if you send it out quickly. So for a job interview, what I recommend if you’re going for… And it’s harder, frankly, Brett in the age of virtual where you may not be interviewing with someone in person, that person may be a half-a-world away and they’re not even working in an office because they’re 100% remote. So there it gets trickier for a job interview thank-you note. But if you are going to a traditional job interview in a corporate office building, you have the address of the person who’s there five days a week or even three days a week, I would bring a thank-you note, blank one to the interview.

I would immediately after the interview, I’d write it out, have your stamp ready to go and pop it in the nearest mailbox. And fingers crossed, the USPS does what it’s supposed to do, that thank-you note is there with the person who interviewed you within a day or two of your interview. It shows you to be on top of your game, it shows you to be grateful, and it shows that you’re really passionate about getting the position. So I think it’s a great practice to have.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned the thank you to a thank you. You don’t wanna do that generally, but my wife and I, we do that ’cause sometimes readers and listeners, they send us nice notes thanking us for AoM’s content saying how it’s changed their life. And so we often… We just write back and just say, “Hey, we appreciate the appreciation.” We really do. It is nice to hear from our listeners that they’re getting something out of this stuff.

Thomas Farley: Yes, and I would draw the distinction. So I think if someone’s taken the trouble to send you, to write you a handwritten thank-you note, I would absolutely acknowledge the receipt of the thank-you note, but to write them a thank-you note as a thank you for them sending you a thank-you note, it starts this cascade effect of, okay, when do the thank-you notes end? It starts to get a little bit silly. But I would absolutely acknowledge it, and I think that’s a wonderful thing to do. Because if someone takes the time to write a thank-you note and they never hear from the recipient, “Oh my gosh, I just got your thank-you note. That was so thoughtful. Thank you,” then they may be discouraged from doing it the next time because they feel like their gesture didn’t really have any kind of an impact. So I would absolutely acknowledge it, but you don’t need to acknowledge it with a thank-you note.

Brett McKay: Okay, so it’s nice to acknowledge a thank-you note, but you don’t need to send a thank-you note, like an actual… Like a thank-you card in response to someone’s thank-you card. So you mentioned writing thank-you notes to the host at a party you attended. I know this was common a couple of decades ago. My parents still do this, my in-laws do this too, but you think yeah, that that’s still an appropriate gesture.

Thomas Farley: If you’re hoping to be invited back, I would highly recommend that. And not just a generic thank-you note that doesn’t really say anything of value, but truly something that remarks on perhaps a dish that you particularly enjoy, the conversation that you had with the host that you particularly enjoyed, something that doesn’t sound like your AI writing the thank-you note, but that it’s truly got that human touch. And I would say, so dinner party, absolutely. You think about the amount of time that goes into cleaning and curating the table and cooking, and from start to finish, anyone who’s ever hosted a dinner party knows the amount of work that goes into it and how exhausting it can be. If you can’t take… Five minutes really is all it should take to write a thoughtful thank-you note, I think that’s really unfortunate. And people say, I’m too busy, I don’t have time. Well, you know what, you had time to go to the dinner party, had time to enjoy the meal, you had time to enjoy the present someone gave you. Five minutes to write a thank-you note, no matter how busy we all are, I don’t ever buy that excuse.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about just saying thank you in face-to-face interactions. What’s an appropriate response when someone says thank you? ‘Cause this causes a lot of debate, ’cause a lot of people, they say, “No problem,” and a lot of people do not like that. What’s your take on that?

Thomas Farley: So Brett, this is fun because there are… From the time we’re small, we’re taught, “What’s the magic word? Say the magic word. You want a lollipop, you’ve gotta say ‘Please’. If someone give something to you, you’ve gotta say, ‘Thank-you.'” And somewhere along the way, some of those magic words, both generationally and through time have lost a little bit of their original true intent. So, thank you, I think is a perfect thing to say, and that really… That’s unassailable, saying thank you as gratitude for something, as long as you’re saying it genuinely and not in a sarcastic way. Or if you’re texting and it’s, “Thank you, period.” Well, now, you know what? Now you don’t sound so gracious anymore, now you sound like you’re being sarcastic. So taking the benefit of the doubt that someone’s genuinely saying thank you to someone for something that another person has done kind to them. Saying ‘No problem’ is almost like you’re swatting away the thanks, which I think is unfortunate. So some of the finest hotels in the world, they know to instruct their staff that ‘No problem’ as a response to thank you is simply not acceptable. And this is not something that’s unique to the English language. So in Spanish, it’s de nada, which means it’s nothing.

In French, it’s de rien, which similarly is it’s nothing. And that’s really… That’s to belittle the gratitude that’s coming from the person. So rather than simply saying, “No problem,” or if you’re Canadian, “No worries,” or if you’re a child of the 1950s, maybe you say, “No sweat,” these phrases really take a thank you and they push it down, they subjugate it, which I think is important. So rather than saying, “No problem,” I highly recommend something instead like, “Happy to do it,” or, “Any time,” or, “It’s my pleasure.” There is also, of course, the standard response of, “You’re welcome,” but that one has taken on a little bit of a generational taint, where pretty much anyone from Millennial on down through Gen Z tends to look at you’re welcome as a little bit smug, almost as if to say, “You’re welcome for the nice thing that I did and I’m glad that you appreciated it.” Perhaps owning the gratitude a little bit too much. Now, this is not something that older generations see in that phrase ‘You’re welcome’ but the way it’s parsed by younger generations, it can often have that taint. So I recommend as a great alternative, no matter how old you are, is simply, “It’s my pleasure.”

And for anyone who’s traveled through Costa Rica, as I have, what really struck me upon my first visit there was they do not say that de facto Spanish response of de nada. Everything… If you say gracias, they respond immediately with con gusto, with pleasure. And I think it’s such a nicer way of acknowledging someone’s gratitude.

Brett McKay: I think that’s an important point about how language evolves with generations. So I think you’re welcome, maybe for younger generations, you might not wanna use that with them. Maybe with an older person, yes. But I think, yeah, I tentily go to the Chick-fil-A route and just say, “My pleasure,” after someone says, “Thank you.” And then you see the same sort of dynamic with compliments. So you go up to somebody and you give them this compliment like, “Hey, you did a great job on that,” and they kind of swat it away by saying, “Oh, no worries,” or, “It was nothing.”

Thomas Farley: Yes.

Brett McKay: I think if you receive a compliment, be grateful for the compliment. Like someone’s putting themselves out there to say you did a great job, so recognize that.

Thomas Farley: Recognize it, own it. And I think the reason that phenomenon exists is people can tend to be a little bit shy about receiving and accepting a compliment. They don’t know what to say. “Oh, oh, I love your shirt. That’s a great shirt.” “Oh, this old thing?” You immediately… Your reaction is to just swat it away as if it’s not something that’s important and you don’t wanna be seen as egotistical. So I think a great fix for that is someone who really wants to be hyper-aware of how to be able to give a compliment without getting that particular reaction you just described is to immediately follow-up the compliment with a question. So instead of saying, “Hey, great haircut,” or, “Hey, great… I love your shirt,” where the person is maybe put in the position of having to diminish the compliment, “Oh no, this shirt’s nothing. It was $5.” Instead, emit following up with a question. So, “Hey, great shirt. Is that a color that you wear often?” or, “Hey, great haircut. Where do you go to get your haircuts by the way?” So you’ve instead of putting them to that awkward position of having to somehow think of a way to respond to your compliment, you’re immediately following up with a question which gives them something to talk about that doesn’t entail having to diminish the compliment.

Brett McKay: I was gonna say on the ‘No problem’ response to thank you, the other thing that I don’t like about that, it makes the person feel like, “Oh, what I asked you for was a problem, like I’m a problem for you.” So yeah, that’s another reason I don’t like the ‘No problem’. So let’s shift our focus to digital communication. Texting. A lot of our communication is done via text. What’s your take? Is there an appropriate timeframe for answering a text?

Thomas Farley: Sure. So this is gonna vary widely. First of all, do you have read receipts on, on your phone? So if the other individual can see that you’ve received and read the text, then waiting hours to respond is not acceptable. If you have an established kind of unspoken time for responding amongst whether it’s your significant other, whether it’s your best friend, whether it’s your boss, whether it’s people who work for you, if you are someone who as a practice, generally responds within five minutes, within an hour, suddenly taking hours or days to respond, it’s out of character and out of practice for you, the other person is gonna think, “Oh no, what happened? Did I offend the person? Did I say something wrong?” So I think there are certainly conversations that are not best had over text by the same token. If this is a quick question, somebody needs a quick answer, and you traditionally respond quickly, you should follow suit.

Now, that being said… And I love texting because it is absence of so much of the formality that an email might require. It is asynchronous communication, so it can happen when it’s convenient for me and the recipient can respond when it’s perhaps more convenient for them, unlike a phone call or unlike a face-to-face conversation. But there are definitely conversations that are not appropriate for a text message. If you really want a thorough, detailed answer that has multiple layers.

Let’s face it, texting is not your friend, but if you say, what time are we meeting again, what’s the address of where the restaurant is, these are perfect opportunities for us to be able to text, so I would say, all things being equal, you should be certainly responding to a text within the hour, if it’s not a very nuanced conversation, and if it is, I would simply respond back, Hey, let’s catch up about this by phone, or it’s a little bit too much for text. When can we talk? And I think that would be the better way, but to wait hours or forget it, days not acceptable.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we had a digital communications expert on the show, Erica Dowan, and her recommendation for text is if you get a text and you can’t get to it right away, like within an hour, she recommends doing what she calls a manual read receipt. So if someone asks you something and it requires you to look into something, it’s a sensitive subject, and you don’t have the time to give them a full response at the moment, you just respond right away saying, Hey, I got your message, I’m really slammed right now, but I’ll check into it and let you know by tomorrow morning or something else can be like, Hey, it’s really crazy for me today, I wanna give your question some thought, I’ll get back to you tonight, and what that can do is it can help people who are… I don’t know, I think some people don’t care when they get their text answered, but for some people, an unanswered text, it creates this open loop in their mind and they’re wondering about what’s going on, or they worry that they said something wrong, so we can sit on their bandwidth, and you can help them with that by saying, Hey, I got your message, I’ll get back to you soon, so I’ve used that before. And it seems to be appreciated. So I like that one.

Thomas Farley: Very much. The idea of acknowledgement. It’s the same thing, brett we walk into a department store or a shop, a boutique, and we’re waiting to be waited upon by the person who is the sales clerk there, and they’re chatting with their co-worker, maybe they get a phone call from a customer and you’re thinking, here I am, a live person standing in your store wanting to transact business with you, and I haven’t even been acknowledged, you’ve made no eye contact with me, you haven’t given me the, I’ll be there in one second, finger gesture, this makes us feel like we’re not being seen, we’re not being acknowledged. And it can be annoying.

And so the same with whether it’s a text message that just goes unanswered, or frankly even email, which I think email is the larger culprit for feeling like our communications are being ignored, how many emails do we receive a day and send a day where there’s just simply no response, where response is being asked for, and because we’re swamped because we don’t have all the answers, we don’t respond or we take days or sometimes weeks to respond, I think that simple acknowledgement, if it’s something you can’t work on in that moment, Got it. I’ll have an answer for you by Friday, is far better than just not responding at all, we’re forcing the person to have to be constantly checking in with that infamous line, Hey, Brett, just checking in on such and such, which… How many of those emails do we write a week So I think the bit of acknowledgement really does go a long way, texting or emailing.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

Well, this kind of goes to my next question, what do you think about ghosting someone? So this happens in dating, it’s where you go on a date and the date wasn’t great and the person text you and you just ignore them, but this can happen also professionally or in other instances where someone emails you a request or something like that, and you just ignore them. It’s kind of ghosting. What’s your take on that?

Thomas Farley: I think there are certain instances where I would say ghosting is defensible. So maybe someone has even a good friend has done something to you that is highly offensive or highly insulting and they’re simply not apologizing for it, or they don’t see err of their ways, or you had a date with someone who was just someone who really frightened you in a lot of ways, and you’re not looking for any further engagement with that individual, I think in those cases, just for the sake of personal safety, if not your own sanity, ghosting might be the best way to go, or maybe it’s someone who just gets a little bit too text happy and is constantly texting you or maybe you’re on a group text thread, and every little thing is being said, Oh hey, everybody, here’s what I had for lunch this afternoon. And you’re thinking, My gosh, I’ve got work to do. So not responding to each and every interaction, I think in those instances is perfectly fine, if someone needs your feedback on something and there’s someone that you care about and you are the only stakeholder in this interaction who holds the cards, who holds the answer and they’re seeking an answer from you, whether it’s a co-worker, whether it’s a loved one, a sister or a parent, or a prospective spouse or significant other, to just completely ignore them for no explicable reason that I would not say is acceptable, like maybe you had a date and the date was just awful.

And someone texts you and says, Hey, I had a great time last night. Would love to see you again. I think if need be… I would still send that person a gentle text without being too harsh, in the way you phrase it, if someone is a sane individual who is looking to have an interaction with you that for some reason, you’re just not interested in continuing, far better to shut it down politely, rather than let the person wonder, Oh, did the person fall off a boat is maybe they lost their phone, maybe they’re traveling, they don’t have signal, they go through all these crazy scenarios, far better to dispel all of those conspiracy scenarios about why someone’s not responding to you and just be straight forward with an answer, but if it’s a question of personal safety or you’ve been genuinely aggrieved or offended by someone and they know it, then in those cases, I think ghosting would be completely acceptable and defensible, ettiquetewise.

Brett McKay: Okay, so ghosting, it depends. I think it’s interesting about The ghosting thing is hinge, the dating app, they did a survey and they found that 85% of dating app users say they like to be rejected directly, but I think sometimes people just say that I don’t oftentimes, I think people don’t really actually wanna be rejected directly, ’cause it hurts, but I think it’s gonna just depend on the person.

Thomas Farley: I think there are ways to make it sting less. And I think if this is a dating situation and you’ve had one date and there was not a love connection, ideally both parties feel the lack of love connection, and in that case, maybe you just ghost each other and that’s the best of all worlds, but of course, sometimes you do have those situations where one person is really into the other person and the other person is just not… I’d far rather as hurtful as it probably is in those initial days, that sting will subside versus just not hearing from the individual at all. I think it’s really… And especially if you’ve had multiple dates, then… I’m sorry, ghosting is not acceptable.

If this was a single date and in your eyes it was a complete disaster, but for some unknown reason to the other party, it was a roaring success. Well, that person maybe needs a reality check, but I still think that they would be deserving of if they’re really earnestly coming back to you. I had such a wonderful time, I can’t wait to see you again. That was terrific. To not respond at all, I think is really inconsiderate, so then it’s really all about how you respond and what do you say? And I think there are ways of letting someone down easy, and I think it could even be something as simple as, Hey, I enjoyed meeting you, I just don’t feel there’s a love connection, or I just… I can’t really commit to anything right now, wishing you the best. Will hurt. Sure. For someone who’s really into you, but far nicer to do that, than just disappear.

Brett McKay: Okay, let’s talk about continue this idea of technology, phones, everyone’s got a phone with them all the time, and a lot of people when they go to eat, they leave their phone on the table during dinner. Okay, not okay.

Thomas Farley: Not a fan. So whether you’re at dinner with your family in your kitchen or your dining room, or whether you’re out to dinner in a restaurant, when you think of how difficult it is to coordinate schedules for a family to sit down to dinner, to coordinate schedules for a family to be in a restaurant or a group of friends to be in a restaurant, it’s not easy, the fact that then we spend at least even a small percentage of our time looking at our phones, Instagramming our food, checking text messages, I think it takes us out of the moment. And I think it’s really unfortunate. So I think certainly there are times and they’re rare where you need to be contacted because there’s some impending massive news that you need to be available for, you’re at a business lunch, but your wife may be going into labor. You are a real estate agent who’s on the verge of closing a big, big deal that could be happening within the hour, in those cases, if you’re out to lunch with someone in a restaurant, I would own that information upfront. Brett, I’m so sorry, I’m not gonna be on my phone, I just do need to say, You know, there’s a chance my wife may be going into labor. The office is closing a huge deal, I may need to briefly step away from the table to take a quick call.

This is the way to handle that, but putting the phone out on the table has actually been proven in studies to create anxiety just literally the sight of a phone on the table makes us anxious, makes us distracted and takes us out of the moment, so I’d put that phone away if you’re wearing a blazer put it in the pocket, put it in the pocket of your pants, but keep it away from the table, absolutely on vibrate. And if you must must take a call, do so away from the table, not with all of your table mates sitting around, kept hostage to your conversation.

Brett McKay: Okay, so if you plan on receiving a text, let people know upfront, I have a friend who’s a anesthesiologist, so when he’s on call, he’ll let us know like, Hey guys, I’m on call, so I might have to text, I might get a text I might have to go away and that’s always appreciated. Another interesting dynamic I’ve noticed in the past couple of years is the smartwatch, so you might have the phone in your pocket, but you got this device on your wrist where you get notifications on your watch, is it okay to check the notifications that buzz on your smart watch during dinner.

Thomas Farley: What I like about the smart watch, in one sense, it’s a little bit more discrete than actually pulling out a cell phone and scrolling, by the same token, it’s still the same concept, you’re still being, your attention and your energy is being pulled away from the dynamic of the folks that you’re dining with and being directed towards your device, and so for that reason, whether it’s haptic feedback where it’s vibrating on your arm or pulsating or flashing, it’s still a distraction, and unless you’re an anesthesiologist, I would not recommend if you wanna be polite to your table mates I’d not recommend acknowledging, so I’d silence those notifications, or if you’re wearing a long sleeve shirt, maybe it’s even as simple as pulling the sleeve down so you’re not tempted to look at the watch.

Brett McKay: Gotcha, alright. Let’s talk about tipping. So there’s been a lot of articles over the last year about how tipping is out of control, every restaurant and service provider seems to ask for a tip these days, even when they’re just doing straight up, like it’s the cashier job and they just flip the screen around and you get that prompt asking if you wanna leave a tip and you feel like there’s pressure to do so, ’cause they turn around, they’re gonna see whether you gave them a tip or not, so what’s the state of tipping today? When Should you tip? And when should you not?

Thomas Farley: Sure, so this is something that there has been a sea change in our culture in the way we are interacting with service individuals, not only in that kind of what’s known as a quick serve restaurant type interaction, where you’re picking something up at a counter as opposed to sitting down in a restaurant. But the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading about airports where you were being prompted for a tip at a self-serve kiosk, where you’re getting food or you’re getting some sort of an airport Trinket where you’re actually being asked for a tip, so it’s exploded beyond our worst nightmares. And I think it’s a very concerning trend for me, it’s known in the popular press as either tip creep or Tipflation are the two terms you’ll hear quite a lot, I’m taking to calling this the tipping invasion, because I really feel that when we are living in a culture, we’re living in a society where you’re being expected to tip at absolutely every turn for absolutely every interaction, there’s really… The genie’s out of the bottle, and there is no line that’s being drawn any longer.

And I think that is really… It’s frightening because we’re rapidly marching toward a culture where I think you’ll be expected to tip your dental hygienist, you’ll be expected to tip your auto mechanic, and it’s diluted what a tip is really designed to do, which is to reward an individual who works in a service industry where, by the structure of the industry, their pay is actually less than minimum wage, so for example, a server in a sit-down restaurant often is being paid $2 and change an hour, not a livable wage, by any stretch, it’s only through the use of tips, which is part of the compact, we know when we enter a restaurant, we know when we sit down in a restaurant that we are going to be tipping, and that is something that we happily accept and happily do, but the idea that you picked up a bag of potato chips on a convenience store shelf at a gas station, and suddenly you’re being faced with a tip screen, how much would you like to tip for this interaction? It’s something… Because simply because the technology allows this to happen does not mean that culturally it is acceptable.

And so that feeling that people get when they suddenly see that screen and those amounts that are also increasing, so it’s not even that they’re asking for a 5% tip they might be asking for a 25% or 30% tip for these very basic interactions with individuals who are being paid a minimum wage or more, people are feeling what is called the guilt tip, so you’re tipping simply because you feel guilty, not just because they’re gonna see it when they flip the screen around, but everybody in line behind you is gonna be seeing how much you tip, you know they’re looking over your shoulder to see which box you tap, so it’s confusing. In a time of high inflation, consumers are really feeling their pocket books are being pinched at every turn, and this is a big part of that, and I find it to be a very, very concerning trend.

Brett McKay: So I think this is an interesting dynamic because I think a decade ago, the concern that people had was, maybe I’m not tipping enough, maybe I need to tip more. Because people were kinda confused about, Well, do I tip this person? Or that person. Now, it seems like the concern is like, I should tip less, I need to be tipping less because I’m being asked to tip in inappropriate situations.

Thomas Farley: Well, it’s true, and the simple fact is there’s only so much discretionary budget any one individual has no matter how well off they are, and if every single interaction… I live in New York City, and there is… We call this the departure tax, that every time you literally walk out your door in New York, there’s a $20 departure tax, there’s $20 that you simply don’t know where it went, it went somewhere, but you know you started $20 Richer before you walked out the door. I think it’s the same now happening across the country with tipping, you’re suddenly being asked to tip for just about everything you buy in every service store and shop and restaurant you walk into, and I think what’s going to happen, I really think it’s going to diminish the amount of money that any one individual has to tip to people who really rely on tipping income because they’re being asked to tip in so many other establishments.

And that, I think is really unfortunate. Let’s face it, stores restaurants had a very difficult time during the pandemic, and I think most consumers felt the need, and it was a wonderful thing to be extra generous, knowing that these individuals, these first responders in the service industries, were out there doing their thing while so many of us were working from home, the pandemic is over, and yet those tipping levels, those expectations and that guilt has remained and is even being amplified, and I think consumers are feeling rightfully resentful, and as I say, there is a limit to the discretionary income, any one individual has. So I see servers in sit down restaurants actually having their tips suffering because there’s simply not enough tipping income, tipping money to go around to everyone, if that’s the culture that we’re headed toward.

Brett McKay: Okay, so what would you say keep your tips for people in the food service industry, bartenders, these are the traditional staff, you would usually tip for 10 years ago, maybe keep tipping for that.

Thomas Farley: Sure, and we know what those are, where… Any consumer has tipped enough in their lifetime to know if you go for a haircut, you’re tipping on that, if you go for a massage, you’re tipping on that, if you get a cocktail in a bar, of course you’re tipping on that, and yes, the sit-down restaurant experiences. It’s all these new things tipping in those interactions, it’s discretionary. If you feel you are blessed and you feel you’ve had a wonderful experience and you wanna share that, that joy with the person who’s waited on you, all the power to you, nothing to say that you can’t do it, but you should not feel obligated. Etiquette does not dictate that you should be tipping those interactions, those individuals are being paid a minimum wage plus, and what really should be happening if the owners of the establishments feel that they can’t attract good employees without offering this as an option they really need to be doing, in my estimation, is paying higher wages, and in turn, if needed, charging higher prices in restaurants and quick serve establishments, but this idea that the burden is being shifted to the consumer and this very awkward, uncomfortable, clumsy interaction. I don’t like it, and I think it really, it bodes not good things for the service industry.

Brett McKay: And I think we should point out, this is probably just an American problem. Other countries, they don’t have the tipping culture that we do.

Thomas Farley: It’s true, and that extends not just for this type of quick serve tip where you have the tablet in front of you, but even a sit-down restaurant in various countries around the world, throughout Europe and Asia, some countries, they would actually look at you quite askance, maybe pleasantly surprised, but even shocked if you gave them a tip. So it’s baked into the equation in the United States. We do have this tradition of tipping. But you’re absolutely right, this is not a global situation, and I do hear from Europeans, but then they come to the United States, they are absolutely stupefied by the number of places where they’re being asked to tip and in the amounts that they’re being asked.

Brett McKay: When you do tip, what do you think should be the standard tip amount? Or does it depend?

Thomas Farley: So if we are in a restaurant and we’re sitting down and we’re having a meal, this old standard of 15% being kind of your nice little baseline, that has gotten pretty antiquated at this point. And I read these studies very regularly, the average tip across the United States in a sit-down restaurant is hovering just above 19% as your baseline tip. So if you wanna walk out of there feeling like you were Daddy Warbucks, super generous, and boy are they gonna be clicking their heels with joy at how much you gave them in a tip, 20% is not going to do that. 20% really is about the baseline that you’re looking to tip. And frankly, I like the math better with 20% tip. If you’re calculating it in your head, which you may not be but if you are, 20% is a lot easier to calculate than 15%. But if you want to be generous, you’re really looking at more in the neighborhood of 25%-30% on a tip, but if you wanna be doing the bare minimum, 20% so that… Will ensure you’re not getting dirty looks as you walk out of the restaurant, which you would likely get if you tip 10% or 15%.

Brett McKay: Let’s shift topics to weddings. Wedding season is upon us. I’m sure there’s lots of different questions we could discuss about weddings. But in general, what’s an area of wedding-related etiquette that people often neglect?

Thomas Farley: One of the biggest gripes I hear about is people who don’t RSVP. And if you think about it, Brett, could it be any easier? Not only do you get the invitation in the mail, but you get a reply card with a return address, reply envelope with a stamp already on it, all you have to do literally is filling your name and check a box that you are attending, and pop it in the mail and you are good to go. So if you’re lucky enough to be invited to a wedding and you want to attend, you’re able to attend, get that RSVP and quickly, and no unpleasant surprises by doing a write-in ballot of someone’s name that you’re bringing when there was no guests invited. And certainly, you’re not doing any gorilla attack by bringing a guest on the day of. That’s gonna just cause havoc at the wedding. We don’t want that.

Brett McKay: That’s a good point about RSVPs. That’s for anything, whether wedding or any other type of… If there’s an RSVP, make sure you do, ’cause people are trying to figure out how much stuff they need to buy, and it makes it hard when you don’t do that.

Thomas Farley: We’re living in the age of maybe. I think it’s really unfortunate, but I think sites such as Evite and Facebook invitations, we’re now in this kind of funny time period where people feel like, well, they’ve got enough invitations that they don’t know if they can commit or don’t want to commit, so the response is either no response at all until the very last minute, or a “maybe” response. And I think that’s really unhelpful to anyone who’s hosting. It doesn’t have to be a wedding. As you say, it could be any sort of occasion. So if you’re invited to something waiting until you see if you get better offers, not acceptable. Simply not replying at all and then showing up, not acceptable. Or saying yes and then not showing up and not letting the host know you’re not coming, also not acceptable. So think about when the shoe is on the other foot, when you’re a host and you’re trying to plan something and you have no idea on numbers, it can really be very… It can convince you never wanna throw a party again. So if you’re lucky enough to be invited to something, let the host know. Even if it’s “No,” “No” is better than nothing, and “No” is better than an interminable “Maybe” that never turns into a “Yes” or a “No.”

Brett McKay: Let’s say it’s your wedding and you don’t wanna have kids there. Is it okay to say, you don’t want kids? This is a touchy, touchy one.

Thomas Farley: This is touchy. And it’s a question I get quite a lot. And what I’d say to that is, there are a lot of reasons why you might wanna have a wedding with no kids. It could be budget, it could be, this is a wedding in some kind of a night time, night-club-y type setting where it’s just not really a child-friendly environment, or simply you feel like the adults deserve and want a night off from their kids. And even parents who have two or three or four or five kids, I often hear from them, “Oh gosh, what a relief we’re able to tell our kids, ‘We’d love to bring you but we can’t. This is a wedding where children aren’t invited.'” Those parents get a night off. So I think that can be a wonderful thing.

The key as the couple, remember, this is your wedding, your rules. Whatever it is that you decide you wanna do, you follow that, but you’ve got to follow it consistently. So don’t say “No kids,” and then start making exceptions here and there, because then suddenly it looks like you’re playing favorites, and some of your guests who do have children who don’t get to bring their children, they’re gonna feel resentful. And so the only exception that you might consider if you are going to do a no-child policy at your wedding is perhaps there is a member of the bridal party like a junior bridesmaid or the ring bearer or the flower girl who typically are a close family member or relative. There you might make the exception, but if just ordinary guests you start making the exception because they couldn’t find a babysitter that night, you’re really gonna have some very other guests who are quite unhappy that they were told they couldn’t bring theirs, whereas others did.

Brett McKay: So destination weddings are becoming more popular. So you fly off to some exotic locale to get married. And they invite people and for the guest, that can be a lot of money to get to these places. If you get invited to a destination wedding, are you still obliged to get the couple a gift?

Thomas Farley: You are absolutely obliged. So your decision to attend a destination wedding, it’s based on a couple of factors, primarily, your budget. Can you afford to attend this destination wedding? Can you afford to fly there? Can you afford the babysitting perhaps that you need? Can you afford the hotel accommodations, the outfit that you might need that you don’t have, because it’s in a climate that you don’t normally have dress clothes for? All of those are factors that you need to consider. However, the travel budget, the cost that it takes for you to actually be there, that is not your gift. So your presence is not your present in this case. That needs to come from your own discretionary annual travel budget, not from your budget for wedding gifts. So you don’t scrimp on a gift for the couple simply because you feel you’ve spent a lot of money to be there. And if you feel you can’t afford both, then I would far rather see you decline the wedding invitation but still send a gift, particularly if this is someone who’s important to you.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about another topic I think a lot of men have questions about. Should you still hold the door open for a woman?

Thomas Farley: Sure. So this is gonna vary depending on the situation. And what I like to recommend to a man who strives to be a gentleman, which I think is a noble goal and something that’s still important in today’s culture, is that you’ve got to remember there’s a distinction between being out on a date and opening a door for a woman, holding a chair for a woman, standing at a table when a woman comes back to the table, gestures that many women, although not all, will find very gallant and chivalrous and very much appreciate. So know your audience. So if you’re on a date with a woman who is very progressive and feels that that sort of gesture is demeaning and insulting, then obviously you’re not going to do it. But I would say in my conversations with women who are all ages and modern to old-fashioned, most will at least appreciate the gesture behind that, the motivation behind that is a good one.

Where you’ve got to be a little bit more wary is this is now a business setting. So in a business setting, the idea that you’d be holding a door for a woman or holding a chair out for a woman, this is not something that would be traditionally done in the American workplace. We don’t recognize gender in workplace, ideally. What we do recognize is seniority, so if you’re gonna let someone go through the door first, let that be because that person is the boss, is the senior person, it’s the client, not because it’s a woman. However, I think a nice workaround for anyone who really… For a man who really strives to be a gentleman in all interactions is you just simply in those cases, you don’t make a distinguishing decision between, “Okay, this is a woman I work with, so I’m gonna hold the door for her, but here comes Charlie, my male colleague, and I’m gonna let the door slam in his face because he’s not a woman.” If you’re a gentleman, you hold the door for everyone. It doesn’t matter what gender they are.

You don’t rush to take the best seat in the restaurant when you’re going to a business dinner because that’s who you are. You let other people take the better seat. You are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to put other people before yourself, that’s truly what a gentleman does. And in a business setting, you don’t have to be worrying, “Is this a man or a woman?” You simply do it for everyone. In that way, if anyone ever accused you, “Well, gosh, why are you holding the door for me? I find that offensive and belittling,” you say, “This is simply who I am. I do this for everyone. I’m sorry to have offended you, but I assure you it’s not a gender-based decision, it’s something that I do as a matter of practice.” And I think there you’re on the best ground of all.

Brett McKay: Well, Thomas, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Thomas Farley: Brett, thank you so much, I’ve enjoyed it. And congrats on the podcast. I know you’re rapidly approaching your 1000th episode, so I can’t wait to see you achieve that milestone, but it’s been a great conversation. I am at on all social media, I’m Mister Manners, and that’s “mister” spelled out. And the website is mister-manners.com. And I pop up on TV and radio and newspaper around the country on a regular basis. I do a column for the NBC Today Show called “Mealtime with Mr. Manners” where I tackle everyday dining etiquette issues, so always happy to receive questions or if any of your listeners have a quandary, it would be my pleasure to fill it for them and answer it in a way that will help them be as mannerly and manly in the case of your listeners as possible.

Brett McKay: Well, Thomas Farley, thanks for your time. It has been a pleasure.

Thomas Farley: Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Thomas Farley, also known as Mister Manners. You can find more information about his work at his website mister-manners.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/etiquetteFAQ where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

dWell, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at ArtOfManliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code Manliness to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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In the list of priorities on how to dress well, your shoe laces should be near the bottom. Take care of the style fundamentals first. But once you’ve got those down and would like to add a bit more panache to your outfit, you can start thinking about the smaller details of style, like adding a dimple to your tie, and, as you’ll find illustrated above, lacing your dress shoes in what sartorialists consider the proper fashion.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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In the classic Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, the ant works through the summer, storing up food for the winter, while the grasshopper spends his days making music. When the colder months arrive, the grasshopper starves, while the ant lives comfortably off his cache.

Yet, one does wonder if the ant did not experience another kind of hunger himself — pangs of yearning for all the warm, sunshine-filled fun he missed while toiling underground.

Frugality, a drive to accumulate resources and a reluctance to spend them down, makes for an excellent approach to economics, to budgeting and household management. But as a life philosophy, as an overarching ethos, it is greatly impoverished.

While parsimoniously focusing on building one’s security and preparing for a potential rainy day can be prudent, it can also lead to the worst kind of waste.

Vacation days held onto, in case they’re needed, until the arrival of the new year, when they disappear forever.

An expensive sweater rarely put on, to make it last, until after only a few wearings, it goes out of style.

Expressions of affection carefully rationed out, to not take a romance too fast or spoil a child, until the relationship turns to ashes.

Retirement savings hoarded up, until the account holder dies, right along with his dream of traveling the world.

Living a flourishing, fulfilling life requires mastering the balance between some of the trickiest tensions of human existence.

Anticipating a coming winter, without neglecting to bask in the glow of an eternal summer.

Cultivating the field of one’s resources, without waiting until after the harvest to start enjoying its fruits.

Laboring with insect-like industry, without becoming a music-deprived drone.

Compiling one’s reserves, without ever forgetting that —

Money is for spending.

Clothes are for wearing.

Love is for giving.

Life is for living.

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No, Timeless Style Is Not a Made Up Marketing Term. There’s been a debate brewing in the world of men’s style as to whether or not “timeless style” exists. Andy Snavely from Primer Magazine makes the case that there is such a thing as timeless style, and while he’s at it, he explores the differences between fads, micro-trends, and macro-trends.

The Hunting Hypothesis by Robert Ardrey. In The Hunting Hypothesis, Robert Ardrey presents an argument for the role of hunting in human evolution, attributing it to the development of speech, cooperation, abstract thinking, and tool-making. He suggests men were selected for hunting due to their physical attributes and risk-taking nature. Initially controversial, this 1976 theory is now accepted by many social scientists. The ideas in the book are interesting, but it’s also just a fun and engaging read. Besides being a paleoanthropologist, Ardrey was a playwright and used his skill to craft enjoyable-to-read prose.

The Huckberry Weekender Sunglasses. Summer is almost here; are you in need of a new pair of shades? My go-to sunglasses for the past few years have been the Weekender Sunglasses from Huckberry. You can read my full write-up on them here, but the TLDR is that they’re affordable and durable and look cool. I’m picking up an extra pair to get ready for all the adventures our family has planned for this summer.

Plato’s Symposium: The Dialectic of Reason, Love, and Wisdom. A great video introduction to Plato’s dialogue about how love can lead us to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. You can find more of Michael Sugrue’s Great Courses lectures for free on his YouTube Channel.

Quote of the Week

Life is like a game of cards. Reliability the ace, industry the king, politeness the queen, thrift the jack. Common sense is playing to the best advantage the cards you draw. And every day, as the game proceeds, you will find the ace, king, queen, jack in your hand and opportunity to use them.

—Edgar Watson Howe

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Discipline is essential to every success in life. It establishes the stable, well-ordered ground that allows an individual to set and achieve goals. It prevents the ensnaring, vice-filled traps that torpedo advancement. It creates the consistent habits that forward progress. And it develops the authority that influences others.

As behavioral analyst Chase Hughes shared on the podcast, when an individual not only puts on a good face in public, but is truly disciplined in their private life, they project confidence and competence. Whether or not you’re disciplined when the metaphorical cameras are off is something you can’t help but exude and that others instinctively pick up on. People intuitively trust and follow individuals who embody discipline and reflexively take a step back from those who don’t.

Chase defines discipline “as the ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own.”

If you’re a college student, and you stay up all night drinking even though you have exams the next day, that’s a failure on the discipline front. As Chase observes, you’ll wake up the next morning thinking, “‘I can’t believe I did that.’ And [you’ll be] mad at your past tense self because you didn’t have concern for your future self.”

If, on the other hand, you spend the night studying and hit the hay early so you’re well-rested for exams the next day, you’re taking care of your future self, and leveling up in your discipline.

As an encouragement to prioritize your long-term aims over your short-term desires, Chase advises thinking of yourself as your own butler.

While few people can afford a full-time, live-in manservant, your present self can act as a butler to your future self.

When, in the evening, you do things like pack what you need in your backpack or briefcase and set out your clothes for the next day, you serve as a butler to your future self, who, the next morning, will really appreciate the fact that his past tense self set up his present tense self for success.

Chase described how this works regarding his own evening routine:

I’m about to go to bed, and I’ll be sticking one of those little Keurig coffee cup pods into the coffee maker and sticking a coffee mug there, ready for the next morning. And out loud, I’ll say, ‘Man, Chase is gonna love this.’ So I will continuously speak about my future self in a way that I am prioritizing his needs, and I will talk about him in the future.

When you develop a relationship between your present self and your future self, where the former serves the latter, you arrive at a point, Chase says, “where you’re looking forward in time with concern and . . . looking backward in time . . . with gratitude.” You develop a more holistic, integrated character.

By prioritizing the needs of your future self by becoming your own butler, you build the discipline that allows you to act, lead, and move forward in the way you desire; you build the discipline that grants you greater freedom, which, at the end of the day, is the ultimate luxury!

For more insights on how getting your stuff together will not only improve your personal life but increase your influence, listen to our podcast with Chase Hughes:

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When men think about optimizing their hormones, they tend only to think about raising their testosterone. But while increasing T can be important, an ideal health profile also means having testosterone that’s in balance with your other hormones as well.

Today on the show, Dr. Kyle Gillett joins me to discuss both of those prongs of all-around hormone optimization. We start with a quick overview of the different hormones that affect male health. We then get into what qualifies as low testosterone and how to accurately test yours. We also discuss what causes low testosterone in individual men, and how its decline in the general male population may be linked to both birth control and the world wars. In the second half of our conversation, we discuss how to both raise testosterone and get rid of excess estrogen, including the use of some effective supplements you may never have heard of. We then get into the risks and benefits of taking TRT, before ending our discussion with what young men can do to prepare for a lifetime of optimal T and hormonal health.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM series on testosterone, including How I Doubled My Testosterone Levels Naturally * AoM Podcast #761: How Testosterone Makes Men, Men * AoM Podcast #878: The Fitness Supplements That Actually Work

Connect With Dr. Kyle Gillett* Kyle on IG * Gillett Health Podcast on Spotify and Apple * Gillett Health on YouTube * Gillett Health website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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If you’ve read the Bible, then you’ve probably come across the phrase “gird up your loins.” I’ve always thought it was a funny turn of phrase. Loins . . . heh.

Back in the days of the ancient Near East, both men and women wore flowing tunics. Around the tunic, they’d wear a belt or girdle. While tunics were comfortable and breezy, the hem of the tunic would often get in the way when a man was fighting or performing hard labor. So when ancient Hebrew men had to battle the Philistines, they would lift the hem of their tunic up and tuck it into their girdle or tie it in a knot to keep it off the ground. The effect basically created a pair of shorts that provided more freedom of movement. Thus to tell someone to “gird up your loins” was to tell him to get ready for hard work or battle. It was the ancient way of saying “man up!”

While I’ve had a vague notion of what it meant to gird up your loins, I’ve always been curious how exactly you do it. So we did some sleuthing and found these instructions on the Historyzine Podcast and turned it into an illustrated guide for your enjoyment and edification. In case tunics ever come back in style, you’ll now know how to gird up your loins and get ready for action.

Yea, now go forth. Gird up your loins and fresh courage take, my brethren.

Like this illustrated guide? Buy the poster!

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How do you come to know yourself?

You can journal. Attend a retreat. Sit on a rock and think.

But perhaps the most underrated tool for gaining self-knowledge is participating in any long-term relationship — particularly one in which the escape hatch has been double bolted by the exchange of public vows.

With most relationships, we only show people certain parts of ourselves. We encounter coworkers, family members, and friends in a pattern of meet and retreat; we assemble for intervals short enough to keep our best face forward, before withdrawing again to our separate spheres.

In a marriage, spouses do not get together for discrete purposes of fun or functionality. They’re together in everything. All the mundanities of daily life. All the stresses of professional and personal setbacks. All the varieties of bodily functions. There are no true timeouts, no chances to literally or metaphorically step away to powder one’s nose.

Duty-bound to make it to the other side of every conflict, spouses are thrown back on each other again and again.

Through this process of full-contact confrontation, you not only get to know your partner, but discover a heck of a lot about yourself. Marriage holds up a mirror in which you can see how you act and who you are more clearly. The layers you’re able to artfully disguise from the world are exposed, leading to the repeated realization: “Oh, so I’m like that, am I?”

In showing us ourselves from every angle, marriage can pack the introspection-generating punch of a hundred self-help books.

In reflecting back all our dimensions, marriage can offer the opportunity to recognize and strengthen the parts of ourselves that are underdeveloped.

In giving us a good hard look at ourselves, marriage can represent, as Joseph Barth once put it, “our last, best chance to grow up.”

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“Cien Años” by Pedro Infante. Pedro Infante was a Mexican singer and actor who was one of the biggest stars of the golden age of Mexican cinema. For us Americans, he was like Frank Sinatra. The character Ernesto de la Cruz in Coco was partly inspired by Infante. “Cien Años” was one of his biggest hits and a great example of ranchera music from that time. It’s all about a dude being sad that the mujer he loved forgot all about him. Aye! Qué lástima! Me deule tanto. Check out this playlist on Spotify for more Infante.

Huckberry Mother’s Day Store. Mother’s Day is on May 14. If you’re looking for gift ideas for the moms in your life, check out this nicely curated Mother’s Day Store at Huckberry. A couple things that caught Kate’s eye: this Cast Iron Always Pan (she’s intrigued by the idea of enameled cast iron that browns without the need for seasoning) and these Rose Cut Blue Kyanite Earrings.

Richard Feynman’s Letter to His Departed Wife. In researching this week’s article on Richard Feynman’s 12 favorite problems, we came across this touching letter he penned to his wife who died when she was 25 and he was 27. Feynman wishes he could discuss his favorite problems with her and do fun projects together, as she was “the ‘idea-woman’ and general instigator of all our wild adventures.” He explains to her that while he imagines she’d hope he’d find happiness with someone else, he can’t yet move on because “You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.”

Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour. Western writer Louis L’Amour was one of the most prolific authors of all time, cranking out over 100 published works. Education of a Wandering Man is his autobiography, which could also be called a love letter to lifelong learning. L’Amour left school at age 15 to roam the world. His various experiences include: hobo on the railroads, Texas cattle skinner, seaman in Singapore and the West Indies, itinerant bare-knuckled boxer, and more. Through it all, he was never far from a book. He read 100-120 of them a year, and by the end of his life he had amassed a library of over 10,000 volumes. Inspiring as all get out, L’Amour’s example will have you asking what on earth you’re doing with all your free time.

Quote of the Week

What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.

—H.P. Liddon

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Every gym has that person.

The person who loudly grunts and yells when he’s exercising. This guy is an extreme example of the phenomenon.

While it seems like it’s dudes who are more likely to grunt while working out, women sometimes do it too.

When I was in college at the University of Oklahoma, there was a girl who would grunt with abandon while she sprinted on the treadmill in the student gym. So as you did the elliptical machine while watching VH1’s Tool Academy (the pinnacle of the classical era of reality television), you could hear her carry on, making loud noises that sounded like she was giving birth.

When I’m lifting really heavy, I’ll do some subtle grunting. I don’t do it on purpose. It just sort of happens. Instead of a loud yell, it sounds like I’m straining to release a built-up bowel movement. When I’m doing Bulgarian squats, I’ll let out a fairly loud “AHHHHH!” as the lactic acid accumulates in my quads. It seems to help me finish those last few reps. The operative word here is seems.

After I finished a recent set of yelly Bulgarian squats, I pondered, “Does yelling, moaning, and grunting actually do anything for my lifts? Does it help me hoist heavier weights, or is it just cathartic and/or theatrical?

AoM investigates.

The Science of Grunting, Yelling, and Moaning While ExercisingBelieve it or not, scientists have researched this very question.

In 2014, sports scientists Chris Rodolico and Sinclair Smith conducted an experiment involving 30 participants squeezing a handgrip in three ways: just squeezing, squeezing and exhaling, and squeezing while making a vocalization. The researchers found that more force was generated when exhaling compared to just squeezing, but the most significant increase in force (10%) was observed when the subjects vocalized while squeezing.

So yelling and grunting does make people stronger, at least on grip tests.

A similar 2014 study examined whether yelling and grunting helped tennis players hit the ball harder. Thirty-two athletes participated, and stroke velocities and isometric forces were measured while they grunted and while they didn’t. The results indicated that dynamic velocity and isometric force increased nearly 5% when the athletes grunted during both serves and forehand strokes.

This adds more affirmation to the idea that vocalizing while exercising does make you stronger.

But why does it have this effect?

Sinclair Smith hypothesized that yelling could activate the autonomic nervous system, which controls the fight-or-flight response, resulting in an adrenaline rush that helps muscle contractions become more complete and forceful. It’s the same idea behind the research that’s shown that swearing can increase your tolerance to pain.

When availing yourself of the force-generating power of yelling and grunting, you’ll of course need to exercise some discretion, especially when you decide to unleash your barbaric yawp while deadlifting in a public gym. It can be annoying and distracting to some people, so practice good gym etiquette. If you’re in a black iron powerlifting gym where such behavior is expected, then yell with abandon. If you’re in a more sedate, upscale gym where most of the clientele are retirees working the Nautilus machines, rein in your exercise noises. And if you’re in a Planet Fitness, you’ll have to decide if goosing your chances of hitting a bench press PR is worth activating the Lunk Alarm.

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When Daniel Zia Joseph decided to join the Army at the unusually late age of 32, he solicited advice from his buddies who had served in the military on how to succeed in the experience and become a good officer and leader. Today, he passes on these leadership lessons to us.

Dan is the author of Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts, and he first shares why he decided to join the Army at an older age and what he would tell other guys who keep thinking about doing the same thing. We talk about how he prepared himself to be a leader and how getting his masters in organizational psychology helped deepen his development. We then discuss the lessons his military mentors imparted to him, including why you should pursue attrition, the importance of command climate, using psychological jiu-jitsu, and the difference between garrison and field leadership.

Resources Related to the Podcast Dan’s video about joining the military after age 30 * AoM Podcast #875: Authority Is More Important Than Social Skills * AoM Article: Are You a Strategist or an Operator? * Once an Eagle* by Anton Myrer

Connect With Dan Joseph* Dan’s website — Combat Psych

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast SponsorsClick here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

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I enjoy browsing used bookstores. I like walking down the aisles, looking at the tattered spines of the books that line the shelves.

Now and then, my eyes will pass by the title of a book that catches my attention. I’ll pull the book from the shelf, start thumbing through it, and discover that it provides an insight into a question or an idea I’ve been mulling over for months or even years.

It might seem like it was sheer accident that I happened to find that particular book at that particular moment that answered that particular question. But, such moments of serendipity are, in fact, the natural consequence of a practice I picked up from Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman.

It’s a practice that’s changed my life. Maybe it will change yours.

Richard Feynman’s 12 ProblemsRichard Feynman was a Renaissance man and polymath. During WWII, he worked on the atomic bomb. Feynman would go on to work in quantum electrodynamics, and his contributions earned him a Nobel Prize. He was a popular professor of physics at Cornell and Caltech and served on the committee that investigated the Challenger disaster.

Besides his academic work, Feynman pursued various hobbies and interests. He juggled, played the bongos, learned to Samba, painted, and cracked open safes — a hobby he picked up while working on the Manhattan Project.

How could Feynman be such a prolific scientist while also excelling in varied leisure activities? In a 1996 lecture, MIT mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota shared the secret to Feynman’s success:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’

Feynman was so successful in his career and hobbies because he always kept a running list of questions or problems in his head. These open questions created a “serendipity engine” that allowed him to attract insights no matter what he was doing. Any time Feynman encountered novel information, he applied it to the puzzles he had simmering on the back burner of his mind. Now and then, he’d find a key that unlocked a professional or private breakthrough.

In order to recognize an insight outside yourself, it needs a corresponding contact surface within yourself. Kind of like the two sides of velcro: the stimuli you receive from books, other people, and the environment are the hooks, and the questions in your head are the loops. Ralph Waldo Emerson put the principle this way: “only that book can we read which relates to me something that is already in my mind.” We can only incorporate what we’re ready for — what we’ve built a mental scaffolding to receive. The questions you keep in your head serve as this scaffolding.

According to an article by Forte Labs, these were some of the open questions Feynman chewed on while he was alive:

How can I accurately keep track of time in my head?
How can we design a large-scale computing system using only basic equipment?
How can I write a sentence in perfect handwritten Chinese script?
What is the unifying principle underlying light, radio, magnetism, and electricity?
How can I sustain a two-handed polyrhythm on the drums?
How can we measure the probability that a lump of uranium might explode too soon?

As you can see, Feynman’s questions varied from big problems like figuring out the dynamics of radioactive materials to personal issues like how to get better at playing an instrument.

In a letter to a former student, Feynman advised him not to discount the value of thinking about the smaller stuff:

The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.

These “humbler problems” provide the pleasure of success that motivates you to solve more problems. Also, what might be a humble problem for you, might be a big problem for someone else. Helping them solve it will mean a lot to them. Finally, thinking about smaller problems might provide insights into your bigger ones. Scientists like Feynman loved to cross-pollinate different domains. Einstein supposedly got insights into his theories while thinking about and playing his violin. Maybe mulling on an issue with your barbell training will provide a breakthrough in a professional dilemma.

Create Your Own Serendipity Engine With Your 12 Favorite ProblemsIf you’d like to get more insights and turbocharge your creativity, create a list of 12 problems you always keep latent in your mind. These open questions prime your psyche to be open to new insights as you go about your daily life.

Here are some pointers on how to get started on your list of 12 favorite problems:

Think of problems or friction points you encounter daily. We all encounter friction during the day at work and at home. Pay attention to those little annoyances. They’re problems waiting to be solved.

Lean into your interests. If you could spend your free time exploring a topic just for fun, what would it be? WWII history? Music theory? Traditional woodworking skills? Economics? Thinking about those interests can help you generate questions. Your 12 problems don’t have to be problems per se, just things you wonder about.

Once you have a general topic of inquiry, create a specific question. Once you’ve homed in on a general topic of investigation, drill down to something more concrete by formulating a specific question about it.

How can you improve in some skill? Why did a particular part of history play out one way and not another? Why did your last work project fail? What’s behind some current cultural phenomenon?

You can also ask about connections between two areas of inquiry: What is the relationship between x and y? How can insights from x provide insights to y?

Repeat these steps until you’ve landed on your questions. You don’t have to have exactly 12. You could have fewer. Try not to go above 12, though, or it’ll start getting gnarly to keep track of all your problems.

You don’t have to try to force yourself to generate all your questions at once. They will come to you naturally once you’ve primed yourself to look for them. Just make a note of your wonderings as they arise, and file them away for further chewing, instead of letting them slip entirely out of your mind.

Once you’ve got your list of problems, think about them throughout your day.

Here are a few of the questions I’m mulling over (some include concepts that mean something to me, but would need further explanation to the wider world):

How does the human drive for status influence group dynamics in my day-to-day life?
Why does the modern world feel unreal?
How do I help my kids “put their loves in order“? How do you educate desire for the Good?
How do you overcome “dopamine death spirals”?
Where do I see arms races in my life that are wasting resources?

I’ve got some other ones, but those are the big questions I’ve been thinking about lately. As I’m reading books or conversing with friends and family, I usually “serendipitously” stumble upon information that provides new insights into these ongoing investigations.

What are your 12 favorite problems?

The post Think Like Feynman: Why You Should Have 12 Favorite Problems appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Writing an email while on a Zoom call. Talking on the phone while walking. Scrolling through social media while watching a movie.

In both our work and our play, we’re all doing more and more multitasking. Doing two things at once makes us feel as if we’re more efficient and getting more done.

But my guest would say that all this task juggling actually makes us less productive, while diminishing the quality of our work and stressing our minds, and that we’d be better off curbing our multitasking in favor of monotasking. His name is Thatcher Wine, and he’s the author of The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better. Today on the show, Thatcher explains the illusions around multitasking and the benefits of monotasking — that is, bringing our full focus to a single task at a time. We discuss why reading is a foundational part of becoming a monotasker, and then get into some of the other activities Thatcher recommends monotasking, including walking, listening, traveling/commuting, and thinking. Thatcher argues that doing things like listening to a podcast while cleaning your house isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but that you may want to try stripping everything away from your daily tasks except the primary tasks themselves to observe the resulting effect and to strengthen your “monotasking muscles” and rebuild your attention span. Once you’ve experimented with doing a task alone, you can then decide to layer back in the second activity, or, maybe decide you actually liked giving it your all.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM podcast episodes with Cal Newport on Deep Work and Digital Minimalism * AoM podcast with Oliver Burkeman on Time Management for Mortals* * AoM podcast with Nicolas Carr on how the internet affects our minds and attention * AoM series on how to improve your listening * AoM article on the benefits of being fully present * AoM article on working when you work, and playing when you play

Connect With Thatcher Wine* Companion Website to the Monotasking Book * Thatcher’s Website * Juniper Books

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Read the Transcript!Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Writing an email while in a Zoom call, talking on the phone while walking, scrolling through social media, while watching a movie. In both our work and our play, we’re all doing more and more multitasking. Doing two things at once makes it feels if we’re being more efficient, and getting more done. But my guest today would say that all this task juggling actually makes us less productive, while diminishing the quality of our work and stressing your minds. And we’d be better off curbing our multi-tasking in favor of mono-tasking. His name is Thatcher Wine, and he’s the author of the book, The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better. Today on the show, date explains the illusions around multi-tasking, the benefits of mono-tasking, that is bringing our full focus to a single task at a time. We discuss by reading is a foundational part of becoming a mono-tasker, and then get into some of the other activities Thatcher recommends mono-tasking, including walking, listening, traveling, commuting, and thinking.

Thatcher argues that doing things like listening to a podcast while cleaning your house isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but that you may wanna try stripping everything away from your daily tasks except the primary task themselves to observe the resulting effect and strengthen your mono-tasking muscles and rebuild your attention span. Once you’ve experimented with doing a task alone, you may decide to layer back into second activity, or maybe decide you actually like giving it your all. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/monotask.

Alright, Thatcher Wine, welcome to the show.

Thatcher Wine: Thanks Brett, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Brett McKay: So you got a book out called The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better. So in this book, you make a case for mono-tasking, and I think to understand what that is, it’s important to talk about what the opposite of mono-tasking is, and that’s multi-tasking. People have probably been multi-tasking since time and memorial, but it’s… Wasn’t until I’d say 20, 30 years ago that it really became a thing in our culture. And in the book, you kinda do a little cultural history of multi-tasking. When did multi-tasking become a thing in our popular culture?

Thatcher Wine: That’s a great question. So pretty much, if you think of our computers and how long they’ve been around, that’s basically how long we’ve really thought about multitasking as a way of living it. So computers were invented… Well, the terms first used in the 1960s to refer to an IBM computer and how it could do multiple things at one time, amazing. The computer can multi-task. And then as people started getting personal computers, mostly in the ’80s and then got connected to the internet, in the ’90s, and we got these cell phones, and smartphones, in the 2000s. And now we all know where we are today. All of our devices do all these different things, a lot of things at one time. And since people have invented computers, we kind of project on to them if we made them do this multi-task and maybe we can do the same thing. Plus at the same time, life has just gotten busier in general, our to-do lists are really long, there are a lot of demands, financial, societal pressure, social media pressure, FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, and so we just tend to take on more and more and more and think we can do it like our devices can.

Brett McKay: And when you were exploring and researching this book, did… Were you able to find where people tend to try to multi-task the most? Like what task do they try to do at the same time the most?

Thatcher Wine: That’s a great question. I think if you just look around in general, I’m a very experiential person, the book does integrate a lot of research and a little bit of neuroscience, but my point, a lot of it is just like, you don’t have to look very far to see people multitasking all the time. If you go out to a restaurant and somebody’s sitting by themselves, or even if they’re with a few friends, they’re all on their phones a lot of the time. I live in Colorado, and unfortunately, when I drive to work or bike or go for a walk, I see people on their phones while driving all the time. So it tends to be this kind of permanent culture of doing more than one thing at a time, a lot of times involving your phone. And I think we’ve seen over the past couple of years with the pandemic, and the transition to more people working at home, everybody who does that can relate to the feeling of just having lots of browser windows, like you open and doing multiple things at a time, being on a zoom call, answering an email, your kids come in and say they’re hungry for lunch, your dog wants to go for a walk.

It’s multitasking. Not all that’s dangerous multitasking, like texting and driving, some of it’s perfectly harmless, like folding laundry while listening to a podcast, some people may be doing that now. That’s totally fine. A lot of my point in the book is about bringing some awareness to, is it within your own control that you are multitasking? Did you decide to do that, or did social media tempt you to? Some notification on your phone, take you out of what you should have been doing, things like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I imagine the pandemic with the Zoom has really increased the amount of multitasking. ‘Cause I’ve been on Zoom calls where you’ve heard the tapity tapity of keys on the other end while you’re talking to somebody, and it’s like, “Okay, that guys answering emails while he’s talking to me, he’s probably not really listening.”

Thatcher Wine: One of the tasks in The Twelve Monotasks is listening in the book, and I go through 12 different tasks, and I know we’ll talk about a few them today. But one of my tips, I guess I thought of after the book, [chuckle] is basically listen as if you’re recording a podcast. What would you… I’m not tapping on my keys, I can’t pay attention to anything else besides our conversation. So if you’re trying to elevate your work or your relationship, or your conversation with your kids and really pay attention to what they’re saying and not saying, listen like you’re recording a podcast. You don’t have to do it every single conversation all day, but it helps you really bring your full attention to one thing at a time and do it well.

Brett McKay: So the reason we multi-task is to get more done. What does the research say about that? Are there… Does that actually happen, and are there downsides to multi-tasking?

Thatcher Wine: It doesn’t happen. And yes, there are downsides, very definitive research has been done on this. You make more mistakes when you multi-task, you don’t get as much done as if you had done one thing in a time, then move on to the next thing. You think you’re going to get more done, but you actually end up feeling more stressed and overwhelmed, so you… You develop… Basically, our brains are only capable of doing one thing at a time, studies have been done where they’re basically are 2% of the population who can be considered super taskers. Those people can do like two cognitive tasks at a time. Most people can fold the laundry and listen a podcast. And for the rest of us, the other 98%, I think it’s okay that we can’t do more than one thing at a time, our brains were built to like, yes, pay attention to the dangers out there, in the world now in old days, there’s like a wild animal or some sort of threat to your human existence.

These days it’s very different, so a lot of things get our attention that aren’t life-altering matters. And when we try to pay attention to more than one thing to time, like typing out that email response while half paying attention to a Zoom call, you don’t do either them well. You make more mistakes, it takes longer and you get stressed out because you aren’t getting things done and you just have this cognitive bottleneck, you’re not quite sure why you’re stressed out, and not feeling good, but it’s probably because your attention is spread so thin.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it is an important point you said, that we can actually only do one thing at a time. So when we think we’re multitasking, what we’re doing is just task switching back and forth over and over again between one task in the next.

Thatcher Wine: Yeah, so a few definitions that are really helpful… You’re exactly right. So most people, when they think of multitasking, what they’re actually doing is task switching, you do one thing, then you do another thing, and then you go back and forth and back and forth. The studies have been done that show takes about 20 minutes for your brain really to come back to… From one thing to another. And if you’re really fast switching back and forth, what happens is you’re not giving yourself the 20 minutes to reset, focus on that presentation you’re working on, or that conversation with your kids, and so you’re not doing a good job, and it’s taken longer as a result. So back to the definitions, yeah, so that’s task switching, which we think is multi-tasking. There’s also primary tasking and background tasking. So that would be the example of you’re listening to a podcast in the background, while folding laundry in the foreground or vice versa. It’s usually a very automated repetitive thing that you know how to do… And if you make the conscious decision to combine those things, that’s fine. Generally, we can do those things well. There are some people who can’t even do either one, and I think that’s great too, if you’re aware of your own abilities to pay attention and mono-task, then you can get through life, I think much better and figure out where to put your attention and focus.

Brett McKay: Alright, so I’m multi-tasking, it causes more errors, actually, sometimes make things take longer than they really should. And you quote Cal Newport in the book, we’ve had him on the podcast talking about this idea of Deep Work. And he makes that point too, he drives that point home, when you try to multi-task, it actually just makes the work crappier oftentimes. And then, also just that back and forth switching, it stresses you out. And that’s why a lot of people… You hear a lot of people talking like, “I’m just feeling overwhelmed.” Then they’re like, “But I don’t really do anything. Why am I feeling overwhelmed?” And it’s likely all that task switching they’ve been doing throughout the day between their smartphone, or the computer, or the kids and drive, that’s what’s exhausting you.

Thatcher Wine: 100%, yeah. And I’m a huge Cal Newport fan, and his work has been very influential in my work. And both as how I run my business, which is called Juniper Books, and just as a small business entrepreneur and manager and creative, like how to focus and get things done. But then it’s also influenced how I think about mono-tasking and the concepts of, especially when it relates to technology and practicing digital minimalism in order to wean yourself off your devices and then reclaim your ability to get your deep work done. I should say, a lot of… I think the pressure that people feel that you mentioned to do more than one thing at a time that results in being overwhelmed and not getting things done. There’s just this glorification of multitasking and always doing more in our society these days. And then you add on the technology, which convinces you that you’re good at it, you can do it, it gives you just enough notifications and feedback that you keep going and you think you can do it all. But if you look at where our time goes and how happy we are these days and how that tracks against the increase of technology in society, it’s not a sustainable equation for the future. So I think we have to reclaim our ability to focus this way.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s really hard. I think a lot of people have heard the research that multitasking isn’t effective, but I know that stuff, but I still struggle to let go of the idea. I still want to do as much as I can at the same time, and I think that goes back… We had Oliver Burkeman on the podcast a couple of months ago, talking about his book, 4000 Weeks. And he makes this interesting case that a lot of… It’s just part of being human. We… We’re able to think about infinite things that we can do, but we’re finite beings at the same time, we can only do so much. And he makes this case, a lot of productivity tactics that we’ve developed, it’s trying make us… Trying to make our finite selves into infinite selves, or be able to accomplish all those infinite things. And he says, you kinda have to resign yourself that you are not infinite, so you have to just be okay with doing… Getting as much done as you can in a day and not freaking out about trying to get it all done.

Thatcher Wine: Yeah, I’m a huge fan of Oliver’s book too. So yeah, I think we have to acknowledge the realities. And that’s a lot of what his book is about, that, yes, you want to do more and more, but we are humans, there are only 24 hours in the day, and what the solution to living a happier, more fulfilling life is not to just always be doing more. You have to be realistic. And so a lot of what I bring it back to in The Twelve Monotasks is about the present moment, and in each moment, you can only be doing one thing at a time. You can make it look like you’re multi-tasking. You may aspire to get more done, make more money, have more friends, more followers, whatever. But in each individual moment, that’s where everything really happens. And so, if you choose to do one thing in that moment, that’s really I think the key to productivity and happiness.

Brett McKay: So okay, the downsides of multi-tasking is taking longer on stuff, doing stuff, not as well. Feeling stressed out. I imagine the benefits of mono-tasking is the opposite of those things?

Thatcher Wine: Yeah, so I think of it in three or four key benefits of mono-tasking. One is, you get more done, just overall, you boost your productivity. Second is you decrease your stress level, so that feeling of being overwhelmed and not getting anything done leads to less stress if you mono-task instead of multi-tasking. The third thing is you, you increase your happiness. And that, a lot of that comes from improving your relationships with other people, being more present in the moment and with the people, you either work with, or your family, your friends, and just being more connected to everybody, not being half paying attention all the time. So that’s what it’s really all about. The productivity, the stress and the happiness.

Brett McKay: Happiness. But I imagine… Do you still struggle with multi-tasking even though you’ve written the book on mono-tasking?

Thatcher Wine: Absolutely. [chuckle] I’m… I say, I wrote it largely for myself out of my own experience. How I went through some very distracting things in addition to all the distractions we face, that we’ve talked about as far as technology and work and just keeping up with the pace of life. I went through cancer treatment a few years ago, and a divorce, and putting my business back together after going through those things. And I really had to kind of sit down and figure out how do I navigate my way through all this? Continue to do good work, be productive, creative, successful, be a good father. And how have I done it in the past, even before I went through those things? And so the philosophy very much came out of that, but it hasn’t taken away the problem, it’s just made me more aware of when I’m multi-tasking versus mono-tasking. And therefore how do I feel about it, and I think it’s made a huge improvement in my life.

I’d say for everyone, it’s not about achieving some sort of mono-tasking sainthood. It’s not like you’re gonna get to this enlightened level, and all the problems are gonna go away. It’s more about having an awareness that this is something you’re gonna have to face in every moment, and definitely into the future, as the future gets more distraction. There’s gonna be more technology, more pressure of every kind, to pay attention to things that are important. So it’s good to build what I call the mono-tasking muscles now, so that you have them for everything you need to do today and into the future.

Brett McKay: Okay, so in the book, you highlight 12 tasks that you think are right for mono-tasking and help you build those mono-tasking muscles. And the first one is reading. Why do you start off with that?

Thatcher Wine: So a lot of… My thinking about reading goes back a really long time, and it’s very connected to the work that I do at Juniper Books. Where we curate book sets and book collections for clients around the world and try to give people more and more reasons to buy books and keep books in their home and read books. And, especially as I was going through cancer treatment, I was thinking like, “Why do I do what I do? And how can I… Should I do it on the other side of these health issues? And why is it good for the world? What’s my mission in life?” So I really started thinking about reading in a broader sense than just book selling, for example. And I think books are just inherently good for us as human beings, not only are they great for learning new things and being entertained, but they also strengthen our ability to pay attention. So when you read for 20 minutes or however long you read for, you get back a strengthened attention spam, because you gave your attention, it all went into one single point of focus on the page, and I’m a big believer in printed books, because I think we all look at screens too much, and I think the experience of reading a printed book, just feels different. Having an object in your hands, feeling where you are in the book, how far through what you are, where things happen on the page.

So I thought a lot about reading why it’s good for the world, I researched really dedicated readers in the world like Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffet, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the most successful people in the world are also really big readers. They… Their ability to pay attention and be productive is enhanced by their reading habits, it’s not just that they know more stuff. So I put all these things together and I thought about technology and smartphones, and I thought, reading a book is kind of the opposite of a smartphone. Reading a book strengthens your attention, looking at your smartphone, fragments it, makes you think you can multitask and do lots of things at one time. And so, that’s kind of where I thought of the definition of a mono-task to begin with, was reading a book. And then I expanded that to think about, well, what if we took that same approach, and that focus that we bring to reading, and applied it to other everyday activities. And then I started looking into and writing about walking, listening, sleeping, thinking, and how just if you give those 100% of your attention, can you do them better, and can they give you something back in the same way that books and reading give you back your strength and detention span? And ability to pay attention to everything in life and do it all better. So you don’t just have to read all the time, [chuckle] you can do any or all the 12 monotasks.

Brett McKay: No, I think reading is a great foundation, it’s a great exercise to strengthen that mono-tasking muscle, because especially paper books. And I think the thing that makes reading difficult today is that we try to do it on our screens, and I found… And I think they’ve done research, like Nicholas Carr has done research on this, when we consume text via a screen, we have a tendency to skim more, and you’re not as focused, but if I have a paper book or a paper magazine, that’s the only thing you can focus on, you can’t go anywhere else, and it really forces you to stick with the reading. If you’re reading on a smartphone, there’s always that temptation to switch apps or go to the next browser, to click this link, and it doesn’t allow you to get really focused.

Thatcher Wine: Yeah, so Nicholas… You’re three for three, you mentioned three of my favorite authors. [chuckle] Nicholas Carr and I have had some great conversations over the years about the value of printed books, and I have an excerpt that he wrote in my… In The Twelve Monotasks as well, and a lot of it yeah, it does come down to that physical, tactile relationship you have with the printed page, that’s very different from the screen and how your brain creates a physical tactile or physical map of what’s happening in the book, draws connections between things, and the information tends to sink in more than what we read on the screen. Plus, I’m a big believer and basically built a whole career out of what your books do when you’re not reading them, so they sit on your shelves, and they tell a story even without opening them and reading what’s happening on the pages, they tell a story across your book shelves. And they work every time you walk by them or see them in the Zoom background, or see somebody else’s books when you go to their house or see it on the screen, you learn about them and kind of their relationship to the world through what they’re interested in.

They may not have read all those books, but that’s… Those are the subjects that interest them, that’s the story that they wanna tell. So I think books just have this storytelling capability and we have a different relationship to them than just what the digital version of the content shows us on the screen.

Brett McKay: No, I agree with that. I prefer physical books over digital books. And what I like about it is, I got bookshelves all over in our house, and I like being able to walk by and then just like the spine catches my eye for whatever reason, and then I pull it out and I, “Oh, there’s this new bit or here’s a refresher of something that I read a long time ago. I’m glad I picked this up.” I noticed I’ve got a couple hundred books on my Kindle, I never think about the books, I’m like… In fact, I forget which books have on my Kindle, they’re down this digital black hole that I can never access again, because it’s not there in front of me physically.

Thatcher Wine: You know, you never… I don’t know how many people are going to cocktail parties these days, but you don’t go to a cocktail party and say, “Hey, can I take a look at your Kindle and see what you’re… What’s on your reading list and then decide what to talk about?” It doesn’t work that way. So yeah, books are really fun, whether it’s you or somebody else seeing them, just to see them on the shelves and pick one up randomly. I do that all the time. It’s fun.

Brett McKay: So how do you train your brain for Monotask reading? If someone hasn’t monotask read in a while and their brain’s all scattered from consuming content on their phone, what’s a good way to start with that?

Thatcher Wine: It’s hard, and I think you first have to acknowledge that it is hard, and then it’s different from what we’ve been used to doing, looking at our phones and not having to sit with a little bit of what may feel like boredom and silence and quiet for a little time that reading brings, but those are the benefits. So, at first they might seem unfamiliar and different, and that’s a good thing, but I think you have to start wherever you are, and in the book I talk about reading, as a monotask being about 20 minutes long, you can start with 30 seconds, but I would highly recommend starting… Always starting with reading on paper, it can be a newspaper, could be a magazine article, could be a book you’ve read before, and therefore, it’s a lot easier to read and kind of re-enter the world of reading, or it could be a new book, go to the bookstore and just intuitively pick out something that speaks to you. But give it your full attention, expect that you might read a few pages, your mind will wander. You may have to go back a little bit, and that’s okay.

If you give it your full attention, you’ll find that your attention will strengthen each time you go back to the book. And if you can build a habit of maybe reading the same time every day or at the same place in your home, it’ll start to cue your attention to the fact that you’re focusing, this is what you’re doing in this place at this time. It may take a while to figure out what the right routine is for you, but it’s definitely worth it. And once you get into that rhythm, you’ll find that it’s just like an infinite world of discovery, and you can use it for learning about your work, something about your kids, or just being entertained in a way that you haven’t been entertained in the last few years.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. The next monotask is walking. In the book, you start off… In the chapter, you start off talking about some famous monotasking walkers, who are some of these guys?

Thatcher Wine: Basically philosophers, thinkers, scientists have used walking throughout history to work out their ideas, their thoughts, to just get away from the stress of life, even before all this technology and fast-moving pace of 21st century life. So, people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Nietzsche philosopher or Socrates, they all walked as a matter of thinking. That might sound like a multi-task to you, and it can be, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend walking to go, come up with a brilliant idea, but if you put down your work and leave things behind and go out into nature or even the city, go around the block, whatever you have available to you, if you give your full attention to it and pay attention to your walk, like the sounds with your feet, the sounds of nature, the sights that you’re seeing, if you resist the temptation to take a picture on your iPhone, things like that, you’ll really treat walking as a monotask and then you can decide to add back later some problem solving that you wanna do or some idea will just come to you.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s interesting. So, walking is one of those tasks that it’s easy enough where you could multitask, you could, again, think about something, or even talk on the phone or let’s do a podcast, and you’re not against that. You’re okay with people listening to a podcast and folding laundry, that’s fine, but it sounds like you’re encouraging people to, every now and then, just focus on an easy task, like a task as simple as walking, so you can strengthen those monotasking muscles.

Thatcher Wine: I think the first step is to strip everything away and get down to one task and identify that as your monotask, and then you can decide to add back later on and occasionally multi-task, but it will be within your control, because you will have identified when you’re monotasking versus multitasking, and you’ll also be strengthening your monotasking muscles, so that you can better resist distractions when they pop up out of your control, and you’ll say, not right now, I’m gonna focus on this. When I get it done, I’m gonna move on to the next thing.

Brett McKay: So monotask walking, that’s just… You’re not gonna be… You’re just gonna go and you’re just gonna focus on just the walk, like, what your step… Is it kinda like a meditative practice? Like, there’s like walking meditations, right? You’re just focusing on the steps, how does the air feel around me, is that what it looks like?

Thatcher Wine: I think that’s a great way to think of it, yeah, as like a mindfulness or meditative walk, and to really think about your other senses. So your body pretty much knows how to walk, so if you think about your other senses like sound, hearing, the sounds you’re hearing, what you’re smelling, what you’re seeing, and if you wanna touch the trees or the flowers or something, that’s fine, but it’s basically bringing your attention fully to the walk in order to relax your mind. And I think like, people… When you’re thinking about something else and doing another thing, so if you’re thinking while walking, because it’s happening in your own brain and nobody can see you doing it, it doesn’t necessarily fit the classic definition of multitasking that is visible to everybody. So I think it’s good to bring some awareness to that. It’s not always a bad thing, but just to acknowledge, I am trying to do two things at a time here, I’m gonna choose one, I’m gonna give more of my attention to it and see what happens.

Brett McKay: And I guess a way to start with that, I think you need to talk about the book 20 minutes again, just like, go for a 20-minute walk where all you’re focused on is the walk.

Thatcher Wine: And I’ll repeat the 20 minutes a lot and in several of the monotasks throughout the book, because I think it’s a good goal for our attention spans. It’s really hard. I mean, studies have been done these days that show that a lot of people can’t pay attention for more than six seconds, and we have to strengthen that. There’s so much every person wants to do on this planet, whether it’s on their to-do list or just having a great relationship, their family or their partner, and we have to basically reverse the trend from fragmenting our attention, look at this ad, look at this notification, download this app, respond to this, click on that. Like, it only will get better and go the opposite direction, if we do things like go for a walk for 20 minutes or read a book for 20 minutes, and the other monotasks.

Brett McKay: And it seems like also walking is a great monotask to do when you’re switching from one task to the next, ’cause it allows… ‘Cause as you said, it takes you what, 25 minutes for your brain to shift from one activity to the next, walking can kinda be like that buffer where you sort of clear… So you work on one project at work, you’re done. I’m gonna take a quick 20-minute walk. You come back and your brain’s kinda ready to work again.

Thatcher Wine: That’s a great way…

Brett McKay: It’s like a reboot.

Thatcher Wine: Absolutely, it’s like rebooting your computer. Yeah, and it’s like, if you acknowledge, Hey, I’m gonna lose that 20 minutes anyway, while my brain kind of consolidates this information from the last thing and gets ready for the next thing, it’s the perfect time to go for a walk. I often say, when you least think you have the time to go for a walk, that’s the most important time to go for a walk.

Brett McKay: Right.

Thatcher Wine: So, it will help you with everything else you need to do going forward, it’s not a loss of 20 minutes at all, it’s pressing the reset button, like you said.

Brett McKay: So instead of surfing Reddit or whatever, go for a walk.

Thatcher Wine: Yes.

Brett McKay: Okay. So another monotask is listening, and you explore listening in two ways, listening to media, sorta like music or maybe an audio book, it seems like one of those tasks that you could do at the same time, it’s mindless, simple enough that it’s okay to multitask, listening to a podcast while doing something else. Despite that you still encourage people again to like, why don’t you just try listening to this song or this album. And that’s the only thing you’re doing. Why is that?

Thatcher Wine: So I think it’s a good skill to have. And I think nobody else is really encouraging people in the world to do one thing at a time, it’s… Yes, you can do more than one thing at a time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should or that it’s good for you. And because listening in that one-way listening example, whereas two-way listening would be more like a conversation. So the one-way listening would be more like a podcast or a university lecture. And if you can develop the ability to pay attention to the whole thing, which is really hard. I completely acknowledge that. I think very few people could actually pay attention to an hour-long class or podcast. And…

But if you strengthen your ability to pay attention in longer increments, you’ll absorb more of the information, you’ll spend less time going back and re-listening to it, and then you can apply it again where you need to. So, if you are going back to school or getting a graduate degree or something, those are important skills to have. And I have two kids and I can see what happens to their brains with technology, and I have to wonder when they progressively go through their education and go to college and everything, is their ability to sit in one place be a little bit bored in a classroom and listen to a lecture and get all the information affected? So I think it’s just a good skill for all of us to have to strengthen that. And thankfully, there are all these great podcasts and sources of listening out there to practice with every day.

Brett McKay: And I think I have a tendency… My wife has this tendency, she’ll listen to a podcast while she’s doing a chore, like folding laundry or just cleaning the house. And I’ve done that too when I’ve got some other chore, I’ll listen to a podcast. And I find that, yeah, on the one hand it kind of gives you something to do while you’re twiddling away with your hands cleaning, but at the same time I noticed that I miss things in the audio. Like actually, I felt like, I miss things when I’m listening, ’cause I’m focused on this task that I’m doing or the task that I’m multitasking, listening to audio with takes longer, ’cause I stop and listen to the like, “Oh, here’s a good part in this episode.” And so, cleaning takes longer if I just had been cleaning and not listening to the podcast.

Thatcher Wine: And if you think about the cleaning as a monotask, it’s not one of the 12 monotasks in my book, [chuckle] but you can do anything as a monotask with your full attention, and you will be the judge. Like, you don’t need a research study to tell you, did you do it better? Did you do it faster? Did you make fewer mistakes? Did you maybe find ways that you enjoyed it that you had kinda numbed out before? And cleaning may not be the best example in terms of discovering amazing new things about yourself, but there are lots of things in this world that I think we’ve gotten used to multitasking, and we miss a lot of the details. It’s obvious in a podcast, if you gave me a quiz, 20 questions, these came up, were you paying attention? It’s not gonna be so obvious with cleaning or folding the laundry, but I think there’s something to discover in everything we do if we pay attention to it.

Brett McKay: What about listening to music while you work? I’ve seen conflicting research on this. On the one I’ve seen research, yes, it can help. Other researchers, no, it’s actually distracting. You should just put on noise canceling earphones and just work in complete silence.

Thatcher Wine: So different people have a different reaction. Like their brains work differently with different stimuli. For me, I find music to be really helpful for working out, like, just changing my mood essentially, and I think probably a lot of people can relate to that. Like, you wanna go high energy, put on some loud music. Whereas with work, if I really have to think, I can’t listen to anything with lyrics. I can sometimes listen to classical music or a piano or something like that, and that is helpful, but other times I’ll just… Now, because I’m so used to thinking as a monotask, I sit down at my desk, I put on my big headphones, and sometimes an hour later I forget that I never put on any music. It’s more just the ritual of here’s how I’m gonna… Where I’m gonna be, I’m gonna give my full attention to my work and thinking, and the music is not really required as part of that. Some people might find that it is required for them to do their best thinking or other work.

Brett McKay: So another part of listening is that two-way conversation, when we’re talking and listening to people in real life, and this is more effortful, and it can… It’s hard, it can be hard just to listen to somebody, what gets in the way of monotasking to this kind of interpersonal listening?

Thatcher Wine: Listening is really challenging, and I think it’s… When early readers read the book, they said that that was one of the chapters that made the biggest impact on their life. And I think a lot of that is because we’ve built up this expectation that people aren’t really going to listen to us completely. And it’s surprising to us, when they do listen, when they give us their full attention. We kind of expect that someone’s gonna be scrolling through their social media and just nodding their head, whether they’re in person or not, and so, why is it hard? I mean, one is because our smartphones make it really hard, they’re very tempting, take some of our attention away. Even if we’re not using them, like, you’re thinking about them on the table there. You’re wondering if your phone just notified you or rang or whatever, or if your kids might try to reach you or the school, etcetera.

So I think there’s this expectation that we are going to be distracted, we are going to be interrupted, and it doesn’t let us settle in to 100% listening state. And for the person who’s doing the talking, they may not pay attention even to what they’re saying, because they’re just assuming that the other person is only gonna listen to half of what they’re saying. So, I think another thing that gets in the way is that a lot of times people are multitasking and that they’re half listening and half thinking, you’re thinking about what you’re gonna say in response, as soon as the person stops finishing talking or you’re gonna think about how to interrupt them. So, I think if you can just truly listen and then when it’s your turn to talk, monotask that, speaking back to them, and it can just change the cadence of the conversation, the amount that you hear, and I think when people really feel listened to, they feel very valued and you end up having a closer friendship and relationship with them.

There are definitely some, just kind of an unlimited number of opportunities that we have in our daily lives to interact with other people and do a better job listening to them. If you really approach it as monotask, I think you’ll see the benefits very quickly.

Brett McKay: So traveling is a time that a lot of people multitask, but you encourage people to mono-task on their commute. What does that look like?

Thatcher Wine: So I mentioned the prevalence of texting and driving earlier, and that was originally where the idea for that chapter came from. And just my own personal public service announcement to be honest. I then broadened it out and it’s called ‘Getting There’. And the chapter really covers everything from commuting, to traveling for pleasure. And just how we’ve… Yeah, we’ve become habitually accustomed to multitasking while we travel, whether that’s listening to an audio book while driving or making a phone call, or if we’re taking the train or plane, doing something else during the time. And if you identify which those things are truly dangerous, if you’re the driver, those go in one bucket. Other things that are just distractions and multi-tasks, that are maybe taking away from your experience of traveling to a foreign country or taking a trip you’ve never been on, or making your commute more interesting, those things are in a separate bucket.

And again, like we’ve talked about before, it’s about kind of unwinding all the multi-tasks and giving your attention to one thing. So if you g-ave your attention to the journey, can you notice more things out the window that you’ve never seen before? Can you plan out a new route to work, to make it more interesting? And then you can add the multi-task back, so most people can effectively and safely listen to an audio book or a podcast on their commute, and that’s totally fine, it’s just about bringing some awareness to it. There are some things that really do stress people out and they’ll make mistakes, like trying to do their work on the train, it’s just too distracting, and they end up making mistakes, it takes longer, they get more stressed out, like we’ve talked about. So it can just help give yourself permission to do one thing at a time and to figure out whether you’re capable of adding other task back later.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think monotasking and traveling is a great way to exercise that muscle. There’s been times where I’ll just not have the radio on, it’s a great time to exercise that muscle, to not check your phone where you’re at a stop light. And just sit there and just be in the moment. And I’ve done this every now… I don’t know, you didn’t advocate this in your book. I’ve done this when I’ve been feeling… I don’t know, ’cause I just wanted to try it. I’ve tried mono-tasking flying on a plane. So just sitting on the plane and not reading or listening to a podcast. I can’t last that long, ’cause it’s the most… It’s pretty tedious. So if you’re feeling, if you really wanna excise those mono-tasking traveling muscles, try to to sit on a airplane and look around you.

Thatcher Wine: It’s a great point. It’s hard. It leads to boredom. So why do we reach for our phones at a stop light or wherever? Is there really gonna be a life-altering message we have to see or respond to or something, or we just bored? And are we no longer capable of sitting with that boredom for a few seconds or a few minutes or a few hours on the plane? I think it’s okay to be bored. I think we’ve lost that ability. And before smartphones, we had to be bored, we had to daydream or look for something interesting, or strike up a conversation with a person next to us. I think those are all good things to do still, so who knows where it’ll lead, but it can all start with mono-tasking.

Brett McKay: So another task you encourage people to monotask is their play, which seems kind of weird, people would try to multi-task while they’re playing. What stops us from mono-tasking our play?

Thatcher Wine: If you’ve been to a live concert lately…

Brett McKay: Yes, I went to one a couple months, yeah, a couple of months ago.

Thatcher Wine: Yeah. So I know people haven’t been going out as much in recent years, but… Because the pandemic. But in general, if you go, a lot of people have their phones out and they’re taking pictures, capturing video of the show. Other people might be standing there like me, occasionally, I’ll catch myself if I go see a show, thinking about work, what happened that day, what do I need to do tomorrow. That’s another form of multitasking. So whether it’s taking pictures and not really being present in the moment, enjoying it, or thinking about something else and kind of being stressed while you’re supposed to be having fun. If you… You basically give yourself permission again to just immerse yourself in the play, then you’ll be in the present moment, you’ll de-stress, you’ll have a much better time, you’ll be connected with the people you’re with, and you’ll truly be able to press that reset button again and be more productive the next day or whenever you’re done with your play.

So this can apply to like going to the gym, going for a bike ride, kicking the ball around the park, taking your dog for a walk, anything, if you just do it with your full attention and catch yourself when you’re maybe thinking of something else or doing two things at once, scrolling your social media feed at the dog park. Just, it’s totally fine, acknowledge it, let it go, bring yourself back to the play, and there are huge benefits to that. We all need to play more.

Brett McKay: No, I’ve noticed myself multi-tasking, while playing, especially when I’m playing with my kids. It’s not like I’m doing something in front of them, but I’m thinking about all the stuff I need to be doing. All the to-dos around the house, I gotta call this repair person, I got this thing at work, and then I’ve catched myself, I’m not really playing here, I’m doing… I’m somewhere else, I’m not actually here with my kid.

Thatcher Wine: Yeah, and our culture… And a lot of people on social media will make it look like they’re having this great life full of play and all this stuff. But are they really monotasking their play? No, those people are thinking about their social media photo posts and caption and everything while they’re ostensibly playing and they’re asking somebody else to take the picture. So we get the sense that there’s this fear of missing out, everybody else is having this great life, they all have this leisure time and go on these great trips and have these great cars and all that. Those people are just as stressed out or more about the next post than you are. So the place to be is right here right now, and whether you’re doing your work or playing, do it with your full attention.

Brett McKay: No, yeah, there’s that… That someone… There’s some quote about like, “Work when you work. Play when you play. And don’t focus about anything else.” Just ’cause that always lead to… It stresses you out less when you do that, when you just focus on one thing at a time. So another monotask is thinking. But like we’ve talked about, thinking is one of those things you can do… You do all the time. You can think when you’re walking and you can think when you’re listening to someone else talk about whatever, you can think when you’re listening to a podcast. Why make… Set aside dedicated times were the only thing you are doing is thinking?

Thatcher Wine: It has a lot to do with the fact that as human beings, we have these amazing capabilities to think and use our brains to do everything in life. But do we take it for granted sometimes that we’re just gonna think in the background or that we can think of multiple things at once? How… What if we really could harness our capabilities, our cognitive abilities to do our work, to problem-solve, to just build everything… Do everything better in life, really. And a lot of times, I can be an over-thinker and so thinking… The thinking monotask is not necessarily like, fixate your brain on one thing and do it, it’s more just, bring your full attention, your full presence to when you are thinking and when you need to think, in order to do the best work possible and to live life really well. And sometimes you have to go for a walk or go play in order for that creative idea to pop into your head. So it’s not always gonna come from giving 100% of your attention to thinking. I think people can relate to that and creatives, like you don’t always have your best idea when you’re trying to come up with your best idea, it’ll pop into your mind in a dream or in the shower.

And I think monotasking in general, is not just about the task that you’re doing, it’s about monotasking around that task. So if you figure out, I do my best work when I go for a bike ride. I come up with my best creative ideas or I get… Going on trips really inspires me to bring back ideas at home to put to work. If you monotask around that you observe yourself, and when you do your best thinking, then you can do a better job when you actually do sit down at your desk or wherever you decide to do your deep work to quote, reference the Cal Newport book again.

Brett McKay: Well, Thatcher, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work?

Thatcher Wine: So I created a website that’s basically a companion to the book, The Twelve Monotasks. So if you go to monotasking.tips, T-I-P-S, the website ends in ‘tips’ not ‘.com’. You can order the book from there, you can basically find all the local book stores that sell it, it’s available on Amazon as well. The book is called The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better. And I’m reachable through the website and through my own site, thatcherwine.com, and also through juniperbooks.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Thatcher Wine, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Thatcher Wine: Thanks, Brett, yeah, appreciate it. I enjoyed our conversation.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Thatcher Wine, he’s the author of the book, The Twelve Monotasks, it’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at his website, monotasking.tips. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/monotask, where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast, and make sure check on our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of The AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher premium, head over to Stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code ‘Manliness’ and check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android and IOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Stitcher. It helps out a lot, and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, you think will get something out of it.

As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you all to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better

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There are a lot of things your car can get stuck in: mud, snow, even a ditch. While every situation is different, there are some principles you can follow that may help you become unstuck without needing to call for a tow. So, we enlisted Wyatt Knox from Team O’Neil Rally School in NH to help us put this guide together should you ever find yourself in one of these sticky situations.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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The modern world can feel curiously unreal.

We wake, work, and sleep in climate-controlled boxes.

We can talk to a dozen people, survey a distant location, and restock our homes by making micro movements with a finger.

We can ask robots to clone voices, create art, write content.

We’re bombarded with endless words, images, and options, which has the odd effect of making none of them seem meaningful or worthwhile.

Rapid alterations in time, space, and culture have made life feel flimsy, insubstantial, weightless.

To navigate this increasingly artificial landscape, it helps to take a page from those who have literally experienced a zero-gravity state: astronauts.

Astronauts employ a variety of practices to maintain morale while living inside a confined vessel untethered from the rhythms, atmosphere, and organic materials of their home planet.

Astronauts establish a routine and have purposeful tasks to complete each day — habits that would also benefit those who dwell on terra firma.

Astronauts prevent the atrophying of their skeletal structure by exercising on resistance-providing equipment. We, too, should engage in concrete, friction-filled activities — weightlifting, cooking, tinkering, face-to-face conversing — to preserve the strength of both body and mind.

Astronauts bolt down anything they don’t want to float away, and we should likewise work to secure our most important values and relationships.

But the biggest reason astronauts stay resiliently happy in orbit is their attitude: they don’t mind inhabiting such a weird environment . . . because they get to experience the amazingness of outer space.

We can reframe our own ethereal conditions in a similar way. While the weightlessness of modernity presents challenges that must be counteracted, they’re a worthy tradeoff to exist in the best time for knowledge, power, and freedom; the best time for exploring the limits of human potential; the best time for taking a voyage on spaceship earth.

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David Whyte on finding your element. One of the insights I got from preparing for my interview with the poet David Whyte comes back to me regularly. He talks about how one of our symbols of beauty — the swan — is actually awkward when he walks; it is only when he enters a body of water that he glides with grace. The solution to your life feeling out of joint, Whyte observes, is not trying to work harder or be more productive, but moving toward the elemental waters where you belong. This excerpt from Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea, where he explains the idea further, is really worth a read.

ENVY: A Theory of Social Behavior by Helmut Schoeck. Envy is an emotion that everyone experiences, but no one likes to talk about; people would rather admit to almost any other vice. Sociologist and anthropologist Helmut Schoeck explores the psychology, sociology, and philosophy of envy in this 1969 book. He argues that envy is usually destructive but in some cases can be constructive. His most interesting insight is that, paradoxically, as things become more equal in a group, envy actually increases due to the narcissism of minor differences. De Tocqueville made a similar argument in Democracy in America. Envy is full of intellectual grit, and I’m still chewing on it despite reading it years ago.

UREVO 2 in 1 Under Desk Treadmill. If you’re looking for a treadmill desk, but don’t have the budget or the room to get a full-size apparatus, check out the UREVO 2 in 1 Under Desk Treadmill. It’s compact, moveable, and you can even run on it (up to 7.6 mph), though we exclusively use it to walk while we work. We’ve got one under our standing desk and have really enjoyed it. Kate uses it when she’s editing the podcast; I use it when I’m answering emails and doing admin work. Great way to get your steps in and build that sleep pressure!

“How Men Make Friends: Hammering Pieces of Wood Together, Plus Power Tools.” We’ve had a few podcast guests mention the “men’s shed” movement out of Australia. Basically, someone opens up a workshop where men can come and build stuff. One of the side effects is that men make friends, or at least socialize a bit. This WSJ article highlights the movement in the United States. From the article: “All share the motto ‘Shoulder to Shoulder,’ the premise being that men bond while working side by side, as opposed to women, who form friendships ‘Face to Face,’ by talking to each other.”

Quote of the Week

It is foolish to try to live on past experience. It is very dangerous, if not a fatal habit, to judge ourselves to be safe because of something that we felt or did twenty years ago.

—Charles H. Spurgeon

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UREVO 2 in 1 Under Desk Treadmill, 2.5HP Folding Electric Treadmill Walking Jogging Machine for Home Office with Remote Control

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One of my favorite things about my recent interview with Kelly Starrett about essential health practices was that he reintroduced me to the concept of “sleep pressure.” I know I had heard the phrase before, but I hadn’t thought about it in years. Since our conversation, it’s been regularly on my mind and given me a great rubric for making decisions around my daily routine.

Sleep pressure, as the name implies, is the drive towards sleep that accumulates during the day. Interestingly, scientists aren’t entirely sure what creates sleep pressure, but it’s believed to be related to the creation of adenosine. This makes sense: adenosine is a chemical that helps regulate the sleep-wake cycle, and just like sleep pressure, it rises during the day and falls while you slumber. Adenosine is produced when cells consume energy. The more physical and mental activity you engage in during the day, the more adenosine is created, and the more tired you become.

You certainly don’t need a biology degree to understand the dynamics of sleep pressure; it’s a phenomenon you’ve experienced firsthand. Think back to times you hiked all day or spent hours swimming in the ocean; how did you sleep that night? Probably amazingly well because of the huge sleep pressure you’d built up. As I mentioned in my conversation with Kelly, I still remember the sleep I got while visiting Italy as the very best sleep of my life. Kate and I walked miles and miles and miles around Rome during the day, under the bright hot sun. When we’d get back to the hotel at night, we’d both fall asleep the instant our heads touched the pillow and stay in an utterly dead-to-the-world state of profound unconsciousness until morning. That’s the power of sleep pressure.

People often complain of trouble falling and staying asleep and seem uncertain as to why they experience these issues. But it’s usually not a great mystery: they spend most of their day indoors, sitting and sedentary. Little activity = little sleep pressure = poor sleep.

While few of us have schedules that will allow for doing hours of activity every day, all of us can incorporate a little more effort, sweat, and sunlight (fresh air and sun both seem to increase sleep pressure for some reason) into our daily routines. Move more. Spend more time walking. With the clients he’s worked with, Kelly has noticed that improvement in sleep begins to kick in once you start hitting just 6,000-8,000 steps a day. When he had special operators in the Army’s Delta Force add 12,000-15,000 steps on top of their usual day-to-day training, it effectively squashed their insomnia problems altogether.

What’s great about sleep pressure is that building it requires doing the kinds of practices that contribute to overall health but can be tempting to skip because the benefits are longer-term and less tangible. Better sleep is a visceral, short-term reward that’s easier to get motivated to work towards.

Sleep pressure is a simple concept, and once you absorb it, you’ll start looking for ways to increase it as you go about your day. We created the visual guide above to help get it ingrained in your head so that throughout your daily routine, you’ll be thinking about where your sleep pressure dial is sitting, make choices that move the needle in the right direction, and enjoy deep, restful sleep every night as a result.

For more tips on the health practices that will enhance your everyday vitality, listen to our podcast with Kelly Starrett:

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Different generations love to cast aspersions on each other. Boomers think Millennials and Gen Zers are fragile narcissists. Those younger generations think that Boomers are selfish, closed-minded pinheads who helped themselves to economic success and then pulled the ladder out for everyone else.

But are these and other generational stereotypes true? Here to unpack that question for us is Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology and the author of Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future. We begin our conversation with some background on the study of generations and why Jean thinks the Strauss-Howe theory of generational cycles has been disrupted. We then work our way through the generations, from the Silent Generation to the present, and talk about the characteristics and particular challenges of each cohort. We dig into the myths and truths of the generations, such as whether Boomers are doing financially well and Millennials are doing financially poorly. We talk about why Gen X gets overlooked, why there’s such a sharp break between Millennials and Gen Z, why Gen Zers are taking longer to get their drivers’ licenses and feel darkly pessimistic, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast + AoM article on the Strauss-Howe generational cycle theory + AoM Podcast #236: What the Generational Cycle Theory Can Tell Us About Our Present Age (With Neil Howe) + AoM Article: A New Generation of Prigs, Prudes, and Squares + AoM Article: How Millennials Could Be the Next Greatest Generation of Personal Finance + AoM Podcast: #751: The Rise of the Religious “Nones” (And What It Means for Society) + Atlantic* article by Jean: “The Myth of the Broke Millennial”

Connect With Jean Twenge* Jean’s website

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #891: Generations — The Surprising Truths and Persistent Myths appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Back in 2015, I started barbell training seriously.

Thanks to some great coaching, I was able to get strong. But more importantly, I discovered a hobby that brought me immense satisfaction.

I love barbell training. I love thinking about programming. I love going down to my garage gym and implementing my plan. I love trying different equipment out. I love tinkering with my nutrition and recovery to help improve my performance. I love everything about it.

Because I love barbell training, it’s never been a slog for me to train. I’ve trained on vacations and holidays, not out of white-knuckle discipline, but simply because I enjoy training so much.

Yes indeed, barbell training has been a source of meaning and identity for me for over eight years.

But back in 2020, right after I hit some of my biggest PRs on the squat and deadlift, I started to experience some injuries from my beloved pastime. Lifting really hard and really heavy for five years — reaching for ever higher numbers — caught up with me.

A shoulder impingement kept me from bench pressing for nearly a year.

Knee pain prevented me from squatting for a year and a half.

A terrible case of tennis elbow in both my arms kept me from bench pressing and shoulder pressing for about five months.

With all of those injuries, I kept up my aim of continuing to train the main powerlifting lifts so that I could eventually participate in competitions again. I worked with my coach, Matt Reynolds, to modify my training so that I could continue to make progress toward my goals and heal up.

2023 started strong, but a couple of months ago, I started experiencing shoulder pain while squatting, shoulder pressing, and bench pressing, and hip pain while squatting. It’s probably a combination of years of heavy training and just getting old. I’m 40 now and not the spry chicken I was eight years ago.

After three years of stymied progress, barbell training started bringing me more distress and frustration than joy and satisfaction. I no longer looked forward to my workouts and felt more peevish in general.

A psychologist named Carsten Wrosch wrote a research paper back in 2003 that explained why I felt so much angst. He also explained what I needed to do to stop feeling that way: give up on my old goal and choose a new one.

You Gotta Know When to Hold ‘Em and Know When to Fold ‘EmWhen discussing goals, we typically talk about employing perseverance and persistence, even in the face of adversity and setbacks. “Quitters never win, and winners never quit,” and all that.

While grit is essential to goal achievement, Wrosch argues that an equally important part of successful living is knowing when to give up and disengage from a goal.

We only have so much time and resources to direct toward life projects. If we spend that limited time and resources on goals we can’t achieve, we’re setting ourselves up for massive frustration. We’d be better off redirecting our limited time and resources to a new achievable goal.

In a series of studies, Wrosch and his colleagues found that life satisfaction goes up in individuals who can successfully disengage from unachievable goals and recommit to more achievable ones.

These results shouldn’t be surprising. It doesn’t feel good to continually bang your head against a wall. But Wrosch points out that many people still have a hard time letting go of their goals. When they bump up against the fact that a goal is unreachable, they typically stay committed to the goal while reducing their effort towards achieving it. Consistent commitment, coupled with decreased effort, results in a sense of distress and futility.

Why do people have such a hard time disengaging from goals?

Several factors contribute to it.

Some people just have a compulsive personality.

Uncertainty about whether the goal is achievable or not also feeds into it. If even a small chance of doability seems to remain, some people will keep hanging on.

The sunk-cost fallacy plays a role as well. After you’ve invested so much time and effort into a goal, it’s hard to give up on it because it feels like all the previous investment was a waste.

But the factor that makes it hardest to disengage from a goal is that the goal is part of your identity. Giving up on dreams that mean a lot to you, that contribute to your sense of self, is just plain difficult.

This is what was happening with me and barbell training. Because barbell training was a big part of my identity, I was still committed to my goal of hitting bigger and bigger PRs and getting ready for competitions despite the obstacles I was experiencing. But I was also reducing the effort to make that goal a reality because of the challenges I was encountering. Result: irritation and vexation.

I needed to disengage from my powerlifting goals if I wanted exercise to be a source of joy for me again.

What to Do When Your Goal is No Longer AchievableWrosch highlights several ways you can let go of your commitment to a goal. One way is to form a new goal. If becoming a lawyer was a lifetime goal for you, but unforeseen circumstances have made that goal impossible, you can give up on becoming a lawyer and become a barber instead.

But giving up on a commitment to a goal doesn’t mean you have to give up entirely on the goal. You could keep your goal but scale it back a bit. Maybe age and injuries have made hitting an all-time PR in a 5K impossible, but you could set a PR for your 40s. Perhaps you can’t become a millionaire by the time you’re 40, but maybe you’ll get there when you’re 50.

Another way to disengage from a goal in a limited way is to choose an alternate path to a high-order goal. Let’s say your goal was to become a doctor, but you can’t achieve that for whatever reason. Look for a high-order purpose behind that specific goal of becoming a doctor that you can still pursue. Maybe the high-order goal is that you want to help people with their health. There are many ways you can do that without becoming a doctor. You could become a nurse. You could become a trainer or nutritionist. You could work in hospital administration. There’s more than one way to skin the goal cat.

How Do You Know When to Give Up on a Goal?This is probably the most challenging question to wrestle with. Wrosch admits there’s no definitive answer on when to give up on a goal and commit to a new one. It’s a skill that one has to develop through trial and error.

In our podcast about her book Quit, Annie Duke suggests developing “kill criteria” to help you figure out when to give up on a goal. For example, create a “state and date” contract with yourself that if you don’t achieve a goal within a specific timeframe, you’ll quit. Let’s say you want to become a successful actor. You can set kill criteria like: “I’ll move to Hollywood, and if I’m not making enough as an actor to support myself in five years, I’ll quit pursuing that goal.”

Duke also advises finding a “quitting coach.” It’s a disinterested third party to help you see that continuing to work on your goal is futile, or that you’ve still got the potential to do something great and should stick with it.

For me, it took awhile to finally decide to shift goals with my exercise. Talking to guys who went through the process of changing their fitness goals helped out a lot. Matt used to compete, but thanks to injuries, age, and new responsibilities, he’s had to shift his goals from hitting all-time PRs to training for overall health. Talking to him about his experience helped me out a lot. (For a taste of the conversations we had, listen to this episode of the podcast.)

All of the above tools can be useful. But ultimately, when it comes to knowing when you should quit something, you have to just follow your gut. As Duke advises, you have to weigh the long-term costs with the long-term benefits and see if you come out net positive. Only you can know if you’re getting more out of something than you’re putting in.

Disengaging From Competitive Barbell Training, Committing to Overall HealthWith Matt’s help, I’ve developed some new fitness goals as I’ve disengaged from serious, super-heavy barbell training. Instead of giving up on weightlifting completely, I’ve shifted focus to a goal that’s still in the realm of strength training but is more attainable in my current stage of life.

I’m still doing the main barbell movements. I’ve just modified them. I’m squatting . . . but with a safety bar. I’m bench pressing and shoulder pressing . . . but with dumbbells. I can still deadlift heavy, which is great because that’s my favorite lift, so we’ll see if I can still get another PR with that. I’m also doing more bodybuilder-type stuff to work on hypertrophy. I’m having fun working on the aesthetics part of strength training. I don’t plan on looking like a young Arnold, but I am enjoying the process of training to look more jacked. Training is fun again.

Learning how to disengage from a goal that’s brought a lot of satisfaction and meaning in my life for the past eight years has been great practice for the big goal disengagement milestones I’ll likely experience in the coming years as I progress through middle age. What does it mean to be a dad when my kids are grown and out of the house? What will I do with myself when I retire from AoM? I don’t know yet, but at least I’m developing the mental models and skillset to handle those letting-go passages when they arrive.

The post The Art of Moving On: When and How to Disengage From a Goal appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When John Bowe learned that his reclusive cousin, who had lived for decades in his parents’ basement, had moved out and gotten married at the age of fifty-nine, John was extremely surprised. What made him equally surprised was how his cousin had finally launched his life. It hadn’t been meds or therapy. Instead, he had joined his local Toastmasters club.

Duly intrigued, John set off on his own Toastmasters journey, as he details in his book I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection. Today on the show, John shares how he discovered that the ethos of this nonprofit organization parallels the tradition of rhetoric espoused by the ancient Greeks, especially by Aristotle, and why the ability to speak, whether in the context of giving a formal speech or simply having a conversation, continues to be such an essential skill in the modern age. In my favorite part of the show, we discuss how our ideas of authentic speech can actually get in the way of expressing our authentic selves. We then turn to the techniques for better speaking that John learned from joining Toastmasters and how Toastmasters ultimately transformed his own life.

Resources Related to the Podcast Toastmasters International * AoM Podcast #698: The Secrets of Public Speaking From History’s Greatest Orators * AoM Article: An Introduction to Public Speaking * AoM Podcast #639: Why You Should Learn the Lost Art of Rhetoric * AoM series on classical rhetoric * Rhetoric by Aristotle * The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett * AoM series on overcoming shyness * AoM Article: How to Minimize Your Uh’s and Um’s * Sunday Firesides: Want to Solve Your Social Problems? Get Over Your Self * “How to Speak in Public” — article in Psyche* magazine by John

Connect With John Bowe* John’s website

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I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection

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So you know how to start a fire . . . but could you start one in the rain? Whether you’re a frequent camper or an avid hiker, it’s an important skill to have. In an emergency situation, it may very well be the difference between life and death, as fire provides not only warmth, but food as well. Follow the tips above and you’ll never be without the skills to start a fire, even on a damp and rainy adventure. (Note that cutting bark from a tree should only be done in an actual emergency, as this can damage and even kill the tree.)

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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On page 172 of Jean Edward Smith’s biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ike is almost 52 years old, an age at which many a man feels his life has largely run its course.

Yet there are 600 pages left to go; the book is less than a third of the way through.

Up until that point, Eisenhower had had an accomplished, well-regarded, but fairly unremarkable military career. Having missed out on seeing combat in WWI, he diligently applied himself to being a peerless peacetime staff officer. His trajectory into retirement seemed predetermined, and had he stayed on it, no one today would remember his name.

But on page 172, Pearl Harbor is bombed, setting Eisenhower on an extraordinary, unexpected journey. He would soon become Supreme Allied Commander, president of Columbia University, and ultimately the president of the United States.

Oftentimes at midlife, beginning even in your thirties, a sinking feeling of resignation settles in. All the major pieces of life are seemingly in place. This is your job. This is your home. This is your spouse. These are your children. The course of your life feels set.

Yet you can never know what plot twists in your relationships, character, professional path, or level of success lie just around the corner.

Sometimes, it takes an external event to change our lives, but we must stay ready, as Ike did, to seize the opportunity if/when it arrives.

Other times, it’s up to us to author a new narrative ourselves.

Fortunately, a metaphorical typewriter lies ever before us, and the brilliance of biography is that the number of pages assigned to each period in life isn’t correlated to number of years but richness of content. No matter how slender the manuscript is so far, the meatiest, very best chapters may still be to come.

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Century of the Self. We recently revisited this 4-part documentary from Adam Curtis and found it just as engaging and eye-opening as we did watching it the first time a couple decades back. Curtis explores the way Freudian ideas and the movement towards self-expression in the 60s ended up being co-opted by advertisers, corporations, and politicians and channeled towards consumerism, so that what promised to liberate the human psyche, actually ended up making people more manipulated and controlled. It’s a must-watch for the modern citizen.

“The Horse Whisperer” by Mark Maggiori. I’ve been a fan of the Western artist Mark Maggiori for several years now. I love his paintings depicting the American West. The way he paints clouds in the desert is amazing. Whenever I’m on a road trip in New Mexico and see a big pillar of clouds, I lean over and tell Kate, “Those are some Mark Maggiori clouds right there.” When I turned 40 a few months ago, a dear friend gifted me a print of Maggiori’s painting, “The Horse Whisperer.” It depicts an old cowboy that looks like my favorite literary cowboy, Lonesome Dove’s Gus McCrae, riding his horse amongst the sage brush. And, of course, there are some great Mark Maggiori clouds in the sky. When you order a Maggiori print, it can take months to get to you, and it just finally arrived. Can’t wait to get it framed and hung up in my living room.

“Is There a Loneliness Epidemic?” You hear a lot of talk in the media these days about a “loneliness epidemic” going on in the West. We’ve even had several podcast guests bring up the idea on the show. But is there really a loneliness epidemic afoot? According to this article, no. Looking at the data, the author concludes: “today’s adolescents in the US do not seem to be more likely to report feeling lonely than adolescents from a couple of decades ago; and similarly, today’s older adults in the US do not report higher loneliness than did adults of their age in the past.” Guess it’s just the kind of narrative/buzz-phrase that makes for good copy.

“Only the Young” by Brandon Flowers. If you’ve been following AoM for a while now, you know that I’m a big Killers fan. I’m also a big fan of the solo projects frontman Brandon Flowers has done over the years. His 2010 solo album Flamingo is packed with several underrated and overlooked gems. But the track that’s been getting the most play in McKay-family transportation lately is “Only the Young.” It’s so dang good. The music video is just as good. Makes me nostalgic for being young again but also hopeful for my kids.

Quote of the Week

There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows.

—Frederic Farrar

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Your wallet is an essential part of your EDC. It carries your identification and your means of payment. In the past few decades, wallet profiles have been getting thinner and thinner. Men don’t want to sit on a George-Costanza-sized lump all day. Moreover, carrying too much stuff in your wallet can be a security risk: if you lose your wallet and it contains sensitive information, you put yourself at risk for identity theft.

So what should you put in and leave out of a wallet to ensure you have the essentials, while also keeping things streamlined and reducing your security risk?

Below we share the items you should sometimes, always, and never keep in your wallet.

SometimesSome items should only be kept in your wallet on an as-needed basis. Keeping them in your wallet all the time creates a higher security risk, and they needlessly take up space.

Health insurance cards/Medicare cards. A thief can use your health insurance card or Medicare card to get procedures done in your name, potentially sticking you with the bill, messing up your health records, or even increasing the cost of your insurance. You only need to bring your health insurance card to your medical appointments. You usually don’t even need it then, as the doctor’s office keeps a copy of your card on file, but every once in awhile they update their records and want to see your card again, so it doesn’t hurt to always bring it.

You might think that you need to always carry your health insurance cards on you in case you end up making an unexpected visit to the emergency room. Not so. A hospital will still treat you if you don’t have your insurance card. You’ll just need to get the hospital your insurance info later.

Save space in your wallet and reduce your fraud risk by carrying your health insurance cards only when needed.

Medical debit card. Your medical debit card is another sometimes item for the same reasons your health insurance card is: to avoid medical fraud and reduce your wallet profile.

Gift cards. You might keep a gift card in your wallet just in case you decide that today’s the day you’re finally going to hit The Cheesecake Factory for dinner. But, you’re probably not, so it’s just taking up needless space in your wallet. What’s more, gift cards don’t need IDs to be redeemed, so if your wallet gets stolen, a thief could use that $100 gift card from Grams to treat themselves to a cheesecake-crowned feast. Only put a gift card in your wallet when you know you’re going to use it in the immediate future.

AlwaysDriver’s license. Got to have this on you by law when you’re driving. Getting pulled over when you don’t have your license may just lead to a “fix-it ticket” where if you later show proof of your valid license, the citation will be dismissed. But you definitely want to skip having to show up in traffic court to get that taken care, so always keep your license with you.

Credit card. Don’t carry multiple credit cards. Just keep one in there that you use the most. Stick with a credit card accepted at most retailers, like Visa or American Express. Not only will this reduce bulk in your wallet, but if you lose your wallet, you won’t have to cancel multiple cards.

Debit card. Debit cards are essential for making payments from your checking account and withdrawals from ATMs. Ensure you have fraud alerts and daily spending limits to reduce debit card fraud.

Cash. A man should always have some greenbacks on him. Carry $100-$300; enough to cover most cash-only transactions that may arise, but not so much that you’ll lose big if your wallet gets stolen.

NeverSocial Security card, birth certificate, passport card. No brainer. You rarely need these documents for identification purposes, and they can all be used for identity fraud. Keep them at home.

Passwords. Don’t be a dummy and store passwords for personal or work services in your wallet. You’re just asking to become a fraud victim. Protect your online privacy.

House key. If your wallet gets stolen, the thief will now have both the key to your house and (thanks to your driver’s license) its address. Bienvenidos thief! Mi casa es tu casa!

Blank checks. If your wallet gets stolen with blank checks, you risk being a victim of check fraud.

Receipts. Because federal law prohibits businesses from including identifying/sensitive information on receipts, it’s highly unlikely that they could be used by criminals who get ahold of your wallet. But they pointlessly take up space, so get in the habit of discarding those you’re sure you don’t need for returns or for your records, and filing away those you do. If there is any chance the receipt does contain sensitive information, shred it.

The post The Sometimes, Always, Never Rule For What to Carry In Your Wallet appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When most people think of psychopaths, they think of uniformly monstrous characters who lack empathy and conscience.

But my guest says that those characteristics are just one part of the spectrum of traits that make up psychopathy, and while always having these traits turned up high is indeed bad, when employed to certain degrees in certain circumstances, they can actually be utilized for adaptive, positive ends.

Kevin Dutton is a researcher of experimental psychology at Oxford and the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. Today on the show, Kevin first defines what makes psychopaths, psychopaths, and how they differ from sociopaths. He describes how psychopathic traits can be particularly useful in some professions and which professions attract the most psychopaths. In the second half of our conversation, Kevin lays out his argument for why he thinks the Apostle Paul was a psychopath and how that’s actually what made him such an effective evangelist. At the end of our conversation, Kevin offers a test that assesses psychopathy; stay tuned to find out if I’m a psychopath and take the test yourself to see if you are.

Connect With Kevin Dutton* Kevin on Twitter * Kevin on IG * Kevin’s website

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The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

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Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was a statesman, diplomat, and man of letters. In his own time, he was recognized for his sharpness in rhetoric and known as an accomplished essayist. Today, however, he is largely remembered for a collection of writings he never intended to be published: his correspondence with his illegitimate son, Philip.

Over three decades time, Lord Chesterfield wrote more than 400 letters to Philip, instructing him not only in the subjects of a classical education like literature and history, but the manners, comportment, and interpersonal instincts needed to rise in the world. As a royal courtier, politician, and ambassador, Lord Chesterfield had gained firsthand lessons in how to build rapport, win over others, and deal with the machinations of institutional intrigue, and he sought to pass this wisdom onto his son so that he too could become an influential and distinguished gentleman.

Chesterfield’s correspondence was published in 1774 as Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, and the book’s perceptive observations have been a guide to many prominent men in the centuries since. While some of Chesterfield’s advice has become outdated, it still contains plenty of evergreen pearls. Below, we share the 38 best.

“The power of applying attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure mark of a superior genius.”

“Look in the face of the person to whom you are speaking if you wish to know his real sentiments, for he can command his words more easily than his countenance.”

“People will, in a great degree, and not without reason, form their opinion of you, upon that which they have of your friends; and there is a Spanish proverb, which says very justly, tell me who you live with, and I will tell you what you are.”

“Frivolous curiosity about trifles, and laborious attention to little objects, which neither require nor deserve a moment's thought, lower a man, who from thence is thought, and not unjustly, incapable of greater matters.”

“Those whom you can make like themselves better, will, I promise you, like you very well.”

“Let blockheads read, what blockheads wrote.”

“Choose the company of your superiors whenever you can have it; that is the right and true pride.”

“Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.”

“When a man seeks your advice he generally wants your praise.”

“Awkwardness is a more real disadvantage than it is generally thought to be; it often occasions ridicule, it always lessens dignity.”

“Prepare yourself for the world, as the athletes used to do for their exercise; oil your mind and your manners, to give them the necessary suppleness and flexibility; strength alone will not do.”

“A man's fortune is frequently decided by his first address. If pleasing, others at once conclude he has merit; but if ungraceful, they decide against him.”

“Compliments of congratulation are always kindly taken, and cost nothing but pen, ink, and paper.”

“It is often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment, the former being never forgiven, but the latter sometimes forgot. Wrongs are often forgiven; contempt never.”

“Aim at perfection in everything, though in most things it is unattainable; however, they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer to it, than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable.”

“Next to clothes being fine, they should be well made, and worn easily: for a man is only the less genteel for a fine coat, if, in wearing it, he shows a regard for it, and is not as easy in it as if it were a plain one.”

“Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”

“Fear manifested invites danger; concealed cowards insult known ones.”

“The manner of speaking is full as important as the matter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understandings to judge.”

“Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him. Haste and hurry are very different things.”

“Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.”

“The heart never grows better by age; I fear rather worse; always harder. A young liar will be an old one; and a young knave will only be a greater knave as he grows older.”

“It is an undoubted truth that the less one has to do the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and, therefore, one seldom does it at all; whereas, those who have a great deal of business must buckle to it; and then they always find time enough to do it in.”

“Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket. Do not pull it out merely to show that you have one. If asked what o'clock it is, tell it; but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.”

“Knowledge is a comfortable and necessary retreat and shelter for us in advanced age, and if we do not plant it while young, it will give us no shade when we grow old.”

“I find, by experience, that the mind and the body are more than married, for they are most intimately united; and when the one suffers, the other sympathizes.”

“A man of the best parts and greatest learning, if he does not know the world by his own experience and observation, will be very absurd, and consequently very unwelcome in company. He may say very good things; but they will be probably so ill-timed, misplaced, or improperly addressed, that he had much better hold his tongue.”

“In order to judge of the inside of others, study your own; for men in general are very much alike, and though one has one prevailing passion, and another has another, yet their operations are much the same; and whatever engages or disgusts, pleases, or offends you in others will engage, disgust, please or offend others in you.”

“A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.”

“A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.”

“Real merit of any kind, cannot long be concealed; it will be discovered, and nothing can depreciate it but a man exhibiting it himself. It may not always be rewarded as it ought; but it will always be known.”

“True politeness is perfect ease and freedom. It simply consists in treating others just as you love to be treated yourself.”

“If a fool knows a secret, he tells it because he is a fool; if a knave knows one, he tells it whenever it is his interest to tell it. But women and young men are very apt to tell what secrets they know, from the vanity of having been trusted. Trust none of these whenever you can help it.”

“Great talents, such as honor, virtue, and learning are above the generality of the world, who neither possess them themselves, nor judge of them rightly in others; but all people are judges of the lesser talents, such as civility, affability, and an obliging, agreeable address and manner, because they feel the good effects of them.”

“Silence and reserve suggest latent power. What some men think has more effect than what others say.”

“Many new years you may see, but happy ones you cannot see without deserving them. These virtue, honor, and knowledge alone can merit, alone can produce.” The post The 38 Best Pieces of Advice Lord Chesterfield Gave His Son appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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There’s plenty of advice out there about how to have a better daily routine. But what’s just bunk and what actually works to improve the quality of your day and your overall life?

My guest, medical-doctor-turned-science-educator Stuart Farrimond, took a deep dive into the research to find the authoritative answers to that question, and he shares them in his book Live Your Best Life: 219 Science-Based Reasons to Rethink Your Daily Routine. Today on the show, we walk through a daily routine, from morning to night, and Dr. Farrimond shares some best practices to make the most of it. We discuss why waking up to an alarm clock feels so terrible, why you shouldn’t drink coffee first thing in the morning, the ideal length for an afternoon nap, how to improve your commute, the best time of day to exercise, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: What Every Man Should Know About Sleep * AoM Article: The Digestive Power of an After-Dinner Walk * “It’s Not Just What You Eat, but the Time of Day You Eat It” * AoM Article: How to Stop Your Snoring * AoM Article: Unleash the Power of the Nap * Sunday Firesides: Your Routine Needs Rites of Passage

Connect With Stuart Farrimond* Stuart on IG * Stuart on Twitter

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Live Your Best Life: 219 Science-based Reasons to Rethink Your Daily Routine

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Fishing is generally a pleasant and unpainful pastime (at least if you’re fishing in freshwater for small fry). But one hazard that can befall the fisherman when he’s bringing in a line or untethering his catch is getting a hook stuck in his finger. If this happens to you, you can use one of the above techniques to get the hook out.

The String Yank Technique can’t be performed on parts of the body that aren’t attached (e.g., earlobe, nostril). And if the hook is stuck in your eye, don’t try to remove it yourself with either of these methods! Go to the emergency room immediately.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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Have you ever known someone who becomes more conservative when he’s part of a liberal community, and more liberal when he’s part of a conservative one?

This behavior — being contrarian seemingly for the sake of being contrarian — can seem a little silly. But these gadflies perform a great service for the communities to which they belong.

Every group, whether small as a church or vast as a civilization, has a culture that perennially oscillates between two poles.

A revolution upends the culture’s prevailing ethos and establishes a new order of values. The movement is meant to correct the excesses of the dominant paradigm. But, over time, the values which were marginalized become institutionalized. Leaven, once badly needed, comes to so saturate the culture that it starts to sicken.

And a new revolution gets launched in the opposite direction.

Human nature is such that cultures cannot reside in a golden equilibrium; instead, they swing back and forth between extremes. Yet though these swings invariably go too far, the oscillation is essential to a community’s health, shortening periods of destructive stagnation and moderating the group’s ethos overall.

The last society-wide countercultural movement happened six decades ago, and was an attempt to correct a perceived excess in constriction and conformity. Yet that which formerly felt original has grown stale, and we yearn for a wind that blows in another direction.

In a world dominated by you-do-you mantras, a devotion to not just living your truth, but seeking the truth feels refreshing.

In a world permeated by caveat-laden beliefs, commitment-spurning aloofness, free-agent optionality, and everything-kept-at-arm’s-length cynicism, full-throated faith, death-do-we-part loyalty, true-to-your-word integrity, and all-in earnestness carry the kick of outright revolution.

In a world where that which was once rebellious now feels tired, boring, and cliche, it’s up to a set of contemporary contrarians to renew the cycle again.

The post Sunday Firesides: The Counterculture We Need Now appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Radio Taiso: The 100-Year-Old Japanese Workout. Every morning at 6:30 a.m., Japan’s public radio company broadcasts a simple calisthenics workout that 25 million Japanese follow each morning. It’s called Radio Taiso, and it’s been a thing since the 1920s. It got its inspiration from Walter Camp’s famous “Daily Dozen” exercise routine. Back in the 1920s, radio stations in America started broadcasting workout routines similar to the Daily Dozen for listeners to follow. The idea got exported to Japan where it’s become a national fitness tradition that’s still going strong today.

Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida: The Saga of César Rincón. After I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises several years ago, I wanted to learn more about bullfighting, so I picked up this biography of one of bullfighting’s greatest matadors, César Rincón. The author does a good job of explaining the history and culture of bullfighting in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries as well as in parts of France. The really interesting bits are the insights about manliness and honor in bullfighting culture. It’s a good anthropological look at a world very few people know about.

Huckberry x Chaco Z/1. I’m picking up a pair of Huckberry x Chaco Z/1 for my summertime adventures, including a float down the Illinois River with the teenage boys I lead at church. The last time I took a float trip, I wore flip-flops, and I kept losing them. The straps on the Chacos will prevent that from happening.

Creed III. After our family watched all the Rocky movies, we moved on to the Creed series. We finished Creed III the other night, and while we were all skeptical we would like a Rocky movie without Rocky, we all ended up enjoying it. It definitely had a different “vibe” compared to the Creed movies with Stallone, but I thought Michael B. Jordan did a great job taking this franchise in a new direction while still subtly paying homage to the original Rocky.

Quote of the Week

There are two kinds of failures: The man who will do nothing he is told, and the man who will do nothing else.

—Dr. Perle Thompson

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There’s nothing like the experience of getting your hair cut at a quality barber shop. The smell of talc and hair tonics is evocative. The feeling of a hot towel on your face is relaxing.

Another thing that adds to the pleasant experience of a barbershop is the unwritten code of etiquette that should prevail there. Understanding and following these guidelines can make your visit to the shop more enjoyable and allow you to develop a positive relationship and rapport with your barber that can last for years to come.

To get the lowdown on barbershop etiquette, I hit up AoM’s resident barber, Thad Forrester, co-owner of Hudson / Hawk Barber & Shop. Thad has been my go-to consultant for content related to hair for years, ever since we made some videos together back in 2016 (check out “Shave and a Haircut,” “How to Get a Side Part Haircut,” and “How to Talk to Your Barber“), and I liked Thad’s haircuts so much that I’d sometimes drive all the way from Tulsa to his Hudson / Hawk location in Springfield, Missouri just to have him cut my hair. This was particularly true after I grew my hair out; cutting my long, thick, poofy hair is tricky, and I couldn’t find anyone locally who did it well. So I’m really excited that Thad has added to the Hudson / Hawk locations in MO and AR by opening a shop here in T-Town. If you live in the Tulsa area, make sure to check it out! You’ll likely bump into me there getting my Sam Elliott hair trimmed.

Wherever you go to get your hair cut, here are some rules to follow to do so like a gent:

Be punctual. Respect your barber’s time by punctually arriving to your appointment. Most barbers schedule back-to-back appointments. One late client can throw off their entire day.

Cancel well in advance. If you have to cancel an appointment, do so with as much advance notice as possible — a couple of hours beforehand at a minimum — so that the barber can try to fill that spot.

If you accidentally no-show for your appointment, the generous and gracious thing to do is call your barber and pay for the haircut you didn’t get. This will obviously pain you, but by not showing up, you basically robbed your barber of a paying client who could have filled your spot. So if this is a barber with whom you want to maintain a positive, long-term relationship, pay for the missed haircut.

This is a problem you can avoid by keeping your appointments.

Communicate clearly. Know how to talk to your barber. Clearly communicate the style you want and any specific requests or concerns. If possible, let your barber know the kind of haircut and haircare you want when you make the appointment, so he can allot an appropriate amount of time for completing the service.

Stay still. Keep your head still and follow your barber’s instructions to ensure a clean and precise cut.

Put away your phone. Texting, scrolling Instagram, and talking on the phone won’t allow you to stay still, which makes your barber’s job harder. Also, when you’re on your phone, it prevents you from interacting with your barber: answering questions he might have about your cut and making the kind of friendly chit-chat that builds increasingly comfortable rapport.

Practice good hygiene. Make sure your hair is clean and freshly washed before your appointment. Barbers don’t appreciate having to work on filthy/sweaty/greasy hair.

If your barber will be washing your hair at the shop before he cuts it, your hair doesn’t have to be clean-clean, but it shouldn’t be so dirty that your barber will be reluctant to put his hands in it.

Don’t put product in your hair before your cut. When your hair is full of creams and gels, it turns your barber’s job into a sticky mess.

Respect other clients. Keep your voice down and avoid disruptive behavior and controversial topics to respect the experience of other clients.

Be politely assertive when you see a problem with your haircut. If you see your barber doing something with your hair that you don’t like, let him know right away so he can course correct.

If you aren’t satisfied with the finished product, don’t mumble “It looks great” when the barber asks you what you think and then go and leave a negative review online. Try discussing the issue with the barber first. As Thad says, “A good shop and barber will appreciate hearing how they can do better. We all make mistakes. The measure of a good shop is how we address them and try to make them right. Going direct to the business owner or barber shows mutual respect and is more well-received and likely to be considered seriously.”

Tip generously. A good rule of thumb is to tip 20% of the cost of your service. If you appreciate the service and experience, take care of your barber, and he will take care of you!

Show appreciation. Say thank you and show your barber your appreciation for their work. A positive attitude and a smile go a long way in creating an enjoyable barbershop experience.

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You know Michael Phelps, the most successful and decorated Olympic swimmer of all time who won a record 28 medals, 23 of which were gold.

Well today, meet the coach behind Phelps’ legendary success. Bob Bowman is an Olympic swimming coach, the head coach of the Arizona State swim team, and the author of The Golden Rules: 10 Steps to World-Class Excellence in Your Life and Work. Today on the show, Bob shares what he calls “the method,” a system of principles he’s developed over the years to coach his athletes to elite-level success that can also be applied to setting and achieving goals in every area of life. We first talk about how Bob ended up working with Phelps, before turning to some of his golden rules. We discuss developing a “dream big vision” and all-in attitude; the importance of having a daily routine and what his own routine and the routine of his swimmers is like; the need to cultivate a passion outside your main pursuit; and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Article: Craft the Life You Want — Creating a Blueprint for Your Future * AoM Article: Visions Over Goals * AoM Article: Motivation Over Discipline * AoM Article: Get 1% Better Every Day * “The Mundanity of Excellence” by Daniel F. Chambliss * Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmers by Daniel F. Chambliss * The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman * The Power of Now* by Eckhart Tolle

Connect With Bob Bowman* Bob on Twitter * Bob on IG

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #887: The Golden Rules of Success appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

The Golden Rules: Finding World-Class Excellence in Your Life and Work

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

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For the ancient Greeks, eudaimonia was considered the highest human good. While the word doesn’t easily translate into English, it roughly corresponds to a happy, flourishing life — to a life well-lived.

Eudaimonia wasn’t a destination — a nirvana that, once reached, initiated a state of bliss. Happiness wasn’t something you felt, but that you did; it was a dynamic, ongoing activity.

What that activity centered on was the pursuit of arete, or virtue.

We tend to think of “virtue” in an exclusively moral sense, as having to do with qualities like courage, compassion, and continence. But for the Greeks, virtue meant doing anything well. Courage was a virtue, but so was speaking articulately. Playing an instrument masterfully was a virtue. Strength was a virtue. Beauty was a virtue.

Virtue equaled excellence.

Which excellences made up the eudaimonic life was a much-debated subject amongst Hellenistic philosophers. Socrates thought that moral virtue alone was required to achieve eudaimonia. Aristotle, however, believed that while excellence of character was necessary for eudaimonia, other kinds of excellences also played a role in achieving a life well-lived.

For Aristotle, developing all-around arete and becoming a superior, well-rounded man meant maximizing your potential on every possible front. In particular, he believed that living a fully flourishing life — achieving true happiness — required cultivating all 11 of the following excellences:

Excellence in Morals

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Even though Aristotle thought that virtue alone wasn’t sufficient for achieving eudaimonia, he still believed that character was foundational in becoming a man of arete.

Aristotle thought we should anxiously develop the moral virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and generosity, and that we do so by actually doing courageous, temperate, just, and generous deeds. That’s how you become excellent or virtuous for Aristotle: action. You act to become.

Excellence in Judgment

He who [has practical wisdom] is skilled in aiming, in accord with calculation, at what is best for a human being.

The Greeks had a word for good judgment: phronesis.

In Reclaiming Virtue, John Bradshaw definesphronesis as “the ability to do the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason.” Phronesis is practical wisdom.

For Aristotle, this kind of good sense was the master virtue, for it’s the virtue that makes possible all the rest. He believed every virtue can be carried to two extremes: you can practice it too much or too little. Frugality is a virtue; miserliness is a vice. Courage is a virtue; recklessness is a vice. Phronesis is what allows you to strike the golden mean between these errors — to know what to say or do in any situation.

Practical wisdom can be cultivated by observing and reading about other excellent individuals. But it’s primarily developed through action. You make decisions, see how they turn out, and hone your behaviors so you make even wiser and more discerning choices the next time around.

Excellence in Health and Fitness

In a young man, beauty is the possession of a body fit to endure the exertion of running and contests of strength; which means that he is pleasant to look at; therefore, all-around athletes are the most beautiful, being naturally adapted both for contests of strength and for speed also.

For a man in his prime, beauty is fitness for the exertion of warfare, together with a pleasant but, at the same time, formidable appearance.

For an old man, it is to be strong enough for such exertion as necessary and to be free from pain through escaping the ravages of old age.

Unless the virtues of character are embodied in a vessel that is strong, healthy, and fit, there are limitations to how much you can do and experience; there are checks on how much of your personal potential and the potential of life itself you can utilize. Aristotle argued that having a healthy body not only makes us look attractive and reputable (another of his excellences) but also allows us to be more productive, joyful, and adventurous — to fully flourish.

For this reason, Aristotle admonished all men to exercise and watch their diet. He even advocates for becoming a hybrid athlete — someone who is swift and strong.

Excellence in Attractiveness

The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness.

While caring about your attractiveness might seem superficial, Aristotle understood that people judge you by your appearance. Better-looking people tend to get treated better, and being treated better unarguably contributes to one’s happiness and success. Beyond its functional value, though, the Greeks simply considered beauty a virtue — an excellence. Everyone prefers aesthetically-pleasing things, whether that’s a painting or a fellow human being.

While Aristotle admits that a lot of our looks come down to dumb luck, he still thinks there are parts of our appearance over which we all have control. Every man can bathe regularly, keep himself well-groomed, stay in shape, and wear clothes that make him look and feel good.

Aristotle didn’t think a man should be fastidious about his appearance (he’d consider that a vice); rather, he simply advised men to avoid looking shabby — to present themselves in a pleasing and respectable way.

Excellence in Wealth

Wealth as a whole consists in using things rather than in owning them; it is really the activity — that is the use — of property that constitutes wealth.

For an ancient Athenian like Aristotle, developing your aretein wealth meant owning lavish estates, lots of livestock, and slaves. While the specifics of Athenian wealth don’t apply to the modern man, the underlying principle around this tenet of excellence — that wealth is an activity — does. For Aristotle, wealth wasn’t so much about acquiring stuff but the way that one’s resources could contribute to a productive and enjoyable life.

It’s been said that money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy security, experiences, beauty (in the form of one’s house, furnishings, art, etc.), books, a better diet, charitable gifts, more time to exercise, etc. It can allow you to see, do, and become more. And that’s what Aristotelian eudaimonia is all about.

Excellence in Honor

Honor is the token of a man’s being famous for doing Good.

We tend to think of honor in terms of inner integrity these days. But for ancient cultures, honor meant having a worthy reputation amongst your peers. And while we’re apt to be very high on the idea that you shouldn’t care what anyone thinks of you and only maintain a personal scorecard, ancients like Aristotle thought it did matter where you stood relative to others.

While this is another one of those excellences that could be written off as superficial, modern research has confirmed how central status is to a man’s sense of well-being. Aristotle would say that it’s perfectly fine, healthy, in fact, to not only want to do great things, but to want to be known for those things — to pursue a little fame, earned from doing difficult deeds, as a happiness-producing excellence.

Excellence in Organization

Everything ought to have its own proper place and so be ready for use and not require to be searched for.

Aristotle believed in the virtue of maintaining an ordered house. He advocated that individuals follow the Spartans’ example of keeping their homes well-organized. He endorsed the philosophy of having a place for everything and everything in its place.

Tidiness is more beautiful, and thus more excellent, than messiness. And a well-organized life produces the discipline of habit and clarity of mind that facilitates excellence in other activities.

Excellence in Family Life

There is no greater blessing on earth than when husband and wife rule their home in harmony of mind and will.

The home is the epicenter of happiness. If a man is in a happy marriage, this happiness radiates into all other areas of his life; if a man is in an unhappy marriage, achieving happiness more generally is impossible. If a man has joyful relationships with his children, he experiences great joy overall; if his relationships with his children are sour, this sours his life as a whole.

While a lot of Aristotle’s specific advice for what it means to have an excellent family life is outdated, there’s still a lot we can learn from the principles that undergird it.

Aristotle encouraged men to treat their wives honorably. He advised men and women to take Odysseus and Penelope — and their loyal, like-minded, equally-yoked partnership — as their example of an ideal marriage. He also admonished men to be good fathers — to teach and exemplify excellence in both the moral and practical virtues so that their children might follow in their arete-embodying footsteps.

Excellence in Intellect

Life in accordance with intellect is best and pleasantest, since this, more than anything else, constitutes humanity.

Aristotle believed that the ultimate telos of humans was to reason. So it’s unsurprising that he put a premium on a man’s intellectual capacity. He encouraged readers to develop a “strong memory, receptiveness, quickness of intuition, and the like” and to spend time studying the sciences and arts. The excellent man, the philosopher argued, was committed to maintaining sharpness of mind and devoting himself to lifelong learning.

Excellence in Public Speaking

Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly.

Aristotle wrote an entire book about public speaking (Rhetoric), so of course he felt it was an important skill to develop excellence in. Men with the ability to communicate effectively are more influential. What’s more, he believed that if you were speaking truth to power but still failed to influence people because you spoke poorly, you were committing a vice.

Aristotle thought that developing all the other excellences was the best way to develop your excellence in public speaking, because your all-around arete was a significant contributor to your ethos — your character — and ethos is the part of rhetoric that packs the most persuasive punch.

Excellence in Friendship

Without friends, no one would choose to live, though he possessed all the other goods.

Aristotle knew that humans were social animals. Being an excellent human thus required being adept at social skills, and the philosopher put a high premium on having good and noble friends. In fact, he wrote more about friendship than any other moral virtue.

The philosopher thought there were three kinds of friendships: those of utility (people who associate for the sake of some external or material benefit); those of pleasure (companions who share interests and enjoy each other’s company); and those of virtue (friends who admire each other and inspire each other to pursue the Good).

Aristotle thought all three types of friends contribute to a man’s happiness, but that friends of virtue most approached the standard of arete. A man was thus well-served by making such friends and being that kind of friend to others — looking for companions that encourage his excellence and helping others achieve excellence in their own lives.

There are other areas in which Aristotle thought you could achieve excellence, but the 11 described above are the big ones he hits on throughout his work. You can find more of his insights into arete in the book he dedicated to the subject: The Nicomachean Ethics. But you’ll also find his philosophy on eudaimonia in other works of his, like Rhetoric and even his Economics — a book on household management.

The more you seek to be your best in body, mind, and spirit, the more you pursue arete in all you do, the more you’ll achieve the dynamic, active state of eudaimonia. People are ever seeking the equation of happiness, and, for Aristotle at least, it looks like this: happiness = eudaimonia = virtue = excellence.

The post Aristotle’s 11 Excellences for Living a Flourishing Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Several years ago, the American Psychological Association issued a set of guidelines for psychologists working with boys and men. Guideline #1 says: “Psychologists strive to recognize that masculinities are constructed based on social, cultural, and contextual norms.” Guideline #3 says: “Psychologists understand the impact of power, privilege, and sexism on the development of boys and men and on their relationships with others.”

My guest says that these guidelines miss the mark, and are just one indicator of the way in which the world of psychology misunderstands, and consequently underserves, men.

Dr. John Barry is a psychologist, the co-founder of the Male Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, and the co-author of the Perspectives in Male Psychology textbook. Today on the show, John unpacks the issues with thinking that masculinity is purely a social construct and that men’s problems grow out of their power and privilege, and how these issues prevent men from getting the help they need. In the second half of our conversation, we discuss the surprising origin of the idea of toxic masculinity, what really defines masculinity, and what effect internalizing a negative or positive view of masculinity has on men. We end our conversation with what works for men’s mental health and well-being if you don’t want to go to therapy, and what you should look for in a therapist if you do.

Resources Related to the Podcast The Centre for Male Psychology * Introduction to Male Psychology and Mental Health course * AoM series on the origins, nature, and imperatives of manhood * Manhood in the Making by David Gilmore * Iron John* by Robert Bly * AoM Podcast #761: How Testosterone Makes Men, Men * Rational emotive behavior therapy * Men’s sheds associations in Australia and the US

Connect With John Barry* John‘s website * John on Twitter

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Read the TranscriptThe post Podcast #886: What the World of Psychology Gets Wrong About Men appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity

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Kelly Starrett, a doctor of physical therapy, has trained professional athletes, Olympians, and military special operators, helping them unlock peak performance. But as he approached his fifties, he started to see cracks appearing in the health of the folks around him. What had worked for his peers in their 20s and 30s, wasn’t working anymore; they were gaining weight, having surgeries, and just didn’t feel good.

So he and his wife and fellow trainer, Juliet, decided to write a book — Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully — that took all that they’ve learned from training elite performers and distilled it into the foundational practices that everyone, at every age, can use to develop lasting mobility, durability, and all-around health. Today on the show, Kelly unpacks some of those essential physical habits, sharing the “vital signs” — tests that will help you assess how you’re doing in that area — as well as daily practices that will help you strengthen and improve that capacity.

Resources Related to the Podcast Kelly’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast — Episode #213: Undoing the Damage of Chronic Sitting * AoM article on the Sitting-Rising Test * AoM Article: 7 Simple Exercises That Undo the Damage of Sitting (including the Couch Stretch) * AoM article on foam rolling * AoM Article: The Benefits of Hanging for Strength and Mobility * AoM Article: 12 Balance Exercises You Can Do on a 2×4 * AoM Podcast #638: How Changing Your Breathing Can Change Your Life * AoM Podcast #678: Physical Benchmarks Every Man Should Meet, At Every Age * Muscles and Meridians: The Manipulation of Shape* by Phillip Beach * Video of Kelly demonstrating the Couch Stretch * Video of Kelly demonstrating the squat test * Video of 90/90 sit/stretch * Video of Chris Hinshaw demonstrating the Old Man Balance Test * Get yourself a pull-up bar * The SlackBlock * Kelly’s article on fixing shoulder pain, including a video on the Shoulder Spin-Up

Connect With Kelly Starrett The Ready State website, including the Built to Move* book page * The Ready State on IG * Kelly on Twitter

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the TranscriptThe post Podcast #885: The Essential Habits for Becoming an Agile, Vital, and Durable Human Being appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Muscles and Meridians: The Manipulation of Shape

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If you’ve ever waited, and perhaps are now currently waiting, to hear whether or not you’ve tested positive for a disease, passed medical boards, or got the job you interviewed for, you know that this period of uncertainty can be filled with tension and anxiety.

My guest today — Kate Sweeny, a professor of psychology — has studied the dynamics of this human experience and how we can best deal with it. We first discuss why the stress of waiting for uncertain news feels particularly uncomfortable and what types of people are more likely to worry while waiting. Kate then shares tactics that can help alleviate some of the worry of waiting, including leaning into being a pessimist as you approach the moment of truth and finding flow, even by doing something like playing Tetris. She also explains at what point the social support for people who are waiting for news tends to wane, so you can better support those around you who are currently stuck in this state of mind-burdening limbo.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: 5 Tools for Thriving in Uncertainty * AoM Article: The Best Books to Read in Uncertain Times * AoM Podcast #287: The New Frontier of Flow * AoM Article: The One Question NOT to Ask for Healthy Introspection (And What to Ask Instead) * AoM Article: The Right and Wrong Way to Journal

Connect with Kate Sweeny* Kate’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

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Read the TranscriptThe post Podcast #884: How to Deal With the Worry of Waiting appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Of all the ninjas skills, being able to walk silently through the night is arguably the most useful for the modern man. Even if you don’t need to call upon it to stealthily assassinate your archenemy, it will allow to check on your sleeping children without waking them or steal cookies from a coworker.

Inspired by Secrets of the Ninja by Ashida Kim. I stumbled upon this book back when I was in middle school. Definitely a fun read.

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We tend to think of immaturity and maturity as dichotomous, uniform states. Once you leave behind the former and enter the latter, you’re mature through and through.

Yet, in reality, maturation follows a patchwork pattern of progress.

Even when you’re a generally got-it-together grown-up, some parts of yourself will exhibit all the sagacity of an octogenarian, while others better resemble a six-year-old than a thirty-something.

Maybe you approach your exercise routine with reliable discipline, but budget your money with spendthrift abandon.

Maybe you react to receiving criticism with stoic equilibrium, but respond to having your birthday forgotten with perturbed petulance.

Maybe you can give a presentation at work with perfect confidence, but can’t approach an attractive woman without sweat-inducing fear.

Maybe you lead with a steady hand in times of great crisis, but lose your cool in the face of everyday setbacks.

Because all adults possess immature weaknesses, there are ways in which we all remain as children.

Because all adults possess mature strengths, there are ways in which we all can serve as mentors to that which is childlike in others.

As the midcentury writers Harry and Bonaro Overstreet put it, “All through life we have to take turns, as it were, being ‘parents’ to one another — because we all take turns at being children.”

When we’re interacting with a spouse, a friend, or even a stranger, we’ll occasionally bump against the parts of their make-up that feel more elementary in age. At such times, we should extend to them what the Overstreets describe as parental tenderness — “a warm acceptance of what is incomplete but capable of growth.” Offer folks a patient arm around the shoulder, a guiding example, an encouraging word of advice.

And, on the days we’re feeling eight instead of forty, they’ll hopefully do the same for us.

The post Sunday Firesides: Parent the Immature in Others appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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A surprising number of folks reach adulthood without ever learning that there’s more than one kind of plunger. And this knowledge is handy because you’ll want to choose the right plunger for a particular job.

Plungers work by creating a seal on clogged drains. When you push the plunger down, pressure moves downward on the adjoining pipe; when you pull the plunger up, a vacuum action moves the pressure back towards you. This oscillating pressure dislodges the clog.

To get an effective suctioning seal on a drain, a plunger has to be the right shape. And that’s where the different kinds of plungers come in. There are three main varieties:

Cup Plunger. Use in bathtubs, showers, and sinks. This plunger is designed to work on flat surfaces; it won’t work well for a toilet clog, because it won’t form a good seal in the rounded surface of a toilet bowl.

Flange Plunger. Use on toilets. This plunger has another cup that extends from the outer bell-shaped cup. Called a flange, this “nose” is narrower than the cup of a cup plunger and will create a stronger seal in your toilet drain. If you fold the flange inside the cup, this plunger can also be used on a sink or tub drain. But you’ll want to disinfect it before moving from toilet use to sink use.

Accordion Plunger. Use on toilets. When you use an accordion plunger, it sucks up water into the bellows to create a vacuum. Every time you plunge down, you’re getting a bunch of water pressure to help dislodge your clog. The nose on the accordion plunger is even narrower than that on a flange plunger, allowing it to fit inside the toilet drain (as opposed to being more or less squished on top of it), potentially increasing its suction power; however, the accordion plunger’s plastic construction can make getting a good seal trickier than with a flange plunger.

You don’t need all three of these plungers, just a cup plunger + a flange or accordion plunger (depending on your preference). You can, in fact, get by with just having a flange or accordion plunger, since these versatile plungers can do double duty for both sink and toilet.

Should you find yourself in a situation where you don’t have a plunger at all, use one of these six plunger-less methods of unclogging a toilet to clear the blockage.

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Whether you see some deer, have a fox cross your path, or spot a moose, there’s something disproportionately delightful about encountering wildlife. Even seeing something pedestrian like a possum feels really fun.

If you’d like to have more of these kinds of encounters, and a deeper experience with nature as a result, my guest has some tips for making them happen more often. His name is Dave Hall, and he’s an outdoor educator and guide, as well as the author of The Naturalist’s Companion: A Field Guide to Observing and Understanding Wildlife. Today on the show, Dave and I first talk about the safety and ethical considerations around observing wild animals. We then discuss the best places to spot wildlife (and how it could be in your own backyard), whether there’s a best time of day to encounter animals, and the approach to take so that the animals don’t know you’re there, or if they do, feel comfortable with your presence. Dave shares the gaze to adopt to spy more animals and the signs that will help you find them. We end our conversation with how to practice what Dave calls “spontaneous acceptance,” which may allow you to chill with a beaver.

Resources Related to the Podcast Field guides and nature-related books that Dave recommends: + Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking by Tom Brown Jr. + Peterson Field Guides + Timber Press Field Guides + Tracking and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign by Paul Rezendes + What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young + Touching the Wild by Joe Hutto + Beaversprite: My Years Building an Animal Sanctuary* by Dorothy Richards * Dave’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #157 — Primitive Pursuits & Winter Survival * AoM Article: A Primer on Identifying Animal Footprints * AoM Podcast #739: Rewild Your Life * AoM Podcast #194: The Field Notes of Theodore Roosevelt

Connect With Dave Hall* Dave’s website

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Read the TranscriptThe post Podcast #883: The Naturalist’s Art of Animal Encounters appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World

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Back in January, we wrote an article explaining why it might be better to wait to make your New Year’s resolutions until around the spring equinox — when the daylight starts outpacing the darkness.

Well, we’ve arrived at that time, and if you’ve been feeling the spring sap running through you, you might consider getting yourself a planner to convert that emerging energy into action.

While I’m a fan of using digital planning tools like Todoist and Fantastical, I know many people prefer analog planners. There’s something about the tactile nature of putting pen to paper that helps turn your abstract intentions into material reality. Every now and then, I’ll switch to analog planners to get that benefit.

I’ve had favorite paper planners that I’ve turned to over the years, but I thought it would be interesting to see what other options are out there.

The market is saturated with different types of analog planners, and the number of choices can feel overwhelming. The one you ultimately pick depends on what you’re hoping to do with it. Some paper planners just let you schedule your day. Some seek to be a general self-improvement tool and offer guidance on creating goals and tracking habits. Others are open-ended and leave it up to you as to how to track your day and life.

I recently ordered a dozen planners to give them a test drive. Below I share the three I liked the most and highlight their features to help you home in on the right planner for you.

Best No-Frills Planner: AT-A-Glance Weekly PlannerMy go-to method of planning is to “time block” my week out each Sunday. This involves mapping out my days and allocating a set amount of time to each task scheduled for the week ahead.

Despite sorting through a load of new planners, none of them turned out to be superior for the time-blocking task than one I’ve used on and off for years: the At-A-Glance Weekly Planner.

The At-A-Glance Weekly Planner breaks down each day into 15-minute increments, so you can plan what you’ll be doing at any given time from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

That’s all this planner offers or “does,” so if you’re looking for something simple and straightforward for scheduling your life, this is it.

The one downside to this planner is that it’s set to a calendar year. So when you buy one, you have to buy the planner for the entirety of 2023. Since we’re almost in April, you’ll have missed out on three months of use.

Best Self-Improvement Planner: Roterunner Purpose PlannerIf you’re looking for a paper planner that’s an all-encompassing self-improvement tool, look no further than the Roterunner Purpose Planner. It’s really impressive what the designers thought to include in this bad boy. Here are the highlights:

Section to work out your roles and goals in life. Prompts ask you to articulate your life roles and your goals for those roles. You’re then asked to write down exactly what you’re going to do on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis to fulfill those roles and goals.
Section to plan out the year. Capture key dates for the year like birthdays, anniversaries, significant work deadlines, and vacations. You can then transfer these dates as you plan out your months and weeks.
Monthly calendar with lists to set monthly goals and priority actions. Make sure the Big Rocks get done with lists for monthly work, health, social, and self-improvement goals.
Weekly agenda. The weekly agenda will allow you to schedule out tasks for each day. But the daily schedule only runs from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and only delineates one-hour blocks, so it’s not ideal for the task of time blocking.
Prompts for end-of-month reflections. At the end of each month, the planner has you write in reflections on goals achieved, memories created, and things you could do better. A great way to review your work that can also become a journal that you and your posterity will enjoy perusing decades from now.
Cool trackers. The planner includes habit, sleep, and gratitude trackers. There are also blocks to write your weekly priority actions for various facets of your life, including work, home, and passion projects. And there’s space to create a “Not-to-Do List” to help you remember to practice “via negativa” in your life.
Plenty of blank pages for notes. Each month’s section includes blank dot-grid pages for note-taking and journaling.

If you’re looking for a planner that will help facilitate your overall self-improvement, then the Roterunner Purpose Planner is the one for you. Now, it is the kind of planner where just looking at it, and all its trackers and prompts, makes you feel really excited that it’s truly going to change your life . . . but then you don’t actually use it for more than a few days. (I know I like the idea of this kind of planner, but am not the kind of person who will ultimately keep up with all that stuff in the long-term!) But, if you’re a highly motivated individual, then this planner can definitely help guide your personal progress.

Best Free-Form Planner: Hobonichi Techo CousinIf you’re looking for a paper planner that gives you more freedom in how to use it, the Hobonichi Techo Planner is worth a look. It’s a daily planner that’s open-ended by design; it’s akin to a bullet journal with a bit more structure, so you don’t have to create the calendar pieces by hand.

Hobonichi’s Japanese-made planners come in various styles/sizes and share similar features. The Techo Planner Book has the most appealing size and feel, but I prefer the larger Cousin Book since it offers monthly, weekly, and daily calendars. (The ”Original” is between the sizes of those two and also includes monthly/weekly/daily calendars but only comes in a Japanese-language version).

Hobonichi’s planners consist of blank graph-paper pages that can be used in a variety of ways; the grid is an open canvas on which you can create custom schedules, tracker boxes, charts, and lists; make journal entries; or draw, doodle, and sketch.

What sets these planners apart from others (and justifies their premium price) is an attention to detail that makes them highly enjoyable to use. The pages are thin (allowing for a compact design) but feel great to the touch; the months are color-coded, which makes it easy to find your place; each day has its own page and includes a mini-calendar of the month in the corner, so you can always see where you are in the larger frame of time; and the binding allows the book to lie flat without your having to hold it open (you’ll really appreciate this feature!). At the bottom of each page is an inspiring quote from Japanese writers, artists, and scientists.

Go with the Hobonichi Techo Cousin if you want more freedom to design your planner and like bullet journaling. If you like more preset structure, stick with the Purpose Planner or At-A-Glance.

The post The 3 Best Planners for Making More of Your Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Hobonichi Techo Planner Book [English/A6/January 2023 Start/Monday Start]

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We live in a chatter-filled world. People will talk your ear off when you see them in person and everyone is constantly sharing their thoughts online. But my guest would say that all this chatter may be hurting us more than we know, and it would be better to close our pieholes and sit on our typing fingers a lot more often than we do.

His name is Dan Lyons, and he’s the author of STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World. Today on the show, Dan unpacks how being quiet and speaking with greater intention can improve your life. We discuss why some people tend to overtalk more than others and the six types of overtalkers out there, from the blurter to the most extreme case, the talkaholic, for whom overtalking is practically an addiction. We then discuss not getting sucked into spouting off online, avoiding conversational narcissism, the argument for spending less time working on your personal brand and more time doing quality work, how silence is power, how the best way to deal with issues in a marriage may be by not talking about them, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: The Virtuous Life — Silence * AoM Article: The Spiritual Disciplines — Silence * AoM Article: The Quiet Man’s Power * AoM Podcast #389: What It Means to Be a Quiet Professional * AoM Article: How to Avoid Conversational Narcissism * AoM Article: Why the Secret of a Happy, Successful Marriage Is Treating It Like a Bank Account * AoM series on becoming a better listener * Jonathan Haidt on how social media is causing a mental illness epidemic in teenage girls * “Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, ‘It’s Unreliable'” * International Listening Association

Connect With Dan Lyons* Dan’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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When I lived in Tijuana, Mexico, fending off roñosos — mangy stray dogs — was a daily battle. Most of the time they were all bark and no bite. Just remaining calm, avoiding eye contact, and continuing on my way was all I needed to do. If they started charging, I pretended to pick up a rock from the ground and feigned throwing it at them. That usually spooked them enough to leave me alone. If that didn’t work, actual rocks were used. There was one time when a dog wasn’t deterred by either the pretend or real variety, and lunged to bite me. I used a backpack as a shield and employed a flurry of kicks to keep the aggressive canine at bay. It finally relented, and I went on my way unscathed.

If you ever encounter a hostile pooch that’s out for blood, here’s how to walk away with jugular intact.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

The post Skill of the Week: Survive a Dog Attack appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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You dropped your dream of becoming a writer and went to medical school so you wouldn’t disappoint your parents.

You stayed in your first relationship two years too long because breaking up would have really hurt your girlfriend’s feelings.

You married your wife, despite getting frigidly cold feet, because the invitations had already been sent, and it felt far too awkward and fraught to call the wedding off.

You never pushed back on the proposals you knew were doomed to fail at work because you didn’t want to rock the boat.

You silently watched your friend self-destruct because it wasn’t your place to say something.

You didn’t go to bat for your kid about how he was being treated at school to avoid causing a stir.

You never voiced your ideas for changes to make at church because that isn’t how things are done.

You never speak your mind anywhere, about anything, to sidestep the potential blowback.

When people think of you (which isn’t especially often), they’ll describe you as pleasant, nice, polite.

But is that all they could say about you?

Niceness is admirable when it serves as the gilding on a life in which stands were made, chances were taken, influence was magnified, and passions were pursued; niceness is a tragedy when it constitutes your sole legacy.

How terrible it would be, at the end of your days, to realize that at the heart of all of your decisions wasn’t belief, conviction, or desire, but a craving for safety, a desperation for approval, and a deep, deep-seated fear of not being liked.

How sad it would be, as you’re laid in your final resting place, if the only epitaph that could be engraven on your tombstone would read:

Here lies _________.

He never offended anyone.

The post Sunday Firesides: The Saddest Epitaph appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Prohibition Worked Better Than You Think. There are few more universally accepted narratives than the idea that the 20th century’s experiment with Prohibition was a failure — that banning alcohol didn’t reduce alcohol consumption and just led to a black market which increased crime. In any discussion of a vice being banned, you’ll hear someone say, “Well, they tried that with Prohibition, and we all know how that turned out!” I even heard a TikTok influencer say this in regards to a proposed ban on the social media app. As someone who’s always a little skeptical of pat narratives, I found myself wondering the other day, “Is this story true?” and started checking out sources on the subject. It turns out, the narrative around Prohibition isn’t entirely true; as one scientific paper on the subject put it, “Probably few gaps between scholarly knowledge and popular conventional wisdom are as wide as the one regarding National Prohibition.” This Vox article discusses how Prohibition did lower alcohol consumption and may not have increased crime; it offers a more nuanced picture of a subject “everyone knows” for those who enjoy contrarian takes and getting more history knowledge.

“Fotografia” by Juanes and Nelly Furtado. A genre of music that I enjoy is rock en Español — Spanish rock music. I discovered the genre back in the early 2000s, so the bands I enjoy come from that era. One artist that gets a lot of playing time is Columbian solo artist Juanes. I love the duet he did with Nelly Furtado on a song called “Fotografia.” Super catchy tune about staying connected to your long-distance love through photographs. Check out the entire album Un Día Normal. All the songs on it are good.

Zevia Ginger Root Beer. Zevia’s Ginger Root Beer has a been a big hit in our house lately. Zero calories and no artificial sweeteners thanks to stevia. I’ve tried the other flavors Zevia has to offer, which are good, but I keep coming back to Ginger Root Beer.

John Wayne: The Life and Legend. If you’re a John Wayne fan, you’ll enjoy this book. It was interesting to see how Marion Morrison became the legend John Wayne. He had a pretty average middle-class suburban childhood. He played football, worked at a soda shop, and did well in school. But through chance, intention, and hard work, he became a movie star and cowboy archetype.

Quote of the Week

Applause is the spur of noble minds; the end and aim of weak ones.

—Charles Caleb Colton

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For centuries, when someone referred to “dinner,” they meant a meal, the largest of the day, which was eaten around noon. A lighter “supper” was then consumed in the evening.

Starting in the 18th century and accelerating in the 19th and 20th, the hour at which dinner was eaten moved later and later in the day. This shift occurred for various reasons: later dinners became fashionable; electric lights facilitated dining after dark; and with more men working away from home and not returning until after 5 p.m., an evening dinner allowed the entire family to reconvene for a meal together.

Today, dinner remains the largest meal of the day but is typically eaten around 6:00-7:00 p.m. in America, and often even later in Europe.

While these large evening meals may be convenient in our modern, industrialized societies, emerging research has shown that this schedule doesn’t align very well with our innate human biology.

As AoM podcast guest Steve Hendricks shared in our episode about fasting:

our circadian rhythms have hardwired us to process food most efficiently in the morning and early afternoon, and we get worse and worse at it as the day goes on. By nighttime, we’re frankly pretty terrible at processing nutrients. So when we eat later in the day or at night, nutrients linger in places where they shouldn’t, and our overnight repairs become interrupted. And there seems to be just nothing we can do to change this circadian rhythm that governs all of these processes.

Because the efficiency of our metabolism peaks in the morning and then declines throughout the day, people who eat the bulk of their calories early on improve their blood sugar and insulin sensitivity. They’re also less hungry and burn more fat than people who eat their biggest meals later in the day, and this is true even when people are eating the same amount of calories overall and doing the same amount of physical activity; meal timing alone can make a significant difference in overall metabolic health.

It turns out there’s much wisdom in the old saying: “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

While it may be beneficial to eat a bigger breakfast/lunch and keep one’s dinner small (or non-existent — according to Hendricks’ research, the ideal daily eating window is something like 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.), most people won’t find this idea very appetizing for reasons both practical and psychological. There is something very satisfying about sitting down with loved ones for a big meal after the stress of the day is through.

If you’re understandably not willing to mix up the timing and “weight” of your meals, there is something you can do to blunt the negative effect of eating the bulk of your calories late in the day: an after-dinner walk.

The Digestive Power of an After-Dinner WalkWhenever we eat, glucose hits our blood, and insulin rises to shuttle it into our cells. In the morning hours, our cells are more insulin sensitive, so that when insulin metaphorically knocks on their doors, the cells are more receptive to opening up and letting glucose in.

As the morning wears into evening, our cells become less insulin sensitive, meaning they start ignoring insulin’s “knocks,” leaving glucose in our blood.

What’s more, as the day progresses, our pancreas starts getting sluggish and produces less insulin, meaning our cells will become less responsive to sugar spikes because the knocks from insulin are less loud.

This combo — less insulin sensitivity + less insulin — means that our blood sugar tends to be higher after meals eaten later in the day. This effect is, of course, only compounded when we eat a large meal later in the day. Thus, big dinners are not optimal for our metabolic health.

Fortunately, our body has another powerful way to clear glucose from our blood that doesn’t rely on insulin: movement.

Muscle is the primary tissue in our body, and it also happens to be one of the main consumers of glucose. In fact, as Dr. Benjamin Bikman noted in our podcast about metabolic health, “Roughly 80% of the glucose that gets cleared from our blood goes into the muscle.”

He goes on to explain: “the moment the muscle starts moving — contracting and relaxing — it opens [its] glucose doors even though insulin isn’t there knocking on them. . . . And so if we just get up and start moving . . . [our muscles] begin greedily consuming all of that glucose.”

Bikman imagines your muscles as having tons of hungry little mouths that open up and gobble your glucose as you get going, and I find this metaphor really motivating!

By getting your muscles to soak up glucose in the absence of insulin, an after-dinner walk blunts blood sugar’s rise and allows it to come down quicker.

In a study done on people with diabetes, participants who were asked to walk for 10 minutes after each main meal improved their blood sugar curve more than those who were told to walk for 30 consecutive minutes at a random time, and this “improvement was particularly striking after the evening meal.”

That an after-dinner walk also effectively blunts glucose for people without diabetes is something to which I can personally attest. I used a continuous glucose monitor a few months ago (while I don’t have diabetes, I was interested in tracking my blood sugar), and it was interesting to see the effect post-dinner movement had on my glucose. My blood sugar would usually start rising around 45 minutes after eating. If I did nothing, it would continue to rise and take two hours to return to normal. But if I took a walk after dinner, my glucose levels wouldn’t rise as high, and they’d get back to normal in just 45 minutes — less than half the typical time.

Walking is also an aid to digestion in other ways. Because the intestinal system slows down when you sleep, a big evening meal can sit heavy in your stomach, disrupting your sleep. Research shows that a post-dinner walk stimulates the stomach and intestines, causing food to pass through them more quickly and giving your digestion a head start before you hit the hay. Walking after a meal can also diminish gas, heartburn, and bloating.

How to Take an Effective Post-Meal StrollLength/intensity. The faster and longer you walk, the more of movement’s post-meal glucose-sucking benefit you’ll get. (Though walking too fast might upset your full stomach a bit, so don’t ramp the intensity up too high.) But while a 10-minute walk is a good minimum to aim for, a recent meta-analysis showed that taking even a two to five minute walk after eating significantly moderated blood sugar. Any movement helps!

Timing. When I wore a continuous glucose monitor, I noticed that when I took my walk immediately after dinner, the walk didn’t blunt the spike in my blood sugar; instead, it just postponed the spike. When the delayed spike occurred, it had the same magnitude as if I hadn’t taken a walk.

A research study backs my personal results. It seems like if you want to reduce blood glucose, you should wait 30-45 minutes after eating to begin your activity. Happily, this gives you ample time to engage in post-dinner conversation before you get up from the table and take your stroll.

An after-dinner walk won’t reverse the effect of eating a big meal at a time that runs contrary to your metabolism’s optimal clock. But it will help a little. Hey, it beats eating dinner like a pauper!

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If you’ve had some contact with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, there’s a good chance you found it abstract, heady, and hard to understand. But my guest would say that it’s full of rich, usable insights on how to become better people, and, fortunately for us, she’s got a true knack for making Kant’s wisdom really accessible.

Karen Stohr is a professor of philosophy and the author of Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life. Today on the show, she brings Kant’s ethical system and categorical imperative down to earth and shares how it can be applied to our everyday lives. We discuss Kant’s belief in our great moral potential and duty to improve ourselves, and how his insights can help us make right choices. Karen explains Kant’s ideas on the difference between negative and positive freedom, the importance of treating people as ends and not just means, the tension between love and respect, why ingratitude could be considered a “satanic vice,” how practicing manners can make us better people, and more.

You Kant miss this episode. Sorry, I had to do that.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Article: Freedom From…Freedom To * AoM Article: Practical Wisdom — The Master Virtue * AoM Article: Via Negativa — Adding to Your Life By Subtracting * AoM Podcast #292: The Road to Character * AoM Podcast #421: Why You Need a Philosophical Survival Kit * AoM Podcast #535: The Problem of Self-Help in a Liquid Age * Sunday Firesides: Embracing the Coin of Character * Sunday Firesides: Manners Develop Self-Control (And May Preserve Democracy) * AoM Article: Are You a Contemptible Person? * MLK’s “Loving Your Enemies” sermon * On Manners* by Karen Stohr * Oxford’s Guides to the Good Life series of books

Connect with Karen Stohr* Karen’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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Like many of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson was a dad. And like a lot of dads, he often took the opportunity to dispense unsolicited dad advice to his children. Over the years, he developed a list of ten life rules he would share with his children, grandchildren, and friends looking for guidance on parenting their kids. Many of his maxims came from his readings of classical philosophers like the Stoics.

In an 1825 letter to John Spear Smith, Jefferson laid out his refined list of adages that he called his “Decalogue of Canons for observation in practical life.” The list made it out to the public and was republished in newspapers and magazines throughout the country in the 19th century.

While the advice is nearly 200 years old, it’s still applicable today. Below we share Jefferson’s ten rules of conduct along with links to further AoM resources to better help you live them.

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.Procrastination can be a significant stumbling block to achieving success in life. If you’re a student and put off studying until the last minute, you might not do as well on a test. If you wait to start saving for retirement until you’re in your 40s, you lose out on the power of compound interest.

Procrastination might seem difficult to overcome, but with some knowledge as to why we procrastinate, we can take proactive measures to help reduce its influence in our lives.

Check out these AoM resources on how to beat procrastination:

Podcast #444: How to Use the Procrastination Equation to Start Getting Things Done
Podcast #728: Improve Your Productivity With the Power of Deadlines
Stop Procrastinating Today With Behavioral Science
Practice Productive Procrastination
Do It Now Video
Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.While it’s true that no man is an island, there’s wisdom in learning how to cultivate a healthy amount of self-reliance in our lives. In many cases, practicing self-reliance is simply more efficient; instead of telling someone else what you need done, waiting around for them to get going on it, and then correcting the subpar way they decided to complete the task, you can take care of it yourself in the same amount of time. And maybe get some learning, growth, and/or satisfaction in the process.

While Jefferson seems to have been referring to a practical type of self-reliance with this rule, it’s also worth developing a self-reliant spirit — the ability to trust yourself and think and act independently of the opinions of others.

Check out these AoM resources on developing your self-reliance:

Developing a Self-Reliant Mentality
A Man’s Guide to Self-Reliance
Podcast #384: What It Really Means to Be Self-Reliant
31 Journaling Prompts for Building Greater Self-Reliance
AoM Skills Archives
Never spend your money before you have it.Not all debt is bad (it can make homeownership and college possible), but too much of the wrong sort can be enslaving. As J. Reuben Clark observed:

Interest [on debt] never sleeps nor sickens nor dies; it never goes to the hospital; it works on Sundays and holidays; it never takes a vacation; it never visits nor travels; it takes no pleasure; it is never laid off work nor discharged from employment; it never works on reduced hours. … Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you.

The more you reduce your debt, the more your peace of mind, security, and freedom to pursue opportunities will grow.

Check out these AoM resources on avoiding and paying down debt:

How to Create a Budget
Start a Debt Reduction Plan
Podcast #363: Budgeting Doesn’t Have to Suck
Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.Often, cheap things can seem like a great deal. But if we buy something just because it’s discounted or less expensive than the alternatives, we may have to pay a premium in the long run. It might be that we don’t really need the thing, so it ends up as bandwidth-burdening clutter, or it might be that the item is such poor quality that it needs to be replaced or expensively fixed, which robs you of both money and time.

There are some things worth paying top dollar for; most other things aren’t worth buying at all.

Check out these AoM resources on keeping things simple:

The Spiritual Disciplines: Simplicity
Modern Maturity: Create More, Consume Less
Minimalism Begets Manliness
Podcast #699: The No-Nonsense Guide to Simplifying Every Aspect of Your Life
Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.Dante thought pride was the most damnable of the deadly sins. Other religious and spiritual thinkers felt similarly. St. Augustine and C.S. Lewis, for example, taught that pride was the root of all other sins and moral failures.

Pride elevates your sense of superiority so that you arrive at the irrational belief that the world revolves around you. And it prevents you from seeing when you need to make changes in your life (you don’t need to change when you already think you’re awesome!). Neglecting to curb your vices and cultivate your virtues leaves the garden of your character fallow and weed-ridden.

The antidote to pride is humility. Humility doesn’t mean you have to be a doormat and completely without self-regard. Instead, humility is the recognition that you aren’t the center of the universe and that even if you’ve already achieved considerable success, you still have plenty of room for learning and growth.

Check out these AoM resources on pride and humility:

The Virtuous Life: Humility
How to Fight Entitlement and Develop Gratitude in Your Kids
Manvotional: False Pride
Podcast #212: Ego Is the Enemy
We never repent of having eaten too little.Our appetites drive us toward doing the things we need to do to survive, thrive, and reproduce — to eat, rest, copulate, seek novelty, gain status, etc. They lend life phenomenal charge and pleasure.

But our appetites can also lead us astray. We can easily fall into traps of inactivity and excess. We have to remember that our desires must be balanced, monitored, and managed. As Plato argued in his allegory of the chariot, our appetites can be our ally rather than our enemy if they’re properly harnessed.

It’s far more common to regret overindulging than under-indulging; in the latter case, while you leave a bit of pleasure on the table, you are compensated with the self-respect that comes with self-mastery.

Check out these AoM resources on practicing personal discipline:

Don’t Take Your Marching Orders From Your Belly
The Spiritual Disciplines: Fasting
Podcast #488: Fasting as a Spiritual Discipline
Podcast #842: What Happened to the Idea of Self-Control?
The Kingship of Self-Control
Podcast #531: How to Best Harness Your Willpower
How to Strengthen Your Willpower and 20 Ways to Conserve It
Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.Some people have a tendency to go through life acting as if they’re constantly put upon. “I have to go to work.” “I have to volunteer for the potluck.” “I have to call my parents.”

Because they do these things out of a sense of foisted-upon obligation, they act resentfully and with a heavy dose of annoyance.

You don’t have to do anything. If you decide to do something, do so out of a sense of inner-directed volition. It will make the task much more pleasant for both yourself and others, and remind you that you’re an autonomous being. Be warned: being able to carry out everything you do willingly and without resentment requires the ability to say no to the things you don’t want to do. This can be scary, especially for chronic people-pleasers, but the “no muscle” gets stronger the more you exercise it.

Check out these AoM resources on getting things done with agency and autonomy:

Don’t Should All Over Yourself
Quit Being a Pushover: How to Be Assertive
The 7 Habits: Be Proactive, Not Reactive
How to Firmly Say No Without Coming Off Like a Jerk
Podcast #407: How to Stop Being a Nice Guy
Sunday Firesides: You Are Not Responsible for Other People’s Feelings
The Autonomous Man in an Other-Directed World
How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!It’s sensible to consider what may come to pass in the future to prepare for the exigencies ahead. But when we worry about things that won’t necessarily happen, which are outside our control, we experience needless anxiety, potentially doubling our pain; we not only experience emotional upset when a misfortune arrives in our lives, but in anticipating the arrival of that misfortune.

Thankfully, the reverse is also true: we can potentially halve life’s pain by only worrying about the things that actually happen and not those that only may occur.

Check out these AoM resources on managing anxiety and worry:

Building Your Resiliency: Part VI – Quit Catastrophizing
Podcast #782: Anxiety Is a Habit — Here’s How to Break It
Podcast #316: An Introduction to Stoicism
The Best Books to Read in Uncertain Times
The 11 Cognitive Distortions That Are Making You a Miserable SOB
Take things always by their smooth handle.Here’s another Stoic-inspired life rule from Jefferson. This saying comes from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who understood that there is an easier and a harder way to do just about anything.

Some people tend to go through life in “hard mode.” They think that if something isn’t difficult, they’re not doing it correctly. But while many good things are hard, the fact that something is hard doesn’t necessarily make it good.

Instead of assuming that your friction-filled course is the right one, ask yourself the question posed by author Greg McKeown: “What if this could be easy?”

Every prickly person or troublesome problem has a smooth(er) handle. Find it and let it be your leverage point.

Check out these AoM resources on taking things by the smooth handle:

Podcast #716: How to Make Your Life More Effortless
Motivation Over Discipline
When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.When you look back on the moments you regret most in your life, a fair number of them likely involved you being angry. And if these cringe-inducing, life- and relationship-damaging moments happen more often than you’d like, Jefferson’s advice to count to 10 when you’re angry or 100 if you’re very angry can be a tool to prevent your temper from getting the better of you.

The reason this advice works is that anger is a “hot” emotion. It comes on fast and strong but goes away just as quickly. If you can insert a pause in between a stimulus to anger and your reaction, you can prevent many a regrettable and destructive outburst.

Check out these AoM resources on managing anger:

Podcast #489: How to Get a Handle on Your Anger
Podcast #805: How to Get Your Anger Under Control
From Overwhelmed to Empowered: How Labeling Your Emotions Can Help You Take Control
The Virtuous Life — Tranquility

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You get really excited about an idea to start an exercise program, or become a better partner, or get organized. And then you do . . . nothing. Absolutely nothing.

It’s said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Even if they don’t send you straight to Hades, good intentions, that go unfulfilled, can lead to real suffering. When you fail to act on your perennial plans for progress, you end up feeling frustrated, demoralized, and stuck.

My guest is a clinical psychologist who has spent his career obsessed with how to tackle this stubborn issue of human existence. His name is Steve Levinson, and he’s the co-author of Following Through: A Revolutionary New Model for Finishing Whatever You Start. Steve first explains the unhelpful ideas we have about why we don’t follow through and that its real cause comes down to a tension between two different systems within us. He then shares the ah-ha moment he had as to how to reconcile these systems in order to consistently follow through on your intentions and offers strategies on how to put his follow-through method into practice. We end our conversation with the idea that the greatest strategy for increasing your follow-through is treating your intentions with a seriousness that borders on the sacred.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: Stop Procrastinating Today With Behavioral Science * AoM Podcast #444: How to Use the Procrastination Equation to Start Getting Things Done * AoM Article: What Gandhi and a 19th-Century Prussian Prince Can Teach You About Making Unbreakable Resolutions * Sunday Firesides: Lash Yourself to the Mast * AoM Article: The Power of Temptation Bundling * Sunday Firesides: Do You Take This Habit . . . ?

Connect With Steve Levinson* Following Through website * Steve on LinkedIn

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Download this episode.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #880: Finally Follow Through appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Following Through: A Revolutionary New Model for Finishing Whatever You Start

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Few pastimes are as satisfying as fishing — it’s a great activity to do with your kids, makes for an excellent microadventure, and harkens to our manly imperative to be providers. What makes it even more satisfying is being able to fillet and cook your catch for a real water-to-table experience.

This illustrated guide is a useful starting point that will be accurate for most fish; some varieties have unique methods, but in those instances you’ll likely have someone with more expertise with you. Get out there and bring some dinner home!

Hat tip to chef Matt Moore for consulting on this piece.

Like this illustrated guide? Buy the poster!

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There are many reasons to consider eliminating, or at least reducing, one’s consumption of the news.

It’s sensationalized. It’s distracting. It offers a distorted, overly negative-focused picture of reality. It serves as pure entertainment versus opinion-changing information on a ratio of 500 to 1.

To this list of reasons against keeping up with the news can be added yet another.

Once you start paying attention to the news, you notice that a good portion of it does not in fact report the news at all; rather than covering what is happening, it forecasts what could happen.

There are endless stories done on future hypotheticals: Here’s what might happen if the virus mutates . . . if he’s impeached . . . if this company collapses . . . if we go to war . . . if they drop a nuke . . . if a meteor strikes the earth.

Not only do almost none of the possible future scenarios ever come to pass, but there’s nothing the average citizen can do to prepare for or change the scenario even if it does.

Perhaps there seems to be little harm done in keeping up with such hypotheticals. After all, few but the very neurotic will panic over what are only potential outcomes.

But there is a cost to such consumption, and it steadily accrues. Every headline produces another small drop of cortisol that day by day diminishes physical and mental health. Every scroll contributes to an unnecessarily gloomy outlook. Every titillating apocalyptic prognostication about public life distracts from improving a private life that’s devoid of native excitement.

It’s been said that worry is interest paid on a debt you may not owe, and this is as true for personal anxieties as societal ones.

Rather than borrowing trouble from a media-imagined future, invest your time and energy in that which will actually reap dividends: the things you can control.

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The Internet’s Richest Fitness Resource Is a Site from 1999. A deep dive into the history of Exrx.net. I remember visiting the site way back in high school in 2000 to use their one rep max calculator. What’s great about Exrx.net is that it hasn’t changed at all in nearly 25 years. Same great, extensive fitness information; same straight up basic HTML layout and design they’ve had since the turn of the century. It’s kinda comforting to know it’s still there and still carries on.

Eureka Springs, AR. This week our family drove to the small town of Eureka Springs, AR for a short spring break trip. It was our first time visiting, and Eureka Springs is one of the most intriguing places I’ve been in a while. It was a resort town in the 19th century, so it’s historic and many old Victorian buildings remain, but it’s also this artsy bohemian place at the same time. It was built on a mountain, so it has all these winding roads and alleyway staircases to get from one level of the town to the next. We checked out the shops, read the plaques that tell the history of the town, and hiked the nice trails in Lake Leatherwood Park. We’d like to go back and stay at the Crescent Hotel, supposedly America’s most haunted hotel. The town’s this truly weird place worth checking out.

Harry’s Taming Cream. Since I’ve been sporting the longer hair, I’ve been on the lookout for a hair product to tame my wild, sometimes frizzy mane. So I went to my nearby drugstore several months ago and saw that Harry’s has a hair cream that has “taming” right in the name. It’s great. It provides a lightweight hold and gives your hair a natural look. It provides just enough moisture that my thick coarse hair doesn’t poof out. Highly recommended if you’re in a similar hair situation.

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. This is a book that I think about a lot and comes up often in our podcasts about socializing and loneliness. In it, political scientist Robert Putnam argues that there’s been a sharp decline in “social capital” in the United States since the 1960s. He points to the decreasing numbers of Americans participating in civic and social organizations, such as bowling leagues, religious groups, and community organizations and argues that this decline has had negative impacts on American society, like loneliness and sharp partisan divides. The book was published in 2000 so some of it is dated, but I think Putnam’s main thesis is still worth contemplating.

Quote of the Week

If we search for the fundamentals which actually motivate us we will find that they come under four headings: love, money, adventure, and religion. It is to some of them that we always owe that big urge which pushes us onward. Men who crush these impulses and settle down to everyday routine are bound to sink into mediocrity. No man is a complete unit of himself; he needs the contact, the stimulus, and the driving power which is generated by his contact with other men, their ideas, and constantly changing scenes.

—Edward S. Jordan

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Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

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When this week’s podcast guest, John Lisle, talked about William Fairbairn in our discussion of the Office of Strategic Services, I was duly intrigued. I wanted to learn more about the work of this fascinating character, so I bought a complete compendium of his books.

Fairbairn was a Royal Marine, learned multiple martial arts, and engaged in 600 street fights over his lifetime, which left him covered in scars from head to toe. From his firsthand experiences in what he called “gutter fighting,” he developed his own no-holds-barred close combat defense system. He trained the Shanghai police force between the world wars and Allied special operators and the OSS during WWII in it.

Much of what Fairbairn taught centered on how to escape from holds and defend against armed assaults. He also offered training on more unique skills, like how to incapacitate an attacker using a metal matchbox.

One of the skills he shared in Get Tough! How to Win in Hand-to-Hand Fighting often shows up in the movies: taking out a guard who runs the risk of spotting you and raising the alarm as you conduct some secret op. Below you’ll find Fairbairn’s instructions for how to pull off this sneak attack.

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The Sentry HoldThe successful execution of this method of attack on a sentry — presupposing thorough mastery of every move — depends entirely on careful preparation. First, the man selected to make the attack should be an expert at stalking. The stalk or approach should be made during the hours of dark or semi-dark, and the sentry should be kept under observation long enough for the attacker to familiarize himself with the sentry’s movements and equipment.

Now let us assume that conditions are somewhat as follows:

The sentry’s rifle is slung or carried on his right shoulder.

He is wearing a steel helmet covering the back of his neck and his ears.

He is wearing a respirator on the small of his back, projecting as much as six inches (see Fig. 46).

There are other sentries within shouting distance.

These conditions are not too favorable for the attacker, but are what might have to be met, and training should be carried out under conditions as near as possible to those which would be met in actual war.

Note: The stalker should not be handicapped with any equipment, other than a knife or a pistol. He should wear rubber or cloth shoes, socks pulled up well over the trousers, cap-comforter well pulled down, with the collar of his blouse turned up and his hands and face camouflaged. (See Fig. 47)

Approach the sentry from behind to within three to four feet and take up the position shown in Fig. 47. This will permit you to make a lightning-like attack by springing on him.
With the fingers and thumb of your left hand fully extended, strike him across the throat with the inner edge of your left forearm (i.e., with the forearm bone), and simultaneously punch him with your clinched right hand in the small of his back or on his respirator case (Fig. 48).

The effect of these blows, if applied as above, will render your opponent unconscious or semi-unconscious. Further, the blow on the throat will cause your opponent to draw in his breath, making it impossible for him to shout and give the alarm.

The blow should be immediately followed with a very fast movement of your right hand from the small of his back, over his right shoulder, clapping it over his mouth and nose (Fig. 49). This will prevent him from breathing or making a noise if the blow on the throat was not effectively applied.

Very likely the blows on his throat and in the small of his back will cause him to drop his rifle or will knock his helmet off his head. Should this happen, do not attempt to prevent their falling on the ground. Just keep still for about ten seconds, after which it is unlikely that anyone having heard the noise will come to investigate. Retaining your hold around his neck with your left arm, drag him away backwards.

Note: The extraordinary effectiveness of this hold will be readily understood if you have a friend apply it on you as above, being careful to exert no more than one-twentieth of the required force.

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With St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow, people’s thoughts are turning to potatoes a little more than usual.

The rest of the year, however, people don’t think too much about these humble tubers. They hold such a ubiquitous place on our tables that we take them for granted.

So let’s take a moment today to celebrate this underrated foodstuff by unpacking four reasons potatoes are awesome.

Potatoes Are CheapOn average, a pound of potatoes costs .95 cents. In contrast, a pound of ground beef costs over $5. Adding potatoes to your meals is a great way to stretch your grocery budget.
Potatoes Can Help Your Lose WeightPeople started getting down on potatoes a couple decades back as the low-carb movement gained steam. Potatoes are starchy tubers. Starch is a carbohydrate made up of numerous glucose units. Our bodies can quickly break down the starch in a potato and convert it into glucose. The fear is that this glucose will spike blood sugar, and high blood sugar will leave you feeling hungry and cause weight gain.

But carbs don’t necessarily make you fat; it’s eating a caloric surplus of any food that causes weight gain (and eating a caloric deficit of any food that causes weight loss). Thus a better metric for a food’s “healthiness” than its macro breakdown is its volume relative to its calories. Calorically dense foods give you a lot of calories without filling you up, leaving you feeling hungry and more prone to overeating. Foods that are higher in volume relative to their calories leave you feeling satiated, making it easier to eat less.

Potatoes fall into that latter, filling category. While deep-frying and covering taters in butter, cream, and cheese does turn them into an unhealthy, calorically dense food, pure potatoes are high in volume and low in calories: an ounce of Oreos has 140 calories; an ounce of potatoes has 22. It’s hard to overeat plain baked potatoes.

Indeed, in one study on satiety, potatoes were found to be the most satiating of foods, even more so than high-protein foods like steak.

Potatoes Are Nutrient-PackedBrightly colored vegetables get all the “it’s good for you” attention, while the brown tuber is assumed to be a nutritional slouch. But it isn’t so; potatoes are surprisingly rich in nutrients. A skin-on, medium-sized white baked potato contains:
Vitamin C: 28% of your recommended daily intake — more than an orange!
Vitamin B6: 27% of your RDI
Potassium: 26% of your RDI — more than a banana!
Magnesium: 12% of your RDI
Fiber: ~3.8 grams

White potatoes and sweet potatoes are pretty nutritionally comparable, by the way. White potatoes have a little more protein; sweet potatoes have a little more fiber. White potatoes contain more potassium and magnesium; sweet potatoes have more calcium and a big spike of vitamin A. White potatoes have a few more carbs; sweet potatoes contain more sugar. Both are similar in terms of calories. Both are nutritious vegetables, and one isn’t really better for you than the other.

Potatoes May Be Good for Your Gut BiomeGut health and gut bacteria are getting a lot of attention these days. Potatoes may contribute to a healthy gut thanks to their resistant starch. Resistant starch is a type of carb that can’t be broken down and digested by the small intestine. Instead, it makes its way through to the large intestine, where it’s then broken down by gut bacteria. This process also helps produce short-chain fatty acids that help nourish the gut microbiome.

I eat potatoes with a protein like chicken breast nearly every day for lunch. They fit my macros and are cheap, filling, tasty, and nutritious. So I say on St. Patrick’s Day, and every day: All hail the humble potato!

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Many a man has been impressed by the ingenuity of secret agent operations, and intrigued by the subterfuge, gadgets, and disguises required to pull them off. Much of what we think about when we think about spies got its start as part of the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence agency during World War II.

Here to unpack some of the history of the world of cloak and dagger operations is John Lisle, author of The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare. Today on the show, Lisle explains why the OSS was created and the innovations its research and development section came up with to fight the Axis powers. We talk about the most successful weapons and devices this so-called “Dirty Tricks Department” developed, as well as its more off-the-wall ideas, which included releasing bat bombs and radioactive foxes in Japan. We discuss the department’s attempt to create a truth serum, its implementation of a disinformation campaign involving “The League of Lonely War Women,” and its promotion of a no-holds-barred hand-to-hand combat fighting system. We also talk about the influence of the OSS on the establishment of the CIA and controversial projects like MKUltra.

Resources Related to the Podcast* William “Wild Bill” Donovan * Office of Strategic Services * William Fairbairn * Time pencil * “Aunt Jemima” explosive * Limpet mine * The bat bomb * John’s article on Operation Fantasia’s radioactive foxes * AoM Article: 15 Cool Spy Concealments * AoM Podcast #225: The Real Life James Bond * AoM Article: The History of Invisible Ink * AoM Article: Why Men Love the Story of the Great Escape

Connect With John Lisle* John on Twitter * John’s website

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Note: This is a rebroadcast.

You may think of anxiety as a reaction, a feeling, or a disorder. My guest today says that perhaps the best way to think about anxiety, especially if you want to treat it effectively, is as a habit.

His name is Dr. Judson Brewer, and he’s a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, and the author of Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind. Dr. Jud and I begin our conversation with what anxiety is, and how it gets connected into a habit loop that can lead to other maladaptive behaviors like drinking, overeating, and worrying. Dr. Jud then explains how to hack the anxiety habit loop by mapping it out, disenchanting your anxiety-driven behaviors, and giving your brain “a bigger, better offer” by getting curious about your anxiety. We also talk about why asking why you’re anxious is not part of this process, and end our conversation with how this habit-based approach to behavior change can also work for things like depression and anger.

Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast #497: The Meaning, Manifestations, and Treatments for Anxiety * AoM Podcast #614: Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life * AoM article, podcast, and video on hacking the habit loop * AoM article on asking “what” instead of “why” * Undoing Depression* by Richard O’Connor * How to Disenchant Your Habits

Connect With Dr. Jud* Dr. Jud’s Website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Podcast SponsorsClick here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Read the Transcript!If you appreciate the full text transcript, please consider donating to AoM. It will help cover the costs of transcription and allow other to enjoy it. Thank you!

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Now, you may think of anxiety as a reaction, a feeling or a disorder. My guest today says that perhaps the best way to think about anxiety, especially if you wanna treat it effectively, is as a habit. His name is Dr. Judson Brewer. He’s a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, and the author of Unwinding Anxiety, new science shows how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal your mind. Dr. Jud and I begin our conversation with what anxiety is and how it gets connected into a habit loop that can lead to other maladaptive behaviors like drinking, overeating, and worrying. Dr. Jud then explains how to hack the anxiety habit loop by mapping it out, disenchanting your anxiety-driven behaviors, and giving your brain a bigger, better offer by getting curious about your anxiety. We also talk about why asking why you’re anxious is not part of this process, and end our conversation with how this habit-based approach to behavior change, can also work for things like depression and anger. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/anxietyhabit.

Judson Brewer, welcome to the show.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a psychiatrist that specializes in anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, and you got a new book out Unwinding Anxiety. How did you end up specializing in anxiety and addiction disorders, as a psychiatrist?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Well, my own anxiety. [laughter] It was kind of serendipitous. So, I used to get panic attacks during… When I was in residency, and then I actually got anxiety trying to help my own patients with anxiety. And I say that because with the best medications out there, it takes about… For every five patients, only one of them shows a significant reduction in symptoms. There’s this term called “Number needed to treat,” which is basically what that means. And so I’m placing the… I’m playing the medication lottery, I don’t know which of the next five patients I’m gonna treat is gonna benefit, and also I don’t know what to do with the other four. So serendipitously, I was doing a lot of research. I’ve just really interested in addictions, it’s a tough field to work in, and I like challenges. So I’ve been doing a lot of research with addictions, and habit change, and we’ve gotten some good results with… We developed a program for smoking cessation, we gotten five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment, so that was nice. And we had developed this eating program, called “Eat right now,” that we had developed through an app so we could deliver it as a digital therapeutic. And somebody in that program, said, “Hey, it looks like anxiety is driving my eating habits, could you create a program for anxiety?” And I was thinking, “Well, I generally prescribe medications for this.”

But it put a bug in my ear, and I went back and looked at the literature, and it turns out way back in the 1980s, people had been talking about anxiety being driven like other habits and when I saw that connection, I was thinking, “Well, I know how to work with habits, that’s my research.” I had never thought about anxiety that way, so I developed a program that we called it Unwinding Anxiety. And we delivered it through an app so that we could measure it and study it, and we got a 67% reduction in clinically validated anxiety scores. And just to put that into context, the number needed to treat, for medications was 5.2, you know, one in five? And for this study, it was 1.6, so much better effects than I had seen with medications.

Brett McKay: Well, so I wanna go back to this idea of anxiety being a habit ’cause that’s the big thrust of your book, is looking at anxiety as a habit that you have. But before we do, what is anxiety exactly? ‘Cause we see this word thrown around a lot, people… I even hear like kids, “I’m anxious.” So as a clinician, how do you define anxiety?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yeah, one of the definitions that I like is that it’s a feeling of nervousness or unease about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. So it’s this feeling that comes up, and I summarize it as fear of the future, ’cause we start to worry about something in the future. Not something that’s happening right now.

Brett McKay: Gotcha, and so is anxiety the same as… Is it synonymous to fear? Is it the same as worrying? ‘Cause I think those are words we throw in interchangeably with anxiety.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, so I think of anxiety is a feeling in the body and worrying is a mental behavior. So those two are very, very closely linked. Whereas fear is fear, fear is different. So that feeling of nervousness, that feeling of unease can lead to the mental behavior of worrying, which then feeds back and drives more anxiety. That’s how these two can get connected in a loop. To form any habit you need three elements, a trigger, a behavior, and a result. And from a neuroscience perspective, that result has to be rewarding in some way. So the feeling of anxiety can then trigger the mental behavior of worrying, and that mental behavior of worrying gives us the reward of feeling like we’re in control, or at least that we’re doing something, which feels better than doing nothing. And then that feeds back so that the next time we feel anxious, our brain says, “Oh, last time you worried, you should do that again.”

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s how anxiety is a habit? You have the trigger, this feeling of anxiety, the behavior is the worrying or thinking about stuff ruminating, and then the reward is, “Well, I feel like I’m doing something,” even though you’re actually not.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Exactly, yeah, yeah. We all are doing something for, to be clear, we’re worrying, but are we doing something that’s helping the situation? Not so much.

Brett McKay: So wait, what causes the anxiety in the first place, that feeling you have? Is it just, depends on the person?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, and it could be anything. Often, we get stuck in these habit loops of trying to figure out why we’re anxious. That’s just a dead end, so sometimes, it just comes on. For people with generalized anxiety disorder, for example, that can come on early in the morning and go all day.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s when it becomes… Like you just have a general anxiety about pretty much everything. Some people, you might be anxious about your job, for example, and that’s it. Whenever you’re not working, you’re okay, but a person with generalized anxiety disorder, they’re gonna be worried about pretty much everything throughout the day.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, and it could just be that they’re worried. There might not even be anything that they have to be worried about, they’re just worried. And in fact, [laughter] I’ve had patients who’ve worried so much in their lives that it’s been such a habit. As they start to worry less and have moments where they’re not worrying, they start to worry that they’re not worried because they feel like there’s something wrong that they’re not worrying. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Based on your work with patients and your research, why does it seem like there’s an uptick in anxiety amongst Americans and Westerners in general? Like what’s going on that’s encouraging more people to get on this anxious habit loop?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, and I would say this is worldwide. And it really… The pandemic was a great… Well, I should say unfortunate, but amazing natural experiment in anxiety. So, the hypothesis is that our brains don’t like uncertainty. Uncertainty prompts us into action to get information to try to reduce that uncertainty. So we’ve had waves and waves of uncertainty over the last couple of years, where anybody can think of a gazillion different things, whether it’s how dangerous the original Coronavirus or the COVID-19 was to economics, to schools, to whatnot. Any time there’s a new wave of uncertainty, our brains start to… Well, they’re supposed to be thinking and planning, but if there isn’t accurate information, our thinking and planning brains spin out into fear and dread where they worry about this or that, or this or that, or this or that. So, we’ve seen that come into play where anxiety levels have spiked, they’ve stayed pretty high because there’s a pretty constant uncertainty, a lot more uncertainty than there has been in the past, and we’re also, as a world, getting more in the habit of worrying.

Brett McKay: And you also make this point that the digital world that we live in through our devices also contribute to this anxiety habit loop. How so?

Dr. Jud Brewer: So information is like food for our brain, it helps us survive, it helps us think and plan, so if there’s uncertainty, if we get information, that uncertainty reduces. If you think of our ancient ancestors, if they saw a saber-tooth tiger, they knew that was accurate information, they could run away and survive. In modern day, not only do we have a deluge of information, thanks to the Internet, we can get more information than we could ever digest, but we also have, layered on top of that, misinformation, where people are inadvertently saying things that are inaccurate, and then disinformation, where people are overtly, where on purpose, they are saying things that are not true. And we have to sort through all of that. Suddenly we have to become an expert in every one of these fields to really try to figure out whether what somebody is saying or posting online is true, and that in itself adds to those layers of uncertainty, and all of that builds anxiety.

Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s go back to this idea of anxiety as a habit, and we talked about the general habit loop, so there’s the trigger. It’s a feeling of anxiety. It can be caused by anything. It just depends on the person, but particularly, it’s uncertainty about something. Typically, the action when we experience anxiety is worrying. We start thinking about what’s going on. And then the reward is, “Oh, it feels like we’re doing something. We are doing something.” And so we just keep doing that anxiety habit loop. Besides worrying, are there other actions you find that people take whenever they experience the trigger of anxiety?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, I see a number of generally unhealthful coping mechanisms, and I see this in my clinic, and I see this in everyday life, where anxiety triggers us to do something because it feels unpleasant, so our brains try to do something to make it go away. And that could be anything from distracting ourselves by going on our social media feeds, we could be drinking alcohol, eating food, so I see a lot of this, or I’ve even seen it where they call it the COVID-20, where somebody’s gained 20 pounds over the… During COVID because they’re anxious, and they are working from home, and they go to their refrigerator and they eat.

Brett McKay: So with other ways besides worrying, it could be eating, shopping online, surfing the Internet, smoking? It could be anything that just soothes the anxiety is going to be a potential action you take because you experience that anxiety?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, yes, and we get that brief relief, whether it’s drinking alcohol or doing any of these other things, and that brief relief feeds back and says, “Oh, next time you’re anxious, you should do this again.”

Brett McKay: Okay, so knowing that anxiety is the trigger for worrying, or drinking or surfing the web or whatever, I can see someone getting the idea that, “Okay, you can change the anxiety habit loop just the way you change any other habit loop, by substituting the behavior of worrying for something more adaptive or something that will give you more positive results.” So someone might think, “When I experience anxiety, instead of doing my typical response of worrying, I’ll just replace worrying with something like, “I’m gonna do 10 push-ups instead,” but you make the case that hacking the habit loop like that for anxiety doesn’t work. Why is that? And what do you recommend doing instead?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yeah, there are… So it makes sense, 10 pushups, but you could… If you’re anxious, you could suddenly become pretty strong, ’cause you’re doing a bunch of pushups. So the problem there is that 10 push-ups don’t actually fix the root cause of the anxiety. And often we don’t know what the root cause of the anxiety is. And so, if we try to go to some substitution behavior or some distraction behavior, we just have to do it more and more and more. So, if it’s… Let’s use the 10 push-ups as an example, somebody might be anxious, they do 10 push-ups, they don’t actually feel less anxious by that much, so they do 10 more and suddenly they just can’t do any more push-ups, but they’re still anxious. So here, it’s helpful to really go to the root cause and really understand how any habit is formed anxiety or otherwise, and then really tap into that system, once you can really work with it. It’s kind of like understanding how your mind works is the first step in working with your mind and with anxiety, that’s absolutely true.

Brett McKay: And so, yeah, you say the first step in getting the handle on your anxiety, Unwinding Anxiety, is you call map out your anxiety habit loops?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, and that’s as simple as just finding what the trigger is, what the behavior is and what the result is. So the trigger typically is the feeling of anxiety, that’s pretty straightforward, the behavior is that worrying, that’s one of the typical ones, but you’ve named some of the others as well. We might eat some food, drink alcohol, smoke a cigarette, go on the Internet, procrastinate or whatever, and then map out what the result is. Is it an avoidance behavior? Do I feel a little bit better because I’m avoiding it? Do I feel like I’m in control because I’m worrying? Or whatever the result is, and once we can map those three things out, that starts to give us a picture of what our mind is doing. And that mapping process is really critical as that critical first step for working with the behavior.

Brett McKay: And you highlight… You have some case studies of patients you’ve worked with, where just doing this mapping process that goes a long way, they suddenly… Like, it decreases their anxiety, not significantly, but for some people significantly. What is it about mapping out your anxiety habit loops that can immediately, before you even start doing anything, decrease anxiety, what’s going on there, you think?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Well, this goes back to the uncertainty, and how our brains don’t like uncertainty. And if we don’t know… You know, if our brain is like a black box, suddenly if you… Or it’s like a dark room. You don’t know what’s in there, and you go in there, “What could it be?” And you flip on the light switch and you’re like, “Oh, this is what’s in the room.” Yeah, I’ll give a concrete example, I had a patient who came in, who was referred for anxiety, he had… He described how when he was in a car he would have these thoughts like he might get in an accident, he would have panic attacks and avoid driving on the highway. And so I just mapped this out with him, like, “Okay, what’s the trigger of these thoughts? What’s the behavior? Avoiding driving on the highway. What’s the result? You can avoid having panic attacks,” and then I just drew arrows between those three. And importantly, so that first arrow from the trigger to the behavior, that second arrow from the behavior to the not having panic attacks and then the third arrow, not having panic attacks feeds back to those thoughts.

So the next time he has a thought, he says, “I can’t drive,” and then suddenly he’s really limiting himself in having… Meeting all the criteria for a panic disorder. Just seeing that, I literally pulled out a piece of paper, mapped it out with him for 30 seconds after taking his history, and I could see the light bulb go off in his head, because he just didn’t know how that process worked. As simple as it is, most of us just don’t see these things, and so, that reduces the uncertainty, because he can see how his brain works and I can explain to him, “Well, this is a normal process, your brain is adopting this old system that helps you survive that’s just ironically making you more anxious,” and that in itself can reduce the anxiety, because the uncertainty is lowered.

Brett McKay: And one thing you remind me, you’re mapping out these habit loops, you’re trying to… You’re supposed to take a mindful approach to it. You’re not supposed to beat yourself up like, “Man, why am I such a dummy, that I have this dumb anxiety habit loop?” You’re just supposed to be as objective and distance from it as possible so you can get a grasp on. ‘Cause if you do that, beat yourself up, you’re just putting yourself in another anxiety habit loop.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, absolutely, that self-judgmental habit loop. And then, that habit loop distracts us from working with the original habit loop as well. So, yes, it’s… I think of it as approaching it like a scientist or a physician, or a lawyer, or somebody that’s just trying to get the facts, so they can really understand what’s happening.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. Alright, so the first part is you map out your habit loops, and this again, requires you to be mindful throughout the day, kind of noticing things and making observations. After that, the next step is to update your brain’s reward value, and this involves… I like how this word… You use the word disenchant, you wanna disenchant your anxious actions. What do you mean by that?

Dr. Jud Brewer: So, this really is what gets to the heart of how our brains learn. And our brains are set up to be as efficient as possible, and we set up habits as a way to learn how rewarding a certain behavior is, and then forget about the details. I think of it as set and forget. So you set the reward value and you forget about the details, what would be… So a concrete example would be food. And our brains are set up to try to maximize calorie intake because back in the day, our ancestors didn’t have refrigerators, and so, when you’ve got a good calorie source, the idea was to pack ’em in. So we prefer cake to broccoli, because our brains are set up to say, “Hey, cake has more calories.” So we set that as a habit loop, and we don’t have to re-learn the reward value of cake every time we eat cake, we don’t have to say, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s any good,” we just look at it and it’s like, “Cake, let’s eat it.” So.

That reward value system is set up for every behavior that we do, where we’ll prefer one behavior to another, we set… The behavior as a habit, and we don’t change it until we update that reward value, and the only way to update the reward value is to pay attention, is to bring awareness in. A concrete example would be if a new bakery opens up in my neighborhood, and I don’t know how good the cake is there, I go in there, I eat some cake and if it’s the best cake ever, I get what’s called a positive predictioner, where it’s better than expected, I learn, “Okay, go back there for cake.” If I eat it and it’s crappy, my brain says, “Eh, don’t bother,” and I get this negative predictioner, which says, “It’s worse than predicted, so don’t go back there,” so I learn; that’s how the learning process happens. We can apply that process to any behavior, so that we can update the reward value to how rewarding it is right now, so if I learned the real value of cake when I was five and I’m just mindlessly eating cake when I’m 45, that’s probably not so helpful. [chuckle] If I pay attention and I notice, “Oh, when I just eat a ton of cake, I get a sugar rush and I crash and I gain weight, and I get cavities and I get diabetes,” I can start to see that’s actually not that rewarding, and in fact, my lab, we did a study, we have this app called Eat Right Now that helps people pay attention as they over-eat.

It only takes about 10 or 15 times of somebody really paying attention as they overeat for that reward value to drop below zero where they start to shift their behavior, so we can do the same thing with worrying… And I have people ask a simple question. As they’re worrying, I ask them to ask themselves, “What am I getting from this?” And feel into their direct experience, and what people typically report is that worrying doesn’t feel very good itself, it doesn’t keep their family members safe or solve a problem or do whatever their brain thinks it’s gonna do beyond distracting them, and when they can start to see that really clearly, they start to become disenchanted with it, they’re not as excited to do it.

We see the same thing with my patients who wanna quit smoking, I have them pay attention as they smoke and they start to realize, “Oh, it doesn’t feel very good.” I run a live group for anybody using our apps, and just today, I was running a group and a woman was talking about how she ate some tortilla chips with cheese on them for dinner, and she air fried them, so… [chuckle] Better than deep frying I guess. And we explored, “What did she get from that?” And she said, “I had a stomach ache and I couldn’t get to sleep until 3:00 in the morning,” and I said, “Well, what does it feel like now? If I put some of those chips in front of you, would you eat them, what would be your likely… ” And she said, “Zero. They’re just, it’s disgusting.” So there is a great example of becoming disenchanted with our behavior simply by paying attention to the results… What it gives us when we do it… Does that make sense?

Brett McKay: No, it makes perfect sense. In fact, I applied this to social media. You just notice like you keep going there and you open up Instagram and you kind of scroll through, and then you have to sit and think, “I don’t feel good doing this, I’m not getting anything out of this,” and it’s amazing. It extinguishes any desire to open it up anymore… ‘Cause it’s like…

Dr. Jud Brewer: That’s disenchantment.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So the question you ask is like, “What am I getting out of this?” And usually the answer is, “Not a whole lot. In fact, it makes me feel terrible,” and if that’s the answer, then you just stop doing that whenever you experience anxiety.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, and I wouldn’t say, so often people think, “Oh, I’ll stop doing that, that’s… ”

Brett McKay: Right.

Dr. Jud Brewer: It’d be great if I could just have one visit with every patient where they come in and they say, “I wanna stop social media,” and I would dub them, I’d say, “Stop doing that,” and they would just leave and stop doing it. So the critical piece here is that the reflection on the previous action helps us load that reward value into our brain, so we can ask ourselves, “Do I really wanna do this again?” And we can feel into the experience of last time, and like you described with social media, we’re like, “Eh, this doesn’t feel so good.” And so we naturally are disenchanted so that we are not pulled to do it again without having to force ourselves not to do it again.

Brett McKay: Right, there’s no… Yeah, that’s what I like about it. There’s no force or grit in your teeth with this approach…

Dr. Jud Brewer: No, not at all.

Brett McKay: Okay, so after you disenchanted the maladaptive behavior, whether it’s worrying or eating or smoking, whatever, the third part is creating what you call a bigger, better offer for your brain… What do you mean by that?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, so this is an homage to myself and all of us that back in high school when we had a date set up for Friday night and then Friday afternoon our date lets us know that their parents are requiring them to power wash the car, or something that’s ridiculous, and create an excuse.

Brett McKay: Wash their hair.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, yeah, where clearly somebody else called them and wanted to go out on a date… And that person was the bigger, better offer. [laughter] And so I think of it this way, ’cause that’s how our brains work, our brains are given a choice between A and B, they’re gonna pick the one that’s more rewarding, so if we become disenchanted with these old behaviors, why not give our brain something better to do and not in the case of if you’re anxious, just go scroll on social media or drink alcohol, because we can start to see that those things aren’t that rewarding themselves and don’t fix the root problem, but instead we can tap into things that are intrinsically rewarding. So if we’re anxious, we can get curious about what that anxiety feels like instead of worrying, and we can even compare those two… Well, you tell me. What feels better: Being curious or worrying about something?

Brett McKay: Being curious works, yeah…

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yeah, it’s a no-brainer. To our brains, of course, curiosity feels better, and here we can actually get at the root cause of the issue, so again, anxiety pops up often out of the blue, it doesn’t matter what caused it, but what the problem in there is… Is that we feed it by worrying or pushing it away, and so instead of pushing it away, this phrase, “The only way out is through,” comes to mind. You might have heard that before.

The only way out is through. So instead of running away from the anxiety or distracting ourselves or worrying about it, what if instead we turn toward it? And what helps us turn toward anxiety is curiosity. I love this quote from James Stevens, who said or wrote, “Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.” So curiosity is like a super power, and as we turn toward the feeling of anxiety, we can start to notice that it is simply sensations and thoughts and emotions in our body, it’s not something that we have to run away from, and the more we turn toward it, the more we become familiar with it and the more we can see, “Oh, these are sensations? They come and go, I don’t have to do anything about them, I can simply learn to be with them, and the curiosity helps me not only learn about them, but also be with them.” And that’s the healing process where we can learn to be. It’s like the being is the new doing.

Brett McKay: So and what this looks like, is you start experiencing some anxiety, a curious approach, where you’re like, “Well, okay, where am I experiencing? Is it, I’m feeling like a tightness in my chest? Is it my pulse, you can check your Apple watch and you feel your heart rate’s going, is that what would it look like?

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes, really sticking with our direct experience, not the concept or worrying about, why am I anxious and trying to figure that out, really just dropping in and seeing what’s going on.

Brett McKay: And then the other section about using some little hacks, I guess you can call them about widening your eyes to maybe encourage or nudge yourself and be curious, what’s going on there?

Dr. Jud Brewer: So this again goes back to evolutionary neuroscience and psychology. There are some great experiments where people looked at, what do our eyes naturally do when we are… Let’s start with something different like angry? So when we’re angry… So just think of a time when you were angry and anybody listening in can do this themselves and see what your eyes naturally do. So would you say that your eyes narrow or do they widen when you’re angry?

Brett McKay: They narrow… Get that flinty look in your eye.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yeah, because anger is about focused [laughter] behavior, it says, “I know what the problem is and I’m gonna do something about it.” [laughter] So we’re literally narrowed in on the, “Problem.” And we are laser-focused on doing something about it. With curiosity, what do your eyes do when you’re curious? Do they narrow or do they widen?

Brett McKay: Typically get narrow. I’d say widen but then if I’m getting focused on, I’d probably narrow my eyes.

Dr. Jud Brewer: So again, when we’re trying to gather more information, so both with curiosity and interestingly also with fear, which makes sense, our eyes get really wide because they have to take in information. And so here if we aren’t curious, we can simply use this trick, it’s called semantic memory. So semantic memory basically just means that our bodies will hold certain postures or positions or feelings that are associated with emotions. So for anxious for example, my shoulders tend to be more contracted or hunched or kind of closed in than when I’m not anxious. So if we’re not curious, we can simply open our eyes really wide and see if that can help induce the feeling of curiosity itself. That’s kind of why it’s a hack, because we simply open our eyes really wide, and anybody can do this right now, it’s like when you open your eyes really wide, do that actually help you become a little more curious in that moment?

Brett McKay: You also tell people to say, “Mm-hmm.” Verbally say, “I’m interested in that.” And you might feel silly, but I did it. I was taking a walk the other day and I did it and I think it works. There’s something to it. [laughter]

Dr. Jud Brewer: The thing I like about “Mm-hmm” I think of it as a curiosity mantra, is that it takes us out of our thinking brain and really into our feeling body because that’s where all the action is. And so if we’re anxious, for example, we can go “Mm-hmm, where am I anxious right now? Is it more on the right side or the left side of my body?” And that, mm-hmm, can really open us to our experience. Another way that I like to play with this is, it’s kind of like if we feel anxious and we start to worry and we go, “Oh, no I’m anxious? Why am I anxious? I’m I gonna be anxious all day? Is there anything that’s gonna fix that? And we can notice that. We can map out that habit loop and then we can go, “Oh, here’s anxiety. What does this feel like in my body?” So instead of, “Why am I anxious? Or how long is this gonna last?” Instead of, “Oh” we can go, “Oooh” And that opens us to our experience so we can really drop in and feel it. It feels like, and step out of the worry habit loop.

Brett McKay: Okay, so just to recap here, first steps map out your habit, your anxiety habit loops that you have. This just requires you be be mindful throughout the day whenever you experience anxiety, pay attention to what you do and what the reward you get out of that. And then after that, the second step is to disenchant that anxiety behavior. So just think about, “Man, what am I getting? How do I feel whenever I do this thing?” Usually the answer is not great, and so just doing that naturally your body or your mind and your body, I guess you can say, would kind of extinguish that behavior if you’re not getting any value out of it. And then third part is offer a bigger, better offer to your brain through curiosity.

Dr. Jud Brewer: That’s it in a nutshell.

Brett McKay: But I think it’s interesting to point out and you’ve mentioned this, but I really wanna hit this home, in this process you are never figuring out what is making you anxious, or why are you anxious, and you say that you actually… It’s called the why trap. It’s actually not very useful to sometimes… Or to figure out why you’re anxious. Why is that?

Dr. Jud Brewer: So as a card carrying board-certified psychiatrist, this might sound heretical, that we’re not trying to go back to someone’s childhood or figure out why they’re anxious. And the reason for that is that, here my neuroscience hat wins out, and when I think about… And I look at the equations that have to do with behavior change, none of them have to do with childhood… [laughter]

Or vast experience. It’s not that that experience isn’t important or meaningful, it absolutely is, but that’s not what changes behavior. And like you’re pointing out, we can get stuck in these “Why” habit loops, trying to figure out, “Why am I anxious?” Thinking that suddenly, if we figure out why we’re anxious, it’s gonna fix it. Well, that “Why” is generally in the past, so it certainly can be insightful, it can reduce uncertainty, but it’s not gonna fix the habit itself. This is why I focus on the “What,” like, “What’s happening, and what am I getting from being stuck in this loop?”

Brett McKay: And also, even if you do figure out what’s causing the anxiety, you might not be able to do anything about it. Maybe something at your job that just… And no matter what you do, you cannot get rid of that thing that triggers the anxiety. So this approach is that, “Okay, well, what can I change? What can I focus… Well, I can change my behavior by discounting or disenchanting that maladaptive behavior and have a different approach to it.”

Dr. Jud Brewer: Absolutely. I think of the Serenity Prayer, it’s like, “Let me accept things that I can’t change and have the strength or courage to change that which I can.” If we can see very clearly what we can’t change, we can stop banging our head against that wall, so that that frees up the energy to look for the doors. [chuckle] And sometimes we do need to find the door. We’re like, “Wow, this job really isn’t [chuckle] a good fit for me,” and we can walk out it, as compared to being too exhausted to even notice.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned some other issues that hacking the anxiety loop, or unwinding anxiety, addiction, over-eating, smoking, it works with this. Does it work for other things like depression?

Dr. Jud Brewer: There’s a lot of good evidence showing programs like Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy can really help people with depression. And what that highlights is that this habit loop, whether I think of worry and anxiety as future-oriented habits, the story of me in the future, worrying and trying to protect myself against the future, or what might happen in the future. Depression is more about beating ourselves up over what happened in the past. And so when we ruminate, we can get stuck in those habit loops around this is terrible, I’m terrible, the world’s terrible, or whatever. And bringing awareness to this and using the same processes can really help us not reinforce those habits, and these programs have been shown to be really, really helpful for depression.

Brett McKay: Yeah, there’s another, Richard O’Connor. He’s a psychologist. He wrote a book, Undoing Depression. And he kinda makes the case that you do with anxiety, that depression is just a series of habits that you have, and you have to undo those habits.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Certainly, and I think that’s part of depression. It’s often not the whole thing. Certainly, for some people there’s a really strong biological component where they just… They’re too exhausted [chuckle], let’s put it that way, the term may not be perfect. But they’re just… They have such low energy that they can’t even think, like thinking feels like they’re going through sludge, or through some bog. And so here, it certainly can help with the thinking elements, but it’s not necessarily… I just wanna emphasize how it can be very helpful for some people, where some medications can be really helpful for those biological components.

Brett McKay: As we were talking, and another problem I can see this habit approach could help, is anger. Anger is a habit. You have this trigger and then your typical response is, “I’m gonna get all angry.” And then the reward is, “Well, I feel like I did something,” but then you sit and notice, like, “How do I feel when I’m angry?” Not really good. And so you start disenchanting that anger response.

Dr. Jud Brewer: Yes. And I think here, and I’ve certainly… This has been helpful for me, [chuckle] in terms of working with my own frustration and anger, is looking at how we’re directing our energy. So anger can feel empowering. It can often make us feel like we’re self-righteous, like, “I’m doing this for the right reasons,” or whatever. “I’m getting angry. I’m doing something.” But we have to look to see what our anger is getting us, and is it the most skillful or helpful way to change something? If there’s some injustice in the world, is getting angry gonna be the best way to solve that problem, or is it just gonna make other people push back and make it harder to solve a problem? Is it gonna be an inefficient use of our energy? So here, even for myself, I ask myself, “What am I getting from the anger?” And that opens up the space when I become disenchanted with it, it opens the space and frees up the energy to ask, “Well, is there another way to go about changing things?”

Brett McKay: Well, Judson, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Dr. Jud Brewer: I have a website, Dr Jud D-R-J-U-D.com, that has a bunch of free resources, links to my books, to the apps that we talked about, and other various and sundry things.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Judson Brewer, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Jud Brewer: It’s been my pleasure, thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest there is Dr. Judson Brewer. He’s the author of Unwinding Anxiety. It’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, drjud.com. Also, check out our shownotes at aom.is/anxietyhabit, where you can find links to resources, read and delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, we post thousands of articles. We know there is about pretty much anything you think of. And, if you like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you could do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLINESS at check-out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps that a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding all listening to AOM podcast to put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #782: Anxiety Is a Habit — Here’s How to Break It appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

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I’m a big fan of old cop and detective shows. One of my favorites is The Rockford Files that aired in the 1970s and starred the legendary James Garner as private detective Jim Rockford. The Rockford Files was famous for the car chase scenes in which Rockford would race down bad guys in his Firebird Esprit. Rockford’s signature car maneuver was the J-turn in which he would start off in reverse, spin the car 180 degrees, and then continue forward in the same direction. Because the move was used so often on the show, the J-turn is often called “The Rockford Turn.”

For a tutorial on how one performs this automotive escape/pursuit maneuver, I turned to Wyatt Knox at Team O’Neil Rally School who teaches the skill as part of Team O’Neil’s tactical driving course. Wyatt noted that J-turns don’t really work with newer cars that have stability control, and he warns against doing them in high center of gravity cars like SUVs and trucks because of the risk of rollover. Above you’ll find his instructions for doing the J-turn, illustrated by Ted Slampyak.

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When you first receive the news that a loved one has died, you can initially feel weirdly alright. Functional. Even buoyant. You may feel so fine, in fact, that you feel guilty you’re not taking it harder than you are.

Then, the shock wears off, and the grief hits you like the proverbial ton of bricks.

Though it arrives with the force of a freight train, its full weight doesn’t come to a complete stop upon you.

Instead, it crashes and recedes in waves. Some days, you can barely operate. Others, you feel close to normal.

Over time, the magnitude of these waves diminishes. While grief doesn’t abate in a linear, progressive fashion — even years after a loss, the pain can resurface with a frightening freshness — its overall trajectory moves in a downward direction.

This pattern of grief — its delayed absorption, its oscillating intensity — may seem random. But it instead points to a built-in defense system.

Rather than taking on the pain all at once, and to what would be a crushing, life-extinguishing degree, our bodies and minds process it in harrowing but survivable doses. We innately know how to weather it. We’re made to endure. As long as we exert a minimum of effort in keeping our heads just above water, we’ll come out — battered, bruised, but intact — on the other side.

As we navigate life’s uncertain journey, we can take heart in knowing that whatever hardship lies around the corner, we are equipped to deal with it.

We can find confidence in knowing that the idea we’re never given more than we can handle isn’t just a comforting cliche.

We can live a bit more bravely knowing that, as Victor Hugo put it, “Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”

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LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe. I have a LinkedIn account (and AoM has a page on LinkedIn) that I use primarily to reach out to potential podcast guests who don’t have other means of contact. LinkedIn was originally designed to be a straightlaced business networking site, but over the years the platform has slowly developed into this bizarre fusion of posts which range from the earnest and personal to the professional and corporate. There are even LinkedIn influencers. Every time I visit the site, I scroll around and think, “Man, this place is really dang weird.” This article from Every (a sender of business-related newsletters) perfectly describes the strange world of LinkedIn and the culture that’s developed there. It made me literally laugh out loud.

Once an Eagle. This is a beast of a novel that my father-in-law recommended to me several years ago. I read it a couple years back and really enjoyed it. The novel takes place between 1910 and 1960 and follows the military careers of two men: Sam Damon and Courtney Massengale. Each man approaches his service in different ways. Damon is a field commander who cares about his troops, while Massengale rises up the ranks through politicking and brown-nosing in Washington. Lots of good leadership lessons from the book. It was actually part of the Marine Corps’ reading list at one time.

ONE Protein Bars. These have been Kate’s go-to protein bars for a few years. I really enjoy them too. 20 grams of protein and only one gram of sugar. Pretty satiating. They’re a good, somewhat-healthier road trip food. My favorite flavors are maple glazed donut and peanut butter cup; Kate recommends the s’mores variety.

Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Saint Patrick’s Day is coming up so our family will be taking part in our annual watching of Disney’s 1959 classic, Darby O’Gill and the Little People. This St. Patrick’s Day tradition started with my mom when I was a kid, and I’ve continued it with Gus and Scout. It’s got Sean Connery in it. He’s great, of course. James Bond even sings in it.

Quote of the Week

What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one’s ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.

—Victor Cherbuliez

The post Odds & Ends: March 10, 2023 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

ONE Protein Bars, Maple Glazed Doughnut, Gluten-Free Protein Bar with 20g Protein and only 1g Sugar, Snacking for High Protein Diets, 2.12 Ounce (12 Pack)

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Dumbbells are a popular and effective tool for strength training and exercise. They’re versatile, easy to use, and come in various weights and sizes, making them suitable for people of all ages and fitness levels.

You can get a full-body workout with a set of dumbbells or use them as I do: as an accessory to the main barbell lifts. I love doing Arnold shoulder presses and bicep curls with dumbbells.

But while doing some of those curls the other day, I got to wondering: “Why are dumbbells called dumbbells?”

I mean, it’s kind of a weird name when you think about it.

I decided to investigate.

The Ur-Dumbbell: The Ancient Greek HaltereNot only did the ancient Greeks give us democracy and virtue ethics, but they also bequeathed us the forerunner of what would become the modern dumbbell. Soldiers and athletes would train with various weighted implements to get stronger. One of these strength-training tools was the haltere.

The haltere

The haltere varied in shape throughout antiquity but most commonly took the form of a semicircle with a hole in it; users would place their fingers through the hole to grip this piece of handheld exercise equipment. Halteres were typically constructed from stone and metal but were also made with wood and wax; athletes would add lead to these wooden and waxen halteres to increase their weight.

Halteres were used similarly to how we use modern dumbbells. Athletes would hold the weights while performing curls, lunges, and deadlifts. They’d also swing them around the way you would an Indian club.

An ancient Greek athlete holding halteres while doing the long jump.

Halteres were used for training in the long jump as well. Athletes would hold the weights in their hands and jump with them to build up power and strength in their legs. They’d also use halteres to jump further. As they jumped, they’d swing the halteres forward to help propel their momentum and then swing the weights backward, letting them go just before landing.

The Romans copied the Greeks and used halteres to train their athletes and warriors. The Greek physician Galen recommended soldiers utilize halteres to get stronger.

Image from De Arte Gymnastica Aput Ancientes showing modern dumbbell-looking halteres.

During the Renaissance, ancient Greek and Roman training methods saw a revitalization. Health books of the period forwarded Galen’s recommendations for using weighted implements for exercise, and the haltere found its way back into Western culture. The most important Renaissance book that promoted strength training with halteres was Mercurialis’ De Arte Gymnastica Aput Ancientes. Along with training regimens inspired by Hellenistic culture, the book contains elaborate illustrations of jacked Greeks and Romans hoisting things, including halteres, to get stronger. But the halteres that Mercurialis depicted looked different from the oblong semicircles that actual Greeks and Romans used. Instead, they looked like two cones stuck together at their heads, forming a rod in the middle you could grasp.

They looked like modern-day dumbbells.

Dumbbells Become DumbbellsThanks to Mercurialis’ De Arte Gymnastica, by the 18th century, training with handheld weights became a common and accepted form of physical exercise. But when did the haltere start being called a dumbbell, and why was it called that?

Jan Todd, a professor of exercise history, has scoured the historical record on these questions and couldn’t come to a definitive answer.

But what she uncovered offers clues about how the haltere became the dumbbell.

In 1711, the British poet and essayist Joseph Addison wrote this in his popular magazine, The Spectator:

When I was some years younger than I am at present, I used to employ myself in a more laborious diversion…it is there called…the fighting with a man’s own shadow; and consists in the brandishing of two short sticks, grasped in each hand, and loaded with plugs of lead at either end. This opens the chest, exercises the limbs and gives a man all the pleasure of boxing, without the blows.

It sounds like Addison was shadowboxing using handheld weights that resemble what we know as dumbbells. But in that essay, he never used “dumbbell” to refer to his hand weights.

However, when describing another of his exercise routines in a different essay in the same issue of the magazine, he does use the phrase “dumb bell”:

For my own part, when I am in town, I exercise myself an hour every morning upon a dumb bell that is placed in a corner of my room, and [it] pleases me the more because it does everything I require of it in most profound silence. My landlady and her daughters are so well acquainted with my hours of exercise, that they never come into my room to disturb me whilst I am ringing.

The dumb-bell exercise apparatus, which was used even by a Founding Father. When Benjamin Franklin was 80, a friend asked him in a letter what accounted for his longevity. Old Ben responded: “I live temperately, drink no wine, and use daily the exercise of the dumb-bell.”

When Addison says he was exercising himself upon a “dumb bell,” he was likely referring to a piece of equipment that included four arms with lead balls on their ends. The apparatus was installed a level above the one on which it would be used. A rope attached to the device ran through the floor to where the user stood below. He would pull the rope up and down, turning the apparatus’ weighted arms like a flywheel. This rope-pulling movement resembled that used to ring a big bell (like a church bell), though this “ringing” did not, of course, result in any sound. Hence, the device was called a “dumb bell” — “dumb” as in “doesn’t make a noise.”

So why did the name “dumb bell” get transferred from this piece of 18th-century exercise equipment to haltere-esque handheld weights?

Perhaps it was because the arms on the dumb-bell apparatus kind of resemble the dumbbells we know today.

Or maybe readers of Addison’s magazine conflated the two articles he wrote together and started thinking of the handheld weights he referenced as “dumb bells” too.

The world may never know.

While there isn’t a definitive answer as to when and why handheld weights became known as dumbbells, it’s clear that by the end of the 18th century, they were regularly being called such (the term “barbell” wouldn’t arrive on the scene for another century).

It’s also clear that dumbbells have a health-enhancing, strength-improving track record that stretches from antiquity through the present day.

Long may they continue to be hoisted.

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In your journey towards becoming stronger, fitter, and healthier, there often comes a point where you wonder if taking some supplements will help your progress along. But what fitness supplements are actually effective and worth investing in?

Here to answer that question is Layne Norton, a powerlifter and doctor of nutritional science who has a passion for debunking health-related myths and promoting evidence-based recommendations. He’s also, full disclosure, the owner of a supplement company himself. But I don’t have any financial connection to Layne’s company and we keep this conversation neutral and high-level. In our conversation, Layne argues that there are three top-tier research-backed supplements to consider — whey protein, creatine, and caffeine — and we unpack how to use each of them for optimal results. We discuss whether plant proteins are sufficient for building muscle, whether it’s true that creatine causes bloating, acne, and hair loss, how to best time your caffeine intake to energize your workouts, and much more. At the end of our conversation, Layne shares some additional supplements that seem promising for enhancing your health and fitness.

Resources Related to the Episode* Layne’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #475 — How to Lose Weight, and Keep It Off Forever * Layne’s supplement company: Outwork Nutrition * AoM Article: A Primer On Muscle-Building Supplements — Which Work and Which Don’t? * AoM Article: Creatine — A Primer on Its Benefits and Use * AoM Article: How to Use Caffeine to Optimize Your Workouts * AoM Article: Chugging Your Protein — It’s Whey Easier Than You Think * AoM Podcast #285: The Real Science of Nutrition and Supplements

Connect With Layne Norton* Layne on Instagram * Layne‘s website

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Nothing is as fatiguing as the continued hanging on of an uncompleted task. —William James

You probably keep a to-do list that compiles your outstanding chores and tasks (and hopefully treat it like a river!).

But beyond this kind of standard to-do list, there are eight other lists that are also beneficial to keep.

These lists expand the function that the standard to-do list already serves: clearing out your head and organizing your life so you can experience greater clarity and get more done.

Uncompleted tasks and unorganized thoughts — open loops — squat on your mental bandwidth. They become so much flotsam and jetsam bobbing around in your cognitive sea, sometimes sinking below the surface of consciousness, sometimes randomly rising into awareness. The fact that you don’t have a good grasp of what’s out there, and sense there are things you want to take action on but can’t remember what they are, makes you feel frazzled, fragmented, and out of sorts.

As the founder of the Getting Things Done system, David Allen, said on the AoM podcast: “Your head is a really crappy office.”

Instead of keeping all your open loops in a chaotic pile on your mental desk, file them into an external “office” by writing them down somewhere and organizing them into the following lists. You can keep these lists anywhere you like, whether in a paper or digital notebook. Their nature will make them easiest to find and access in that latter format, and while you can slot them in a well-organized “second brain,” simply using your phone’s notes app works perfectly well.

Beyond the Standard To-Do: 8 Lists You Should KeepTo Buy. You’re brushing your teeth and notice you need more toothpaste. You’re getting dressed and notice you need more socks. You’re making dinner and notice you need more pepper. You promise yourself you’ll remember these things the next time you make an Amazon order or run to the store, but, in reality, you’ve forgotten the low-inventory item five minutes later.

As soon as something you need to buy crosses your mind, write it down on a shopping list, organized by which outlet/business you’ll be purchasing it from.

To Watch/To Listen To/To Read. A co-worker mentions a show that sounds interesting. A friend sends you a podcast he recommends. Your brother suggests a book he thinks you’ll enjoy. But when you’re starting your commute to work, stepping on the treadmill to begin a run, or sitting on a plane, you can’t think of what to watch, listen to, or read. You don’t remember that a loved one gave you a good recommendation, or you do remember that they did, but can’t remember the name of the suggested movie/podcast/book.

Whether ideas for media to check out come from your social network or you stumble across them while browsing/consuming something else, write them down in separate To Watch, To Listen To, and To Read lists that you can easily cue up the next time you’re working out or washing dishes.

To Cook. You and your family have probably cooked a bunch of meals that everyone liked. But when it comes to that perennial question — “What should we have for dinner this week?” — everyone draws a blank. It’s hard to remember the meals that exist within your familial repertoire, so keep a list of them for easy reference.

To Eat. You’re driving around town, see a new restaurant that seems interesting, and make a mental note to dine there the next time you go out to eat. But by the time the weekend rolls around, the idea has evaporated from your mind. Keep a running list of restaurants to check out, so you don’t have to always default to your old standbys.

To Give. It’s your friend’s or spouse’s birthday next week, and you’re pondering what to give them as a gift. Though you rack your brain for an idea, nothing comes to mind. To prevent yourself from winding up in this pickle, write down ideas as they arise throughout the year, even if you’re months away from the occasion. The person may mention something they like, or you see an item while shopping for something else you think they’d dig. When a birthday, anniversary, or Christmas does finally roll around, you’ll only need to check your list of ideas to figure out what to get.

Another good list/note to keep is a rundown of a loved one’s favorite things — colors, foods, candies, brands — and their sizes in clothing and rings. These things are easy to forget and having a reference makes gift buying a lot easier.

To Talk About. This is a list of things to talk about with a friend, and it serves two purposes. The first is to help you remember to ask someone things you’ve been wondering about but keep forgetting to bring up. “What’s the latest on your lawsuit?” “Have you heard from Andy?” “Did you ever figure out what was causing that noise?” The second purpose is to enhance the conversation you have with someone the next time you get together. While it’s often supposed that it’s best to keep social interactions strictly spontaneous, a little intentional planning on the backend can actually make interactions much smoother, deeper, and more enjoyable. Before you get together with someone, make a list of questions you’d like to ask and good conversation topics to discuss.

You may, of course, want to make other lists based on your particular responsibilities and interests. For example, when we hear about a new trail, we add it to our “To Hike” list.

Move whatever things you can out of the crappy office that is your cranium and to an external file. The more lists you keep, the more organized you’ll feel and the more enjoyable, life-enriching action you’ll take.

The post Beyond the Standard To-Do: 8 Lists You Should Be Keeping appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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You heard about The Art of War, and it sounded pretty cool. So you picked up a copy to read. But you found that, beyond a few of its famous maxims, a lot of this text attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu was hard to understand, much less incorporate into your life.

My guest offers a tripartite framework that can help you get a lot more out of The Art of War. His name is Jim Gimian, and he’s an editor of one of the text’s translations as well as the co-author of The Rules of Victory: How to Transform Chaos and Conflict—Strategies from The Art of War. Today on the show, Jim argues that The Art of War is a holistic, interconnected text that’s about how to approach conflict and obstacles in a holistic, interconnected way. Underlying this approach are three dynamics: Heaven, Earth, and General, which correspond to View, Practice, and Action. Jim and I talk about the importance of constantly orienting and reorienting yourself to an ever-changing world, working with the shih, or energy, in the landscape you’re navigating, using action to further refine your perspective, and more.

Resources Related to the Episode The Art of War: The Denma Translation * Professor Andrew Wilson’s Great Courses course on Masters of War* * AoM Podcast #664: The Masters of the Art of War With Andrew Wilson * AoM Article: 43 Books About War Every Man Should Read * AoM Article: Lessons from The Art of War — Good Leaders vs. Bad Leaders * AoM Article: The Tao of Boyd — How to Master the OODA Loop

Connect With Jim Gimian* The Rules of Victory website * Jim on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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I’m surprised by the number of men who don’t know how to shuffle a deck of cards. But you shouldn’t have to hand the deck to your grandpa for shuffling the next time you’re playing one of the six card games every man should know. Learn how to thoroughly shuffle a deck of cards just like Gramps, with a bit of flair to boot!

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

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Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” imagines a time in which the government enforces the absolute physical and mental equality of all citizens. The beautiful must wear masks. The most graceful dancers are saddled with weights. The strong have bags of birdshot padlocked around their necks.

And the intelligent — like George Bergeron — are forced to wear “handicap radios” on their ears. At short, regular intervals, transmitters send out ever-novel, cranium-shaking noises which “keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”

These constant disruptions prevent George from ever fully gathering his thoughts. Even when he sees his son shot to death on television, George can’t hold onto his grief; as soon as another shockwave of sound ripples through his head, he forgets what he’d been feeling.

While “Harrison Bergeron” conjures up what seems like a distant dystopian future, parts of its vision are a reality now. While we don’t wear government-issued transmitters, we have volitionally adopted a similarly disruptive technology.

At short, regular intervals, our phones scatter our thoughts, not always with a literal noise, but with an internal, yet equally forceful itch.

Work for two minutes; check your phone.

Talk with someone for two minutes; check your phone.

Read for two minutes; check your phone.

The most insidious thing about any kind of “handicap radio” is that they not only interrupt your thoughts in general; they also interrupt your thoughts about the interruption.

Before we can recall what life was like prior to these devices, before we can register how we feel about being part of the Great Leveling, another buzz, another itch, another scroll-scroll-scroll chases the impressions from our minds.

We sense there might be an above-average spark of genius on the other side of that two-minute window . . . if only we’d switch off our handicap radios long enough to find out.

The post Sunday Firesides: Switch Off Your Handicap Radio appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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The Craftsman. Philosopher Richard Sennett came up in a podcast interview I did this week, and it reminded me of a book of his that I read several years ago that I still mentally chew on today. In The Craftsman, Sennett sets out a philosophy of good craftsmanship. For him, good craftsmanship is where you focus on developing the skills that will allow you to do good work for its own sake and where you focus on the work itself and not your vain desires. We published an article several years ago highlighting insights from this book.

TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time. I stumbled upon this YouTube video last week and watched all 30 minutes of it in one sitting. It’s a hypnotic journey trillions upon trillions of years into the future that offers an idea of what will happen to our universe. Short answer: lots of black holes and empty space, with the black holes eventually evaporating into nothing. It’s a video that’s both terrifying and oddly comforting. As one YouTube commenter put it after watching the video: “This is the most soothing existential crisis I’ve ever had.”

So, you’ve been challenged to a duel. What are the rules? If you ever find yourself challenged to a duel, make sure to glance through this 19th-century rule book, so you fight to the death correctly and like a proper gentleman. What’s interesting is how many of the rules are about who you’re allowed to duel. As we discussed in our series on traditional honor, honor is the respect due to a man who is your equal. So as Article 18 of the Rules of Dueling indicate, if a man of lesser standing insults you, you just have to ignore it. This is an interesting peek into a bygone era.

Brownflex Chukka Boot. The chukka boot is a timeless men’s footwear staple that can be worn with both casual and dressier duds. I’ve owned a pair of Italian-made chukkas from Astroflex for coming up on seven years now, and they’re still going strong. They’re super comfortable and pretty dang versatile. I’ve worn them with a t-shirt and jeans or a button-down and chinos. Always looks good. Check out our highly informative FAQ on the chukka.

Quote of the Week

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man is his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.

—H.F. Hedge

The post Odds & Ends: March 2, 2023 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Synthetic workout shirts were supposed to represent a great leap forward in performance wear.

Unlike cotton shirts, which soak up your sweat and become wet and heavy, synthetic fabrics, typically made of polyester, wick away moisture, keeping you cool and dry.

Unfortunately, this advantage comes with a significant downside: they can smell terrible. Terrible. This isn’t just anecdotal observation: sweaty synthetic shirts have been scientifically proven to smell worse than sweaty cotton ones.

There’s something special about the way body odor mixes with polyester that makes for a particularly repugnant scent.

While polyester repels water, it attracts bodily oil and the smelliest kind of bacteria. And while this stinky grime doesn’t get pulled into the fibers of synthetic fabric, it winds up trapped between them, where it becomes stubbornly hard to remove.

This is why your synthetic workout shirt can still smell even after you’ve put it through the wash. And why even if it doesn’t smell coming out of the dryer, it almost instantly starts to stink again when you begin your next workout. The bacteria was never fully washed away in the first place and got reactivated as soon as you started to sweat. This phenomenon is evocatively known as the “rebloom effect.”

Your regular wash routine isn’t sufficient to get the stubborn stink out of synthetic workout shirts. It requires a special HIIT-level effort.

If you prefer to wear synthetic shirts when you work out, but don’t want to knock over fellow members of your running club with your odor, here’s the field-tested cleaning method we recommend:

Buy a week’s worth of workout shirts. Washing your workout shirts requires a special, and especially aggressive, method that isn’t needed or desirable for your other clothes. So you’re going to be washing your workout shirts in their own dedicated wash. Given that you don’t want to do this special wash every few days, buy a week’s worth of workout shirts to batch this chore. This doesn’t have to be a pricey investment: all synthetic shirts pretty much function the same, so you don’t need to get a name brand; even Amazon Essentials’ shirts (2 for $18) work fine. Getting inexpensive shirts will also help you feel better about engaging in the aggressive wash method outlined below.

Keep your dirty shirts in their own ventilated hamper. Because moisture breeds bacteria, experts often recommend hanging up your dirty workout shirts after you take them off to give them a chance to dry out. But the average person is not going to hang up their sweaty workout tops. It still isn’t a good idea to crumple them up in a plastic hamper, though, where their moisture will molder, and their stink will get on your other clothes. So adopt a compromise position: put dirty shirts in a well-ventilated mesh hamper where they’ll at least get some air. Drape your most recently used ones over the outside edges of the hamper so they can get max airflow and dry out faster.

Turn your shirts inside out before washing. This will maximize contact between the shirts’ most soiled areas and the water and detergent.

Use the washer’s heavy-duty hot-water cycle. The manufacturers of workout clothes recommend washing their garments in cool water and drying them on low heat in order to preserve their structural integrity. They warn that hot washing/drying can damage their shirts — causing them to shrink, stretch, or lose their shape. So if you wear expensive, premium workout gear, you may want to heed this warning and treat your shirts delicately.

However, we’ve found that even when using a special detergent designed for workout clothes, a cool cycle just isn’t as effective for stink-removal as a hot one, and a hot wash/dry doesn’t seem to do much damage to synthetic shirts. They still last for years and years. Plus, if you’re already wearing the bargain kind, you may not care if their longevity is slightly diminished.

Set the washer to the hot heavy-duty cycle + presoak + extra rinse.

Don’t overdo the detergent. You might think that using extra soap will make the wash extra effective at removing grime. But using too much detergent will actually backfire, as it creates residue that traps more of the odor-causing bacteria in your shirts. With doing laundry generally, you can often use 30-50% less detergent than the detergent manufacturer calls for and still have your clothes come out clean. So when you’re washing your workout shirts, rather than using more detergent than the bottle suggests, use a little less.

There are special detergents made for washing workout clothes, but we’ve found that a standard detergent works fine, as long as you pair it with the next step:

Presoak the shirts with OxiClean. OxiClean is the secret sauce in getting the stink out of workout shirts. Depending on load size and level of shirt-stink, add a half to full scoop and let soak for four hours. You can soak longer, but then the hot water will cool before the wash cycle starts; you want to strike a balance between soak time and maintaining water temp.

As mentioned above, use the extra rinse function on your washer with this wash to better eliminate residual grime, detergent, and OxiClean.

Dry on high heat. Again, the manufacturers of synthetic workout shirts don’t recommend this. But while a hot dry cycle may or may not get hot enough to kill bacteria outright (it depends on the particular dryer), it will ensure your shirts get thoroughly dry and don’t retain residual, bacteria-breeding moisture. And we haven’t noticed any damage in drying workout shirts this way. But if you’ve got nice shirts you’re worried about, dry them on low heat or air dry.

Don’t use dryer sheets. Dryer sheets work by depositing a softening, static-reducing chemical compound on your clothes. This coating not only reduces the moisture-wicking ability of synthetic shirts but also traps odor-causing bacteria in the fabric.

Instead of using dryer sheets, we use these wool balls in all our loads. They don’t reduce static to the same degree as dryer sheets, but their natural nature, reusability, and workout-shirt-compatibility are a plus.

Whew, just considering all these steps feels like a workout in itself. You might want to make peace with those soggy cotton tees, after all.

The post How to Get the Stink Out of Synthetic Workout Shirts appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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If you’re just getting started honing your pistol marksmanship, you may have noticed that your shots are grouping to one side of the bullseye or another. A small adjustment of your finger on the trigger will likely fix this issue and make your shots more accurate.

The illustration above and instructions below apply to right-handed shooters. If you’re a southpaw, just flip things.

Snatching. If your shots are grouping to the right, it likely means you have too much finger on the trigger. When you squeeze the trigger, it’s causing the sights and the barrel to shift to the right.

Pushing. If you notice your shots are grouping to the left of where you’re aiming, it’s likely because you have too little of your finger on the trigger. When you squeeze the trigger, it’s causing the sights and the barrel to shift to the left.

Heeling. If you notice your shots are grouping high, it likely means you’re anticipating the recoil from the shot and consequently driving the heel of your palm forward. This causes the barrel to shift up. One drill you can use to fix this is to have a friend load a magazine with a random assortment of live and dummy rounds. When you fire a dummy round, you won’t get the normal recoil and will be better able to see if you’re heeling and shifting up the barrel of the gun. Focus on keeping things even throughout the trigger squeeze.

Jerking. If your shots are grouping low, it likely means you’re jerking the trigger instead of squeezing it. Abruptly jerking the trigger will cause the barrel to tip down.

When you place your finger on the trigger, make sure the trigger sits on the middle of the first pad of your finger. And remember to squeeze or press the trigger straight back. Don’t pull. That will just cause you to jerk the pistol and disturb your sights.

Keep these pointers in mind during your next session at the range, and your shot grouping may end up much more on target.

The post Pistol Marksmanship: How to Fix 4 Common Trigger Mistakes appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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What albums and songs are getting a lot of play on your Spotify or iTunes app currently? My guest would say that the music you put in heavy rotation comes down to your unique “listener profile.”

Her name is Susan Rogers, and she’s a music producer-turned-neuroscientist as well as the co-author of This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You. Today on the show, Susan unpacks the seven dimensions of music and how they show up along a varying spectrum in every song. She explains how everyone has an individualized taste for the configuration of these dimensions, and that how closely a particular song aligns with this pattern of sweet spots accounts for whether you like it or not. Along the way, we discuss artists that exemplify these dimensions, how Frank Sinatra injected virility into his music, how part of your musical taste has to do with the way you prefer to move your body, and much more.

Artists and Songs Mentioned in the Episode Prince’s Purple Rain * Barenaked Ladies * The Shaggs * Ella Fitzgerald * The Rentals * The Killers * Tame Impala * Steven Page * Johnny Cash * Cake * James Brown’s “Hot Pants” * Yes’ “Roundabout” * Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” * Carly Rae Jepson’s “Call Me Maybe” * Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue* * Frank Sinatra’s first hit song “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” (1940) vs. “It Was a Very Good Year” (1965)

Connect With Susan Rogers The This Is What It Sounds Like* website, including the “Record Pull“ * Susan’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Has life been feeling flat?

Do you not get the same pleasure from activities you once enjoyed?

Is it feeling harder to get motivated to do things?

Are you unhappy with a habit like constantly checking your smartphone or watching porn?

Do you want to kick an addiction to alcohol or tobacco?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might consider doing a dopamine reset.

The Pleasure/Pain BalanceDopamine is the neurotransmitter of wanting. It’s what makes pursuing goals so dang pleasurable. Dopamine is released in our brains whenever we encounter rewards, or “natural reinforcers,” that help us survive and thrive. Food, sex, novelty, friendship, praise, and money are all natural reinforcers. Whenever we encounter them, dopamine is released, which helps create a neurological pathway in our brains so that we repeat the same behaviors that helped us attain the rewards previously.

Usually, the dopamine released by natural reinforcers is adaptive. It’s good to want food, sex, and novelty in moderation. These things contribute to our mental and physical well-being. But sometimes, adaptive dopamine-driven behaviors can become maladaptive. Binge eating, obsessive porn watching, and all-consuming video game playing are examples of healthy impulses being hijacked into unhealthy compulsions.

Drugs and other substances release dopamine in even greater amounts than things like food and sex. This is what makes drugs addictive despite them being so bad for you. The dopamine spike created by certain substances causes addicts to repeat the abuse behaviors so that they can repeat the high.

The interesting thing about dopamine is that besides inducing the pleasure of desire, it also causes us to experience pain.

As psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke explains in her book Dopamine Nation, our bodies and minds like to keep things in homeostasis. Lembke highlights research that whenever the brain experiences a big, pleasurable spike in dopamine, it downregulates dopamine transmission and its sensitivity to dopamine to bring things back into balance. But the thing is, our brain doesn’t stop this downregulation when things get back to even. It will keep downregulating until the balance is tipped an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain.

This dynamic, called the opponent process mechanism, explains why you feel pretty let down after achieving a big goal. You had a lot of dopamine driving you to achieve it, but once you reached the goal, your brain downregulates your dopamine, so much so that you feel bummed.

This is why high-performance athletes and artists often battle post-victory depression after notching a big achievement.

It’s the same thing with something like masturbation; you feel driven to do it, but after achieving the reward of orgasm, you can feel kind of deflated and even dejected.

The opponent process mechanism also explains why drug addicts feel really bad after the initial high. The significant, drug-induced spike towards the pleasure side of the balance is followed by an equal and opposite dip into pain.

To counter the pain that comes after a dopamine spike, the addict will consume more and more of the drug or engage in more and more of the maladaptive behavior (e.g., compulsively watching porn or gambling.) They’re trying to get their pleasure/pain balance to shift back into pleasure.

Unfortunately, this only makes an individual’s pleasure response get weaker and shorter thanks to tolerance, while the pain side of the balance dips even further down. The addict ends up in a state of dopamine deficit. When they’re in this dopamine deficit, they don’t really enjoy anything. Things that once gave them pleasure no longer do. They feel a lack of motivation and happiness and sink into depression. Psychologists call this state anhedonia.

Even if you’re not addicted to drugs or gambling, Lembke argues that we can all experience this dopamine deficit if we engage in dopaminergic activities too much. Maybe you’ve experienced the existential flatness of anhedonia thanks to checking your smartphone excessively. Not only does perusing TikTok no longer give you any pleasure, but as you check it more and more, hoping to get a dopamine hit from some novel story, it increasingly puts you into a dopamine deficit that saps some enjoyment from other activities in your life as well.

So how do you get out of this dopamine deficit and back to your dopamine baseline so that you feel motivated and driven, but in a healthy way?

By doing a dopamine reset.

How to Do a Dopamine ResetWe all have different dopamine baselines. Some of us are more dopaminergic and naturally seek greater novelty and excitement. Others are less dopaminergic and feel more at home eating corn flakes every morning and listening to the same music they did in college. Wherever you fall on that spectrum, a dopamine reset will get you out of your dopamine deficit and back to your healthy dopamine baseline.

When Dr. Lembke treats patients with addictions, she walks them through the following steps for doing a dopamine reset. The goal is to help her patients get their dopamine pleasure/pain balance out of pain and back to its natural homeostasis. She wants her patients not to hurt anymore and kick the addiction.

You might benefit from a dopamine reset even if you don’t have a severe addiction. If you’ve been feeling a little flat lately, you might be experiencing a bit of dopamine-induced anhedonia. A dopamine reset can also help you break bad habits like constantly checking your smartphone.

Note: If you’re still feeling flat and unmotivated after doing this reset, you might consider visiting a psychologist to explore whether the problem isn’t just your dopamine balance and may be a case of clinical depression.

Do a Dopamine FastAs mentioned above, whenever we get into a dopamine deficit, our natural tendency is to try to feel better by doing more of the drug or behavior that got us our initial dopamine spike. But that only deepens the dopamine deficit.

Lembke argues we’d be better off abstaining from the drug or behavior. When we do that, our brains naturally take us out of the dopamine deficit and back to baseline.

One of the first things Lembke recommends her addiction patients do is take a dopamine fast for a month. That means abstaining from the problematic substance or behavior for four weeks. She admits that this is really hard to do, especially in those first two weeks, but the payoff is worth the effort. It really does get you back to baseline.

A dopamine fast will take some willpower, but Lembke recommends utilizing various behavioral techniques to bolster your self-control, like putting barriers between you and your maladaptive habit. That could mean removing all the drugs and booze in your house or placing internet filters on your computer and smartphone.

For individuals who don’t have full-on addictions, Lembke suggests that a fast that lasts a day or week is likely enough to get you back to your dopamine baseline. If checking your phone too much is a problem, consider incorporating a weekly tech sabbath into your life; if you’re not happy with your snacking, fast entirely from food for a day.

Press on the Pain to Get More PleasureIf you’d like to turbocharge your dopamine fast to help you get out of a dopamine deficit, Lembke recommends enhancing its pain.

Don’t worry. You won’t have to whip yourself or wear a hairshirt.

It seems counterintuitive: when your pleasure/pain balance is already tipped toward the pain side, you can restore balance by pressing on the pain. But remember the opponent process mechanism we discussed above: our brain likes homeostasis, and if it notices we’re engaging in activities that add weight to the pain side of our pleasure/pain balance, it will respond by shifting things to the pleasure side.

And according to Lembke, the pleasure we receive from mildly painful activities gives us access to dopamine via an indirect source that makes it less vulnerable to the problem of tolerance, dependence, and withdrawal.

So how can we press on the pain side a bit more to turbocharge our dopamine fast?

Cold Water Exposure. We’ve been advocates of cold showers since before they were cool. Lembke has found that cold showers and ice baths are a great way to press on the pain, tap into a healthy source of dopamine, and restore your dopamine baseline.

Cold water is very unpleasant and causes you to gasp and shiver. Despite the pain, research has shown that 1-3 minutes of cold water exposure can increase dopamine concentrations by 250%. What’s interesting about the dopamine surge from cold showers and baths is that it’s gradual and goes back down gradually. This might explain why the dopamine we get from taking them doesn’t cause the same problems as the sudden dopamine spikes from drugs or other maladaptive behaviors.

Exercise. Like cold showers, exercise can be unpleasant. You get out of breath and sweaty. Your muscles and lungs burn and ache as you strain to lift heavy weights or perform an all-out sprint.

But this pain is highly effective in bringing your dopamine system back to baseline.

Research highlighted by podcast guest Dr. Jennifer Heisz shows that recovering drug addicts do better when they combine their recovery with exercise. Lembke has observed the same thing in her work.

Drug abuse releases supernatural amounts of dopamine that strip away the brain’s receptors for it. Natural stimuli, which release far less dopamine, lose their ability to feel sufficiently rewarding. This only makes drugs more addicting, as the addict becomes reliant on them as their sole source of pleasure.

Exercise speeds up the process by which the brain’s dopamine receptors return to their normal state; once they’ve recovered, an addict is in a much better place to kick their habit because they can once again experience a “high” from natural things and are no longer dependent on the substance for pleasure.

Plus, exercise itself gives the brain the reward its dopamine seeks, which helps crush cravings.

Other Hard Activities. Lembke also recommends that patients press on the pain side of the pleasure/pain balance by engaging in hard activities beyond cold showers and exercise. This could be reading a challenging book, fasting from food, or working on a difficult household project. Anything that frustrates you can help you press on the pain side of things and restore your dopamine to baseline levels.

In conclusion, while dopamine is a master pleasure hormone, it can work against us when our pleasure/pain balance swings too far into the pleasure side. Fortunately, by engaging in a dopamine reset, we can return to a healthy neural balance.

For more insights on the role of dopamine in your life, listen to our podcast with Dr. Anna Lembke:

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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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Influence comes down to a person’s level of authority. When someone is perceived as having power, status, and worth, others readily follow them and comply with them.

Authority isn’t just a matter of position. It’s also a personal quality.

When people attempt to develop their influence or authority, they tend to focus on learning social skills and changing their behaviors around speech and body language.

But my guest would say that authority isn’t about what you learn but who you are, and that once you establish the right lifestyle and mindset, influential behaviors will emerge as a natural byproduct.

Chase Hughes is a behavioral analyst who trains both military operatives and civilians. Today on the show, Chase unpacks the five factors that measure someone’s level of authority and produce composure, a state which resides between posturing and collapse. We talk about how so much of authority comes down to having your stuff together, why you should become your own butler, and what Andy Griffith has to teach about leadership. We also talk about the things that kill your authority, and how not to be influenced by false authority.

Resources Related to the Episode Chase’s books: + Six-Minute X-Ray: Rapid Behavior Profiling + The Ellipsis Manual: Analysis and Engineering of Human Behavior* * Chase’s app * Milgram experiment * “The Social Psychology of Imitated Jaywalking” * Chase’s Authority Self-Assessment Matrix * AoM Article: The 5 T’s of Mastering the Art of Poise * Becoming a Well-Differentiated Leader * AoM Article: Never Complain; Never Explain * Smoke-filled room experiment * AoM Article: 8 Reasons You’re Hardwired for Sheepness * The 34 Behaviors That Will Kill Your Authority

Connect With Chase Hughes* Chase‘s website * Chase on IG * Chase‘s YouTube channel and The Behavioral Panel YouTube channel * Chase on Twitter

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #875: Authority Is More Important Than Social Skills appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The Ellipsis Manual: analysis and engineering of human behavior

Six-Minute X-Ray: Rapid Behavior Profiling

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The omelet is really the star of the egg-centric breakfast dishes. And while it’s often the highlight of any good restaurant breakfast buffet, it can easily be made at home with a little practice; omelets are awesome for both the bachelor looking for a quick and healthy breakfast (or breakfast for dinner) and the dad making some Saturday morning goodness for his family.

What’s great about the omelet, is that you can make it your own: Keep it simple with just ham and cheddar or branch out and add various meats, cheeses, and vegetables. Whatever you add to yours, follow the step-by-step instructions above, and your omelet will turn out just as good as those made by the cooks who man the buffet line.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

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Just One Quality Conversation With a Friend Boosts Daily Well-Being. Jeffrey Hall, who came on the AoM podcast to discuss how long it takes to make a friend, has a new study out showing that having just one quality conversation with a friend during the day can boost your well-being. A “quality” conversation can range from meaningful talk to joking around to offering sincere compliments — it’s just the act of reaching out that matters. The boost you get is biggest when you have the conversation face-to-face, rather than electronically.

The Power Elite. A genre of books that I enjoy are sociology-themed books from the middle of the 20th century. The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man are examples we’ve highlighted on the site before (see here and here). Along these lines, I recently read The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills published in 1959. It was interesting to see how a sociologist described the status structure in mid-century America. While things have definitely changed since 1959, the insights about status and ambition are timeless and still relevant today.

TriggerPoint MB Vibe 3-Speed Vibrating Massage Ball. I’ve been dealing with some aches and pains in my hips lately. A physical therapist recommended adding this massage ball from TriggerPoint into my foam-rolling warm-up before doing squats. Using a ball in place of a foam roller increases the pressure and intensity of the self-massage. When you turn on the vibration, it adds even more intensity. It could be placebo, but it’s helping. My aches have been reduced and squatting doesn’t hurt when I use this before I get under the bar.

John Wooden’s “Two Sets of Three.” Legendary coach John Wooden gave his sons two sets of three rules. These “Two Sets of Three” undergirded his life philosophy, as well as his famous “Pyramid of Success.” We have them hanging up in our kitchen and recite them at each of our weekly family meetings. We’ve added a couple specific to what the McKays want to work on. “Don’t Be a Potato Head” refers to not being the kind of person who sits silent and slack-jawed in class or Sunday school and stares blankly at their phone at restaurants and events, and who is instead curious and engaged with others and the world.

Don’t be a potato head.

Quote of the Week

When we are young, we are slavishly employed in procuring something whereby we may live comfortably when we grow old; and when we are old, we perceive it is too late to live as we proposed.

—Alexander Pope

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When Nick Gray moved to New York City, he was a shy introvert with few friends. But he wanted to build up his social network. So he started throwing cocktail parties to meet people. These parties changed his life, and he thinks they can change yours, too.

Nick knows what you’re thinking: you don’t throw parties, and hosting them is simply not for you. But, he would encourage you not to tune out. He’s got a great case for why you should give this idea a try, and just as he does in his book — The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings — Nick is going to lay out exactly how to throw a party that’s low stakes and low effort, but will be highly successful in helping you build all kinds of connections.

Today on the show, Nick shares what he’s learned from throwing hundreds of parties and refining his hosting technique to a T. He explains why cocktail parties are better than dinner parties (and don’t have to involve actual cocktails), the best night of the week to throw a party, why the party should only be two hours long and have a firm end time, how many people to invite, and who to invite when you don’t yet have any friends. And he explains why he’s a big fan of two things you might be hesitant about — name tags and icebreakers — and why two of his favorite things to include in a party are grapes and a harmonica.

Resources Related to the Episode* Related articles by Nick: + How to Host a Party at Home With Kids + How to Host a Digital Nomad Happy Hour + Mocktail Party: How to Host When You Don’t Drink Alcohol + How to Do Icebreakers: The Ultimate Guide + Event Platforms: Pros, Cons, and My Favorites * Related AoM articles and podcasts: + The Manly Art of Hospitality + How to End a Conversation + 9 Reasons You Should Host a Party This Weekend + Podcast #378: Brunch Is Hell + Podcast #362: The Art of Mingling

Connect With Nick Gray* Nick’s website * Nick’s newsletter * Nick on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings

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Among people who experience some sort of trauma, what percentage do you think go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder? A third? A Half? More?

Actually, the answer is 10%. An overestimation of how common it is to develop PTSD after trauma is one of the misconceptions my guest thinks are leading to its overdiagnosis and an underestimation of human resilience.

Dr. Joel Paris is a professor emeritus of psychiatry and the author of Myths of Trauma: Why Adversity Does Not Necessarily Make Us Sick. Today on the show, Joel explains what some of those myths of trauma are, including the idea that it’s trauma itself which causes PTSD. Joel argues that PTSD is instead created when exposure to trauma meets an individual’s susceptibility to it, and he explains what psychological, biological, and even social factors contribute to this susceptibility. We also get into how the methods used to prevent the triggering of trauma can backfire and how the treatment for PTSD will be ineffective if it only focuses on processing an adverse experience.

Resources Related to the Episode AoMPodcast #788: The Dangers of “Concept Creep” * AoM Podcast #555: Dandelion Children vs. Orchid Children * From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era* by Edward Shorter * AoM Podcast #440: The 3 Great Untruths That Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure * Jay Belsky’s research on differential sensitivity * Video demonstration of EMDR * Radical Acceptance * Interview with Bruce Wampold as to what makes for a good therapist * Joel’s other books

Connect With Joel Paris* Joel’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #873: The Myths of Trauma appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era

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How do people lose their spouse, their faith, their grip on their values, goals, and dreams?

It doesn’t happen all at once.

It doesn’t happen overnight.

It happens through tiny shifts: a steady accumulation of daily, imperceptible deviations from one’s set course.

A little more attention is given to one thing than another.

A frame of mind bends a bit at a time in a certain direction.

A small weed of temptation pops up and is allowed to grow.

As the months and years go by, one domain in life inflates while another shrivels. Thoughts turn 180 degrees. Tangles of vice take over the garden.

A man wakes up one day and doesn’t recognize his own life. He doesn’t know how he got there. He is a stranger to his wife. A stranger to his children. A stranger to his twenty-year-old self who had ideals and a vision for who he wanted to be.

Left unchecked, every life flows away from higher aims and towards the path of least resistance. Daily practices can help stem this slide. But staying on course requires check-ins that are too big to do every day, and too important to only accomplish monthly (or yearly).

These are your weekly habits.

A weekly planning session to re-establish your agenda.

A weekly dedicated hangout to physically and mentally reconnect with your spouse.

A weekly family powwow to sync your schedules and reaffirm your values.

A weekly worship service to remind yourself you’re more than a product of nature.

A weekly walk in the woods to remember you’re also a product of nature.

Though you may zig and zag each day, weekly habits ensure you keep moving in your chosen course; there’s only so far you can get off track when you’re recalibrating your compass every seven days.

The post Sunday Firesides: There’s Only So Far You Can Get Off Track in a Week appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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You walk down your driveway to your mailbox.

You open it up and start sorting through your mail.

Bill.

Weird fake handwritten letter from a window replacement company.

Garnet Hill catalog.

Ah, crap.

A jury summons.

One of the duties of being a citizen in the United States is serving on juries when summoned. Yes, jury duty is annoying, inconvenient, and often incredibly boring, but it’s a vital part of our justice system.

I’ve had the opportunity to do jury duty here in Oklahoma. I never got selected to work a trial, so it was pretty dull and uneventful.

Every state has different protocols on how jury duty works, but they all pretty much follow the same general guidelines. To give American readers the lowdown on how to fulfill your civic duty, I’ll go over some things to know the next time you’re called to serve.

Find Out if You’re Exempt or Excused From Jury DutyIf you’re a U.S. citizen, 18 years or older, not a felon, and have resided in your judicial jurisdiction for at least a year, you’re eligible for jury duty and are required to show up to court on your appointed date if your name is randomly drawn to serve.

However, federal and state courts have exemptions or allow excuses from jury duty. Each court is different, so make sure to look it up online.

If you’re exempt or excused from jury duty, there’s a form you can fill out on your summons that you can return. Do that immediately so you don’t have to show up to the courthouse on your appointed jury duty date.

The ol’ Liz Lemon technique for getting out of jury duty probably won’t work.

Show Up at the Courthouse on the Appointed DateIf you’re not exempt or excused from jury duty, arrive at the courthouse at the appointed date and time. This is important. Failure to report to jury duty will mean you’re in contempt of court. You’re breaking the law. You can be fined or given community service. Don’t miss jury duty.

Plan to Be Out of Pocket for a WeekMost jury duty terms are a week. If you’re assigned to a trial, your trial could be wrapped up in a day or two, which means you’ll go back to the jury pool to await being assigned to another trial.

So make plans to be out of pocket for a week’s time. Let your employer know about your jury duty. By law, employers can’t fire you for missing work due to jury duty. They don’t have to pay you, but they can’t give you the boot.

You’ll get paid for your service on jury duty, but it’s just like $20 to $50 a day (depending on where you live). Just enough to cover parking and lunch at Arby’s.

Some trials can go longer than a week, but that’s rare. If you get assigned to a trial that goes longer, bless your civic heart.

Dress ProfessionallyIn both federal and state courts, the dress code is business casual. Don’t wear shorts, t-shirts, or flip-flops.

I wore a sport coat and slacks during my jury duty. Most men were wearing polo shirts and khakis. One older gentleman was rocking a full double-breasted suit.

Bring Something to Read/DoIn most states, when you arrive at the courthouse, you’ll be ushered to the jury pool area. It’s just a big waiting room that probably has the same decor as it did in 1986. There you will sit until you’re randomly assigned a trial.

You might be selected to go to a trial first thing in the morning. Or you could be like me and not get called up until day three of your jury duty.

So I had to wile away the time for two full days.

Thankfully, I brought my laptop and was able to get some work done while sitting in the jury pool area. I also brought some books to read. It was actually kind of nice to get some uninterrupted work and reading done for an entire two days.

When you get assigned to a trial, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll serve as a juror in that trial. Once you get into the courtroom, you’ll go through a process called voir dire, or “vore dyer,” as we say here in Oklahoma. It’s jury selection. This is when the attorneys from both sides of the dispute will ask you questions to see if they want you on the jury panel. The goal is to make sure both sides get a fair and impartial jury.

You may get excused from the trial after jury selection, and you’ll return to the jury pool waiting area to be assigned to another trial. This happened to me. I got called to a criminal trial on my third day but got the boot during jury selection. I think it may have had to do with my legal background. Who knows. Anyways, I had to go back to the jury pool waiting area and returned to reading my book and working on my laptop. At the end of day four, they told me I didn’t have to come back the next day since they were done starting new trials for the week. So my jury duty lasted just four days.

If you get called to a trial on the first day of jury duty, there’s a chance you’ll wrap your trial up in a day or two. In that case, you’ll return to the jury pool for the rest of your service time. You’ll be glad you brought something to read/do.

Don’t Discuss the Case With Anybody and Avoid News About the CaseIf you get selected for a trial and it isn’t over by the end of the day, you’ll be instructed by the judge not to discuss the case with anybody: your family, other jurors, lawyers, or the bailiff. Nobody. You’ll also be instructed to avoid any media discussing the case. Your job as a juror is to decide the case based only on the evidence presented in the courtroom, not by analysis in the news. In some cases, the judge may sequester you to a hotel room to ensure you aren’t exposed to outside media during the trial.

Listen Carefully to Jury InstructionsAfter closing arguments, the judge will give the jury “jury instructions.” Pay close attention during this time because it will guide your deliberations with the other jurors.

During jury instructions, the judge informs the jury of the applicable laws for their deliberations and that jurors are required to adhere to these laws when deliberating, whether they agree with the laws or not. (Some juries ignore this instruction and engage in “jury nullification.”)

The judge will then explain that the jurors are responsible for determining the facts of the case. Your job is to determine which side made the most convincing arguments about what happened during the dispute or crime. Sometimes the judge will lay out which facts are in dispute and which ones aren’t relevant to the case.

The judge will then explain the standard of proof the jury should use when determining liability (in a civil case) or guilt (in a criminal case). In a civil case, the standard of proof is “a preponderance of the evidence,” which means it’s more likely than not that the defendant is responsible. Basically, if the evidence presented by a plaintiff shows that there’s about a 51% chance that the defendant is liable for the damage, then you can hold the defendant liable. In a civil case, you may also be given instructions on assessing damages.

In a criminal case, the standard of proof is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which means the state has presented evidence that leaves you with an abiding conviction that the charge is true. You need to be 98% to 99% sure that the defendant is guilty in a criminal case. The standard is so high in a criminal case because the punishments are potentially severe: imprisonment or even death. As Ben Franklin put it: “Better that a 100 guilty men go free than one innocent person should suffer.”

Be Professional During Jury DeliberationsAfter jury instructions, you’ll be escorted to the jurors’ room for deliberations. Your first order of business will be to elect a jury foreman. Their job is to guide the discussions, take votes from the other jurors, and deliver the verdict.

During deliberations, be professional. Treat your fellow jurors respectfully, even if you disagree with their opinions on the case.

If you have questions for the judge about the applicable law, the foreman can send a note to the judge. The judge may answer with a note or call the jury back to the courtroom to clear things up.

In most states, civil and criminal cases require a unanimous verdict from the jury. Everyone has to agree. (In some states, civil liability can be determined by a majority of the jurors).

After the verdict is read to the court, the court is dismissed. If it’s Tuesday during your week of jury duty, you’ll go back to the jury pool and wait to be assigned to another trial. If it’s late in the week, you might just be sent home.

If there isn’t a unanimous decision, that’s a hung jury. The judge may ask that you keep deliberating or may declare a mistrial. If it’s a mistrial, the case can be tried again with another jury.

Few people are excited about jury duty, but when it’s your turn to serve, give it your best. You’d hope for the same from your fellow citizens if you ever found yourself in the defendant’s seat.

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You’ve probably heard of Ernest Shackleton, and his ill-fated Antarctic expedition. The Endurance, the ship on which he and his crew sailed, famously became trapped in ice, sunk, and set the men and their indomitable leader off on an arduous journey to safety and rescue.

But the Shackleton expedition wasn’t the only one to meet such a fate, and to become a crucible for leadership. The year before the demise of the Endurance, the Karluk, flagship vessel of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, became icebound and sunk, leaving its crew to trek 80 miles across dangerous ice floes to an island, and its captain to travel 1,000 miles more to obtain rescue for those marooned survivors.

Buddy Levy shares that compelling story in his new book Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk, and unpacks it for us today on the show. Along the way, he brings out the leadership lessons in planning, maintaining morale, and embodying endurance you can glean from the expedition’s two dominant figures: its ostensible leader, who abandoned the ship, and the Karluk‘s captain, who did all he could to save its shipwrecked survivors.

Resources Related to the Episode Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition by Buddy Levy * Endurance* by Alfred Lansing * AoM Article: Leadership Lessons from Ernest Shackleton * AoM Article: What They Left and What They Kept — What an Antarctic Expedition Can Teach You About What’s Truly Valuable * AoM Article: Alone — Lessons on Solitude From an Antarctic Explorer

Connect With Buddy Levy* Buddy’s Website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Endurance : Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic

Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition

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You’ve heard of the seven-year-itch.

It’s the sense of restlessness or dissatisfaction that supposedly sets in after you’ve been with someone for seven years of time. It’s most often talked about in the context of romantic relationships but is also applied to one’s “relationship” with something like a job or place.

While the seven-year-itch is part of pop culture lore, is there evidence that it’s actually real?

Very little research has been done specifically on the questions of whether the seven-year-itch exists, and if it does, why it exists. But there are things we know about human psychology and the rate that people seek change that can help us infer some answers.

If It Was Real, Why Would It Happen?When you first fall in love, your brain is bathed in a heady cocktail of feel-good neurochemicals. These neurochemicals generate intense excitement about your significant other and your future together. And they act as a pair of perspective-altering goggles that minimize your partner’s flaws and magnify their virtues. This person is everything you ever wanted! Your relationship will be a never-ending honeymoon of bliss!

The neurochemicals of love form a kind of buffering forcefield that prevents the other person’s flaws from fully registering and keeps their annoying behaviors from being annoying.

As these neurochemicals wear off, your pedestalized portrait of the person shifts into a more nuanced picture. You start to notice their faults and weaknesses more. Areas of incompatibility, formerly ignored, increasingly come to the fore.

The neurochemicals of new love have largely evaporated by the second or third year of a relationship, so their disappearance occurs too early to explain the seven-year-itch. Yet while they wane in the main after several years, their fumes likely go on longer than that.

One of the central neurochemicals of new love is dopamine, which drives love’s feelings of excitement and pleasure. Dopamine is catalyzed by anything new, and while the novelty of new love — as a whole — eventually recedes, the partners in a couple will continue to discover new things about each other even after the relationship has become well-established. It takes longer than two or three years to learn all the secrets and idiosyncrasies of another person, and each time you do, you get a little resurgence of dopamine.

Perhaps then, the seven-year-itch arises at the time in a relationship when both partners have finally gotten to know each other like the backs of their hands. They have few new stories to share or secrets to reveal. Each person knows what the other will say before they say it. In the absence of novelty, there is an absence of excitement, and a feeling of stagnation — a feeling that the relationship has run its course — may set in.

This is, of course, just a speculative theory.

And, Is It Real?If the seven-year-itch were real, we would expect to find a rise in relationship break-ups around a couple’s seventh year together.

While not all long-term partners get married these days, we have the most data on relationship length with regard to divorce.

Stats vary according to the data and methodology different studies use, but, on average, the highest risk of divorce seems to occur 5-8 years into a marriage.

The fact that divorce peaks within a range of years, rather than exactly at seven, may count for rather than against the existence of the seven-year-itch, given the other variables at play:

First, the clock on the 7-year-itch would presumably start running when a couple begins dating, not when they get married.

Second, you have to account not just for the length of the marriage, but the length of time between when the couple felt the itch and when they actually got divorced.

So if a couple dated for a year before getting married, their seven-year-itch would arise six years into their marriage. Once the itch emerged, they might first try simply separating, and even once they decided to divorce, it might, for personal and legal reasons, take a year or more to become official. They would thus feel the itch around their sixth wedding anniversary, but not be legally divorced until around their seventh or eighth anniversary.

If a couple dated for three years before getting married, they would experience the itch around year four of the marriage, but might not be divorced until year five.

Given the average time a couple dates before marrying and the time it takes to get a divorce, the fact that the risk of divorce peaks 5-8 years into marriage does suggest that the seven-year-itch may be a real thing.

Data from other domains of life suggest something similar. On average, people replace half of their friends every seven years, and move houses every eight years (they would presumably feel the itch to move at year seven, and it would then take another year or so to prepare their home for sale and to actually sell it).

Is the Seven-Year-Itch a Cause for Alarm?While the existence of a seven-year-itch can’t be proven, there does seem to be something to the idea. The itch undoubtedly doesn’t arise according to a strict timetable — exactly at seven years on the dot — but likely happens somewhere around that marker.

Given that the seven-year-itch seems to sometimes lead to divorce, should you be concerned if it’s something you’ve been sensing in your relationship?

What’s important to note here is that while the seven-year-itch seems to lead some people to dissolve their relationship, the news for people who make it past that milestone is quite good: your risk of divorce goes down each year after your tenth anniversary, and years 9-15 of marriage have a particularly low risk of divorce.

The fact that some people’s relationships disintegrate after seven years while others get stronger suggests that the significance of the seven-year-itch isn’t in the phenomenon itself, but in how the partners in a couple choose to frame it.

The seven-year-itch is best interpreted not as a negative signal that your relationship has a problem, but as a neutral signal that it’s undergoing a transition.

Long-term love can remain many things: deeply satisfying, profoundly ardent, and even intensely passionate. But one thing it won’t stay is exciting.

Excitement is predicated on uncertainty, anticipation, and even a kind of pleasurable apprehension. The guessing at feelings. The gap between an imagined future and what will actually unfold. The tension of not knowing who you will end up being to each other.

Excitement dissipates once possibilities become realities and uncertainty transforms into surety. There is little room for uncertainty once you know your lover’s deepest secrets, most granular habits, and the nuanced meanings of a single eyebrow-raise.

But the diminishment of excitement is not without its compensations. As excitement decreases, feelings of stability, security, and intimacy rise, and you have the opportunity to enjoy a new set of satisfactions: The gratification of knowing someone completely, and being known that way in return. The freedom from fraught misunderstandings. The comfort of being entirely at ease with someone else. The joy of having your entire life — your past memories, present navigations, and future dreams — intertwined with another’s.

The feeling of the seven-year-itch may simply be the feeling of reaching a new threshold of familiarity in your relationship. At this juncture, it’s natural to look back a little nostalgically to the intoxicating road you traveled to get there, and to wonder if the best is behind you. But if you hold on, if you recommit to doing all the romantic stuff that brought you to this crossroads in the first place, there can be a whole nother epoch of love, happiness, and swoon-worthy fulfillment ahead.

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Years ago, I was flipping through TV channels and came across Hugh Laurie, of Dr. House fame, decked out in 19th-century English gentleman garb. Because I was a House fan, I was curious about what Hugh Laurie sounded like with his native British accent, so I paused my channel surfing to find out.

Then I brought up the title and saw that I was watching Sense and Sensibility. “Ugh. Jane Austen. No way I would enjoy that,” I thought. I associated Jane Austen with foo-fooey lady stuff. So my plan was to flip the channel as soon as I heard Dr. House talk British.

Two hours later, the end credits for Sense and Sensibility scrolled down the screen. I had watched the entire thing. Didn’t even get up to go the bathroom.

Not only did I watch the whole movie, I remember thinking, “Man, that was really good.”

Thanks to Dr. House, my resistance to Austen was broken, and I found myself genuinely curious about her books. So I got the free version of her collected works and slowly started working my way through what are arguably her three best: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. And I’ll be darned if I didn’t truly enjoy them all.

If you’re a dude who’s written off Jane Austen’s work as I once did, perhaps today’s podcast will convince you that there’s something in it for women and men alike and encourage you to give her novels a try. My guest is John Mullan, a professor of English and the author of What Matters in Jane Austen? John and I discuss the literary innovation Austen pioneered that influenced the likes of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and will give your social agility a healthy workout. John then explains why soldiers and Winston Churchill turned to Austen during the world wars. We also discuss the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that Austen’s work was “the last great representative of the classical tradition of virtues,” Austen’s idea of manliness, and how a man’s choice of a wife will shape his character. And John shares his recommendation for which Austen novel men should read first.

Resources Related to the Episode AoM Article: Why Every Man Should Read Jane Austen * Editions of Jane Austen‘s works available in the public domain * Editions of Sense and Sensibility and Emma with introductions by John * AoM Podcast #824: Lonesome Dove and Life’s Journey Through Uncertainty * Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Janeites” * After Virtue* by Alasdair MacIntyre

Connect With John Mullan* John’s Faculty Page

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After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition

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Have you ever known someone who joined the faith of the person they were dating?

Perhaps the sincerity of that conversion seemed a little suspect, given that the move was likely motivated in part by the individual’s love for their significant other.

But Plato would have found it the most natural progression in the world.

He compared love to a ladder: what begins as an individual’s passion for a particular person can arouse a love for virtue which rises to a love for knowledge and, ultimately, a love for eternal ideals.

A desire for beauty leads to a desire for Beauty; an attraction to goodness becomes an attraction to Goodness; the inspiration to stay true to another inspires a dedication to Truth.

Plato posits that the potential for this progression is rooted in the fact that all earthly beauty is but a reflection of the perfect heavenly “Forms”; all the beauty we encounter here points to something greater beyond it.

But there’s more to it than that.

Love animates the soul, lending someone the energy, sense of capability, and motivation to move formerly backburnered, seemingly arduous quests to the fore.

Love opens dimensions of experience that someone couldn’t have conceived of, prompting them to wonder what other aspects of existence remain to be discovered.

Love, the desire to forever bind one’s life to another’s based on a feeling, softens the inflexible rationality that can ironically handicap the pursuit of truth.

Love emboldens us to do more, be more, perceive more.

Everyone senses that romance is shot through with possibilities. But a glance stolen across a room, a hand held in a darkened theater, or a kiss exchanged on a doorstep can mean more than the beginning of a new relationship; it can be the first rung of someone’s ascent into something even higher.

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TikTok is a New Kind of Superweapon. TikTok is a Chinese-owned company famous for its propriety algorithm that delivers highly viral content. Here in the U.S. and in most Western countries that means you see a lot of content of people dancing, lip-syncing famous movie scenes, and doing stupid things like licking toilets. But tech ethicist Tristan Harris has pointed out that in China, kids don’t see twerkers and toilet-lickers on their version of TikTok, but rather science experiments and educational videos. Furthermore, the Chinese version of TikTok is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. This article explores the possibility that China is potentially using TikTok as psyops in the West — basically counting on it to dumb down and fracture its citizenry.

Tuck Everlasting. Our family just finished reading this book out loud together. We all really enjoyed it. It forces readers to ask themselves, “What if you could live forever?” Underlying the existential plot and evocative writing are resonate notes as to what it feels like to be coming of age and feeling the stirring desire for independence.

Mr. T Advice Compilation. Thanks to our family’s recent viewing of the Rocky series, our children were introduced to Mr. T. Of course they thought he was awesome, so we got on YouTube to see more Mr. T stuff and came across this compilation of him dispensing short nuggets of life advice. The clips are 40 years old, but the wisdom is timeless and on point. Plus, everything sounds cooler when coming from a guy in a mohawk and gold chains.

Carbon Nutrition Coach App. If you count macros for your nutrition needs, the Carbon app from AoM podcast guest Layne Norton will be of interest. You pick your diet goals (gain weight, lose weight, etc.), track what you eat, and weigh in each week. The app then adjusts your macros for the following week based on your weight and your goals. I’ve been using Carbon for the past six months or so and have found it incredibly helpful. Takes the guesswork out of adjusting my macros each week.

Quote of the Week

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

—Goethe

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There are some foods that are difficult to eat non-awkwardly. They’re hard to pick up with your fork and hard to always get into your mouth in a single clean bite. Salad is one. Pasta, at least of the strand variety, is another.

Whether or not you’re pounding your pasta properly may be of little import when you’re eating in the privacy of your own home. But when you’re on a date, and there’s someone sitting across from you, staring at your mouth, the question takes on a bit more urgency. You don’t want to get food on your face or your shirt. You want to impress, come off as well-mannered, and eat your pasta like a smooth operator.

To do so, the big thing to know is that even if your place setting includes a spoon, knife, and fork, you’ll only be using that last utensil to eat your pasta. You’re not going to cut your spaghetti into pieces, and you’re not going to twirl it on a spoon. That latter point may be controversial, and if you’re an avowed spoon twirler, no one’s going to stop you from continuing the practice. But using a fork alone is the authentic Italian way to do things.

Beyond that, follow the other dos and don’ts illustrated above. And maybe order the soup instead of the salad.

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Twenty years ago, it didn’t seem like a burdensome task to write a handwritten letter to a loved one. Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t a big deal to write a long email to a friend. Today, it can feel hard to motivate yourself to tap out a two line response to a text.

The feeling that your attention span has been shrinking over time isn’t just in your head. Research by today’s guest shows that it is empirically getting shorter and shorter.

Dr. Gloria Mark is the world’s preeminent researcher on attention and the author of Attention Span. If you’d like to get a handle on your diminishing powers of concentration, you have to understand how attention works, and that’s what Gloria explains in the first part of our conversation. We then get into how multitasking is like drawing on and wiping off a whiteboard and why it makes us feel so frazzled. Gloria then shares the way that personality influences your attention span, including why people who are more neurotic have the shortest attention spans and why conscientious people may not want to use distraction-blocking apps. We then get into how the internet and the shot lengths of modern movies reinforce our short attention spans. In the last part of our conversation, Gloria makes the case that fighting the hindrances to our attention by trying to be focused all the time isn’t possible or desirable, and that our goal should be balanced focus rather than hyper focus. She explains how to achieve that balanced focus by leaning into your unique productivity rhythm, taking breaks without guilt, and developing a sense of agency over your attention.

Resources Related to the Episode* AoM Article: How to Effectively Manage Your Attention * AoM Article: 11 Exercises That Will Strengthen Your Attention * AoM Article: 12 Concentration Exercises from 1918 * AoM Podcast #420: What Makes Your Phone So Addictive & How to Take Back Your Life * AoM Podcast #553: How to Become Indistractable * AoM Podcast #768: Become a Focused Monotasker * AoM Podcast #832: The Power of Unwavering Focus * Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire

Connect With Gloria Mark* Gloria‘s Website

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Every night, our family reads a book aloud for ten minutes together, and then watches a movie for ten minutes together. It’s a way to cap off the night with some familial hangout and help the kids wind down before bed.

After making our way, one ten-minute installment at a time, through all the movies every Millennial dad should show his kids and then all the films in the Mission Impossible and Hunger Games franchises, we were puzzling over what to watch next.

Out of the blue, our son, Gus, suggested that we watch Rocky. We weren’t sure where he got the idea, and after a slew of modern, fast-moving action flicks, weren’t sure he and his sister would enjoy a film made back in 1976. But we put it on, and to our surprise (it’s unexpectedly slow — see review below), the kids enjoyed it. We all enjoyed it. And so we decided to move on to Rocky II. The kids remained hungry for more. So over the last couple of months, we watched all the remaining films in the series. And thoroughly enjoyed these as well.

If you haven’t watched the Rocky films, you should check them out. You’ll gain a better understanding of the many pop culture references they spawned that have become permanently embedded in the zeitgeist. And they’re just good flicks. Each installment charts the ups and downs of boxer Rocky Balboa’s career as he moves from small-time pugilist to heavyweight title holder to retired champ. Each boasts exciting, realistic fight scenes and motivating training montages. (Did you know we delineated each and every exercise included in each and every Rocky training montage? Some of our best work there, folks.) And each grapples with worthy themes like what it means to be a man and be resilient in the face of fear, doubt, and setbacks. Some might consider it all a little schmaltzy, but in an age saturated with wink-wink cynicism, we found the straightforward sincerity refreshing.

(An aside: while Arnold seems to be the 80s-action hero who gets the most love and admiration in the present age, Sylvester Stallone arguably goes under-appreciated. His is a Wikipedia page worth reading; it’s full of surprising, impressive facts. Just a few of them: Stallone wrote the script for Rocky in three days, turned down a six-figure deal for it — even though he was dead broke — in order to play the lead himself, and not only wrote the screenplays for all the films in the franchise, but directed nearly all of them too.)

Below you’ll find our rankings as to how each film in the Rocky franchise stacks up. (The list focuses only on the movies where Rocky is the main protagonist and excludes the Creed spinoffs.) While some are better, and some are worse, they’re all worth watching, in chronological order.

6: Rocky VRocky V, which was originally intended to be the last film in the franchise, was the most critically panned of the Rocky films. But don’t let its low Rotten Tomatoes score or its last place finish on our list dissuade you from watching it. It may be the weakest film in the franchise, but it’s not a terrible movie. In fact, its plot is more cohesive than the film that went on to be the final Rocky movie (Rocky Balboa), and it deals with an issue seldom featured in cinema: how do you transition when you’re past your peak and can no longer do the thing you’re good at and love?

Because of financial mismanagement, Rocky V finds our fighter right back in the down-and-out circumstances in which he started, and he’s decided to retire from boxing because of worries about the damage it’s doing to his brain. But he can’t give up on the thrill of winning, and so starts living vicariously through a boxer he decides to manage: Tommy Gunn (played by real-life fighter Tommy Morrison). Rocky gets so wrapped up in training Gunn that he neglects his own son, who was played by Stallone’s actual son. The father-son pair have a genuine rapport that adds to the film. Another nice touch is that some of the inspirational speeches in the movie, which includes parallels to Mike Tyson’s story, are drawn from the wisdom of real-life training legend Cus D’Amato.

Yet despite a few strengths, the movie is marred by moments of excess cheesiness and the loss of Rocky fighting and training himself. No matter how decent the plot, no movie in which Rocky coaches rather than contends and that ends with a street brawl in an alley rather than a bout in a ring, is going to rise to the level of the other films.

One indicator of the quality of a Rocky film is whether or not the “Gonna Fly Now” theme gets played in full; there are only two movies in the franchise where it isn’t. This one, and the next entry on our list:

5: Rocky IVOn paper, the epic set-up for Rocky IV would seemingly make it a shoe-in for one of the best in the bunch: Rocky faces off with a Soviet boxer who not only represents the “Evil Empire” but also killed his friend Apollo in the ring. It’s East vs. West! Individualism vs. totalitarianism! Technology vs. old-school heart!

Yet, for all this promise, the picture never pans out. The plot is handled a little too ham-fistedly. More damningly, part of the criteria for evaluating the quality of each Rocky installment is how satisfying the climax of each film’s final fight is, and this one doesn’t deliver. Despite the big stakes, the suspense of the bout never feels palpable, nor does the payoff of Rocky’s victory.

Which isn’t to say this isn’t a watchable and entertaining movie. The training montage (so epic it’s broken into two parts!) is awesome, Ivan Drago is the franchise’s best villain (“If he dies, he dies”), and if nothing else, the movie’s random robot, flashback montage as Rocky drives his Lambo, and “Burning Heart” theme song make for a quintessential showcase of 1980s vibes.

4: Rocky IIIThe Rocky films work best when Rocky is a relatable everyman, the underdog. It’s therefore no surprise that the third installment in the franchise, which finds our fighter reigning as the heavyweight champion, living in a giant mansion, and driving a Maserati, doesn’t come up to the quality of the first two films. It doesn’t end up as bad as you think it might from the early over-the-top charity match between Rocky and Thunderlips the wrestler (played by Hulk Hogan). But the plot that follows remains fairly thin: Rocky, who realizes his trainer handicapped his title defenses to ensure victory, decides to postpone his retirement to (twice) fight a fierce, trash-talking contender, James “Clubber” Lang (played by Mr. T).

Yet it’s hard to dislike a film that debuted that hype-up classic, “Eye of the Tiger,” includes an awesome bromance between Rocky and Apollo (his former adversary puts aside his antagonism to become Rocky’s trainer), and introduced both Mr. T and his signature catchphrase (which Stallone wrote) — “I pity the fool!” Plus, though the plot-driven stakes aren’t as significant, the climax of the final bout proves to be the second most satisfying in the series.

3: Rocky BalboaBecause many viewed Rocky V as a disappointing conclusion to the franchise, Stallone wanted to make Rocky Balboa as a more fitting capstone. And in this, it succeeds. The film doesn’t have the atmospheric prism that somehow makes films made in the 70s and 80s just seem cooler. But its storyline (Rocky, at age 60, comes out of retirement for one last fight), flashbacks (both to scenes and musical scores used in earlier installments), and overall heart tie up the narrative arc of the franchise nicely. The movie also scores points for the fact that Rocky seems more like the character he was in the first two films. In the sequels, he seems like a different person, more sophisticated than the lovable lunkhead depicted in Rocky and Rocky II. (Obviously, fame and fortune will change a man, but the difference between the character in I and II compared to III and IV seemed too great).

There are some weaknesses: the plot never quite gels — Rocky’s relationship with Marie doesn’t really go anywhere, and the sudden enmeshment of Marie’s son in Rocky’s life and the friction-turned-reconciliation between Rocky and his own son seem too abrupt; everything seems to happen a little too abruptly, really. The movie also goes a tad heavy on the inspirational speechmaking, though these monologues do contain some sage advice: “It ain’t about how hard you hit — it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward!”

2: RockyThe surprising thing about the low-budget film that kicked off the whole Rocky franchise is how little boxing (whether in the form of training or fighting) the movie includes and how relatively quirky it is. The film has more of an art-house feel than an action-movie vibe. While the backbone of the plot ostensibly revolves around Rocky, a small-time fighter, getting the chance to battle the world heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed, a lot of the movie simply consists of Rocky and Adrian falling for each other and talking about turtles.

But Rocky — which won the Academy Award for Best Picture — has plenty of hard-to-put-your-finger-on charm. Stallone gives a winning, Brando-esque performance, there’s great cinematography of a gritty Philadelphia, and the viewer is introduced to the franchise’s soon-to-be iconic “Gonna Fly Now” theme song and training montage feature, which includes Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the first time.

1: Rocky IIWhile the original Rocky may get the most acclaim, Rocky II was the unanimous favorite amongst the McKays.

One of the things that makes Rocky II great is that the character of Mickey, Rocky’s crusty, manic old-school trainer (“You’re gonna eat lightning and you’re gonna crap thunder!”) really comes to the fore in the film. Burgess Meredith’s memorable performance leaves you marveling that he’s the same actor who portrayed the cerebral characters in two of The Twilight Zone’s most iconic episodes: Time Enough at Last and The Obsolete Man.

The film also includes Rocky’s feel-good return trip up the museum steps, this time with an entourage of cheering kids in tow. And he chases a chicken as part of his training montage in this one, which is awesome.

Finally, the climax of Rocky’s rematch with Creed — crowned by the iconic line, “Yo, Adrian, I did it!” — is the best of the franchise; it elicited spontaneous fist pumps all around.

Now, on to watch the Creed franchise next . . .

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Surviving in the wild can seem like a romantic proposition, at least as it often plays out in popular culture and our imagination. We picture ourselves confidently navigating the obstacles of nature, pulling trout out of mountain streams, and building a snug shelter inside a tree.

But the reality of wilderness survival isn’t so rosy. Few people know that better than Jim Baird. Jim and his brother won the fourth season of Alone, a reality show that’s actually real, and leaves contestants in the wild to face the elements and live off the land. Today on the podcast, Jim shares his experiences surviving on Northern Vancouver Island for 75 days, and what he learned from them as to what’s true about survival and what’s simply a myth.

Resources Related to the Episode Season 4 of Alone * “Four Survival Myths That Could Get You Killed” — Field and Stream* article by Jim * AoMPodcast #848: The 5 Priorities of Short-Term Survival

Connect With Jim Baird* Jim on YouTube * Jim on IG * Jim on FB

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While “labyrinth” is sometimes used to describe a deliberately confusing maze with branching passages and dead ends, a classical labyrinth has a single clear path to the center and back out again.

This “unicursal” pattern has existed since ancient times and shows up in cultures around the world. It’s been etched onto pottery, carved into the walls of caves, and inked on the skin.

It’s also been used to create large, walkable labyrinths which are inlaid on the floors of cathedrals or cut into the greenery of gardens.

Pacing the predictable path of such labyrinths has long served as a form of moving meditation, and even a symbolic pilgrimage. As someone winds his way around the curves of a labyrinth’s set course, he prays, recites devotions, or simply lets his mind wander and reflect.

While not everyone has access to this kind of physical labyrinth, everyone can turn their daily routine into something that functions as such.

Each day we typically follow a well-worn course that takes us from bed, through a familiar set of tasks, and back to bed again. While the repetitive nature of our daily routine may sometimes seem like a drag, it’s also an opportunity.

As you move through activities that have become habitual, you’re granted a rich space for contemplation; your mind is free to ponder a philosophical puzzle, discern more about your purpose, and receive needed insights.

Turning your repetitious rounds into redemptive rituals takes but three simple things: 1) starting the day with that intention; 2) carving out pockets of silence; 3) having substantial grist to chew on gathered from media and conversations engaged in at other times.

While novelty is a well-known spur to creative inspiration, routine — at least when entered as a labyrinth — can also allow you to penetrate deeper and deeper into life’s mysteries.

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No One Knows Who Their Local Influencers Are. Since I’ve been re-reading Jayber Crow these past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of local communities. I happened to come across this new study showing that most people these days can’t name a person in their local community who is “influential,” like local politicians, business people, and religious leaders. We’re pretty good at naming people who are influential on the national level, though, like celebrities, national politicians, or billionaire captains of industry. Probably doesn’t portend good things for the health of local communities.

Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire. An upcoming podcast guest, Gloria Mark, mentioned this quiz in my interview with her (look for her episode on attention/focus to go up next week). It’s free and interesting to take and will tell you how much of an evening or morning person you are, when your natural bedtime is, and how to use light therapy (including the specific time you personally should employ it) to shift that bedtime.

The Success Equation. This is a book I think a lot about, even though I read it over seven years ago. It’s also a book I gift young men who are thinking about starting a business or exploring entrepreneurship. Success is a mixture of skill and luck. The trick is figuring out which part of your success you can attribute to either. It’s also where I learned about the “Paradox of Skill”: as your skill level increases, the importance of luck as an outcome in your success increases. Make sure to listen to our podcast with the author, Michael Mauboussin.

Huckberry’s Valentine’s Day Shop. If you’re wondering what to give your sweetheart for Valentine’s Day, check out the well-curated selection of his and hers gifts Huckberry has put together in their V-Day Shop. Kate’s favorite item is this Patagonia hoody; mine is the Summit Slipper — I’m in need of a good lightweight camp shoe.

Restless Heart’s “Why Does It Have to Be (Wrong or Right)” is an under-appreciated classic of 1980s country music. The music video for this ode to moral ambiguity is proof. It’s got everything: a catchy song with amazing harmonies, a keytar, pretty ladies giving sultry, searching looks into the camera, that late-1980s black-and-white artsy style, and a drummer who looks like 1980s Sam Elliott. Coming across this video several years ago helped push me over the edge in deciding to grow my hair out.

Quote of the Week

It takes two things to bowl over a tree — a heavy wind outside and decay inside. Much of the moral wreckage is caused by inner cynicism — a disgust with life’s futility, an inability to see sense in it. A person in that mood is an easy mark for the next high wind.

—Art Sisson

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The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing

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Whether you’re moving across town or across the country, there are a lot of factors to consider in deciding where to live.

To figure out which factors to prioritize, it can be helpful to use what we call the “90/10 Rule.”

Under the 90/10 Rule, you base where you should live on the factors that will affect 90% of your life.

(The “90” and “10” numbers are not to be taken literally here; instead, they stand in for “the majority of your life” and “the minority of your life,” respectively).

This may seem like an obvious rubric for making a where-to-live decision, but in practice, people very often make their moving choices based on things that seem salient in their minds, but will, in fact, have a minimal impact on their overall satisfaction. In so doing, and ignoring the factors that will have the lion’s share of influence on their lives, they end up less happy with their decision.

Let’s look at some examples of how this can play out.

Example #1: A family wants to move to the suburbs to get a bigger house with a guest room. In making this move, the father will double the length of his commute. While the guest room will only be used a handful of times each year, the long commute will impact him twice a day, every workday. The benefit of the guest room isn’t likely to increase his and his family’s happiness, but the stress and time-suck of the commute may diminish it.
Example #2: A man takes a high-pressure job he doesn’t enjoy to live close to his extended family. While he sees his family a couple of times a month, the stress of his job beats him down every day.
Example #3: A couple wants to move from a city in the Midwest to a city in the Mountain West in order to live near the Rockies. Once they do, and the mountains are just a 30-minute drive away, they find they actually don’t make it out to them many more times than they did when they lived eight hours away. In the meantime, the fact that their cost of living has dramatically increased affects nearly every aspect of their lives, diminishing the size of their house, their savings account, and their vacation budget, while increasing their overall financial stress.

When thinking about a move, the “sexiness” of certain factors — a hip downtown, access to the beach, a big yard — loom large in your mind as you imagine how these elements will change your life.

But in reality, at least if you have a young family, 90% of your life, regardless of where you live, will consist of your commute to work, work, and your commute home from work; kids’ school stuff; and errands/chores. The quality and pay of your job, the quality of your kids’ schools, and the cheapness and ease of taking care of life’s endless to-dos will have the biggest impact on your life satisfaction. Prioritizing those factors is not only likely to increase your day-to-day happiness, but also gives you the time, mental bandwidth, and financial resources to make the remaining 10% of life — the dinners you eat out, the parties you throw, the trips you take — extra special.

Of course, there’s a great deal of subjectivity in all this. Maybe you like long commutes. Maybe you get so many visitors that the guest room will get a ton of use. Maybe regularly seeing your family compensates for a lack of fulfillment at work. Maybe in being closer to the mountains you will in fact visit them far more often.

The factors that make up the 90% in the 90/10 Rule are typically correlated with the number of hours and domains they affect. But a factor can look small if quantified that way and yet have an outsized impact on your happiness. For example, even if in moving closer to the mountains, you only visit them a few more times than you used to, perhaps you simply love the mountains so much that those few additional visits have a disproportionate effect on your happiness.

In choosing where to live, the key is to figure out what factors will most impact your satisfaction, and to recognize that they may not be the factors that first come to mind.

The post Use the 90/10 Rule to Decide Where to Live appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Happiness is the subject of thousands of articles, podcasts, and scientific studies. Yet all this focus on happiness doesn’t seem to be making people any happier. In fact, the more they try to be happy, especially by fighting to get rid of bad feelings and cling to good ones, the more unhappy people often become.

My guest would say that the first step in escaping this negative cycle is redefining what happiness even means — thinking of it not as a state of feeling good but of doing good.

His name is Russ Harris and he’s a therapist and the author of The Happiness Trap.

Today on the show, Russ explains how struggling against difficult feelings and thoughts just makes them stronger — amplifying instead of diminishing stress, anxiety, depression, and self-consciousness — and how simply obeying your emotions doesn’t work out any better. He then unpacks the alternative approach to happiness espoused by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. With ACT, you allow both hard and pleasant feelings to coexist, and unhook from the latter so that they no longer jerk you around. This allows you to focus on taking action on your values to create a meaningful, flourishing life, or in other words, real happiness.

Resources Related to the Episode* AoM Podcast #614: Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life With the Founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Steven Hayes * AoM Article: From Overwhelmed to Empowered — How Labeling Your Emotions Can Help You Take Control

Connect With Russ Harris* Russ’ Website

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #868: Escape the Happiness Trap appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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You’re a busy man. You’ve got work and community obligations. You want to spend quality time with your family and friends. Maybe you’ve made it a goal to read more books this year.

How can you fit in a workout with so much on your plate?

Supersets.

The answer is supersets.

What Is a Superset?A superset is a specific type of workout set wherein you perform two separate exercises back to back without rest between them. There are three different types of supersets:

Antagonist supersets: supersets involving two exercises that work opposing muscle groups. For example, chest press followed immediately by back rows, or leg extensions followed immediately by leg curls.
Alternate-peripheral supersets: supersets involving two exercises alternating between upper and lower body movements. For example, a squat followed immediately by the bench press, or a deadlift followed immediately by a shoulder press.
Compound supersets: supersets involving two exercises that work the same muscle groups using similar movements. For example, tricep extensions followed immediately by tricep pulldowns, or a barbell bench press followed immediately by a dumbbell bench press.

The type of superset you choose will depend on your overall goals for training. We’ll walk you through how to determine which superset scheme to use here in a bit.

Typically, when you perform a superset, you do the two exercises back to back without any rest. After completing the second exercise in each pair, you then take a rest break before doing your next superset. A standard rest interval between weightlifting sets is about two minutes. When you’re doing supersets in which the first and second exercises in the pair work different muscle groups, the muscles worked by the first exercise will have already gotten some rest while you performed the second exercise, so you may be able to take a rest break that’s a little shorter than that.

If you’re prioritizing conditioning over strength, or it’s a one-off situation when you’re especially pressed for time, you can skip the break between supersets altogether and keep going until you’ve completed your prescribed sets and reps. Supersets without breaks are a great option for a day when you only have 15 minutes available for a workout.

The Benefits of SupersetsSupersets save you time. The primary benefit of supersets is that they save time. Instead of resting between exercises, you move immediately into the next exercise. While you take a short rest after you’ve completed a superset, you still end up saving time by doing two exercises back to back.

Supersets get your heart rate up. Because you’re not resting between exercises, supersetting makes for a tremendous metabolic conditioning workout. Your heart rate gets going and you get nice and sweaty. Great for burning calories.

Supersets are great for hypertrophy. Hypertrophy means muscle growth. For many dudes, getting big muscles is the primary reason they lift weights. For muscle hypertrophy, you want to increase the volume, or reps, you do in a workout, and supersetting allows you to get more reps done in a shorter time.

Supersets give you a nice pump. I love the pump I get after I do a superset of curls and tricep pulldowns. I feel like 1970s Arnold, if only for a few glorious minutes.

Supersets are fun. Supersets can help you break up the monotony of a workout and keep it interesting. Instead of sitting around between sets swiping through TikTok, you can keep moving and pumping.

The Downsides of SupersetsSupersets could interfere with strength gains on main barbell lifts. If you’re barbell training and doing the main lifts, trying to superset those movements could reduce strength improvement. To build pure strength, you have to train with heavy weights using 80% to 90% of your one-rep max. You got to lift heavy. When you lift heavy, you don’t just fatigue the muscles you’re training, you fatigue your entire central nervous system. Supersetting heavy squats + a heavy bench press could create so much fatigue that you won’t be able to complete the prescribed reps at the prescribed weight.

If strength is your goal, don’t superset those movements. If you’re just training for overall health, go right ahead and superset your primary barbell lifts.

Supersets can be tricky in a public gym. Supersets often require you to toggle back and forth between two pieces of gym equipment, like a preacher curl setup and a tricep pulldown machine. If someone starts using the unoccupied tricep pulldown machine while you’re finishing up your set of preacher curls, you’ll have to wait while that person finishes their set. It’s not always an issue, but when it is, it’s annoying.

Choosing the Right Superset SchemeThe superset scheme you choose will depend on your goals and time constraints. For all of them, doing three supersets of each exercise pair is a good average number to aim for.

Antagonist Supersets. I like to use antagonist supersets for my accessory work after I complete my main lifts for the day. So on days I deadlift or squat, I’ll end my workout with a superset of leg extensions + leg curls, or lunges + leg curls. On days I bench press or shoulder press, I do a superset of bicep curls + tricep pulldowns.

Supersetting my accessory work allows me to get a lot of volume in a short amount of time which is good for hypertrophy, and it’s a way I can get some of my metabolic conditioning in.

Here are some examples of antagonist supersets you could do:

Leg Extensions + Leg Curls
Bicep Curls + Tricep Pulldowns
Bench Press + Barbell Rows
Dips + Seated Cable Rows
Barbell Squat + Romanian Deadlift
Shoulder Press + Chin-ups
Push-ups + Chin-ups

Alternate-Peripheral Supersets. If you’re looking to do as much work as you can in as little time as possible, consider using an alternate-peripheral superset. This is a superset where you do a lower-body movement followed by an upper-body movement.

Here’s an example of this approach using the four main barbell lifts: squat, deadlift, bench press, and shoulder press:

Monday: Squats + Bench Press
Tuesday: Deadlifts + Shoulder Press
Wednesday: Off
Thursday: Squats + Bench Press
Friday: Deadlifts + Shoulder Press

As discussed above, supersetting the main barbell lifts could reduce overall strength gains, but if supersetting fits your schedule and allows you to get all your work in, or you just enjoy doing it that way, then go for it.

Compound Supersets. Bodybuilders have used compound supersets for decades to build and shape their bodies. Doing similar movements, one right after the other, is a great way to get a good pump and the volume you need for hypertrophy. Many lifters do compound supersets as a “finisher” for a workout. On arm day, for example, you could finish with compound supersets of two different kinds of bicep curls.

Here are some compound superset ideas to consider:

Barbell Bench Press + Dumbbell Bench Press
Barbell Shoulder Press + Arnold Shoulder Press
Barbell Squat + Lunges
EZ Curl Bicep Curls + Hammer Curls
Tricep Extensions + Tricep Pulldowns
Lat Pulldowns + Pull-ups
Romanian Deadlifts + Leg Curls

Overall, the best way to choose a superset is to experiment and see what works for you.

Supersets are a great way to get your workout done faster and to mix up your routine. Give them a try the next time you hit the gym.

The post Squeeze More Into Your Workouts With Supersets appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Dante’s Divine Comedy is considered one of the greatest works of literature ever written. The poem not only imagines the three parts of the afterlife, but serves as an allegory for the spiritual journey of the human soul.

Here to take us on a tour of the journey Dante describes is Robert Barron, a bishop in the Catholic Church. Today on the show, Bishop Barron offers a bit of background on the Divine Comedy and how it resonates as a story of the search for greater meaning that commonly arises in your mid-thirties. We then delve into Dante’s journey through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. We discuss why Dante can’t initially climb the redemptive mountain of purgatory and has to go through hell first, the importance of having a tough-but-encouraging guide for any spiritual journey, why hell is an inverted cone that gets narrower and colder at the bottom, and why traitors inhabit its lowest layer. We then get into what it takes to climb Mount Purgatory, why heaven in the Divine Comedy doesn’t get much attention, and what Dante finds when he gets there. Along the way, Bishop Barron describes the meaning behind the religious imagery Dante used in his poem, as well as insights that can be applied to any spiritual journey.

Resources Related to the Episode Divine Comedy translated by Mark Musa (Bishop Barron’s favorite translation) * Word on Fire course on Dante and the Divine Comedy * AoM Podcast #527: Father Wounds, Male Spirituality, and the Journey to the Second Half of Life With Fr. Richard Rohr * AoM Podcast #598: Journeying From the First to the Second Half of Life With James Hollis * AoM Podcast #518: The Second Mountain With David Brooks * AoM Article: Lessons in Manliness from Dante * The Seven Story Mountain* by Thomas Merton

Connect With Bishop Robert Barron* Word on Fire Website * The Bishop on FB * The Bishop on IG * The Bishop on Twitter

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #867: Dante’s Guide to Navigating a Spiritual Journey appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition

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In discussions about getting older, people will sometimes say, “When you’re young, you think adults have it together. But when you become an adult yourself, you realize grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing either!” This is shared as some kind of conspiratorial secret — a ubiquitous-yet-under-discussed truth.

Yet this “truth” is hardly universal. There are plenty of adults out there who do know what they’re doing.

It’s true that, regardless of age, no one ever stops facing uncharted territory that initially leaves them perplexed.

But by the time you reach your thirties, you should have developed a decent amount of emotional and practical intelligence — a set of adaptable mental tools that allow you to adequately grapple with any problem, no matter how novel.

If you haven’t developed such a capacity, then something has gone awry, either with the upbringing to which you were subjected or the personal development track you self-selected; either way, this lack ought to be addressed, rather than excused.

The idea that no one knows what they’re doing, even the supposed grown-ups, does a disservice to individuals and society alike.

The more you personally believe that the chaos and confusion that marked your youth must continue ‘til the grave, the more hopeless life will feel.

The more we collectively believe that no one can ever really be competent, the more readily we’ll accept mediocre schools, dysfunctional government, and corrupt corporations as an unalterable inevitability.

If there is a great secret these days, it’s that a society of capable grown-ups does exist, that it’s ever in need of new members, and that the only requirement to join its ranks is a willingness to develop the kind of serious gravitas, consistent reliability, steady self-control, and diverse know-how that makes for life-enriching, culture-strengthening maturity.

The post Sunday Firesides: Attention Adults — You Should Know What You’re Doing appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Why Men Kill Themselves. An interesting article from former AoM podcast guest Will Storr that describes a theory of “social perfectionism” that makes some men more likely to kill themselves. According to researcher Rory O’Connor, at the same time that modernity has increased our expectations of what it means to live a good life, it’s also created “more opportunities for men to feel like failures.”

The Digital Workplace Is Designed to Bring You Down. An interview highlighting the thought and work of another AoM podcast guest, Cal Newport. In it, Cal explains the things that are getting in the way of our productivity, one of which, of course, is our saturation with communication tools. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I was toting up the number of different apps I use for communicating and collaborating (both personally and professionally) and it’s at seven. Keeping track of all of them is definitely a pain in the rear. For more insights on this subject, check out our podcasts with Cal on email overload and the quest to be a digital minimalist.

Tasty Shreds. There’s a genre of TikTokers and Reel makers that consist of bros showing other bros how to make delicious high-protein, low-calorie meals that are great for those counting macros. Kyle Smith of Tasty Shreds fame is one of these dudes. I haven’t made any of his recipes yet (seems like I need to get me an air fryer first), but it’s just fun to see what healthier twists he comes up with for classic craveable bro food, like the crispy chicken sandwich. I bought his cookbook and hope to try some of the recipes soon.

The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring. Our family reads a book out loud together every night, and we’ve together enjoyed several of John Bellairs’ spooky novels over the years. We read The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring (not to be confused with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) last fall and it was my favorite family read aloud of 2022.

Quote of the Week

To will and not to do when there is opportunity, is in reality not to will; and to love what is good and not to do it, when it is possible, is in reality not to love it.

—Emanuel Swedenborg

The post Odds & Ends: January 27, 2023 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Shaving is one of those daily rituals that most men take care of as part of their morning routine. It makes sense. Shaving in the morning allows you to start the day looking as fresh as possible and ensures you look clean-shaven longer throughout your waking hours.

But I’ve personally been a night-shaver for several years now and love it. Below I share a few reasons you might consider adopting this practice as well.

You Can Take Your Time With Your Shave. If you’re like most guys, you’re rushing to get ready in the morning. But you don’t want to rush a shave. That can lead to cuts and uneven stubble removal.

When you shave at night, there’s no rush. You can take your time, ensuring you get a close, comfortable shave without any nicks or razor burns.

Moreover, slowing down your shave makes the experience more enjoyable and relaxing. When you shave at night, you have the time to make yourself a barbershop hot towel. You’ve got the time to create a nice, warm lather with a badger brush. When you shave at night, you can make shaving more of a ritual and less of a chore.

Shaving at night also gives you the margin to try your hand at a more traditional shaving method: straight razor shaving. Time is your ally with straight razor shaving, especially when you’re first starting. You don’t want to rush the process.

It Saves You Time in the Morning. Even if you’re a pro at shaving, it still takes time. If you shave at night, it’s one less grooming chore you have to do upon waking. Use the extra time you save in the morning to catch some extra ZZZs or engage in a short session of meditation.

It Gives Your Face Time to Heal. This is a big reason why I switched to the nighttime shave. When you shave, you’re scraping a sharp piece of metal across your face. No matter how careful you are, you’ll have some irritation and even some nicks. When you shave in the morning, there’s a chance your face is going to look red and irritated as you go to work. If you’ve nicked yourself, you’ll likely have a little scab on your face or maybe even a bit of blood on your shirt collar. Not a good look.

When you shave at night, you give your skin time to heal from the scraping and cutting. Instead of looking irritated, your face will look nice and healthy.

If I Shave at Night, Won’t I Have Too Much Stubble in the Morning?Some guys might be reading this and objecting to the idea of nighttime shaving because they’ll wake up in the morning with stubble or a full-blown five o’clock shadow (a 5 a.m. shadow, in this case).

This is a legitimate concern. If your facial hair grows fast and thick, the nighttime shave might not be for you.

However, if your facial hair grows slowly, you can still shave at night and look fresh in the morning.

I’d say my facial hair grows at an average rate. When I shave in the morning, I’ve got some stubble by the end of the day. But I’ve noticed that when I shave at night, I have less stubble after waking from eight hours of sleep, than I do eight hours after I shave in the morning.

There might be a reason for this. Hair growth is driven by our circadian rhythm, and studies have shown that hair grows faster in the morning than at night. This might explain why I’ve noticed that I don’t have too much stubble in the morning when I shave before bed: hair doesn’t grow as fast at night.

So if you have a fast-growing beard, you still might try the night shave. You may discover that you’ll wake up with less stubble than you think.

More relaxing shaves, more time in the morning, a more handsome and less irritated face. Yes sir, there’s a case to be made for shaving at night.

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When we think about the benefits of exercise, we tend to think of what it does for our body, making us leaner, stronger, and healthier. But my guest is out to emphasize the powerful effect physical activity has on our brains too, and just how much our bodies and minds are connected.

Dr. Jennifer Heisz is a professor, the director of the NeuroFit Lab which studies the effects of exercise on brain health, and the author of Move the Body, Heal the Mind. Today on the show, Jennifer and I first discuss how physical activity can help treat mental disorders. She shares the way that low to moderate intensity exercise can mitigate anxiety, and how short bouts of intense exercise can be used as exposure therapy for treating panic disorders. We also talk about the phenomenon of inflammation-induced depression, and how exercise can alleviate it. And Jennifer shares how exercise can strengthen someone’s attempt at sobriety, as well as prevent addiction in the first place. From there, we turn to the way exercise can not only mitigate mental maladies but actually optimize the mind. Jennifer shares how physical activity fights aging, and can enhance your focus and creativity. We discuss how exercise can improve your sleep, how it can be used to shift your circadian clock, and whether it’s okay to work out close to your bedtime.

Resources Related to the Episode* AoM Podcast #589: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage * AoM Podcast #741: The Exercise Prescription for Depression and Anxiety * AoM Podcast #585: Inflammation, Saunas, and the New Science of Depression * AoM Podcast #775: We Need a P.E. Revolution * AoM Podcast #575: Counterintuitive Advice on Making Exercise a Sustainable Habit * The NeuroFit Lab toolkit for overcoming obstacles to exercising consistently

Connect With Jennifer Heisz* Jennifer’s Website * Jennifer on Twitter * Jennifer on Instagram * The NeuroFit Lab Website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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We’ve all had plenty of firsthand social experience.

We all know how good it feels to be complimented, appreciated, reached out to.

Yet when we contemplate directing such behaviors toward others, we hesitate. We worry that it will be awkward or figure the person won’t really care about the gesture.

This mismatch between our perception of how others act toward us, and how we think others will perceive how we act toward them, is created by our innate egocentricity. We get caught up in thinking about our own thoughts; if we noticed that we acted awkward during an interaction, we figure the other person noticed our awkwardness too. We struggle to step through our own feelings to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes; if doing something doesn’t give us a sense of positive surprise, we can’t imagine the positive surprise it will create in someone else.

Reams of studies have been done on the human failure to accurately read other people’s minds. But our common weakness in perspective-taking is more than just a psychological curiosity. It has very real effects on our social life, demotivating us from doing the kinds of things that will help us develop richer and more positive connections with friends, family, and even strangers.

Below are nine research-established mental distortions to be aware of. Understanding them will help you be more proactive and confident in social interactions and keep in mind these important and overlooked truths: talking with others will go better than you think; people are less critical of you than you suppose; folks appreciate affirmation far more than you know.

1. You underestimate how much you’ll enjoy talking to a stranger. People in subway cars and other public places tend to keep to themselves — listening to music with headphones in; staring off into space. They’re reluctant to start a conversation with the folks around them because they think their overtures will be rejected or the attempted conversation will be stilted. But such pessimism is overblown; studies find that when you do strike up a conversation with a stranger, the interaction is more welcomed, enjoyable, and mood-boosting than expected. You never know where a conversation with a stranger will lead; at the very least, it will cause you to feel a little bit happier.

2. You underestimate how much new acquaintances like you. After meeting someone at a party, you go home and think, “Boy, was I awkward! They probably think I’m a real goober.” Actually, they probably don’t. People typically like you and enjoy your company much more than you think. Researchers call the mismatch between what you think people think of you and what they really do think of you “the liking gap,” and it can last a long time; even college students who shared a dorm room and interacted daily believed that their roommates liked them less than they actually did for several months. So spend less time ruminating on how poorly you think you came off to others; as researchers concluded: “after people have conversations, they are liked more than they know.”

3. You underestimate how much people will care about intimate disclosures. Most people say they’d like to move beyond small talk to have deeper and more meaningful conversations with new acquaintances. Yet they’re reluctant to share the kinds of revelations that would make these deeper conversations possible. That’s because they overestimate how awkward doing so will be and underestimate how much people will be interested in such disclosures. In reality, research shows that people care about the more intimate details of your life more than you think. You don’t want to overshare, of course, but don’t stubbornly stick to only the shallowest of conversation, either.

4. You underestimate how much someone else will be thinking about you after conversing. You have a meaningful and interesting conversation with a stranger or a good friend and find yourself chewing on the things discussed in the hours and even days afterward. But you figure the conversation didn’t feel as significant to the other person, and they’re not doing the same. Wrong. “Studies demonstrate that people remain on their conversation partners’ minds more than they know” and “remember their stories [and] revisit their advice.”

5. You underestimate how willing people are to help you. We can be reluctant to ask for help because we figure the people we might ask are likely to say no, and that even if they say yes, they’ll feel put out by the request. But studies show that people are much more likely to comply with requests for help than people predict and feel more positively about giving this help than people expect. Folks very often want to help, and they feel good when they’re able to do so.

6. You underestimate how hesitant someone will feel to ask you for help. You see a loved one struggling, and, unsure of what to do for them, assuage the guilt you feel about not reaching out by saying, “Well, if they needed help, they would ask for it.” Probably not. Even though they themselves are hesitant to ask for help, people still routinely discount the discomfort — the feelings of inadequacy and self-consciousness — that others feel in doing so. If you wait for someone to ask for help, you’ll likely wait forever. Use your sagest discernment to assess what they need, and then just step in and take care of it.

7. You underestimate how much your appreciation will be appreciated. It’s easy to let an upwelling of gratitude for something someone did or who they are in general go unexpressed because you figure it won’t really mean that much to them or will make them feel weird. But research shows that people overestimate how awkward receiving an expression of gratitude will make someone feel and underestimate how much the person will appreciate it. Never hesitate to express your gratitude to others.

8. You underestimate the positive impact of giving a compliment. It’s the same deal here as with expressions of gratitude: people overestimate how awkward giving a compliment will be and underestimate how good the compliment will make its recipient feel. Offer praise regularly and freely.

9. You underestimate how much someone will appreciate you checking in with them. You write up a text to an old friend you haven’t talked to in a long time. Something like, “Hey! I was just thinking about you today. How have you been?” But then you delete the message, thinking, “Hmm, maybe they’ll think I’m weird for reaching out out of the blue like this.” Not so: research finds that people appreciate a check-in message more than you’d think, and the more distant you’ve been, and the more surprising the message is, the more it makes their day. So the next time you find yourself thinking about an old friend, go ahead and hit send on that “Hey man!” message.

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Within the space of just three decades, monumental episodes of exploration and expedition, politics and violence, including the mapping of the Oregon Trail, the acquisition of California, and the Mexican-American and Civil wars, forever changed the history of the United States and the shape of the American West. And one man, an illiterate trapper, scout, and soldier, was there for it all: Kit Carson.

In his book Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, author and historian Hampton Sides follows Carson as a through-line in this extraordinary period. Today on the show, Hampton and I discuss how Kit Carson became a living legend through embellished accounts of his heroics, and yet undertook real-life exploits that were nearly as unbelievable as the tall tales told about him. We explore how Carson joined the grizzled fraternity of mountain men in his youth, and the wide array of skills that helped him excel as a trapper. We discuss how Carson then parlayed those skills into becoming a scout on expeditions that took him from St. Louis to California, over the Rocky and Sierra mountains, and all throughout the wild, rugged West. Hampton shares how these expeditions turned Carson into a national celebrity and what this frontiersman thought of his fame. Hampton also unpacks Carson’s complex relationship with American Indians, and how he respected and adopted the ways of some tribes, but fought against others. We end our conversation with why he decided to become an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War, his initially reluctant and then brutal campaigns against the Navajos, and his legacy.

Resources Related to the Episode Hampton’s previous appearance on the show: Episode #510 — The Greatest Battle of the Korean War * AoM Article: Legends of the Northwest — Mountain Men * AoM Podcast #203: The Real Life Most Interesting Man in the World * Polk by Walter Borneman * AoM Article: How to Track a Human * Imperfect Union by Steve Inskeep * Long Walk: A History of the Navajo Wars* by Lynn Bailey

Connect With Hampton Sides* Hampton’s Website

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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Within the space of just three decades, monumental episodes of exploration, expedition, politics, and violence, including the mapping of the Oregon trail, the acquisition of California and the Mexican-American civil wars, forever changed the history of the United States and the shape of the American West. And one man, an illiterate trapper, scout soldier, was there for it all, Kit Carson.

In his book, Blood under Thunder: The epic story of Kit Carson and the conquest of the American West. Author and historian Hampton Sides follows Carson as a through line in this extraordinary period of American history. Today on the show, Hampton and I discuss how Kit Carson became a living legend through embellished accounts of his heroics, and yet undertook real life exploits that were nearly as unbelievable as the tall tales told about them. We explore how Carson joined the grizzled fraternity of mountain men in his youth and the wide array of skills that helped him excel as a trapper.

We discuss how Carson then parlayed those skills into becoming a scout on expeditions that took him from St. Louis to California over the Rocky And Sierra mountains and all throughout the wild rugged West. Hampton shares how these expeditions turned Carson into a national celebrity and what this frontiersman thought of his fame.

Hampton also impacts Carson’s complex relationship with American Indians, in how he respected and adopted the ways of some tribes and yet fought viciously against others. And we end our conversation with why he decided to become an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War, his initially reluctant and then brutal campaigns against the Navajos, and his legacy today. After the show’s over, check out our show notes aom.is/carson. Hampton joins me now via clearcast.io.

Alright, Hampton Sides, welcome back to the show.

Hampton Sides: It is good to be with you.

Brett McKay: So we had you on a couple of years ago to talk about your book, On Desperate Ground, which was about the greatest battle of the Korean War, the Chosin Reservoir, brought you back on ’cause I wanna talk about a book you wrote, it’s almost 13 years ago, and I think you started it even back in 2002. It’s called, Blood and Thunder, and it’s about the famed trapper, mountain man, scout soldier, Kit Carson. I’m curious. What drew you to Kit Carson as a subject?

Hampton Sides: Well, Blood and Thunder isn’t really a biography of Kit Carson. It’s using Kit Carson as a through line to tell a much bigger story. And what drew me to Kit Carson was that this one man, in the span of one lifetime, went everywhere, did everything, knew everybody, somehow intersected with history in this consequential way, and enabled me as a writer to tell this bigger story of the conquest of the American West.

In a single generation, the western third of the continent became the United States. What’s amazing about Carson is that even though he wasn’t a general, West Pointer, a writer, a big time politician, he was essentially a nobody, an illiterate frontiersman, he knew everybody. And when you start charting the big events of Manifest Destiny and the conquest of the West, somehow or another, he was there.

He was always there. Or if he was not there, he missed it by five minutes. His best friend was there, or his wife was there, or his… So it’s a great through line to write about this much bigger story, which is really what I was interested in, because I had moved to the West. I moved here to Santa Fe, and I was looking for a big canvas kind of story to sink my teeth into, try to understand this land out here and how it became part of the United States.

It’s really then becomes the story of Native Americans, it becomes the story of Spanish Americans, the mountain men, who were mostly French, and these sort of spiral of events that led to finally, the Mexican-American War, and also the Civil War, which most people don’t realize there were actually some pretty consequential battles that took place here in the West during the Civil War.

So it’s got all these different chapters and episodes, but that through line that keeps returning is this one man who is very controversial. He was an Indian lover and he was an Indian killer. He married into… His first wife was Arapaho, his second wife was Cheyenne. He spoke six or seven different Indian languages. But he also fought against different tribes, and especially he’s famous for his conquering the Navajo and leading them on their notorious long walk.

I was drawn to that part of Carson’s life too. The fact that he was so controversial, so conflicted, has sort of this deep love and appreciation for Native American culture, but also fought against Native Americans in big ways that still have ramifications today.

Brett McKay: When I read this book, I was like, “This is just… It’s epic.” The stuff that happened in a short amount of time from the 1840s ’til the 1860s, it’s mind-boggling how much happened. I think what we’ve been going through in the past decade here in the modern age you think, “Oh man, things are just going so fast.” But like big changes, monumental changes happened in a matter of years back then.

Hampton Sides: Yeah, yeah, well, especially during the Mexican-American War, when President Polk took office, he cast his eye west and he decided he wanted all of it. He wanted the Oregon Territory, which is… Oregon and Washington now. He wanted California, which was nominally part of Mexico, that was kind of semi-independent.

He wanted the New Mexico territory, which was part of Mexico, and he wanted Texas and everything in between. He wanted ports on the Pacific. He wanted this relatively small country to become an empire, and he wanted it all in one fell swoop, and he got it all during the Mexican-American war. It was a brutal and relentless land grab.

It was pretty shameful in many respects, but he achieved what he sought out to do. After one term in office, he went home to Tennessee and in a few months, he was dead. James K. Polk came out of nowhere and achieved what he said he was going to do, and suddenly, the United States had grown by about the size of Continental Europe. [chuckle]

Those events that led to all that just happened so fast and furious, and it’s so hard to even keep track of them all and all the different characters. But one person just kind of treads right through the middle of it, and that’s Kit Carson. And that’s why he became such an interesting kinda connective tissue for this larger story.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s look at the life of Kit Carson, and along the way, we can talk about some of these big events that he was involved with, in American History. So we’ll start of when he was born. What was America like when Kit Carson was born?

Hampton Sides: Well, he was born in Kentucky, but moved very soon thereafter to Kentucky. And there was this slow but steady march westward to find untouched land. And he was part of that movement. His parents were. He was distantly related to Daniel Boone and these were true frontiersman. They moved to Missouri.

But beyond Missouri, it was wilderness. And the notion was that sort of the middle third of the country was gonna be set aside for the Native American tribes, many of whom had been forcibly relocated during the Trail of Tears and other forced relocation sagas like that. But then beyond the plains, there was this whole other part of the continent that was not very well understood. Part of it was part of Mexico, part of it was just wilderness that had not been mapped or explored very much.

And then you finally get to the Pacific Coast and you get different continental powers that are vying for, and interested in controlling, particularly the Pacific Northwest. The British are interested in it and have lots of little tentacles in that part of the world. The Russians are still trapping and exploring up around Alaska and working their way down the coast. California was part of Mexico, and by extension, part of the greater Spanish Empire.

So everyone had their eyes on this great prize of the virgin far West, and the United States was beginning to express its interest in having all that. And so, Carson’s family moved from Kentucky to Missouri. That was the end of the line. St. Louis was the gateway to wilderness, and there was a trail that was formed from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe, known as the Santa Fe Trail. And that was kind of the one little tentacle where there was some trade and there was expeditions west.

And Carson as a young boy, his father died when he was eight, and his stepfather, he butted heads with his stepfather, and he wanted to get the hell out of his home environment. He became an apprentice to a saddle-maker. But then he started hearing these stories about these mountain men, these people out west that came west on the Sante Fe Trail and went into the mountains and trapped beaver.

There was a tremendous amount of money to be made doing that. It was an adventurous life, it was a dangerous life, but he wanted to be part of this fraternity of greasy grizzled old mountain men, and he ran away. When he was about 16, ran away to Santa Fe and really never looked back.

He went up into the mountains, up around talus, and slowly but surely worked his way into this fraternity of men and became in the end, one of the most famous mountain men of all. So that’s how he got his start in the West, trapping beaver, which was an incredibly valuable asset really because, for some reason, people back in London and Paris and New York had decided that a beaver hat was the finest hat you could have. [chuckle] It was a fashion statement.

And so really, these men became so proficient at trapping beaver that beaver became nearly extinct in many parts of the West. But along the way, they learned how the rivers… How the drainages flowed, the big rivers, the little rivers. They learned essentially, if not formally, to map the West, at least to get around, sort of made a mental map of the West.

And these mountain men, with all this knowledge of this territory that was otherwise unexplored, then went on to become scouts and guides in various topographical expeditions into the West. So this was valuable information that they had, and Carson was proved to be the very best one of all of the mountain men, to make that transition from trapping beaver to guiding formal expeditions into the West.

Brett McKay: One thing you talk about, and you quote people who talked about, the skills that Carson had. He was just in any situation in the West and the wild, he could handle himself. What were some of the skills that he was famous for, that he had?

Hampton Sides: It wasn’t any one thing that Carson had that made him so competent at what he did. It was kind of a panoply of skills. He knew when to fight, he knew when to bluff, he knew when to negotiate, he was cool under pressure. He was really… He was a great horseman, although most of these guys didn’t have horses, they had mules. They really trusted their mules, and they would say, “The horse won the West.”

It actually was no horse, it was a mule that won the West. But Carson was good with a knife, he was good in a fight, he was an expert marksman, a good hunter, he was a decent cook, he was a, just somebody you wanted on your side, and when you’re out in the wilds. It’s kind of extraordinary, given how many scrapes he got into with different Native American tribes over the decades, that he lived to fairly ripe old age in those days and died of natural causes. He somehow knew where to be, and had a sixth sense for when to fight and when to avoid a fight.

He also had a really remarkable… Even though he was illiterate, a remarkable gift for language. He was fluent in Spanish, he was fairly fluent in French, and he knew multiple Native American languages and sign language. So he was great at communicating. All the different expeditions to remark about that, that he was the guy that came forward and figured out what was going on and communicated with the local tribes and was able to negotiate whatever it is they wanted or needed at the time. So those are some of his… Those are some of his skills.

He certainly had a temper, and if you riled him, he would not back down, he was ferocious and he was relentless, and he would pursue you. And I guess that’s his other famous skill, was pursuing people. He was an amazing tracker and would sometimes track a fugitive or an… In one famous case, a woman who had been kidnapped for days and days and days across the mountains and the plains.

He could read, you know, read the signs on the ground and was quite famous for this skill. Which is really almost a mystical skill, to look at the grass and try to determine how old a particular footprint is. I don’t know how people do that, but he was apparently phenomenal at that skill.

Brett McKay: Well, and it was during his time as a mountain man where his complex relationship with Native Americans began. This is when he married, I think he has married two Native American women during this time.

Hampton Sides: Yes, his first wife, Singing Grass was Arapaho, and a lot of people say that those were his happiest years was when he lived with her tribe, her band of Arapaho Indians, and really live more like an Indian than a White guy, than an Anglo. Had two children with her. Unfortunately, she died in childbirth. He raised their children and along the way, married a Cheyenne woman, that marriage did not work out very well. It ended in what they call the “Cheyenne divorce”, where she basically kicked him out of her teepee.

But all this is just to say that he was somebody who respected and found a lot of power in Native American traditions and language and lived with great respect for certain Native American tribes. There were other tribes that he seemed to spend much of his life fighting against, and maybe foremost among those were the Blackfeet and also the Comanches and at sometimes the Kiowas.

So he didn’t really look at Native Americans in a monolithic way, like Indians out there, he was very specific in his allegiance to certain tribes, and his often lifelong antipathy to other tribes. So it’s very interesting. His third and his final wife was Spanish, came from an old Spanish family in Taos, Josefa Jaramillo. And so he then sort of just organically morphed again into kind of like a Spanish guy.

He spoke Spanish, he converted to Catholicism. He raised his kids to speak Spanish and as Catholics and lived in Taos, and viewed himself as allied, aligned with Spanish, New Mexico, which of course, they’ve been there for hundreds of years. So it’s interesting this guy just keeps kind of like a zelig figure, he keeps kinda changing into whatever, and he’s like a cat who had nine lives.

So, he went from being a mountain man to being a rancher, to being a scout and a hunter, and then he became… Finally, joined the regular army, the Union Army, and fought against the Confederates in several battles. And then became, at the end of his life, he became a brigadier general, so he…

And there’s a couple of other incarnations I just skipped over, like a cross continental courier, he rode to Washington to give messages, and he was, you know, he was a scout and he was a guide, and he was so many other things. So he had this real talent for sort of rebooting himself. As soon as one lifestyle seemed to dry up or one set of opportunities evaporated, he would just recreate himself anew.

Brett McKay: Well, so as a trapper, he started to make a name for himself, but like where this, where he became like almost a living legend was when he became the scout for Fremont, John Fremont. So for those who are not familiar, who was John Fremont and why was he exploring the West?

Hampton Sides: Yeah. Well, John C. Fremont was a botanist and a cartographer living in Washington, very talented, very ambitious young man, very good looking dude, ladies seemed to think he was extremely handsome and dashing. He had… His ambition really knew no bounds, he was all those things I mentioned, but he really wanted to be President someday.

Like a lot of ambitious young men, he married a woman who was the daughter of a very, very powerful man. This man was Senator Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri, one of the architects if not the principal architect of Manifest Destiny, John C. Frémont knew that Benton was his ticket to get to where he wanted to go which was to explore the West, map the West and then somehow use his fame and celebrity to catapult it into a political career.

Well, it worked out pretty much the way he envisioned it, he married Benton’s daughter, Jessie Frémont, who was herself just a remarkable woman, who was educated pretty much the way if the senator had had a son, this is the way he would have educated his son. She didn’t go to finishing school or anything like that, she got a rigorous education and was just a very shrewd political creature herself. And they became… John C. Frémont and Jesse became kind of like Washington’s original power couple.

He would go on these expeditions and come back, and she would do most of the writing, because she was a very talented writer and understood the PR aspect of all this. It’s like one thing to go and describe a bunch of plants and the topography and try to do it in a scientific fashion, but those reports that Frémont wrote were rather dull and rather dry.

She would take these reports and turn them into great stories that became bestselling books and that ensured her husband’s fame and fortune. In these books, Frémont was a dashing hero, but perhaps even more dashing a hero as depicted in those books was Kit Carson. And that’s really how Kit Carson became famous, it seems like on every page Carson was doing something daring, something bold. That he was plucky and resourceful and got the expedition out of innumerable scrapes.

So Carson kinda owed his fame to John C. Frémont and Frémont’s wife, Jesse. Carson however, didn’t understand that celebrity, he didn’t like that celebrity. He was a pretty shy and awkward guy, he didn’t understand why people back east seemed to know his name. He had spent his youth trying to get away from America and suddenly he was this almost like a action figure hero.

He became then the subject of all these pulp novels that were written really bad, most of them very bad novels but they were kind of precursors to what we now call “a western” and often Kit Carson was the star of these books, the protagonist. Somehow they turned him into 6-foot-8 blonde, blue eyed, alien viking or something.

And he was like 5’4, not particularly handsome, shy and awkward around the ladies, he just didn’t… They turned him into something else, a kind of a caricature, and he spent much of his life trying to live that caricature down or trying to understand it. He didn’t get any money from these books, they didn’t get his permission to use his name. The ultimate irony was he couldn’t read these books, ’cause he was illiterate, so he had to have other people read to him these exploits that were completely…

Carson had an amazing life and he did amazing things, but of course that wasn’t good enough for these novelists who had to exaggerate. It would say like, “Kit Carson would kill two Indians before breakfast,” which presumably was a good thing back then, considered a good thing. It really set up this mythology that Carson spent the rest of his life trying to live down.

But all of it goes back to Frémont’s expeditions which Benton, Senator Benton was instrumental in commissioning, they left from St. Louis, there was three main Frémont expeditions. So Frémont’s expeditions west really were important historically, because he charted and mapped the Oregon Trail, which was then a very crude and dangerous throughout west towards the northwest, across the Great Plains.

And after his books came out, books that were largely written by his wife, this kind of ignited this Great Migration of pioneers and people said, “Well, maybe it’s not so dangerous, so let’s all… “, then en masse began to migrate west along the Oregon Trail. So this is an instance in which cartography and exploration led directly to settlement on a big scale, all part of a master plan of Benton and the others who wanted, really wanted the United States to be a continental empire, from shore to shore, from sea to shining sea.

And it basically worked. The first act of occupation and settlement is first exploration, and Frémont led those early expeditions and Carson was his guide. Their friendship is also a very interesting dynamic in the book, is that these two guys were kind of codependent, Frémont and Carson, two people who seemed to really need each other.

Carson very self-reliant guy but also very conscious of the fact that he was illiterate, that there was a whole world back east of educated people, powerful people, that he was curious about. Frémont was quite educated and Carson seemed to defer to him in many ways. When Frémont asked him to go do something, sometimes a very unsavory thing, Carson would do it. He was dutiful to a fault.

Frémont, meanwhile, he needed a guide, he needed somebody that really knew the West, he needed someone who was really proficient in all those skills of survival in an extreme environment that Carson already had, having been a mountain man for all those years.

So these two men very much were, I guess in modern parlance we’d say they were codependent, or they very much relied on each other, and they did remain friends for the rest of their lives. So it’s an interesting part of Carson’s life is the extent to which he identified with Frémont and needed Frémont somehow to… Almost like a father figure that Carson seemed to need to have.

Brett McKay: Going back to that, the celebrity in the books that were written about Carson, and one of the most poignant moments in the book is when you describe… This is after, I think… This is during… After the Civil War, when he was basically fighting Native Americans, there was a family of settlers, they were kidnapped. White, was their last name?

Hampton Sides: Yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah and Carson went to go hunt her, find her from these… I think it was a Native American tribe that kidnapped her. And he found her, but she was already dead, but amongst her possessions, she had a book about Kit Carson who came and saved people. That was just one of those moments, he couldn’t live up to the legend.

Hampton Sides: Yeah. That is a famous story, and it’s 100% true. It’s almost… It’s fabulous, like something that seems like it is a made up story, but it is true. He got the assignment essentially to go find this woman who had been kidnapped by Hickory Apaches on the plains, and he spent nearly a week tracking her across the state plains, and he found her, but unfortunately, she had been killed.

As you say, in her possessions, they found the very first Blood and Thunder book, these horrible pulp westerns, and in that book, in that particular story, he was the protagonist. And the weird plot line of the book was that he had gotten the assignment to go find a woman who’d been captured and kidnapped by Native Americans, and he went and found her and saved the day and won her back and brought her back to her family.

That’s in the novel, but he couldn’t in real life live up to that legend. Of course, he couldn’t read the story either. Someone read it to him, and he was like… It was like the first time that he ever became aware of his own legend, that he was some kind of mythological figure back east, that these novels… And of course, this was the first of many of these terrible novels.

But it is an amazing story. Ann White was her name. You can’t make this up, her name was White. She’d been coming down the Santa Fe trail with her family. All the men in her group were killed, but she and her African-American slave and her daughter, her baby daughter, were kidnapped, and so, yeah, it’s just one of…

This is the thing. Tracking down stories about Kit Carson is just, it’s a full-time job. It kept me busy for years and years because there are just so many of them. Many of them are false, many of them were exaggerated, but just as many of them are true. It’s like if something like that happened in my life, I would say that was like probably the biggest thing that ever happened to me, the most…

Well, he had dozens and dozens and dozens of those kinds of stories, all in one life. So it really is kind of an extraordinary thing to think about, just all the episodes and incarnations, and just tall tales that actually prove to be true that happened to this one man.

Brett McKay: So we talked about, so he was a scout for Frémont. The expeditions to California, that eventually morphed into the Mexican-American War. There was some crazy stuff in that chapter, of insurrections going on and just nutty stuff. The Mexican-American War happened. Carson got roped into that. He started working with… I think it was Kearny was the general of the army in the West?

Hampton Sides: Right.

Brett McKay: Started fighting in the Mexican-American War. But then after the Mexican-American War, Carson continued to be a soldier, and he actually became an officer for the Union army during the Civil War.

Hampton Sides: He was rather reluctant to do that, and it was kind of complicated in the sense that he was originally from Missouri and most of his brothers had sided with the Confederacy, and why he decided to become Union officer is kind of interesting, but he did. And one of the many reasons he did is because there was an army coming from Texas to try to claim New Mexico and Colorado for the Confederacy. Spanish New Mexicans for generations and generations had had this fear and loathing of Texans. In some senses, we still do.

Brett McKay: Tejanos, you gotta watch out for the Tejanos.

Hampton Sides: Right, the Tejanos. So he was able to recruit very quickly, a pretty large army of Spanish New Mexicans that he commanded and fought against those Texans when they came up the Rio Grande at a place called Valverde, a really important battle, and one that I think most Americans don’t even know happened at all. And after the Texans were sent back to Texas where they belong, Carson, here he was still in the Union army, and he basically wanted to go back to Towson, be with his wife and family.

But a general by the name of Carlton came along and said, “No, well, we’re on a war footing now, why don’t we now go after some of these tribes that keep attacking the settlements along the Rio Grande?” The wandering tribes, the raiding tribes, and foremost among those, at that time, were the Navajo, the Diné.

And this general, Carlton, came up with this plan to round up all the Diné, one of the largest tribes even then, and certainly now, in America, and move them to a reservation on the Pecos River, where they could be watched and where they could be taught to be sedentary Christian farmers, completely rewire their society.

Because they were… What they really were, were semi-nomadic sheep herders and moving over a huge piece of land. The Diné country was just massive, all over the Four Corners region of what we call the Four Corners now, of the United States. And when General Carlton came up with this ambitious plan to sort of rewire the Navajo, he decided that he had to have Carson to actually lead it. And Carson tried to resign. He didn’t really want any part of this. He said he had joined the Union Army to fight Texans, not Native Americans.

But in the end, he signed on and he thus began really the chapter of his life, the episode of his life, for which he is now widely reviled and hated by Native Americans, and hated for just the ferocity of this scorched-earth campaign that he led into Navajo country, to break their spirit, break their back, break the back of their nation, and to march them to this kind of like a prison camp on the Pecos River.

This is probably what he’s most famous for now, and his long life with many twists and turns, comes down to one of the last chapters of his life, the Navajo campaigns.

Brett McKay: And I thought was… This was happening during the Civil War. What I thought was interesting is that most people think, after the Civil War, the Union Army, they started the American Indian Wars. Sherman was a big part of that. This was the precursor to that.

Hampton Sides: Yeah, well, Carson found that it was almost impossible to fight the Navajo, that they didn’t fight pitched battles. They would raid and retreat, raid and retreat. Navajo country is so wrinkled and full of canyons, and they would just disappear. They would vanish into this massive wilderness.

And so, the only way Carson could fight them, was to starve them to death, was to kind of… Even before Sherman led his scorched-earth campaign across the American South, Carson was doing this and perfecting it, burning every corn field, destroying every orchard, slaughtering every sheep, every cow, every horse that they came across. Poisoning water sources, destroying salt sources. Literally starving the Navajo, slowly but surely, to death. This is one of the reasons why the Navajo, they never forgot and they never forgave.

It’s like it happened yesterday, because it really had a psychic effect. Because not only were they being attacked, but it was their very land, their sacred land was being attacked. Carson proved to be very good at this. He didn’t wanna do it. He tried to resign several times, but once he signed on, he was brutal. And it worked, because in 10s and 20s, and then finally by the hundreds and thousands, the Navajo surrendered and they went on their long walk.

This experiment on the Pecos River did not go well. They hated it. They were miserable. They refused to plant their crops. They didn’t wanna become Christian farmers. [chuckle] They wanted to go back to their beloved Land. And after the Civil War, actually Sherman, who you mentioned, does come out to negotiate some treaties and decides that this experiment was an abject failure.

And the Navajo, after much discussion, they decided to return them back to their homeland. Which is one of the very rare instances in our history, where no one apologized, but they admitted the failure of relocating a people forcibly, and they actually returned them to their ancestral lands, which is instead of Oklahoma or some other place, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles from where they actually are from.

So the Navajo were returned in this, another long walk, but a joyous one, back to the Diné country, where they are now, the largest reservation in the country, and one of the largest Native American tribes in the country. Carson, like I’ve said several times, he was illiterate. We don’t really know what he thought and felt about all of this.

I think he felt… There are some indications that he certainly felt reluctant to do it in the first place, and then he felt… Obviously, he recognized that it was a failure, that it didn’t work. And many, thousands of Navajo died, there was outbreaks of different diseases, and it was just a great tragedy that didn’t really need to happen. Again, Carson was kind of at the center of it.

But he did spend the rest of his life, really quite directly advocating on behalf of various Native American tribes and establishing treaties, with particularly… He was very close to the Utes and went all the way to Washington, with a group of Ute elders and negotiated a treaty that was quite successful and led to a creation of their own sovereign lands.

But this Navajo campaign, I think just remained a stain on his career for the rest of his life, and really is the thing that he’s most famous for, all these many years later.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I thought it was… You said how Carson, he… Ever since he was a trapper, the way he looked at Native Americans, he viewed Native Americans as Native Americans viewed Native Americans. It’s like instead of a White person, a European, at the time would think of Native Americans as a monolithic and they’re all the same, Carson understood, no, they all think they’re the best people. Like the Comanches are the people, or the Utes are the people, and every other tribe, and Carson kinda had that world view as well.

Hampton Sides: He did, he did, and to his credit, I think that he is in a completely different class of figures in the American West. This was no Sheridan, this was no Chivington, famous for his massacres, this was no Custer. This was a guy who really actually understood a lot about Native American life and saw that most of these clashes that were happening out in the West were happening because White settlers, White miners, Mormons and missionaries were changing the West and encroaching on Native American territory.

He hated what was happening, and I think maybe on some level, he understood that he himself had brought this on by virtue of leading those expeditions to the West, and he had sort of fouled his own nest. Because he’d loved the American West, and the pristine West that he roamed over when he was in his 20s as a mountain man had been ruined by igniting these mass migrations of Europeans, Anglo-Americans.

So in his later years as he’s negotiating treaties and giving testimony to Congress, you see a very different Carson. He’s quite contrite. He hates what has happened to the West, and he hates… There’s just a lot of… Of course, don’t forget the Gold Rush, which he actually is thought to have played a bit of a role in himself.

He may have… He was transmitting some messages to Washington, and in one of the saddle bags, it’s thought that the very first mention of gold being found in California was in one of those saddle bags. So even the Gold Rush, he may have helped ignite. I think the real tragedy of Carson’s life story is that he kind of ruined his own paradise in one lifetime.

Near the end of his life, the transcontinental railroad has come, and the Old West that he knew is over, and it’s a whole different world when he died in 1868.

Brett McKay: Hampton, where can people go to learn more about this book and the rest of your work?

Hampton Sides: Obviously, anywhere where books are sold, but I always encourage people to go to independent bookstores, which are struggling and suffering during this pandemic. Or my website, which leads you to all kinds of information, which is hamptonsides.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Hampton Sides, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Hampton Sides: I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Hampton Sides, who talked about his book, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West. It’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere, and you find out more information about his work at his website, hamptonsides.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/carson. You can find links to our resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you could think of. If you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLINESS at check out for a free month trial.

Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate you if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or a family member who you think would get something out of it.

As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #681: The Epic Exploits of Kit Carson appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America

Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

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Maybe you have roadside assistance, maybe you don’t. Either way, you should know how to change a flat tire yourself. You never know if you, a loved one, or even a stranger, is going to need the help.

The post Skill of the Week: Change a Flat Tire appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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The Struggle to Be Interesting is Real. A cultural anthropologist explores how “expressive individualism” has only intensified in the past few decades. We’re all just trying to be interesting and that often takes a lot of time and money. “And so, being interesting is all about being able to narrate some aspect of our existence as distinctive, elevated, and more thoughtful than (almost) everyone else in our weak social network (office, extended family on Thanksgiving, casual friends).”

Vintage Blast Pre-Workout. This has been my and Kate’s go-to pre-workout for years now. Offers a solid, sustained, non-jittery energy boost. Sugar-free and all natural, it doesn’t have the cloying, artificial taste of most pre-workout supplements. I think Blueberry Lemonade is the best flavor. A little of my allegiance may also be due to the fact that I kind of look like the guy on the package.

Issawi’s Laws of Social Motion. I don’t remember how I came into possession of this obscure book from the 1970s written by a historian and economist specializing in the Middle East. It’s full of pithy insights about life, money, and geopolitics, like:

“One is tempted to say ‘We don’t know’ when one really should be saying ‘I don’t know.'”

“When we call others dogmatic, what we really object to is their holding dogmas that are different from our own.”

“Problems increase in geometric ratio, solutions in arithmetic ratio.”

It’s a good, high-brow toilet book. Copies are hard to find on Amazon. Maybe I’ll put together a post of my favorites so more people can see them.

Imploding the Mirage. The Killers are my favorite band and 2020’s Imploding the Mirage is my favorite album. I still haven’t gotten tired of it. Great for working out or for long road trips through the desert. All the songs are great, but here are my absolute favorites: “Lightning Fields,” “Dying Breed,” “Fire in Bone.”

Quote of the Week:

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The post Odds & Ends: January 20, 2023 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Over the last year, my 12-year-old son has been doing one challenge every week as a rite of passage and chance to earn a special trip. Some of these challenges have involved reading a book in a week, and the most recent book we gave him to read was How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. His review? He said it was the best book he’s read so far.

So a book written almost 90 years ago can still be a favorite of a kid in the 21st century. Talk about some staying power.

The advice in How to Win Friends & Influence People, and Dale Carnegie’s other classic, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, is timeless. But to help introduce it to a new audience, my guest, Joe Hart, has recently co-authored the book Take Command, which synthesizes, updates, and adds to the principles of Carnegie’s two perennial bestsellers. Joe is the President and CEO of Dale Carnegie & Associates, which continues Carnegie’s work in the present day, and we begin our conversation with some background on the guy who kicked off this work back in 1936. We then talk about what principles we can take from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living on developing a positive mindset. From there, we talk about the big overarching principle of How to Win Friends & Influence People, and how you can use it to improve your relationships. We end our conversation with advice on how to live life with more intentionality and meaning.

Resources Related to the Episode How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie * How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie * The Dale Carnegie Website, with links to the Take Command* book page and the Dale Carnegie Course * AoM Article: The 8 Best Vintage Self-Improvement Books * AoM Podcast #818: The Philosophy of Self-Improvement * AoM Podcast #457: Leadership Lessons With Craig Groeschel * AoM Podcast #527: The Journey to the Second Half of Life With Richard Rohr * AoM Podcast #518: The Second Mountain With David Brooks

Connect With Joe Hart* Joe on Twitter * Joe on LinkedIn

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Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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Thumbnail image credit: Auntie P

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #865: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the 21st Century appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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In the years after World War I, longtime Army colleagues and friends George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower contemplated what would happen if another global conflict broke out. As Patton envisioned it: “In the next war, I’ll be the Stonewall Jackson, and you can be the Robert E. Lee. Ike, you do the big planning, and you let me go in and shoot up the enemy.”

And that’s pretty much how things worked out in World War II.

Eisenhower led from Allied headquarters as Europe’s Supreme Commander, while Patton served on the ground as commander of the Third and Seventh armies.

Ike, who lacked battlefield experience, was nonetheless brilliant as a theater commander. Having spent his career as a highly effective staff officer, he had a genius for planning, marshaling material, organizing logistics, and practicing diplomacy. Charming, modest, flexible, and steady, he excelled at getting the disparate and sometimes rivalrous Allied leaders to work together, interfacing with politicians and the press, and keeping all the pieces of a monumental war effort sorted and spinning.

Patton, on the other hand, had little patience for politicking and wasn’t lauded for his ability to formulate high-level plans. But, he possessed all the traits necessary for superior battlefield command. Bold and aggressive, he executed missions with mastery and confidence and advanced with relentless drive.

While each man’s position and responsibilities were different, each excelled in his particular role.

Ike was the consummate strategist.

Patton was born to be an operator.

Strategists Versus OperatorsAndrew Wilson, a professor at the Naval War College, describes the difference between Eisenhower and Patton as the difference between having a bent toward strategy versus having a bent toward operations.

Wilson defines strategy as “the means by which you translate political purpose” — what the political leadership hopes to achieve with a war — “into military action, and how it is that you anticipate military action to deliver your political purpose. . . . So strategy is the bridge between policy and military actions.”

Operations, he says, are those military actions — “essentially the big muscle movements, the battles.”

Those who excel in that second kind of work — operators — do best on the ground and in the field. They excel at, and derive satisfaction from, practicing and carrying out a certain skill, craft, or art.

Those who excel at the first kind of work — strategists — do best in high-level positions. They excel at, and derive satisfaction from, overseeing, organizing, and supervising those who practice and carry out skills, crafts, and arts.

Another way to describe the strategists versus operators dichotomy is as managers versus tacticians.

It’s a distinction in men’s proclivities that extends beyond the military context, and it’s crucial to know which category you fall into.

Are You a Strategist or an Operator?While there are a few men who are adept at both strategy and operations, most primarily lean toward one over the other.

Problems arise when men don’t have the self-awareness and foresight to understand their personal strengths and propensities, and end up in a role for which they are ill-suited.

Strategists Becoming Operators Sometimes a man is doing well as a manager type, but may desire a job in the field, perhaps because such work seems “sexier.” For example, he may have done well for years as a supervisor within a company, but thinks about striking out on his own and becoming an entrepreneur, even though the skill set necessary for success in the former pursuit isn’t likely to translate to success in the latter.

Eisenhower thought about making this kind of shift.

In the lead-up to WWII, Ike thought he’d like to work alongside Patton and become the commander of an armored regiment. He had never seen combat; because he was so good at training others, he had been kept stateside during WWI and tasked with preparing troops to deploy. Having missed out on the consummate experience of a military career during the First World War, he was determined to get into the field during the Second.

So when in 1941, a general in the War Plans Division asked Eisenhower to consider joining its staff in Washington, Ike demurred. He really liked the prospect of that position, and knew he’d do well there, but felt that a field command was something he was supposed to prefer. He felt conflicted, and worried he’d “pass[ed] up something I wanted to do, in favor of something I thought I ought to do.”

Eisenhower needn’t have worried. While he continued to position himself for field command, his administrative abilities were too valuable to be dispensed with, and he was eventually appointed chief of staff to the commander of the Third Army, then Chief of the War Plans Division, and eventually Supreme Allied Commander. Ike’s sense of personal satisfaction, and the fate of world history, benefitted from his sticking to these strategic positions.

Operators Becoming StrategistsWhat happens more often than managerial men trying to shift into tactical roles is tacticians being promoted into administrative positions. Those who excel in operational roles are frequently moved up the ranks. The problem is, the skills required to succeed as tactical operators don’t typically translate into success as strategic supervisors. This is the essence of the “Peter principle.” And not only may a tactician placed in a managerial or executive job struggle to be competent in that position, he is also unlikely to enjoy it.

Entrepreneurs who successfully launch start-ups often don’t transition well to becoming the CEOs who run them. Fitness coaches who excel at training clients frequently flounder at owning their own gyms. Pastors who have the skill set to plant churches don’t always have the skill set to oversee the large, established congregations they grow into. Doctors who like practicing hands-on medicine won’t be satisfied spending their days supervising teams of nurses. Academics who enjoy teaching end up less happy as deans than they were as professors.

Writers and artists, who initially function as fully autonomous operators, sometimes try hiring assistants and social media gurus to expand the empire around their “brand,” but find they’d rather keep their “business” smaller than to give over any of the time they could be creating to managing other people.

Sometimes an operator has to transition to being a strategist because the fieldwork they do is physical in nature and takes a toll on the body. As a man who works in the trades gets older, for example, he may find it desirable and/or necessary to move from working on projects himself to supervising the work of others.

But oftentimes, an operator ends up in a managerial position because he feels he’s supposed to take it and defaults to following the standard professional trajectory. The next rung up the ladder may take someone out of the field, but the position comes with more money, power, and/or status. A man thinks he ought to keep moving up in the world, even if that “advancement” puts him into a position he’s less suited for and finds less fulfilling.

Do You Want to Be in the War Room or in the Trenches?It’s important to know who you are: a strategist or an operator.

If you’re a manager type, lean into that, even if that job may not seem as sexy as others. Administrators are absolutely crucial in keeping the world spinning round, and even help win world wars.

If you’re the tactician type, do some real reflection before you accept that “promotion.” Is the benefit in money and status worth the tradeoff in fulfillment that comes from doing a job you’re brilliant at and love? It’s okay to recognize that you like carrying out orders more than formulating them. And it’s okay to value the chance to practice the things you’re really skilled at more than a bigger office.

When Eisenhower was serving as Allied Supreme Commander in North Africa during WWII, his forces experienced some initial setbacks on the battlefield, and the Army’s Chief of Staff, George Marshall, suggested that Ike bring Patton in to serve as his deputy and oversee the fighting. But Patton balked at the idea of taking a more administrative job. He understood that he could do more good on the ground than at HQ, and that an operator belongs in the field — not behind a desk.

The post Are You a Strategist or an Operator? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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In a world that celebrates overnight success, it’s easy to forget that very often, achieving your dreams takes a heck of a long time. My guest knows this all too well. You may know Steven Pressfield as the bestselling author of books like The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and The War of Art, but as he details in his new memoir, Govt Cheese, it took more than a quarter century for him to become a published novelist.Today on the show, Steven talks about what he learned in that journey, and the many odd jobs, from driving trucks to picking apples, that he took along the way. We discuss the lessons Steven gleaned that apply to achieving any dream, including how to overcome a propensity for self-sabotage, get your ego out of the way, finish what you start, and develop the killer instinct. This is a great, motivating conversation on learning not to “pull the pin” on the important commitments in your life. And we’ll explain what that means coming up.

Resources Related to the Episode Steven’s previous appearances on the show: + #55: The Warrior Ethos + #281: Overcoming the Resistance by Turning Pro + #692: The Two Halves of the Warrior’s Life * Steven’s books mentioned in the show: + Govt Cheese + Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be + The Legend of Bagger Vance + The War of Art* * AoM Article: 4 Key Insights From the Bhagavad Gita * AoM Article: Hector and Achilles — Two Paths to Manliness * Seth Godin’s pamphlet for learning to “ship it” * AoM Podcast #849: Live Life in Crescendo

Connect With Steven Pressfield* Steven’s Website * Steven on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #864: Advice on Achieving Any Long-Haul Dream appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle

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What’s the perfect temperature for running a marathon?

You might imagine that it’s a balmy 70 degrees.

But, in fact, most runners turn in their best performances when the temperature resides in the low-to-mid 40s. The fastest runners do their best when the temperature sits in the upper 30s.

Running long distances generates a tremendous amount of metabolic heat. The faster you run, the more heat you produce. Temperatures that feel cold when you’re standing around in them can feel oppressively hot once you start chugging along.

You’ve likely noticed this phenomenon with all kinds of wintertime activities. When you check the weather report, and look at the gray landscape through your window, you don’t want to leave the house. But get yourself out the door anyway, and start skiing or shoveling, and soon enough you’re sweating bullets and stripping off layers. You get to feeling perfectly comfortable in a way that belies what the mercury may say.

It’s the same experience with any new habit, practice, town, school, or job you’re starting out “cold” with. From the outside looking in, the climate may not seem welcoming. You may dread stepping into it. And it does feel stiffly frigid once you do. It doesn’t seem possible you’ll ever feel comfortable living in this new place or doing this new thing. You just want to retreat to the coziness of how you did things before.

But that which seems forbidding from a stationary standpoint, feels entirely different when you’re on the move.

The hardest part is getting going. Once you do, the heat generated by vigorous investment and consistent action will warm you right through.

The post Sunday Firesides: You’ll Warm Up appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Lectures on René Girard’s Mimetic TheoryI’ve been watching these video lectures by Jonathan Bi and David Perell during my Zone 2 cardio lately. I was first introduced to the idea of René Girard’s “mimetic theory” when Luke Burgis came on the AoM podcast. These lectures on the subject are very well done and provide a lot of food for thought about why we want what we want and how our desires can create conflict.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry Several years ago, Kate’s late Uncle Buzz mailed this book to me out of the blue with a note that said something to the effect of “This book is about a small town barber in Kentucky. It’s hard to describe why you want to keep reading it, but I couldn’t put it down. I think you might like it too.” And I did! It became one of my favorite books. This was my first introduction to the writing of Wendell Berry, and I’ve since become a fan. I plan on re-reading Jayber Crow this year. Join me. You won’t regret it.

Wireless charging stand for Apple Watch and iPhone.I got tired of having to look for an Apple charging cable every night because the kids moved the charging port somewhere else in the house to charge their Switch or iPad. So I found this three-in-one charging station that sits on my office desk. It can charge your Apple Watch, iPhone, and AirPods all at once. Pretty dang convenient.

The College Essay Is Dead. Writing has long been used as a way to assess the mental fitness and aptitude of students and job candidates. Essays for classes and college applications, as well as cover letters for job applications, have always been less about the actual content than showing the reader/reviewer that you’re a generally competent person who knows how to use language. What happens, then, when artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT can be used to crank these essays out? Will writing still be used as a gauge of intelligence and aptitude? Will teaching writing to students still be as important as it once was? There’s been a lot of ink spilt lately on the impact A.I. will have, and this Atlantic article is one of the best at getting at the way it’s going to change our world.

Quote of the Week:

Though conditions have grown puzzling in their complexity, though changes have been vast, yet we may remain absolutely sure of one thing; that now as ever in the past, and as it will ever be in the future, there can be no substitute for elemental virtues, for the elemental qualities to which we allude when we speak of a man, not only as a good man, but as emphatically a man. We can build up the standard of individual citizenship and individual well-being, we can raise the national standard and make it what it can and shall be made, only by each of us steadfastly keeping in mind that there can be no substitute for the world-old commonplace qualities of truth, justice, courage, thrift, industry, common sense, and genuine sympathy with the fellow feelings of others.

—Theodore Roosevelt

The post Odds and Ends: January 13, 2023 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Are you looking to get a bigger upper body and improve your bench and shoulder press?

Then let me introduce you to a supplemental bodyweight exercise you need to start incorporating into your training: the dip.

What Muscles Do Dips Work?The dip works several key muscles in your upper body, particularly ones involved in the bench press, making it a tremendous supplemental movement to improve that lift.

The dip primarily works the chest/pecs.

It also hits your triceps, shoulders, and back muscles.

The amount of work a muscle group receives during the dip depends on your body’s position as you perform the movement. If you lean forward more, you’ll hit your pec and shoulder muscles more; if you maintain a more upright position, you’ll work your triceps more.

Why Do Dips?Dips contribute directly to the main barbell lifts, particularly the bench press. If you want to improve your bench press, the dip can help you with that. As discussed above, the dip primarily works the muscles involved in the bench press: pecs, triceps, and shoulders.

Besides the bench press, dips can also contribute to increased performance on the shoulder press.

Helps build big guns. Many dudes think that if you want big arms, you should spend all your time doing bicep curls. While bicep curls can contribute to arm size, working your triceps actually gives you more bang for your buck, since the triceps make up most of your arms’ girth. The dip is a great movement for beefing up your triceps.

It can be used for conditioning. I typically include dips as part of a conditioning circuit I do after bench pressing. (Don’t neglect your conditioning!) It’s a great way to get both stronger and sweaty.

You can do them outside the gym. Standard dips are performed on a set of parallel bars. But if you don’t have access to those, you can improvise and perform a dip variation on a park bench or chair. This variation is handy to pull out when exercising away from home. Incorporate dips into a circuit along with air squats and push-ups, and you’ve got yourself a quick and effective bodyweight workout.

The Big Downside of DipsWhile dips come with many benefits, the exercise does have a downside: if performed improperly, it can tear your rotator cuff.

Back in my twenties, I injured my shoulder doing dips. I went down too deep and too fast during the descent. While I didn’t tear my rotator cuff, I sprained it and had to take it easy for a few weeks while my shoulder healed.

If you have bad shoulders or are older, you should probably skip the dips. My barbell coach, Matt Reynolds, has a simple rule regarding dips: “If you do a dip, and it bothers your shoulders, don’t do dips.”

In place of dips, do another accessory exercise that works the triceps like a tricep rolling extension.

How to Do a DipTo perform dips, you’ll need two parallel bars.

These parallel bars can come in the form of two dip bars — freestanding, upside-down U-shaped apparatuses that can be moved around.

You can also do dips at a pull-up/dip station. The dip bars at these stations are often angled so that the space between them is narrower toward the bar on which they’re mounted, and wider apart as they move out. This allows the dip station to accommodate different-sized individuals. If you’re smaller, you’ll want to grip the bars closer to the mount; if you’re bigger, you’ll grip the bars closer to their ends.

If you have a home gym, you can buy a dip attachment for your squat rack.

If you’re just starting out, avoid using gymnast rings for your dips. They’re unstable and increase the risk of tearing your rotator cuff while dipping.

Grab the bars. Your grip should be wide enough that your hands are just outside your shoulders. Going wider than that will increase your risk of injury.

Get in the start position. Jump up until your arms and elbows are fully extended. Bend your knees and lean forward slightly.

Lower your body. Brace your abs and lower yourself in a controlled manner while keeping your forearms vertical and your body in a slight forward lean. Lower yourself until your shoulder goes just below your elbow. This will give you the most range of motion without going so deep that you injure yourself.

Push yourself back up to the start position. You just did a dip.

What If You Can’t Do a Dip?If you can’t do a single bodyweight dip, place a resistance band around the dip bars. Put the weight of your knees on the bands. This will give you some assistance during the movement. As you get stronger, decrease the resistance level of the band until you can do a full, unassisted dip.

Increasing Weight with DipsIf you can crank out more than ten reps of bodyweight dips with ease, it’s time to add weight.

You can do that with a dip belt. It’s a leather or nylon belt with a chain attached. To add weight to your dips, you thread the chain’s free-hanging end through a barbell plate and hook it to your belt.

Another way you can add weight to your dips is by putting heavy weightlifting chains around your neck. You definitely feel like a badass adding weight to your dips this way.

Bench Dip VariationIf you don’t have access to parallel bars, you can still work your triceps by doing a modified dip using a weight bench, a park bench, or a chair.

Position yourself as if you’re going to sit down on the bench, but place your butt just off the bench’s edge with hands shoulder-width apart, gripping the edge. Adopt the proper bench dip posture: keep knees at 90 degrees; draw in and brace the abs; lock the shoulder blades back and down.

Slowly lower your body by bending at the elbows and shoulders until your forearms create a 90-degree angle. Maintain good posture throughout.

To increase the difficulty of this exercise, extend your legs out straight.

Programming DipsAs mentioned, dips are a great accessory exercise for the bench press and shoulder press. Matt typically programs dips for me on the days I do my upper-body workout. He’ll usually combine them with pull-ups.

So my workout would look something like

Bench press
Shoulder press
Pull-ups
Dips

If you’re just starting out with dips, you’ll need to slowly work your way up to 4 sets of 10 reps. Start off with 4 sets of as many as you can. This could be just 2 or 3 reps. Each week add a rep. When you can do 4 sets of 10 bodyweight dips, it’s time to add some weight with a dip belt or chains. Look to add 5 to 10 pounds at a time.

The post Bro Basics: The Dip appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Started in 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development represents the longest study on happiness ever conducted. It set out to follow a group of men through every stage of their lives, from youth to old age, to discover what factors lead people to flourish.

Here to share some of the insights that have been gleaned from the Harvard Study of Adult Development is Dr. Robert Waldinger, the current director of the project and the co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Today on the show, Robert explains how the study has affirmed the absolute primacy of relationships in happiness and how to develop the “social fitness” to make and enrich those vital connections. We discuss what the happily married couples in the study did differently, and why happiness in marriage tends to follow a U-shaped curve which hits its low point in midlife. We talk about how the way you were raised helps set a trajectory for your life, but how it’s also possible to overcome a rough upbringing to become a transitional character in your family. We also discuss the role that friends and work played in the happiness of the men who participated in the study. We end our conversation with what folks in every stage of development — whether youth, midlife, or older age — should focus on to live a flourishing life.

Resources Related to the Episode AoM Article:* Love Is All You Need: Insights from the Longest Longitudinal Study on Men Ever Conducted * AoM article and podcast on how and why to have weekly marriage meetings * AoM Podcast #795: The U-Shaped Curve of Happiness * AoM Article: You Don’t Have to Be Your Dad — How to Become Your Family’s Transitional Character * AoM Podcast #742: The Power of Talking to Strangers * A Eulogy for My Grandfather, William D. Hurst

Connect With Robert Waldinger The Good Life* website * Harvard Study of Adult Development

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #863: Key Insights From the Longest Study on Happiness appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

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The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. —Joseph Campbell

Did you neglect to make any New Year’s resolutions this year? Or did you make some, and one week into the new year, have already failed to keep them?

You shouldn’t stress about that.

Not because New Year’s resolutions are inherently worthless, mind you. One of the dumbest memes to emerge on social media in the last several years is the idea that they are. People say that you shouldn’t wait until January to make goals, that you should be trying to improve the whole year through, and blah, blah, blah.

This kind of rah-rah-rah rhetoric ignores the research that shows that “temporal landmarks” — significant dates — can motivate you to reach your goals.

Turning the page on the calendar, the expectation of starting anew, and the cultural conversation around resolutions all create a scaffolding that helps you reflect on how you’d like to improve and launch into making those improvements.

It’s like holidays; you don’t need a special occasion to think about another person’s interests and buy them a gift, to write a love letter, to get friends and family together for a party, or to make special foods, but a calendared event prompts you to do those things to a degree you otherwise wouldn’t.

So if you like making New Year’s resolutions and you did feel motivated to hit the ground running on January 1st, then that’s great, and by all means, you should ride that momentum for all it’s worth.

If, however, you didn’t feel a wave of energy going into this month, that’s okay too. There may be a very good reason for that.

Why You Might Want to Make March 20th Your New January 1stOne of the most interesting insights Micah Mortali offered in our podcast episode about “befriending winter” is that January really isn’t the optimal time to make new goals.

Micah, who uses outdoor experiences to develop mindfulness, is big on the idea articulated by Joseph Campbell above: trying to match the rhythm of your life to the rhythms of nature.

In the winter — which Micah calls “the night of the year” — those natural rhythms tend toward a dynamic of rest. Animals hibernate. Plants go dormant. Water freezes over. The atmosphere of the season is quiet and still.

Winter isn’t only a season of rest for the natural world; it used to be a season of rest for human beings too. Before the Industrial Revolution ushered out the seasonal cycle and ushered in twelve straight months of equally go-go-go activity, hunter-gatherer and agricultural peoples were less active in the winter. There were seasons for hunting, planting, and harvesting, and a season where things laid fallow; seasons of outward effort, and a season of inward retraction.

So if ideas about what goals to make, along with the motivation to go after them, aren’t coming to you right now, it may be because this was a slower, more restful time of year for all of creation for thousands of years. Your vibe may be wanting to match the vibe of the universe, and that vibe is currently trending toward stillness.

Micah thus suggests waiting until the dawn of spring, specifically around the time of the spring equinox, to make more concrete resolutions. After the spring equinox — which is March 20th this year — the days will start getting longer and the nights shorter. Photosynthesis will restart. Water will begin to thaw and flow. Buds will reappear. The world, including yourself, will reawaken, and it’s at this time that you may feel greater direction, clarity, and energy as to where you’d like to go and what you’d like to do in the coming year.

So consider making March 20th the start of your personal new year. In so doing, you’ll combine the power of temporal landmarks with the power of matching your inner rhythm to that of Nature.

What to Do During the WinterWhile it can be fruitful to embrace winter as a season of repose, that doesn’t mean you should cease activity altogether. Rather, you should continue the essential maintenance tasks that keep you vital, while shifting your focus to different kinds of activities — ones that are restful yet enriching.

Trees are a good model for what this looks like.

In winter, trees look entirely dormant. The branches of deciduous trees are stark and bare, and even evergreen trees stop growing new needles til spring. Above ground, trees don’t seem to be doing much.

But below ground, it’s another story. As long as the soil stays warm enough, the roots of trees continue to grow during the winter. (It’s ironic and instructive that what keeps the ground warm enough for root growth even when the air is freezing is layers of snow; the deepening of winter promotes life.) As forester Michael Snyder explains, “This winter quiescence — where roots are resting but ready — is extremely important for the health of individual trees and, by extension, for forests in general. Indeed, it is this trait . . . that allows all species, including deciduous hardwoods, the opportunity to expand their root systems in search of water and nutrients in advance of spring bud break.” During the winter, tree roots move toward needed resources to gather the energy that will enable their branches to bring forth new leaves and flowers once the warmer months arrive.

In the same way, while we may not be busy with frenetic upwards striving toward big new goals in the winter, we can use the time to deepen our roots, nourishing and strengthening our inner resources and establishing a strong base for another season of growth.

Here are a few ways to slow down and rest while also expanding your personal root system during the winter:

Reflect. Micah describes winter as an “open” season; you don’t have to yet know your exact, specific intentions for the year. Instead, the task is to send out feelers that will help you develop a vision of where you’d like to head as the subsequent months unfold.

All these listed practices will help with that exploration, as will simple daily reflection. Spend some quiet time each day just letting your thoughts roam and range over the different possibilities and ideas that pop into your head.

Read. When the weather outside is frightful, it’s the perfect time to sit by the fire and read a good book. Reading will plant plenty of seeds in your mind and soul that will eventually germinate as time goes on.

Journal. As you work to expand, enrich, and explore your inner thoughts, it can also be helpful to see what they look like outside your head. Writing things down can help you better understand the parameters of your ideas and allow you to perceive how to take action on them.

If you need ideas on how to journal to find patterns in your habits and move your thinking in proactive directions, listen to our podcast with Campbell Walker.

Keep a dream journal. During this “night of the year,” dig more into what’s going on when you’re literally sleeping. Keep a journal by your bed and as soon as you wake up, write or draw what you can remember from what you dreamed about that night. As you regularly make entries, see if there are patterns in your dreams that may be pointing to a problem that needs addressing or an idea that needs birthing.

Meditate. Aim to make your inner quietude match nature’s stillness in wintertime. Engage in formal meditation, or just take some time to stare into the fire in your fireplace or at the flame of a candle.

Start Running When the Sap DoesIf you’re feeling your oats this January, ride that wave of momentum. Even though humans are part of the natural world, we’re also a distinct species, and part of that distinction is our ability to willfully cut across the dynamics of nature. Sometimes this is unwise, and sometimes it’s a perfectly healthy strategy to bring about a fruitful result. It’s okay to eat strawberries in February, and it’s okay to go after an audacious goal in the dead of winter.

But if you don’t feel motivated to tackle some big resolution right now, and, come to think of it, never feel like doing that in January, then you should stop feeling guilty about it. Use this season to turn inwards: rest; dream; reflect; write; prepare for a fertile, flourishing rebirth in the spring.

For more insights on how you can befriend winter, listen to our interview with Micah Mortali:

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In the last several years, intermittent fasting — only eating for a short window each day — has gotten a lot of attention, particularly for the way it can facilitate weight loss. But as my guest will explain, going longer than a few hours or even a full day without eating also has some striking, potentially even life-changing benefits too, and may be able to heal a variety of health issues. Steve Hendricks is the author of The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting. He spends the first part of this conversation offering a thumbnail sketch of the history of extended fasting as a medical treatment. From there, we get into what emerging modern science is showing as to how prolonged fasts lasting days or even weeks can prevent and even cure a variety of diseases, from type 2 diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis. We then talk about fasting‘s effect on cancer, and how it may address mental health issues by offering a metabolic reset. If you’re an intermittent faster, you’ll be interested to hear why it is you should ideally schedule your eating window for earlier rather than later in the day. We end our conversation with how to get started with extended fasting.

Resources Related to the Episode* AoM Article: The Spiritual Disciplines — Fasting * AoM Article: How Intermittent Fasting Can Help You Lose Fat, Gain Muscle, and Get Healthier * AoM Podcast #328: The Pros and Cons of Intermittent Fasting * AoM Podcast #624: The Crazy, Forgotten Story of America’s First Fitness Influencer * Henry S. Tanner * Minnesota Starvation Experiment * Professor Valter Longo * AoM Podcast #852: The Brain Energy Theory of Mental Illness

Connect With Steve Hendricks* Steve’s Website, including his answers to FAQs on fasting

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #862: Using Extended Fasting to Heal the Body appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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85% of the users of dating apps say they would like the folks they go out with to tell them directly if they’re not interested.

But two-thirds of these same people have ghosted someone before.

A strange dynamic exists around telling people no — whether in personal or professional contexts. We know that we ourselves appreciate a clear rejection. But we also know, that no matter how politely it’s given, rejection still hurts.

Since we don’t like hurting people’s feelings, we feel uncomfortable with saying no, and therefore avoid it. The fact that a no is appreciated is overshadowed by the fact that it stings.

To keep the appreciated nature of nos salient, and motivate yourself to give them more often, it helps to reframe them from a draught of poison to a generous gift: something that takes effort on your part (in overcoming your feelings of discomfort), but ultimately benefits the other person.

A no puts a stop to someone else’s cycle of rumination and all-consuming wondering. A no allows someone to cross an option off their list. A no frees up someone’s mental bandwidth to think about other things. A no permits others to accurately plan for the future. A no keeps people from being saddled with a guest/co-worker/partner who doesn’t want to be there, and has the annoyed, checked-out attitude to match.

So give the gift of no freely and without guilt.

No, I didn’t feel the spark.

No, I can’t meet up for coffee.

No, I’m not available for a call.

No, I’m not interested in serving on that committee.

No, I won’t have time to see you when I’m in town.

No, I can’t attend your party.

No, I won’t leave your brain hanging with a possibility that isn’t going to happen or wasn’t meant to be.

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One of my favorite things that some of my fellow bloggers/newsletter authors do is offer a weekly roundup of links to books, stories, podcasts, gear, etc. that they’ve discovered and recommend. This year I thought I’d try doing that myself. There are often books I read that aren’t a good fit for the podcast (because, for example, the author is dead), or cool things I come across that won’t fit in an article, that I think AoM followers might dig or like hearing about. So this weekly feature will give me a chance to share those “Odds & Ends” with you guys. Hope you enjoy.

Facing Nolan. Like a lot of boys in the 90s, Nolan Ryan was one of my favorite baseball players. In the documentary Facing Nolan, we get to see the trajectory of the legendary pitcher’s career. The successful run he had in his 40s was particularly inspiring to me seeing how I just turned 40 a few weeks ago. Great to watch during Zone 2 cardio.

The Builder’s Mindset. I’ve never liked the dichotomy of focusing on process over outcomes or outcomes over process. I think there’s a benefit of getting lost in and enjoying the process of an activity, but results matter too. Psychologist Dr. Gena Gorlin suggests a middle way between the two: The Builder’s Mindset. Interesting idea that I will be mulling on.

Skater Socks. My go-to socks for working out are 1980s dad tube socks from Skater Socks. The main reason I wear them is to protect my shins while deadlifting; I don’t want to scrape them while the bar is going up my legs. But I even wear them when I’m not deadlifting. Why? Because I like them.Go for the 25-inch knee-high-ers.

Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing by Soren Kierkegaard. If you’ve been following AoM for awhile, you know I enjoy the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing is a bracing book that forces you to self-reflect and ask yourself if you’re really seeking the Good in life or if you’re just giving it lip service. Kierkegaard pushes you to explore if the opinions you have are really your own or if you just have them because everyone else does too. He demands that you act as an individual, which means being fully responsible for your actions and beliefs. It’s one of my favorite Kierkegaard books.Quote of the Week:

Part of human nature resents change, loves equilibrium, while another part welcomes novelty, loves the excitement of disequilibrium. There is no formula for the resolution of this tug-of-war, but it is obvious that the absolute surrender to either of them invites disaster.—J. Bartlet Brebner

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Purity of Heart: Is To Will One Thing (Harper Torchbooks Book 4)

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If you live in an area that gets a lot of snow, you may invest in a snowblower to clear your driveway and walkways. But if you live somewhere that only gets snow occasionally or you simply like the fresh-air exercise that comes from removing snow manually, then you’ll be clearing the white stuff with a trusty shovel.

Anyone who’s ever shoveled snow knows that the task requires a lot of effort — equivalent to running. Along with that effort comes the risk of injuries and even death. Each year roughly 11,500 people visit the emergency room for snow-shoveling-related incidents, and around 100 die from a snow-shoveling-triggered heart attack. The job is hard on the ticker not only because it gets the heart pumping vigorously, but because cold weather also raises blood pressure, restricts arteries, and increases the likelihood of blood clots.

You should only be shoveling if you’re healthy, and even then, to avoid throwing your back out and to simply make the job quicker and less arduous, it pays to know how to shovel efficiently and effectively. The above tips can help with that.

If you’re expecting a lot of snow, don’t wait for it to stop falling before you start shoveling. It will be easier to shovel one fresh layer off and then a second a few hours later, then it will be to face a thick accumulated mass of it, especially if you allow it to be packed and trampled down before you begin the removal process.

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In my twenties and early thirties, I was a regular journaler. Several years ago, however, I stopped journaling almost entirely because I wasn’t getting anything out of it anymore. But my guest has helped me see that my problem wasn’t with journaling itself, but that I had gotten into a journaling rut, and he’s introduced me to some new ways to journal that have inspired me to get back into the practice. Campbell Walker is an illustrator, animator, podcaster, and YouTuber, as well as the author of Your Head is a Houseboat: A Chaotic Guide to Mental Clarity. Today on the show, Cam shares how journaling transformed his life and what it can do for yours. We discuss why it’s helpful to do a journaling brain dump and how to then move beyond that to incorporate different techniques that will help you get greater insight into the problems you’re facing and how to solve them. We unpack those techniques, which include how to journal to break mindset, conduct a lifestyle and habits audit, and quell anxiety. We also talk about an experiment Cam did where he only used the social media apps on his phone when he was posting something, and every time he got the itch to check social media for fun, he engaged in something he calls “microjournaling” instead. We end our conversation with how Cam’s journaling changed after he became a dad and his tips on making journaling a consistent habit in your life.

Resources Related to the Episode* Campbell’s Video: The Journaling Techniques That Changed My Life * Campbell’s Video: I Replaced Social Media With Micro-Journaling for 1 Year * AoM Article: The Right and Wrong Way to Journal * AoM Article: Why I Stopped Journaling * AoM Article: 30 Days to a Better Man Day 8 — Start a Journal * AoM Article: Jumpstart Your Journaling — A 31-Day Challenge * AoM Article: 31 Journaling Prompts for Building Greater Self-Reliance * AoM Article: Quit Catastrophizing * AoM Podcast #387: Think Like a Poker Player to Make Better Decisions (With Annie Duke)

Connect With Campbell Walker (AKA “Struthless”)* Cam on YouTube * Cam on IG * The Struthless Shop Website * The Struthless Animation Studio Website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #861: 7 Journaling Techniques That Can Change Your Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. If you came to the end of 2022 with a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction that the year hadn’t been all you had hoped it would be, and you’ve had a similar feeling for a series of years now, maybe it’s time to try something new.

Like, for example, joining The Strenuous Life.

TSL can be just the kick in the pants you need to finally make good on your goals. Here’s a tiny sample of some of the stuff members have done as part of The Strenuous Life in the last six months:

If you’re finally ready to move from point A to point B with your goals, TSL will provide the map and guide you on your journey.

The Strenuous Life is meant to be shared — come and join a tribe of men who want more out of life!

Earn the Exclusive Polar Bear BadgeThose who join up during the Winter enrollment of The Strenuous Life have the chance to earn the exclusive Polar Bear Badge. Some of the Agons (weekly challenges) are temperature sensitive and involve being outdoors, and thus will be more challenging during this season for those who live in a cold climate. TSL is, of course, all about doing hard things, and the program will helpfully get you more active during this season than you might otherwise have been, but we just want to forewarn you.

If you do complete The Strenuous Life Challenge, you’ll receive the free Polar Bear Badge that’s available exclusively to those who begin the 12-week “boot camp” during the January enrollment.

Enrollment Is Open Until Thursday, January 5, 2023 or Until 4 Classes Are FilledTo get different results, and a different year, do something different this January: join The Strenuous Life.

Enrollment will only be open until Thursday, January 5, 2023 or until we fill 4 classes; whichever comes first.

For those enrolled, the 12-week Challenge officially begins on January 7th.

The next enrollment of TSL will not occur until the summer of 2023.

I hope to see you on The Strenuous Life!

The post The 2023 Winter Enrollment of The Strenuous Life Is Now Open! appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When most people work out, they jump right from a resting state called Zone 1 cardio to Zone 3 cardio. But in skipping over Zone 2 cardio altogether, they miss out on a significant range of benefits to their health, fitness, and overall well-being.

Here to unpack why you need to make the relatively easy yet hugely beneficial form of exercise that is Zone 2 cardio a big part of your life is Alex Viada, a hybrid athlete and coach. We spend the first twenty minutes of this conversation discussing the physiological science of what cardio zones are and what happens in the body as you move from one zone to the next. From there, we turn to the more accessible and practical elements of getting into Zone 2 cardio. Alex shares the easiest way to know if you’re in Zone 2, and we discuss how it can improve heart health, metabolism, sleep, and weight loss, as well as enhance athletic performance, whether you’re into endurance sports or powerlifting. We then get into the amount of Zone 2 cardio you should be getting each week and how to get it, including Alex’s take on the ever-controversial elliptical machine.

Resources Related to the Episode AoM Article: A Guide to the Biggest Thing Missing From Your Fitness Routine — Zone 2 Training * AoM Podcast #777: Becoming a Hybrid Athlete * AoM Podcast #787: Run Like a Pro (Even If You’re Slow) * AoM Article: Conditioning — What It Is and How to Develop It * The Hybrid Athlete* by Alex Viada

Connect With Alex Viada* Alex on IG * Complete Human Performance on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #860: Get Fit, Not Fried — The Benefits of Zone 2 Cardio appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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We tend to think of our goals as destinations — things to strive towards and then check off the list.

Some goals are structured by this dynamic.

Habits are not.

The need to keep up with a habit isn’t over after twenty-eight days, or six months, or a decade.

It’s never over.

Habits get easier to sustain the more ingrained they become; yet their maintenance phase never expires.

We are ever swimming against the current of entropy. As soon as we stop making the effort to move forward, we immediately begin drifting back. As soon as we quit the diet, the lost pounds return. As soon as we stop lifting weights, limiting our screen time, or praying, our strength atrophies, our focus deteriorates, our faith dwindles.

To remain where you end up, you have to keep doing exactly what it took to get there.

Habit formation is thus less like taking on a one-time project and more like committing to a lifelong marriage. And an arranged one at that.

Choosing a new habit therefore requires more self-reflection than it’s usually lent.

Do you really want to become the kind of person who does X, Y, or Z, or is it something you simply feel you should do?

Do you think you’re a good match with this particular habit, or is there a way to achieve the same desired outcome but with a practice that better aligns with your unique proclivities?

Do you believe this is a habit you can come to love, and are you willing to put in the effort to cultivate that “romance”?

Do you feel ready to vow fidelity to this new way of being or acting?

Do you take this habit, to have and to hold . . .

’til death do you part?

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Anyone who’s ever tried to lose weight, curb their temper, quit smoking, or alter any other habit in their lives knows that personal change is hard. Really hard.

Most self-help books out there treat people like machines, blitzing past this difficulty and offering mechanical 5-step formulas for changing your life.

My guest today says such simplified solutions hugely miss the mark. He argues that if you ever want to change, it’s more fruitful to understand why you don’t, than figure why you do, and to understand that, you’ve got to go deeper, existential even.

His name is Dr. Ross Ellenhorn, and he’s spent his career facilitating the recovery of individuals diagnosed with psychiatric and substance abuse issues. In his latest book, How We Change (And Ten Reasons Why We Don’t), he’s taken what he’s learned in his work and applied it to anyone trying to change their lives.

Ross and I begin our conversation with some of those reasons we don’t change, including the existential pressure of feeling like you’re solely in charge of making change happen, a dizzying amount of freedom and number of options for what to do with your life, and day-to-day factors which influence our level of motivation. From there we turn to the role of hope and faith in psychology, and how these forces can both boost and restrain your ability to change. We discuss the way a fear of hope can constrain your life, why you sometimes need to embrace staying the same in order to ever change, and the difference between good faith and bad faith. We then discuss the idea that you don’t develop hope, but can develop faith, and how you build your faith in yourself through embracing humility and taking small steps. Ross then explains why he doesn’t really give advice on how to change, beyond finding the good in a bad habit, but how patience and your social environment can also help.

This show’s got some counterintuitive advice that will help you see your struggles differently.

Resources Related to the Episode AoM archives on habits * AoM Article: Limiting Your Choices * AoM Article: Self-Efficacy and the Art of Doing Things * The Psychology of Hope* by C.R. Snyder * AoM Podcast #589: How Exercise Helps Us Find Hope, Connection, and Courage * AoM Podcast #581: The Tiny Habits That Change Everything * AoM series on overprotective parenting * AoM Article: Dance Like Zorba the Greek

Connect With Ross* Ross’ website * Ross on Twitter

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast SponsorsClick here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Anyone who’s ever tried to lose weight, curb their temper, quit smoking or alter any other habit in their lives knows that personal change is hard, really hard. Most self-help books out there treat people like machines, blitzing past this difficulty, and offering mechanical five-step formulas for changing your life. My guest today says such simplified solutions hugely miss the mark. He argues that if you ever wanna change, it’s more fruitful to understand why you don’t, than figure out why you do. And to understand that, you’ve gotta go deeper, existential even.

His name is Dr. Ross Ellenhorn, and he spent his career facilitating the recovery of individuals diagnosed with psychiatric and substance abuse issues. In his latest book, How We Change and 10 Reasons Why We Don’t, he’s taken what he’s learned in his work and applied it to anyone trying to change their lives. Ross and I begin our conversation with some of the reasons we don’t change, including the existential pressure of feeling like you’re solely in charge of making change happen, a dizzying amount of freedom and number of options for what to do with your life, and day-to-day factors which influence our level of motivation. From there, we turn to the role of hope and faith in psychology and how these forces can both boost and restrain your ability to change.

We discuss the way a fear of hope can constrain your life while you sometimes need to embrace staying the same in order to ever change, and the difference between good faith and bad faith. We discuss the idea that you don’t develop hope, but you can develop faith, and how to build your faith in yourself through embracing humility and taking small steps. Ross then explains why he doesn’t really give advice on how to change beyond finding the good in a bad habit, but how patience and your social environment can also help. This show’s got some counter-intuitive advice that will help you see your struggles differently, after it’s over. Check out our show notes at aom.is/change.

Alright, Ross Ellenhorn, welcome to the show.

Ross Ellenhorn: Thank you.

Brett McKay: You work with people who’ve been in and out of the psychiatric system and trying to get help, and they haven’t been able to make changes. But this book is also geared just to regular people who have found change to be hard. And I think we’ve all experienced that to one extent or the other. Trying to quit smoking is hard, trying to lose weight is hard, controlling your anger or your temper is hard, and you always have this desire that, “I’m gonna… This is the time. This is the thing it’s gonna be. I’m gonna get it this time.” But then a week later, [chuckle] you’re off the treadmill. So what’s going on there? Why is it so hard to make personal changes like losing weight, quitting smoking, being more patient with your kids?

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, and so I learned why it’s hard from these individuals who were having such profound problems with motivation and with accepting help. But it really is applicable to all of us, including you and me. No one’s free from this. And it’s basically that every time you’re trying to change something in your life, you’re exposing something that’s really terrifying, which is that you’re kind of driving the bus that’s your life. And that’s what existentialists would call existential accountability, and that causes anxiety. There’s nobody really making things happen for me. I’m in charge, and if this life’s gonna have any depth or meaning to it, I’m in charge of that.

And so every act of changing yourself is really this profound act of shepherding your own life. It’s very interesting because, think about what people did, at least at the beginning of COVID, in response to that. The massive agility that people showed in changing their lives, but they did it in a group, and they did it because they had to. That’s actually easier, even though it’s more massive than dieting, ’cause dieting’s like, “I’m on my own. I’m in charge of my life, and I’m making this happen.” And so there’s always that pressure of having to look at yourself and your own accountability every time you try to change something.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think it’s definitely existential. Freedom is so scary. I’d rather have someone tell me exactly what to do so I don’t have to think about this.

Ross Ellenhorn: Right. There’s this fascinating work on, why is it that Scandinavian countries, their people are so much happier? And there’s all kinds of reasons, but one reason is less choice. In the United States, when you walk in, there’s 20 different cereals. You walk into TGI Fridays, and there’s an enormous menu. And that level of choice actually can become depressing.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, and we also have just choices on how we wanna live our lives. A hundred years ago, your choice was like, “My dad was a farmer, his dad was a farmer, I’ll be a farmer.” Now, it’s like, “Well, I can be a blogger, I can be a lawyer, I can be an accountant, I can be whatever.” And that can be really terrifying to have to make that choice.

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, that combined with a culture that says that because you’re free, something’s wrong with you if you don’t achieve those things. So there’s also a mythology in that, that everybody’s seen as this free agent that should be able to make their life become whatever it should be. So there’s two things going on at the same time in our culture. One is this idea that wherever you are is an expression of who you are. And the other is you’re in charge of your life, ’cause there is some truth to that, the second part, that you’re in charge of your way you respond to the world. You’re not always in charge of how, where you end up.

Brett McKay: Alright, so there’s this deep existential reason why it’s hard to make personal change, ’cause it’s scary to accept the fact that you’re the one who’s driving the bus of your life. And you have all these options to choose from as to where to go. There’s also more a day-to-day things that can either make us more or less motivated to change.

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah. And so there’s this field around us. And let me give you an example from the book, and then I’ll explain why that example’s important. So I have a goal in my life to give more honest, critical feedback to my employees, ’cause it’s not something I’m very good at. And one day, I needed to give one of my managers some feedback. And I really felt like this was the opportunity to change that behavior, but I didn’t sleep well the night before. It was kind of a muggy day. I felt lousy. All the excuses for not doing it started entering my head. “Maybe I’ll just do it next week, or I’ll kick the can down the road some other way.”

And I was in New York City, and I got on this elevator with a group of people. And while we’re going up, this woman spills her coffee. And somebody in the elevator says, “I’m gonna sprinkle a little sugar on that to make it congeal so it doesn’t spread through the elevator.” Another person grabbed some napkins from their pocket and put it on it. And we got to the fifth floor and this guy got out and said, “That was the best elevator ride ever.” And everybody started cracking up. And then we got to the 10th floor, and this business man gets out, and he yells back to us, “Same time, same date next year, let’s all meet here on the elevator.” And we just lost it. And I got off of that elevator, and I was totally prepared to give this manager feedback.

Now, what happened in that elevator ride? Well, we all live in these fields, and the fields are very complex, and you cannot predict when those fields will shift. In the fields are basically, there’s a bunch of forces moving you forward. There’s self-esteem, there’s all kinds of traits. Your own self-confidence, your own mental agility. But there’s also things like how good your day is going, what happened to you yesterday, what’s on your mind at that time, what’s your socio-economic class, what else is going on at that point. And then there’s all these restraining forces, all these things holding you back, your self-doubt, socio-economic reasons, all of those things.

And so what happened to me that day was there was enough of an extra little bit of good stuff going on, sort of a sense of faith in humanity, that pushed me over to the ability to actually change my behavior. And that’s why one day you might be planning to diet, and you can’t diet. And then the next day, you wake up, and you’re completely able to diet. That’s because something has shifted in this field around you, all the forces holding you back, all the forces pushing you forward. And the way to think about it is each of us is sitting between those two forces at all times. Sometimes, we’re closer to our goal because either the positive forces are stronger and the negative forces are the same, or the negative forces are less for some reason, and we’re pushing towards it, and that we’re always in this field between these two things, moving back and forth.

Brett McKay: And then as we just discussed earlier about this existential anxiety, that’s a restraining force. But what’s interesting about that, just the fact of wanting to do something, to achieve a goal, make a personal change actually can cause a restraint ’cause we start freaking ourselves out.

Ross Ellenhorn: That’s right. That’s so great you point that out. That’s exactly right, that the thing that changing comes with its own built-in restraining force. There’s other kinds of motivations where it’s just basically these two fields. But change always has that existential accountability, and it also always has hope. So hope is always there. If you’re gonna plan, “I’m losing weight,” you’re hoping to lose weight. And so there’s always hope as a positive force forward, but the problem is that hope too has its restraining element, because hope can lead you to profound experiences of disappointment and helplessness. And so if you’ve had enough experiences of disappointment, hope is actually scary. And that’s part of why hope is both a positive force and a restraining force.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s dig into this idea of hope more, ’cause it is the first book of psychology that I actually read where it deals with hope very seriously, ’cause you often read about hope in terms of a religious book or something like that. In this realm of psychology, humanistic psychology, what does it mean to hope for something? You just want something that you don’t have or can’t see? What is it?

Ross Ellenhorn: First of all, I wanna point out what an insane world we live in, that hope is not a central element of what we’re talking about in psychology, and that we have all these weird terms that psychology and psychiatry has made up that have very little meaning like depression, anxiety, that they don’t really have a meaning attached to ’em when hope does. “I’m hoping for this thing. I am experiencing despair ’cause I didn’t get it.” These words have been removed from therapeutic practices. It’s very sad in a lot of ways because it treats people as if they’re like these broken things instead of recognizing they’re dealing always with the same things everybody’s dealing with, which is “How do I hope for things, and how do I deal with the despair of not getting them?”

So hope is not quite an emotion. It’s sort of an emotion and a position, if that makes sense. So hope is, in a way, it’s similar to other things that are emotions and positions like paranoia. Paranoia is not just a feeling. It’s a position towards life. And hope is this attitude in which you place importance on something you want, and you start moving towards it. So every time you hope, you are actually attributing to something, an importance. So an example is your parents ask you what you want for Christmas or Hannukah, and you say a bike. The minute you say bike, that thing becomes this important thing to you. You also notice at that point that you lack a bike.

So two things are going on at the same time when you hope for something. It becomes important, and you recognize you lack it. That means that hope always implies risk, because if you don’t get it, you recognize something you’ve now appointed as important you don’t have, and you recognize you lack it. So every time you’re trying to change something about yourself, you’re gonna be recognizing if you don’t get it, you lack that thing that you wanna change, and it was important. And hope is this thing that moves you through uncertainty. You don’t hope for something and know you’ll get it. That’s what makes it so evolutionarily important because hope is getting you through uncertainty to a goal. It moves you to the goal, through uncertainty.

It’s kind of very different than a cheaper emotion, which is optimism. Optimism is, “Everything’s gonna be great.” Hope is, “I don’t know if everything’s gonna be great, but it’s gonna drive me, move me towards that thing.” And there’s two very important qualities to hope. And if you take a survey on hope, you’ll be taking Charles Snyder’s survey, typically. And there’s two things he’s looking for that hopeful people do. One is they have a belief in themselves. There’s a sense of, “I can do this.” And the other is they find alternative pathways.

So hopeful people, when you see a barrier, you try to figure out your way around it. And when you think about hopeful politicians, they’re often talking about how we’re gonna work our way around something. They’re not promising, “We’ll get there.” Churchill’s famous speech about, “We’ll fight here, we’ll fight there, we’ll fight there,” he never says, “We’ll beat the Germans.” He’s just talking about, “We’re gonna try every way possible to fight them.” And that’s hope, that’s where hope rest. It’s this emotion we experience through uncertainty.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you mentioned one element of hope is this belief in yourself that you’re capable of doing something, that belief like that’s… Faith comes up. So hope and faith are also connected. And again, faith is one of those words we typically associate with faith, and religion, and spirituality. But in this model of how people change, what is faith?

Ross Ellenhorn: So again, this is a real problem that we would think of these things as important in church, and in synagogue, and in mosque but not important in therapy. So faith is very similar to what Bandura, a social psychologist, calls self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the belief that you can make things happen, that you’re competent enough to control your life, and to fix things and make things, and be able to take on something and make it work. That’s different than self-esteem. And that’s really what faith is in yourself which is that “I can get through this, I can figure out how to get through this.”

And so hope has that kernel of faith in it, because it’s that element, what Snyder is pointing out, is this sort of belief in yourself, that’s kind of faith. That’s faith. And when you’ve been met with lots of disappointments, you lose that faith in yourself. And if you lose that faith in yourself, you become afraid of hope, because you’re saying “Hope’s gonna bring me to that point again, where things are gonna fall apart, because I’m gonna get disappointed, I’m gonna fail. And I don’t know if I have enough faith in myself to handle that.”

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s a good point. So these things, faith and hope, they drive us. They help us move forward in uncertainty. But as you said, it’s a double-edged sword, ’cause once you experience that defeat, you don’t get what you wanted, or you had faith in yourself and your ability, and it didn’t work out, you can fall into despair.

Ross Ellenhorn: Right. And also despair, the other term I would use for that is helplessness, the experience I can’t get my needs met, I can’t make my life work. That’s a profound experience. “I’m driving this bus, and I’m no good at making things work.” That really beat you up. And so that’s why the next time you’re ready to hope, you’re like, “I don’t wanna have that experience again that I’m not able to make my life work.” That’s a very profound terror.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s a good point. You mentioned, when you were talking about hope and giving the example of hope and the kid hoping for a bike at the holidays, if you don’t get the bike, it’s a bummer, but you move on. But when you say you hope to lose weight for the 20th time, that can be even more devastating, ’cause just like it’s about you. It’s not a thing. It’s about you as a person.

Ross Ellenhorn: Absolutely, that’s right. Think about COVID again. What were we hoping for when we massively adjusted our lives? We were hoping for the status quo. We weren’t hoping for some great thing to happen. So the challenge of hoping wasn’t that great. It was just like, “Let’s get through this thing.” But to say to yourself, “I’m gonna lose weight,” that’s like “All the responsibility is on my shoulders, and I’m hoping for a thing that makes me better than I am right now.” And that makes that really kind of serious, because the pitfall is, “I’m not able to diet. If I’m not able to diet, simply do that, am I capable of doing other things? Who is this person driving the bus that is my life? Can I have faith in that person?”

Brett McKay: Yeah, there’s existential stakes whenever you make a goal like that.

Ross Ellenhorn: Yep, yep, exactly.

Brett McKay: And I thought it was interesting, your research on hope and this fear of hope. So hope can cause a fear of hope, because there’s always a chance it’s not gonna happen for you, what you wanted. What you found is that people who are the most hopeful are actually the most afraid of hope. Or is that did I get that right, or did I read it wrong?

Ross Ellenhorn: Almost right.

Brett McKay: Okay.

Ross Ellenhorn: People who are very hopeful and have fear of hope are very agitated. They get engaged in these things called counterfactuals where they’re constantly thinking, “I should have done this, I should have done that,” or “This should have happened differently.” They’re less likely to see a positive event coming up, than a person who doesn’t have hope. That kind of makes sense. A person who doesn’t have hope, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, my graduation is coming up, big deal.” A person who has hope, they’re going, “Oh, my God, I’m gonna get excited about this, and then I’m gonna be let down.” And they get scared of it, they don’t wanna look at it.

So what we’re finding is that the relationship between hope and fear of hope is this sort of difficult, difficult situation. And what that means on some level is we might be actually diagnosing people as depressed or even in despair when actually, they’re people with a lot of hope, but they’re afraid of it. It scares them. They’re like a high diver who’s afraid of heights.

Brett McKay: And you make this case that’s really… It’s counter-intuitive that, okay, when you decide that hope is in me, you also have this fear of hope, and you decide to let the fear drive your decision. We often think, “Well, that’s not good.” But you make this counter-intuitive case that sometimes, that’s what needs to be done. Sometimes, you have to just stay the same, because you’ve still got some work you have to do before you can make that big change you’re hoping for.

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, so this gets a little con… Not convoluted by complex, maybe. Let’s think about this for a second. So I’m afraid of trying something that will change my life, because I’m afraid of that feeling of helplessness that’s gonna happen and despair if it doesn’t happen again, and I’m afraid my hope’s gonna coax me into doing it, and then I’m gonna be let down. What am I protecting when I do that, when I don’t change? I’m protecting my hope. In a strange way, I’m protecting my capacity to keep hoping. I don’t want it injured anymore, so I’m actually doing something that’s nurturing of myself. I’m trying to make sure that what hope I have is safe, so I’m playing possum. I’m not moving forward because I don’t want that injured again. I’m staying still so that I don’t get whatever motivates me more hurt.

And so in the book, that’s really what I’m talking about is: Can you find a way to have some affection for staying the same? That’s sure a better attitude towards staying the same than hating it and being shameful about it. That’s such a disrespectful way to look at the fact that you didn’t diet or you didn’t work out or anything like that. It’s not respecting that there’s parts of you that are trying to take care of yourself that aren’t working, and they come from self-love, and all love is messy and inaccurate and screwed up, and sometimes goes overboard. Love is not some pure state, and so sometimes you go overboard and you protect yourself too much, but it’s coming from the right place.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, something you say about people who have a fear of hope, the thing they do to protect the hope that they have is they severely constrain their lives, and time kinda gets compressed. The only things you’re worried about are things that happened a few months ago, and the only things you’re kind of maybe excited about are the things that will happen in a few months, but you’re not really hoping, “What’s my life gonna be like in a year, two years, three years? What are my kids gonna be like? Grandkids?” Because you don’t wanna hope that far in the future because there’s a good chance it might not work out the way you hoped for.

Ross Ellenhorn: Exactly, right. And so then what are you doing there? You’re trying to protect what hope you have from another injury, and that kind of makes sense. It’s not great, you end up staying the same, but on the other hand, you’re doing something that has some sense to it, and the more you can respect that, maybe even find it kind of beautiful that you’re doing it, the more likely you are to change. It just doesn’t work to hate yourself for not… That just doesn’t work. Shame, if you wanna really be stuck, be shameful, that’ll keep you stuck.

Brett McKay: This idea of hope and being afraid of hope reminds me of that saying… I don’t know if it’s connected, but it sounds kind of the same… “Cynics are just idealists who have been disappointed over and over again.”

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay: Right? It’s like any people, like hopeful people, they’re just like people who are afraid of hope, they’re just they’re hopeful people, but they’ve just been… They feel like they’ve been burned so many times that they get kind of like, “I’m not gonna put my… I’m not gonna hope this time, ’cause it’ll feel bad.”

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, I would just adjust that just a little bit from people who are… You and I are afraid of hope. Some people are just more afraid of it than us. There’s not a single theologian out there that says, “Go hope, it’s easy.” They’re always talking about it. Hope and courage go together, that it takes some strength to face hope, and if it takes some strength to face hope, there must be something scary about it, and what’s scary about it is hope is always about risk, and that that’s not something I made up. Every theologian’s talked about hope is a risky attitude. You’re climbing a mountain, and every step you take towards hope means a bigger fall if the thing doesn’t work out, and that’s why religion has always been about hope and faith. It’s trying to get people to act on hope. It’s a really evolutionary thing.

Brett McKay: So, okay, staying the same. So say someone makes a goal to lose weight, or maybe they wanna change their job, but they haven’t made the move because there’s a whole bunch of reasons, and you give a whole bunch of reasons. In the years you’ve been working with people, you found different reasons, different things that people are protecting. When you say when they decide, they might not know they’re making the decision, but yeah, when they decide, “I’m not gonna move forward on that change that I hoped for,” and one of ’em is just pain. Yeah, we’ve been kinda talking about this, but this pain of… One pain is just the fear of existential freedom, and we’d rather just, like we talked about it earlier, just escape from that. Any examples of people you worked with where the reason why they stayed the same is ’cause they were afraid of that existential freedom?

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, I would say that most of the people I deal with… Now, this is me applying my ideas on them, and I’m pretty much against people deciding what other people’s experiences are, but…

Brett McKay: Sure.

Ross Ellenhorn: But my way of looking at things is that most of the people I’m dealing with, this is what they’re struggling over. They’re having a major existential crisis, partly caused by the fact that they’ve had a massive disappointment because of having been diagnosed with a psychiatric issue, and so they’re dealing with, “If I’m free, I’m accountable, and if I’m accountable, can I actually get my hopes up again? Can I have another experience of loss regarding this?” And so for most of them, I think this is going on for them.

Brett McKay: And you also talk, you bring this other existential idea of bad faith and good faith. Good faith… I think this is from Sartre who…

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah.

Brett McKay: He said that good faith is when you recognize that you are accountable. You might not be responsible for the hand you’re dealt in life, but you are responsible for how you respond, and that’s the scary thing. Bad faith is whenever you pretend you don’t have that ability or accountability or responsibility, and I remember you talked about one person you worked with who did something that looked like good faith but was actually bad faith. I guess what it was is he set up this system of accountability where people checked in with him, so he had people check in with him. So it looked like good faith in that he was setting up this system, but it was actually kind of a bad faith move because he wanted other people just to take care of it. He wanted to set up the system, and then he didn’t have to think about it after that.

Ross Ellenhorn: Right, right. That was a fascinating thing. That’s right, that’s right. So he wanted these… We kept telling him… Because I run this program that it’s 24 hours, so he just kept telling me, “You could call any time if there’s a crisis,” but he wanted check-ins to make sure he wasn’t in crisis.

And that’s bad faith, because what he wanted was the sense that people were there, automatically responding to him, and that he was this sort of passive person that they were taking care of, ’cause passivity is kind of the art of bad faith. And to call us would mean that he was an agent, he was making this happen, so that’s a really significantly injured person, that they knew that they had this service where they could call any time, but they didn’t wanna use the service ’cause they were so terrified of actually being an agent, making things happen. And that’s classic for a lot of the people I work with, but right now, you and I are talking, that’s a good faith interaction. I’m feeling completely like I’m my own agent in my life right now. I feel like I’m spewing out words and ideas that are my own, and I’m accountable for those things.

And when I leave and I walk home, I’m gonna be thinking about how I have to be home at a certain time. And that “have to” is bad faith, because I’m acting as if that time I have to be home is something I have to do instead of I want to do because I don’t wanna piss people off that I’m late, and I’m making that decision. So our days are filled with these back and forths between good and bad faith, and some of that’s just functional. You can’t just go through life seeing everything as a choice, but some of it’s because we just are terrified of this idea that there’s a lot of choices in front of us.

Brett McKay: So, going back to this idea where that can actually be useful, because I think people are hearing that like, “Well, that’s not good. Bad faith sounds not good, where you pretend like you don’t have accountability for your life,” but say, we talked about this guy who set up this system, it’s not like it was useful for him. Can that be a way where he sort of works his way up to building good faith?

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah. I tell this other story about… And these are extreme stories, ’cause these are people that have been under extreme experiences of disappointment, but this is another example. I had a guy in a group, and I hated this, but I was a junior therapist at the time, so we had to ask them to give a number to their mood, which is sort of dumb, and he would always say every week he was a two, which is really low in depression. He was a two, with 10 being doing really well, and he’d say a two every week, but there were these women in the group who went to church with him, and they’d come into my office and they’d tell me things, like he was starting to date, like he spoke at the church the other day, like he got his own apartment, and he got a job. And then one day he didn’t show up, and he never showed up again, and so he needed us to kind of stay in this place of seeing him as a two, not scare him with our expectations going up about his own agency, that he can make his life work. In order for him to escape bad faith, he couldn’t have us be part of it and get excited for him, and so that was sort of his method to get out of it.

Brett McKay: So that’s another one of the 10 reasons why we don’t change, the fear of just expectations from ourselves and others. Once you tell people, your wife, like, “Oh, I’m gonna… I’ve been losing weight. This is the time I’m gonna do it,” and she’s like, “Yes.” And then a week later, you’re got the burrito taco enchilada meal, and she’s disappointed, and you feel it, and you’re like, “I just don’t wanna experience… I’m not even gonna say I’m trying to make a change.

Ross Ellenhorn: Right, exactly, that raising other people’s expectations means raising them seeing that you’re the master of your life, and having other people witness that is scary because then you can let them down, you witness yourself letting them down, and you feel bad about yourself, so you try to avoid that, and one way to avoid that is to not change. You stay miserable so that you don’t have to face the misery of a disappointment in front of them. And the same goes with our own selves. We don’t wanna raise our own expectations and we sort of stay in this state, this possum like state, because we don’t wanna have that experience of raising our hopes and then having them dashed.

Brett McKay: So this one guy you talked about who went to your group therapy session said he’s a two, that was kind of his way out of it. And so…

Ross Ellenhorn: It was smart.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it was smart, but how else have you seen people overcome this fear of just expectations? Does it come naturally? Does it come when you’re ready? What happens there?

Ross Ellenhorn: I think that it’s a couple of things. One is that I really don’t think that you can develop hope, you have to develop faith. So the more people get better at things, get better at life, the more willing they are to risk hoping again, and so the more willing they are to face the fact that things might not work out, but they’ll survive. So I’ve seen that in my own life. The more I’ve gotten good at things, anything, the more I feel like I can survive other disappointments. And I’ve seen that in my clients. The more that they can take care of themselves and be in charge of their lives, the more willing they are to take greater risks.

I guess the one story I tell in the book is this guy I used to know back in the punk scene in LA who wanted to quit smoking, and he did actually the opposite of the guy that gave the two. He took pictures of himself looking like an idiot smoking, and he called these idiot cards, and he plastered them… And he was really well-known in LA and people loved him… So he plastered these all over the clubs, and the bathrooms in the clubs all over the place, and it was his way of reminding himself in a way that continuing on with this behavior wasn’t actually working for him. It was his kind of reflection of this thing, but he also made it into kind of a performance, ’cause he got all these other people involved and in a way where they were reflecting to him, and it held them accountable in this other kind of way that helped him finally quit. It was kind of a beautiful little piece of performance art in some ways.

Brett McKay: You mentioned one thing that people get out of overcoming these fears of expectations or freedom is they start taking small steps in different areas of life. It might not even be related to the big issue in their life, whether they think they’re depressed or they’ve got something else, but they decide, “You know what? In this one area of my life where the stakes aren’t that big, I’m gonna make these small steps,” but then another reason people don’t change is ’cause small steps, that’s kind of undignified, it’s like, “That’s for babies. I’m a grown man. I’m gonna make big changes now.” And so a lot of people think, “Well, it’s not even worth it, if I have to do these little minuscule steps and not make much progress, then I’ll just stay the same.”

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, yeah, so here’s another word that you don’t hear in therapy enough, which is humility, that. When you head out towards a goal, if you find every small step to be insulting because every small step reminds you where you are, it reminds you how far you are from the goal. As a matter of fact, if you don’t take those small steps, you can dream all you want that you’re really close to the goal and never change. It’s really easy to think, “Oh yeah, I could do that tomorrow,” but to take the small steps is this kind of painful event of having to look at where you are in relationship to your goal.

If you’re afraid of hope, you’ll never take those small steps, or if you have this kind of overblown version of yourself where you think you can achieve it right away, you’ll never take the small steps, and the danger in that is that every small step once it’s completed, actually adds to your faith in yourself. If you can do it, it adds to your faith, and the next day you’re gonna take the next step, but you gotta get on those steps along the way in order to keep going. You have to… These fuel each other, if you can get on the track, but the problem is you’re terrified and it’s painful because each one is an insult.

Brett McKay: Right. So I’m trying to think of a problem. If you’re trying to get a promotion at your job, a career that means a lot to you, it might mean you have to take some sort of remedial course or go through some continuing education class that you think is really easy, and you’re gonna look like an idiot, and you’re just like, “I’m not even gonna do that ’cause it’s… ” But if you had hope and you wanted to act on that hope, and you had the humility, you would do it.

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, that’s right, it’s exactly right. And then so the humility is needed at that point of the small steps. The story of Icarus is really fascinating because Icarus’s dad, who was the God of craft… Which is amazing, ’cause craft is all about small steps, you have to really get skilled at craft… And he built Icarus these wings, and the wings had two problems with it. One was we know about the sun, they’d melt if he had hubris, if he got too close to the sun. But if he got too close to the ocean, they’d get wet and get destroyed, and that’s humiliation. And so you have to float between those two things. You can’t be worried all the time that, “I’ll feel bad about myself and humiliated if I take this small step,” and you also can’t be living in this world where, “Oh, I’m above those small steps.”

Brett McKay: So we say we hope for change, but sometimes we just stay the same because we’re afraid. We’re trying to protect ourselves from all these things we’ve been talking about: The fear of freedom, the expectations, the indignity of small steps. So I think we kinda hit on it, but it’s like… The first step is looking at these things as maybe not as a negative, ’cause that will just, I don’t know, kind of taint things and make you feel worse about yourself, which just creates this vicious cycle that’s not good. So what is the solution to these tensions that’s created of hoping and then hope causes fear of hope? What do you? When you work with a client, what does that process look like of change when it finally happens for him?

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah. So I’m in this awkward position of writing a self-help book that gives no advice because I really don’t believe that advice on what you need to do to change works. What I think works, and what science shows, is contemplation from a non-judgmental space. In other words, I’m doing this for this reason. That’s why I have 10 reasons not to change. I’m doing it for this reason. I could do it for this reason, and I’m looking at both and I’m weighing them. You’re not gonna do that if you look at sameness as bad. You’re never gonna look at the reasons for it, and so real change happens, real sustainable change happens when you’re able to say, “There’s some good in this behavior I wanna change, and I have to say goodbye to that good in order to move forward.”

If all you say is that lie to yourself, that everything about this thing is bad, it’s very hard to move forward. That’s really what is happening now in some ways with people with problematic habits or what people call addiction, is that we’re discovering that if a person can discuss and think about why they like using, why it’s important in their lives, what it does for them, they’re actually more likely to give it up than somebody where it’s just about, “You’re screwed up because you’re an addict.” And that’s what I’m trying to do in the book, I’m trying to say, “Spend some time looking at this thing and appreciating it,” ’cause if you do that, you can probably leave it behind, you can retire it. You’re never gonna retire it if all you think is it’s bad and that you’re bad because you’re doing it.

Brett McKay: Well, it sounds like, this is a good analogy, would be an overprotective parent. An overprotective parent, they’re not doing it out of they have this urge to be a totalitarian, they’re usually doing it out of a sense of love and they wanna protect you, but at a certain point, they have to realize, “That’s actually not gonna help my kid. I need to back off if I really do love ’em.”

Ross Ellenhorn: Right, exactly. Yeah. I have a 22-year-old son who’s planning a big road trip right now, and my wife and I are discussing whether it’s a good idea for him to do it, and it’s like, “What are we doing? This kid’s 22.” [chuckle] But we love him and we’re worried about him, and if we were to intervene on that in some way, we would be doing something not good, but it would be coming out of our love, it wouldn’t be coming out of anything bad. It would sure piss him off, and it wouldn’t feel good, but it’s not bad, it’s just love that’s not being controlled right.

Brett McKay: So let’s recap, big picture overview, of what we’ve talked about so far. Whenever you want something, you hope for something, automatically, there’s a tension that’s created between where you are, you don’t have the thing, and where you’re at, the thing you’d like. And by thing, we’re talking about personal change here, so I’m not talking about a bike or an iPad or whatever. And then whenever you start hoping, that’s a driving force towards the thing you want, but then also there is a countervailing restraining force, which is the fear of hope, and then there’s also faith that is driving us towards it. We have this capacity, we have faith in ourselves and the ability to do what we want or what we need to do to achieve that thing we’d like but there’s also a countervailing restraint to there that’s like, you mess up and your actions don’t give you the results you wanted, and embedded in that, there’s all these other driving and restraining forces, like you were talking about earlier. You’re in a good mood, or your family’s supportive, the weather’s nice, but also restraining things like you just… People are annoying. [chuckle] A customer service experience that went bad. That can all affect things as well. Did I get that right?

Ross Ellenhorn: That’s great, man. That’s awesome. Thank you. That’s great.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and then the other thing, sometimes we decide in all the midst of these tensions and driving forces just to stay the same because that’s easier, and sometimes it protects where we are now.

Ross Ellenhorn: That’s right, that’s right. And I think the only thing I wanna add to that is that sometimes those restraining forces are out of our control. And so I give this example or story in the book about a woman who works in the cafeteria who wants to go back to college, and has to drive to her college through rush hour to get to class, and then has to drive all the way home, has to find parking on campus, is dealing with having to take care of her kids too. And she may be filled with hope and have low fear of hope, and still not do as well as the person with high fear of hope and lots of hope who’s the executive in her company where the cafeteria is, and someone drives him to the class, and someone helps him with his homework, and all those sorts of things, so there’s all kinds of other restraints than simply our existential choice. There’s all kinds of other socio-economic restraints, gender restraints, all kinds of restraints on us as we move through life. I definitely don’t want this book to be something like Tony Robbins. I just don’t believe that we can think things and beautiful things will happen. I don’t believe it. There’s plenty of political and economic forces against us as we move forward in life.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s true, but you also make this point, like Sartre would say, he’d say, “Yes, there are restraints, but we have the ability.” We can navigate. It’s gonna be hard, but we can take a posture towards these restraints that’s hopeful, faithful and… I’m not gonna say positive ’cause I don’t wanna get… But, yeah, you have efficacy in the world.

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, in your response to the world. That’s right, that’s right.

Brett McKay: And then also, it just sounds like too… I think it’s interesting we’ve been talking about faith, hope, humility. I think another thing that’s required for change is patience, and that’s something that’s not really talked about. Oftentimes, when you go to a therapist, they’re like, “Well, here’s our plan. We’ll meet for three weeks, and then once a month after that, and then you’re done.” And it sounds like your idea is, No, it could take a year or two to… I don’t even know if you solve things completely, it doesn’t sound like you solve things completely… But for things to get better.

Ross Ellenhorn: You know this book Zorba the Greek? It was also a movie.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah.

Ross Ellenhorn: And there’s this scene in Zorba the Greek that’s just so beautiful, where he finds a chrysalis with a caterpillar that’s slowly becoming… It’s just about to the point where it’s becoming a butterfly, and he decides to help it, so he starts opening up the chrysalis, and of course that thing dies in his hands, and he’s like, “That’s just about the most sinful thing you can do,” and he says this in the book. Like not letting something just sort of emerge in its own time, is just an awful thing to do to it, and we’re doing that too much to ourselves. We’re not respecting the fact that it might take getting on an elevator with some coffee spillers for us to feel like, “I can move forward today.” You have to wait for your field to be in the right place sometimes, and you have to be patient with that.

Brett McKay: And another thing you talk about, you were talking about all these different restraining forces we don’t have control over, but another driving force that can help us is our social environment, and that can play… And so surrounding yourself with people who are supportive and understanding, so that can help a lot. That’s why people go to group therapy or join AA, because it’s just being around people who’ve got their back or if they feel like they’ve got their back.

Ross Ellenhorn: I have to tell you, it’s amazing how little the psychotherapeutic professions understand motivation, and how well social psychology understands motivation. Social psychology has it down, and they’ve done research after research on that, and this is about things like a sense of your value in your community, your purpose, your social support. These are all the things in a person’s field that actually move them forward. Social psychology is basically kind of the study of motivation on some level, on some level, and it’s all about this thing, about what are the things going on around you that get you to move forward, and one of the main ones is social support. Social support is just this medicine that kinda moves you forward. I got this cousin of mine that does this research where he has people sit in a chair, and he’s a social psychologist, and he has them sit in a chair and he has this tarantula in this plexiglass box move closer to them down this ramp, and they actually can control how close it gets, and people that only think about negative support, only think about it, they don’t have less social support than the other people, think that that tarantula is closer to their face than the people that think about positive social support. Not that they have more social support.

Two people walking towards a hill will more accurately measure the height of that hill and how hard it will be to travel that hill, than one person. So social support has all kinds of things to do with how we look at threats and how we look at challenges, and so surrounding yourself with people, feeling connected to people, is just vital to us moving forward. We know that isolation ties with cholesterol and smoking for heart disease, and that’s because of all the cortisol that’s in your system when you’re isolated. It makes you paranoid, it causes all kinds of problems for people, so these are all social things. They’re not necessarily psychological.

Brett McKay: Social support can help you be more of an individual with good faith, that sees that they are accountable and responsible for their life. It’s kind of counter-intuitive. You need the group to become an individual.

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, that’s really great, though. It’s a really great kind of paradox that you can’t be too lonely to be alone with yourself, that these things really feed our ability to be original and creative with our lives, is this sense that we’re connected to others.

Brett McKay: Ross, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Ross Ellenhorn: My work is at ellenhorn.com. That’s my company. And then the book, it’s on Amazon, it’s everywhere. It’s HarperCollins, and they can just look it up: How We Change and the 10 Reasons Why We Don’t.

Brett McKay: Well, fantastic, well, Ross Ellenhorn, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, it was great, thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Ross Ellenhorn. He’s the author of the book, How We Change and 10 Reasons Why We Don’t. It’s available on amazon.com and in bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his website, ellenhorn.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/change where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years, and if you like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLINESS at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Stitcher. It helps out a lot, and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing this show with a friend or a family member who you would think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #657: Why You Don’t Change (But How You Still Can) appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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What creates the differences between the sexes? Many would point to culture, and my guest today would agree that culture certainly shapes us. But she’d also argue that at the core of the divergence of the sexes, and in particular, of how men think and behave, is one powerful hormone: testosterone.

Her name is Dr. Carole Hooven, and she’s a Harvard biologist and the author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us. Today on the show, Carole explains the arguments that are made against testosterone’s influence on shaping men into men, and why she doesn’t think they hold water. She then unpacks the argument for how testosterone does function as the driving force in sex differences, and how it fundamentally shapes the bodies and minds of males. We delve into where T is made, how much of it men have compared to women, and what historical cases of castration tell us about the centrality of testosterone in male development. We then discuss how T shapes males, starting in the womb, and going into puberty and beyond, before turning to its influence in athletic performance. We end our conversation with Carole’s impassioned plea for celebrating what’s great about men.

Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Podcast #86: Demonic Males With Richard Wrangham * AoM series on testosterone * AoM Podcast #336: Master Your Testosterone * AoM series on status * AoM Podcast #756: How the Desire for Status Explains (Pretty Much) Everything * AoM series on the origins and nature of manhood

Connect With Carole Hooven* Carole’s Website * Carole on Twitter

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Read the Transcript!If you appreciate the full text transcript, please consider donating to AoM. It will help cover the costs of transcription and allow others to enjoy it as well. Thank you!

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. What creates the differences between the sexes? Now, many would point to culture, and my guest today would agree that culture certainly shapes us, but she’d also argue that at the core of the divergence of the sexes, and in particular of how men think and behave, is one powerful hormone: Testosterone. Her name is Dr. Carole Hooven, she’s a Harvard biologist and the author of, “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us”. Today on the show, Carole explains the arguments that are made against testosterone’s influence on shaping men into men and why she doesn’t think they hold water. She then impacts the argument for how testosterone does function as the driving force in sex differences, and how it fundamentally shapes the bodies and minds of males. We delve into where T is made, how much of it men have compared to women, and what historical cases of castration tell us about the centrality of testosterone in male development. We then discuss how T shapes males starting in the womb and going into puberty and beyond, before turning to its influence in athletic performance. We end our conversation with Carole’s and passionately for celebrating what’s great about men. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/t.

Carole Hooven, welcome to the show.

Carole Hooven: Thanks so much for having me, Brett.

Brett McKay: So you got a book called “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us”. So, you have spent your career studying the physiological and psychological effects of testosterone on humans and other animals. How did that happen?

Carole Hooven: Okay. Wow, I don’t know where to start. I guess I could start… I’ll just start by saying, when I graduated from college, I had no idea what I wanted to do, I just sort of got a regular job, I did that for 10 years, and then I decided that I wanted to go work with Richard Wrangham, who I know you’ve had on the show before, and the reason I wanted to do that is because I had been taking classes, and reading books and just trying to… And traveling, and trying to figure out what I really wanted to do when I grew up. And I read this book by Richard Wrangham called, “Demonic Males”, and I had really been focusing in on understanding human behavior, and I’d gotten really interested in neurobiology, then I discovered genetics and evolution and got really interested in that. And then I read Richard’s book, which used research on non-human primates, primarily chimps, as a way to understand the evolutionary and genetic origins of human behavior, particularly aggression, and I thought that was fascinating, and I thought that was something that I might be able to actually do, especially ’cause Richard was at Harvard at the time. And so I applied, quit my job and applied to the Harvard Graduate Program, and got rejected because I had no relevant experience, and then I really bugged Richard and some other people in the department, and I was like, “Look, I already quit my job. [chuckle] This is what I wanna do.”

And eventually, because I was persistent and enthusiastic, not because I had any special expertise, I have to say, Richard gave me an opportunity to go out to Uganda and study chimps for a year. I ended up getting evacuated because there was a lot of really awful violence and political upheaval around Uganda, in that region of Africa at the time, so I only spent eight months out there. But long story short, it was spending eight months in the jungle with chimpanzees surrounded by a lot of actual human aggression and violence that got me really interested ultimately in testosterone, because the way… If you… Anyone who goes and spends time with chimps can see that the sex differences in the chimpanzees in so many ways mirror sex differences in humans, just in these very broad patterns of the status and hierarchy, obsession among the males, competing largely for food and the right to have sex with the females who are in estrus, who can get pregnant. So there’s a lot of aggression, there’s a lot of status obsession in the males. They’re also capable, like humans are, of being kind and nurturing, and warm, and family-oriented in a way.

And the females, on the other hand, I never saw, although it does happen, I never saw any instances of female physical aggression. I saw it every single day among the males. And so there was just this very pronounced sex difference where there’s a lot of nurturing and caregiving among the females, just much more peaceful overall on… All of this is on average. And they don’t have any human culture, so there was nobody who was gonna be able to convince me after that experience that these similar patterns of sex differences in humans are primarily due to human culture. They’re not. They’re molded by human culture, the way they’re expressed is heavily dependent on human culture, but the evolutionary and genetic origins are in us. We’re born that way. And so that’s why I got interested in testosterone ’cause there’s no more powerful way of explaining human sex differences, which are… Male behavior in particular is a really important aspect of our lives.

Brett McKay: Yeah, one of the goals of your book is to push back some of these popular arguments out there that testosterone really doesn’t influence differences between the sexes. There’s lots of them. Can you briefly summarize the arguments against T’s influences on sex differences? Like, if it’s not testosterone, what are they saying is causing the sex differences?

Carole Hooven: Right. I’ve been asked this before, and I admit, I do find it challenging because… But it’s a really good exercise, and I try to do this in the book, which is to entertain the best argument from the opposition. So most critics, except for the most extreme ones, will acknowledge that the physical differences basically from the neck down are due to testosterone. So it really… You have to be kind of a nut job to deny that male size and strength overall, although there are nut jobs who are getting a lot of press, unfortunately, but that’s just really would be incredibly far-fetched to try to deny the science that testosterone at least explains the secondary sex differences in humans, so that’s high muscle mass, fat distribution, body hair, those kinds of things.

So most critics will acknowledge that testosterone is responsible for those physical differences. More reasonable critics, and I think this can play a really useful role in the science of testosterone and sex differences, most other critics deny that testosterone has any important effects on the brain, and thus, behaviour, and that it is not ultimately the most powerful driving force in those sex differences that I just talked about. So the largest sex differences that exist, and this is not my view, this is, in fact, I’m not talking about the cause, I’m just talking about the observation, are in sexual psychology and behavior and physical aggression.

So those are huge, consistent with non-human animals. We see them across ages, not the sex part, but across cultures. They’re just incredibly pervasive. And so those sex differences exist, but the question is, does testosterone influence the brain and behavior in ways that promote increased physical aggression in males and increased desire for variety and number of sexual partners. So those are the biggest sex differences, and those are the ones I really focus on in the book because there’s so much clear evidence that testosterone in the early developmental period around pre-natally and directly post-natally, and then in puberty and beyond, that those differences in exposure to that hormone and how it acts, coordinates the body, the physical adaptations of size and strength with psychological adaptations that enable male animals, including humans to take advantage of their larger body size, and the fact that they have sperm and a penis, that they have to be motivated to wanna get that sperm into the female reproductive tract, and to do that, especially over human evolutionary history, there had to be physical competition with other males for status or for the resources they need to acquire high status, which enable…

And that could be territory, now a lot of that is money and professional status. But doing all of that increases the chances that males will be able to have a higher number of sex partners ultimately. And there’s different strategies that males can use and we can get into that. So it might not be an increased number of sex partners, but it might be using one’s body and having the psychology to wanna use one’s body, or even just one’s sort of competitiveness and desire to elevate one’s status that could result in the acquisition of a high quality mate, where if you mate with that single female for life, you could do very well reproductively. It doesn’t mean that you have to have 10 kids, but it means you have to acquire that mate and have sex with her. So the adaptation is not the male desire necessarily for children, it’s the desire to either partner with one or a few mates and be a good partner, or play the field and have many different partners, there’s many different strategies. But… Sorry, this is a long answer, but the idea is that testosterone coordinates the psychological adaptations with the physical adaptations.

And I should just get back to the critics ’cause I’ve gotten off the topic here. But the critics are, to me, bizarrely denying that they’ll accept that testosterone acts on the body, but then are denying that it acts on the brain because they want to assert, and they do assert, that because we live in a gendered society, the default assumption should be that the sex differences that we observe are due to social and cultural influences. But this just doesn’t make sense from a scientific and evolutionary point of view. The default assumption is that we are like all of these other animals where testosterone does these very same things in males. It’s not a coincidence that it does the same thing in humans, it’s just that our culture can exacerbate those differences. They can minimize… The culture can minimize or kind of enlarge those differences or just budge the expression around. So it’s always gene, culture, interactions.

Brett McKay: Why do you think the critics are so reluctant to embrace the fact that T influences not just the body but the mind? What is the apprehension?

Carole Hooven: Yeah, I think it’s based on fear, which should not be playing a role in science and our efforts to understand reality. So even if the fear was true, if the fear was based in reality, so suppose the fear is that, well, if men are dominant to women and have power, commit rape, cheat on their wives, if that’s because of something in their genes, if that’s because their genes code for high levels of testosterone and testosterone promotes these behaviors, the fear might be, “Well, then there’s nothing we can do about it. Then we’re stuck with bad male behavior, and it justifies bad male behavior because it’s natural.” That’s called the naturalistic fallacy, by the way, the idea that what is found in nature is good. Anyone can see in two seconds that there’s plenty of things that are natural, like malaria, that are terrible. So that’s just a bad argument.

And there’s also plenty of evidence that we are definitely… That’s biological… The idea of biological determinism, that if something is in our genes, it’s immutable and we’re stuck with it and we have to accept it. Of course, that’s not true either. And all you have to do is look around the world at different cultures and different societies and see what the differences in, say, the rates of murderers, because males commit across the world about 95% to 98% of all murders, but in some cultures, the sex difference in the murder rate and the murder rate itself is incredibly low. And I always use Singapore as an example because it’s extremely safe, people, especially women can walk around feeling safe because the sexual assault is incredibly low, physical aggression committed by males in general is extremely low, and that’s because of their culture and harsh penalties for those crimes. So…

And that’s just one example, and we know that there are examples on the other end. I was just talking to a grad student in my department who is from India, and he was… And I know the data on India. But sexual assault is rampant because it hasn’t been taken seriously in India by the government there, and you can get away with it. And so men, if you can get away with it, men are going to do it, and they do. So the idea is that genes and testosterone sort of lower the bar for the expression of those behaviors in the right environmental circumstances, but that doesn’t mean that the environment can’t shape heavily the expression of those behaviors. So males are definitely more inclined to those behaviors, but we know that there’s all kinds of things we can do to tamp down the expression of those behaviors, and that’s clear from just even looking across cultures, or even across time, and how we’ve changed over time. Our genes haven’t changed, but the laws have, and the social norms have.

Brett McKay: Okay, let’s dig into the basics of testosterone. I think everyone has a general idea of what it is, it’s a male… All male and females have testosterone, but males…

Carole Hooven: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Males have more testosterone. Where is it made in the body and what are the difference in testosterone levels in men and women?

Carole Hooven: So testosterone… First of all, in adulthood, males have anywhere… In puberty, males can have 10 to 30 times the level of testosterone as women, but in western well-fed populations, it’s about 10… Males have about 10 to 20 times as much as females, adults, that is. And there’s no overlap in testosterone levels in healthy normal populations of men and women. And so in men, about 95% of testosterone comes from the testes, and the rest of it comes from, mostly from the adrenal gland, and there’s some other sources. Testosterone is actually made by many tissues, it’s even made in the brain, so it can… Most of it comes from the testes, and then can enter the brain, but it can also be made de novo in neurons, which is really interesting. And I should just… And so in females, about half is made in… These very, very low levels are made in the ovaries, and then the rest is made in the adrenal glands and in fat cells. So also, and I should just say, estrogen comes from testosterone. So testosterone is converted into estrogen in males and females, and males also make estrogen, and males who have more body fat are gonna have more of the enzyme, which is called aromatase, that converts testosterone into estrogen.

So men who have a high level of adiposity can start to develop some feminine features like gynecomastia, AKA man boobs, and that’s because the estrogen levels can really rise due to this high activity of this aromatase enzyme. So in females, estrogen can come from conversion of testosterone in various tissues and from precursors to testosterone that are produced in the adrenal gland, that can then also be converted to testosterone in other tissues. And I should just say that testosterone is an androgen, and there are different androgens and our body’s testosterone is the main one, but there were other ones like dihydrotestosterone, which is also a product of testosterone conversion, and all the androgens interact with what’s the androgen receptor and… Like a key in a lock, basically. And the androgen receptor is present in many, many tissues, again, also in our nervous system and our brain. And what’s interesting is that the sex steroids, which are estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHT, can all, because they’re steroids, because they’re fatty molecules, they’re lipophilic, they can go into any tissue in any cell. They can just cross the blood-brain barrier, they can get right through cell membranes, inside cells and they affect gene transcription once they’re inside cells. So they’re very, very powerful and they can go everywhere and have these long-term systemic effects on us.

Brett McKay: I think it’s interesting to note that our knowledge of testosterone is relatively new. It wasn’t until the 1920s that scientists were able to actually pin down testosterone, the hormone.

Carole Hooven: Right.

Brett McKay: But before that, they… Scientists, people, humanity had a hunch that the testicles were involved in masculinizing men. And there’s some interesting, I guess we can call them natural experiments that happened throughout human history where we were able to figure out there’s something going on with the testicles that cause men to be men, and one of them is this really interesting thing in Italy, church choirs would castrate young boys basically, and they called it Castrati. Can you tell us about that? What do we learn about testosterone from that?

Carole Hooven: Yeah, so this is disturbing. I do talk a lot about castration in the book, over the ages and in different cultures, and I learned a tremendous amount and it was all gross [chuckle] because I did get… It’s not funny, I did get into the procedure, and there’s also Unix in Imperial China, and the way that they were castrated was particularly horrific, but most of the history of castration. So if we just start with the Castrati in, say, 18th century Italy, these are… What happened was, there was a lot of poverty and there were opportunities for kids who were pre-pubertal who were singers, to gain fame and fortune by singing in church choirs, some of them could gain great fame and fortune, but even if they didn’t have great fame and fortune, they could have some fortune at least, and help out their families. And so every year, thousands of young boys were castrated in the hopes of sort of making it big and making it to a church choir, and this is before there was any anesthetic. So a lot of them died, and most of them did not make it and had to live lives of a eunuch.

So what happens is, if a kid, a boy is castrated prior to puberty. So most of the people listening are men who have gone through puberty, and you know exactly what happens when you go through puberty, to your body, to your psychology, to your voice, and sometimes to your hair. Some people start going bald fairly soon after puberty, but a eunuch never goes bald. And so what happens is, if you remove the testes prior to puberty, and again, yes, this is before anything was known about testosterone, but there were these predictable changes where the period of childhood growth continues for a long time, and the reason is that in puberty, it is actually rising testosterone that is converted primarily into estrogen even in boys, that causes the growth of the long bones, and that when it plateaus towards the end of puberty, that causes the growth plates in the long bones to seal, and that is why growth, the height spot stops at the end of puberty, it’s actually because of estrogen coming from testosterone even in boys.

But the point is, if you remove the testes, you never have that testosterone increase during puberty and that growth hormone generated childhood growth, like I have a 12-year-old boy, he’s still in that sort of growth hormone period, he’s transitioning now to… Testosterone is gonna be taking over and… But that period is extended, so you get this longer period of childhood growth, and the castrated men can end up to be very tall because they don’t have that testosterone peak where growth ends. So they can be very tall and they don’t get those secondary sex characteristics that most of your listeners will have developed during puberty. So they retain their head hair, their voice does not deepen, and that’s the big point, is that the voice doesn’t deepen, they retain sort of high… They retain a soprano singing voice, but they have a much larger body size. They have larger lungs, so they have a powerful soprano voice, more powerful than a female soprano voice. And females were not allowed in church choirs, so they needed men basically to fill those parts in the choirs, so that’s what castration did for them. But of course what happens is these men have almost no libido, and of course they have no ability to impregnate anybody.

So that is one of the ways, that’s one of the sources of information that castration, even in humans, lowers libido. So it’s something about the testicles is necessary for typical male libido. And this was also known because there was lots of castration experiments on animals and animals would be castrated to reduce aggression, to reduce libido for various reasons, to generate certain kinds of meat like from a chicken, a castrated chicken has a large body size and more tender meat, and that’s called The Capon. And so it’s been known for ages that castration of male animals reduces muscle mass, reduces and eliminates libido and aggression in some cases. Yeah, so there was a long, deep knowledge about the testicles and the necessity of the testicles for typical male behavior, but testosterone itself was not isolated until 1935. And so that took a long time because we’ve known about this since the fourth century BC, had this information and yeah, so it took until the early 20th century to really identify testosterone and start to try to manufacture it.

Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s talk about how testosterone makes boys boys and men men. And I think oftentimes we think, Oh, testosterone only has an effect on a male during puberty that’s when we have this huge spike, but you talk about the influence of testosterone starts in the womb prenatally. So walk us through that process, what happens to a fetus when it’s exposed to testosterone? What’s going on there?

Carole Hooven: Yeah, so that’s super important, that prenatal and directly postnatal period, we don’t know as much about what testosterone is doing in little boys, little boy babies when it goes up right after birth, but we can talk a little bit about that later, but we know a lot about what it’s doing in utero. And I should just say that the way that little humans or conceptuses, which are just that embryo, the very early embryo actually doesn’t become male or female because of testosterone, it takes on male and female characteristics because of testosterone, but the determination of male and female is dependent upon the presence of the Y chromosome and the gene on the Y chromosome, that is sex-determining region of the Y… Called sex-determining region of the Y-chromosome or SRY. So if you have the Y chromosome, and it has an intact SRY gene, which almost every male will have that. That is what causes the undifferentiated gonads to differentiate into testes. So before six weeks…

The embryo is not identifiable as male or female. You could look at the chromosomes, but there are no structures or physical differences yet, it’s when that gene is expressed, that it goes on to cause that tissue, those undifferentiated gonads to differentiate in the testes direction rather than the ovaries direction.

So once that happens, it just takes a couple of weeks for the testes to start pumping out testosterone. So, like, I was pregnant with a boy, and it was just bizarre to know that he was in there with his little testicles in my body, that his little balls are making testosterone, that and that testosterone is what was necessary for guiding his body and to promote the development of all the male reproductive structures and Physiology, so his scrotum, his penis, his prostate, his vas deferens… All that stuff is due to the actions of testosterone directly, and testosterone can do that because, like I said before, it acts on his genes that females share.

Females have the same genes, it’s just that they don’t have testosterone to cause the genes to be expressed in a way that grows and maintains the male reproductive structures. So the little fetus has testes that produce a lot of testosterone, and that’s what is responsible for the development of the male reproductive structures and male reproductive function that I just described, but at the same time, evolution has done this amazing thing where testosterone at the same time, prenatally, as it’s working on the body to masculinize it, it goes into the brain, because, I’m just gonna say it knows that this is an animal that needs to reproduce in a way that females don’t need to reproduce. Like this animal has to compete basically for female mating opportunities and it’s gonna be producing sperm, so this animal is going to, as a little kid, need to be do more rough and tumble play, for instance, and females might have to practice nurturing behavior, so females don’t have exposure to testosterone in utero, or they have very… Typically, very, very low exposure.

Males will have high levels of… Very high levels of testosterone in utero that masculinize the body and the brain, so that the brain can take advantage of the male body and shape that animal for male reproductive strategies, which are different than what females need, because females need to use their bodies to grow their offspring and feed their offspring… Sorry, offspring, and males don’t use their bodies to grow the offspring, they use their bodies to compete for the right to make… To have a female do the work for them basically, and that all starts in utero. And then there’s a small rise in testosterone… Sorry, it’s… Actually, it’s a short-term rise, it’s a three-month increase in testosterone shortly after birth that seems to be very important physically, again, and probably neurologically, but we don’t know a lot about it, but there are some hints that it might have to do… Might further masculinize behavior, and have something to do with penis development and could have something to do with ultimately penis size, but there’s not a huge amount of work on that yet…

Brett McKay: Right. So okay, basically, this is kinda like a mini puberty for boys right after they’re born.

Carole Hooven: That’s right. That’s right.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So basically, this prenatal exposure testosterone, is it kind of laying the ground work, like the wiring for later development in puberty?

Carole Hooven: That’s exactly right. So the framework that scientists use to talk about this is called the organizational activation effect or framework. So this is the idea, and this is actually really important because people think all you have to do is shoot up, and this happens obviously in, like trans men, or people who transition their gender, they will take the hormone, they’ll block their own hormones and take the hormones of the opposite sex. So for instance, if a female transitions to live as a male, and takes male levels of testosterone, that testosterone that she’s taking as an adult is acting on her brain, in a way that’s different from how it would act on a male brain, because a male brain has been… The neural structures are permanently masculinized, and these are very subtle effects, these aren’t huge differences in structures in the brain.

These are widespread small effects on, like cell death and synaptic, and connections between cells, so these are small effects that seem to have… Small changes that seem to have important effects in adulthood. So the brain is masculinized in boys pre-natally and then in adulthood when testosterone goes up in puberty, that testosterone is acting on those previously masculinized neural structures. So that if testosterone goes up in adulthood, say in a female whose brain has not been masculinized pre-natally, it’s going to have a different effect because it’s not acting on previously masculinized structures. And, this is hard to study, in humans, but it’s very clear in non-human animals, that you cannot activate typical male sexual and aggressive behavior in female animals whose brains have not been masculinized pre-natally, if that makes sense.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Carole Hooven: Does that make sense?

Brett McKay: Yeah. That makes sense, that makes sense. And so okay, this prenatal exposure testosterone is what gives boys their boyish behavior, so like… While these others…

Carole Hooven: Yeah, yeah, before puberty, they’re like tackling each other.

Brett McKay: Before puberty, Yeah, so there’s a lot of rough and tumble play, I think I’ve heard boys, this is generally tend to be more object-oriented as opposed to person-oriented. And what’s interesting, like gender differences in toy preferences. You see this even in chimps, they’ll give Chimps a toy and the female girl chimps will play with maybe a doll, but the boys will somehow turn it into a weapon or some sword.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, the primate toy studies are less… They’re interesting, but I…

Brett McKay: Not robust. Sure.

Carole Hooven: They are less convincing to me than the rough and tumble play, we don’t even need the toy thing. We need… You can just…

Brett McKay: Okay, just the rough housing.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, you can look at all these. Just look at, take mammals, and it’s not even confined to mammals, but you could look at chimps, you can look at rats, you can look at a huge variety of animals, and you look at the juveniles and there are clear sex differences in play that are parallel in many ways to what we see in humans where the male, the little boys, say in chimps or in rats are tackling each other, they’re playing physically, they are… What they’re doing is practicing physical competition for status as adults, so they have to practice their reproductive skills, their survival and reproductive skills.

So that rough and tumble play is fun, it has to be fun, or else they wouldn’t do it and they wouldn’t get the practice, but they like that heavy physical play more than females do. Females are doing other things. And in humans, we see the exact same patterns. And in non-human animals, you can easily manipulate the expression of that behavior by simply suppressing testosterone exposure in boys, or increasing prenatal testosterone exposure in females and female juveniles in non-human animals, you can… It looks like it’s entirely due to prenatal testosterone exposure. And then in humans, first of all, we have a very large and cross-culturally consistent sex difference where boys like to play physically. Now, I’ve…

Again, I have a son, he has friends who are female, I know how they play. I don’t see girls getting together in groups and jumping all over each other for hours, like boys will tend… On average, not everyone does this, and there’s overlap in these complex behaviors, but these are broad patterns. And there’s a suggestion in humans that it’s also apparently, of course, the cultural influences, but that testosterone is the primary driver, because we know in girls who have different conditions, especially congenital adrenal hyperplasia, that result in their exposure prenatally to abnormally high levels of testosterone. So it’s not as high as boys, but even a slight elevation in girls can have a pronounced masculinizing effect.

And so girls that have this condition where their… It happens to be their adrenal gland is producing relatively high levels of testosterone, that condition is corrected at birth at least in places with good medical care, and those girls on average, end up far more than girls who don’t have that condition to want to engage in rough and tumble play, they wanna play with whatever toys the boys are playing with, they’re more likely to wanna play with boys, they’re more likely to grow up to be lesbians, they’re more likely, even though the rates are very low, to have a male gender identity than females who never had that condition. And the only difference there is that they had increased exposure to testosterone in utero, there’s no difference in the adult hormones.

So it’s clear that that sex differences in that early exposure to testosterone have a huge amount to do with who we become, because this is prior to puberty. So if boys are engaging more physically active basically, especially with each other, in childhood, that’s gonna set the stage for later behaviors, almost regardless of what happens in puberty. And this is not all boys, I should say that boys who grow up to be gay are much less likely to engage in rough and tumble play, but those boys… So that’s interesting, and that’s kind of a mystery, but those boys who grow up to be gay have the same pattern of sexual behavior of boys who grow up to be heterosexual. So being exposed to high levels of testosterone in utero seems to always shape male sexual behavior to be masculine, to shape the desire for a higher number of sex partners ultimately and a higher libido.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we’ve talked about childhood, so prenatal testosterone raise the ground work throughout childhood, T levels between males and females are pretty much the same, and then puberty happens and there’s this spike. And I think we all know what happens during puberty, the secondary sex characteristic just show up, you get taller, more muscle mass for men, body hair, facial hair, deeper voice. What’s going on though on the brain, how is that testosterone surge influencing the mind and behavior?

Carole Hooven: I’ve talked to a lot at this point, just in talking about the book, a lot of men and trans men, which is interesting, people who lived as women and then took high levels of testosterone about what it feels like. Most men say that they were preoccupied with sex, preoccupied with their position in the status hierarchy and social relationships among boys, and then young men. So again, I have this 12-year-old, and that’s what he talks about a lot, he’s… Not the sex part, but the who is popular, what they do, how they behave. And this is all fascinating because it seems all of them are really, really attuned to status hierarchies, and there’s a great evolutionary reason for that, and testosterone is promoting that.

Girls have their own hierarchies too, that’s also extremely important, but the way they navigate competition within those hierarchies is totally different. Girls don’t use this very direct form of aggression and physical aggression, they tend to use gossip and passive aggression and back-stabbing, I hate to say. And now social media, which I think that’s a horrible way to harm people’s reputations. Boys are more likely to go up into somebody’s face and call them an a-hole or something, and so they’re this… And they’re more likely to get into obviously physical aggressive… Physically aggressive interactions, and of course, that depends on culture around the world, and just within, say our United States, there’s obviously different norms around beating other guys up with different cultures.

Brett McKay: And I think there is a point…

Carole Hooven: So, Yeah. I think that’s what’s going on psychologically is sex and status competition.

Brett McKay: And I think a point to make is, there is a cultural… So we have this biological thing going on, but culture can help direct it, right? So in the west, it’s like, Well, how do you get status? It’s like, Well, you go maybe you play football, or you run for student council, or… This is if you were a teenage boy.

Carole Hooven: That’s right.

Brett McKay: You can get status that way. In another culture, it might be something different, but they’ll be a drive for status somehow.

Carole Hooven: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Because the idea is like, if you got status, the chicks will like you.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, but you might not even think of it that way at the time. You just seem driven to gain status over other boys or young men. And yeah, it seems like a benefit is that the girls start to pay attention to you. So, culture… People sort of miss this point about how incredibly important culture is. And nobody should resist the facts of biology about… And the role in all of these types of behaviors, they shouldn’t resist that because they think that culture is important or culture is more important. It’s incredibly important. But what’s interesting is how it interacts with our biology in these fascinating ways that have an important evolutionary explanation.

Brett McKay: Well, I think you made some guy, I forgot who is was, I think the guy that wrote, The Trouble With Testosterone. I forgot his tame.

Carole Hooven: Robert Sapolsky.

Brett McKay: Yeah, he said, like, if you… Talking about the influence of culture and biology, kind of the interplay they have. It’s like, if you gave testosterone to a bunch of monks, they would start competing… They wouldn’t start beating each other up, they would start trying to out compete each other, who can meditate the most or who can do niceness…

Carole Hooven: The niceness or something, yeah.

Brett McKay: But if you gave testosterone to a prison gang.

Carole Hooven: That’s right.

Brett McKay: You’d probably see just a bunch of shanks and things like that.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, that’s what’s fascinating is that, it seems to promote whatever is necessary for a man, and or an animal in a given environment to gain status or to avoid… Just to avoid losing status, say. So, it sort of increases your attention to those signals of status is how it seems to work. Your vigilance and your attention and your striving for status in whatever way is necessary. And in our deep history and still in many parts of the world, that was physical aggression. So that’s why males are larger than females and still are, so there’s still those cues and women are still attracted to big, tall, say, muscular, assertive men. Even if there isn’t any actual reproductive benefit. That’s how women are wired. So males are also still wired to, Yeah, really care about status and be responsive to those cues, in a way that women are responsive to different kinds of cues. And status just is not quite as important for female reproduction, of course, as it is for men. It still matters because females wanna compete for the high status males, and there aren’t that many of them, so.

Brett McKay: Let’s continue with this status-strain here. So I think it’s interesting, you talk about studies that testosterone can… Okay, influences this drive for status chronically, systemically, so, it just kind of wires you for that. But there’s these acute things going on. If a male experiences an increase in status or a decrease in status, there can be these sudden drops of testosterone or increases in testosterone. What causes such a rapid change? ‘Cause I mean, the production of testosterone takes a while. It has the pituitary gland sent a signal and…

Carole Hooven: Very good, very good.

Brett McKay: What causes that super fast? It’s so weird. A guy can watch his favorite sports team lose, and his T-levels will drop immediately. What’s going on there?

Carole Hooven: Yeah. So I don’t wanna overstate the prevalence of this phenomenon. And however, it does exist in humans and in non-human animals. And I think it’ll be helpful just to say what happens in non-human animals. And so the Syrian hamster has been studied heavily regarding these testosterone changes, which I think are very important in humans. And again, it’s not so much how much testosterone you have as a guy in general, as long as it’s within the normal range, your sort of baseline level seems not to be super predictive of much. What does, to me seem to be important is prenatal testosterone and these changes that you’re talking about in social… That are a product of social interactions. And this to me, is absolutely fascinating. So in Syrian hamsters, if a Syrian hamster has a fight with another male for territory… So territory is the equivalent of any kind of resource in humans, ’cause you need territory to get females, ’cause females will feed on the territory that a male can guard, basically. So high status males will have larger territories in the wild, anyway. And the outcome of… If you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, or even think about it from today.

So if you’re fighting physically with another guy, if you lose, you need to know on some level that you’re a loser. You can’t go… If you’re losing consistently against other males in physical competitions, you need to stop, you need to run away, basically. [chuckle] If somebody’s in your face, you need to run away, you shouldn’t be challenging them. ‘Cause you wanna survive to try to win some other competition in the future, so that you can mate, right? So how do animals make those decisions about… How do they know, “Well, I need to fight,” or, “I need to flee,” right? Those are decisions that animals have to make. So when you’re… When someone’s threatening you, it may trigger in you the feeling that they’re threatening you physically, even if it’s just a chess game or a tennis match, definitely in a football game or just some guy is in your face, there’s all kinds of situations where two males are competing for status in humans, in some way, right?

So in the hamsters, if a male loses a physical fight and he submits, right? He ends up by getting on his back and submitting, his testosterone will tank. So first of all, when they’re facing off, they’re both of them have an increase in testosterone, the loser will have a pronounced decrease in testosterone. The winner will maintain high testosterone or it will get higher. And if you… And then the loser will fail to defend itself or defend it’s territory against a future threat, because he’s lost… That reduction in testosterone is somehow telling him, He should be scared and run away.

So if you block that reduction in testosterone after he loses, he’ll continue to defend his territory and challenge other males. And then he’ll get his ass kicked and he could die, right? So it seems like the testosterone drop is adaptive for losers. A testosterone rise is adaptive for winners. Because it’s a way of, signaling, shaping, the animal for future encounters. So if you’re a winner, you know in the face of threat that you’re a winner. You act like a winner, you don’t back down. You take on the challenge. If you have lost, you’re fearful and anxious and you retreat from confrontation. So we have all varieties in humans of those responses to competition, but it seems like testosterone changes in the moment in the face of competition are playing a role neurologically to set people up for reaction to future competitions and may help to account for different… Even in the ways that people engage in competition in general.

And just feeling like, they are fearful or feeling confident in the face of competition. So yes, there’s all kinds of examples in the human literature where either from sports, or again, from competitions that are not physical even. And then there’s all these competitions that we don’t measure, which are just males getting in each other’s faces in some way. Having subtle competitions where there are these testosterone changes. It’s tough to pin down experimentally, exactly when they happen, and who they happen in, and exactly what the function is. But from the literature on non-human animals, it seems clear that we do know that when testosterone rises in these social situations, it can increase dopamine, which is a hormone that is rewarding, and promotes the same behavior in the future, because… It increases motivation for the same behavior in the future because it felt good last time. And cortisol is a hormone that is associated with stress and anxiety and that can be paired with the testosterone drop and that can possibly motivate the animal more towards a retreat-strategy in the future.

Brett McKay: So, there’s like a Matthew effect going on, right? To he who has, will be given more, he who doesn’t have will be taken away from. So.

Carole Hooven: Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Carole Hooven: I think that’s right, but it’s adaptive for all basically based on… But it’s a way to… If you’re in a stressful situation, it’s possibly a way to condition males about how to respond very quickly, so they don’t have to stop and think about it. And I should just say you raise a really interesting question, how does testosterone change in these situations, because like you said, the signal to produce testosterone in the testes comes from the brain. It comes from the hypothalamus and pituitary in the form of luteinizing hormone, and it takes an hour for that hormone to get from the brain to the testicles and to result in a pulse of testosterone, essentially. Then that testosterone have to go through the blood and alter gene transcription, which theoretically should not have immediate effects on behavior. So the answer is we don’t know how social interactions can cause these testosterone rises. It may be that it’s not coming from the testes or it may be that it’s not coming from LH… Luteinizing Hormone. It may be that there’s an increase in adrenaline, and that somehow adrenaline acts on the testes to release testosterone that’s kind of hanging out there, but we don’t know.

Brett McKay: Right.

Carole Hooven: And this is something that I’ve been obsessed with a long time. What is the mechanism here?

Brett McKay: Okay, so testosterone makes a boy… Or teenage boys, young adults, young adult males preoccupied with sex, preoccupied with status. We also talked…

Carole Hooven: I wouldn’t say makes but heavily influence. Heavily influence, yeah.

Brett McKay: Heavily influence. [chuckle] Yeah. Right. But… And then also, we’ve talked about this a little bit, aggression. It makes or causes or influences males to be more aggressive. And what’s the advantage of… What’s the advantage of being aggressive, because that just helps you get access to mates and resources? Is that the idea?

Carole Hooven: So there’s actually not a big sex difference in aggression just broadly. It’s really physical aggression.

Brett McKay: Okay. Physical aggression.

Carole Hooven: So using… And what’s interesting is, if you think about these strategies over human evolutionary history that males and females would use to maximize their reproduction. And that’s what natural and sexual selection acts on, is the traits that animals possess that allow them to maximize reproduction. So for females, taking physical risks is a bad idea because you need your physical integrity. You need energy, you need safety, you need a long healthy life. That’s what… Because you don’t have to worry about fighting for mates, right? You have to worry about having the energy and health that you need to bear and feed your children, and you have to care for them.

So it doesn’t pay off for females to take physical risks. And they don’t have that need to compete physically for mates. Although they compete for mates, but in ways that don’t put their physical selves at risk, typically, right? So males are, relative to females, over evolutionary history have benefited from physical aggression, because that’s what their bodies are, in a sense, built to do, relative to females. That’s where they’re putting their reproductive energy budget. That’s why they have bigger bodies and more muscle. That’s the only reason, relative to females. So that muscle, that’s a history of using their bodies to compete physically for mates. So we retain that in a modern environment… And that’s… Again, that’s attractive to females. It’s not the case that they have to compete physically anymore. So in different cultures, women are gonna prefer men who have high status, whether it’s gained physically or not. I’m married to a philosophy professor and he’s definitely never gotten into a fight, but he’s super attractive to me, partly because, partly because of his status, but it’s not, he got that with his brain, not with his body, but it depends on the environment you’re in and what pays off. So we have this evolutionary history of physical aggression paying off, but it still plays out in the extremes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you can see the propensity for physical aggression in males, just like looking at crime reports.

Carole Hooven: That’s right.

Brett McKay: If you look at murders, physical assault, sexual assault, it’s pretty much all dudes. There’s women there every now and then, but it’s mostly dudes, but then if you look at crimes like fraud, shoplifting, etcetera. There’s still more men, but women, that’s more of where they do their crime, if they’re gonna commit crimes.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, that’s where the sex difference is reduced, so women are gonna commit crimes, but they’re just much less likely to put themselves physically at risk to commit those crimes. Males are much more likely to put themselves physically at risk to commit crimes and to do everything else, to show off, to thrill-seeking, men are just far more likely to do that physically.

Brett McKay: Okay let’s, so we’ve talked about testosterone’s effect on behavior in males. Something that’s been getting a lot of press lately is the role of testosterone in athletic performance. What do we know what’s going on there?

Carole Hooven: So there’s a lot of controversy and confusion around this area, but I’ll just say that the science is clear. It’s not confusing, and people who try to make it seem confusing, from my point of view, have a political or ideological agenda. It’s totally clear that in the almost all sports, there are some exceptions, males, men, so if you’re looking at the elite level, if you’re looking at comparing highly trained people who are all taking care of themselves, all healthy, eating well, sleeping, training, etcetera, men blow women out of the water. There is no competition. There are, in many sports, even at the Olympic level, there will be thousands of men who will be better than the number one female, and that’s almost the case across the board. In some endurance sports, there are some exceptions to that.

The reason is testosterone. It is, again, this is abundantly clear that this is an effect, a consequence of males going through puberty, for all the reasons that… All the things we’ve been talking about physically, never mind what might be happening psychologically, which is a question, but the physical advantages are immense in terms of what happens that is irreversible, first of all, in puberty. So there is some aspects of pubertal changes that are reversible, but there’s others that are not.

So the ones that are permanent are obviously the bone growth, so the height, bone density to some extent is irreversible. Testosterone causes increase in bone density, and that happens because of the increased muscle during puberty that exerts forces on the developing bones that causes them to increase mineralization and density. So you have stronger, taller bones. So you have larger bodies, and on those larger bodies have much more muscle and testosterone causes stem cells during puberty to differentiate into muscle preferentially over fat. So those don’t reverse, so that in adulthood, if you suppress… If you’re a man, and a male and you suppress your testosterone, you will not lose all of that muscle advantage you would have over a typical female.

So there’s height, there’s bone density, there’s larger hearts and lungs, there’s increased hemoglobin. So males have significantly more hemoglobin. That’s a direct effect of testosterone and hemoglobin carries oxygen around the blood, so you’ll have more oxygen fueling the greater amount of muscle mass. You have massively higher upper body strength. Males, again, the upper body strength just blows away the upper body strength of females. You have greater throwing capacity. You have greater grip capacity. I could go on and on. And you have more power. So sports that emphasize power, like weight lifting.

Like Laurel Hubbard, for instance, is a trans woman who competed in weightlifting in the Olympics recently, and there was a lot of controversy and questions about whether she, because she was a person who was male who transitioned to living as a woman and had stopped her testosterone and taken estrogen and the question was would she have an advantage in weight-lifting over natal women? And the answer is yes. Because she went through male puberty, she’s going to have a huge advantage because all of her muscle mass that she gained as a result of male puberty doesn’t disappear even when testosterone has stopped for something like even five years. So there’s enormous advantages to going through male puberty and those do not disappear when testosterone is suppressed in trans women. And that’s just indisputable. There’s just no, it’s not that women, some people are saying women aren’t trying hard enough and that’s why they’re losing. That’s just a joke. That is a joke.

Brett McKay: So when people finish this book, what do you hope they walk away thinking?

Carole Hooven: Yeah, there’s a couple of things. Of course, I’m incredibly interested in testosterone and the power of testosterone and how it shapes who we are, but I think one of my overarching values in life is that science and knowledge is, it’s crucial for us to have clear views about reality and to not fear the truth, and to do whatever we can to find and communicate the truth. That’s what I see my job as a science educator, and that when you learn how things work, you have more power to make the world a better, safer, more equitable place. And so that is one thing I want people to come away with. I want them to see that it’s possible to be clear and honest and open, but also sensitive and compassionate.

And then the other point is of course about the hormone. There’s just so much evidence that this one molecule shapes our society in these really profound ways and that the more we understand about how it works, the more we can capitalize on the positive aspects of being a man, which we didn’t even talk about. We didn’t talk about toxic masculinity, which I really don’t like at all. I don’t like that term. I don’t want my boy…

Brett McKay: I don’t like the concept either.

Carole Hooven: I don’t want him to be exposed to that idea. He already is, and I don’t like that at all. I want him to be, I’m tearing up here. I want him to be proud. Sorry.

Brett McKay: No, it’s fine.

Carole Hooven: Sorry. I feel so deeply about this. Nobody should be ashamed to be a man, to be masculine, and we didn’t talk about heroism, and if you look at the news and who’s risking their lives to save the lives of others, it’s men, typically. There are really brave women who are doing that too, but over, I don’t know why I’m getting so upset. I’m sorry.

Brett McKay: No, you’re fine.

Carole Hooven: It’s men, and I think there are a lot of struggles that we need to acknowledge that men are facing, and I wish we could just be open, and some of those struggles are around puberty and adolescents and I wish that more people felt they could talk about their struggles and have support, and that this ultimately is the way to making the world a better place, and there’s so much positivity around masculinity and that should be celebrated and encouraged, and this whole narrative about toxic masculinity that seems to be increasing, I wish would end. I wish it would end.

Brett McKay: No, I think that’s a… I like how we ended on that ’cause I think it’s true. I’m tired of the toxic masculinity discourse. I don’t think it’s helpful. I don’t even know what it means anymore ’cause it gets banded around so much, but then we also forget about all the great things men do, and I think that’s, I think men need to hear that as well ’cause I think you’re just scolded all the time in the popular culture and it can get you down.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, and you’re… I assume working hard and being a great dad. To me, having that involvement in the family and having that kind of support and men bring something to the family that women just don’t. And I watch this in my own family, the way that I am with my son and the way my husband is with my son is very different and he needs that. I’m not saying that people won’t, that every family has to have a male and a female, or a mom and a dad, ’cause of course, they don’t, but there is something that is so important that dads are bringing to the family, and also I have, the people aren’t gonna like this, but to the world, there is a different way of being in the world that I’ll just say quickly.

That I asked my students at the end of class, I usually ask them, what would the world be like without men or something like that, and just a couple years ago a student said, “I don’t think we’d have tall buildings.” Or I think I said, “What would happen if we castrated men?” or some other student said, “We should castrate all men” or something ridiculous, and this other student spoke up, which was great. I don’t think he’d say that today. He said, “I don’t think we’d have tall buildings. I don’t think we’d have the kind of innovations that we have,” and that’s controversial, of course, but there is something to it. That competitiveness, that drive for status sometimes can be destructive, but can also be incredible motivation for innovation, and that’s something that remains to be explored. It’s too politically incorrect probably to study it seriously, but I wish we could.

Brett McKay: Well Carole, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Carole Hooven: Okay, so I have a website, CaroleHooven.com. I’m on Twitter @Hoovlet, H-O-O-V-L-E-T, and my book is on Amazon and wherever you like to get your books, and if you do get it and like it, I never ask people to do this, I keep forgetting. Just if you could review it on Amazon, that really helps. And yeah, so I’d like to get more reviews.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well Carole Hooven, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Carole Hooven: Thank you so much, Brett. I’ve enjoyed the conversation.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Carole Hooven. She’s the author of the book; T, The Story of Testosterone. It’s available at Amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find out more information about her work at her website, CaroleHooven.com. Also check out our show notes at AOM.IS/T where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at ArtofManliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of, and if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to StitcherPremium.com. Sign up, use code Manliness at check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download this to your app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of The AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you’d think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #761: How Testosterone Makes Men, Men appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us

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Another great year here on the Art of Manliness has drawn to a close. We hope you’ve enjoyed all the articles and podcasts we’ve published the last twelve months. In case you missed some of our content, below you’ll find a rundown of what was most popular amongst it, as well as highlights of our personal favorites.

ArticlesMost Popular Articles of the Year Based on TrafficSeems like you guys like stuff about fitness and books! And cleaning out your dryer vent?

The 1980s Walking Workout That Will Actually Get You in Shape
8 Low-Tech Ways to Strengthen Your Home Security
15 Things Every Man Should Have in His Desk
How Long Does It Take to Put on Muscle?
Bibliotherapy: The 8 Best Books For Managing Depression
A Guide to the Biggest Thing Missing From Your Fitness Routine: Zone 2 Training
Improve Your Life With the 80/20 Rule
The Insanely Difficult Standards of History’s Hardest P.E. Program
How to Clean Out Your Dryer Vent
The 5 Best Hardboiled Detective Novels
Disenchant Your Bad Habits
The Philosophy Textbook Every Man Should Own
The Biggest Benefit of Exercising Outside in the Winter
The 8 Best Vintage Self-Improvement Books

Our Personal Picks(Some of the most popular above would be included in this list as well):

A Counterintuitive Cure for Burnout
Autofocus: The Productivity System That Treats Your To-Do List Like a River
An Argument for Making Exercise (Not Diet) the Foundation of Weight Management
The 5 Characteristics of Highly Dysfunctional Groups + Becoming a Well-Differentiated Leader
The Importance of Having a Physical Identity
Why Ambivalent Relationships Are Terrible for You (And How to Deal With Them)
True Comradeship
An Intro to Envy + Envy, Ressentiment, and the Inversion of Values
Could Physical Activity Be the Solution to . . . (Almost) Everything?
How to See Better in the Dark
¿Tienes Ganas?
The Pyramid of Leisure

Sunday Firesides Favorites* Look Into the Tomb * Are We the Prudes? * The We’re NOT Going to Hell in a Handbasket Fallacy * Develop a Metabolically Flexible Psyche * Distraction Expands to Fill the Void Available * You Already Know * We Need to Make Adulthood More Desirable * What Feels Like Stress Is . . . * There Is No Other Layer to Life * Feed Your Individuality on Non-Regurgitated Food * You Are a Sojourner * Boredom Is Evil * Man’s Last Great Conquest — Himself

PodcastMost Popular Podcasts of the Year Based on Listens* The Life We’re Looking For * Fat Loss Made Simple * Tactics and Mindset Shifts for Making the Most of Life * How to Turn a Boy Into a Man * Anxiety Is a Habit — Here’s How to Break It * Developing Your Personal Uniform * Declutter, Downsize, and Move Forward With Your Life * How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)? * How to Shift Out of the Midlife Malaise * The New Science of Narcissism * Philosophical Tools for Living the Good Life * Become a Focused Monotasker * A Playbook for Modern Dating

Our Personal Picks (Some of the most popular above would be included in this list as well):

The Existential in Red Dead Redemption 2
Live Life in Crescendo
The Cues That Make You Charismatic
The Power of Unwavering Focus
From Novice to Advanced — The Weightlifter’s Journey
Lonesome Dove and Life’s Journey Through Uncertainty
Routines Are Overrated
How Polio Made a President
We Need a P.E. Revolution
Kierkegaard on the Present (Passionless) Age

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A huge thank you to everyone who supports AoM! We truly appreciate those of you have shared our stuff with others, sent an encouraging note, made a donation, left a review, and simply made our articles and podcasts a part of your daily and weekly routines. Thanks for including us in your lives and we look forward to bringing you more interesting, insight-packed, and life-improving content in 2023!

The post The Best of the Art of Manliness: 2022 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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With Christmas coming up, you’re likely in the full holiday swing of things — decorating your tree, eating certain foods, listening to particular music, and buying and wrapping gifts. But did you ever stop to think about why it is you’re taking part in this slate of often weird-but-wonderful traditions?Brian Earl has traced the backstories of our Christmas traditions in his podcast and book called Christmas Past. Today on the show, he shares some of those backstories with us, and explains how many of our seemingly fated and timeless traditions actually came about in fluky and fortuitous ways and are a lot more recent than we think. He first unpacks how Christmas went from being a small religious observance to a huge cultural celebration and how our idea of Santa Claus evolved over time, with our current conception of Old St. Nick being less than a century old. We then discuss how it is we ended up taking evergreen trees inside our houses and decorating them, the origins of the most recorded Christmas song in history, why fruitcake became the butt of jokes, and why hardly anyone roasts chestnuts anymore, on an open fire or otherwise. Brian shares what new Christmas traditions he’s seeing emerge and which classic ones are going away, and I offer an important PSA to future parents about Elf on the Shelf. We end our conversation with Brian’s tips for getting into the Christmas spirit if you haven’t been feeling it.

Resources Related to the Episode* AoM Article and Video: How to Roast Chestnuts on an Open Fire * AoM Article: Be a Scrooge This Year — Reflections From A Christmas Carol * The evolving image of Santa Claus * Pew Research study on the changing ways Americans celebrate Christmas * Vintage Flintstones Fruity Pebbles Christmas commercial * Vintage McDonald’s Christmas commercial * AoM Article: 11 Ways to Get Into the Holiday Spirit

Connect With Brian Earl* Brian’s Website and Podcast

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Download this episode.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #859: The Unexpected Origins of Our Christmas Traditions appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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One of the things I love about the Iliad and the Odyssey is that I always notice new things when I re-read them.

During my last read-through, the importance of baths in both Homeric works stuck out to me.

In Homer, the bath serves as a ritual in several ways. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, warriors returning from the battlefield take baths to wash the gore and grime of battle off themselves physically and spiritually. In this instance, the bath serves as a purification ritual.

We see this most dramatically in the Iliad after Odysseus and Diomedes kill the Thracian king Rhesus in a night operation. They return to the Greek camp, jump in the ocean to wash off their sweat, and then get into a brass bathtub for a soak. After lolling about in the tub, they anoint themselves with oil.

The bath also plays a vital role in the ancient Greek concept of hospitality, or xenia. Xenia required that Greeks accept anyone into their home who came a-knocking — including strangers. Before a host could even ask a guest his name or where he was from, he was to offer the stranger food, drink, and a bath. Only after the guest had supped and soaked could the host inquire about his identity.

We particularly see the bath of hospitality in the Odyssey. Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, gets a welcoming bath from Nestor, and Odysseus receives a pleasant and rejuvenating bath from the Phaeacians after he washes up on shore.

The bath is also a ritual of homecoming and transition. When a Homeric hero returns home, the first thing he does is take a bath. The bath becomes a ritual that allows the warrior or adventurer to transition from the public world of effort, danger, and striving to a private world of personal and domestic interests.

What’s interesting about these Homeric homecoming baths is that they’re often scenes where a hero’s true identity is revealed. The bath becomes a way for a man to take off both his literal helmet and his metaphorical mask and show his closest confidants who he really is. The bath allows a Homeric hero to let down his hair and be himself. It makes him vulnerable.

The vulnerability of the homecoming and transition bath didn’t turn out very well for Agamemnon. His wife murdered him while he was taking his return-home soak.

But a hospitality-turned-homecoming bath worked out great for Odysseus. When he returns to Ithaca, he does so in disguise and encounters his wet nurse, Eurycleia. Practicing good xenia, Eurycleia offers the travel-weary stranger a foot bath. While washing Odysseus’ feet, she notices the scar just above his knee that he got while boar hunting and recognizes the stranger for who he really is: her master Odysseus.

We see the bath as a ritual of homecoming and recognition again in the Odyssey after Odysseus slaughters the freeloading suitors in his palace. He takes a bath to clean the blood from his body, but also as a way to transition back into being the head of his household. Robert Fagles’ translation of the Odyssey describes Odysseus’ last bath as follows:

The great-hearted Odysseus was home again at last.

The maid Eurynome bathed him, rubbed him down with oil

and drew around him a royal cape and choice tunic too.

And Athena crowned the man with beauty, head to foot,

made him taller to all eyes, his build more massive,

yes, and down from his brow the great goddess

ran his curls like thick hyacinth clusters

full of blooms. As a master craftsman washes

gold over beaten silver—a man the god of fire

and Queen Athena trained in every fine technique—

and finishes off his latest effort, handsome work . . .

so she lavished splendor over his head and shoulders now.

He stepped from his bath, glistening like a god,

and back he went to the seat that he had left

Bathed and restored to his former glory, Odysseus has his famous reunion with Penelope, in which she recognizes her long-lost husband.

Taking a Homeric Bath as a Ritual of Homecoming and Transition in Your Own LifeWe typically think of women taking baths to unwind. But as discussed above, the bath has been used by dudes for millennia to relax and rejuvenate. It’s time we reclaim it, particularly in its Homeric form.

While most of us aren’t out there running spears through people’s necks or slicing out livers like Homeric warriors, we could all use more rituals of transition.

During the workday, we’re elbowing our way through the hustle and bustle of public life. Work requires us to put on figurative armor to deal with the slings and arrows of demanding customers and co-workers and unforeseen mishaps and friction. While only some of us get physically dirty with our work, most of us probably feel a bit of psychological grime on ourselves after a stressful day at the office.

Even though we don’t want to bring that stress home to our families and friends, we often do, as we don’t make a meaningful transition between wearing one hat for our professional roles and donning another in our private ones. This is particularly true for those who work from home; when you go to the office, you at least have the commute as a kind of passage between work life and home life. For those who WFH, the former and latter completely bleed together.

A bath can serve as a pivot point between the two modes of being — a way to wash off the psychological gunk of acting and behaving for others so you can shift into your private self.

After you come home from the office, or after finishing your at-home work day, take a bath before you head into the rest of the evening.

If taking an end-of-the-workday bath is impractical because you’ve got a family who wants your attention as soon as you walk through the door, take your bath after the kids go to bed to mark the transition between the time you dedicate to others and the couple of hours you get to yourself.

If you don’t have time for a daily bath, take one on Friday nights to decompress from the previous days’ stress and mark the transition from the workweek to the weekend.

As far as what a 21st-century Homeric bath looks like, while you probably aren’t in a position to have a maidservant and goddess on hand to soap you up, you can still turn your bath into an intentional, relaxing ritual.

Fill a tub with hot water. Put in some Epsom salts, scented perhaps with lavender or eucalyptus. Light a candle. Decompress.

After soaking for 15 minutes or so, dry off with a nice towel and put on a cozy bathrobe. Anoint yourself with oil . . . or just some Gold Bond lotion.

Slip into some comfortable non-work clothing and go engage in the personal pursuits of your choosing. Hang out with friends. Spend time with family. Work on your hobbies. You’ve sloughed off the garbage of the workaday world and transitioned to private life.

Life’s hard. We got to find ways to decompress and relax. Exercise, meditation, and sleep should all play a role in that restorative process. But don’t forget the Homeric bath.

The post Take a Homeric Bath appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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For most people, their siblings will be the longest-lasting relationships of their lives, potentially enduring all the way from birth until past the death of their parents.

Marked by both jealousy and conflict and love and loyalty, siblings are also some of our most complicated relationships. While a little over half of people describe their relationships with their siblings as positive, about one-fifth classify them as negative, and a quarter say their feelings about their siblings are decidedly mixed.

Here to take us on a tour of the complex landscape of sibling-dom is Geoffrey Greif, a professor of social work and the co-author of the book Adult Sibling Relationships. Today on the show, Geoffrey shares how our brothers and sisters shape us and how our relationship with our siblings changes as we move from childhood to old age. We discuss how the perception of parental favoritism affects the closeness of siblings and how a parent’s relationship with their own siblings affects the relationship between their children. Geoffrey explains how most sibling relationships are marked by the three A’s — affection, ambiguity, and/or ambivalence — and how the relationship can also become very distant or outright severed. We end our conversation with Geoffrey’s advice on developing a good relationship between your children and reconnecting with your own siblings.

Resources Related to the Episode* Geoffrey’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #360 — Understanding Male Friendships * AoM Article: Forging the Bond Between Brothers * Study: “How Experiences with Siblings Relate to the Parenting of Siblings“ * Study: “Differential Effects of Perceptions of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Favoritism on Sibling Tension in Adulthood”

Connect With Geoffrey Greif* Geoffrey’s Faculty Page

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Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #858: The Affectionate, Ambiguous, and Surprisingly Ambivalent Relationship Between Siblings appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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While busy airports tend to get all the attention around the holiday travel season, the highways and byways are actually far more trafficked. Of long-distance travelers — those going 50 miles or more — over 90% are getting to where they’re going by car. Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Year’s are in fact the most heavily trafficked times of year on America’s roads.

While it’s wonderful that folks are traveling to spend time with friends and family, it’s also an unfortunate time of year to be on the roads in certain parts of the country. Icy streets and snowstorms can quickly change a pleasant drive with the family into a stressful and truly dangerous situation, especially if one isn’t familiar with winter driving tactics and practices; it’s a whole different game than driving on dry pavement.

So whether you’ll be passing through conditions on the way to Grandmother’s house that you don’t normally encounter in your home state, or you’ve recently moved to a snowy place and are getting the feel for driving in your first winter there, be sure to acquaint yourself with how to navigate this cold and slick season. Below I offer a primer on this subject, based on input from experts, as well 15 years of my own experience driving in wintry conditions in Minnesota, Iowa, and Colorado.

Before DrivingEnsure proper tire tread. One of the most important things you can do before getting behind the wheel in snowy conditions is to ensure your tires have enough tread to grip the road/snow. While proper tire inflation is also important (even though myths about intentionally underinflating in winter persist, don’t do that; it puts too much pressure on the tire), tread depth is more so. In some states (including my home of Colorado), you can actually get fined in the winter for having balding tires.

You should have at least 1/8” of tread. A quick way to measure this is to simply use a quarter, with George Washington’s head pointing down. Place the quarter in the tread, and if the top of his head is covered, you’re also covered. If the top of his head is visible (at any point around the tire — test multiple points) it’s time for new tires, and ASAP. More winter accidents are caused by poor tread than anything else. In recent years, Colorado State Patrols have tried to underscore this point by measuring tire treads at ski area parking lots and handing out fines if treads are less than that 1/8” threshold.

You’ll see some guidelines saying that 1/16” is okay (which would be passable using the Lincoln penny test), but newer standards and research shows that it may already be too late at that point — especially in mountain environs.

Don’t hesitate to delay your errands/road trip if needed. Pay close attention to weather forecasts. If it’s a week out and the weather looks spotty, no need to postpone plans yet. But check daily what the reports look like, and if it gets to be 1-2 days beforehand and the forecast still calls for blizzard conditions, don’t hesitate to postpone. It’s a hassle, of course, but far better to be safe than sorry. And even though weather forecasting is an inexact science, when it’s just a day or two out they’re more likely than not to be right. You also really just need to know your own confidence levels. Growing up in Minnesota, I have years of winter driving under my belt, so it takes quite a bit to keep me off the road. I have no judgment, though, for someone from a warmer locale canceling plans because they don’t want to be on the snowy roads. Again, use your head, and repeat to yourself over and over that it’s far better to be safe than sorry.

Here’s a pro tip: Use national weather services vs. local reports. In his book The Signal and the Noise, statistician Nate Silver researched this topic and found that local meteorologists tend to exaggerate forecasts (albeit unintentionally — probably) and make things seem just a little worse than what the National Weather service might say. Why does this happen? Because a poor weather forecast is going to garner better TV ratings than a good one. My go-to is weather.gov online and Wunderground on the phone.

Keep winter emergency supplies in the car. While there are some things you should always have in your car, a few are winter-specific:

Blanket(s)
Hat(s) and gloves
Ice scraper
Mini snow shovel
Kitty litter (for tire traction)
Tire chains
Candles (and lighter/matches)

This article goes into a little more detail on these things (plus the other stuff you should be keeping in your car).

Clear the car of snow and ice (ALL of it). After a snowstorm, few things drive me crazier than seeing cars that have cleared off windows and hoods, but left a foot of snow on top that is slowly — and sometimes not-so-slowly but rather all at once — being blown off into the car(s) behind them (including mine). I know it’s hard with your giant SUV, but clear off the entirety of the car before driving. It reduces risk for everyone else on the road.

Know that your 4WD SUV doesn’t make you a Super Snow Driver. While your 4WD is handy for traction, it only works if you’re going at safe speeds at which the tires can actually catch that traction. If you’re going too fast, 4WD won’t help you slow down faster. You still have to practice all of the following safe driving tips, even if you’re driving a tank.

Know your locale. When I was in college, I was once visiting my mom in Seattle over spring break. She lived in the heart of the notoriously hilly city, and while I was there it snowed a few inches. While back at school in Iowa, that wouldn’t cause anyone to even bat an eyelash, I kid you not when I say that the entire city was shut down. People were literally sledding down the streets on mattresses.

It was clear that it would be best for us to stay off the roads, not only because they were filled with gleeful sledders, but because the folks out there driving likely had little to no experience and were making the whole thing more dangerous. In my hometown, those few inches would be nothing, and it was more likely that the folks on the road knew what they were doing (to some degree, at least). In short, know where you are and use your practical wisdom to judge whether or not the situation would be safe.

While DrivingAccelerate and brake slowly. Everything takes longer in snowy and slick conditions. When accelerating, do so slowly. Your tires will be better able to grip the snow and push forward versus if you’re slamming the gas pedal, in which case your tires will just spin and spin.

Same goes for braking. It (hopefully obviously) takes longer to stop on snowy roads. Press the brake slowly rather than slamming it down, and give yourself much more room than you think you need in order to stop. If people would heed this single piece of advice, there would be far fewer winter accidents.

Related: you’ll want to double or even triple your normal following distance to account for this. Give 2-4 car lengths between your car and the one in front of you, depending on your speed. Some experts say to add a car length to every 10 miles per hour in speed in winter driving conditions, e.g. at 30 mph, give 3 car lengths of space. Put another way, give 8-10 seconds between you and the car you’re following; that is, you pass a landmark or stoplight 8-10 seconds after the person ahead.

Drive slower than you normally would, and know your vehicle. It’s okay to be a grandpa on the road when conditions call for it. Drive as fast as you can while still feeling in control of the vehicle, no matter the speed limit (without going over, of course). If it’s 30, and you can safely drive 30, great. If it’s 60, but you can only drive 30, do it. There’s no “right” answer here because it totally depends on the conditions and the vehicle. I drive our 4WD SUV a little differently than our small 2WD Toyota. As you’re driving, you’ll be able to make a determination on how the car is handling, and adjust accordingly. Sometimes when I start out driving in snowy conditions, I’ll hit the brakes on a random stretch of straight road — when nobody is around, of course — just to test out what it feels like. You’ll have to gauge each scenario as it comes.

Let’s talk about hills. Hills are a nightmare in the winter (in fact, if you have 2-wheel drive, it might be prudent to alter your commute routes and the like in order to avoid particularly steep ones). A couple tips to help you navigate them:

On the way up: Don’t floor it. Your instinct might be to give the car extra juice the whole way up the hill, but that’s the wrong approach. It’ll just get your wheels spinning, and you’ll stop making progress. Instead, try to actually get some inertia before you get to the hill so that you don’t have to accelerate too much while you’re on it. Then when the car naturally slows at the top, you can sort of coast into the decline at a nice slow speed.

On the way down: Coast down nice and easy, but don’t hit the brake beyond a gentle squeeze. If you hit the brakes too hard, you’ll slide and possibly lose control. You want the tires to still spin a bit.

Ditch the distractions. For real though. A vast majority of Americans agree that distracted driving — particularly in the form of phone use — is very bad and very dangerous, and yet 70% of drivers admit to using their phone while driving in the past 30 days. We know the problem, but most of us still contribute to it. In poor conditions, you need to be especially cognizant of any distractions in the car. Don’t text, don’t be eating, don’t shave (yes, I’ve seen it), and even consider turning off the radio/music altogether so you can really focus on driving safely.

Watch the road surface closely. Black ice — basically, thin, invisible ice on roadways — is difficult to detect, but if you train your eyes to detect dark, wet, slick-looking patches on the road, you’ll be better able to avoid those areas. Underpasses are notorious black ice zones (they don’t get the sunlight that often melts ice), as are bridges and other elevated roadways (they don’t get residual ground heat, so they stay colder).

Related: Watch things on the road a bit further out than usual. You’re often just looking at the first few cars ahead of you and reacting to what they’re doing. In poor winter conditions, though, you’ll want to look even further ahead. Since things take longer, you need to know what’s happening 10 cars ahead rather than just a couple.

Slow wayyy down for turns. Normally, you’re probably braking and turning at the same time. That’s the wrong tactic for driving in slick conditions. You’ll want to slow way down before the turn — almost all the way down, in fact — because braking and turning would just lead to slipping and a possible wreck. Once slowed — again, almost to a complete stop — you can either coast into the turn, or give it just a bit of gas. This way you’re in full control and can adjust as needed. For instance, if you gas too much and the wheels start spinning, you can take your foot off the pedal and probably gain the traction you need to keep the car in control. If you’re braking and turning, there’s just not as much you can do once you’ve started sliding in an undesirable direction.

Make yourself extra visible. If you’re in a snowstorm, make your car as visible as possible by first always having your headlights on. You can also turn on your hazard flashers when it’s especially poor visibility or if you’re traveling much slower than the speed limit. Flashers alert other drivers of your presence better than just having your headlights on.

Know your skids — and how to avoid/get out of them. A couple years ago the fellas at Team O’Neil Rally School put together an article for us on how to avoid and get out of 5 different skids that occur when driving in the winter. Read that article, and know how to properly apply the brakes when skidding (hint: it does not include slamming the brakes, even if that’s your natural instinct).

Give just a little extra time at stoplights. In snowy conditions, I always wait just an extra second or so to start going at a green light. You never know if someone from the other direction might slide or not be able to fully stop at their red light. Nobody is going to fault you for some extra caution in snowy conditions.

Give a little extra grace to other drivers. If you’re normally a little road-ragey, cool it. You should really cool it anyways, but especially in poor winter driving conditions. Give everyone around you plenty of space, don’t honk if someone doesn’t immediately hit the gas at a green light, etc. You’re not the only one stressed out about getting to work on time, but in the snow, there’s a little more slack all around, including, hopefully, from your employer.

Driving in wintry conditions can be hairy and stressful; you can find yourself gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles for hours on end. Hopefully by heeding the above tips, you can relax a little more (while staying vigilant) and will not only make it through that next snowstorm like a champ, but gain confidence in your winter driving skills as well, which is nearly half the battle.

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The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't

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When someone shares too-private information on Instagram in the search for likes. When someone does any kind of dance on TikTok.

When someone excitedly joins a multi-level marketing scheme. When someone swears they’re turning over a new leaf for the sixth time in as many years.

When someone acts like they’re the first person to discover the arguments for atheism. When someone falls down a conspiracy-theory rabbit hole.

When someone marries a red-flag-waving trainwreck. When someone breaks up with a partner who’s perfect for them.

When someone responds to a small setback with tears or rage.

At such times, it’s hard not to cringe, slap your forehead, and wonder, “Geez, why would they do that?!”

At such times, when your cynicism about humanity deepens and your desire to stay connected to loved ones slackens, there’s a mantra — worth regularly repeating — that will help you cultivate greater patience and empathy for others (and more compassion for your own history of cringeworthy moments too).

“Everyone’s just trying to make it in the world.”

Everyone’s born naked and ignorant and never given an entire guidebook to what lies ahead.

Everyone’s seeking to get their needs met without always knowing how to go about it.

Everyone’s yearning to be liked, recognized, and desired.

Everyone’s struggling to accept that no one will ever love them as much as they love themselves.

Everyone’s harboring some childhood insecurity.

Everyone’s worried they’re exactly as uncool as they imagine themselves to be while staring at the ceiling at night.

Everyone’s starving for significance and hungry for joy.

Everyone’s creating hedges against the fear that it’s all meaningless.

Everyone’s striving to make it count while protecting a heart that’s tenderer than they’ll ever let on.

Everyone’s looking for home.

Everyone’s in need of a little grace.

Everyone’s just trying to make it in the world.

The post Sunday Firesides: Everyone’s Just Trying to Make It in the World appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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You’ve established an exercise routine that has you working out 60 minutes a day. Nice work, champ!

Most days, you can stick with that routine.

But what do you do when you don’t have an hour to work out?

Maybe you’ve got extra work that’s due. Maybe you’re traveling. Maybe kids’ activities are taking up a larger than usual chunk of your day.

Whatever the reason, you’ll likely find yourself in situations where you can’t stick to your regular 60-minute (or 45-minute) workout routine and only have 30, 20, or just 15 minutes to exercise.

What should you do?

Do Something Rather Than NothingBehavioral scientist Michelle Segar works with people to develop healthy eating and exercise habits. In our podcast interview with her, she said perfectionism is one thing that keeps people from exercising regularly. They engage in all-or-nothing thinking when it comes to exercise: “Well, if I can’t do my full 60-minute workout, then it’s not worth exercising at all!”

The reality is that the benefits of exercise accrue over time, and that all physical activity is good for you, regardless of whether it comes in 15-minute or 60-minute stints. In fact, research has found that just a few minutes of vigorous activity a day reduces your cancer mortality risk by 40% and your cardiovascular mortality risk by almost 50%!

Not only do the healthifying effects of exercise add up over the long term, but a short burst of activity will improve your mood and stress levels immediately.

Plus, getting in a workout, however short, keeps you consistent with exercising, solidifying the physical activity habit in your life. The more you solidify that habit, the more you ensure you’ll get the many benefits of physical activity for years and decades to come.

So get it out of your head once and for all that it’s not worth exercising if you can’t do a full workout.

When it comes to moving your body, something is always better than nothing, even if it’s only 15 minutes of something.

Use Your Constraints as an Opportunity to Be an Exercise MacGyverInstead of getting frustrated that you only have 15 minutes to work out, use it as an opportunity to participate in the art of improvisation. Have fun with the creativity that arises when your back’s against the wall. Instead of focusing on what you can’t do, focus on what you can do.

For me, this is the most helpful mindset shift. It’s switching from feeling frustrated that my ideal exercise plans were ruined to getting playful about what I can still do to move my body in a limited timeframe.

Be an Exercise MacGyver!

Focus on Workout Density If you don’t have time to do your regular workout, my barbell coach, Matt Reynolds, recommends shifting your focus to maximizing the “density” of your workout. That means doing as much work as possible in the time you have available.

You can make your 15-minute (or 10- or 20-minute) workout dense in all sorts of ways:

Do one set of AMRAPs. Let’s say you were scheduled to do 3 sets of 5 on the squat, 3 sets of 5 on the bench press, and 3 sets of 5 on the deadlift. Well, if you only have 15 minutes, you don’t have time for all those reps.

Instead of doing 3 sets of 5 on each lift, do one set for as many reps as possible (AMRAP). So you’d do a set of squats for as many reps as possible, a set of the bench press for as many reps as possible, and a set of the deadlift for as many reps as possible.

You might have to lower the weight slightly, but that’s okay. The goal is to get in as much work as you can in the short amount of time you have. With this suggestion, and all the others, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Do supersets. Another way to add density to your workout is to do supersets.

Supersets are when you perform two different exercises one right after another. When doing supersets, you want to combine exercises that work different muscles. This allows one group of muscles to recover while you’re working the other.

A superset can pair together something like bicep curls and tricep dips. But since we’re trying to get the most bang for our buck here, do ones that involve compound exercises that work more than one muscle group. For example, you could combine a lower-body exercise, like the squat, with an upper-body exercise, like the shoulder press. Or you can pair a pushing exercise, like the push-up, with a pulling exercise, like the pull-up.

With a superset, you perform the exercises back to back and then rest between the supersets. While the standard interval of rest between weightlifting sets is ~2 minutes, you can get away with taking a shorter rest when you’re doing supersets, as the first muscle group you worked already got some rest while you performed the second exercise in the pair. If you’re really short on time, go for broke and skip the rest between sets altogether.

Do a bodyweight prisoner workout. If you don’t have access to weights during your abbreviated workout window, try doing a prisoner-type bodyweight workout. They don’t require any equipment, can be done in 15 to 20 minutes, and leave your body plenty fatigued.

One of my favorite bodyweight workouts to do when I’m pressed for time or on vacation is CrossFit’s Cindy WOD.

Set yourself a time limit for the workout. It could be 10, 15, or 20 minutes. Then do as many rounds as possible of the following:

5 pull-ups
10 push-ups
15 air squats

Just repeat that sequence as many times as you can until your timer goes off. There’s no resting between sets or rounds unless you get so tired you have to stop. Cindy will torch calories and send your heart rate soaring. It’s brutal, but you get a lot of work in!

Do HIIT. HIIT alternates very intense bursts of exercise with periods of rest. It’s perfect for small time windows; in fact, you can’t do HIIT any other way (it’s impossible to sustain the all-out effort it requires over a longer period of time).

You can do HIIT with bodyweight exercises or a kettlebell, or on a treadmill, elliptical machine, or bike. Whatever allows you to crank your heart rate up. Choose the modality you prefer.

When you’re doing HIIT as a regular part of your anaerobic training, you’ll want to follow the guidelines we’ve laid out here, which start beginners with a 1:5 work-to-rest ratio. But for this kind of improvised, one-off session, maximize your work density and time-to-sweat ratio by going all out for one minute and then resting for one minute. Repeat these intervals for as long as your timeframe allows.

The above should get you thinking of ways to add more density to your workouts. Experiment and use what works for you.

If you don’t have time to do the kind of effort-dense workout that produces a sweat (and then clean up that sweat with a post-workout shower), just take a walk. Even a short walk is crazy good for both your physical and mental health. If you want to increase the intensity slightly, put on a weighted backpack or Heavyhands it. But a standard stroll is fine too.

Taking any kind of walk will show yourself that you’re committed to daily physical activity. It’s a way to reinforce your physical identity. Exercise is just something you do. It’s part of who you are!

You’ll carry that momentum over to your next full-length workout.

Remember, doing something is always better than doing nothing!

The post You Only Have 15 Minutes to Work Out. What Should You Do? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Even though the legendary poet Homer wrote the Iliad and Odyssey thousands of years ago, my guest would say that these epic poems are just as relevant and significant today, and even represent a kind of scripture.

His name is Adam Nicolson, and he’s the author of Why Homer Matters. Today on the show, Adam makes the case that the Iliad is really the story of a collision between a more rooted, civilized way of life, represented by the character of Hector, and a nomadic, honor-bound gang ethos, represented by Achilles. We talk about how this collision birthed the character of Odysseus — who was both great warrior and subtle diplomat — and the whole Greek consciousness. And we discuss how that consciousness is also our consciousness, as we’re still wrestling with the warring impulses, dramas and dilemmas, and big questions of human experience Homer gave life to.

Resources Related to the Episode Robert Fagles’ translation of the Iliad and Odyssey* * AoM Article: Hector and Achilles — Two Paths to Manliness * AoM Podcast #337: What Homer’s Odyssey Can Teach Us Today * AoM Article: 3 Lessons From Homer’s Odyssey * AoM Article: What Is Honor?

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #857: Why Homer Matters appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When you’re taking part in your daily constitutional, you’ve got a few minutes to yourself where you’re sitting there not doing anything.

To while away the time, a lot of people bust out their smartphones and scroll through social media.

But using your phone while you’re on the pot is kind of gross. And do you really want to let your digital distractor bleed into every conceivable nook and cranny of your life?

Instead, make like your dad did in 1985 and establish a dedicated collection of magazines and books for the bathroom.

Since a visit to the toilet should be short (sitting on the pot too long will give you hemorrhoids), I like to have a book handy that provides quick hits of interesting information. I’m talking literature that will allow me to get something out of it within a three-minute stretch. Consequently, most of my go-to toilet books consist of collections of quotes, factoids, illustrations, and trivia.

Below I share my top ten favorite toilet books that have provided me bite-sized entertainment while taking care of business. Stack a few by your porcelain throne.

Pocket RefI love a good reference book, and my favorite by far is the Pocket Ref by Thomas J. Glover. This little book is crammed with just about every piece of information a man might want to know. Want to know about different lumber types? How about how to tie the fifty most common knots? Need the formula for determining the area of an oblique triangle? It’s all there in the Pocket Ref and much, much more.

The Official Rules: 5,427 Laws, Principles, and Axioms to Help You Cope with Crises, Deadlines, Bad Luck, Rude Behavior, Red Tape, and Attacks by Inanimate Objects The rules contained in this hefty tome are the kind of simple sayings that reveal truths that seem obvious once they’re spelled out, but you hadn’t previously been able to put into words. They’re the kind of quotes grandparents hang up on their refrigerators and employees peg to bulletin boards to give their officemates a gallows-humor chuckle about corporate life.

You can open this book to any random page and find a great piece of wry life advice to help you navigate our often vexing world.

The Illustrated Art of ManlinessShameless-but-appropriate plug: Our book, The Illustrated Art of Manliness, is an excellent toilet read. It consists of a bunch of skills and manly know-how wonderfully illustrated by the talented Ted Slampyak. Each time you take your daily constitutional, you can become a handier, more competent man and learn something new, from how to properly deadlift to how to shoot a gun.

The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is WrongBe prepared to have your assumptions about the world challenged and reversed when you flip through The Book of General Ignorance. John Mitchinson and John Lloyd examine taken-for-granted facts and show how they’re completely wrong. Was baseball really invented in America? Is Mount Everest really the tallest mountain in the world? Was Magellan really the first man to sail around the world? Find out the real dope in this classic toilet book.

Schott’s Original MiscellanyWhile it’s a small volume, Schott’s Original Miscellany is jam-packed with interesting facts and trivia like weather proverbs, the husbands of Elizabeth Taylor, Shakespearean insults, and chess terms. You’ll leave each trip to the loo with some fodder for your next cocktail party conversation.

The Ultimate Worst-Case Scenario Survival HandbookA compilation of the very best guides from the famous Worst-Case Scenario series. Learn how to escape a charging rhino, what to do if you have excessive gas, how to survive if you forgot your wedding anniversary, and more. Some of the guides are silly and fun, but many are dang practical, making it an excellent toilet book.

The Encyclopedia of Cultural LiteracyWe’ve written about the importance of having cultural literacy.

Use your time on the toilet to bone up on yours with a copy of The Encyclopedia of Cultural Literacy. It’s a giant tome of a book, so it’ll provide years of bathroom reading edification. Flip to a random page and read a short section on Greek mythology or literary references every gentleman scholar should know.

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical QuestionsWhen you’re sitting on the toilet, questions might come to your mind like:

What would happen if the earth stopped spinning?

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball hurtling at 90% of the speed of light?

You can learn the answers to these questions by reading What If? Serious Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Randall Munroe, creator of the classic internet comic xkcd, explains and illustrates the answers to some off-the-wall hypotheticals. The explanations are deeply researched and based on science but presented in an easy-to-read and humorous format.

100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous SituationWritten by retired Navy SEAL Clint Emerson, this book covers just about everything a man might need to know to become a secret international operative, or as Clint puts it, a “violent nomad.” There are sections on things like scaling high walls, stealing a plane, escaping from a car’s trunk, and turning a pen into a weapon, accompanied by plenty of illustrations (also done by Ted, so you know they’re great). The chapter on constructing a rectal concealment may be particularly apropos for bathroom reading.

The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to PhilosophyThis is the philosophy textbook every man should own.

Now, you might be thinking, “You’ve included a philosophy textbook on your toilet book list? How does it fit the criteria for a book that will provide a quick hit of infotainment in three minutes or less?”

Well, what’s great about The Great Conversation is that the authors organized the book into brief, very readable sections. In a short bathroom session, you can flip to the Aristotle chapter and read the section on “substance and form.” Maybe not the kind of academy of thought Plato had in mind, but an effective way to learn a little more about philosophy every day.

Bonus: While I don’t own this one, the Uncle John’s series is a classic in the genre that might also be worth checking out. For 35 years, the Bathroom Readers’ Institute has been publishing story- and factoid-filled books specifically designed to be toilet reads.

The post The Top 10 Toilet Books appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative's Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation

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Some people dread winter with its cold weather, long dark nights, and the downcast mood these elements often induce.

But my guest would say it’s possible to befriend winter, and truly enjoy the rhythms and opportunities that are unique to this season.

Micah Mortali is the founder of the Kripalu School of Mindful Outdoor Leadership and an instructor and retreat leader who uses the teaching of ancestral skills to help people develop greater mindfulness and connection with nature. Today on the show, Micah explains why we should consider winter “the night of the year” and how befriending the season involves aligning yourself with its call toward rest and reflection. We first discuss exploring the outdoor world during winter and how learning survival skills like shelter building and animal tracking can help you spend more time in nature, restore your sense of well-being, and simply feel more alive. In the second half of our conversation, we talk about how to improve your interior life during winter, both in the literal sense of making your house more cozy and in the metaphorical sense of turning inward. Micah explains why you should spend one night a week pretending you live off the grid, embrace the power of firelight, and may want to wait until March to make your New Year’s resolutions. We end our conversation with why you might want to read The Road this winter.

Resources Related to the Episode Micah’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #739: Rewild Your Life * Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature by Micah Mortali * AoM Podcast #157: Primitive Pursuits & Winter Survival * AoM Article: How to Make Pine Needle Tea * AoM Article: How to Track Animals — A Primer on Identifying Footprints * Tracking and the Art of Seeing by Paul Rezendes * Tom Brown’s Science and Art of Tracking by Tom Brown Jr. * AoM Podcast #566: How to Have a Hyggely Christmas and a More Memorable New Year * AoM Article: 8 Things That Can Help You Get More Hygge This Winter * “The Forgotten Medieval Habit of ‘Two Sleeps'” * “Can’t Get to Sleep? A Wilderness Weekend Can Help” (Write-up on CU sleep study) * WoodWick Candles that crackle when lit * AoM Article: Carry the Fire * The Road* by Cormac McCarthy * AoM Podcast #760: Cormac McCarthy, The Road, and Carrying the Fire

Connect with Micah Mortali* Micah’s Website * Micah on IG * Micah’s Kripalu Faculty Page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #856: Befriending Winter appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature

Tom Brown's Science and Art of Tracking: Nature's Path to Spiritual Discovery

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“Hair of the dog” refers to solving a problem using the same element that caused it. The expression derives from the old idea that a bite from a rabid dog could be treated by stuffing the wound with fur from the dog that bit you.

The same concept, which the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates termed “like cures like,” can be found across cultures. In Slavic languages, there’s an expression that translates to “a wedge dislodges a wedge.” Italians, Spaniards, and Turks say, “A nail removes a nail.”

Hair of the dog, in all its international iterations, is most popularly used to refer to alleviating the aftereffects of drinking alcohol, by drinking more alcohol. This “cure” is, of course, of dubious value. While it does temporarily make the drinker feel better, it only delays the return of his hangover.

There is, however, an area where the hair of the dog approach produces effective and lasting results: stress.

Nothing torpedoes the chronic stress built up from work crises, interpersonal drama, and the daily grind of setbacks and inconveniences as well as exercise. And exercise is nothing more than the intentional stressing of the body.

Running works wonders for anxiety, despite the fact that — really, because of the fact that — it induces a response similar to a panic attack.

Lifting weights breaks down muscle. Lifting weights can save you from a breakdown.

Sitting in a sauna burdens the body with heat. Sitting in a sauna lightens the load of worry.

When your body is inflamed by stress, the remedy, paradoxically enough, is to inflame it further with more of the same.

When the slings and arrows of the world threaten to consume, the cure is the hair of the dog that bit you: fighting fire, with fire.

The post Sunday Firesides: Hair of the Dog appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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With winter weather setting in, snow days filled with snowball fights will be making an appearance in many places in the Northern Hemisphere. For a refresher on how to build the perfect snowball, we’ve called in snowball-building expert Buddy the Elf.Be sure to refuel after your next snowball fight with a steaming plate of spaghetti covered in maple syrup. The post How to Make the Perfect Snowball: An Illustrated Guide appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Of the dozens of men who have served as US president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a particularly close connection with the citizens he served. The only president elected to four terms, Americans hung FDR’s picture up in their homes, wrote him thousands of letters, and regularly tuned in to listen to his fireside chats.

My guest would say that much of the depth, gravitas, and empathy Roosevelt was able to convey to the country was not something inborn, but in fact grew out of a tragedy which befell him at the age of 39: the contraction of polio. Jonathan Darman is the author of Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President, and today on the show, he paints a portrait of what Roosevelt was like before he got polio, and how, despite charm and ambition, he was considered shallow and a political lightweight. We then discuss what it was like for FDR to get polio, what he did during years of bedridden convalescence, and how the disease and his rehabilitation changed him. We talk about how the influence of FDR’s polio experience can be seen in the way he guided the country through the Depression and WWII, and the lesson in realistic optimism he offers us today.

Connect With Jonathan Darman* Jonathan’s Website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Teddy Roosevelt, the patron saint of the Art of Manliness, had an exuberant love of life.

A friend of T.R.’s described his joie de vivre as the “unpacking of endless Christmas stockings.”

If Teddy Roosevelt approached all of life as if he were unpacking Christmas stockings, what was he like when it was actually Christmas?

According to the man himself, he derived “literally delirious joy” from the holiday.

Below we unpack how T.R. approached Christmastime with strenuous festivity and how you too can enjoy the warmth and cheer of the season just like the Bull Moose himself.

Connect With Your Inner Child It’s been said that Teddy Roosevelt never entirely grew up; there was still a bit of boy in him even when he was in the prime of manhood. He wasn’t childish but retained a childlike capacity for boundless enthusiasm. That connection to the boyish part of himself is one of the reasons he had so much zest for life and why Christmas was always magical in the Roosevelt home.

In his autobiography, Teddy describes Christmases when he was a boy and how he tried his best to recreate the same magic when he became a father himself:

In the evening, we hung up our stockings — or rather the biggest stockings we could borrow from the grown-ups — and before dawn we trooped in to open them while sitting on father’s and mother’s bed; and the bigger presents were arranged, those for each child on its own table, in the drawing-room, the doors to which were thrown open after breakfast. I never knew any one else have what seemed to me such attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce them exactly for my own children.

So the first step to celebrating Christmas like T.R. is reconnecting with your childhood sense of wonder and fun. Think about your favorite holiday memories growing up. What traditions do you remember enjoying the most? Is there a way to recreate them, in perhaps new form, now that you’re an adult?

Put Up a Christmas TreeThere’s a famous story that Theodore Roosevelt banned Christmas trees from the White House because of his commitment to conservation. In 1902, the story goes, his 8-year-old son Archie snuck a contraband Christmas tree into a closet and decorated it with the help of a White House carpenter. On Christmas morning, he surprised his father with the Christmas tree, and, just like the Grinch who has a change of heart, Teddy Roosevelt lifted his ban on tannenbaums.

There’s only one problem with this story: it’s largely humbug.

Roosevelt was never anti-Christmas tree. The Roosevelts put a tree up in their Oyster Bay home, and T.R. gave a tree to the local school there each year.

It is true that the family didn’t put a tree up in the White House the first Christmas they spent there in 1901. But it wasn’t because Teddy was against the idea. The practice of putting up a tree hadn’t taken such hold in the country that it was considered a sacrosanct tradition (it wasn’t until the 1920s that Christmas trees became a regular fixture in Americans’ homes), and it seems the Roosevelts just decided not to have a tree that year.

It’s also true that Archie snuck a Christmas tree into the White House in 1902. On Christmas Day, he threw open the closet door it was hidden behind to the surprise and delight of his family. Upon the tree, he’d placed a gift for each of his parents and siblings, as well as the Roosevelts’ pets, “Jack the dog, Tom Quartz the kitten, and Algonquin the pony, whom,” T.R. said, “Archie would no more think of neglecting than I would neglect his brothers and sisters.”

After Archie’s caper, Christmas trees became a regular thing in the Roosevelt White House.

So if you want to celebrate Christmas like T.R., don’t hesitate to put up a tree (a real one — always a real one!) and enjoy the evergreen smell and twinkling lights of one of the very best parts of the season.

Do Good, Maybe While Dressed Up Like SantaWhile he was growing up, Roosevelt’s father would donate money and volunteer his time to provide Christmas dinner at the local newsboys’ lodging house. As a young man, Roosevelt followed in his father’s footsteps by doing the same.

As an adult, Teddy continued the tradition of doing good at Christmas by handing out presents to children at the local school in Oyster Bay. First, he would give a speech. Roosevelt said his speeches “[were] always mercifully short, my own children having impressed upon me with frank sincerity the attitude of other children to addresses of this kind on such occasions.” He’d then pass out presents to the kids, slap folks on the back, and say, “Bully Christmas!”

Some historians suggest that Roosevelt would dress up like Santa while passing out the gifts. This has never been confirmed, but I’d like to imagine T.R. dressed up like Old Saint Nick.

Go Big on the Presents for the KidsWhen Roosevelt was a boy, his parents gave him more practical presents for Christmas. But he liked to get his own kids a spread of gifts that were designed for their imaginative play and sheer delight. He loved watching the looks on their faces when they caught sight of their holiday haul.

In a letter, Roosevelt described the excitement of Christmas mornings in his home:

At seven all the children came in to open the big, bulgy stockings in our bed; Kermit’s terrier, Allan, a most friendly little dog, adding to the children’s delight by occupying the middle of the bed. From Alice to Quentin, each child was absorbed in his or her stocking, and Edith certainly managed to get the most wonderful stocking toys. Bob was in looking on, and Aunt Emily, of course. Then, after breakfast, we all formed up and went into the library, where bigger toys were on separate tables for the children.

I wonder whether there ever can come in life a thrill of greater exaltation and rapture than that which comes to one between the ages of say six and fourteen, when the library door is thrown open and you walk in to see all the gifts, like a materialized fairy land, arrayed on your special table?

Roosevelt was, of course, well-off and could afford to get his kids a nice array of presents, and one shouldn’t go into debt to make Christmas morning a big extravaganza. But within reason, and within one’s budget, it can be enjoyable to lay out an impressive assortment of goodies. After all, Christmas comes but once a year! (And your kids will be out of the house before you know it. Have you seen this chart? Boy, that chart). You don’t need to give your kids cool gifts to spend quality time with them, naturally. But it does make for a memorable bit of annual fun.

A historical side note here: According to the book Christmas Past, it wasn’t until the 1950s and 60s that wrapping Christmas presents became a thing. Most families just put the toys unwrapped in stockings or on a table like the Roosevelts. Growing up, my siblings and I each had our own couch where Santa placed our presents unwrapped, Rooseveltian style. Kate grew up with Santa putting wrapped gifts under the tree. To each their own.

Go for a Christmas Eve Sleigh RideSleigh-riding was a big thing in the late 19th century, and it developed its own culture that was all about drinking, having a good time, and even a bit of male bravado (really getting that sleigh chugging along and taking the downhills with gusto!). “Jingle Bells” is a song that arose from this sleigh-riding culture.

On Christmas Eve, Roosevelt would get his family all bundled up and go for a more domesticated sleigh ride to church.

Unfortunately, we don’t get enough snow here in Oklahoma to go for a sleigh ride. But one day, we’d love to spend a Christmas in a cold climate, partly to check taking a yuletide sleigh ride off the bucket list.

Go to ChurchTeddy Roosevelt was a regular churchgoer and always attended Christmas Eve service with his family. He’d typically attend Christ Church while residing in Oyster Bay and Grace Reformed Church when he lived at the White House.

Roosevelt had fond memories of singing Christmas songs with his congregation in Oyster Bay:

One of the hymns always sung at this Christmas eve festival begins, ‘It’s Christmas eve on the river, it’s Christmas eve on the bay.’ All good natives of the village [Oyster Bay] firmly believe that this hymn was written here.”

Our family goes to Catholic Mass on Christmas Eve. The sights, sounds, smells, and chance to belt out Christmas hymns help get us in the spirit.

Now that you know how to celebrate this most wonderful time of year like Teddy Roosevelt, have yourself a very Bully Christmas!

__________________

Sources:

Theodore Roosevelt for the Holidays: Christmas and Thanksgiving with the Bull Moose by Joshua Hodge

Christmas Past: The Fascinating Stories Behind Our Favorite Holiday’s Traditions by Brian Earl

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People sometimes ask me what I think of video games. I think that, in moderation, they’re a fine source of the kind of passive entertainment we all need little doses of in our lives. But for me personally, I rarely play video games because there’s just too much other stuff I’d rather do instead.

There is one notable exception to my ambivalence towards video games, however. A game which I played for hours with thorough enjoyment and zero regret: Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s a video game that’s more immersive and story-like than most others, and even gets you reflecting on the existential layers of life.

Here to discuss those deeper layers of Red Dead Redemption 2 with me is Patrick Stokes, a professor of philosophy and fellow fan of the game. We combine two of my favorite things — Red Dead Redemption 2 and the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard — in a conversation on the existential themes you can find in the game like nostalgia, freedom, choice and consequences, and the certain uncertainty of death.

Resources Related to the Episode AoM Podcast #790: Kierkegaard on the Present (Passionless) Age * AoM Podcast #635: The Existentialist’s Survival Guide * “Art for Trying Times: How a Philosopher Found Solace Playing Red Dead Redemption 2″ by Patrick Stokes * Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death by Patrick Stokes * “A Special Way of Being Afraid” — Kathy Behrendt on the fear of non-existence in death * A Very Easy Death by Simone De Beauvoir * Photo of Lewis Powell — conspirator in the Lincoln assassination * “The Ruin” poem * Kierkegaard quote on living life forwards * Mimesis as Make-Believe by Kendall Walton * The Ethical Demand by Knud Ejler Løgstrup * Patrick’s articles on New Philosopher*

Connect With Patrick Stokes* Patrick’s Website * Patrick on Twitter

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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #854: The Existential in Red Dead Redemption 2 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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The other day I was helping a guy move. We were carrying heavy stuff like pianos, dressers, and even an old cabinet hi-fi stereo.

As I was helping him load this stuff in the U-Haul truck, I got to thinking, “I can deadlift 550 pounds, but carrying one end of this stereo feels a lot harder than a 550-lb deadlift. What gives?”

To find out what gives, I got some insight from my barbell coach Matt Reynolds (who also happens to be a former professional strongman who’s hoisted lots of heavy stuff in his life) and strength coach Dan John (who recently exhorted listeners of the podcast to incorporate carrying work into their fitness routines). These masters of strength filled me in on why carrying heavy feels harder than lifting heavy, why you need to work on both strength capacities, and how you can incorporate heavy carrying into your fitness programming.

Why Carrying a Heavy Load Feels Harder Than Lifting a Heavy LoadIf you’ve ever wondered why you can pick up a 315-lb barbell with ease, but struggle to carry a 50-lb bag of mulch to your backyard, Matt says you can chalk up the difference to two big factors:

Carrying heavy uses different movement patterns and muscles than lifting heavy. When you lift a barbell off the ground in the deadlift, the movement is simple and the muscles you use will be the same every time you perform the exercise. Not so with carrying a heavy load. While walking with something heavy looks similarly simple, there’s a lot more going on there than when you’re simply lifting a bar up and down: carrying a heavy load requires your body to stabilize and brace itself — and it has to do that with every step you take. This is especially true when you’re carrying an “odd” object — something that’s not uniform in size, shape, and/or density.

“Carrying heavy is a skill that must be practiced and developed,” Matt told me. “Even if you’re really strong, the first few times you carry a really heavy load, you’re not going to be able to go that far. But after a few sessions of practicing it, it gets easier and easier. Your body has to learn how to express the strength you have in the carry exercise.”

Carrying heavy is more work than lifting heavy. Lifting a heavy barbell is definitely intense, but the length of exertion isn’t very long. You just have to lift the bar up and then bring it back down. It’s a hard exertion, but a short one.

Carrying a heavy sandbag for 50 yards requires a lot more effort than simply lifting a bar up and putting it back down. You’ve got to exert yourself for a much longer time period. That’s the big reason why carrying a 50-lb bag of mulch from your pick-up truck to your backyard can feel a lot harder than deadlifting 315 pounds once. You’re doing a lot more work when lugging that bag than you are just lifting a barbell once off the ground.

You can increase your ability to carry load for longer periods of time through training; you just have to start carrying heavy more often.

Why You Should Carry Heavy, and Not Just Lift HeavyLoaded carries are functional. “There’s nothing more functional than carrying heavy stuff,” says Matt. Yes, lifting heavy is functional, and being able to deadlift or press heavy has come in handy a few times for me. But I’ve found myself having to carry moderately heavy stuff for distance much more often than I’ve had to lift a really heavy thing just once. You’ve got to be able to carry your kids when they’re tired/sick/asleep, carry your grocery bags inside (and ideally do it in just one run from the garage!), and hoist the aforementioned bags of mulch. If you want to be good at these functional, everyday movements, you need to practice them by carrying heavy stuff in your workouts.

Loaded carries build the strength of multiple parts of your body. Carries strengthen your core, develop your hip stability, and create a yoked upper back. They’re also incredible for building your grip strength, an often overlooked capacity that aids your ability to perform all kinds of strength movements. Dan John believes it was adding the multidimensionality of loaded carries to his workouts that allowed him to have his best year as a strength athlete at age 47. “Loaded carries was the gap in my training,” he told me.

Loaded carries are great for all-around conditioning. In my podcast interview with John, he mentioned that he’s noticed that when his athletes start doing loaded carries, their work capacity, or conditioning, goes up. That is, they’re able to train longer and harder.Loaded carries are a great way to top off a training session and build your all-around fitness. As John’s written, “The loaded carry does more to expand athletic qualities than any other single thing I’ve attempted in my career as a coach and athlete.”

Loaded carries build your “stone” and Anaconda, Arrow, and Armor strength. Another thing John argues is that loaded carries build what professor of kinesiology Stuart M. McGill calls your “stone.” Your “stone” is your strength in stability. When you’ve got stone, you feel like you can stand as strong as one; when someone pushes you, you don’t move. When you lift something heavy, your core turns rock hard and energy doesn’t leak out like it does when you’re soft and all Jell-O-like. Loaded carries help build the muscles that give you stone.

John further breaks “stone” strength into three subcategories: Anaconda, Arrow, and Armor:

Anaconda. Anaconda strength is the type of strength that allows you to squeeze the life out of something. You use this strength when you bear hug a heavy bag, for example. John points out that when you squeeze with Anaconda-stone strength, you’re not just squeezing with your arms. You also need to push out with your upper body so that you squeeze the object from both sides. That ability to push out and tense the upper body makes you more rock solid.

Arrow. Arrow strength is your ability to keep your body straight and under tension whenever you’re exerting yourself. “When you watch an arrow in slow motion leave a bow string, it bends back and forth, but it’s always fighting to stay straight and tense,” John explained to me. “You want to be like an arrow: always fighting to stay tense when you exert yourself. Body tension is key to strength. It’s what allows you to lift heavy or tackle someone without hurting yourself.”

A heavy farmer’s carry helps you develop that Arrow-stone strength because as you walk with heavy dumbbells in your hand, your body naturally wants to go slack as you take a step with that heavy weight. You’ve got to fight that tendency and keep yourself as tense as possible throughout the duration of the carry.

Armor. If your skin and muscles aren’t used to taking on certain pressures and grappling with rough surfaces, blood vessels are more apt to break and blisters and scratches are more likely to form. Your body has to get used to friction and pressure by getting less sensitive and more calloused. This process of toughening your hide and making it more impenetrable and stone-like is what John calls “armor” building.

Armor building is what lets MMA fighters get kicked really hard in the shin but not feel as much pain. Armor building is what allows you to do a low crawl on a hard, rocky surface, but not be writhing in pain and get seriously scuffed up while you do it. Armor building is also important in helping your carry heavy loads.

When you lift heavy barbells, your hands get pretty calloused, but the rest of you stays soft and sensitive. Loaded carries can help build your “armor” in other places. For example, when I first started rucking, I’d have these big red marks on my skin from where the ruck straps dug into my shoulders and they’d slowly turn into bruises. I don’t get that anymore because my back has been toughened from rucking regularly. The first time you carry a big rock on your shoulder, it’s going to hurt because the pointy edges of the rock dig into your skin. After a few times carrying a pointy rock on your shoulder, it won’t bother you as much; it’s just rock rubbing on stone!

It’s fun. Carrying heavy stuff is just fun. It’s a great way to break the monotony of moving a barbell up and down.

You’ve Got to Lift Heavy to Carry HeavyWhile carrying heavy requires developing a set of skills and a capacity that is distinct from lifting heavy, the two do overlap, and your ability to lift heavy is key in your ability to carry heavy. “Carrying heavy is an expression of strength,” Matt says. If you want to be able to carry heavy, you’ve got to be able to lift heavy. A guy who can deadlift 400 pounds is going to be able to carry more than a guy who can only deadlift 200 pounds. So don’t do one type of exercise to the exclusion of the other.”

How to Carry HeavyThere’s really not much to developing the capacity to carry heavy. Find something heavy, pick it up, and practice carrying it. But if you’re looking for specific loaded carry exercises to do, below you’ll find some ideas.

Keep in mind that one of the advantages of developing your carrying capacity is the functional advantage it produces, so while you can do some of these exercises with a dumbbell or kettlebell, the uniform shape, size, and texture of these loads is not going to adequately prepare you for what you may be called upon to hoist in the real world. Subbing in a heavy rock or log every now and again will make your carrying capacity more versatile, prepare you for everyday tasks and emergencies, and build your body’s “armor” as well. To make carry workouts even more challenging, and fun, practice carrying objects over and under obstacles, and while you’re balancing on a narrow surface (like a 2X4 or a log).

How much weight should you use? Depends on the exercise, and there aren’t strict standards. The lighter the weight you use, the farther you’ll be able to walk and the more of an endurance exercise it will be; the heavier, the shorter distance you can go, and the more of a strength workout you’ll get. Experiment with different weights and find a sweet spot where it’s not too heavy — you should still use good technique; don’t be leaning to one side too much, or rounding your back — but still feels challenging.

As to timing and frequency when incorporating loaded carries into your programming, it’s of course going to depend on your personal goals. But a pretty universal plan is to aim to do loaded carries once a week, performing one or a few exercises at the end of your normal workouts. If you’re doing them for strength, practice the same exercises each week, increasing the weight you use and/or distance you go each week. If you’re doing them for conditioning, you can mix up the exercises each week, and just see how much you can do with each exercise before getting fatigued. Either way, it’s a great way to finish a workout strong!

Farmer’s WalkPick up a heavy dumbbell or kettlebell in each hand and walk as far as you can in 30 seconds. The next workout, shoot for 45 seconds. The following workout, aim for a minute.

Suitcase CarrySimilar to a Farmer’s Walk except you only carry one heavy dumbbell/kettlebell in one hand. This imbalance forces you to work extra hard to stand up straight. Walk as far as you can in 30 seconds. Switch hands on the dumbbell and carry it again for another 30 seconds. The next workout, shoot for 45 seconds. The following workout, aim for a minute.

You can also “split” the Farmer’s Carry and Suitcase Carry and do a cross-body carry: carry one weight by your side, and one weight overhead.

Press CarryHold two dumbbells over your head and carry them for 30 seconds.

Waiter’s CarrySimilar to a press walk, except with just one dumbbell. You’ll look like a waiter carrying a tray. Carry for 30 seconds, switch hands and carry for another 30 seconds. Work your time up with each workout.

Sandbag CarryMake yourself a really heavy sandbag (here’s a tutorial on how to do it). Mark off 25 yards. Pick up the bag and carry it 25 yards as fast as you can. Carry the bag however you want. Hoist it on your shoulder, bearhug it, or mix up the two ways. Repeat 5 to 10 times. Great metcon workout to finish your training session with.

Fireman’s CarryOne of the most vital benefits of being able to carry heavy is having the capacity to carry someone to safety in an emergency. It’s a physical skill that’s not wholly trained through lifting a uniform weight, nor through carrying one. You’ve got to practice with an actual person. So know how to perform the Fireman’s Carry, throw a human over your shoulder, and see how far you can transport them.

RuckingCarrying doesn’t just involve hoisting a load with your arms, but also shouldering a load on your back. To strengthen this capacity, you’ve got to practice rucking — that is, walking/hiking with a loaded backpack. Rucking has a bunch of benefits, including the fact that it’s easier on the knees than running, but still gives you a cardio workout. Plus, carrying that load for miles helps build your stone.

A Combo of the AboveSomething Matt recommends is taking multiple carry exercises and putting them together into a carrying gauntlet. Start off with 30 seconds of a Farmer’s Walk, then move right into a Sandbag Carry, and then go right to a Press Carry. Great conditioning circuit.

Dan John says that practicing loaded carries will change your life in 3 weeks. Try it and see!

For more advice on carrying, as well as why it’s important to build both your brawn and your brains, listen to our podcast with John:

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One of the most difficult existential questions is why bad things happen to good people, especially if there’s a just, benevolent force at the helm of the universe. Seneca, an ancient Stoic philosopher, offers an answer that invites us to consider ourselves as athletes and warriors. He first observes that the “part of each man […]

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“Looks like I gotta go commando.” We all know what that phrase means. It means you’re going to wear pants without underwear. But why do we call the act of not wearing underwear beneath pants “going commando”? Did commandos actually go commando? AoM investigates. Where Did the Phrase “Going Commando” Originate? Doing some sleuthing into […]

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Most leadership advice says the same thing: to be a good leader, you need to be generous, humble, and authentic. My guest, professor of organizational behavior Jeffrey Pfeffer, would say that kind of advice may make us feel good and represent the world as we’d like it to be, but it doesn’t actually work in […]

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“I need your John Hancock.” “He’s the prodigal son of our family.” “That job was like working in the seventh layer of hell.” “He has a Willy Loman-esque resignation about him.” “We’re navigating between Scylla and Charybdis here.” Anybody with the literacy of an eighth-grader could read those sentences. Heck, a third-grader could read those […]

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Mental illnesses of all kinds are on the rise, and yet we seem no closer to being able to treat them effectively. We’re only able to treat the symptoms of mental illness, but aren’t often able to put the illness into remission because its root cause has been a mystery. My guest, however, believes he […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in February 2021. The popularity of beards has waxed (the mid 19th century) and waned (the 1950s), and for the […]

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In the 19th century, scientists conducted dissections on live animals to study their living anatomy. Known as “vivisection,” the operations were highly controversial. While some argued that vivisection imparted valuable insights that couldn’t otherwise be gleaned, others felt the additional knowledge the practice produced was negligible, especially when weighed against the cruelty involved in harvesting […]

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It’s that time of year again, when we share our top men’s gift ideas from Huckberry. It’s hard to go wrong with getting family members and friends any of the items featured above, and if you need even more options, check out the variety of well-curated shops that Huckberry has put together. Each is eminently […]

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Our world has never been more convenient and comfortable. With just a few taps of our fingers, we can order food to our door, access endless entertainment options, and keep our climate at a steady 72 degrees. We don’t have to put in much effort, much less face any risk or challenge, in order to sustain […]

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We’ve all seen Norman Rockwell’s famous painting, “Freedom from Want.” It’s become synonymous with Thanksgiving. One of the things that stands out to me about that depiction of Thanksgiving in some small-town home in mid-20th century America is the kindly grandpa wearing a suit and tie. I reckon that his usual workaday clothing was a […]

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In 2016, David Sax wrote a book called The Revenge of Analog, which made the case that even as we marched towards an ever more digital future, we were increasingly returning to real, tangible things — choosing vinyl records over streaming, brick and mortar bookstores over Amazon, and in-person conversations over Skype. In the intervening […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in November 2019. According to a survey cited by psychology professor Robert Emmons, when parents were asked what they […]

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When you’re sitting at a poker or blackjack table, you’ll have stacks of chips in front of you. You’ll likely find yourself fiddling with them out of boredom or nerves. If you’re going to fiddle with your chips, at least do it with some flare by shuffling them. Shuffling chips not only offers at outlet […]

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When I started to barbell train with gusto seven years ago, I noticed that my knees would make a loud crackling noise when I squatted. It sounded just like milk hitting Rice Krispies. I had never heard my knees make noises like that before, so I assumed something was terribly wrong. “Great! I’ve given myself […]

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Amongst supposedly monogamous couples, 23% of men and 19% of women have cheated on their current partner, and while studies have long found that men are more likely to cheat than women, that gap has significantly narrowed over time; in fact, married women between the ages of 18 and 29 cheat at a slightly higher […]

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Over the years, I’ve tried to implement various morning and evening routines. The goal of these routines was to get more of the important things done and provide a rhythm to my life. I can still flip through the pages of my journals and see the various detailed outlines of my routines: Morning Routine 5:30 […]

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You’ve heard of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. But did you know that its author, Stephen Covey, was in his late fifties when it came out? After it became a monumental bestseller, Covey continued to work on new book ideas, one of which encapsulated his own experience with late-in-life success and his commitment to having an ever-forward-looking attitude. A […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in November 2016. One of the earliest articles we published on the Art of Manliness was “100 Must-Read Books […]

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Dwight D. Eisenhower started smoking cigarettes in his junior year at West Point. He would soon begin smoking them in a near-endless chain. He could smoke fifteen cigarettes in the course of a few hours, and regularly worked his way through two to three packs a day. In the weeks leading up to the Invasion […]

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While we all wonder how we would fare if we had to survive for months in the wild like Brian does in the book Hatchet, the reality is that most survival situations only last a day or two. You get lost or injured in the woods and have to spend a night out that you hadn’t planned on. […]

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Welcome back to Bro Basics, a series that covers exercises that are popular and can be useful but are often done inadequately and shows the exercises’ broader function and how to perform them correctly. Bros do a lot of isolation moves like the exercises we’ve covered in this series so far: the tricep extension, the […]

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When Kate was growing up, her grandfather often told her that when he was serving on a Navy ship during WWII, there were two things he and his fellow sailors never talked about: religion and politics. In the present age, we’re apt to think that leaving politics off the table like that is inauthentic, or […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2021. I started baking bread a few years ago. The simplicity appealed to me. With just four […]

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Once you know someone’s political party, you can probably guess all kinds of other things about them: the area they live, the car they drive, the podcasts they listen to. In the modern age, citizens seek to bring every aspect of their lives, from their philosophical perspectives to their lifestyle choices, into alignment with their […]

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If you’ve got a military buddy, you may have heard him spell something out using whole words that begin with each of its letters. For example, if he’s on the phone and needs to spell his name, he might say something like: Juliet. Alpha. Charlie. Kilo. That’s “Jack.” Juliet, Alpha, Charlie, and Kilo are words […]

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In the 80s and 90s, few sports stars loomed as large as Bo Jackson. A Kansas City Royal and an Oakland Raider, he was the rare athlete to play two professional sports. His strength and power seemed supernatural. He soared into end zones, ran the 40-yard dash in 4.13 seconds, hit meteoric home runs, and broke baseball bats […]

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You walk down your hallway and do a double-take. At about the height that a six-year-old stands, in the chicken-scratch scrawl that a six-year-old uses, someone has written “PoOPy HEAd” in crayon on the wall. Your son is six years old, as tall as an average six-year-old, and enjoys saying phrases like “poopy head.” Hmmm […]

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There are two parts of the mind: the conscious and the unconscious. While the former dominates your attention, the latter actually occupies far more of the brain, influencing your mood, generating inspiration, and making you who you are, all behind the scenes. My guest would argue that to become all you’re meant to be, you […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in May 2018. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour […]

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You probably brushed your teeth this morning. And will do so tonight. And 730 more times in the year to come. As soon as the last load of laundry is folded, it’s time to put in another wash. As soon as you’re done eating and cleaning up one meal, it’s time to start making the […]

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You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your f***ing khakis. The above represents one of the most memorable and fist-pump-inducing quotes from Fight Club. And it certainly includes a lot […]

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This past week, we had our first cold snap of the season in Oklahoma. It got down to a blustery 27 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday morning. BRRRRRR!!!! It reminded me that now is the time to stock up on my winter driveway and walkway clearing supplies. Oklahoma weather is unpredictable. Every few years, we’ll get […]

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The Twilight Zone is arguably one of the best and most influential shows in television history. The reason it endures, and is still being watched and talked about more than sixty years after its debut, can not only be traced to its superior storytelling and innovations in the genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, […]

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It’s indisputable that hydration is a top priority when you’re hiking or backpacking. More debatable is the best way to carry the water that makes that hydration possible. There are two main ways to carry water in the outdoors: in a bladder/reservoir or in a bottle — often a Nalgene bottle. Each of these water-carrying […]

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A lot of people feel dissatisfied about how they spend their time. They often feel busy, but that busyness doesn’t add up to anything — not to fun, not to fulfillment, not to memories. My guest, Laura Vanderkam, has spent a lot of time thinking about and studying time, and last year she decided to […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in August 2021. Years ago, I found myself at Kate’s ten-year high school reunion. As I surveyed the room […]

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You may have heard that life is not a dress rehearsal. That you can’t wait for your “real life” to begin. You get this idea. You understand it. But you are still waiting, aren’t you? Even as you get on in age, even as more and more of the things you thought about when you […]

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Ideally, you’d keep all your vehicles stored inside your garage when not in use. The garage protects your car from the elements, reducing its wear and tear and preserving its structural integrity, aesthetics, and future resale value. But for various reasons, you may be unable to keep your car in the garage. For one thing, […]

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The two years, two months, and two days Henry David Thoreau spent at Walden Pond represent one of the most well-known experiences in American literary and philosophical history. Thoreau’s time at Walden has become something of a legend, one that is alternately lionized and criticized. Yet though many people know of Thoreau’s experience at Walden, […]

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Almost twenty million self-help books were sold last year. But the popularity of self-help literature is hardly a modern phenomenon. Some of the writings of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers arguably fall into the personal development category. So do pieces of literature that were written every century after their time. In a way, this can […]

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“Don’t be a quitter!” “Quitters never win, and winners never quit!” These maxims encapsulate our usual attitude towards quitting, which is to see it as a bad thing, a weakness, a character defect. We celebrate those who stick with things, who have grit. But my guest would say that quit and grit are just two sides of the same coin, and that quitting is a […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in January 2015. To be a well-groomed man, it’s not necessary to be hyper-concerned about your appearance and scent. You […]

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Just as soon as the party invitation, funeral notice, or wedding announcement arrives, the familiar thoughts begin: Do I have to go? Will I be missed if I don’t? Is there any way to get out of this? Even when the summons comes from a close friend or beloved family member, there are often other […]

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At your local gym, you may have seen a tube on the ground that’s attached to a swivel joint and pivots in all directions. It’s called a “landmine” and looks like the picture above. Even though you may have seen it around, and have a vague idea that you can insert a barbell into the […]

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Travel can often be approached as just another consumer good; travelers quickly dive in and out of a place, check off the things they want to see, harvest the requisite pictures to prove they were there, and wear their trip as a status symbol. My guest, Rolf Potts, thinks there’s a better way to approach […]

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Way back in 2010, I bought a vintage wool mackinaw cruiser on eBay. Boy, was it a handsome jacket. I got a great winter season of wear out of it. When spring arrived, I put my mackinaw in the coat closet and forgot about it. When we had our first cold snap the subsequent fall, […]

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The ancient Greeks and Romans thought a lot about what it means to live a virtuous life. They believed that good character was essential for achieving both individual excellence and a healthy, well-functioning society. For this reason, they also thought a lot about whether virtue could be taught to citizens, and philosophers put this thinking […]

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The post Podcast #838: Can Virtue Be Taught? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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A year and two months after his wife died, Ralph Waldo Emerson opened her tomb. Emerson had been visiting Ellen’s grave daily since she’d succumbed to tuberculosis, just two years into what had been a happy, golden marriage. But on a gray day in March 1832, Emerson decided to not only talk to Ellen as […]

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Charisma can make everything smoother, easier, and more exciting in life. It’s a quality that makes people want to listen to you, to adopt your ideas, to be with you. While what creates charisma can seem like a mystery, my guest today, communications expert Vanessa Van Edwards, says it comes down to possessing an optimal […]

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Note: My guest in this episode, Dr. Earle Labor, died on September 15 at the age of 94. Earle was the world’s foremost authority on one of the Art of Manliness’ guiding inspirations and lights: Jack London. Earle dedicated his career to London scholarship and his work was pivotal in turning London’s literature into a subject of […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in November 2017. When I was a boy, whenever there was a food or activity that I didn’t want […]

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In the world of sports, when a star player leaves his team for another franchise, hometown fans often feel disappointed and indignant. Yet while we decry such displays of disloyalty in athletes, we tend to approach all of our own decisions — even those unrelated to business and career — with a similar free agent […]

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If we’re going to be harkening back to the 1970s in terms of economic inflation, we might as well harken back to that decade for something much groovier: corduroy. While corduroy clothes came to prominence during the age of gas shortages and boogie nights, they’ve never entirely gone out of style (though baggy 90’s-era corduroy […]

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Dip your toes into the world of personal finance and you can find plenty of questions which are the subject of endless debate. How much of your income should you save? Is it okay to take on debt? Which is better — renting a home or owning one? When it comes to the stock market, […]

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In one of the emails Oliver Burkeman, author of Time Management for Mortals, sent out to his subscribers, he talked about how we typically treat our to-do lists like buckets that we need to empty every day. The problem, Burkeman observes, is that the to-do list is a bucket that never entirely empties. As we […]

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Our lives are populated by rituals. Baptisms. Funerals. Graduations. Singing happy birthday, chanting cheers at a sports event, saying grace before dinner. When we perform rituals, there’s no causal link between the behavior and the hoped for effect; for example, there’s no causal connection between exchanging rings at an altar and becoming wedded to another […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in September 2021. Even if you’re not a master carpenter, you likely have a tape measure on hand. It’s […]

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Have you ever noticed that you tend to feel more down at night? You’re more apt to think about embarrassing moments and regrets, and to feel that certain areas (or all areas) of your life aren’t going well. A sense of general hopelessness sometimes creeps in. There are biological reasons for this. Your circadian rhythm […]

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You’re working under a boss who really rubs you the wrong way. So you quit your job and take another. But in your new office, you find yourself stuck with a co-worker who bugs the tar out of you. The presence of annoying, incompetent, and underhanded people isn’t a particular workplace problem, but a universal […]

The post Podcast #834: The 7 Types of Work Jerks (And How to Deal With Them) appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Last week we discussed Edwin Friedman’s theory of what makes groups dysfunctional. Friedman laid out his ideas in A Failure of Nerve and based them on the “Bowen family systems theory.” He posited that many modern families, organizations, and even nations have an emotional system characterized by “chronic anxiety” — a high level of tension/nervousness that the […]

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Amidst the epic clashes of armies and navies that make war such a fascinating subject, lie the smaller human interest stories that prove just as compelling. One such story is that of World War II soldier Joe Johnson Jr., which is told by Marcus Brotherton in a newly published book called A Bright and Blinding […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2016. Six years later, we’re still doing weekly marriage meetings ourselves, and still finding them greatly beneficial. […]

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Whenever someone says something like “____ aspect of modern society is worse than it’s ever been,” someone else will invariably jump in with: “Please. People have always wrung their hands about that. Even the ancient Greeks complained about societal decline and ‘kids today.’” Person B offers their counter with a “case closed” finality, and it […]

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Summer is coming to an end, which means the end of hot, buggy days and nights here in Oklahoma, and the end of the impossibility of enjoyably camping around these parts. It’s the beginning of crisp autumn days and nights, and the beginning of our favorite time of year to camp. Problem is, it’s the […]

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When you were a kid, teachers and parents probably told you to concentrate. And as an adult, you likely often think about how much more productive, present, and happy you’d be if only you had better focus. But despite how much we think about our desire to improve our focus, no one ever gets any […]

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Humans are social animals. Anthropologists argue that humans have been so successful as a species because we’re great at coordinating and cooperating. This high degree of sociability allowed hunter-gatherer tribes to kill giant mastodons and modern societies to land people on the moon. When human groups function in a healthy and coherent way, we can […]

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Why do some people who look can’t-miss high-achievers on paper end up floundering in life, while those who can seem like underdogs end up flourishing? When my guest noticed this phenomenon while being involved in the selection process of veteran SEALs for a specialized command, it led him to the discovery that beneath more obvious […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in July 2016. As Lesley M. M. Blume observes in Let’s Bring Back: The Lost Language Edition, while clothing […]

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When you have a kid, there inevitably comes a time when she not only wants you to push her on the playground swing, but to swing beside her. And as you pump your legs towards the sky for the first time in a couple of decades, you think to yourself, “Hey, this is fun.” Swinging […]

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Growing up, I’d watch my dad gather his EDC every morning: Billfold Fish and Wildlife Service special agent badge Pen Pocket knife Pistol Pocket comb The other day, I found myself thinking about the last entry on that list, and how many other men my dad’s age also carried a black comb in their back […]

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The smell of searing meat over an open flame brings us back to a primal state. Whether you prefer the fatty goodness of a ribeye, the lean and clean flavor of a flank, or a good old-fashioned T-bone, the keys to perfection are proper heat and timing. Follow the quick-hit guidelines above, and if you […]

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As an economist, Russ Roberts has been taught to approach decision-making by conducting an analysis, weighing tradeoffs, and then rationally budgeting resources to get the most bang for his buck. But as he explains in his new book, Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, he found this approach woefully inadequate for […]

The post Podcast #831: Grappling With Life’s “Wild Problems” appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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In the United States, over sixty percent of people live a sedentary lifestyle. A quarter of the population gets no physical activity at all. Maybe you’re one of these sedentary folks. Physical activity is just not something you do. It’s not part of your life. Why is this? Why are so many adults physically inactive? […]

The post The Importance of Having a Physical Identity appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Being adept at discerning people’s true thoughts and intentions is a valuable skill to have. Knowing when someone is deceiving you can protect your finances, your professional interests, and your loved ones. Here to teach us some of the elements of this skill is Dr. David Lieberman, who’s a psychotherapist, a consultant to the military […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in February 2018. You’re staying in a cabin with some friends and family in the remote wilderness far from civilization. […]

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We think of life as moving in a single direction. Left to right. Up then down. So it is that when things are going well in some area of life — we’re cruising professionally, swooning romantically, killing it creatively, clicking socially, thriving spiritually (and maybe even firing on all these cylinders at once) — we […]

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Last year I developed a terrible case of tennis elbow. On the day of its initial onset, I woke up feeling fine. But by the afternoon, it felt like electric shocks were surging through my right forearm, just below the elbow. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but it’s painful. I started to do some […]

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No kid forgets getting his first bike, nor the surge of independence he felt the first time he pedaled away from his parents. And even as adults, the bike seems to give off a feeling of romance, of freedom, and, when you get going fast enough, even of flying. The special allure of the bicycle […]

The post Podcast #829: The Bicycle as Freedom and Flight appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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We’ve long been advocates for the idea of intentionality. In a universe where everything defaults to the path of least resistance, good stuff doesn’t just happen. You have to make it happen. This is a truism we’ve applied to everything from creating a positive family culture to getting the most out of your leisure time. […]

The post The Case Against Scheduling Your Fun appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Do you feel stuck in life? Inwardly you keep repeating the same thoughts, outwardly you keep repeating the same routine, and on and on a cycle of unhappy disappointment goes. To break the cycle, maybe what you need to do is watch a film that has become synonymous with this kind of stuck-ness — Groundhog […]

The post Podcast #828: The Groundhog Day Roadmap for Changing Your Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2014 and written by Creek Stewart, Senior Instructor at the Willow Haven Outdoor School for Survival, Preparedness & […]

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In the realm of physiology, being “metabolically flexible” means that your body can use whatever fuel is available to meet its energy demands. It can readily switch between burning carbohydrates or burning fat (whether that’s fat you ingest or fat already stored in your cells). While a metabolically inflexible individual gets cranky and lethargic if […]

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In The Safety Trap by security expert Spencer Coursen, he mentions that a surprising number of burglaries occur because the homeowner left a door or window unlocked. He describes one case where a wealthy client of his kept the key fobs for his luxury vehicles near the front door. The rich client failed to lock […]

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A wrench (or “spanner” for those who use British English) provides grip to keep nuts and bolts from turning and torque to help you turn fasteners more effectively. Like all the tools every man should have in his toolbox, it’s a fairly simple instrument to employ. But also like all the tools in your toolbox, […]

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When we think about people who can live anywhere, we tend to think about corporate-employed remote workers and online entrepreneurs. But many other kinds of professionals, from teachers to doctors, could hypothetically find a job anywhere, and thus live anywhere they’d like. If you’re what my guest Melody Warnick calls an “anywhereist” and have seriously […]

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Step inside the homes of many middle-class, middle-aged Americans, and you’ll find decorative wooden signs and vinyl lettering upon the walls that declare things like: “Live, Laugh, Love” “Bless This Mess” “Family Is Everything” “It’s Wine O’Clock” It’s the kind of stuff you see at Hobby Lobby or in the Instagram feeds of moms pumping […]

The post Live, Laugh, Life Is Hard! The Ceiling Word Art of Michel de Montaigne appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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I’ve been barbell lifting for seven years. In that time I’ve hit some personal records that I’m proud of: a 615-lb deadlift, 225-lb shoulder press, and 465-lb squat. The last couple years though, I haven’t notched these kinds of big milestones for a combination of reasons, including dealing with injuries, having less time, and experiencing […]

The post Podcast #826: From Novice to Advanced — The Weightlifter’s Journey appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Today marks the 77th anniversary of the end of World War II. It’s a milestone that feels both distant in time, and not that long ago. There are still those living among us who experienced the attack on Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Normandy, and the celebration of V-J Day firsthand. But each year, they […]

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The Art of Manliness Podcast aims to deepen and improve every area of your life — from philosophy to fitness — by interviewing some of the world’s most interesting and insightful thinkers. The show has been around since 2009 and is now over 800 episodes strong. Brett does the interviews, Kate produces and edits the […]

The post Did You Miss These? Here Are 5 of the Best Episodes of the AoM Podcast So Far This Year appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Matthew Dicks wears a lot of hats. Among other things, he’s a storyteller, communications consultant, writer, and schoolteacher. In order to excel in his professional life, as well as do what he loves in his personal life, he’s developed a set of strategies that help him be more creative and productive, and can be used […]

The post Podcast #825: Tactics and Mindset Shifts for Making the Most of Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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If you’ve been listening to this show or reading the AoM website for awhile, then you likely know what my favorite book of all time is: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. It’s therefore my real pleasure to be able to talk all about that novel today with Steven Frye, professor of American literature and author of Understanding Larry McMurtry. […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2021. Next week, Kate and I will be joining a friend in Colorado for a backpacking trip. […]

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Since growing my hair to Sam Elliot length, I’ve had to think more about my mane. That’s the biggest downside of having longer hair: it requires more upkeep. For starters, it takes longer to dry. When I had short hair, I’d quickly run a towel through it and get on with my day. Now I’ve […]

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A lot of us have niggling bodily pains. A bum knee, a tight hip, an achy back. My guest would say that the cause of those maladies, as well as their cure, can likely be traced to a common source: your posture. His name is Vinh Pham and he’s a physical therapist and the author of Sit Up Straight: Future-Proof […]

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Have you ever noticed that at your office or church, a small fraction of people do the lion’s share of the work? This is just one manifestation of what’s called the “80/20 rule.” Once you understand the 80/20 rule, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. And be able to use it to significantly improve your life. […]

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As a member of the Ottawa Tribe and someone who’s worked with over five hundred tribal nations, my guest has long been inspired by his Native American culture and heritage, particularly the tradition of native warriors. And he thinks those warriors have much to teach all modern people about work, life, and leadership. His name […]

The post Podcast #822: Developing the Warrior Within appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2017. The polo shirt is a true men’s style staple. Yet despite its ubiquity in the male […]

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“It is not the critic who counts.” If this line from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech is taken to mean that the individual who takes action has far greater worth than he who merely casts stones from the sidelines, then it can be adopted as an unassailable truth. If, however, it’s taken […]

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It’s been freaking hot around the world this summer. Here in Oklahoma we’ve had more than a dozen days in July alone with temperatures over 100 degrees. The chances of suffering a heat-related illness like heat exhaustion and heat stroke go up during extreme heat. According to the CDC, between 2004 and 2018, an average […]

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As men, we all want to be physically capable. We want to be able to save our own life in two ways: in the more metaphorical sense of wanting to preserve it in healthy, fit form for as long as possible, and in the more literal sense of being able to make it through an […]

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When it comes to automotive maintenance, your tires often get the short shrift. Unless you get an electronic low inflation warning up on your dashboard, you’re not apt to think about your wheels very much. But your tires are the workhorses of your car. They’re the only thing on your vehicle that directly contacts the […]

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You struggle with being productive. So you decide you need to establish a routine for yourself. You get real gung-ho about this routine — this is going to be the thing that changes everything! But then you fail to stick to it. So you flagellate yourself for that failure and decide what you need is […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in September 2018. You’re in the woods near the end of the day and you ask yourself: should I […]

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Skills are abilities we can learn and get better at. We tend to think of them in terms of concrete, physical pursuits, which often involve the use of tools or instruments. Shooting a gun. Fixing a car. Playing the piano. We think of all other traits and activities as things that just sort of are […]

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When I was growing up, my family road tripped to our vacation destinations. That usually meant getting in the Aerostar and driving west on I-40 to Albuquerque. I didn’t fly on a plane until I was nineteen years old. I married into a family of flyers. Kate’s dad worked for American Airlines, so they got […]

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The squat is one of the most basic human movements, and calls upon some of the largest muscles in the body. If you want to be as strong as possible, you want to work as many of these large muscles as possible. Enter the low-bar squat. When most folks squat at the gym, they likely […]

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We like to think that our personal safety and the safety of our loved ones is something that other people — law enforcement, school administrators, social media moderators — will take care of for us. My guest today, Spencer Coursen, would say that while this mindset may help us feel safe, it’s actually when we feel the most safe, that we’re in the greatest […]

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Despite assuming the presidency from the 20th century’s narrowest election victory, John F. Kennedy captivated the American public’s imagination, even before his untimely death. What was it that made JFK so compelling in his own time, and continues to contribute to his enduring appeal today? We dive into the answer to that question by unpacking some […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2020. This guest article was written by Tony Galloway. There was a time when nearly every man […]

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According to Parkinson’s Law, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” A homemaker or employee will linger and dawdle over their chores and responsibilities because they can, in order to fill the day or eight-hour shift. How much time they spend on each task comes to seem like how much […]

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I have a confession to make: I don’t make my bed. I never saw the point in it; I’m just going to mess up the covers again that night. I don’t spend much time in my bedroom, and my guests don’t spend any, so it’s not as if anyone has to keep looking at my […]

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There are thousands of books, podcasts, and social media posts about how to be more productive, strengthen your relationships, find your purpose, and be your all-around best self. And there are legions of programs and seminars out there designed to help you improve your life. All together, self-help represents a multi-billion dollar industry. But despite its ubiquity and […]

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Our family has been taking more road trips these past few years. In the last six months, we’ve driven to New Mexico twice and Colorado once. We’ll be driving to Wyoming later this summer. When you’re on a road trip, food is a primary concern for everyone in the car, especially kids. Kids love stopping […]

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In 1981, Time magazine stated: “If you are ever in a crucial life-changing negotiation, the person you want on your side of the table is Herb Cohen.” Cohen was then known as the world’s best negotiator, and had worked with Fortune 500 companies, professional athletes, and US presidents, and also penned the bestselling book You Can Negotiate […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in March 2008. When a man packs for a trip, he packs his main bag, and then he packs […]

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You’re going round and round on a decision. You’re trying to figure out whether or not you need to make some change in your life. And you feel like you’re just one more reddit-trawl, advice-soliciting text, or journaling session away from finding the answer. But, chances are, you already know the answer. You already know […]

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Much has been made of the increasing number of Americans living alone (in 1960, single-person households constituted 13% of all households; today, they represent 28% of them). But such a period is not without historical precedent. While 51% of men ages 18-29 are single today, in 1890, 67% of men in roughly the same age […]

The post A Celebration of the Ideal Bachelor From 1906 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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In the modern age, people are bombarded with more information, and are more personally responsible for managing that information, than ever before. How do you stay on top of your schedule, work responsibilities, financial obligations, and the spigot of media that runs full force 24/7 while not only avoiding becoming overwhelmed, but actually using all […]

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In 1826, John Stuart Mill had an existential crisis. He fell into a deep depression and contemplated suicide for a year. Mill was only 20 years old. What made his existential malaise so perplexing was that since the day he’d been born, his entire life had been designed to generate the utmost happiness. Mill’s father […]

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In March of this year, Mark Vande Hei returned to earth after spending 355 days in outer space. Today on the show, I talk to Mark about what it was like to spend nearly a year in orbit, and how he ended up setting a new record for the longest spaceflight by an American astronaut. We […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in May 2021. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once opined, “War is the father of us all.” It’s certainly […]

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My war against annoying flying pests continues. The battle against mosquitoes seems to be going well. Eliminating and treating standing water around my house has significantly reduced the number of mosquitoes I’ve encountered this summer. Huzzah! It’s time to move on to my next winged enemy: the wasp. Just look at one of those narrow-waisted, […]

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Whenever you get into an argument, whether you’re discussing politics with a colleague or the distribution of chores with your spouse, you likely feel like you’re floundering. You feel worked up, but you don’t feel like you’re getting your point across, much less convincing the other person of it, and the conversation simply goes in […]

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Postcards were first printed in the mid-1800s, and over the next century, hundreds of billions of them would be sent around the world. Between June 1907 and June 1908 alone, Americans exchanged 667 million of them. As author Lydia Pyne argues, the astonishing ubiquity of postcards made them the “world’s first social network.” Practical and […]

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The 18th century doctor, civic leader, and renaissance man Benjamin Rush was one of the youngest signers of the Declaration of Independence, edited and named Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, implemented medical practices that helped the Continental Army win the Revolutionary War, made sure Benjamin Franklin attended the Constitutional Convention, and shaped the medical and political […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in August 2019. Editor’s Note: This is a guest article by Marine Corps veteran and paramedic Charles Patterson. Imagine […]

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In a classic experiment conducted by the psychologist Solomon Asch, participants were placed in a group, shown a “target” line alongside a set of comparison lines of varying lengths, and asked which was closest in length to the target. The answer was always obvious, but unbeknownst to the study’s actual participants, they had been placed […]

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95% of people say that they’re self-aware. But only 10-15% of people actually are. As my guest today says, that means “on a good day, 80% of us are lying to ourselves about how much we’re lying to ourselves” and this blind spot can have big repercussions for our success and happiness. Her name is Tasha Eurich, and […]

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Lifts like the deadlift and barbell row are mainly back exercises. Both also secondarily strengthen your grip. Holding a heavy bar in your hands will do that. And a strong grip is pretty dang handy to have. Yet no matter how much you strengthen your grip, its strength will never be on par with that […]

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In your quest to become a better home chef, you probably find yourself wondering things like: What potato should I use in this recipe? How much salt should I put in this dish? Am I even making spaghetti right? But then you forget to Google the answer to your question, or if you do, you […]

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Sometimes people criticize the youth of today for their failure to launch into adulthood. They think those stuck in prolonged adolescence are lazy, soft, and unambitious. Other people lay the blame at the feet of the mothers and fathers of these young adults. They say that parents coddle their kids, indefinitely extending their childhood. These […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2014. Throughout this year we’ve been running a series on how to father with intentionality and create […]

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Travel can offer a lot of good: memory-making adventure, mind-expanding experiences, and plenty of fun and relaxation. It’s not surprising then that most people say they’d like to travel more than they do. What’s keeping them from fulfilling that desire? Well, one obstacle, especially these days, is that the high price of plane tickets puts […]

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There are people we really love — friends and family we consistently enjoy and feel strong affection for. There are people we completely despise — folks we positively can’t stand. Then there is a category of people which sits right in between. You might call them “frenemies,” though the “enemy” part of that compound can […]

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A lot of young men today struggle in finding their footing in adulthood. They feel lost, directionless, and unsure of who they are and how to confidently and competently navigate the world. Part of the reason for this is that most young men today lack something which was once a part of nearly every culture […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in May 2013. A few years ago, we published a guest post on suit buttons, and one of the […]

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Amidst all the preparation required to leave for a trip — all the ticket purchasing, itinerary planning, suitcase packing, and checklist reviewing — you sometimes start to wonder: “Man, is dealing with all this stress even worth it?” We’re taught to think that stress = bad. And stress certainly can be detrimental when it isn’t […]

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For several years, I attempted to become a front pocket wallet kind of guy. I had gotten tired of the discomfort of sitting on my old billfold, and thought a change was in order. Consequently, I tried out a couple different variations of front pocket wallets. In switching to a front pocket wallet, I did […]

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Puzzles may seem like fairly pedestrian pastimes — fun ways to while away a rainy afternoon. And while they certainly do make for satisfying diversions, my guest would say they’re also more than that, and can teach us plenty about life as well. His name is A.J. Jacobs, and he’s the author of The Puzzler: […]

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Have you ever wondered why it is that being called a coward is considered such a grave insult? It’s because courage is the lynchpin of character — that which makes possible every single one of its other dimensions; as Samuel Johnson once said (and Winston Churchill later paraphrased): “courage is reckoned the greatest of all […]

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We’ve all heard by now just how important strong relationships are to our health and well-being. But a lot of the common advice and conventional wisdom out there about how to build stronger relationships doesn’t end up taking us closer to that goal. My guest today has spent years sorting through what really builds better […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in April 2021. You’ve started a serious weightlifting program. You’ve increased your protein consumption. Now, how long before you […]

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Have you ever read an ancient, sacred, or philosophical text — something dense, difficult, or foreign — that was heavily footnoted? At first, you tried to figure out the text yourself before turning to the bottom commentary for clarification. But then, over time, you started jumping right to the footnotes to see what things meant. […]

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The summer months are here, and with them, a change in mood, expectations, and itineraries. If you (and your family — you only get 18 summers with your kids, after all!) want to make the most of the season’s unique possibilities for fun and memory-making, below we offer a list of the many summer-related resources […]

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Remember how in the book Hatchet, the pilot who’s flying Brian up to Canada suffers a heart attack and dies, and Brian has to figure out how to land the plane? That scenario may seem as unlikely as having to survive for months in the bush with only a single trusty hand-tool, but it happened […]

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There are a bunch of different ways to cook eggs: hard-boiled, poached, scrambled . . . heck, you can even make them in the microwave. When it comes to making an egg sandwich or putting an egg on a burger (and a burger should seldom be without one) there’s no question as to which method […]

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Friedrich Nietzsche is famous for espousing a philosophy that may be a help in wrestling with existential angst and finding meaning in life. My guest would say that Nietzsche’s philosophy may also be useful for figuring out something else: how to have a healthy relationship with modern technology. His name is Nate Anderson and he’s […]

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On the Art of Manliness, we talk about many things, from personal development, to physical fitness, to concrete skills and know-how. If you’ve ever wanted to do more than just listen to/read the content we publish, and desire to start taking action in these areas, then The Strenuous Life is for you! The Strenuous Life […]

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The Medal of Honor is the military’s highest and most prestigious decoration and is awarded to a member of the United States Armed Forces who “distinguished himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.” During World War II, no U.S. unit would produce more […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in July 2020. Have you had a depressing and demoralizing few weeks, or years? One of the best ways […]

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Growing up, did you ever do one of those puzzles where you were shown a hyper-zoomed-in photo of some object or animal and had to guess what it was? It could be hard to recognize what you were looking at until you flipped to the zoomed-out answer. “Oh, it’s a butterfly.” Those ultra-close-up photos represent […]

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The bicycle is one of the greatest tools of self-reliance. Without any need for electricity or gas, it can carry you far distances. But bikes only work towards your self-sufficiency if you know how to maintain them. They may have fewer complications than an automobile, but they’re still machines that can break down and need […]

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There was a time when learning to ballroom dance was part of every gentleman’s education. You had to be able to show up to a formal ball, ready to lead some swell debutantes around the room and show off your fancy footwork. These days, more formal dances are few and far between, being primarily comprised […]

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When you look back on the moments you regret most in your life, a fair number of them likely involved you being angry. And if these cringe-inducing, life- and relationship-damaging moments happen more often than you’d like, then it’s time to start thinking about how to get a handle on your anger. My guest today […]

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In the 19th century, the source of the Nile River remained one of the greatest mysteries of geographic exploration. The story of how the British eventually found it is one of adventure, danger, and bravery, but also arrogance, envy, and resentment. Here to offer some snapshots from this dramatic expedition is Candice Millard, author of […]

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When it comes to the biggest problems in modern Western society, things like obesity, anxiety, depression, and of course, COVID-19, surely rank near the top of the list. Every year, the United States spends $200 billion on mental health services, another $200 billion on conditions related to obesity, and has thus far spent trillions on […]

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If you’ve been following AoM long enough, you know I like philosophy. I’ve written about philosophy on the site and talked to lots of philosophers on the podcast. Philosophy isn’t some esoteric practice for me. It’s practical. I turn to philosophy to figure out how to live a good and meaningful life. But it’s also […]

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If making small talk makes someone anxious, it may just be because they have a fear of such interactions, and my guest today, Rich Gallagher, can help them overcome it through his practice as a therapist. Or, someone’s anxiety around small talk can be based in part on simply not knowing how to do it, […]

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Summer is almost here so I’ve been thinking about refreshing my wardrobe for the warmer weather. Dressing for warm weather has always been befuddling for me. I usually end up wearing a simple t-shirt with a pair of shorts. If I need to dress up a bit, I’ll go with a polo shirt. But sometimes […]

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Have you ever driven along the coastline, or walked by a local pond or lake and thought about taking a dip, but felt hesitant about swimming in what you know is cold water? My guest today, who argues that cold water swimming is one of the very best things you can do for your mental […]

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in May 2016. Have you ever had someone come to you crying? Maybe your wife had a brutal day […]

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When writing Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway titled one of its sections “Pursuit as Happiness.” The heading, a riff on the Declaration of Independence’s celebration of “the pursuit of happiness,” not only well described Hemingway’s feeling about the safari he undertook which the book recounts, but his entire life’s philosophy. Hemingway was ever in […]

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Welcome back to Bro Basics, a series that covers exercises that are popular and can be useful but are often done inadequately and solely for aesthetics and shows the exercises’ broader function and how to perform them correctly. In our last edition of Bro Basics, we covered a popular back exercise done with a machine: […]

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You may not wear a tie very often, and when you do, you’re likely apt to layer it over a white dress shirt and call it good. That’s certainly a safe option. But it’s also a rather boring one. A lot of guys are intimidated by the idea of mixing different color/pattern ties with different […]

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When it comes to improving our lives and reaching our goals, we often think of changing our personal habits and routines. We think about ourselves, but don’t look outside ourselves. But my guest would say that if we really want to change and make progress, we also need to surround ourselves with positive, strengthening people, […]

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Of the short stories Jack London penned, “In a Far Country” is my favorite. The story follows two characters London calls “The Incapables” who travel to the savage and unforgiving Alaskan North searching for gold and adventure. The men make a very poor go of things: they bicker, shirk chores, hoard food, take pleasure in […]

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A lot of people really dislike conflict and have a low opinion of it. They’re uncomfortable with disagreements at the office, think there’s no room for contention at church, worry that fighting with their partner means their relationship is destined to dissolve, and generally feel that heated arguments tear communities apart.

My guest today, Ian Leslie, used to be one of these conflict-averse people. But as he discovered in researching his new book, Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes, conflict not only brings us together, the lack of it, he says, just plain makes us stupider. Today on the show, Ian and I discuss why people get the idea that conflict is unproductive from watching online arguments and why these flame wars aren’t actually indicative of the value of arguing offline. We then delve into this surprising value, from the way conflict makes us smarter, to how couples who have heated arguments are actually happier. Ian unpacks some of the myths around difficult conversations, such as the idea that they have to be done in a strictly rational and unemotional way to be fruitful, and he offers ways to approach conflict that will make it more productive, especially remembering to always prioritize the relationship above all.

Resources Related to the Podcast * AoM Article: The Rationality of Emotions * AoM Podcast #559: How to Handle Difficult Conversations * Podcast #648: Lessons in Building Rapport from Experts in Terrorist Interrogation (With Laurence Alison) * reddit — Change My View

Connect With Ian Leslie * Ian’s Website * Ian on Twitter

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Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. A lot of people really dislike conflict and have a low opinion of it. They’re uncomfortable with disagreements at the office, think there’s no room for contention at church, worry that fighting with their partner means the relationship is destined to dissolve, and generally feel that heated arguments tear communities apart. My guest today, Ian Leslie used to be one of these conflict averse people, but as he discovered in researching his new book, “Conflicted, How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes,” conflict not only brings us together, the lack of it, he says, just plain makes us stupider. Ian unpacks some of the myths around difficult conversations, such as the idea they have to be done in a strictly rational unemotional way to be fruitful, and he offers ways to approach conflict that’ll make it more productive, especially remembering to prioritize the relationship above all. After the show is over, check out our show notes at AOM.IS/conflict.

Alright, Ian Leslie, welcome to the show.

Ian Leslie: Thank you, Brett. Very good to be here.

Brett McKay: So you got a book out called “Conflicted, How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes.” I’m curious, how did you take a deep dive into the nature of social conflict?

Ian Leslie: Well, I think, like a lot of things, we can blame Twitter for it. I… [chuckle] My last book was about curiosity and I was looking for, I guess, another aspect of human nature that I thought hadn’t been fully investigated or not in a really interesting way. And as I was thinking about this, I was both observing and then sometimes participating in really stupid toxic arguments on Twitter, kind of futile bickering. And again, I think that really is what brought it to mind, I was thinking, “There’s so much bad argument out there, why is that? And what can we do about it?” And I felt it particularly because I’m a pretty conflict averse person myself. I actually try and stay out of conflict or direct disagreement, or at least I did. But the more I looked into it, and the more I thought it, and the more I kind of researched this topic, the more I came to think that actually the problem is not that we have an excess of disagreement, it’s actually the opposite.

The problem is people like me. [laughter] the problem is that people like me see all this, the kind of top of the iceberg, the toxic stuff on social media and on TV, and we think, “Wow, this just confirms what I thought,” which is that, “Disagreement and argument is really something to be avoided and I’ll do anything I can to do so.” What happens when you do that is you make yourself a little bit stupider, to be blunt. [chuckle] Conflict is one… Well, really the central way, disagreement is kind of the central way in which we do our thinking collaboratively and it’s also something as we’ll talk about that I think brings us together ultimately, even if it puts stress on relationships. In the meantime… So we can’t do without it. We might pretend, we might think we can, we might try and avoid it, but actually, when we try and avoid it, things just get worse.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And we’ll dig into some of the benefits, the surprising benefits of disagreement and conflict. A lot of it’s counterintuitive from popular advice out there. But before we do, I think people do have this in general a hunch that, okay, through disagreement, you can do sort of this synthesis, right? Where you can get a new idea. And so that’s why we go into debates, with that idea. It never turns out that way ’cause it becomes acrimonious, like you said, Twitter is a perfect example, and so we think, “Okay, to make these debates more productive or these conflicts more productive, we gotta use some certain techniques and approaches so it’s more rational.” What are some of these popular approaches that people typically take to make sort of corral debate and discussion and conflict, and then why don’t they usually work?

Ian Leslie: Well, I mean, one of them is just to, as you indicated, is to become extremely rational, is to say, “Look, we’re going to discuss this. Let’s take all the emotion out of it. Let’s model our discussion on a kind of Oxford seminar or [chuckle] something where we just talk about the facts, and we talk about reason, step by step.” And that is really… First of all, it’s kind of implausible, I mean, your emotions are nearly always invested in what you’re… The point you’re arguing to some extent, and as much as you try and suppress them, they find their way out and people [chuckle] can sense it, right? But secondly, it’s just in a way it’s naïve. It’s actually your emotions help you to do thinking, right? We think with our emotions as well as our faculty of reason, and this has been demonstrated many times in different ways by cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and so on. And philosophers talked about this, David Hume said, “Reason is the slave of the passions,” and it should be, [chuckle] because when you’re emotional, you actually… You drive yourself to come up with better answers and better arguments. So I don’t think that taking emotion out of it is a wise idea, nor do I think falling back on a kind of very strict series of rules about going step by step and taking one point at a time, all this stuff can be useful in certain limited context, but for the most part, I think you have to go with the grain of human nature rather than against it.

Brett McKay: Alright. So this I idea of, “You can take emotion out of the debate, that will solve it,” that’s naïve, implausible, and actually you make the case, and we can talk about this later as we go throughout our discussion, it makes discussion or debate kind of impotent, kinda limp, and it takes some of the…

Ian Leslie: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. But another thing you make, a point you make about conflict, that people often overlook, conflict isn’t often over facts, it’s usually about a relationship. Can you flesh that out a little bit more for us, what you mean by that?

Ian Leslie: Yeah. So if you talk to communication scientists, psychologists who kinda study communication, conversation, they will tell you, and I’m putting it in very simple terms, but there are fundamentally always two channels of communication that are opened during any tense conversation. Actually any conversation, but they become very apparent when there’s some conflict at stake. One is the content channel, and that’s the kind of… The content is the thing that we are ostensibly arguing about. We’re arguing about who should be running the country, or if we’re at home we’re arguing about who should take the trash out, whatever it is, that’s the content of the disagreement. And then there’s this other level, which is actually not verbalized most of the time, not articulated, but it’s the relationship level, and that’s going on underneath, sort of submerged, and that’s about what I think about you and what you think about me. Do you like me? Do you respect me?

I’m thinking that, and you’re thinking that, or if it’s a group of people, we’re all thinking that to some extent. And until that relationship level is settled in some way, then the content level is going to be disrupted, and it will kinda go off the rails. And often when arguments, disagreements go wrong, and the participants are thinking, “Wow, this is going badly. Why is he being so crazy?” Or, “Why is he being irrational? Why is he not listening to me? Why is he so sullen? Why is she being so sullen?”, whatever it is, it’s always because there’s some unsettled dispute at that kind of invisible relationship level, and you need to get to that first. And this is where the smart disagreer, somebody who’s skilled at productive disagreement, productive conflict, this is what they’re good at. They’re very good at being attentive to that relationship level and working out ways to fix it when it needs fixing.

Once it’s fixed, and you have a mutually satisfactory relationship in the conversation, then you can really get into the content level and have a really vigorous disagreement because nobody is feeling slighted, put out, ignored, and so on. So just bearing in mind those two levels I think is really important.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, I think people will see this in relationships, like marital relationships, when couples argue about something like cleaning out the egg pan after you finish it, it’s really not about the egg pan, it’s just about a mutual… It’s about respect, basically.

Ian Leslie: I would say more that it’s about both, and it’s always about both at the same time. And you kind of have to keep your eye on both. And when people have studied this, I hate to conform to or to confirm stereotypes, but it is more often than not, the men who are not paying attention to the relationship level of an argument and only focusing on the content. They’re usually the ones thinking, “Oh, well, I’m just being very rational and focusing on the thing that we’re arguing about. Why is she getting so upset?” And meanwhile, the woman is actually paying attention to relationship level and she’s saying, “Now why is he being patronizing to me?” Or, “Why is he bossing me around?” Or, “Why is he not recognizing how much work I do in this household?” There’s some underlying thing going on here that she’s attentive to and the man’s not, and you get that imbalance.

Now one of the interesting things about that line of research is that it’s not that men are “hard-wired to”, in inverted commas, to only focus on the content level, ’cause actually when they’re given an incentive to do so, that actually give the man money to pay attention to it, they can do it perfectly well, [chuckle] it’s just that they’re not motivated to do it most of the time. And you see that in other contexts too. Often the person who’s on the kinda wrong end of the power imbalance is the person who’s really paying attention to that more emotional relationship level, and the person who’s not is just looking at the surface content level.

Brett McKay: Okay, so I think two takeaways so far we’ve gotten is that when you’re in a conflict or a discussion that’s conflicted, don’t discount emotions, don’t discount the relationships. You gotta keep those two things in mind, it’s not just about facts, and we’ll talk about how…

Ian Leslie: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Some advice or… I’m not gonna call them techniques, but principles that you can use to use your emotions in your relationships to make conflict more productive. But before we do, I think a lot of people have this feeling that you had looking at Twitter. I mean, they look at it and they’re like, “Man, this is just terrible. I get into these debates. No one changes their mind. Everyone’s angry. This was not useful. This was not a productive use of time.” And I think what you talked about, that we don’t always have a strong relationship or any relationship with the people we engage with online, is part of the reason for that. And then, another thing you talk about in the book that I thought was really interesting and that I think can help us understand why online arguments are so unproductive, is this idea of high context and low context, and online communication is primarily low context. Can you flush that out for us?

Ian Leslie: Yeah, it’s a distinction from Anthropology. They talk about it in terms of countries and sort of global cultures, but actually you can apply it in all sorts of ways, but let me explain it through that lens. So they would say these are two types of communication culture. A high context communication culture is, an example would be China or Japan, usually the Asian countries are more high context, and what that means is the social context in which you’re in does a lot of the talking for you. So a conversation around a boardroom table in Japan, you would find, compared to a western boardroom, there’s less verbalizing of people’s opinions. People are… Really kind of express themselves much closer according to the roles that everybody has in the room. You don’t have to say much, everything is said obliquely. And you don’t really have direct disagreements, that’s seen as very gauche and rude and disruptive.

And that can work, because everybody understands the context, everybody has a very kinda deep immersion in the kind of relatively homogenous culture of a Chinese boardroom. In a western boardroom or western office or any kind of a western context, you have much lower context culture because you have more diverse groups of people from different cultural backgrounds, different belief systems, different religions, just different kind of ways of behaving and speaking, thrown together, and everybody has to articulate what they’re saying, they have to kinda spell things out, right? When you don’t have all that context guiding you in terms of what you can say, you actually have to be more kind of articulate, more verbal. And that leads to the situation where you’ve got everybody speaking their minds, and when everybody’s speaking their minds, you’re bound to have more clashes of opinion. And by the way, nobody’s saying high context is better than low context or vice-versa, that’s completely beside the point.

These are just two ways of communicating. But the low context way will give rise to more disagreements ’cause you’ve got… Yeah, I’ll just say lots of people speaking their minds and lots of people kind of talking across purposes because they have kinda different ways of understanding cultural norms. Now, this is a long-term trend, as societies become more diverse, and people move to cities, and all sorts of different people from different backgrounds meet each other at work and so on. But it’s been accelerated and amplified by the internet, ’cause if you think about it, the internet, and social media is like the ultimate low context culture, you’re just… You’re engaging with and talking to and seeing people, who you have no idea who they are, and all you have to go on is… Are these words in a box, right? You have no kind of sense of… It’s very hard to intuitively understand where people are coming from a lot of the time, and so no wonder you have all these kind of disagreements, there’s just so much kind of dry tinder there for things to explode into toxic conflict.

Brett McKay: Yeah. With low context online, people are typically just responding to the most recent thing.

Ian Leslie: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And that just… It causes these flame wars, ’cause they’re ignoring or they don’t have… They’re not privy to all of the other communication, like the unspoken norms that might be in that online social group. And I think people see this like on Reddits, or like, some internet forums, where there might be a community there where people have been together talking to each other for a long time, so they kind of… They know each other, they have some sort of unspoken ground rules…

Ian Leslie: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And then a new person comes in.

Ian Leslie: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And that new person, that… You typically don’t go through the archives and see what everyone’s been talking about, you just throw something out there, and it’s typically often inflammatory or it breaks this unspoken rule, and everyone just gets upset by it, and then the person who did the initial bomb throwing is like, “Well, I don’t know what the problem is, I just wanna talk about this and… ”

Ian Leslie: Exactly.

Brett McKay: And it’s because it’s low context, like there’s… It’s a low context communication medium.

Ian Leslie: Exactly, and so what that means is… Well, first of all, it means social media is just always gonna be hard for productive conflict. I don’t think there’s a kind of an answer to that, I just think, in a sense, my suggestion to a lot of people is, “Don’t get into too many conflicts on social media. Or over email, whatever it is, or in Slack. Where you can, try and have your disagreements in person or over video, where you can get more kind of a richer sense of the relationship channel.” You get a richer sense of the other person’s background or context. Or where you are encountering people who are from a different kind of micro-culture, it doesn’t have to be a completely different culture, but as you say, it can be just somebody coming into it to a forum where more people have established norms and not understanding them, help them understand it quickly, like get them up to speed on the rules, don’t just blame them for being rude or stupid, and so on. Just say, “Look, this is how we do things here,” quickly try and establish some context where there is none.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so you made this point, when people see conflict, people who are conflict avoidant, they’re like, “I just don’t… I wanna opt out. I’m just gonna avoid conflict as much as possible.” But as you said earlier, when you do that, you miss out, you become stupider. But then there’s also you miss out on strengthening your relationship through conflict. Let’s talk about this idea that conflict can actually strengthen relationships, because this seems counter-intuitive, it’s like, “Well, conflict’s the thing that separates people. It’s why people get divorced, alright? It’s conflict about an issue.” So how can conflict bringing people closer together?

Ian Leslie: It is counter-intuitive and it kinda goes counter to our feelings about things, because disagreement, direct disagreement with people, is a little bit stressful. It does put stress on the relationship, but I think about it in terms of exercise, right? I mean, I am not necessarily enjoying myself when I go to the gym [chuckle] and I can feel uncomfortable, and sometimes I’m in pain, but I go back every week or whatever it is, because I know that actually the muscles grow back stronger and ultimately can… And it’s the same with relationships, they need some kind of stress in order to grow back stronger. There’s a really interesting line of research from the scientists who study marital relationships or long-term couples, where… And in this field, it used to be thought the norm was that couples who argue a lot are the couples who split up because they had looked at couples who split up and they said, “Did you argue a lot?” And they said, “Yes.” Then… And when actually they started doing more kind of sophisticated experiments of this, they got a different story. And what they do is, just briefly to explain the model of this research, is they’ll get couples into the lab and they’ll say, “Can you just discuss an issue of contention, [chuckle] a long running bone of contention in your relationship? We’ll leave the room, leave the camera on, and you two just talk about it.”

And actually couples usually get into it pretty quickly and start talking and kind of forget that the camera is on. And then they track the progress of that relationship over the coming weeks, months, and years, so these are kind of longitudinal studies. And what they have found, and this has really only became apparent over the last sort of 10 years or so, is that the couples who are quicker to rise to argument, and have quite often quite kinda heated back and forths are the ones who are more likely to stay together over the long-term, and to be happier, and to have solved the problems that they are discussing. So number one, [chuckle] I just think that’s hilarious, and great. And some of my favorite couples are the ones who just really have no hesitation in kinda getting into it and having a big row, but still love each other, right? I think that’s kind of really interesting, but also begs the question, “What is that? What’s going on there?” And when I asked one of the psychologists who run these studies… Runs these studies about that she said, “Conflict is information.”

And what she meant by that was when you are in an argument, you’re really learning about what the other person really thinks and really feels. Right? You’re getting a little glimpse into their soul, the veil of politeness, or just passivity is dropped and you say, “Oh right. Wow. I didn’t realize you cared about that so much, that’s what you think, is it? My goodness.” Right.

And in the moment it can be quite uncomfortable and stressful, but you’re updating your model of your partner. And it’s a really important thing to do. ‘Cause if you don’t do that, you have to this stick with this model of your head of what your partner’s like, and you think you know them really well, you know them better than they know themselves. Five, 10 years down the line turns out they’re completely different from the person you had in your head and the relationship comes to an end. So arguments and conflict are giving you information about what your partner is thinking and feeling, they’re keeping you up to date on their emotions and ultimately bringing you close together.

Brett McKay: And that can showcase like how not arguing can cause relationships to go south, because you have all those emotion kind of seething beneath the surface. And there’s a lot of resentment. And then they might express itself in passive aggressiveness.

Ian Leslie: Yeah. I mean, so the psychologists and organizational psychologists look at this as well. People who study workplaces and so on. They will talk about how different kinds of aggression are productive in different ways, depending on direct aggression versus indirect conflict and so on. The one form of conflict that nobody’s found any benefits, for whatsoever is passive aggression. [laughter] Passive aggression comes to no good. It’s corrosive. And it’s what happens when disagreements and conflict aren’t aired. The disagreement, the issue of contention does not disappear. It does not dissolve into the ether. It is merely swept under the carpet. It goes underground and it kind of corrodes the basis of the relationship and whether it’s in a marriage or in a workplace you should really be trying to minimize that.

And that means having your… Getting used to having your disagreements out in the open and not feeling like it is actually a huge, terrible high stakes dramatic thing. It’s just the way we are. It’s the way we do things.

Brett McKay: And I think a key to making these, like having a row with some… Your spouse or a kid or someone at work is as long… I think it is Gottman, as long as you avoid contempt, like that will be fine. ‘Cause as soon as you go into, I think you’re little, I think you’re less than what you think you are. I’m gonna call you names. That’s not going anywhere, but if you can passionately argue without going there, it’ll be productive.

Ian Leslie: Yeah, exactly. And again, it’s that thing of trying to pay attention to both things at once, which is hard when you’re emotional and you’re getting upset about something, but just keeping one part of your brain, which is like, what’s going on with the underlying relationship here. Are there things that I need him or her to know about what’s going on? Okay, well let’s try and air those. But am I kind of pressing in areas that’s just gonna make them feel kind of small or to make them feel crushed? That’s not good. And that’s not gonna lead to a productive disagreement and it’s not good for the relationship.

So my advice is not to, just have, get it all out there and scream and have terrible arguments. It’s more kind of, try and secure a good basis on which you can have… A good relationship basis for you to have arguments that kind of stick to the thing that you’re meant to be talking about.

Brett McKay: All right. So conflict can bring us together because it’s a medium through which we can gain more information about the person.

Ian Leslie: Yeah. I mean, another, a more blunt way of putting is, it’s how you learn the truth about the other person.

Brett McKay: Right. Yeah.

Ian Leslie: It’s when you speak truths to each other.

Brett McKay: Well, another benefit of conflict is it makes us smarter. And this again is counterintuitive because I think a lot of people, they get in debates online. Like I’m dumber. Was it… I think it’s from Billy Madison. Like we’re all dumber from experiencing this conversation, but you make this counterintuitive case that even unreasonable positions we take in a debate actually can make us smarter. How does that happen?

Ian Leslie: Yeah, so it’s often said that… The problem with disagreement is that we all have confirmation bias, and we’re all just motivated to make the argument that we’re making and that… And again, it kind of goes back to this thing of, and it just gets emotional and nobody’s kind of thinking rationally. There’s a grain of truth in that, but it’s not the whole story, because if you think about it, if you are really strongly motivated to make a case, there was some emotional motivation for you to make an argument, to a large extent you’re gonna make a better argument. ‘Cause you’re gonna be working harder to think of more reasons why you are right, to pull up or to find information that supports your case.

And to look for weaknesses in the other person’s argument. Emotion is the great motivator. And when we were working hard at something, we’re more likely to be good at it. So there is some benefit to confirmation bias, to this feeling that I wanna make this case, because it’s my case. If you think about a disagreement where the parties involved, as soon as they hear a good counterpoint, they go, “Okay, yeah, yeah. Right. You’re probably right.” What happens then? Not much. I mean, the disagreement effectively comes to an end, ’cause everyone’s just too kind of calm and rational and nice and goes, “Yeah. Yeah. You probably got a point.”

Really good productive kind of insightful disagreements come from people who tend to be quite vigorously engaged in what they’re arguing. Who have some kind of incentive to really make the case, and to take it maybe a little bit too far sometimes. Now of course, if you take it too far and you never back down, you’re completely inflexible. That’s not good either. So we have to kind of be somewhere in the middle, you have to kind of ride your biases, learn to ride them, you know, give them kind of some free rein. But don’t let them control you, but don’t shy away from… Having your heart in the disagreement as well as your head.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And you use Socratic dialogue as is a great example of… People being unreasonable, but allows you to get to a truth. Socrates often engaged with these interlocutors, who were just like, you could tell they were just… They were digging in their heels. But through that process, you were able to get closer to trying to figure out what justice is.

Ian Leslie: That’s right. And Socrates was actually good at, he’s underrated as an emotionally intelligent interlocutor, he was good at managing his interlocutor’s responses. If you look at the dialogues, there are moments where he is effectively saying, “Hey, you shouldn’t get angry when I say this, but let me put it this way.” And he’s calming them down. Because even in Athens at the time, argument was seen as this zero-sum game of persuasion where you win or I win. I persuade you to do something or you persuade me to do something. Socrates was very innovative when he came along and said, “Hey, look, it doesn’t have to be like that. We can all be in this as a collaborative endeavor. What we’re trying to get at here is truth. So it doesn’t matter if I’m right, what matters is that we are right as a group. And the best way to get to truth is in discussion.”

So Socrates understood something that we’ve lost sight of to a certain extent, which is that intelligence is collaborative, it’s interactive. We do our best thinking with other people, even when we’re thinking by ourselves, we do our thinking often because we’ve internalized other voices, we’ve been reading or talking to people that disagree with us, and now we play out the argument in our mind. We put so much emphasis, especially recently with the advent of neuroscience and fMRI scanners, put so much emphasis on the individual brain, what’s going on in the brain, what’s the brain doing, that we forget that, actually, the process of reasoning and thinking and debate is a social one.

Brett McKay: Well, you just brought another point, this idea that with the Sophists in Athens their whole approach to this debate was someone has to win, winner take all.

Ian Leslie: Yeah.

Brett McKay: I think a lot of people today, they have that approach to a conflict, there has to be a winner. And so with that mindset, our typical approach to debate is on persuasion. We read books on persuasion.

Ian Leslie: Yeah.

Brett McKay: About how we could be more persuasive, so we could show that this guy is wrong. This is just exactly like the Sophists, they use rhetoric to win arguments and persuade people. And then Socrates comes along and said, “It doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to have debate or discussion like that. There doesn’t have to be a winner. We can just have this conversation, this conflict, and hopefully get a little bit closer to the truth.” So I guess, one takeaway too is just be more like Socrates and less like the Sophists.

Ian Leslie: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why he didn’t write anything down. Obviously writing has been a net boon for us as a civilization. But when he was around, it was a relatively new technology. It was like, I don’t know, the iPhone or something like that. You take it or leave it. And he didn’t like it. And the reason he didn’t like it is that it couldn’t talk back to him. You write something down on a page and it just sits there. He really liked the idea that when you put a proposition forward, somebody comes back and tries to knock it down. And you say, “Well, yeah, I disagree, but I see your point here,” and you move the conversation on and the thing unfolds. But yeah, he had to… He was really introducing the whole idea of an intellectual inquiry to western civilized form, made him such a great figure. Up until then, as you say, the process of reasoning and debate was really about who wins. Who’s gonna come off best here in this battle of wits. And Socrates, his point was, “No, actually, we can use our reasoning for this other thing which is getting to the truth together, acting collaboratively.”

Brett McKay: All right. So knowing that conflict, there’s an emotional element that we… If we try to take it away, that’s probably futile, but it also, we also make our debate less potent. And then also knowing that conflict is about relationships. I wanna talk about some of the advice that you’ve picked up based on research and talking to experts on how you can have more productive conflict by taking these two factors in mind. So this idea in order to have a productive conflict with somebody, you had have to have this relationship with trust where you can vigorously argue and disagree without harming the relationship. How do you establish that trust and how do you allow… How do you prevent the debate from harming the relationship in the process?

Ian Leslie: Yeah. So there’s many different answers to that, many different ways of thinking about it. I talked about this principle of first connect. Often the reason that a debate or disagreement goes wrong is that we get to the disagreement too quickly. We go directly at it before we’ve really settled the relationship. And you got to do that first before you get in there. As you know, for the book, I talked to people who have really tough conversations under very extreme conditions. So I talked to hostage negotiators, and terrorist interrogators, and divorce mediators, therapists, all sorts of things. They all do it in different ways, but this was the theme, the people who were really skilled at those jobs, what they’re really skilled at is settling the relationship level before you get into the really tough part.

So a hostage negotiator does not pick up the phone and say, “Right, how are we gonna get you down from this roof? Or how are we gonna get the hostages out, out of this situation?” They are trained, the good ones spend a few minutes going, “Okay, look, I just wanna say, thanks for doing such a good job here. You’ve stayed calm. And we all appreciate that you have the right intentions.” And whatever they can do to settle that person down, to make them feel a little bit more secure, so in the relationship that they have with you, that’s gonna be good for when you get into the actual negotiation. But people are not gonna be able to have a good disagreement with you if they’re feeling insecure, threatened, that’s when they shut down or they get really, really aggressive. Same with interrogators.

I know you’ve had Laurence Alison on the show. He is a brilliant academic who trains terrorist interrogators in Britain and around the world. And one of the things he says is that bad interrogators are the ones who walk into the room and say, “Right, you need to tell me what you know.” That’s gonna shut the person down. In a sense, you are playing into their hands that they’re prepared for that situation. They just say, “Okay, well, I’m not gonna say anything.” The really skillful interrogators make a big deal out of the fact that you don’t have to speak. Depends what your legal regime is but they’ll say, “You have the right not to say anything. You have the right to a lawyer. And the fact is, I can’t tell you what to do. They can’t tell you what. Nobody here can tell you what to do, it’s up to you.”

But, listen, I really wanna hear your story ’cause I’m really interested and you have to be genuinely interested by the way you can’t fake it. But nine times out of 10, when they do that, the person opens up. These hardened terrorists who’ve been trained for this kind of situation, they really wanna tell their story. And your job is to, first of all, establish a relationship with trust and second of all, let them feel like it’s their choice to speak. And once you do that people will open up. So it’s a kind of long answer to your question, but there is several different things going on here.

Brett McKay: Yeah I think Laurence C calls it, when you in a conflicted debate or discussion with somebody, you have to let go of the rope and not try to control the person what they think or feel.

Ian Leslie: Yeah. So, probably the most frequent problem with a disagreement is that it turns into a power struggle of some kind. Whether an overt one or a covert one. Where people are kind of trying to establish their dominance, obviously or subtly in the conversation. And if you wanted to go well, you gotta to do everything you can to stop that from happening. So as soon as you feel the rope, torten into a kind of tug of war, Laurence’s suggestion is, let go of it. And often terrorists or criminals who are being interrogated and who are used to it and are prepared for it, they will try and turn it into a tug of war. So they’ll do kind of disruptive things, they put their feet on the desk and your instinct as an interrogator, or as a police officer or whatever it’s to say, “Get your feet off the desk.” “No, I don’t want to.” “Get your feet off the desk.” “No, I don’t want to.” And it’s just a futile pointless diversion from the thing that you’re meant to be doing. And Laurence’s suggestion in that type of situation is, “If you want your feet on the desk, that’s fine.”

Brett McKay: Well, another point that Laurence makes is that even when someone is saying something that you disagree with strongly or it just doesn’t make sense to you, instead of just dismissing them right away, what you wanna do is approach them with a kind of intellectual empathy. Like where you take a step back and try to figure out what’s going on in their head. And like why they care about something the way they do and why they think, why they’re thinking the way they’re thinking. Because even when someone’s position seems just irrational on the face, if you listen to them, there is sort of rationality going on to what they’re are thinking.

Ian Leslie: Exactly. Right and you see this with your kids actually. ‘Cause they’re being very emotional about something and it seems completely trivial to you. And your temptation is to say, “Oh, don’t be so stupid. Why would you get upset about that thing?” Often, there’s some deeper reason that they’re getting upset about it. It’s connected to something they really do feel deeply about that does make sense. But you can only get there by taking their initial point of view kind of seriously saying, “Yeah tell what I can see you’re really upset about that and I wanna hear more about it.” Because as you say the thing that appears irrational might conceal some sort of deeper, rational objection, deeper disagreement that actually kind of, is interesting and is worth discussing. But you can only get there if you are genuinely interested in why that person is thinking like that and feeling like that.

Brett McKay: And then when you do that, you’re establishing that trust and it opens up the person to your point of view, possibly.

Ian Leslie: Yeah, absolutely absolutely. So it becomes a kind of virtuous cycle. So yeah I think when you’re really stuck in a disagreement, you think, well, how can we even find any common ground here, then just switching into curiosity mode and saying, “Okay I can at least to be interested in how they got there.” It can get you into that better kind of virtuous cycle.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It sounds like what you’re doing is making the communication more high context, right? You’re making unspoken things explicit.

Ian Leslie: That’s a great way of putting it. And I talked about high context cultures and low context cultures in terms of China versus the US the west versus the east. But look every conversation is a little culture. You and me are, we have a little micro culture between us, an agreed, an unspoken kind of background set of norms about, what’s acceptable and what’s not, what’s interesting and what’s not interesting. And so your job in a conversation, that’s a difficult conversation I think is to try and help the other person, understand your culture and to try and understand their culture. And it doesn’t have to just mean they’re a Christian and I’m a Muslim or whatever. It just means, how’s this person’s well, how are they used to thinking and talking and how is it different from me? And how can we kind of move a little closer together there.

Brett McKay: Another thing you talk about in the book is establishing boundaries for conflict. They make them more productive, and this isn’t a… Using Robert’s rules of order right. But it is sort of having like a loose framework. What can that framework look like and how do you get people to agree on the boundaries of a discussion or a conflict?

Ian Leslie: Well, I think that the point about setting boundaries is that they can be very very simple. In fact, one of the most simple ones is just no hostility. So actually here’s a kind of good real world example, you mentioned Reddit earlier, there’s a great kind of subreddit called Change My View. Set up a few years ago and I talk about it in the book. The point of Change My View is, yeah, you, what it says on the tin really, you go along and you say, look, here’s a think something I’ve been thinking about here is my view on, feminism, whatever it is, what do you think? And I’m willing to be talked out of it and amazingly this, this seemingly kind of like this thing, which is so antithetical to the spirit of social media has actually been very successful and been hundreds of thousands of users and they just have a few very simple rules. And then they kind of closely monitor. They have a set, quite a few moderators who monitor the debates and make sure these rules are followed. And they also incentivize the people who follow them they kind of give them badges. So they’re kind of gamified as well.

But the rules are very simple and one of them is, just don’t be hostile. Basically, don’t be a Dick, right? You’d be amazed how far that one goes. Another one is, don’t just repeat the same arguments over and over again. If somebody has come back with a counterpoint, you have to address their counterpoint, just kind of don’t stick to where you are. And if you do that, you’re breaking the rules. And just being explicit about the rules up top is something we just don’t do very much. You do it, if you can do it at work, it actually can go a long way, say at work, in this workplace, we really value open disagreement. So we want people to do it A and B here’s a few guidelines rules, whatever you wanna call them to make it go better. And this is how we do things at our company. Hardly ever happens. But sometimes really good companies like Netflix that’s how they operate, right? They put a great emphasis on open disagreement and they set those principles out very clearly. And it goes a long way.

Brett McKay: Well, we’ve talked about some techniques. I don’t like calling them techniques, they’re principles. I want I like principles a little better. Because I think technique is to life hacky.

Ian Leslie: Yeah I agree.

Brett McKay: And a discussion or a debate are really fluid and complex but like, what’s one thing that people can start doing today to have more productive conflict. Is there like one thing that you found in all your research that provides a real big bang for your buck?

Ian Leslie: Well, I think as a kind of general the, as you say right there wasn’t like a hack that you can just apply to everywhere. There are principles. And I think probably the most important principle is to try and make the other person feel good about agreeing with you. And actually, lower the stakes for them in terms of coming around to your point of view. And that ultimately that means making them feel secure, making them feel respected, making them sure. Making sure that they feel that you like them and so on. If they don’t feel any of those things, they are never going to have a productive disagreement with you. So kind of keep your eye on how the other person is feeling, the more relaxed, more comfortable in themselves they’re feeling the more likely they are to get into a good disagreement with you.

Brett McKay: Well Ian, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work?

Ian Leslie: Sure. I mean, so the book is called Conflicted, so you can just Google my name and Conflicted and it’ll come up. Or go to my website, which is Ian-leslie.com. And I’m on Twitter for my Sins @Mr.IanLeslie. So you can come and see me there and watch me failing to follow any of the principles that I’ve just laid out down and getting into terrible disagreements online.

Brett McKay: Well, Ian, thanks for this time it’s been a pleasure.

Ian Leslie: Thank you so much, Brett really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Ian Leslie. He’s the author of the book, Conflicted it’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, Ian-leslie.com. Also check out our show notes today at AoM.is/conflict where you can find links to resources, Where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website theartofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes to the AoM podcast, you can do so on stitcher premium, head over to stitcherpremium.com sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad free episodes to the AoM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or stitcher it helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already thank you. Please consider sharing the show to a friend or family member who you would think will get something out of it. As always thank you for the continued support until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes

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Have you interacted with young adults lately?

Even more pertinently, have you tried teaching them?

The trouble they have in paying attention can perhaps best be encapsulated by the trouble they have in not using their phones while watching a movie; what was once considered a mindless break from more challenging classwork, now feels unbearably slow and unstimulating compared to the barrage of 15-seconds-long, dopamine-hit-inducing clips on social media.

This is a sobering state of affairs.

It is, of course, a perennial trope to wring one’s hands about “kids today.”

But the kids today are actually not to blame.

It wasn’t kids who decided that children were incapable of spending ten minutes in a dentist’s waiting room without looking at Mommy’s phone, nor was it kids who decided it was impossibly tedious to get their teeth cleaned without another screen placed right above their faces. It wasn’t kids who decided that it was better to know you were left out while looking at TikTok, than to feel you were left out in not having it.

As the gatekeepers of their children’s tech, adults have and will determine their fate in a world that has both utterly changed, and stubbornly remained the same.

While technology has made so much of life easier, all that is best in it, all that leads to success — all relationship-building, conversation-making, craft-honing, and subject-mastering — still requires uninterrupted focus, persistent dedication, what Nietzsche called “a long obedience in the same direction.”

While avoiding tech altogether isn’t necessary for the maintenance of this capacity, the proportion of children’s lives which are consumed by it, versus the proportion in which they engage with the resistance-filled realm of the concrete, will be exactly proportional to the degree they stand out from their distracted, anesthetized peers — and exactly proportional to their inheritance of the future.

The post Sunday Firesides: The Non-Technologized Children Shall Inherit the Earth appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Last year, we noticed that our clothes would take a lot longer to dry in the dryer. After the typical drying cycle would finish, our clothes would still be damp, and would have to be put through another go round.

Before calling a repairman, I did some Google sleuthing and learned we likely had a blocked dryer vent. When you run your dryer, it releases excess hot air to the outside. This is why you can smell fabric softener wafting from some of the homes in your neighborhood. It’s coming from the dryer vent.

Lint can catch a ride with the hot air that flows from your dryer and clog up the vent that connects the dryer to the outside. That’s what had happened in our case; I just needed to clean the vent out, and we’d be back in business.

It’s an easy job and can be completed in less than 30 minutes. You should do it every six months or so to avoid heavy build-up. Regularly cleaning out your dryer vent will give you drier clothes in less time, save you money on your electric bill, prolong the life of your dryer, and even prevent a house fire. (Fast fact: According to FEMA, 2,900 fires are caused by home dryers each year in the U.S. and cause an estimated five deaths, 100 injuries, and $35 million in property loss).

Here’s how to clean out your dryer vent. Get the job done this weekend.

Buy a Dryer Vent Cleaning Kit

You can buy an inexpensive dryer vent cleaning kit at Home Depot. It comes with a brush to clean out the lint trap, a 10-foot dryer duct snake brush, and a vacuum attachment to clean out the lint trap. Mine set me back $17.

You can buy dryer-duct snake brushes that can be attached to your power drill. I’ve used one of these before and didn’t think there was much difference in effectiveness between it and the manual brush.

Clean Out the Lint Trap

Open up your dryer door and remove the lint filter.

Take your lint trap brush and brush out the lint trap.

You’re going to find big lumps of lint sticking to the brush. Remove that lint and keep brushing out the lint trap until your brush comes out clean.

Next, put the vacuum attachment on your vacuum and vacuum out the lint trap. We’re aiming to get the small stuff that our lint brush didn’t pick up.

Once you’re satisfied with the cleanliness of your lint trap, replace the lint filter. Time to move to the back of the dryer.

Clean Out the Interior Vent Duct and Back of the Dryer

Pull your dryer from the wall and disconnect the power cord and the duct that connects your dryer to the dryer vent.

Use your lint brush and vacuum to clean out your dryer’s exhaust.

Next, turn your attention to the duct that connects into the vent hole on the interior side of your wall. Grab your snake brush and stick it in there as far as it can go. Spin it around a few times. Pull it out. You’ll likely have globs of lint on your brush. Remove the lint and stick the brush back in. Spin. Pull out. Repeat until you no longer have any lint on your brush when you pull it out.

Vacuum out the duct with your attachment.

If you want, you can remove the duct from the vent hole on the wall; it will allow you to get further up the vent with your brush and vacuum. I didn’t want to because detaching and reattaching my duct is a pain in the butt. I still got plenty of lint out.

While you’ve got your dryer pulled out from the wall, vacuum all the crap behind it. It gets pretty messy back there.

Reconnect the duct to your dryer, plug the dryer in, and push it back to the wall. Time to move outside.

Clean Out the Exterior Vent Exhaust

You need to locate the dryer vent on the exterior side of your house. In most homes, the dryer vent runs horizontally through the wall to the outside. You just need to go to the place on the exterior of your home where your laundry room is, more or less, and you’ll usually see the vent’s exhaust on the wall nearby.

But the dryer vent goes straight up and exits out on the roof in some homes. These types of set-ups are trickier to clean on your own. You’ll probably want to call an expert to do the job, and the service will set you back about $100.

Once you’ve located the vent’s exterior exhaust, remove any covering flaps and stick your snake brush inside it. Repeat until you no longer have any lint on your brush when you pull it out.

That’s alotta lint, boys.

Do a test run on your dryer to ensure everything is working correctly when that’s done.

Bam! You’ve cleaned out your dryer vent.

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“We were young citizen-soldiers, terribly naive and gullible about what we would be confronted with in the air war over Europe and the profound effect it would have upon every fiber of our being for the rest of our lives. We were all afraid, but it was beyond our power to quit. We volunteered for the service and, once trained and overseas, felt we had no choice but to fulfill the mission assigned. My hope is that this book honors the men with whom I served by telling the truth about what it took to climb into the cold blue and fight for our lives over and over again.”

So writes the 100-year-old World War II veteran John “Lucky” Luckadoo in the new book he co-authored with Kevin Maurer: Damn Lucky: One Man’s Courage During the Bloodiest Military Campaign in Aviation History. Kevin is my guest today, and will share Lucky’s story, and with it, the story of WWII’s famous B-17 bomber.

During the war, airmen in the 100th Bomb Group could finish their combat service and return home after flying 25 missions. Yet with a 1 in 10 chance of becoming a casualty, few were able to reach this milestone. Lucky was one of the, well, lucky few who did, and Kevin traces how he got there, from trying to join the Royal Canadian Air Force as a teenager, to learning to fly the B-17 on the job, to his harrowing daylight bombing missions over Germany, to the life he made for himself after the war. Along the way, Kevin describes the brutal conditions inside a B-17 and the bomber’s role in winning the war.

Resources Related to the Podcast * The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell * Memphis Belle * Norden bombsight * Video tour of B-17 G model

Connect with Kevin Maurer * Kevin’s Website

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Transcript Coming Soon! The post Podcast #798: The Harrowing Life of a World War II B-17 Pilot appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

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Welcome back to our occasional, ongoing series exploring the nature of envy.

In the previous article, we defined what envy is.

We based our definition of envy on Aristotle’s: pain at the good fortune of others.

We also experience envy when we feel joy at the bad fortune of others. The Germans call that schadenfreude.

We experience envy when we compare ourselves to others, particularly people who are similar to us. You probably don’t feel envy towards Jeff Bezos for his wealth, but you likely turn green with it when you hear that your co-worker got a big raise.

There’s another feeling that often accompanies envy, and it’s one that philosophers have found particularly worthy of examination. Like envy itself, it not only makes us feel bad, but also is a vice which can canker our character.

That feeling/state/mindset is resentment.

Envy Leads to Resentment Envy is, again, pain at the good fortune of another person. When you — whether consciously or unconsciously — blame the envied person for causing you that pain, that creates a form of resentment.

Resentment is a complex emotion. It describes the displeasure — the anger, disgust, and contempt — you feel towards someone you think has wronged you in some way or violated some code of values. Marked by a sense of indignation, resentment is often born from the perception that you (or those you care about) have been treated unfairly.

Sometimes feelings of resentment are justified. If a co-worker gets a promotion because he dishonestly took credit for an idea that was actually yours, you’re going to feel understandably indignant. If your brother’s drug problem has caused all kinds of headaches and heartache for your parents, you may come to resent him.

With resentment born from envy, however, the “offender” doesn’t know he or she has done something that’s affected you (they may, in fact, not know you, period!). They committed no intentional act of malice towards you or others. You simply feel resentful at what they have or who they are. You perceive that they got what they have unfairly, this causes you pain, and you categorize them as the source of your pain. It may not even be that you think someone has directly done something to you, but simply a sense, born of a scarcity-mindset, that because they have gotten something good, there’s less of it for you; they have in some way robbed you of a reward or quality that you desire for yourself. You essentially end up blaming someone for existing.

Resentment is a silent emotion. You usually don’t express it like outright anger. Instead of burning white hot, it smolders inside you. People often don’t know that you resent them. When resentment outwardly manifests itself, it usually does so through passive aggression. You might ignore people, snip at them, or gossip about them behind their backs. Resentment is sneaky.

Every now and then, resentment can flare up, and you suddenly lash out at people with words or even violence.

Ressentiment and the Inversion of Values The pain that arises from envy can be described as dissonance: the discomfort that emerges in the gap between where you are and where the person you envy is — between what someone else has or is and what you think you should have or be.

There are two ways to close that gap, and eliminate that uncomfortable dissonance.

The first is to strive upwards, towards the person you envy, in order to attain or achieve what they have attained or achieved.

The second is to pull the person down, so that you no longer perceive them as being above you in any way.

We do this by denigrating someone’s success — finding ways to say that their achievements or virtues aren’t actually so great, and definitely don’t make them better than us.

“Yeah, that guy got the promotion, but he had to degrade himself with office politics and brown-nose to get it.”

“Yeah, that guy is a better artist than me, but I bet his family life is in shambles because he focuses so much on his work.”

“Yeah, that guy’s business is booming, but it’s only because he engages in so much hyped-up marketing on social media.”

“Yeah, that guy’s really ripped, but who’d want to be a meathead who spends so much time in the gym?”

“Yeah, he acts so happy, but I’m sure it’s all a facade. He’s such a fake.”

When this denigration project happens on a society-wide scale, it represents a manifestation of what philosophers call ressentiment.

Ressentiment is the French word for the English resentment, and has a distinct set of psycho-philosophical dimensions.

Soren Kierkegaard was the first to explore the concept of ressentiment philosophically. In his book Two Ages, he describes the way that the passionless masses of men, who are stuck in the realm of thought and abstraction and too afraid to ever make a bold decision, envy the world’s few passionate risk-takers and their ability to take real action. This envy, Kierkegaard argued, leads to ressentiment, which fuels a desire to hammer down any who dare stick out their heads. He called this whack-a-mole dynamic, in which the crowd essentially says — “If all can’t be great and noble, then no one can!” — leveling. Leveling operates through the media which exposes, lampoons, or, as we’d say in modern parlance, “cancels,” various figures who may think differently, and through the abstract-yet-powerful current of public opinion, which acts as an invisible force of gravity, cowing people from attempting anything new or revolutionary in the first place.

A few decades after Kierkegaard, Nietzsche explored this idea of ressentiment in several of his writings, particularly On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche argued that envy-induced ressentiment not only drives the masses to bring the noble and great ones down to their level, but compels them to go a step further still — to assert that what might seem to make themselves inferior, is actually what makes themselves superior. In what Nietzsche described as an inversion of values, that which was once considered bad in antiquity becomes good in modernity: vulnerability becomes courage; meekness and poverty become blessings. Nietzsche argued that the ethical codes of Judaism and Christianity actually grew out of the weak’s envy-fueled ressentiment for the strong. To deal with the pain of inferiority, the weak recast their disadvantages as superiority-conveying strengths.

Nietzsche called these inverted ethical codes “slave morality,” and described them as feckless and intellectually dishonest; while recasting the hierarchy of values in a new upside-down light made the weak feel better about themselves, they nonetheless remained enslaved to their deficiencies, and continued to lack the power and strength they really desired.

Fighting Resentment With Action The tricky thing about the concept of envy-induced resentment/ressentiment, is that it’s always easier to see its manifestations in others, than it is to recognize it in ourselves. Do we resent someone because they’ve committed a true injustice, or because we simply want what they have? Are people criticizing us because they’re filled with ressentiment, or because our ideas and behaviors are, in fact, damaging and dumb? How easy it is to dismiss one’s “haters” as merely being jealous, rather than really examining what you’re doing in the world!

So while the concept of ressentiment is useful in understanding the motivations for how others treat you, as well as in diagnosing what is at the heart of societal dynamics, you also have to continually train that lens back on yourself. To what extent are your feelings and actions driven by envy-fueled resentment?

This is an extremely difficult assessment to make! Our egos want to justify our beliefs. It’s hard to parse whether you resent someone’s success because it truly is unfair and unearned and based on dishonesty, hype, or mediocre work, or, because you simply yearn for the same status, rewards, and accolades, and feel frustrated that they aren’t coming your way.

But even if your motivations for indignation cannot typically be cleanly untangled, it’s actually helpful to always assume that there is some envy behind it. One, because even in situations where some resentment does seem objectively justified, there still almost always exists an element of envy lurking in the wings as well; and two, because the way you should respond to the personal potential for envy is healthy, and the best way to approach life, regardless of the actual degree of envy’s sway.

Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche believed that ressentiment was rooted in evasion — the search for a scapegoat to blame for your mediocrity and misery. Its antidote, then, was to directly engage — to take full responsibility for your life. If the person with ressentiment says, “I’m miserable, and it’s everyone else’s fault!” then the Ubermensch asks, “What can I do to improve my lot in life?” While a person with resentment is passive and reactive, the person who owns his life is dynamic and active. Nietzsche argued that the more active you become — the more you concentrate on playing, dancing, creating — the less you even notice what other people are up to.

Whatever is bringing you down, adopting an active stance puts you in the best position to tackle it.

It thus behooves us to always believe that there is some envy-induced resentment underlying our criticisms and contempt. Not only because there invariably is, but because owning that knowledge will ever push us towards a higher range of action.

The post Envy, Ressentiment, and the Inversion of Values appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When it comes to making behavior change around diet and exercise, it’s no secret that many people fail in their efforts. My guest would say that’s because too often we only concentrate on the things that drive us towards that change — whether willpower, or motivation, or the rewards that turn behaviors into habits — and that we need to think more about the obstacles keeping us from making the decisions we desire.

Her name is Michelle Segar and she’s a behavioral science researcher and health coach, as well as the author of The Joy Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise. Today on the show, Michelle explains why exercise and eating aren’t conducive to becoming habits — at least of the automatic variety — and why it’s more helpful to think of these behaviors in terms of “life space” and “choice points.” She makes the case for why we shouldn’t just focus on what drives behaviors, but also understand what disrupts them, and unpacks four of these disruptors: temptation, rebellion, accommodation, and perfection. Michelle then offers a three-step decision tool for dealing with these disruptors, and explains how to develop the flexibility to choose the perfect imperfect option that keeps you consistent and even celebrate and enjoy the decision to do something instead of nothing.

Resources Related to the Podcast * Michelle’s previous appearance on the show — Podcast #575: Counterintuitive Advice on Making Exercise a Sustainable Habit * AoM Article: How I Finally Made Flossing a Habit * AoM Podcast #782: Anxiety Is a Habit — Here’s How to Break It (With Judson Brewer) * Kurt Lewin * Freakonomics episode that includes Daniel Kahneman referencing Lewin * Grounded cognition * Affective–Reflective Theory of physical inactivity and exercise

Connect With Michelle Segar * Michelle’s Website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

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Read the Transcript! Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. When it comes to making behavior change around diet and exercise, it’s no secret that many people fail in their efforts. My guest would say that’s because too often, we only concentrate on the things that drive us towards that change, whether willpower or motivation, with rewards that turn behaviors into habits, and then we need to think more about the obstacles keeping us from making the decisions we desire. Her name is Michelle Segar. She’s a behavioral science researcher and health coach, as well as the author of The Joy Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise. Today on the show, Michelle explains why exercise and eating aren’t conducive to becoming habits, at least of the automatic variety, and why it’s more helpful to think of these behaviors in terms of life space and choice points. She makes the case for why we shouldn’t just focus on what drives behaviors, but also understand what disrupts them, and unpacks four of these disruptors: Temptation, rebellion, accommodation, and perfection.

Michelle then offers a three-step decision tool for dealing with these disruptors, and explains how to develop the flexibility to choose the perfect imperfect option that keeps you consistent and even celebrate and enjoy the decision to do something instead of nothing. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/segar. Michelle joins you now via ClearCast.io.

Alright, Michelle Segar, welcome back to the show.

Michelle Segar: It’s great to be here.

Brett McKay: So we had you on a couple of years ago to talk about your book, No Sweat, which is all about how to become more consistent with your exercise without gritting it out with just will power. And I was telling you before we got on, I have referenced that episode so many times on the podcast whenever I have a fitness person on. It’s just some really great insights. You got a new book out called The Joy Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise. How is this new book a continuation of your thinking from No Sweat?

Michelle Segar: Great. That’s the question. And when I wrote No Sweat, I didn’t think I had any more ideas, so it was kind of a surprise to me when new thinking popped into my head. And here’s the relationship: No Sweat was about setting people up for converting exercise from a chore into a gift. And of course, as you know from what you just said, that has to do with picking activities that you enjoy, that feel pleasurable or satisfying in some way, and definitely not punishing. But no matter how much we set ourselves up for success in exercise and healthy eating, or really in any life area, the reality is is that we are going to confront challenges to our plans and our goals. And so The Joy Choice speaks to that. It explains to people what really gets in our way when we bump up against an unexpected conflict to either our eating plan that we were doing so great on, or that exercise or physical activity regimen that we’ve been doing oftentimes. And so I’ll just finish my answer there, that this book is all about how can we joyfully, easily, playfully address those conflicts so that they don’t get in our way?

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And I think this… Again, this is kind of counter-intuitive because… Your approach in this book, because I think the typical approach when people have when they think, “Well, I gotta eat better. I have to exercise regularly.” They think, “Well, I gotta make these things a habit.” And you make the case that behaviors like diet and exercise, they aren’t actually very conducive to habit formation. Why is that?

Michelle Segar: Yes. So, first of all, let me just say I love my flossing habit. I’m so glad I have an automatic habit to feed my dog in the morning, or he might starve. So habit formation and automatic habits are wonderful for simple behaviors that we depend on. The problem comes when we try to create automatic habits for complicated complex behaviors. Habit formation is based on what’s called a habit loop, which starts with some type of cue. It could be walking in the bathroom or brushing your teeth. Then you do the behavior, and then there’s some type of reward, and that reward in our brain is very satisfying and helps create this association between the cue, the behavior, and then the reward, and thus an automatic habit that we don’t have to think about. And it makes… Who wouldn’t wanna offload our choices? We have so much to think about every day. The problem happens with complicated complex behaviors, because if you think about something like flossing, where does it happen? And who’s in there with you? Well, it mostly happens in the bathroom, and much of the time, there is no one else there to disrupt that cue from happening.

But when it comes to physical activity or healthy eating, we could be anywhere, doing anything with any number of people, with any number of unexpected curve balls coming our way, and the cues depend on a stable environment. And so with complicated behaviors, it’s very hard for that cue to stay stable. Now I do wanna add a caveat and… Two caveats. One is nothing is ever true for everyone. So for example, this isn’t true for my husband, who is what I call a habiter. He gets up at 5:30 in the morning before he has any distractions, anything to get in the way of his cue, the alarm getting him into the basement where he exercises. So people who are very disciplined and don’t have a lot of disruption in their life, what I call habiters, they tend to be able to form habits much more easily for complicated behaviors. But hopefully the difference between forming a habit for flossing and forming a habit for following some type of healthier eating plan, the distinction is clear.

Brett McKay: No, I think it is clear, ’cause eating is a complex thing. There’s… Timing can be off. Sometimes you are unexpectedly invited out to eat, and that wasn’t part of the plan, but you still wanna be social and engaged with these individuals, and so that throws you for a loop, and your… The habit is not gonna come in handy there because it’s not the same routine.

Michelle Segar: And again, oftentimes things that are common sense, we kind of easily adopt them and think, “This makes sense. I’m gonna do this,” or, “This was written about and it sounded really compelling,” but the problem is… Or not the problem is, the deal is, is that when it came to making changes in behavior, there’s always going to be assumptions underneath behavior change strategies, and if we don’t know to look at those assumptions and see if we meet them or not, then we won’t know if it’s actually gonna be the right fit for us.

Brett McKay: Got you. So yeah, one of those assumptions is that you can turn any behavior into a habit. Maybe, if you’re like your husband, you might be able to do that. But if you’re someone who’s not as disciplined or conscientious, you’re not gonna be able to turn complex behavior, like exercise program, into a habit, and you have to take that into consideration.

Michelle Segar: Yeah, not just person… Not just… Personality is definitely an issue. But the other part of it is if you’re managing the lives of many people and you’re juggling multiple roles and responsibilities, that adds a level of unexpected chaos and hubbub that would make a habit very hard to stand the test of time. An automatic habit, I should say.

Brett McKay: Well, another issue with behaviors like eating and exercise, unlike flossing… Flossing doesn’t have a lot of emotional baggage, typically. I get shamed every time I go to the dental… Dentist and the hygienist is like… They do that test where they check your pockets to see, and they can tell, “Oh, you got some four-millimeter pockets here,” and I’m like, “Oh jeez,” but I don’t really… I don’t have a lot of baggage about flossing. But exercise and diet, people over the years could develop just bad experience with those, and that can affect whether that becomes a habit or not.

Michelle Segar: Right, and that’s something else that we don’t think a lot about. So if we have any body shame that could be intertwined with exercising or trying to change our eating, or discomfort, or guilt, or sense of failure, for habits to form with that loop, we have to be able to have that reward. And so think about how feeling those types of complicated negative emotions could really thwart having the reward that is actually needed to form a habit. So that’s another one of the assumptions that you’re mentioning.

Brett McKay: Okay, so instead of thinking of implementing these behavior changes of diet and exercise in terms of habits, you make this case that you should think of it in terms of life space and choice points, and this came from a social psychologist named Kurt Lewin. Can you tell us about his idea of decision-making, and how you’ve taken that and applied it to diet and exercise?

Michelle Segar: Sure. So a lot of people these days are talking about Kurt Lewin. His work has kind of had a resurgence after a long time. And Daniel Kahneman, actually, was talking about this idea, and it was recorded on a Freakonomics episode, and so Daniel Kahneman said this was… I think he said, this is the best idea… Nobel Prize-winning, let me say. The man, Daniel Kahneman, was saying that the best idea he’s ever heard came from his mentor, Kurt Lewin, which is that instead of trying to drive a behavior, we should look at everything that gets in its way. And so if we take that idea and we think about the life space, which is everything we bring to a decision… At the point of choice, of any choice, that is our life space, and we bring our personalities to it. We bring our internal conflicts to it. We bring everything. And so, at this life space, which is this choice point, this point of decision, we’re coming with everything, not just, “I really wanna follow my plan, but I’ll feel like a failure if I don’t do it,” or this, “I know I can’t do it. Why even bother?”

Or, “Oh no, my phone’s ringing. It’s my kid’s school, I better pick it up.” I mean, everything comes to this moment of choice. So the question is, which forces… And this is part of this idea that there’s drivers and then there’s disruptors… At every point of decision, or what I’m calling choice points, there’s drivers and disruptors. And so which is gonna win out? And whichever forces are more compelling at the moment are going to basically flip the switch. Are you gonna do the choice you hoped for? Are you not gonna do it? Is there an alternative to the choice?

Brett McKay: Got you. Okay, so just to reiterate, with any choice, there’s things driving us towards that choice. And I typically, when we think about behavior change, we think about that. How can we drive ourselves to make the correct choice? But what Lewin says, you also have to think about what’s disrupting, what’s pushing you away from that choice. And like Kahneman says, you should ask, instead of, “How can I drive this behavior?” Ask instead, “Why aren’t I doing it already?” I think that’s really insightful.

Michelle Segar: It is really insightful, and it’s kind of interesting to note that that is also… Habit formation is based on a driver model, and…

Brett McKay: Right, yeah.

Michelle Segar: Right? It’s based on a reward driving a behavior and creating this unconscious association. So Kahneman’s saying, “Gee, we really would be… The most strategic thing we can do is figure out what is actually getting in the way and addressing those things.”

Brett McKay: And then this idea of not just choice points, but life space, thinking about the decisions in the broader context of your life. You can’t just think of diet and exercise as separate from your life. We’d like to think we can do that, that they’re sort of these separate systems, but in fact, they are part of our larger life experience. We have to integrate it not only with work, but our family life, stress levels, and if you don’t do that, you’re just kinda kicking against the bricks.

Michelle Segar: That’s exactly right, but we haven’t been taught… As a society, we haven’t been taught to think about the context, the many contexts, that are around these desired changes in behavior. But just like you said, it’s like if people start a business… And they start businesses without business plans, but oftentimes, investors are gonna look to see, “Okay, have you done your analysis?” What is it called? The SWAT analysis? Or some type of analysis where you show that you know what are the opportunities? What are the challenges? What are the competitors? We really need to come to changes in behavior in that strategic way, and the reason why is because we often think about changes in behavior, like, “I’m motivated right now. This is what I wanna achieve.” But if we switch our perspective from this kind of intense motivation, or the motivation bubble that gets us started to, “Gosh, I really want this behavior to stand the test of time through the ins and outs and ebbs and flows of my life, and that means I have to think about the context that it has to survive with them.”

Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk about these disruptors that push us away from the decision we wanna make, and you highlight four of them in your book. Let’s talk about the first one. It’s temptation. As a behavioral scientist, how do you define a temptation?

Michelle Segar: You know, I define temptation, I would say, more from my coaching than as someone who has actually done research on temptation. My experience is how people experience it that I work with, and here’s what they say: They say they feel like they’re being seduced or pulled, and it’s a visceral experience. And it could be a pull toward that chocolate cake that may not be on their eating plan, or a pull toward the couch and HBO Max or something instead of the plan to go to the gym. And so we’re used to thinking of temptation as something that controls us from the outside, but what I think is really interesting are the new theories that are about temptation and desire. And they propose… And there’s research to support them, that temptation, when we feel that visceral pull to do something like that, it’s coming from inside our brain. It’s not coming from the chocolate cake that’s in front of us. It’s coming from our history of experiences eating chocolate cake, not just the flavor, but the texture, and the mood we were in when we ate it, or the many times we ate it and who we were with and the connection we felt.

And so I think it’s really empowering to understand, no, it’s not just that that cake looks good. It’s that… And we could think of these as forces that are in our life space at these choice points, and so that’s… In that chapter, I talk about how we can kind of harness these new theories that are about how our brains work and the different systems in our brain to help us address the visceral pull we might feel.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I was gonna say that theory, in terms of food, you apply grounded cognition theory.

Michelle Segar: Yes.

Brett McKay: And that’s what you’re talking about. It’s like all the feelings you experience when you see that… I don’t know, that cheeseburger. Right? “Oh, when I had a cheeseburger when I was a kid, it made me feel good. I have memories of it.” You’re bringing that with you every time you have that choice to eat a burger or not.

Michelle Segar: That’s exactly right. The grounded theory of cognition is all about the sensory experiences that go with it and the meanings that go with it, and to a great extent, many of them are under our consciousness. But the really cool thing is that once you learn about these things, once you learn that certain things are there, but you might not have been aware of it, you shine a light on those experiences. And then you can be aware of them and name them, which also helps you have a… Are better able to control impulses to succumb to a temptation that you might not want us to succumb to.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You make this… You have this sentence says, “In its very essence, temptation is emotion remembered,” basically.

Michelle Segar: Yeah, I believe that came from an interview I did with Dr. Joel Nigg, who’s an expert in executive functioning. Yes. I mean, isn’t that a cool definition? It’s emotion remembered, but the memory can be… It doesn’t have to be consciously remembered. It can be unconsciously remembered.

Brett McKay: And then with exercise, there’s this idea of effective reflective theory of physical activity, which kind of helps explain why… We wanna exercise and we’re like, “Oh, I don’t actually… No, I don’t want to.” And we decide not to.

Michelle Segar: Yes. And so there are different theories about different behaviors, but there are some similar… Really kind of fundamental similarities, and one of the similarities is that our past experiences with the behavior contribute to the life space at the moment of choice. And if we had a negative experience, or PE, or we feel self-conscious in the gym, or whatever the reason is, those experiences, they call them in the paper, they say they tag exercise with an emotional meaning, or another word is “brand” it. So our past experiences, brand… Have branded physical activity, and like any branding process, it creates either a desire to approach something or a disdain to avoid it. And that’s why we have to be so conscious of what these behaviors mean to us. And again, once we learn that, then we can take back control.

Brett McKay: Right, and we had on the podcast a couple of months ago, Judson Brewer, and you highlighted his research as well, where he’s using these ideas of grounded cognition theory and ART, active reflective theory, to update your emotional values to these behaviors so that instead of being like, “Yeah… ” you’re like, “Oh yeah, actually, I wanna do those things ’cause I actually enjoy them.”

Michelle Segar: Yes, and value-based decision-making and updating the value of something, and really, that was the biggest part of No Sweat was helping people increase the value of exercise through converting it from a chore into a gift, and even though my process didn’t explicitly talk about the underlying brain mechanisms that Judson Brewer talks about, and I am a big fan of his, by the way, that’s what we’re talking about, and that’s what we need to do. That is part of the process, if you disdain exercise, no matter what your goal is, the research pretty clearly shows you just will not be able to sustain it. So the first step for someone is to figure out if you really disdain the eating plan you’re trying to adopt or the exercise program you’re trying to develop into a lasting change. Starting with figuring out how to create a positive meaning and experience is really gonna be the first part, because those experiences are so potent, emotion is… We probably talked about this in our last interview, that how we feel about something really determines whether we do it over time, so the emotions, the emotional meaning we have for any behavior is hugely impactful, and we’ve gotta be aware of that, and that is what the temptation chapter… That is… That’s the beginning, that’s the tip of the iceberg on that question.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So another disruptor is rebellion, and this is interesting because why would we wanna rebel against a positive choice?

Michelle Segar: Well, as soon as I say it, people are gonna go, “Oh, yeah.” Well, because we rebel against having our freedom taken away. Via reactants theory, we know that human beings are motivated to reclaim their freedom when they feel that it’s been removed, so on a higher level, if we’re trying to exercise or change the way we’re eating because we think we “should do it”, or our doctor told us to, or our company is somehow either incentivizing us in ways that feel controlling or punitive, well, I’m gonna wanna rebel against that. Actually, I have a story to really explain this. I have a colleague who worked for a company that… Well, I wouldn’t say incentivized, there were programs in place that he would pay less for monthly insurance if he lost weight and went to the gym and attended weight watchers, and they tracked him, it was an electronic tracking system.

And he did all these things to get the inexpensive health insurance, but as soon as he got home, he was like, “Screw this,” and just went to town. And that is rebellion in its true essence. And guess what? He recognized what was going on, and he’s like, “You know what? I’m gonna pay the higher insurance premium because this is just a psychological nightmare, and I’m not taking care of myself.” So that might be an extreme example, but it really does reflect why we would rebel against something that we, in theory, think we really want.

Brett McKay: Now, I’ve had that experience too, and you talk about this in the book, there’s these companies who’ve developed apps that are geared towards better eating or exercising, where they’ll send you a notification and say, “Hey, it’s time to do your exercise.” You just tap it and then it gives you the workout. And what the research has found is that people actually rebel against that. The first time, they’re like, “This is great, I’m getting this kind of coach,” but then after a while, it’s like, “This is really annoying.” And then they just turn it off, they don’t wanna do it anymore. I had that experience, I downloaded this app, it was a habit app actually, to help me floss, remind myself to floss, so it’d send me this notification at night on my smart watch. And at first, like, “Oh, this is great,” and then after a while, like, “This is so annoying.” And then it keeps bugging you, it’s like, “It looks like you’re not doing your flossing, Brett,” and I’m like… I just deleted the app. I’m like, “No, you’re annoying.” [chuckle]

Michelle Segar: It goes from a nudge to a nudge.

Brett McKay: Yeah, don’t wanna be a nudge. Alright, so we have temptation, we have rebellion. Another one disruptor is accommodation. I think this happens a lot for people, particularly around their diet, what’s the accommodation disruptor?

Michelle Segar: Well, it’s different depending on which behavior, but let’s jump into the example that I use in the book. So, accommodation reflects consistently placing your plans, your self-care plans, your exercise needs, whatever, always behind the needs of other people or other projects. So if we’re talking about eating, I had a client and she had a three-family reunion every year at the same time, and people always bring these wonderful, delicious foods, and a few weeks or months before this very celebratory weekend happened, she started following a new eating plan. She felt great, she was proud of herself. There was no rebelling in sight, this was…

She was all in. But on one of the evenings, one of her friends took out a special cake that she had baked just for this occasion, and my client felt like she didn’t have a choice about eating it, she was accommodating what she perceived as the celebratory needs of the full group. And so that’s an example of how, with accommodation, how someone with eating could think, “Gosh, I don’t wanna be a bummer, I don’t wanna burst the bubble, I don’t wanna be the no person,” and that’s just one very straightforward way with eating, how accommodation works. Of course, there were many other alternatives to her, but she was so stuck in, “I need to make sure I meet other people’s needs,” that she didn’t have the consciousness or the mental prowess to figure out the many alternatives that were there.

Brett McKay: With exercise, that happens too as well, “My kid needs to do this thing, so I’ll go do that thing with my kid, instead of exercising.”

Michelle Segar: Yeah, or my work is always more important, it’s always more important trying to get to zero on inbox, just in like, “Oh, oh yeah, I know I had planned to go outside and take a walk, but I’ve got 50 emails. Let me see if I get down to it.” But it’s like if you consistently make those choices… Now, sometimes we have to make the choices, that’s not what accommodation is, accommodation is consistently placing your eating plans, your exercise goals, whatever they are, below all these other needs.

Brett McKay: And that’s an easy one to fall into, because you feel like you’re being a good person, it’s kind of playing to your idea of altruism, but in the end, it’s hurting you.

Michelle Segar: Well, it’s also what we’ve been taught to value in society, that’s why we think we’re being a good person, is we have been taught to be productive and to be successful, and to take care of all the people we love, but that’s an extreme… We haven’t been taught that it’s an extreme message, but really it’s much more adaptive to be in the middle. If you’re always taking care of yourself to the exclusion of other people’s needs, then you’re selfish and that’s a bad thing, but really there’s a middle ground that’s the sweet spot.

Brett McKay: Alright, the final disruptor is perfection, and I think we talked about this in No Sweat as well, but how does this idea of perfection disrupt our good choices?

Michelle Segar: Well, perfection is… I’m gonna say, this is the icing on the cake, this is the cake and the icing and the platter. We’ve been taught to have all-or-nothing thinking in society, and so when we come to a choice point where we had planned to… We were just talking about going outside and taking a walk, and a conflict arises. If I can’t take the 45-minute walk, then the only alternative is nothing, and that is how most people come to choice points. But in a way, it’s become a dogma that it’s… We have very perfectionistic ideas about what our exercise and our eating needs to look like, and this dogma has… It blinds us to the numerous many options that are right in front of us, but we haven’t learned, we haven’t been taught, been socialized to understand that being flexible is actually the most adaptive response we can have, so that the alternative to all-or-nothing is, ta-da! Something is better than nothing.

Brett McKay: And I see this perfection problem hitting people particularly if they decided to follow some strict restrictive diet like Paleo or Whole30, whatever, it’s like, “Well, I didn’t do it today. What the hell? I’m just gonna eat this giant cake, why not? ’cause I’ve already blown it.”

Michelle Segar: And that’s what tends to happen, and research shows when you come to these choice points with restrictive strategies, it boomerangs and it backfires, but… And again, I wanna say this here, ’cause it’s appropriate, this is a place also where there might be individual differences, where someone, and I think it’s the minority of people, but I do know some people who literally have to follow their Paleo diet to a T. The problem is, is that everyone has been taught to follow whatever diet to a T, and that is not what research shows results in sustainable change for most people. So what we need to do, we really need a revolution on this, we need to revolutionize our thinking, our belief systems, our mindset, so that we begin to understand that something is better than nothing, “I’m gonna make the perfect imperfect choice because that is what will keep me on the path of lasting change.”

Brett McKay: Okay, so every choice point we have when it comes to diet or exercise, there’s possibly gonna be a temptation, there… You might have a feeling of rebellion, accommodation or perfection. And I guess for every person, it’s gonna be different what that disruptor is, correct?

Michelle Segar: Correct.

Brett McKay: Okay, and so I guess by knowing what the disruptor is, it’ll allow you to figure out how to approach this choice. Is that the idea?

Michelle Segar: That’s exactly right, and if people are interested in seeing whether they… How they score on these disruptors or what I call traps, decision traps. There’s actually a quiz on my website that people can take. But the thing is, is that it’s understanding what… Again, self-awareness is what we all need to make changes that we can stick with, so being able to say, “Oh, I know that this is my trap, or this is one of the things that really gets in my way. I’m noticing it. Hello, temptation! I see you staring at me.” The very act of naming what has the propensity, what has the possibility of derailing our choice or getting us into some kind of non-optimal self-talk or self-denigration, we can take some of that power away. So that’s the power of knowing what our traps tend to be.

Brett McKay: And then to counter or to make a… What do you call it? Joy choice. You’ve dealt with this acronym called POP. And I like the sort of metaphor you’ve created, these life choices that we experience are kind of like bubbles. We have this idea of different possibilities, but every one could be popped at any moment because of circumstances. How we respond to how that original idea pops, is what you talk about with this acronym, POP. So let’s say we face this decision point with our diet or exercise, say we want to exercise. We have this plan of what our ideal workout plan would look like. The choice is there, but then something comes up to interrupt it, how can this acronym of POP help us navigate that choice point?

Michelle Segar: Sure, so first, let’s think about it this way. Usually at choice points, life bursts our bubble. Something happens and we think… We have all-or-nothing thinking and it just goes… Our bubble goes down the drain. But instead, POP is this proactive, self-owning action, “I’m gonna pop my plan.” Metaphorically… That we had ’cause we can’t do it, and we can open up and release the options that are in front of us. So, POP now is an acronym that we are proactively choosing the process to go through. It stands for pause, because… I didn’t make up the wisdom of the pause, it’s been around for thousands of years. The pausing lets us both name our trap, which takes away some of its power. It also gives us a space so that we can figure out how to respond instead of react unconsciously through a trap or something else. It allows us to harness our conscious attention, so that we can engage our executive functions, which are our innate mental abilities that let us problem solve. So, that’s what pause does.

Then the O in POP is, open up our options in play, and that’s just a fun opportunity to just think, “What else can I do? Hmm… ” I don’t have 45 minutes for my walk, I could walk for 15, or maybe I go down to the basement and ride the exercise bike for five after dinner, or maybe I see if a friend wants to take a walk for 10 minutes before dinner, or I pop into the gym for seven minutes. I mean, there’s all these options always available, but we haven’t been taught to think about it. And research shows that when we help people see things in a certain way, it actually helps them embrace the concept. So, by the very essence of the POP process and acronym, people are learning how to think more adaptively.

And then, the third part of POP is the second P, Pause, Open up your options and Pick the joy choice. And the joy choice is anything. It’s the perfect imperfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing. And that could be as simple as, “I am simply gonna walk to the mailbox, which I might not have done, and that’s gonna be my joy choice today, because that’s all the time I have or that’s all I have energy for.” And by its very essence, we are choosing to be consistent, and that is something that we can feel success about, and joyful.

Brett McKay: No, and you can apply this POP to any one of those different traps. As you were talking about this, I was saying, well, say your trap is accommodation, you get invited out to dinner, which you weren’t expecting, to the Cheesecake Factory, and so you accommodate it, it’s like, “Well, I wanna go, because I wanna be with these people that I enjoy.” But you could be like, “Okay, this doesn’t fit my eating plan exactly, how can I still join them in this dinner without it just disrupting things too much?” And you could say, “Well, I’ll get a salad, a big salad instead of the cheeseburger with a cheesecake afterwards.” That’s a way you could use this POP process to counter the accommodation trap.

Michelle Segar: Yeah, I mean, you could say, “Gee, I’d really like a hamburger and I wanna participate in the celebration, but I know the hamburger isn’t gonna make me feel great, so how about I have half a hamburger?” It’s really about teaching people to make compromises that in the past would have been considered as “failures”. But in fact, it’s the compromises, it’s the trade-offs that research suggests best keep us on the path of lasting change. And the more we do it, the better at generating different options we get. So it is a process of learning, and it might not be… People, it takes time to learn, to memorize an acronym POP. But I also suggest to my clients that they make a contact, so when they get to the choice point at the beginning of learning it, they don’t have to remember it right away. They can just pull up POP, and read it, and go through the process.

Brett McKay: No, I’ve done this POP process sort of intuitively over the years, because I think one of my big troubles with working out consistently was always perfection. It’s like, “Well, if I can’t do the actual workout, I’m not gonna workout at all.” And a couple of years ago, it just changed to, “Well, I don’t have time to get the whole workout in, so I’ll just do the main… ” I do barbell training, so I was just like, “Well, if I can’t get the whole thing in, I’ll just do the main lifts,” and I won’t do the bicep crawls and the assessor, I’ll just clip that. Or I’ll even reduce… Like, say I’m really clipped for time, really short for time, so what I’ll do instead, I’ll just do two sets instead of three sets, and that will shorten it and allow me to get some work in. And then it’s not the full workout, but I got something in. And it keeps that, I guess, that fly wheel turning, of consistent exercise in my life.

Michelle Segar: That’s exactly right. In the past, when I might not have wanted to go into the gym for 45 minutes and do a full set of hand weights because I was just exhausted, but I said, “Michelle, you know what? Go in and do three sets of three.” Literally, do a quarter or 20%, and instead of viewing it as not worth doing, view it as the joy choice, the perfect imperfect option that lets you do something. I mean, that is the new mantra. That is what will get more people successful, feeling good and staying consistent. It’s so counter-intuitive in a way, that if we give ourselves permission to do less than the ideal or the bull’s eye, that somehow we’re failing. But it’s the opposite, when we let ourselves do less, we actually do more.

Brett McKay: No, that’s the thing. Every nutritionist I’ve talked to, health expert I talk to, the thing they say that will lead to lasting success is you just have to be consistent. And that perfection… I think for a lot of people, the perfectionist thing gets in the way of being consistent ’cause they just… It’s all or nothing. So if you can just do something, that is probably better for you in the long run than just not doing anything at all.

Michelle Segar: And can I just add something right here?

Brett McKay: Sure.

Michelle Segar: Actually, last week when I was giving a key note, someone raised their hand and said, “Well, how do we stop someone from creating a bad habit of not doing anything or not doing enough?” And it’s a great question, right? But the answer is, the other way doesn’t work. The other way for most people, which is trying to aim for a bullseye doesn’t work. So, would you rather have people be consistent with doing less than might be an optimal dose of something, or would you rather have people do nothing of the gold standard? And the logic is clear that a better model for the way our human brain works and the way our chaotic lives are lived is that we have to learn how to be flexible and… But it’s one thing to tell people that being flexible is the solution, and it’s another thing to get them to really feel great about it, and that’s the point of the book. I want people to celebrate when they make the perfect imperfect choice.

Brett McKay: Well, how do you do this process, this POP process when you’re feeling particularly stressed or tempted? ’cause it is a… You’re bringing in your executive function to do this, and research has shown when you’re really stressed out, that executive function kind of goes to the back burner and our lizard brain takes control. Is it just a matter of practicing?

Michelle Segar: Yes. It is a matter of practicing, and I find that when I’m stressed, the act of noticing that and saying, “Can I POP it?” Like I use POP for everything now, I don’t just use it for choice points with exercise and eating, I use it when I might be irritated at someone in my family. Can I POP this? What are my… Let me pause, let me open up my options here, let me pick the joy choice. Yes, so if we can name the stress and see it, then we immediately take back some of the power in that situation, and then we can shift into harnessing our executive functions. I really like what Judson Brewer says, which is, “Get curious.” So as a first step, I think getting curious, “Hmmm,” and that’s… He even says that, “Hmmm, I notice that I’m feeling stressed right now, I wonder what that’s about.” I think the friendlier we are, the more curious we can be, instead of just feeling like, “Ugh, I can’t believe it.” Or when we notice and have awareness, that gives us an observer perspective, and again, this is paramount, this is core wisdom in the mindfulness movement, when we can self-observe, we really do have much more control. And so the idea is that we can notice the stress and then shift into the POP process. And I found it very empowering to say, “I’m gonna POP that stress,” or, “I’m gonna POP that anger,” or, “I’m gonna POP that in my plan and see what else I can do.”

Brett McKay: As I was reading your book, I got… You were saying that you use this process for things beyond eating and exercise, and I think it works for other complex behavior change as well. I think typically, people make new year resolutions, like “I wanna be less angry,” and I think this POP process can help them. Whenever you feel angry, think about, “Okay, what’s going on here? What are my options besides lashing out?” And then you pick the one that’s a better option besides lashing… The one that you enjoy.

Michelle Segar: And then you celebrate.

Brett McKay: Yeah, well, Michelle, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Michelle Segar: I’ve had so much fun, Brett, thank you. People can go to my website, which is my name, Michellesegar.com. And I know that this is being aired on the 25th of April, so if people are intrigued by the ideas we’re talking about and wanna learn more about the science or method, if they order before the 26th, midnight tonight, they can participate in my four-session live book club with a workbook where we’ll go deeper into these issues. But there’s more information on my website and the quiz too.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michelle Segar, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Michelle Segar: Thank you so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Michelle Segar, she’s the author of the book, The Joy Choice, it’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website, Michellesegar.com. Also, check out our show notes at AOM.is/segar, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast, make sure to check out our website at Artofmanliness.com, where you can find our Podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of The AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher premium. Head over to Stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on android, ios, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of The AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you’d take one minute to give us a review on apple podcast or Stitcher or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you, please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #797: Overcome the Decision Traps Around Diet and Exercise appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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This article was written through a collaboration between C. Daniel Motley and the AoM Team.

The Victorian poet Matthew Arnold once claimed that “The crown of literature is poetry,” and if our neglect of poetry is any indication, the crown is rusting. While book sales fluctuate from year to year, fewer and fewer publishing houses are printing volumes of poetry. The demand for poets and their poems has ebbed.

However, we do ourselves a great disservice when we neglect the reading of poetry. John Adams, one of the founding fathers of the United States, commended poetry to his son John Quincy. Both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt committed their favorite poems to memory. Ancient kings were expected to produce poetry while also being versed in warfare and statecraft. That poetry has fallen out of favor among men in the 21st century is a recent trend rather than the norm.

To help remedy this, we have compiled a list of 20 classic poems that every man should read. Spanning the past two thousand years, the poems on this list represent some of the best works of poetry ever composed. But don’t worry — they were selected for both their brevity and ease of application. Some are about striving to overcome, others about romantic love, and still others about patriotism. Whether you’ve been reading poetry for years or haven’t read a single line since high school, these poems are sure to inspire and delight you.

“Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tennyson, poet emeritus of England during the latter half of the 19th century, composed a number of classic poems that deserve careful reading. “Ulysses,” possibly his most anthologized poem, begins at the end of Odysseus’ life after the events of Homer’s Odyssey. Tennyson depicts the desire of a man wanting to set out on new adventures and see new sights, even as his life is passing into twilight. Ulysses’ memorable phrases will encourage even the most settled soul to strike out and start something new.

Read “Ulysses” here.

“If—” by Rudyard Kipling

Arguably the world’s most famous piece of literature on what it means to be a man. Soldiers and athletes have drawn from its wisdom, and boys (and men!) have committed its lines to memory for over a century. A celebration of the British “stiff upper lip” and the ideals of manly character, this Victorian classic is worth meditating on every so often as a reminder of the virtues and actions that make up a life well-lived.

Read “If—” here.

“Sailing to Byzantium” by W. B. Yeats

Socrates, speaking to a friend, once asked, “Is life harder at the end?” W.B. Yeats’ meditation on adolescence and what it means to grow old is a salve for world-weary souls. Writing near the end of his life, Yeats confesses that, although his body wastes away, his desire for what is good will not cease. Yeats’ vision for what is “true, good, and beautiful” reminds us that youth and vitality are ultimately about how one sees the world and not about age. Filled with beautiful imagery, “Sailing to Byzantium” offers a corrective to our modern obsession with chasing the phantom of eternal youth.

Read “Sailing to Byzantium” here.

Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare

No list of poems is complete without the Bard himself. Known primarily for his plays, universally accepted as some of the best works in world literature, Shakespeare was also a poet, composing over 150 sonnets in his lifetime. Sonnet 29 is a lamentation on the loss of fame and fortune but ends with a meditation on the love that he has for his beloved. Works such as It’s a Wonderful Life echo the themes in Shakespeare’s Sonnet, showing us that the company of loved ones far outweighs all the riches that the world offers.

Read Sonnet 29 here.

“Invictus” by William Ernest Henley

We’re not promised a life absent trials and suffering. While horrific events have sidelined many men, William Ernest Henley refused to be crushed on account of hardship. As a young man he contracted tuberculosis of the bone, which resulted in the amputation of the lower part of one of his legs. The disease flared up again in Henley’s twenties, compromising his other good leg, which doctors also wished to amputate. Henley successfully fought to save the leg, and while enduring a three-year hospitalization, he wrote “Invictus” — a stirring charge to remember that we are not merely given over to our fates. While life can be “nasty, brutish, and short,” we cannot sit idle while waves crash against us. A product of Victorian stoicism, and lived struggle, Henley’s poem is a clarion call to resist and persevere through the hardest of trials.

Read “Invictus” here.

“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost

Robert Frost once told John F. Kennedy that “Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age.” If that is the case, then Frost brought both to bear in this poem about two neighbors rebuilding a fence between their property during a cold winter in New England. A story told in blank verse, Frost critiques the phrase that he attributes to the other man in the story, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Dedicated to neighborliness and good will towards others, Frost’s work is a helpful tonic against 21st century individualism and selfishness.

Read “Mending Wall” here.

“Pioneers! O Pioneers!” by Walt Whitman

The West has captivated the imaginations of America’s greatest writers, from James Fenimore Cooper to Cormac McCarthy. Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” mixes adventure and a summons to tread out on new paths. Published at the end of the Civil War and the start of the great migration west, Whitman is rightly considered to be one of the earliest poets to distill America down to its essence. “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” still moves the spirit to chart a new course and serves as both a reminder of where we have come from and where we can go.

Read “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” here.

“Horatius” by Thomas Babington

While serving the English government in India during the 1830s, politician, poet, and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay spun semi-mythical ancient Roman tales into memorable ballads or “lays.” His most famous lay was “Horatius,” a ballad that recounted the legendary courage of an ancient Roman army officer, Publius Horatius Cocles, who was lauded for making a stand with two comrades, and then alone, against a horde of advancing enemy Etruscans. Macaulay’s homage to the honor of Horatius has proved an inspiration to many men, including Winston Churchill, who is said to have memorized all seventy stanzas of the poem as a boy.

Read “Horatius” here.

“On the Stork Tower” by Wang Zhihuan

The shortest poem on this list (the entirety of its text is contained on the image above), Zhihaun’s meditation on nature also serves as an epigram, a short motivational work meant to encourage seeking out new and better prospects. While the poem is only four lines long, it works as a meditative focus point, something to ponder whether sitting alone outside or during a crisis as a reminder that there is a solution to be found no matter the problem. Combining Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian religious ideas, Zhihuan’s only surviving poem provides food for thought dressed in the language of nature.

“The Builders” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

While we often think of builders as limited to those who work with their hands, the ethos of the craftsman is something everyone should strive to emulate and cultivate. Life is a craft in and of itself — one that needs to be learned and attended to with the same kind of patience, care, and integrity that go into shaping tangible materials. All of us, Longfellow argues in this poem, are architects; all of our days are building blocks that contribute to the structure of our existence; and all of our actions and decisions (even those no one else sees) determine the strength, and thus the height, that the edifices of our lives can reach.

Read “The Builders” here.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes

Hughes penned this poem when he was just 17 years old. Written on his way to visit his father, the work both summarizes the experience of the young, black writer and encapsulates the struggle of African-Americans across the span of time. Hughes uses famous locations of African civilizations as a reminder of his rich heritage. Exasperated but not undone, Hughes’ poem is a tribute to those who have come before and an unspoken pledge to transcend time and circumstances.

Read “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” here.

“The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke

“War is hell” quipped William Tecumseh Sherman, and no generation understood this better than the boys thrown into the grinder of World War I. While Wilfred Owen’s “Dolce Et Decorum Est” also makes for necessary reading, Rupert Brooke’s poem about loss and remembrance in wartime marries youthful vigor with a cautious patriotism. Meditating on his own death and what he hopes it means for others, Brooke reminds us that countries aren’t composed of flags and anthems, but the people who serve and sacrifice their lives for the greater good. His soldier is “A body of England’s, breathing English air,” composed of and composing what England is. “The Soldier” is a heartfelt memorial to all of those who met danger with courage and should stir us to press forward — even at the highest cost.

Read “The Soldier” here.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot What happens when societies favor disillusionment rather than contentment, individuality rather than community, safety rather than fulfillment? Eliot explores these questions in his own context, writing after the devastation brought on by World War I. Ironically titled, the poem lacks another individual for the poet to praise. Rather, the narrator reflects and laments on missed chances and opportunities never taken to reach out and connect with another person. A difficult but rewarding read, Eliot’s iconic poem serves as a warning — do not allow the awkwardness of human connection to keep you from making meaningful relationships.

Read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” here.

“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon have one thing in common — they were unable to outlast the empires they forged. Though they garbed themselves in symbols meant to represent the eternal, eventually they went to the grave like the rest of mankind. Shelley encapsulates this motif in “Ozymandias,” written from the perspective of a man speaking with a traveler who had just visited the former empire of the great Ozymandias. Although the dead ruler’s statues and memorials remain, they are dilapidated and gather dust, a symbol of the passage of time that dooms any who dreams of building empires. Shelley’s classic work is a morality tale, a check on hubris, a reminder that no matter how great our works, they will all ultimately decay as the wheel of history turns round.

Read “Ozymandias” here.

“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne

Written to his wife upon leaving for a trip abroad, Donne’s poem uses the literary concept of a “conceit,” an extended metaphor, to encourage his wife to see their momentary separation not as “A breach, but an expansion” of their love. Donne describes their relationship in terms of a drawing compass, her being the arm that is fixed in place and his as the arm extended outward, yet still connected. Donne’s masterful use of the English language, blended with emotional longing, makes “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” one of the greatest love songs ever penned. Donne’s work is an excellent poem to read with your spouse or significant other.

Read “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” here.

Poem from The Iron Heel by Jack London

This poem is actually contained within another work of literature — Jack London’s novel, The Iron Heel. The book’s narrator, Avis Everhard, describes the text as her husband’s favorite poem and an encapsulation of his spirit, but it is also clearly a description of London’s own philosophy of life — his belief in the infinite power and potential of man and desire to experience everything the world had to offer. “How can a man, with thrilling, and burning, and exaltation, recite the following and still be mere mortal earth, a bit of fugitive force, an evanescent form?” Everhard asks. It’s a rhetorical question, of course; speak it aloud and see for yourself.

Read the poem from The Iron Heel here.

“The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

During the Crimean War, a miscommunication led a small band of around six hundred British cavalrymen to ride into a valley surrounded by twenty Russian battalions armed with heavy artillery. While the British cavalry was resoundingly and tragically defeated, and their commanders sharply criticized for the heavy casualties, the bravery of the men who charged into the “valley of death” was celebrated and honored in many forms — none more famous than this poem by Tennyson.

Read “The Charge of the Light Brigade” here.

“Opportunity” by John James Ingalls

Opportunity, it is famously said, knocks only once. John James Ingalls, a U.S. Senator from Kansas, penned an ode to this simple but profound principle in the mid-19th century, and it was said to have become Theodore Roosevelt’s very favorite poem. When he was president, an autographed copy of it was the only thing besides a portrait to hang in TR’s executive office in the White House. If the Bull Moose needed a potent reminder to listen for opportunity’s subtle call, we all surely do as well.

Read “Opportunity” here.

“Character of the Happy Warrior” by William Wordsworth

What makes a good soldier? What qualities are attendant in a “happy warrior”? These are the questions that William Wordsworth lays out in the opening line of one of his most famous poems, and then proceeds to answer in the lines that follow. A great warrior deftly finds balance between being eager for battle, and yet aching for the joys and pleasures of home. A great warrior is guided by an inner light of virtuosity and generosity. A great warrior knows that suffering contains purpose. While the words pertain particularly to the soul of a soldier, its inspiration applies to every man engaged in the fight of life.

Read “Character of the Happy Warrior” here.

Ode 1.11 by Horace

Made famous by Robin Williams’ inspiring literature teacher in the film Dead Poets Society, Horace’s Ode 1.11 contains one of the most quoted Latin phrases — carpe diem, or “seize the day!” Writing to his friend Leuconoe, Horace tries to convince him to avoid thinking about tomorrow, or attempt to speak to astrologers in order to peer into the future. Instead, he encourages Leuconoe to make every day count and to stop relying on the hope that tomorrow will bring something better on its own. Ode 1.11 admonishes us to remember that we are not promised tomorrow, and calls us to do what needs to be done today.

Read Ode 1.11 here.

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C. Daniel Motley lives in Washington state with his wife, cat, and dog. They are both Southern ex-pats who are always on the prowl for sweet tea and Cracker Barrel. The post 20 Classic Poems Every Man Should Read appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Every neighborhood has one.

He’s the old, eighty-something guy you see running every day. He’s always out at the same time. He’s frequently shirtless.

Chances are, this guy didn’t start running last year. Or a decade ago. Or even forty years back.

Chances are, he started running in college. Or high school. And he hasn’t stopped in the half century since.

According to one law of physics, an object at rest stays at rest, while an object in motion stays in motion.

According to another, it takes more energy to set an object in motion, than it does to maintain its motion.

There’s a corollary in the laws of personal development that’s just as universal and ironclad:

It’s a lot more difficult to get going, than it is to keep going.

Starting a new behavior, staying with it long enough that it becomes habitual, is hard. But once you do, once it becomes a normal, natural part of your life, it becomes easy. You can’t imagine not doing it.

It takes a lot of force, a lot of fuel, for the rocket ship of personal change to escape the gravity of things-as-they-are-now. But once it does, it remains indefinitely in orbit. A perpetual motion machine.

There are implications to this law of life:

If you’re young, take advantage of the surplus of enthusiasm inherent to that stage, and initiate the kind of habits your elderly self will thank you for.

If you’re older, when a surge of “I-want-to-turn-over-a-new-leaf!” energy arises — which happens less and less as you age, but still happens — ride that wave for all it’s worth. You never know when it’s the last burst of brightness in a collapsing star.

Wherever you are, begin. Start today.

Then, when you’re pushing eighty, you’ll be the guy who’s still at it. With any luck, shirtless.

The post Sunday Firesides: Objects in Motion appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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A knife’s functionality is only as good as its maintenance. Although there are dozens of ways to sharpen knives, this basic technique goes a long way toward keeping your blade keen enough to do most jobs with ease. Sharp blades mean smoother cuts, which are safer because they require less force. You can find more details on knife sharpening here.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

The post How to Sharpen a Pocket Knife: An Illustrated Guide appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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2.5 million weddings are projected to take place this year in the United States — the most weddings this country has seen in almost 40 years. After postponing their ceremonies during the pandemic, many couples are finally tying the knot.

Whether you’re set to walk down the aisle, or you’ll be attending the ceremonies of family and friends who are, we’ve published a bunch of articles over the years that can help you navigate one of life’s most singular events. Below you’ll find our wedding-related resources broken down by your role in the proceedings; from the duties you have responsibility for, to how to dress to show your respect for the occasion, we’ve got you covered.

For the Groom * The Complete Guide to Being a Groom * How to Pick the Perfect Men’s Wedding Ring * 20 Classic and Unique Groomsmen Gift Ideas * A Guide to Writing Thank You Notes

For Groomsmen/Best Man/Ushers * How to Throw a Classy Bachelor Party * The Duties of the Best Man * 10 Steps to Giving the Best, Best Man Speech * The Ins and Outs of Being a Wedding Usher

For Guests * A Primer on Wedding Etiquette * Dressing for Life’s Big Events (Including Weddings) * Dressing for the Occasion: Your 60-Second Visual Guide * How a Suit Should Fit

The post The Art of Manliness Wedding Resource Guide appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Warmer days have finally arrived.

That means cookouts, cornhole, and swimming.

It also means mosquitoes.

I hate those suckers (pun intended!).

Mosquitoes can ruin a perfectly good outdoor event. They can also spread viruses like West Nile and Zika.

To prevent yourself from getting bitten, you can spray your body with insect repellent. But even when it’s natural stuff you make yourself, slathering that gunk on is annoying.

Ideally, you’d like to not only keep mosquitoes away from your skin, but away from your vicinity in general.

I’ve tried to curb the mosquitoes around my home over the years, but every summer they seem to get the better of me. I’ve made it a goal this year to finally vanquish them. In preparing my ‘squito battle plan, I’ve learned that there are better and worse tactics to employ, and below we break down which common control methods belong in each category.

The Best Mosquito Control Method: Destroy and Treat Mosquito Breeding Grounds The best thing you can do to control mosquitoes is to disrupt their breeding cycle. You want to prevent these bloodsuckers from laying eggs in the first place.

Mosquitoes lay their eggs in standing water. Still, stagnant water provides mosquito larvae with the bacteria and microorganisms they need for food. So if you want to prevent mosquitoes from laying eggs near your home, you need to eliminate their breeding grounds, i.e., you need to eliminate or reduce all standing water near your home.

Walk around your property once a week and look for standing water.

Flower pots, birdbaths, toys, tree stumps, water features, buckets, and clogged gutters are all potential breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

If you find some standing water, find ways to eliminate it. Clean out your gutters, turn over empty flower pots so that water can’t collect in them, and replace birdbath water regularly.

If you have areas in your yard or garden that don’t drain well, you may need to consider installing French drains or doing some landscaping to encourage better drainage.

If you have standing water that you can’t eliminate, you’ll want to treat it with a mosquito dunk. Mosquito dunks are donut-shaped tablets made of bacteria that only kill mosquito larvae. They don’t kill other insects. They’re safe and last up to 30 days. I put a mosquito dunk in our water feature in our front garden. I’m also going to start putting one in an area in our garden where water tends to drain slowly.

Mosquito dunks are cheap and can be bought at Walmart, hardware stores, and Amazon.

Eliminating and treating mosquito breeding grounds is the most effective way to reduce mosquitoes around your property. What’s more, it’s the cheapest and safest way to do so. This should be your go-to line of defense in controlling mosquitoes around your home.

If you need a proof of concept that this method works, look no further than Disney World in Orlando, FL. The place was built in the middle of what used to be a mosquito-infested swamp, but the park has no mosquitoes despite not using pesticides.

How do they do it? They ruthlessly guard against having any (untreated) standing water in the park. No mosquito breeding grounds; no mosquitoes.

Adequate Methods of Mosquito Control Eliminating and treating mosquito breeding grounds can go a long way in controlling mosquitoes around your home. But it’s not foolproof. Mosquitoes are wily suckers. They can find not-so-obvious places on your property to lay eggs. The bit of water that collects in the depression of a leaf is sufficient for a mosquito to lay its eggs.

Try these mosquito-control measures if you still have a mosquito problem after eliminating breeding sites:

Mosquito Barrier Treatment. A mosquito barrier treatment is an insecticide spray applied to areas around your home where adult mosquitoes feed and rest. The spray is applied to leaves, shrubs, grass, trees, and around your home’s doorways. Adult mosquitoes that come into contact with a surface that has been treated with the insecticide spray will die a short time later.

The treatment lasts for up to a month and has been shown to reduce mosquito activity.

There are a few downsides to employing a mosquito barrier treatment. First, it’s not something you can typically do on your own. You’ll likely have to hire a professional to come and apply it. And these professional treatments can be pricey. Look to spend $65-$100 a month on them.

Second, mosquito barrier treatments may contribute to mosquitoes developing insecticide resistance.

Third, mosquito barrier treatments also kill non-target insects, including pollinators like butterflies and bees.

Use mosquito barrier treatments sparingly and only after you’ve done your best to eliminate and treat mosquito breeding grounds.

I’ve tried mosquito barrier treatments in the past. I think it may have reduced our mosquitoes a little, but not enough that they stopped being a nuisance, and not enough to justify the $99/month charge.

Mosquito Foggers. Mosquito foggers use heat to create a thick white fog of insecticide that drifts through shrubs and leaves to kill adult mosquitoes.

Mosquito foggers only provide temporary relief from mosquitoes. They only kill the adult mosquitoes that get hit with the insecticide-laden fog they emit. After a fogging session, you’ll get a few hours to up to a day of mosquito relief. Foggers are great to use before an outdoor event like a pool party or BBQ.

The downside to foggers is that they do kill other non-target insects like butterflies and bees. Take that into consideration if you decide to use one.

Mosquito foggers can be purchased at all hardware stores. Application is pretty straightforward, but you need to consider a few factors before applying:

Apply when adult mosquitoes are most active. Usually, that’s at dawn and dusk.
Don’t apply in the middle of the day. The heat will cause the insecticide to volatilize and drift upward out of target areas.
Don’t apply when it’s windy. The insecticide will just blow away.

I’ll occasionally use a mosquito fogger in the morning when we have a backyard social event planned for later that day. It seems to do the trick in reducing mosquitoes, but yes, it’s only a temporary fix.

A Simple Fan. Mosquitoes are weak fliers. The air from a fan will do a decent job of keeping mosquitoes away from you. If you’re looking for temporary relief from mosquitoes while you’re outside at a cookout, just run a fan. It doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t require spraying chemicals around, doesn’t kill other insects, and will also keep you cool on a hot, humid night.

Less Effective Methods of Mosquito Control Mist Systems. In recent years, automated mist systems that spritz out mosquito insecticide throughout the day have become popular among homeowners. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it solution for mosquito control.

However, there isn’t a lot of research out there on the effectiveness of these mist systems. Studies suggest that the systems only reduce mosquitoes near spray nozzles. Also, wind activity in your area can blow the insecticide out of your backyard, reducing its efficacy in eliminating mosquitoes on your property.

There are also concerns that the frequent misting of these systems is creating insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. And besides killing mosquitoes, the insecticide kills insects like bees and butterflies as well.

Furthermore, misting systems are pretty dang expensive to install; look to spend $2,500 to $4,000 in setting one up, depending on the size of your property. Some misting systems are also prone to frequent breakdowns, so many homeowners spend even more money maintaining their system after it’s installed.

Due to the lack of research supporting their efficacy and their high cost, along with the potential of increasing insecticide resistance and killing pollinating insects, automated misting systems aren’t considered an effective way to control mosquitoes.

Bug Zappers. You’ve likely seen a bug zapper hanging around your grandpa’s back porch or near the outdoor dining area of a lakeside restaurant. The idea is simple. A UV light attracts an insect to the zapper. When the mesmerized insect comes into contact with it, they get electrocuted to death.

If you’ve looked in the tray of a zapper, you’ve likely seen some mosquito carcasses. So zappers work for controlling mosquitoes, right?

Well, no.

Researchers have found that of the bugs killed by zappers, only 1% to 6% are mosquitoes. The vast majority of insects killed by bug zappers are butterflies, bees, moths, and flies. They also kill insects that prey on mosquitoes. This is likely why the U.S. Department of Agriculture has found that your chances of getting bit by mosquitoes actually increase when you’re in the vicinity of a bug zapper. Kill mosquito predators —> more mosquitoes —> better chance of getting bit.

The scientific consensus is that bug zappers should be avoided.

Citronella Candles. Citronella candles and tiki torches have been used for decades to keep mosquitoes away from pool parties and backyard cookouts. But if you’re like me, you’ve likely noticed that they don’t do much to repel mosquitoes. I still get chewed up when we burn one.

That’s because citronella candles don’t really work. An essential oil from a plant called Cymbopogon nardus, citronella does repel mosquitoes, but the concentration of scent emitted from a candle isn’t enough to keep mosquitoes at bay. Also, wind can just blow the scent away from your area. The mosquito-repelling effect you do get from burning a citronella candle likely just comes from the smoke itself and not the scent. You’d get about the same mosquito protection by burning a regular candle.

Check Your Local Agricultural School for More Mosquito Fighting Tips If you’re looking for more tips on controlling mosquitoes in your area, I highly recommend visiting the website of your nearby agricultural school. Each part of the country has different mosquito seasons and even mosquito breeds. The tactics you use may need to be tweaked depending on where you live. Researchers at ag schools are constantly updating their websites with battle-tested tactics for controlling mosquitoes in your area.

The post The Most (And Least) Effective Ways to Control Mosquitoes appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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In the quiet moments of our lives, we can all sense that our hearts long for something, though we often don’t know what that something is. We seek an answer in our phones, and while they can provide some sense of extension and fulfillment — a feeling of magic — the use of technology also comes with significant costs in individual development and interpersonal connection that we typically don’t fully understand and consider.

My guest today will unpack what it is we really yearn for, how technology, when misused, can direct us away from the path to fulfilling those yearnings, and how we can find true human flourishing in a world in which so much works against it. His name is Andy Crouch and he’s the author of The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. Today on the show we talk about the tradeoffs you make when you seek magic without mastery, and how we can understand our desires better once we understand ourselves as heart, soul, mind, and strength complexes who want to be loved and known. We discuss the difference between interactions that are personal versus personalized, as well as the difference between devices and instruments, and how to use your phone as the latter instead of the former. We end our conversation with why Andy thinks we need to redesign the architecture of our relational lives and create something he calls “households.”

Resources Related to the Podcast * Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe * Wendell Berry * AoM article on Plato’s idea of the tripartite nature of the soul * AoM Podcast #723: Men Without Chests * AoM Article: The Tool Works on Both Ends * AoM Article: Communities vs. Networks — To Which Do You Belong?

Connect With Andy Crouch * Andy’s Website * Praxis Labs

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Read the Transcript! Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. In the quiet moments of our lives, we can all sense that our hearts long for something. We often don’t know what that something is. We seek an answer in our phones, and while they provide some sense of extension and fulfillment, a feeling of magic, the use of technology also comes with significant cost in individual development and interpersonal connection that we typically don’t fully understand and consider.

My guest today will unpack what it is we really yearn for. That technology when misused can direct us away from the path to fulfilling those yearnings, and that we can find true human flourishing in a world in which so much works against it. His name is Andy Crouch, and he’s the author of The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World.

Today on the show, we talk about the trade-offs you make when you seek magic without mastery, and how we can understand our desires better once we understand ourselves as heart, soul, mind and strength complexes, who wanna be loved and known. We discuss the different interactions that are personal versus personalized, as well as the difference between devices and instruments, and how to use your phone as the latter instead of the former.

We end our conversation with why Andy thinks we need to redesign the architecture of our relational lives and create something he calls “households”. After the show’s over check out our show notes at aom.is/crouch.

Andy Crouch, welcome to the show.

Andy Crouch: Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you’ve got an interesting background, you’ve studied Classics at Cornell University. It’s beautiful Ithaca.

Andy Crouch: Yes it is.

Brett McKay: And then after that, you went to divinity school at Boston University, you got your Master’s in Divinity. Usually, most people, they become like a minister or they go teach. You did a little bit of ministering, but you’ve spent most of your career writing about digital technology, particularly its intersection with culture and faith and philosophy. What drew you to explore the humanistic side of our digital technology?

Andy Crouch: Great question. Well, I’ve always loved technology, even though it wasn’t the thing I ended up studying, it was my first love. My dad brought home one of the very first computer terminals, you’re probably too young to know what these were, but back when there was just a single computer for a whole university.

And so when I was a kid, I started coding, I still love to code, and so I’ve been fascinated with this, though it wasn’t my vocation. As a user, as a beneficiary of technology of course, ’cause we all are, I’ve really got more interested in it though, when I tried to start understanding, honestly, what was going wrong at the same time as so many things were going so right.

Like the iPhones just keep getting better and better, and our tech keeps getting better and better, but people are not getting better and better. We’re not getting happier and happier, that’s become pretty clear. We’re not getting healthier and healthier, especially in the US.

So I started trying to get to the heart of, what is technology, how has it shaped us? It just ends up being one of the most fundamental and interesting questions you can ask, and as a journalist and as a writer, I’m just drawn to the big important questions, and this to me is maybe the big important question of our time, for those of us who live in what we call “the West”, which is really the technological world.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that is important. I think people forget about when it comes to technology and science, what often happens is there’s an advancement in technology, and then we come up with a philosophy for that technology, like how we’re gonna integrate it into our lives, and in previous centuries, there’d be decades or centuries between innovations, so we have time to figure out, “Okay, well, what is the printing press? What does this mean?”

And now stuff’s just happening constantly, and we never have time to think about, “Well, what does this mean, how are we gonna incorporate this into our life? What place will it have in our life?” So I think a lot of people were just like, “Okay, this is new. I’ll use it,” and we don’t really think about, “Well, what are the second order, third order effects of this?”

Andy Crouch: Completely. I think this is partly because of the distinctive thing about technology. We have a saying in our family, ’cause my wife is actually a scientist who’s a physicist, so she does experimental physics, and we say “science is hard, technology is easy” Or “technology is easy, science is hard.”

Science is slow, science is challenging, although the pace of scientific discovery has also accelerated, but what has really accelerated is the introduction of applications of science, which is what technology is, that are actually very easy to use. So it used to be that when people invented tools, it took a long time to make those tools really effective for human use, but now technology is so good at insinuating itself into our lives because it’s so easy to adopt. But you can adopt it so fast without actually thinking through, “What are we adopting? Why are we adopting it?”

It’s also sold on two things. It’s always sold on the premise of it’s going to be, you’ll be able to do something new and you won’t have to do things you don’t like to do. So, “You’ll be able to do this, you don’t have to do this.” But we never talk about the other two things that always come with technology, which is you’ll no longer be able to do something if you adopt this, or at least they’ll get a lot harder.

So it’s not only going to expand what you can do, it’s going to subtract what you can do. And it’s not just that you don’t have to do some things, but now you’ll actually start to have to do things. In other words, technology has a kind of coercive quality. Once we introduce it into our lives, into our homes, it actually requires behaviors of us, and those are often not disclosed in the sales process, you might say. [chuckle]

So it’s this combination of offering and coercion that we don’t really have time to reflect on, whereas with tools, they entered the human story so slowly and gradually that I think societies did a better job reflecting on what we were actually adopting and why.

Brett McKay: Can you give us an example of that, the promises that we get with technology and the burdens of it?

Andy Crouch: Yeah, I think of all the reasons people get a smartphone, now you’ll be be able to… One, they get it for their kids. Now you’ll be able to check on when their soccer game is. A lot of people feel like their kid needs a smartphone just to find out when soccer practice is. And that’s a really interesting example of the technology promises to expand your capabilities, but then it says, actually, now there is no other way to find out about soccer practice. So you have to have the thing to do this thing that people managed to do for many generations before the phone, but now you have to have it. It has this coercive quality.

Maybe a deeper example is what’s happened in music. I think the making of music is one of the most important things human beings do together and do as persons, and of course, technology about 100 years ago made it possible to listen to recorded music, which is an absolutely new idea in human history. Up ’til 100 years ago, if you wanted music, somebody had to play.

And now technology says, “Well now you can just listen to whatever music you want, and with streaming, listen to almost any music you want, any time, anywhere, and you’ll no longer have to play yourself.” And that sounds great, like what’s the downside to that? I think the downside is, as your world becomes full of professionally made recorded music, it’s at least less and less likely, even if not strictly speaking, less and less possible, it’s less and less likely that you or someone you know will sit down and go through all the effort and all the expense and difficulty of actually learning to make music.

And if you never go through that, you’ll never be able to make music yourself. And so this technology that opens up the world of hearing music to you, also closes down the possibility of making music together, ’cause now we’re often in places where no one in the room has ever practiced enough to be able to play in a way other people would wanna listen to, and so we’ve traded. It’s a, I don’t know, is it a bad trade or a good trade? But it’s definitely a trade. Does that make sense?

Brett McKay: That makes sense. And I think this trade-off that we make with technology is part of the reason, I think you make it explicit, it’s one of the reasons why you feel kind of this, I don’t know, ambivalence towards our technology. This is what you explore in your latest book, it’s called The Life We’re Looking For, is this idea, this idea of trade-off, is one of the big ideas that you’re trying to explore in this book?

Andy Crouch: Completely. In a way, it’s the trade of wanting to do magic. [chuckle] Arthur C. Clark said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And that sounds like a good thing, like, “Oh, I’d like to have that,” but magic is actually the way human beings talk about the ultimate trade. [chuckle]

So there’s this whole history of people reflecting on, what do you actually trade away when you decide to become a magician or a sorcerer or an alchemist? And the fundamental story of this in Western history is Goethe’s poem, Dr. Faustus, about this magician, sorcerer, alchemist who makes a deal with the devil to acquire incredible power, but at the cost of his soul.

And I’m not saying… Well, I don’t know if I’m saying, is that our technology is quite the same bargain. Because of course, it is not based on pure imagination, the way that maybe Faust was. It’s based on real things in the world that we’ve learned how they work, and that’s good for human beings to learn how the world works and make use of that.

But have we traded something away? I think we’ve traded away a bunch of things of great value to human flourishing, in the pursuit of what we thought was sufficiently advanced technology, this kind of magical world that works on its own, world that works without us having to do anything, without us having to become anything, without us having to grow or develop, and that leads to very diminished people in a very powerful world. I think the powers that we’ve acquired have come at the expense of our internal capability to really meaningfully be part of the world that we’re in.

Brett McKay: Do you know where else in culture they explore this trade-off of magic and what you… Twilight zone.

Andy Crouch: Totally.

Brett McKay: Yeah. We watch it a lot in our family, and it seems like every other episode is about that trade-off, sort of this Faustian bargain that people are making.

Andy Crouch: Exactly. It’s all over. Because we just instinctively know as human beings I think, that there are risks in these bargains. But because we think that all technology is about is science, basically, we’re like, “Well it’s just STEM, it science, technology, engineering, maths. What could go wrong?” But I actually think it’s embedded in these much deeper mysterious forces that we modern people don’t talk and think as much about, but then I think actually are still very much there.

Brett McKay: So your book’s called The Life We’re looking For. What is it that we are looking for when we turn to technology to make our lives better? What is the big thing we’re looking for, you think?

Andy Crouch: Maybe I’ll start with what we were originally looking for, which wasn’t a device and wasn’t technology. I think essentially what we’re looking for is a fully personal life. I begin the book by saying, “The very first human quest is recognition. First of all, we’re just looking for someone who is looking for us.” Which is a phrase I got from the psychiatrist Curt Thompson.

We’re looking for someone who’s going to look back, who’s going to regard us, pay attention to us, and in fact, none of us make it to adulthood without parents or someone who played the role of parents gazing at us and beholding us, interacting with us, listening to us. Because the first thing we’re looking for in a way is love, connection.

And then beyond that, all the things that become possible when you feel truly loved. You become creative in the world, you grow… We grow through the process of human development into adult human beings who have tremendous bodily capabilities, strength, tremendous mental capabilities, tremendous emotional range.

So we were looking for, and we still are looking for that kind of full human life, which I describe it as heart, soul, mind strength, complexes designed for love. That’s who we are. What we’re looking for with technology, I think comes in when the quest for real life fails or is frustrated in some way.

It’s actually really interesting to me to look at when do people first give a toddler a screen? ‘Cause toddlers are given screens now, right? We hand our toddlers screens. When do we do that? When they are feeling distressed, basically. The first time. Now, eventually you give it to them so they can find out when soccer practice is. [chuckle]

But when you give a 2-year-old an iPad, it’s because that 2-year-old is experiencing some frustration of being human. Maybe they’re stuck in the car, maybe they’re mad at mom, maybe they’re bored, whatever, and we’re like, “You know what? Here, try this.” And when the toddler tries it, that magical device responds to them in a way that other people don’t as readily.

That is, it pays unlimited attention to them. It is much easier to manipulate than the real world. Toddlers get frustrated in the real world, as do adults, ’cause it doesn’t always respond to what we want it to do. But that device and its kind of magical virtual world is designed to just be so easy to use that even a toddler can use it and feel very efficacious.

So what we turn to technology for is a compensating simulation of the real powers that we want, but that are too hard or too long or difficult to acquire. And for relief from the distress of being heart, soul, mind, strength, complexes designed for love in a world that’s a vulnerable place and hard to be in, and technology will take away some of that distress and replace it with this kind of pretty easy effortless sense of capacity and power.

Brett McKay: Okay, I wanna dig more into this. Okay, this idea of being a person. What we’re… You’re making this case that we’re seeking to be a person, that’s the light, we’re trying to develop ourselves into a person. And you say this, I wanna dig into more of this heart, soul, mind, strength complex. What is that?

Andy Crouch: Well, it comes from one of the longest standing wisdom traditions in the world, the Hebrew Bible. It’s this idea from the Hebrew scriptures, that we are to meant to love, it says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul,” Jesus of Nazareth adds, “All your mind and all your strength.”

I was thinking about that, and I thought, “That is a very good and very irreplaceable precise summary of the components of being a human being.” In other words, we’re not a brain without a body, we’re not mind without emotion, but we’re not emotion without reason. You can run all the permutations or combinations.

We are all these things together and they interact, so heart is like emotion, desire, also the will that comes from the desire, the desire to pursue something because that thing is beautiful or worthwhile, it activates our emotion and our activity. Mind, of course, is the capacity for cognition, reason, thinking things through.

Soul is the hardest one, but I suppose it’s something like depth of self. It’s going down into the very heart of who I am that makes me distinct perhaps from others, and my own unique story with all its pain and all its power. And then strength is the fact that we’re embodied. We’re not disembodied, mental, just mental spirits. We can’t think without our bodies, and our bodies can’t exist without thinking.

So this word “complex” kind of holds these all together and says, “They can’t be completely separated, but they are different from each other.” And then I think to turn it around, so much of modern life neglects one or more of these things, at any given time. The thing that’s been most neglected, because we really built our computers on the model of just pure minds, our computers are really good at the mind part of life, as it were, but they’re not that good at the strength part, and they ask very little of our strength.

So when you’re sitting at a computer, your body, which is meant to be moving in three planes through the world, is just totally idled. Totally inactivated practically. We’ve designed technology and designed a modern world that very rarely lets us bring all four of these things back into active collaboration, which would have been just normal for human beings until the blink of an eye ago.

Most human beings most of the time were out in a natural world that was beautiful, activated their heart. They had a sense of soul and connection to some transcendent reality that reflected itself in some ways in the depths of their being. They did, of course think their way through the world, and they were acting with their bodies. And every day all day, that was the human experience.

And now, how much of a given day is that actually our experience in the technological world? A very small part of the day, I would say, where all four of those are happening. So we’ve lost something that really we almost could have taken for granted for a very long time.

Brett McKay: Yeah, this idea of heart, soul, mind, strength complex. You also see this with the Greeks, like Plato had his idea of there’s three parts of us, three parts of the soul. And then you also… CS Lewis kinda picked up on this as well within The Abolition Of Man, where mind, chest, just kind of like that, I guess, that soul part. And then the belly. All are meant to work together to be fully human. If you take out one part, then you’re no longer human.

Okay, so what you’re saying is that in order for these to develop we typically, we interact with other people. We interact with the world around us. I think the important part of this idea of becoming human, I wanna bring in another writer that I like a lot, is Wendell Berry. He writes about being… You have to think of ourselves as creatures, that we are products of the earth. We are bound here in temporal time, and if we try to go beyond that, then we somehow miss out in our development.

And so you’re… Typically the way humans mostly develop, you’re a baby and you interact the world, you crawl, you pick up things, stick ’em in your mouth, and you’re doing this with people and you develop, and over time you develop into a human being. You’re saying technology kinda skips some of that stuff and we miss out on some of that development and becoming a person?

Andy Crouch: Exactly. Because development mostly happens against resistance. Right? So part of I think what Berry is getting at, and he’s influenced me tremendously as well, is it’s even the… Part of being a creature is you go out in the world and the world is just really big compared to you. Even if you just step out in the world, you just feel the smallness of being human. Some kind of resistance. The world is not set up to just actualize yourself in any easy, simple way.

And so I begin every day going outside, I just stand outdoors, before I look at a screen, I go out of doors and I stand ideally out from under a roof, entirely. I get off a porch, I stand under the sky. Some days it’s raining or snowing or whatever, I still stand there. And I just feel like my smallness. Which strangely is not frightening, at least most mornings. It’s strangely grounding.

But it is a kind of resistance. It says, “Gosh, how is little you going to make a difference in this world?” It’s both an invitation and a kind of warning. And that’s developmental, like something happens to my mind, my heart, my soul, my strength when I start the day that way, that invites me to figure out what the next thing is, what I can do.

And then ideally, I’d be working against certain kinds of resistance. We know that strength only develops when you push muscles or pull muscles against resistive forces, but that’s really true for the mind as well. It’s happening for me in this conversation, like you’re asking questions that I don’t know the answer to them, or in a simple way know the answer. So I have to think my way through it, I’m feeling resistance as I do that, good things are happening as I’m doing that.

What technology does is it makes a lot of these things much easier. So if I have central air conditioning in my house, I never have to go outside and feel a difference of temperature or step out into a natural world where I’m no longer kind of in charge of the temperature, the computer does a lot of the thinking for me. If I need to do math, it just does the math. If I need to remember something, it just does the remembering.

That’s useful, but it’s not developmental, and this is… I think this is the heart of why we are so markedly lonely, anxious and depressed, is we’ve become very diminished people, and diminished people have a hard time finding something to do that’s worthwhile in the world and have a hard time finding a way to make a real connection with other people in the world, because if everyone else has just been equally undeveloped as me, who am I connecting with? I’m connecting with shadows or ciphers.

That’s an exaggeration maybe of where we’re at, but maybe not totally missing something that has changed, is that we used to be in a world that just of necessity developed us, and now we’re in a world that almost necessarily or coercively fails to develop us, just keeps us still, keeps us not engaged, and I think that’s causing a lot of distress that’s hard to surface until you really start paying attention to what it feels like to be us right now.

Brett McKay: Alright, so human development, there’s resistance, there’s frustrations, there’s friction. So when we experience that, we turn to technology thinking, “Well, maybe this can solve that issue.”

Andy Crouch: Exactly.

Brett McKay: I think one of the things you talk about, you really hit home. I think one of the things that we’re looking for as human beings, you said in the beginning, we’re looking for recognition, we’re looking for relationships with other people. Well, sometimes making relationships can be hard. Sometimes people don’t pay attention to you.

Andy Crouch: Sometimes. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Yeah, sometimes, pretty much all the time people misunderstand you, they’re frustrating, so we think, “Well, we can turn to technology,” and we get this social media superpower. But you’re making the case when we do that, we become a little bit less human, correct? ‘Cause we’re not developing it to its fullest capacity.

Andy Crouch: And more and more fragile, less resilient, less able to handle or know how to respond when someone doesn’t get what you’re saying or isn’t listening. Sherry Turkle who has studied so many dimensions of how media is shaping us, she had this really interesting series of kind of experiments or conversations in her lab at MIT with college students who are the easy ones to get in a lab at a college research setting, and she was trying to prob why do college students prefer to text rather than talk with each other, right? Why would you text your friend if you could talk with your friend?

But the answer is I think really illuminating. The basic answer that she gets from students as she probes this in her conversations with them, is they prefer to text because when you text you are in control of the message you send. So even as we’re having this conversation, there’s a lot I’m not in control of.

I’m not in control of what you ask, I’m not in control of how you respond, and I don’t get unlimited time to figure out how to respond. I sort of have to be in the moment, and that’s vulnerable. But if you’re texting, first of all, you’ve reduced the information stream tremendously. You’ve gone from mega-bits of information over a voice connection, like we’re using terabytes if we were face-to-face, like we’d be exchanging so much information in real time.

You take that all the way down to a few bytes of information at a time, that means that I can actually look over what I’m going to send to you before I send it. So I’m totally in control. I never send a message I didn’t mean to send, which happens all the time in real relationships. It’s much more likely you will get the message I want to send, but it also finds out the relationship.

The problem is the quest for control is directly in opposition to the quest for relationship. [chuckle] The more you wanna be in control of a situation, the less real relationship you have. Because relationship is risk, it is improv, it is vulnerability, and we would prefer not to have that. But the more we opt out of that, the less we lack the very thing we were most deeply designed for.

So that trade of, “Well, I’ll be more in control, I won’t be as vulnerable, it won’t be as hard,” in some ways true, but you won’t have much left once you’ve given up the things that make relationships what they are.

Brett McKay: Well, the other thing that technology allows us to do with relationships is, okay, we can control the conversation, we can control how we present ourselves to others so they like us, but we can also control who we even interact with in the first place. A lot of the frustration that happens with relationships, you end up with people that you just don’t even think like them, and you have to learn how to manage that.

With social media or the internet, you can find people who are pretty much just like you, and you know as soon as I interact with them it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be easy.

Andy Crouch: Exactly, exactly. And easy everywhere is what technology promises. That’s, to me that’s the fundamental idea, is wouldn’t it be nice if life were easy? Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone pretty much had the same opinions as you do, the same style of communication as you do? It’s such a steep trade-off to, how am I going to become the kind of person who can handle difficulty in the world, who could actually persuade others? I mean, this is a huge issue in our world right now.

How does anyone ever persuade anyone now? Because we’ve lost the ability to attend to someone who genuinely sees or feels the world differently than I do, and have them come to trust enough that I really know why they think what they think, what it feels like to be them, and then I can offer them an alternative account of the world, and they’re like, “Oh actually, that helps make sense of something that I couldn’t make sense of.”

But when we’re siloed off from each other and we’re never encountering that real difference, we also completely lose the ability to ever persuade someone else. And then of course, it just spirals into tiny little polarized tribes, rather than people who have actually done the hard work of, how do I listen well enough across some real difference that I could be part of a real conversation.

The problem is, the logic of this is ultimately it’s Narcissus’ mirror. Because it’s interesting, I’ve been married for 27 years, and when my wife and I got married, one of the things our friends said about us was, “Oh, Andy and Catherine are so alike,” like we had the same Myers-Briggs type, we had the same… There were so many ways that we were… We seemed quite similar while we were dating and engaged.

And then the day we got married, it was like a switch flipped and we just discovered all these ways that we’re so different from each other, and I never think of myself primarily these days as like my wife, even though I think if you met us, you would probably say that on an initial encounter. But the truth is, as we get to know any other person, we discover, “This is hard, this person does not see or feel what I see and feel.”

There’s always moments where you’re like, “I would rather opt out of this and go to some other environment where I’m more in control.” But the only place where you’re really going to experience that is with the infinite personalization of a screen that just mirrors back to you who you are.

Cause the moment you encounter another person, no matter how similar they seem to be, you’re going to encounter some deep chasms of difference that you’ll have to bridge, and that will cause conflict and strain and stress. If you opt out of that, you are ultimately opting out of all relationship in the world.

Fortunately, with screens, maybe you’ll be relatively palliated, [chuckle] but you won’t be living the life we were looking for when we started, which was to find that other face and somehow know what it was to be known by another. That, you won’t get.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show.

I love this distinction you make in the book about personal and personalized, ’cause I think this is a useful distinction ’cause I think what technology does it promises us to have personal experience, but what we get is personalized experiences. I love the example that you give of those robo letters you get from real estate agents that look like they’ve been written by hand.

Andy Crouch: They look so real.

Brett McKay: Yeah, tell us. Tell us about that distinction?

Andy Crouch: I got one as I was starting the book, I was thinking about this issue of what exactly has gone wrong in our world of persons? And I got this letter that, it completely fooled me. I consider myself to be a pretty suspicious person, but I got this letter in the mail and it looks like a friendly 10th grader had written me a note, it was sort of exuberant handwriting, and it took me several minutes looking at the letter to realize this window salesman [chuckle] had not actually written me a letter.

And I thought, “Oh, this is what technology is getting so good at. It’s getting good at simulating personal connection.” Because of course, what do I respond most deeply to? I respond to that face I’m looking for. And so now our technology, it’s a very convincing imitation of the real thing. That my devices know my name, they talk to me by name, they recognize my face.

But the difference between personal and personalized is very simple. In personalized encounters, there’s not actually another person on the other side, it’s a device, it’s a thing, it’s an algorithm, it’s a program. And yes, it very convincingly talks to you, presents itself to you as if it knows who you are and what your unique interests and needs and so forth are, but in fact, there’s no face of another person who’s paying attention to you.

So it’s like it both totally feeds the hunger, and it’s also like the most lonely thing in the world, because this device doesn’t in fact know me or care about me, or have anything to offer me other than what can benefit the system that produced the device. And that’s a very different thing from a real personal encounter with another person, who is more than the sum of a system of profit generation.

Even if they are a window salesman, if I meet a real person, there’s something real that happens ideally with that person that’s not just transaction, but a personalized world is all transaction all the time.

Brett McKay: So I get this a lot with PR people who are pitching podcast guests.

Andy Crouch: Oh my gosh.

Brett McKay: They use the template.

Andy Crouch: I can only imagine.

Brett McKay: Right, and have like I guess these…

Andy Crouch: “Dear Brett… ” [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Yeah. But sometimes I think there’s a macro they use, and so they can just automatically… But sometimes the macro doesn’t work and it says, “Dear podcast host,” in parentheses. And…

Andy Crouch: “Dear influencer… ”

Brett McKay: Right. That’s a perfect example of personalization, but not personal. But then you even also see this personalized ethos creep into really intimate relationships. There’s apps now that can send out text messages to your spouse to offer affirmation or…

Andy Crouch: No. Oh no. No, I don’t wanna know about this.

Brett McKay: Or if it’s their anniversary. And people like, “Well, this good for my relationship. My wife will approach it.” But it’s like, man, it just feels like a Dark Mirror episode. This is not good.

Andy Crouch: And the veil will eventually slip, and instead of saying, “Dear Catherine,” it’ll say, “Dear spouse.” [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Right, “Dear spouse.” Or you won’t even… She’ll say, “Thank you for sending that message.” Like, “I didn’t send a message.”

Andy Crouch: “What message was that again?” [chuckle] “Yes Honey.”

Brett McKay: These are our attempts at we want personal relationships, we’re looking for that connection, but we’re looking for the shortcut, but in the process, we de-humanize ourself in the process.

Andy Crouch: Yes, exactly. And there just are no shortcuts. So I talk in the book about superpowers, and a lot of tech now sells things, but you’ll have coding superpowers, you’re have presenting superpowers, podcasting superpowers. Fine, there’s a place for the amazing affordances of technology in certain kinds of work and all that, but there are no personhood superpowers. There’s no love superpower. There’s no marriage superpower.

And in fact, quite the opposite. The attempt to import… To be honest, a few moments ago, I said how many years have I’ve been married, and I’m not sure I got it right. I know my wife would get it right, right? So I know she knows the exact number of years. I took a reasonably accurate guess. I didn’t take the time to do the math. If she listened to this, she may say I got it wrong.

Well, that’s part of the relationship. That for better or for worse, that’s who I am, and if, yeah, I could outsource that to a machine and have it keep track, but then there’s no additional quantum of relationship in that. There’s just a facsimile of attention, but not the real thing.

And so the quest for superpowers needs to be very, very carefully constrained and kept away from the things that matter most, because in the areas where it matters most, superpowers actually cannot help, they undermine, they distract and they ultimately deplete the real power we need to be human.

Brett McKay: And you end up as Twilight Zone episode.

Andy Crouch: That is, doesn’t it kind of feel like that’s where we are? [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Well, another point you make in the book is we often think when we use technology, that we’re the one who is working the technology, but what we often forget is that the technology is also working on us in shaping us. How do you think our technology shapes us unknowingly while we are using it? It’s like the tool works on both ends, right?

Andy Crouch: Mm-hmm, yeah. And it’s always been true. You use the hammer and it acts back on your neuromuscular system to reshape literally your neurons, reprogram, to expand in a way to be able to wield that tool more and more effectively. Every moment of use in the world is rewiring my neural system, my reward system.

I think that we’re… Everybody brings up The Social Dilemma film when I talk about this stuff and they’re like, “Oh yeah, do you know they’ve studied our rewards and… ” Yes, they sure have, and they know what makes us tick, but I actually think the deeper layer of this is not the designed interventions, like the ways that the algorithms really are calculated to keep you clicking, that is true.

It’s more the whole premise that my life should get easier. To me, that’s actually how technology is acting on me. It’s making me shrink from risk, shrink from productive effort and always want a shortcut, and my brain gets very itchy and uncomfortable when I can’t find the shortcut. The thing is that all creativity and generativity happens if you persist in that discomfort of not being able to find the shortcut. The shortcut never is truly generative. It’s always imitative and repetitive.

If I wanna do something really new, whether a new thought or just learn a new motion with my body that I haven’t learned yet, I’m a pianist, I play the piano, have trained pretty seriously as that, and when I sit down to practice, if I wanna learn something really tricky with one or both hands, I have to push through that itchy sense that says, “Wouldn’t you rather do something easy, wouldn’t you rather just play something you already know? Or for that are just press play and listen to somebody else play it?”

And it’s only if I press through the resistance and the desire for a shortcut, do I come to ultimately a kind of mastery of the new thing. And our technology is just constantly training us, “Don’t bother with the hard thing, choose the easy thing.” In that way, it’s so different from tools, which are… They’re not easy to use. Even a simple tool like a hammer, not easy at all. As you use it, it doesn’t train you to decline in ability, it trains you to increase.

But I think that the way we’ve designed a lot of our devices, they kind of train us to decrease and to just wait for the shortcut to happen and wait for the magic to happen, rather than actually figure out how to exert ourselves in new and creative ways in the world.

Brett McKay: Well, I wanna dig into this. You make this… You’re not like a Luddite, you think technology can be life-enhancing and life-affirming as opposed to life negating, and I like this distinction you make, the type of technology that can enhance our life, you make this distinction between devices and instruments. What are the difference between the two?

Andy Crouch: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought this up ’cause it is so important. This is not an anti-technology book, I’m not anti-technology, I use a lot of technology. But I do want us to totally reframe what we’re looking for and ultimately redesign. The whole stack of technology needs to be redesigned from devices which basically do everything we’ve been talking about, they kind of replace and displace human engagement and effort.

But then there’s this other kind of thing we make, often using very sophisticated understanding of the world from science and so forth, and very high tech, that we call instruments, and I think the three ways I see that word used a lot are “medical instruments”, “scientific instruments” and maybe most richly, “musical instruments”. And an instrument can be very, very complex at the technical level, that is highly complicated device in one way, but it fully engages a person. Ideally with heart, soul, mind and strength all at once.

I grew up playing a Steinway grand piano, which is already an industrial thing, it couldn’t have been made before the modern era, there’s a lot of industrial technology in even a acoustic grand piano, but then often I’m in settings where I’m playing a digital piano, which is all silicon and it’s all computational technology, but because of the way it’s designed, it doesn’t play itself, there’s no little triangle where you just press “play”.

It’s designed to actually be played by a musician, and in fact, the digital thing can in certain ways call forth new creative acts that the acoustic thing could not, because there’s new layers of interface and possibility built into the thing, but only if a human being uses it with skill.

So an instrument is a kind of technology that fully involves us and keeps developing us, that is as I keep using it I am growing, I’m developing. I’m not getting kind of cut out of the loop, I’m not taking shortcuts. I’m growing, I’m contributing, and the instrument’s helping to kind of channel and amplify that.

I think we could go back almost literally like… So I don’t wanna roll back to 100 years and not have technology any more, I wish we could roll back under years and say, “Hey, scientists, as you’re figuring this stuff out, give us instruments, not devices.” [chuckle] But instead we wanted magic, right?

But I think we could have said, “No, no, we want all instruments.” Like, “You’re gonna design a computational interface that will give us great powers in math memory. Okay, that’s fine, but we’ve got to stay moving in the world.” No screens, ’cause screens pin you to one place. Just for the convenience of the computer. You’re not there for your own convenience, you’re there because that’s the only way we figured out how to build an interface.

But what if we built a different kind of interface where you can move through the world the way people always did when they had real work to do or hard thinking to do, they’d get out and move around. Why not build a thinking instrument, a different kind of computer? We could go through almost every kind of domain of technology and redesign it to be much more instrument-like and much less device-like.

Brett McKay: Okay, so for people who are listening, how could they know if they’re using a device? If it does work for them and doesn’t require any skill, you’re probably using a device?

Andy Crouch: Mm-hmm, yup, yup. And you’re using an instrument if you feel like more alive at the end, like there’s a crescendo of involvement, and if you’ve become something different at the end. Whereas the device, you feel often there’s a great surge, like when you’re exercising these superpowers, it sort of feels very pleasurable, but then at the end, you feel kind of depleted.

I just was talking to a mom who lets her kids have two hours a weekend on screens, like video games, which is low and good for her, and it’s hard to hold the line as a parent. And she said something really interesting. She said, “My son is so eager to get to the video games for the two hours a weekend, but he sometimes at the end says, ‘Mom, I feel like trash,’ at the end.” That’s his word for the feeling at the end of using the thing.

I’ve never felt that on a bicycle, I’ve never felt that playing a piano or a digital piano. I’ve never felt that when I’ve had a really good session like coding on a computer where I’m really thinking through a problem and coming up with a solution. But we know that feeling like, “Ugh, I feel like trash.”

Instruments don’t make you feel like trash, they make you feel, “I’m more fully alive.” And I’m actually able to let it go. That’s the other interesting thing. Often, the superpowers are very sticky, like we don’t wanna let go, and the instrument is sort of very free. You pick up the hammer, you work hard for a while, then you’re willing to lay it down. You’re not compulsive about it, you’re not addicted to it. Depends on…

Brett McKay: You’re not constantly hammering things. “I just gotta keep hammering. I’m bored. Need a hammer.”

“I’m waiting in line, I’m gonna hammer.”

Andy Crouch: Exactly. And yet you can be really good with it and love doing it, but without compulsion. That world is just waiting for us if we asked for that instead of the magic, but we asked for the magic.

Brett McKay: I think everyone’s got a device in their pocket, a smartphone. Is it possible, you think, to pound your smartphone device into an instrument?

Andy Crouch: Totally, and this is actually to me the hopeful thing about the glowing rectangles, is to be super geeky right now, a computer is just a Turing-complete universal machine, which basically means it can represent any state of the world you ask it to, or nearly Turing-complete.

And that just means these things can be the ultimate device, we can ask them just to do all magic all the time. Or they can be the ultimate instrument. So what I’ve tried to do with my smartphone is discipline myself, and it does take practice and certain kinds of habits and certain kinds of rhythms, but that every time I pick it up, it’s to use it as an instrument, not as a device.

So I’m not using it to distract myself, I’m trying to not to use it to soothe myself when I’m anxious or upset. When I’m bored, I don’t take it out, because I know if I’m bored, I’m likely to just use it to assuage the boredom. So I pick it up when I need to attend to a person through the medium of a text message, or call or email, when I need to learn something about the world.

And I don’t do this perfectly, but I have shifted dramatically since I started really trying to pay attention to this, I’d say like I used to be 80% device, 20% instrument, and now I think it’s 80% instrument, and it feels way less compulsive, I feel the weight in my pocket much less, I leave it behind more often without anxiety, ’cause it’s no longer that magical thing.

Brett McKay: No, I stayed at a monastery a couple of years ago, and I come to find out, I learned that monks use computers. But they treat it… It’s like a tool. It’s like a shovel. They’re just like, “Well, I gotta get on here to upload this thing for whatever,” and then they’re done, and that’s it. To them it’s just another shovel, it’s a hammer. Nothing more.

Andy Crouch: Exactly, exactly. It’s totally possible to rewire your brain and instincts, it’s just hard and also very hard to do. It’s not an accident that you found that at a monastery, because it’s hard to do without a community of people who are pursuing this together and also have a better life to live beyond the screen.

If you are really isolated and your best option is the screen, it’s really hard to turn that into an instrument only. It’s easier when you’re part of an intentional community that’s actually pursuing something different.

Brett McKay: So, big argument in the book, the big thing we’re looking for is relationships and connections, and we think we can get that through our digital devices, but then we come up empty-handed, we find out actually it makes us feel… We made that Faustian bargain, we become less human in a way.

But then you say, if we want that human connection that we’re craving, you argue, we gotta find that in households. What’s a household, and how is it different from a family or a small group like a CrossFit gym or something like that?

Andy Crouch: Yeah, ultimately, so there’s a redesign that needs to happen with the tech itself, but there’s also a kind of social architecture redesign that I think we need, which is you’re only going to find the life that you’re looking for with other people in an extended durable way, which almost always means some version of living under the same roof or very close to it.

You’ve gotta be proximate enough to other people for long enough that you overcome the inherent superficiality of our relationships and the transactional nature of our relationships in our world. And you go beyond that to something that is just deeper and more lasting.

Now, that can happen in family to some extent. Some people are fortunate to marry and have children and for a season of life, you can have that with what we call a “nuclear family”, but I’ve really become convinced that’s totally inadequate for several reasons. One is, I’ve had the very disturbing experience of discovering that the children grow up and leave, which happened to me now. [chuckle] So I have two amazing young adult children who I love dearly, who probably for very good reasons are now moving into the world and they’re going to form their own households and their own families. And so that’s a very temporary thing, as intense as child-rearing is for those of us who get to do it, it’s a temporary thing.

But the other thing is more generally, like the reality is many people in our world may not marry, and marriages end for all kinds of reasons, sometimes tragically, it’s just a truth, and we need a kind of community that’s bigger than just that nuclear unit. It needs to be ideally more generational, more stages of life, more different conditions of life in a way, but it needs to be almost literally under a roof.

I lived for my first four years out of college with four or five other men, depending on the year, in a single house. We had one bank account for those years. We each had our own lives and jobs, but we took that common life very seriously. We weren’t monks, but for a season we lived with a kind of intentionality of life, and it was one of the most beneficial formative experiences in my life.

And then when my wife and I got married, instead of just moving into a single unit kind of living situation, we lived for many years with other people, and I think this is a missing piece in rebuilding a social world that actually has room for the kind of relationships we’re craving. Because we live such atomized individual lives, even when we’re coupled. A couple is not a big enough unit to keep personhood going. [chuckle]

So in the book, I’m kind of inviting us to rethink, like there’s other patterns from other times and places where people lived in much more complex dwelling units, and ultimately we need to rebuild our world to make that possible for more people.

Brett McKay: Well, the thing is, there’s people out there in like Silicon Valley, “There’s a problem, people need households, so we’re gonna develop an app where you can sign up and you can… ”

You can make the case, a lot of these co-working things, like WeWork, that’s what they’re trying to do. But like you said, it’s a simulation, it’s not the real deal.

Andy Crouch: It’s a simulation because of another kind of layer here, which we haven’t talked a whole lot about, but it’s the way the technological world is all built on usefulness and productivity. So it WeWork was and is a beautiful idea and a lot better space to work than many places, but it’s all built on one slice of your life, which is your working life, and once you’re not generating money to pay the monthly dues or fees or whatever, you’re not part of that community. Same with CrossFit, actually, which I’m a big believer in gyms and boxes and whatever community you build for your fitness.

But what happens when you’re too old to participate or you become disabled in a way that you can’t really do the work out of the day, and how does that community touch all the other aspects of your life? This is where a household is sort of indispensable ’cause it’s the one integrated environment where you’re known in all your facets as a person, rather than only being there as long as you make sense transactionally for that system. Does that make sense?

Brett McKay: No, that makes sense. And I think the other thing people might be tempted to do, “So okay, I wanna develop more household in my life,” and again, they’ll turn to technology, “Well, we can start these group texts with people.” And it could help, but it’s probably not gonna do… It’s gonna require you to, like you said, do some re-jiggering of your social structure in your life, and that’s something that a device can’t do.

Andy Crouch: Yeah. ‘Cause this is where there’s just not any superpowers for the thing we most want, which is being known. One way to put it is, there’s just a whole involuntary layer to being known. There’s all the things my housemates see in me and about me that I never intended for them to see, and that I might not even know about myself, and sometimes it’ll cause real conflict and they’ll push back and complain or criticize.

Or just maybe more lovingly intervene and say, “Do you realize you’re really anxious about this? Or, “Do you realize you’ve been really depressed for the last four nights and haven’t done anything except lie on the couch?” I’m never gonna put that in a text message, honestly. I’m just not going to choose to disclose that.

So we have to live in environments where we can’t help but be known, an environment where if you fall asleep and stay asleep for a long time, someone will come check on you. If you have a cardiac arrest, you’re not gonna text your friends and say, “Hey, by the way I’m incapacitated right now.” [chuckle]

You need a place where people will notice, “We haven’t seen him for a while. What’s going on?” And that level of being known that goes beyond the what I volunteer or what I would willingly offer, is actually the essence of being known, but how many of us have places where that happens regularly? Not enough, I would say.

Brett McKay: No. I’ve seen that in my own life, not just this household thing, but in small groups, what I consider my communities I belong to. There’s always this moment where people are like, “Well, we need to connect more.” There’s not enough camaraderie, and so they’ll like, “We’ll do this group chat, or we’ll do Discord,” and this will be the thing and then nothing ever changes. And then… I don’t know.

It’s frustrating ’cause I think lot of people think like, “Oh, this will be it, this is gonna be the thing that fixes it,” and it’s like no, it’s not. It’s not gonna be that.

Andy Crouch: The thing that would fix it, like short of moving in together, which I recommend or giving each other keys to your house, there’s steps we can take. Catherine and I have given… There’s like five people who have a key to our house who didn’t a couple of years ago, ’cause we no longer live under one roof with other people, but we we’re like, “We need to invite other people close enough that they could kind of let themselves in when they want to.”

But for that group, rather than the Discord or the group chat, I think the only thing that would approximate is go on, the old word would be a pilgrimage together. That is go somewhere hard, long for an extended period of time and the relationships would change, the connection would go way deeper.

Because you’d get that involuntary quality of this extended time where other people see you without filters, not at your best, often in challenging or adverse circumstances in some ways, and what gets forged in those that kind of travel, that kind of pilgrimage journey is incredibly powerful. But in some ways we need a group of people we’re doing that pilgrimage of life with where we are, not just on special occasions. But a pilgrimage would do it in a way that a group chat won’t.

Brett McKay: I think that you gotta still manage expectations, there’s not gonna be a lot of people who wanna go do that pilgrimage.

Andy Crouch: It’s true, it’s true.

Brett McKay: There’s gonna be people who say, “Oh yeah, I would definitely be down for that,” but then when it finally comes to put your chips on the table, “No, I have my… ”

Andy Crouch: “It’s costly.”

Brett McKay: Yeah, “My wife, I got stuff I gotta do.” And they’ll find some reason not to go. But I think when you do find people who wanna do that, you gotta just embrace it, embrace those people.

Andy Crouch: Yes. Those are the people, those are the people. And a lot of people will resist it, because it is costly. It’s also scary, and so people will find reasons not to do things that are scary, but the good stuff is always found on the other side of that.

Brett McKay: Well Andy, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Andy Crouch: You can learn a little more about me at my website. [chuckle] It just feels so self-promotional to even say things like this, but andy-crouch.com, with a dash, andy-crouch.com. But I also work for an organization called Praxis, and we actually help people build ventures and businesses that work on this stuff, and we have a whole section on the book at praxislabs.org. “Labs” like a laboratory.

Praxislabs.org/life will give you you a lot more, not just about the book, but how you could actually build new ventures for-profit, non-profit along these lines.

Brett McKay: Fantastical. Well, Andy Crouch, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Andy Crouch: Thank you so much. This was great.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Andy Crouch. He’s the author of the book, The Life We’re Looking For, it’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website and andy-crouch.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/crouch, where you can find links to resources, we can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. Make sure check on our website at artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium.

Head over to stitcherpremium.com. To sign up, use code “manliness” at checkout for a free month’s trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it.

As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #796: The Life We’re Looking For appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Do you ever feel like the time we live in feels flat, complacent, timid, conformist, populated by people who are focused on playing it safe and are inwardly empty?

A century and a half ago, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard felt the same way about the period in which he lived, and posited that there are two kinds of ages: the revolutionary, decisive, and passionate, and the sensible, rational, and reflective.

Here to unpack Kierkegaard’s ideas on these two kinds of ages is Jacob Howland, retired professor of philosophy and author of Kierkegaard and Socrates. Today on the show, Jacob and I first discuss some background on Kierkegaard and his existential philosophy. We then get into the differences between an age of passion and an age of reflection. We discuss how in a passionate age, an individual stands as an individual, possesses an energy which focuses on truth and ideals, and has the courage to take bold leaps of faith, while in a reflective age, the individual is subsumed by the crowd, is afraid of public opinion, and gets so lost in analysis and abstraction that he never makes a decisive move. All along the way, we delve into how Kierkegaard’s description of his age parallels our own, and Kierkegaard’s evergreen call to be an individual, embrace risk, and own your opinions and actions.

Resources Related to the Podcast * Works by Kierkegaard mentioned in the show: + Two Ages: A Literary Review + Either/Or + Fear and Trembling + The Sickness Unto Death + Philosophical Fragments + Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Philosophical Fragments * Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd * Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel * On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life by Friedrich Nietzsche * “Yes, Sabermetrics Ruined Baseball” * AoM Article: Your Three Selves and How Not to Fall Into Despair * AoM Article: An Intro to Envy * AoM Podcast #635: The Existentialist’s Survival Guide

Connect With Jacob Howland * Jacob’s Website

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The post Podcast #790: Kierkegaard on the Present (Passionless) Age appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The Two Ages : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 14 (Kierkegaard's Writings, 53)

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (Penguin Classics)

On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Hackett Classics)

The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification & Awakening by Anti-Climacus (Penguin Classics)

Penguin Classics Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric By Johannes De Silentio (Penguin Pocket Hardbacks)

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To use leisure intelligently and profitably is a final test of a civilization. — Jay B. Nash, Philosophy of Recreation and Leisure

For thousands of years, man largely got the doses of challenge, creativity, achievement, and satisfaction needed for psychic health from his work. Initially his work in hunting and gathering was directly connected to his survival; then as civilization, and in turn trade and commerce, began to expand, he remained connected to the final product of his labors.

But after the dawn of industrialization, work became increasingly routinized, mechanized, and bureaucratized. Work was fragmented and more and more layers developed between a man’s labor, and its results, fruits, and outcomes.

After a day of work in the present age, many individuals cannot discern that the world is any different for their effort, and they themselves do not feel any different as a result of it.

The more man is alienated from his work, the more he must look elsewhere for sources of growth, mastery, and fulfillment; the more he is alienated from his work, the more critical it becomes for him to cultivate his life outside of it — his leisure.

The Critical Importance of Well-Used Leisure Time to the Individual, and to Society

Recreation [can] take on significance—possibly spiritual significance. Recreation can and even may become a way of life.

In 1953’s Philosophy of Recreation and Leisure, Dr. Jay B. Nash, professor of physical education, health, and recreation, argues that in a world where work is increasingly unsatisfying, leisure takes on an outsized importance; the way it is used can either exacerbate the malaise created by the shrinking significance of work, or act as a critical counterbalance to it.

In the former case, the dynamic runs something like this: people feel tired from their work, and interpret this tiredness as mental/physical fatigue caused by over-effort; they then seek rest in the form of mindless, passive amusements; these amusements, however, while they offer a temporary distraction in the short-term, leave people feeling more enervated in the long-term; this makes them seek more passive entertainments to feel better; and on the cycle goes. In this way, leisure time only deepens the malaise that can lead to garden-variety unhappiness, as well as contribute to clinical cases of depression and anxiety. It’s a cycle, Nash observed, that leads modern individuals to “go to pieces.”

If, on the other hand, as is often the case, the seeming fatigue caused by work is not the result of too much engagement, but too little of it — is in fact a manifestation of boredom — then leisure, used wisely, can act as the reinvigorating antidote to the modern tendency towards psychic disintegration.

Leisure, Nash says, can supply the interest, stimulation, and sense of accomplishment that is often lacking in paid work, would otherwise go missing from our lives, and is ultimately critical to psychological wholeness and the integration of character.

Nash argues that it is “in the practice of skills” — real, concrete, progressively-developed skills that contrast with the typically abstract energies we moderns typically deal in — that man achieves what he calls “all-thereness.”

Indeed, he says that man possesses a “skill hunger” that must be fed if he is to thrive.

The concept of the greatest number of skills for the greatest number of people is probably the best foundation for a democratic society. Greater skills mean greater eagerness for life and this in turn develops a joy of living. The true vocation of man in the universe is to exercise skill in one or another of its innumerable varieties.

Nash further argues that active, creative recreation is not only critical to preserving the wholeness of the individual, it is critical in preserving the health of a democracy. Not only because a democracy has an interest in ensuring its citizens are psychologically sound, but because leisure pursuits can develop the kind of patience, critical thinking, and engaged orientations that are needed to facilitate a functioning political life.

The death stage of a civilization is often marked by the rise of what Nash called “spectatoritis” — an epidemic retreat into predominantly passive amusements. Think of the Romans and their gladiatorial games. When a people is satisfied with the pseudo sustenance of bread and circuses, it no longer recognizes the cultural and political decay happening around them, and is too surfeited by superficial entertainments to muster the will to do anything about the rot.

The Wise Use of Leisure Does Not Happen Naturally

We are learning that the profitable use of leisure is an art in itself and not something that comes automatically.

There are myriads of books and podcasts and courses about how to manage your work time and be more productive.

But there is comparatively little discussion of what to do with your free time.

This is partly because we like to think of our leisure time as something freeform that should be utilized spontaneously. And certainly, much of the joy of our leisure is that it is ours, with no set rules, structures, or expectations. We figure we’ll simply know how to use our free time as it arises.

When, as it so commonly happens, our evenings and weekends pass by in an indistinct, underutilized, unsatisfying blur, we figure the problem isn’t caused by an untrained instinct, but a lack of time. If we had a little more of the latter, we think, we’d have put our leisure to better use.

Yet the data belies this belief.

If it were the case that the more leisure time we possessed, the more we’d use it for creative, constructive activities — socializing, reading, exercising, playing sports, engaging in hobbies, and so on — then, quite obviously, the more that leisure time increased, the more that participation in such activities would increase.

And yet the very opposite has happened.

In the midst of a typical workweek grind, it can seem like we’re the busiest and most labor-laden humans that have ever existed, and it’s easy to forget just how dramatically work hours have fallen over the past 150 years. As researchers have pointed out, the amount we toil has been cut in half, meaning that “Before this revolution in working hours people worked as many hours between January and July as we work today in an entire year.” Just between 2019 and 2020, people gained another half hour of leisure time (partly due to an uptick in the number of folks who started working from home and got to drop their commute — a situation that for many will remain permanent, even post-pandemic).

As work hours have fallen, time spent watching television/videos/movies and playing video games has risen, so that those activities now occupy almost four hours a day (and that doesn’t even account for random phone scrolling/checking), dwarfing the time spent on every other leisure activity, and making up almost 75% of the 5.5 hours of leisure time people have, on average, at their disposal each day.

Thus, while we often imagine ourselves as would-be artists, craftsmen, and hobbyists, who are only thwarted in taking up more meaningful leisure pursuits by a scarcity of time, our societal track record undercuts this kind of self-flattering optimism.

If we’re honest, the more free time we get, the more we tend to struggle with figuring out what to do with ourselves. All humans tend to default to the path of least resistance, and towards lowest-common-denominator activities. Breaking that passive pattern, in order to make better use of our leisure time, requires some deliberate direction and active intention.

The Pyramid of Leisure

Who was the happy man? He painted a picture; he sang a song; he modeled in clay; he danced to a call; he watched for the birds; he studied the stars; he sought a rare stamp; he sank a long putt; he landed a bass; he built a cabin; he cooked outdoors; he read a good book; he saw a great play; he worked on a lathe; he raised pigeons; he made a rock garden; he canned peaches; he climbed into caves; he dug in the desert; he went down to Rio; he want to Iran; he visited friends; he learned with his son; he romped with his grandchild; he taught youth to shoot straight; he taught them to tell the truth; he read the Koran; he learned from Confucius; he practiced the teachings of Jesus; he dreamed of northern lights, sagebrush, rushing rivers, and snow-capped peaks; he was a trooper; he had a hundred things yet to do when the last call came.

While the specific ways someone chooses to use his leisure time should be individual and idiosyncratic, some guiding principles are helpful in thinking about how to make the most of it.

Nash offers these guiding principles in the form of a pyramid.

At the base of the pyramid sit society’s most passive amusements; as you ascend the pyramid, activities become increasingly participatory and creative, and increasingly beneficial to the human soul.

Let’s talk about each level of the pyramid, starting from the bottom, and working our way up:

Spectatoritis-Type As we’ll see when we move to the next level on the pyramid — Emotional Participation — watching, listening, and reading aren’t necessarily passive activities, and aren’t necessarily consigned to the pyramid’s bottom layer. But these activities do fall into the Spectatoritis category when they fail to engage one’s thoughts and emotions. These are the most mindless entertainments — the kind of thing you do when you want to mentally check out from life: watching a dumb sitcom or an action flick you’ve already seen a million times; scrolling through Instagram or TikTok; scanning headlines on a tabloid-y news site; listening to Top 40 radio; spectating at a sports game (sometimes).

Passive amusements, what Nash calls “looking on,” aren’t entirely without merit. They can provide an easy distraction, a chance to turn off the old brain. But they’re like junk food in a diet; okay as an occasional indulgence, but detrimental when overindulged in.

Passive amusements, Nash said, are of the going-nowhere, “Merry-go-round type where the rider gets off just where he got on.” Scrolling reddit and watching TV will leave you essentially unchanged; spend a weekend merely “looking on,” and you go into Monday morning the very same person who headed into Friday night.

Emotional Participation Reading, watching, and listening can become participatory rather than passive, Nash says, when “You have looked on but you feel a part of it.” A good book, meaningful film, thoughtful television show, beautiful art exhibit, or teleporting music performance, as well as some sporting events, can stimulate your thoughts and/or touch your emotions; the event/media reaches into you, and you reach into it; you are involved in it. Such experiences can expand your perspective, clarify your vision, provoke some insight.

One characteristic of good as applied to an activity must be whether or not it carries one onto new activities. Does the activity open up new realms, new worlds, new interests? Does an activity branch and broaden out to touch several phases of life?

The gauge of whether or not an activity is emotionally participatory rests most of all on whether it spurs you to do something: to be different, to try a new task, to learn more, to take action. Such activities point beyond themselves to new philosophical and recreational horizons. As Nash puts it, such activities “have a catalytic power to set up . . . chain reactions of new experiences.”

Active Participation As one ascends above the two levels of spectator-type activities, he moves out of the stands and into the arena. He not only brings his eyes and ears and feelings to an activity, but involves his whole self.

At the level of Active Participation, an individual participates in an activity in which the model/pattern/system has been created by someone else; he acts in a play, performs a song, plays a game or sport, hikes a trail, cooks a recipe, and so on. As the name of this level of leisure implies, he not only feels moved to action, he follows through on that prompting.

Creative Participation When an individual moves beyond following a model created by someone else, and creates his own model, he has reached the pinnacle of the pyramid: Creative Participation. Even when his works are for amateur use and private display, or he simply rearranges preexisting elements, if he crafts something in a novel way, does something a little differently than it’s ever been done before, he engages in the act of creation. This is man as composer, poet, artist, playwright, photographer, author, chef, filmmaker. This can also be man as social or recreational organizer — he who throws a party, hosts an event, or creates a new club, fraternity, sport, challenge, or tradition.

Nash advised people to spend as much of their leisure time as possible in activities represented by the pyramid’s top three levels — and the higher one could reach, the better. Doing so, he counseled, would provide a counterbalance to the atrophying effects of unchallenging and unstimulating work, scratch one’s “urge to do,” and forge a path to greater fulfillment.

Not only do we, on average, work less than any post-industrialization people, work hours seem poised to decrease even further in the future, and there is talk of a move to a four-day workweek. While such predictions have in fact been posited for more than a century now, the viability of their coming to pass seems greater than ever before.

If our work time is indeed destined to decline further, while our leisure time rises, the use we make of the latter will only increase in importance. Will we be content to sit in the literal and metaphorical grandstands and theater seats, looking on at life, and letting our social, moral, cognitive, and physical capacities atrophy? Or will we be full participants in life — doers rather than viewers, creators rather than consumers — and engage in the skill-developing, body-strengthening, mind-expanding activities that will build us into joyful, well-rounded individuals? The stakes are real; as Nash observes, “In time, the whole character of society will be determined by the way in which the mass of citizens spend their leisure.”

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A lot of people feel like they’ve seen and done everything there is to see and do in their local area. They’re bored of their daily routine, and contemplate going off on some grand adventure in a exotic locale.

My guest would say that you don’t actually have to wait until your next big trip nor go far afield to mix things up, and that adventure can be found right where you are, in your ordinary routines, the everyday landscape of your life, and even DIY projects, if you decide to approach them in a different way.

His name is Beau Miles and he’s an Australian filmmaker who documents his own small-scale adventures on YouTube, as well as the author of The Backyard Adventurer. Today on the show, Beau shares his experiments in proving anything can be infused with the challenge, intrigue, and fun which mark adventure, if you add in some intentional risk, difficulty, and simple what-the-heck quirkiness. He tells us about some of the close-to-home adventures he’s executed, including walking and kayaking his 90-kilometer commute to work, reconnecting an old, long closed-down rail line by running its often hidden, overgrown path with a shovel in his hand, and making a paddle with scavenged wood. We then talk about how he created a gastronomical adventure for himself by eating his body weight in beans, and even turned tackling his to-do list into an adventure by pairing the crossing off of its entries with running a marathon in 24 hours. Along the way, Beau shares how backyard adventures help you better get to know your local area, how he deals with the police who sometimes check in on what he’s up to, and how the next time you get some odd idea, you ought to just go for it, mate.

Resources Related to the Podcast * Beau’s films/adventures mentioned in the show: + Walking to Work + Paddling to Work + Junk Paddle + Human Bean + Run the Line + Mile an Hour * AoM Article: My 8-Week Microadventure Challenge * AoM Podcast #120: Microadventures With Alastair Humphreys * AoM Podcast #560: The Magic of Walking * Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

Connect With Beau Miles

Beau‘s Website
Beau on YouTube
Beau on Instagram

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Transcript Coming Soon!

The post Podcast #789: Become a Backyard Adventurer appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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It’s famously been said that every individual is the average of the five people he interacts with most.

Life experience certainly bears out the validity of this truism.

A teenager falls into a friend group that practically undoes the influence of a previous decade and a half of parenting. A soldier goes into a deployment with one set of habits, and comes home with another. A man was never much for exercise, until he started dating a woman who is.

The people we’re surrounded by limit or expand our sense of what is possible; shift our perception of what is normal and acceptable; raise or lower our sights. The vast majority of this shaping effect comes not through direct means — overt cajoling as to what we should or shouldn’t do — but through the imperceptible-but-profound power of example, and the kind of energy others radiate into our lives.

When it comes to personal change, we can either work with or against this energy.

Doing the latter makes the task doubly difficult; you must not only face the resistance inherent to altering behavior, but also push against the countervailing force attendant to carving out a path foreign to your peer group.

In contrast, when you’re embedded amongst people who share your values, who are also after what you’re after, the wind is ever at your back. You change steadily, naturally — and often effortlessly.

The world of self-help is relentlessly focused on discipline, but the amount of discipline life requires is directly proportional to the quality of one’s family and friends. A spouse who ever encourages your excellence, a friend who consistently elevates your vision, a community which routinely realigns your compass, is worth more than all the resolution-making and teeth-gritting you can muster. When it comes to becoming who you want to be, relationships > willpower.

The post Sunday Firesides: Relationships Over Willpower appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Trauma. Violence. Bullying. Addiction. The range of things that these words encompass has expanded over time, and while my guest today would say that changes in how language is used are natural and inevitable, he also argues that the way we use words matters and has consequences, and that we need to better grapple with what those consequences are.

His name is Dr. Nick Haslam and he’s a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne who has studied a phenomenon he calls “concept creep,” which refers to the tendency of concepts having to do with harm — from trauma to depression — to broaden their meaning over time. Nick describes how concept creep happens in two ways — vertical and horizontal — and occurs both amongst clinicians and the general public. He explains what he thinks is behind concept creep, and how the way we talk about harm-related concepts changes how people experience themselves and life, bringing new kinds of identities and new kinds of people into existence. Nick argues that while there are upsides to concept creep, it also carries potential dangers that can negatively impact our lives.

Resources Related to the Podcast * Nick’s ResearchGate page * “Harm Inflation: Making Sense of Concept Creep” * “How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm” — Atlantic article about Nick’s work * The Loss of Sadness by Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield * “Making Up People” by Ian Hacking

Connect With Nick Haslam * Nick’s Faculty Page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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Read the Transcript! If you appreciate the full text transcript, please consider donating to AoM. It will help cover the costs of transcription and allow other to enjoy it. Thank you!

Brett McKay: Brent McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast, trauma, violence, bullying, addictions, the range of things that these words encompass has expanded over time, and while my guest today would say that changes in how language is used are natural and inevitable. He also argues the way we use words matters, and has consequences, and that we need to better grapple with what those consequences are. His name is Dr. Nick Haslam and he is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, who studies a phenomenon he calls concept creep, which refers to the tendency of concepts having to do with harm from trauma to depression to broaden their meaning over time.

Nick describes how concept creep happens in two ways, vertical and horizontal, and occurs both in most clinicians in the general public. He explains what he thinks is behind concept creep and how the way we talk about harm-related concept changes how people experience themselves in life, bringing new kinds of identities and new kinds of people into existence. Nick argues that while there are upsides to concept creep, it also carries potential dangers that can negatively impact our lives after the show’s over check at our show Notes at aom.is/concept-creep.

Nick Haslam, welcome to the show.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Hi Brett, glad to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are a psychologist who has researched and written about an idea that you call concept creep in psychology, and we’re gonna get into the details about this, but broadly speaking, how would you describe concept creep?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Well, concept creep is just the tendency for concepts to do with harm, that is concepts to do with suffering or pain or damage or destruction to broaden their meanings over time so that they start to refer to a wider range of things than they once did.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we’ll talk about one for example, an idea we hear a lot in the popular culture is this idea of trauma, a decade, two decades ago, it had a very specific meaning, we’ll talk about what that was, but over time, it has broadened to encompass larger, psychological things that happen in life, it covers more than besides that specific meaning it originally was designed to describe.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah, and that’s a great example. In fact, trauma, as you know it goes right back centuries and it used to refer to a physical wound, and then about 100 years ago, it started to refer to a psychological wound instead, and that’s now the dominant meaning, but also within psychiatry, a trauma, a traumatic event used to be something that was seriously life-threatening, but over time, in successive additions of psychiatric classifications, that idea has loosened, which is a great example of concept creeps that refers to a wider range of bad things that can happen. And of course, every day people have taken that further, so that in some circles, a trauma just now refers to pretty much any kind of adversity, not just the release to be ones that used to mean.

Brett McKay: When did you first start noticing this idea of concept creep in your work as a psychologist?

Dr. Nick Haslam: My memory is really vague on that. So I started thinking about this seriously about 10 years ago, and I first wrote about it in 2015, but I have friends in grad school who said that they used to hear me banging on about it back in the 90s, so look, I think it’s been around for a while, but I just started noticing what I thought was a pattern around about 10 years ago, so the clinical psychology side of me was saying, “there’s all this work on how our ideas about mental illness have broadened massively over the last century, and the trauma example is another fine example of that.” How I started to notice people talking about trauma in a much looser, more expansive kind of way, and then the social psychology side of me also noted similar things going on in relation to, for instance, bullying or prejudice, how social psychologists started to talk about prejudice in ways that include the things well beyond the kind of blatant bigotry that they used to exemplify prejudice back in the old days.

I thought, Well, maybe there’s a pattern going on here, maybe this is a general tendency for harm concepts to expand and inflate over time.

Brett McKay: And you argue that concept creep in psychology can happen in two ways, there’s vertical expansion and horizontal expansion, walk us through what does vertical expansion look like?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Vertical expansion is just the tendency for a term to come to refer to milder and milder examples, so that trauma case you just mentioned is really a terrific example of this. Where initially trauma referred to things that were really severe life-threatening damaging to life and limb and over time, come to refer to things much milder, less severe less damaging while still referring to the more severe things as well, so the… So, trauma, it’s a vertical creep in the sense that there’s a kinda downward movement in the range of things that the concept refers to. Whereas horizontal creep is more when a word starts referring to qualitatively different things in addition. So to give you an example of this bullying, is a good case study, I think here as well, and the idea of bullying has really broadened over time, so if you’ll allow me to go off in a little bit of an excursion here.

Brett McKay: Sure.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Bullying was introduced to psychology by this Norwegian psychologist back in the 1970s, and he was really specific, that it was a kind of peer aggression that occurred among school children that had to be intentional, it had to be repeated, it had to be carried out in the context of a power differential or a bigger or more powerful or older bully terrorized a smaller, weaker, younger victim. And over time, of course, this idea of bullying has been expanded to refer to some milder kind of examples and all of those criteria have been relaxed in the bullying literature, but an example of horizontal concept creep here, I think is how we are increasingly using the word bullying to refer, not just to things that happen in playgrounds, but also things that happen in boardrooms.

So this like expansion of the idea of bullying from something that occurs with children to something that occurs among adults is what I’d call a horizontal creep, it’s an expansion. Not of severity, no one’s saying that adult bullying is milder than childhood bullying, but it’s to a different range of experiences, a different range of contexts, so I would call that an example of horizontal creep or if you wanna go back to the trauma case, the fact of that trauma used to refer to physical wounds and then it expands to refer to psychological wounds is another example of this sort of horizontal creep where the concept broadens out to refer to qualitatively different sorts of phenomena.

Brett McKay: I wanna dig more into some of these examples so we can flush out… So people can see how different psychological concepts have experienced vertical and horizontal expansion. So let’s dig in this trauma idea more, ’cause you see it any time you open up a magazine or a website article, there is just trauma, everything’s trauma. You mentioned that originally started out, trauma was a physical harm, if you’ve lost a limb or you had a big wound in war, that was trauma. And then it shifted that you could also experience psychological trauma, and that is often the result of something very severe. What was the example? What was psychological trauma originally described as?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Well, I think there wasn’t a single kind… And again, also, there’s this ambiguity here, because often people use trauma to refer to the event, the traumatic event, but sometimes they also use it to refer to the psychological response, so there’s a kind of ambiguity in here. But when trauma made the jump from the physical to the mental, it was in the time of Janey and Freud and the like, and so often it was sexual trauma, often it was sexual abuse, rape, various kinds of sexual harm done to people, supposedly causing hysteria and other things like this. So trauma was events that weren’t necessarily causing physical damage to the person, but were in some ways, or rupturing their mind or soul in some fashion.

Brett McKay: And then you’d also see it… You started seeing it a lot in the 70s and 80s. Describe PTSD, it was caused by a traumatic event, you experienced what I guess I would call moral trauma and it really harmed you psychologically.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah, I mean, the whole advent of PTSD, and PTSD didn’t exist until 1980, when DSM-III was published. I mean, they’d always been shell-shocked, there’d always been a recognition that there were psychological casualties of war, but there hadn’t been this recognition that a traumatic event could cause a particular kind of mental illness. And so when DSM-III was published in 1980, it was pretty much in response to the Vietnam War and the kinds of symptoms that were people, the people were facing there. And DSM-III said that trauma was something which was, as I indicated, a life-threatening, damaging situation where the person was at risk of death or serious injury. And look, the word trauma had been used in the physical sense in the early psychiatric classifications where it was referring to physical or chemical or electrical damage to the brain, but only in 1980 did we start talking about trauma as being some sort of psychologically meaningful event that caused harm. And in the case of PTSD, that harm would include flashbacks, would include hyper-vigilance, high levels of anxiety, and a range of deeply unpleasant and often hard-to treat symptoms.

Brett McKay: And so you’re seeing again, this vertical creep, it moves in the physical then it moves to psychological, but even at the psychological, when it made that jump, the psychiatrist and the colleges were very adamant, this is… Trauma is only something, it has to be really severe, it’s like you were raped or you saw someone die, or you did something in war that went against your colleague, it was like the stakes are really high for there to be considered a traumatic event.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah, and look, I think that’s where it was in 1980 and then progressively over the next few revisions of the DSM-III that got relaxed. And look, It didn’t get relaxed in some sort of willy nilly unprincipled way. There were reasons for it. So for instance, a psychiatrist often noticed that people showed post traumatic symptoms, just full fledged PTSD, but in response to witnessing rather than directly experiencing some sort of traumatic event or through some sort of event which wouldn’t quite have met the criteria for being traumatic according to DSM-III, but nevertheless was pretty severe, and so over a period of time, and this was arrested a little bit in DSM-V in 2019, there was this loosening of what counted as a trauma, so it could include indirect experiences, vicarious experiences, witnessing things rather than having them happen to oneself, sexual experiences, which weren’t necessarily assaults, but which were developmentally inappropriate. And in various ways, this idea of trauma broadens, and it broadens, as I say for often quite good reasons, namely that some people show full fledged post traumatic stress disorder, having experienced something that fell short of the original definition of what a trauma was.

Brett McKay: So this idea vicarious, this could be… If you just saw something like on the news, this could cause trauma?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s a kind of indirect experience was allowed. You no longer had to be the person to whom it happened, you just simply have to be aware of it. And of course, the more you do this, the more you broaden these conscious, the more people are potentially being traumatized, and of course the rates of posttraumatic stress disorder therefore go up because more people are eligible for as it were.

Brett McKay: There’s also another thing, there’s the expansion by clinicians that’s going on, but there’s also kind of an expansion going on with popular culture, where there’s people themselves where they start to take that idea, they’re not psychologists, but they’ve heard about it, and then they continue the expansion even more and as you said earlier, trauma can be just something like just normal frustration for regular people.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Absolutely, and I think when I talk about concept creep, I’m not only talking about what professionals are saying, it’s just as much what’s going in the culture at large. And you’re quite right, there is this tendency to grab a concept and run with it. And that’s just the nature of psychology, because they really are not bright lines between what is trauma and what is rather just an unpleasant event. There is gradations of these things, the way you draw the line, It isn’t clear, but yeah, lay people, I think for assortment of reasons, will tend to expand concepts, use concepts more broadly. Not just concepts of trauma, but I mean, you can call someone a narcissist, just ’cause they’re a little bit unpleasant. There’s a wholesale borrowing of psychological concepts and using them in a little bit of a promiscuous way.

Brett McKay: Now, you can see how it creeps into the popular culture. A couple of months ago, my daughter was having this frustration is like, “I’m so traumatized,” and I was like, “What… Where did you like, where did you hear that? Like that you’re traumatized by that? Because for me the definition of trauma is like you had to like, it’s like PTSD, you had to experience something that gave you PTSD and that was you know, the severe stuff, the really heavy stuff. And I was like, “Where did you learn?” She’s like, “Oh, a YouTuber talks about that,” I was like, “Oh okay, that’s interesting.”

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah but this happens all the time, and it’s interesting, we do some research on this sort of thing and we find that people have very widely discrepant understandings of what these words mean. So, some people like you might have relatively narrow concepts of trauma. Others, maybe like your daughter, or at least the YouTubers who are giving her these ideas might have much broader ones. We aren’t using these terms with common meanings, we often mean very different things by them. As I say, we’ve done research on this and we find huge variations in the breadth of people’s concepts of trauma, of bullying, of abuse, of mental illness.

We find that there are systematic differences in the source of people who have broader versus narrower concepts. So people who are more politically liberal, tend to have broader concepts. Women on average, tend to have broader concepts of harm. More empathic people have broader concepts of harm. There’s an array of different personality characteristics, people who are somewhat more personally vulnerable tend to have broader concepts of harm. It’s not about age incidentally, so often people think it’s just these youngsters who have these broad concepts of harm. Actually, age is not the main determinant at all.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned bullying and you give that as an example of horizontal expansion where it went from schoolyard to boardroom. But you also talked about your research paper that it’s also expanded horizontally by… You can now cyberbully someone, right? So it’s like… It goes from the physical world to the virtual world.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah look I think bullies and humans, in general, are versatile right? So if we got a new medium for doing something horrible to someone we’ll take it. And again, that obviously couldn’t have occurred back in the ’70s because there was no cyber to bully with. And you know this is nevertheless a broadening of the meaning. You used to… Bullying required you to be in the physical presence of someone in the old days, and now it doesn’t, you can do it digitally.

And again, no one is saying that cyberbullying is less severe than in-person physical bullying, there’s no intrinsic greater mildness of it but it is a different phenomenon. And I think it’s really important too here to be clear, I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, I think some people when they hear the idea of a concept creep, they think, “This individual is saying we shouldn’t be broadening our meanings and that it’s wrong, or that it’s a sign of weakness, or vulnerability, or fragility or something like that.” I’m not saying that at all, I’m saying once bullying expands to include cyberbullying, it’s broadened, its meaning. And that’s a thing that’s neither intrinsically good nor bad.

Brett McKay: How has bullying experienced, or has had vertical expansion?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Well, I think again, going back to what Olweus, the Norwegian, said about bullying… It had to be behavior that was repeated, intentional and carried out downwards in some sort of power hierarchy. And over time all of those things have been relaxed, so that we can now say that someone’s bullying someone else, even if they only did it once.

Now that’s intrinsically a vertical expansion, right? Because it means now you don’t need to do something multiple times to be called a bully, you just need to do it once. So that’s a milder understanding of what bullying might be. You can be a bully through unintentional behavior, according to some ways of thinking, that’s again, arguably a vertical expansion. You could argue with that. I mean often, bullying as well the focus in the old days used to be on physical acts of comission where you do something bad to someone else but more and more bullying is including acts of omission where you just fail to include someone in your social group and things like that.

Which I think you know, ostracism hurts, I’m not saying that’s intrinsically milder, but I think once you start including acts of omission among acts of commission you are essentially making the behavior more mild. And the other example I think also, in terms of the hierarchy idea, once upon a time bullying was always downwards in a hierarchy but then when I do my human resources module at my University, I’m told that you can be bullied by someone below you in the hierarchy or by a peer at the same level. And I think once you start talking about bullying as something that two co-workers do to one another when they’re at the same rank, or when a underling bullies someone who’s higher up the chain, that’s probably in most cases a vertical expansion. It’s a milder kind of behavior than when someone in power is bullying someone with less power.

Brett McKay: Is also like… Just like teasing… That would be sort of good-natured teasing can be labeled bullying now, is that like a vertical expansion?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah it would be, and again, no one’s saying that teasing is fun necessarily, but that’s the other thing, I think you see in many examples of concept creep that it’s more and more seen as being a matter of the victim, or target’s, perceptions, not necessarily the intentions of the person who’s doing the bullying. So if you experience my teasing of you as being bullying, then it probably is bullying. So there’s a kind of subjectivizing of the concepts as well, rather than trying to define the concepts in terms of actual objective behaviors.

Brett McKay: You also talk about addiction has gone through concept creep, how so?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Well, I think this is another story which you know, I didn’t invent. There’s a lot of people that have observed this before me, but at one point in time addictions were to ingested substances, so you shoot up your heroin or you smoke your cigarette and over time you develop a physiological dependency to the substance which you require more and more of to get the same sort of hit.

And there is a physical dependency on this ingested substance, which strictly your body doesn’t need. But then over time, we’ve developed this idea of behavioral addictions where you can be addicted to pornography, to eating, to sex, to love, to gambling, and a range of other behaviors. Some of which you have to do, I mean you do have to eat, so it’s not as if, like heroin, you don’t actually need it to survive. So there’s been this general inclusion of acts, some of them merely just bad habits, and describing them in terms of an addiction dynamic as if you’re addicted to the behavior rather than addicted to some substance. And again, no one’s saying this is necessarily a bad idea because there’s lots of neuro-biological evidence that similar processes are going on when you are addicted to a substance as when you’re addicted to a video game, let’s say. But, nevertheless, it’s still an expansion of the idea. Addiction wasn’t in the past used to refer to these sorts of habitual compulsive behaviors and now it is.

Brett McKay: And then I guess an example too of vertical expansion with addiction is that you… And clinically addiction is, it’s a repetitive behavior that gets in the way of your life, that just causes problems. Some people might call something they do repetitively an addiction but it doesn’t really get in the way of their life. They might check their phone more than they like but it doesn’t… They can still pay their bills, they go to jobs, it’s not getting in the way of their marriage, etcetera, but they might call that an addiction, even though clinically, they might say, well, it’s not an addiction.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah, quite right, and I think a lot of people say this and sometimes they say it kinda flippant way without really meaning it. They’re not claiming that they’re suffering from a mental illness when they say that they check their phones too often but they’re using this word which has these connotations of dependency and which also imply that these things might be hard to get out of or that you have limited control over them. So I think the words we use to describe our experiences matter and if you start using those words in loose, relaxed, inflated kinda ways that can have consequences.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. Have any other mental disorders like maybe ADHD, anxiety, depression, have those experienced concept creep over the years?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Have any not experienced it? I think it’s really so common. Pretty much any disorder you can think about has probably undergone some change at some point. Now it hasn’t always necessarily been in one direction. So often there’s a broadening from one addition of a diagnostic classification to the next and then it retreats the one after. But for sure these things have happened, so attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder has certainly broadened. And the reason why these things broaden in part is ’cause they’re on a spectrum, they’re on a continuum, and so where you carve the continuum between those who have the disorder and those who are merely a little bit inattentive or rambunctious is quite hard to do, but certainly you see very large increases over certain periods of time in the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and one reason for that is that the diagnostic boundary has shifted downwards so that more people meet the criteria, so that’s happened.

I think in depression, there’s definitely work that people are using the word more loosely than they once did, everyday people, and there’s also some evidence that the professionals have as well. So there’s a great book called The Loss of Sadness by Allan Horwitz and Jerry Wakefield, which discusses how the idea of depression at one point referred to very severe melancholia where the person was essentially often suffering from delusions of rotting from the inside or wasn’t simply unhappy and over time we’ve started to refer to what used to be just everyday sadness as depression, we’ve brought in clinical language to refer to everyday emotions to some degree. Now that’s not to say that in psychiatry, depression has radically changed its meanings, often these changes in meanings are more how everyday people use these words inappropriately if you like, compared to professional language rather than how psychiatry uses these words.

But yes, depression’s broadened over time. You can say the same thing about some anxiety conditions. You can certainly say the same thing about the autism spectrum, how that has certainly broadened out over time, often in fits and starts rather than in sort of one linear kind of way, but it’s really, really common. And look, I’m not the first person to point out diagnostic expansion or concept creep, a lot of people have talked about it. There was a lot of chatter prior to the publication of the last issue of the DSM in 2013, when people were saying normality is endangered because everything is now said considered abnormal because our idea of mental illness is just billowed out to become something enormously inflated.

Brett McKay: With regards to the anxiety, I have friend who is a college professor and he was… He kind of… He was telling me something like oh, that’s… After I read your papers, that’s concept creep in action. He was saying how maybe 10, 15 years ago when he was teaching, he’d have one or two students that would need some sort of testing accommodation. And usually it’s for… They were dyslexic or something like that. And now he says, it’s like 30% of my students get some sort of test accommodation ’cause they have test anxiety. And he’s like, it’s really interesting to see that happen in just 10 years.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah, some of these things happen very rapidly, some of them happen more slowly. And I think that experience that the professor had is something we see here in Australia as well, it’s not a uniquely US phenomenon. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the professional concept of an anxiety disorder has broadened over that time. We’ve done some research on this and shown that the tendency for mental disorders to expand over time has been weak overall, present but weak, but how people use those concepts or people’s willingness to see their own experience in terms of these concepts and often get a compliant doctor to sign off on them has definitely increased, so more and more people are describing their experience, it’s not as normal worry or normal anxiety but more as clinical anxiety, which therefore needs some sort of accommodation or need some sort of treatment. And again, that’s not necessarily something you lay at the foot of the psychiatrists, that’s really just how everyday people are starting to understand their own experience and it’s having real effects at universities.

Brett McKay: What’s your theory about what’s behind concept creep? Do you have an idea… I guess this, completely theoretical, but what would encourage concept creep you think?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Well, I think there’s a pattern here in that there are a lot of concepts which are creeping. There are a lot of these ideas that we’ve talked about so far that are broadening their meanings and they’re actually quite diverse. So, a trauma and mental illness and addiction are all to do with clinical psychology and mental health problems. But then there are others like bullying and abuse, which aren’t specifically about mental illness. And then there’s others like violence and hate and prejudice, which are different yet again. And I think maybe there’s some sort of single, underlying dynamic for all of these and what I say without huge amounts of evidence I have to be clear is that it’s just been a rising sensitivity to harm within many Western cultures. There’s just a greater concern for harm, a concern for caring for others who have been harmed, harm has just sort of become a more sub dominant cultural theme. And we are therefore more attentive to it than we used to be.

And I’m not just saying that from my armchair, we’ve actually done some work looking at changes in moral language over the last century, we do find starting at about 1980 after the prominence of harm-related moral concepts have declined throughout the 20th century, you see this fairly steep rise since then, at roughly the time when I think a lot of concept creep is happening, people are becoming more concerned about harm, they’re becoming more concerned about the ways in which people are harmed and the way in which people harm others, and the changing meanings are simply a reflection of that rising cultural concern about harm, which I think is quite ambivalent, being more concerned about harm is a great thing, right?

You no longer tolerate bad behavior, you no longer tolerate sexual harassment as much as you used to, you no longer tolerate bullying as much as you used to. You identify people who might have been languishing without treatment and say, “Here, here are some treatments for your problems,” which we’ll now call a mental illness, but maybe also there are some negative aspects as well. So I would say at a broader kind of cultural societal level, what is going on is this rising sensitivity to harm and the changes in concept meanings come out of that. Now of course, there are other things which might lead people to broaden the meanings of concepts, so sometimes people do it quite deliberately, people broaden the meaning of a concept in order to achieve some sort of political and concepts creep for an assortment of reasons, which we’ve talked about in some of our academic papers, but I think the dominant thing as I was saying is just is rising concern with harm in our cultures.

Brett McKay: Is the rising sensitivity due do you think the fact that since about the 1980s, Western societies have been relatively affluent and safe, and so you become more sensitive to things that in a previous generation you would have just ignored ’cause you were starving or your family’s going off to war, etcetera, so you didn’t have the luxury to be sensitive to harm, so now that we are a little more safe, we can be more sensitive to those, to harm.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah, look, I think that’s a large part of the story, and again, you have to be careful how you say this because you don’t want to create the impression that you think that no one is suffering out there, of course there’s lots of rotten things happening in the world. But yeah, I think the sort of people who do studies, the sort of people who use the words trauma and bullying and addiction in their understandings of their own experience, tend to have grown up in context where there is less time and damage, where we do live longer, where there is more affluence. And so of course, it stands to reason that milder things were seen harmful if you are accustomed to less harm, and we do find some pretty good evidence, so that’s one of the drivers of what’s going on with concept creep.

So part of it, I think you’re right, is just people adjust to the level of risk and threat and danger in their world and if you’ve experienced less of it, smaller harms will be more salient to you and more problematic to you. So I think it’s partly a story to do with just the objective, rising comfort over all of our lives and it’s also changing our values, so I think there’s this rise in what some people have called post-materialist values where people seek fulfillment and well-being for its own sake, rather than just struggling to get by materially, and that I think also contributes to this rising focus on the things that can go wrong in your life and a greater attention to, in the scheme of things, milder problems.

Brett McKay: You also bring in this idea, this philosopher, Ian Hacking, that might provide some idea about concept creep, what did he have to say that can help us understand concept creep?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah look, Hacking is one of my heroes, he’s a philosopher based in Toronto, and I mean, he has this idea of looping kinds and what he calls dynamic nominalism if you care about that, but essentially that idea is he says, as concepts evolve, and he wrote some wonderful stories about evolving ideas of autism and multiple personality and things of this nature and child abuse, concepts changed through time. We all know that, you don’t need to be historian to know that, but what Hacking adds to that, that’s interesting is that these changing concepts actually change your identities, they bring new kinds of person into existence. Once you start using some sort of concept like autism or like bullying, once you start using these words in different ways, you actually change how people experience themselves and how they identify themselves as being bullied or as being victims or as being traumatized and those changing concepts through history bring about new senses of personal identity and social identity, which really matter.

So, it’s not as if just the concept changes in some sort of abstract way, it actually changes people, makes new kinds of people exist, you get a greater range of new traumatized people who see themselves as traumatized as a class and historical changes in concepts sort of find their way inside us to create new identities. So look, that was probably a little bit waffly, in fact I’m sure it was waffly but Hacking is sort of giving us a way of showing how concept creep at a cultural level, that is changes in how the culture at large defines concepts can have impacts on the individual members of those cultures.

Brett McKay: No, that makes sense. So if you were… Before, if you were just like a worrier, now you say, “Oh, I have anxiety.” And that changes the way you think about yourself and how you interact with the world.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Yeah, and how others react to you and how you seek certain kind of treatments and how you receive certain kind of treatments and has all sorts of flow on consequences, and the very same experience at some level suddenly becomes different ’cause the label isn’t just a label, the label creates your sense of self, allows others to see you in a certain way as someone who’s experiencing a disorder rather than someone who’s just experiencing every day worries.

Brett McKay: So we mentioned how there’s been concept creep going on from the clinician standpoint with the DSM-5, they’ve been changing it over the years, and they’ve, for good reasons as you said, maybe we need to… It makes sense to expand trauma in certain ways, but as we also have talked about, there’s also an expansion going on with lay individuals, and I’ve noticed, I would say in the past year or two, this increase of, I’d guess we call them mental health influencers on social media, I don’t know if you follow that much, do you think social media is accelerating the idea of concept creep in different ways?

Dr. Nick Haslam: I don’t follow it too much, but I’m sure you’re right, I think it turbo charges everything. Right, so the rate of change is just so much more rapid now, in part because there’s just this instantaneous circulation of new ideas and words get used in new ways all the time, and of course, at some level, this is all good democratization of ideas and people [0:32:42.0] ____ borrow and use these words any way they like, but I do think it does become a bit too use a word I used earlier promiscuous, I think you’re using words too freely, the clinical words especially get detached from their actual professional meanings. And I think at some level, you can say, Well, who cares? Who cares if someone’s talking about being traumatized when it was just some minor romantic break-up, who cares what language they use? And I think it does kind of matter, because if you’re framing your experience in clinical language in terms of diagnostic language, that is implications for how damaging you think the experience will be what sort of interventions you might need for it, and it changes the whole complexion of what problem is in your world, so the short answer to your question is, yeah, I’m sure influencers and many others who are using psychiatric sorts of terms in new and broader inflated ways, I’m sure that’s occurring a lot, and I do worry a little bit about the consequences of that.

Brett McKay: So there is consequences of concept creep, we’ll talk about the negatives, but first let’s talk about positives, what do you think are the benefits of content creep? What have been the benefits of concept creep, you think?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Well, I think in the abstract, you could just say, if you are identifying new harms which you previously didn’t identify as being problems, then you allow them to be dealt with and taken seriously and respected. So if, for instance, in terms of bullying if in previous times, we just thought that nasty behavior by superiors to the underlings in workplaces was just ordinary office politics and you should just harden up and deal with it. I think if you start to use the label of bullying to refer to this, and maybe that allows you to control, reduce, deal with and punish bullying in a workplace context, which is a good thing, so that’s just of an example, I think where broadening the concept allows you to problematize things that were previously tolerated, you could probably say the same thing about some kinds of abuse or harassment or violence, pretty much any concept, if you just lower the threshold for when you identify that, that concept, it allows you to care for people who have been harmed, harmed in ways that weren’t previously considered to be important enough to deal with. So that’s all a bit abstract. I’m sorry, Brett, but I think pain is to say that there are both costs and benefits, and I think the benefits are problematizing and taking seriously forms of harm that were previously neglected.

Brett McKay: What about the negative consequences both for the individual and as a society?

Dr. Nick Haslam: Well, I think as a society, you just have to wonder whether it makes good sense if everyone thinks they’ve been traumatized or if everyone thinks they got a mental health condition, or occasionally, of course, lowering the threshold for when some bad thing has happened can be over sensitive, we can, in the case of bullying, for instance, criminalized behavior that really might be unintentional, unrepeated and really not so bad at all in context, especially if we allow the person who’s being victimized to define what counts as bullying to them. I think it can lead to some overly harsh punishments for people who’ve maybe done things that aren’t as severe as the term might suggest, I think in terms of the clinical world, again, you have to be really careful how you say this because you do want people to go and seek help when they have experienced some kind of mental illness, and not enough people, especially men, do seek help for mental health problems, but then if you define mental health problem so broadly, that just about everyone has them, I think you run the risk of people feeling that they are unable to deal with their own problems themselves, they have to seek professional treatment when perhaps they could do pretty good self-help without professional intervention. You see people defining themselves as harmed or as victims, when maybe that’s not a very helpful identity from the standpoint of recovery and getting better.

So I think, generally speaking, again, being somewhat abstract here, broadened concepts of harm lead more people to identify themselves as victims and as harmed, and that if it becomes part of your identity, I think is problematic ’cause it often stands in the way of you getting out of those problems. Havard psychologists, Payton Jones and Richard McNally have done some amazing work on trauma where they experimentally manipulate people’s concept of trauma to give them broader versus narrower a concept of trauma, then they expose them to a very unpleasant video clip with IRB approval, of course, and they show that those who have a broadened concept of trauma tend to respond worse with more post-traumatic symptoms to the gruesome video, showing that the breadth of your concept of trauma in this case, has real emotional consequences for you, and I think much could be said and much could be said about how broadened concepts of metal illness might have as Hacking would have said, implications for our well being.

Brett McKay: Well Nick, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn more about your work?

Dr. Nick Haslam: There’s lots of academic papers, I haven’t written anything really popular on it, you can find an article by Conor Friedersdorf from the Atlantic from 2016 when the first paper came out, if you wanna see what I’ve been doing and my colleagues have been doing, I’ve got a research gate page where you can find some of my papers and you can… I’d recommend a review paper we have called harm inflation, that was published a couple of years ago in the European Review of social psychology. It’s all kind of technical. So if you’re interested in social psychology, you’ll love it, if you’re not, it might not be right, but look check out my research gate page and get in touch if you’d like to.

Brett McKay: Well, Nick Haslam, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Nick Haslam: Me too thank so much.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Nick Haslam, he’s professor of psychology at The University of Melbourne, you can find all of his research on concept creep at researchgate.net. Just go to researchgate.net and look up Nick Haslam. Also check out our shownotes at aom.is/concept-creep, where you will find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast, make sure check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast, archives, as well as thousands of article interviews about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to join ad free episodes of AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher premium, head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness to check out for a free month trial, once you’re signed up, download the stitcher app on android OS, and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast and if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it, if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify it helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you, please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, who you think would get something out of it, as always thank you for the continued support. Until next time it’s Brett McKay. [0:39:21.2] ____ AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Running is a gloriously democratic and accessible sport. All you need is a pair of shoes and the will to start moving your legs. It’s so seemingly simple, that you may never think to figure out how you might get better at it — you just follow what your peers may be doing (who may not know anything more than you do), or pick up tips that percolate through social media (which may not be accurate), or 100% wing it, just vaguely trying to get a little faster each time you run.

My guest says that, rather than taking a willy-nilly approach to your recreational running, you can greatly improve your performance by learning from the professionals who actually run for a living.

His name is Matt Fitzgerald and he’s a sports writer, a running coach, and the co-author of Run Like a Pro (Even If You’re Slow): Elite Tools and Tips for Runners at Every Level. Today on the show Matt translates the best practices of elite runners into tactics the amateur can incorporate into their training, beginning with why you need to follow a well-programmed running plan, how to find the sweet spot for your running volume — including why you actually should concentrate more on the amount of time you run rather than the miles — and the number of hours Matt recommends trying to work up to running each week if you’d like to really see what you can do as a runner. We then discuss the ratio of low intensity to high intensity workouts you should be doing, the surprisingly small emphasis pros put on running form, what the pros know about what works best for recovery, and the edge you can get through cross-training. We end our conversation with the difference in mindset that marks elite runners, including how they’re probably better quitters than you are.

Resources Related to the Podcast * AoM Podcast #202: Matt’s previous appearance on the show to talk about How Bad Do You Want It? * Ventilatory threshold * Ben Rosario, co-author of Run Like a Pro (Even If You’re Slow) * AoM Podcast #266: The Myths and Truths of Distance Running * AoM Podcast #382: How to Lift More, Run Faster, and Endure Longer * AoM Article: Beginner’s Guide to Long-Distance Running * AoM Article: Bulletproof Ways to Prevent Running Injuries

Connect With Matt Fitzgerald * Matt’s personal website * Matt’s business website: 80/20 Endurance

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of of the Art of Manliness podcast. Running is a gloriously democratic and accessible sport. All you need is a pair of shoes and the will to start moving your legs. It’s so seemingly simple that you may never think to figure out how you might get better at it. You just follow what your peers may be doing, who may not know anything more than you do, or pick up tips that percolate through social media, which may not be accurate, or 100% wing it. Just vaguely trying to get a little faster each time you run. My guest says that rather than taking a willy-nilly approach to your recreational running, you can greatly improve your performance by learning from the professionals who actually run for a living. His name is Matt Fitzgerald, he’s a sports writer, a running coach, and the co-author of Run Like a Pro, Even If You’re Slow: Elite Tools and Tips for Runners At Every Level.

Today on the show, Matt translates the best practices of elite runners, the tactics the amateur can incorporate into their training, why I need to follow a well programmed running plan, how to find the sweet spot for your running volume, including why you should actually concentrate more on the amount of time you run, rather than the miles and the number of hours Matt recommends trying to work up to running each week, if you’d like to really see what you can do as a runner. We then discuss the ratio of low intensity to high intensity workouts you should be doing, the surprisingly small emphasis pros put on running form, what the pros know about what works best for recovery, and the edge you can get through cross-training. We end our conversation with a difference in mindset that marks elite runners, including how they’re probably better quitters than you are. After show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/run.

Matt Fitzgerald, welcome back to the show.

Matt Fitzgerald: Great to be back.

Brett McKay: So, you have been a runner pretty much all your life, you’ve also written about running extensively, as a journalist, you’ve written several books about running, you’ve become a coach, you got certified nutrition to help runners. So basically, you know a lot about running, you’ve made it your life’s work, in a way. So why did you decide to go live with a bunch of professional runners in 2017? What did you see lacking in your own running performance, that you thought you could probably fill in those gaps by hanging out with a bunch of pro-runners?

Matt Fitzgerald:The first thing is that, I think athletes in pretty much any sport fantasize about going pro at some point, especially if you discover your sport young. I started running when I was 11, and I wasn’t the most gifted runner, so I figured out pretty quickly, I wasn’t going to the Olympics. But still, I dreamed about it, how cool it would be to have a pro shoe contract and travel around the world, racing for a living. Didn’t work out that way, but then, so when I got deep into my career as an endurance sports writer and coach, I have an interesting experience where I have sort of one foot in the recreational world, almost all the athletes I coach and write for, are recreational-level competitive, but amateur. And then, I do a lot of my learning from the elites, and I noticed that most of recreational runners kind of have no idea what the elites actually do, and because they don’t know, they’re not doing it themselves.

And, I’ve always been a big believer in kind of what I call a best practices approach to developing in any sport, including endurance sports. So, when I was 45, about to turn 46, I just got this idea into my head, to guinea pig myself, to kind of put my money where my mouth was and prove, as this 46-year-old above average, but still amateur runner that, by fully immersing myself in these elite best practices, just completely living their entire lifestyle, that I could benefit from it, and just I wanted to show that you don’t have to be born with elite genetics to benefit from emulating the top performers.

Brett McKay: So what happened with your experience? There was a race you did that kind of showed that, “Okay, what I did, worked.”?

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, so I spent 13 weeks with the HOKA Northern Arizona Elite Professional Running Team in Flagstaff, Arizona. So that was like a complete marathon training cycle, and at the end of that build-up, I ran the Chicago marathon. Interestingly, the agent for the team, a guy named Josh Cox, he pulled some strings and got me a professional bib. So, I had a two-digit number, I got to start. Chicago marathon is like 40,000 runners, and I got to start in row 3, within touching distance of the guy and the girl who ended up winning the race. I did not, but I did undergo an astonishing transformation. Now, I aged in reverse, I ran my fastest marathon ever. It was about my 40th or 41st marathon, and I beat a time that I thought I would never have come anywhere close to again, improved by two minutes; a time I had set nine years before and hadn’t gotten within nine minutes of since. So to say that I proved what I set out to prove is, an understatement. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Right, now, that’s impressive. So as you said, you’ve kind of had your feet in two worlds. You’ve had it in the pro world, where you’re writing about these pro runners, but also you’re coaching amateur runners, and what you’ve done with your book, Run Like a Pro, Even If You’re Slow, is show amateur runners the principles that elite runners use, to perform at their best, that they’re just as applicable to amateur runners. But before we get to some of these principles, let’s talk about the differences you’ve seen between pro runners and amateur runners and how they approach running. So, what are the differences? An amateur runner, what are they doing differently than what pro-runners are doing?

Matt Fitzgerald: The first thing that anyone would think of is, running a lot less. So, that’s obvious, but I guess the thing I would say… That’s a good opportunity to mention that when I say that everyone should train like the elites, I don’t mean that you should not just train, but kind of practice all the same methodologies as the elites. I don’t mean that you should literally match them in every detail. The typical elite runner runs 120-130 miles per week. That would destroy most people. So, it’s not that sort of literal monkey-see monkey do I’m talking about, but emulating the underlying principles. So, the principle behind volume for the elites is they find the maximum… The amount of running that benefits their fitness maximally. So, just before they get to that point of not diminishing returns but negative returns. And they… So they find that limit and then they set just one step on the safe side of it. Most… Even though most recreational runners couldn’t run as much as the elites, they also don’t run as much as they themselves could benefit from doing. And because they typically just think, “Oh, well, you know, I’m slow. What’s the point?” So that’s an obvious one.

Some of the stuff that’s, I guess, less obvious, like even some of the stuff that I myself, as a very serious and experienced competitive runner, wasn’t really doing before I got the flag-staff, just kind of like, more complex, well thought out warm-ups. I would just work at my desk for three hours, get up, lace up my shoes, get out the door, start running. A pro runner is more likely to get up from the desk, change into their running gear, and then do some activation exercises to just wore your lunges and stuff to kinda wake up their body and get it ready to move. Then, they would do a little bit of jogging. Then, they would probably do a more dynamic warm-up, like some drills and some short accelerations. And then, they would get into the meat of their workout. So just, it’s… I get it. Most people, they feel like, “Oh, man, I barely have time for the running. I gotta do all that other stuff.” But, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and when I started doing all these other little ancillary things that I had been cutting corners on before, I improved.

Brett McKay: No, yeah, that was one of the big take. We’ll talk about this too, that just how not hard pro runners go. I think a lot of amateur runners, at least when I’ve done running, when I’ve prepared for like a 5k or like an obstacle race, I just… My approach to running is, “I’m just gonna go as hard as I can, and I’m gonna just be huffing and puffing.” And pro runners don’t really do that. They actually take it pretty easy.

Matt Fitzgerald: Yes. About 80% of the time, yeah. That honestly, is probably the most costly discrepancy in how amateur runners train, compared to the pros. So, I call it the “moderate-intensity rut”, where pretty much every run that the typical recreational runner does, is not really easy, not… It’s not at a physiologically low intensity, but it’s also not that hard either. Because think about it, if you’re going medium-hard every day, you don’t have anything left to go really hard. And so… Whereas the typical recreational runner’s caught in this moderate-intensity rut. For the elite runners, their training is more polarized in intensity where their easy days are really easy and their hard days are really hard, and there’s not all that much in the middle.

Brett McKay: Okay, we’ll get back to volume and intensity here in a bit, but I wanna start digging in more into specifics that amateur runners can learn from the pros by starting with why you say even recreational runners need a credibly-sourced running plan. And you’ve got lots of plans in your book. Because I think a lot of folks, I think when they start running, they just sort of run to gain some sort of general fitness. They might vaguely try to get faster each time. And you can get fit enough to finish a 5K race that way. But, if you really wanna improve your performance, you wanna do well, you argue that you have to have a specific training plan for the specific distance of race you’re gonna run. Because you don’t just wanna get generally fit, you wanna time your progression with your training, so that you’re peaking around race time, so you can perform your best when it really counts, right?

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, exactly so. I think a lot of people, they come to running from a background in general fitness. And in that domain, you have this sort of “get fit, stay fit” mentality, right? Sort of like you get off the couch, you get a gym membership, you start working out, and eventually, you start getting the results you want, and then you just try to maintain them, right? That’s actually very different from what you’re trying to do in competitive running, where you’re actually… Peak fitness is not a sustainable state. If you really want to be at your best for one competition, in the lead up to it, you need to build up to a level of training that… They refer to it as “functional overreaching” where you’re still benefiting from it, but if you kept doing it, you would crash. [chuckle] And then… So, the idea is to time that functional overreaching period, so that you taper right after that. So you build up to that peak, it’s not sustainable, but that’s okay because you’re not trying to sustain it. Then, for one to three weeks, you bring it down and then you’re really fit and you’re really fresh, you compete, and then you need a break. And then you need time off before you can start a fresh build up. Again, that’s… With that timing element and the specificity of the kind of fitness you’re trying to build, winging it, it’s just very unlikely to get you there, or even a plan built by someone who doesn’t know a lot about running.

Brett McKay: Well, hey, yeah, that’s an important point. The planning that goes on, it… Pro runners not only plan their running. They actually, they plan in, like what you’ve been callin’ “deload weeks” where they’re just taking time off so that they can recover and continue the training. And I think a lot of amateurs don’t do that.

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah. Yes, ’cause what you’re really doing is, moments of unsustainable workloads all along the way, right? So if you try to train a little bit harder each week than the week before, you’re only gonna be able to keep doing that even if you’re young and fit and durable, for maybe eight weeks tops, before you hit a wall. But if you do take sort of a three steps forward, one voluntary intentional plan, step-back approach, then you can actually attain a higher eventual peak workload, without breaking down.

Brett McKay: Okay, so I guess the principle there; plan things out and also expect this to take months. It’s not gonna just be like… You can’t just train from work out to work out. You have to think, weeks, even months in advance. I think it’s the bit… I think it might be a hard shift for amateur runners to make, because it’s not very rewarding. Honestly, they’ll be like, “Wow, man, I’m gonna do… I’m gonna run slower than I usually do? Like, what?” [chuckle] But, you gotta keep that long-term perspective in your view.

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah. It’s worth it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so you mentioned that one thing the pros do differently from amateurs is that, they just run a lot more. The median is like 120 miles a week. What about the average Joe? How much should they be running? I’m guessing, it depends on their personal circumstances, right?

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, because I use this phrase in the book, Your Mileage Sweet Spot. So that’s the underlying principle is that… And this is my co-author on this book, Ben Rosario, the coach of the professional team I trained with in 2017. He makes this point. He gives examples of specific individual runners on his team. There’s one who goes all the way up to 140 miles some weeks, and then there’s another runner on the same team, who competes in some of the same events, who’ve only run 65 to 70 miles per week, so about half, and it’s because one of the runners is very durable and the other one isn’t, but they’re both… Granted, 65 or 70 miles a week is still plenty, but the underlying principle, the thing that they’re both doing, even though the numbers belie is, they have both found their mileage sweet spot and I hinted at what that really is, earlier in our conversation. Tt’s the volume of running that is associated with your maximal returns. So, at some point, you get diminishing returns all along the way.

So that’s what I’m talking about. If you go from 10 to 20 miles per week, you’re gonna get much more return than if you go from 20 to 30, and if you go from 30 to 40, you’re gonna get less return than you would before. So, the returns are diminishing all along the way, but they’re still positive, you’re still getting fitter, so the sweet spot comes just before the level where you actually start to get worse by adding more mileage. You’re just breaking yourself down and piling fatigue on your body, and that… It’s a little bit of a moving target because it takes… They call it training to train, it takes some time to develop the infrastructure in your body, to be able to handle your lifetime sweet spot of volume, and it’s so individual that it’s a little bit of an experiment. It’s a structured experiment, you’re not just putting yourself through the meat grinder, but you don’t really know what your sweet spot is going to be, until you discover it.

Brett McKay: How do you know when an athlete is figured out their sweet spot?

Matt Fitzgerald: The most common way is, breaking down, actually. Either getting injured or just becoming… Going from functional to non-functional over-reaching, where you just… You can feel yourself getting less fit even though you’re running more. So it sounds like it’s, “Okay, well, you have to just push them off the cliff.” Well, kinda, yeah, but you’re not really going off a cliff. It’s not the end of the world if you over-cook yourself a couple of times in training because there’s a lot of value in it. It’s like, “Okay, well, there’s my limit.” Ben actually, he tries to be a little more conservative because he’s training people whose livelihood depends on staying healthy and fit, so he just tends to be pretty conservative, and he’ll gradually bring athletes along in that process, and he’ll often kind of cap their mileage when… Before they go off the cliff, but it just seems like, “Hey, you’re winning races, so why… It ain’t broke so let’s not fix it.” So that’s another way, when you just… If you’ve gone through the process and you’re running a lot more than you were at the beginning, and you’re feeling great and you’re performing well and you’re happy with your results, you can just sort of hang out there and spare yourself learning the hard way, what your limit is.

Brett McKay: One thing I thought was an interesting tidbit from the book on volume and how much you should run, you make the suggestion as well as Ben, that when you’re first starting out, not to make mileage a goal, instead just make time your goal. Why do you think it’s better to focus on time and not mileage?

Matt Fitzgerald: It’s really because your body doesn’t adapts to exposure to mileage. It adapts to exposure to time. And so, time… When you measured by time, it’s a great equalizer. If I had… If I were leading a workout for a group of 20 runners of all different fitness levels and I wanted them to have an equal challenge, I would make… I could do so by making the work-out time-based versus distance-based, to get concrete. For example, most people listening probably are familiar with the concept of VO2 max, which is an exercise intensity associated with your maximal breathing rate when your muscles are consuming oxygen as fast as they possibly can. So, not a full sprint, but a very high… The highest sustainable intensity of exercise.

Now, whether you are very, very moderately fit or you are an elite runner, you can probably sustain the pace associated with your VO2 max for about six minutes. So obviously, that pace will be a lot faster for an elite runner, but it’s still… That’s an intensity, you can sustain for about six minutes, whether you’re not that fit or you’re extremely fit. So when you’re looking at… Well, if you wanna develop your VO2 max by exposing yourself to that intensity and training, it makes sense to make it time-based, because no matter how fit you are, you can be confident that it’s an appropriate challenge level for you. And same thing goes when you’re looking at just how much running can your body handle. Take the runner… The elite, doing 120 miles per week. Well, that’s only about 12 hours of running. And so, if you’re a much slower runner, 12 hours of running for you, might actually be doable in a week, but you’re only gonna cover maybe 70 miles in that time, versus 120.

Brett McKay: So you give this great example, saying that you’re starting out. You’re like, “I wanna get into running, using this time-based approach,” what would a training schedule look like, would it be just like, would you schedule an hour, hour-long blocks?

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, if you’re a raw beginner, let’s just say you’ve been doing some exercise, but no running, because of the high impact nature of running, injury risk is sky high in those first steps, and so I’m very cautious with that. It’s sort of like an inoculation, those first few runs you do, so I would have people, as many, especially if they’re overweight or older, I might have them start with walk runs, so run a minute, walk four minutes, run a minute walk four minutes, do that for 30 minutes, and then I would also have people… Now, some people, they can skip that step, they can go ahead and just run for 30 minutes, but even if you’re one of those people, I would not have you run again for 48 hours, ’cause your body needs time to absorb all that stress and then remodel the affected tissues, the bones, the muscles, the connective tissues, and just actually emerge stronger, so give yourself 48 hours before you expose yourself to another dose of repetitive impact, and then just go from there. It’s just, it’s step by step, give yourself at least 10 days at a certain level of running and see if you can handle it, and that sort of earns you the right to take the next step.

Eventually, you can get to the point where you can start running on consecutive days, again, where that threshold is, depends on your starting point and how you seem to be absorbing the progression. The thing that I recommend that everyone, anyone who has ambitions of just seeing what they can do as a runner, I give them sort of like an initial target of seven hours, like try, no matter how long it takes, no matter where your starting point is, try to see if you can get up to seven hours of running per week, which is… It’s about an hour per day, every day, you can do a lot with that amount of running, you can achieve most goals that most amateur runners would want to achieve for themselves, and it’s a commitment, but most people can also fit that into their lifestyles.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and I think that the time approach is really a lot more… ‘Cause I think the mileage thing can get really debilitating for people, and exhaustion just cause them to just run themselves in the ground, I think, and like you said, that’s where a lot of the injuries, ’cause you’re trying to like, “Oh, I gotta get 20 miles this week.” Well, no, maybe not, maybe you just, and as long as you get seven hours, then you’re good.

Matt Fitzgerald: Yes, yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it makes it seem less daunting for sure.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Let’s talk about the speed, ’cause we were talking about, okay, you do all this volume often times they’re doing it at a very low intensity, but they’re not just doing low-intensity work, there’s also, they’re mixing in high intensity work, but generally like, okay, how do elite runners figure out what is low intensity from them, like hard to go, because I’ve read different things about that, there’s that whole the heart rate model you use like, Well, you’re… You do 180 minus your age, and then you do like 70% of that, are elite runners doing that or are they doing something different?

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, they’re doing something different. There’s been a coalescing around this concept of the first ventilatory threshold, which is most exercise scientists now consider that the proper dividing line between low intensity and moderate intensity for the typical runner at fall somewhere between 77% and 81% of their individual maximum heart rate, and that’s a number that varies a lot, so you can’t use… You can’t use a formula for it. Conveniently, that threshold, what happens there, and the reason it’s important is that if you’re just below that threshold, it’s actually a lot less stressful on your body than if you’re just above it, that’s why it is a true threshold. And there’s a spike in the breathing rate that occurs there, it’s not hyper-ventilation, you’re not even conscious of it, you would have to just be breathing into a mask that collects your exhaled gases to know where that threshold actually lies. But the reason is that it’s important is that if you go from just below it to just above it, your brain has to start recruiting different types of muscle fibers in order to keep up with the demand that your muscles are putting on it, and it’s just…

It’s sort of like, it’s almost literally like flipping a switch, and so it just… It makes it more stressful to your autonomic nervous system, so it takes a little bit longer to recover from, which is fine if you do that once, but if you do it habitually, then you’re creating this chronic burden of, never fully process fatigue. It just kind of stops you from getting all you can, all the benefit you ought to be getting from the running you’re doing the convenient thing is that that threshold aligns with the fastest running pace at which you can carry on a conversation comfortably. And so, one advantage that elite runners have in that regard is that they can run pretty darn fast in absolute terms and still be below that threshold just because they’re so fit, and most elite runners, the team I trained with, they train in groups, and they actually are having conversations when they’re doing their low intensity runs, so that’s what they do, they just go out there, most of them are not wearing heart rate monitors, they’re barely even paying attention to their pace, they’re just jogging along comfortably, having a conversation, and it gets the job done without really much fussing about the objective numbers.

Brett McKay: Okay, so most of the training is just below this threshold, and if you can have a conversation, you’re probably good, but runners also have to do some high intensity work because you wanna be able to practice for that kick at the end, right? If you’re running a marathon, usually you’re running harder at the end, so you can… If you need to beat someone, you can… How do elite runners incorporate high intensity training if they’re doing most of the work with low intensity volume?

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, it’s really… You know the simplest way to think about it is in terms of like on a per session basis or per run basis, so the typical elite runner is running usually 13 times per week, so twice a day, six days, and then one easy run on the “rest day”. And of those 13 runs, usually three involve are sort of focused on more intense efforts, so it’s about one out of every three runs set aside for harder work, and that ratio works pretty well no matter what you’re running frequency is, so if you run three times a week, one run should be high intensity, if you run six times a week, two should be, and so on, so that’s really the way they approach it, and it’s like they train in micro-cycles that have a recurring structure, so they just get in a nice rhythm with their training, it’s one or two easy days, then a hard day, one or two easy days, hard day, and so it becomes very predictable, they know what their body can handle, they work hard on the hard days, but they have the time to regenerate between hard days and it works.

Brett McKay: On those high-intensity days that they’re trying to reach certain speed, heart rate, what are they… What’s the goal there, usually?

Matt Fitzgerald: There’s a great variety of… Yeah, because really… So when I say higher intensities, I’m really talking about everything in that kind of moderate to maximal range, which is a very broad range. There’s a lot you can do there, so it’s not all one type of workout. So I was training for a marathon with that group, as were most of the real pros on the team. So marathon pace for them, for the male runners, you’re talking about two hours and 10 minutes is their marathon pace and for the women, 2:25 to 2:30. So that’s not a high-intensity, that’s a moderate-intensity, a pace you could sustain for more than two hours. And so there was a fair amount of work, that would be sort of like… That’s not an easy run either, though. So when we did marathon pace workouts, it would be like a fairly high volume of work at that somewhat aggressive pace.

And then other days would be much, much more intense than that, so short blasts of speed with active or passive recoveries between them. And then sort of in between those, you would have some longer intervals like fast but not quite that fast. And then tempo runs, which are faster than marathon pace, but maybe slower than 5K or 10K pace. And so there’s just quite a bit of variety, and so I practically did not ever do the same workout twice during the 13 weeks I was there. ‘Cause it’s like well, if you’ve already done it, let’s not do it again. Let’s progress from there. And generally, what you’re trying to do is get more and more specific to the demands of whatever you’re actually trying to train for.

Brett McKay: Alright, so I guess to take with the principal there, every third workout, do some sort of high-intensity. Again, high intensities like moderate to high like, your heart feels like it’s gonna come out of your chest. There’s different ways you can do that. But again, I think the overall principal that I got for that part was most of your stuff’s gonna be low-intensity volume, that’s where they spend most of their time. ‘Cause it allows you to get the most fitness but also just doesn’t beat you up, this allows you to train more. And the more you train, the better you’re gonna be.

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah. One thing that, for those who are having trouble wrapping their head around like, why is that the best way? One thing that I think most people don’t know that kind of makes sense of all this is like, if you take a very, very challenging high-intensity interval workout, so like going to the track and running one hard lap, so 400 meters, a quarter mile, and then recovering and then doing it again, and then doing it again. Say doing it 12 times, so 12 times, a hard quarter mile with recoveries between them. If you do that type of run as your bread and butter, that’s the main type of training you do and you don’t do a lot of easy running, and you have another runner who does a lot of easy running and only does that type of workout occasionally, the runner who does a ton of easy running will destroy the other runner who specializes in that type of workout, absolutely destroy them. So that’s what you’re getting from all that easy running, it actually allows you to do… Now, if you do all easy running, you’re gonna have a very bad time at the track. But if it’s mostly easy and just a sprinkling of those hard interval workouts, it actually makes you better at the hard interval workouts. It’s not that it’s either good or bad, you’re just, you’re getting the most out of it if you’re doing most of you’re running at low-intensity.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about something I’ve… Whenever I read popular press about running, there’s a lot of emphasis on running form. You gotta be a mid-foot striker, you don’t wanna be a heel lander. Maybe you should get a running coach if you wanna up your running game. Do the pros worry about that stuff?

Matt Fitzgerald: No, not very much. I mentioned in the book that during the three plus months I was in Flagstaff, Ben, the coach on the team, he didn’t correct my form once or manipulated or asked me to change it a single time, and I did not see him do that with any of the pros on the team. And that was pretty much expected, I’ve been involved in this sport long enough to know that running technique is not emphasized at the Elite level. Now, that could be for one of two reasons. One potential reason is that, well, they all have perfect form. That’s how they became pros, and so there’s nothing to fix. The other possible reason is that sort of batting practice for running is not actually an effective way to get better at running, and it turns out that the latter is true. That running form matters and running form can and should change, but you can’t manipulate it consciously.

It actually, it’s counterproductive, and there’s a lot of science showing this. If you tell a runner who runs X way, “No, you gotta run Y way,” and you measure their running economy, their efficiency before and after. No matter what you have them change, [chuckle] no matter how textbook it looks, no matter how much prettier their form looks, they’ve gotten less efficient. So the key is to run naturally, and there are ways you can evolve your stride to make it more efficient through… Actually strength training and plyometric training helps, just running a lot helps, running at different intensities helps, getting fitter helps, losing weight helps. So there’s lots of ways to evolve your running form, but just intentionally landing differently with your foot on the ground and stuff like that is not the way to go.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you highlight there are elite runners who are heel strikers and they’re doing alright. And maybe their training is different because it does put a lot of stress on their lower limbs, but it works for them. I think the point you… That’s the other point, is like why you should run a lot at a low intensity. The more you run, the better your running will get. Your body’s gonna adapt to find the most efficient form for you.

Matt Fitzgerald: Yes, they call it a self-optimizing system. And you know what’s going on… With every single stride you take, your brain and the rest of your body are talking to each other. And so your brain is kinda listening, “How’s it going down there?” And it’s like… If you measure your running mechanics with sophisticated accelerometers and force plates and stuff, what you see is actually no two strides that any runner takes are identical. There’s a little bit of play in the stride continuously that you can’t see with a naked eye. And there’s no way to eliminate that, and you wouldn’t want to, because that play allows for your nervous system to look for more efficient ways to get the job done. But actually your running form changes over the course of a single run, because you will unconsciously adjust your form to make up for fatigue starting to set in. So this unconscious system is way smarter than your conscious brain. So, you sort of just have to get out of the way and let it do its thing.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the takeaway there, Don’t worry too much about your form.

Matt Fitzgerald: Pretty much.

Brett McKay: Yeah. As long as you run a lot, your form will get… Will optimize… Self-optimize. Let’s talk about recovery. How do pros approach recovery differently from the amateurs?

Matt Fitzgerald: The interesting thing there, is that you might think, “Oh yeah, the pros are doing all the fancy expensive stuff like supplements and cryo therapy and compression boots and massage guns.” And, yeah, they do some of that, but really what the science shows is that… And it kinda makes sense. The things that make a real big impact with recovery are the basics, the low-tech stuff. So rest, sleep, nutrition and stress management are the big ones, those are foundational. And pretty much, if you’re doing those four things well, consistently, then you’re getting about, probably, 98% of the recovery that you could possibly get. And then that other stuff, the supplements and the compression boots can maybe get you that other one or two percent.

Brett McKay: There’s a study done on… I guess, at these runs, there’s tents you can go to where you can get compression boots and massage stuff. And I think in the study, they found, correct me if I am wrong, the athletes who go to that stuff more do worse than the athletes who don’t go to it. Don’t get that stuff done.

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, that was actually from the Olympic Training Center. So, it was actually Olympic-level athletes. So even at that level, they found that… Yeah, they had a recovery center at the Olympic Training Center. And just the guy who operated that facility kept track of who used it. And he found that the people who used it least, were most likely to win medals. So, yeah, kind of interesting. And so yeah. And now, even if you look at sort of the competitive recreational runner, I think what you see is a lot of people… They use the gizmos and the high-tech stuff as a way to make up for not doing the basics, right? So it’s like, “Well, I don’t get enough sleep, but that’s okay, ’cause I got my compression boots.” It’s like, “My diet’s crap, but that’s okay because I take all these supplements.” It doesn’t work like that. So if there’s any benefit in the high-tech stuff, you’re only gonna get it if you’re already taking care of the basics.

Brett McKay: So, yeah. When you were at this camp, you were, what, sleeping 10 hours a night, and then also you were getting a nap, like an hour of nap during the day, correct?

Matt Fitzgerald: Well, that was the guy… That was the real pro runner I was living with when I was there, a guy named Matt Yano. So yeah, he was sleeping 10 hours a night and napping one or two hours in the afternoon. I, when I was there, I’m just not an napper. I have to have the flu, and then… Even then if I… When I wake up from my nap, I’m still a zombie for the rest of the day. So I’m like, “Forget it. No way am I gonna nap.” But when we got really, really deep into the training, I started napping too. [laughter] I saw, “Okay, this is why they do it. Just… Yeah, in order… ” I was just ready for it. My body was telling me, “Hey dude, in order to be able to sustain this workload, you’re gonna need a little bit more shut eye.” But yeah, you hear that the pros sleep a lot. And I was living with one of them there, and I saw it first hand that, yup, he made it a priority.

Brett McKay: Alright, so good sleep. The pros, of course, are also taking care of nutrition for their recovery. But you talk about it in the book, they’re not really big on, “You can’t eat this, you can’t eat that.” They just eat a lot of natural, unprocessed foods, lots of different high-quality foods. And you mentioned this in the book, that means, for a lot of the pros, they’re getting about 60-70% of their food from carbs. So pros are running on a high carb diet. And then the other thing for recovery is just stress management. And for the pros, they basically don’t do anything except run, and then just hang out basically. So just hanging out, relaxing. For the average Joe, they don’t have that luxury just to hang out when they’re not running. They have to go to work. But you talk about the… You can employ standard stress management practices like meditation, breathing exercises, things like that. You also mentioned that part of the recovery process for pros, and just staying optimally fit, is doing cross-training. What does that look like?

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah. And this is one… It’s like a… It’s really an untapped resource for a lot of recreational runners is… You know, most humans, and definitely most recreational runners, they actually… We talked about that mileage sweet spot before. But really, because running is so hard on the body through that repetitive impact, most runners, when they hit their sweet spot, where they just can’t handle any more running, they still have untapped potential to gain aerobic fitness. And the only way to mine that potential is to get aerobic training in some other modality, right? ‘Cause you’re already doing as much running as you can do, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing something else, you know swimming, cycling, cross-country skiing, rowing, whatever it is, you can actually gain a little bit extra aerobic fitness without increasing your injury risk, ’cause you’re not subjecting your body to any more hounding.

So, the pros like, they definitely… Because they’re paid to run, they try to get all of their fitness through running, and they will only supplement with cross-training if it’s apparent that they can’t get to the mountain top through running alone. But they’re very quick to do it. They won’t hesitate for a second. A lot of runners, they’re like, “Well, I don’t like that, doing that other stuff. I just wanna run.” And so they just go from all to nothing. They run until they get injured, and then they do nothing for six weeks while they heal, and you know, that’s no way to do it. And interestingly, when I was halfway through my fateful runner stint in Flagstaff, I got injured. And I cross-train like a maniac. And it was actually a pretty serious injury, it was a strain in a hip abductor tendon. And yeah, I was in the hands of the support team there, with their physical therapist and yeah, we even had… Shoot. I had a… Was even seeing a sports psychologist while I was there.

And I made this, what felt to me like a miraculous recovery. And I was just so much fitter than I thought I could be, even though I had… There was a period when I wasn’t able to do much running at all while I was healing. But because of all that cross-training, I was able to pick right back up where I left off, and like I said, still run my fastest marathon.

Brett McKay: Yeah, one type of cross-trainer that I saw, and it was treadmill hill climbs, which is… It was fun when I saw it, ’cause my wife, she’s a runner, and for a long time, she kinda settled in. It’s like, she does the treadmill where she’ll just… What she’ll do, she’ll put the treadmill at the highest incline you can go, and just walk while she watched ‘Law and Order.’

Matt Fitzgerald: Yup.

Brett McKay: And I was like, “That’s pretty silly. What… That… How’s that supposed to help you running?” Then I read this. “Oh my gosh, you’re vindicated. You figured out [chuckle] this principle and it works.” And she says it works for her. It helps her out a lot.

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, it’s good stuff, ’cause if you think about it, what you’re doing is very, very similar to running. If you want the fitness you get from cross-training to transfer back to fitness, then you should choose something that is fairly similar. And inclined treadmill walking is… It’s not no impact, it’s low impact. So, you’re still getting a little bit of impact, which is actually good. And then you’re using… It’s weighted, and you’re using sequential movements of your legs just like you do in running, it’s just… Yeah, it does look a little goofy, but it works, like you said.

Brett McKay: It works. Well, let’s talk about mindset now, generally. How pro runners approach it differently from amateur runners. This kind of segues nicely to our conversation we had last time, a couple of years ago, about your other book ‘How Bad Do You Want It?’ What approach do pros take when it comes to sort of the psychology of performance that amateurs don’t?

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, I mean, I love this topic, as you know already, because quite honestly… Yeah, I mean, the pro runners I was around at that time, and others I’ve gotten to know, they are impressive physical specimens. They are gifted, they work hard, they’re fitter than you can imagine, they can do things, run… Sustain speeds that are just jaw-dropping. So, they are physically different from you and me, but they’re also very different in characteristic ways above the neck, and that is really cool to me, you know? I think there were about 12 or 13 runners on the team when I was there. And there were just certain characteristics, like, psychological characteristics, that they all had, that you had to think were part of the formula for their success. And in point of fact, of those 12 or 13 runners, only one of them was like a blue chip prospect in high school. Someone who was like, “This guy is a generational talent.”

All the rest were like, “Good, not great in high school. Good, not great in college.” But they were the ones with shoe contracts as adults, because they had enough physical talent, but they also had it going on between the ears. And it was the combination of those two things that made them great. And I didn’t quite answer your question, but I wanted to just impress on people…

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Matt Fitzgerald: That like, it’s not just physical.

Brett McKay: Oh, so, what are some of the psychological traits that you saw in common with these guys?

Matt Fitzgerald: You know, one is just like, the thing that I think would be most surprising to the folks listening is, like, I saw a lot of runners during the 13 weeks I was there. A lot of the pros abandoned workouts, quit workouts, way more than… Like, the amateur runners I coach are… They would rather die than bail out of a workout. The pros do it all the time, and the reason they do it is not that they’re lazy or mentally weak, it’s because they’re smart. [laughter] Because… I remember one runner on the team, Scott Fauble, 2:09 marathoner, he bailed out of a workout. And I said, “Hey, what went wrong? Why did you quit?” He said, “Well, I’m developing a sinus infection, and I figured if I… I’ve had these before, and if I force it now, I could lose a week, but if I quit while I’m ahead, I should be back up to 100% in two, three days.”

And that’s so hard for most people to do. It seems like an easy thing, right? “Oh, he’s just being rational,” but it’s just that sort of… That kind of confidence and trust in the process that allows them to push when it’s time to push, but also to exercise discipline and restraint. They don’t live and die by today’s performance. They understand the context. And so, they’re just a little bit more relaxed and centered. And I guess, the way… I was talking about it with Ben recently, and we agreed that amateur runners try to win the workout, and pro runners try to win the process. That’s a key distinction.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s a key distinction. I know in my own experience with barbell training, when I was first getting started, I got really serious about it. I had once this period like, if I had a bad workout, I just got all pissy and just angry, and how like, it ruined my day.

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah.

Brett McKay: There reached a point where I’m like, “I can’t do that. It’s a bad workout. You have one bad workout it doesn’t mean you’re gonna have a bad performance when you compete.”

Matt Fitzgerald: Yeah, one thing I tell… I’ve started… Especially coming away from that experience in 2017, that I tell the runners I work with all the time, is that you should only judge your fitness, and if you want, your running ability, by your best workouts. Because you cannot perform better in a workout than your fitness allows, right? There are no flukes, you can’t just pull it out of thin air. Like, if you’re able to perform at a certain level on a given day, it’s because you’re fit enough to do so. There’s no other possible reason. But there’s a myriad of reasons where you could underperform in a given workout. So, if you have a sort of like mediocre workout or lay an egg, it could be because you slept poorly last night, or you’re developing a little bit of a bug, or simply because you’re a little bit tired from previous training. So, that’s like… That stuff, you just need to brush it off. And as long as your last really good workout isn’t too far in the past, then judge your fitness by that and know you’re okay, and don’t worry about the mediocre workouts.

Brett McKay: Well, what do pros do differently? Say, they’re in a competition and they got a… Like, they’re feeling uncomfortable, they’re hurting, and they’ve gotta put in that last kick so they can perform, like, do the best they can, what do pros do differently to dig deep during competition?

Matt Fitzgerald: You know, there’s some variety there, but Ben, he says… He has this term he likes. He got it from his high school coach, ‘the champion’s mindset.’ And he said, “Champions, in those moments, they relish it. They view it as their time.” It sorta reminds me a bit of that old joke, “If you and your friend are being chased by a bear, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than your friend.” You know, running hurts. Long distance running races are… They’re suffer-fest. They’re very, very uncomfortable. And that’s true for everyone. And there are instincts in all of us that recoil from subjecting ourselves to that kind of misery, but the champions, their attitude is not like, “This sucks. I wish it didn’t suck so much.” Their attitude is, “If I can suffer just a little bit more [chuckle] than these chumps around me, it’s my race.” And so, that’s their mindset. It’s like, they don’t have to like it, they just have to just embrace it just a little bit more than the people around them.

Brett McKay: Well, Matt, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Matt Fitzgerald: Anywhere books are sold, I’m told anyway by the publisher. And for more about me, and my other books, my training plans, there’s my personal website, mattfitzgerald.org, and my business website 8020endurance.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Matt Fitzgerald, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Matt Fitzgerald: You bet.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Matt Fitzgerald. He is a co-author of the book, ‘Run Like A Pro, Even If You’re Slow.’ It’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about Matt’s work at his website mattfitzgerald.org. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/run, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles and interviews about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AoM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com. Sign up, use code MANLINESS at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’ve signed up, download the Stitcher App on Android or iOS, and you start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing this show with a friend or a family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #787: Run Like a Pro (Even If You’re Slow) appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When we got married fifteen years ago, we both wanted to make the outdoors a part of our lives together. So we made a modest goal to go camping at least twice a year: once in the fall, and once in the spring. We even registered for a tent and sleeping bags as part of our wedding registry.

These early years of married life were pretty busy for us: law school and starting AoM and having babies. But we stuck with our commitment pretty well, even if most of our camping trips were just quick 36-hour getaways.

The kind of camping we did was car camping, where you pull up in your vehicle to a developed, preset campsite outfitted with tent pad, fire ring, picnic benches, and nearby restrooms. It was the kind of camping we were most familiar with and seemed the most accessible.

We certainly had some good times, hiking and sitting around the fire doing our biannual check-in on how we were each respectively doing in the different areas of our lives, and engaging in our tradition of sharing our individual and mutual “hopes and dreams.”

But almost from the start, we experienced some measure of doubt about the ROI of these excursions. Packing up for the trip took a lot of time and tedium (even though we found ways to streamline the process); then there was setting up camp when we got to our destination; then packing everything back up; then unpacking it when we got home to air it out; then packing it back up again . . . and for one (uncomfortable) night sleeping out!

The discomfort of sleeping outside would have been justifiable, if these trips really offered the feeling of getting away from it all — of stepping into the wild. But the campsites, at least the ones around here in Oklahoma and Arkansas, evoked anything but. It’s hard to feel you’re engaging in a John Muir-esque soul washing, when the glow of the restrooms casts a light over your tent, people blare music from radios, playgrounds sit a few feet away, and you fall asleep to the sound of bullfrogs . . . mixed with the hum of RV generators.

So over the last several years, we’ve tried alternatives. Staying in a cabin. Backpacking.

And now that we’ve sampled several avenues for getting a dose of nature, we’re ready to declare: car camping is the worst.

You know, at least relative to the other options.

Car camping requires the same amount of preparation/packing/unpacking rigmarole and nearly the same level of tent-sleeping discomfort as backpacking, but without the latter’s advantage of allowing you to feel you’ve escaped civilization completely and immersed yourself in nature.

Car camping requires more preparation/packing/unpacking rigmarole, and a worse night’s sleep than a cabin, without actually feeling like a significantly wilder experience.

Cabin stays, backpacking, and car camping all offer the chance to hike, which is, at least for us, unarguably the main point and best part of these excursions (and if you live close to the outdoors, a day hike that has you exploring all day, and back in your own bed at night, can be one of the best possibilities of all). But car camping sacrifices the comfort and convenience of the cabin stay, without the full-on-nature-bathing upside to backpacking, and thus exists in a kind of unappealing limbo land.

Now in fairness to car camping, it is cheaper than renting a cabin, or buying backpacking gear (although these are one-and-done purchases). And it allows you to bring more equipment and supplies, which can come in handy if you’ve got kids or you’re make-a-full-breakfast-of-flapjacks-and-eggs-over-the-campfire kind of people (perhaps our antipathy to car camping may be explained by the fact that we’re not, and are instead roast-hot-dogs-on-a-stick-for-dinner-and-eat-granola-bars-for-breakfast kind of people).

Those caveats aside, we offer this general rule: If you want to do some hiking far from home, stay in a cabin. If you want to do some hiking + sleep out in a place where the buzz of social media seems like a distant, unreal dream as you stare into the vastness of the Milky Way, go backpacking. But you likely needn’t make space in your life for car camping. It’s the worst.

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Man has spent thousands of years mapping, domesticating, and harnessing his environment.

He has sailed the earth’s seas, climbed its mountains, plumbed its depths, and left its atmosphere.

He has tamed the wilderness, supplanted thick forests with sprawling cities, cultivated agricultural yields that can feed billions.

He has channeled electricity, routed many diseases, shrunk space and systemized time.

Yet while the resulting rise of civilization solved many of humanity’s most pressing problems, its very fruits have created a new set of them.

Indeed, a question posed by J.B. Nash in the middle of the 20th century remains more open than ever today: Can man live in the world he has created?

Can he avoid the mind-unraveling and body-degenerating effects of physical inactivity by willing himself to move, even when such movement isn’t necessary?

Can he push himself to partake in the life-giving energies of nature and sunlight, when it’s possible to spend all of one’s time within the walls of a fluorescent-lit domicile?

Can he prevent the mismatch between an increased capacity to be bombarded by worry-inducing news, and his static capacity to do anything about it, from becoming a source of crippling anxiety?

Can he find existential meaning when every value is contested and contestable?

Can he live in a world where he enjoys — has become dependent on — corporation-facilitated conveniences, but finds it soul-sucking to work within the structures required to keep them going?

Can man live in the world he has created?

The answer depends on whether he recognizes that though he may have subdued his external obstacles and enemies, he must overcome psychological foes — depression, anomie, angst — which are no less formidable for their ethereality. He must embrace the fact that though this world may be thoroughly charted, explored, and technologized, there remains one last territory to conquer — himself.

The post Sunday Firesides: Man’s Last Great Conquest — Himself appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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If you’re serious about your strength training, you likely want to get the most out of your time in the gym. But if you’re like most regular joes, you don’t have hours upon hours to dedicate to working out.

If you’ve got three to four lifts you need to perform in a workout, and you’re doing those lifts for multiple sets, how long you rest between sets will determine whether you’re able to get all of your work done in your allotted gym time.

But you face a problem when it comes to taking those rests:

Rest too much between sets, and you needlessly extend your workout time.

Rest too little between sets, and you risk diminishing your performance due to fatigue.

So how long do you actually need to rest between sets so that 1) you recover enough to perform the next set, and 2) you don’t spend more time in the gym than you need to?

It depends on your fitness goals. Read on and we’ll break it down for you.

If Your Goal Is to Get Stronger: Rest ~2 Minutes If your primary goal is to get stronger and put on muscle, you’ll want to rest long enough between sets that you’re consistently able to complete all the reps in your subsequent sets.

You could ensure that you get enough rest between sets by resting 10 minutes between them. But if you’re doing three of the major lifts (e.g., squat, bench, and deadlift) for three sets of five, that means you’d be resting for 90 minutes during your session. That’s 90 minutes of doing absolutely nothing. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

So what’s the least amount of time you can rest between sets that will still allow you to recover enough to perform your next sets?

This is actually a well-researched topic in the world of sports science.

And the consensus is about two minutes.

It all comes down to how quickly your muscles can regenerate ATP. If you remember from your high school biology class, ATP is what powers your body. Your body makes ATP in three ways; the primary way it does so while you’re lifting weights, is by recycling previously used ATP using creatine phosphate.

When you’re lifting heavy weights, for the first few reps of a set, your muscles are primarily using ATP formed from creatine phosphate you’ve already had stored in your muscles. But this power source rapidly depletes after just 10 seconds or so of an intense activity like lifting weights or sprinting.

If you feel really snappy and strong when you start a set of squats but then feel like you can barely complete the last rep, you’re experiencing creatine phosphate depletion. Your muscles are running out of creatine phosphate to power ATP production, so lifting gets harder. Studies show that when you lift until failure, your body has about 15% to 30% of the creatine phosphate levels it possesses when fully rested.

While creatine phosphate depletes pretty quickly, it can also restore itself pretty quickly. In fact, after just 30 seconds of rest, creatine phosphate levels can refresh themselves back to 50% of their full capacity. After a minute of rest, creatine phosphate levels are, on average, back to 75%; after 90 seconds of rest, they’re at 87.5%; after two minutes, they’re back to 95%.

From there, creatine phosphate goes up incrementally; to get as close to your 100% as possible, you’d likely need to rest five minutes or more.

So the question becomes: Is resting more than two minutes to get closer to 100% creatine phosphate restoration worth it?

The research suggests that the answer is typically no.

Even lifters who rest for five minutes or more don’t have significantly greater strength and muscle mass compared to those who rest for just two minutes, and most lifters will be able to complete all the reps and sets they need to do in a given workout with their creatine phosphate levels at 95%. Resting longer than the two minutes it takes to reach that level, in order to achieve 100%, has a diminishing ROI, in that you’re not getting much of an extra power boost, but are spending significantly more time in the gym.

Again, though, these are averages; whether you only need to rest two minutes or could benefit from going a little longer depends on your unique situation. You probably only need to rest two minutes between sets if you’re younger, lifting lighter weights, and/or doing single-joint lifts (like bicep curls). As you get older, the weight gets heavier, and/or you’re doing compound lifts (like the deadlift), you may need to rest longer between sets.

Experiment and find the proper resting time for you. Start with two minutes. If you can complete your subsequent sets on that rest time, you’ve discovered that you just need to rest two minutes between sets. If you fail the next set after resting for only two minutes, extend your rest between sets to three minutes and see what happens.

The goal is to find a rest interval that allows you to rest the least amount of time while recovering the most you can. Finding this sweet spot will ensure you get the most out of your limited workout time.

If Your Goal Is to Improve Metabolic Conditioning: Shorten Your Rest Between Sets If your goal isn’t to get stronger but to improve your metabolic conditioning, keep your rest periods short. 30-60 seconds seems to be the magic interval. It’s enough time for you to catch your breath. If you’re lifting weights as part of your metabolic conditioning, keep the weights light enough that you don’t need more than a minute of rest to complete a set.

Do More Work in Less Time With Supersets If you’d like to get more work done in less time, consider doing supersets.

Supersets are when you perform two different exercises one right after another. When doing supersets, you want to combine exercises so that they work different muscles. This allows one group of muscles to recover while you’re working the other.

For example, you could create a superset with the bench press and bent-over rows.

The bench works your chest, while the rows work your back. When you’re doing the bench press, your back is getting a rest; when you’re doing the bent-over rows, your chest is recovering.

You could also do a superset of squats and shoulder presses.

Or bicep curls and tricep extensions.

With a superset, you perform the exercises back to back and then rest between the supersets. You may be able to rest less than two minutes here, as the muscle group you first worked, and are about to work again, already got some “rest” while you did the second exercise in the superset. Again, experiment to find your sweet spot, remembering that that sweet spot is the minimum amount of rest that allows you to still complete all your sets/reps.

By switching back and forth between exercises like that and resting between sets, it allows you to cram more work in your workout while giving your muscles adequate time to recover. The research backs this up. Supersetting allows you to get more done without negatively affecting your strength.

The only thing that will hold you back with supersets is your anaerobic conditioning. Doing sets of exercises back to back will get you all sweaty and out of breath. You might find that your muscles are able to do the work, but you’re just too winded to get a superset done. Thankfully, after consistently working out for a while, your conditioning will improve and getting all out of breath won’t be a problem anymore.

Can You Do Cardio Between Weightlifting Sets? Some people like to kill two birds with one stone and get their cardio done while “resting” between lifting sets.

Will that get in the way of your strength?

Not necessarily.

As long as you do cardio that works different muscles from the muscles you’re working with your lifts you should be fine. So if you’re doing shoulder presses, you can jump on the stationary bike in between sets. If you’re squatting, you can do some battle rope exercises.

You also want to avoid going too hard with your cardio. You don’t want to be sucking wind before you start your next set on your lift. That will just get in the way of you performing all of your weightlifting reps.

So feel free to do cardio between sets, just do cardio that works different muscles than your lifts and keep it light.

What Else Can You Do While Resting Between Sets? If you don’t want to do cardio in between your sets, what should you do instead?

Most folks scroll through Instagram. I’ve had periods where I’ve done that. I don’t like scrolling through Instagram, though. Feels bad, man.

You’ll usually find me reading a book between sets. It’s how I find possibilities in spare moments. I have to do a lot of reading for my work, so getting some in while I’m resting allows me to maximize my time.

When I don’t feel like reading, I just walk around outside my garage. It’s relaxing and allows me to get some sun. If Gus is down in the garage with me, we’ll toss the football around between sets.

You can always just stand in the middle of the gym and blankly stare forward like a weirdo during your rest periods. It’s a dominance move.

Whatever you do, just make sure you’re taking it easy during your rests, so your body can replenish its creatine phosphate stores, so you can power through all of the work you have planned during your workout.

My Current Between-Sets-Rest Routine Warm-up Sets

During my warm-up, the weight is light enough that I don’t need to rest that long.

For the first two warm-up sets (I do four warm-up sets in all), I don’t rest at all. I just add weight to the bar and get right back to lifting. Once I get to my last two warm-up sets, I’ll rest for about 90 seconds between them.

Working Sets

During my working sets, I rest three minutes between sets. That seems to be the sweet spot for me. After three minutes, I feel recovered enough to complete the next set.

After I complete a set, I just tell Siri to set a timer for three minutes. Having a timer helps keep my workout on track.

If I’m short on time, I’ll do the warm-up sets for the next lift during my rest time for the lift I’m working on. For example, if I’m doing the worksets for my bench press, during my rests for the bench, I’ll do the warm-up sets for my deadlift. This, of course, requires that you have enough barbells available so that you can have a barbell loaded for two lifts at the same time. Using more than two barbells at once in a public gym can be a gym etiquette faux pas. Use your discretion.

Accessory Work

After I finish my main lifts, I’ll do some accessory work where I do things like bicep curls, tricep extensions, lat pulldowns, kettlebell swings, etc.

I turn my accessory work into a metabolic conditioning workout, keeping the weight light and resting very little between sets.

For example, when I do bicep curls, I’ll crank out a set and rest just a minute before I do the next set.

I’ll sometimes superset bicep curls and tricep extensions. Depends on what I’m feeling like doing that day.

My goal for accessory work is to get a nice pump and get really sweaty and out of breath. I’m not trying to break bicep curl records.

Some guys take their accessory work more seriously and will lift heavy and rest longer between sets. If getting stronger on your accessory lifts is a goal of yours, by all means, rest longer between sets.

The post How Long Should You Rest Between Weightlifting Sets? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Hammering may seem like the most basic tool technique known to man. And indeed, to the unskilled, hammering just means pounding the heck out of something until you get the job done. Sure, you could do that, but you’ll end up with crummy results and a tired arm to boot. A wise handyman knows how to choose the right hammer for the job, and how to then wield it safely, effectively, and efficiently.

The above technique-refining tips can help you avoid the frustration of bent nails and the pain of smashed fingers. Good technique will also drive your targets in faster, so you can spend less time hammering and more time admiring your finished work.

The post How to Handle a Hammer appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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How did one of history’s greatest writers — Ernest Hemingway — get going with his craft, develop his indelible style, and infuse his narratives with memorable life and compelling tension?

Today we delve into the answers to those questions with Hemingway scholar Mark Cirino, who is a professor of English, the editor and author of half a dozen books on Hemingway — including Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action — and the host of the One True Podcast which covers all things related to Papa. Mark and I our begin our conversation with how Hemingway cut his teeth with writing as a journalist, how the “iceberg theory” underlay his approach to writing as a novelist, and how his years in Paris — and the books, people, and art he encountered there — influenced his work and the trajectory of his career. We then discuss how his travel and recreational pastimes allowed him to write with a vivid firsthand understanding of certain places and pursuits, what his writing routine was like, and how the characters in his novels explore the tension between thought and action. We end our conversation with Mark’s recommendation for where to start reading Hemingway if you’ve never read him or haven’t read him in a long time, and what Mark thinks was Hemingway’s “one true sentence.”

Resources Related to the Podcast * Hemingway works mentioned in the show: + “Big Two-Hearted River” + “Soldier’s Home” + “Hills Like White Elephants” + “Killers” + “Indian Camp” + “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” + In Our Time + Death in the Afternoon + A Moveable Feast + The Sun Also Rises + Across the River and Into the Trees + For Whom the Bell Tolls + The Old Man and the Sea + A Farewell to Arms + Men at War (edited by Hemingway) * Shakespeare and Company lending cards for Hemingway * Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker * Hemingway’s Brain by Andrew Farah * AoM Article: Why Ernest Hemingway Committed Suicide * AoM Article: The Libraries of Famous Men — Ernest Hemingway * AoM Article: Ernest Hemingway as a Case Study in Living a T-Shaped Life

Connect With Mark Cirino * One True Podcast * One True Podcast on Twitter

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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Transcript Coming Soon! The post Podcast #786: The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action (Studies in American Thought and Culture)

A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingway Hardcover book

For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition

Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time

The Sun Also Rises (Macmillan Collector's Library)

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For nearly two hundred years, the private detective has been a literary archetype of manliness.

Edgar Allen Poe invented the literary detective with his character Auguste Dupin. Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most famous of literary sleuths. (You can find the 10 best Holmesian stories here). These detectives, and other private investigators of the 19th and early 20th centuries, showcased keen observation and sharp analytical deduction. You rarely saw them get into physical altercations. They were heroes because they were brilliant.

But in the 1930s and through the 1950s, a new type of private eye started popping up in American literature. These detectives were smart, but they were also physically and emotionally tough. If they needed to, they’d resort to violence. They also did their best to develop a kind of mental armor to protect themselves from the sleaze they encountered because of their work. This resulted in their having a cynical and detached view of life.

These detectives had to become “hardboiled.”

Dashiell Hammett is credited with creating the hardboiled detective with the character of Sam Spade. Raymond Chandler added his spin to the archetype by introducing the world to Philip Marlowe.

What all hardboiled detectives have in common is that they’re outsiders. They work to solve crimes, but do it because they’re hired to perform a job. They’re not officers of the law, though criminals often see them that way. They’re mercenaries. Renegades. Liminal characters stuck between two worlds. Consequently, the hardboiled detective often doesn’t have a given code of ethics to follow. He has to develop his own and fight like hell to stick to it.

For the last couple years, I’ve been reading and enjoying numerous works from the hardboiled detective genre. While these books are known as pulp fiction, and they are indeed engaging, non-overly-high-brow reads, there are also deeper existential currents going on under the hood. So you can read them as gritty page-turners, and also as musings on how to make your way in a chaotic, crooked world.

Below I share five of my favorites; if you’re looking to dive into the genre, they’re all can’t-go-wrong starting places.

The Difference Between Hardboiled and Noir

Genres are funny things. They can cause a lot of debate among fans. The world of detective novels isn’t immune from that dynamic.

Hardboiled and noir are often used interchangeably to describe the same type of book. While hardboiled and noir novels do share similar characteristics (an unflinching look at violence against a backdrop of human depravity), many aficionados make a distinction between the two. The best description of that distinction that I’ve encountered comes from noir author Megan Abbott:

“The common argument is that hardboiled novels are an extension of the Wild West and pioneer narratives of the 19th century. The wilderness becomes the city, and the hero is usually a somewhat fallen character, a detective or a cop. At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored. . . .

Noir is different. In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable.”

I’ve read my fair share of noir novels, and I’ll do a post highlighting my favorites within that genre in the future. For this article, I’ll just be focusing on hardboiled detective novels.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett created the pattern for the hardboiled detective with Sam Spade. Underneath Spade’s hardened and cynical facade lies a profound idealism — a commitment to live by his own code of ethics.

The Maltese Falcon begins with Spade’s long-time partner getting killed and the police fingering Spade as the primary suspect. Spade has to juggle proving his innocence while trying to hunt down a valuable statue of a bird. Featuring grifters, crooked cops, and a femme fatale with ever-shifting loyalties, The Maltese Falcon is a hardboiled detective novel you’ll have a hard time putting down.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely is the second installment in the Philip Marlowe series but is considered Chandler’s best work.

It’s easy to see why.

The story is actually several stories woven together into one. It starts out with Marlowe witnessing the murder of a club owner by a felon looking for his old girlfriend. You think this will be the main story you’ll be following in the book, but the narrative then shifts to Marlowe hunting down the thief of some stolen jewels. You subsequently think that’s going to be the main mystery Marlowe will solve, but then the story finds him diverted once again, and trying to bust a phony psychic and a drug-dealing doctor. That might sound like a confusing jangle of plotlines and loose ends, but it doesn’t feel discordant, and in the end, Marlowe discovers that all of the mysteries are connected in one grand meta-mystery.

Throughout it all, Marlowe lives by his personal code of honor and does his damndest to neither be seduced by wily femme fatales nor corrupted by all the crooks he encounters.

I’ve read most of the Marlowe novels, and this one is by far my favorite.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

Nick Charles is a former private eye who spends his time drinking and wisecracking with his socialite wife, Nora. Charles reluctantly comes out of retirement to start investigating the murder of the secretary of a really messed-up family.

What makes The Thin Man such a great read is that the Charles character is completely different from Hammett’s other detective creations, and from other PIs in general. Charles is definitely a hardboiled guy. Thanks to years of working among humanity’s lowlifes, he’s tough and cynical.

But there’s also a lightness to him.

He doesn’t take life too seriously, and you see that play out in his relationship with his wife, Nora. They really do love each other, and they really enjoy each other’s company. The best part of the novel is watching them sling witty banter and dialogue back and forth.

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

When black people show up in old hardboiled detective novels, they’re usually crime suspects or minor characters.

Walter Mosley broke that mold by creating a black private eye: Easy Rawlins. We’re introduced to Easy in Devil in a Blue Dress.

Like his white counterparts, Easy has to navigate a world where he’s an outsider. He’s not a police officer, but he’s also not a crook. He’s different even from many of the other private investigators in the genre, in that he has no background in law enforcement; untrained and unlicensed, he gets into detective work as an amateur.

But there’s yet another layer to Easy’s role as an outsider: he’s a black man living and working in 1940s Los Angeles. He has to navigate the racial tension and animosities that exist in mid-20th century America.

In Devil in a Blue Dress, we see Easy take on his role as a hardboiled private eye and how he gets the job done in the face of all the opposition he encounters. And like all other PIs, he has to do so while maintaining his own code of ethics and honor.

The Moving Target by Ross/John Macdonald

In The Moving Target, Ross/John (both pen names for Ken Millar) introduces his hardboiled private detective, Lew Archer. Like Marlowe and Spade, Archer is a hardened and world-weary guy (though he’s got more of a sensitive and sympathetic strain) who’s just trying to make it in his line of work without compromising his ethical code.

In his literary debut, Archer is hired by a paralyzed wife of a millionaire to find her missing husband. To solve the case, Archer must deal with the flirtatious daughter of said millionaire, an aging Hollywood film star, a sinister British crook, an addict jazz singer, and a cult leader.

Seamlessly constructed and thoroughly engaging, The Moving Target is my favorite out of all the hardboiled detective novels I’ve read.

The post The 5 Best Hardboiled Detective Novels appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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As the dying approach their death, up to 88% of them experience certain vivid, moving dreams — though “dreams” isn’t even the best word for these experiences, as they can happen to people when they’re both awake and asleep, and are described by them as being “more real than real.”

My guest today has studied these visions and dreams for many years and thinks they have important insights into the nature of life and death. His name is Dr. Chrisopther Kerr, and he’s a hospice physician and end-of-life researcher, as well as the author of Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life’s End. We begin our conversation with Dr. Kerr’s efforts to study end-of-life experiences on an objective, scientific basis, and how his research into these visions and dreams doesn’t attempt to find their spiritual or paranormal origin, but simply seeks to catalog the phenomenon from a clinical perspective. We then discuss how long before death people begin having these dreams, the content of the dreams, and who shows up in them. Dr. Kerr describes how pre-death visions and dreams are typically positive and comforting, and how even the rarer, disturbing variety can end up being transformative. And he shares what these dreams do not only for the dying, but for their caregivers as well.

Resources Related to the Podcast * Dr. Kerr’s Tedx Talk * Death Is But a Dream PBS documentary * Netflix docuseries Surviving Death (Dr. Kerr is featured on the 5th episode) * AoM Podcast #171: The Dying Experience — Myths and Answers

Connect With Dr. Kerr * Dr. Kerr’s Website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Transcript Coming Soon! The post Podcast #785: The Dreams That Precede Death appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End

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When communicating with your barber on what kind of haircut you’d like, it’s important to know the meaning of the terms that can be part of that conversation.

Two common barbering terms that often get confused by the layman are “taper” and “fade.”

It’s easy to confuse these hairstyle descriptors because, as we’ll soon explain, all fades are tapers, but not all tapers are fades.

To ensure you never ask for a fade, when you meant a taper, read on.

What Is a Taper Haircut?

A taper haircut gradually changes your hair length, typically starting out longer at the top of the head and getting shorter as you go down to the natural hairline on the nape of the neck and sides of the head. The length of a taper can vary. You can have a really long taper (hair is longer) or a short taper (hair comes down closer to the skin).

Unless you’re growing your flow out or you got a buzz cut, most haircuts for dudes will involve some sort of taper.

What Is a Fade Haircut?

A fade is a taper that gradually takes the hair down to the skin, so that it looks like the hairline on the sides and back of your head “fades” away before it reaches the natural hairline.

Basically, a fade is a really short taper. Hence, all fades are tapers, but not all tapers are fades.

Fades are a bit trendier and give your face and head a bit of an “edge” — both in terms of its literal lines as well as in the overall impression or vibe the hairstyle gives off.

Fades can start low, mid, or high. Low fades start fading closer to the ear, mid fades start fading just above the ear, and high fades can start fading way up high on the head. Which fade you choose will come down to personal preference and the look you’re going for.

The one downside with fades is that they do require regular maintenance to keep that faded-to-skin look fresh and sharp.

There Is No Such Thing as a “Taper Fade” So Quit Saying It A lot of people ask their barber for a “taper fade.” When you tell your barber that, he’s probably going to ask you (if he’s a good barber), “So do you want a taper or do you want to fade down to skin?” Remember, a taper is longer; a fade fades to skin.

Now that you know the distinction between a fade and taper, rather than confusedly putting the terms together, you can use them to convey your desires to your barber more clearly.

The post Men’s Hairstyles: What’s the Difference Between a Taper and a Fade? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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There could hardly be a more horrifying way to die: when young Sean O’Brien waded into the Nueces River on horseback, he disrupted a nest of water moccasins, and found himself surrounded by a swarm of big, brown, worm-like snakes.

By the time his companions were able to pull Sean from the water, his body was covered in numerous fang marks, and he soon expired along the banks of the river.

In this episode from the novel Lonesome Dove, a grave is shortly dug, a hasty burial service is held, and the men prepare to keep their cattle drive moving. But Sean’s fellow cowboys, especially his brother Allen, find it difficult to grapple with this sudden and unexpected death.

Weak with shock, Allen is the last to mount his horse, and as the men ride off, he keeps looking back at his brother’s grave. “It seems very quick just to ride off and leave the boy,” he says with dismay. “He was the babe of our family.”

“If we was in town we’d have a fine funeral,” the cowboy sage Augustus McCrae replies. “But we ain’t in town. There’s nothing you can do but kick your horse.”

Gus may seem cold, but he’s simply a realist.

Whether we’re faced with literal death or more everyday setbacks and losses, we ought to mourn/commemorate/figure out where we may have messed up.

But there’s a point where nothing else can be done; no amount of paralyzing grief, rear-view regret, or circular rumination is going to bring back the deceased, enable you to redo the blown job interview, give you another shot with your ex. You gotta saddle up and ride on, pardner.

Life can only be lived forwards.

Feet in the stirrups. Hands on the reins. Eyes towards the horizon.

The post Sunday Firesides: Get on Your Horse and Kick appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When you’re traveling, various maladies may beset you, and you won’t have your home’s well-stocked medicine cabinet at your disposal to remedy them. You can pack a full first aid kit, but if you’re traveling light, and are only concerned about issues that have a high likelihood of occurring, there are really only a few essential supplies you need to bring.

They make little travel-size packages of the below items, but it’s much more cost-effective to simply take a few of each item from the big bottles you have at home and throw them into a small ziplock bag or a container like an Altoids tin (one of the many handy ways they can be repurposed). Take note of what each pill looks like before you put them together; they all look different enough you shouldn’t have any trouble telling them apart later. Obviously, the longer your trip, the more replications of each item you’ll want to bring.

Band-aids. For small cuts. To kill two birds with one stone, get the kind that has antibiotic ointment built right into the bandage’s pad.
Blister bandages. When you’re on a trip, you’re often walking a lot more than you do back home. As a result, blisters can crop up on your feet. If one does arise, you’ll want to be able to pad it so you can keep on trekking.
Ibuprofen. The stresses of travel and changes in environment (especially if you’re going up in altitude), can trigger headaches. And an increase in physical activity/the doing of different kinds of activities that often happens on trips can create bodily soreness. So always have plenty of pain relievers with you. We like ibuprofen over acetaminophen (Advil over Tylenol) as the former also addresses the inflammation that may be causing your feeling of squigginess.
Sleeping pill. Research shows that you don’t sleep as well when you bed down in a new place. Neurologically, one hemisphere of the brain goes to sleep completely, while the other half actually sleeps more lightly and stays more active and responsive to noises. The phenomenon is known as the “first-night effect,” and it’s hypothesized to be an evolved survival tactic; because the brain isn’t sure of your bodily safety in a novel environment, it stays partly awake and vigilant in order to monitor for potential threats. Falling and staying asleep the first night or two on a trip can thus be a struggle, and a sleeping pill can help with that. The type of sleeping aid you take is up to your preference; we like something like Advil PM, as it both helps you sleep directly, and alleviates the aforementioned aches and pains that can arise on an activity-filled vacation, further contributing to a more restful sleep.
Allergy medicine. The new flora in a place to which you travel can unexpectedly set off your allergies, so have a medication to treat them at the ready. You’ll probably want the non-drowsy variety (though Benadryl can double for the sleep aid mentioned above), so you can stay feeling peppy. The kind that dissolves in your mouth without the need for water is handy for on-the-go intake.
Indigestion medicine. Exotic food, street food, simply dining out a lot . . . the way you eat while traveling can do a number on the digestive tract. So pack a medicine that can treat all the symptoms of indigestion from stomachache to nausea, like Pepto Bismol. The chewable tablet variety will be a lot more convenient than bringing a bottle of the liquid stuff.

Happy traveling.

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Advil PM Pain Reliever/Nighttime Sleep Aid, Ibuprofen and Diphenhydramine (1 Pack ,200 Coated Caplets)

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Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like a clickbait-y title.

But, it actually seemed like just the right one to use in this case, because we are indeed going to share one weird trick that can help you bust through a weight-loss plateau.

And, in a departure from those spammy ads/articles that appear alongside headlines screaming “You Won’t Believe What This Celebrity Looks Like Now!” this is actually sound advice that can really work.

Add Back the Pounds You’ve Lost to Keep Losing More Pounds Weight loss can be a tough journey. Typically, when you start a diet that produces a caloric deficit, shedding the pounds comes fairly easily. At first. But then your weight loss can begin to slow.

The stalling of your progress can be due to several factors. For one thing, the body fights to hold onto its weight, triggering physiological responses that increase your hunger and make it harder to stay in the caloric deficit that’s needed to keep your weight loss rolling.

But, even when you continue to eat the same amount of calories that initially resulted in weight loss, that weight loss can still slow or stall.

That’s because as you shed pounds, your metabolic rate went down. Part of the reason for that is simply that you now have less body weight to carry around. When you were heavier, pre-initial-weight-loss, your body moved less efficiently — all of your movements required more effort, and that greater effort burned more calories. Now that you’re a little lighter, your body is carrying less weight, it takes less effort to move, and you thus burn fewer calories from day to day.

Because your metabolism has gone down, you can keep eating the same amount of calories, but stop losing weight.

For example, let’s say your body burns 2,000 calories a day. You go on a diet where you start eating 1,800 calories a day. For several weeks, you consistently lose weight, because you’re in a caloric deficit. But then the weight loss stops. That’s because you’re still eating 1,800 calories a day, but your metabolism has decreased, and your body has started only burning 1,800 calories a day. Though 1,800 calories formerly resulted in a caloric deficit, it no longer does. The result is a weight-loss plateau.

To get back into a caloric deficit, you can either start eating fewer calories (e.g., dropping down to eating 1,700 calories a day) or you can start exercising more than you were. Or, you could do neither of those things, and try this “one weird trick” instead: put the weight you’ve lost back on. No, you’re not going to gain back the weight you’ve worked so hard to lose by getting fat again; rather, you’re going to employ a method Dr. John Berardi shared with us on the podcast:

I actually have a friend . . . and a strategy he’s been playing around with is putting a weight vest on people. They live most of their waking hours with a lightweight vest on that accounts for the weight that they’ve lost. Let’s say they start at 200 pounds, and they start exercising a bit more, and eating a bit less and they drop down to 190 pounds. Well then he would put a 10 pound weight vest on them, so they’re still carrying around 200 pounds.

So, as you lose weight from the inside of your body, you add it on the outside of your body in the form of a weighted vest that represents the amount of weight you’ve lost. You’re tricking your body that it still weighs 200 pounds, so that it burns the calories needed to move 200 pounds, even though you really weigh 190 pounds. Clever, right?

The benefit for people who try this, Berardi notes, is “that they don’t have to keep lowering their calorie intake, or increasing their exercise. They can continue to lose at a similar rate, without pushing the exercise harder, or eating less, by accounting for that body weight, which seems like such a simple thing, but it makes such a huge difference, and it frustrates a lot of weight-loss efforts.”

This method isn’t for everyone because, well, it requires you to wear a weighted vest all day. That may be okay if you work from home. Less so if you don’t, as weighted vests aren’t very inconspicuous. You have to be okay with walking into QuikTrip or your office looking like you’re kitted out for battle.

There are some weighted vests that you can wear underneath your clothes, but you still look like you’re wearing a weighted vest.

If wearing a weighted vest around for much of the day isn’t a practical option for you, you can at least try reverting back to your former, heavier weight during your dedicated workouts. That can mean wearing a weighted vest just while you exercise. Or, if you normally take a walk every day, start taking that walk while carrying a pack that holds the amount of weight you’ve lost. Coach Dan John calls this “reverse rucking,” as you’re reverting back to walking while carrying the amount of weight you used to carry through your body weight alone. John says reverse rucking can also be accomplished by using ankle weights, and/or by holding small dumbbells in your hands — i.e., the Heavyhands method.

However you go about it, the goal is to return to your formerly heavier body weight, in order to make physical movement more calorically “expensive,” get back into a caloric deficit, and start shedding pounds again.

That’s it. The one weird trick for busting through a weight-loss plateau. No sipping on cayenne-pepper-laced lemon juice required.

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RUNFast/Max 12lbs-140lbs Adjustable Weighted Vest

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Pizza. It’s ubiquitous. It’s a fixture at parties and office break rooms, and there’s a good chance you order it from your favorite place for dinner every single week.

But there’s one setting where pizza doesn’t show up very often, and that’s in your own oven, having been made in your own kitchen. But my guest today, who’s spent decades pursuing the perfect pizza, says you ought to be making your own pies more often and will teach you the secrets to getting restaurant-quality pizza at home. His name is Dan Richer, and he’s the owner and chef of Razza in New Jersey, as well as the author of The Joy of Pizza: Everything You Need to Know.

We begin our conversation with what makes pizza such an awesome, go-to, inexhaustibly delicious dish and how to overcome the obstacles that typically prevent people from creating pizzeria-level pizza at home. Dan then gives us his recommendations on sauce, cheese, and toppings in order to create the perfect pizza pie, including his take on that most burning of questions: does pineapple belong on a pizza?

Connect With Dan Richer * Joy of Pizza Website * Dan on Instagram * Website for Dan’s Razza restaurant

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Transcript Coming Soon! The post Podcast #784: The Secrets to Making the Perfect Pizza appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The Joy of Pizza: Everything You Need to Know

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Your co-worker gets the promotion that you applied for. You congratulate him while seething inside.

Your friend goes on a fantastic vacation and shares pics of it on Instagram. You usually “like” his stuff, but this time you don’t.

Your wife’s parents watch your sister-in-law’s children for the weekend. You’re ticked that they never do that for your kids.

A business competitor enjoys a string of successes. You start thinking about all the things you don’t like about him and why the way he does business is stupid.

You’ve likely experienced the above scenarios or something like them.

You see someone get something that you don’t have, and you feel angry and resentful.

There’s a word for that feeling: envy.

The Emotion No One Likes to Talk About Despite it being a common emotion, people don’t like to talk about envy.

People rarely admit that they are envious of someone else. They might say they admire someone for their success, but you never hear someone say, “I’m really upset and angry at that person because they have something that I don’t!” Because that would make them seem petty and small, and further lower their already diminished feeling of status.

Not only do regular people not like to talk about envy, but scholarly types don’t like to talk about it either.

For one thing, there is a real dearth of books written about envy by psychologists. Which is weird because it creates all kinds of emotional and interpersonal problems. I could only find two books on Amazon about the psychology of envy. One takes on envy from a Freudian/psychoanalytic perspective, and the other takes a more empirical/scientific approach to the subject. That latter book, while rigorous and insightful, was published in 1991. That’s thirty years ago. That’s a long time. It was also mostly about jealousy, which is related to envy but isn’t the same thing (more on that below).

Sociologists and philosophers have written about envy a little more, but even then, the extant books and treatises from that field of study are still quite old. Sociologist Helmut Schoeck published Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour back in the 1960s. Alexis de Tocqueville (a proto-sociologist/political scientist) wrote about envy in Democracy in America, but that was published nearly 200 years back.

Philosophers Nietzsche and Kierkegaard wrote a lot about envy and its role in human life, as did Kant and Bacon. Aristotle devoted a great deal to the emotion of envy in his book Rhetoric. In fact, the definition of envy that he laid out over 2000 years ago is the definition that philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists still use today (when they do talk about envy, at least). But all those guys have been long dead for centuries. There hasn’t been too much chatter about envy from philosophers since.

So people don’t like to talk about envy — their own or others.

While we don’t like to talk about envy, understanding it can help us navigate many social conflicts. Many of the ill feelings we experience towards others have a strain of envy underlying them. Kierkegaard said that “anyone who wishes to understand the nature of offense should make a study of human envy.” I know that as I’ve read more about envy, I’ve been made more aware of it in my own life and have taken steps to quell the green-eyed monster within.

What Is Envy? Since we don’t talk much about envy, our definition of it is varied and muddled. If you were to ask ten different people to define envy, you’d probably get ten vaguely similar and yet still distinct answers.

So let’s get Socratic here and clearly define envy.

As I said above, Aristotle laid out a pretty clear definition of envy in Rhetoric. It’s a definition that subsequent philosophers and psychologists have used and built off of as well.

According to Aristotle, “envy is pain at the good fortune of others.”

And for Aristotle, envy isn’t just pain at the good fortune of others; we also experience envy when we feel pleasure in the misfortune of others. The Germans have a word for that manifestation of envy: schadenfreude.

So envy is pain experienced at the good fortune of others or pleasure at the misfortune of others.

Whom Do We Envy? If you look at your own experience with envy, you’ll likely notice that you envy some people but not others. Why is that?

According to Aristotle, we typically experience envy towards those we consider our equals — those we situate in our own peer group. We usually don’t envy “those who lived a hundred centuries ago, or those not yet born, or those who dwell near the Pillars of Hercules, or those whom in our opinion or that of others, we take far below us or far above us.”

Instead, we become envious of those more like us — “those who follow the same ends as ourselves . . . [and] who are after the same things.”

When you think about your own life, you’ll find this to be true.

You generally don’t envy people who experience success in work unrelated to yours. If you’re an aspiring writer, and your police officer buddy gets promoted to detective, you’ll probably feel nothing but unenvious happiness for him. His field and career trajectory are completely different from yours; you’re pursuing different ends, as Aristotle would say.

You also probably wouldn’t feel envy at hearing the news that J.K. Rowling had hit the bestseller list again with a new series of books; she’s a fellow writer, sure, but is operating in a whole different league.

But . . . if a friend who’s been trying to publish his first novel inks a big book deal — ooh, watch out! — you’ll likely be hit with a flick of the green-eyed monster’s sharp tongue.

You don’t have to be pursuing the exact same specific ends for envy to arise; it can also occur in relation to the broader aims you and your seeming peers share.

For example, you probably don’t actively envy Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, even though they have a lot more than you do. They’re just too far above your socioeconomic status to care about. But if you’re, say, an attorney, and your entrepreneurial friend sells his business for five million dollars, you might feel a stab of envy; even though you’re in different lines of work, you both share the general end of getting rich, and he now has a level of wealth that you don’t. Or, let’s say a relative becomes famous on social media for sharing motivational messages; maybe you don’t want to be a lifestyle guru, per se, but you do feel the desire for fame, generally; you might then feel envious towards your relative.

According to Aristotle, the reason why we feel envy only towards our direct or quasi equals is that it forces us to think, “That could have been me!” You look at the guy who has the good thing and think, “I’m like that guy. If he has that good thing, I should have it too!” But you don’t have it, so it hurts.

The idea that we experience envy towards those we consider our relative equals is an important one. Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard argued that the amount of envy in society (and the conflict that comes with it) will increase the more egalitarian that society becomes. We’ll flesh this idea out more in a future article.

So we experience envy towards people we consider our peers.

Thus, our working definition of envy can be stated: envy is pain at the good fortune of others, particularly those we consider our equals who are pursuing the same ends as us.

Envy Is Not Jealousy

People often conflate envy and jealousy. They’re similar emotions, but for philosophers and psychologists, there’s a distinction.

Envy is pain at the good fortune of others. You feel bad because people have something you don’t.

Jealousy is feeling pain that someone might take away something you have.

The most common situation that arouses jealousy is romantic relationships. You experience jealousy when you think your friend is trying to steal your girlfriend. Many fights and murders can be traced to the ire of a jealous lover.

Why Is Envy a Vice? Thomas Aquinas took up Aristotle’s definition of envy and fleshed out what made it a vice in Summa Theologica. For Aquinas, envy is a vice because you feel pain towards goodness or take pleasure in misfortune.

What virtuous person would feel pain towards goodness or pleasure in misfortune? That’s the opposite of charity.

And based on Aquinas’s definition of evil (the privation of good), envy can be seen as taking joy in evil. Which is probably why John Milton made Satan an envious and resentful demon dude in his book Paradise Lost.

Not only does envy cause us to feel pain towards goodness, it often causes us to seek to reduce the amount of good in the world. When you experience not just envy, but what’s called malicious envy, you not only feel pain at the fortune of others, you want their fortune to be taken away from them. To reduce the pain we experience at witnessing the goodness of others, we’d like to see their goodness destroyed. We think, “If I can’t have what they have, they can’t have it either!”

Not only is envy a vice, it’s a strange one at that. For, unlike the case with other vices, you don’t derive any pleasure from it. With gluttony, you at least get the pleasure of stuffing your face with one slice of pizza too many. With lust, you at least get the pleasure of orgasm. With sloth, you at least get the satisfaction of just lying on the couch playing Fortnite.

With envy?

There’s not much pleasure. You mostly just feel bad.

Even when you experience schadenfreude (pleasure at the misfortune of others), it’s a bitter pleasure. You feel bad that you feel good at the misfortune of others. It doesn’t actually feel that great.

Towards a Greater Understanding of Envy I think the above is a good start in this exploration of envy. I’ve taken a deep dive into the topic this past year, found it thoroughly interesting, and have a lot I’d like to share about it. Consider this the beginning of an intermittent series on the subject. In the subsequent articles in this series, I’d like to flesh out the experience of envy even more.

What makes envy different from righteous indignation?

How is envy related to resentment?

How does envy influence group dynamics?

What can we do about envy?

I hope you’ll join me on this exploration of this little-talked-about and yet universally-experienced emotion.

The post An Intro to Envy appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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Democracy in America: Translated, Edited, and With an Introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop

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Note: This is a rebroadcast. It originally aired in September 2020.

From guiding the Allies to victory in World War II as supreme commander, to steering the ship of state for eight years as one of the country’s least partisan and most popular presidents, few leaders in history have had to make as varied and consequential decisions as Dwight D. Eisenhower.

My guest today possesses insights into how he made the many choices he was faced with in his military and political careers that are gleaned not only from studying Ike’s life, but from personally knowing the man beneath the mantle. Her name is Susan Eisenhower and she’s a writer, consultant, and policy strategist, one of Dwight’s four grandchildren, and the author of the new book How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower’s Biggest Decisions. Susan and I begin our conversation with her relationship with Ike as both historic leader and ordinary grandfather, and why she decided to write a book about his leadership style. We then dive into the principles of his leadership, beginning with his decision to greenlight the D-Day invasion, what it reveals about his iron-clad commitment to taking responsibility, and how that commitment allowed him to be such an effective delegator. From there Susan explains how a love of studying history born in Ike’s boyhood allowed him to take a big picture approach to strategy, how he used a desk drawer to deal with his lifelong struggle with anger, and how his belief in morale as an input rather than an output inspired him to always stay optimistic for the benefit of those he led. We then turn to how Eisenhower dealt with the discovery of concentration camps at the end of WWII and making peace with Germany after it. We then talk about his nonpartisan governing style as president which he called the “Middle Way” and which involved emphasizing cooperation, compromise, and unity, including members of both political parties in his cabinet, limiting his use of the “bully pulpit” to sway public opinion, and striving not to turn policy issues into personality confrontations. We then discuss how this style influenced how he dealt with Joseph McCarthy and enforced the Brown v. Board of Education decision. At the end of our conversation, Susan explains that while she doesn’t expect everyone to agree with the difficult decisions her grandfather made, she thinks there’s something to be learned from how he managed to make them, and to make them without becoming hard and cynical in the process.

Resources Related to the Podcast * The Eisenhower Decision Matrix * Never Criticize Without Offering an Alternative * AoM series on Eisenhower’s leadership * AoM Article: 43 Books About War Every Man Should Read * AoM Podcast #463: The Friendship, Rivalry, and Leadership of America’s 3 Greatest WWII Generals * AoM Article: Remembering D-Day 75 Years Later * Robert Taft * A Matter of Justice by David Nichols * Eisenhower Diaries * Letters to Mamie * My Three Years With Eisenhower

Connect With Susan Eisenhower * Susan’s Website * Susan on Twitter

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Read the Transcript If you appreciate the full text transcript, please consider donating to AoM. It will help cover the costs of transcription and allow other to enjoy it. Thank you!

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. From guiding the Allies to victory in World War II as Supreme Commander to steering the ship of state for eight years as one of the country’s least partisan and most popular presidents, few leaders in history have had to make as varied and consequential decisions as Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Susan and I begin our conversation with her relationship with Ike as both historic leader and ordinary grandfather, and why she decided to write a book about his leadership style. We then delve into the principles of his leadership, beginning with his decision to greenlight the D-Day invasion, what it reveals about his iron-clad commitment to take responsibility and how that commitment allowed him to be such an effective delegator.

From there Susan explains how a love of studying history born in Ike’s boyhood allowed him to take a big picture approach to strategy, how he used a desk drawer to deal with his lifelong struggle with anger and how his belief in morale as input rather than output inspired him to always stay optimistic for the benefit of those he led. We then turn to how Eisenhower dealt with the discovery of concentration camps at the end of World War II and making peace with Germany after it.

We then talk about his non-partisan governing style as President, which he called the middle way and which involved emphasizing cooperation, compromise and unity, including members of both political parties in his cabinet, limiting his use of the bully pulpit to sway public opinion and striving not to turn policy issues into personality confrontations.

We then discuss how this style influenced how he dealt with Joseph McCarthy and enforced the Brown v. Board of Education decision. At the end of our conversation, Susan explains that while she doesn’t expect everyone to agree with the difficult decisions her grandfather made, she thinks there’s something to be learned from how he managed to make them and to make them without becoming hard and cynical in the process. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/howikeled.

Alright, Susan Eisenhower, welcome to the show.

Susan Eisenhower: Well, thank you. It’s just great to be with you.

Brett McKay: So you’ve got a new book out, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower’s Biggest Decisions. And you also happen to be one of Dwight Eisenhower’s granddaughters. I’m curious, to start off, this is kind of the context, what was it like being Eisenhower’s granddaughter? And how old were you when he was General and then President of the United States?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, he was actually inaugurated in 1953 and so I was a toddler at the time. I was born on the last day in 1951, so I wasn’t aware of too much for a while, and my father was in the army as well. And he, of course, went to every army post he could go to probably in many of those years. But back in around 1957 we moved back to Washington, DC for some of my father’s assignments. And that’s when I really got to know my grandparents really well.

Brett McKay: And were there moments when you were like… Was he just grandpa for you? Or did you have moments as even as a kid where you realized that Eisenhower was more than just grandpa?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, it was a little hard to avoid the fact that he was more than grandpa because my siblings and I had Secret Service protection. So that didn’t seem very normal. And to have big guys with big guns following you onto the playground isn’t exactly normal. But I must say in retrospect, I look back and I think it was really remarkable how normal a family life we had. And I think that’s because… There are two simple reasons for it. My father made sure that we didn’t “start wearing the boss’s stars.” In other words, we were to understand that our grandfather was different and that this conferred nothing on us, except a responsibility to be good kids. And then I think the other thing was we were taught to compartmentalize. So I have very strong feelings about him as a grandfather, but I’ve spent my professional career as a policy analyst, and his legacy is everywhere, so I had to learn to be able to think of him separately from being a grandfather. This book is the first time I’ve put it together in a way, and that was a pretty wild experience.

Brett McKay: Well, what did you think? Why write this book now? What was it that got you thinking, I need to write… ‘Cause you’ve written a biography of your grandmother, Eisenhower’s wife. What made you decide to go in and write a biography of Eisenhower, particularly how he led?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, first of all, we have the anniversary of the end of World War II in this year. And then in September, the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC is going to be unveiled, dedicated. And then I also thought that we’re in a very highly contentious political time. And I thought it was important for rising generations and for people who don’t know Dwight Eisenhower very well to learn something about him in an easy way. I don’t think you have to know a huge amount about the period to be able to understand that there were indeed principles behind the way Eisenhower looked at different situations. And I thought that might be useful right now in this particular environment, political environment.

Brett McKay: So the way you organize this book, it’s a biography. But it’s a biography of Eisenhower’s leadership style, and how he developed it and how it manifested itself in different parts of his career. And you start off the book with this famous note that Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander wrote. World War II. On the eve of D-Day. And it was only to be released if his decision to green light the invasion failed. And it said in part, “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.” Why do you start the book off with this note and what do you think it tells us about Eisenhower’s leadership style?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, I think the note is an important note. First of all, it wasn’t known for a very long time. It came out probably after Ike’s death. It’s not that it wasn’t known, it was already published in Harry Butcher’s book called My Three Years With Eisenhower, but somebody found it, when reading that book, probably 20 years ago, and started talking about it a lot, and I think it’s because it strikes a chord with us today. We have so many leaders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue who stand up and blame somebody else for mistakes that have occurred, but this was not Eisenhower’s way. And I dare say that the military is well-schooled to understand that they have to take responsibility.

There’s something at West Point called the No Excuses. He took responsibility even for the weather forecast, in that it was his decision to go at that time. In any case, you see that same willingness to take responsibility throughout his presidency, famously after the U-2… This is the aerial reconnaissance airplane was shot down over the Soviet Union in May of 1960. He took full responsibility for the fact that he’d ordered that over-flight, and many of his advisors were asking him to continue to say that… You know, come up with something that would be what we call today plausible deniability, but Eisenhower wanted to make sure the Soviet Union knew that he was in charge, and that there was no ambiguity about who made orders there within the administration.

And then finally the Suez Crisis, which actually was in 1956. That whole crisis emerged just as voters were going to the polling booths, and he said to my father that if the Suez Crisis goes south, he guesses he’ll lose the election, but there we are. So there was a kind of fatalism marked with a strong belief that there were no excuses. So let me just… Brett, let me just leave you with something that I find rather wonderful. He once said, “Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”

Brett McKay: That’s hard to do. A lot of… I mean. But… And how did… But how did he deal with the burdens of that? How did he… That’s… People don’t like doing it, because it feels terrible to take responsibility for failure, particularly failures where you weren’t directly involved. Like he was a big delegator. So he only focused on high-level strategy, and he would delegate the tactical things to the people who were working with him, beneath him. So how did he deal with taking responsibility for stuff that he might not have had any direct influence on?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, you can’t mobilize those you delegate to, if they don’t feel like the leader has their back, and that’s what I think that that sentence about leadership is, that if you don’t give them the credit and take the responsibility, then you don’t have a system that will accommodate delegation. Now, the reason delegation is important is somebody’s got to be the strategic leader, and part of the reason my book is so oriented towards strategic leadership is we simply don’t have it anymore. We’re like political day traders, and we can’t figure out what we’re really trying to accomplish, what our timeline is, and what… And how we’re going to get from where we are today to address those longer-term goals. So I think that’s just inevitable if you’re going to delegate, is you have to give people the knowledge that they will be able to do their jobs.

Brett McKay: And that idea that people who… That Eisenhower led, that they felt that had… That he had their back. You talk about these instances where soldiers would say, “Basically, Ike, I would do anything for you.” There’s a time when later in his life, when he was having problems with his heart, you had… There was people writing a letter saying, “I’ll give you my still-alive heart as a heart transplant, so you can live.”

Susan Eisenhower: Isn’t that amazing? I remember when it happened. I was… I would say I was tangentially part of that conversation. The doctor came out and said that they had received all these offers. And I compare this against my brother’s memory, and yes, that is, indeed, absolutely correct. And it’s very moving, but they… The bond that Ike had with his soldiers was one of trust, and if he wasn’t willing to take the responsibility even for their failure, then how could they trust him?

Brett McKay: And what you… You mentioned that Eisenhower, he thought strategically; he was thinking big picture; he was playing the 10,000-foot level game, while everyone else was playing… Just thinking about the next quarter, the next year. Where did he develop that mindset, do you think?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, it’s interesting. He displayed his interest in bigger-picture studies when he was a kid. He grew up on a farm in Abilene, Kansas, and his parents were surviving just financially. He always said that we were poor, but didn’t know it. In any case, he would do… I wouldn’t call it daydreaming, but he was obsessed about history, and the family was very well educated. As a matter of fact, Ike’s mother, my great-grandmother, actually went to college, and they could read Ancient Greek and Latin, which is pretty amazing for those days, this farm family. But Ike was always reading history books, and he was fascinated by what these great historical figures were trying to accomplish, and why did they make the decisions they did, and in making those decisions, how much information did they have when they made those decisions. And I think it’s fascinating that an interest in that would extend all the way… You know, it’s a lifetime, it’s a lifetime undertaking.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s something people don’t know about Eisenhower, is that how educated he was and how deeply and well-read he was. There was moments where you talk about where he would… When he was president of Columbia, he just surprised people with just lectures about military history going all the way back to Alexander the Great. And professors were just baffled, ’cause they just thought of Eisenhower was just this army guy who smiled and waved and that was it.

Susan Eisenhower: Well, you know what’s interesting about this, and this is the reason I felt it was pretty important to include the leadership traits he developed during the war and to take that into the Presidency. Because the biographers tend to fall into two categories, the presidential biographers of Eisenhower and the war-time biographers of Eisenhower. And then there are some books that try to put it all together, but again, if it’s done chronologically, they end up being very, very big books. But I do think that there’s a consistency about the way he thinks and about the way he approaches issues. So I think the Eisenhower who is general and the Eisenhower who is president are one and the same person, which is why as a kid I could never understand why people said he was a do-nothing president, and he didn’t know, that he was not on top of things, when this was the guy who ended Nazism for the Western alliance. I just could never figure that out even as a kid.

Brett McKay: Right. Well, so yeah, so going back to the popular image we have of Eisenhower as sort of this, especially as president, this sunny, friendly, grandfatherly character who played golf, and we’ll talk about what he was actually doing as President when people thought that’s all he was doing. But you mentioned that, and you talk about it, throughout the book, he grappled with inner struggles, particularly anger. Ever since that he was a boy, what was his anger like, was it like… Did he just have a short temper, did he just dwell on things, get resentful, what was that like?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, it’s interesting, as a kid, he really did have a temper and he admitted that he would have occasional meltdowns and then be disciplined by his father and counseled by his mother. I think part of it was, if you ever read the full set of his diaries and also his letters to Mamie Eisenhower, his wife, my grandmother, you will see there a very, very passionate nature. And as a kid, he felt the sense of injustice very strongly, but he had a very passionate nature, and so he had to learn how to control what I’d call his inner landscape, his inner resources.

And he had… His mother really made the case after one particularly frightening experience where he had as we call it a meltdown because his two older brothers were allowed to go out and trick or treat and he wasn’t. And she really talked to him very quietly about what this was doing to him, and it wasn’t hurting anybody else, it was hurting him, and he always remembered that. And so he started developing tricks, and some of the tricks were actually rather sophisticated, and I like them. I use them myself sometimes. He would, for instance, keep a diary. Now, that’s very important, he was a diarist his whole life, so he blew off steam on the written page.

In addition to being a diarist, he would write whatever it was that was bothering him on a piece of paper, then he’d crumple up the piece of paper and he’d throw it away. So this was actually a rather artful way of getting the anger inside out, and on a piece of paper, then it suddenly becomes de-personalized and I think it’s a very smart idea. I do have to laugh about it, though, ’cause he did this during the White House years, and then he’d throw these crumpled up pieces of paper into a lower drawer in his desk, and it was the responsibility of his secretary to go in and clean out the crumpled up pieces of paper. I swear she had to have a security clearance in order to be able to do that ’cause she more than anybody knew who he was upset with that day.

And then the other idea he had is that he would put the problem on a chair and get up and walk around it. But as you can see, there is a theme here, which is getting this anger out of you, out of you inside and de-personalizing it. So I think a lot of people would benefit from knowing that there was a very powerful person who found these tools useful.

Brett McKay: Besides anger, did he ever get discouraged or get depressed? There’s a lot of things during his career that he could get discouraged or depressed about, during the war and later on in his presidency?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, I don’t think he’d be a human being if he hadn’t been depressed and concerned at times, but he thought that morale was an input, not an output. In other words, people have to feel good about things and have a sense of morale in going into any challenge, and not just the result of being victorious. And I think this is really true, pessimism at the top is very infectious. So who wants to go into battle with somebody who doesn’t have confidence in the mission? So he made it, as he said in his diary, as a lifelong commitment to try and stay optimistic in front of everybody else all the time.

So during this dire moment, during the Battle of the Bulge, during World War II, when the Germans have finally managed, launched what looked like it was a successful offensive, Eisenhower comes into the room and says, to his commanders, “There will be no long faces in this room.” He says, “Do you realize what the Germans have just done? They’ve given us an opening. For the first time, they’re showing us their faces. So let’s go.” That sort of twist on the thing that worried everybody most, it turns out to be the thing that inspires confidence, if the commander has it. It took a lot of personal discipline, Brett, I really have to say that I’m full of admiration for that, because I struggle as a professional myself all the time and try very hard to show this optimism, but it isn’t always so easy.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and something he noted as well, besides being optimistic, Eisenhower was very adamant about leaders, if they have personal problems, personal issues, they gotta take care of that privately. And that’s kind of counter to what you see today, where it’s if you have a problem, just show it, emote it, express it and see… You put it out there on social media. That wouldn’t be what Eisenhower would have done.

Susan Eisenhower: Absolutely not, it’s called too much information. And I think what it’s done is somebody’s making it everybody else’s problem too. And that would be counter to personal responsibility. You’ve got to, as I say, you’ve got to keep your own landscape in good order. You did ask me a minute ago, what did his temper look like when it came across him. I always thought as a kid, it was like a thunderstorm. And I didn’t see it that much, I have to say, but it was like a thunderstorm because he would get angry, his associates told me this, and then it would pass. And he didn’t hold grudges, so nobody really worried about it; they observed it occasionally but they didn’t worry about it because if they had made a mistake, or if they had let him down in some way that was more personal, he just didn’t hold grudges. And I think some of that is self-discipline too, but some of it is back to the state of your insides; is it toxic in there? Are you allowing all this negative energy to build up, or are you finding another way to deal with it so that you can move on?

Brett McKay: And one thing that you stress throughout the book, one of… An important part of Eisenhower’s leadership style, yes, he was a big picture strategist and he was able to see and play the long game. But something else that gets overlooked about Eisenhower was that he was… He had really good people skills. I think one of his strengths was he knew how to read people and how… And he understood what people needed, and he was very attuned to people’s needs and wants.

Susan Eisenhower: Well, I think that is, and I think he got that trait from his mother, who was an extremely empathetic person. She was very religious. As a matter of fact, few people realize that he grew up in a pacifist household. She had been born and raised just after the Civil War in Virginia and saw the horrors of that war and made a determination that she was never going to support war of any kind. So she was very empathetic, and I would say that the wonderful thing that he had from his childhood is that he had a mother who was empathetic and focused on cooperation and optimism, and he had a father who took care of the discipline end of things. And so for many reasons, not the least of which, he had this team of his parents that brought different sides to his personality, and all of his brothers were extremely successful too, but I think the empathy was one of Eisenhower’s biggest traits. It’s the one I admire, because I think when you’re making decisions at this level, it would be so easy to become hard and cynical, but he never allowed himself that at all, at all; I never saw any evidence of it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and during the war, he’s often asking when they’re making decisions, like, “What would this look like to the other guy? How would the other guy take this?” And it got him into trouble, not trouble, but it frustrated some of his American colleagues, because he was trying to reach out to British allies and work with them and cooperate with them, and when there was people on the American side who were just like, “No, we want to do our thing, forget about the British,” but Eisenhower made it… He was very adamant that, “We have to work with these guys too and make sure that they’re getting what they need as well, with any operation that we do.”

Susan Eisenhower: Well, he really believed in alliances, and he was the first Supreme Allied Commander in warfare during World War II… Or, sorry, during the First World War, everybody managed their own troops, but there was nobody that integrated all of the forces. And so this was a very, very new concept also, to integrate the British with the Americans, and to have French forces under his command, it just had never been done before. And he would not have been able to keep that alliance together if he hadn’t been able to stand back and look at this joint effort from other people’s point of view. There was a lot of national pride involved, there was a very big difference in how each of these nations looked at strategy, the concepts behind strategy.

And he also had to deal with A-type personalities who had very strong views about the righteousness of their own positions. So this looking at it from the other guy’s point of view was a self-educating way to say, “You know what? It might be more productive to use this tool in my toolbox rather than another.” And what I learned from him in this is that not every fight is worth it, to concentrate on the fights that are pivotal at his level, and to make sure that everybody feels like they’re heard.

Brett McKay: So another issue, or big decision Eisenhower faced as Supreme Allied Commander was, towards the end of the war when they started discovering the concentration camps. What was his response? How did he implement sort of his higher-level strategy thinking on what to do with this issue?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, one of the major issues for the impending victorious Allied Forces was how Germany was going to be treated after the war, and the shocking discovery of the internment camps, the death camps, really sent a shiver throughout Allied Forces. Eisenhower liberated Ohrdruf, which was a sub-camp of Buchenwald, and was just overcome, actually. I think he kept his counsel… It was… The scene was so bad that George Patton was unable to go through parts of the camp for fear of getting sick, and the smell apparently was just absolutely overwhelming.

So Eisenhower looked at all this, and I think this is one of the remarkable things about this story, he sort of instantly understood that unless this Holocaust was chronicled that 50 years from now people would say it never happened. That night he gets back to Patton’s headquarters and he writes to Marshall immediately and says, “I want you to bring all of the reporters you can send from the United States, members of Congress,” and then everybody who was close to any of those camps was ordered to go through them and to take photographs and take eyewitness assessments of what was going on there. My own father, as a matter of fact, went to Buchenwald. He was an amateur photographer, and made a whole photo album of these atrocities for precisely the same reason. I was raised on those photographs, and even my own grandchildren have seen them; a terrible, terrible time.

Brett McKay: And what was interesting, too, is Eisenhower made sure that the German people in the villages that were nearby these camps, he made them come and look at it and see what was going on underneath their noses.

Susan Eisenhower: Well, he more than had them come look at it, he made them give the victims of the Holocaust a dignified burial. And I think it was deeply, deeply shattering for many people who’d turned a blind eye to what was going on. Ike had absolutely no patience for the military who said they didn’t know this was going on, because in his view it was willful denial. And one of the big jobs during this particular period, in the last weeks of the war, was to make sure that as we liberated areas that we were never seen to be adopting anything like the same tactics that the Germans did. What I mean there is that we did not look like we had come as a conquerer and we were also holding these people in detention. So that became a very challenging thing to make sure that the victims of the Holocaust understood that friends had arrived, and that they would be treated with a dignity, henceforth, and their needs would be met to the extent that it was humanly possible at this stage of the proceedings.

Brett McKay: And along with this, this was a thing that he had to balance as well, is on the one hand, he wanted to hold accountable the German people for what happened in their country. But at the same time, Eisenhower had this thing, he wanted to move on. He thought… He was very future-oriented. So how did he do that? How did he hold people accountable, at the same time not holding this grudge on them permanently forever, where they could never move on and go on to better things?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, there was sort of a multi-faceted way of looking at this. War criminals had to be held accountable. Those who said that they didn’t know but had every prospect of knowing, given where they were located, they too were dealt with in a certain way. The German population itself not only was forced to give a dignified burial to those who had died, but in many cases, their housing was requisitioned for victims of the Holocaust to live there for a time. And then finally, I guess the United States Army put together a video of these atrocities and made many, many Germans see this film. I mean, they had to understand what they did or what was done in their names in order to begin that period of renewal.

Then after that, of course, it was probably higher policy as well to assure that former Nazis were not running the new government in Germany at any level. And then of course, the big work of establishing NATO and eventually bringing West Germany into NATO in 1955 is another threshold moment. I would just say here, Brett, which is really amazing and symbolic, but on exactly the 10th anniversary of the Germans’ unconditional surrender, the Eisenhower administration, Dwight Eisenhower himself, brought Germany, West Germany into NATO. And as one German described it to me, that we held them in our iron embrace until in fact that country became a prosperous democracy and eventually, of course, in 1989, ’90, you could say that World War II was finally over for Germany.

Brett McKay: So after the war, Eisenhower, he was President of Columbia University and all during this time he was… There’s lots of people pushing for him to run for President. And he kept on telling them, “No, I don’t want that job. Leave me alone. Quit asking me.” What finally pushed him over the edge and caused him to throw his hat into the ring and run for president?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, I think it’s pretty clear, Eisenhower was very worried about the fact that the country was still on war footing. By this time we’re in the middle of a war in Korea, and he did not believe in small wars. He didn’t believe that it was in our national security interest to bleed ourselves dry in terms of human capital and also financial expense. And he went to Korea right after he became the President Elect, to see what the situation was there and eventually brought about the Armistice in that summer.

But that Korean war played a role in his decision to run for president, just as the deteriorating financial situation. A lot of labor unrest after the war. But I think that probably the most important thing was, is it looked like there was a prospect that the Republicans might win the 1952 election, in that Harry Truman’s popularity ratings were very low. And if that were to happen, the isolationist wing of the Republican Party would have come to power. Ike believed that we could never go back to the way it was between the First war and the Second war, and so I think if Robert Taft, who was the key Senator, “Mr. Republican,” who was destined to get that nomination, if Robert Taft had agreed to support NATO and America’s internationalist role in the world, Ike probably would not have run.

He certainly had other plans for himself after the war, but Robert Taft refused to support NATO. He had no liking for the United Nations at all. He was against a lot of foreign aid and other things that Eisenhower thought were crucial. So in fact, Eisenhower decides that he’s going to run, and it was a dramatic thing. It’s one of those turning points, certainly for the future of the Republican Party, and as it turned out for the United States of America.

Brett McKay: And that was a big decision, because to run for president, he had to give up his commission as general.

Susan Eisenhower: Yes, he did. He had to give up his commission, for sure. And his long-time valet from World War II, who was still with him, reacted to the General’s news that he had given up his commission, and since he might or might not win the presidency, his valet was free to find another job. And the valet, a wonderful man named John Moaney, said to his boss, he said, “You know, we’ve been together for a long time, and if you don’t win the election, I think the two of us can probably find a job somewhere else.”

Sgt Moaney, a wonderful, wonderful man, was the only African-American… Or the first African-American to be a pallbearer at a president’s funeral. And he and his family are… He’s long gone, but his family are still close to mine.

Brett McKay: So Eisenhower gets elected President, and he ran on the Republican ticket… Won on the Republican… With the Republican Party, but it didn’t seem like he was much of a partisan. How would you describe his governing style as President of the United States?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, Brett, I think it’s… You could argue that Eisenhower was the most non-partisan president since George Washington or one of the other military leaders, perhaps. He’s certainly more non-partisan than Ulysses S Grant. But the… I think the key here is that he had his difficulties with the Republican Party in the first term, and in the second term, he had some difficulty with the Democrats. So in a way, you could argue that he crafted his middle way pretty effectively, because both sides… Or I should say the extreme wings of both parties felt quite skeptical about his governance.

He had an enormous popularity rating, though, during his two terms, averaging mid-to-high 60s for his two terms in office. Part of it was, I think, how he organized the White House, and he organized it in some ways very much like he organized the war effort. He surrounded himself by diverse viewpoints. And he wanted pushback. He thought that was the way he could understand the complexity and the dimensions of any particular issue. He wanted… He would have a cabinet meeting once a week, and all cabinet members had to come to those meetings fully briefed on whatever the topic was, even if it was outside of their own agency, and he would referee the debates and make sure that he understood all the viewpoints.

He had not only conservative Republicans in his cabinet, but also all the way through the spectrum to Democrats, a couple of Democrats, and after he heard this vigorous debate, then he would go into his office and make a decision. After that there would be a special… A unit at the White House that was there to implement the decisions and to make sure everybody followed the decisions that the President had made.

I think… He also held a press conference once a week, because he thought it was important to retain his visibility with the public and for them to understand what was going on at the White House and why he was handling things a certain way. I think it’s just important to add here, finally, is that you can have all the greatest strategy in the world, but if you don’t have an organization, not only to pursue rigorously the facts, wherever they might lead, but also to implement the President’s decisions and to make sure that a diverse set of viewpoints are considered, it won’t… You can’t exercise a strategy without that kind of infrastructure. And unfortunately, that whole system was dismantled after his administration.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This is sort of… You see in a continuation of his leadership style that he developed as a general, he had… He was only concerning himself with the high-level strategic thinking, and then he made sure that there was an organization in place beneath that to take care and make sure everything else… That the strategy gets put into action.

Susan Eisenhower: That’s right. And of course, delegation plays a huge role in that. He was almost a genius at figuring out how much leeway people could be given. In other words, which individuals struggled a little bit more to think about how to tackle an issue and the rest of it, and those who he knew were brilliant and could carry on with the Administration’s viewpoint in mind. So… And I think another key, of course, to delegation is to protect… To have the back of the people you’ve delegated to.

Brett McKay: Yeah. We talked about that earlier. He did that in the military. He took responsibility for the failures and he let…

Susan Eisenhower: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Right.

Susan Eisenhower: Quite rightly, too. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, in… Is there… Another interesting thing about the office of the President of the United States, I don’t think a lot of people understand or realize is that the President of the United States has two roles. First, he’s a politician. He’s there to implement policy or to execute policy, but on the other hand, he’s also a figurehead for the entire country. In other countries, like say in England, the Queen is the figurehead, and then you have the Prime Ministers doing the dirty politics. But in the President, those things are in one and there can be… Sometimes there’s contradictory… They contradict each other. Eisenhower somehow was able to resolve those conflicting roles of the Presidency. How do you think he did that?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, first of all… Actually, I would say there are probably three different roles. One would be head of state. One would be head of the executive branch, and the other would be head of your political party. And it’s been very hard for some presidents to reconcile these contradictory roles. Eisenhower believed that unity of purpose, or to unite the country, behind a set of policies, is what he called the middle way, and to do that, he had to serve as the figure that could bring everybody together. He was not, though, disconnected from his role as chief executive or as head of his party. He didn’t display that as much as other presidents had, because he thought that that would be at cross purposes with the larger goal of uniting the country. As… Today we see presidents who are largely [0:38:22] ____ or those that combine that with being a chief executive. But this idea of being the uniter, at least in the public perception, is not something that we’ve seen too much of since his era.

Brett McKay: So he was still doing politics, but he did it in the background?

Susan Eisenhower: Yeah. He did it where that… It was out of sight. And actually, Brett, I would say that’s probably one of the reasons why his leadership style has been misunderstood for so long, because we’re so used to valuing the bully pulpit. But Eisenhower really believed that the bully pulpit could be useful at some times, but it could be counter-productive in meeting goals if it was used at the wrong time. So he developed an idea about not singling out personalities, not turning issues into personality confrontations, because this way, it’d be very very hard, not only to unite the country but, secondly, of course, to get that person ever to cooperate with you or his allies.

Today, we see that we’ve become so tribalized that this exchange of insults only hardens the bases of these political parties, and that’s something that Ike wanted to avoid. In any case, this was his strategy of, maybe, I’m not going to say it was unique to him, but it certainly was out of sight for many people. And so, we still see today many people who analyze his presidency and think that he wasn’t involved in issues that he was deeply involved in, just in a behind-the-scenes way.

Brett McKay: Well, this being, this idea that he had about just dealing with people and governing, of this idea of never dealing with personalities. He had to deal with this in his first term because in his own party, there was a guy, Joseph McCarthy, who was stirring up trouble, accusing people of communism. And Eisenhower had to deal with it ’cause it was causing problems within his own party and preventing him to get stuff done. But as you said, he didn’t go after McCarthy directly. He did this sort of behind the scenes thing to manage him.

Susan Eisenhower: Well, there are two reasons for that strategically. First of all, the President of the United States cannot censure a member of the United States Senate or the House of Representatives. We have three co-equal branches of government. So it would not be analogous to comparisons that are made with any of our leaders today who one side or the other thinks is using demagogic arguments, because as a co-equal branch of government, which is the Senate, only the Senate could censure Joseph McCarthy. And actually, the Senate supported Joseph McCarthy. And this was the President’s own political party, so he had to use surgery rather than, you might say, bombardment of this particular problem because his own party needed to survive this really toxic confrontation that McCarthy had begun.

Now, the other thing about McCarthy is that he was a junior senator. He wasn’t in the leadership at all. And so Eisenhower decided as a second way of looking at this is that, he would not give McCarthy the thing that McCarthy wanted most. Joseph McCarthy wanted to be elevated to a level where he could be in direct dialogue with the President of the United States, because he had presidential ambitions of his own. And Ike said, “I’m going to deprive this guy of the one thing he wants most,” which is to engage the office of the presidency in an unworthy debate about these many fallacious accusations that McCarthy made. And so today, there is some resonance to that, but still, Eisenhower’s own handling of this is still not understood, because the third pillar of this strategy was to work behind the scenes with members of the Republican Party. To make them understand that this, the activities of Senator McCarthy, were toxic, unjustified and very possibly ultimately damaging for the party itself.

And it turned out to be the case. The Army-McCarthy hearings at the end of this drama revealed McCarthy for who he was, and the Senate finally censured the senator. But this idea that the President of the United States could have done anything to stop McCarthy is just wrong. It was up to the Senate colleagues. And he worked, Eisenhower worked very adroitly behind the scenes to help them understand that they had to take measures.

Brett McKay: And I imagine this took a lot of… All throughout his presidency, he was very principled in this middle way and his style of governing. And I’m sure he was getting pressured all the time saying, “You need to confront McCarthy directly. You need to hit the bully pulpit and say this.” But he had to resist that pressure all throughout his presidency.

Susan Eisenhower: He was under enormous pressure. He was under pressure from people in his administration, he was under pressure from family members, he was under pressure from everybody. But he truly believed, he understood he did not have the power or the authority to censure Senator McCarthy. What he had to do is create the condition so that Senator McCarthy’s own colleagues would do it. And it took longer than I know he liked, but that’s just the reality of our constitutional government. In the meantime, he managed to preserve the integrity of the presidency itself by not “getting down into the gutter with that guy,” and allowing McCarthy to set the rhetorical agenda.

Ike used the bully pulpit all right, he just never mentioned Senator McCarthy. He was out giving speeches about… He’d say, “You can’t fight communism by destroying America.” Or, “Only Americans can hurt America.” He really believed that we had a choice about whether or not we were going to allow this kind of unwarranted accusations to occur. In the meantime, of course, he also had an internal security system, as Truman had, to actually make proper investigations. But certainly the McCarthy effort was over the top and out of bounds.

Brett McKay: So another big issue he faced as president was the Brown v. Board of Education decision in the Supreme Court. And as the head of the Executive Branch, his job is to enforce decisions made by the Supreme Court. But this was an issue that was fraught with a lot of… It was just a really highly contentious issue. How did Eisenhower handle enforcing the Brown v. Board of Education decision?

Susan Eisenhower: I think if there’s one thing about some of the scholarship, not all of it, that’s out there today that distresses me, it is simply some people interpreting what Eisenhower meant by some very forceful words. I don’t know why there’s any question about it, but repeatedly, from the campaign through the first State of the Union Address, and on and on, Eisenhower said that his strategy was to desegregate everything that the federal government controlled, which he pretty much accomplished by the end of his eight years.

Let’s remember that Brown v. Board of Education was a measure that came before the Supreme Court that called for the desegregation of schools. And but by this time, Dwight Eisenhower, because he controlled the District of Columbia, had already desegregated Washington DC schools, and actually the City, the District of Columbia itself. So this idea that he would do what he could control, was what a good strategist would say, “This is what I can accomplish in eight years. A change in the hearts and minds of the public in general is going to be a very, very tough road to hoe. And it’s going to take time.”

Now, with respect to Brown v. Board of Education, it was his Supreme Court appointee as chairman, that would be Earl Warren, who was the one who produced that result in the Supreme Court, and Eisenhower had absolutely no problem enforcing a set of… In enforcing a Supreme Court decision that he agreed with. I’d like to single out David Nichols’ wonderful book called A Matter of Justice, which was really a turning point in the understanding of Eisenhower’s policy on civil rights. Let’s not also forget that he was the first President since reconstruction to achieve passing a Civil Rights Bill in 1957.

Brett McKay: And another thing that was really controversial that he did is he sent in the 101st Airborne. It was in Arkansas, right, to enforce desegregation.

Susan Eisenhower: Yes. Eisenhower believed in the idea of the appearance of overwhelming force. That particular decision to send the 101st Airborne came after Governor Faubus refused to enforce Brown v. Board of Education. The President gave Faubus a chance to do the right thing after a meeting, and when Faubus didn’t do the right thing and stepped back from assurances he made the President at that meeting, the 101st Airborne was called into action. What they did was to help escort and protect nine African-American students as they made their way to Central High School for the beginning of the school year.

Of course, unfortunately, and this is where the federal government could only do so much, whether or not the schools remained public schools was really up to each state of the union. So unfortunately the following year, the state took it upon themselves to cancel classes. And we’re still having this struggle, as we know. We do have everything desegregated, but we’re still having this terrible struggle. But it is worth nothing that Eisenhower used federal forces to protect the African-American youngsters who were being harassed and threatened by a white mob.

Brett McKay: But again, he got criticized ’cause people felt that was… He was just overstepping his bounds, it was tyranny. But at the same time, he was also getting criticized, he got criticized throughout his presidency that he didn’t do enough for Civil Rights as well. And again, it’s sort of like a theme that you see throughout… Even as a general, his career, he was really committed to this principled middle way. And he understood that it wasn’t going to make everyone happy.

Susan Eisenhower: Well, here’s the thing about the middle way. In his mind, the middle way was the middle ground where people could come together from both sides and compose their differences and find compromises that would lead to progress. As it is now, we’re in a winner and loser situation, where we either get everything we want, or we don’t cooperate. And of course, that would have been an anathema to him, that progress is key, and that middle way was the area in the middle that could bring people into that place where a progress could be realized.

And I think also that it is worth noting that the idea behind a middle way is what I would call devising sustainable strategies. Everybody can have a strategy, but if it isn’t sustainable because it’s actually built on something that isn’t universally agreed, or at least generally agreed, then it’s not sustainable. And then you get thrown back, back on it next time around. Actually, if you look at the things that he undertook in his presidential career, it’s remarkable how many of the frameworks he put into place are still with us today.

Brett McKay: So we talked earlier, part of his leadership strategy or his understanding of leadership was that a leader… He has to take care of personal issues himself, because the morale of the people you’re leading is often dependent upon what the leader looks like. If they’re optimistic, people are going to be optimistic. And that can be lonely, because you might have… You might want to grouse, you might have just doubts. You might get depressed. So, who was Eisenhower’s inner circle that he would go to so he could get some support, or sort of vent, ’cause if he couldn’t do that with his subordinates, ’cause he was really adamant about keeping that sort of distance between leader and subordinate.

Susan Eisenhower: Well, let me take the leader and subordinate thing here, first. You know, I understand it. He wanted to be in a position to be unencumbered in his relationship with his colleagues and subordinates at work, be unencumbered from the social aspect because of potential for it skewing your thinking. So he wanted to come in and have a highly professionalized environment that was not colored by a social relationship, let’s put it that way. And so he obviously depended on having friends elsewhere. There were a number of rules in the Eisenhower orbit, and that was that there are no favors to be asked.

He told… I discovered this in the scholarship and in books written by his colleagues, many, many comments about if anybody calls you and says that they’re a friend of mine, ignore it. Give them no help because we don’t do that, right. So, you know, that, of course, to some degree, reflected the fact that of his friends, he wanted them to be friends and not to make the situation more complex. But even ultimately, when somebody has that much power, it’s a very distorting thing for a lot of relationships.

In the book, I had some fun thinking of the many relationships that get distorted by this kind of power, including one’s relationship with one’s doctor. And at the end of the day, I think it’s just inevitable that anybody in that position of authority is going to be relying pretty much on his family, and that is the inner circle. Ike benefited from having an older brother who was a extremely conservative Republican, and a younger brother who was a liberal Republican. So, he got lots of pushback and lots of differing advice, even from his own family, not to mention my father, John, who was one of his confidants.

Brett McKay: That was some of the interesting things about his relationship with his brothers and the discussions they would have via letters, and sometimes they would spill out into the public. He’d get asked at a press conference, “Your brother Edgar said this.” And Eisenhower would be like, “Well, that’s Edgar’s opinion. I don’t care.”

Susan Eisenhower: Yeah. And in one case, he says, “Oh, yeah, that’s Edgar, he’s been criticizing me since I was five years old.”

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Susan Eisenhower: I don’t know, I enjoyed looking into these letters. I knew Edgar Eisenhower. I mean, he was quite a charismatic character and very sure of his opinion. And God love him, but he certainly gave his younger brother the President a run for his money, and I think at the end of the day, Ike would say that it was helpful, just as he relied on Milton Eisenhower, his younger brother, for a view of what the liberals were saying and thinking in his party. But at the end of the day, Brett, and I think this is the thing that stood out for me most, he really believed in the privacy of heart and mind. He didn’t like fussers and cluckers, and he wanted to go into his quiet space to process what he’d seen, to process what he’s hearing, and to make his own decisions, and then he would stick with them and live by them. And I think that it was kind of a maturity that has always stayed with me.

Brett McKay: Yeah, he took up painting. That was one of the things he did when he was processing information, he’d go and paint a landscape.

Susan Eisenhower: Well, it has been noted that his landscapes are very serene. As a matter of fact, I have a couple here that he gave me and they look so calm and, of course, you know that what he was dealing with at the time wasn’t calm at all. I have one painting from 1957, he was undoubtedly working on the deployment of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock and the aftermath of the launching of the Soviet Sputnik into space. And you would have no idea from looking at this landscape that that’s what was on his mind. But he was very absorbed by color and, like anything else, it’s like people get this from playing golf or going out and engaging in athletics or sailing or something, by the time you get back, your brain’s been somewhere else and you can think about things more clearly.

Brett McKay: So, we talk about how Eisenhower was sort of aloof from people that he led, but at the same time, he was very interested in people. And you highlight these moments that people had with Eisenhower where you could see he was always thinking about people and their needs and their wants. And he’d just do little small, really thoughtful things that would just floor people ’cause they weren’t going to expect that from the President of the United States. Were there any moments like that that really stood out to you?

Susan Eisenhower: Yes. I’d just like to say one thing first is that I would use a different word than aloof, that he was not engaged socially, in other words, he didn’t like to mix business and pleasure, would be another way of saying that because it interferes with the way you think about an issue, an issue that needs clarity and thought, because of the relationship. There are always complaints that people in government decide and make their decisions based on the last person they’ve spoken to. Well, he wanted to avoid that kind of a trap. Now, with respect to, I think the thing… And I had an opportunity over the years to do a fair amount in the leadership and strategic leadership area, and character, of course, plays a huge role in any leader’s capacity to build a bond of trust with those he’s leading. And a huge part of that is how you treat those people. And in this respect, small gestures really matter.

I outline in my book so many small things he did that let his men during the war know that he was not… That this wasn’t about him. It was about us. Okay. And one of the ways he did that, rather ironically, is he never wore a helmet. I’d almost challenge anybody to find a picture of Ike with a helmet on, because he didn’t want to pretend he was out there on a day-to-day basis facing the same physical dangers they were, though sometimes he was in some physical danger. He passes up honors and awards that only go to GIs, like the Congressional Medal of Honor, etcetera.

But what I… The gestures I like the most, or at least I witnessed, and therefore was able to write about, were the gestures made to people who couldn’t do anything for him. They couldn’t vote for him, they couldn’t… They couldn’t recommend him to anybody of any importance, small gestures he made to kids he’d never met before, or GIs who after the war made his acquaintance. And it’s moving to me, because that’s what the Army calls when no one was looking, right. What are people doing when no one is looking? And I think that that benchmark is where you can begin to discuss what character really looks like.

Brett McKay: As you were researching and writing this book, was there anything new that you learned about your grandfather?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, I’ll tell you, Brett, for… I was raised to compartmentalize my grandfather’s career from what I know of him as a grandfather. I’ve already made that point on numerous occasions, ’cause I think it’s important to know that I don’t expect everyone to agree with his decisions, but I did want to bring something new to this book that I had no insight into, which is how he handled things and how he thought about things.

And so for the first time in my life, I really put it all together. I mean, what I knew of him with his policies, and there were times when I would read somebody’s scholarship and they’d say, “Well, he did this because… ” And then I thought, “Well, no, that wasn’t really it, because he used to say at the dinner table dot dot dot.” I’m not going to say I was surprised by this, but I guess I will always, for as long as I live, will always be in awe of how he handled the burden of this power and consequential leadership, and in the face of that never became hard or cynical. I just saw no signs of it and I… Not only, it’s not just me. If you read the books of his associates, they were all amazed that he could still be an optimistic forward-thinking person after he’d been to some of the darkest places humankind has ever been.

And I think part of the way he did that is that he believed in something bigger than himself, this wasn’t about him, this was about our country, and it was about securing the peace for a world that had seen catastrophes beyond anything imaginable for today’s generation, that is World War II. And as he once said about this higher cause, he says, “A man just has to forget his fortunes,” and he forgot his fortunes and was able to serve his country, I think, in certainly a genuine way and in a way that was full of dedication and integrity.

Brett McKay: Well, Susan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Susan Eisenhower: Well, I think probably my website. Apologies to everybody that it isn’t more fulsome than it should be, but a lot of information about the book is on there, that’s www.susaneisenhower.com, and I could be followed on Twitter, but I sometimes find myself simply speechless to know what I should be saying about the current situation. I look forward to engaging with anybody, and for those who are interested in a copy of the book, I can be reached through my website and would be happy to get a bookplate in the mail.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Susan Eisenhower, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Susan Eisenhower: Well, I just want to thank you, Brett, for this opportunity and you’ve got a wonderful website there and I just wish you the best of luck.

Brett McKay: Thank you so much.

Susan Eisenhower: Take care.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Susan Eisenhower, she’s the author of the book, How Ike Led. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. And you can find out more information about her work at her website, susaneisenhower.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/howikeled, where you can find links to resources, read a little deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives which hold thousands of articles we’ve written over the years, including a series about the leadership style of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of The AOM podcast, head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code Manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of The AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcasts or Stitcher, it helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #641: How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike’s Granddaughter appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution

How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions

My Three Years With Eisenhower: The Personal Diary of Captain Harry C. Butcher, USNR, Naval Aide to General Eisenhower, 1942 to 1945

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When it comes to fitness, people tend to either focus on endurance or strength; they’re runners or powerlifters. But wouldn’t it be pretty cool to be able to deadlift 500 pounds and run a marathon? My guest says that combining real strength with true endurance to become a “hybrid athlete” isn’t only possible, it also makes for a wonderfully adventurous and fulfilling path to pursue.

His name is Fergus Crawley and he’s the co-founder of Omnia Performance, which offers coaching to hybrid athletes. Today on the show, Fergus shares how he found his way into hybrid training, what a struggle with depression had to do with that journey, and why he decided to take on some incredible challenges that combine strength and endurance, including squatting 500 pounds, running a sub-5-minute mile and doing a marathon in a single day, and powerlifting 1200 pounds and doing a sub-12-hour Ironman Triathlon in a single day. We then turn to the technical side of programming hybrid training, and how you incorporate both endurance and strength workouts in a single week. We end our conversation with Fergus’ case for the benefits of hybrid training to body, mind, and spirit, which made me want to go out for a run — something I don’t say every day.

Resources Related to the Podcast * Movember * AoM series on male depression * AoM Podcast #741: The Exercise Prescription for Depression and Anxiety * Celtman Extreme Scottish Triathlon * AoM Article: The Case for Not Listening to Music When You Work Out * Zone 2 Training

Connect With Fergus Crawley * Fergus on Instagram * Fergus on YouTube * Omnia Performance

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Transcript Coming Soon! The post Podcast #777: Becoming a Hybrid Athlete appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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I’m someone who’s struggled with depression. As such, I’ve experimented with a lot of strategies to get a handle on it.

One of the strategies I’ve tried is going to see a therapist.

To be honest, I personally didn’t get much out of it. But there is a form of therapy I have found really beneficial: bibliotherapy.

“Bibliotherapy” refers to reading books to help alleviate mental health issues. And the research suggests it can be an effective form of treatment for mild and moderate depression.

Over the years, I’ve read dozens of books about depression and general melancholiness to better help me manage my own depressive tendencies, and as research for the series I wrote about male depression here on AoM.

Visiting a human therapist can be effective for some people, but if that’s something you’re not interested in for whatever reason (can’t afford it, don’t have time, don’t like the idea, etc.), consider doing some bibliotherapy. It’s cheap, convenient, has no adverse side effects, and can work.

Also, if you do decide to see a therapist, it can be helpful to be familiar with the concepts around treating depression so that you can get more out of your sessions; having plenty of context for your condition will allow you to better hit the ground running. Often, a counselor or therapist will assign a patient to read a book on managing depression as a supplement to their in-person visits anyway.

Below, I highlight the best books on understanding and managing depression that I’ve come across during the course of my own bibliotherapy; maybe they will help you, too. Some of the content overlaps between the books, but each author has their own unique slant, and some repetition is valuable — it’s how you keep the important principles you need to remember at the forefront of your mind. Aim to read one book every few months; just like traditional therapy, bibliotherapy shouldn’t be a one-and-done thing, but an ongoing process.

Feeling Great by David Burns

One of the many factors that contributes to depression is faulty thinking. Depressives are often depressed because they see the world through an inaccurate, overly-pessimistic lens. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of effective talk therapy that aims to help the depressed individual challenge those faulty thoughts and replace them with ones that align more closely with reality.

In Feeling Great, psychiatrist David Burns gives the lay reader a comprehensive, easy-to-read guide to implementing CBT to manage a variety of mood disorders, including depression.

Feeling Good (which was basically the earlier edition of the now-updated Feeling Great) is one of the most valuable books I’ve read on managing depression through better cognition and one that I keep going back to for a refresher when I need to scrub the barnacles off my psyche.

Check out our article on the 11 cognitive distortions that are making you a miserable SOB to get a taste of what you’ll find in Feeling Great.

On Depression by Nassir Ghaemi

On Depression isn’t so much a how-to manual on how to manage depression. Instead, it provides readers a better, more holistic understanding of melancholy. Dr. Ghaemi makes a compelling case that the way we typically think about depression in our popular culture is overly simplistic and that we not only need to think of it in terms of biology and psychology, but also in terms of philosophy.

I found this book helpful because it offered a different framework to think about depression. While it might not be something we can cure because it’s just part of the human condition, we can take steps to manage it so that it doesn’t get in the way of living a flourishing, meaningful life.

Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson

Rick Hanson’s Hardwiring Happiness has been one of the most life-changing books I’ve read.

Like Burns, Hanson makes the case that many of our mood disorders are caused by disordered thinking. All humans have a tendency to focus on the negative; depressed humans hyper-focus on the negative.

In Hardwiring Happiness, Dr. Hanson guides readers through a meditative practice (grounded in cognitive and neuroscience research) that helps individuals “rewire” their brains so that they’re less sensitive to the negative and more receptive to the positive in their lives. You do that “rewiring” by noticing and really soaking in the positive experiences you have throughout the day.

I’ve been doing Hanson’s Hardwiring Happiness meditations for years, and they’ve really helped. I can’t recommend this book enough.

Check out my crib notes on Hanson’s method, as well as my podcast with him:

The Depression Cure by Stephen Ilardi

Depression is a multifaceted disorder. Genetics, psychology, and environment can all play a role in its prevalence and manifestations.

In The Depression Cure, clinical psychologist Stephen Ilardi provides a multi-pronged approach to treating and managing this multi-pronged condition. What I like about Ilardi’s book is that it’s incredibly action-oriented. Mood and thoughts often follow action. Consequently, Ilardi focuses on easy (and free!) lifestyle changes that you can make that can help alleviate depression, like exercising, getting outside in nature, and socializing.

Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk

In Lincoln’s Melancholy, Joshua Wolf Shenk gives readers a history of Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong battle with what we’d now call depression. While this isn’t a self-help kind of book, but rather a biographical one, it’s still quite valuable in contributing to the kind of context that will enhance your understanding of your own personal bout with the black dog.

Shenk shows how Lincoln’s melancholy was both a curse and a blessing. At some points in his life, depression drove Abe to the brink of suicide. But Shenk also makes a compelling case that Lincoln’s depression helped him develop coping strategies and a realism about life that would allow him to lead the Union through the Civil War.

Learning about Lincoln’s life provides a flesh and blood example of how you don’t have to “cure” your depression in order to live a successful life. Lincoln didn’t let his depression either define him or crush him, but instead mitigated, harnessed, and integrated the condition into something that made him a better leader and man.

Undoing Depression by Richard O’Connor

Like Ilardi, Dr. Richard O’Connor takes a holistic approach to treating and managing depression. O’Connor makes the case that our habits are an overlooked factor in the disorder. We can get “good” at depression because we develop habits like faulty thinking or self-medicating with alcohol. Undoing Depression examines how these depression-deepening habits can prevent a person from experiencing healthy emotion.

A Liberated Mind by Steven Hayes

Steven Hayes is an eminent psychologist who developed a mode of talk therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). While CBT argues that you need to home in on your negative thinking and then challenge those thoughts so you can overcome them, ACT argues that by trying to focus on and challenge negative thoughts, you actually make them worse.

Instead of challenging negative thoughts, ACT suggests that you just accept them non-judgmentally and then commit to relating to them differently through psychological flexibility.

In A Liberated Mind, Dr. Hayes shows readers how to apply ACT to mood disorders ranging from depression to anxiety.

If you’ve tried CBT and haven’t had luck with it, pick up a copy of A Liberated Mind and see if ACT works for you.

Listen to my podcast with Steven Hayes where we discuss ACT:

Leashing the Black Dog by Brett McKay

Several years ago, we published a series of articles on male depression called “Leashing the Black Dog.” In it, I summarized all the research out there about the causes and potential treatments for depression, with a focus on how they apply to men.

An updated version of that series is available as a paperback and an ebook in our store.

I’m really proud of Leashing the Black Dog. It’s thorough but concise, will help you reframe your mindset on depression’s place in your life, and takes an action-oriented approach to managing it. Over the years, I’ve gotten many letters from readers who’ve said it’s really helped them with their own depression.

We don’t promise that reading this book will cure your depression, but hopefully, it will empower you to put a leash on your own black dog.

The post Bibliotherapy: The 8 Best Books For Managing Depression appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When you think about someone having a midlife crisis, you probably think of a man getting divorced, stepping out with a younger woman, and buying a sports car. But my guest today says the often jokey, mockable trope of the midlife crisis we have in our popular culture discounts the fact that the sense of dissatisfaction people can feel in their middle years is quite real, and that the questions it raises are profond, philosophical, and worth earnestly grappling with.

His name is Kieran Setiya, and he’s a professor of philosophy and the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. Kieran and I first discuss what researchers have uncovered about whether the midlife crisis really exists, how it might be better described as a kind of midlife malaise, and how Kieran’s own sense of life dissatisfaction began when he was only in his mid-thirties. We then explore the philosophical reframing that can help in dealing with the existential issues that the journey into midlife often raises, including feeling like you’ve missed out on certain possibilities and feeling regret over your mistakes and misfortunes. We also talk about how to shift out of one primary cause of the midlife malaise — the sense that your life is merely about putting out fires and checking off boxes.

Resources Related to the Podcast * Seasons of a Man’s Life by Daniel Levinson * AoM series on Levinson’s research * Transformations: Growth and Change in Adult Life by Roger Gould * Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life by Gail Sheehy * Orville Gilbert Brim’s MacArthur study on “Midlife in the United States” * David Branchflower’s study on the U-shaped curve of happiness * John Stuart Mill * Sunday Firesides: Youth Is Not an Identity * AoM Podcast #770: Philosophical Tools for Living the Good Life * AoM Podcast #620: How to Deal With Life’s Regrets * AoM Article: The George Bailey Technique — Mentally Erase Your Blessings for Greater Joy and Optimism * AoM Podcast #527: Father Wounds, Male Spirituality, and the Journey to the Second Half of Life With Richard Rohr * AoM Podcast #598: Journeying From the First to the Second Half of Life With James Hollis

Connect With Kieran Setiya * Kieran’s Website * Kieran on Twitter * Kieran’s Podcast

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Transcript Coming Soon! The post Podcast #776: How to Shift Out of the Midlife Malaise appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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When it comes to wintertime adventuring, a campfire is what keeps you cozy and comfortable, and in a survival situation, alive. The downside of fire as a heat source, of course, is that it is consumable; it needs regular feeding to stay alive. This isn’t a big issue in the daytime, when you can keep adding wood to your fire at will. But at night, constantly having to tend to the flames will greatly fragment and disrupt your sleep.

Creating a fire that is self-sustaining, requires minimal maintenance, and keeps burning as long as possible is thus obviously quite advantageous. No fire lasts an entire night through without any tending, but there is a way to create one that will persist for hours without being refueled, allowing you to maximize your stretches of unbroken slumber.

There are various ways to build a long-lasting fire, most of which involve needing logs so big they will likely necessitate cutting down a tree. A more accessible way to build a durable fire is to utilize the upside-down lay. This campfire structure, also handy for building a fireplace fire that won’t make your house smoky, inverts the typical fire lay.

With a typical campfire, you start the lay with the smallest tinder, then move into bigger kindling, and then add larger logs once that setup has ignited. When you’re building a fire that will last through the night, however, you don’t want to have to rise from your sleep to manually add the logs yourself; you want to be able to fix it and forget it by building a structure that ignites the logs “automatically.” You do that by making your biggest logs the base of the lay, then adding layers of thinner wood and kindling, on up in a pyramidal structure, atop which sits your tinder. In a reversal from your classic campfire lay, the fire burns downward. As each layer of the pyramid burns, it sinks and falls, igniting the layer below it: the tinder burns and ignites the kindling, which ignites the larger pieces of wood, which eventually ignites the logs. The fire feeds itself.

In addition to using the architecture of your fire lay in a way that facilitates a long, tending-free burn, you can also set up other aspects of its layout to increase its longevity as well. Fire relies on oxygen to combust; the more of it, the faster the fire burns; the less of it, the slower it burns. So the key is to strike a balance between allowing your fire enough air to keep burning, but not so much that it burns too quickly. You’re going for more of a slow smolder. Placing the wood close together and creating a ring of rocks around the fire will help you create judicious limitations to its airflow.

Since you’re not going to be actively babysitting your fire (though you’ll be sleeping nearby), take extra fire safety precautions — clearing the area around your fire, not building one in dry or windy conditions, etc.

Depending on conditions in the environment and your wood, and how big you make your pyramid, this fire could burn for up to 4 hours without any active maintenance. After that, the embers and hot rocks will continue to provide warmth, and you’ll likely wake up to a bed of still-hot coals, ready for cooking!

Learn more skills of the master fire-builder:

How to Make a Swedish Torch (another way to create hours-long warmth)

How to Build a Roaring Campfire

9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches

How to Start a Fire in the Rain

How to Make a Dakota Fire Hole

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

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In letters men exchanged in the 18th and 19th centuries, they referred to one another as “bosom friends,” exulted in their “eternal” and “ardent” attachment, and affirmed that even when apart, “my heart is knit with thine.”

In photographs from the same era, men hold hands, sit on each other’s laps, and wrap their arms around each other’s necks.

We moderns are apt to assume that these men must have been lovers. But historians will tell you this isn’t necessarily the case. Men and women alike commonly spoke to each other in effusive terms and demonstrated a level of physical affection — in both romantic and platonic relationships — we would find foreign.

We often think of our forebearers as hilariously inhibited, and as society’s openness as moving in a progressive, linearly upwards arc.

But the evidential record belies this overly-neat narrative. In some ways, we are in fact more repressed than even the supposedly uptight Victorians.

We have an endlessly broad spectrum of sexualities with which to identify, and yet would balk at clasping the hand of anyone who is not our significant other. We can look at the nakedness of thousands of strangers online, and yet would be embarrassed to get undressed in a public locker room. We can hook up with anyone without shame, and yet struggle to admit to, and express, the yearning for a lasting relationship. We can talk in the abstract about everything that was once taboo, and yet find it difficult to share anything from the heart.

While we feel quite liberated, in every form of physical and emotional intimacy, we can really be terribly restrained.

While we pride ourselves on our permissiveness, we may go down as one of history’s most prudish societies — a people who were not only bashful about their bodies, but also shyly concealed their souls.

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Cast-iron skillets are great. They last forever, cook pretty evenly, offer an all-natural form of non-stickiness, add a nice crust to everything from pizzas to cookies, are clutch in frying chicken, and make you feel like a cowboy out on the open range when you’re searing a steak.

But, they’re certainly not without their inconveniences. They’re heavy as heck, not as non-stick as more modern cookware, will rust if not kept thoroughly dry, and should be re-oiled after washing.

And, most annoyingly of all, cleaning a cast-iron skillet can be a pain because one of the, ahem, iron-clad laws of using this kind of cookware is that YOU NEVER USE SOAP ON A CAST-IRON SKILLET!

The reason given for this rule is that if you were to use soap, it would strip the cast iron of its “seasoning.”

Seasoning is a layer of polymerized oil that’s baked into all cast-iron cookware. It’s what gives a cast-iron skillet a non-stick (really more like an “easy-release”) surface. The more you cook with your cast-iron skillet, the more this layer of polymerized oil builds up, and the more its easy-release properties are enhanced. People pass cast-iron skillets from one generation to the next, with patinas of oil decades in the making along with them.

Not wanting to strip my cast-iron skillet of its precious seasoning, I never used soap to clean it — just water and elbow grease.

And for the most part, that’s all I’ve needed to clean my cast iron. Thanks to its seasonsing, cleaning a cast-iron skillet has usually been fairly easy.

But, I’ve had instances of cleaning my cast-iron skillet where I’ve faced some really baked-on detritus that would have easily been eliminated by adding a bit of soap to my scrubbing. But, of course . . .

YOU NEVER USE SOAP ON A CAST-IRON SKILLET!

So I just scrubbed harder with straight water, and sometimes a layer of friction-generating salt, to get that stuff off.

A few months ago, however, I was once again scrubbing a bit of really baked-on food gunk from my skillet when the thought came to me, “Can you really not use soap on a cast-iron skillet, or is that some bit of oft-repeated-but-inaccurate folklore?”

So I googled it.

Come to find, you CAN use soap on your cast-iron skillet. It will not ruin or strip off its seasoning.

Lodge Cast Iron says you can.

Field Company Cast Iron says you can.

Serious Eats says you can.

America’s Test Kitchen says you can.

The list goes on and on.

As my grandfather, and cast-iron skillet aficionado, William D. Hurst would say, “I’ll be damned.”

Where the Myth of Never Using Soap on Cast Iron Came From So if Lodge Cast Iron, finemakers of cast-iron skillets for over 120 years, says you can use soap when cleaning your cast iron, where did the idea come from that using soap on it was some sort of mortal sin punishable by being cast down to the seventh layer of cooking hell?

Well, it’s because there was a time when using soap on cast-iron cookware would strip off its seasoning. But that time was fifty-plus years ago when dish soaps used harsher active ingredients like lye and vinegar. A lye-based soap would definitely damage your skillet’s well-earned patina and damage the pan’s underlying iron. So using soap on your cast-iron was a big no-no.

Modern dish soaps don’t use lye or vinegar. They’re actually pretty gentle. So gentle, in fact, you can use them to wash your hands on the regular without irritating them. Despite being mild, they’re able to cut through tough grease and oil effectively.

You might be thinking, “If modern dish soap cuts through grease and oil, then surely it will strip off cast-iron seasoning since seasoning is made up of oil.”

However, as Serious Eats points out, seasoning isn’t just oil. It’s polymerized oil. It’s an important distinction. Polymerized oil is oil that’s been “broken down into a plastic-like substance that has bonded to the surface of the metal. This is what gives well-seasoned cast iron its non-stick properties, and as the material is no longer actually an oil, the surfactants in dish soap should not affect it” (emphasis added).

Dish soap will wipe away oil and grease, just not polymerized oil and grease. Comprende?

All of this is to say, “YOU CAN USE SOAP ON YOUR CAST-IRON SKILLET!”

How to Clean Your Cast-Iron Skillet While all the cast-iron companies say you can use soap, they all say to do so judiciously. Try not to use it if you can; if you need to use it, use just a bit.

All the other rules of cleaning cast iron are legit: don’t soak a cast-iron skillet (if its cooking surface is covered in stubborn food gunk, put it back on the stovetop and simmer some water in it for a few minutes); don’t scrub it with steel wool (unless you’re preparing it for a re-seasoning); don’t put it in the dishwasher. Do completely dry it after washing and rub it with a very thin layer of oil.

Take care of your cast-iron skillet and it will take care of you (perhaps in cooking up these one-skillet meals) for years to come.

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You’ve seen them around your house, usually in your bathroom and kitchen or outside.

They’re electrical outlets with a “test” and “reset” button on them. Maybe you’ve had to press the “reset” button every now and then on one when it seemed to randomly stop working.

Those outlets with the buttons are called GFCI outlets. GFCI stands for “ground fault circuit interrupter.”

GFCI outlets serve a vital function: protecting you from dying from an electrical shock.

If you’ve ever wondered how those “outlets with the buttons on them” work, read on. Below you’ll find the primer on the GFCI outlet you didn’t know you needed.

Understanding Ground Faults To understand how a GFCI outlet works, it helps to have a rudimentary understanding of how an outlet works in general. So let’s start off with a very elementary outline of how electrical outlets function. (Note: the outlets we’ll be focusing on here are the outlets you’ll find in North America. Other countries have other setups).

Take a look at an outlet. You’re probably very familiar with its configuration of two vertical slots and a hole. But do you know anything about these openings? Let’s zoom in a bit more:

Hot wire slot. The slot on the right is shorter than the slot on the left. The right slot is connected to the “hot wire.” This is where your electricity leaves the outlet to power your devices.

Neutral wire slot. The long slot on the left is connected to the neutral wire. Electricity leaves the hot wire slot, travels to power your device, and then travels back to the neutral wire slot, thus making an electrical circuit.

Ground wire hole. The hole on the bottom goes to your ground wire. Usually, there’s no electricity flowing through the ground wire. Electricity will only flow through the ground wire if there’s a breakdown in how the hot and neutral wires typically carry the electrical current.

In a normal situation, when you plug an electric razor into your outlet near the sink, 120 volts of electricity leave the hot wire to power your device. A neutral wire from your razor takes 120 volts of electric current back to the neutral wire slot on your outlet.

A nice electrical circuit is formed, powering your razor and keeping you safe from electric shock.

But what happens if you drop your electric razor into a sink full of water?

Well, water is a fantastic conductor of electricity thanks to the ions in it from dissolved minerals and salts.

Instead of the electricity flowing back through the neutral wire to the neutral slot on your outlet, the electricity will flow through the water until it gets to the ground.

When the current of electricity strays from a planned path to the ground, it’s called a ground fault.

You can probably see why ground faults could be potentially dangerous. If you were to pick up that electric razor from the sink full of water, you’re picking up a device that no longer has a safe, complete circuit between hot and neutral. The water is now carrying an electrical current. You grab that thing out of the sink, and — POW! — you’re going to get a shock that will send you to kingdom come.

How GFCIs Work GFCI outlets can detect ground faults and quickly shut off the power from the outlet, potentially saving you from getting electrocuted.

GFCI outlets constantly monitor the electricity leaving the hot wire slot and returning back through the neutral wire slot. In a properly functioning outlet, 120 volts should leave the hot wire, and 120 volts should return to the neutral wire.

If the GFCI outlet senses a mismatch as small as 4 to 5 milliamps between the hot and neutral wire, it interprets this as a potential ground fault, and the GFCI outlet will shut the power off from the outlet immediately (we’re talking in as little as 1/30th of a second).

By shutting off the power on the outlet, GFCIs can significantly reduce the chances of electrocution. In fact, before GFCI outlets were standard in homes, there were an average of 800 deaths by electrocution a year in the United States. Now that GFCI outlets are part of the housing code in American homes, there are less than 200 deaths by electrocution each year.

Where You’ll Find GFCI Outlets Housing codes in America require that outlets that are placed within 6 feet of a sink or water source are of the GFCI variety. So you usually find GFCI outlets in bathrooms and kitchens. You’ll also find them outdoors since those outlets are potentially exposed to water in the form of rain or snow. Many states also require that GFCI outlets be used in garages and unfinished basements.

Multiple Outlets Can Be Connected to a Single GFCI Outlet You might have noticed that a non-GFCI outlet in your home will lose power if a nearby GFCI outlet is tripped by a ground fault.

That’s by design. You can wire your outlets so that if a GFCI outlet is flipped off, non-GFCI outlets downstream from the GFCI outlet will also lose power. It’s just a way to provide GFCI protection to you, even on non-GFCI outlets.

Knowing that nearby non-GFCI outlets lose power when a GFCI outlet is tripped can come in handy when troubleshooting a faulty outlet. Often the only thing you need to do to get a non-GFCI outlet working again, is to reset the GFCI outlet that’s nearby.

Another Way to Get GFCI Protection

Besides having GFCI protection on an outlet, you can also buy extension cords that have the same safeguard. You can plug the extension cord into an outlet without GFCI protection and immediately get GFCI protection to the device or appliance you’re using. Lots of contractors use GFCI extension cords to get GFCI protection when there isn’t a GFCI outlet nearby.

You can also install GFCI breakers in your home’s breaker box. This will allow you to provide GFCI protection to all the outlets in an entire room. Usually, GFCI protection is only needed on specific outlets, so GFCI breakers aren’t used that often.

What to Do When Your GFCI Outlet Is Tripped

If your GFCI outlet detects a ground fault and flips off, bringing power back to the outlet is as easy as hitting its “reset” button.

Before you push the reset button, make sure to resolve any issues potentially causing the ground fault. For example, if you dropped your electric razor in a sink full of water, unplug your razor, dry it off, reset the GFCI outlet, and then plug your razor back into the outlet.

How and When to Test Your GFCI Outlets I bet you didn’t know this: you’re supposed to test ALL of your GFCI outlets every month. It even says so on the outlet.

This is to ensure that your GFCI outlets work when you really need them. Because here’s a scary thing: it’s possible for your GFCI outlet to continue giving power but not be able to detect a ground fault. That means when a ground fault occurs, instead of shutting off the power from the outlet, your GFCI outlet will continue to spit out power, potentially electrocuting you to death.

So test your GFCI outlets.

Thankfully, it’s pretty dang easy to do:

Simply plug an electronic device, like a hair dryer, into your GFCI outlet. Turn it on.

Push the “test” button on your GFCI outlet. The power from the outlet will shut off, and the hair dryer should too.

Press the “reset” button on your GFCI outlet. The power from the outlet will come back on, and the hair dyer should resume working as well.

Bam! You tested your GFCI outlet.

There you go. Now you know how that thing you’ve glanced at thousands of times while brushing your teeth actually works.

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When it comes to physical education in our country’s schools, parents, teachers, and administrators alike typically place it at the bottom of their list of priorities — something to fit in if budget, time, and academic standards allow. My guest, however, says that P.E. should be thought of as the most important component in education, and as critical not only in ensuring the lifetime health of our kids, but even attaining those vaunted academic standards too.

His name is Dr. Daniel O’Neill and he’s an orthopedic surgeon, a sports psychologist, and the author of Survival of the Fit. Today on the show, Dr. Dan lays out how a lack of physical activity is creating problems in kids from obesity to anxiety, and preventing the development of what he calls a “physical identity.” He explains the way the huge number of kids who don’t see themselves as athletes end up not pursuing physical activity at all, and why he thinks school-sponsored sports are only contributing to this problem. Dan takes us back to a time in our history when physical education was prioritized, and we discuss what’s wrong with modern P.E. and how it can be improved. Dan makes an argument for why P.E. should be the main, foundational thing focused on in schools today, and what people can do to push to make that happen.

Resources Related to the Podcast * AoM Podcast #749: Let the Children Play! * Trailer for The Motivation Factor with footage of what the La Sierra P.E. program was like * The Motivation Factor documentary * AoM Podcast #183 on the La Sierra P.E. program * JFK on Americans getting soft and the need for a more physically fit nation * Natural Movement (MovNat) * AoM Podcast with Erwan LeCorre, founder of MovNat * Tedx talk on the Naperville, IL physical education program * AoM Podcast #599 on “physical intelligence” * AoM Article: How to Instill a Love of Fitness in Your Kids

Connect With Dr. Daniel O’Neill * Survival of the Fit Website

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Read the Transcript! Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. When it comes to physical education in our country schools, parents, teachers and administrators alike typically place it at the bottom of their list of priorities, something to fit in if budget, time and academic standards allow. My guest however, thinks that PE should be thought of as the most important component in education, and is critical not only in ensuring the lifetime health of our kids, but even attaining those wanted academic standards too. His name is Dr. Daniel O’Neill, and he’s an orthopedic surgeon, a sports psychologist, and the author of Survival of the Fit.

Today on the show, Dr. Dan lays out how lack of physical activity is creating problems in kids from obesity to anxiety and preventing the development of what he calls a physical identity. He explains the way the huge number of our kids who don’t see themselves as athletes end up not pursuing physical activity at all and why he thinks school-sponsored sports are only contributing to this problem. Dr. Dan takes us back to a time in our history when physical education was prioritized, and we discuss what’s wrong with modern PE and how it can be improved. Dan makes an argument for why PE should be the main foundational thing focused on in schools today and what people can do to push to make that happen. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/pe.

Alright, Dr. Daniel O’Neill, welcome to the show.

Daniel O’Neill: Thank you so much, Brett. My pleasure.

Brett McKay: So, you are an orthopedic surgeon, but you become this… A big advocate for rebranding and revamping the way American kids experience physical education in schools, how did you get involved in with reforming PE?

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, that’s a good question, because my day job was an orthopedic surgeon, and after about 10 or so years, I thought I was missing a big component, I was working with some pretty high level athletes in those days. And I went back to school and got a degree in exercise and sports psychology, and that was at the school of education at Boston University on my program. So I wound up taking a lot of education courses over those years, and what the real thing was, and this is not news to anybody, is that in my 40 years of medicine I have seen kids get fatter and sadder and more out of shape and more unable to play and more unable to move and it’s just been visual, it’s not even you have to do a study and break down the data, you can just see it anywhere, any time. And I thought we needed to do something about it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think everyone’s seen that, and I guess everyone’s heard about that there’s been an increase in the number of children these days with what we call the diseases of civilization, things like diabetes, it’s stuff that you wouldn’t get… You’re not supposed to get until maybe you’re 40s or 50s, you’re seeing kids as young as 10 get it.

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, it’s unbelievable. And what I talk about and the analogy I make is that when I was a kid, we were stealing our parent’s cigarettes, and they were afraid if we got addicted to those cigarettes we would become emphysemic and have lung cancer and such when we’re in our 60s and 70s. These children, our children today are sick now, they’re not waiting until they’re adults to get diseases, like you say, they have diabetes and high blood pressure and anxiety and depression, all these western diseases, diseases of civilization, but really adult diseases, you know, and they shouldn’t be having them as children.

Brett McKay: Well, nutrition plays a role in that. You write a bit about that, but your focus is on the physical activity component. Do we know what the state of childhood physical activity in America is today?

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, it’s zero. It’s the limit of X approaches zero. You’re absolutely right. In the book, I didn’t wanna go down the diet road too much, just because there’s so much written on that and there’s so much, not controversy, but just so much that we know and that we know is not happening. And there are a lot of really smart people that are working on that. But what I feel like hasn’t been addressed is that physical activity component, and the kids today are just not doing anything, they’re not moving, they’re not playing… The ones that do organized sports quit by the age of 15, and they’re getting those diseases that you mentioned. So, unless we do something when they’re young, when they still have what I call a physical identity, we’re going to have another generation that has a shorter lifespan than the last generation.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I wanna talk more about this physical identity idea in a bit ’cause I thought it was really powerful, but do we have any comparisons to say how much physical activity kids got say a generation or two ago compared to today?

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, it’s interesting, it hasn’t really been quantified, but kids just went out and played, and playgrounds and ball yards and these things just had kids all over them, but we don’t know the real breakdown of activity versus the ultra-processed foods that we’re dealing with versus the genetic components, because it’s to the point now where there is a genetic component to some of their obesity because the parents are giving these kids a bad start in life in utero because of the foods they’re consuming, the mothers are consuming, so it really is complicated. But I don’t know of a study that has literally looked at an activity when I was a kid 50 years ago versus today.

Brett McKay: We have numbers… You talk about in the book, we have some rough idea on the amount of time kids are spending on screens, and that’s just been increasing, I think I’ve seen numbers up to seven hours a day on screens, which is crazy, because if you have your six hours at school, and you’re asleep for eight hours, the rest the time you’re just on a screen.

Daniel O’Neill: It’s absolutely amazing. And like you say… Whatever number you mentioned, it’s probably bigger now, it’s getting bigger by the day, just like obesity… Just like obesity is getting bigger by the day, and I use the word very specifically addicted, these children are addicted to the two-dimensional entertainment, they’re addicted to their screens, they are addicted to Call of Duty, they’re addicted to their iPhones, are addicted to Snapchat, they are addicted just like they’re addicted to the ultra-processed foods and just like people are addicted to cigarettes, it’s a very similar physiologic response for sure.

Brett McKay: So we’ve mentioned the lack of movement has resulted in an increase in obesity, metabolic conditions like diabetes, but I also like how you emphasize the lack of physical activity can also help explain partly why we’ve seen an increase in childhood anxiety and depression in the past two decades.

Daniel O’Neill: Oh, absolutely. And we have all the data on this. That’s the thing that… There’s no secrets here. I was talking about setting up a study and I was talking to a public health guy from Columbia, and I’m on the phone with him, and I almost felt him reach through the phone and grab my neck and scream “We don’t need anymore studies. We have the studies.” This is not a tobacco issue where the tobacco companies were able to obfuscate a lot of the data and such, there’s no question with what is going on now, we see it time after time, study after study. You cannot open the paper, essentially, if you open the USA Today today, it says, if you had done this one study group of 6000 or something people, I forget, if they had done 10 minutes of exercise more it would have increased their lifespan by this much. It’s just remarkable how little exercise we need to make these health changes, but in the case of kids, they need a lot of exercise because they’re kids.

Brett McKay: And what’s crazy is that movement can do all sorts of things to help with obesity, insulin resistance, anxiety, depression, it’s free, you just have to go outside and do it, but our typical solution is a medical one. It’s like, well, give the kid a drug for his anxiety, put them on high blood pressure medication or some sort of medication for his diabetes, and it’s like, “Wait a minute, we got this thing that’s free. Why aren’t we using that?”

Daniel O’Neill: Brett, if I knew. I was down… A week ago, I was down at our legislature testifying in front of the education committee, talking about just this. They have a bill before them, they’re taking a hospital down in the southeast part of the state, and they’re making it a full pediatric psychiatric hospital, and that’s to the tune of millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars, rather than sitting there and saying, “Hold it, why do we have all these kids with anxiety and depression and all these other problems? Why don’t we do something about that?” And as you point out, oh yeah, we have this thing called mother nature, and she could help us with this, and if we just gave these children physical education every day for every child, it is gonna solve so many issues. And just to pick up on your point, we have our big brains to run these fancy bodies that we have, in other words, it’s not the mind-body connection. It’s the body-mind connection. The body is what drives this, if your body is not working, your brain is not gonna be working.

Brett McKay: So, one of your more, I think really powerful and strong arguments you make in the book is that by kids moving less in childhood, it’s causing them to not develop what you call a physical identity. What do you mean by physical identity and what happens when a kid doesn’t develop a physical identity in childhood?

Daniel O’Neill: Right, so for anybody that has had a kid or a puppy dog or an octopus or a bear cub or has seen any youth, any young animal moving, they understand that they have a physical identity, you come out of the womb, you come out of the egg with a physical identity, you are born to move, you are born to explore, you are born to go out in the snow and roll around and make snow angels. That’s what children do. What we have to do is allow them to keep doing that. In other words, if we let children continue to play and help them play with facilities and bike pass and this sort of thing. They are gonna keep doing that ’cause that’s what they know how to do. That’s their physical identity.

So everyone, every child has a physical identity, there’s no two-year-old who walks slowly through the airport, every two-year-old is jumping and skipping and running, that’s what they do. If we allow them to keep that, things are going to be just fine. And if we allow them to have physical education every day, they’re going to keep playing, and with a little bit of instruction, they can learn some body movement skills, they can learn how to squat, they can learn how to swing a racket, this kind of stuff, but the most important thing is to let them play. And believe it or not, the kids are making that distinction around the age of seven, so in other words, if we don’t let them keep their physical identity after the age of seven, that’s when the kids start heading to the couch and bad things happen there.

Brett McKay: What you point out in the book is that some kids will take up a sport and they’ll keep with that, but then there’s some kids who don’t take up a sport for whatever reason, maybe it’s just not their thing. The problem is they think in their head, “Well, I guess physical activity in general isn’t for me,” so they kinda give up on the idea of being physically active all together, and they’ll even carry that with them into adulthood.

Daniel O’Neill: So what you’re talking about is that athletic identity, and about 25% or 20% of our kids will have that, and they’re fine, we don’t care about them, they’re gonna do great, they’re gonna be healthy, they’re going to be active, and they’re going to play sports, they’re gonna go skiing and do all the other things, but it’s that other 75% or 80% when they get to that fork in the road, that then they can identify, and I don’t like this phrase, but they identify as non-athletes, and you see that traditionally, on the ball field or on the hockey rink or wherever, where this kid is not so good at that, they don’t have much of a proclivity for that, and so then the kid starts getting that message. And the difference is, in 2022, is that they can go to the couch and then they can do something that is really cool, and that’s these crazy video games and such. Whereas back in the day when a kid wasn’t good at throwing a football or good at ballet, then she would still ride her bike and she would still play with the other kids, but now the kids have that option, and that option is cool, and as we said, incredibly addictive.

Brett McKay: ‘Cause that’s a good important distinction, so you can identify yourself as an athlete, and that’s if you play some sort of sport, whether it’s football, soccer, basketball, wrestling, whatever. Or a non-athlete. And what typically happens, you’re making the case is that when kids have that the only identity they can have about being physical is athlete, non-athlete; if they identify as non-athlete ’cause they just didn’t take to a sport, then they have a tendency just to not move their body at all in any way, so they don’t have a physical identity.

Daniel O’Neill: Right. In 2022, they lose their physical identity, they lose that inborn physical identity. And when we ignore this big cohort of children at that age and we let them head for the couch, what a horrible thing that is to do and to allow to happen, and that’s why with physical education, if we keep these kids moving, they at least have that fitness, to start doing these sports at any age or to start doing the fun things, whether it’s ballroom dancing or tennis or whatever it might be as they get older, but what’s happening is children are graduating from high school with zero fitness, and so they’re never going to pick up that tennis racket or they’re never going to start doing skiing or whatever that they might do as an adult, because they just don’t have any fitness.

Brett McKay: Well, this is a nice segue to some of your critiques on how America does physical education or helping kids develop a physical identity, and you make this really compelling, intriguing argument that the development of school sports in America has unintentionally caused more kids to not develop a physical identity, can you walk through that argument? I think it’s really interesting.

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, and this is something that I get a lot of blowback for, but it’s something we have to consider. Right now, a small percentage, generally, in the survey that I did for the book, 16%, and that was a survey across the United States, 16% of kids are playing three sports a year, and that’s what we need for them to have fitness, as opposed to one sport. So, in other words, there’s a small percentage of kids that are playing three sports a year, and again, those are children we don’t have to worry about, but this other big cohort who is not playing any sports; however, the bulk of our money, of our physical education money, if you will, is going to competitive sports, so the bulk of our money, and I think it was 86% in the book, 86% of the money is going to 16% of the children.

And that is a big problem because we are spending not millions, but billions of dollars in healthcare costs, again, getting back to what you said way at the beginning, when we have options, when we have other things we can do and with a small reallocation of that money, we could get so many kids fit and not have to pay all those healthcare costs, and then if the community is to build in competitive sports and such, that would be a great solution, but right now we’ve got to stop conflating education and school education with sports, because it’s a system that’s just not working.

Brett McKay: Right, and the argument you make is whenever sports in a school is presented as the primary way you’re gonna get physical activity at school, again, you have that problem, the athlete, non-athlete dichotomy. If a kid identifies as an athlete, they’re gonna play lots of sports, they’re gonna be fine, but as you said it’s a small percentage of kids that do that, so most of the kids, they think, “Well, I’m not good at football, I’m not good at basketball, so I’m not gonna really do any physical activity,” and then they don’t develop that physical identity.

Daniel O’Neill: Right, and these kids though are not playing on their own, that’s the difference too, so just ’cause you weren’t on the basketball team back in the day, you would still go into the backyard or out into the school yard and shoot baskets and play and play pond hockey or do whatever. But now, the other thing, the other thing I talk about in the book is that children do not know how to play on their own, and as a result, unless there is an adult there blowing a whistle, they don’t do anything, and so they don’t do pick up games. And so again, this is a perfect scenario, it could not have been set up better for the folks in Silicon Valley, ’cause now they’ve got these kids, they’ve got this 80% of our children, and they put the screws into them, and they get them addicted and that is the end of the game, and that’s what’s gone on with this generation of children.

Brett McKay: An interesting point you make, and I don’t think a lot of Americans realize this, is that the idea of sports being connected to school, that’s pretty much a uniquely American thing. In other countries schools don’t have sports programs.

Daniel O’Neill: And that’s why it has to be, in my mind, a community concept, which is, as you point out in most countries. What happened with us is in the early 1900s, when we have the huge wave of immigration, the idea of organized sports was useful for that immigrant community, it was useful for them to learn to take orders, as in the military, it was useful for them for socialization, it was useful to get them off the streets. So it worked out very well, but unfortunately, we’ve taken that system that was built for a very specific time in this country, and then now we’ve morphed it into this insane multi-zillion dollar sports industrial complex, where the companies are more than happy to have high school teams spending literally millions of dollars a year, especially down south for these teams, and it’s just not benefiting us as a society, or certainly the vast majority of children in that school.

Brett McKay: So I think in most schools in America, if you don’t… I’m talking about public schools, and that’s your primary focus with this book; if you don’t play a sport, then there’s some sort of PE requirement. I remember when I played football in high school, because I played football, I never had to take PE and I never did a PE class ’cause I was doing year-round football ’cause I had the season, and then in the off-season, we exercise. But you make this case that, okay, here’s these kids who aren’t athletes, they’ve maybe have to do a PE class, but you make the case that our PE classes aren’t that great in America today. What’s the state of American Physical Education?

Daniel O’Neill: Okay, so there are a couple of things to unpack there; number one, the amount of physical education kids get is dependent on the school district, so it’s anywhere from zero to maybe three days a week at best, almost no school has five days a week of physical education, when you get to high school, it gets even worse. In one of our local high schools that we were just quoting in the testimony of the State House, it’s out of eight semesters of high school, you have to do PE once, so in other words, it’s pretty much non-existent. The other thing that we haven’t talked about, and when you talk about not going to PE because you’re doing football, one of the things that PE does, a morning PE class is it turns on your brain.

So even for those kids that are playing field hockey and volleyball and football in the afternoon, I want those kids in the PE class at 10 o’clock in the morning, ’cause I want their brains turned on for Algebra and for English and Science. So, PE has a huge breadth of influence. The other thing is that just because you were doing gymnastics or you’re doing football, that does not make you an athlete, or I should say a fit athlete. When you specialize in certain sports, you wind up not being that kid that could climb trees and swim and do all the other things that a normal, active fit person should be doing. So, PE should help with that and rounding out those rough edges.

Brett McKay: No, it’s okay, you’re making… That’s a good point. So you’re saying you’re not against organized sports and not even against organized sports in schools, it’s just that sports should be seen as a supplement to physical education, every kid should… No matter if you’re an athlete or non-athlete, you should be doing some type of physical education in your school day.

Daniel O’Neill: Absolutely, absolutely. That’s the key, because of the academic influence that that activity has on the brain, and because it makes you into just a better, fitter individual, so just because you play football, it doesn’t mean you know how to lift weights, that’s something you hopefully would learn in the PE class, and we just gotta keep getting away from this concept that the organized sports is the panacea, not just for fitness, but for psychological health and all these other things, we just put so much on organized sports, and what we should be emphasizing is that every child who graduates from an American high school at the age of 18 should have a level of physical fitness and after that, everything can just work itself out.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah, the other problem, if you make sports the only way you get a physical identity in high school, though oftentimes you play a sport in high school, once you’re done with high school, you never play that sport again. I haven’t put on football pads in over 20 years, but I still exercise because it’s something I enjoy doing, I have a physical identity where I lift weights and do things like that. We’re gonna take a quick break for words from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

So let’s talk about this, the decrease in PE. What’s interesting, we’ve been seeing some states, some districts where they don’t even have a PE requirement, but you highlight in the book, you kinda do a history of physical education in America, where there’s been periods of time where physical education was seen as a priority in a child’s overall education. Any moments in history where it was really a priority? And then what caused the decline, like why don’t we do as much physical education today?

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, I love this. One of my favorite things to quote is in 1866, that’s 1866, California ahead of the curve, California said that every child going to school had to have two exercise periods a day, and you know that these kids were not taking the school bus to school, and you know that they were not going home and watching television. That was California, that was in 1866. But then the one that most of us remember was the President’s Council for Physical Fitness, and what happened was President Eisenhower, who as we all know, was a great General in World War II, looked around as president in the late ’50s and he says, “Boy, we’ve been out of Korea now just for a few years. We’ve been out of World War II for a decade. Our boys are getting unfit, they’re not doing enough.”

We have factories now, television was just invented and was becoming a bigger and bigger thing, fewer farmers, more people were living in the city, and Eich said, “We’ve gotta do something about this.” So he established the President’s Council of Physical Fitness. And then the one that people remember is Jack Kennedy took that and really ran with it. The problem is, is that the federal government does not have a huge influence on physical activity, it’s really just a bully pulpit, so President Kennedy can just say, “Listen, our kids who are unfit and we’ve gotta get them moving,” and they started this Council on Physical Fitness, and they got a lot of high schools. There were like 4000 high schools that were involved with this, but then that just faded away now, and now it’s still out there, but it’s not nearly the same influence that it had back then.

Brett McKay: Now you highlight one high school in the ’60s that really took up Kennedy’s call to make physical education a priority, and that’s La Sierra High. We actually did a podcast a couple of years ago, a guy did a documentary about La Sierra called The Motivation Factor, and this was some really intense PE, you watch these videos, these kids and it’s impressive.

Daniel O’Neill: Oh yeah, it’s great and I would have your listeners punch that up ’cause it’s fantastic. I criticize that a little bit in the book, because I know all these kids are fit, they’re all boys, you don’t see any of the girls, and obviously that’s an issue, but the one great thing about it is, this was really basic stuff and you remember watching the videos, this was not fancy equipment. Somebody sent something to me yesterday about a playnasium in… Where was it? It was in Australia, and it was these fancy pieces of equipment you put on a playground and the parent can exercise while the kid is on the machine, you’re using the kid’s weight basically as your lifting weight and stuff.

But it was this incredibly expensive piece of equipment that’s going to break down, that’s going to get old; with the La Sierra thing, these kids are swinging on bars, doing push-ups, nothing fancy at all. And that’s really the point here, all of our movement patterns, they’re not different, we’re the same animals that we were 250,000 years ago, we don’t need fancy equipment, we don’t need to rethink things, and it’s all there, we have all the research. And it’s just a question of getting these kids to that gym class, the minute they get over that threshold, they are moving. And that’s all that we need to do.

Brett McKay: It was interesting, in the La Sierra documentary, the filmmaker interviewed students who went through the program, so it was a lot of boys, and I guess La Sierra they started… It became co-ed, the PE program later on in the ’70s, so there are some women they will interview. And it was interesting, all of them talked about that helped them develop… They didn’t say in these words, but they said it helped them develop a physical identity. You talked to some… I think one guy had some sort of surgery where he couldn’t walk, a knee surgery, and he went back to his days in La Sierra, it’s like, well, you just get a little bit better every day by walking a little bit further. And so that’s the power of a good physical education program, it can instill that in you and it will last you until you’re 67 years old.

Daniel O’Neill: Absolutely. And what we have today is this Naperville, Illinois… Anybody from Naperville High School give me a shout and let me know how your experience was, but I talk about that in the book. And we have examples of this. And as you say, this is not rocket science, this is because this is in our genes, we want to move, we want to feel resistance, we want to swing and run and do these things, this is all inbred, we’re not trying to make our bodies do something that it’s not meant to do. We were meant to run and walk 10 miles a day as hunter-gatherers, that’s what we’re programmed to do, and that’s what we have that inner need to do, we have this primitive part of our brain and we have to use it on a daily basis for things to go well.

Brett McKay: So besides spending less time, making kids spend less time in physical education, the other problem with PE is, when they do go, the classes aren’t that great. I remember… This was 20 years ago. Sometimes you’d walk through a PE class and you see it going on and half the kids were just sitting on the bleachers and then the other kids were playing basketball. I mean, that was it. Can you describe what is it? Is that indicative of what a typical PE class in America looks like? It’s just half the kids participating and half the kids not.

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, it’s exactly that. And it’s the kids with the physical identities they’re out there participating, and the kids that are not that are on their cell phones. One of the PE teachers we interviewed for the book, she said she’s gotten to the point where she has to look under kid’s hats if they’re wearing a wool beanie or something, because they have ear phones in and they’re talking to their friends in PE class, their friends probably somewhere else in the school. It’s absolutely incredible what the kids without a physical identity will do to get out of activity.

And that’s why in the book, we delineate, we give you a month of PE classes, and we delineate exactly what these kids can be doing for that 30 or 45 minutes that you have them, and that’s getting them moving because that’s what’s going to give us, not only the health benefits, but again, the academic benefits, if you don’t get that heart rate up, every kid, then you’re not going to get any of the benefits from it. Yeah, the PE teachers, that old PE teacher has to move out of the way, if that’s the way you’re running your class, if half of your kids are just sitting around, you better rethink what’s going on because these kids are not getting a physical education, they’re getting addicted.

Brett McKay: And one of the arguments you make in terms of we need to do to revamp physical education is you actually have to have some standards, you actually have to hold these kids accountable, and you make this interesting argument, if the kid’s not doing well in math… Well, the teacher is gonna sit down with them and say, “Hey, what could we do to help you with your math?” But when it comes to physical education, if a kid doesn’t participate, for some reason, we feel like we can’t force a kid to do PE, it’s like, well, they don’t see themselves as an athlete, we don’t wanna embarrass themselves, but you’re making this case like, “No, we have to hold these kids accountable, and actually have some standards that we’re trying to help them shoot for when it comes to their physical education.”

Daniel O’Neill: Brett, physical education is the most important class your child is going to in school. What our schools almost have to become now is physical education first, second and third, that’s gotta be the main focus because the kids are not fit enough to learn science and math. And guess what? You can learn a lot of science and math on the internet, and nobody… Nobody else has said this, and I’m sure I’m going to be a hassle for this, but what the kids are not getting at home and they’re not getting on the weekends and in the summer, unless they have motivated parents, they’re not getting any physical education.

So, our schools should become for 180 days a year, the main thing we’re teaching “our kids” is PE, in other words, the main thing we’re doing with our kids is getting them moving, that is the absolute best thing we can do for their education and for their health and for their adulthood than anything else, because guess what, you can learn, you can pick up that extra math time or that extra English time on the computer on your own time, but unless you have the health to learn these things, it’s just not gonna happen. My main mantra is, “There’s no STEM without fitness.”

Brett McKay: Right. We’ve had guests on the podcast talking about the cognitive benefits of fitness, particularly in children, and schools that make play or physical activity priority, the kids typically do better. But what’s interesting, a lot of public school particularly, have a lot of pressure to perform well on the standardized tests, so they… To prepare for the standardized test, they take away from PE or outdoor time or play time, and the kids don’t do better, and it’s like, again, you’re saying, what are you doing? If you just made PE priority, this could probably solve that problem of trying to help the kids do better on these tests.

Daniel O’Neill: Absolutely no question. Absolutely no question. What’s the most important thing we can do to stave off Alzheimer’s disease? And that’s exercise, it’s not crosswords or Sudoku, it’s exercise, and the best way to get a STEM, you know, get a smart, healthy kid is exercise. It’s the same thing, and that’s what we absolutely have to be emphasizing. And as you point out, when we took all the time away from PE, which was mainly where the time came from, for no child left behind in 2002, nothing changed, nothing really changed with our Math and English scores because the kids are not fit enough to learn Math and English. So what we have to do is make PE the priority, the physical education teacher is the first violin in the school. That’s the person who’s really running things, and that’s the person who’s going to make the difference.

When I was doing my psychiatric rotation at the VA hospital, there was a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a social worker, and the social worker was the guy who was in charge of getting the VA benefits and stuff for these vets, and he said to me, he says, “I cure more patients than the psychologists and the psychiatrists.” And they actually, they laughed and they nodded ’cause he was right. In other words, that’s what we have to be doing in the school, the PE teacher. And you alluded to it before, there’s a lot of social issues, again, historic social issues with the PE in our schools and a lot of kids hated it, and because they were getting their glasses knocked off being hit by a volleyball, etcetera, etcetera, we’ve gotta get rid of all that stuff and we’ve gotta make it fun again, because that’s where the… Literally, that’s where the money is.

Brett McKay: Alright, so PE in America, most schools probably aren’t doing it, they’re not making their kids do it. If the kid is doing it, they’re probably not doing anything in the class. It’s like a blow off class where you can get an easy A. Are there any school districts? You mentioned that one in Illinois that’s doing a good job of PE. What does their PE class look like?

Daniel O’Neill: Well, the problem with them is they have a lot of money, and so if you again, punch up, when you punch up the La Sierra films, punch up the Naperville, Illinois films, and they have pools and they have kayaks, and they have a beautiful track, and they have all this cool stuff. And that does make it easier. And if we can talk about that unpleasant topic of money, I’m not a technology guy, I’m like you, I’m a mother nature guy, I just wanna go out and play and hike and get out in the woods, but it is 2022 and kids do like technology, and so with a small investment in technology, at our one school, we just have a step recorder, so if the kid is standing there, they don’t stand there, they walk in place ’cause they wanna get some step credit. And so there are some technology that can be really useful, and because such a big percentage of kids have iPhones and personal phones already, we can use that for some quantitative information, so again, something to motivate the kids, similar to the Fitbits and the Apple watches.

Brett McKay: What sort of… Like you mentioned in the book, you have like an ideal, like a month-long class of PE, schedules for PE classes. What kind of stuff would you like to see kids doing in a PE class? And again, this is under the assumption. Your assumption is every kid in the school should be doing PE, whether they’re playing a sport or not, with that said, what would you have these kids be doing in PE?

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, so you need to be able to have some certain functional movement patterns, I mentioned you should be able to run, ideally, kid could be swimming and cycling, but that’s not something you’re gonna get in PE, you need to be able to defend yourself, so you need to have certain objects flying around, so to a certain extent, but it doesn’t have to be a volleyball or some projectile that’s going to hurt you. You need to be able to swing hockey stick or a bat or this kind of thing, but these are all really simple things and they have these big, safe toys now, for lack of a better word, that the kids can use. And again, on the scheme of things, compared to a football team, they’re cheap, cheap, cheap, and they get these movement patterns, they have the kids doing these movement patterns. Obviously, core exercises are huge, but it can be fun if you just do it right and getting out and running full speed can be fun if you do it right, if you motivate the kids, if you make it a game and you make it something that they wanna participate in and that they see the benefit of, and they’re gonna see the benefit in their fitness and they’re gonna see the benefit in their fun factor.

Brett McKay: No, a lot of the activities, a lot of them are just games where they’re running around, your goal is just to get these kids heart going and get a little sweaty so that they can get that physical activity they need.

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, that’s… At the end of the day, that’s really all that matters. If no kid wants to necessarily just run for 30 minutes, but you know what, that’s really the most important thing, get them sweaty, get that heart pounding, ’cause that’s gonna get that brain pounding, and that’s what’s going to really make the effect, but they could be crawling and they could be kicking and they could be doing all sorts of fun stuff, and most importantly, whenever you can, is getting the kids outside, ’cause we do want these kids to get addicted to mother nature and get rid of their addiction to the computer.

Brett McKay: I was thinking, as you were talking sort of what your goals are for PE, a great platform that you can help teach kids these basic functional movements is MovNat. Have you ever heard of MovNat?

Daniel O’Neill: I have not.

Brett McKay: So yeah, it was started by this guy Erwan Le Corre, it’s based on this thing from the 19th century in France, this guy named Georges Hebert, who had developed this physical culture method called the natural method, and it was all about just teaching and training people how to do basic movements, running, jumping, crawling, climbing, swimming, and he said if you can just focus on those things, you’re gonna be good as a human being, and I think MovNat would be a great platform to teach these kids to move. ‘Cause it’s fun, it doesn’t require any equipment, so there’d be like no extra cost, ’cause that’s an idea too. I would look into that if you’re looking in for another way to encourage better PE.

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, I love that. But you’re making the point, there’s nothing magic about this. Dudley Sargent was around 100 years ago, and his name is on the physical therapy school at Boston University. And one of the things I mentioned in the book is that if Dudley Sargent came back and he saw what was going on in a PE class today, he would be horrified. On the other hand if William Osler showed up and he came to my operating theater today, he would be blown away. PE has not made the gains, but it’s also… They don’t need to make a lot of gains, we have this… As you point out, back in the 1800s, these basic movements are the same, basic movements, there’s nothing magical about this, ’cause we are the same human beings we were 100 years ago and 100,000 years ago. It doesn’t have to be rocket science.

Brett McKay: So let’s say there’s a parent listening to this and they’re looking at their kid’s PE class and like, “Boy, yeah, my kid’s PE class, not great.” Any advice to get administrators on-board with revamping PE? ‘Cause it just seems like PE is one of those things that school districts and school boards give the short shrift to.

Daniel O’Neill: Absolutely, and I interview on my website, the survivalofthefit.net. I interview a principal, elementary school principal, and she says that. She says, you know, we get to these meetings, principal meetings, and PE is at the end of the schedule, if at all. So yes, for your listeners, survivalofthefit.net, and there, there are letters that you can download to send to your school administrators, to send to your teachers, to send to your PTA members, and we can get this revolution, what I call the PE revolution going from below. The other thing is, as I said earlier, I was down at our State House last week, we’re trying to do it from above also. So we have a bill in the New Hampshire State House right now to mandate PE for every kid every day. And if we can do this pincer mechanism from both sides, if we can get the grassroots going and we can get things going in state legislatures, that’s when we’re gonna make the real progress.

Brett McKay: And I think it’s an easy sell, at least the way you describe in the book, you can just go to your administrator or a school board and say, “Look, I got something that won’t cost that much more extra money or not even any extra money, and it can help with behavior problems in classroom, it can potentially help with test scores, so what do you think?” And like, “Oh yeah, I would… Yeah, let’s do that.” And it’s like, well, yeah, just get the kid moving, let’s have PE every day.

Daniel O’Neill: Exactly, and it’s amazing because it’s exactly what you say, this is one of those topics where nobody disagrees with me, I mean, this is not a political topic, this is not a religious topic, this is so basic, and every American out there says, “Yeah, kids don’t play, kids aren’t having as much fun as we had when we were kids, what’s going on with all that?” There’s no controversy here, but where the controversy exists is that they’re gonna get in there and they’re gonna say, “Well, we’re mandated to have X number of minutes of English everyday, and X number of minutes of math every day, and on and on and on. There’s just no room for PE.”

But what I would tell that administrator and that principle is that any data you have from education that’s more than 10 years old is useless, it’s absolutely useless because the world changed in the last 10 years. While we weren’t looking the kids became severely addicted to these two-dimensional entertainments, and as you point out, they’re on these bloody things for seven and a half hours a day. It’s absolutely extraordinary. That happened in the last decade. Anything you know about education, anything you wanna think about in terms of teaching math or science or English, forget about all that stuff because this crisis has overwhelmed everything.

Brett McKay: And let’s say there’s a parent… They’re making these moves to help PE get better in their school district, but it’s just… You’re dealing with bureaucracy. Things are gonna be slow, there’s a lot of red tape. Any advice for parents who have kids who are in a school that don’t have robust PE program to get them developing a physical identity?

Daniel O’Neill: Yeah, the main thing is don’t let your child lose the physical identity. Your two-year-old, your three-year-old is fine, they have a physical identity, let them keep going, get them outside. Same… When we were kids, right? Kick ’em outside, come back when it gets dark, it’s just, if you allow that child to keep their physical identity, they will, because mother nature is still more interesting than any video game. If you wanna get your kid involved with organized sports and stuff, that’s fine too. But make sure the child knows it’s their sport, it’s not your sport, they don’t want you there screaming at refs.

They want you there to take them there and to be supportive and stuff, but you don’t need to go to every game, you don’t need to scream at anybody and the coaches or the refs or the kid for that matter, it’s all about play. And obviously on the weekends and in the summer, but you wanna make… You can look around, is your kid enjoying the ball sports? Well, maybe they would like to do a mountain biking clinic, or it’s some kind of swimming activity or horseback riding or any of these things, but they gotta get outside, and that’s where the addiction is gonna come, that’s where the positive addiction is gonna come.

Brett McKay: And I imagine just being an example yourself, your kids pick up on that. Have a culture of physical activity in your family.

Daniel O’Neill: And that’s right. And Brett, that’s one of the big problems now is that the adults have lost their physical identity and they have bad food in the cupboard and they are not being active on the weekends, and so you’re right, we’re dealing with some parents that just aren’t on-board but the vast majority of parents will be for sure.

Brett McKay: Well, Dan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Daniel O’Neill: Right. Survivalofthefit.net is the website. We have tons and tons of content there, my email is there, dfoneillmd@gmail.com, and I would just implore anybody to shoot me an email, go to the website, pick up the book that’s available at all the local outlets, your indie bookstore outlets and such and be part of this PE revolution, because truly this is the most important thing, and we’ve seen this in the last two years with COVID. Fitness is absolutely paramount to everything, and it could help and change so many things for the positive.

Brett McKay: Well, Dan O’Neill, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Daniel O’Neill: Thank you Brett, any time.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Dan O’Neill, he’s the author of the book, Survival of the Fit, it’s available on Amazon.com and book stores everywhere, you can find more information about his book at his website survivalofthefit.net, also check out our show notes at aom.is/pe where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast, make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of, and if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com. Sign up, use code MANLINESS at check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android/iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of The AOM podcast, and if you have done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or a family member who you’d think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support, until next time it’s Brett McKay reminding you all to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #775: We Need a P.E. Revolution appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Survival of the Fit: How Physical Education Ensures Academic Achievement and a Healthy Life

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Most everyone struggles with saying no.

It’s hard to say no to the dinner invitation from the perfectly-nice-but-deathly-boring acquaintance; to the looks-good-on-paper-but-is-sure-to-fail proposal from a boss; to the request that you serve in an entirely-worthy-but-wholly-unsuited-to-your-talents role at church.

Saying no feels awkward. It feels impolite. It makes you feel bad that maybe you’re not as nice or as helpful a person as you’d like to think, and it makes the asker feel bad that you’re somehow rejecting them personally.

But there’s a way to decline invitations and requests that allows both you and the asker to remember that saying no doesn’t make you a bad person.

It’s called the “positive no.”

Why It Feels Unpleasant to Tell People No and to Get a No According to negotiation professor William Ury, the way most people say no to requests typically creates tension, hurt feelings, and resentment all around.

Think about how you might typically start off declining a request:

“I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to . . .”

You’re starting off with a negative, which triggers the other person’s brain in a defensive direction.

Human brains are highly sensitive to the negative. When you begin your no with a negative, it subconsciously puts its recipient on red alert. When you decline someone’s invitation or request, you’re knocking them down a peg in status; they feel less liked/important/appreciated. And, even if they cognitively know that your decline may not be personal, womp-womp neurochemicals kick in and it viscerally stings.

And then you feel bad, for making them feel bad. No one likes to disappoint.

The Positive No Instead of starting off your no with a negative and thus causing its recipient to shift into defensive mode, Ury recommends offering a “positive no.”

A positive no allows you to convey to the asker (and to yourself) that the reason you’re saying no is not because you’re a bad person, but because you have positive priorities that you’re working on and saying yes to, which don’t allow you the time or bandwidth to take on another commitment. It’s a way of telling people that you’re not saying no to them, but saying yes to other things that are important in your life.

The positive no doesn’t completely take the dejection out of rejection (you are, after all, still saying that your own priorities take precedence over whatever it is the other person is asking of you), but it does significantly dampen it, making your decline feel less personal, less jerky, and less apt to be received as a status defeat.

How to Give a Positive No Giving a positive no is pretty dang easy. Not only does it make the interaction less fraught, but it also allows you to provide a firm no without being wishy-washy about it.

Here’s your outline for a positive no:

Start with warmth. Show appreciation for the ask. The person wouldn’t be making the request to you if they didn’t think you’re a cool and/or competent dude. By making the request, they’re showing some deference. Appreciate that!

Tell the person what you’re saying yes to right now. This is where the “positive” part of the “positive no” comes in. Briefly and enthusiastically share your positive priorities with the requester. This could be a project at work, your family, or a community service commitment. Let the recipient know what you’re saying yes to.

Give your no. Explain that, because you’re saying yes to _____, unfortunately, you can’t do the thing they asked you to do.

Don’t say you’re “sorry” for having to decline; apologies are for when you do something wrong, and not being desirous or able to fulfill a request doesn’t fall into that category. An “unfortunately” or an “I wish I could” (if that’s sincerely the case) express your regret that it’s not possible for you to do everything in life, without confessing to an offense or failure.

End with warmth. Wish the person well with their endeavor (if you sincerely support it). If you have a contact in your network that could help the requester, offer to put him or her in touch with that contact. This isn’t necessary though; well-wishes can suffice.

Comparing a Typical No With a Positive No To see the difference this request-declining methodology can make, let’s contrast an example of a typical no with a positive one.

Let’s say your boss asks you to head up the firm’s softball team. You just don’t have the bandwidth for it because you’re coaching your kid’s baseball team in the spring, and you’ve got a lot of projects you’re tackling at work.

Here’s what a typical no would look like:

Thanks for asking me, but unfortunately I won’t be able to run the firm’s softball team this spring. I’ve got a lot of projects at work that I’m working on, and I’m coaching my son’s baseball team this spring. I just don’t have the bandwidth for it. Sorry I couldn’t help.

It’s not a terrible decline. It’s short and to the point. You give your reasons for saying no. But, because you start off with a negative, the whole thing just feels like a downer and that you’re disappointing the other person. The recipient will be so focused on the no, that they’ll ignore or downplay your explanation for it.

Let’s see what a positive no would look like:

Hey! Thanks for asking me to head up the firm’s softball team. I’ve really enjoyed playing on it over the years.

As you might know, I’m working with some big clients for the firm, and we’re making some important pushes that will allow us to hit our quarterly goals next month. I’m really enjoying the work and am spending time after office hours refining our pitches. I’ve also committed to coaching my son’s baseball team this year. I’m really excited about it since I love baseball, and it gives me the opportunity to hang out with my son.

To do a good job on these projects at work and as a baseball coach, I unfortunately have to say no to other commitments, like heading up the firm’s softball team.

I wish you all the best with it!

While the content in these two responses was pretty much the same, their structure differs; the second is bookended with warmth, and, most importantly, starts off with what you’re saying yes to. The no which follows is firm, but its reception will be softened by the more positive lead-in.

Here’s another example of offering a positive no, this time in regards to a social situation:

Thanks very much for the invitation to the party! It sounds like a lot of fun. I’ve just come off a crazy season at work where I didn’t get to see my family very much and I’ve committed to devoting my weekends for the next while to hanging out with them. So I unfortunately won’t be able to come on Saturday. Hope you guys have a blast!

If you’ve had trouble saying no in the past, try framing your nos as positive nos. You might be surprised by the difference it makes.

In conjunction with this technique, continue to work on being more assertive and less of a reflexive people pleaser in general. A big reason people feel bad about saying no to others is the fear of letting them down and making them feel bad. But, remember, while you are responsible for being a respectful and polite person, you are not responsible for other people’s feelings.

The post A Better Way to Say No appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes

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There are little decisions to make in life like what to wear to work and what to eat for lunch. Then there are potentially life-changing decisions like whether to move, take a new job, break up with someone, or get married. With these big decisions, you may never have faced that choice before, have to sacrifice one path to choose another, and have a hard time figuring out the right way to go. As a result of the high stakes and high uncertainty, we often flounder in this kind of decision-making, sometimes failing to make any decision at all.

My guests have studied those who have to make these kinds of critical choices more often — first responders and members of the military — to figure out how civilians can make better decisions in their everyday lives. Their names are Laurence Alison and Neil Shortland, and they’re the authors of Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On. Today on the show, Laurence and Neil explain the mistakes people commonly fall into when making big decisions, including getting stuck in a cycle of redundant deliberation, where you forever circle around your options without ever pulling the trigger on one. They then unpack their model for more effective decision-making, including why it should follow a foxtrot pattern, and how to know when it’s time to stop ruminating and finally make a choice. Along the way, we discuss the importance of self-awareness in this process, and what it is you need to know about yourself to make better decisions.

Resources Related to the Podcast * Conflict — How Soldiers Make Impossible Decisions by Neil and Laurence * AoM Podcast #648 with Laurence on building rapport * AoM Podcast #744 with Laurence on life lessons from the labors of Hercules * AoM Podcast #486: How to Get Better at Making Life-Changing Decisions * AoM Podcast #740: Life’s 10 Biggest Decisions * AoM Podcast #685: How to Decide * AoM #644: How to Develop Greater Self-Awareness * AoM Article: How to Wrestle with a Difficult Decision: Advice from Sergeant Alvin C. York * Study on “inappropropriate persistence” * Maximizers vs. Satisficers/Minimizers

Connect With Laurence and Neil * Ground Truth Website

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Read the Transcript! Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Now there are little decisions to make in life like what to wear to work and want to eat for lunch. Then there are potentially life-changing decisions like whether to move, take a new job, break up with someone or get married. With these big decisions, you may never face the choice before, have to sacrifice one path to choose another and have a hard time figuring out the right way to go. As a result of the high stakes and high uncertainty, we often flounder in this kind of decision-making, sometimes failing to make any decision at all. My guest has studied those who have to make these kinds of critical choices more often, first responders and members of the military, to figure out how civilians can make better decisions in their everyday lives. Their names are Lawrence Allison and Neil Shortland and they’re the authors of Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On. Today on the show, Lawrence and Neil explain the mistakes people commonly fall into when making big decisions, including getting stuck in a cycle of redundant deliberation where you forever circle around the options without ever pulling the trigger on one. They then impact their model for more effective decision-making, including why you should follow a foxtrot pattern and how to know when it’s time to stop ruminating and finally make a choice.

Along the way, we discussed the importance of self-awareness in the process and what it is you need to know about yourself to make better decisions. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/decisiontime. Alright. Well, Lawrence Allison, welcome back to the show. Neil Shortland, welcome to the show.

Neil Shortland: Thank you for having me.

Lawrence Allison: Thank you for having us again.

Brett McKay: Lawrence, we’ve had you on the podcast in the past to discuss two very different topics. The first time we had you on, we discussed what you’ve learned about building social Rapport from being an expert in criminal interrogation, and then the second time we talked about what we can learn about life from the Mythical Labors of Hercules. You got a new book out that you’ve co-authored with Niel, it’s called Decision Time; it’s all about decision making. So let’s start off with a bit of your respective backgrounds. Let’s start with you Lawrence, some listeners may already be familiar with you, but can you give us a little bit of review on your background, and then Neil, what’s your background? And how did you two wind up working together on this book?

Lawrence Allison: Yeah, so I’m a psychologist, broadly speaking, a forensic, but also do a lot of organizational psychology, as you said Brett, you very kindly had us on before to talk about Rapport, and my other area of interest is decision-making. So I mean, in brief, I deal with things that include difficult communication and difficult decisions, been doing that for the last 30 years, and that’s me.

Brett McKay: Neil.

Neil Shortland: Thank you. So not to age Lawrence, but I was actually a student of his in 2011, on the master’s program in Liverpool, in which I was briefly introduced to some of the research and the ideas around how, I think, real people make decisions in the real world, and then for me, I actually ended up moving off and working with the UK Armed Forces and then moving to America and studying kind of security psychology. But throughout all of it, I kind of kept this real interest in a paper Lawrence wrote in 2012 about kind of what police decision-making looked like in these kind of fast-moving, counter-terrorism operations. And so I went back to Lawrence a couple of years later and kinda had this idea of, what if we look at this extreme decision-making psychology, but let’s add in this kind of military interest and angle that I kind of picked up along the way?

So for that, I think five or six years we kind of worked with the army over here and the army in the UK and lots of different agencies studying the real human process of making really difficult, high uncertainty decisions. And then I think kind of seeing the positive outputs of Lawrence writing Rapport and a book really aimed at the general population and translating our kind of psychology for a much larger audience, we had a thought that a really nice idea would be to do the same thing with decision-making, ’cause the more you talk about studying decision-making with everyone in your life, the more they tell you they really need help making decisions and they wish they understood their own decisions. And so that kind of brought us, I think, to the point of writing Decision Time, which was this translational piece of all of these soldiers and police and fire and all these difficult decisions we have studied and trying to use that to help people in their everyday lives with the decisions that they focus on and struggle with.

Brett McKay: Okay. So this type of decisions you’re focusing on this book are not everyday decisions, they’re not like, what am I gonna have for lunch? As you said, Neil, these are extreme decisions, like 1% of decisions people have to make. In the military, in the police, I can see the type of things that people would have to make a decision, whether to engage with an enemy, shoot, not shoot. For an average person, what kind of decisions, extreme decisions does a regular person have to face?

Lawrence Allison: There’s lots of books about decision-making and how to improve your life, but as Neil said, we’ve been dealing, in my case, for the last 30 years, with people that make life-changing decisions. And although that is within military, security services, law-enforcement and so on, nonetheless, we often find ourselves at a crossroads where we’re making a really difficult life-changing decision and it could be something as benign as, what house will I buy? But that said, sometimes these decisions are really, really important and are really difficult, that might be to do with whether to have cancer treatment or an end of life decision or something that is heavier, that is consequential, that is not reversible, that is high stakes, that does carry uncertainty and does carry risk. So they’re the, I guess, less than 1% of decisions that we might face but that are going to change our lives. And that’s why we wrote the book.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So okay, the stakes are high, a lot of uncertainty and other characteristics of the decisions, often times you just have to make that decision once in your entire life, and so you don’t have any patterns to look back on on how to make the decision, ’cause you haven’t faced it before and you probably never will again.

Neil Shortland: I think one of the things that I’d add is, so from… When we were doing the original work with the soldiers, I remember talking to a VA clinician about the kind of decisions that we were specifically focusing on. And the way she phrased them, which I always really liked was she called them kind of ‘Shoulda, woulda, coulda’ decisions, and what made these decisions that we studied so tricky was that, when the people made the decision, you could realistically see that both options could be good and both options could be bad. And very few decisions actually truly present in that way and it makes them very difficult to make, because even if you choose path A, it’s very easy to convince yourself that path B also could’ve been as good. And I think when we look at our everyday decision-making and the decisions we make in our life, it’s not every decision that presents itself that way, but there are, as Lawrence said, these life-changing, path-changing decisions we all face maybe around taking a job, maybe around ending a relationship, maybe around moving country for love or career or whatever it may be, and if it’s those decisions that both options could be really good or could be really bad, you’ve never had to make that calculation or that decision before and there is that high uncertainty.

Again, we’ve all experienced that, but as Lawrence said, it’s a rarer form of decision, but the impact and potential of these decisions is so, so much higher. And then the other thing that makes choice so difficult, and from a psychological standpoint, is in order to choose one cause of action, you necessarily have to sacrifice what the other course of action is offering you, and very few forms of decisions make you have to do that. Again, it’s a specific form of decision-making, but it is psychologically, I think the most difficult because you have to sacrifice, you have to argue to yourself and you’re starting from a place of really not knowing whether A or B is the right choice or the right outcome for you.

Lawrence Allison: Just to follow up on Neil’s thing, just by way of giving an example, we talk about in the book, we compare, which might be a weird comparison, but we talk about the Thai cave rescue where, what Neal was saying is, if you take one course of action and you send a SEAL in to go and save the kids, once you’ve committed to that course of action, it could go wrong, but you’re not gonna know whether that goes wrong until you commit. And in the same way, it might seem a ridiculous comparison, but if you’ve been in a relationship for many, many years and you decide to end that relationship, you can’t then not end it, you can’t have both pathways, you can’t have your cake and eat it.

Once you’ve made that commitment, those decisions that are irreversible are particularly difficult because you can’t play at that parallel universe version of that decision that you didn’t make or that choice that you didn’t take and see whether it would have been better or worse and that is what often causes hesitation. So one of the other things I wanna emphasize is this, that often it’s important to commit to what it is that you’re gonna do because a lot of people spend their lives waiting and thinking but not acting. So the other thing that this book touches on quite a lot is this thorny problem that we’ve seen a lot in emergency services, law enforcement and so on, that they’re not actually making erroneous decisions, they are failing to commit to a course of action. And you see this time and time again, whether it’s a terrorist event or a disaster management thing, organizations are often criticized for being slow to act or not acting at all, rather than making a really catastrophically bad decision. It’s about pace, timing and accuracy.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I wanna dig more into decision hesitation, decision inertia, ’cause I thought that was really interesting. But before we do, in your experience, when you’ve looked at the research literature and also just in your own experience, when an organization or an individual faces one of these extreme decisions where it’s super uncertain, you only have to make it once, the stakes are high, what’s the typical decision pattern or method that people fall back on to, and why do they fall short?

Lawrence Allison: Well, we’ve done quite a lot of work on the difference between novices and elite performers in this regard, and there are basically four mistakes that novices make that elite performers don’t. The first… And actually, all of these things are about proportionality and moderation. It’s a bit like the Rapport book where we’re talking about anything that’s extreme is usually bad, it’s the same kind of principle here. And what we know that our elite performers do are, first of all, when they are trying to weigh up what it is they are dealing with and diagnose the actual problem itself, they will develop two or three plausible explanations for what’s going on.

Novices either develop one and stick to it and confirm everything in that one direction, or they develop a huge proliferation of possibilities and they can’t juggle them in their mind. So proportionate development of three or four options to explain what’s going on and then digging into them to decide which best accounts for the situation, that’s the first thing. The second thing is time management. Our elite performers are neither too slow nor too quick. They know they need to ask about time or consider time as a factor that they need to consider, and if they think that the window of opportunity is collapsing quickly, they will go with the best option that they can given that time constraint. They also are able to [0:11:23.8] ____ if they do have more time and if you do, you should use it. If you’ve got more time to firm up the situation, you should use it.

Novices either act too quickly or too slowly and often don’t ask about time at all. The third thing is that our experts are able to adapt, so novices suffer from what we call entrainment. They will develop an idea, they will stick with that idea, and even in the face of compelling evidence that suggest they should change tact, they don’t. Our experts are able to recognize and respond to those cues rapidly and change accordingly. And then the fourth thing is the ability to revise the plan, the ability to throw out the plan that was developed, that was right for then, but isn’t right for now. So those are the four sort of mistakes people make. Too much faffing around trying to figure it out, not considering time at all or just pondering forever, failing to adapt to the new circumstances and being unprepared to revise. Our elite performers don’t do that, but I’ve got to say, our elite performers are rare, why? Because if this is 1% of the times that you have to make a decision, as Neil said, you don’t have that lexicon of experience behind you to be used to dealing with these novel or unique events.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and I think most people, what they do when they face a tough decision, at least this is my method, is I’ll go online and see, “Well, did someone else have this problem?” And see how they made the decision. But it’s kind of useful, but in the end it’s not… I usually find it not very useful because that person’s situation is so unique that it’s like, “Well, okay, this doesn’t apply to me. I don’t… I can’t do anything with this.”

Neil Shortland: Well, I think that’s a… It’s a really good point and it’s an interesting method, Brett, and I think it links to I think one of the points that we’ll hopefully talk about throughout the interview. But one of the big things we emphasize about these forms of decisions is that they are often deeply personal, as in what the right decision is varies based on who the decision maker is.

So to give you an example, when we were writing the book, it was kind of at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the things that a lot of people were talking about was how young couples were handling the decision to get married or not get married or delay or do it by Zoom and all of these kind of things. And looking at that decision, I think you could always… You could look at what other people were doing, you could look at were they doing it via Zoom, you could look at whether they were delaying three years, five years, 10 years, whatever it was. But to make that decision correctly, really it’s just… What matters is what is right for you in that moment and that’s one of the things I think the book really emphasizes on, is that it is always good to look at other people and think about maybe what other people have done, but at the end of the day, what we preach is this idea of know thyself, and so it really comes down to, I think what makes you be able to make that decision is being able to look inside of yourself and know what truly matters to you, ’cause it may be different to what these other people have done and how other people in the past have made that decision in that moment.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s circle back to this idea of decision inertia, why is it when we face these big decisions with high stakes, lots of uncertainty that we typically don’t do anything? Like what’s going on cognitively to cause that?

Lawrence Allison: Well, what people tend to do is they go through a process that we call redundant deliberation. It’s really weird actually because it’s using a lot of cognitive effort for no gain. They will think about option B and think about all the permutations for option B, they would think about option A and all the permutations for option A, and they will just not be able to decide between the two, ’cause they don’t want to commit, they don’t want to end that relationship, they don’t want to have that kind of treatment because not having it could be better or staying with the same person could be better, so the sort of in perpetuity just keeps circling around and around these plausible options. So my view that I used myself, two things that I ask myself that I think are useful when you’re faced with these are, one, do I have to decide now? You need to understand whether that decision is fast-paced or slow-paced, and if it’s fast-paced, maybe you need to make a decision now. But most decisions aren’t super fast, and so therefore you do need to slow things down and seek more information, but you can’t put an infinite timeline on it, you have to put something that’s proportional.

The second thing I always ask myself is this, what is the goal? What do I want this to end up looking like? And we’ve found it with police before or even just every day decisions, people get fixated on the decision, but not the ending point, not the goal. What is it ultimately that you want out of this? And Neil, I don’t know if you wanna talk about your own personal experience with your wedding, ’cause I know we went through it ourselves, but there was a lot of debate. But when you articulated what the goal was, the decision presented itself easily, so I don’t know if you wanna give that example.

Neil Shortland: Well, I can ’cause I think it’s interesting. So when we think about indecision, and I think one of the really interesting things about Lawrence’s work historically on this and some of the things that we brought into the book is, psychology is kind of the emphasis on stimulus response and most of psychological research is set up to force the person to choose something and assess the choice that they made. So the idea of, I guess studying the absence of a choice is actually quite psychologically odd, but one of the things that we see is it’s really, really pervasive, and you see it in everyday life, and there are different ways that people try and avoid decisions, from avoiding it completely to knowing what they want, but never, as Lawrence mentioned earlier, never actually behavior really committing to it. And it’s a really easy pattern to fall into.

And when I think about your question, Brett, what… How do we kind of overcome it and what does it… What kind of causes it? The thing that I always come back to, I think is fear encouraged being essential here. Because when you look at a true… A true difficult decision, so what we would call a least worst decision that we kind of talk about in the book, so all the examples we gave earlier, leaving relationships, changing jobs, moving countries, divorces, how to have a marriage, all this kind of stuff, choosing something and committing to a course of action requires great courage because you know that in doing so, you’re actively losing something by choosing the choice that you’ve made. And so I will give the example that Lawrence gave that I think a lot of young couples faced in 2020. So I was with my now wife, Spoiler, I guess to the decision we made, but we had that horrible decision in May of 2020, of do we get married via Zoom or some form of stripped down COVID wedding, or do we delay and have the big 100-person, 150-person wedding that we’d spend two years planning. And we ended up choosing to get married via Zoom.

And why I say that courage is so important is that when we made that choice, and so you know, we knew that we were gonna do it on the original date, just a few people, completely socially distant, with no family coming, no friends flying over. We knew that it was going to hurt and you know that it is a difficult decision, and even though you know that you’ve chosen the right thing, you still have to have courage because you know that you’ve sacrificed things that are really, really important to you. And I think that’s what really difficult choices require of you, they really require courage ’cause you know that even if you think or know you’re choosing something that’s right, you’re still losing something that mattered to you, and that’s why these decisions are so difficult. And so I think when it comes to this idea of overcoming inertia, of committing to decisions and making them in the real world…

One of the things that Lawrence and I talk about a lot in the book is just the value of courage, and that’s because fear of loss is such an innate human thing, we are designed to protect our resources, we hate the idea of loss. But a choice requires you to embrace loss and stare loss in the face because whatever you do, whatever you choose, you will have to lose something, you will have to sacrifice something. And so it’s this real balance, I think, of being brave enough to tolerate the loss in the knowledge that you are embracing the greater good or embracing the right choice for the right reasons.

Brett McKay: My own experience, the thing that causes me to put off decisions is that rumination trap that Lawrence was talking about, and like you said, it’s really sneaky because it feels like you’re doing something, It’s like, I’m really thinking about this, but you’re just going in circles just over and over again. You have to decide, “I gotta make a decision, this is not doing anything,” you have to catch yourself doing it and then just make the decision and move forward.

Neil Shortland: It’s kind of almost this curve of diminishing returns, and so we’ve planned a study recently where we kind of… We get people to make a series of decisions, and you can give… We ask them if they want more information, there are about five different information injects. And what’s really interesting is some people will say they want no information whatsoever and they just dive right in and that’s not good, and then some people want all of the information and eventually you have to kind of say, there’s no more information, just come on, come on and do the decision. And the Goldilocks in this is someone kind of in the middle who takes some early information and really helps themselves understand the situation, invest a little bit of time early on, but then knows that anything more that they’re getting out isn’t really helping them, and now is the time to just kind of get out of that redundant deliberation and just move on to the making of the decision. And it’s something interesting. And Lawrence, you might wanna talk about this from some of the work that we’ve done together, but we kind of identified this interesting Fox-Trot pattern that some of our better decisions makers engaged in, which is where they were, I think…

What is it like? Slow, slow, quick, quick. My dancing knowledge might be a little off.

Lawrence Allison: Yes, slow, slow, quick, quick. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, actually.

Neil Shortland: Okay. So what this was is we were doing a study with military or police, I think it was, and looking at the different patterns that people use to make decisions, and what we found was there was this one pattern that people engaged in, which was kind of fast, fast, slow, slow, which was that they moved through the information gathering stage really, really quickly, but then they got really stuck on the actual process of having to choose between the options, and then there was this kind of more… I think it was the more senior officers who actually demonstrated this pattern, which was kind of this idea of the slow, slow, quick, quick, which was that they took more time to gather the information, they took a bit more time to comprehend the situation, and then when it came to making the decision, they were much faster to be able to choose what the right option to them was.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You devote a chapter and you mentioned it early on about, if you wanna make better decisions, you have to know thyself. How does greater self-awareness improve decision-making? What do we need to know about ourself in order to make better decisions?

Lawrence Allison: Well certainly, one of the things that we’re repeatedly finding is that there’s this attribute called maximization or minimization, which in really simple terms is, if you tend to be a maximizer, you’re the sort of person that wants everything to work out really well, so you find it very hard to tolerate a poor outcome or even an outcome where there’s two options, both of them look bad and you’re not really prepared to even pick the least bad one, so there’s really bad and bad, but you just don’t want the bad one. And people that are maximizers, we tend to find, suffer more from this kind of redundant deliberation or constant rumination because they’re thinking… Basically feeling regretful about a future scenario that they find intolerable. Whereas, minimizers, which is the kind of alternative sort of thinking approach is, okay, this is not ideal, but I’d rather have this least bad option than the really bad one. So part of this is knowing whether you’re a minimizer or a maximizer, and they’re not necessarily one better than the other, but if you score very high on maximization, you tend to be the sort of person that will ruminate in perpetuity.

So that’s one function. The other thing that we know quite a lot about is this thing called need for closure, and in simple terms the idea of that is if you are the sort of person that requires a lot of predictability, certainty, order, decisiveness, you wanna know exactly what time you’re gonna meet at the restaurant, how many people are gonna be there, what’s gonna be on the menu, dadadada, that type of thing can slow people down as well, so people that can tolerate ambiguity, which is the opposite of need for closure, tend to be faster time decision makers. So the broad concept about knowing yourself, and I think Neil spoke about this earlier, is knowing what your value system is, where you wanna stack your tokens, what matters to you most and having good insight into that and being able to articulate that and face yourself in the mirror and think about it will help you identify the absolute critical function of decision-making, which is, what is my goal? Where do I wanna end up? What am I prepared to sacrifice and what I’m not, and Neil did a lot of work on what we call sacred and secular values, so just a little segue on that. Where you have a sacred value, it’s something which is non-negotiable. So if we talk about military sacred value, you might have a sacred value of, “Leave no man behind.”

A secular value is something that you’d like to retain but isn’t critical and might be negotiable, but where you have a problem is where two sacred values collide. So in military ops, what we found that if you’ve got the sacred value of leave no man behind and complete the mission, and we design a scenario which has both of those colliding, that’s where you find it difficult to tease those two things apart. So sacred values are the ones that are really tricky to negotiate. One other thing I just wanna add about a Fox-Trot thinking, which I think is interesting, and to just reinforce this point for listeners, stacking your tokens at the front end of the thinking is a good idea. To think about what it is that you are dealing with carefully and diagnose what you’re dealing with is really important, that then enables you to speed up.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah. Lawrence, we talked about the sacred/secular problem in our conversation about Hercules facing decisions. We had sacred values in conflict with each other and it made decisions tough.

Lawrence Allison: Yeah, yeah. Without segueing into the Hercules thing, we had that exact situation, didn’t we? Where he’d left one of his compadres behind after a scrap and that was a difficult thing to do. It kind of ruined him and created a degree of moral injury, and that’s not uncommon in soldier scenarios. But Neil may have something to say about this as well.

Neil Shortland: Well, no. I think it’s all tethered to the idea of kind of knowing thyself. And so the one thing that I’ve heard, most of the feedback I’ve had from the book from family member and friends is they call me and they say, “Oh, you wouldn’t believe it, I’m a maximizer.” And I’m like, “Well, yes, objectively, I probably could have told you that.” And they always say, “Well, it’s a bad thing” and I always say, “It’s not a bad thing, being a maximizer isn’t a bad thing. But knowing yourself means that you know what your miss is going to be.” And so what we talk about in the decision making is that there are times to be a maximizer and there are times when you really can’t maximize. And what you wanna avoid is the attempt to maximize in a non or un-maximizable situation.

And I think it’s really kind of one of the important things that knowing thyself means, is you know the pattern you’re gonna fall into, you know what your personality trait is and what you’re going to want from a decision. And sometimes it’s about knowing that the decision that you’re facing just isn’t gonna let you have everything and accepting that and being able to move on. And I think that links to what Lawrence was just saying, is kind of the second part of knowing thyself, which is literally about knowing thy values. And one of the formative books as we were writing the original book, we wrote a book called Conflict: How Soldiers Make Impossible Decisions, which kind of was our platform for writing Decision Time, was Mark Manson’s book, The Subtle Art. Basically the art to a happy life, or the art to happy living is knowing the one thing that you care about so much that you’re willing to sacrifice everything else.

And that has always been our kind of framework of knowing thyself and this discussion of sacred values, is looking at a decision and knowing the one value, if you can, the one value that absolutely matters more to you than anything else. And it’s really difficult to do. And we give examples in the book from people that we’ve met and people that we’ve worked with. And we have friends who we’ve watched face these kind of decisions. You’re given this brand new promotion or this brand new job opportunity, and it’s really important to you that you chase your career and you have value in your work and you achieve everything you can, but that’s running directly against something else that might be investment in the family and spending time with your young children and your wife as they grow up and they do these foundational moments of taking their first steps, saying their first words.

And what a good decision maker has to be able to do is to sit there and work out, “I have two values going against each other and whatever choice I make I’m going to run over one of those values, so which one can I absolutely not sacrifice in any way? Is it myself, my career, my confidence and my identity? Or is it me as a family member, me as a father, me contributing to the household? And if people aren’t able to know thyself and know that value and links back to the Heracles example that Lawrence gave in your prior podcast of, you actually risk this idea of moral injuries. When you make a decision that sacrifices something that’s truly, truly important to you, that’s a specific form of trauma that you can have from making the wrong decision in a crucial moment. And so all of our model of decision-making, it’s all based on first and foremost knowing who you are, knowing your patterns and your tendencies and your psychology and then knowing, really being able to work out what actually matters to you when it comes to making this decision, whether it’s the gold or the values.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s move on and talk about your decision making model and it’s called STAR, it’s an acronym, and the S in STAR stands for situational awareness or storytelling. What’s involved in developing good situational awareness? Any questions people should be asking when they face a decision and they’re trying to get their bearings on the situation?

Neil Shortland: So when it comes to situational awareness, I guess there are kind of… The original model is that there are kind of three stages of situational awareness, which is kind of identifying the patterns in the environment or cues in the environment that matter, webbing them together to get kind of get an understanding of what’s going on, and then this third layer is kind of using that to project what will happen if you do action A or do action B. And as Lawrence kinda mentioned earlier, the thing about situational awareness is it’s about not just going all in, originally just going all in on this one assessment of the situation, having adaptability and the flexibility to think about, what are the other factors that could be going on? What are the different interpretations of this situation? And we talk about in the book, one of these early trainings that Lawrence gave, and I think at the time I was kind of helping alongside.

But we gave this early training to police officers, kind of policing the tube during the, I think it was 2012 or 2014 Olympics in London, and what we talked to them about was this idea of, when you’re stressed, when you’re tired, when you’re hot, when you’ve got all of these things going on, you’re running out of resources and the natural pattern is to think you know what’s going on, to not test it, to not think of alternatives, and just to basically just go all in on this one assessment of the situation. And I think kind of in the S model of our STAR, what we really preach about is being open and flexible to thinking or holding in your mind, are there two or three potential explanations for this situation? Potential interpretations of what I’m seeing in front of me and what this means. And the extreme of that is something that Lawrence and I have talked about and we recently put a paper out, about, the best decision makers are, when they have to be they’re kind of grim storytellers, they have imagination, they’re really able to think critically about what their situation is.

And so with the S stage of the model, it’s finding a calibration between these two extremes that Lawrence mentioned earlier, right. The first is just… The first extreme is just seeing something thinking you know exactly what’s going on and diving right in with this kind of singular interpretation of the situation; This has happened and I think it’s gonna be this. On the very, very other end, is not really knowing or committing to any kind of interpretation and just thinking that, well, there are 100 things that could explain this and I can’t really move forward because I don’t really know possibly anything that’s going on in this situation. And in the middle, there’s this kind of sweet spot of being able to identify a few plausible explanations and taking the time to kind of game those explanations against each other to really get the best understanding of the situation that you can. Because everything about a decision stems from what you actually think is going on and how you’re interpreting kind of the information that’s in front of you.

Lawrence Allison: The key takeaways from that, I think, are, don’t over-ruminate about every possibility. Conjure in your head two or three possibilities and make sure that one of them, which I know is a bit unpleasant, but one of them should be, what’s the worst case scenario here? What is the… If I think this is going on, okay, I don’t really wanna go there and think it’s maybe this bad, but, you know what? Perhaps I do need to think it’s maybe this bad, because then the shock of it being that reality is less damning and you are prepared to deal with it. So simple takeaways, think about what it is you’re dealing with, have no more than three, that’s a bit of a rule of thumb, but it’s hard to have in your mind more than kind of three possible situational models about what you’re dealing with. Make sure one of them is the worst possible scenario.

Brett McKay: Okay. And what’s interesting is that all this, you don’t… You’re admitting that you don’t know what the situation is exactly ’cause you have three different options.

Lawrence Allison: Yeah, so you are alive to the possibility that there are three ways to explain what it is that you’re seeing. So say you wanna end a relationship or… I think we talk about a mastectomy there, whether you’re gonna have your breast removed in relation to cancer; you wanna sort of think about, what does this look like? What’s the worst case scenario? Or what do I value? Maybe this could happen, this could happen and this could happen. Three options. Best case scenario, worst case scenario, somewhere in between, but don’t ruminate on that forever. At that point, it gives you some kind of idea about how much… What work you need to do to disentangle whether it’s more likely to be one, two or three in the same way that perhaps someone that’s dealing with an illness is gonna be looking at it. Someone comes to the doctor and they present with various symptoms, that doctor should be thinking, “Well, this could be this bad, it could be cancer and therefore what do we need to do to firm up whether it is. What tests do we need to do that?” However, it could be something benign and that’s a plausible scenario as well, and it’s to that stage that you should seek to interrogate information that will help you push forward one of those three scenarios more than the other.

But like I say, when you’re considering these existential pathways, you do have to contemplate the worst case scenario. It gives you much more stretch in your imagination to be able to deal with what is gonna eventually be coming at you.

Brett McKay: Alright, so the next part of the Star Model, T stands for time mastery. Why is when we make a decision important and then what happens if your timing is off?

Lawrence Allison: Because if it’s imminent and the decisions move past you, you’re not good basically. It does surprise me how often people don’t even consider time. Our really poor decision-makers don’t even ask about it, they don’t think, “Do I have to decide now, how much time have I got?” They just think they’ve got all the time in the world. And for most of us, most of the time, happily, we do have a bit of time to think about our decision. In military situations that isn’t always the case, but sometimes even in our own lives there is a time limit on which we should really… I mean, I’ve spoken to countless people, police officers that have stayed in the same job for years, and every year they’re saying, I kind of feel a bit burnt out with this job and maybe I should change and I’m not giving enough time to my family, what do you think? And then we’ll go through all the possible scenarios that they could do and maybe they could change this or they could change to another unit, and then they’ll come back a month later, same thing and again and again and again. And if you don’t have that externally imposed time pressure on you, with a shoot, no-shoot decision, you can just keep extending that deadline forever.

So ask, “Do I have to decide now.” More often than not you don’t have to decide imminently, but if you don’t have to decide imminently, then you need to start thinking about, what is a reasonable amount of time to allocate to this decision. And a pretty good tip to tell you that you have now run out of time is if you keep asking the same questions and you keep getting the same information, then you really don’t wanna be waiting a lot longer because there is no new information and you do now need to decide.

Brett McKay: What happens if you have to make a decision now? Is there a heuristic that people can use to know what’s the right thing to do or the best thing to do in that situation?

Lawrence Allison: Very simple terms, least worst first. This is bad, this is awful, let’s go with bad.

Neil Shortland: If there’s a huge time pressure and you absolutely have to make a decision right now and you honestly are staring at two or three horrible or bad options, the only thing to be able to do is really say to yourself, what is the one option that I, or the one miss that I cannot tolerate? And that’s that kind of that… If you can do it, that’s that kind of sacred value. And under time pressure, that may be the only thing you have time to try and reflect on or calculate.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the next part of STAR is A and that’s adaptation. What do you guys mean by that?

Neil Shortland: Well, I think adaptation’s a really critical stage, because I think when we… It kind of links a little bit to the first stage, which is situational awareness. But there’s some old psychology in kind of the 1990s on NASA, I think it’s NASA errors, and it found that most of the bad decisions or error-based decisions in this pilot sample was not because they didn’t understand what was going on, it’s because they understood what was going on, then the environment changed and they were unable to update or re-evaluate what was going on when new information was coming in. And so I think one of the things about… When we look at these decisions in the real world and these complicated decisions that people are facing, they’re iterative, they’re moving moments in time. And so sometimes the scene does change and sometimes the situation does change. And what we often see is that people fail to adapt and update their way of thinking And there’s a lot of… I think this links, probably the point in the book that I think links to a lot of the core psychology around decision makers is driven by heuristics and biases and cognitive closure.

And the fact that the… We are cognitive misers in the sense that we’re always trying to confirm what we currently think is correct anyway because it’s easier than having to re-update and re-evaluate and reconsider what we think we’re staring at. And so the adaptation phase is encouraging people that even if you’ve made the best assessment of the situation you can, and even if you have understood your relationship with time and when a decision needs to be made, and assuming that you haven’t missed the decision window, be open to updating your assessment of what’s going on. Be open to new information. Be willing to ask if things on the ground have changed, if your current understanding is no longer in date and needs to be updated. And it’s just an exercise in almost good cognition.

Good cognitive healthy behavior to re-evaluate, re-update, reintegrate and just to check that what you think is going on and assessed is going on is still there. And it’s really difficult. So one of the examples we have in the book is this interesting case of this guy, Jack, who’s offered this job out of the blue and it’s kind of a shiny new job with a shiny new promotion. And if anyone’s ever been offered a job or offered an opportunity, suddenly, the way you evaluate the current job, you’re almost looking for the negatives now. You’ve been offered this shiny new thing and it changes the way you look at everything around you. And that’s the brain, that’s the mind trying to make the decision easier by stripping away uncertainty and just closing itself off to any alternative way of thinking.

So when we make decisions our cognitive structure is sometimes working against us to make things simpler. And so adaptation in dynamic and difficult decisions is absolutely essential because people need to keep checking that their assumptions are correct, keep checking the situation is what they think it is. Is there anything new? Is there anything different? Is there a bit of information that really needs me to think differently that something else is actually going on here, that something has changed since I started trying to work through this decision. And it’s just one of those critical stages that we often don’t see and that old research has found it, our own research has found it, that yeah, people really need to focus on being adaptive and making sure that their assessment is always in time with what they’re facing.

Brett McKay: So the final part of STAR is R, and that stands for revision and resilience. And this can be a really hard part because often our tendencies… After we’ve made a decision, we’ve taken action and we’re doing it, even though we get new information and we see, like, “Oh, we should probably adapt,” it’s really hard to go back on your decision. It’s like, “Well, I made a decision, I gotta stick with it.” So how do you figure out whether or not you should stick with a decision or you should bail and change your mind to do something else?

Neil Shortland: So it’s a really interesting conundrum, and again, I think it speaks to just the way… Just the ethos of the kind of psychology we talk about in the book. And Lawrence mentioned it earlier, I think, “Nothing is good in extremes.” And so in the resilience chapter and revision, we really talk about this idea of change in its extremes. And so one extreme of change is someone who, the minute they face a difficulty, the minute they face a hardship, abandons course and immediately goes to find a new course of action and decides that their plan is a failure. And in psychology there’s a lot of theories and research on things like grit. So Angela Duckworth, her idea of grit is this kind of… This golden trait that predicts success is people’s ability to be gritty and work through things. And we talk about desirable difficulties as being able to work through difficult moments. And difficult decisions often require difficult moments.

So the wedding example I gave earlier, after making the decision, there were difficulties in telling people what your choice is. There’s difficulties, and if you change a job, it’s not immediately amazing sometimes. And in the first 6 to 12 months, there’s difficulties. If you leave a relationship, there’s difficulties, right? And so there’s this psychological idea that you have to work through those and that’s critical to success. And it is. And then on the other side, there’s another organizational psychologist who kind of studied this idea of persistence and identified this really interesting part of persistence called inappropriate persistence, which is kind of this idea of just persisting for the sake of persisting because you just want to persist, right? Which is almost like the complete opposite end of the spectrum. And you’re not persisting for a reason, you’re not persisting for a purpose, you’re merely persisting because you don’t want to not persist at something.

And again, that extreme of non-revision is equally detrimental and equally harmful. If you change jobs and you move countries and two years in you hate it, and you still are unhappy and still nothing is going correct, maybe that’s a point to re-evaluating and coming home. And so it comes down to the question that you asked, which is how do you juggle and how do you know what the right balance of those two polar ends of the scale are? And I think it comes back to in the way that we kind of talked about it in the book, is knowing why you’re persisting, right. So when you’re experiencing a difficulty, a desirable difficulty or otherwise, why are you being gritty? What are you persisting in purpose of or in the quest for? And I think it comes back to that idea of, are you persisting for something that is sacred, that is important, that means something to you? Are you persisting in line with your values and your goals? And if you’re not and you just find yourself persisting because of a fear of non-persisting, well, then you may be in that state that you’re no longer being driven by the right motives and by the right motivations.

Brett McKay: Oh, so it all goes back to knowing thyself.

Neil Shortland: I think it really does, and I think the more that we talk about the book and the more that we hear from the readers that have been very kind to share their thoughts on it with us, that’s what I think it comes down to. One of the big parts, I think, when we wrote it and what people are reading from it is the value of knowing thyself. And it’s difficult because, I think especially if you’re young and you’re thinking about your values. You know, values change, knowing yourself. The personality may be slightly more rigid, but things that are sacred to you, that matter to you, that are really important to you, they change and it’s almost like working out. It’s something that you do need to consciously often think about. Think about what matters to you, reflect on it, update what is actually sacred and important to me?

And Lawrence and I, we had a long walk on the beach a few weeks ago where we talked about our values and our goals. And it’s interesting that I’ve kind of… As I’ve grown up, I’m experiencing sacred value shifts in real time. And you can’t make a good decision unless you know what the most important thing to you is, because the real risk here… I think that one of the risks is not making a decision, but the other risk is making a decision driven by a value that you think is the sacred one and finding out after you’ve made the decision that it really isn’t. And that’s not a state, I think, we’d wish on anyone and something that really this book is aimed at trying to help people avoid. So while I think the STAR model is critical because I think it really talks about what I think real-life, difficult decisions look like, we can’t take away from just the importance of knowing who you are and what really matters to you when you’re kind of looking at making these kind of fork-in-the-road, life-changing decisions.

Brett McKay: Well, Lawrence, Neil, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Neil Shortland: The book is currently available on amazon.co.uk and on Audible. And for any American listeners, I believe in about a few months it will be out for the stateside audience. And any of our work on kind of the operational side of things, so training with police, military, law enforcement, we have our Ground Truth website, which Lawrence can correct me if I get it wrong. It’s ground-truth.co.uk, but that’s where we kind of work with all of the practitioners on our decision-making trainings and our rapport trainings and any of that or our Twitter feed if you, I guess, wanna see our opinions on, well, current events.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Lawrence and Neil, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Neil Shortland: Thank you, Brett.

Lawrence Allison: Great to speak to you.

Brett McKay: My guests today were Lawrence Alison and Neil Shortland. They are the authors of the book, Decision Time. It’s available on amazon.com. Make sure to check out our short notes at aom.is/decisiontime where you find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of The AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of The AoM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLINESS at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android IOS and you could start enjoying ad free episodes of the AoM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us your review on our podcast or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you’d think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post #774: How to Make Life’s Big Decisions appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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