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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
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Transcript Coming SoonThis article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
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
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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.
That Dwight D. Eisenhower became Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, orchestrating the largest amphibious invasion in history on June 6, 1944, was far from inevitable.
He came from the middle of nowhere — Abilene, Kansas — had never led men in battle, spent most of his career as a staff officer, and didn’t make general until he was in his fifties.
How, then, did he become the leader on whom the fate of the world would rest?
Today, we trace the making of Ike with Michel Paradis, author of The Light of Battle. We talk about how Eisenhower’s Midwestern upbringing shaped his character, and how his most important education happened outside the classroom. Michel shares how crucial mentors were in Ike’s development, and how Eisenhower made the most of those relationships. We discuss the books that were most formative in shaping his thinking, including what he got from Nietzsche. We also get into some of the practices Eisenhower used to lead effectively, including how he budgeted his time to maintain his morale while under the pressure of planning D-Day and what he did the evening before the invasion to deal with the stress.
Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast #641: How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike’s Granddaughter * AoM series on Eisenhower’s leadership * AoM Podcast #996: Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later * The Line Man’s Bible: A Football Textbook of Detailed Instruction by Ernest Graves. * Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come * Fox Conner * The Czar of Halfaday Creek* by James B. Hendryx
Connect With Michel Paradis* Michel on LinkedIn * Michel’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.
Read theTranscriptBrett McKay: All right, Michelle Paradis, welcome to the show.
Michelle Paradis: Thanks so much for having me.
Brett McKay: So you got a book out called The Light of Battle, which is about D-Day. D-Day is one of the most studied and written about events in modern history. What do you think gets missed in the books on D-Day? And what were you hoping to bring to our understanding of D-Day with your book?
Michelle Paradis: No, that’s exactly right. There are so many great books about D-Day too that I definitely knew in starting this one that I couldn’t write just another book about D-Day. If only because like, you know, competing with people like Max Hastings is going to always be impossible. And so, you know, to me, I think the thing we missed, to answer your question about D-Day, the thing that fascinated me is not just the actual heroism of the men who hit the beaches, you know, on Omaha or on Juneau, but how much went into it. How much was behind them? We think about those 176,000 men who hit the beach in the first day, you know, obviously correctly. They are the literal heroes of that story. But, you know, depending on how you count it, about 2 million people made D-Day happen. And that kind of collective action, right, that working together for a common goal was essential to D-Day’s success. And that ultimately is what drew me, especially to Eisenhower. And obviously there’s no lack of historical celebration for Dwight Eisenhower, but I also think we almost take him for granted.
You know, there’s a book, a minute about people like, you know, about Churchill, about Patton, about D-Day itself, but there are actually very few serious studies of Eisenhower. The last, you know, significant biography, certainly covering his wartime experience, is at least about 10, 15 years old now. And I just thought that was amazing, right? I couldn’t understand that because here you are, you have this guy, he comes from the middle of the country, right, about as far away from anywhere as you could possibly get, which is Abilene, Kansas, and not only comes to the heights of military leadership in the Second World War, he commands the most complicated, and I would argue consequential military operation of that war, which is D-Day, and then goes on to be probably one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century, the first president we call the leader of the free world. And so many, I think, even admiring takes of Eisenhower sort of look at him as like this inevitable figure or a boring figure at worst, like the, you know, the 50s, the mayonnaise on white bread kind of thing. And to me, I just knew that there was something more going on there.
And so in thinking about D-Day and thinking about the heroism of the men on the beach on D-Day, I really wanted to just understand how they got there and how they got there in a way to succeed. And that took me to Dwight Eisenhower.
Brett McKay: And that’s what I loved about the book. You get into his personality or try to, because he is kind of an enigma. He’s kind of a Sphinx character in a lot of ways, just kind of this affable, smiling guy. And I think that’s why he gets overlooked. But you try to paint a picture of him that, no, there’s a lot going on with this guy. And that’s why he was so successful as a commander and later as a president of the United States. So let’s dig into Eisenhower and try to figure out how did this guy manage to carry off one of the biggest military invasions in the history of humanity? You mentioned he grew up in Abilene, Kansas. How do you think his Kansas upbringing prepared him for his role in World War II?
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, I mean, he’s such a fascinating figure, like as you say, because he’s known, certainly in his lifetime, particularly as president, as being, you know, everyone likes Ike. He is this smiling guy. He’s sort of almost seen as, again, bland or non-threatening. And yet he is probably, you know, responsible literally for the deaths of millions of Germans and one of the most, I think, cunning and in some ways ruthless military and political figures of the 20th century. But it’s all concealed around this very sort of bland, deceptively bland, I would say, packaging of smiling Ike. And a lot of that traces to his upbringing in Kansas. And there are a couple of things that I think shape him. You know, he’s born in 1890, which is sometimes celebrated as the year the West was closed, and he grows up in Abilene, which had been a, you know, a cow town from the Wild West, but by that point had become a fairly reserved, very religiously oriented community around the River Brethren. And his family, his father’s family, was a very prominent religious family, a farming family. But his own father was a, you know, a complicated guy.
He wasn’t a drinker, but he was definitely abusive. And even for the time, I would say, abusive. You know, late 1800s Kansas. And so Eisenhower grows up in this community in the middle of Kansas, which emphasizes a certain kind of, you know, humility. You know, if you talk to anyone from Kansas, the most important thing they’ll let you know is, well, Kansas is nothing to talk about. You know, we’re just humble people from the plains. And so that sense of Eisenhower of being, in a way, self-effacing is right out of Kansas, right? Everyone in Kansas recognizes that. But I think the other things he gets from growing up in his very unique circumstances is, one, a real burning desire to see the rest of the world. I don’t know that he travels more than about 100 miles or so before he ends up enrolling in West Point when he’s 19 years old. And as the middle child of a fairly low-income, large family, he just has this itch to want to see the absolute rest of the world. And that leads him to cultivate all sorts of mentors, both in Abilene and then really for the rest of his life.
It’s probably one of his greatest skills as a sort of a man in development is that he looks for people who seem to have figured something out that he wants to know. And he gloms onto them and tries to learn from them in a really intimate way. And in Kansas, one of his first mentors is the publisher of the local Democrat newspaper, the Dickinson News. And he just goes to this guy’s newspaper shop, hangs out there after school, typically with some friends. And this publisher sees in Eisenhower a curiosity, and Eisenhower wants to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. And so this guy starts just giving Eisenhower books to read. And one of Eisenhower’s favorite, or the one that makes the biggest imprint on him, is The Life of Hannibal. Now, when I said Eisenhower is the middle child of a very large, low-income family, that’s also a religiously pacifist family. His father and his mother were part of a movement called the Bible Students, which we now know as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but were much more, how would we say, mystical movement at the turn of the 20th century.
And his religiously pacifist mother is not at all impressed when he brings home The Life of Hannibal, and in fact confiscates it from him and puts it away in her closet. And as Eisenhower sort of tells the story later, he would wait until she was out in the garden culling some of the crops, and he would sneak into her closet like he was looking for the Playboy and read The Life of Hannibal sort of in secret, and just became fascinated by, really in love with, a kind of military heroism, a kind of manly figure. And the thing he would always say about Hannibal in particular is that he knew from the time he was a young boy that Hannibal was one of the greatest generals in all of history because he was recounted as such, but only ever by his enemies. There are no extant tracts or histories by the Carthaginians of Hannibal’s exploits, only those written by the Romans. And to Eisenhower, the fact that someone could be so compelling as a figure, so powerful as a general, so brilliant, so heroic, as to go down in history that way when the only people writing about you are the enemies who fought you in battle, really impressed Eisenhower from a young age.
And so that upbringing in Kansas, that combination of, you know, it sounds cliche, but it’s true, small-town values, but combined with this real burning itch to get out of Kansas, to see the rest of the world, to be a part of the world, formed Eisenhower’s character at a young age in ways that you can see almost to the day he dies.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned West Point was his ticket out of Abilene. He went to West Point. How did West Point prepare him to be Supreme Allied Commander, you think?
Michelle Paradis: A couple of different ways. You know, Eisenhower went to West Point as his, you know, ironically enough, his way of rebelling against his parents and his ticket out of Abilene. And he gets there, and he’s really quite awkward. You know, he is a country boy, but he has a sense of this is where he wants to be. And this is where he’s, in a sense, always wanted to be since he was a boy. And so ends up doing two things in his career at West Point that end up, I think, shaping him and the sort of the Eisenhower we know forever. One is he has this deep concern about his background. He is not the son of a general. He is not part of the sort of burgeoning American aristocracy that is filling the ranks of his classmates. But that gray uniform they all wear at least covers up how sort of shabby and country his clothes are. But the way he talks, where he’s from, right? No one’s ever heard of Kansas, really. But people have heard of Abilene, that old west sort of history that Abilene carried as being the place where cowboys had shootouts in the town square. Eisenhower fully embraces as part of his personality.
And it’s where he begins to take on the nickname Ike as well, because Ike is this sort of typical name for a cowboy in the dime westerns that you’d get. You know, a cowboy who was out on the land all alone, who was his own man, who was always there to do the right thing, even if he was a little uncultured. And really leans into this identity of being sort of from the cowboy town, even though that is not at all consistent with how he actually grew up, but develops this kind of like cool, right? It’s funny to say Eisenhower was cool, but in West Point, he definitely develops this sense of cool and devil may care, big smile, you know, always ready for a good time that cultivates, I think, a very warm kind of friendship and respect between his classmates who go on to be his contemporaries in the army over the next 30 years. The other thing though, and this is, I think, underappreciated now, just given how different we think about sports, but he also was a star football player in his freshman and sophomore years, and not particularly skilled,
Right? He wasn’t a very, very fast runner, but he was a hardcore player, right? He would just throw himself into the opposing line. And so he was known as a bruiser and started, you know, having a lot of success and gaining quite a reputation for himself as a football player, but then blows out his knee. And at the time in West Point, if you had an injury like that, you could get kicked out, not of West Point, but kicked out of the army. And so Eisenhower is faced, you know, from a young age with the prospect of really not having a military career left just because of his knee injury. But the one thing he does, and the one thing the army sees in him is, you know, once he’s literally back on his feet, he can’t play football anymore, but he can coach it. And he becomes the assistant coach of the football team and demonstrates a kind of genius for the game, a genius for organizing men on the field that just as a practical matter, the army really appreciated back then because people used to play a lot of very competitive football. It was kind of the way softball leagues are maybe today.
But that in turn is what keeps him in the army. The army always wants a good football coach. And he basically spends the first 10 years almost of his career as like a star football coach in the army. But that also gives Eisenhower the first real lessons in leadership. And those lessons in leadership of leading a football team, coaching a football team end up, I think, shaping his understanding of what it means to lead in battle, to lead an army in ways that far surpass anything he actually learns in the classroom, either at West Point or the Command and General Staff School or anywhere else. It’s really at West Point and that opportunity to be a football coach that he learns to really be a leader.
Brett McKay: In this section about his role as army football coach and as a player for the team, you talk about this guy, Ernest Graves. He was an army football coach and he wrote this book, Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna go find this Ernest Graves book. And I read it in just like one setting. It was really easy to read. But you’re right, there’s these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but an army, a military unit.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly in my telling of it, is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather predictions about whether to launch this invasion. And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became, or it’s going to be a complete and utter disaster. There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he’s making this decision. And when he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let’s go. And that’s his famous sort of send-off speech for the D-Day invasion. And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field. He’s like, well, okay, when it’s time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let’s go. And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower’s head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, we’ll never really know. But yeah, that sense of, okay, it’s my job to lead this team. And the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct. And this section about his role as army football coach and as a player for the team, you talk about this guy, Ernest Graves. He was an army football coach and he wrote this book, Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna go find this Ernest Graves book. And I read it in just like one setting. It was really easy to read. But you’re right, there’s these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but an army, a military unit. Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly in my telling of it, is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather predictions about whether to launch this invasion. And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became, or it’s going to be a complete and utter disaster. There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he’s making this decision. And when he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let’s go. And that’s his famous sort of send-off speech for the D-Day invasion. And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field. He’s like, well, okay, when it’s time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let’s go. And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower’s head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, we’ll never really know.
But yeah, that sense of, okay, it’s my job to lead this team. And the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct.
Brett McKay: So he graduates West Point in 1915. World War I is happening, but he doesn’t get sent off there. Instead, he gets kind of sent off to different training positions, and then he becomes sort of this staff officer. Not really on the battlegrounds. How did those staff positions prepare him for D-Day, you think?
Michelle Paradis: I think they prepared him uniquely well. And it gets to something I was saying a few minutes ago, is that one of Eisenhower’s, I think, most important leadership lessons is the importance of followership. And it’s the importance, particularly when you’re young, particularly when you’re coming up, to understand that your job is not to be the smartest person in the room. Your job is to figure out who the smartest person in the room is and make yourself as useful as possible to them. Because in doing that, not only are you going to be much more effective than kind of butting heads with the person who actually knows what they’re doing with your own ill-conceived ideas, but you’re going to learn a lot. If you keep a genuinely open mind and pay attention to what that person is doing and how they’re making decisions, you’re going to learn a ton from them that you can then use as you rise up the ranks. And so for Eisenhower, one of the ways I even thought about telling his story is by telling it through his mentors. And I could rattle them
Off, but the big ones certainly are people like Joe Howe, who was that newspaper publisher, Fox Connor, who he spends a long and very formative period with in Panama. But then people like General Moseley, who is probably one of the more suspect figures in history, but who has a big influence on Eisenhower. Same thing with General MacArthur, and then obviously General Marshall, and then I would even say Roosevelt and Churchill. As Eisenhower rises up the ranks, there’s always someone who’s the smartest person in the room, and he gets that. But he makes himself as useful as possible to fulfilling their vision. And in the course of doing that, learns their skills, learns how they either command an army, how they manage a team, or how they develop and use political power in ways to get things actually done, the way Roosevelt and Churchill did. And so it’s by having the humility, really, to be that staff officer, to be the one who helps the leader execute their plans, that Eisenhower really does grow into an incredibly formidable political figure in his own right.
Brett McKay: One thing I’ve taken away from Eisenhower’s experience as a staff officer is, yeah, that humility, and then also patience with your career. I know Eisenhower lamented when World War I was over. He’s like, is it? My military career is over. It’s not going anywhere. I’ve gone as far as I can go, and I missed it. I missed my chance. And he didn’t know he was about to embark on the biggest part of his military career. And it would happen in his 50s.
So I mean, I think that’s a great lesson there for a young guy, or even if you’re a guy in your 30s or your 40s, you think, man, I missed the boat. This is as good as it’s going to get. Maybe not. You could have a whole big, giant book of life ahead of you, like Eisenhower had, after his staff positions.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, it’s definitely an encouraging story to anyone who’s still not yet in their mid-50s to see that Eisenhower starts World War II as a colonel, and within a matter of three years, he’s a five-star general. And again, one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century, too. And yeah, it wasn’t just after World War I. There are a lot of false dusts in Eisenhower’s career where he thinks he’s just finished. It’s all over. I’ve wasted my best years. This is the end. And each time, he’s proven wrong because there’s a new and often greater challenge just waiting just a little bit further down the line that he ends up having to take on.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned one of Eisenhower’s mentors during this staff officer period of his career was Fox Connor. This was when he was in Panama. This is one of my favorite sections of the book because you explore the education that Connor gave Eisenhower. This is where really Eisenhower got his education. He didn’t get it at West Point. It was when he was in Panama with this Fox Connor guy. So what did that tutelage look like under Connor? What did he tell Eisenhower? What did he assign Eisenhower to read? Tell us about it because I think it’s really interesting.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, yeah. Fox Connor, he’s the son of a Confederate wounded veteran, has an army career, a quite distinguished army career in its own right. He’s probably the principal military planner of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, where he comes to know George Patton, George Marshall. Fox Connor has a pretty amazing repertoire of connections that obviously matter a lot in Eisenhower’s life too. And Eisenhower gets stationed with him in Fort Gaillard, Panama, and this is a backwater in a backwater. I got to be honest with you. And one of the things that I never was able to fully pin down is why Fox Connor got marooned to command this podunk post in the middle of nowhere. It’s not obvious. But one of the things that is suggested though is that Fox Connor was not an easy person to get along with at all.
He had a Mississippian sort of rigidity to his personality. He was extremely serious. He inspired very little loyalty, let alone affection in subordinates who saw him as extremely high-handed and brusque. And Eisenhower, frankly, is no different, I think, when he arrives in Panama. Fox Connor basically makes him every day write out these very complicated orders of the day. What is everyone to do for today and how are they to do it? And there’s no point in this exercise, right? The army’s job in Camp Gaillard is basically to make sure the camp doesn’t fall into the Panama Canal. And that’s it. There’s nothing going on there.
He was first in his class, and it’s from then on that Eisenhower’s career just takes off.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You mentioned that one of the books Conor gave him was The Philosophy of Nietzsche, and you talk about the book. That book actually had a big impact, a lasting impact on Eisenhower. How did Nietzschean philosophy influence
Michelle Paradis: Eisenhower, you think? Oh, that was a real surprise to me, right? Almost the last person you think about when you’re thinking about Eisenhower is Friedrich Nietzsche. But sure enough, I was able to, again, one of the real difficult things as a research matter, but one of the most satisfying in trying to understand Eisenhower was just figuring out what books he read and then reading them. So what’s in his head and where can you see these ideas pop up later, if at all? And when I read the copy of Nietzsche that Fox Connor had, almost right away, I’m looking at almost verbatim things Eisenhower says later. And there are a couple of things that are going on in Nietzsche, or at least the Friedrich Nietzsche that Eisenhower reads, that are incredibly formative to Eisenhower. One is what we probably would just call basic stoicism. Going back to at least Marcus Aurelius, this idea of manhood being about seeing the world as it is in an unsentimental way and knowing that the truth is always going to matter much more than any ideology or idea or wish for how the world could be.
And that anytime you find yourself, as he often did and would, complaining about, oh, things aren’t turning out the way I hoped, knowing that, shut up, your feelings don’t matter. What matters is what is. And as soon as you can reconcile yourself to that, the better. And so that’s a big part of Eisenhower’s own philosophy, just being very objective and really quite hostile to ideology, which I think is one of Eisenhower’s most important and laudable traits, whether or not it’s Nazi fascism or communism or any of the other sort of, how would you sort of say it, sort of ideologies or theories of the day. Like he’s always worried and always thinking fundamentally about brass tacks. Okay, how does this really matter? What’s really going on? What’s really motivating people? Another big thing in Nietzsche that Eisenhower like fully embraces is the virtue of toughness and the manly virtues, so to speak, the willingness to fight for something bigger than yourself as a virtue in and of itself. And then the third thing I think that Eisenhower draws directly out of Nietzsche, actually quotes it several times without attributing it, but it’s right out of Nietzsche, is this idea that human beings all have a fundamental desire to be free.
And that when you motivate that, when you can appeal to that individual desire to be free, people are willing to do anything, to fight and to die for their own freedom. And indeed, one of the biggest quotes he often repeats that again is verbatim out of Nietzsche, is the idea that there is nothing more powerful than a motivated democracy. That democracy fundamentally is all about allowing free people to be free. And if you can harness that energy, that drive towards something greater than themselves, that individual desire to be free, to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, that you harness the most powerful force that human beings can muster.
Brett McKay: So Eisenhower graduates from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He’s still confined to sort of administrative positions. He’s the aide to General Douglas MacArthur. He serves as the chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division. He holds various staff positions in Washington, D.C. He’s a colonel when World War II starts. He’s never led a battle. He doesn’t have that big personality like a MacArthur or Patton, but he still gets the job of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe over George Marshall, who is also in the running. And there’s a whole interesting story there. But from the time he takes that command, he’s got less than six months to plan Operation Overlord, D-Day. What kind of physical and emotional toll did the pressure in planning that invasion take on Eisenhower?
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, it’s an incredibly compressed time frame. The day by day is just stunning. And yeah, it has a huge toll. It has to. Eisenhower is basically sick the entire time, to varying degrees of severity. His cold basically comes and goes. He smokes like a chimney. He’s up to three packs a day by the time the D-Day invasion launches. I did the math on that. That’s about 11 to 12 hours of smoking per day. He begins to drink too much. He sleeps like three to four hours a day. And he really does bear the weight of it internally in ways that you, you know, it’s almost difficult to imagine anyone else being able to endure. You know, he’s lonely. He misses his family. He misses his son. There’s a moment when he, which I recount in the book, which is so poignant, when he’s asked to essentially give the commencement address at Britain’s equivalent of West Point and, you know, gives this very solemn speech about how the weight of the world is on these young men who are going to be literally his subordinates in a matter of weeks. And he writes this letter home that’s so meditative. It’s quite dark, where he says, you know, I just don’t understand this human need to destroy and how so many lives are put to waste and how we haven’t learned as a species to do better, to be kinder to each other.
And I think the poignancy of that moment came not just in the fact that he’s looking at these young men who he is confident he is sending to their deaths at some point or very well could, but they’re his son’s age. His son John is actually graduating from West Point, ironically enough, on June 6th, 1944. And, you know, as he’s bestowing awards and shaking their hands, like they look and act and are exactly like his own son. And that has to occur to him in terms of just like what is really putting what at risk? What are the costs? What are the dangers that these young men who are going to be crossing that beach, what are they confronting and why are they doing it? And he’s the one there sending them off, right? It’s his responsibility ultimately. He owns that. And the pressure is insane.
Brett McKay: So besides smoking and drinking a lot, another thing that helped Eisenhower deal with the pressure of the battlefront was spending time with what he called his official family. And this was like his tight inner circle of individuals he was close to. It included Case Summersby, his driver. There was his personal naval aide, Harry Butcher, his secretary, Mattie Panette. What role did Eisenhower’s official family play in kind of boosting up his morale during this period?
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to overstate. He’s not a drunk, to be clear. You know, he basically spends, no, but he spends his nights. Eisenhower’s very disciplined about organizing his time. It’s actually one of the more interesting and I think prescient leadership traits that he has is that he knows that a big part of his job is just making so many decisions day after day, high consequence, low consequence, just one after the other. And to do that effectively, to make the best decision he can, regardless of how it turns out, he has to keep himself healthy, both physically and mentally, as much as he possibly can. And so he’s very disciplined ultimately about budgeting out his time, right? This is an era before smartphones. And so when he goes home basically to the official family, he basically is disciplined from about 7 or 8 o’clock at night when he can about turning off the office and playing bridge and watching movies together and chatting and reciting poetry. It’s a really, I think, important opportunity he has to just be as human as possible under the circumstances. And this official family is both his literal
Aides, right? There are secretaries and drivers and things like that. But I think they’re just also the people that he can relax with. These are the people who are not gunning for him. They’re not trying to get anything from him. They’re not trying to use or manipulate him for their own ends. These are just the people he can trust day in and day out. And he knows he needs that retreat and he needs to take advantage of that retreat and not just constantly be working because otherwise he’ll collapse, he’ll burn out, and he won’t be able to make the hard decisions that he
Brett McKay: Has to make. I think it’s a great lesson for even if you’re not the Supreme Allied Commander, take your rest time seriously and make time for it. If Eisenhower could have done it during Overlord, you can do it when you’ve got your 9-5 job. Like, you’re okay.
Michelle Paradis: That’s right. Turn your phone off. Hang out with your kids. Have a meal without looking at your
Brett McKay: Phone. So you mentioned there’s a lot of internal struggles that Eisenhower had. He knew the impact his decisions were going to have. He was going to send lots of young men to their death. I mean, how did he do that and think about the human consequences while not letting it paralyze him? Because I think that’d be really hard. I mean, if I were in that position, I would think, oh my gosh, I can’t even make a decision. I would just freeze. What do you think Eisenhower did to overcome that while maintaining his humanity at the same time?
Michelle Paradis: I think actually the key thing was that he maintained his humanity. You know, we talked a bit about Nietzsche and this is sort of a Nietzschean idea or a stoic idea at least, but I think it also comes right out of Nietzsche, is that he never looked away from the consequences of his own decisions. Like he fully embraced them only as a corrective to make sure he was making the right decision. And being able to hold those things in his head at the same time I think was a key part, certainly of his ability to lead in crisis and some of the hard decisions he made. I’ll give you just one example of it that almost brings me to tears every time I think about it, is the night before D-Day launches, he goes around and sees off the 101st Airborne. And there’s probably the most famous picture of Eisenhower addressing these young men who were all painted up and getting ready to jump out of these planes over France. And he had been given an estimate just before that about half of these guys are gonna be lost. Half! And he’s sending thousands of these young men across the English Channel.
So he goes and he goes to see them off and there’s no fanfare, right? This is not a review. He literally just has Kay drive up as quietly as possible, gets out and just starts mingling between them and shaking their hands and talking to them. And again, there’s this very famous photograph where his hand is forward and he looks like he’s very sternly telling them some sort of great rallying cry to get them over the beaches. And with a little bit of tracking down, Ribna find the actual story behind that photo. And the guy he’s talking to, he’s talking to him about fishing because he would just go up to these guys and be like, what do you like to do? Where are you from? What was your job? What’s your hobbies? Anyone from Kansas? And this guy said he likes fishing. And Eisenhower is an adamant fisher himself, and a fly fisherman on top of that. And he’s like, so when you throw a rod, this is how I throw it. And he’s demonstrating the throwing of his rod, and the photographer just sort of happened to catch the moment in this way that has this very sort of commanding overtone to it.
But what’s really going on there is he’s just treating that young man like a human being, like his son, like himself. And when he goes around and meets these young men and shakes their hands, he forces himself to look each one of them in the eye when he does it. And think about that. Each hand he shakes, he knows that basically every other one is going to die, right? Every other one is some kid who is either his son’s age or younger, who’s just not going to go home again, who’s not going to see his own father again. And Eisenhower made himself do that, not only, I think, to be there for them and to let them know that he saw them and saw them not as soldiers to be sent across the border, but as young men who he cared about, who had their own lives and dreams and interests, but to remind himself of that too. And when he finishes, he just collapses into the back of his car and just said, well, no one can stop it now. And that’s how he ends June 5th, 1944. But I also think that’s how he does it, because he doesn’t numb himself to the costs of what he’s doing.
He understands it, he internalizes it, and owns it. And so that when he has a hard decision to make, such as sending them over there, knowing how many of them are unlikely to ever come home again, he’s able to do it because he’s weighed the costs, the benefits in a real way that he owns. It’s as much about responsibility and owning responsibility as it is just making the best decision you can.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, the idea of owning responsibility. Eisenhower famously wrote two memos before D-Day happened, and one of them was, if it was a failure, it’s like, if this mission failed, I take full responsibility for it. But he didn’t have to publish that one, but he kept letting me know that. Yeah, the guy took responsibility. So okay, this is June 5th, he sent off the men personally. How did he spend the night before the invasion in the morning? What was he doing?
Michelle Paradis: Smoking. He basically, he stayed up the entire night, best as we could tell, smoking and reading Westerns. He was an adamant Western reader. He had his guilty pleasures, as we all do, and he was very emphatic that he got to enjoy them. And so really from about two in the morning when he gets back to base camp to about 7, 730, when he finally sort of gets up and meets the day, he’s just sitting on his bed, laying in bed, reading Westerns and smoking cigarettes and just waiting for the news to come in. Yeah,
Brett McKay: You talk about the Western you read about. Black John is the name of the story.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. Eisenhower really liked good shoot-em-up Westerns. Those were his favorite. Tsar of Half a Day Creek is not one of those. It has like a sort of more humorous vein to it, and there’s not a lot of shooting. But it really was apt. It really kind of met the moment very well because it’s all about this guy, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. His name is Black John Smith, who is the kind of the doer in the small camping town in Alaska, or in Yukon country I think it is actually, where he’s always up to something, but he’s keeping everyone just everything in line. Everyone kind of thinks he’s this old hillbilly, but he actually is the guy who’s always got the plan and is one step ahead. So it was a very apt book for Eisenhower to be reading on
Brett McKay: D-Day. Another lesson there from Eisenhower, don’t feel bad about just indulging in a guilty pleasure when you’re going through a stressful period. He read Westerns. It’s okay if you want to, I don’t know, watch a crappy movie on Netflix. That’s okay, as long as it kind of just takes the edge off. That’s fine.
Michelle Paradis: No, that’s entirely true because one of the things that I found super interesting about Eisenhower, which you don’t see on the surface at all, but is very true, is that he thought a lot about how he thought. And he understood that if he was tired, if he was exhausted, if he was overwhelmed, that he was going to make bad decisions. And bad decisions didn’t mean that those decisions would not turn out the right way. He understood that there was always risk, just like any poker player would. But he wanted to make sure he was always making the best decision available to him based on the information available to him. And so doing things like making time for guilty pleasures, making time for friends, not beating up on yourself too much about your own vices. Everyone’s telling him he’s got to stop smoking, otherwise his cold will never get better. And he’s like, yeah, yeah, I get it. But he understands that he only had so much energy, only so much sort of self-discipline and focus that he can direct. And so prioritizing what you’re paying attention to, what you’re really investing your emotional and mental energy in, is honestly just as important as any one decision you
Make because your ability to make those decisions is going to be entirely contingent on how focused you are, how clear-minded you are, and your ability to just take everything in and decide. And so, yeah, just giving yourself your guilty pleasures and focusing on the things that matter and figuring out what matters is just as important as any one thing that you do.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea that Eisenhower thought about his thinking and he was kind of this master self-psychologist. Another thing that I remember reading about him that he did, he had an anger drawer. So Eisenhower, he had a temper, and he struggled with it his entire life. But he had this tactic whenever someone would piss him off and he wanted just to light him up. What he did instead is he wrote this letter out, exactly what he wanted to say, no filter. And then he just put it in his drawer. It cooled off and he’s like, okay, I got it out of my system. Now I can approach this with the cool head.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, no, as you say, he was his own psychologist because there was no one else around he could trust for that role, really, other than maybe Kay Somersby or Harry Butcher. And yeah, so he would do those sorts of things. Or if he just was like feeling overwhelmed, just same thing. He was feeling overwhelmed and he was like, if he was having trouble focusing on any one thing, he would sit down and literally just write himself a memo of all the things he had to think about one after the other and putting down a couple of thoughts about each one just to, again, put it out on the page, get it out of his body and into something tangible so that he could focus on it more clearly. He’s just full of all of these very specific habits and techniques for making him a much better thinker and leader than he otherwise would have been.
Brett McKay: So something that Eisenhower is known for is his political ability. He was able to manage these big egos, Montgomery, Padden, Marshall, Churchill, DeGaulle. Did it deftly. I don’t think any other person could have done that. But the other thing that impressed me about Eisenhower was his grasp of public relations. He knew how to manage the media.
How would you describe his approach? I think this is underappreciated about
Michelle Paradis: Eisenhower. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. I agree. I think it’s totally underappreciated. He got in a very sophisticated way that media had changed a lot and had changed politics a lot by the 1940s. And he understood that there were really two things that he needed to do to be an effective manager of his public persona, which in turn would give him a much freer hand in dealing with difficult political issues. And one was, you’ve got to be friends with the press. And he made sure that when he was playing bridge and smoking and drinking, that reporters were always with him just to kind of hang out, with a few exceptions, as guys. And having that kind of intimate friendship-level relationship with reporters enabled him to know what was going on, what they were going to print and publish before they did, and also gave him opportunities to, in what we would now call, shape the narrative before things hit the press. And that helped him on several occasions, not the least being with people like George Patton. But the other thing, though, and this was so – I mean, it’s part of who he is, but it’s so prescient that it demands to be remarked upon, is he also understood that as the media was becoming more intimate and celebrity-driven, where you had these personalities who were not just on the radio or in newspapers, but actually on film and could be seen, that there was a huge value in being seen as ordinary.
And I’m not saying he put that on. This is, in a way, who he is. These are his Kansas instincts coming out. But he leaned really hard into it in a way that was certainly designed to conceal the sophistication of his own thinking in most situations, where he understood that being kind of folksy and having this, like, oh, I just like going out fishing, and being very seen as not grasping for power in an environment where most politicians, to include Roosevelt, and Roosevelt being only sort of a marginal exception to this, were still seen as these very stern, statuesque figures, was its own kind of political power. It’s where we get the idea of I like Ike. The idea that a politician should not be only a leader but likable more or less draws directly from Eisenhower. And I know this, again, almost seems too obvious to say now, but it’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was for a general, like a major powerful general, to be known broadly in the public for smiling. A smiling general. There’s almost nothing more incongruous than that if you really think about it. And Eisenhower fully leaned into that and had a kind of folksy celebrity that obviously becomes his trademark.
And I think in the environment that he’s in particularly, with people like de Gaulle, with people like Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt, is crucial to his ability to wield power because none of them understand that yet. None of them understand the importance of likability in the media as a kind of political power. And so everyone around Eisenhower just underestimates him all of the time as just being sort of like a smiling nice guy because they’re obviously very much still in the Marvel statue mold. And Eisenhower both, I think, understands that and uses that to such great effect that now it’s actually difficult to think about a politician who doesn’t smile all the time, right, where it’s not this sort of like happy, I’m a nice guy, I’m just like you, whether or not it’s George W. Bush on his ranch and Crawford clearing brush, or Donald Trump eating a Taco Bowl, or Barack Obama smiling big and throwing baskets, right? All of our politicians now, we want them to, quote unquote, to be just like us. And Eisenhower kind of sets that mold and sees that that’s where society is going way earlier than anybody else does.
Brett McKay: So after researching and writing about Eisenhower, what’s something that stuck with you the most about his life or his leadership?
Michelle Paradis: I think for me, in addition to giving hope to 40-year-olds everywhere that life is not yet over, I think the most both inspiring and cautionary aspects of Eisenhower’s life to me are that he really did come from nowhere to achieve the absolute greatest heights of political power in the 20th century. He, through a combination of, I think, intelligence, luck, and ruthlessness, pulled himself up to that height to great, I think, benefit to not only the United States but to the world. And so the both encouraging but cautionary things that I always think about when I think of Eisenhower is encouraging is that talent is everywhere. Talent can come from the middle of nowhere, from someone you’d never expect, where it wouldn’t even be recognized by most people until well into their 30s or 40s or even 50s. And the cautionary piece of that that I worry about sometimes is, do we still live in that America, right? Do we still live in a society where talent can rise? Because we have more people than ever. We have more opportunity for more people than ever as well, and fewer barriers based on old lines, whether that’s gender or race. But do we still have a society that allows the very best to rise?
And I don’t know the answer to that. I worry about that sometimes because all the opportunities Eisenhower had have become much more difficult and much stricter and much more tied up in tradition or bureaucracy or sort of other kinds of red tape that I worry we may not be getting the talent that we have at our disposal to have the kind of leaders that we possibly could have.
Brett McKay: Well, Michelle, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, the book is available anywhere fine books are sold, The Light of Battle. It makes a great gift in time for Father’s Day. I’ll plug that. And yeah, feel free to always reach out. I’m very easy to find. And so if you had any questions or ideas or thoughts about the book, good, bad or ugly, feel free to email me. I try to respond as quickly as I can.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michelle Paradis, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Michelle Paradis: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Michelle Paradis. He’s the author of the book, The Light of Battle. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is slash supremecommander. We 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 artofmaleness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the podcast. Put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent. But it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette.
Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette, and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the “no elbows on the table” mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman.
Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Podcast #897: Answers to the FAQ of Modern Etiquette * AoM Podcast #422: Men & Manners — Tipping, Emojis, and Much More * AoM Article: The Importance of Good Manners * AoM Article: How to Acquire Good Manners * AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Dining Etiquette and Proper Table Manners * AoM Article: How to Make Introductions Like a Gentleman * AoM Article: How to Make Small Talk * AoM’s Complete Guide to Giving a Great Handshake
Connect With William Hanson* William’s website * William on TikTok * William 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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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent, but it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette. Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the no elbows on the table mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @AoM.is/etiquette. All right, William Hanson, welcome to the show.
William Hanson: Thank you very much for having me.
Brett McKay: So you are a professional etiquette teacher. How did you become an etiquette teacher?
William Hanson: Well, it wasn’t something I necessarily sort of woke up one day and thought, right, that’s it, I’m going to become an etiquette teacher. It wasn’t a profession I was even aware really existed. As a child growing up, I wanted to either be the Archbishop of Canterbury, for whatever reason, or a spy or a newsreader. That’s the trajectory I was heading in, I had decided. But then my grandmother gave me this book of etiquette for Christmas when I was 12. And sort of after a few sort of, have I read any of it type questions, I thought, well, I bet I just better read a bit and then I can tell her I’ve read it. And it was actually very interesting and very funny and I bought more books on the subject. And then when I was 16, 17 at my school, they came up to me and said, oh, we’re looking for someone to teach the younger years how to set a table. Do you think you could do that? And I said, well, when do you want me to do it? And they said, oh, Tuesday afternoons. And I said, oh, instead of playing sport? They said, yes. So I didn’t need to be asked twice, really. And that’s how the teaching side of things started.
Brett McKay: And so you got a new book out called Just Good Manners, where you take Americans and just anybody through the ins and outs of British etiquette. And we’re gonna dig into that because I think it’s applicable to whatever country you live in. But I thought it was really interesting, you talk about the history of etiquette education in the United Kingdom. Can you tell us a bit about that? Because I didn’t know about this.
William Hanson: Yes, I think Britain has always, or England even, we should say before it sort of became Britain, has always sort of led the way in education, in manners and etiquette and civility. Swiss finishing schools as well were very popular and they basically did the same thing, but they just had the mountains skiing. That’s what they could offer that we in Britain couldn’t. But even going back to the Dickensian England, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but men would sort of go on what was called the grand tour around Europe just before they settled down. And whilst that was happening, the ladies were being finished and you would have sort of characters like Dickens portrays one in Little Dorrit called Mrs. General, who is there sort of taking these group of sisters under her wing, finishing them and telling them sort of how to behave and what was expected of them. So this sort of education has always existed, certainly in the last sort of 300 years or so.
Brett McKay: And you’re the director of one of like the last English etiquette schools, correct?
William Hanson: Yes, so sort of at the height of the 20th century, which is when these finishing schools, we still had presentation at court, which is when young girls would curtsy in front of the king and queen, as it were, before they were sort of eligible to be married, completely outdated practice and one that Queen Elizabeth sort of quite quickly when she ascended the throne knocked on the head because she thought it was ridiculous. But you had finishing the schools such as Winkfield Place or Lucy Clayton. And Lucy Clayton actually in 2001 sort of regenerated into the English Manor, which is the company I’m now very pleased to run and own.
Brett McKay: So at the beginning of the book, you make a distinction between manners and etiquette. And I’ve seen this distinction before, but what do you think is the difference between etiquette and manners?
William Hanson: I would say manners are sort of the top line fundamental requirement for being a human being wherever you are in the world to treat people with civility, charm, grace, decorum, respect. How we do that is by using a set of rules. Most of the time, the etiquette is correct. Sometimes it isn’t. We actually have to break the rule of etiquette. But etiquette is, it can change from country to country and what is considered polite in one country can be very different and actually impolite in another. So you use the set of rules according to your environment.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and a lot of people, when I see them make this distinction between manners and etiquette, manners is just sort of how you comport yourself with other people to make sure things go smoothly, etiquette of the specific rules. They often say, well, manners are more important than etiquette. And you make the case, well, maybe not.
William Hanson: Yeah, I would say I think it is impossible to be a well-mannered person without knowing something about etiquette. You don’t necessarily need to know that a dinner napkin at its largest is 26 inches. For example, I think you will be able to get through life without knowing that pearl of wisdom. But I would say following the rules of etiquette makes you a more well-mannered person. You can be a well-mannered person without knowing etiquette, but I think you can be an even more well-mannered person if you use the two. I think they work together.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree with that. Because I think what etiquette does, it gives you something concrete to do. Because oftentimes people just don’t know what to do in certain situations. Like, I don’t know, what am I supposed to do? Well, here, follow these rules. You can be well-mannered by following these simple rules.
William Hanson: Exactly. As a child, I don’t know about you, Brett, but as a child, I liked to know what was expected of me. Because as a child, of course, we’re all petrified, or most children are petrified of being told off or grounded or whatever the form of punishment is. And so we sort of want to know when we go to this person’s house, what are we doing? What are we expected? How am I meant to behave at schools? For example, we were given parameters and boundaries. And that’s sort of all it is, really, in adult life. I think adults thrive with parameters and boundaries and knowing what is expected of them. Because we all want to get it right. And we’ve bizarrely got to a point in life where so many people will say, oh, I don’t need etiquette. Who knows etiquette anymore? And actually what they’re doing, rather badly, is masking the fact that they don’t know the rules themselves. And so they are sort of saying it doesn’t matter because actually they don’t know and they don’t want to admit their sort of blissful ignorance.
Brett McKay: And something I’ve noticed, and I think you’ve noticed this as well with your career, because I think you’re really popular on TikTok, I feel like a lot of young people crave that knowledge of etiquette because they want to know how to act in the world with other people in a way that’s well-mannered and smooth.
William Hanson: Yes, absolutely. I think there are so many sort of ways now for people to be sort of, rightly so in some instances, called out or flagged down for bad behavior. And so younger generations who have grown up knowing that actually they can’t really be an awful human being and get away with it, are more conscious of it. One of my biggest demographics on my social media videos is Gen Z. And actually when the Gen Z people come and sort of say hi to me in the street, if they pass me, whether it’s in London or New York or wherever, they’re so nice and so polite and cautious about coming up to me. Whereas some millennial followers that I have, and I am a millennial myself, will sort of charge up to me and almost demand immediately without sort of being conscious that I may not be working, I might be out in a social capacity and demand that I do a photograph with them. I don’t mind doing a photograph, but sort of ask me nicely. So Gen Z get a bit of a bad rap, but actually from what I’ve seen, I think it’s quite good that they’re interested in how to behave and just sort of being aware of how their actions affect other people, which is really all it is.
Brett McKay: So let’s dig in to some of the rules of etiquette that you highlight in your book that can help us guide our social interactions. I think a lot of etiquette is primarily about interacting with other people
William Hanson: Yes.
Brett McKay: And making those interactions as smooth and as comfortable and as pleasant as possible. Let’s start off with introductions. What’s the best way to introduce yourself?
William Hanson: Well, I think when I was writing Just Good Manners, this was one of the things that I found sort of faintly interesting was that in the etiquette books, the Emily Post original edition from the 1920s, for example, there is nothing about introducing yourself because it used to be the etiquette that it was incredibly taboo to introduce yourself, but there was lots of advice about introducing other people. Whereas now etiquette books, Just Good Manners aside, will have information about how to introduce yourself, but nothing about introducing other people. And certainly a lot of Brits or people that spent too much time in Britain and sort of picked up some bad British habits, when they go to introduce themselves to someone, whether it’s on the street or at a cocktail party or whatever, apologize for introducing themselves. Maybe that’s because we in Britain are programmed to know that it’s not really good form historically to introduce yourself, although absolutely fine now, but they’ll say, oh, sorry to interrupt, or, oh, sorry to come up to you today. And actually, well, I don’t know anything about you, but I have just, I do now know that you’ve just interrupted me and that you’re apologizing. So already I’ve noticed that you’re apologizing and you’re interrupting me, whereas I may not have noticed actually. So just, I think something positive and upbeat. Hello, my name’s William. Very lovely to meet you, for example, is all you need to do. And say your name clearly as well. It is so important to say your name that so few people actually bother to say their names when they’re introducing themselves, which is extraordinary behavior because otherwise I don’t know what to call you.
Brett McKay: Okay, so be positive, be upbeat, don’t apologize, say your name clearly. You mentioned people don’t know how to introduce other people. And I’ve noticed that as well. Whenever I’m interacting with individuals and let’s say they’re with their spouse or you’re going over to a friend’s house and their grandmother’s there, no one knows how to introduce people to other people. So I end up usually just having to introduce myself. So what is the proper protocol on making introductions?
William Hanson: So it can get quite complicated. And actually, when I started teaching etiquette 18 years ago, this was the bit that I would in class dread coming to teach because it can be quite wordy. But what you don’t need to do is you don’t need to say both parties’ names twice. So if you’ve got Bill and Ben, for example, you don’t need to say, Bill, this is Ben. Ben, this is Bill. You don’t need to reverse it. And the example I would give you is to sort of show you why that is wrong, is if you take the head of state in any country. In Britain, it would be the king, the president in America. Let’s take the president, for example, whoever that president is. If I said, Mr. President, may I introduce Bill, that is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I put the president first. I’m giving him the respect as head of state. But if I then switch it, Bill, this is the president, that second time I have elevated Bill and relegated the president, which in a diplomatic context is completely the wrong thing to do. So you only need to say the most important person’s name first. How you define who that most important person is, is up to you. And it depends on context. In a professional setting, the CEO of the company is probably going to be more important than the intern. A client to a company is going to be more important than the CEO. Socially, you probably now would go on age rather than looking at gender. So Granny being 85 is going to be sort of elevated above Annie, who’s 18.
Brett McKay: Okay, that makes sense. And then you also talk about whenever you make an introduction to add some context to the introduction.
William Hanson: Yes. None of us really like making small talk if we’re completely honest. I mean, small talk with complete strangers for some is absolute purgatory. So you can make life easy for the two people that you are introducing by saying, Bill, this is Ben. Ben’s just flown in from Sydney. And Bill, I believe, didn’t your mother used to live in Australia? If you can find a link, that’s perfect because then they do have common ground. But if not, you just say, Ben just flew in from Sydney, leave it at that. And then hopefully one of them goes, oh gosh, I’ve always wanted to go. And just says something. But if you just say the names and do the introduction, people just stare at each other like, great, you’ve introduced me, but who are you?
Brett McKay: We typically shake hands when meeting someone new. This is the art of manliness. We got to talk about the etiquette on handshaking.
William Hanson: Yes. I mean, handshaking, which of course it slightly went out of fashion during the pandemic, but is thankfully now back. It’s probably the only physical contact you will have with most people. And I think, and I don’t know about you, Brett, you can tell so much about someone by the quality of the handshake. Do you judge someone?
Brett McKay: Of course. If I get the limp fish, it’s an immediate like, yeah, yeah I don’t know, yeah, yeah.
William Hanson: Yeah. It’s an ick to use a modern parlance. Already in the first couple of seconds whilst we’re judging a new person, I’ve met them and it’s a limp fish handshake, as you say. And it’s unpleasant. Similarly, if it’s a bone crusher, you think, wow, why are they having to overcompensate and come across as overly assertive? So the handshake is so important. And I, again, in the book, when I was writing, I thought, well, actually maybe, maybe I’m being a bit harsh on people that have bad handshakes because I can remember, I think my parents telling me how to shake a hand age five, maybe, roughly around age five. But then no parent, I mean, maybe there are parents out there that sort of are the exceptions that prove the rule. No parent then revisits that handshaking lesson when their child is now 15. And actually the strength of their handshake is going to be very different for what they were doing when they were five. You’re sort of told what to do and then nobody revises it. And actually having a good handshake is often half the battle, particularly in business.
Brett McKay: No, I agree. Handshake is important. Something I’ve taught my kids. And I like a good firm handshake for men and women alike. I’m an equal opportunist when it comes to that sort of thing.
William Hanson: Oh, absolutely. And I would, again, one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing writing the book is sort of tracking where the changes have come in and what these changes are. And again, if you read the original Emily Post or books published in the 1920s, ladies didn’t massively shake hands. The hostess might’ve shook hands with guests, but other than that, ladies didn’t do it. Now, anyone of any gender, business or professional, everybody shakes hands. Everyone should take off their right glove if they’re wearing gloves. It’s flesh to flesh. Obviously, if you’re in absolute minus 40 degrees Celsius temperatures, fine, you can keep your glove on. There are always sort of caveats to it. But yes, a handshake is pretty equal.
Brett McKay: So this is related introductions, but this has happened to me a few times. It’s whenever you encounter someone you’ve met before, but you can’t remember their name. You’re not really acquaintances, but you know of each other. How do you make those, what we call reintroductions to each other?
William Hanson: Yes, I think a lot of people sort of can get quite offended that the other person hasn’t remembered you. But actually, you know, sometimes we’re the most memorable and interesting person in our own lives because we’re there, we’re the only person that is sort of the world expert on ourselves. But other people may not necessarily remember you like you remember them. So just say your name quickly. Hello, so lovely to see you again. It’s William, of course. What have you been up to since I saw you at Brett’s, for example? Just help them out rather than sort of expect them to remember every detail about you. Obviously, if they can remember everything about you, that’s fantastic. Actually, a really simple trick I often do in restaurants or hotels I go to a lot, I just write down the staff’s name in a note in my phone. And so when I’m going back in, I can remember that, you know, Grant is the tall waiter with the ear piercing. And so when I go in again, I can say, oh, hello, Grant, how are you? And generally, you find you get a thousand times better service when you actually bother to learn their names. It also helps, I think, trains your brain to remember people’s names better as well.
Brett McKay: I like that. That’s a classy move. I’m going to start doing that. What happens if you forget someone’s name? Any tips on navigating that?
William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, apologize and move on quite quickly. So, Brett, if I called you Ben, for example, and you say, oh, no, it’s Brett, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Brett, I’d probably say, using your correct name and then move on. But again, it’s quite a British thing to make that into a drama and to over-apologize. Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. Oh, that happens all the time. And the more of an issue I make it, the more of an issue it becomes. So just say sorry, say the correct name, make a mental note not to get it wrong again, and move on.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s something I’ve learned after reading your book. British people like to apologize, very apologetic.
William Hanson: We do. I mean, look, hey, it’s better to over-apologize than not apologize at all.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
William Hanson: But it can go the other way as well.
Brett McKay: Let’s talk about small talk. Any etiquette to small talk? Are there topics that are taboo that you definitely don’t want to go there?
William Hanson: Yeah, I would say this is something that has not changed very recently. Sex, money, politics, health, and religion still remain for small talk. And this is conversation with people you do not know well. I’m not saying when you’re talking to very good friends. But with strangers, avoid sex, money, politics, health, or religion to begin with because you just don’t know what people’s opinions are, what makes them engage, what disengages them, what offends them. And it’s so much better to sort of play it safe. And some cultures just don’t get small talk. The Germans absolutely don’t get it. The Dutch sort of get it but aren’t particularly good at it. But think about small talk as the slip road onto a major highway. If you didn’t have that slip road and you were joining the conversational highway going at 70 miles an hour, you would crash. And so you need that slip road to just sort of build your speed up into a slightly more interesting conversation. That is the point of small talk. I’m not pretending it is fascinating, but it is needed in order to have a proper conversation with someone.
Brett McKay: Okay, for our American listeners, a slip road in England is what we call an on-ramp over here. And that’s the metaphor I always use for small talk. Some people say they hate small talk and they just want to jump to the big talk. But you’ve got to take the on-ramp of small talk to get up to speed into that deeper conversation. So what are your go-to topics for small talk?
William Hanson: I mean, look, in Britain, we’re obsessed with talking about the weather. I was being interviewed yesterday. It was a British journalist. We spent five minutes talking about the weather at the start of the interview. But in Britain, our weather, we often can have three or four seasons in a day. If you’re in gorgeous California or you’re in the Middle East where the weather is sort of fairly consistent, the weather’s not going to be spoken about. But beyond the weather, I just talk about the environment that you are in there and then. You’re trying to find a shared experience or something in common with that person. And if you have nothing else in common, you don’t sort of have lots of hobbies in common, what you do have is the room you’re in. Gosh, what a beautiful ceiling. Aren’t the band fantastic? Something upbeat and positive is what we want. Talk about the canapes. How do you know the host? That’s safe and better small talk than, gosh, well, it’s a lovely sunny day, isn’t it?
Brett McKay: In America, we’re obsessed with work.
William Hanson: Yes.
Brett McKay: So often work is a topic of small talk. What do you do? In Britain, apparently, that’s frowned upon to talk about work in small talk.
William Hanson: Yeah, well, I’ll be honest, your American tendencies are sort of creeping in. And I think particularly younger generations are slightly more work-focused and find it less taboo. But people really shouldn’t be defined by their jobs. I mean, I do speak as someone who’s an etiquette coach. I’ve got a slight vested interest in this and pushing my own personal agenda. But if I go to a party this evening, I’m going in my social capacity. Whether I’m a dentist, a tax lawyer, or an etiquette coach, it’s got no bearing on whether my friend has invited me to that party. And as much as I love my job, I mean, I have no other talent, so I don’t know what else I’d do, I don’t want to talk about it all the time, actually. There’s more to me than my job. And so certainly to begin with, and again, when you say to people you’re an etiquette coach, people sort of either freeze or start panicking. I’d quite like to talk about something else, thank you very much.
Brett McKay: Yeah, or if you ask someone about their job, they hate their job.
William Hanson: Oh, and then you’ll say, oh, God, I don’t really care, really. Especially if you meet someone, yeah, and they start moaning about their job, and you think, well, I was just asking it to be polite. I don’t really need a whole rundown.
Brett McKay: What do you do when you’re engaging in small talk and let’s say the conversation starts going into some of those taboo topics you mentioned earlier? Any way to navigate that deftly?
William Hanson: Well, I mean, hopefully, most of your conversation is listening and being able to pick up on what you’re being given back. And if you’re asking a question, especially if you think it’s controversial and you’re not getting much back from the other person, it is probably time to move on. But often it’s other people witnessing or listening into the conversation that will have to step in and could see the car crash, to use another driving analogy, about to happen. And so, I mean, it’s such a cliche, but it works, is just stepping in and going, well, what lovely weather we’re having today and saying it very pointedly. I’ve only ever had to do it once at a dinner I was hosting. And that should be a clue to the people that had started to get a bit heated, but also to the other guests. We need to move this on. Everyone needs to step in and help me here.
Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a cocktail party, a mingling event, and you’re going there by yourself. You don’t know anyone and there’s already established little circles of conversation going on. How do you enter a conversational group with class and smoothly?
William Hanson: This is hard to explain on an audio podcast, but generally you want to, first of all, before you actually move in, make sure there are what we call an open body language group. And usually that means there’s a great big gap for you that you can go and stand in. If there’s no gap, don’t try and approach them because they’ve sort of subconsciously or consciously closed that gap off. And so you’re not going to get much success. But really, basically, if you know somebody in that group, much easier, you just make eye contact with them and hope they bring you in. But if you don’t know anyone in that group, it’s as shallow, basically, I hate to say it, it’s as shallow as picking the one that looks like you. So that could be you’re tall and blonde, they’re tall and blonde. It’s a group of women and one man, you look at the male, for example, or man in a tie, man in a tie, just anything that you will have most success joining a group if you basically pick the person who looks most like you, smile at them, make a really nice positive signal. If you get a smile back, you step forward and do your approach and would say, oh, hello, may I join? My name is William. Again, don’t say sorry to interrupt. If you don’t get a smile back and they sort of look away or close the gap, you just move on and try and find someone else.
Brett McKay: That tip of looking for people that look like you, you talk about in the book, you go into a party where the invitation had ambiguous instructions on dress code and it was either black tie or 1970s apparel.
William Hanson: Yes.
Brett McKay: So you’re the etiquette guy. You went black tie. Of course you’re gonna go black tie. But there was only three other guys that went black tie. You guys just ended up talking to each other the entire night.
William Hanson: We did, because again, it’s shallow. When people don’t know many other people, they don’t take risks. If you’ve got a group of mice, you’ve got a group of cats. Okay, the cats might want to play with the mice, but the mice don’t want to play with the cats. And it’s the same. So I didn’t know there were two dress codes. I was someone’s guest. I was going on secondhand information without having seen the invitation. I always ask to see the invitation now after that drama. But yes, there were, you know, in a room full of 100 people, there were three of us in black tie, tuxedo. And it was quite boring after a while because no one else wanted to talk to us. And it’s sort of playground stuff, but it does happen.
Brett McKay: I’m sure a lot of people have had this happen to them when they’re at a party and they start talking to someone and this someone does not want to let go of you. But you want to go talk to other people. How do you politely break away from someone who’s talking your ear off?
William Hanson: Well, ideally you want to introduce them to someone else and pair them off. It’s not great to leave someone standing on their own. If they’ve said something objectionable or you absolutely have to go because you’re going to miss your flight or something, then fair enough. But try to pair them off with someone else. Brett, it’s been so lovely talking to you. I’ve just seen someone over there I’ve got to go and get and speak to before they leave. Have you met Susan, however? And I’ve sort of seen Susan floating around and I grab her as she comes past and go, Susan, may I introduce Brett? Brett has just flown in from Sydney. And Susan, I believe your mother is from Australia. I’ll leave you two talking and off you go. So that’s what you ideally want to do. But if there is no one, you’re going to have to leave them standing on their own, but you can make it sound like you are the bore. So I would say something like, well, Brett, look, I know I’ve monopolized so much of your time this evening and I know there are lots of other people you want to go and talk to, but maybe we’ll see each other in a few weeks’ time at that fundraiser. Shake hands and off we go.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So I think we’ve handled introductions, we’ve handled small talk. Let’s talk about table manners. Let’s start with this question. Why do the British have what seems like such complicated and fastidious rules of table etiquette?
William Hanson: Well, I would say, I mean, thankfully, it’s not the case anymore in Britain. We have such a wide and varied cuisine. But historically, our food was always a bit rubbish. And I think a lot of these rules might have been developed just to sort of slow down eating it. You didn’t want to rush it because it wasn’t very tasty. And so we came up with these sort of rules to have very small mouthfuls and small portions. And we had a lot of alcohol with our food, different alcohol for each course. And also, you know, in Britain, we like a rule, we like structure. And I think British dining is the most complicated compared to European, which is a different thing from British dining, we should say. And that’s not a Brexit thing. It’s always been that way in sort of etiquette land. We’ve always had British and then European dining and then American dining. But we do like to overcomplicate things sometimes.
Brett McKay: And you recommend that people learn British etiquette because that’ll basically cover your bases.
William Hanson: Yeah, and that’s something I picked up from my great friend and colleague, Myka Meier, who’s the leading expert in America in etiquette. And she teaches British dining as the sort of the gold standard, because if you can do the top standard, you can easily do the bottom standard, whatever that one is. I guess it’s like driving. I mean, I know it varies now, but if you learn to drive on a stick, you can drive an automatic. But if you learn just on an automatic, you can’t drive on a stick. And so it’s probably best to learn the hardest one. And then you’re covered for all bases.
Brett McKay: So I think most of us growing up heard the rule, no elbows on the table. And you talk about the history of why we have that rule. So what is the history of the rule, no elbows on the table?
William Hanson: Yes, and this is what people seem to forget, particularly with etiquette and dining etiquette, is that we have not just come up with these rules to annoy people. There is a rich history behind all of our cultures. And the no elbows on the table one goes back to sort of medieval Britain and Europe, where the tables were not secure tables like we’re fortunate to eat from today. They were created from benches and sheets of wood twice a day when people were eating two meals a day back then, not three. And if you put your elbows on the table, because of the way the food would be laid out down the center of the table well balanced, if you put your elbows on the table, the table would tip and it would not be secure. And so thus it became the etiquette to not put your elbows on the table because you didn’t want the food dropping onto the floor. I would say now we as humans, we’re sort of so ingrained knowing all our ancestors have learned not to do that. We sort of subconsciously or consciously know it as well. And so something we still follow, even though our tables are by and large secure.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and it also doesn’t look good when you’re at a nice dinner to have your elbows on the table.
William Hanson: No. It’s horrid. I mean, it’s actually very difficult to eat with your elbows on the table. I challenge anyone to do it nicely. Maybe at the end of a dinner when you’re sort of chatting over a cup of tea or coffee with your host, maybe having a little bit of a chocolate or something, I can sort of see that it’s okay in that instance, especially if your host is doing it. But formally, whilst there’s proper food on the table in the middle, then no elbows off.
Brett McKay: When you’re a guest at a dinner, when should you start eating?
William Hanson: So once the host has started, basically, is the rule. If there’s a guest of honor, you would wait until the guest of honor has started. But generally on most meals that we have, there isn’t a guest of honor. And so once the host starts, and they should be served last, then you may pick up your cutlery and begin.
Brett McKay: I think everyone knows that when you’re out to eat, you don’t start eating your dish until everyone has been served. But if it’s like an informal dinner at your home with friends and family, do you need to wait until everyone’s gotten their food to start eating? I mean, is that the rule?
William Hanson: Oh, yes, yes. Everyone’s got to have food in front of them and be ready to go. And they’re not still waiting for potatoes or sprouts or anything like that. You wait until everyone’s got it. And that’s when the host then picks up their cutlery as a signal, we may now begin.
Brett McKay: If you’re a host of a dinner, how should you pace your own eating?
William Hanson: Yes, you want to sort of identify the slowest eater around the table. And obviously for family dinners, you can probably work out who that is quite quickly because you dine with them quite a lot. Growing up in my household, if my parents were hosting, it was always granny. Granny would do a lot of talking, but not a lot of eating. And so my father was always sort of there dissecting a singular garden pea or something because that’s all he had got on his plate whilst granny started, whilst still taught and did less eating. But host starts first, but host finishes last. And that’s a huge discipline. And the idea is that you don’t leave one person still eating with the rest of the table staring at them. So the host sort of picks who’s the slowest, follows them so that they can match pace. And so they are included and are not feeling like they’re holding things up, even though let’s be honest, they might be.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk dinner place settings. This is how you got your start as an etiquette teacher. First thing you did was teach how to do dinner place settings. I’m sure if you’ve been to a fancy dinner, you see just this layout and you’re like, oh my gosh, which fork am I supposed to use? Which one’s the bread plate? There’s that whole advice that was in the Titanic, start from the outside and work your way in with the silverware. Does that really do the trick or are there nuances to that?
William Hanson: That does generally do the trick. I mean, all of these dining etiquette rules only work if a table has been set nicely. But working on the proviso the table is set nicely and correctly, that one generally works. However, in American dining etiquette there is what’s called the American informal play setting where a teaspoon, used for dessert, will actually precede the dinner knife. American etiquette books often will show both the standard play setting with outside in and then this American informal and the outside in rule does not work at all because it’s sort of zigzagging all over the shop. So I’m very against the American informal one because I don’t think it helps people and the whole point of etiquette is it’s meant to sort of help people whereas this is one exception too many and also nobody that I have spoken to and please if you’re listening to this and you know where that rule came from please tell me because my colleagues and I, even the American ones, just can’t work it out. Who came up with that? What was the logic behind that? I think with any rule if you can’t find the logic behind it it’s probably time to ditch it.
Brett McKay: What’s the etiquette of napkins? Apparently you’re a big napkin aficionado.
William Hanson: Yes, I’ve got an unhealthy amount of napkins for a grown man of my age but I love a good quality napkin. I’ve yet to get to the stage in life where I take my own napkin to a restaurant but I’m sure it’ll happen at some point because in Britain, I don’t know what it’s like in America as much but in Britain some places are obsessed with paper napkins and I’m just not convinced. I don’t think it doesn’t need to be paper because it’s bad for the environment so a perfectly serviceable linen napkin that can be reused is I think a bit better but yes, napkins on the lap, not round the neck. Historically you had different types of napkin for different types of meals. The larger the meal, the larger the napkin. Today it’s very unlikely unless you’re me that you have different sizes of napkin which is fine just as long as it’s sort of clean and ironed that’s all I ask.
Brett McKay: Should you put your napkin in your lap as soon as you sit down?
William Hanson: Not the second you sit down unless food is sort of hovering behind you ready to be placed down.
Brett McKay: Okay.
William Hanson: I would sort of within the first minute.
Brett McKay: Okay.
William Hanson: Is when you can do it. You don’t want to look too keen.
Brett McKay: What do you do with your napkin if you need to leave the table for the restroom for example?
William Hanson: Then it would go on the chair and again some people get sort of when I say this sometimes in class people will recoil because they’re like oh well the chair is so dirty. Well if the chair’s got arms put it on the arm of the chair never put it on the back of the chair because then we can see it but actually if you’re worried that the chair is that dirty what sort of establishments are you dining in? So just rethink where you’re going. So yes seat of chair or arm of chair and then on the table when you’re leaving but you’re not coming back.
Brett McKay: Okay that’s what you do with it when you’re done you put it on the table?
William Hanson: Yes
Brett McKay: Okay.
William Hanson: Absolutely I’m not coming back goodbye thanks so much and really everyone should do that at the same time as well.
Brett McKay: What do you do with your silverware when you’re done?
William Hanson: So it depends if you’re eating what is in America called continental style which is not a term we have over here but if you’re eating continental style or you’re eating zigzag style continental style again many American etiquette coaches advocate for that knife in right hand fork in left hand you would sort of place them in a triangle on the plate when you’re resting with the bridge of the fork going over the knife almost creating like a pizza wedge shape in front of you and that is just to show I’m paused I’m just going to take a sip of my drink I’m chatting to my neighbour I’m pacing myself whereas when you’re finished they would go together and you know different countries have slightly different angles in Britain we do 6:30 if you imagine the cutlery is the hands of a clock with Americans it’s generally 5:25 some Europeans it’s 4:20 some it’s 3:15 I don’t really care as long as they’ve gone together that’s all the wait staff are looking for they’re not going to look at your cutlery and go well they’ve done it in the Dutch way and we’re here in California so we’re not going to clear that plate they’re not looking for that as long as it is together that’s what they want to know.
Brett McKay: Let’s go back to handling utensils how to hold them so you mentioned the two styles the continental style and the zigzag style so the continental style is when you got your knife in your right hand your fork in your left hand and you got the tongs or the face of the fork pointed down right?
William Hanson: Yeah and they work together and in Britain or continental style we let go of both of them when we’re resting but other than that we have got one in each hand they’re almost extensions of our hands whereas in zigzag style you might cut one or two pieces up with the knife place the knife down on the upper edge of the plate turn the fork over into the dominant hand stab and eat and then transfer it back pick up the knife cut another bit set the knife down transfer the fork I mean that’s an aerobic exercise Brett.
Brett McKay: Yeah no I don’t like the zigzag style I like where you just use the utensils as extensions of your hands for the duration of the dinner.
William Hanson: I think it’s a lot easier but some people insist it isn’t but you know to each their own as long as the food’s going in their mouth and not all over the shop.
Brett McKay: The other benefit of it too is it allows you to take up less space because your elbows are tucked in you can keep your elbows tucked in you don’t have your elbows all jutting out and bugging the other person.
William Hanson: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
William Hanson: Yeah. And that’s key as well, because some dining tables you’re really tightly packed. Now in American dining, you prefer round tables, and actually at state banquets at the White House used to be straight edge tables like we have in Britain a lot more, but Jacqueline Kennedy switched them over to round tables, and that seems to be how it’s stayed at a state level at the White House. And the beauty of a round table, other than being more sociable, is that you are less restricted and you aren’t immediately sitting next to somebody where you could elbow them. But on a big, grand, straight edge table, you do have to be very conscious of where your elbows are going.
Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a dinner where you’re being served family style, so all the dishes are on the table and you’ve got to pass them around to make sure everyone gets serving. What are the rules of passing dishes?
William Hanson: So I have to be honest, Britain is the only country that makes things difficult and passes things in the opposite direction to every other country. In Britain, we pass things around to the left, so clockwise around the table, whereas in America, in India, in the Middle East, in Africa, every other country, Europe, the plates or the dishes go counterclockwise to the right. That said, I would say most Brits don’t know that rule. I’m just telling you from an etiquette profession rule, that’s the rule. I think as long as you are offering the people each side of you, no one really cares whether it goes to the left or to the right.
Brett McKay: That is interesting. You talk about in Britain, it’s kind of faux pas, maybe it used to be, not so much anymore, but to ask someone to pass you a dish, like directly, hey, can you pass me the potatoes?
William Hanson: Oh, no, that’s a slap in the face in Britain, traditionally, because you’re sort of saying, look, William, if you had said that to me, the subtext to that is, William, you have not seen that I’m sitting here surrounded by no potatoes. You have failed, because again, good manners are about other people. And so we’ve developed this very passive-aggressive way in Britain, and we sort of say it now as a bit of a joke, but I can assure you it does work in practice. If you had, and I know you wouldn’t, Brett, but let’s, for sake of argument, say that you didn’t pass me the potatoes, I would say, Brett, would you like any potatoes? And you might say, no, thank you, William, but would you like some potatoes? Oh, yes, I think that I would, actually. And then they get passed.
Brett McKay: When I read that, it reminded me, I think the Dowager did that a few times in Downton Abbey.
William Hanson: Yeah, exactly.
Brett McKay: Or I just imagine the Dowager’s just saying some sort of passive-aggressive thing like that.
William Hanson: Well, exactly. And I think someone asked me a few weeks ago, do you think passive aggression is a good thing? And I think, you know, it’s better than active aggression.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s right. There’s also etiquette on passing the salt and pepper. What’s the rules of passing salt and pepper?
William Hanson: Yes, so salt and pepper travel together is the mnemonic that we teach children, but it works beautifully for adults as well. They are a marriage couple, in effect, and you don’t want to split them up. So if someone says, please, could you pass the salt? You would pass both the salt and the pepper together in one hand if they’ll fit in one hand, but two hands is fine. And I think that goes back to necessity. When salt and pepper pots used to be teeny tiny, they weren’t great big mills or grinders like we have now. They were much smaller, and so you didn’t sort of want to split them up because then you might not find them.
Brett McKay: Tell us about salt cellars. I never heard of these things until I read about them in your book.
William Hanson: Yeah, salt cellars are sort of small little dishes. So I guess a lot of salt. What does your salt and pepper look like in your house?
Brett McKay: They’re just shakers that we just… Yeah.
William Hanson: Yeah, which is sort of the more contemporary style. But going back to the Downton or even pre-Downton era, salt was served in a little, it would often be a silver little pot, but with an inlay of blue glass, because if you put salt directly on silver, it will erode the silver and it doesn’t taste then very good and it doesn’t do the silver much good either. So you’d have this sort of blue little glass inlay that sat in there, and that’s where the salt was. And a tiny little silver spoon that you would spoon out granules of salt and put it in a neat little pile on the edge of your plate. And you would sort of add a couple of granules then using the tip of your knife. Sounds terribly complicated onto whatever was loaded up on the fork.
Brett McKay: Are they still used today?
William Hanson: I would say this one is being slightly relaxed. Most restaurants you go to now, you don’t get salt cellars. I would say salt cellars now, you would see it in a very grand private house, if at all.
Brett McKay: Okay.
William Hanson: But most restaurants, it’s the salt shaker with one hole in it. Pepper has several holes and you can apply it more or less wherever, but try and taste the food first.
Brett McKay: All right, but for listeners, they ever have a dinner at a manor, they know what to do when they see a salt cellar.
William Hanson: They do know what to do, exactly.
Brett McKay: Any other rules that a guest at a dinner party or maybe even an extended stay in someone’s home should follow to show proper hospitality, proper manners?
William Hanson: Yes, I mean, I think it obviously depends on context and whether you know them well or not. But, you know, particularly I get so many, I do a podcast as well, and so many letters we get in about, oh, I had my family to stay. They stayed with us for an entire week and they didn’t once offer to cook or they didn’t take us out for a dinner to say thank you. Yes, it’s an awful lot of work having someone stay in your house for anything over one night. And even that can be quite tricky. So if you are going to stay, don’t assume that your hosts will be entertaining you all three meals of every day either and the stuff in between. But do offer to take them out, to say thank you, to give them a night off cooking. I mean, that’s, I don’t know about you, most hosts don’t want other people cooking in their own kitchen.
Brett McKay: No, I wouldn’t like that.
William Hanson: You can get quite territorial.
Brett McKay: Yeah
William Hanson: But please, let’s order takeout or let’s go out for a nice meal in a restaurant. It’s on us. Just something to acknowledge the effort that they’re going to. Take a nice gift, write them a decent length thank you letter afterwards.
Brett McKay: What’s a good gift to bring as a guest? What’s your go-to? Because I think a lot of people say like wine or maybe that’s not a good one.
William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good one if you know that they like Italian Merlot, for example. If you know that that’s their favorite wine, take them a couple of bottles and it should be a couple of bottles if you’re staying for several nights. It might even be a case of wine if you’re staying for a week plus. But if you don’t quite know what they drink, or indeed if they drink, and more and more people aren’t drinking now, particularly with the younger generations, alcohol is probably not the best thing. So chocolates, I mean, the practice of post-desk gifts goes back to Chicago in the ’30s and chocolates were the absolute sort of that was all that was acceptable. Most people like chocolates or can quite easily re-gift them if they don’t. But ideally you want to take something personal and personalized to them.
Brett McKay: You know, when I heard, and I would like if I got this, which is like a nice bottle of olive oil, because I use olive oil a lot.
William Hanson: Do you know, olive oil is becoming such a popular gift over here as well in London. And it’s great. I mean, a good quality.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
William Hanson: Particularly if it’s Italian olive oil. I mean, over here it might be easier to get that than with you. Yeah, it’s a nice novel thing. Doesn’t matter if you drink. I don’t think many people are allergic to oil. So it ticks a lot of boxes.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and it often comes in a nice bottle that presents well too. So I like that. Let’s talk about elevators. Is there an etiquette for elevators?
William Hanson: Oh, yes. If you’re in a really old building in Chicago or New York or London, the elevator is probably going to be a little bit tighter than in a great big new build somewhere in Los Angeles. And so the senior person, whether that’s the senior in the business or a lady or granny, whoever would go into the elevator first. The person who gets out of the elevator first when it arrives at the floor is the person closest to the elevator doors. And that’s the person who got in last. It winds me up in hotels where they’re taking you to your room and you turn up at floor seven and they put their hand in front of the lift doors and you sort of have to edge past them because they want you to go first. But that’s all very well, but I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve not been to this hotel before. So actually I want the hotelier to get out of the lift, put their hand across the lift doors from the other side of the lift and point me in the right direction, much more courteous than sort of awkwardly edging past them.
Brett McKay: Is small talk appropriate in an elevator or should you just keep to yourself?
William Hanson: I was having a heated debate about this only a few hours ago. No, in Britain, it’s so taboo to speak in an elevator. I’m going to film a social media video, I think, that just sort of has a group of us saying nothing in an elevator. And then I’ll just say at the end, we’re British, we don’t talk in elevators or lifts as we call them over here. But look, if you and I got in an elevator and we knew each other and there was no one else, you can absolutely speak. But with everyone else, Brits are so private with their conversation and thoughts, we couldn’t possibly have someone else over here what we’re thinking or saying. So there is normally this very awkward silence in an elevator.
Brett McKay: Well, I prefer the silence too. I’m a big fan of that.
William Hanson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Brett McKay: So the British are famous for queuing, standing in line. Any etiquette for line standing?
William Hanson: Yes I mean just sort of, it’s so democratic it’s first come first served. It’s so straightfoward we get very irritated when someone tries to jump the queue. And so etiquette rule number one is, if you don’t mind the rules, don’t play the game, basically. So if you don’t want to queue don’t queue and I think you are all going to be shocked down in flames in Britain, if you sort of try to jump the queue. And I would say that is actually the commonalities between Britain and America, I mean, I think we are all sort of the Olympic gold medalist of queuing in Britain, but I would say you’re probably the silver medalist in America. Whereat it doesn’t even get bronze is the Europeans. And actually when you go to Disney in Paris oversee the American concept as British I’ve been to a lot of the Disneys the American ones are great, because everyone follows the queuing standing in line pressure call, but in Euro Disney or Disney Paris as it’s now called yeah it’s a little bit of a freeforall and it’s quite stressful.
Brett McKay: How do you handle line jumpers? Lets say someone tries to break that sacred social order, should you call them out?
William Hanson: Oh, yes. No we would and I think we would sort of call them out probably giving then the benefit of the doubt to begin with. We might say something like, oh actually the back of the queue is just here. For example because it might be an innocent mistake, if they then go “No, no I’m gonna join it from here” then well that’s a war crime.
Brett McKay: Is it proper to save places in line? Can you do that?
William Hanson: If its not a busy queue you could perhaps do it for maybe like a minute.
Brett McKay: Okay.
William Hanson: But I would be very careful even don’t so I would probably not advice that.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree. It has to be done in moderation [0:48:16.9] ____. Well, William, this has been a great conversation and we only scratched the surface of what’s in this book. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
William Hanson: Yes, the book is out now, Just Good Manners, published by Gallery at Simon & Schuster. It’s available in all formats. There’s an audio book. So if you’re not sick of my voice after this interview, there’s more of it on audio book, e-book and hardback in all good bookshops.
Brett McKay: And any other place on the internet where they can learn about you?
William Hanson: Oh yes, there’s my Instagram @williamhanson, TikTok @williamhansonetiquette or my website, williamhanson.com.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, William Hanson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
William Hanson: Thank you so much, Brett.
Brett McKay: My guest today was William Hanson. He’s the author of the book Just Good Manners. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website williamhanson.co.uk. Also check out our show notes @AoM.is/etiquette where you 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 and make sure to sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at 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 my podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
Uncertainty is a constant of human existence. How will market conditions affect your new business venture? What will be the results of the medical test you just took? Will a new relationship work out?
For most of us, situations of uncertainty trigger anxiety, even fear. But the stress of uncertainty doesn’t have to overwhelm you. You can learn to navigate it with secure, adaptable confidence so you can keep thriving and progress towards your ultimate goals.
Today on the show, Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander, returns to share insights from his new book Masters of Uncertainty. He first explains why thinking that life will be predictable keeps people from realizing their potential. He then walks us through practical techniques for dealing with uncertainty like “moving horizons,” creating meaningful goals that work with our brain chemistry, and de-stressing your body so you can be more resilient and make better decisions under pressure. We also discuss how understanding your unique attributes will help you understand how you react to uncertainty and how teams can implement “dynamic subordination” to adapt in rapidly changing environments.
Resources Related to the Podcast* Rich’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast — #738: The Character Traits That Drive Optimal Performance * AoM Article: 5 Tools for Thriving in Uncertainty * AoM Article: The Best Books to Read in Uncertain Times * The Physiological Sigh
Connect With Rich Diviney* The Attributes website * Rich on LinkedIn * Rich 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. Uncertainty is a constant of human existence. How will market conditions affect your new business venture? What will be the results of that medical test you just took? Will a new relationship work out? For most of us, situations of uncertainty trigger anxiety, even fear. But the stress of uncertainty doesn’t have to overwhelm you. You can learn to navigate it with secure, adaptable confidence so you can keep thriving and progress toward your ultimate goals. Today on the show, Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander, returns to share insights from his new book, Masters of Uncertainty. He first explains why thinking that life will be predictable keeps people from realizing their potential. He then walks us through practical techniques for dealing with uncertainty like moving horizons, creating meaningful goals that work with our brain chemistry, and de-stressing your body so you can be more resilient and make better decisions under pressure. We also discuss how teams can tackle uncertainty by implementing dynamic subordination to adapt in rapidly changing environments. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/uncertainty. Rich Diviney, welcome back to the show.
Rich Diviney: Well, thanks for having me, Brett. It’s good to be back.
Brett McKay: So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, The Attributes. I know it was a big hit with our listeners. You’ve got a new book out called Masters of Uncertainty. Is this book a continuation of your thinking in The Attributes?
Rich Diviney: It’s not a continuation. It’s actually the overarching idea. This is the book actually I’ve wanted to write for years and years and years. And as you know, because you’ve read them, I know we’ll get into The Attributes as simply one aspect of understanding oneself in uncertainty, challenge, and stress. And so in a move that was kind of unconsciously genius, I guess, I decided to write The Attributes book first, which was fantastic because The Attributes is such a big topic and it laid a nice foundation for people to understand them, for us to build our assessment tool, and so on and so forth. But understanding how we operate and perform in uncertainty is really where I’ve always had my passion and what it takes to do that, both neurologically, physiologically, and of course, what we need to know about ourselves. And so The Master of Uncertainty is really kind of the overarching idea that I’ve been exploring for a long time. Attributes was a piece and I just happened to write that Attributes book first.
Brett McKay: Yeah, maybe Masters of Uncertainty is the prequel.
Rich Diviney: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Yeah, prequel. Yeah.
Brett McKay: So why have you been so passionate about uncertainty and thinking and writing about it? What’s your background with it?
Rich Diviney: Well, uncertainty on its own really is defined as that which cannot be relied upon or known. You’re just in an unknown, unreliable situation or environment. Now, what we have to understand is that there are different forms of uncertainty. You can have uncertainty with curiosity. That’s every kid on Christmas Eve. There’s uncertainty there, but there’s no fear. It’s excitement that comes from that. What we’re talking about and what I specifically focus on is this idea of uncertainty plus anxiety, which equals fear. So it’s the uncertainty that elicits fear because that’s really where most people focus on when it comes to defining their performance or interrogating the performance or when they fail in performing. And so obviously in the SEAL teams and any spec operations unit, especially in combat, you are very well versed in managing and moving through things that are pretty dangerous and scary and have that uncertainty element in it. So in doing that throughout a career in the SEAL teams, I really began to wonder, okay, what is it we do? How do we do it? I began to kind of explore the neuroscience when I linked up with, who’s now a good friend of mine, Andrew Huberman.
This was seven years ago, seven or eight years ago, so it was before his enormously successful and awesome podcast. But we began to, he has his fear lab at Stanford, and we began to kind of explore this together. And I began to realize, or I guess we began to realize together that you could talk about the neuroscience and you could talk about the techniques that guys like us use, and you could fuse those together in a meaningful way that allowed other people, anybody, to really understand that this is actually quite human and we all have the capacity to do this.
Brett McKay: So yeah, you mentioned you are a SEAL. That’s your background, Navy SEAL. How did uncertainty show up during your career as a SEAL? Because I imagine that every time you went on a mission, even if you had done a lot of planning, there was still an element of uncertainty to it.
Rich Diviney: 100%. And I would even say uncertainty shows up in SEAL training. I mean, the day one, I mean, SEAL training BUDS, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, is designed to throw you into uncertainty and challenge and stress, all of it, because it’s designed to take you down to zero physiologically and physically and even mentally, and then ask, okay, what else do you got? What else can you do? And can you, in fact, problem solve when things are very, very serious and the stakes are very, very high? And so you start in SEAL training. The guys who show up to SEAL training and make it through were all folks who somehow got good at this prior to getting to the beaches of BUDS. You have to have some level of competency even to make it through the first day, first week, first two weeks of BUDS. But what happens is you hyper develop these techniques, these tools, these skills, if you will, and then you find yourself utilizing them in almost every aspect of SEAL life, whether it’s training, jumping out of airplanes at 20,000 feet, whether it’s in combat, in gunfights, whether it’s scuba diving in dark harbors every one of those environments comes with it, a sense of you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. And so this is why you become masters of the craft.
Brett McKay: What do you think is a common misconception civilians have about how Navy SEALs deal with uncertainty?
Rich Diviney: Well, I think one common misconception is they think that Navy SEALs are fearless, and Navy SEALs are absolutely not fearless. In fact, fearlessness in of itself is a very, very dangerous thing. I was told by a really wonderful officer when I was a younger junior officer, he said, Rich, beware the fearless leader, because that guy is going to get you killed. And so fear is a natural human thing. It’s a human being’s risk assessment tool, and it tells us, hey, pay attention. This is risky. This might kill you. This might hurt you. This might harm you. So Navy SEALs, we experience fear just like anybody else. However, we have the capacity, the tools, and the practice in moving through that very deftly, so it doesn’t sideline us. We use the fear in a very meaningful way by risk assessing properly and planning properly. But then after that, we understand that, hey, things are just going to happen, and we know how to move through it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you used the example of the Osama bin Laden raid. This was something that was planned for months. They even built a replica of the compound he was in to practice.
Rich Diviney: Yeah.
Brett McKay: But whenever the actual mission was underway, things just went completely cattywampus. Helicopter went down, and so they had to adapt, and they still were able to get the mission done.
Rich Diviney: They were, yeah. And just a quick correction there. The mission actually hadn’t been rehearsed or planned for too long. I mean, the decision was made by the president when they got the intel, and so the team had about, I think, three weeks, three or four weeks.
Brett McKay: Oh, wow.
Rich Diviney: Yeah. But in that three or four weeks, they rehearsed ad nauseum and memorized and got prepared for every single detail they could possibly anticipate. And yeah, like you said, as soon as they hit the target, the plans changed. Uncertainty struck, and the plans changed. So it’s a classic example of the idea that, and again, we can talk about planning. I do not besmirch planning at all. I think proper planning is good. What we don’t want to do is get caught up in the paralysis by analysis or paralysis through analysis, where we’re trying to plan every single thing. Because A, it’s not going to let us move, and B, it’s a real energy drag. So we have to get ourselves into a position where we plan a couple things. Hey, this might happen, this might happen. And then after that, if anything else happens, we’ll figure it out along the way.
Brett McKay: At the start of the book, you write this. I thought it really caught my attention. Most people fall short of realizing their potential primarily because our culture promotes a misleading belief that life is predictable. How does believing life is predictable set someone up for failure, falling short of their potential?
Rich Diviney: Well, we are lucky enough to live in a society and live in a time, most of us, I guess, where the environment is structured around us so that or such that we can rely on predictability. I mean, people don’t have to worry about getting killed by the saber-toothed tiger anymore or finding their food or else they’re going to starve or finding proper shelter and so on and so forth. However, what we do have to understand is that even though that is the case, even though life is designed nowadays around predictability, uncertainty is always going to happen. It’s always going to be present. The combination of not knowing and the combination of anxiety is going to bubble up that fear response in us. And to assume that things are going to go as planned is a bad assumption because you’re not going to prepare yourself when things inevitably do not go as planned. So I think that’s one factor. The other factor is that we are, as a species, designed to step outside of our comfort zone. I mean, this is in fact why we have gone from cave dweller to space explorer because the human being, the human species were designed to keep exploring, keep discovering, step outside of those boundaries.
And so understanding how we can do that more effectively not only prepares us for that uncertainty, challenge, and stress that hits us without warning, but it also allows us to take deliberate steps, choose deliberate times to step outside of our comfort zone and explore and grow. That’s where growth and evolution happens. And I think that’s a really powerful aspect of unlocking potential of every human being.
Brett McKay: All right, let’s talk about some of the tactics people can use to get a better handle on uncertainty in their work or their life. I’m sure a lot of our listeners, most of them probably aren’t Navy SEALs, but they’re dealing with uncertainty. We’re living in a work environment where artificial intelligence is upending a lot of industries. If you’re a parent, your kids can come home with problems you got to deal with that you’ve never dealt with before. So a lot of uncertainty. One tactic you talk about is moving horizons. And this is where you progress through uncertainty toward your ultimate goal by repeatedly setting and then reaching for one immediate horizon at a time. And you do this by clearly defining a duration, pathway, and outcome or DPO for each step along the way. Tell us more about moving horizons and DPO.
Rich Diviney: Yeah, moving horizons is a tool that taps into our own, every human being’s neurology. And the neuroscience behind that is that when we are in any environment, our brain is trying to figure out that environment. And it’s doing so along basically three major factors. There’s obviously other things in there. But the three primary factors it’s trying to figure out are duration, how long this thing’s going to last, pathway, what’s my route in, out, or through, and then outcome, what’s the end state of this. And what we have to understand is when we are in absence of one or more of those aspects of those three things, we find ourselves in uncertainty and anxiety and we start to feel oftentimes the fear response. An example would be illness. So say you and I got strep throat. Strep throat is a known disease that we know people don’t really die from and there’s a known antibiotic to treat strep throat. So in the case of strep throat, we are knowledgeable about pathway, the antibiotic, and we’re knowledgeable about outcome, which is we’ll get better. What we don’t know, what is unknown is duration. Because some people respond to antibiotics differently than others.
You might get better tomorrow. It might take me three days. So our anxiety, stress, uncertainty level is mild. Now say we get the flu. The flu is also a known disease that most people, at least in today’s society, don’t die from. However, there’s no known antibiotic or medicine you can take for the flu. And the recovery for the flu is variable. We don’t know how long it’s going to take for someone to recover from the flu. So in the case of the flu, we know the outcome. We will get better, but we are absent duration and pathway. So our anxiety, stress level is moderate. Now imagine a virus shows up and we’ve never seen it before. There’s no known cure or vaccine. There are some people dying, there are some people not dying, and it’s spreading around the globe and we don’t know how long we’re going to be in this thing. Obviously, this sounds familiar to most of your listeners because this is 2020 in a nutshell, right? And in that case, we were absent all three. We were absent duration, pathway, and outcome. And our fear, our anxiety, our uncertainty level was high. So all moving horizons does is it gives someone the ability to, inside of any environment, basically buy down uncertainty by creating a duration and pathway and outcome.
You create what was previously unknown and you do that by, in whatever environment, you’re in asking yourself, what do I know and what can I control in this moment? And you pick something to focus on, a horizon. And once doing so, you’ve created a duration, pathway, outcome. So I’ll give you a quick example of SEAL training. So in SEAL training, you run around with big, heavy boats on your head all the time for hours and hours. And I remember doing this, it was three in the morning or something. We were on the beach and we were running next to a sand berm. And of course, I was miserable, everybody else was miserable. And I remember saying to myself, you know what? I’m just going to focus on getting to the end of this sand berm. And what I realized, well, I didn’t realize at the moment, but what I did at that moment is I picked a horizon. And by picking a horizon, I created a duration, pathway, outcome. Duration, from now until end of sand berm. Pathway, from here to end of sand berm. And then outcome, end of sand berm.
By doing so, I also neurologically created myself a small goal and then a reward at the accomplishment of that goal, which is a dopamine reward. And that allowed me then to, once I hit that accomplishment, to come back out, ask the question again, okay, what do I know, what can I control? Pick another horizon and then do it again. And you can do this cycle over and over and over again through any uncertainty, challenges, and stress until basically one of three things happens. Either you move through the challenge, you’re done. You accomplish the goal, or you gain enough certainty in your environment so that you no longer have any uncertainty in your environment. So the moving horizon strategy, by the way, is the reason why it’s such a powerful strategy, a powerful tool, is because every single human being has done this at some point in their lives, right? So I’m not telling anybody anything new. They’ve done this. They’ve chunked their environment in a way that allowed them to step through whatever they were trying to step through. All we know now is by articulating it and understanding it, you can in fact do it more often. You can practice it and become very, very good at it so that you do it without thinking, which is where masters of uncertainty lie.
Brett McKay: As you were speaking, an example that came to mind where you could use this, is unemployment. Let’s say you lose your job, you get laid off. You can use moving horizons to work through that. I think the uncertainty with job loss is typically duration. How long am I going to be unemployed? The pathway, it’s like, okay, I got to start networking, submitting resumes, things like that. The outcome is obviously I have a job. So the duration thing could be the tricky part. But yeah, you can just keep setting smaller goals for pathways until you accomplish your goal of getting a job.
Rich Diviney: It’s a wonderful example. I would say the initial loss of employment immediately creates an absence of all three. How long am I going to be unemployed? What’s my route? What’s my pathway to get a new job? And then how long, am I going to be able to get a new job? So you’re immediately absent of all three of those. You’re correct. So in those cases, in that case, someone needs to say, okay, what do I know? What can I control? And create a horizon and therefore create a DPO. So it could be, you know what? Okay, I have a buddy. My buddy can link me up with a recruiter. That’s my first horizon. I’m going to call my buddy and see if he can link me up with a recruiter. You’ve created your first horizon. You’ve created your first DPO. You do that. Then whatever that result is, you create your next one. Then you create your next one. But it is very much about working the problem in the moment and focusing only on that which you can control in the moment. One thing you will never, ever see Navy SEALs do is worry about stuff they can’t control in the moment. If they don’t have any control of it in the moment, we’re not going to worry about it. It’s useless.
It’s a waste of energy. And this goes for everything from SEAL training to legitimate gunfights in Iraq or Afghanistan. When you’re in a gunfight in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s so much going on, but you’re in the moment. You’re saying, what do I know? What can I control? What is my thing that I can actually take focus on and control in this moment? And you start moving through that. And slowly, certainty builds, hopefully, and you move through that. But I think unemployment is a wonderful example, and you can see exactly why these strategies are not only reserved for Navy SEALs or super performers. They’re very human.
Brett McKay: Yeah, another example I thought of was waiting for medical test results. So you might know you’re getting results back in three days. So what you do is you set a horizon and you just say, okay, I’m going to research the different possibilities of what I might have and what that might mean. That’s my horizon. And then when I reach that horizon, I’m going to ask myself again, all right, what do I know and what can I control? And maybe set another horizon where I then research specialists who might be able to help me and then just concentrate on that horizon. And that can give you a sense of control. It gives you something to do. And I don’t think not everyone might want to do that because some people just don’t want to worry about things before they’re concrete. And maybe they’re just going to say I’m just going to focus on keeping up my health by making sure I do one of my workouts every day for the next three days. That’s the only thing I control, and that’s the only thing I know has a benefit. Related to moving horizons and creating manageable horizons is creating meaningful horizons. What do you mean by that?
Rich Diviney: So the meaningful horizons describes what the size horizon needs to be. That’s always the next question. Okay, how do I know, like, what should I focus on? Or what’s the best size horizon? And so what we have to understand to understand the answer to that question is dopamine as a neurotransmitter, which is a very powerful chemical. It was for years and years regarded only as a reward chemical, but it’s much, much more than just a reward chemical. It’s actually a motivation chemical. It kind of gets us up and moving. It tells us, keep going. This is good. Keep doing this. Dopamine is what gets us up out of the bed in the morning. They’ve done experiments in the lab with rats where one group of rats is given, well, I guess a whole group of rats is given a device where they tap a lever and a tasty pellet comes out of that thing. And so, of course, every rat will just sit by that thing and just hit the lever, hit the lever and get a pellet. Then they took half of that group and removed the dopamine from that group. And all they needed to do was put those rats who had no dopamine basically a rat’s length away from that lever, and those rats wouldn’t even move to get that pellet.
So what this means is that, and dopamine works in our system, is that when we create a horizon, we are giving ourselves a motivation through dopamine, and we have an amount of dopamine that’s allowing us to keep going. If we create a horizon that’s too far away, that’s too big, we will run out of dopamine along the way, and we will quit. All quitting is is just you run out of dopamine. That’s what it is. So if I’m in a situation, and maybe I’m on that beach in Helwig, and I say, you know what? I’m running with this boat. I’m just going to make it to the end of the week. That’s way too big in that moment. The other side of that is if you pick a horizon that’s too close and too easy, you won’t get enough of a dopamine reward to feel it and be motivated to pick another horizon. And so that would be maybe I’m just going to count three steps. That might be too small, whatever that is. But as you can tell, these are very subjective to the person, and they’re subjective to the intensity of the environment.
The more intense the environment, the shorter the horizon is likely going to have to be. But we can and must modulate this size, these meaningful horizons, as we move through, and it has to be subjective to our own experience.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s walk through an example of doing this. Let’s say someone wants to start a business. They have a 9:00 to 5:00 job. They’ve got a dream of becoming an entrepreneur, starting their own business. What would setting meaningful horizons look like for that?
Rich Diviney: So let’s just work through at least a basic level of subjectivity here, right? So imagine the person has already started some businesses before and is looking to start a new business get out of what they’re doing, looking to start a new one. Their first horizon might be, you know what? I’m going to call my buddy who’s a VC, pitch him an idea, and see if I can get some funding going, okay? Because that’s the first thing. Or their horizon might be, you know what? I’m going to start something up. I’m going to talk to my friends, start something up, and we’re going to see if we can put together something in the next three or four months. That might be the horizon for someone who’s done it before. Someone who’s never done it before and is literally deciding to quit their job and do it, their first horizon might be, I’m going to go to the library and start learning about how to build a business, how to create a business. I’m going to call somebody to ask some questions to do that.
A really good way to describe this, so in the book I talk about a guy I met who was an ultra runner. And when I met him, I said, how’d you get into ultra running? And he said you won’t believe this, but I used to be 400 pounds or so.
Brett McKay: Wow.
Rich Diviney: And I was like, oh no, I was like, my gosh. I mean, tell me that story. He’s like, well I was so heavy and I was so overweight and unhealthy. And I decided one day, I’ve had enough, and I’m going to start running. I’m going to set a goal to run a marathon. And I said, so what’d you do? He’s like, well, the first thing I did is I decided I was going to go home and I was going to order running shoes. So that’s what he did. And then when the running shoes showed up, he said, okay, tomorrow morning when I get up, I’m going to get up and put on the running shoes. He did that. Next morning he put on the running shoes. He walked to his front door. Next morning he put on the running shoes. He walked to his mailbox and then so on and so forth until he was running a marathon six, eight months, 10 months later, I can’t remember. So the example for him was putting on his shoes and walking to the front door was a meaningful horizon.
Now, I try to run a couple times a week when I’m home and not traveling. I like doing it. If I have to take two or three months off and I haven’t run in two or three months and I decide I’m going to start running again, putting on my shoes and walking to the mailbox is not going to be enough of a horizon for me. It’s not going to be meaningful enough for me because it’s too short. And so we have to understand that this subjectivity matters and we have to begin to modulate our own horizons. You can do this in the moment too. I mean, you can actually in the moment pick something and as you’re moving towards it to decide, oh, wait, that’s way too far and pick something shorter. Or you accomplish this like, actually, that wasn’t far enough. I need to pick a longer one. So it’s not, you don’t have to get it perfect every time, but it must be subjective in whatever endeavor you’re doing.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it sounds like a skill that you develop on how to measure that. Reminds me of in weight training or even in running, you have this RPE, rate of perceived effort.
Rich Diviney: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And it’s auto-regulation and it takes a while for you to figure out like what’s a 10 for you, like what’s really, really hard and what’s a four. When you first start off, I think you typically underestimate because you’re not fully aware of what your body can do. But then, yeah, once you get the hang of it, you’re able to be like, you know what? My goal is to go for an eight and today this effort feels like an eight. But on another day, an eight could be less or more just depending on what’s going on…
Rich Diviney: 100%. I’m so glad. I went for a run this morning and I was traveling all day yesterday, so I didn’t eat a lot all day yesterday. And so when I went for the run this morning, I started and I just felt completely depleted. And I was like, oh my God, I was slower than I usually am. And so perfect example that you just gave, because my eight today was markedly slower than my eights when I’m properly nourished. So yeah, you’re 100% right.
Brett McKay: Okay, so creating meaningful horizons is about making sure the horizon you set is challenging enough or just like has enough to it to keep you interested, but not so challenging that you give up and quit. So here’s an example. Let’s say you’re thinking of moving somewhere different from where you’re at right now, and you’re not sure about the move. Like you don’t know if you’re gonna like it or not.
I think it takes about two years to really feel settled into a place and be able to feel like you click with it. But telling yourself you’re definitely at the state for two years, that can feel pretty psychologically daunting. And I think you can tell if you’ve got potential with the place in a year. So you set a horizon for one year. You say, I’m gonna do all I can to dig into this place for one year. And at the end of the year, I’ll evaluate if it’s working and whether I wanna stay. So that could be a motivating, meaningful horizon. Another idea you have on sort of modulating and taking control of your dopamine system to stay motivated is this piece of advice that I thought was interesting. It was counterintuitive. It was keep your eyes off the prize. How does that actually help with long-term motivation?
Rich Diviney: Well, this feeds into the meaningful horizon concept. So in other words, we have to have an objective, right? We have to have something we’re moving towards, whether it’s run a marathon, whether it’s make it through SEAL training, whether it’s start a business, okay? That’s the objective that has to be present. However, we know, just because we just talked about it, is that that’s too big, that’s too far away. That’s too much of, that’s the whole elephant. And you need to break the elephant into one bite at a time. So when you are in this process of moving horizons, as you move through these challenges, especially during uncertainty, to keep focusing on the big goal, the big picture is too much, it’s too far away, it’s too much to handle. So keep your eyes off the prize is simply a reminder that, hey, it’s there, it’s driving you, it’s important, but take it down to the chunk and focus on that chunk. Don’t worry about the big goal right now, focus on the chunk. This is what keeping your eyes off the prize means. And it’s important because if you focus on that big thing too much, then you’ll lose focus on your horizon shifting and you will eventually, it’ll be too long and you might give up along the way or quit.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so we’ve talked about some psychological tactics you can do to reframe things in your head whenever you face uncertainty, how to manage it, how to navigate it. You have another section in the book where you talk about actual tactics, like physiological tactics you can do to calm down the arousal system that kicks in whenever we’re afraid, whenever we’re dealing with uncertainty. And this is important because you need to be calm in order to be in the right mental space to choose an appropriate next horizon. And that can be challenging when uncertainty is just thrown right in front of you, right in the moment, like something’s wrong in the moment and you don’t know what’s going on, how’s it gonna affect you, what do you need to do, and you’re just stressed out. So what are some tools people can use to reduce the arousal they feel whenever they’re stressed out in uncertainty?
Rich Diviney: Yeah, I mean, there’s many, although the most powerful, fastest ones that have kind of been discovered have to do with our visual system and our respiratory system. And that’s because our visual system and respiratory system are directly connected to our central nervous system, which is what we talk about, sympathetic, parasympathetic systems when we’re in stress, challenge, uncertainty. And so what’s happening, like you just described, when we have uncertainty, challenge, stress, fear, all that stuff, our anxiety goes up, our autonomic arousal, our sympathetic system starts to climb. So let’s talk about the positives and negatives of this, right? As our autonomic arousal climbs, we’re in sympathetic response, our frontal lobe, the decision-making part of our brain begins to recede, and our limbic brain, our emotional kind of unconscious brain, our lizard brain begins to come to the fore. Now in the extreme cases we encounter what’s called autonomic overload or amygdala hijack which is when the frontal lobe the decision-making part of our brain has receded completely and our lizard brain has taken over and we are acting without thinking okay now this comes in very handy for things like jumping out of the way of a moving train or running from a bear.
Okay but it doesn’t come in handy for 99% of the other things that happen to us in life when we can actually really use some conscious and intelligent decision-making going on and so what we have to understand is physiologically we can bring that frontal lobe back online by decreasing our autonomic arousal. We can do this visually or through breath now like a visual tool that I talk about in the book is open gaze you know when we’re stressed and focused what happens is our gaze begins to focus in very tightly on whatever the threat is that’s why we sometimes get tunnel vision during these phases so what they found is if you go into open gaze and open gaze is simply the technique of just if you’re staring out or even if you’re staring at something you just soften your gaze you’re no longer staring at it anymore you’re just kind of noticing all of your peripheries you’re just taking it all in this is very easy to do with horizons and things like that but they’ve proven that this type of open gaze begins to shift your physiology from sympathetic to parasympathetic and brings down your autonomic arousal.
There are respiratory tools as well I’m not going to go into all of them but when we talk about breath when we get stressed and anxious what happens is our breathing changes it becomes quicker shorter, we’re not taking in as much oxygen we’re taking in a lot of carbon dioxide and so another technique that I lay out is this technique called the physiological sigh where basically you take a full deep breath in, you top it off and then you slowly breathe out and what’s happening there is you’re blowing out the carbon dioxide from your system which is de-stressing you which is taking your autonomic arousal down. And so this is taking your autonomic arousal down it’s shifting our physiology and most importantly allowing our brains our frontal lobes to get back online in such a manner that we can start to ask questions about our environment. And of course the first question we want to ask is what do I know? What can I control? What’s a horizon I can focus on? And so there are physiological ways what’s happening there is when we think about uncertainty plus anxiety equals fear the way we buy down anxiety is through those techniques those physiological techniques.
You can buy that down the way we buy down uncertainty is through the process of moving horizons but as you buy down both of them the fear starts to dissipate.
Brett McKay: Gotcha okay so an example of this let’s say you run a business and you have a website that takes orders the website crashes that can I mean that’s happened to me with some of the stuff that I’ve run. It can just stress you the crap out. Especially when you’re having a lot of high traffic and like this is really important that the site be running and I’ve, whenever that happened I just like freak out, oh my gosh. I would have been better first to just do some of those practices maybe open up my gaze do the sighing.
Rich Diviney: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And then that calms things down and then I start doing the moving horizon thing.
Rich Diviney: Yeah although I will say I mean the cool thing about this is even choosing in the moment to do like say five physiological sighs that’s a horizon right there. You’ve just picked a horizon you’ve picked something to focus on you do that and you come back out and you say what can you do again. So you can use even these tools even these breathing tools as many horizons. Sometimes the environment’s so intense that your only horizon is I’m gonna take ten breaths that’s what I’m gonna do. And after that I’m gonna see what’s going on. So yeah it’s a great example and all this meshes in a very very meaningful way.
Brett McKay: Okay in the next section of your book so the first section is all about calming yourself down when that fear starts hijacking your limbic system and then figuring out ways to reduce the uncertainty in that specific situation. The second part of your book you talk about identity. And you return to your framework of attributes which you talked about in your first book in this part. How can knowing what your attributes are help you navigate uncertainty in life? Maybe we start like what are attributes for those who haven’t read that first book.
Rich Diviney: Well yeah so this part of the book just described so I say the first part of the book describes those things that are not unique to us as human beings. In other words all of us have this. All of us have the capacity to move horizons and this is how our brain works ubiquitously throughout the human species. The second part of the book focuses on those unique things that we bring into an uncertain situation. This is when we get into those things about us that are different from everybody else. So the first one is attributes and this idea these qualities that we have patience situational awareness, compartmentalization, perseverance, okay. And where we fall on those qualities like we talked about in the last conversation attributes we all have all of the attributes. We have all of these qualities the difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. So adaptability for example if I’m about a level six on adaptability which means when the environment changes around the outside of my control it’s fairly easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it. Someone else might be a level three which means the same thing happens to them it’s difficult for them to go with flow and there’s friction there.
They’re still adaptable because all human beings are but if we were to line up these attributes on a wall like dimmer switches all of us would have different dimmer switch settings. And it starts to speak to our own unique performance not only in everyday life but especially during stress challenge and uncertainty. Because in stress challenge uncertainty we are literally running on our attributes. Because all that other stuff you know personality on that stuff goes out the window when the you-know-what hits the fan. So understanding our unique attribute fingerprint or footprint is very valuable in understanding how we’re going to show up in uncertainty. And that’s why it’s so important in this process.
Brett McKay: Gotcha and where can people go to learn like what their attributes are, is there like a website that you have?
Rich Diviney: Yeah. Our website theattributes.com we have it all there. And we have an assessment tool there that you can take and you can figure out where you stand on all 41 attributes and it gives you a readout and gives you some information on how and why you behave the way you do. And so yeah, check it out at theattributes.com.
Brett McKay: Well let’s say you take the thing and you realize, oh man, I suck at adaptability, how should you prepare yourself for times of uncertainty?
Rich Diviney: So first of all, knowledge in this case is power, right? Because if I know I’m low on adaptability, then automatically when the environment starts to change, uncertainty starts to come into the fray. And because the environment’s changing, I immediately can say to myself, oh, wait, this feels bad because I know I’m low on adaptability. And just that conscious thought, by the way, is bringing your frontal lobe back online, or at least keeping your frontal lobe engaged in the process because you’re having a conscious thought. But I would say in those environments, if you know you’re lower on adaptability, you can say, okay, well, when the environment shifts, so say you’re traveling, okay, and you have a couple connections and you’re at the airport and you’re told the flight’s delayed and it’s going to affect your connections down the line. It’s also going to affect the engagement that you were supposed to be at. So you’re not going to get there in time anymore, so on and so forth. Now you are in an environment of uncertainty and it’s because the environment’s changing rapidly. And so the same process applies. You just begin to pick horizons that are meaningful for you.
In the case of low adaptability, just know that it’s going to feel uncomfortable and more stressful and more uncertain because you’re low on it. When I’m traveling, because I do so all the time and the plans start to shift around me, the environment starts to shift around me, I’m pretty high on adaptability. So the difference between me and someone who’s low on it is not that we don’t DPO the situation or shift horizons through that situation. The difference is I just feel less stressed about it. I feel less uncertain about it. So just understand that the attributes we’re a little bit lower on, we’re going to feel more uncertainty, challenge, and stress when those things are exercised due to the environment versus other ones. But the opposite is true. If you’re high on stuff, the attributes you’re high on, when the environment goes uncertainty and the environment requires whatever that attribute is and you happen to be high on it, you’re going to feel less uncertainty and challenge and stress. But that’s one way to look at it is that these uncertain environments that are asking for the attributes we’re lower on, those are likely the ones that are going to cause us more work.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I imagine too, if you’re high in adaptability, if you don’t have enough uncertainty, then you get bored. And that can be a problem too.
Rich Diviney: Yeah. Any of these attributes to their extremes, too high, too low can be bad. Right. But we also understand that any of these attributes, whether you’re high or low is not a bad thing or a good thing. These are completely nonjudgmental. In fact, there are advantages to being high adaptability. There are disadvantages to being high adaptability. And there’s advantages of being low adaptability and disadvantages. So in the normal spectrum of these things, there’s always pros and cons. But at the extremes in any of these attributes, it certainly gets to be a bad thing.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think knowing your attributes can help you design better horizons. So if I’m low on, say, perseverance, that’s one of your attributes. If I’m low on that, I can’t just set long, vague goals. I’ve got to make my horizons shorter, more defined, more frequent, so I don’t run out of gas halfway through. The same thing goes with compartmentalization. That’s another one of those attributes you talk about. So if you struggle with that, you probably struggle to block out noise, stay focused when things get chaotic. So if that’s your problem, then your DPO might need to be even more simple. And so basically, your weaker attributes don’t mean you’re doomed under uncertainty, but they do mean you need to tailor your horizon strategy to how you’re wired. And that just makes the whole system work better. And you also talk about the role that identity plays in motivation and staying the course during times of stress and uncertainty. Talk to us about that.
Rich Diviney: Yeah, identity has always been fascinating to me because it’s always been something on my mind. And it’s because I’ve witnessed and certainly researched and seen examples of people acting in ways that are confusing to them when they look back at it. So take the sports fan who beats the crap out of another sports fan and then is suddenly in front of the judge and like, I don’t know what I was doing. I was out of my mind. They’re confused as to why they even acted that way. And one of the reasons is because our performance, our behavior sits and relies upon the identities that we collect along the way. So we are, as human beings, a collection, a collage of different I ams. They can be everything from benign to very, very important, very powerful. I went to this high school. I am this type of sports player. I am a Navy SEAL. I am a husband, father. I’m a Metallica fan, whatever that is. Okay, we have a collection of these things. And each one of these I ams, each one of these identities comes with it, some conditions, some rules, some behaviors that describe how you act in that identity.
And we align to those. That’s why we chose those identities in the first place. What we have to understand is in uncertainty, challenge, and stress, we are always going to behave towards the identity that we align to, that we prioritize in that moment. And this can be an advantage. It also can be a disadvantage. So the example would be as a Navy SEAL, that’s a very powerful identity. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, that was the priority identity that I was aligning towards, as were my teammates. However, sometimes the target would change, and we’d suddenly have to put on our husband, father hats because maybe we have to deal with some civilians or kids. This is an example where a fluidity in your identities can actually be very beneficial. Now take this sports fan. I mean, say you’re a fan of whatever ex-sports team, and you find yourself in an argument with a fan of another ex-sports team. And if you continue down that track, depending on the sports teams, you and I could probably comment on some that are worse than others, but if you continue that track, you may find yourself in a physical altercation because that identity is driving you. Or you could calm yourself and ask yourself, okay, I’m also a husband and father.
I’m a professional business person, and so getting into a fight in the street right now is probably not good for that identity, and you can shift. So all this to say is understanding that identities really are very powerful in the way they drive behavior, especially during uncertainty, challenge, and stress, to start to get a handle on those identities we carry, and we all carry a lot of them, we really do. Again, some are really important and powerful, some are fairly benign, but there are a lot of them. Get a handle on what they are and begin to use them in a more effective, proactive way, because you can begin to shift into identities that actually more appropriately fit whatever situation. You’ll often find, if you do the diligence, you might find some identities that don’t matter to you anymore. They’re like, oh, actually, I’m not that anymore. I can discard that one. And then we also find ourselves in situations where we’re building new identities. Entrepreneurs do this. I did this coming out of the Navy. The Navy SEAL identity, very powerful, but once I’m not a SEAL, I’m not a SEAL, and so I put that on the shelf, obviously in a position of honor and respect.
However, now I’m going to build a new identity, and that is author, entrepreneur. And that’s another way to actually actualize this stuff, is to have an understanding and move and flow in a positive way towards whatever you’re looking at.
Brett McKay: All right, so we’ve been talking about how to deal with uncertainty as an individual. So the DPO, moving horizons, using those tactics to calm yourself down, knowing how you typically navigate uncertainty by knowing your attributes, having that identity to help you stay grounded and motivated when things get hard. Let’s talk about teams, how to navigate uncertainty as a team. And you introduced this key principle that you got from the SEALs called dynamic subordination. What is that?
Rich Diviney: Yeah, dynamic subordination is simply, if you were to think about how this looks on a chart, it’s not the pyramid task work structure, which we all know, the leader sits on top and barks orders. It’s not the flat line where everybody’s in this together, we don’t know actually who’s in charge. And it’s not even the upside-down pyramid where the leader’s at the bottom in service to everybody, because the burden is not supposed to sit only on one person. And so what it really is is a blob, it’s an amoeba. And the position of leadership in that amoeba can be anywhere at any time. It’s wherever it needs to be in the moment. And so dynamic subordination is an idea that the team understands that challenges and issues and problems can come from any angle at any moment. And when one does, the person who’s closest to the problem and the most capable immediately steps up and takes lead, and everybody follows and supports. And then the environment shifts, and someone else steps up and takes lead. And so this is how all the highest-performing teams operate. Listen, I was an officer in the SEAL teams.
I went on hundreds of combat missions, and I was in charge of every single one. It did not mean I was always being supported. In fact, most of the time was the opposite. I was supporting other people, whether it was my snipers or breachers or whatever, or assaulters. Sometimes the environment shifted, and they were in support of me. But it was all based on the environment and what was needed in the moment. So it’s a very important concept that tells us that our role on a team has nothing to do with our hierarchy or rank. It has everything to do with what we are there to contribute to the team. And this is how the highest-performing teams operate. And this is the key to operating in uncertainty challenges and stress, because uncertainty by its very nature is we don’t know what’s coming. We don’t know what angle things are coming at. So we need to adjust and focus on whatever we can in the moment, and that might be at any angle.
Brett McKay: And just to be clear, I want to, kind of touch on this, there’s still a leader whenever you have dynamic subordination, correct? Like someone who’s responsible.
Rich Diviney: Yeah, I understand the question, but what we have to do is I can’t answer it if I use the colloquial definition that we all think of as leader. A leader is a behavior. Being in charge is a position. There’s two very different and distinct things. And we don’t get to self-designate, by the way. We don’t get to call ourselves leaders. That’s like calling yourself good-looking or funny, all right? People decide whether or not you are someone they want to follow based on the way you behave. And I remember being in situations in the military at least a couple times where I’d look at a person in a hierarchical position above me, and I would say, I would not follow that person anywhere. Meanwhile, there’d be someone over to my right or left who had no hierarchical position whatsoever. I’d be like, I would follow that person to hell and back. It’s because of the way we behave. And so leadership is defined as someone who others choose to follow based on behavior, which means everybody on a team can be a leader in the moment. Now, if you’re talking about the person who’s in a position of being in charge, who is responsible for the team holistically, now you’re talking about someone whose leadership role should be to create a dynamically subordinating environment.
That’s the whole role of the leader in terms of the person who’s in charge. You need to create that environment because if you don’t, you’re not going to create a team that can in fact deal with uncertainty, challenge, and stress. So yeah, every team is going to have a hierarchical nature to it. That’s the nature of a team. But the role of the person in the highest position of hierarchy is to create a dynamically subordinating team. It’s not to have the big office, big desk, get the big paycheck, and be deferred to on everything. It’s to create a dynamic subordinating team that actually moves fast, moves efficiently. And I always kind of told my junior officers when I was talking to them, you have to get used to what I call the irony of leadership. And that is if you do your job correctly, you eventually work yourself out of a job. You create a team that can run without you and in many cases run faster than you, outrun you. That should be the goal of every true leader because every true leader should aspire to that. You want to make your team so good, so much better that eventually, oh man, they’re so good, I got to withdraw.
They’re moving way too fast than I could ever move. And it’s because of the things I’ve allowed and helped them do.
Brett McKay: So let’s say you’re in a position of authority. How do you develop that environment where dynamic subordination exists? I’m sure there’s a lot to it, but one or two things that people can do.
Rich Diviney: Well, I mean, first of all, you empower an environment of trust. Trust is the foundational element. And trust is all about behaviors as well. You can’t make anybody trust you. All you can do is behave in a way that allows them to make a decision to choose to trust you. So as a leader of a team or a hierarchical position, the highest hierarchical position in a team, you must be behaving in ways that promote that environment of trust, making people cared for. You listen to them. You practice empathy. You’re consistent. You’re competent. You tell the truth. You’re accountable. These are all behaviors that will allow for others to look at you and say, ooh, this is someone I trust. By the way, the behaviors that define great leaders are almost synonymous with the behaviors that define trust. So they’re very, very similar. So we have to build that environment by doing, by modeling the behavior we want to see more of and then rewarding the behavior we want to see more of in terms of trust. Now, part of that trust, part of that trust building is that as the person in charge, you need to give opportunities for the people on the team to extend themselves, go outside their comfort zone.
To actually step up and be in charge, to take those positions, even if they might fail because we learn a lot from failure. But when they fail, that’s really important because if you have their back when they fail, they will learn rapidly, they feel that trust and that safety, and they’ll be ready to do it again and do it the right time this time. So we have to, as people in charge, really take responsibility and accountability for creating that environment, both through the way we act, through the way we reward, and through the way we allow our teammates and those in our span of care to really extend themselves and, of course, have their back when they do it.
Brett McKay: Besides developing that trust, another thing you talk about that’s important to have this dynamic subordination take root in a group is really being intentional about the culture in a team. How can a person who’s in a position of authority, not a leader, a person in a position of authority, help develop that kind of culture?
Rich Diviney: Yeah, I mean, a culture is kind of, I mean, very close to the identity of a team. Whatever that culture is, is close to the identity of the team. And those things can be intertwined. In other words, what are the behaviors that this team expresses because we’re part of that team? That’s what the culture really is. And so why we have to be very cognizant of this is because culture in any group of people is going to emerge regardless of whether or not the leader has anything to say about it or not. Whether you’re deliberate about it or whether you’re not deliberate about it, some sort of culture, some sort of identity will emerge. And if we are not deliberate about it, then we might not like what we see that emerges. And so the challenge is to be deliberate about the culture, be deliberate about whatever identity you’re creating for that team. Include the team in that process, of course, because it’s not just you as the person in charge. But what are those things that define us as a team from an identity standpoint and a culture standpoint? The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts do this well.
The Marines do this well. The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have a creed, and their creed is really just a list of rules that define their behavior. That’s what it is. That’s the culture. And you talk to any Girl Scout around the world, they are all aligned on that very same rule list of things, that culture. So we can do the same thing in organizations. We just have to be deliberate about it. But rest assured, if you’re not deliberate about it, it’s going to emerge whether you like it or not, and you may not like it.
Brett McKay: And you also talk about once you establish that culture, you have to start being picky about who you let in to the group to make sure that they match up with the culture.
Rich Diviney: Well, yeah, and this is a lot of the work we do with organizations and teams around attributes. Every culture, every identity is going to have a set of attributes that are prioritized. And I say set, it’s probably one or two or three top things that are prioritized. And so what we have to do as people who are bringing new folks onto a team is make sure that the people we’re bringing on are aligned with that from an attribute sense and from a value sense, from an identity sense, all those things, so that they come in and they’re like, okay, this person actually fits, they’re a culture fit. But you can’t do that if you don’t know what the culture is. So you got to start there.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think in times of uncertainty, it really does help to know what you’re about. Well, Rich, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Rich Diviney: Well, yeah, the best place is theattributes.com, like I said. So it’s theattributes.com. So there’s a the in front of the attributes. And there you can find both books. You can find the assessment tool, you can find everything we do for businesses and organizations and teams, kind of a one-stop shop. And of course, the books are also, you can find them on Amazon as well. And I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn under Rich Diviney, but theattributes.com is the best place.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Rich Diviney, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Rich Diviney: Thank you, brother. Great to be back.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Rich Diviney. He’s the author of the book, Masters of Uncertainty. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, theattributes.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/uncertainty, 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 think of. And make sure to sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
Community is one of life’s most valuable but increasingly scarce resources. While we hear about a supposed epidemic of male loneliness, many men still resist joining groups or struggle to maintain involvement after initial enthusiasm wanes.
Today on the show, Frank Schwartz will help us understand the barriers to building male community and how to overcome them. Frank is the CEO of F3, a free, all-volunteer men’s leadership organization that uses workouts to bring men together and supports hundreds of decentralized chapters worldwide.
In the first half of our conversation, Frank explains the psychology behind men’s hesitation to join groups, how to navigate the “wish dream” of idealized community, and why expecting perfection kills participation. We then discuss what makes leadership in a decentralized group different from traditional hierarchies, the importance of embracing messiness, and why allowing men to make their own decisions creates stronger leaders than giving them a rulebook to follow. We end our conversation with Frank’s perspective on cultivating patience as a leader and how to measure success when building a community of men.
Resources Related to the Podcast F3 * AoM Podcast #324: How Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith Are the Cure for Sad Clown Syndrome * Q Source: The F3 Manual of Virtuous Leadership* by David “Dredd” Redding * AoM article on phronesis/practical wisdom * Dying Breed article on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vision of community
Connect With Frank Schwartz* Frank on LinkedIn * Frank on X
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Community is one of life’s most valuable but increasingly scarce resources. While we hear about a supposed epidemic of male loneliness, many men still resist joining groups or struggle to maintain involvement after initial enthusiasm wanes. Today on the show, Frank Schwartz will help us understand the barriers to building male community, and how to overcome them. Frank is the CEO of F3, a free all volunteer men’s leadership organization, that uses workouts to bring men together and supports hundreds of decentralized chapters worldwide. In the first half of our conversation, Frank explains the psychology behind men’s hesitation to join groups, how to navigate the wish stream of idealized community, and why expecting perfection, kills participation. We then discuss what makes leadership in a decentralized group different from traditional hierarchies, the importance of embracing messiness, and why allowing men to make their own decisions creates stronger leaders than giving them a rulebook to follow. We end our conversation with Frank’s perspective on cultivating patience as a leader, and how to measure success when building a community of men. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/mensgroups.
Frank Schwartz, welcome to the show.
Frank Schwartz: Hey, thanks so much for having me man. I appreciate it.
Brett McKay: So you are, is it the CEO or president of F3?
Frank Schwartz: This is a very good question. And up until a couple of years ago, I could have said president, but now CEO. We kind of eliminated the president position. And the thing about F3 is, and guys who are familiar know, but those who aren’t, everything’s kind of very made up. So we have sort of different names for what we do that are a little bit kind of inside baseball. And so, yes, CEO on paper, but the official title within F3 is Nantan.
Brett McKay: Okay.
Frank Schwartz: Which is an Apache word kind of meaning cultural and spiritual leader.
Brett McKay: All right. So you’re the CEO of F3. We’ve had the guys who started F3 on the podcast. This was back in 2017, episode number 324. And we’ll link to that in show notes. But for those who aren’t familiar, what is F3?
Frank Schwartz: So F3, it’s a free men’s leadership group that uses workouts to trick you into coming out so we can teach you about leadership. That’s really what it is. But essentially it is to men’s workout group. Our stated mission is to plant, to grow and to serve small workout groups for men, in order to invigorate male community leadership. The founders, as you mentioned, Dave Redding, Tim Whitmire, Dredd and OBT, affectionately known within F3, kind of looked around and said, “Hey, we see a lot of guys at church and other civic organizations and at work, and whatever. A lot of guys just standing around with their hands in their pockets, and nobody doing anything about the world around them. And influencing their community, and there’s just not a lot of leading happening.” And Dave with his special forces background said, “Hey, the place I learned the most about leadership, and the way I think we could spread leadership throughout our communities and in our world, is via training, physical training.” It’s a great place, pretty low risk to do that. And that wasn’t the intention when it started, which again, you’d probably go back and listen and hear it, but when the intention when it started, but it is kind of where it ended up.
So the short answer to that very long answer I gave is, it’s a place where men can come into community with one another and get physically fit and learn leadership.
Brett McKay: And again, it’s all free, man. You can go to their website and you can find, there’s like chapters all over the world at this point. How many chapters are there at this point?
Frank Schwartz: Ooh, I should have had that much more readily available on the tip of my tongue. I think it’s about 450, maybe just shy of 450.
Brett McKay: Okay. And so, typically the workouts are early in the morning before work, and it’s a bootcamp style workout, calisthenics, things like that?
Frank Schwartz: Yeah, typically body weight, although some places, there’s kettlebells or sandbags and some of that kind of stuff that guys use. But yeah, typically, if you sort of shot at the middle of the curve on an F3 workout, it’s gonna happen about 5:15, 5:30, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later, and it’s gonna be a lot of body weight and calisthenic type, some running, pushups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and then really get a lot of whatever we can find.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So you do the workout, and then there’s also a fellowship aspect to it, a leadership aspect to this. Tell us more about that leadership component, because again, the workout is the hook. That’s like the Trojan horse for that other stuff.
Frank Schwartz: Right, yeah. It’s just the way we sneakily trick you into coming, ’cause you go, hey, free workout, and a guy goes, aha, I could try that. What’s the problem? So the three Fs are fitness, fellowship, and faith. And really, we don’t have a program per se, but again, if you were to kind of shoot at the middle and go, “Well, what’s typical?” Guys get together early in the morning, and work out together. It’s a pretty strenuous, pretty vigorous workout, generally speaking. And then we get together for what we call a cafeteria afterward. You hang out, you make friends, and you get deeper in fellowship with one another, because, and you know this probably as well or better than most anyone, community is really where we’re gonna save the country, where we’re gonna do our best work, is in community with one another. So we put men in community with one another. And then what happens inevitably, once you do that, is guys start looking at their lives and go, “Well, now that I’ve got these things more or less squared away, I’ve lost some weight, I’ve got some friends. Well, now what? What am I supposed to do now?”
And they start looking outside themselves. Now that they are more settled, they start looking outside themselves and saying, “Well, what can I do for others?” And that’s the big question of faith. What is it that exists outside yourself, and how can you live in such a way that you can kind of wear yourself out in the service of that thing?” So we don’t make any kind of determination about, well, a guy ought to believe in Jesus Christ or a guy ought to believe in Buddha or a guy ought to believe in whatever. We just say, you’ve got to believe in something bigger than yourself in order to be a virtuous leader. And that’s what we do. And so, a lot of times in those meetings after workouts, guys will study. They might study certain kinds of books or whatever. We have a book that Dave wrote, Dredd wrote, called “The QSource” And it sort of outlines our overall leadership philosophy and framework. And so, guys will study that together, and we’ll discuss that together. We’ve got podcasts about it and all kinds of stuff. So I wouldn’t say there’s like a super formal program, but we do have what we call stuff worth trying.
And so, you kind of get in there, and you’re like, “Oh, hey, I don’t know if this will work for you or not, but here’s the framework, and maybe try it, until you find something better.” But that’s the idea, is to create leaders amongst men, and to take those things that we learn in what we call the gloom, which is that those pre-dawn hours when your family’s sleeping and work hasn’t started calling yet, those things that we learn there and take them home, take them to the community so we can be better people.
Brett McKay: And the leadership structure of F3 is unique. It’s decentralized. Tell us more about that, how that works.
Frank Schwartz: Absolutely. And this is conceptually, I think Dave and Tim early on were like, we can’t lead everywhere. We can’t be everywhere. And if really what we’re called to do is to create leaders, then we’re gonna have to hand off the power here as time goes on. And so, the idea is that, if you start making rules, then you have to make more rules to enforce those rules, and it kind of becomes this big spiraling thing. And then pretty soon, you’ve got 5,000-page bills getting introduced into Congress, right? So we live by a mission, a credo, and five core principles. And the idea is, that every man has been born and put on this earth to be a leader. That is his job. That is what he has been created to do. And so, what we try and do is help guys to recapture that. We want men to lean into that part of themselves, and to figure out how to not just lead a workout well or to even manage something well, but to truly influence others for good, in every place that they’re in.
Brett McKay: Okay. And so, it’s all volunteer?
Frank Schwartz: I feel like I didn’t answer the question very well.
Brett McKay: No.
Frank Schwartz: Right. So to decentralize it, right?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Frank Schwartz: So since every man is a leader, we say, okay, then I can’t be in charge of where you are. Because Brett, you’re in where? Tulsa, right?
Brett McKay: Correct.
Frank Schwartz: Yeah. So I don’t know what’s happening in Tulsa. I can’t tell you what to do in Tulsa. I don’t have any idea of what the right thing to do will be where you are. So I have to teach you how to lead, and give you the power and the empowerment, I guess really, to say, hey, you make those decisions. I think that honestly, not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s been one of the best things I learned for myself from F3 is that, I don’t need permission to be a man. I don’t need permission to be a leader. I think that’s something that I think men and maybe people in general, kind of crave in our world anymore. We want someone else to tell us what to do. I don’t know whether it’s because we just don’t wanna make the decision, or because we want it to be their fault if it doesn’t go well or something. [laughter] I don’t know. But we don’t seem to wanna take the personal responsibility. And F3 teaches us that there isn’t anybody else responsible but you.
Brett McKay: And you’re the CEO, but again, this is volunteer. You’re not paid to be the CEO?
Frank Schwartz: Yeah, no.
Brett McKay: This is all voluntary?
Frank Schwartz: No salary here.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, tell us about your experience with F3. When did you join and why did you join?
Frank Schwartz: So I joined in late 2014. And the reason I joined is because I was overweight, and I had sleep apnea, I had high blood pressure. I had high cholesterol. And my doctor was like, “Hey, guess what? You’re a stroke waiting to happen.” So I’ve got to get you healthy somehow. We want you to live for your young kids. And I’ll send you the picture. You’ll love it. But essentially, I was like, I got to get in shape somehow. So I started going to the gym, but I kept hearing about this F3 thing. Kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it. And finally, I was like, fine, I’ll just go. And so, I showed up one Saturday, and I was hooked. I was absolutely hooked. There was just something very magical about the fact that it’s always outdoors no matter what. It was freezing cold. Like horrifyingly cold, ’cause it was November when I went out for my first one on a Saturday. And there was just something invigorating about like, we’re outside in the elements. And then at the end of every F3 workout, we have something called a COT, or a Circle of Trust.
And it’s a place for men to kind of lay down their burdens next to their brothers, where we can pick it up together. The old saying, a burden shared is half a burden, a joy shared is twice the joy, something along those lines. And so, it’s a place where you can kind of lay down your burden and say, hey, help. And I’ve heard everything in those things. But there was something about that end piece, laying my hand on another guy, ’cause you get in kind of a big circle and you kind of huddle up and then feeling that energy from other men, who were in the same spot I was trying to figure this out together. It was just magical. It was magical. So I kind of jumped all in, both feet and ended up finding myself in just weird coincidental places. [chuckle] If you’re a believer in coincidence, then it was coincidental. For me, it was providential. And I just would find myself bumping into the right kind of people, and just volunteering and jumping in to say, yeah, no, I can help with that or whatever it might be around sort of the F3 universe.
And then pretty soon, became really good friends with Dredd, Dave Redding, and we kind of figured out how we’re gonna do this together. So, there was a guy he handed it off to, and then that guy, stepped down and handed it off to me. And that’s the way it’ll always go forever. And I think, kind of to touch on both things, how I got involved and why I got involved is, A, how it was almost by accident, and how I became the leader of this whole deal, I think also was almost, again, coincidence or however you wanna look at it, but almost by accident. Where I just sort of right place, right time. And I think God put me where he wanted me to be. But I think that the nice thing or maybe the nice thing, but the beautiful thing about this is that, I will serve for a period of time, and then I will have accomplished what I need to, and I’ll hand it off to somebody else.
And so, to kind of harken back to the how do you decentralize this thing is, first thing you have is a mission. Second thing you have is no ego. I can’t lead, the mission must lead. The mission must take us to the next level. The mission must take us where we wanna go. I’ll help make decisions along the way, to support that mission or to move us forward toward that mission. But ultimately, that’s how we decentralize it. Is we only commit ourselves to these very few things. We don’t try and run an organization. We try and keep a mission in men’s hearts, and they’ll run the organization. They’ll figure it out where they are. You guys will figure it out there in Tulsa.
Brett McKay: I’m curious, like how, your life has obviously changed because of your involvement with F3, but how have you seen other men’s lives change during your involvement with F3?
Frank Schwartz: Sure. There’s easy ways, obvious ways, guys lose weight, they get a little more fit, they start looking better in the mirror, their health gets better, their mindset gets better. That’s the easy stuff. We have seen things in F3 where, look, and one of our core principles is that it’s open to all men, no matter what. So number one is it’s always free, as you mentioned. Number two is that it’s open to all men. And when we say all men, we absolutely mean it, Brett. And so, we have convicted felons working out next to billionaires in the same workout. You’d never know. You’d never know. And so, the way that this changes men or the things that it does, is it turns a light on in their hearts again, because it doesn’t matter what your lifestyle has been or will be. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, where you came from. What matters is that you’re a man. When you are a man, you have this need inside you. You have this desire inside you. And the world has a tendency to try and figure out a way to quiet that spark down.
To get that drive tamped down so that we can control you, and we can make sure that you become non-dangerous to the things that we’re trying to do. So F3 kind of wakes you up. And so, we hear stories of guys who beat alcoholism. We’ve saved marriages, and guys attribute it to F3. And people who have been steeped in addiction, who have come out of it because they say, “Hey, being around you guys has made me realize I got to do better in my life.” And turn their lives around. So it’s almost innumerable. The number of stories that we could tell, that are out there in guys that in a very acute way, “I changed my life today.” That’s almost innumerable. Probably in some ways, for every single guy, however many there are, we estimate something like 75,000, 80,000 guys. So there’s 80,000 different stories that we could tell of how it impacted a man’s life and made his life better.
Brett McKay: That’s awesome. So I wanted to bring you on the podcast today to talk about leading groups, like leading men’s groups or even just forming a group of guys who, you’re trying to get some friends going. So I know a lot of our listeners, that’s something that they’ve been trying to do. They struggle with, and they run into these issues and they just feel like it’s impossible. So I wanna tap into your expertise with your experience, establishing the culture in F3 of where guys get together. And you also have other leadership experience as well. And maybe you can find some insights from F3, that we can apply to other domains of our lives ’cause I think you can. So the first question is, you hear a lot about the male loneliness crisis. Men today, they seem incredibly lonely. They’re looking for friends. But at the same time, men, they seem resistant to joining a community group or even getting things going with another guy just to hang out. What do you think is going on there? What’s the tension going on there? What do you think’s behind that?
Frank Schwartz: I tell you, here’s what I think, and I could be wrong, but I think that the hesitancy on the part of men to do this kind of thing is, well, a number of things. One is fear. Terrifying. He’s afraid to fail. He’s afraid to fail, and he’s afraid to have people criticize him. He’s afraid to say, “I’m making a stand, because that’s not an easy thing to do.” And I think guys are afraid of that. And I don’t blame them. It ain’t fun, to have other people be like, you suck. So I think there’s some of that. I think there’s some fear and some trepidation around doing that kind of thing. But I think also, it’s kind of like we were alluding to before, the thing that I think keeps guys from doing this, is they really believe that there’s some right way to do it that they’ve been just kept out of the loop. They just don’t get to know what that right way is. And other people seem to be doing it just fine, but gosh, why won’t anyone write the book so I can just follow the program?
Well, the problem is there’s no program. And if you believe there’s a program, that just means you’re following somebody else’s dream. You’re following somebody else’s way of doing it. And so, I think that to some degree, it’s like, why won’t a guy do this? Well, ’cause he thinks there’s a right way to do it, and he’s afraid to fail. I think that’s a lot of it. And I think guys get lonely because they have been convinced that somehow that that’s what they are, and that that’s the epidemic. And so, we just believe it. We’re like, well, I guess we’re lonely. If they say so, I guess we’re lonely. They’re the ones doing the research. Or maybe sometimes I think too, they’re like, I’m afraid of putting myself out there. I don’t really wanna get hurt. I don’t really wanna whatever. I don’t wanna lead. I don’t wanna have to take on all that responsibility and all that kind of stuff. But I also think, that one of the things that keeps a guy from feeling that connection or wanting that or whatever it might be, or to start a group like this is, he just thinks that, again, since he thinks there’s some way to do it right, that he shouldn’t start until he knows that exact way. When the fact of the matter is, and again, this probably as well or better than anyone, is you won’t know until you get out there and start.
Brett McKay: Right.
Frank Schwartz: You just got to start. You just got to do something. And I think the momentum will help carry you, but this alleged epidemic of loneliness, and I do think it exists. I think that people do feel lonely. I think it gets solved by doing things, by being out there and being with people.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think you hear people talk about a lot like, oh, well, we no longer have any third places anymore to go to, et cetera. And it’s like, well, you can make a third place, like find a park and do a workout. Nothing’s stopping you from doing that.
Frank Schwartz: Nothing, it’s funny. And not that you and I frequent Starbucks as a whole lot necessarily, but I love that the new CEO brought mugs back.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Frank Schwartz: Right?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Frank Schwartz: I don’t know if he has the intention of turning it back into more of a gathering place or a third place or whatever you wanna call it. I don’t know. But nothing says, get out of here, like a paper cup with a sleeve, that they shove at the end of a counter and they just yell your name. They don’t want you to stay. They want you to get out. They got to turn tables, man, ’cause they got money to make. ‘Cause they got investors and shareholders to answer to. And so, you don’t have to wait for Starbucks to create a third place for you, although I do see it starting to trend more maybe back that way. You don’t have to wait for church. And you and I both know, theoretically, that should be a great third place to do that. It doesn’t end up that way sometimes. And so, sometimes you just have to take matters into your own hands. I was telling somebody this morning, actually, men look around people, look around a lot and go, somebody ought to do something about that.
The thing that we teach and that we talk about a ton in F3 for sure is, hey, if you think that thought, the instant you think that thought, the next thought ought to be looking in the mirror and going, wait, I just remembered, I’m that somebody.
Brett McKay: Yeah, totally agree. It’s that whole Tocquevillian ethos, Alexis de Tocqueville talked about in Democracy in America, talked about, when he came to America, he noticed how Americans at the time, if there was like a tree in the middle of a road, they would just form a group together and solve it. They wouldn’t wait around. He said, well, in Europe, they would like, wait, okay, who are we supposed to go to to get this thing?
Frank Schwartz: Which government agency is gonna fix this? Yeah.
Brett McKay: And I feel like we’ve kind of lost that. We’ve kind of become like Europeans in the 19th century that Tocqueville was criticizing.
Frank Schwartz: I think you’re right. I think you’re right. And I think that’s why I’m so grateful that, well, I say I found F3, but I think F3 found me, to a large degree. And I think that’s the way it always goes. If you want something good in your life, you’ll either find this or it’ll find you. But that’s been the best thing is it’s like, guys no longer, guys that I hang out with anyway, we don’t sit around going, somebody ought to do that. It’s done before anybody had the thought of whether or not it should get done. ‘Cause we knew it should get done.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Something I’ve seen in different organizations, whether it’s like a sort of informal group of individuals, just guys trying to get together to do a workout together, a poker night once a month, or even more structured organizations like at a church group, you’ll see this phenomenon, you’ll get it going and then you’ll have guys who enthusiastically show up once or twice, and then they just vanish. You’re like, man, what happened? What’s going on? So what do you think is going on there? Is it a failure of unmet expectations or something else going on?
Frank Schwartz: I think it’s a similar problem. You know what January 19th is? I think it’s the 19th.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s like Quitter’s Day or whatever?
Frank Schwartz: Quitter’s Day, right. [laughter] Exactly. So I think some of it’s that. Everybody starts with great intentions, but boy, when the rubber meets the road and it starts to get hard, I don’t wanna show up for that. Someone’s supposed to… I’m supposed to be entertained, Brett. My phone taught me that. I’m supposed to be a consumer. The commercials, my YouTube pre-rolls taught me that. I’m supposed to just eat and drink and be merry. I’m not supposed to go do stuff. I’m not supposed to be something. And so, I think guys show up, and it happens in F3, as you might imagine. Some guys come out and they blaze out, and I always get nervous. The guys who are just a little too enthusiastic, and I want to be like, eh, you’re gonna need to save some for the fifth lap here, biggin’. You need to pump the brakes just a little bit because consistency, is gonna beat energy every time.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Frank Schwartz: Forever and ever, amen. Right?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Frank Schwartz: Simon Sinek talks about the infinite game. I don’t know if you read that one, but it’s a fantastic book. And essentially, he kind of says, most of us run around with this sort of finite mindset that there’s winners and there’s losers. And there are in sports, in places where there is a definite ending, a finite time period or whatever it might be, but there’s no winning in life. It is not a race. It never has been a race. It’s a journey that we’re all on together, theoretically. Or we should be. And I think it’s part of our culture where it’s like, well, I showed up to the gym three times, I’m not in shape. I can’t figure this out, I quit. And you go, well, no, you have to show up for months and years. And then you have to stay at it. There’s no arrival. Again, it’s this finite mindset of, well, I thought after three times it was gonna be perfect for me. And you go, well, the only way it was gonna get perfect for you brother, is if you stood up and made it perfect for you.
You have to do it. You have to be the one responsible. You have to be the one involved. And so, even if you showed up to church or to the poker night or whatever, and after a couple of times you were like, this was great, maybe something didn’t go your way and you’re like, well, screw that. I’m supposed to have everything I want all the time. Man, what a finite mindset. You’re just, you’re setting yourself up for failure. But if you recognize that everything you do has purpose, because it’s part of this long and infinite journey toward your ultimate self-actualization or whatever term you wanna put on it, but for you to become what it is that you were meant to become, if you recognize that, and you can kind of, I hate the term, but lean into that. Man, your life becomes infinitely better because you realize you’re playing a long game. You’re playing a very different game than other people are playing. And that’s what I think is the great thing about F3, and really Art of Manliness and a lot of the things that are out there, that we’re doing is because it isn’t a finite thing.
Everything that you see and encounter is a tool to help you on this journey, and to make you a better person as you go. And I think people forget that, and they think, well, I didn’t win after the third time, so I don’t wanna do that. I wanna go where I feel good and happy and get my dopamine hit all the time.
Brett McKay: Yeah. No, I’ve seen that in my experience with different groups, whether it’s a church or even just friend groups, or we even see this on The Strenuous Life within our geographic groups. I think some guys, they go into these, like, oh man, here’s a group of guys doing things. I want to be part of this community. And then I think they have what’s called, my wife, she wrote this great series on our Substack, Dying Breed, about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas on how to live in a spiritual community. And Bonhoeffer talked about one problem he sees, is that a lot of people have, he calls it the wish dream of community, this idealized version of what it should be. And then once they actually encounter the reality of it, it doesn’t meet that. And they’re like, this sucks. It’s not as great. I’m not getting what I thought I’d get out of this. I’m out of here. And I’ve seen that in so many groups, where people, I think they have too high expectations or they have this overly idealized version, it’s gonna be like a Norman Rockwell painting.
Everyone’s just in the barber shop, singing, playing the banjo, and it’s this community. And community can be that, but it’s also, you have to deal with just annoying people. You have to deal with friction. And it’s like, I tell people, if you want community, you have to want all of it. You have to want the good stuff and also the frustrating parts of it as well.
Frank Schwartz: Oh man. Preach as they would say.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Frank Schwartz: Because that’s exactly it. We’ve been taught to think, and I don’t know, maybe this existed before and we just didn’t know, because it wasn’t as prevalent and it wasn’t in our face like it is now with social media. But certainly, social media has made it so that we look around and I look around and we go, well, but they’re in Italy again. We think that only the good parts get to exist and if there’s bad parts it’s because we did something wrong or the thing is wrong or whatever because the lie is that everything is, it’s utopia all the time. But the messy is what teaches you the things you need to know, so that you can refine and make it better as you go. So when you show up to the whatever it is or if you start the whatever it is, and I can’t tell you, and you probably did the same thing before AOM or Strenuous Life or any of those things came along too. I’ve started, I don’t even know how many things that have just gone out either in a nice blaze of glory failure or a slow whimper into the death in the corner failure.
I’ve started all kinds of groups. I’ve tried all kinds of crazy things to try and get done what I wanna get done or to bring people together or whatever it might be. And then I just look and go, well, it’s kind of that Thomas Edison idea. I didn’t invent a light bulb. I invented 10,000 ways to not make a light bulb. [laughter] I didn’t discover the light bulb or whatever it was. And I feel similarly. I didn’t discover how to lead a men’s group. I discovered lots of ways to do it wrong. And then, I’ve tried to practice on the other end how to maybe not do it so wrong this time.
Brett McKay: No, that makes sense. Yeah, it’s continual learning, Kaizen, or whatever you wanna call it.
Frank Schwartz: Sure.
Brett McKay: Talking about your experiences forming communities, can it be intentionally engineered or does it have to be random or serendipity or is it a mixture of both?
Frank Schwartz: I’m gonna say, yeah, it’s probably a mixture of both to some degree. I don’t like the word engineered, just because I think it implies that there is something that you can build. I want my bridges engineered, ’cause I don’t want them to break. We don’t want a lot of failure when it comes to bridges. So I don’t mind failure when it comes to people, because that’s life. That’s just part of how we do it. So I think intentionally engineered, maybe not engineered, but does it have to be intentional? Boy, I tell you what, it better be. It better be. ‘Cause it can’t be complete chaos and just hope for the best. I think just like any good leader or any good leadership model, you’ve got to have a mission in mind. You’ve got to have an end state in mind. Where are we headed? What is it that we’re trying to accomplish here? And not just tasks, but what, again, going back to Cynic, what he might say is a just cause. What is that thing that is much bigger than all of us that we’re trying to get to?
And if we have a good sense of what that is, then we can be intentional toward that. And then what you have to do, I think is you have to allow for the chaos around you. So you be intentional about the things that are supposed to be controlled, which is adherence to mission maybe, or enforcing standards when it comes to like, hey, you’re not living the core principles or whatever. But that’s more of an arm around a guy and telling him in a one-on-one kind of thing. But then I think you have to allow for the chaos around you and the serendipitous accidents or whatever you wanna call them. And it’s actually a good example, in a way, to harken back to the early days and kind of the founding of F3. And I don’t remember, it’s been a while since I’ve listened to the original podcast that you were talking about from ’15 or ’17, whatever it was. But the guy, the group that this sort of broke off from, was a guy who wanted to control things.
He was capping the membership. He was the one leading every time, stuff like that. But what was recognized was, if I let go of control, and if I let go of the leadership and if I simply teach others to lead, rather than try and be the leader all the time and if I adapt to the circumstances that are in front of me and incorporate them, then I’ll come out with a better product. If it had only gone the way that Dave and Tim and even myself, if I was only willing to accept the things that I think are good ideas, we’d die. We’d die. I have some good ideas every once in a while, but that’s why the other thing I would people who are starting groups, don’t do it by yourself. Don’t do it by yourself. You can be the person that has most of the vision or you might be the good organizer or whatever, but by golly, you better find some people who have some complementary skill sets and mindsets and bring them in, and you’ve got to influence them and love them into buying into the dream and the mission of what you’re trying to get done.
‘Cause, there’s no way I could do this thing by myself. So I embrace the chaos, because either A, I’ll get stronger as a man or a leader, or B, I’ll learn some stuff that will actually make the group much stronger. There might be ideas that it’s like, oh, well that actually is a whole different direction we might take things that we hadn’t thought of before. If it was up to me or if it was just up to my vision or our initial thoughts, it would be engineered to failure.
Brett McKay: That makes sense. It makes total sense. I’m curious if you’ve seen this problem in groups or in F3, ’cause I’ve seen it in groups that I’ve belonged to. Everyone joins a group for different reasons. You think they’re all joining for the same reason, but oftentimes they’re not. I’m sure for F3, it’s the same thing. Some guys, they just want the workout. Others are there for the friends. Others are there for the leadership training. I’ve seen this in other groups where I belong to, where you think, oh, you’re here for this thing, and then you see them getting really persnickety about another issue. It’s like, oh, actually you’re not here for that thing. And then it causes all this conflict. So how do you balance competing ends in a group?
Frank Schwartz: Well, I often say if it was easy, we wouldn’t need leaders. You got to recognize that any time you do one thing, you’re gonna get dynamically more of it, and dynamically less of something else. And so, there is always this eternal tension in leadership of figuring out all the different competing factors. So one thing I would say is, yes, everyone joins a group for their own reason, but they stay typically for a very similar reason. And I think ultimately for a successful group, I think they have to stay for the mission. If they’re dedicated to the mission, if they see those things and if they’ve experienced something in that group where they go, no, no, but I understand what we’re really trying to get done here, then you can look past a lot of the other stuff. Dave introduced me to something he called the Augustinian Code, although apparently it’s dubious as to whether or not St. Augustine actually said it. And that is in essentials, we will have unity. In non-essentials, we will have liberty. But in all things, we will have charity. And so, I think you have a desire and a dedication and a focus on a mission, and then a guy joins for whatever reason he joins for.
But I think he stays because he says, no, I understand that there’s stuff that is greater than me, these things that are bigger than me. Those are things that I serve. I take myself out of it. And then he stays because he wants the same thing we want, which is, in our case, to help build leaders and to unlock men’s hearts and minds so that they can be maximally effective in their areas of influence, whatever that might be. So I think that’s the answer.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think the key there is just communicate the mission constantly. And…
Frank Schwartz: That’s all I do.
0:32:36.2 Brett McKay: Yeah, and if you think you’ve communicated it enough, you probably haven’t. So in a traditional leadership setting, say like a company or even a church, there’s typically a clear hierarchy, like president, vice presidents, et cetera. F3 doesn’t have that in these groups. So what does leadership look like in a decentralized volunteer community like F3? ‘Cause I’m sure, there’s lessons we can take from F3 to any other voluntary group that you might belong to.
Frank Schwartz: Well, that is our hope. In fact, we would like you to take it to the non-voluntary groups that you belong to as well. ‘Cause I think there’s things that we can teach about leadership that are definitely applicable in every area of life, even those that are non-voluntary. But to your point, I think the number one thing to remember is, you said, what is decentralized leadership? It looks messy. That’s what it looks like. [laughter] To have no leader, set person that you’re like, well, he just told me, I guess I have to do it, is messy. And it’s funny because this is something that came up early on in my sort of serving at a national level in F3 was, one of the guys got really frustrated and he was like, “What are the men thinking? Why can’t they just do the thing that I want them to do? What are they thinking?” And I had to say, I was like, well, I think they think that they’re free to lead. [laughter] I think this is your fault. You taught them, that they’re leaders and then when they do the thing, they’re trying to lead, you get mad at them.
So it’s kind of funny. But I think that we want you to recognize in a decentralized situation, that every person ultimately is responsible for the outcome of their own lives. And so, if they’re leading a workout that day, yeah, they might be responsible for the individual outcome of that workout. And they may have sort of positions or kind of different areas of responsibility or something within a region or group of F3 or whatever. I have a different job, I guess, technically, than maybe some others. But ultimately, it isn’t that one job is more important than another. It’s understanding that A, if I called the guys in Tulsa and said, hey, you’re gonna do this for your workout tomorrow. When they stopped laughing, we could probably have a discussion about it. Right?
Brett McKay: Right.
Frank Schwartz: I can’t tell anyone what to do. I wouldn’t even pretend to. I wouldn’t attempt it, because number one, it’s not my job. Number two, they understand now, that they’re the ones with the responsibility. And coming from me, it would be comical, because they ask me questions all the time. Guys ask questions like, well, how old should a kid be before we let him come to an F3 workout? Man, you’re looking for a rule and I get that and I understand why you want it. But ultimately, you have to make that decision. You’re the one responsible. And I know that frustrates you, but that’s just the way that it is. I can’t tell you what to do. So my job is not to tell you what to do. My job is to stand and to help you discover the right answer that you already know or that you have in your heart. Or what is the answer that aligns most with the mission that we theoretically all believe in? That kind of a thing. And so, I think it looks messy, but it also looks like just a lot of love, a lot of influence. I don’t remember how many times I’ve not answered a question to a guy, but suddenly at the end of our conversation, he seems to know what to do.
Brett McKay: No, I’ve had that experience too with The Strenuous Life.
Frank Schwartz: Yeah, right.
Brett McKay: I’ll get questions from guys like, well, does this count for this requirement? Or if I do this, will it count? Or how about if I do this for our group? Is that okay? And we have this guiding principle in The Strenuous Life. I’m sure Strenuous Life listeners know what I’m about to say. Phronesis, which comes from the Greek, ancient Greeks, and it’s basically practical wisdom. It’s like knowing what the right thing to do for the right reason, the right time, for the right purpose. And I just tell people, use your phronesis, man. Use your brain. You’ve got it. I trust you. You can make that decision.
Frank Schwartz: It’s in there.
Brett McKay: And a lot of guys, they get frustrated with that, ’cause they just wanna be told exactly what to do. I’m like, I’m not gonna do that. I want you to develop this capacity to make decisions and use your judgment.
Frank Schwartz: Yeah. I think that fundamentally, and this is something that I think is so critical to leadership of any kind, certainly of any small group, and very, very certainly of any sort of volunteer-type organization, like what we’re doing out here. It’s a different one when you got a boss and a boss can just tell you what to do or they can threaten you to get fired or whatever. That’s not leadership. That’s just management. And so, if you’re gonna be in real leadership, I think another thing that we forget amongst the many, is that this is a love endeavor. This is a love endeavor. And our world has taught us that, if I love you, that I will kind of plow the road ahead of you and you never have to worry about anything. I will accept you exactly as you are, and I will let you do whatever you want because that’s love. But it’s not, it’s permissiveness. And permissiveness actually is it’s own kind of sin in my estimation. And so, I think that what you’re talking about there, that’s real love.
Real love is loving you enough to let you fail. It’s loving you enough to let you figure it out and struggle through it and make your own decision. Dude, if I could just tell my kids exactly what to do, and have them do it, my life would be infinitely easier. Infinitely easier. It is messy and horrifying, that I send them on their way and I’m like, and they come to me and they’re like, dad, what should I do? And I look at them and I go, you’ve been taught how to make decisions. I think you should do that. They don’t love that. [laughter]
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Frank Schwartz: As you might imagine. But that’s how I answer the things to the guys in F3 too. They’re like, well, what should we do? I think you should employ those tactics and those techniques that you’ve learned along the way on how to make decisions, and you should do that. Because I can’t tell you and I should not tell you. In fact, I love you too much to tell you. You have to know for yourself. If I tell you, it’s what I think, if it goes wrong, then it’s my fault, if it goes right, then it was my success somehow, and I love you too much. You get to do this. This is your deal.
Brett McKay: How should leaders of small groups of men, whether it’s a church or you got a book club or whatever, how should they define success?
Frank Schwartz: That’s a good question. Every group is gonna have it’s own definition, I’m sure. And so, I would say, success looks like adherence to whatever that mission is. So for me, how about this? How about I answer it this way? For F3, here’s what I think success looks like. And guys all over the country and even our board sometimes and certainly from outside organizations, look and they’re like, well, how are you measuring success? And I’m like, well, that’s a good question. It sounds like you probably have an opinion about that. Why don’t you tell me what you think? And they’re like, well, growth numbers. Like how many men are in F3? You should be tracking that. You should know. And I’m like, okay, but what if every guy in F3 is an idiot? But we have 500,000 of them, but they’re idiots. And they’re like, oh, I hadn’t thought about that. Exactly. So that can’t be it. Okay, well, what if we have only 10 guys that are in it, but they’re really dedicated to the mission? Is that success? Again, I go, well maybe. I don’t know. Here’s what I know.
For me, success looks like, I wore myself out, my personal success. I wore myself out in the service of the mission. And I think success across the organization, for us anyway, is largely anecdotal. It’s the stories I hear about men saying, I recaptured my life. My wife and I get along now. We snatched our marriage from the jaws of divorce. Or it looks like I quit drugs and alcohol. Or I lost 100 pounds or whatever it is. The individual results of “success” I think you’re gonna have as many, as there are individual guys. So I think success for us, is knowing that we did the best we could to adhere to the mission and serve the thing that is greater than us. That’s the best I can answer on that one.
Brett McKay: Something I’ve had to struggle with as a leader of different groups I belong to, is cultivating the patience that’s often required to lead whenever it seems like things are just going slower than you want. Have you had that struggle as well? And if so, what have you done to overcome it?
Frank Schwartz: Yeah, no, I struggle from a condition known as perpetual dissatisfaction. [laughter]
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Frank Schwartz: I don’t know if you’ve said something similar, but no, patience is not my jam. I tend to move fast. I decide things fast. I live fast. In fact, a guy, CEO of a very large fitness company just yesterday was like, “You have an intensity issue.” And I was like, do I? That’s interesting coming from you, but okay. So I recognize that that’s my bias. I say that to say, I have tons of biases, Brett. And I’m always gonna be slightly dissatisfied. I’m always gonna think that it’s not moving fast enough. I’m always gonna be unhappy with the result of something. I’m happy with a lot of results too. Don’t get the impression that I walk around sad all the time going like, why can’t everything be wonderful? It’s not that at all. But I know that I have biases. So the advice that I would give to someone starting a thing or who’s looking to lead in any way, the way to cultivate that patience, is to segment your life a little bit. So exhibit patience where in those environments where it’s appropriate. And then by golly, get yourself a mentor and get yourself a small group.
In F3, we call them shield locks. You lock shields with two, three other guys. And those are the guys that hear the best and the worst and the hardest and the whatever. And I unload it to those guys and they get to hear it. And then they get to tell me that my head is in my rear end, or they get to tell me where I might be choosing poorly or where I might be choosing well. So, okay, it’s not moving as fast as I want. Fine. Too bad. It’s moving as fast as it can. It’s moving as fast as it’s supposed to. The analogy I give a lot of times to guys, is I go, all right, ’cause I’ll say it in their marriage. Something went wrong in their marriage, and they’re struggling. And then, they’re trying to make good on it, but they can’t seem to get their wife to forgive them and to move forward or whatever. And I said, well, here’s the thing.
You think of it like a seed that you put in the ground, and you can put all the nutrients you want in that soil and you can cover it up at the perfect depth, and you can measure the pH and the moisture content and you can make this thing just as optimal, the perfect amount of sunshine, keep the temperature, whatever it is. But that seed, is gonna sprout above the edge of that soil, when it is darn good and ready. And the only thing you can do, is to consistently try and create a perfect environment or as optimal an environment as you possibly can. That’s your job as the leader in the group or in the organization or whatever it might be. That’s your job, is to consistently try and create optimal conditions so that when growth is ready to happen, it happens. So again, we get our minds caught in this finite game of, well, but I didn’t get this done by X date. And so, it must be not going well, or it must be a failure or any number of things. And I just say, no man, again, I think you’re just, you’re playing the wrong game as a leader, particularly of a volunteer organization.
But I think as a leader in general, it only serves us to remember, that this is an infinite game, that goes on forever and ever and ever. And so, patience is all you have. Time is all you have. You can’t control any of the other factors. I can do what I can to maintain an optimal environment. And then when that seed is ready, it’ll come up.
Brett McKay: Well, Frank, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about F3?
Frank Schwartz: Just go outside and whether you hear some crazy guys in a parking lot somewhere barking in cadence, then you’ll know. That’s where we, no, I’m just kidding. Yeah, go to f3nation.com. There’s a place like if you’ve never heard of F3 before, and you think to yourself, man, that sounds like a thing I might wanna try. Go to f3nation.com. You’ll see a link in there up at the top that says locations. I think it’s under new or get started or something, I don’t remember now. But you find the map, find the locations, find one near you. And men, just show up. Just show up. And then we’ll help you through the rest. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. We’ll guide you. We’ll get you moving. But yeah, go someplace. Just find one near you, and show up. And you can read all about us on the website there.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Frank Schwartz, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Frank Schwartz: Brett, I appreciate the time, my friend. Take care.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Frank Schwartz. He’s the CEO of F3. You can find more information about F3 at f3nation.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/mensgroups. We 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. And make sure to sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Reminding you not just to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
Figuring out the pitfalls and best practices of adulthood can be tricky. It’s helpful to have some pearls of wisdom to guide you along the way.
My guest today has spent decades collecting these kinds of helpful truths and has crafted her own guiding mantras of maturity.
Gretchen Rubin is the author of numerous bestselling books, including The Happiness Project, and her latest, Secrets of Adulthood. Today on the show, Gretchen shares how she came to write hundreds of aphorisms on how to navigate life, and we dig into some of my favorites of these concise, sage sayings. Amongst many topics, we discuss why “happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy,” the best strategy for changing ourselves, a very useful heuristic for making decisions, why you should wear a favorite sweater more often, and even why big top tables at restaurants are one of my pet peeves.
Resources Related to the Podcast* Gretchen’s books * Gretchen’s “What’s the next new habit that will make you happier?” quiz * AoM Article: The Self-Deception Destroying Maxims of Francois de La Rochefoucauld * AoM Article: Nietzsche’s 66 Best Aphorisms * AoM Article: Just Go to Sleep * Sunday Firesides: Life Is for Living
Connect With Gretchen Rubin* Gretchen’s website * Gretchen on IG * Gretchen on FB * Gretchen 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.
Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Figuring out the pitfalls and best practices of adulthood can be tricky. It’s helpful to have some pearls of wisdom to guide you along the way. My guest today has spent decades collecting these kinds of helpful truths and has crafted her own guiding mantras of maturity. Gretchen Rubin is the author of numerous bestselling books, including The Happiness Project and her latest, Secrets of Adulthood. Today on the show, Gretchen shares how she came to write hundreds of aphorisms on how to navigate life, and we dig into some of my favorites of these concise, sage sayings. Amongst many topics, we discuss why happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy, the best strategy for changing ourselves, a very useful heuristic for making decisions, why you should wear a favorite sweater more often, and even why big top tables at restaurants are one of my pet peeves. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/secretsofadulthood.
Gretchen Rubin, welcome to the show.
Gretchen Rubin: I’m so happy to be talking to you.
Brett McKay: No, likewise. So we were talking before we got on, we go way back.
Gretchen Rubin: We go way back.
Brett McKay: Way back. So both you and I started off as bloggers. We still blog. Do they still call it blogging?
Gretchen Rubin: I call it my site. I’m posting on my site.
Brett McKay: That’s what I say, because I feel kind of silly when I say I’m a blogger.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, that feels very retro.
Brett McKay: So yeah, you have The Happiness Project. That was what you started off with, got the art of manliness. We were part of this community of other self-development writers back in 2008. So yeah, you’ve been writing about personal development for almost, it’s been almost 20 years now or over 20 years. As you look back on your career, what would you say is the connecting thread through everything you’ve written and put out there?
Gretchen Rubin: Well, if I had to say what my subject is, I would say my subject is human nature. And in fact, before I started writing about sort of happiness and good habits, I wrote a book called Power Money Fame Sex, A User’s Guide, which is my first book. Then I wrote kind of a short unconventional biography of Winston Churchill and one of John F. Kennedy. And to me, I think to a lot of people, those books seem very different from the books that I’ve written sort of in the last while. But to me, they’re all about human nature. So you learn about human nature by studying Winston Churchill because he’s just this gigantic figure. So I think that is my subject. Like, who are we? How do we understand ourselves better? How do we change if we want to change? How do we understand other people?
Brett McKay: And then, yeah, you started The Happiness Project, started off as a blog, turned into books. It’s kind of become this media empire. And there you’re just trying to explore, it seems like, what does it mean to live a flourishing human life?
Gretchen Rubin: Exactly. Like, can you make yourself happier? And if so, how? That’s my question, yes.
Brett McKay: When you say happiness, how do you define happiness?
Gretchen Rubin: Well, I started out my career in law, as did you, Brett. And maybe you also have happy memories of spending an entire semester arguing about the definition of contract. And happiness is an even more elusive concept to define. There are something like 15 or 17 academic definitions of happiness. And I think that for the layperson, it’s just, it can be whatever you want. Joy, peace, bliss, satisfaction, well-being, whatever you conceive of as being happiness for you. Because I think that it’s more useful to think about being happier. Whatever that means for you, what can you do with your conscious thoughts and actions starting tomorrow, without a lot of time, energy, or money to move yourself in the right direction? So next week, next month, next year, can we make our lives happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? And I think that’s much clearer to understand. Like, is this going to make me happier? It’s much easier to answer for the average person than like, can I achieve happiness? Because when I think about that, I’m like, what does that even mean? It feels so abstract that it’s hard to grasp even what that would look like.
Brett McKay: Well, something you’ve done recently, you come out with a new book called Secrets of Adulthood, where you’ve put together a collection of aphorisms that you’ve developed to help people make sense of this topsy-turvy, complex world we live in. And at the beginning of the book, Secrets of Adulthood, you talk about your lifelong love of aphorisms. You’ve been collecting them since you were eight years old. What draws you to the aphoristic style?
Gretchen Rubin: Well, first, let me say what an aphorism is, because I think a lot of people don’t know. That’s why I didn’t use the word aphorism in the title or subtitle of the book. So an aphorism is a short, usually a sentence or two, insight observation about human nature that’s meant to be sort of a general observation. And it’s attributed to a particular person. Maybe it’s Mark Twain, maybe it’s Oscar Wilde, maybe it’s Warren Buffett, maybe it’s Montaigne. And then that way it’s different from a proverb. So a proverb is folk wisdom. These are ideas, you know, reminders, things that have been kicking around for centuries. Like you can’t push a rope or sailors fear fire more than water or you’re only as happy as your least happy child. These are pieces of folk wisdom. But an aphorism, we know who said it. And I’m very drawn to aphorisms because, well, first of all, they’re short. And I love, I think there’s so much power in keeping things brief and really having to crystallize ideas to distill them down into like just a sentence or two. That’s very creatively challenging. And it’s also intellectually challenging because to write that way, you really have to be able to think that way. And that’s hard.
And then I think that they’re just, they have more power in the mind because we can grasp them. So for the last while, I have been really pushing myself when I have a big idea to see if I can express it in an aphorism.
Brett McKay: Are there any famous historical aphorists that you like?
Gretchen Rubin: Well, I do love Oscar Wilde. If you read something like The Portrait of Dorian Gray, it’s like reading Hamlet. You recognize so many lines because so many of them are so famous. One of my hopes with writing this book is to bring back into the spotlight one of my favorite aphorists who is a 19th century Austrian aphorist named Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach, who’s amazing. Like one of my favorites of hers is, you can fall so fast, you think you’re flying. Which I’m like, whoa, that’s powerful. And then there are people who, like I mentioned Warren Buffett. He can invest and he can also really write. There are many really funny, thoughtful aphorisms in his letters to shareholders. So I’m looking for them all the time. And so those are some of my favorites. Oh, Andy Warhol. I don’t even really like his art, but he said these extremely unpredictable, thoughtful aphorisms that just keep your mind warm.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, he’s come up with like, you know, everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes, exactly. He’s extremely famous for that. And then he has like, my favorite kind of atmosphere today is the airport atmosphere. And I’m like, I know exactly what you mean by that. Or I can’t remember how he said it exactly, but he said something like the most old fashioned thing that people do is get pregnant. And I completely understand that. It does feel so old fashioned to like actually get pregnant. I’m also like volcanoes. Haven’t we all kind of outgrown volcanoes? That seems like kind of an ancient Rome thing. Are they still happening? Every time there’s a volcano, I’m like, huh, I thought these things were sort of out of date. I don’t know. But again, it’s like, what do I even mean by that? That’s a ridiculous thing to say. But Andy Warhol helps me have these odd thoughts. So that’s one of the reasons that I love his writing so much.
Brett McKay: Yeah, a few aphorists that I enjoy. Nietzsche, he had some killer aphorisms. I think his writing style, his best writing style is his aphorisms. I also like Francois de La Rochefoucauld, the French author.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, he’s great. He’s amazing.
Brett McKay: He’s kind of like cynical, which is interesting.
Gretchen Rubin: The aphorism is a very judgmental form. When you’re writing them, you find that you… I see why he is so cynical. It’s a form that invites you to write that way. Okay, so what are some of your favorites?
Brett McKay: Well, here’s some I brought up. We did an article highlighting some of his maxims. Here’s one. Fortunate people rarely correct their faults. They always think they are right while fortune is favoring their evil conduct.
Gretchen Rubin: I mean, is that so true?
Brett McKay: That’s true. That happens.
Gretchen Rubin: It’s so true. Yes.
Brett McKay: Another one. This one’s really cynical. No one deserves to be praised for kindness if he does not have the strength to be bad. Every other form of kindness must often merely be laziness or lack of willpower.
Gretchen Rubin: I mean, that is cynical.
Brett McKay: It is, but I kind of think there’s some truth to it. I mean, for being good to mean anything, you have to have the capability to do otherwise.
Gretchen Rubin: Wait, if you give me a second, I can read some of my favorites, hang on, from my collection of his, hang on, let’s see. Those who apply themselves too much to small things ordinarily become incapable of great ones. Well, here is one that I really think is true. However dazzling an action may be, it should not pass for great when it is not the result of a great design. And I think that’s very true. Like sometimes people do things accidentally. You don’t really get credit for that because you didn’t do it on purpose.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that reminds me of Machiavelli, where he talks about the difference between virtue and fortune. So sometimes we confuse the two.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes.
Brett McKay: Another aphorist that I like, G.K. Chesterton is another one.
Gretchen Rubin: Oh, I love Chesterton. I’m so glad you mentioned him because I feel like he’s kind of fallen out of the spotlight. And I love the writing of G.K. Chesterton.
Brett McKay: Yeah, he does this thing where he kind of inverts the sentence.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes, yes.
Brett McKay: And so he comes up with these little witty sayings about life. So in this book, Secrets of Adulthood, you developed your own aphorisms. Did you find that challenging? And if so, what was hard about it?
Gretchen Rubin: Well, it is very challenging because first you have to have a thought. And I don’t know about you, but I find it very hard to have thoughts. And then you have to really distill the thought into a succinct form and to aim for elegance. Because, you know, we’re talking about La Rochefoucauld, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde. You know, they express their ideas very beautifully. There’s, as you say, there’s often inversion. There’s often paradox. Often with an aphorism, there are things to kind of increase the writerly elegance of them. So that’s very challenging. So I have been working on these for years. Certainly I’ve been collecting them forever from other people. And then I started writing them myself and collecting them myself. And, you know, this is not the kind of book that I could have sat down and written in like, you know, just like done it. Because they had to come to me in moments. And some of them arise out of my previous books, like The Happiness Project or Better Than Before. Like the aphorism, The Secret of Adulthood, Habits Are the Invisible Architecture of Everyday Life. That was something that I wrote for my book Better Than Before.
That was an idea that I had when I was thinking about how we make and break habits. But a lot of these are things that I’ve just noticed along the way and been gathering up for a really, really long time.
Brett McKay: So as you were putting together the book Secrets of Adulthood, how did you figure out which ones made it?
Gretchen Rubin: So I had this giant trove that I’d been working on for years, but I decided I wanted them to be Secrets of Adulthood, meaning there was something in them that could be useful as you were facing a challenge of life. So maybe you were facing procrastination or you were finding it hard to make a decision or you were perplexed by a relationship or you were trying to know yourself better. All of them are aimed to help give insight into something that is a challenge of adulthood. Because many of the aphorisms that I wrote were just observations, like a dog doesn’t gaze at a waterfall. I think that’s interesting. It’s true. Or the tulip is an empty flower. I believe that. The tulip is an empty flower. What is up with that? But those are mere observations. And then I had a lot of bleak aphorisms. As we were saying, the form kind of pushes you in a dark direction. And I had a lot that were very dark. And I thought, oh, you know, nobody wants my dark aphorisms. Let me distill this into the Secrets of Adulthood.
Brett McKay: I love it. Well, maybe you should release the dark ones as a secret item somehow.
Gretchen Rubin: Well, you know what’s funny? Gretchen Rubin after dark. What’s funny is on my book tour, a lot of times it would come up that I had written those. Everybody said, I want to read your dark aphorisms. And I think that’s the negativity bias, right? People are always interested in the dark things or the negative things. And so I should figure out what to do with them. Because I worked on them just as hard as I worked on the ones that ended up in Secrets of Adulthood. Brett, I am sure you know the feeling. It’s so painful to leave anything on the cutting room floor.
Brett McKay: It is.
Gretchen Rubin: It’s always very exciting if you think, oh, maybe there’s a way I can use this stuff after all.
Brett McKay: So let’s dig into some of your secrets of adulthood. I really enjoyed reading through your aphorisms, and I’ve kind of picked out some that I like, and let’s just riff on them. I’ll talk about them, and let’s just riff on it together. So the one that really stuck out to me is one of the very first ones. Happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, because I think when I was first writing The Happiness Project, I was really struggling to understand, like, how do you even think about happiness? What’s a framework for even contemplating it? And I realized that if you’re thinking about how to make our lives happier, we want to think about feeling good, feeling bad, feeling right, and an atmosphere of growth. So feeling good is enthusiasm, love, friendship, energy, all the things that we want to have more of. And then there’s feeling bad. So that’s things like anger, resentment, guilt, boredom. Those are things that make us feel bad. We want less of those. Then we also want to feel right, which means we want our life to reflect our values. We want to put our values into the world, and we want to demonstrate our values through our actions. And then also we want the atmosphere of growth. And so the atmosphere of growth is when we’re growing, learning, teaching, fixing, solving, where we feel like we’re growing or we’re contributing to the growth of others or to the growth of the world. And the fact is, sometimes when we do things to help us live up to our values or to cultivate an atmosphere of growth, we don’t feel very happy.
Like an atmosphere of growth, when you’re learning to do something, often you feel insecure or frustrated, even angry. When you’re feeling right about living up to your values, often you might be doing something that you don’t enjoy. Like I remember a friend telling me how he went to go visit his very, very difficult father in the hospital, and his two brothers refused to go. They wouldn’t see their father. But he said, I really don’t like to go. I dread going. And we’ve never gotten along, and he was a terrible father, but he’s still my father. And so I feel like I have to go. And I’m like, well, yeah, it made you feel bad, but you feel right because you’re like, I’m living my values, which is we’re still father-son, and I feel like I need to do this. And so happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy.
Brett McKay: Yeah, when I read that, I love Aristotle. So immediately I thought of Aristotle.
Gretchen Rubin: Oh, talk about aphorism. Yeah, got a million of those.
Brett McKay: But he talked about his idea of happiness, the way it was defined was flourishing or eudaimonia. And it meant just living a good life all around. And it didn’t necessarily mean feeling good. It wasn’t hedonism. And even Epicurus, he makes that argument that sometimes in order to live a pleasurable life, you have to do unpleasurable things in the short term.
Yeah, exactly right. There’s some things that don’t feel good in the short term, but if you do them, it’s going to lead to something bigger, and it’s going to make you feel good in the long run. Kind of related to this, another one of your aphorisms, there is no right way to create a happier life, just as there’s no best way to cook an egg.
Gretchen Rubin: Well, this came from an experience that I have often, which is because I write about happiness, people are always like, okay, what should I do to be happier? What’s the secret to happiness? And I always say, well, you know, it depends on you. It depends on your nature, your challenges, your interests, your values. There’s no one best way because we’re all different. And then they say to me, okay, well, which is like, what’s the best way? And so now, and I can never think of a satisfying answer. And so now I say, well, what’s the best way to cook an egg? And they say, well, there is no best way. It depends on how you like your eggs. And some people say like, I don’t even like eggs. And I’m like, that’s right. There is no best way to cook an egg, just like there’s no best way to make your life happier because it depends on each of us what we want.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea of like the secret to life, everyone’s just looking for it, reminds me of, you ever see City Slickers?
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah, Curly, you know, the guide on the ranch trip.
Gretchen Rubin: I’m not sure I ever actually saw it. Is this the one with Billy?
Brett McKay: With Billy Crystal?
Gretchen Rubin: Crystal?
Brett McKay: Yeah, he has like a midlife crisis and decides for his 40th birthday.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah. I don’t think I actually ever saw it.
Brett McKay: Okay, well, it’s a great, I would recommend it. It’s a fun baby boomer movie about midlife that was made in the 90s.
Gretchen Rubin: You have me. Okay. I’m convinced.
Brett McKay: Yeah. But, you know, Curly is just like hardened trail hand who’s taking these guys on this dude ranch trip. And he said, the secret of life is just one thing. And he never says what that one thing is.
Gretchen Rubin: That’s funny.
Brett McKay: Because the answer is, well, it’s the one thing to you. You got to figure that out.
Gretchen Rubin: Right, right. Well, it’s funny because since so many people are like, but what is the habit I should work on the most? I actually did create a quiz that will tell the individual because I can’t like meet you and just from that tell you the right thing but this quiz which is just on my site will tell each individual like what right now is the thing that would move the needle the most on your happiness based on your answers. And of course it might be different in a month, but it is kind of uncanny how often people are like, oh yeah, you know, that is really where I feel like I need to do the most work. So there are definitely individual answers, but there’s no one size fits all answer.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and related to that is the idea that what makes you happy is gonna change throughout your life.
Gretchen Rubin: Absolutely, absolutely.
Brett McKay: That’s something I’ve learned. Like what worked for me when I was in my 20s does not work for me in my 40s.
Gretchen Rubin: Well, and related to that is something called hedonic forecasting, which is the ability to predict what will make you happier in the future. And turns out we humans are really, really bad at this. We are not good at thinking, okay, what is the happiness consequence of this decision? And so that’s one thing, if you’re working on your happiness is to try to improve your hedonic forecasting because we tend not to be very good at it.
Brett McKay: All right, here’s another one that stood out to me because I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Accept yourself and expect more from yourself.
Gretchen Rubin: Okay, this is a good example of something that took me months and months and months to wrap my mind around, because I got caught in like, well, it’s really important to accept ourselves and to show ourselves self-compassion and not to like be unrealistic and set ourselves up for other people’s expectations. But then I would also think, but we also have to try to get ourselves out of our comfort zone. And we do need the atmosphere of growth. And we don’t want to be complacent. And we don’t want to fall short of our potential. And then finally, I thought, well, both are true. And then I was like, okay, I could write about that for pages. But is there a way to distill those two truths that are in tension to distill that into a single sentence? And so saying, accept yourself and also expect more from yourself, that took me months and months and months, really, to write.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And I’m spending like my entire life trying to figure out, am I accepting myself and expecting, like, am I being content, but not being complacent?
Gretchen Rubin: Yes. Yes.
Brett McKay: And sometimes I have to ask myself, you know, when I think I’m being content, well, actually, am I just being complacent?
Gretchen Rubin: I mean, it’s the great challenge of our lives, I think, is to recognize. And people are always like, okay, but then how can you tell? And I’m like, that is what’s hard about adulthood. There’s no magic answer to tell you, is this something where you should accept yourself and just say like, hey, that’s not my thing, and spend your time doing things that are more in line with your true nature? Or are you like, no, this is something that’s reasonable for me to expect for myself. I can do this. I can expect this for myself. I want to push myself, even if it doesn’t feel good.
Brett McKay: Let’s talk about change. You write a lot about change. We want to expect more for ourselves and get better. One of your aphorisms is, it’s easier to change our surroundings and our schedules than to change ourselves.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes. Oh, my gosh. I so firmly believe this because people will often, and I saw this when I was writing Better Than Before, when I was really focusing on habits, is people will be like, well, I want to be a completely different kind of person. And I’m like, I don’t know if that’s possible, but if it is possible, it’s very hard. And then I’m like, but you could just change your schedule. You could just change your surroundings. You could work on the things around you and your conscious thoughts and actions. And that’s much easier. I remember I was doing an interview with a reporter in front of an audience, and there was this, to me, very poignant moment where she said, I want to be the kind of person who loves to get up and go for a five-mile run every day. And I was like, I don’t think you ever will be that kind of person. Like, I don’t want to be discouraging, but knowing you as I know you, I don’t think that’s who you are. I don’t think that’s how you’re wired. And in some ways, we just have to say to ourselves, you get what you get and you don’t get upset.
And like, I’m me. I’m like, but if what you want is you want to be fit, if what you want is to have a healthy body, if what you want is to be consistent in your promises to yourself to do something that’s going to be really good for your life and your mood and your immune function and your memory, that you can work on. You can put it in the schedule. You can set yourself up for success to keep that habit. But saying like, well, I want to be a different kind of person so that this behavior will come easily, that’s not a good way to succeed. You have to say, given who I am, what can I do to get where I want to go? Instead of, can I transform myself into an utterly different kind of person and therefore live a different life?
Brett McKay: No, I totally agree. I see it in my own life. So going back to Aristotle, if you want to be fit, you have to do fit things or put yourself in a fit environment will get you, help you out a lot.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes, exactly. Excellence is a habit. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Speaking of change, another one you talk about is changing other people. Because in adulthood, you’re going to deal with just so many frustrating, frustrating people.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes.
Brett McKay: And we’re just like, why can’t you just be like this? But you have an aphorism for that. It’s, we can’t make people change, but when we change, our relationships change, and so others may also change.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes. What got me thinking about this was when my daughters were very young, I’m an irritable person. I’m a cranky person. I’m a carping person. I’m a high-strung person. I’m a rigid person. Like, that’s who I am, right? And if you have little kids, that’s a hard way to be because they are disorderly and messy and throw your schedule off. And I was just a more irritable kind of parent than I wanted to be. And I would get frustrated and kind of crabby, and they would get frustrated and crabby, and then it was just, it all went downhill. But then when I was like, okay, I’m going to get up earlier, so I have a bigger margin in the morning, so I can get up in just sort of like my own quiet way, get dressed and get organized and have my cup of coffee. Thoreau said, I love a broad margin to my life. I’m a person who needs a broad margin. I’m going to build in more margins so that I don’t feel rushed or pressed for time, and so I’m not hustling them along. We have plenty of time. When I started doing all these things to make my…
And then just working on staying patient, staying good-humored, seeing the funny side, and not constantly depressing. When I relaxed, they relaxed. When I had a warmer, more tender attitude, they also became calmer and more cheerful. And so I didn’t do anything to change them. I only changed myself. But because I changed, they responded. And so then the atmosphere of our household changed.
Brett McKay: Yeah. This reminded me when I read that aphorism of Bowen Family Systems Theory. Are you familiar with Bowen Family Systems Theory?
Gretchen Rubin: A little bit. I mean, I know that it’s, yeah, but in what respect?
Brett McKay: Yeah, so there’s this idea, this thing developed by this guy named Murray Bowen back in the 50s, 60s, and his idea was that, you know, we carry over our relationship dynamics that we developed when we were kids in our family of origin to other relationships. And one of his big ideas is there’s often a lot of what he calls anxiety in a relationship. I mean, anxiety isn’t like nervousness. It’s just kind of like stress. Everyone’s just kind of freaking out about stuff. And he says in order to change that dynamic, one person in that relationship, they have to be differentiated. So they have to not catch the anxiety of the other person. He says you have to be a calm, non-anxious presence. And then his idea is that, well, if you change, if one person changes themselves in the system, then the system becomes more calm.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes, yes. That’s interesting. I think that’s 100% true. In my own family growing up, my father is just this very calm, unflappable, cheerful, enthusiastic person. Like whatever you want to do, that’s great. And I realized much later in life how much I had taken that for granted and how much his attitude really did act as a buffer for other people’s agitation or, you know, that he could kind of absorb it and then let everybody kind of calm down or reach equilibrium. And it’s only, you know, with much greater maturity that I was like, that’s a lot of work. I always thought that’s just his nature. And I’m like, that’s not easy for anyone. Like that is a way that he is choosing to be. And I realized how valuable it was and probably how much energy it took to be always that person in the system who was able to be like, let’s just chill out a little bit here. Like, let’s have a sense of humor about it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree. I’m like you, I’m very high strung. Not super high strung, but I’m cranky. I mean, that’s why we went to law, possibly.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, cranky. Yeah, it’s good for cranky people. Yes.
Brett McKay: It’s good for cranky people.
Gretchen Rubin: It’s a cranky profession, yes.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. One of the hardest things, or can be really hard about being an adult, is being a parent. Super complex. Actually, I’ve noticed this. Maybe people talk about how being a parent is hard, like when they have babies, little kids. I actually didn’t think being a parent of babies or little kids was that hard. It was just because you have to make sure they’re fed and safe, and it’s fun, and sometimes it’s tiring. I’m finding it’s getting harder and harder to be a parent as my kids have gotten older, because their problems have gotten bigger and more complex.
Gretchen Rubin: Well, they say little children, little problems. Big kids, big problems. Yeah, that’s a folk proverb. Well, I think when they’re young, it’s physically demanding. And when they’re older, it’s more emotionally and intellectually demanding.
Brett McKay: Yes. So you’ve got some aphorisms about being a parent. And one of them is, I really resonated with this, we can’t change our children’s natures by nagging them or signing them up for classes.
Gretchen Rubin: Right. I mean, it’s just, again, it’s like you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Like, of course, we can help people reach their potential, and we can help them accept themselves and also expect more from themselves. But in the end, you’re not going to change people’s natures. You know, with a lot of these aphorisms, there was kind of an origin story, or there was something that happened to me or something that I read, which really caught my attention and sort of had me thinking and turning it over in my head, like a dog with a bone trying to understand it. And in this very funny encounter with somebody that I hardly knew, she was the mother of somebody who had a son that was my daughter’s age. And she was talking about how he had gotten all this money for his birthday. And he was young, like a young teenager. And he wanted to start one of these, I don’t even really know what it is. It’s some kind of account where you can put your money in and you do kind of pretend investing. It’s the kind of thing that if you were the kind of kid that wanted to grow up and become a finance person or investor, you’d be very interested in.
Like, he wanted to learn about the stock market and he wanted to place his bets and everything. And she was like, you know, though, I just think, wouldn’t he be better off spending that time doing something like learning ceramics? And I was like, let me stop you right here. I think you would like to learn ceramics. I think you should let your kid do what he wants. That’s a totally reasonable thing for a child to want to do. He’s not actually risking his money. He’s interested in a subject that’s, you know. So why would you say like, oh, no, I mean, it would be the rare child who would like to do both of those equally. And I think that that’s just what sounded fun to her.
Brett McKay: Yeah. As my kids have gotten older, I’ve noticed this more and more, is that they have their own personality.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes, they do.
Brett McKay: And no matter how much I nag them about something like, hey, it doesn’t do anything. So it’s just trying to figure out, like, what can I do to harness that in a more positive direction is what I’m trying to do.
Gretchen Rubin: But I also think that there’s a difference. And I think about this a lot because I think it’s one of the big challenges of parenting, which is there’s helping people do something that they want to do, but they’re dreading doing either because it’s so much work or there’s so many steps to it or there’s something about it that just makes them really uncomfortable. So like, I live in New York City and neither of my daughters who are like 26 and 20, neither of them have a driver’s license because it’s so hard. They have to learn how to drive and it’s hard to practice because we live in New York City. And then it’s really hard just like to take the test. And one of my daughters failed the test. So then she has to take it again. And then it’s just, there’s so much paperwork. There’s so many steps. It’s so awful. So I am kind of badgering them about that because I know in the end, this is something that they want. They both know how to drive. It’s just like a lot of steps. But that’s different from saying, oh, I think you should.
I’m going to badger you to take up scuba diving, even though you have no interest in it, just because I think it’s something that would be cool for you to do or something. Or what’s really hard, I think, is when, because the parent loves something, they want the child to love it too. And they become angry when the child doesn’t love it. Like everybody in our family loves University of Nebraska football. We’re all Cornhuskers. You should love University of Nebraska football too. And if you don’t love it, then there’s something wrong with you.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you can’t do that.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, you know, you can try to expose them. You can try to get them people interested. But at a certain point, it’s like people have their own. I mean, I don’t like the Olympics. And I can’t tell you how many people are constantly trying to convince me to like the Olympics. And I’m like, I’m just here to tell you, I’m not interested in the Olympics.
Brett McKay: Not doing it.
Gretchen Rubin: You know?
Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, I think as a parent, what you can do is you can kind of think of yourself as a gardener instead of a carpenter.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes, that’s the Alison Gopnik book.
Brett McKay: So you’re a gardener. You kind of create an environment where they can flourish because they come with these seeds of personality and talent and potential already embedded inside. And you can’t just reconstruct them and build them differently. All you can do is create an environment that nurtures those seeds. And then you see where it goes because it’s up to them after that.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes. Yes, exactly.
Brett McKay: So here’s another favorite one of mine. My wife liked this one a lot, too, because she’s been talking about this for a long time. But I love how you really put this in a succinct aphorism. Before declaring that something is superficial, unhealthy, inefficient, dangerous, disgusting, or immoral, we should consider, maybe this just doesn’t suit my taste.
Gretchen Rubin: Well, so in my collection of aphorisms, I have a giant list of things that in previous times in cultures, people considered inefficient, dangerous, immoral. And it’s just bananas what people will take into their mind to oppose. I mean, when postcards were introduced, people were violently opposed to postcards. You know, it’s like, maybe you just don’t like postcards. You don’t have to decide that they’re immoral. And I remind myself of that when I’m thinking like, oh, it’s terrible that people are doing X, Y, Z. I’m like, well, maybe it’s just because I don’t like to do X, Y, Z, so I don’t understand why somebody else would like it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, as a person who’s been putting out articles and podcasts for almost 20 years, you’ve probably experienced this too. There’s people who are going to like criticize you. And the way they frame their criticisms like, you know, this is wrong and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then you’ll have people who say, I love what you’re doing. This is great. I think it’s the greatest thing in the world. And so this aphorism reminds me of that. And it reminded my wife of a story from Ben and Jerry’s, the ice cream example. And one of the guys, Ben or Jerry, was doing an interview and he talked about how they would get letters from people saying, your chunks are too big and this is why the ice cream is bad and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s awful. I’m not going to buy your ice cream anymore because your chunks too big. But then they’d also get letters saying, oh, I just love how big your chunks are. It’s one of my favorite things about your ice cream. Keep doing that. In fact, I want them bigger. And Ben or Jerry says, I wish I could just somehow swap the letters so that the people who were complaining about the big chunks would get the letters from the people who love the big chunks and then vice versa. So people could see like, oh, you know, it’s just taste. There’s nothing wrong with the ice cream. It’s just that your taste doesn’t suit it. And that’s fine.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah. Well, in terms of creativity, to your point, I always remind myself that a strong voice repels as well as attracts. And that if you’re so innocuous that nobody objects to you, you’re probably catching nobody’s interest either because you’re right. Everything, somebody doesn’t like something. One of the funniest tourist slogans, my whole family grew up in North Platte, Nebraska. So I have a real fondness for Nebraska. And their tourist slogan for a period was, honestly, it’s not for everyone. And I think that’s so funny because it’s like, we love Nebraska, you know, but honestly, it’s not for everyone. And right. And so you can just say like, that’s just not my taste. You don’t have to say like, oh, there’s something wrong with that.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Objectively wrong.
Gretchen Rubin: The chunks are too big. The chunks are too small. It’s like, I like a chunkier ice cream.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s so true. Another one that I liked, by trying to save things for a special occasion, we may squander them. Spices go stale, white shirts turn yellow, wine turns to vinegar.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah. No, I mean, I have kind of a hoarding nature. I will save things like I’ll buy a new shirt and I’ll save it or I will get new stationery and I will save it. And I have to remind my, it’s one of my 10 personal commandments is to spend out, meaning like put things into use, like use things up. Because by saving them, you’re often wasting them.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so true. Life is for living, money is for spending. Use the good dishes, the good china, don’t save, don’t wait for it.
Gretchen Rubin: Use the good China. Yes.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so yeah, that’s a good lesson for adulthood to make it more enjoyable.
Gretchen Rubin: I mean, I had a pair of pants once that I loved so much that I saved them and wore them very sparingly because I wanted to like keep them in really good shape. But then, you know, fashions change. And then all of a sudden I’m like, they’re not great pants anymore. I could have worn them like 10 times more than I did, but I felt like I had to hold them back. But I feel this way creatively. I don’t know if you ever have this where you’re like, I can’t put out all my good ideas. Like if I put in all my good ideas, maybe I’ll run out of ideas. Maybe I need to hold an idea back. My sister, Elizabeth, who’s the co-host of the Happier podcast with me, she’s a television writer. And she said, they always remind themselves, put every good idea in the pilot, put in every good idea that you possibly can. Don’t say like, oh, we’ll put this in episode four, because you may never get to episode four. Use everything up right away and then trust that there will be more. So I think it’s true for the good dishes. It’s literally true, but it’s also true creatively, which is the more that we create, the more we will create.
Brett McKay: All right, here’s another one that I liked. It’s about doing well in life, making a change in the world, an impact on the world. To respect us, people must first notice us. We can’t earn trust and admiration from the sidelines.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, I mean, maybe that’s a little bit of a dark aphorism. Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes people are like, oh, I’m silently working away and nobody notices me. Why am I not getting a promotion? It’s like, I think you’ve answered your own question.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’m sure you’ve noticed that as with your career putting out content, you can put out really great stuff, but if you’re not actually promoting it, no one’s gonna know how great the stuff is that you’re putting out.
Gretchen Rubin: I know, I know. I remind people of that all the time because they’re like, well, I don’t like to do that work. I’m like, well, that is part of the work. That isn’t like icing on the cake. If you wanna reach people through your work, you have to do what needs to be done to reach them.
Brett McKay: You gotta hustle. I think Ernest Hemingway is a good example of that. Like he really dedicated to his craft of writing, but the guy knew how to do self-promotion.
Gretchen Rubin: Oh my gosh.
Brett McKay: He created a myth around him.
Gretchen Rubin: I mean, and that is, if you read biography of great artists, you usually see that they are tremendously self-promotional. You know, it’s not an accident that they are in the spotlight.
Brett McKay: Well, yeah, there was a biography I read about Emerson. You know, we think of Emerson as this kind of sage that he was kind of above self-promotion, but that guy hustled. He was constantly promoting himself, getting himself out on the Lyceum circuit, speaking because he wanted to make a name for himself. And Thoreau, he wasn’t comfortable with that, and he didn’t have the success in his lifetime that he wanted. He actually kind of felt bad about it. I think he felt kind of bad that he didn’t have the admiration that he thought he deserved. Because he was a great writer, he had these great insights, but he just didn’t want to promote himself. And Emerson would get on to him, he was like, you need to get out there, man. But Thoreau was like, I just don’t want to do it. And Thoreau had to die, and then maybe 100 years later, he became famous.
Gretchen Rubin: Well, you know, it’s interesting. For a long time, I’ve been wanting to learn more about the Transcendentalists. So you’re inspiring me to dig up some book and read about them. Because I know a little bit about them, and I certainly admire their writing, but I don’t really know that much about their relationships. And that sounds really interesting.
Brett McKay: Oh, they’re interesting characters. There’s just a lot of bickering between them and sort of envy and comparison going on.
Gretchen Rubin: Well, didn’t Thoreau live with Emerson for a while?
Brett McKay: Yeah, Thoreau was his kid’s babysitter, basically, and handyman. And they were like best friends, but then they would have these falling outs. They’re really interesting characters to read about.
Gretchen Rubin: Okay, you’ve inspired me. I want to, I mean, as an aphorist, you would think I would have spent a lot of time studying the Transcendentalists because those characters are writing aphorisms left and right. And I love their writing, but I have always wanted to know more about their relationships. Okay, you’ve inspired me.
Brett McKay: All right, so another one I liked kind of hit home to me at this point in my life. It is, do you need more time or do you need to make a decision?
Gretchen Rubin: I remind myself of this all the time because the way that I postpone the difficult work of decision-making is sort of saying like, oh, I need to consult someone about that, or I need to talk to my husband about that, or I need to do more research about that. And it’s like, no, you don’t. You just need to make a decision. It’s just a form of procrastination.
Brett McKay: Yeah, usually you already know the answer.
Gretchen Rubin: Or you don’t know the answer, but you know you need to just decide.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s a fair point. At that point, you probably just flip a coin. You have to do something.
Gretchen Rubin: You have to do something.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay, another one that I liked. Oh, yeah, this was, I really like this one. This is about if you have a decision to make and you don’t know what to do, you have a heuristic and aphorism for it. When uncertain about how to proceed, make the choice that allows you to choose the bigger life.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes, this is extremely helpful. I would say of all my secrets of adulthood, this is one of the ones that people most often will say to me has been useful to them. I can’t even remember where I wrote about it first. Maybe in Better Than Before? Anyway, and I’ll give an example from my life where my daughters were begging for a dog and my husband was like, okay, I’d get a dog. He grew up with cats, but he was open to it. But to me, it was a perfect balance because on the one hand, I knew all the happiness research about a dog and how much dogs bring happiness and actually even good health. I knew I had a dog growing up and I love my dog, but then I thought, oh, it’s all those errands and all those responsibilities and then we have to worry about the dog every time we want to leave town and we live in a New York City apartment, so it’s like a whole thing. And I just felt paralyzed because the pros and cons felt very equally balanced. And then I thought, well, choose the bigger life.
And then the answer was immediately obvious to me, which was that for our family, the bigger life was the life with the dog. Now, somebody else might say, no, the bigger life is the life without a dog because then you could travel, you can be spontaneous, you have more money to spend, like you’re freer. And so that might be the bigger life. But for us, I was like, the bigger life is to get a dog. And we did and we were so happy we got the dog.
Brett McKay: I find that I have to be more intentional about that as I’ve gotten older. Because as you get older, you kind of get complacent, you become a hobbit where you’re just like, I just want to stay in my little hobbit hole and not do any things that’s comfortable. When I was younger, I was like, oh yeah, go do big things because I got nothing to lose. As you’re older, you’re like, oh man, if I do that, there’s going to be a lot of complications, I get the risk. So yeah, I need to make that my mantra. Choose the bigger life.
Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, well, for me relatedly, and this came to me after the book was already done, so I didn’t make it into the book, but I was realizing exactly what you were saying. I would have opportunities to do things, fun things, and I’d be like, gosh, I just don’t even want to deal with scheduling it. It’s like, well, pick a day, then one of us will have to reschedule and it’s just going to be this whole thing and then I’ll have to figure out how to get there. And oh my gosh, in the end, wouldn’t I just rather stay home and read in bed? But then I thought, scheduling is life. Like I say, I hate to schedule, but scheduling is life. Everything that I want to do needs to go onto my schedule. And if I’m not scheduling, then I am just staying home and binge watching The Office, which is, in a sense, my favorite thing to do and certainly the easiest thing to do. But that’s not a good life. Scheduling is life. So that’s how I try to embrace it for myself now.
Brett McKay: I like scheduling. That’s another great aphorism. Scheduling is life.
Gretchen Rubin: Scheduling is life. Volume II.
Brett McKay: Volume II.
Gretchen Rubin: Secrets of adulthood, volume II.
Brett McKay: Let’s do a few more because there’s so many. How many did you include in the book?
Gretchen Rubin: I think there’s a couple hundred.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s awesome. You could just flip to a page and like, here it is for you. I thought this was an interesting one because I think it’s true, but I couldn’t figure out why it’s true. To understand a new place, visit a grocery store.
Gretchen Rubin: Oh, I just think this is such a fun thing to know. If you’re in a new place, it’s just fascinating to visit the grocery store. Like, what is the food? How is it presented? How is it different? It just gives you an insight into a new place. It’s a very fun thing to do.
Brett McKay: Yeah, we go to, our family would go to Vermont for the summer, and we’d always go to the, first thing we do when we get there, before we go to the Airbnb, stop by the local grocery store. And it’s always interesting to see what foods they have in New England that they don’t have in Oklahoma. It’s like devil dogs are a thing in New England, not a thing in Oklahoma. Maple cream donuts, thing in Vermont, not a thing in Oklahoma.
Gretchen Rubin: Maple. Everything maple.
Brett McKay: Everything maple.
Gretchen Rubin: But it’s funny because I remember when I went to college, I didn’t realize that there were like regional brands, that there would be brands that other people thought were huge that I had never heard of, like Entenmann’s. This is a thing, and they may have it now, but in Missouri when I grew up, we didn’t have Entenmann’s. And everybody, when I got to college on the East Coast, they were like, how do you not know this? It was like not knowing, you know, Coke. They thought it was this ubiquitous brand, and then there were brands that I knew that they didn’t know. So it is, and then like maple. You’re like, I’m in the land of maple now, and everything will be maple, maple, maple, or I’m in the land of lobster, or I’m in the land of, you know, whatever it might be. It’s fun.
Brett McKay: Here’s another fun one that I agree with. Once a group includes five people, a single conversation is very hard to maintain.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes, so you’re reading now from the Simple Secrets of Adulthood. So I have my Transcendent Secrets of Adulthood, which is most of the book, which are what I hope are like deep insights. But as I was writing the book, because I just love hacks, I love a practical tip, I just couldn’t stop myself from making a list of those as well. And when I submitted my manuscript, I thought my editor would be like, Gretchen, these Simple Secrets of Adulthood just don’t belong with the other ones that are so much more transcendent. But she said, oh, these are fun. Let’s include them, like the one about the grocery store, or the one about the five people. This is something that I learned from writing my book, Life in Five Senses. This is called the dinner party problem. It’s a very well-established psychological phenomenon that once a group includes more than four people, it will almost inevitably break into smaller conversations unless you make enormous effort to keep people unified. And if you’ve ever been to like a single topic dinner party or something, you have to tell people that that is the rule and then really enforce it because people just will naturally break into smaller conversations. So it’s a useful thing to think about when you’re approaching a social occasion that that is something that you will encounter.
Brett McKay: I read into this, I agree, I’ve been in conversations where there’s more than five and it just doesn’t work. But also I relate to this rule because I was a waiter in college. I absolutely hated big tops where people get like 20 people and we had to smoosh tables together because it’s just like, why are you doing this? No one’s talking to each other. You’re only talking to the people in front of you and it makes it harder for the waiter. And so whenever I see…
Gretchen Rubin: You know, that is a great point. I guess it’s you want to feel like you’re together, but maybe you’re like, you’ll actually enjoy it more.
Brett McKay: Yes, you’d enjoy it more because after like, you know, two people over, like you have no idea what the other people are saying. And it makes it… Go ahead.
Gretchen Rubin: Well, and also talking across the table would be easier. So in a way you’re less, you feel like you have access to fewer people, but you might actually have access to more.
Brett McKay: Yes, and it’ll make the experience better for you and the waiter because the waiter can actually… It’s just easier to manage. So whenever I go into a restaurant, I see a big top, I’m just like, ugh, people don’t know what they’re doing. They need to stop that. That’s my pet peeve. No big tops.
Gretchen Rubin: But that’s interesting because I do think that our impulse is like, oh, well, we all want to be together and we don’t want anybody to feel like they’re stuck at the wrong table. It feels very high stakes.
Brett McKay: You could be in the same area.
Gretchen Rubin: Right, you could be next to each other.
Brett McKay: Next to each other, but you don’t need to smoosh all the tables together.
Gretchen Rubin: Interesting, I like that. See, and there’s room at the back of the book for people to write their own secrets of adulthood. So that would be what, like, you know, I’m going to write that down myself as a hack. So a lot of times reading these will inspire people to realize that they have their own.
Brett McKay: All right, last one, because I relate to this one a lot. If you don’t know what to do with yourself, go outside or go to sleep.
Gretchen Rubin: I mean, I just feel like that works. That’s just like, that is, to me, one or the other or both. I always am going to feel better.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I have this tendency. You probably have this tendency too. Everyone has this tendency. At nighttime, you’re tired, and then you get stuck on something that you’re just upset about and depressed about. And then because you’re tired, you start ruminating and go down this death spiral. And then my wife usually tell me, just go to bed, just go to bed. And then in the morning, you feel great and you have the answer.
Gretchen Rubin: Yes, yes, absolutely.
Brett McKay: Well, Gretchen, this has been a lot of fun. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Gretchen Rubin: Gretchenrubin.com. There’s links there to my quizzes, the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast, the books, all my books, my writing. I have a newsletter, Five Things Making Me Happy. I have an app, I have products, I got all the things. And I love to connect with people on social media. I love to hear people’s observations and questions and resources that they suggest. So follow me on social media. I’m Gretchen Rubin in all the places.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Gretchen Rubin, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Gretchen Rubin: Thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Gretchen Rubin. She’s the author of the book Secrets of Adulthood. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website Gretchenrubin.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/secretsofadulthood, where you can 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. And make sure to sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. It’s for men and women alike. It’s a great way to support the show directly. You can learn more at dyingbreed.net. 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. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think there’s something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Reminding you not to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
Feelings of burnout and boredom have become prevalent in modern life. To understand the roots of and solutions to these issues, we can turn to both ancient philosophers and contemporary thinkers. Among the latter is Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose thought-provoking analyses are gaining increasing recognition.
If you’re not yet familiar with Han’s philosophy, Steven Knepper, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute and the co-author of a new critical introduction to this modern philosopher’s work, will take us on a tour of some of Han’s key ideas. In the first part of our conversation, Steven unpacks Han’s concept of the “burnout society” and why so many of us feel tired from participating in what he calls “auto-exploitation” and “positive violence.” We then discuss how our burnout society is also a “palliative society” that tries to avoid suffering at all costs and how our obsession with health has turned us into a modern version of Nietzsche’s “last man.” We end our discussion with some of Han’s ideas for resisting the pitfalls of modernity, including embracing ritual, contemplation, and an openness to the mystery of others.
Resources Related to the Podcast Byung-Chul Han’s books, including The Burnout Society and The Palliative Society * Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford * New Verse Review * Steven’s work at The Lamp* * Dying Breed Article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration * Dying Breed Article: What Nietzsche’s Typewriter Brain Can Tell Us About Twitter Brain * Sunday Firesides: Protect the Sanctum Sanctorum of Selfhood * Sunday Firesides: We Need as Much Meaning Extension as Life Extension
Connect With Steven Knepper* Steven at VMI
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. Feelings of burnout and boredom have become prevalent in modern life. To understand the roots of and solutions to these issues, we can turn to both ancient philosophers and contemporary thinkers. Among the latter is Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose thought provoking analyses are gaining increasing recognition. If you’re not yet familiar with Han’s philosophy, Steven Knepper a professor at the Virginia Military Institute and the co-author of a new critical introduction to this modern philosopher’s work will take us on a tour of some of Han’s key ideas. In the first part of our conversation, Steven unpacks Han’s concept of the burnout society and why so many of us feel tired for participating in what he calls Auto-Exploitation and Positive Violence. We then discuss how our burnout society is also a palliative society that tries to avoid suffering at all costs and how our obsession with health has turned us into a modern version of Nietzsche’s Last man. We end our discussion with some of Han’s ideas for resisting the pitfalls of modernity, including embracing ritual contemplation and an openness to the mystery of others. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/han. All right. Steven Knepper, welcome to the show.
Steven Knepper: Thanks for having me. It’s honored to be here.
Brett McKay: So you co-authored a book about a modern philosopher that I’ve been seeing more and more of in my readings. This guy named Byung-Chul Han, he’s a German Korean philosopher. For those who aren’t familiar with this guy, who is he and why am I seeing him more and more in my philosophical reading?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. He is popping up everywhere today on the internet, on social media. So Byung-Chul Han, he is a Korean German philosopher, as you’ve said. He was born in Seoul, Korea. He’s living, I think that’s important to to point out. He’s continuing to write all the time. So, he’s very much a thinker on the move. He’s born in Seoul, Korea. As a younger man he studies metallurgy and is really into engineering, kind of material science. But as a young man studying those, he becomes more and more interested in philosophy and philosophical questions and literature. So he travels to Germany to study abroad and he lets his parents under the impression that he’s gonna continue his material science studies in Germany, but he makes this big move into studying theology, literature, and especially philosophy at the graduate level. So I think that’s just kind of a fascinating thing in and of itself.
About 15 years ago now, he had this breakthrough book that is really his turn to more topical problems, problems of the day. And that book was called “The Burnout Society.” And it was a big hit in Germany but it also was relatively quickly translated into a whole bunch of other languages. And Byung-Chul Han, some of your listeners may be familiar with Matthew Crawford, who wrote books like “Shop Class As Soulcraft.” And they might be familiar with arguments about how more and more we live in a society where there’s this war for our attention, where our attention is commodified. And you’ll be in the line at the service station and you get up there to pump your gas and suddenly the gas pump starts talking to you and giving you ads, or even above the urinal there might be ads. So, our attention’s getting pulled more and more in by these digital technologies and certainly all of those kind of more real world examples like the gas pump and the urinal pale beside the smartphone, which is algorithmically tailored to harvest our attention.
So Han is a really sharp critic of those kind of dynamics, and I think that’s a big part of the appeal. But he really zooms into on the ways in which, while acknowledging that all these things are designed to catch us, we also kind of catch ourselves. We go along with it, we are very easily encouraged into binge watching or going deeper into email. And he talks about how we auto exploit. And I think that’s what’s really captured people’s mind because I think a lot of people can recognize that in themselves. I know I can. The ways in which we don’t have to be checking work email but we do. The way in which we have a down moment and we pull out that smartphone. I think he’s really an astute critic of that.
Brett McKay: Okay. So I hope we can talk more about these ideas, these criticisms he has of modern life in depth. And yeah. I’m sure our listeners are familiar with Matthew Crawford. We’ve had him on the podcast a few times, talking about “Shop Class As Soulcraft.” “The World Beyond Your Head.” So I think this will be right up their alley. I’m curious, you’re a professor at the Virginia Military Institute. So, how did a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, where they do drum outs, take an interest in this Korean-German philosopher?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, I love VMI. I love working with cadets. As you might expect, they’re very ethically serious and they’re very disciplined and they live in a system that encourages discipline and virtue. But cadets are not immune from some of these same dynamics. They too struggle with screen addiction. They too struggle with being able to focus their attention. And a subset of cadets come to a place like this because they want that structure. They know they need it to succeed. So, in one ways, I think that working at VMI gives me some insight into some of the ways we can deal with these things because VMI, for instance, during their freshman year, what’s called the rat year here, cadets aren’t allowed to use their cell phones. But on the flip side, I think just like if I were teaching anywhere, I can see how my students are struggling with some of these dynamics.
Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s dig into Han and his philosophy, kind of bigger picture. How would you describe his approach to philosophy? Like what school of philosophy would you put him in? Is he a Aristotelian, an existentialist? What’s Han’s philosophy? How would you describe it?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. There’s lots of different ways I could answer that question. And he draws on some very different sets of philosophical resources, including Zen Buddhism, including Christian theology at times. But I think I would answer that question for right now in the way that I think really focuses, why he resonates so much with people, is that he comes out of this tradition, especially in German philosophy, that’s very techno skeptical. Sort of earlier critiques even before the digital age that are concerned about instrumental reason, about how we tend to approach the world and other people as things, as objects, as machines. How there’s that reductionism involved in that. How bureaucracy and this technical reason rationalize our lives and organize it but then also might seem like they’re squeezing out room for freedom. So, some figures here you might think of on the left would be someone like Theodor Adorno and on the right would be someone like Martin Heidegger but also German Catholic thinkers like Romano Gordini or Josef Pieper, and Han draws on all these thinkers.
But more recently, there’s this turn toward thinking especially about technology and how it shapes the world. So someone like Heidegger is gonna talk about how technology inframes the world, it determines how we see the world in each other itself. There’s something about the way the technology restructures our world and that gets taken up in media theory by people like Marshall Mcluhan outside of Germany and a lot of other media theorists that Han is in dialogue with, who are looking at the ways in which, yeah, technology isn’t just sort of this passive transmitter of information or this tool that we use. Technology and especially communication technologies shape how we see the world often in ways that we’re not aware of and I think we’ve all seen that with the digital. Think about how the experience of smartphones has reshaped how we experience the world, how we experience time. So he’s certainly a philosopher that picks up those concerns and takes them in very interesting and precise ways into our digital present day.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, yeah. He’s kind of taken a turn towards media theory. And yeah, he does talk about Marshall McLuhan. I’m sure people have heard that phrase, “The medium is the message.”
Steven Knepper: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Yeah. The idea is there that the tools that we use for media consumption or communication, it shapes the way we think. I did an article about this on our substack called Dying Breed about Nietzsche and the typewriter.
Steven Knepper: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And actually, there was a famous German media theorist that wrote about this, talking about how Nietzsche went blind. And once he went blind, he had to start using a typewriter. And this guy talks about how his writing style changed once he went from writing out by hand to writing with a typewriter. His writing became punchier, became more aphoristic, more bombastic. And so yeah. The same sort of thing happens. I’m sure people have noticed how their emails have changed since they started communicating primarily via email. I remember when I wrote handwritten letters, it kind of flowed and was more stream of conscious, and it was long sentences, and now with email, the medium of email, it’s gotta be short, punchy, and to the point, because that’s how you do email.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And even text messaging, I think, has refigured how we do email. But you might think too about something like how we’ve had this move that’s ongoing from text to video and then from video to short videos. Like on Google now, you can search for short videos. And there’s lots of research that’s emerging about what that’s done to our attention span, how TikTok kind of rewires our brain. And I think that’s a great example of this dynamic. People aren’t aware of how this technology is reshaping how they experience the world but it’s doing it and Han is part of that tradition that’s trying to make that explicit for us.
Brett McKay: Okay. So Han, he is trying to figure out why modern life can feel just weird, overwhelming, boring. Sometimes you just feel like you’re in this rat race and you can’t get out of it. It feels fast. So let’s dig into this more because I think everyone’s listening to that has probably experienced that. Let’s talk about that book you’d mentioned that was his breakout book, “The Burnout Society.” What is his central diagnosis of modern life in that work?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So he emphasizes in “The Burnout Society” that when it comes to feeling burnout, which is this new phenomenon that many, many people feel burnout, even though if you look at statistics, at least in the developed world, we have more “free time” than any other generation that came before us. But we often have this feeling of being run ragged, of being burnout, and he describes it to what he calls this achievement culture, where we have this sense of an open-ended possibility. There are all these things we could do, so therefore we try to do as many of them as we can. And we get hooked on these little doses of dopamine, on these little often quantified metrics of achievement. So this might play out in social media, where you’re looking for a certain number of friends or a certain number of likes. You post something and then you wait for the notifications to roll in and you get your little hit, but quickly it diminishes and you feel like you need to post something else, and it goes on and on and on and before you know it, how much time have you spent in that sort of strange little dynamic?
It might play out in sort of being a workaholic at the office, where you’re checking your email even when your boss doesn’t expect you to. You’re answering emails, you’re impatient when other people aren’t answering emails outside the usual business hours. It could play out even at the gym, he says, where you become super fixated on numbers and on sort of micromanaging your achievement there. So, he sees it playing out in all these different areas. And I think it’s particularly interesting how he talks about how it plays out not just in those meritocratic spaces like being a super high achiever at work, but it infiltrates our entertainment. So, you feel like you’re just sitting down to watch a video, you know, to relax at evening, and you end up absolutely vegging out on the couch and autoplay binging half a series in one night. This is a pretty common experience now. And certainly the technology itself facilitates it with autoplay but he sees it too as this sense of, well, we could watch just this next one, it’s all there to stream right now. And so we end up doing it. So there’s a way in which, in pursuing more and more and more, we burn ourselves out.
And in all this pursuit of more and more and more, what’s missing is a sense of, okay, what’s a good healthy balanced life looks like? What is a good sense of limits when it comes to these things? The open-ended injunction to achieve doesn’t give us any places to rest, doesn’t give us a sense of when we’ve accomplished something, doesn’t give us this robust telos to pursue. And of course, who benefits from this? Well, certainly advertisers do, on the internet. Clicks are money. Attention is money. But he’s very astute about how we have this, what he calls auto-exploitation.
Brett McKay: Yeah. let’s talk about that. So, auto-exploitation or sometimes it’s translated self-exploitation. And then he talks about this idea of positive violence. I think they’re kind of connected. What does he mean by self-exploitation and positive violence, and how does that connect with this idea of the achievement society?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. What he means by positive violence, and that’s a strange little term in some ways. So negative violence would be coercion by outside forces. Someone forcing you to do something, someone threatening you so that you do something. “Check your email at these hours or you’ll be fired.” That would be kind of a negative pressure. Han would say that positive violence is stuff that we do to ourselves. So, it’s when we, in the pursuit of achievement, we just go and go and go and go and go. That’s what he means by positive violence. And he sees this move happening with kind of the dawn of the digital age from what he calls a disciplinary society that’s about rules and injunctions and negative discipline, he sees that giving way in a lot of senses to this positive exploitation. More and more, instead of telling us what not to do, powers that be, economic powers, political powers, are gonna encourage us to do more. And often it’s framed as, this is good for you, why wouldn’t you want to do more? But of course, this just serves some institutions, some companies, really, really well, but it can have a big toll on society and on individuals in the society that suffer burnout, fragmentation, feelings of Isolation, all these things that can come as negative consequences of the achievement society, according to Han.
Brett McKay: Okay. This actually reminds me of this idea of positive violence and self-exploitation in the achievement society and how we’re doing this to ourselves, trying to improve ourselves because we feel like we should because we can. Those are potentials that we can pursue. But then they can be used by other people or other businesses or governments for their own ends. We did a podcast a really long time ago about the happiness industry, about these consultants that come into companies and say, “Hey, we’re gonna develop a wellness program for your employees where we’re gonna have meditation sessions and you can have a nap room.” And it sounds like, “Oh, it’s great. It’s for the employees. It’ll improve morale.” But really,it’s like, well, we want to do that so we can get more out of our employees.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. Precisely. And in the book, The Critical Introduction that I co-authored, we talk about office space. And if you remember that movie, great movie with Jennifer Aniston’s character where she works at this restaurant where they have to wear these flare, like these buttons all over their uniform and be really bubbly and excited as they go about their job. And her manager at one point says to her, “You’re only wearing the minimum allowed amount of flare. Don’t you want to wear more? Don’t you want to wear more?” And it’s pitched as, why wouldn’t you want to do this? But it’s so clearly kind of degrading and coercive underneath the surface. So that’s maybe an extreme example but I think it’s a pretty good example of something that was already going on way back when office space was produced but I think has become much more prevalent in the time since then.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Because of the digital technologies, you see social media influencers like, hey, I’m living my best life and here’s what I do. Here’s the routine I follow to live my best life and you can do this too. And it’s like, man, that’s a lot to do when I’ve got a job and kids and other responsibilities, but you try to do it because you’re living in that achievement society.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And I think that one thing I would like to specify, and I wish that Han would do more of this in his own writing, but I don’t think that the problem, at least from my view, maybe he would disagree with this, but I don’t think the problem is wanting to have a set of disciplines that pursue a goal, like fitness, working out, or trying to learn something new. I mean, all of these can be good things but what makes them pernicious in Han’s view is when you don’t have this ideal that you’re aiming at, which will sort of let you know when you’ve got there. You don’t have this sense of direction. You don’t have this sense that you’re aiming at flourishing. You are just sort of going from hit to hit to hit on these many achievement rubrics. And what gets lost is this rich notion of flourishing or this balanced life. And so, I mean, I think that’s what art of manliness is really good about. Certainly, you give people fitness tips and you give people time management tips. But again and again, you come back to this robust notion of what flourishing should look like. And I think that if you take that seriously, that actually counteracts the achievement society..
Brett McKay: Yeah. Maybe you could put it this way. In the achievement society, we tend to treat means as ends because we don’t have an ultimate end, really.
Steven Knepper: I think that’s a fantastic way of putting it.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen this in my own life. I mean, a perfect example, I’ve talked about this before on the podcast and in my writing. You know, I was a power lifter for a while, really got into it. And I was always chasing the next PR. And it was fine for a while but then a couple of years ago, I was getting to the point where in order to increase the weight on the bar, I was just having to train harder and harder and it was just causing a lot of stress, physical. It beat me down. And I got to the point it’s like, I can’t do this anymore. This is no longer enjoyable. So, I still train but I’m not chasing numbers. I’m just training so I just feel good and because I enjoy it.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And one thing that Han emphasizes elsewhere in his works, I mean, so far we’ve talked about his diagnosis of our society’s problems but his books are kind of split between those more diagnostic works and works where he’s recommending some practices that will help counter this. And he’s written a lot about ritual and the importance of ritual. Ritual trains our attention. It allows our attention to be more robust. It gives time a shape. And you think about how traditional practices of exercise, you know, we might think about like, say martial arts, how there’s this ritualistic dimension to it and this communal dimension to it. And I think that’s the antidote, that’s not part of the problem. But there is this tendency for achievement society, if we use Hans terms, to take even good things and kind of twist them away from substantive ends to means, means, means, or many, many goals that don’t provide sort of lasting satisfaction or a sense of closure or pacing but you just chase one after another after another.
Brett McKay: An example I just thought of as you were mentioning that we, where we take something that we maybe enjoyed for the thing itself and then turn it into achievement society thing, like a hobby. You see this happen all the time where someone has this hobby that they’re really passionate about and then they start sharing it on social media because they love it, but then it turns into a business for them and then their hobby becomes this means to gain influence and money and it kind of kills the joy of the hobby.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s spot on. And we might think about other things too. So, Han recommends contemplative practices as something that are especially important in our distracted attention divided present day. But you think about how like a certain practice of something like yoga or even daily prayer can be just another thing on the to-do list that you’re using as like a bandaid to sort of manage the worst feelings of being burned out or stressed or to allow you to just squeeze out a little more achievement. And that’s not sort of the transformative practice that Han’s recommending to really counteract this achievement society. But it can be sort of co-opted as part of the regimen.
Brett McKay: There’s this great phrase that Han has, I think it’s in “The Burnout Society.” He says that people today are tired from not being able to be themselves. What does he mean by that? And how does the achievement society contribute to that tiredness?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that there’s many ways you could approach that but I think that Han has had this qualm about present-day society and the achievement society but he also sees some tendencies towards this in Western philosophy and Western society for a long time. He thinks that there’s often this unconscious kind of egotism to it, where you’re focused on being the best you. And for a lot of people to even question that just sounds insane. This is the mantra by which they live and by which they exhort others. But one of the dangers with that is that you never really know when you’ve reached prime you and also, often by sort of being so focused on you, you don’t open yourself up to other people or to the world or to great works of art or literature or ideas. You know, everything’s about self-maximization or it’s about that next little bit of achievement. And not only is that really bad ethically because we need to be attentive to others, Han doesn’t quote, as far as I know, Iris Murdoch, the great British novelist and philosopher, but he would agree with her that in some ways ethics begins with attention. We gotta be able to sort of give people our attention in order to treat them well. So there’s this ethical downside but there’s also this paradox in which the achievement society, it seems like you’re doing this all for your own benefit, but it feels so thin and you feel like you’re burning out. Whereas really, if you open yourself up to others and you have substantive relationships with other people or if you pursue kind of a disciplined practice that gives your life shape or religious practice, those things open up a depth of meaning and a depth of satisfaction but you only can access those if you let go of the ego, if you dialect the ego, if you make yourself receptive to them. When you get out of the way, then meaning can be discovered.
Brett McKay: Yeah. When I read that phrase, tired from not being able to be themselves, it made me think of Kierkegaard and his notion of despair. And he had this idea that we have this idea of ourself as it should be. And I think he talks about someone who’s really ambitious, and it’s either you gotta be Caesar or nothing.
Steven Knepper: Yeah.
Brett McKay: So it’s like, if you can’t be Caesar, then it’s just you’re worthless. And I think Han would agree with that. We have this idea in our modern world that we got to be the absolute best and if we can’t do that, we’re worthless and then we just fall into this funk and we’re depressed. And yet Han, I think, he argues in “The Burnout Society” a lot of the depression that we see in the modern world, yes, he would agree that maybe there’s some biological components. Some people are just depressed because of something biological going on in themselves. But he argues that a lot of depression, people just feeling down and just in a funk, it’s because we are striving so hard to be this awesome thing that we think we should be because the achievement society tells us we need to be and we’re not reaching that, even though we’re trying really hard, we just get burned out and we’re just like, “Okay. I’m just gonna give up.”
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And my co-author, Rob Wiley, he’s a great Kierkegaard scholar. And I think part of what drew him to Han is that even though Han doesn’t “Kierkegaard that much” there’s a lot of shared sensibility. And I think one of the things is this notion of perhaps the most dangerous kind of despair is the despair that you’re not aware of. You’re not aware you’re in it. And I think he sees that as plaguing a lot of us that are caught up in this achievement society.
Brett McKay: So we mentioned that technology plays a major role in Han’s critique of modern life. How does he see digital technology, especially smartphones and social media, contributing to the burnout society?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. That’s a great question. And my other co-author, Ethan Stoneman, this is really his wheelhouse. And one of the things that he points out is that really Han doesn’t turn to engaging digital technology fully until after the burnout society. That’s when you see him start referencing thinkers like Marshall McLuhan. That’s when you see him really giving attention to how smartphones have reshaped our experience of the world. So, I think the burnout society is still a great place to start with Han. But if you’re interested in the technology, you wanna look at some of those later works where he really goes in-depth on how technology is feeding into this achievement society mentality. But even in “The Burnout Society” he’s already talking about how the smartphone can be kind of like a portable, a mobile labor camp where we are just always pulling it out in any down moment and clicking, clicking, clicking. I think too, on social media, one of the things that he is insightful about is that there’s this drive to make yourself transparent on it, to sort of share everything about your life, everything that’s going on. And certainly, that’s really good for marketers because behind the scenes they’re creating intricate profiles for each user that they can then sell to other companies.
But also cumulatively, it creates the sense that humans are really these thin things, that an online profile captures who we are as a person, and sort of the depth and mystery of the individual gets lost. You might think about something like dating apps, which I know lots of people that have met the love of their life on these, so I’m not trying to sort of just categorically dismiss them but there’s this real danger with them that you think that if you match with some preferences online, that when you meet the person, that you already know them or that you know there’s a compatibility there and you can lose track of that mystery of the other person. And of course, too, when we create online personas, we can either be consciously or unconsciously performing a persona that’s not really us. So, Han worries about how it creates this thinned out version of self and other. And he’s a big proponent of recovering real-world relationships, real-world friendships, where you can’t just sort of ghost each other if you don’t like how the conversation’s going, or where you might have to dwell in silence for a few moments when you’re sitting together at the restaurant, and where there might be this real tension. Where the other person might call you out or you might sort of need to stick with each other through hard times. All of these, he thinks awaken us to a richer sense of ourselves and others as having this unfathomable dimension of otherness or mystery. He thinks we hunger for that. Yeah, I do too.
Brett McKay: For sure. Yeah. Han’s critique about transparency I thought was really interesting because yeah, you see this ethos particularly online and social media, where you got to be transparent. So yeah. It benefits the social media companies. They get more information about you so they can sell ads to you. But also you see this ethos from the people themselves taking part in social media. There’s this idea that if you have a following, like your followers demand transparency from you. You got to let them know everything about you. Like, what are your thoughts about this issue? And tell me about your family life and your problems. And you get rewarded if you reveal things about yourself. Oh, thanks for being real. And you’re just so authentic. And Kierkegaard makes this argument too in the present age. He makes this comment how people, he was writing in the 1800s and he was writing about how people would talk about their personal lives very freely in the public, like in newspapers and essays and things like that but then when they were actually with people face to face, they wouldn’t reveal those things. Like they would just suddenly become very reticent and they wouldn’t talk about those deep personal things, but they had no problem sharing it with the mass audience.
And Kierkegaard said somehow that that hurts being a self. Like you can’t become a self and an individual unless you have, he calls it a sanctum sanctorum, like a holy of holies that only you can go into. Because if you’re just living your life out in public, you’re constantly shaping yourself to fit what the public wants, so you can get the followers and the likes, et cetera
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s spot on. So it’s kind of interesting. This might feel like a bit of a digression but there’s this Emily Dickinson poem that I teach most semesters. It’s very short. It’s called, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Actually, it’s not the title. It’s just the first line that’s taken as the title. But it goes, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell, they’d advertise you know. How dreary to be somebody. How public like a frog, to tell one’s name to live long June to an admiring bog.” It’s a great poem, right?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Steven Knepper: You know, especially today, students on their own immediately go to social media. But with that idea of transparency in mind, what does the frog do again and again and again? They say their same name over and over. But in this poem, Dickinson suggests that the nobodies that are behind the scenes that have a sense of privacy, they’re the ones that actually have mystery, depth, something interesting and new to say. So I think that that poem like way before we have digital technology is on to something about how always making yourself transparent kind of thins you out and loses something important.
Brett McKay: Another thing that Han explores is the role of boredom in modern life. What role does boredom play in Han’s critique of modern life and what does he mean by boredom?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. That’s a fantastic question because there’s a couple different types of boredom at play. One type of boredom is this restlessness that we have no patience for whatsoever. So, if you’re waiting at the bus stop and you have a down moment, probably you’re gonna feel an itch to pull out your phone if you’re like most people. So, we want to fill up every moment with something and we have no tolerance for that restless boredom. But Han actually is a big advocate of this deeper sense of boredom, profound boredom, where you let go of the restlessness and you sink into the moment and you just open yourself up. And he thinks that that kind of state is really important today because that’s the kind of state where new ideas might come from you or where you might notice stuff around you. Certainly if you’re an artist, that’s where inspiration might strike. So he thinks that this kind of profound boredom, that a lot of us that were lucky enough to grow up pre-digital, you know, as kids I think we reached this state often because you go through the restless boredom like, “Oh man, I’ve got all day, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m tired of all my toys.” And you don’t have anything, any recourse. So over time you might come up with like an imaginative game or you might go out on a walk and you sort of sink into this more receptive open state.
So, those are the two states of boredom in Han. Now I’m not sure this is exactly everything that’s going on and this might be only a partial answer to why he’s interested in that profound boredom. But I think Han, since he’s such a great diagnostician of what’s wrong with society, one of the things that he’s aware of is that, okay, if we’re already feeling really burned out because of this achievement society, what if we just let go of that compulsion to achieve in the midst of the burnout? Maybe there’s not that big of a gap between feeling exhausted and that profound boredom. And if we could just allow ourselves to sink into that, then maybe the antidote is much closer to the state of our problem than we think. So I think that’s maybe part of the reason why he’s so interested in profound boredom. There’s a qualitative leap between the burnout state and profound boredom but maybe the divide in another sense isn’t that far apart.
Brett McKay: Maybe it’s kind of like hair of the dog where you have to kind of lean into it a little bit more to figure out what it is you lack and really need.
Steven Knepper: Yeah, I think so. And you can see him sort of trying out different approaches to our problems. So, post-burnout society, he also starts to talk a lot more about openness to the other, and Eros is this thing that draws us out of ourself towards the other or towards the world. So here too, I mean, I think he thinks that, okay, we’re seeking all this fake community online, and he’ll talk about online community as often seeming like you’re encountering other people but really because of algorithms and really because you still kind of mediate that encounter, he says you’re actually trapped in kind of a mirror world. You’re trapped in what he calls the hell of the same, where if you really want to encounter other people you often have to go into the real world where there’s a little more risk and uncertainty in the encounter but there’s also the sense of depth and a richer possibility of a relationship. Martin Buber is another thinker that’s important to him. And Martin Buber will say things like when you enter into a real relationship with the other person, the relationship itself is bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s not just you and me, there’s now a we. And Han will say similar things. But you have to sort of open yourself up to that for that to happen. And he thinks a lot of people are seeking that on the internet but it’s pretty hard to find on the internet.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So, we’ve talked about “The Burnout Society” so we’re all feeling kind of burned out, according to Han, because we live in this achievement society that has this, we call it ethic of self-exploitation or auto-exploitation, where we’re pursuing things not because we have to but it’s this idea, well, you could do it, so you need to do it, and we have these tools that allow us to measure ourselves and make progress but you can never know when you actually reach that best self. And so you just get tired and burned out and it can cause boredom too because some of that stuff that you’re constantly doing can just wear you down and it can be boring. I want to talk about another book that he wrote, it’s a short one, called “The Palliative Society.” This is another critique he makes on modern culture. What does he mean by the Palliative Society?
Steven Knepper: So, in this book, his main argument is that there’s something seriously out of whack about our relationship to pain as a society. He sees our society as not just an achievement society but one that tries to avoid pain and suffering at all costs. And of course, Han thinks that in many cases, yeah, we want to try to reduce pain and disease, we want to try to reduce pain in all kinds of areas of life, but one of the dangers here is that to be human it means you’re gonna undergo pain. So if we get to the point where we think pain is always a problem, a problem to be solved with a technical solution, then what happens when you run into a situation where the pain can’t be solved? Maybe someone’s dying. And he thinks we’re really bad at accompanying people through painful situations. I think that’s probably true. But then Han would also say that many areas of life require pain in order to reach a higher level. So, you think again about physical fitness. This is one of the few areas in our society where I think that you still see some embrace of pain as a necessary step. In order to become a better athlete, you’ve gotta train hard, you’ve gotta suffer. But Han points out too that in education, you know, he’s a philosopher. To be a good philosopher, he says, you’ve gotta confront ideas that challenge your own. You’ve gotta wrestle with difficult ideas that make you uncomfortable. And it’s hard work and it’s painful.
I would say the same is true. I’m a words guy. I’m an English professor through and through. But mathematics, you know, mathematics at a certain level becomes really tough. And in order to get through it, you’ve gotta be willing to sort of suffer through the hard work to get there. And then maybe most importantly, think about relationships. Think about a good marriage or a good friendship or with kids. Those relationships, there’s gonna be time when that loved one is suffering and they need you and it’s gonna be unpleasant to go through that with them. So any kind of real love entails suffering. And that’s ancient wisdom, that a lot of people would pay lip service to but actually, our vocabulary and our practices for dealing with that have gotten really thinned out. And he thinks that we basically live in a society that avoids pain.
For him, the COVID pandemic really revealed that because after the opening stages, when we got a better sense of what’s going on with this disease, he saw kind of an overreaction in all kinds of areas. We might think about schools shut down for kids long after we knew that this disease, thankfully, for the most part, wasn’t that threatening to children. And this strange way in which we couldn’t sort of balance that this is a tragic situation, that there’s gonna be negative outcomes no matter which way we go. He saw this as kind of failing the test in a pretty profound way. And he traces it back, at least in part, to this inability to deal with suffering and to sort of think about pain in an adjusted way.
Brett McKay: You mentioned that you think our vocabulary around pain and suffering has been thinned out. What are some examples of that off the top of your head?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, I mean, I think we see it in all kinds of areas. And there have been some really good contrary trends to this. But I think that when you think about parenting and how for a few decades now we’ve had the phenomenon of helicopter parents. Whenever your kid has problems, there’s a real not even just temptation but almost expectation from other parents, you might think, to jump in there and smooth it out for your kid. And sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Sometimes there’s situations the kids are in that they can’t deal with and they need adults to step in. But also there’s a way in which if you want your kid to be an adjusted adult, they’ve gotta learn how to suffer through some situations. They’ve gotta grow in toughness and courage. And I think we’re pretty poor at that kind of vocabulary. I think too. It’s really tough. It’s tough for me. And I’m a religious guy from a tradition that keeps some of these things more alive. But it’s really hard to accompany family members that are in deep sickness and on their way to death. It’s hard to know how to talk to them and it’s probably always been hard. But I think it’s become especially hard in our day where we tend to close that away in retirement homes and hospitals. So, those are some examples.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Another one that came to the top of my head was you saw this a couple years ago. I think you’re seeing a trend away from it. But the idea of trigger warnings in classrooms when you’re discussing heavy topics like sexual assault or crime or whatever, you’ve got to give a trigger warning to people. I think that might be another example of like, Han would say, this is an example of the palliative society and we want to reduce and eliminate pain as much as possible, even though to really understand an experience, you have to confront everything, even the terrible parts of it.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And Han would say, life itself is gonna throw up these really hard situations. So certainly in classrooms, you shouldn’t handle difficult material flippantly or brusquely. You should try to be sort of sensitive about it. But one of the ways, the reasons to study the humanities is to study the tragic and help you then process it when you have to encounter it in your own life. So, if you just sort of immediately bracket that off, then one of the main reasons that the humanities is important goes away. And people end up suffering more as a result for that, I’d say.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You become fragilized. We had the guy who wrote “The Coddling of the American Mind” or something like that. He writes about that. I would like to talk about this. I think it’s in “The Palliative Society.” Han has this kind of throwaway line. He didn’t really explain it or follow it, and I wish he did because that’s actually really interesting. He talks about this idea of the palliative society and wanting to eliminate pain. He likens it to the last man from Friedrich Nietzsche’s, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” And he said that the last man is actually obsessed with their health. Do you know what I’m talking about when he wrote this? Can you flesh that out? Because I think that’s really interesting.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And just a sort of a broader point. I think that one legit frustration that people can have with Han is that since he writes these shorter extended essay-like books, sometimes there will be these lines that almost feel like throwaway lines. You’re like, “Oh, I wish he would have just fleshed that out.” I think that’s a pretty common experience. His relationship to Nietzsche is a really interesting and complex one because one way of thinking about Nietzsche, and there’s certainly abundant textual evidence to think about this, is as this great philosopher of the will and of action. But he brings out a more contemplative side to Nietzsche and he pulls out these passages that show him emphasizing the importance of contemplation, of being able to have real repose. So that’s an interesting thing. But yeah. I think that he thinks that the last man is obsessed with health and obsessed with their own happiness in such a way that it has that unconscious egotism about it and also becomes very fragile and can’t face up to the tragic side of life, the suffering of life, and the suffering of others.
Brett McKay: Yeah. When I read that it made me think of, you know, we live in this world of wellness culture where we have all these devices and supplements we can take and there’s this talk about, we’ve got to extend our lifespan. And I’m thinking, like, why? Like, what are we doing with that? I mean, health is important. I’m not trying to dismiss health but it seems like we’ve made health an end rather than a means to a higher telos.
Steven Knepper: I think that’s exactly correct. And yeah. I don’t think the problem is that you want to be healthy or that you want to reduce suffering from disease or unjust circumstances or things like that. I think that’s all to the good and important. But I do think that one danger of sort of fetishizing health too much is that any risk becomes unacceptable or any difficulty becomes something to avoid. And that just really thins out life because so many of the things that make life most meaningful. And I think too, it’s important to make that distinction between kind of pleasantness and meaning. Often deep meaning, you know, you think about a Buddhist monk or a saint, you know, deeply meaningful life but one that’s full of asceticism and challenge.
Brett McKay: So, we’ve been talking about some of Han’s critiques and sort of diagnoses of modern life, and that’s what he’s most famous for. He’s a diagnostician. But as you said, we’ve been talking about it throughout the conversation, he does offer some potential antidotes to this feeling of burnout, this feeling of boredom, this feeling of flatness in modern life. And one of those things you mentioned was this idea of Eros and that we need to return to this idea of Eros. I think a lot of people, lay people, when they hear the word Eros, they think, oh, sex. But that’s not what Han means. What does Han mean by Eros and how can that help us out of the burnout society?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So his notion of Eros goes back to Plato but I think he definitely puts his own spin on it. But it’s this notion of Eros as this desire that draws us out of ourself towards some other good. So, he would distinguish that from the kind of lower level base desire gratification that often the internet trades on. You want to get those likes or yeah, if we want to talk about sex, pornography, literally masturbatory interaction with the internet. Whereas real Eros, yeah, you’re drawn outside of yourself towards the other and when you really encounter another person or you encounter the world, you realize that it’s bigger than your project. It doesn’t exist just for you. You discover this depth and richness and mystery. And so, yeah. When it comes to erotic relationships, sexual relationships, relationships of erotic love, he’d say that, yeah, there’s a big difference between that transactional kind of pornographic interaction and one where you’re attracted to the other person as a three-dimensional person and as a mystery. But he would also use Eros broadly as, well, we’re attracted to the beauties of the world or we’re drawn out of ourself into friendship. So, it’s much, much bigger than sex for sure.
Brett McKay: All right. So yeah. Eros takes us out of ourselves. So yeah. This kind of goes back to Matthew Crawford’s idea of the world beyond your head. If you really want to become a self, you have to get outside of yourself. And for Crawford, he talks a lot about the role craft can play in drawing you out of yourself, kind of get out of this morbid self-consciousness. But that can also happen through relationships, can come from looking at art, can come from spending time in nature. And another concept related to Eros that I thought was really interesting from Han was that if we want to open ourselves to those erotic encounters where we’re drawn out of ourselves, we have to have this stance of friendliness to the world. I really like this idea. What does he mean by friendliness?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, this is an idea that runs from his thinking from the very early untranslated works in German right through his most recent work. And what he means by friendliness is kind of this intent of openness to the world and to other people. So, sometimes he’ll use this language, especially when he’s drawing resources from Zen Buddhism, he’ll talk about becoming a guest house to the world, where you’re just kind of open to the world. And he sees this as a friendly stance. I think he’s really good at drawing attention to all these ways that when we’re in our phone, we’re literally closed off from other people in the world. Or when we’re all up in our head, again, coming back to Matthew Crawford, you can be walking down the street and maybe you’re not looking at your phone, maybe you don’t have headphones on, but you’re so wrapped up in your head, you’re not aware of anything that’s going around you or aware of anyone around you. So to have this friendly disposition towards the world is the stance of openness.
Brett McKay: Yeah. This made me think of Hartmut Rosa. He’s on my mind because we’ve talked about him on the podcast before but I also did another article from my substack, Dying Breed, about his idea of resonance. And he had this idea of resonance being like, you’re open to the world or the outside world talking to you and it kind of transforms you. And he makes the case that we have a hard time feeling that sense of resonance because we see the world as just aggression points. There’s things we got to do. So, like the example I gave, when I’m in my house, I’m constantly looking around like, all right, we need to fix that thing. This thing needs to be painted. We need to declutter that. I’m hardly ever just thinking, I’m just gonna be in my home and just enjoy my home. We can even see other people as aggression points, things we gotta do things with. Like, what can this person do for me? Or someone’s having a hard time and they open up to you, we think like, well, okay, I got a lot to do, what can I do just to get through this as quickly as possible so I can get on with my life? So we go, they’re there. Okay. You’ll be all right. And we just send the person on their way.
And Rosa would say like, no, you have to actually kind of have a stance where you’re open to like, okay, just let this person who’s saying they’re sad just be there with them. You don’t have to fix anything. Just be there. And you might have this moment where like both of you feel like you’re edified in some way. I think maybe Han would agree with that. Like, instead of seeing the world as points of aggression, you’re just open to the thing or the person as they are.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And Rosa is a thinker that’s become much more important to me too or that I should say that I’ve just discovered more fully, even after writing this book, even though Rosa gets cited in here. And I think that as you suggest, Rosa and Han are approaching some similar things from somewhat different angles. And I think that’s useful because just like anything, if you look at it from one angle and then look at it from another angle, you’re gonna get a richer picture. But I think Rosa, he has this great insight that as moderns, we really like control. We want to eliminate as much contingency or risk from our lives as possible. We want more and more things to be under our control. And there’s something that’s understandable about that but there’s a real danger when it becomes as exaggerated as it has become for us, in that, to have a really rich relationship with something, to have a true relationship that has a back and forth, a resonant relationship as Rosa would say, then you’ve gotta relinquish control in order to have that sense of a meaningful relationship with a friend.
You can’t be all about controlling everything about the friendship and manipulating it, or that’s just gonna be a disaster in addition to being unethical to the friend. But also, we have this deep hunger to connect with nature but at the same time, we struggle to operate on any level other than, yeah, controlling it. So yeah. So Rosa thinks that we have to let go of this modern urge for control in order to see problems and fix them, in order to open up these richer spaces, these resonant spaces. In your example of someone that’s suffering, you don’t always need to fix the problem, you just need to be with them. That’s a good example of that.
Brett McKay: Does Han offer any sort of practical… I mean, Han would be like, “You can’t reduce my philosophy to a list of things to do” because he’s like, that’s kind of counter to what I want to say. But are there like some practical ways people can start countering this burnout society, this feeling of tiredness for just the everyday person? We’ve got jobs, families, and phones that never stop pinging us.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think so. And I think there are actually a lot of different practicalities and possibilities that he offers throughout his works. I think that he would bristle against the idea that he’s some kind of high theory self-help, in part because he’s challenging you to not just sort of make these small adjustments in order to achieve better in the achievement society, he’s calling for these more radical transformations and he thinks that’s where you’ll find deeper solutions. And certainly too, he’d like to see some more widespread changes in society to cultivate these things. But that said, one of the things I love about Han is that, he writes like editorials about the problems that teenagers in schools are facing in Germany. And one of the reasons he writes these short books is that he really does want to speak to non-academics about their problems. And I think that’s another reason why he’s become so popular. So yeah. Some of these possible remedies to achievement, to burnout, I think one is just cultivating that sense of openness. When you’re at the bus stop or you’re walking down the street or whatever, and you have this urge or there’s a lull in the conversation, and you have this temptation to pull out the phone, don’t pull it out.
And if you really struggle with those things, Han doesn’t say this, but I think it’s a corollary of his positions. Yeah, go with a dumb phone or leave the phone at home. I think too, he has like long sections about how to be a good listener in his book, “The Expulsion of the Other.” I think too, things like, okay, maybe you’ve got a friend that’s going through a hard time, put yourself in that situation where you’re accompanying them through it. So these are all some things that come through. One we haven’t touched on much that I’ll add is that Han talks a lot about ritual and certainly talks about religious ritual and how one of the advantages of that is that it gives time a shape. So every day isn’t just the same empty box in which you fill it up with achievement but you have things like the Sabbath or you have festivals that give time a shape. And even if you’re not religious, you can try to recover a more variegated sense of time. So those are some practical possibilities.
Brett McKay: Yeah. He talks about meditation could potentially be one but like he said, well, don’t use a meditation app where it tracks your streak of how many days in a row you’ve meditated. You’re in achievement society mode if you do that. But just take a few minutes where you just sit there and contemplate something. I think looking at art, going to a museum just to stare at something for half an hour, that could do it. Being out in nature can be another source of that as well.
Steven Knepper: Learn how to tolerate silence. Learn how to be alone and not on technology and just be an observer.
Brett McKay: How has engaging with Han’s work changed the way you live personally?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So I’m certainly someone that struggles with screens. And I have my periods where I do really well with it and others that I don’t do so well. So yeah. I think that studying Han is for me too, it’s become a way of trying to get a better grasp of some of these things in my own life. And yeah. I can remember times like, you know, it’ll be a beautiful evening and my kids are in a ballet practice and I’m outside here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are absolutely gorgeous. And there’s this great sunset, and I’m on my phone? Like doing what? That was one of the moments that just got to me and it’s like, yeah, this is bad. Changes need to be made. Changes need to be made for the sake of other people in my life but also for my own sake and having this richer experience of the world. So Han’s been a really important philosopher to me. And I probably got into him in some ways via Matthew Crawford. I knew Crawford’s work first. That really spoke to me. And I could see Han picking up on some similar themes.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s interesting. Han started off in metal work and then he became a philosopher and Crawford, he’s like a motorcycle guy, motorcycle mechanic, and then he went into philosophy. So yeah. They’re similar in that way. If someone wanted to dive into Han’s philosophy for the first time, where should they begin?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, “The Burnout Society” still is a pretty good place to begin but I think some of these more recent works are great entry points too. I wouldn’t be surprised if many Art of Manliness listeners liked “The Palliative Society.” I think that’s a good book. Another recent one called “Vita Contemplativa” which focuses on contemplation as an antidote to burnout. I think that’s another good place to start. And certainly, I’d put in a plug for our critical introduction. Han’s written over 30 books and some of those aren’t even translated into English yet. So, what our critical introduction tries to do is give some through lines across Han’s body of work, situate him in among some other thinkers, show how he speaks to contemporary problems both in the ones that he addresses in his book and some others that we identify. So, it’s an academic book but it’s one that’s definitely pitched at the general reader with a little bit of background in philosophy should be able to navigate.
Brett McKay: Well, Steven, this has been a great conversation. Besides your book that listeners can find on Amazon, is there some place they can go to learn more about your work in general?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So I’m working on an author website but I don’t have that up yet. But two places they might go. One is I edit this online poetry journal, “New Verse Review” which has kind of an eclectic focus. So, it touches on some of these questions about attention and contemplation for sure. But then the other place that you might look is, I’ve written a few pieces for The Lamp magazine that touches on similar themes, including I have an overview of Han that I wrote for that magazine. So if you go there and just search my pieces, that’s another, I think, good place. .
Brett McKay: Great. We’ll link to those in the show notes. Well, Steven Knepper, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Steven Knepper: Thank you very much. It’s an honor.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Steven Knepper. He’s the co-author of “A Critical Introduction” of Byung-Chul Han. It’s available on amazon.com. You can check out our show notes at aom.is/han, 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 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 make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. It’s for both men and women alike. You can sign up at 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 AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
Note: This is a rebroadcast.
Do you have a goal to lose weight? If so, you’re probably thinking about how you need to exercise more. And that can certainly help. But what about the 23 hours a day you’re not at the gym? How much you move during those hours — from walking to the mailbox to fidgeting at your desk — can be just as important in winning the battle of the bulge.
Here to explain the importance of what’s called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, is Dr. James Levine, a professor, the co-director of the Mayo Clinic’s Obesity Solutions Initiative, the inventor of the treadmill desk, and the author of Get Up!: Why Your Chair Is Killing You and What You Can Do About It. James explains how much more sedentary we are than we used to be and what happens to your body when, as the average American does, you spend two-thirds of your day sitting. He shares how doing the lightest kinds of physical activity, even standing more, can help you lose a significant amount of weight and improve other aspects of health, from your sleep to your mood. And we talk about how to easily incorporate more NEAT into your day.
Resources Related to the Podcast* Role of Nonexercise Activity Thermogenesis in Resistance to Fat Gain in Humans — James’ overfeeding study * AoM Article: The Digestive Power of an After-Dinner Walk * AoM Podcast #552: How to Optimize Your Metabolism * AoM Article: The Importance of Building Your Daily Sleep Pressure
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Do you have a goal to lose weight? If so, you’re probably thinking about how you need to exercise more, and that can certainly help. But what about the 23 hours a day you’re not at the gym? How much you move during those hours, from walking to the mailbox to fidgeting at your desk, can be just as important in winning the battle of the bulge.
Here to explain the importance of what’s called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, is Dr. James Levine, a professor, the co-director of the Mayo Clinic’s Obesity Solutions Initiative, the inventor of the treadmill desk, and the author of Get Up, Why Your Chair Is Killing You and What You Can Do About It. James explains how much more sedentary we are than we used to be, what happens to your body when you spend half of your day sitting.
He shares how doing the lightest kinds of physical activity, even standing more, can help you lose a significant amount of weight and improve other aspects of your health, from your sleep to your mood. And we talk about how you can easily incorporate more NEAT into your day. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/neat.
All right. James Levine, welcome to the show.
Dr. James Levine: Thank you so much for having me, Brett. So you have spent your career researching obesity, particularly how our physical activity levels can contribute to how trim we are or how fat we are. When it comes to the way our body burns or uses calories, you’ve broke it down in your work, and there’s basically three ways our bodies burn calories. What are those three ways our body uses calories?
Yeah, the three basic ways we burn calories are there is the basal metabolism. Basal metabolism accounts for about 60% of the total. The bigger you are, the bigger your basal metabolism, or more specifically, the greater your lean body mass, the greater your basal metabolism. Now what’s important is, yes, it’s actually the majority burn, but you can’t change it. So moving on, the next one is the thermic effect of food. It accounts for about 11% of the total. Now, those are the calories you expend when you convert your meal into intermediary metabolites like glycogen and glucose.
So, if you have three meals a day, you’re gonna have three thermic effects of food. It accounts for about 11% of the total. Guess what? You can’t really change it. Now, the remaining component, where we’ve done 60, we’ve done 10. So the remaining component is about 30% on average of the calorie burn is through activity. Activity is either non-exercise activity or putting on your lycra spandex shorts. I know, Brett, I think you adore those and going off for a run.
We all know what exercise is, but most people around the world actually don’t take purposeful exercise at all. So all of their calorie burn through activity is through non-exercise activity. And in terms of calories, we call that non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And Brett, as a micro sidebar, if I may, even if you do go and do pilates three times a week or whatever that may be, when you actually work out how many calories you burn doing those three classes, which are 30 minutes, and you’ve done the three times a week, you’ve driven there, and so on and so forth. That only averages out to about 100 calories a day, and that’s if you’re having a proper workout.
Dr. James Levine: And so really, for nearly everybody listening to the podcast, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis are the calories you burn through daily energy activity.
Brett McKay: So, okay, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, shorthand, it’s NEAT. It’s called NEAT.
Dr. James Levine: NEAT.
Brett McKay: So basically, it’s just anytime you move during the day, like I’m standing up while doing this interview, talking to you, I’m gesticulating. That is NEAT, correct?
Dr. James Levine: NEAT are the calories you burn throughout the day. That is exactly correct. And I’m also standing up, Brett. There we go. Twin standards. But yeah, it’s all those calories you burn throughout the day. And it’s the calories you burn sort of as you get out of bed and go make coffee and go and collect the mail from the mailbox. It’s the mooching around you do during your day. It’s even sort of the tapping on the table as you’re waiting for the website to upload. And it’s sort of chopping up vegetables in the evening as you’re making your dinner. It’s wandering around the supermarket. It’s all those things you do that aren’t sleeping and eating.
Brett McKay: And how many calories, you’ve figured this out… Like how many calories do we burn in a typical NEAT activity? So if we’re just walking from the couch to the kitchen or we’re doing laundry, like what do we, like how much does it actually burn?
Dr. James Levine: So let’s think about that. First of all, as you know, what’s your NEAT for the day, and then how do you actually get to that number? So as we sort of agreed, it’s about 30% of your calories throughout the day. So that’s gonna be about, for an average person, about 700 calories. Now, what’s really, really interesting about NEAT is if you sort of look at this, if you compare 100s of people, the data set is 576 people living in high-income countries.
What you can see is actually an astonishing variation. Some people will burn 2000 calories a day more NEAT than other people. Example, if you happen to be a mail person delivering mail on foot throughout your day, or you work in agriculture, you can actually be burning 2000 calories a day more through your NEAT than if you’re actually sitting behind your desk all day long and then sitting in the evening in your rather comfy armchair.
Now, how does that actually compute? Now, what’s most important about all of this is that the sort of the biggest way of burning calories through your NEAT is to get off your bottom and walk. And I don’t necessarily mean sort of striding around, I mean mooching around. So if you get up and just walk at one mile an hour, which we call shopping speed, that’s sort of the speed when you’re going through TJ Maxx looking for the best deal. You’re walking on average about one mile an hour. You double your energy expenditure. You’re burning an extra 100 calories an hour.
So, you can immediately appreciate if you spend two hours online doing your shopping, sitting on your bottom versus mooching around at the mall for a couple of hours, there’s 200 calories right there. Now, if you walk a little bit faster at two miles an hour, you’re at 150 calories an hour. So now, Brett, you and I are both upstanding as we’re doing this podcast. We could either sit down absolutely statically still and burn almost nothing above basal. Or we could sort of stroll at about two miles an hour, which is the speed of a walk and talk meeting, and burn 150 calories each.
And so, when you actually compare people with very high NEAT to people with very low NEAT, people with very low NEAT are sitting on their bottoms all day. People with the highest NEAT are up mooching around, doing stuff on their feet, whether that’s at work or at play.
Brett McKay: All right, today, what’s the typical amount of NEAT that most Americans get? I think you said 700 calories?
Dr. James Levine: Yeah, that would be a reasonable number right there. But again, as you’re listening to this, remember the key thing, Brett, is that this is highly variable. So as you’re listening to this podcast, and you’re somebody sort of a bit like my job, which is 100% behind a computer screen every single day of the week, then you know intuitively that that’s too much sitting. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this now, if you look at job postings, they will even put as a warning on the job posting, this job requires excessive sedentary time. It’s actually extraordinary.
On the other hand, if you happen to have a job, whether that’s working in a warehouse, whether that’s working in a bakery, whether that’s working in fields, whether that’s sort of something much more ambulatory, that could even sort of be a greeter at Walmart, if you like, where you’re also mooching around. You can imagine having a NEAT five, six, 700 calories a day more than the person confined to a sedentary job.
Brett McKay: So there’s been a lot of talk about rising obesity rates in the United States, and there’s been different arguments put forth about what the cause is. It’s people are eating more, people are eating more sugary foods, people are eating more fatty foods. And you highlight research, but oftentimes it gets overlooked is that people are just moving less. Do we know like how much less we are experiencing NEAT in America today?
Dr. James Levine: Yeah. If you go back sort of 200 years to the Industrial Revolution, people moved from agricultural environments into the cities. And then what happened, of course, is there were production lines in the big factories. And then what happened, what, in the 1950s or thereabouts, people started sitting down working behind desks. And in fact, office desks were actually designed including the chair with the wheels, to stop people getting up and moving because the ergonomists back then believed that if you could stop people getting up and walking, they would actually be more productive if they sat behind their desk all day long. They were wrong.
But, that is exactly sort of how things have evolved to push us down in our chairs. And are we sitting too long? Oh, my goodness. Yes, we are. How do I know that? Is it just because of the rising obesity rates that you talk of? And there are really good data to the effect that we have sat progressively more and more and more over the last 200 years. But in fact, our calorie intake has not increased substantially. The only data showing that it has are actually from Australia.
So yeah, our calorie intake has been constant, but it’s too much for the degree of inactivity we have. And it’s not Brett, just about obesity. There are 27 other chronic diseases and conditions associated with sitting too much. And that means things like diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, even some types of cancer, and of course, musculoskeletal problems. And so, yes, on the other hand, you may be listening to this podcast and smiling. It’s quite interesting, but it’s bigger than that. It’s really serious stuff. And it’s not just our bodies we’re hurting. We’ve set up a society whereby our kids are gonna ultimately receive the world we’ve created for them.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think it’s interesting you point out this lack of activity, physical activity on a daily basis is probably driving the obesity, a big factor in driving the obesity. You talk about, if you even look at office work, you talk about this in one of your books. If you look at office work 50 years ago compared today, you did a lot more moving in the office than today. You had to move even if you were just doing a desk job.
Dr. James Levine: This is a 100% correct. I think back to sort of when I started in the day. I’ll give you a fantastic example. My very first job was working for a really famous professor called Professor Davies, who is an osteoporosis professor. And of course, as you may be aware, osteoporosis is growing quicker and quicker, partly due to the lack of activity. And she asked me to gather papers about a certain document she was writing for the World Health Organization. I said, I’d love to.
Now, those papers were scientific articles. And in order to gather them, I kid you not, I literally had to get on my bicycle and cycle across London to probably one of 15 different libraries to gather all the articles she needed. Yes, it took a lot of time. But my goodness, I’d come into her office, sweat pouring down my back. Today, click, click, click, click, click, it’s done. And just taking that simple example, all of us listening who are of a certain age, remember how difficult things used to be where we used to have to go and get resources.
We used to… We even have to sort of walk to the printer, which was actually in the printing room. Yeah. Now we barely… We can actually spend our entire day when you think about it in the office at work. And if I need my lunch, click, click, click, DoorDash right to my desk and get home, drive through, click, click, click, Pizza at my door, and on we go. And if you sort of step back and actually think about how much time I spend sitting every day, if you think about it, what’s really interesting is you can’t really imagine a world where you don’t spend it sitting because it’s sort of a subsidiary symptom of how we actually live.
And so you don’t sort of analyze, Oh, I’m sitting a lot at the moment. You just live your life, you see. And so this is what’s happened. It sort of crept up on us. And all of a sudden, we’ve all become these terribly sedentary and rather unwell and sort of slightly blue, sedentary office workers, both in the office and at home.
Brett McKay: When some people, or I think when most people notice that I’m gaining some weight, I notice that I don’t move around all that much ’cause I have an office job that doesn’t allow me to move around all that much. They think, well, I can take care of this with just diet and exercise. But you argue that diet and exercise will never be enough to compensate for the lack of NEAT. The problem with dieting, just reducing calories, is that you can’t do that forever.
So, let’s say you reduce your calories and you do lose weight. Because you’ve reduced the amount of calories you’re consuming. But in order to continue the weight loss with calorie reduction, you have to decrease the calories even more because you’ve likely decreased your metabolic, overall metabolic rate, resting metabolic rate ’cause you’re smaller. So your body requires fewer calories. And so, it gets to a point where it becomes unsustainable. And I think…
Dr. James Levine:Let me jump in there, if I may, please. ‘Cause you’ve touched on a really interesting point. Not only is everything you just said correct, but it’s even sort of more subtle than that, if I may please. When somebody loses weight through caloric restriction, through cutting their calories down, yeah, body fat is disseminated. Somebody can also lose some lean body mass and body weight declines on a lower calorie intake. The trouble with this is the body is not a static system. The body, brilliant in its design, adjusts and actually becomes more efficient.
So in fact, once you’re at that lower caloric intake, the body is working more efficiently, making it actually more difficult to lose more weight. So you’re not even dealing with a sort of a simple mathematic is I’ve decreased my calories in, I’m now going to be able to maintain a lower body weight easier. That actually isn’t true because the body will sort of counter-regulate to make it more difficult to maintain your body weight.
Brett McKay: And then also exercise just relying on focused exercise activities to offset the amount of being sedentary. As you said earlier, it’s not gonna do much in the long run ’cause you might just burn 100, 200, 300 calories and that can’t make up for being sedentary every other hour you’re awake.
Dr. James Levine: Purposeful exercise for the sake of improving your health, like going to the gym or something like that, is fantastic if you like to do it. Let’s be clear about that. If you like to go to the gym, keep doing it, please. It’s really good for you. It’s really good for your health. But very interestingly, again, for even people who go to the gym, the harm associated with sedentariness, as you say, all the other time that you’re not at the gym, which is basically 95% of your week, the harm of sedentariness is still not eliminated.
So, if you go to the gym, great. But if you’re sedentary, you’re sedentary. And if you’re sedentary, it’s causing you harm.
Brett McKay: I feel like in the last decade or so, people, whether… You’re talking about dedicated exercise or just physical activity in general, people have been kind of down on physical activity as a method of weight management. There’s this idea out there that you can’t exercise your way or burn your way to weight loss. Diet is what really matters. If you move more at some times, you’re just going to slow down. At other times, your body’s gonna find ways to just compensate for that extra activity somehow.
But you did a study that proved, Yes, activity can keep the pounds off. It was this really complex study. You basically got a bunch of people, including yourself, and then you overfed them 1000 calories a day. And then you just watched what happened. Who gained weight and who lost weight. So walk us through that study. And what did you learn from this study?
Dr. James Levine: Yeah, Brett, it was extraordinary. It was called the Great Overfeeding Experiment. And that is exactly what we did. But I have to tell you, this wasn’t done using a computer watch or guessing. This was done meticulously in metabolic laboratories at Mayo Clinic. It was a big, big deal. Every single food item was weighed and measured chemically. Every single movement was captured. Every calorie burned was analyzed. And even how people change their body fat was measured using precise technology down to a few 100 grams.
It was extraordinary work. A huge team of people helped do it. And what we found were two things that I think are really important. You can take a group of people, none of whom have obesity, and you can expose all of them to 1000 calories a day of overfeeding for months on end. And the extraordinary thing, first of all, is this, one person can take nearly all of those extra thousand calories and deposit it in body fat. That person is super prone, almost like a sponge absorbing water, to developing excess body fat.
On the other hand, another person can receive the same amount of excess food and somehow magically through their brain get up and start spontaneously moving. Their NEAT can increase for extra 1000 calories they’ve received. Their NEAT can increase 700 extra calories a day through movement, not going to the gym, through movement. 700 calories extra a day. On one hand, you’ve got somebody who seems to absorb every extra gram of food and deposit it in their body fat.
On the other hand, you’ve got somebody who you can overfeed a 1000 calories a day and gains almost no body fat because they switch on their NEAT. They get up and they move. So what you realize is, first of all, some people are really predisposed to gaining obesity. Yeah, we all know that and I’m sure some of your people listening are nodding their heads right now. But other people have this capacity from inside of the brain to get up and move so much more that they don’t gain any weight with overfeeding. And they never went to a gym. So that’s the first thing. Now what’s the second thing? The second thing is probably even more important than that.
The second thing is, if you are one of those people nodding your head right now, if you’re one of those individuals who has a tremendous susceptibility to gaining excess body weight, as soon as you sniff extra food, what you realize is that the body is designed in such a way that you can not gain more body weight. You cannot gain excess body weight and develop obesity if you are up and you are moving and your body has the capacity to do this. And you can even burn up to, if you like, 700 calories a day extra based on those data. So it’s a beautiful idea. You can win. You don’t need to go to the gym.
You can get up and move 100s of extra calories a day, whether that’s converting a standard meeting at work to a walk and talk meeting, whether that’s converting shopping online to actually shopping by foot, whether that’s getting your groceries delivered to your door from the supermarket, or actually going to the supermarket and physically choosing it. You can integrate movement into your day, so much so to stave off excess body weight, and you can even burn up to an extra 700 calories a day doing it.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Did you all figure out what causes some people to have that natural tendency to, when they consume more calories, they just start moving more naturally and others don’t do that? Is there a gene?
Dr. James Levine: Yeah, we spent a lot of time on that. And again, what’s fascinating is this. Think about it for a second. So what we did in that experiment is we got completely healthy, normal volunteers and we overfed them. We checked that they took every single extra calorie that they were given. We measured that. We even measured their urine in their stool, I should tell you. We had freezers full of poop. And what we then measured was that people responded to that by increasing their NEAT, their movement throughout their day. If you think about it for a second, how did people know to do that? It had never been discovered before.
I mean, how did that happen? People, if you like, knew to do it subconsciously because there’s a mechanism in the brain that counter-regulates how our food relates to our activity. And we thought, well, we’ve got to go and try and find that area in the brain because then we can actually help people really achieve their goals. And so we had a whole neuroscience team led by Dr. Novak, a brilliant young neuroscientist, and she identified tiny parts of the brain right in the hypothalamus, which is an old part of the brain that switches on your NEAT and switches on NEAT more in some people than others. So in fact, right at the center of your brain right now as you’re listening to this podcast, your brain is analyzing your calories in, your calories out, and is propelling you to move more or move less. So yes, there’s a deep biology underpinning this.
Brett McKay: Okay, so in some people, there’s a part of the brain that’s more discerning or more activated so that whenever you take in excess calories, it sends a signal to move more. And then in some people, that part doesn’t switch on as strongly. But a big point you make in all of your books you’ve written is that even if you don’t have that natural tendency to want to move more whenever you consume excess calories, you’re not destined to be an inert lump. You can still take action. It doesn’t have to be big change. Just take small, tiny changes throughout the day to counteract that.
Dr. James Levine: Absolutely. And the trick, if you like, I actually, as somebody who looks after patients, I really don’t like tricks. But nonetheless, for you, Brett, the trick. The trick to all of this is to make a decision. Is to make a decision with your day? Today. Is today going to be the day I’m gonna get up and take control of my life and step forwards? Or is today gonna be the day I stay on my seat? If you decide to stay on your seat, my only prayer is that tomorrow you think the same question of yourself.
On the other hand, if today is the day right now that you are going to get up, take control, and take a step forward, the moment you do that, you will do it tomorrow and you’ll do it the next day. And the data suggests that if you can find those moments throughout your day to consistently be up and moving, and you do it for 21 days approximately, it will become a habit. Just like sitting down in the evening every evening and binge watching is a habit, you can actually have really cool and healthy motivational movement habits as well.
So, if you can find those moments to get up and move throughout your day and keep doing it, it will become a habit. It’ll become part of your life. And here’s what the data from… We’ve worked in over seventy US corporations, here’s what the data from corporations show, it’s really great stuff, is once you’ve taken on one good habit and done it for 21 days, we call it the NEAT ripple effect, is a good movement habit will beget, will make another movement habit. And so, one becomes two, and all of a sudden two becomes four. And what happens is people who are sitters become people who are movers.
And people who become movers also influence their families, their kids, husbands, and wives, and friends to become movers as well. And so, there’s a NEAT ripple. But the trick, the trick, the trick is to think right now, today is today. I’m gonna get up and take control of my life and take that first step forwards or not. And if the answer is yes, do it now. In other words, Brett, what I’m saying is, if you can get it into your mindset, into your thinking that I’m gonna fight the chair, I’m gonna win this battle, you can actually do it.
Brett McKay: And what’s great, you offer suggestions on how you can do that. I think the trick is understanding, Okay, our social environment is pushing us to be sedentary. Everything is like, you do everything sitting down. And I think one trick is just, can I do this typically sedentary activity? Can I do it while moving somehow? So, you offer suggestions like, if you like to watch TV, get yourself a really cheap treadmill. You can find them on Amazon for 300 bucks now. They’re so cheap. And then just stick that in your television room. And while you’re watching your favorite show, just walk at one point one miles per hour on that treadmill. Or if you like playing video games, do the same thing. You can play a video game while you’re walking. Or like you said, if you take phone calls during work, don’t do that sitting down. Do that while you’re walking.
Dr. James Levine: You are a 100% correct. And I’m telling you, what’s really cool about this is the other thing I mentioned is once you’ve… And I will tell you now, 300 bucks for a treadmill in your house, that’s expensive these days. I mean, they’re coming in at a $100 now, or you can get a secondhand one, or you can get… People are throwing away their exercise bicycles. I mean, take it, refurbish it, put it in your TV room. And you’d be surprised that you can binge watch, I’m actually starting to re-watch Seinfeld again, I hate to tell you this, but I can binge watch Seinfeld gently cycling on my stationary bicycle.
It makes almost no noise and I’m getting just as much TV. And there is so much we can do if we put our mind to it. And the other thing, Brett, you mentioned is we sort of, society has put us in our chair. But the other thing to think about for a second is how we can change the society. Now, I don’t mean changing the world, let’s be serious, but how can I change the society I live in? So, next time if I’m dating, next time I choose a date on, I can’t remember the name of the website, whatever, where you’re swiping left and swiping right, I’m actually going to choose a date for somebody who also likes to go walking.
I’m going to sort of say, next time we all sit to come for my birthday, and for those of you listening, my birthday is November the 20th. Next, for all of you who are going to come to my birthday party, yeah, we’re going to have cake, you bet we are. But also, once we’ve done our cake, we’re also all going to go out for a walk together, we’re going to do a family walk. So, we actually have the opportunity to influence the micro society we live in, but we need to choose to do that. And it’s all part of the same thing, make that decision, take your first step, and the rest is going to flow from there.
Brett McKay: And one thing you point out in your book is that you work with a lot of patients who have had extra weight, and just by simply increasing the amount of NEAT in their lives, they’ve been able to lose weight, a lot of weight. They don’t even become serious gym goers, they’re just moving more during the day.
Dr. James Levine: A 100%. And so, yes, and if you like, there is the world of what I call testimonies, and this is fine, and I’m a 100% respectful. But as somebody with a science background, I’m actually more interested in the hardcore data from the scientific studies. And the scientific studies conducted in normal US office workers show that even in people who don’t want to lose weight, they will tend to lose weight and become more active. But in people who want to lose weight, people will start, if they activate their lives, they take on NEAT, are going to be losing 10 to 20 pounds slowly and gently, if you like, without breaking a sweat. And they’re gonna do that over six months, and then over the six months, the same.
And so, what’s really powerful about this is, Yes, 60% of the population may be dieting in any given year, but what’s really cool about NEAT is NEAT is going to help you keep off that excess body weight, and it’s going to nudge you forwards and forwards and forwards. And what’s important about this is you’re not gonna get a sports injury from NEAT, you’re not gonna have to pay a gym membership for NEAT, everyone can get up and move throughout their day without paying a penny for doing it. And what it’s gonna help with, for those people who want to lose weight, you don’t have to lose weight, even if you have excess body weight, you’re not obliged to. If you want to, this will help.
Brett McKay: So we’ve been talking about the benefits of NEAT and weight loss, but you mentioned earlier, there’s other benefits to moving more throughout the day. How can NEAT improve metabolic health? We’re talking like how we regulate glucose.
Dr. James Levine: Oh, this is really, I hope we have enough time for this, Brett, but let me explain briefly. This is super cool. Experiments were done where healthy volunteers came onto a research centre, very, very carefully monitored, and their glucose from their blood was being monitored every 30 seconds. These individuals were given breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the metabolic unit in the research centre, and then were instructed to get on with their normal day. And that was, computer work for the morning, then lunch, computer work, and a bit of Facebook, and then dinner, and then evening time, Facebook, binge watching, and TV, okay?
And we measured their blood glucose every 30 seconds continuously throughout the day. And what actually happens is, when you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, your blood glucose climbs to a mountain and then slowly descends over a total period of about an hour and a half. After each of the three meals, that’s what happens. Then we said to people, we want you to do exactly the same day again. We’ll measure your glucose again. We’ll give you the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner again, but we want you to do one single thing different. After every meal, we want you to take a 15-minute walk or stroll at one and a half miles an hour. That’s literally strolling.
15 minutes after every meal. Now, as I mentioned, without the stroll, normal day, you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, your blood sugar, your blood glucose climbs to a mountain, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you add a 15-minute stroll, that’s it. The mountain becomes a hill. It literally halves the size of that blood glucose mountain. 15-minute stroll after each of your meals. The biggest predictor of Type 2 diabetes is the size of those mountains. So all of a sudden, for taking a 15-minute stroll after each of your meals, everyone listening can do this. You halve your blood glucose response to meals and potentially risk of Type 2 diabetes. What a win, win, win!
Brett McKay: Now, that is really powerful. Another thing you talk about is the benefit of NEAT to our mental health. I know a lot of people out there are struggling with their mental health. What effect can NEAT have on that?
Dr. James Levine: There has not been one clinical trial in depression prevention that includes a walking program. That hasn’t helped people. Many of us are susceptible to feeling blue. I am. Feeling low, feeling bad. Most people listening will know that when you’re feeling bad and you go for a walk, for a reason you quite can’t understand, you actually feel a little bit better. What’s really powerful are the data that show that if you actually sort of take on NEAT walking as part of your routine, that will actually help you feel brighter, smarter, and sort of more alive. All of us already sort of know this. We all know this. When you’re down, somebody says, let’s go for a walk, and you feel better.
This is actually a truth. And so for those of us who can take on a NEAT approach to life, not only is your sort of body going to be better, whether that’s with respect to obesity prevention or diabetes, blood pressure, whatever it may be, but actually you’re gonna feel brighter too. And what’s really cool is once you feel brighter and happier doing a little bit of walking, even after each of your meals, guess what? You’re gonna keep doing it and you’re gonna take on more stuff so you can feel even brighter and happier. And again, that’s what the data suggests.
Brett McKay: Another thing you’ve seen in your research and working with patients is that a lot of these patients that come to see you, they talk about, I’m just so tired all the time. And it seems weird because like, you’re just sitting around all day. Why would you be tired? But I think everyone has experienced how doing absolutely nothing can just be exhausting. And by incorporating some more light physical activity during your day, it’ll actually give you the physical energy you need to do the things you want to do in life.
Dr. James Levine: I think we all, again, know this to be a common truth, but Brett, that allows me to touch on one other thing, which is so important and this will not shock anybody. Sleep. Sleep is a critical component of this equation. It is absolutely critical. And the data on NEAT and sleep are fascinating. We brought people again onto our amazing research centers at Mayo Clinic. These are extraordinary places where people volunteer to do studies to help us understand what’s going on. And we brought them onto the research center. And we said, Have a good night’s sleep in your normal way.
Get used to our facilities. And people did. What we then did is we sleep restricted people. We said to people, you’re gonna sleep 30% less. We’re gonna wake you up. We’re gonna twiddle your toes. We’re gonna keep you awake. And my goodness, yes, you’re gonna get tired. And that’s exactly what happened. But here is what the data show. The data shows when you sleep restrict people, they eat more. We all know this. When you’re tired, this is me, by the way. Okay. This is me. When I’m tired, I eat more.
This is always the case. For some reason, you reach for the choc, you reach for the chips, whatever it may be, but you eat more. This is what happens when you sleep deprived. You’re feeling tired, you’re feeling pooped out, you’re noshing, you’re eating a few snacks here and there. But the one thing when you’re tired you don’t want to do, is to get up and go for a walk. When you’re fully rested and you’ve got good sleep, you get up and you feel, what’s the word we all use? Energized. That’s what we feel. And that energized means get up and go for a walk. Get up and do some cool stuff. Let’s do something fun today. And guess what? You think less about that food you’re going to lean on to deal with your tiredness.
So I fully understand that people may have two or sometimes three jobs. I totally get it. I totally do understand that there is tremendous stress at the moment and tremendous mental anguish. But if you can find a good method to get good sleep, whether that involves, for example, stopping your coffee at noon or starting to relax early in the evening so you’re ready for sleep, not stressing yourself out with text messages or arguments before you go to bed, whatever it may be, if you can find a method of getting good sleep, that is a critically important part of the NEAT equation.
Brett McKay: Well, I also think moving more can help you sleep better. I’ve noticed my own life. There’s this idea I’ve heard about sleep pressure. You have to build up some sleep pressure so your body wants to go to sleep. And one way you can do that is just moving more. I’ve had the best nights of sleep when I’ve had a really active day. I think the best night of sleep, I’ve been chasing this night of sleep for 20 years now is when my wife and I, we went to Rome. And you just walked. There’s, like, all day. You’re just walking hours on hours. And I remember we came back to our hotel and we just laid down and we just both fell asleep. We didn’t wake up until, like, 14 hours later, and we both felt that was the best night’s sleep.
And I think it’s because we just walk so much. And I noticed in the times where I don’t move a lot during the day, I have a hard time falling asleep.
Dr. James Levine: This is 100% correct, your body… If you remember earlier, Brett, we were talking about the parts of your brain that are sort of monitoring all of this, one question you’ve got to ask yourself is, Okay, I’ve now got my movement going, just as you say. You walked around Rome all day, you sort of met your NEAT goal set by your brain. What happens if you don’t? And I think a lot of people actually understand this, but haven’t necessarily thought about it the way you put it. So if I am sort of forced to sit in meetings all day long, and I assure you that’s often many of my days, you get home sort of feeling this sort of anxiety. This sort of tightness inside of you. And I don’t know about you, but I get this thing sort of like my thoughts, and I get frustrated and irritated much more than if I’d actually had an active day where I dissipated all of my energy. And I think the other thing that, again, many people relate to, when you’ve come back from work and it’s been a day that you’ve been in your chair, you haven’t been up, moving and so on and so forth, what’s one thing you do? You reach for a beer. Really, what that’s saying is I need an anesthetic. There’s too much pressure in my head. I need to anesthetize myself.
And so therefore, the complexity of getting a good night’s sleep absolutely relates to the need to burn off the energy that our body needs us to burn off. We’re designed to get up and move. If you suppress the human, the human doesn’t do well. We get really internally upset by that, and we need to move. So part of our argument is that by forcing people to be seated all day, it’s fundamentally unnatural to people, and they need to move just to function normally. And your day in Rome is illustrative of that.
Brett McKay: So we talked about some ways people can incorporate more NEAT into their lives. There’s an activity that you do sitting down. See if you can do that standing up or even walking. For people who want to incorporate more NEAT in their life, is there a goal they should shoot for? Like, what’s the minimum dose of NEAT that we need to get before we start seeing that benefit? Is it an hour of extra NEAT two hours? Is there steps? What have you found in your research?
Dr. James Levine: Yeah, I mean, this is a terrific question. There has been a huge vogue, as many people know, to buy various gadgets, to look at various watches and sort of monitor stuff. Now, if you’re somebody who loves monitoring stuff, go for it, enjoy it. That’s great. But what is actually the truth and again, when you study this in sort of normal folk, what you find is if you give people a monitoring device, they’ll use it for a short period of time, and it can be literally, I kid you not, days. And their use of that monitoring device will fall off almost exponentially, almost sort of like over a cliff face, and they’ll sort of put it into a drawer. And how many people listening today have exercise monitoring devices, wearable little things that are in their drawer that’s powered down, that’s unused? So my advice to people is to actually look at it completely differently.
If you love monitoring stuff, get the equipment. It’s great. If you’re going to take on for yourself a goal, I suggest you take on one goal, not 100 goals. One thing. What’s the one thing you’re going to do for the next few weeks, and let’s say for the sake of argument, is every Thursday, and this is as simple as it gets, every Thursday I have to do a conference call with central corporate where they talk about health and wellness, whatever it is. It’s a 40 minutes call every single week. I only have to listen to fulfill my obligations. So I’m going to do that walk and talk. That’s one thing I’m going to do every Thursday. Super simple. Actually, what I’m going to do is I’m going to have a little chart on my fridge, and every time I do it, I’m going to put a check mark against it until I’ve done it 21 times. Monitoring, as simple as it gets.
On the other hand, I’m going to be a different person. I’m going to say, you know what? My daughter loves the art stuff, and I live in Washington DC, where all the galleries are free at Smithsonian. So once a week, I’m going to go with my daughter and we’re going to stroll through the art gallery, and we’re going to do that together for two months. Now, honestly, do you need to put that on your fridge to remind yourself to go for a walk with your daughter in the art gallery?
No. What you want to do is to do it for three weeks and it becomes a habit between you and your daughter. And so what I suggest again, is be smart, what works for you. But pick something, find a way of monitoring it, and do it. And the last concept I’d like to share with you in this regard is the idea of rewards. Now, rewards are great, okay? They’re really, really cool. But again, you have to be smart. So giving yourself a reward to go to the mailbox and collecting your mail on foot every day, to me, honestly, sounds a bit silly. I’m not going to reward myself for collecting the mail. However, if my goal is to walk a half marathon, and I had this amazing patient who did this, she came into clinic in her wheelchair, and she sent me a photograph of her and the grandchildren when they walked a half marathon.
I kid you not, it was like, it blew my mind. Her reward was if she could walk a half marathon, she’d saved up enough money to go to South Dakota for a week. That was her reward and that was her goal. And she actually said to me, Actually, the reward was to do it. So I think if you can think of the idea of finding things that you want to do, finding a method to record it, and then finding a method to recognize yourself, pat yourself on the back, or have some sort of achievement recognition that you’re off to the races.
Brett McKay: I love it. So just find ways to move more. That’s it. Again, it’s not hard. It doesn’t have to be that hard. It could be as simple as standing up at work occasionally. It could be doing the walk and talk, something that I’ve done after reading your book, or we’ve done this for a long time as a family. When we park somewhere, we park the furthest away so we can walk there, take the stairs. Kind of becomes a game. Finding ways you can move more in an environment that is fighting for you to sit more. It’s kind of fun to be a rebel. I’m going to move more instead.
Dr. James Levine: Yeah, be a rebel for yourself. Do it. Get up and move.
Brett McKay: Well, James, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
Dr. James Levine: Well, I mean, it’s fantastic. If people wish to go to the library and get the book, Get Up. It really summarizes the work we did in the lab. It’s, of course, available on our favorite online website as well. And that’s great. But also places like mayoclinic.com have really high quality information on the Internet. And so please please make a decision to get up and move today and learn more from these various resources and make it happen for yourself.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, James Levine, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. James Levine: It’s my pleasure as well. Thank you so much, Brett. I really enjoyed it.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. James Levine. He’s the author of the book Get Up!: Why Your Chair is Killing You and What You Can do About It. Check out our show notes at aom.is/neat, where you 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 and while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We got a weekly edition and a daily edition. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what we’re doing at The Art of Manliness.
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This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
The era of artificially intelligent large language models is upon us and isn’t going away. Rather, AI tools like ChatGPT are only going to get better and better and affect more and more areas of human life.
If you haven’t yet felt both amazed and unsettled by these technologies, you probably haven’t explored their true capabilities.
My guest today will explain why everyone should spend at least 10 hours experimenting with these chatbots, what it means to live in an age where AI can pass the bar exam, beat humans at complex tests, and even make us question our own creative abilities, what AI might mean for the future of work and education, and how to use these new tools to enhance rather than detract from your humanity.
Ethan Mollick is a professor at the Wharton business school and the author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Today on the show, Ethan explains the impact of the rise of AI and why we should learn to utilize tools like ChatGPT as a collaborator — a co-worker, co-teacher, co-researcher, and coach. He offers practical insights into harnessing AI to complement your own thinking, remove tedious tasks from your workday, and amplify your productivity. We’ll also explore how to craft effective prompts for large language models, maximize their potential, and thoughtfully navigate what may be the most profound technological shift of our lifetimes.
Connect With Ethan Mollick* Ethan’s faculty page * One Useful Thing Substack * Ethan on LinkedIn * Ethan on Bluesky * Ethan on X
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. The era of artificially intelligent large language models is upon us and isn’t going away. Rather, AI tools like ChatGPT are only going to get better and better and affect more and more areas of human life. If you haven’t yet felt both amazed and unsettled by these technologies, you probably haven’t explored their true capabilities. My guest today will explain why everyone should spend at least 10 experimenting with these chatbots, what it means to live in an age where AI can pass the bar exam, beat humans at complex tests, and even make us question our own creative abilities, what AI might mean for the future of work in education, and how to use these tools to enhance rather than detract from your humanity. Ethan Mollick is a professor at the Wharton Business School and the author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Today, on the show, Ethan explains the impact of the rise of AI and why we should learn to utilize tools like ChatGPT. As a collaborator, a co-worker, co-teacher, co-researcher, and coach, he offers practical insights into harnessing AI to complement your own thinking, remove tedious tasks from your workday, and amplify your productivity.
We’ll also explore how to craft effective prompts for large language models, maximize their potential, and thoughtfully navigate what may be the most profound technological shift of our lifetimes. After the show is over, check out our show notes @aom/ai. All right Ethan Mollick, welcome to the show.
Ethan Mollick: Thanks for having me.
Brett McKay: So I’m sure everyone listening to this episode has heard about or even used what’s called artificial intelligence. Or, you know, we’ll talk about the difference between that. In large language models like chatGPT is the most popular one, but I think popularly when people use the phrase artificial intelligence, they probably use that without really understanding what it means. You see, like AI this and AI that. This has AI. When computer scientists talk about artificial intelligence, what do they mean by artificial intelligence?
Ethan Mollick: So it is the world’s worst label, like one of many of them, because it actually came from the 1950s originally, and it has many different meanings. The two biggest meanings recently was before ChatGPT’s use. When you heard artificial intelligence being used, we were talking about machine learning, which are ways that computers can recognize patterns in data and make predictions about what comes next. So if I have all this weather data, I can predict what the weather is going to be tomorrow. If I have all this data about where people order products, I can figure out where to put my warehouse. If I have all this data on what movies people watch, I can use that to predict what movie you might like, given your watching history. So this sort of, you might have heard of big data or data as the new oil or algorithms, like all of that was this kind of what we’d called AI through most of the 2010s. And then OpenAI introduced ChatGPT and large language models became a big deal. Those use the same techniques as are used in the other forms of machine learning, but they apply them to human language and it turns out that creates a whole bunch of really interesting new use cases. So AI has meant many different things as a result.
Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s talk about large language models or LLMs, because I think when most people think about AI these days, that’s typically what they’re thinking about. So we mentioned ChatGPT, then there’s Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. How do these things work? Like whenever you type something into ChatGPT, what’s going on on the other end, that gives you whatever it spits out.
Ethan Mollick: So the right way to think about this is that we don’t actually know all the details. We know technically how they work, but we don’t know why they’re as good as they are. Technically, how they work is you basically give this machine learning system all the language that you can get your hands on. And so like the initial data sets these things trained on was all of Wikipedia, lots of the web, every public domain book, but also like lots of weird stuff, like there’s lots of semi pirated Harry Potter fan fiction in there. Also all of Enron, the accounting firm that went under for financial fraud, all of their emails went in because those were freely available. And so there’s this vast amount of data and then the AI goes through a process of learning the relationships between words or parts of words called tokens, using all this data. So it figures out how patterns of language work and it does that through complex statistical calculations and it figures that on its own. So when you actually use these systems, what it’s doing is doing all this complex math to figure out what the next most likely word or token in the sentence is going to be.
So it’s basically like the world’s fanciest autocomplete that happens to be right a lot of the time.
Brett McKay: Okay. But it can also create images. Like you can do that with ChatGPT and some of these other LLMs. So what’s going on there. Like how does that work?
Ethan Mollick: So that’s a really interesting situation because as of the time we’re recording this, there’s been actually a very big change. So prior to the last week or two, the way that AI’s generated images tended to be something called the diffusion model, which is kind of unrelated to large language models. And it involves taking random static and then kind of carving it away until you get an image. And those models which you’ve all seen, We’ve all seen sort of operate, tend to produce a lot of distortion. So they didn’t do language very well. If you tell them they’re, they’re not really that smart. And so when AIs were creating images, they were prompting one of these diffusion models to make an image for them. That all changed in the last week or so because two different systems, OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.40 and Google’s Gemini, gained the ability to create images directly. That this is called multimodal image creation. So now what the AI does is, remember we talked about how it creates language by adding one word after another, one token after another. It now can do that with images. Basically, it’s painting little patches of images.
And just like words, it can create images or voice or any other thing that way. So when it makes an image now, it can actually make it accurately. So there’s been a huge change in a very short period of time.
Brett McKay: Okay, we’ll dig more into how people are using this on a practical basis. But let’s talk about the different LLMs that are out there. So there’s the popular ones, ChatGPT, that’s run by OpenAI. There’s Claude, there’s Gemini. What’s the difference between these different large language models?
Ethan Mollick: So there’s a lot of things that, that are different between them that probably don’t matter that much because they’re all evolving pretty quickly. So the most important thing to think about if you’re thinking about which AI to use is they all have different features, but they’re all adding features all the time and converging. It’s that you want to make sure you’re using at least when you’re trying to do hard problems that you’re using. The largest, biggest AI you have access to, we call these frontier models. So ChatGPT has a lot of options available. GPT4.O was just updated, but GPT 4.5 or 0.1, their most recent models tend to be better. So if you are listening to this and you last used AI 18 months ago or 12 months ago and thought, okay, it doesn’t do that well, right now, it makes a lot of mistakes. All of those things change as models get bigger. So as models get bigger, they get smarter at everything and more capable at everything. We call this the scaling law. And as a result, you want to have access to a tool with a that is actively being developed, so you have a very large model.
So anthropic ChatGPT and Google through their Gemini system are all very good choices because they all have a lot of options about what they can do and very big recent models to use.
Brett McKay: So researchers have given a lot of tests to these LLMs, the kind of tests that, you know, a human would take, try to figure out how good these things are. So how do the models do?
Ethan Mollick: So we’re getting to the point where it’s getting hard to test these things. So to give you one example, there is a famous test that’s used to evaluate these models called the GPQA, which stands for Google Proof, Question and Answer of all things. And it’s designed so that a human PhD student using Google and giving a half hour or more to answer each question will get around 31% right outside their area of expertise. And inside their expertise, they’ll get around 82%, right. So with Google access to tools, that’s what they get, right. What’s happened very recently is until like last summer, the average AI was getting around, you know, 35%, so better than a human outside of expertise, which is pretty impressive, but not as good as a human expert as of late this fall and into this spring now, the models are performing better than humans at that test. So they’re getting 85%, 84% beating humans at this. So they’ve gotten so good at tests that we’ve had to create new tests. So the most famous of these is something called Humanities Last Exam, where a company put together a bunch of human experts in everything ranging from like archeology and foreign languages to biochemistry to math.
And they’ve all created really hard problems, professors who created hard problems that they couldn’t solve or, you know, they would have trouble solving themselves. And when that came out in January, the best models were getting around 2 or 3%, right. Now they’re getting between 18 and 28%, right. Just about six or eight weeks later. So they’re doing really well on exams.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and ChatGPT, when it takes the bar exam, it’s passing it. When it takes the AP exam in biology and history and psychology, it’s scoring fours and fives. So, I mean, yeah, it’s really, it’s really impressive.
Ethan Mollick: Yeah, I mean, we’re in a place where the AI will beat most humans on most tests.
Brett McKay: So going back to this idea of how AI works, like a fancy autocomplete, like, so what’s going on? Like, if you give it a question, how is it figuring out the answer is just saying, well, the probability based on this question is, you know, this answer is that what’s going on?
Ethan Mollick: So two things are happening. The comforting thing that’s happening sometimes is they cheat, right? So they’ve already seen these questions, so they can predict the next answer because it’s already been in the data set before. But we find that if we create new questions the AI has never seen before, they still get things right. And the truth is, this is where we’re not 100% sure why they’re as good as they are at this. We’re actually trying to understand that right now. So we know how these systems work technically, but we don’t actually understand why they’re as creative and good and persuasive and interesting as they are. We don’t have great theories on that yet.
Brett McKay: People listening to this who have kept a pace of computer science, they’ve probably heard of the Turing Test. For those who aren’t familiar with the Turing Test, what is that? And have these large language models passed the Turing Test?
Ethan Mollick: So the Turing Test is one of a series of, like, kind of mediocre studies of what makes artificial intelligence artificial intelligence that we used to use to judge the quality of AI because it didn’t matter. No AI came close to it. So the Turing Test is this test by the guy who actually came up with the name for artificial intelligence, which is Alan Turing, who is a famous World War II scientist. And he came up with the idea of, we called the Imitation Game. So imitation may have even seen the movie about this. But the idea is that if you talk to an AI via typing and you talk to a human, could you tell which was the AI and which was the human in natural conversation? Until very recently, the idea of this was kind of laughable, right, that you could spend time talking to a computer, you would know it was a computer. And in some ways, it’s become kind of irrelevant, because I think everybody thinks that they could be fooled by AI, and they can be. So the Turing Test seems pretty decisively passed. In fact, what’s pretty funny is that at this point, humans, in some small studies, actually are more likely to judge the AI as human than human is human. So we’re still figuring this out. But I think the Turing test is passed.
Brett McKay: So AI, these large language models, they’re really good at a lot of things. What are the limitations that these LLMs have right now, and what do they not do well?
Ethan Mollick: It’s a good question because that’s changing all the time. We have this concept in our research we call the jagged frontier, which is AI is good at some things you wouldn’t expect and bad at some things you wouldn’t expect. So until very recently, for example, you could ask the AI to write a sonnet for you about strawberries where every line starts with a vowel and it has to also include, you know, a line about space travel, and you’d get a pretty good sonnet. But if you asked it to write a 25 word sentence about strawberries or even count the number of hours in strawberries, it would get that wrong. So the AI has these weird weak spots and weird strong spots. Now the other thing is, this is always changing. So that R Test, how many Rs are there in Strawberry? Worked really well until January 2025. And now it doesn’t work anymore because the AIs are good enough that they can count the number of hours in Strawberry. So this is an evolving standard.
Brett McKay: I’m sure people who have been keeping on top of what’s going on with large language models have heard of this idea of hallucinations. What are those? And is that still happening?
Ethan Mollick: So remember, what an AI is doing is predicting the next word in a sentence. It’s not looking things up in a database, it’s predicting. And so oftentimes what it predicts as the next word in a sentence may not be true. So if you ask it, you know, especially older models, if you ask them, like a book I’ve written, it might make up the title of a different book that could be something I wrote because it’s predicting something that’s likely to be true, but doesn’t know whether it’s true or not. We call these hallucinations. They’re basically errors the AI makes, but they’re kind of really pernicious or dangerous errors because the AI makes things up that sound real, right? If you ever ask for a citation or quote, it’s really good at making up quotes like, I bet you Abraham Lincoln did say that, but he never did. So it’s not just like an obvious error, like it makes something up. Like, you know, Abraham Lincoln said, the robots will rise and murder us all. It will say something that sounds like Abraham Lincoln, quote. So we call those things hallucinations. There’s sort of good news and bad news about hallucinations, which is they’re kind of how AI works.
Always making something up. That’s the only way. It’s always generating with probability, the next word in the sentence. So it’s always kind of hallucinating. The fact that hallucinations are right so much of the time is kind of weird. And also it’s what makes the AI creative. If it wasn’t making stuff up some of the time, the answer would be very boring. And the text is very boring. So it’s very hard to get rid of hallucinations entirely. But as AIs get bigger and better, they hallucinate less. So just last week, a new study out looked at hallucination rates on the AI answering questions about New England Journal of Medicine medical vignettes. And the hallucination rates used to be 25% of the vignettes that it talked about were hallucinated. Now the Latest models like O1 Pro are hallucinating 0% of the time. So that is changing over time. That doesn’t mean hallucinations go away, but again, that is a thing that decreases over time.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I remember a couple years ago I wrote this article for our website called why Are Dumbbells Called Dumbbells? And I wanted to see what ChatGPT had to say. So I asked it. I think this was maybe chatGPT 3.5 when I asked it, and it just gave me this nonsense answer. It was like, well, dumbbells are called dumbbells because Lord Dumbbell in 1772, blah, blah, blah. And I mean, it was well written. And if you didn’t know why dumbbells are actually called dumbbells, you’d think, okay, this, this sounds like a reasonable answer, you know, but there’s no Lord Dumbbell. That was totally made up. And I just typed the same question in now. So I’m using chatGPT 4.05 and actually gave me a closer answer about why dumbbells are called dumbbells. So, yeah, that’s a perfect example of a hallucination.
Ethan Mollick: That’s right. And it’s a great. And you kind of want it sometimes to tell you the Lord Dumbell story, because otherwise it wouldn’t be interesting or fun or, you know, come up with creative ideas. And these systems are actually creative, which is sort of goes back to when you asked me the question, what are they bad at? People want to hear the answer that they’re bad at creativity, for example, or bad at emotion. Except that they aren’t. So that’s what makes it kind of weird to talk about what AI is good or bad at.
Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah, they’ve, there’s like creativity tests that they’ve run on the LLMs and they do pretty well on those creativity tests.
Ethan Mollick: Yeah, I mean, there’s some colleagues of mine at Wharton who run a famous entrepreneurship class where they teach design thinking. One of the professors involved actually wrote the textbook on product development and they had their students generate 200 startup ideas. They had GPT4, which was the model at the time, generate 200 startup ideas. And they had outside human judges judge those ideas by willingness to pay. Of the top 40 ideas as judged by other humans, 35 came from the AI, only five from the human humans in the room, which is pretty typical of what we see, which is this is pretty good at creative ideas especially beats most people for coming with creative ideas. If you’re really creative, you’ll be more creative than the AI. But for a lot of people, you should start almost every ideation process, write down your own ideas first and then ask the AI to come with ideas for you.
Brett McKay: Before we get into the potential benefits of AI, let’s talk about the concerns people have about it. So in your research about artificial intelligence and you’re talking to companies, educators, what are the biggest concerns people have about artificial intelligence, particularly the LLMs?
Ethan Mollick: It’s a great question. I mean, there’s a lot of concerns. So first off, just to put this in context, we consider AI to be ironically, a GPT, which in this case stands for general Purpose technology. So these are those rare technologies that come around once in a generation or two, like the computers in the Internet or steam power that transform everything in ways good or bad. So there’s lots of effects when you have a general purpose technology that are good or bad. So we could talk in detail about all the little effects, right. I mean, they may not be that little to you, right. Is, you know, you can make fake images of people, you know, it can convince people to give them their money. Like there’s all kinds of effects that might be negative, job impacts, other stuff. A lot of AI researchers are also worried about long term issues. So they’re also concerned about what they call existential threats. The idea that what if an AI is powerful enough that it, you know, tries to control the world or kill everybody on earth or what happens if people can use AI to create weapons of mass destruction.
So there’s sort of these two levels of worry. There’s a worry about the kind of impacts that are already happening in the world. And then there’s worries that either some people dismiss as science fiction or other people think are very plausible that AI might be dangerous to all of humanity.
Brett McKay: On that existential threat. There’s this idea that the AI might become sentient. You hear about that is that an actual, like people actually think that’s going to happen potentially.
Ethan Mollick: I don’t think anyone knows. We don’t have a good sense of where things are going. And I think people’s predictions are often off. And I think you don’t even need sentience. We don’t even know what sentience is, but we don’t even need sentience to have this kind of danger, right. The classic example of the AI gone wild is called the paperclip problem, which is if you imagine you have an AI that’s programmed or given the goal of making as many paperclips as possible as part of paperclip factory, and this is the first AI to become semi sentient or self controlled, it becomes super smart, but still has the goal of making paperclips. Well, the only thing that’s standing in its way is the fact that not everything is a paperclip. So it figures out ways to manipulate the stock market to make more money so they can instruct humans to build machines that will mine the earth to find more metal for paperclips. And along the way a human tries to shut it off so it kills all the humans incidentally, without worrying about it, and turns them into paperclips because why would it take the risk that it gets shut off and it can’t make enough paperclips, so all it does is make paperclips without caring about humans one way or another. So that’s sort of this model of AI superintelligence. But you know, again, nobody knows whether this stuff is real or not or just science fiction.
Brett McKay: You write in the book that when people start using LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude, they’ll have three sleepless nights. Why is that?
Ethan Mollick: So this is an existentially weird thing. I mean, it is very hard to use these systems and really use them. I find, by the way, a lot of people kind of bounce off them precisely because they feel like this kind of dread and they sort of walk away. But like you’ve got a system that seems to think like a human being who can answer questions for you, who can often do parts of your job for you, that can write really well, that could be fun to talk to, that seems Creative and like, these are things humans did. Like no one else did this. There was no other animal that did this. And it really can provoke this feeling of like, what does it mean to think? What’s it mean to be alive? What will I do for a living given that this is, you know, I don’t know if you’ve seen Notebook LM create podcasts right on demand. Like, you start to worry, like, what does this mean if this gets good enough? What does it mean for my kids Jobs, for my job? And I think that that creates, you know, it’s some excitement, but also some real anxiety.
Brett McKay: No, I’d agree. If you haven’t had those sleepless nights while using AI, it’s because you haven’t used it enough or gone deep with it. Because, you know, both my wife and I, we have the podcast, but we also write for a living. That’s what we’ve done for the past 17 years. And sometimes, you know, we’ll go to ChatGPT and like, chatGPT will spit out some like, that was really good. Like why, why am I here? What am I doing? Or the Notebook LM. I’ve used that. So I’ve used Notebook LM to help me organize my notes, kind of create outlines and things like that. And I’ve used that podcast feature and it sounds just like two people having a back and forth conversation, a podcast that blows my mind.
Ethan Mollick: And you could jump in with a call in, by the way, there’s a call in button now, you know, and this will only get better. And so that, that is this existential moment of like, you know, I also write for a living and you know, of the AIs right now, the best writer is still probably Claude of the set, although some of them are getting better. And like, it’s kind of crazy. Like I ask it for feedback on my writing and it has really good insights. You know, I write everything myself. But then I do ask the AI, what am I missing here for a general audience? And sometimes it’s like this would be really good to tighten up this paragraph. I’m like, oh, that’s really good advice. And I’ve had editors for years and like, it is weird to have this AI be so good at these kind of very human tasks.
Brett McKay: You call AI a co intelligence. What do you mean by that?
Ethan Mollick: So as of right now, the most effective way to use AI is as a human working with it. Now that doesn’t mean that it isn’t better than us at some things, but part of what you need to think about is how to use AI to do better at what you to do more of what you love. So it’s not, you know, you’re not handing over your thinking to it. You’re working with it to solve problems and address things. And one of the really cool things about AI is it’s just pretty good at filling in your gaps, right? So we all have jobs that we have to do a lot of things at. Take the example of a doctor. So to be a good doctor, you have to be good at, you know, at doing diagnosis.
You have to be probably good at hand skills and being able to manipulate the patient, figure out what’s going on. You have to be probably be good at giving good bedside manner. You’re probably managing a staff. You have to do that. You have to keep up on medical research. You have to probably be a social worker for some of your employees and your patients. No one’s going to be good at all of those things, and probably nobody likes all of those things. The things you’re bad at, you probably like least. So those are things the AI can help you most with. So you can concentrate on the things like to do most. The question is whether this maintains itself in the long term. But for right now, AI really is a thing to work with to achieve more than it is something that replaces you.
Brett McKay: So in the book, you provide four guidelines for using AI. The first is always invite AI to the table. So what does that look like in practice, and why do you recommend doing that?
Ethan Mollick: So one of the things we’ve talked about is the idea that with AI, you need to know what it’s good or bad at. And it’s often hard to figure that out in advance, and it’s often uncomfortable to figure that out. So you kind of have to force yourself to do it. And the easiest way to do it is to use AI in an area you have expertise in. So the magic number seems to be around 10 hours of use. And if you use 10 hours of AI for 10 hours to try and do everything at your job you ethically can with AI, then you’re going to find pretty quickly where it can help you, where it can help you, if you learn to use it better, where it can help you more, where it’s not that useful, where it might be heading, and that lets you become good at using AI. So it’s hard to have you to give you rules that make you great at AI use other than use AI in your job. And you will figure it out. So the first rule and the rule that I think has become the most useful for people is just use it.
If you haven’t put 10 hours in because you’re avoiding it for some reason, you just need to do it.
Brett McKay: The second guideline is be the human in the loop. What do you mean by that?
Ethan Mollick: So this is an idea from control systems that there should always be a human making decisions. I’m using a little more loosely than that, which is that you want to figure out how you integrate AI into your work in a way that increases your own importance and control and agency over your own life. So you don’t want to give up important things or important thinking to the AI. You want to use it to support what you do to do it better. Oftentimes when people start using AI, they find out it’s good at some stuff that they actually thought they were good at and the AI is better than them. That is an okay thing to come to a conclusion of. And you then figure out, how do I use this in a way that enhances my own agency in control and doesn’t give it up?
Brett McKay: Yeah, I like to think of going back to that co intelligence idea. When I’m working with an LLM, I imagine myself like Winston Churchill, who had like a team of. When he was a writer, you know, he, Winston Churchill was a big writer, wrote histories. He’d have a team of research assistants. So I kind of think of like, me, I’m Winston Churchill. And the LLMs are like my research assistants. They go out and find things for me, compile things, summarize things. Then I take a look at it and like, okay, now I’m going to take this stuff and write things out myself.
Ethan Mollick: I love that analogy. The research team. I mean, that’s how I use it in my book for the same kind of purposes. Like, I got feedback from it. You know, did my jokes land in this section? It’s not that great at humor, but it actually is pretty good at reading humor. You know, when I got stuck, give me 30 versions of how to end the sentence, you know, did I summarize this research paper properly? So that kind of team of supporters is a really helpful way to think about things. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Then also, I mean, I’m still, you know, I know these LLMs are really good at things, but I still don’t trust it completely because same thing as, like, with a person. Like, I don’t like even I delegate a task to a person. Like, I trust, but I gotta verify. Like, well, you gave me this answer Let me make sure that’s right.
Ethan Mollick: Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s exactly right. You should be nervous about this because in the same way you kind of are nervous about a person, but you also kind of learn its idiosyncrasies, right. So you learn, oh, it’s actually pretty good at these tasks and I can pay less attention, but this one I’m going to be very nervous about.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So the third guideline is treat AI like a person. I think this goes back to our co-intelligence idea, correct?
Ethan Mollick: Well, a little bit. It’s also just general advice. So I think a lot of people think about AI as, you know, software, and it is software. But software shouldn’t argue with you, it shouldn’t make stuff up, it shouldn’t try and solve your marital issues when you’re discussing things with it. It shouldn’t give you different answers every time. But AI does all of those things.
And what turns out to be a pretty good model, even though it’s not a person, is if you treat it like a human being, you are 90% of the way there to prompting it. If you try and treat it like. We’ve actually found some evidence that computer programmers are actually worse at using AI than non programmers because they want to work like software code. But if you treat it like a person in the same way as you’ve been discussing here, right, what’s it good at? What do I trust it for? What’s its personality? If you use different models, you’ll find Claude has a different personality than GPT4, which has a different personality than GPT 4.5. And so treating like a person gets you a large part of the way there and also demystifies this a bit. And so if you’re a good manager, if you’re a good teacher, if you’re a good parent, you’re probably going to be pretty good at using AI.
Brett McKay: Well, I imagine people that are hearing this are thinking, well, AI is not a person like, and that’s ethically questionable to tell humans to treat this code like a living person. What’s your response to that?
Ethan Mollick: You’re absolutely right. And that battle is lost. So one of the first things people talked about in computer science is that it’s unethical to anthropomorphize AI to treat AI like a person. And yet every single computer scientist does that anyway, right? We all, we anthropomorphize everything around us, right? Ships are, you know, she, you know, we curse the weather like a person or name Storms, like, we do this anyway. So I think it’s really important to emphasize that it is not a person. This is a technique. But for better or for worse, all the AI companies are very happy to blend the line. So a lot of the models have voice modes where they talk to you like a person. They all talk in first person. They’re happy to tell you stories about their own lives, even though they don’t have lives. So I think it is important to remember this is a product, it’s a software product. So view this as a tip for getting things done, but don’t forget that you are talking to software.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think the danger of anthropomorphism just treating like an actual human being. I mean, that you are seeing that at an extreme level where people are actually developing, like, emotional relationships with artificial intelligence. And like, that’s not good.
Ethan Mollick: I agree. I mean, I think it’s inevitable, but not good, right. Now, there is some evidence early on that people who have these relationships with AI may actually have. It may help them psychologically. We’re still unclear, but some early papers suggested that that may actually be the case for people who are desperately lonely. We don’t know. But I mean, as a general rule, I would be nervous about treating a technology like a person emotionally or having an attachment to it emotionally. It is software in the end. But, you know, I think that we can recognize both things are true, that there is a limit at which this becomes unhealthy to do. But as a useful tip or mental model, there’s value in that.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I know my use of these different LLMs, like treating it like a human. I don’t. Maybe I think I treat it like an alien, almost like it’s human, but not. I don’t know. Anyways, I’ve noticed that if it gives me like a bad answer, like that was. That’s a bad answer. If I’m kind of mean to it. If I’m like, I’m like a stern boss, like, that was not a good answer. That was terrible. I know you can do better. Do better. And like, it does better when I give that response.
Ethan Mollick: Yes. I mean, so it turns out that, you know, giving it clear feedback like a stern boss is actually very valuable. Now, the sternness or politeness doesn’t. We have a study that just. We put out a couple weeks ago that we found that being very polite to the AI had very mixed effects on some questions like you asked it. It would actually be more accurate math if you were very polite. But in Some questions, if you’re very polite, it would be less accurate at math. So I don’t worry so much about things like politeness per se. Although most people are polite to AI because they kind of fall into that. It feels like a person. But I think you hit a very big secret there, which is the interaction. It gives you a bad answer. You don’t walk away. You say, this is what you did wrong. Do better. And it will do better. Not so much because you’re being stern to it, but because you’re acting like an actual manager, right. You’re saying, this is what our boss or parent, this is what’s wrong. Please fix it or fix it. You don’t have to say the please, and you get better results.
Brett McKay: With the idea of being polite to the AI, it’s definitely weird because the AI, it’s typically really affirmative, even when it’s giving you a critique, and because it’s being nice to you, like, you feel like you need to be nice back to it. And I’ve noticed that sometimes when it gives me, like, a really good answer to a question I asked it, I feel this impulse to tell it, oh, hey, thanks. That was really helpful. That was great. And then you think, wait a minute, this is weird. Like, what does it mean to feel gratitude for a machine? Yeah, it can be a mind trip sometimes.
Ethan Mollick: It is. And it’s really hard to be rude to these things, especially when you use, like, a voice mode and it’s being like, hey, how are you doing today? Like, you want to answer it and you are being tricked. So, I mean, it’s. Why this. You treat it like a human is a technique for using AI. It is not a philosophy.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. Yeah, treat it like a human interacting with. But not emotionally, maybe.
Ethan Mollick: Absolutely. And don’t get fooled.
Brett McKay: Yeah, the fourth guideline for AI is assume this is the worst AI you will ever use. Why is that a guideline?
Ethan Mollick: Probably the most accurate thing I said in the book. We talked about test scores earlier. These systems are getting better faster than I expected a year ago. There’s been a whole bunch of innovations that have made development happen faster. And, you know, I know enough about what’s happening inside the AI labs themselves to say, like, I don’t think most of them expect the development to end anytime soon. So you should assume that if AI can’t do something now, that it’s probably worth checking a month or two to see if it can do it, then, you know, we’re talking about writing. I mean, that’s something I’ve been paying a lot of attention to as somebody who writes a lot also, right? That’s my job, both as a professor, as a blogger, or as somebody who’s on social media a lot. And, you know, a year ago, AI’s writing was absolute crap. And now when I use Claude, you know, like you said, it sometimes comes with the turn of phrase. You’re like, ooh, this is pretty good. You were talking about using GPT 4.5. Like, you could feel that model writes better and like, it’s, it’s cleverer.
And so there is this idea that, like, things that were impossible stop becoming as impossible.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So I think there’s this fear that, okay, you know, the AI, it can just do anything and humans are cooked. Like, we’re done. So there’s no point of knowing anything because all the AI knows everything. But studies have found that people with a humanities background, you know, they know a lot of history, philosophy, art, you know, things like that, are actually able to make the most of AI. Why is that?
Ethan Mollick: So AI systems are trained on our collective knowledge. The data that goes into building statistical models comes from everything humanity’s ever written, essentially. And all the art that goes into this comes from not just, you know, the most recent animations or what, you know, Simpsons or Studio Ghibli or whatever, but also from the entire history of art for humanity and part of what you can be successful at. Like, there was a sort of second caveat to the treat the AI like a person, which is also tell it what kind of person it is. You can invoke styles, Personas, approaches. Think about this like you are, you know, Marc Antony. Think about this as if you were Machiavelli. And you get very different kinds of answers because you’re priming the AI to find different physical connections than before. So if you have a wide set of knowledge to draw from, like, if you think about AI art, everybody knows about Studio Ghibli or the Simpsons or Muppet Style, but if, you know, you know, German Expressionism and boutique paintings and, you know, classic 1970s slasher posters, like, you could get the AI to work in those kind of styles.
And that gives you edges that other people don’t have, because you can create things that are different than what other people see, get different perspectives than other people. So having that wide knowledge of human endeavor is actually really Helpful.
Brett McKay: I’ve noticed that. So I have a humanities background and I have found that I just get a lot out of it because, like, I can make connections in my head and then I can prompt the LLM with this, you know, like, here’s this weird connection I want to make, or is there any connection there? Or how can we make that connection? And I imagine if you didn’t have that background, you can’t do that. Like, the AI is, is only as good as the prompt or the information you give it. And if you don’t have anything to give it, you’re just going to get kind of mediocre results.
Ethan Mollick: Yeah, I mean, it’s getting easier to prompt, right. So there’s not that many tricks to it. But there is this kind of core truth you’re pointing out, and it’s coming down not just in that first prompt, but in the interaction. The fact that you could see the results and be like, this is dull. Like, get, add me more variation in the sentences, or, you know, I told you to write this as if you were Stephen King. But I didn’t want you to add so many horror elements. So, like, let’s take those out, right? It’s an interactive experience where if, you know, connections and web, that’s what the AI is, a connection machine, you’ll be more effective at using it yourself.
Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about treatment, LLMs like a person, and I don’t. I think a lot of people don’t realize that because LLMs are trained on how humans think and write. If you talk to it not like a blunt Google search, but more like a person, you get better results. But beyond that, general advice, are there any other tips for prompt construction so you get better results?
Ethan Mollick: Yeah, there’s four things that sort of research backs up to do. And the first is really boring, which is be direct. If a human intern would be confused by your instructions, the AI will be too. So you want to be direct about what you want. I need a report for this circumstance under, you know, for this reason and that gets better results. So be very direct about what you want. The second thing you want to do is that you want to give the AI context. So the more context it has, the better context can be, here’s some documents I like or here’s, you know. But it can also be things like act like this kind of person or this is going to be used in this kind of way. The more context the AI gets, the better off it is. The Third is what’s called chain of thought prompting. This turns out to be a very powerful technique, and it’s become actually a key way that AI’s improved is that the newest models of AI do this automatically. So it’s no longer as important to do chain of thought, but it used to be the most useful way to do this, which is you literally, at the end, think step by step.
First do this, you know, come up with 300 ideas for an article. Two, rate the ideas on a scale of 1 to 10, and then pick the top 5. Then re-consolidate them together into a new paragraph. Now write the document. So that step by step reasoning. Both makes the AI work better. But if you think about how AIs work, right, they’re adding… They’re just predicting one word at a time. They don’t have a chance to pause and think. So the way they think is by writing. So if you have them write a bunch before giving you an answer, they’re going to end up with better answers. So chain of thought makes them write out some stuff and go through a logical process. It also makes it easier to figure out what’s going right or wrong. And the fourth tip is called Few shot. Give the AI examples of the kinds of things you want to see that are either good or bad, and it will deliver things that are more like the examples.
Brett McKay: Okay, Yeah. I think that earlier tip of just tell the AI, like what you want it to be can be really useful. So I used this the other day. So for the past couple of years, I’ve had like this pain in the back of my knee from squatting, from powerlifting, and it’s gotten better, but I’ve gone to an orthopedic surgeon, did an MRI, and they’re like, well, nothing’s going on there. Went to a physical therapist, and he really didn’t know what was going on. And so just the other day I was like, I haven’t asked ChatGPT this. What would chat GPT say? So I told it, I want you to be the world’s best physical therapist/orthopedic surgeon. I don’t know if this is actually very good, but I said, that’s what I want you to be. Here’s the situation I have. I took a picture and had it pointed to, like, where the pain was in the back of my knee. Here’s when I experienced the pain and etcetera, like, what’s going on there? And then generate a rehab protocol. And it generated this rehab Protocol. Then I started doing some of the exercises, and it actually feels like it’s working because I can feel it in the spot that it’s been hurting.
And I haven’t been able to do that with, like, the. The advice that my physical therapist gave me.
Ethan Mollick: Huh. I mean, listen, I think, you know, with all the qualifiers around this, that if you’re not using AI for a second opinion, like cheap second opinions, super easy, and you absolutely should be doing it. Like, all the research shows it’s a pretty good doctor, right? Do not throw out your doctor for this yet. But, like, that exact kind of use, I’ve used it for the same thing where I hurt my shoulder, you know, and I’m like, tell me what the issues could be. And it’s not bad, right? It’s certainly better than searching Google for this stuff. And the research on medicine shows it works pretty well. And the idea that you gave it the context you needed, what you actually did there was you both gave it a context and a Persona. Act like this person. That’s a very reasonable way to start that. That’s part of the advice in the book. Tell it what kind of person it is. And then you gave it all the background, including, I love that you gave it the picture with the arrow pointing to it. Because these things could see images. And so giving it that context made it more accurate.
Just like what a person would like, you could put in your medical, you know, history and numbers. I would not again, use this as your only physician, but as a backup to empower yourself. It’s incredibly powerful.
Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s talk about some practical ways you’ve been seeing companies and educators use AI. Let’s talk about work first.
So what are some, you know, brass tax ways people can use AI in their work? And we’ve kind of mentioned some things, but what are some things that a general worker, maybe someone who’s in management or something like that, how can they use AI for their workflow?
Ethan Mollick: So it’s pretty good for advice. There’s a really nice study that shows that of all people, small business entrepreneurs in Kenya who are already performing well, those who perform bad, they didn’t have the resources to do anything with it. Who just got advice from the AI? You had profits increase 12 to 18% just from advice. So it’s pretty good at giving you advice or helping you talk through issues. It’s obviously pretty good at writing and reading. Like, it’s pretty good at summarizing the entire meeting and telling you what action points people can take. Increasingly if you use the deep research modes, it writes an incredibly good market research report. There might still be some errors, but it’s a great starting point. It can save you 20 or 30 hours of work. And those deep research modes are available right now in Gemini OpenAI’s ChatGPT and in Grok from Elon Musk’s XAI. But those deep research are very, very useful. I mean, I’ve worked with them with lawyers and accountants and they’re also very impressed by the results. It’s very good if you can’t code. I build little coding tools all the time. Help me work through the financials here by building an interactive spreadsheet for me.
So you have to experiment. That’s that 10 hours thing. But there’s a lot of use cases. The thing I tend to point out to people in a work environment is two things. One is you will know what it’s good or bad for pretty quickly because you’re an expert at your own job. So if you’re like this is not good for that, great, you’ve learned something. If it is good, you often know how to give feedback to make it even better. The second thing I would tell people about using AI at work is the thing you have to overcome is this idea of working with a human. You only can get so many answers. I think you should take a maximalist approach to working with AI. Don’t ask it for one way to write this, this email, ask it for 30 and then pick the best one. Don’t ask it for one idea, ask for 200. Like it doesn’t get tired, it will never get annoyed at you. So part of what the value of it is is this abundance.
Brett McKay: You also talk about in the book how you got to figure out how to decide what to delegate to the AI and which task you should keep doing yourself. So is there a rubric you use to make that decision?
Ethan Mollick: So I think part of it is about personal responsibility and ethics. What do you think you ethically have to keep for yourself to do? Like for example, we actually know from research that AI is a better grader than I am, but I don’t use the AI to do grading on papers, even though it’s better. Because I feel like my job as a professor is that I am providing the feedback, right? Or if I’m using, you know, teaching assistance or something I would delegate to those humans. But like I don’t use AI to do that even though it could do a better job. On the other hand, you know, there are things I know, the AI is not going to be great at where I know I have to take over. And I know that because I’ve spent my 10 hours working with AI. So I think it’s either ethical or AI can’t do that. That creates that line.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. And I think, too, with this idea of thinking about AI in your work, I’ve read about this, maybe you talked about this in your book too, if I can’t remember. But you now are in the position where everyone who has access to AI can do a lot of jobs at an 80% level, whereas it used to be, you know, if you were bad at writing a memo or doing other kinds of tasks, then your career is going to be kind of stunted. But with AI, you can write a pretty decent memo, but everyone else can also write pretty decent memos. So now it’s like, okay, if I can get everybody 80% of the way on the more basic stuff, then you got to figure out how to do the. How to do the other 20% stuff super well. And, you know, that’s what’s going to separate you from the pack is if you can do that extra 20%. So you got to ask, like, what can I add to get all the way there? And that’s often the hardest part.
Ethan Mollick: So I’ll push back a little because I think when I say it does 80%, 80% level, that’s not always the easy part. Sometimes it actually does the hard part, and it’s very good at that. I think the question is how you attach it together and how you work together with it and focusing the areas where you’re definitely better than AI. You know, I think about this a lot. I’m a former entrepreneur myself. I teach entrepreneurship classes at Wharton. You know, fund company, work with companies. And one of the things that’s really interesting about being an entrepreneur is you generally are really good at one or two things and you suck at everything else. But you have to do all that other stuff to do the one or two things you’re good at. So you’re really good at coding, you’re really good at running a podcast like this. You write compelling content nobody else is able to write, but you also have to keep the books and fill out forms and give your employees performance reviews and all the other stuff that comes with running a business that you may not be good at writing emails, you know, writing marketing, repair.
So the idea is that if the AI does that is good, as an 8th percentile person, it’s not bad, right? That was stuff you were doing at the 20th percentile. So that lets you focus on the things you do really well and give up the stuff you don’t do well.
Brett McKay: That makes sense. Are there any like, specific prompts that you found useful for the world of work?
Ethan Mollick: So there’s a whole bunch of things you could think about. I find one really good thing is to ask the AI to have arguments on your behalf, like, what are some pros and cons of this? Another really nice piece of advice is think about frameworks I can use to address this problem. Examples of frameworks might be things like a two by two matrix or a strategy matrix. And give me two different frameworks that I can use to think about this problem and tell me what those frameworks would say. So you can force the AI to kind of think like a high end consultant on those kind of problems.
Brett McKay: But how do you think AI will affect more creative work? Like, what role do you think humans can play in a world where AI can create pretty good art, write good copy, even do a podcast? Like where do you think humans can fit in there?
Ethan Mollick: So I think if AI stayed at the level where it is right now, it’s quite good. But it’s not as good at podcasts as you. I’m trying to butter you up for good editing here. It’s not, you know, it’s, I don’t think as good as professor as me, right. Or a good writer. As a good writer is a good writer. I think analysts are like, if you’re whatever you’re best at, you’re probably better than AI. The question is whether that stays the same, right. It hasn’t, right. Next year it’s going to be better than it is now. At some point it might, you know, it might be a better podcast than you, it might be a better professor than me, or better writing research papers or whatever else. And I think that becomes the big question, what do we do in that world? And that’s a decision we get to make in some ways. Like AI is something being developed, but it’s not something that we don’t have any control over. And what I worry about is when people just sort of throw up their hands and be like, well, AI does stuff like what do we want the future to look like? We get to make decisions about that.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So I mean, you’ve talked about how you’re still using, you’re using AI in your own creative process. Like when you write, you know, you’re trying to figure out how to end a sentence, and you’re just thinking, thinking, thinking, and nothing’s coming to you. So you ask the AI, well, you know, what are some 30 different ideas, how I could end this and like spit some things out. Then you’re like, oh, well, that’s a good one. Or you start mish-mashing, you know, kind of different sentences that it spit out to you to get a good one.
Ethan Mollick: I mean, and that kind of method of working with it, that co intelligence piece, is ultimately the message here, at least for right now at the level AIs are at, it has weaknesses and your ability to use it as a starter for information, as a fill in, as ability to get more done, right? So, maybe there’s a world where the AI is very good at podcasting and you develop a way so that it’s doing personalized podcasts for everyone who downloads one, right? So this model is. Now you’re hearing the two of us talk, but we’re talking specifically about the issues that you, listener X, are experiencing. I mean, there are future models of more ambitious worlds where if everyone has a thousand PhDs, what do you do with those? So I don’t think this takes away all choice and agency for us. It does make us rethink how we work.
Brett McKay: Okay, so we’ve talked about using AI at work. Let’s talk about using AI at school. And you’re a professor, so you’ve got a front row seat to see how this is all playing out. But before we talk about some of the potential upsides of AI in the classroom, let’s talk about the disruption. It seems like AI has pretty much blown up homework. Like it’s caused the homework apocalypse. You know, like when a student gets an assignment, they can just go to AI, say, AI, write me an essay. AI, you know, here’s a picture of a math problem, the calculus problem. Solve it. So what do we do in a world where students can just get the answer right from AI? I mean, is school over?
Ethan Mollick: So, I mean, right now it’s absolute chaos, right? As of last July, 70% of undergrads and 70% of K12 students were using AI for “help with homework”. So everyone’s using it. AI detectors don’t work, by the way. All of them have a high false positive rate. Some people just write like AI and they get accused all the time of using AI and they could never prove they didn’t use it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, like, AI uses the word delve a lot. And before AI, I’d use that word. I’D use the word delve. And now I can’t use delve anymore because it’s kind of an AI thing.
Ethan Mollick: Yes.
Brett McKay: And I don’t want people to think that AI wrote it.
Ethan Mollick: Well, that was actually what was pretty funny is there’s actually a statistical analysis that shows that the use of delve is dropped off dramatically because the models no longer say delve that much and no humans want to use it anymore, right. So it’s very funny to react negatively to it. But you can’t ever prove that you’re not using AI, right. I’ve just kind of given up. Like, I mean, what you end up doing is leaving spelling errors in or something like that and hoping that that that proves it. But I mean, you’re facing the exact same problem we all are, right. You could be accused of using AI anytime. You can’t prove it. So teachers really have two choices. Choice number one is the same thing we dealt with in math classes after the calculator, because the 1970s, which is what you do is you go back to basics and you say, listen, you do the homework, don’t do the homework, the homework helps you with tests in class, we’re going to have active learning. I’m going to ask you questions about the essays you wrote, you’re going to do in class, assignments you’re going to do in class, blue book tests.
And that’s a completely reasonable way to respond to AI in the short term. That’s exactly what we did in math classes, right. Like you do the math homework, it might be graded, it might not be graded, but the big deal are the tests you do in class. And we could do that for other things like writing. We just don’t. The second option is you transform how you’re teaching. And like my classes are 100% AI based. Everything you do involves AI stuff. So you teach AI that pretends to be a bad student, you co write a case with it. The AI rules you about problems. Because I teach entrepreneurship, I’m also able to do incredibly impossible assignments like, you know, come up with a new idea and launch a working product by the end of the week. We can do things we didn’t do before. So we’ll figure this out. But schools are definitely in chaos right now.
Brett McKay: Well, I think going back to that idea, that point you made, that people with humanities degrees or humanities background do better with AI. I mean, I think that makes the case, like we still got to teach people or teach young people, like general knowledge, like that becomes more important. If you want to Actually make the, make this AI useful.
Ethan Mollick: Absolutely. General knowledge is more important than ever. Expertise is more important than ever. And we can teach people this. I mean, we really can. They’re in the classroom already. And the most effective way of teaching has always been active learning where people are doing things actively in the classroom and not just hearing a lecture. So the trend even before AI was how do we create flipped classrooms where you watch videos of lectures or read textbooks outside of class, then in class you apply that knowledge. That kind of approach is very AI proof. And there’s lots of ways we can use AI to make learning more engaging. I’ve been building games and simulations where you basically, you know, you don’t just learn how to negotiate, there’s an AI you negotiate with and that turns out to be really easy to build. You can use AI to do all kinds of really interesting teaching things. There’s a set of research out of Harvard that shows an AI tutor improves performance on scores. There’s another big study done by the World bank in Nigeria that shows that six weeks of after school AI tutoring with teachers in the room.
It’s actually important to have teachers involved because students, when they just use AI themselves to learn, it turns out they don’t learn very well at all. They just kind of cheat and don’t realize they’re not learning and they do worse on tests. But if you make it part of assignments and teachers work with you on this, then you actually get huge increases in learning outcomes. So there is like a really good future where AI supercharges learning, makes it more personal, makes it better. And I think we’re close to that. It’s just, you can’t just say to your kids, use AI and it’ll all work out, because that’s not actually the case. Like learning requires effort and letting AI skip that effort actually can hurt you. So we have a lot of potential for the future, but also a lot of misconceptions and sort of thinking to do about how to use this properly.
Brett McKay: Something my wife and I discuss quite a bit since we’re writers. And then we look at like what AI can do with writing. It’s like, is there even a point for like my kids learning grammar and how to diagram a sentence and whatnot? You’re a writer. Is there still a case to be made to learn those fundamentals of writing in the world where ChatGPT can just spit out something for you?
Ethan Mollick: I mean, again, I think that the key is really building true expertise. And I think that what this hopefully does is sharpen things for us. You know, math classes became a lot more organized after the calculator because people had to actually think about what do we want people to learn, like how much do they learn to do multiplication, division by hand and what’s that valuable for? And when should they switch over to using calculators. And I think we can do the same thing with writing education. I mean, I understand that it kind of sucks, right? Like essays used to be a great way to do things for teachers. They could just assign essays and assume people learned. A lot of people didn’t learn or were already cheating. By the way, prior to ChatGPT, there were 40,000 people in Kenya whose full time job was writing essays for American college students. So this isn’t a new problem. So I do think we need to learn how to, I mean, whether diagramming sentences is the right approach or just trying writing a lot with creative prompts. I think writing remains really important because we want people to learn to be good writers and readers and that’s what school’s for.
But we have to start approaching this a different way. We can’t just assume we give people a take home assignment, an essay and they’re learning something from it. But that also hasn’t been true for a long time. Since the Internet came out, people are already cheating. So I think we have to face the fact that, you know, this is something we have to learn about how to do better and actively work to do better.
Brett McKay: Any advice to parents who they’ve got. Maybe they got kids in middle school, high school, and they’re seeing their kids use AI for their homework, for homework help. Any advice on guiding them and how they can use that as not just like a way to cheat and just get the answer and get the homework done, but like, oh, we can actually enhance your learning. What are some like prompts or some guidelines for that?
Ethan Mollick: So we have a bunch of free prompts that you can use and you can find those at Generative AI Lab at Wharton. And there’s a prompt list that you can use of tutor prompts. But aside from those, I don’t think prompts are really, as, you know, they’re important. But I think the real key is thinking about, as a parent, how to use it. So for example, when you want to give your kids homework help, don’t let them use AI or try and suggest they don’t use AI. But what you do is you actually take your phone and you take a picture of that calculus problem and you ask the AI. Explain this to me In a way that I can teach my kid how to do this and they’re good at this or bad at this or even better, have an ongoing conversation where it knows the strength and weakness of your kids. When your kids do use AI, ask them to give practice help for quizzes. Generate problems for me for AP Social studies in this unit and quiz me on what I know or don’t know. Like the key is that it has to be effortful work.
So if they’re just getting answers from the AI, they’re not getting anything valuable. If they’re being quizzed by the AI, they’re asking questions and getting answers back. They’re indulging their curiosity. You’re the one using this to help you become a better teacher. We all are, you know, amateur teachers to our kids on lots of topics. And I mean I can’t remember calculus, but the AI does. And you can use those tools to do this. But it’s like any other form of media or experience. You need to be an active parent.
Brett McKay: And I think even if you don’t have kids and you’re just an adult and you want to continue your education, I think AI can be a really powerful co learner or co teacher with you. I’ve been using it my own sort of personal reading, right now I’m reading Invisible man by Ralph Ellison. Read it back in high school, decided to read it again as a middle aged guy and I’ve been reading it along with AI. So I’ll finish a chapter and I’ll say go to the AI, say hey, you’re an American literature professional professor, I want to talk to you by about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Let’s talk about chapter three. And it says, okay, yeah, here’s, here’s chapter three, here’s what happens. But then I’ll just start asking it more and more questions. Kind of drill down into more and more specific questions like you know, what do you think is going on this line? What does that mean? And it starts spitting out ideas and it just helps. It just gets me thinking about the text in a deeper way.
Ethan Mollick: And that by the way, the co thinking partner thing is often important. I spoke to a quantum physicist at Harvard and he said his best ideas come from talking to the AI. And I’m like, is it good at quantum physics? He said, no, no, not, not really. But it’s very good at asking me good questions and getting me to think. And I think you’re sort of spotting like the most ultimate form of co-intelligence. Is we just don’t have. Even with a, you know, a supportive spouse who’s doing the same work that you’re doing and is, you know, and is intellectually engaged with you, we still lack thinking partners in the world, right. Like, so it can help you spur your own thinking. I love your examples of use. Show you what happens when you get comfortable, this system, and you start to think about, how can I use AI to help? And what I love is all the examples you’ve given about how you help with your writing or how you help getting, you know, help with this reading project is about having it supplement your thinking, not replace it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s the way I think. It’s supplementing, not replacing. So what do you think is the future of AI? Where do you see it going?
Ethan Mollick: So I think it’s worth noting something which is the big thing that’s happened over the last few months is there been a couple technical breakthroughs in AI that make it much smarter, that are pretty easy to implement, that people have been doing. So these are called reasoners, models that think before answering questions. Turns out that makes the AIs a lot smarter. And as a result of that, plus a few other breakthroughs, when you talk to people at the AI labs, and they talk about this publicly too, they genuinely believe that in the next couple of years, two to three years, they might be able to achieve AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, a machine smarter than a human at every intellectual task. I don’t know if they’re right. Nobody knows if they’re right. They might be, you know, high in their own supply, but they believe that this is true. The message you take away from that is that these systems will keep getting better. So I think there’s an advantage to kind of learning what they’re good or bad at right now. But I also think we need to be flexible. The future is changing. I mean, it’s a very good time to be an entrepreneur.
It’s a very good time to try and learn more about the world. It’s a very good time to use this in your job to become much more successful. Because a lot of people don’t realize what these things could do yet, but I don’t know what the future holds in the long term. I think these systems will keep getting smarter. They’ll still be jagged, not great at everything, but they are getting smarter.
Brett McKay: Well, Ethan has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Ethan Mollick: So I’ve got a free substack called oneusefulthing.org that is probably the best way to keep up to date on AI. My book is available at every major bookstores. It’s called Co-Intelligence and I think that’s a fun read also. And I am very active on social media on Twitter and blue sky and LinkedIn so you can look for me there’s fantastic.
Brett McKay: Well, Ethan Mollick, thanks for having. It’s been a pleasure.
Ethan Mollick: Thank you. It’s been terrific.
Brett McKay: My guest today is Ethan Molech. He’s the author of the book Co-Intelligence. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can learn more about his work @oneusefulthing.org also check out our shownotes @aom.is/AI 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 at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And make sure to sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You sign up @dyingbreed.net and it’s a great way to support the show directly. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us your reading up a 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 we got something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, Brett McKay, your Monoton listening Win podcast with Put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
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.
Transcript Coming SoonHelp support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!
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
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 SoonHelp support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!
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
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 SoonHelp support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!
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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This episode starts off a little differently than others — with a short quiz, something called the Brief Sensation-Seeking Scale, which will tell you whether you’re what psychologists call a high sensation-seeker or a low sensation-seeker. Read the following eight statements, and then pick a number from 1 to 5 that corresponds to your level of agreement, where 1 is “Not at all like me,” 2 is “Not like me,” 3 is “Unsure or both like and not like me,” 4 is “Like me,” and 5 is “Very much like me.”
- I would like to explore strange places.
- I would like to take off on a trip with no pre-planned routes or timetables.
- I get restless when I spend too much time alone.
- I prefer friends who are excitingly unpredictable.
- I like wild parties.
- I would love to have new and exciting experiences, even if they are illegal.
- I would like to try bungee jumping.
- I would like to do frightening things.
Now add up all the numbers together. If you scored between 8 and 16, you are a low sensation-seeker. If you scored between 16 and 28, you’re about average for sensation-seeking. If you scored over 28, you’re a high sensation-seeker.
Today on the show, I unpack what these categories of personality mean with Dr. Kenneth Carter, a clinical psychologist, a professor, and the author of Buzz!: Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies. Ken explains how sensation-seeking exists on a spectrum between chill seekers, who like safety and calm routine, and thrill seekers, who enjoy chaos, risk, and novelty. He shares how there are actually four components to high sensation-seeking, and which two tend to get people in trouble. And we talk about whether being high or low sensation-seeking is a matter of nature or nurture, how high sensation-seekers fare in romantic relationships and what they should consider in choosing a career, and what the world’s chill seekers can learn from its thrill seekers.
Resources Related to the Podcast* 40-Question Sensation-Seeking Scale Test
Connect with Ken Carter* Ken’s website * Ken on IG * Ken on X * Ken’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.
Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. So I’m gonna start this episode out a bit differently today than others by giving you a little quiz. It’s something called the brief sensation seeking scale, which will tell you whether you’re what psychologists call a high sensation seeker or a low sensation seeker. So I’m gonna read you eight statements and then you’re gonna pick a number from one to five, where one is not at all like me, two is not like me, three is unsure, or both like and not like me. Four is like me and five is very much like me. All right, got that? Are you ready? You got your pen and paper? All right. So here we go. Here’s the first statement. I would like to explore strange places. So remember to assign the statement a number one through five, where one is not at all like me, and five is very much like me.
So again, statement number one, I would like to explore strange places. All right, number two, I would like to take off on a trip with no pre-planned routes or timetables. Number three, I get restless when I spend too much time alone. Number four, I prefer friends who are excitingly unpredictable. Number five, I like wild parties. Number six, I would love to have new and exciting experiences even if they are illegal. Number seven, I would like to try bungee jumping. Number eight, I would like to do frightening things. Okay. Now, what I want you to do is add up all those numbers together. If you score between eight and 16, you are a low sensation seeker. If you score between 16 and 28, you’re about average for sensation seeking. And if you scored over 28, you are a high sensation seeker.
Today on the show, I’ll unpack what these categories of personality mean with Dr. Kenneth Carter, a clinical psychologist, a professor, and the author of Buzz! Inside the minds of thrill seekers, daredevils and adrenaline junkies. Ken explains how sensation seeking exists on a spectrum between chill seekers who like safety and calm routine and thrill seekers who enjoy chaos, risk and novelty. He shares how there are actually four components of high sensation seeking and which two tend to get people in trouble. And we talk about whether being high or low sensation seeking is a matter of nature or nurture. How high sensation seekers bear in romantic relationships and what they should consider in choosing a career and what the world’s chill seekers can learn from its thrill seekers. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/buzz. All right, Ken Carter, welcome to the show.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Thank you for having me.
Brett McKay: So you are a clinical psychologist and you are professor of psychology and you’ve written a book about scary, like why we like to be scared. [laughter] I thought you’d be the perfect person to talk to ’cause it’s Halloween. It’s the time of year when people are visiting haunted houses, they’re watching scary movies. Generally most people don’t like being scared.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah.
Brett McKay: But in some circumstances, I think all of us, to a certain extent, like doing scary things, like to play scary video games. Whether that’s five nights at Freddy’s, which my kids played a long time ago. Riding a rollercoaster. ‘Cause We want that little bit of, we want to be scared. Why do we have a taste for scary and thrilling things?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. So different kinds of psychologists have different theories about that. The classic one from Freud says there are ids, like love that sort of death instinct kind of thing. And then other theories, like for example from sensation seeking says that we sort of love that newness, that sort of surprise that comes along with it. And so I’m actually in the group of people who don’t like to be scared too much, which is odd because I wrote a book about how people like doing thrilling things. But you’re right, most people do enjoy those surprises to an extent.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like the inclination to seek out scary stuff, it resides on a spectrum. So you’re on that end where it’s like, ah, I don’t really like it all that much.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: No, no. I study thrill seekers, but I’m definitely a chill seeker myself.
Brett McKay: Are some people completely like they don’t even wanna watch a scary movie at all, like they don’t want any type of thrill at all?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. I mean, even though I’m pretty low, I mean, I’ve met people who are even lower who don’t like being frightened that have sort of an aversive reaction to fear in some ways. But I’ve also met people that are the opposite where they don’t even remember having any fear in them whatsoever. I actually interviewed a woman who didn’t realize that she was in danger until someone told her that she was in danger. So yeah, definitely quite a spectrum.
Brett McKay: Okay. So your book Buzz! You did extensive research on the people who love scary stuff. They’re on that far end the spectrum. So this is interesting ’cause you’re a guy who doesn’t like scary stuff and you decide, I’m gonna figure out what’s going on with these people that like to do crazy stuff, go to really scary haunted houses, BASE jump, bungee jump, all that sort of thing. And these are people who go out of their way to do thrilling and dangerous things. And the academic term for this is high sensation seeking. You mentioned some theories as to why most people like small scares in their life. What are the theories as to why there are people who are especially oriented to intense thrills?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. I mean, if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, we need people who, or there’s a benefit to people who can tolerate that chaos in life. Because if you’re in a dangerous situation, you want someone that’s going to be calm to sort of help you out of that. And so yeah, there are definitely some evolutionary benefits to having some members of our population who are high sensation seekers, who can tolerate that chaos. There’s also some evolutionary benefits to having some chill seekers, right? To prevent us from going in those directions. So you need a little bit of both in society.
Brett McKay: When psychologists try to explain this is thrill seeking, is it a personality type? Like I think everyone who is listening to this show has probably heard of like the Big Five personality traits, extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness to new stuff. Is thrill seeking like an amalgamation of those different Big Five Personality traits or is it something separate?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: It’s a little bit different. I mean, I think because… So when I’m teaching about personality theories or research personality theories, I think of those things like grand theories that try to explain a bunch of different things in their personality. And the Big Five is sort of one of those grand theories. Freud is a grand theory. I call sensation seeking kind of a mini theory because it sort of does one thing pretty well, but it doesn’t really explain other aspects of our personality. So there are just like a couple of different components of it. And if you’re using it to explain like why people might choose to do different things, works really well for that. It’s like a single use tool. [laughter]
Brett McKay: So what are the components of high sensation seeking personalities?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. So we call them thrill seekers, but there’s really four different kinds of components. The first two, tell me a little bit about the kinds of things you might choose to do. And the last two, tell me how much trouble you might get yourself into with your sensation seeking. And there’s a pretty quick test. There’s like eight questions that you can… To take to sort of figure out where on the scale you might be. So the first one is called thrill and adventure seeking. These are people who like sort of physical thrills. It could be bungee jumping, BASE diving, those things that we normally think of with thrill seekers. The second one is really sensations of the mind and of the senses. These are people who might like be drawn to interesting people or maybe drawn to interesting foods or even sort of adventure travel.
So it’s not the danger that beckons them, it’s sort of the curiosity of what happens in their mind. The last two, like I mentioned before, tells you how much trouble you might get yourself into. One of them is called disinhibition. These are people who, if you score really low on this, you sort of look before you leap and sort of think things through. If you score high, you just leap. You just sort of put yourself in it and figure it out later. And the last one is called boredom susceptibility, is how easy you get bored and how irritated you get when you get bored. And so you can have different kinds of high sensation seekers because you might be a high sensation seeker but you don’t like dangerous stuff. But you love cultures, you love trying different foods. You take a big bite of an unusual food no matter what. And the kinds of ways that you sort of are in the world are gonna be pieces of those different four components.
Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s recap here. So there’s four components of high sensation seeking. The first is the desire for physical thrills. These are high stimulus activities like skydiving and mountain climbing. The second is a desire for mental sensations and sensations of the senses. So this is seeking less risky experiences like travel, art, music. The third is disinhibition. So it is just being more impulsive. And fourth is a susceptibility to boredom. So it’s a dislike of repetition and a desire for new external stimuli. I mean, someone could have different constellations of these traits. Like you could be high on thrill and adventure seeking where you love doing dangerous stuff, but you’re low on disinhibition. Like you’re disciplined, you’re conscientious. And actually a lot of the people you highlight that do dangerous stuff, they’re like that. Like because they’re doing stuff that can get you killed. So they have to be in control.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yes, yes. Like ice climbers for example. I interviewed one of the very first people to climb up Niagara Falls frozen. It takes a lot of focus and concentration to tell what kind of ice it might be holding you or not. So you don’t really wanna be a high disinhibited, ice climber. Right? Because you need that discipline to be able to do that pretty well.
Brett McKay: And going back to this idea that this thrill seeking is a mini theory of personality, I can see situations where you can look at someone who on the Big Five personality, it looks like they should be a thrill seeker. They’re extroverted, they’re not very conscientious, et cetera, but they’re actually, they don’t like doing dangerous stuff. Things like that. So I really, I thought that was really interesting that you have to look at thrill seeking as almost kinda like a little bit of separate personality. You can’t just look at someone’s overall grand personality and peg them as a thrill seeker.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. In fact, one of the biggest like, the easiest to imagine that thrill seekers are these extroverted sort of wild people who will do whatever. But what I’ve realized is sometimes it’s the really quiet ones, those introverted high sensation seekers are going to do a lot of those things that… And you wouldn’t have expected because you’re sort of looking for an extrovert. But a lot of high sensation seekers are introverts as well.
Brett McKay: Yeah. We had a guy on the podcast, Tommy Caldwell, who’s one of those free climbers who scaled El Capitan in Yosemite and this guy, high on thrill seeking, but he also seemed pretty introverted.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah, yeah. This is the thing I love about psychology, is like it helps you to understand like what might be going on inside someone’s mind and sort of put aside some of those assumptions you might have about different personality types.
Brett McKay: Is thrill seeking or high sensation seeking, is it a matter of nature or nurture or is it both?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: It’s a little bit of both. Some of the research suggests that maybe like 60% or so may be biological because there are some chemicals that are involved in sensation seeking that are a little bit different than in high sensation seekers than average and low sensation seekers. But we know that environment can have a big impact on that as well.
Brett McKay: To the biology, how is the physiology in a high sensation seeker different from someone of low or average sensation seeking?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. So there’s a lot of differences, but the ones I usually talk about to help people think through, because there’s some chemicals that people are usually aware of, focus on cortisol and dopamine. So cortisol, as you probably know, is that sort of stress hormone. It helps organize our body for that fight, flee or freeze response when there’s lots of chaos or dangerous things. So if you are surprised or scared, your heart rate will go up, your muscles rev up for those kinds of things. What we find is that high sensation seekers don’t tend to produce as much cortisol in those chaotic moments. They’re actually pretty chill and calm during those things that would normally cause people a cortisol response, but their dopamine levels tend to be a little bit higher. So dopamine is a neurotransmitter that most people have heard of that’s associated with pleasure. And so when high sensation seekers are confronted with these chaotic experiences, they feel a lot of pleasure but not that much stress. And so it’s a very interesting combination of chemicals that sort of leads them to feeling the way they do. Their body is just telling them that it’s not a dangerous thing. Low sensation seekers like me, I produce a lots of cortisol all the time, so I’m gonna feel freely stressed out but not that much pleasure in those chaotic experiences that high sensation seekers are really gonna be sort of vibing in.
Brett McKay: All right. So the high sensation seekers, whenever they encounter a dangerous maybe different situation, their response is go towards it. Low sensation seekers are like go away.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. ‘Cause we’re trying to avoid those things that might be dangerous, but if your body is not telling you it’s dangerous, then it doesn’t feel dangerous.
Brett McKay: Well, this is the Art of Manliness Podcast. Does testosterone play a role in sensation seeking?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: It does. So testosterone levels tend to peak in early adolescence, which is around the same time that you’d expect to see lots of sensation seeking. And so as people get older, their testosterone levels start to fall. We do see some changes in sensation seeking as people get older.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And this connection between testosterone and sensation seeking is also why you see more men who are high sensation seekers than women. At least in three of the four sensation seeking categories, though women actually outscore men in the experience seeking category, which I think is interesting. But yeah, everyone has testosterone so everyone also gets that decrease as you get older. And you highlighted people in your book where when they were young, maybe young adults, they did crazy stuff, travel without a plan, eat weird food, [laughter] jump off of bridges. But when they got married or had kids, they started scaling that back.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah.
Brett McKay: A lot. And I’ve noticed that in my own life. I’m 40, I’ll be 42 here soon. When I was younger I was up for… I’m not a super high sensation seeker, but when I was younger, I would do crazy stuff. But now I look back like I’m like why did I do that? I was really dumb. [laughter] If I was given that opportunity again, I’d be like, no, I’m gonna pass on that.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. Yeah. And part of that’s environmental and part of it’s biological, biological change, the changes in those hormones like testosterone or another chemical called MAO tends to decrease in people that’s associated with sensation seeking. But I also talked a little bit about things I called anchors in your life, things that sort of anchor you in, because the older you get the more you have to lose. Right? And so thinking about how other people might be impacted with those choices makes a big difference as well.
Brett McKay: Right. So maybe a guy is very cavalier about climbing dangerous mountains in his youth, but when he gets married and has kids, he starts having second thoughts about that pursuit. So we talked about nature. Let’s talk about nurture a little bit. What does the research say about the way someone’s upbringing as a child can nudge them towards high sensation seeking?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah, a couple things. I mean, and it’s hard to sort of figure out sometimes because there might be lots of influences on that. Some of the research suggested that people that grew up with either spirituality or some religious background had some impact on their disinhibition. There’s also some research that suggested that high sensation seekers said that they had more controlling parents. But it’s very possible that parents might have seemed controlling because they were wanting to do high sensation seeking things. And so hard to figure out like what those environmental influences could be because there’s so many influences in a person’s life.
Brett McKay: One thing I thought was interesting is if someone grew up in a home with a lot of kids, that might nudge them towards high sensation seeking ’cause they grew up in a household that was pretty chaotic.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. And so that tolerance of chaos can create that as well. Yeah.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So in addition to kind of exploring why some people are more prone to being high sensation seekers or low sensation seekers, you also looked at like well, how does this affect the rest of their lives? So some of these high sensation seekers like to eat weird food, they like to do crazy dangerous stuff, but how does it affect other facets of their life, like work, relationships? So let’s talk about relationships. How do high sensation seekers approach their friendships and romantic lives?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Probably in the same way they approach other aspects, where they can tolerate that chaos. They are taking their sort of whole selves into those relationships. One of the things that sort of surprised me in the research was, and it probably shouldn’t have, but that… Because we all think that other people see the world like we do, right? [laughter] And so a high sensation seeker thinks that other people aren’t as frightened of things that might be frightening. And so they can sometimes have trouble with other people in terms of them being frightened by the things they do or not being able to tolerate the chaos in certain ways. And so that can be a struggle with some high sensation seekers who have friends or relationships with individuals who may be average and low sensation seekers. But for the most part, they’re sort of drawn to either high or low sensation seekers fairly equally.
Brett McKay: Do they like more… I don’t know… How do I say this? Drama in a relationship? Is there drama given the sensation that they need?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. And that’s one of the things that drew me to this research begin with, ’cause I was originally gonna write a book about people that I called chaos junkies, people who seem to crave chaotic experiences, and so we know that high sensation-seekers, they have that really wonderful balance of dopamine and cortisol when they’re in chaotic situations, and so sometimes high sensation-seekers won’t back down from chaotic situations because they’re fine in that space. And so they may create that drama because that’s the space they tend to operate the best in.
Brett McKay: Yeah, talking about… Going back to the physiological response that high sensation-seekers have compared to low sensation-seekers, I imagine that someone with low sensation-seeking personality, whenever they encounter a social conflict like the cortisol is just pumping through their body, they don’t get any dopamine out of it. This is unpleasant, and so they just want to avoid any conflict whatsoever, whereas the high sensation-seeker, whenever there’s a conflict in the relationship, it could just be over just dumb stuff, the cortisol is not pumping through their body, so they don’t see a problem with the argument or the disagreement. They’re just like, “Oh, this is just normal. And it’s fine and everything is okay.” Whereas the low sensation-seeker will be like, “This is awful. The relationship is terrible. We’re in a bad place.” So I imagine that could happen.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. Which is really the thing that drew into psychology anyway, when you have one situation, you see two people responding really differently to it. You have this study that I talked about in the book, where it was a really interesting study where they have high and low sensation-seekers, and they had to pick. They were given a profile of different people that they might have a conversation with, and they could choose whether or not they want to pick a conversation that would create conflict as they talked or one that wouldn’t. And the low sensation-seekers, just like you sort of described, picked low conflict conversations. The high sensation-seekers picked the things where they thought they might have an argument because that’s the space where they operate best in, which reminds me of certain people that I know is like, “Why would you talk about that, when you know that they don’t like talking about it?” It’s because it creates that chaos, that’s sort of that perfect combination for some high sensation-seekers.
Brett McKay: Yeah. The high sensation-seekers, the guy at Thanksgiving dinner was like, “Hey, tell me who you’ve voted for.”
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Right. [laughter]
Brett McKay: I’m like, “Yeah, okay.”
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Everyone else is going, “No.” And for them, they’re happy to approach it because they aren’t feeling this thing, that cortisol that other people might in those situations, they’re just full of dopamine.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And then I’m curious, are high sensation-seekers and low sensation-seekers able to be romantically partnered?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: They can. Yeah. So high sensation-seekers really are focused on that relationship piece, they’re drawn equally to high and low sensation-seekers for romantic relationships. The piece they have to watch out for is that empathy around the things that might cause that low sensation-seekers some stress. So what I recommend that people do is say they take this sensation-seeking survey and they can find out where there might be some ways where they can come together. The one couple I’ve worked with, for example, they found out that they both have high levels of experience-seeking, so they might do some adventure travel together, even though the high sensation-seeker might also be high and throw on adventure, they’re not gonna take their partner with them bungee jumping, but they might do some fun food adventures, for example, or travel to unusual places together.
Brett McKay: Oh, I thought it was interesting in the relationship section, we talk about the six styles of love from this guy, John Allen Lee, and he developed this in the 1970s. And so the six different types, they come from Greek types of love: Agape, eros, storge, pragma, mania and ludus. And so ludus is game-playing love, so this is people who are drawn to the hunt for love, the chase, that’s what they like. And research shows that high sensation-seekers are more drawn to that ludic type of love.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. And I know as a clinical psychologist that it takes different kinds of skills to find someone than it is to maintain a relationship, so I wondered whether or not high sensation-seekers may be better at the beginnings of relationships and may struggle sometimes with the middle of relationships, because for some people that I interviewed, that part just gets dull to them. One woman I talked to said that she not only jumps out of perfectly good airplanes, but she jumps out of perfectly good relationships because she gets bored, and that’s part of that… That can be part of that sensation-seeking personality for some people.
Brett McKay: Yeah, reminds of me that BB King song, ‘The Thrill is Gone’, that’s what the high sensation-seeker might say…
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Right, right. And so finding ways of maintaining that or even being aware that that could be an issue can really help some people. And that’s one of things I love about doing stuff like this, where writing a book for every day people, hopefully some people will see themselves in that description and maybe try to navigate that a little bit better.
Brett McKay: Let’s talk about the work that high sensation-seekers are drawn to, what kind of job do they like to do?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: I think about sensation-seeking as a part of a person’s personality, some people employ that in their work and not just in their out-of work time, so you can see that in first responders, for example, people in the military, I interviewed an emergency room physician and a nurse, anywhere where you expect to find chaos, you want people who can handle that chaos in a way that is elegant. But sometimes they find themselves out of those kinds of jobs and that can be tough for them because they use that part of their personality in their jobs.
Brett McKay: Okay. So if you’re a high sensation-seeker and you just constantly feel bored at work, maybe one suggestion there is to find a job that offers more sensation.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Right. Right. Or find some recreational activity that can account for that, for sure.
Brett McKay: And going back to this idea that there’s not just one type of high sensation-seeker, you can be someone who likes to look for excitement, thrill, et cetera, but is low on disinhibition, you’re disciplined. So you talk to a lot of military special forces guys who love the thrill of jumping out of an airplane or being shot at, but they were incredibly, incredibly disciplined.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yes. And so those are people that probably had low levels of disinhibition and hopefully low levels of boredom susceptibility as well, so they could use that, throw in adventure-seeking or experience-seeking in their careers in the military.
Brett McKay: Yeah, let’s talk about… I’m curious about this, you’ve done some research on this a little bit, is high sensation-seeking associated with any let’s say personality pathologies like sociopathy or psychopathy?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: It can. And what I don’t wanna suggest is that people that are high sensation-seekers have some kind of psychological disorder, but when you look at certain kinds of psychological disorders, there are high sensation-seekers may be over-represented in certain categories. You can see them over-represent in anti-social personality disorder, a little bit over-represented in addictive disorders, whether or not there are behavioral addictions or even different kinds of chemical addictions as well.
Brett McKay: Do you have any advice for high sensation-seekers who are listening right now on how to use their unique personality trait to flourish in life and make the world a better place?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. I think that the key is to make sure that you have that disinhibition and boredom susceptibility sort of under control, but also to think about that empathy piece in terms of how other people might experience that high sensation seeking. If you’re in a car and changing lanes and going back and forth, you’re probably really chill, but your passenger may be really freaked out and you might not realize it, so it’s important to stop and think and to be able to see how other people might experience those things that you might be doing to make sure those relationships are going well.
Brett McKay: Any advice for parents who’ve got kids with… Like, this kid might be a high sensation-seeker and they’re just pulling their hair out, ’cause they’re just driving them crazy?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. And I’ve got a lot of emails from parents asking for that kind of advice. To me, finding some things that their kids might do so they can do that high sensation-seeking in a healthy way. One thing I really try to emphasize is that these things that you see high sensation-seeking people do, is not just what they do, is sort of who they are as a person. We can find that when people aren’t allowed to express that, you can really impact them, ’cause they don’t have access to that thing that brings them awe. So maybe enroll them in activities where they can do those high sensation-seeking kinds of things, whether or not it’s that emotional high sensation-seeking in terms of the experience-seeking, or maybe it’s a certain gem that really emphasizes rock climbing or adventurous sports, helping them find a way to do that, that’s safe and respectful of other people, is everything.
Brett McKay: All right. So give them an outlet is basically what you’re saying. What about… I would consider myself today on the lower end of sensation-seeking. Is there anything we can learn from high sensation-seekers?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: I feel like there are. I feel like… One of the things I feel like I learned from talking to high sensation-seekers or a couple of things that I really try to employ in my life a lot more, part of it is sort of trusting yourself. I think a lot of low sensation-seekers we’re trying to avoid risk at all cost, but the thing I’ve found from a lot of high sensation-seekers is that they trust themselves and that things work out better than they think they’re going to. They did this really interesting study that I always love talking about whenever I have a chance, where they had people think about what things were they worried about at the moment, and then they came back to them a couple of weeks later to say, “Hey, did those things that you were worried about actually happen? And if they did happen, how did you handle it?” And what they discovered was about 80% of the things that people worry about on a daily basis never happen, but as a low sensation-seeker, I feel like I sort of arrange my life so I have a plan A, a plan B, a plan C for everything. High sensation-seekers trust themselves and they sort of put themselves into situations and they figure it out, and I feel like that’s a lesson, I feel like I’ve learned from them.
Brett McKay: Have you done any crazy thing since you’ve done this book? [laughter]
Dr. Kenneth Carter: I think the book was probably the craziest thing I’ve done, but those physical things, I just don’t have the hardware to run that sort of program. I get too overwhelmed too much, not enough dopamine, way too much cortisol. But I feel like I have tried more unusual foods because I feel like the worst that can happen is that I just don’t like it. So one thing I tell a lot of low sensation-seekers is to sort of embrace your own version of awe. That awe for a high sensation-seeker is going to be bungee jumping and BASE diving, that may not be your awe. And so the things that I find full of awe are going to be kind of dull for high sensation-seekers, but I feel like I’m gonna find my dopamine in my own ways.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that. So yeah, fill your own type of awe, try new things. So if someone gives you a “Hey, let’s go do this new thing.” Instead of being like, “Oh no, I don’t wanna do that.” Yeah, just go ahead and do it. You probably won’t regret it.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Yeah. Right, right.
Brett McKay: Well, Ken, this has been a great conversation, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Dr. Kenneth Carter: I’m at drkencarter.com on social media, but also on my website as well, so you can check out my book, which is Buzz! Inside The Minds Of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies, anywhere you find books online.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Ken Carter, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Kenneth Carter: Thanks so much.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Dr. Ken Carter, he’s the author of the book Buzz! It’s available on amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is/buzz, where you can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic, including a more comprehensive test for determining where you are on the sensation-seeking scale.
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 think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you to 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 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.
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“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love,” Charlie Brown once said. Indeed, being spurned by one’s crush, or, for that matter, by a friend or potential employer, not only ruins the taste of one’s favorite sandwich spread, but causes great psychological distress and even physical pain.
Here to walk us through one of life’s worst feelings is Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and the editor of Interpersonal Rejection. Today on the show, Mark unpacks the experience of social rejection, including why we’re so sensitive to it and the emotions and behaviors it causes, which can be positive and prosocial or maladaptive and even violent. We discuss the role that is played by the sociometer, a concept Mark originated, in monitoring our social acceptance and rejection and what influences its sensitivity to fluctuations in your relational value. And Mark offers advice on how to remove some of the sting of rejection and civilly reject others.
Resources Related to the Podcast* Mark’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #725 — The Curse of the Self * Simpsons’ episode where Lisa breaks Ralph’s heart * AoM Article: Honor in the American South
Connect With Mark Leary* Mark’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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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love,” Charlie Brown once said. Indeed, being spurned by one’s crush, or for that matter, by a friend or potential employer not only ruins the taste of one’s favorite sandwich bread, but causes great psychological distress and even physical pain. Here to walk us through one of life’s worst feelings is Mark Leary, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and the editor of Interpersonal Rejection. Today on the show, Mark unpacks the experience of social rejection, including why we’re so sensitive to it and the emotions and behaviors it causes, which can be positive and pro-social or maladaptive and even violent. We discussed the role that’s played by the sociometer, a concept Mark originated, in monitoring our social acceptance and rejection and what influences its sensitivity to fluctuations in our relational value. And Mark offers advice on how to remove some of the sting of rejection and civilly reject others. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/rejection.
Alright. Mark Leary, welcome back to the show.
Mark Leary: I’m delighted to be here.
Brett McKay: So you are a professor of psychology. You have done research on the self. We had you on last time to discuss the curse of the self, though you also done research on interpersonal rejection, which is social rejection. How do you, as a psychologist, define interpersonal rejection?
Mark Leary: I think it’s easiest to think of rejection as a subjective psychological experience. It’s hard to define it in terms of how people behave toward us, because different people interpret other people’s behaviors in different ways, and I might feel rejected by something somebody does, and you wouldn’t. So rejection is really the psychological experience of feeling like other people don’t adequately value their relationship with us at this moment. It’s a signal of low relational value.
Brett McKay: Alright, we’re gonna get into this objective, subjective split with social rejection and talking about your idea of the sociometer here in a bit. But let’s talk about this, what happens to us emotionally and even physically when we experience social rejection?
Mark Leary: Well, any time we feel like people don’t adequately value their connection with us at the moment, and it could be a big thing, it could be a romantic rejection, we got fired from our job, we got kicked off the team, we were ostracized, it could be a big kind of rejection like that that makes us… It very clear other people don’t value their connection with us. It could be very minor things. We just felt ignored, or dismissed, or, Hey, we didn’t get invited to that party. Those things all kick off a series of psychological and emotional and behavioral reactions in us that involve our emotions, and we can go into detail about what those emotions are, and our views of ourselves and our behavior becomes affected.
Any time we feel rejected, we clearly have a response. It’s hard to imagine a person who’s been rejected who just shrugs and has absolutely no reaction whatsoever. We are very sensitive to the possibility of being rejected. It’s a feature of human nature. It’s an evolved part of the human brain to be sensitive to rejection, because throughout evolutionary history, we had to live in groups with other people, and they had to accept us. They couldn’t kick us out. We would never have survived out there on the plains of Africa during evolution just living by ourselves. And so we had to behave in ways that led other people to at least minimally accept us and be very sensitive to those instances in which they found us lacking in some ways and wanted to reject us. So that’s why we are so sensitive to other people’s acceptance and rejection of us.
Brett McKay: So what are some of those emotions we might experience when we feel like we’ve been rejected by somebody or excluded?
Mark Leary: The key emotion that is probably common to most instances of rejection is the thing that we in every day life call hurt feelings. Why are your feelings hurt? Your feelings are hurt when you feel that someone doesn’t adequately value you at the moment. And this could even be someone that you know loves you and cares about you, but at that moment, they don’t seem to really value their connection with you. I can imagine on my anniversary suggesting to my wife, “Hey, let’s go out to dinner.” She goes, “Oh, I’d love to, but I really wanna watch “Wheel of Fortune” tonight,” or something.” [chuckle] Oh, that would sting. So hurt feelings is the fundamental rejection emotion. But we experience other things as well, depending on the consequences of the rejection. So if rejection involves losing a valued relationship, somebody rejects us, tells us they never wanna see us again, we often feel very sad. And sadness is caused by the loss of something valued. If we feel like it was unfair that they rejected us, that often creates anger, hostility. People get enraged at times. If the rejection leads to negative consequences of various kinds, we can experience anxiety.
What’s gonna happen now? I’m getting kicked out of my house. If we think it’s gonna last for a long time and we’re not gonna find anybody else for a friend or a romantic partner or group memberships, oh, then we’ll feel lonely. It’s really interesting. There are so many negative emotions attached to rejection that it sort of suggests to me that evolution really wanted us to make sure that we didn’t miss any instances in which we were rejected. That’s how important it is. It triggers all kinds of negative things, depending on the context, and it motivates us to respond in one way or another.
Brett McKay: You mentioned whenever we experience these emotions, we also have… There’s changes in our behavior. What are some behavior responses to rejection?
Mark Leary: There’s three major categories. One is sort of a helpless resignation, Okay, she kicked me out of the house, and I gotta go on with my life, and it’s just a helpless resignation, passive, moving on. A second one is a very pro-social reaction, where it’s clear that I might be able to repair this rejection, get back on the team, to get the friend to come back, to win the romantic partner back if I just treat them nice enough. So in some instances, people begin to behave more positively, more pro-socially, or they, as we just discussed, people become aggressive and angry about it. They become vengeful and they wanna get back at the person. And which way people respond depends a lot on what they think the prospect is for getting the person back. If I am sure that you’re gone and you’re not coming back at all, and particularly if I think it was my fault, then I’m just gonna be resigned and I’m gonna walk away with my head hung down and my feelings hurt. If I think there’s some chance of repairing whatever it was that led to the rejection, then I’m going to behave positively, to try to get back on the team, to try to get the job, to try to get the romantic partner back.
If I feel like there’s no chance at all I’m gonna get you back and this is all your fault and I blame you, then you’re gonna get the anger and potential aggression in response. So we can either sort of sulk away, we can respond more positively, or we become angry.
Brett McKay: And in addition to the psychological responses, emotional responses, behavior responses, rejection can also affect us physiologically. It actually can cause changes in our body where we kind of feel physical pain almost.
Mark Leary: Absolutely. We suggested, just speculatively, years ago that the systems that make our experience hurt feelings in the brain may be somehow related to the same systems that make us feel physical pain. And at the time, we were just guessing, or speculative, but neurosciences have shown that that’s the case, that some of the same brain systems that light up when you’re physically in pain also light up when you’re in social pain because other people haven’t valued you enough. Not only that, but you kick into high gear, your sympathetic nervous system kicks on with the classic fight or flight or freeze reaction that we have any time we have a strong emotional reaction. So yeah, we hurt, we’re experiencing some psychological pain, and our whole system gets really revved up.
Brett McKay: Have you seen… There’s a Simpsons episode where Lisa Simpson goes on what Ralph Wiggum thinks is a date, but Lisa doesn’t think it’s a date, but Ralph does, and then in the moment, Lisa rejects him very publicly, saying, “This is not a date. I’m just going with you… Went out.” And you can see Ralph just physically, his heartbreak. It got recorded on TV, and Bart replays it over and over again. He’s like, “Hey, Lisa, you can actually pinpoint the second when you break Ralph’s heart.” [laughter]
And he just plays it over and over again.
Mark Leary: There it is.
Brett McKay: I think we’ve all experienced that Ralph Wiggum…
Mark Leary: We have.
Brett McKay: Where you’re just like, “Oh.” You’re just like, “Oh man, that feels so bad to be rejected,”
Mark Leary: Yes. Everything seemed to be okay, and it takes a split second, and suddenly, you’ve got that broken heart and the pain and the resignation all at once. Yeah, comes on quickly.
Brett McKay: In elementary school, kids are often taught, You have to include everyone, be friends with everyone, but something you argue is that social rejection or interpersonal rejection is actually a necessary part of social life. Why is that?
Mark Leary: Yeah, I would hate to quite word it that way, and I may have worded it that way sometime in the past. [laughter] It’s not so much we have to reject other people, but we have to recognize we can’t value everybody we meet equally, and they can’t value us equally. We only have so much time and energy for our social connections. So how many good friends can you really have? Research suggests that, to maximum, five to seven good friends, and most people don’t even have that many. You just can’t. You can’t have 40 really good friends. You can’t maintain those kinds of friendships. So it is true that we have to be aware of the fact that we can’t have close, supportive social connections with a very, very large number of people. And we need to think about that from both sides. One is from the side we know we can’t value everybody equally. Sure, we can treat everybody in a friendly way, but that doesn’t mean we have a strong support of emotional connection to that person. We only have so much time and energy. But we also have to realize that’s true of everybody else. So sometimes when we feel rejected, it’s not that the other person is rejecting us, it’s the fact that their niches, their little slots to have friends and romantic partners and people in their lives are kind of filled up and there’s just not room for us. And yes, they don’t value us as one of their top five people, but that doesn’t mean they devalue us. We’re just on a different tier.
And I think it’s important for people to remember when dealing with their own feelings of rejection with friends or in the work settings or on teams, other people… Any other person can’t have close connections with everybody, and maybe you’re sort of secondary status, but that doesn’t mean they’re really rejecting or devaluing you.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, you can only have one spouse, unless you’re polygamous, I guess.
Mark Leary: Yes. Yep. [chuckle]
Brett McKay: But, yeah, an employer can only hire so many people. They can’t hire everyone that wants a job, so they have to reject. And again, like you said, it doesn’t mean they devalue you or think you’re not worthy of being valued or having that relationship, they just… They don’t have enough room in their finite social brain.
Mark Leary: That’s well said.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So typically, when I think people think of social rejection, they think of romantic rejection; we’ll talk a little bit about that, or being rejected by friends. But we experience social rejection when you apply for a job and you don’t get it. That’s a form of social rejection.
Mark Leary: Yes.
Brett McKay: You’re being excluded from a group. Or I remember when I was in college and I applied for particular scholarships, like the Presidential Leadership Scholarship, I didn’t get it, and I felt rejected. That’s another form of interpersonal rejection. And going back to what you said earlier, this idea that social rejection or interpersonal rejection is a subjective feeling. I wanna dig deeper into this, because as you said, objectively, someone can look like they’re being accepted socially from a third party; they belong to the group, etcetera, but subjectively, that person who looks like, from a third party, they’re being accepted, they feel like they’re being socially excluded.
Mark Leary: Yes.
Brett McKay: Walk us through more of this objective, subjective split of interpersonal rejection.
Mark Leary: No, that’s a very important point. Our reactions to rejection situations, situations that appear to be rejecting, are based entirely on our perceptions of what’s going on in our interpretations, and those aren’t always right. People may not realize that they’re being rejected. In many cases, everybody can see that she doesn’t wanna have anything to do with you, and you don’t seem to get it. Or they can feel rejected when they’re not, which is actually, I think, probably more common. So I think when we feel rejected, one of the things that’s really useful to do is to try to be as honest and accurate as possible and deconstructing, What is really going on here? Knowing that our perception of the events, our interpretation of the events may in fact not be accurate. And we’ve done several studies over the years that show that people’s judgments of how much other people are being accepting actual other people in that situation, we have the ratings of those other people, how much they like and accept you, and we get your ratings of how much you think they like and accept you, and you’re way off, but you think that you’re right.
And as human beings, we do tend to err in the direction of over-estimating rejection. That’s true of most threat systems in the body. We’re more likely to react to things as if they’re dangerous when they’re not, than to think that dangerous things are safe. We always lean in the direction of over-interpreting threats. All animals do that. You think of the deer. How many times does a deer in the woods get kind of skittish and startled and run away when it’s really nothing going on? That’s to make sure it doesn’t miss a real threat. And so our brains are programmed to over-react to potential rejection when it’s not really there, just to make sure we don’t miss a real rejection. It’s like making sure the fire alarm really does pick up a fire so it’s gonna go off when I just burn food on the stove in the kitchen. I think people need to realize that too. We overestimate rejection, we underestimate the degree to which people wanna have connections with us, and so we feel worse about our social lives sometimes than we really should…
Brett McKay: How does your idea of the sociometer play into this objective, subjective split of rejection?
Mark Leary: Well, the sociometer is a label that I made up for the psychological and brain systems that monitor our social acceptance and rejection, that monitor our relational value in other people’s eyes. It’s almost like we have a antenna up almost all the time that’s monitoring the social environment for information about how other people feel about us. We’re not consciously thinking about it all the time. We don’t walk through life just thinking, Hey, what’s he think? Oh, does she like me? Oh, was he being rejecting? But we have these antenna up, and they’re monitoring the social situation, but now and then, just non-consciously, they pick up some little cue, that little frown from that person, that look of disinterest, it dawns on you that it took her two days to reply to your email, and then a little warning system goes off that says, Hey, you probably ought to take a look at this. There may be a problem here. It’s like a smoke detector going off.
So the sociometer is just this gauge that monitors our relational value, and when it goes off, then we start looking around and trying to figure it out, and we start looking at the situation and, What did I do? And what did she really mean by that? And then the emotions begin to come out we’ve described. Our views of ourselves start to come out and change. If we start feeling like we’re being devalued, we start wondering what’s wrong with us, and our self-esteem can go down. So it’s just a monitoring system. Operates non-consciously most of the time, but then when it picks up some kind of information regarding rejection, then we kick into a conscious analysis of it and have a reaction.
Brett McKay: And from what I’ve read, it sounds like the sociometer is… It can be context-specific. Like, it’s gonna be more sensitive in certain situations than others, so for example, my sociometer in relation to my family, I’m gonna be more sensitive to maybe slights from them than say to strangers on the Internet. I don’t really care if I get excluded by some rando on the Internet. But if my wife gives me the cold shoulder, I’m gonna be more sensitive to that.
Mark Leary: No, that’s absolutely true. And that makes sense, obviously, because we worry more about our relational value to the people who are close to us, that we have relationships with, us, but if we’re just passing in the street, it really shouldn’t matter. [chuckle] The interesting thing is, it does sometimes. Sometimes, we do have a reaction, our sociometer sends off a warning signal about somebody’s reaction that really shouldn’t matter to us, in the least. I remember I was in Switzerland a few years ago checking out of a grocery store, and I just made some… What I thought was a funny comment to the woman who was checking me out. And I don’t know if it was a language difference [chuckle] or a cultural difference, but she looked at me with disgust on her face, like, What kind of a maggot are you anyway? And I realized, I just sort of stumbled out of the store, and I got out in front of the store, and I just thought, Oh my God, and my feelings were hurt, and I felt like, Gee, she thought I was an idiot. But then it dawned on me, Why do I care? [laughter] I’m never gonna see this person again. She just didn’t think I was funny.
What that told me is our socio-meters, even though they do distinguish between important relationships and non-important relationships, they still are prone to over-trigger in situations that really don’t matter very much. So how that guy bumps into me in the bar, which seems to me like he’s dismissing me somehow, it affects me even though it doesn’t matter. And I think it’s important to know that, that just because your sociometer kicks off and you’re getting charged up about this rejection, this might not matter in your life at all. Move on. It does not matter.
Brett McKay: How does our sociometer develop? Is it something that we’re born with, or do we develop it through experience?
Mark Leary: Well, certainly, its operation develops as kids grow. When you’re born and you’re an infant, you’re not judging to the degree to which you’re accepted or rejected by other people. As you get older, it begins to become active. And by the time kids are two and a half, three years old, they are beginning to realize, Some people treat me better. Some people seem to like me, and some people don’t. And as it develops, it becomes calibrated in terms of the experiences we’ve had. The ideal situation, think of it as a gas gauge in a car, but this is a gauge in your brain that’s judging how much other people value their relationships with you. The ideal situation, just like with a gas gauge in a car, is that it’s perfectly accurate in telling you how much value you have to other people, telling you exactly how accepted or rejected you are. But it can become mis-calibrated. I had an old car once that would tell me I had three-quarters of a tank when it was really running on empty. Well, that’s not good. You need to know how much gas is really in the car. And if you grow up in an environment where you are rejected a lot, or you’re neglected by your parents and you aren’t taken seriously and you’re dismissed, your sociometer begins to calibrate too low. It begins to assume that most of the feedback that’s coming in is negative feedback, and so it’s more sensitive to those things and you walk through life not feeling acceptable.
If you grow up in an environment where you get a lot of praise and people do seem to like you and your parents are supportive, your sociometer will either be accurate or potentially calibrated a little too high. If you think of a narcissist, a narcissist’s sociometer is calibrated too high. They think that they’re wonderful and other people ought to accept them all the time. And only rarely do they become aware of the fact, well, no, these people think I’m an idiot. So again, another point I think for a listener in terms of thinking about this is how accurate is your sociometer? If we tested it against the actual amount of acceptance and rejection you’re experiencing, and as it moves up and down, as you move through life, how accurate is it? And there’s no way to know for sure, but I think it’s useful to think about the fact that your particular sociometer is not always spot on accurate.
Brett McKay: Okay. So people can have a more sensitive or less sensitive sociometer. It sounds like it’s a lot of just based on your experience growing up. This reminds me of a book I read a while back ago, culture of honor by Richard Nisbett. Nisbett. He’s a sociologist. He was trying to explore.
Mark Leary: He’s a social psychologists.
Brett McKay: Yeah, a social psychologists. He was exploring like, why is there more violence in the American South than there is in North New England area? And his thesis was that, well, in the American South, there is this culture of honor where from childhood, you are basically inculcated to be very sensitive to your status amongst other people. And if you ever see a slight to your status, And like the way you respond is through violence. Like, Hey, you talking to me? You can either duel or you punch, you’re gonna fight. But in the Northern States, that culture didn’t exist. And so they’d done studies where they go to universities and insult a college student in the American South or a student from the North. And the young men from the South are more inclined to feel aggressive and wanna fight.
Mark Leary: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a well-known set of studies in social psychology. It’s very interesting and it has a lot to do… He traces it historically to the fact that in the South you had people living by themselves. I mean, like in rural areas where you didn’t have law enforcement, that if in fact someone was presenting a threat and seeming to disrespect you, you’re gonna have to handle it yourself and shut it down on the spot. If you were living in Philadelphia and somebody was disrespecting you, you didn’t have to worry too much ’cause there was probably a constable up on the… Policeman up on the corner somewhere who would take care of things. So it was protective at one time. It made a certain amount of sense not to tolerate any disrespect because that might inflame into somebody attacking me. It makes a lot less sense now.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Another theory is that the South was settled by a lot of Scotch Irish and they’re the genetic and cultural descendants of the warrior pastoral Celts. And that’s still influencing men today. So I mean, I think that’s an interesting theory. What about differences between men and women? Are there differences in the sociometers between the sexes?
Mark Leary: Generally, no. There’s differences in what they respond to as indications of low relational value. Men and women are concerned about different things in terms of how they wanna be perceived by other people. But men and women are… Sociometers are equally responsive to certain kinds of social threats and they kind of fire off in pretty much the same way. Their behavioral reactions differ somewhat because we’re socialized to behave differently as men and women and the brain systems are even different. And male testosterone increases the chances you’re gonna get an aggressive response. But the sociometers themselves seem to work pretty comparably.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So you mentioned earlier some of the responses we can have to interpersonal rejection or that feeling that our relationship with someone’s not being valued as much as we want it to be valued. We can kind of sulk and just feel bad and just sort of retreat socially. Or someone could try to get back into the good graces of someone. What are some strategies that we typically try to use with that approach?
Mark Leary: They can be anything you would normally do to get someone else to like you. You could be doing favors for them, complimenting them, just kind of being nice in a passing fashion until they warm up to you again. It’s exactly the same things you would do with a stranger if you were trying to get them to like you, you just crank that up a notch and that shows up in real relationships. And it shows up in laboratory experiments where people feel rejected by people they don’t even know in a laboratory setting. And then you look and see how they interact with that person when they have to talk to them again. And if they’re trying to get back in their good graces, they’re just more positive and they’re agreeing more and they’re nodding their head more and they’re showing more eye contact and they’re smiling., all the things you do to try to get other people to like you.
Brett McKay: And is it the same thing if we’re trying to avoid social rejection? Let’s say we have a relationship with somebody and we wanna maintain it. Are there things we do to do that?
Mark Leary: If it’s somebody that we know well and we’re trying to maintain it, obviously we do things to make sure that we keep the relationship strong by being positive and supportive and happy and pleasant and complimenting and not making them mad very often. And we kind of do that automatically with our friends and romantic partners and family members. If you’re dealing with strangers, you get two different reactions depending on the person’s confidence. If I’m a confident person, feel like I have good social skills and I’ve just met you and I really want you to like me, well, yes, then I’m gonna agree with you. And I’ll bring up interesting conversations and follow up on what you said, everything I can do to make you like me. If you’re not a confident person, those people sometimes shut down. I’m more worried about you disliking me. So I’m overly careful and cautious in what I say and it works against me. I’m not doing really positive things because I’m trying to be real careful not to do negative things that’ll lead you to devalue me. But it also doesn’t allow me to come across in my best way. So it’s sort of moderated by how much social confidence you have.
Brett McKay: So you’re playing not to lose socially in that situation?
Mark Leary: Yes. Yes.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Defensive rather than offensive.
Mark Leary: Yep.
Brett McKay: Never good. That’s not a good strategy.
Mark Leary: Generally not.
Brett McKay: Then there’s maladaptive ways. You respond with anger, aggression, violence. I wanna dig more into this because something I’ve noticed, I’m sure other people have noticed too, is with the mass shootings that we’ve had here in the United States, you always look at who was the culprit and it ends up being typically a young man and their history is one of they were bullied, ostracized, just, they were socially rejected. Has there been any research done about the connection between social rejection and violence and like mass shootings?
Mark Leary: Yes. Yes. In fact, I’ve been involved in two large projects where we actually did case studies of all of the school shootings that we could get our hands on to try to understand what were the common characteristics in the shooters. There’ve also been examples of experimental research in laboratories where they bring participants in, often college students, but not always. And they either get accepting feedback or rejecting feedback. And then they have laboratory measures of aggression. The next thing you’re supposed to do is blast this other person with loud noise ’cause this other person’s doing a task. And part of the study is you’re supposed to give them loud noise to see how much it interferes with them doing the task. But you get to choose how much noise and how loud a noise you’re giving them. And people who were rejected by this person blast them with a whole lot more noise. Now, that’s a lot different than shooting somebody, but it shows that even in a laboratory situation, the motive to aggress against people who reject us goes up when we feel rejected.
Other studies have had you feeding other participants in a study crackers with hot sauce on them. And you either believe the other person likes hot sauce or doesn’t like hot sauce. And you feel like the other person was either rejecting or accepting of you. You find that you start giving more of the rejecting people who don’t like hot sauce more hot sauce. And again, that’s different than shooting people. But it shows the same basic psychological process. I’m going to aggress against people that I feel like have devalued and rejected me. Of course, nobody gets through the school system without some rejections, romantic rejections, or you don’t make the team or you’re teased or you’re bullied, I mean, everybody experiences that, but only a small fraction go out and shoot somebody. And you’re right. It’s almost always males. Less than 5% of school shootings were perpetrated by girls. More than 95 were guys. So what makes the difference? And in our case studies of hundreds of shootings, rejection shows up a lot, not in every case, but it does show up a lot.
Brett McKay: I feel ostracized. I’m on the outside. People make fun of me. I’ve been bullied. But it almost always involves one or more of three to four other things. You find that the school shooters not only have been rejected, but they have already shown certain psychological problems, evidence of sadism in the past, like smashing worms or trying to kill little birds when they were kids or destructive aggression or vandalism or depression or being suicidal. So if you take rejection and then combine it with already existing psychological problems, the likelihood of aggression goes up. The shooters generally have a familiarity with and fascination with guns. Makes sense. If you’ve never seen a gun in your life or ever had a gun, you’re probably less likely to shoot somebody than if you’re comfortable with guns. We find out a lot of the shooters have a fascination with violence and death. They’re interested in the Holocaust, or they read about other school shootings, or they like to read stories about violent people.
Mark Leary: So it’s not just the rejection that does it, it’s combining it with a motive. The rejection gives me a motive to shoot people at my school ’cause they don’t accept me. The availability of guns or explosives gives me a means to do it. And my psychological problems often mean I don’t have the same control over myself. We’ve got other adjustment problems that make it less likely. A lot of us have had urges or thought through my mind, man, I’d like to kill that guy. But of course, we’re not gonna do it ’cause we have self-control. So it helps to explain a little bit. I mean, not all shooters are the same, but rejection often plays a part along with these other things.
Brett McKay: Going back to the sociometer, have you found any evidence that the sociometers of these mass shooters or anyone else who takes part in violence in response to social rejection, like it’s out of whack, it’s maybe more sensitive than it needs to be?
Mark Leary: Yeah, that would be a very hard kind of research to do. We don’t have any data on that, but that would make a certain degree of sense, because again, there’s plenty of the rest of us who have been rejected, who have our own psychological problems, who might own firearms, who still don’t go shoot people. So it does suggest the sociometer may be out of whack, but I don’t know of any evidence of that.
Brett McKay: Let’s dig into romantic rejection. I think men experience a lot of romantic rejection, but women can experience it too. But men typically experience it because they’re the ones doing the pursuing in a relationship usually. They’ve got to ask a woman out on a date, which means that they set themselves up to be told no. So I mean, just based on your research on the best way to respond to social rejection, any advice for men out there who are in the dating scene on how to alleviate the blow of social rejection?
Mark Leary: I think the best way to cope with it is to go back to this idea that we can’t be valued by everybody. There’s a lot of people in the world and only a few of them can really value in us… Us enough to date us, to get involved with… Romantically involved with us, to form a permanent relationship. So I think we just have to go into it knowing that this is just a low probability event that I’m going to be able to match up with this person who wants to go out with me as much as I want to go out with her. And that doesn’t mean it says anything about me. And it doesn’t mean it says anything about her feelings about me, except for the fact that I’m just not making the very top few people in the whole world that she might be interested in going out with. I think sort of to talk to yourself about this, this is often not an acceptance rejection reaction. It’s a compatibility reaction ’cause I have sort of turned people down in my own life who I liked a lot.
Yeah, I wanna hang around with you, you’re… You’d make a good friend, but as a romantic partner, no, I don’t think we’re compatible. I don’t think that’s gonna work for either one of us. And so I’m gonna turn you down. So one way to soften it I think is to realize this woman has a lot of choices and just ’cause you’re not among the very top ones doesn’t really say she’s rejecting or devaluing you. And it has a lot more to do with compatibility than the fact that she thinks that you’d possess undesirable characteristics.
Brett McKay: Your colleague, Roy Baumeister, we’ve had him on the podcast before, he did research on what it’s like to be the rejecter of romantic overtures. Do you know what his research found with that?
Mark Leary: Yes. That was a fascinating set of studies on unrequited love where one person is attracted to another one and has reached out and sort of thinks that we ought to get together. And the other one is not interested. And now when you see movies about unrequited love, where there’s a pursuer and they keep getting turned down, you sort of get the sense that the person getting turned down is suffering a lot and the person being pursued is not being affected by this very much. But what Roy’s research showed as I remember is that the person who’s being pursued has as many negative reactions as the person who’s pursuing and who’s being rejected. So yes, the person being rejected is heartbroken. They protest, they persist, please, let’s go out. I wanna get to know you. They can feel sad and in despair. They can get angry and defensive. The rejectee, the person who’s experiencing the unrequited love experiences all of the stuff we’ve been talking about today.
But the rejecter also experiences negative emotions. They feel trapped and put upon and frustrated. They’re like in a no-win situation ’cause this is often somebody they know, the person who’s pursuing them, somebody they like. And if they say no and turn them down, it kind of damages a friendship in some cases. But if they say yes, they’re getting into a relationship they really don’t wanna be in. So it’s a no-win about it. And they certainly feel badly about hurting the other person’s feelings. It’s not easy to just be cavalier about rejecting somebody. If you fire somebody from a job or don’t hire them, it’s… I’ve been on the other side of it. And no, it hurts to turn other people down, to kick somebody off the team, to break up with somebody. So it was interesting that it’s not just the people being rejected who experienced negative emotions going through the process of being a rejecter. Rejecting other people is negative too.
Brett McKay: Yeah. That was interesting. Baumeister said that the pursuee, the person who’s in the pursuing part of the romantic relationship, they experience negative emotions when they get rejected, but he also says, they actually, they experienced a lot of positive emotions in the process. Like they feel good. Like I’m in love and I’m gonna… I want to do these things to get this person’s attention that it feels good to be in love, but then it feels bad when you get rejected. And then he said the person who is the pursuee, the one who has to do the rejecting, it’s more of a problem to be solved. Like they don’t… They might not actually feel any of those good feelings. And they just got to figure out, well, how do I let this person down without hurting their feelings? So it just kind of becomes an annoyance.
Mark Leary: Yep.
Brett McKay: Yep. And yeah, I mean, I think I think there’s some guys out there that have this idea that women just love to turn guys down. Reading the research suggests like, no, most women they feel really bad when they have to turn a guy down.
Mark Leary: Yes. I think that’s true.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So as we discussed, you can’t be friends with everybody. You can’t be romantic partners with everybody. You can’t invite everyone to work for you or be a part of your team. So you’re gonna have to socially reject people. It’s just a part of life. The question is how do you do it in a way with some class, like in a way that respects the other person’s dignity?
Mark Leary: Wow. That is a great question. And so everything I’m gonna say is just totally speculative based a little bit on research, baby, but mostly I’m just making this up. Your listeners need to know this is not research-based. That is very difficult to do as we were just discussing to have to reject somebody. And I guess I would say that you have to be basically honest with the person, but also kind in how you do it. And what that means is framing the rejection in a way that doesn’t damage their self-esteem. And often, that… It’s true that you can say, no, I really do like you. I mean, I think you’re a great person, but to be honest, here’s the reason why. Again, the compatibility might be a good explanation. So I really like you. I mean, we have a lot of fun as friends, but you know, I’m just not sure we’re really compatible as partners.
I think there’s things about me you wouldn’t like. And there may be things about you that I wouldn’t like, and you’re a great person, but it’s just not the best fit for me. I would even pepper the rejection with certain compliments, ’cause what you’re trying to do is show that I do value you. I value my connection with you, if that’s true. And in many cases where you have to reject somebody, you really do sort of value your connection with them, but not enough to go to the next step and really accept them fully and be in a romantic relationship with them, for example. I think even turning people down for a job, you interview them for a job. Yeah. You got to tell them, no, I’m sorry, you didn’t get the job. But you got to sort of be honest about why to some extent. Say, Hey, you’ve got great credentials. I think under other circumstances, I could have seen we could have hired you, but we had this other candidate who had this thing you didn’t have. And I think most people, when they hear it really laid out and they understand what’s going on, I think they accept it better. As I said, we have this tendency as human beings to over-interpret reactions as more negative than they are, other people’s reactions.
So to the extent you can be upfront and show, nah, this isn’t blanket rejection. This isn’t blanket negativity toward you. I’ve got some very positive thoughts about you, but here’s the reason why we can’t go along with this, that I don’t value you enough to give you the job or to go to the prom with you or whatever it might be. I value our connection, but not as much as you would like, is sort of what the message would be.
Brett McKay: Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Anywhere people can go to learn more about your work.
Mark Leary: I think the best thing, if anybody’s interested in most of these topics, is just Google Mark Leary rejection. I just tried it this morning just to see what came up and you get a whole lot of stuff that either I’ve written or things about what I’ve written that’s accessible online and you can take your pick about how people try to be accepted. We’ve done a lot of research on how is it that we try to make sure we’re not rejected? How is it when we are rejected? How do we behave? And so, yeah, there’s a lot out there. Just Google Mark Leary rejection and you’ll find things.
Brett McKay: Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Mark Leary: I’ve enjoyed it a lot. Thank you so much.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Mark Leary. He’s the editor of the book, Interpersonal Rejection. It’s available on amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is/rejection, 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 out podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. You get a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to [0:39:26.2] ____ 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 if you think there’s 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 my podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
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Nietzsche’s maxim, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” isn’t just a sound philosophical principle. It’s also a certifiable physiological phenomenon; toxins and stressors that could be deadly in large doses, actually improve health and resilience in smaller, intermittent ones. The ironic thing, my guest points out, is that it’s the fact that we’re not getting enough of this sublethal stress these days that’s really doing us in.
Paul Taylor is a former British Royal Navy Aircrew Officer, an exercise physiologist, nutritionist, and neuroscientist, and the author of Death by Comfort: How Modern Life is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It. Today on the show, Paul discusses the science of hormesis, how small doses of intermittent stress can make us more resistant to chronic stress, and why you need to embrace what Paul calls “discomfort harvesting.” We talk about some now-familiar topics like fasting and cold and heat exposure with fresh inspiration as to how important they are to practice and how to do them effectively. We discuss how hot a sauna needs to be to get the benefits of heat exposure, Paul’s suggestion for how to make an ice bath on the cheap, what may be the single best type of food to eat to improve your gut’s microbiome, a form of fasting that’s got anti-cancer benefits but is so accessible it won’t even feel like fasting, what supplement to take to mitigate the effects of a bad night’s sleep, and much more. We end our conversation with how to use what Paul calls a “ritual board” to stick with your healthy habits and resist the “soft underbelly” of modern life.
Resources Related to the Podcast* AoMPodcast #708: Overcome the Comfort Crisis * AoM article/video on the benefits of cold showers * AoM Podcast #801: The Cold Water Swim Cure * AoM Podcast #603: The Physical Keys to Human Resilience * AoM Article: How Saunas Can Help Save Your Body, Mind, and Spirit * AoM Article: How to Sauna — All the FAQs * AoM Podcast #585: Inflammation, Saunas, and the New Science of Depression * AoM Podcast #862: Heal the Body With Extended Fasting * AoM Podcast #328: The Pros and Cons of Intermittent Fasting * AoM Podcast #581: The Tiny Habits That Change Everything * AoM Podcast #425: Action Over Feelings * The NOVA Food Classification System * Stanford study on the effect of fiber and fermented food on the microbiome * Research on creatine as a neurotransmitter and creatine’s effect on brain health (including impact when sleep deprived)
Connect With Paul Taylor* Paul‘s website * Paul on IG * Paul on LinkedIn * Paul‘s podcast * Paul‘s mental fitness course for coaches and health professionals
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Nietzsche’s Maxim, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” isn’t just a sound philosophical principle, it’s also a certifiable physiological phenomenon. Toxins and stressors that could be deadly in large doses actually improve health and resilience than smaller intermittent ones. The ironic thing my guest points out is that it’s the fact that we’re not getting enough of this sub-lethal stress these days that’s really doing us in. Paul Taylor is a former British World Navy aircrew officer and exercise physiologist, nutritionist, and neuroscientist, and the author of Death by Comfort: How Modern Life is Killing Us and What We Can do About It. Today on the show, Paul discusses the science of hormesis, how small doses of intermittent stress can make us more resistant to chronic stress and why you need to embrace what Paul calls “discomfort harvesting.”
We talk about some now familiar topics like fasting and cold and heat exposure with fresh inspiration as to how important they are to practice and how to do them effectively. We discuss how hot a sauna needs to be to get the benefits of heat exposure, Paul’s suggestion for how to make an ice bath on the cheap, what may be the single best type of food to eat to improve your gut’s microbiome, a form of fasting that’s got anti-cancer benefits but is so accessible it won’t even feel like fasting; what supplement to take to mitigate the effects of a bad night’s sleep, and much more. We in our conversation with how to use what Paul calls a “ritual board” to stick with your healthy habits and resist the soft underbelly of modern life. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/stronger.
All right. Paul Taylor, welcome to the show.
Paul Taylor: Brett, thank you for having me as I’m a longtime listener, so it’s great to be on.
Brett McKay: Well, thanks for listening. So you got a new book out called Death by Comfort: How Modern Life is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It. You have an interesting career because you are a neuroscientist who’s also an exercise physiologist and a nutritionist. So how do you end up combining these three areas in your career?
Paul Taylor: Well, it all started, I went to university and did a master’s degree in Exercise Science and then I joined the British military. I joined the Navy and I flew helicopters for a number of years. I also went through combat survival and resistance to interrogation training, which started my interest in this area. And then I ended up doing helicopter search and rescue and I did another master’s in nutrition ’cause I didn’t wanna sort of hang around doing nothing on when we were waiting for the call. And I always had the intention of leaving and starting as a physiologist, a nutritionist. So I did that. I moved to Australia, met my wife in Ecuador, actually she’s an Aussie, dragged me kicking and screaming to Australia and I set up as a physiologist, a nutritionist working one-on-one initially. And then I realized that it wasn’t so much about the science, it was about behavior change. And so that’s why I went on and did another, I went back to university and studied neuroscience. I’m now on kind of topping it off with a PhD in Psychology. So I’m kind of what I call… I call myself an integrationist and a pracademic. So I like to take all the geeky academic research and turn it into practical tools and solutions that people can use, and now I do a lot of corporate speaking and translate that science stem for everyday people.
Brett McKay: All right, so let’s talk about your book Death by Comfort. You argue that the comfort revolution that we’ve experienced for the past 100 years is killing us. How has increased conveniences, increased comfort made us sicker?
Paul Taylor: So we need to start with a fundamental principle here. And Professor Frank Booth, legendary exercise physiologist, said that the human genome has not changed for over 45,000 years. And that the current human genome requires and expects us to be highly physically active for normal functioning. And it’s not just that. So if we take the movement piece, we don’t hunt or gather anymore and we know that the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania in East Africa, the Hadza women and girls take double the steps of women and girls in modern societies, Hadza men and boys three to four times the steps. But when it comes to intensity of movement, they do seven to 10 times the amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity. And what we now understand is that exercise is a very powerful driver of your gene expression. So when we’re not exercising we lose all those positive changes in gene expression that actually help us to be healthier.
And then we have the convenience of food. Now with the rise of ultra-processed foods particularly in the last 30 or so years… And I know Brett in your country 60% of all calories consumed are ultra-processed foods. Australia’s not far behind. And teenagers, American teenagers, 66%. And these things have lots of additives in them that disrupt our gut microbiome, that make us eat more. And it’s these convenient foods that are actually destroying us. And then the other thing is that we live in thermal neutral environments, where we’ve got heating and cooling and we’re no longer cold or hot. And that actually robs us of these ancient biologically conserved mechanisms that protect us and make us healthier when we’re exposed to intermittent stressors of movement and some nutritional stress, but also the thermal stresses as well. So we’re missing these things that are fundamental to our biology.
Brett McKay: Right, so we’ve reduced stress but in the process it counterintuitively increased chronic stress in a lot of parts of our lives?
Paul Taylor: That’s correct. And there’s a whole heap of research that shows that people who exercise and who are fitter deal with psychological stress better. And we also know that exposing yourself to heat and cold just helps with what I call “stress fitness,” and that’s my PhD is now focusing on stress fitness. But I like to use the analogy of physical fitness. So all of your listeners will understand that there’s a continuum of physical fitness. You can be low fit, moderate high fit, or very fit. But you’ve got to do the work. People who are up high on that continuum, they do the work. And you know as well as anybody, Brett, that if you stop training for a couple of weeks, you slip down that continuum. And this is what’s happening with modern life. We’re not getting those inputs that actually build our stress fitness. And then we see we have all sorts of teenagers, young people and older people who are just not prepared for the inevitable stress that is thrown at them in terms of life.
Brett McKay: And so this all goes down to this idea in science, it’s hormesis. Can you walk us through the science of hormesis? What is that?
Paul Taylor: This is my favorite branch of science, and kind of summed up by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” So hormesis is defined as sub-lethal exposure to stressors or toxins, which at high levels can kill you, but at low to moderate levels, induce stress resistance. And there are over 600 known hormetic stressors. And so exercise is one, cold exposure, heat exposure, but also the sun UV radiation. You get too much of that, you get skin cancer; you don’t get enough, you get low Vitamin D. We know even small doses of nuclear radiation, which we used to think is damaging, now we actually see can enhance longevity in people. So there are a number of stressors, nutritional stressors as well. Polyphenols, these little things, that compounds that you get in certain foods, mostly fruits and vegetables that are small doses of toxin but actually upregulate our protective genes. So we get a net benefit when we expose ourselves to small doses of intermittent stress because it upregulates our protective genes. So cellularly we become more resilient or increase our stress fitness because of exposure to that small dose of stress.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. And this hormesis, it’s the stress, it goes on a u-shaped curve, right? So…
Paul Taylor: That’s right.
Brett McKay: There’s this you reach a point where you’re going up in the stress and it hits a sweet spot, and then if you keep increasing the stress you start having diminishing returns; it starts going down and becomes detrimental.
Paul Taylor: That’s right, and then it becomes detrimental. And we see that from everything. You see that in exercise. Now that’s starting to come out, that the people who are doing the most… And we’re talking here marathon runners, people who do lots of triathlon, these guys sometimes they actually don’t live longer than people who do no exercise. Now, it’s not all of them. So there’s some individual stuff that we don’t understand, but basically all of these hormetic stressors follow that same curve that you just described. And it’s a little bit like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It can’t be too little, it can’t be too much. It’s got to be just right. And a lot of our upbringing, it’s too little exposure.
Brett McKay: All right, so let’s walk through some ways we can start adding some more good stress in our life, reducing the comfort in our lives a little bit so we don’t have death by comfort. We’ve been talking about exercise. Let’s talk about this. What goes on in our bodies when we expose ourself to the stress of exercise? ‘Cause it is a stressor. You feel good after a good workout, but when you’re doing the workout it’s actually stressor. So what’s going on in our bodies when we exercise?
Paul Taylor: Yeah, yeah. [chuckle] You’ve hit the nail on the head here, Brett. And I spoke to thousands of people over the years about exercise. Some people go, “Yes, I’m into it.” Others go, “I don’t like it because it makes me feel uncomfortable.” And I say to them, “It’s supposed to be bloody uncomfortable.” That is why exercise is good for you because it’s a stressor that activates these stress response genes that actually protect us. And then there’s another wave of gene expression called “metabolic priority genes.” These are hundreds of genes that are upregulated whenever you expose yourself to the stress of exercise. And then we have other genes that improve our mitochondrial function. So it is by exposing ourselves to moderate intermittent amounts of stress in the body, we’re upregulating gene expression.
And what we now know is that exercise releases a whole host of things called “myokines.” Some people call them “exerkines.” These are molecules that are released from your contracting muscle that we now know get into your bloodstream. They not only affect the muscle, but they get into your bloodstream and affect pretty much every single organ and every organ system in the body in a positive manner. And recent research shows that these myokines or exerkines are carried around the body by these things called “exosomes.” And so it gets pretty technical, but I just want people to understand there are massive changes in gene expression and release of these myokines that then tell the organs and the organ systems in your body to improve how they’re actually operating.
Brett McKay: Yeah. One myokine that people might have heard of is BDNF. What is BDNF?
Paul Taylor: So BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And neurotrophic means nerve growth, right? So it helps you to create new brain cells in areas of the brain such as the hippocampus and maybe some other areas, but it also protects the brain cells that you have against damage. And we know there’s a couple of ways that BDNF is released. So there are two myokines that cross the blood-brain barrier. One of them is called “irisin.” And that crosses either from cold exposure or exercise that crosses the blood-brain barrier and triggers the release of BDNF. And then lactate, people know about lactic acid. We used to think that was a waste product. We actually now know that it is fuel for some different cells including our brain cells. And lactate actually crosses the blood-brain barrier and triggers the release of BDNF. And some of your older listeners, Brett, will remember Miracle-Gro in the United States, this stuff that you sprinkle over plants and they would grow like crazy. BDNF is Miracle-Gro for the brain.
Brett McKay: Oh yeah, some other myokines you mentioned in the book, there’s myokines that drive metabolic adoptions such as muscle and bone growth and repair, improved immune function, healthier gut, healthier liver, healthier pancreas. And there’s one myokine IL-6 that has anti-inflammatory effect on the body. So again, the stress of exercise can help reduce inflammation in the long run.
Paul Taylor: Yeah, and this is the thing. So when you exercise there’s a transient increase in inflammation followed by a drop off in inflammation. And often that’s the sort of thing that we see. So you have to look at the long-term benefits of all of these molecules. And the body is just so sophisticated, and we’re still trying to work out exactly what goes on when we expose ourselves to things like the stress of exercise or other different stressors.
Brett McKay: So one thing you do when it comes to physical activity and physical movement, you encourage people to think of their daily activity consisting of three parts: Movement at the workplace, incidental movement, and dedicated. So walk us through these three areas and how can we increase our movement in these three areas?
Paul Taylor: Yeah. So the workplace, I always say to people that if you have a job that involves lots of physical movement, that has got to be worth thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars a year because of the net effect on your health. But lots of us these days have got jobs that involve chronic sitting. And we know that chronic sitting is really, really bad for your health. And so I always encourage people, we know that if you’re sitting for 20-30 minutes plus, there are significant negative changes in your gene expression. So it’s just getting off your bum at least every 30 minutes, I encourage people, and just do some movement. Ideally, the best case scenario, I’ve got kettlebells and clubbells sitting right beside my desk, and every 30 minutes I get up and swing some kettlebells and clubbells around. But if you’re in the workplace, you can just quickly walk them down a couple of flights of stairs.
What that does is it’s gonna create positive gene expression offset the sitting, but it’s also gonna burn up any stress hormones if you’re having a stressful day. Then the other thing I talk to people about the workplace is just look for opportunities to move. And I’ve got a rule that when I’m on the phone I stand up or you can go walking whenever you’re on the phone, and then trying to do things like walking meetings and stuff like that. Just any way that you can add these in. Then when it comes to our incidental stuff, and it is about these little movement snacks and doing, I call them these little “movement snacks,” just one to two minute bursts throughout the day. And I have exercise equipment strategically placed all around my house that acts as a bit of a trigger.
And actually one guy when I did a corporate workshop, it was the second time he’d seen me and he actually said to me, “We have changed our family that when we go into the village for a walk, we actually take the long cut rather than the shortcut.” And I thought, “You know what? That is just brilliant.” How many times have we driven past 30 perfectly serviceable car parks just so we can get as close as possible to our destination? And we’re losing that opportunity to move. And then with exercise, look, I think everybody’s convinced of the benefits of doing more, but for me one of the most important things is to do exercise that you enjoy. That is just really clear from the research that when you find something that you enjoy, you’re much more likely to do it. But also really remember about the benefit of these movement snacks. And researchers call them VILPA, vigorous intensity, lifestyle, physical activity. So these are just little one- to two-minute bursts of physical activity that we do throughout the day that we’re starting to see are really, really beneficial. So it’s not just going to the gym or going for a run; it’s those little movement snacks that are important as well.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you could do movement snacks while you’re watching TV. Yeah.
Paul Taylor: Absolutely. Every time the adverts come on, there’s an opportunity to do movement snacks or just do them while you’re watching stuff. Get an exercise bike and watch your favorite podcast or watch TV while you’re doing some stuff. That’s ideal.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I love the kettlebell. I actually busted out my kettlebell after I read your book and put it someplace in my house that I walked by. I sit down a lot for my job, so I’ve been doing movement snacks with the kettlebell ’cause it’s so easy. It takes up little space and you could do all sorts of things with it.
Paul Taylor: Yeah, they’re just brilliant. I’m a massive fan of kettlebells and clubbells.
Brett McKay: Okay. So move more at work, do more incidental. And the movement at work and the incidental movement, you talk about how a fitness tracker can help with that, right? Counting your steps, seeing your movement, you don’t want to get obsessive about this stuff, but I like the Apple Watch ’cause I can look at it and be like, “Oh, I haven’t really done much today. I’ll get up and take a 20-minute walk.”
Paul Taylor: Brett, I’m exactly the same. I have an Apple Watch and I have my active energy set for 750 calories every single day. And it just, it’s that trigger and it’s just making sure that you’re doing it. And oftentimes, if I’m sitting a lot as well, I’ll look at it and I go, “Oh my God, I just haven’t done stuff.” And it just, it gives you that little prompt to actually go and do stuff. So us neuroscientists will tell you what gets measured gets managed. And I’m a big fan of knowing how much you’re actually moving. That’s really, really key.
Brett McKay: Okay, and with dedicated exercise, pick something you like, just get sweating out of breath frequently throughout the week.
Paul Taylor: That’s it, exactly.
Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s talk about this idea of, you call it “discomfort harvesting.” And we can do that by exposing ourselves to heat and cold. So how can cold showers allow you to do discomfort harvesting?
Paul Taylor: Yeah, so firstly let me define discomfort harvesting. So when psychology, a psychologist will talk a lot about discomfort tolerance, the ability to tolerate discomfort. But I prefer the term “harvesting” because tolerance kind of has the implication that this isn’t that good for me and I just need to kind of tolerate it. Whereas harvesting, you’re actually reaping the benefits. So we know there was a landmark study done in Holland about seven or eight years ago where they took a bunch of workers and randomly assigned them into two groups. And one, they got to have a cold shower at the end of their normal shower for 30, 60, or 90 seconds. And the other group, the control group, just did their normal shower. And they measured their health, their sickness, and their absenteeism. And they found at the end of the year that the cold shower group had a 29% reduction in sickness and absenteeism, which is just massive. Now since that study, there’s been lots of other studies that have shown that there are really huge benefits from exposing yourself to cold water, and it activates something called the “cold shock response.”
So this is an ancient mechanism that as soon as cold water touches your skin, we have neurons just under our skin that send a very quick signal to the brain. And the brain activates this full body response, body-and-brain response to the cold, and it upregulates protective genes. It increases noradrenaline, I think your Americans call it “norepinephrine,” and dopamine in the brain, which are really useful chemicals for motivation and for mood. And we get all of these physiological up-regulations in protective gene expression just from that cold water response. And we know there’s a recent study that showed that if you get into an ice bath at about four degrees, just for 20 seconds, you get a whopping 3% to 500% increase in dopamine and noradrenaline or norepinephrine, which is just huge. And it persists for hours. So it has positive lasting effects on your mood. And we’re now actually seeing people with treatment resistant depression being successfully treated with cold water therapy.
Brett McKay: No, we had a guest on the podcast last year, Dr. Mark Harper, who wrote a book called Chill: The Cold Water Swim Cure. He’s an anesthesiologist, but he swims out in the ocean when it’s freezing. And that led him… He started researching how to prevent hypothermia during surgery, and that led him to research the benefits of cold water exposure and managing the body’s overall stress response. I guess when anesthesiologists put people under, they have to keep the person cold.
Paul Taylor: That’s right.
Brett McKay: It has all this protective benefits. And he started doing the research and the people who do the cold water swimming, they get some of the similar benefits. So yeah, like you said, people who have been able to manage the depression with cold water, exposure decrease inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and things like that, all because of cold water exposure.
Paul Taylor: Yeah, and the reductions in inflammatory markers. We cannot underestimate those benefits because if you look at the vast majority of chronic diseases, inflammation, chronic inflammation is a key driver of that. So that seems to be one of the many benefits of this cold water exposure. And we know that you get activation of heat shock proteins and cold shock proteins and changes in gene expression when you regularly expose yourself to the cold. So it’s about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s what I mean by discomfort harvesting.
Brett McKay: How cold does the cold water need to be to get the benefit? Do we know that?
Paul Taylor: So yeah, actually on my podcast I interviewed Professor Mike Tipton, who is from the UK, would certainly know the guest that you talked about. He’s the world leader in cold exposure, and he reckons that 15 degree water. Now, that’s centigrade. I’m not sure how that translates to Fahrenheit, but 15 degrees centigrade seems to be the trigger for the cold shock response. But I recently saw a research paper where they had people in 20 degree centigrade of water, but they had them in for 20 minutes and they got some benefits. So there seems to be a trade-off between time and temperature. But it’s really, it’s at about that 15 degree centigrade, that seems to be around that area.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So 15, in Fahrenheit that’s 59, about 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
Paul Taylor: There you go, boom.
Brett McKay: And then 20, that’s 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
Paul Taylor: Yeah. And it’s important for your listeners to understand, Brett, that there is a trade-off between temperature and time. So the colder you go, the less time you need to actually spend in it. So I know some people who get into ice baths and they’re in there for at 10 minutes. There’s really no benefit above being in an ice bath for around a minute. The vast majority of the benefits are gonna kick in, no. There’s not really a benefit to staying in as long as you possibly can other than maybe a bit of psychological toughness.
Brett McKay: Is this something you can do every day or should you do it every other day?
Paul Taylor: We don’t have any data on that. Look, I think the best thing, Sonya Sonnenberg did a research study and she found that the optimal dose was about 11 minutes of exposure over a week. So I think we need to see other research replicating or doing similar studies to her until we can say definitively. But let’s take that as a guide for now.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. See, I do a cold shower before I work out. That’s when I do it. That’s what I like to do.
Paul Taylor: Oh, interesting.
Brett McKay: And yeah, but it’s hard to do cold showers or cold baths in Oklahoma during the summer ’cause the water is just lukewarm ’cause it’s like 115 degrees outside. So now it’s starting to cool off and now we’re starting to enjoy it. Yeah, I can’t… I don’t wanna spend $6000 for one of those ice tubs, whatever.
Paul Taylor: I’ll give you a little hack, Brett.
Brett McKay: Okay. What’s that?
Paul Taylor: Get an old fridge freezer. You know one of those chest freezers?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Paul Taylor: And put silicone on the inside, so you silicone it up. And then you just plug it in on a timer and fill it up with water and run it three to four hours a day. And you can get it to around three to four degrees, and then you just need to jump in. There you go. Boom. Saved yourself $6000.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. What’s another discomfort harvesting activity is exposure to heat. Now this is something I do regularly. I’ve got a sauna. I did fork over the money for a sauna. I’ve really enjoyed it. So what happens to our bodies when we are in a sauna or even exercising out in the heat?
Paul Taylor: Yeah. So that increasing core body temperature, again, activates the heat shock proteins, and it’s the heat shock proteins that seem to be the driver of the cellular changes and changes in gene expression. And the other thing that a sauna does is it works as an exercise mimetic. So it seems to mimic the benefits of exercise. So you’ll notice when you’re in an sauna that your heartbeat goes up, your heart rate goes up, your stroke volume goes up. And that’s some of the benefits that we get from low intensity aerobic exercise. And studies out of Finland have shown that people who have regular saunas four to seven times a week live seven years longer than people who don’t. Now, one of the other benefits that you get is around this discomfort tolerance. So with the heat… And I have a sauna as well, I forked out on one, it’s the best money I’ve ever spent. And with that heat, you know that discomfort that you feel when you get really, really hot?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Paul Taylor: That actually releases dynorphins in the brain. These are kind of like the cousins, the opposite cousins of endorphins. So endorphins are the feel-good chemical, dynorphin is that thing that says, “Brett, this is horribly hot. You need to get outta here.” And it turns out when you activate the dynorphin system reasonably regularly, you actually make your endorphin system more sensitive. So you actually get better feel-good chemicals from other exposures. So that would seem to be another independent effect. But there’s just so many changes from your cardiovascular system and your hormonal system, heat shock proteins that happen when you expose yourself to that heat that we get all of these net benefits.
Brett McKay: Another benefit, we’ve had a guest on the podcast, Charles Raison, he’s a psychiatrist and he wrote a book called The New Mind-Body Science of Depression. And the argument he makes is that one potential cause of depression is inflammation. Not all people who are depressed, but some people who are depressed have increased markers for inflammation in the body. And so what he’s found is if you put these people in a sauna, you have that acute increase in inflammation because you’re sitting in the sauna, it’s a stressor. And then in the long run it reduces overall inflammation and it can help alleviate major depressive symptoms.
Paul Taylor: Yeah, absolutely right. And it’s a little bit like exercising in that you get that transient increase of inflammation and then you get a net reduction afterwards. So yes, absolutely true. And we see that actually a sauna is pretty effective for depression as is cold exposure.
Brett McKay: How hot does a sauna need to be to get the benefit? How long? What’s going on there?
Paul Taylor: Yeah. So look, again we can’t say absolutely definitively, but studies have shown that 80 degrees centigrade again, Brett, you’ll need to do the conversion to Fahrenheit, but at 20 minutes activates heat shock proteins. Now possibly that could be less. This is really about increasing your core body temperature by one degree. And I actually did an N=1 study on my infrared sauna, which only goes up to 70. But infrared, as you may know, Brett, it penetrates deeper into the body, so potentially increases your core body temperature at lower temperatures. I did an an N=1 using a rectal thermometer, which we won’t go into.
Brett McKay: Oh yeah.
Paul Taylor: But saw those benefits. Now that is N=1, but we know that any exposure to significant heat where you caused your body to sweat significantly is going to have those benefits. But if you want the heat shock proteins, it would appear it is around that 80 degrees centigrade but maybe lower for an infrared sauna. And again, it’s a trade-off against time.
Brett McKay: Okay. So 80 degrees centigrade, that’s 176 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s pretty hot.
Paul Taylor: That’s hot. Now, that doesn’t mean… That’s when they saw the increase, but they didn’t in the study look at 70 degrees. So it may be that there could be less than that. And I think that there would be certainly be less than that when you look at an infrared sauna. And actually we’re gonna do some research over here in Australia. I’m collaborating with people over in New Zealand to look into that. So maybe I’ll let you know down the track once we work it out.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So when I do the sauna, I like to go really hot. So I get it to about 180 and then I just do it for 15 minutes, 20 minutes. And then if it’s cold outside, I like to get outside, kind of just be out there in the freezing cold and then get back in.
Paul Taylor: Yeah, the nice benefit of winter. I live in Melbourne in the south of Australia and I have a swimming pool right beside my sauna. And the swimming pool gets bloody cold in winter. So I’ll get from the sauna into the pool, back into the sauna, back into the pool. The only thing I would say, Brett, for people around cold exposure is if you’ve just done resistance training, you don’t want to get into the cold straightaway because it dampens the inflammatory response, and we need that inflammatory response to drive muscle protein turnover. So I will generally do resistance training, get in the sauna. If you get in the sauna right after you’ve done strength training, you get a 3-500% increase in growth hormone. So that’s the one time though that I wouldn’t do the hot-cold, hot-cold. I just want the heat right after the strength training.
Brett McKay: Yeah. That’s why I do my cold showers before my workouts rather than after. Let’s talk about our diets. We kind of mentioned this earlier. How has our modern diet made us sick?
Paul Taylor: Look, this is I think the biggest underappreciated impact on chronic disease, is the massive change in our diet. For all of human history, apart from the blink of an eye, the last 30 to 50 years of human history, we have eaten natural foods that have been alive recently. Now, there is a massive global increase in ultra processed food consumption. And there is a food classification system that came out of a university of Brazil called the NOVA classification that I think is the best ever invented. So it talks about the level of processing that we have, unprocessed foods, I call these low HI foods, low human interference. And I always say to people, look at a piece of food and if you can recognize that it’s been alive recently and minimally interfered with by humans, eat it, it’s fine. Don’t worry about the fat, the carbohydrate, the protein.
But if you’re looking at a piece of food and you’re going, “Mr. Krispy Kreme donut, I don’t remember seeing you running around on four legs,” then it is in your treat food. So I’m not saying never eat it, I talk about the 80-20 rule. And the research that’s come out of NOVA there’s literally around 100 research papers all showing the health risks when we increase ultra processed foods in our diet above around a 20% mark. And you see that 20% mark in countries like France, Spain, and Italy. In America it’s about 60% of calories from ultra processed foods. Worse for kids in Australia, in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, all more than 50%, and Mexico as well. And it is this massive rise in ultra processed foods. So let’s define it. They are foods that go through industrial scale processing and have lots of additives in them. Not just fat, salt and sugar, but preservatives, artificial flavors, emulsifiers that make them feel great in the mouth. And we know that a lot of these chemicals disrupt our gut microbiome, and that we also ate much more of those foods.
A randomized control trial took a bunch of people, half went on an ultra processed food diet, half were on a normal diet, matched for fat, carbohydrate and protein. They did it for 14 days and then they swapped over. And when people were eating ultra processed food, they ate 500 calories a day more. So what we know about these ultra processed foods, there are amazing scientists all around the world working out what’s called the “bliss point” in the brain. These are certain combinations of fat, salt, and sugar, any two of those three that actually hijack our reward systems and give us a massive hit of dopamine and make these foods addictive or more-ish so we eat more of them. And they’re empty calories. So there’s two mechanisms that happen here. One is you’re eating a lot of crap and that is damaging our cells and damaging our whole processes. But we are also crowding out good foods, things like fruits, vegetables, fresh meats, fish, all of those things that are really beneficial for us. So we get more rubbish in and less good stuff in. So it’s a bit of a double whammy.
Brett McKay: Okay. So your guidelines for countering this food ecosystem we find ourselves in, first one is eat a low HI diet. So low human interference diet. And it doesn’t mean to eliminate all those foods, but 80% should come from low HI diets. So whole foods, oatmeal, yogurts, meats, vegetables. If you eat 80% of your diet coming from that, you’re probably gonna be okay?
Paul Taylor: Correct, correct. And don’t worry so much about the fat, the carbohydrate, the protein. Just eat real foods. And you know the clue? Real food does not have ingredients. Real food is ingredients.
Brett McKay: You also talk about another rule is feed both of your brains. What do you mean by that?
Paul Taylor: So yes, the second brain, the enteric nervous system. So this is basically your gut microbiome. And we know that a lot of neurons reside in the gut microbiome. And there’s a two-way connection between the brain and the gut. And we know that basically if you look at most chronic diseases, lots of neurodegenerative diseases, obesity, diabetes, there are disruptions in the gut microbiome. And we get really good evidence that this is causative. When you look at fecal transplants on either animals or humans, where you can take the gut microbiome of an unhealthy mouse or human and transplant it into a healthy one and they actually develop diseases; or vice versa, you can take an unhealthy mouse, generally we do these on animals, and transplant the gut microbiome of a healthy mouse and the disease disappears. So we know there’s pretty good evidence that it’s causative, and we know that there are certain things that are very beneficial for our gut microbiome.
We’ve known for decades that fiber is good because there are a certain class of bugs in your microbiome that munch fiber and they give off these beneficial short-chain fatty acids that are really good for our heart and our brain and the rest of our body. And what we also know is that fermented foods, so there’s a great study come out of Stanford University a couple of years ago, where they took a bunch of people on the SAD diet as it’s called the standard American diet, and half of them they put on a high fiber diet, half of them high fermented foods. And they measured markers of inflammation, and they actually thought that everybody was going to do better. But what they saw is that some people on the high fiber diet did better, some did much worse. They didn’t tolerate the fiber well. Everybody on the fermented foods diet did better. And what it seems to be is that when we eat fermented foods, they send signals to our gut microbiome to actually be healthier and they proliferate the ones that digest the fiber.
So my takeout from that study is if your diet’s not so great, start to add in some fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, Greek yogurts, these sorts of things; some cheeses, miso soup, anything that’s got pickles or vinegar. Add that into your diet first bit by bit, and then start to add in fiber and particularly what we call “resistant starch.” And then you’ll create a much healthier microbiome and at the same time reduce your amount of sugar and processed foods, ’cause they’re the ones that really drive an unhealthy microbiome.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I love kimchi. My mouth’s watering just thinking about it.
Paul Taylor: [laughter] Yeah, there you go.
Brett McKay: It’s so good on your eggs. And then resistant starch, that’s found in things like peas, beans, lentils, whole grains. There’s supplements for resistant starch. I know raw potato starch and Hi-maize is another starch that you can supplement with.
Paul Taylor: And banana [0:37:17.1] ____ and stuff like that. Yeah, they’re supplements. But yeah, you get them in peas, beans, lentils, these sorts of things, and the skin of apples and stuff like that. So it’s just eating lots of fruit, vegetables, peas, beans, pulses, those sorts of things.
Brett McKay: And the other rule is embrace nutritional hormesis. What does nutritional hormesis look like?
Paul Taylor: Yeah, so there’s two aspects to this. One is these hormetic polyphenols. And so things like… A lot of people talk about broccoli being superfood and sulforaphane that’s in it. And people talk about it being an antioxidant. It’s actually not. It’s a small dose of poison that creates an antioxidant effect. And we know that lots of fruits and vegetables have these hormetic polyphenols, little small doses of poison that the plants use as protective mechanisms against insects. But because we are much bigger, they just create a very mild metabolic stress. And that upregulates protective genes, things like superoxide dismutase catalase, glutathione peroxidase, these are things that drive your antioxidant defense system. So by eating small doses of toxins that we find in plants, we get a net beneficial effect.
And then the other hormetic stressor is intermittent fasting. And humans have done intermittent fasting unintentionally since the start of time or since we’ve been around anyway. And it turns out that there are lots of beneficial biological processes that happen when we go without food for a little bit of time. We get a cleaning up of our cells that’s called “autophagy,” and we can then switch over, we develop metabolic flexibility. We switch over from running off glucose to running off ketone bodies that can actually be very, very healthy for us. So there’s a whole heap of different fasting strategies, which we can go through some of them if you like, just at a top level.
Brett McKay: Yeah. What are ones that you like, fasting protocols that you like for a beginner?
Paul Taylor: Yeah. Look, for a beginner I think to dip your toe in the water, Brett, there’s really good benefits, anti-cancer benefits from doing a 13-hour night fast. So nil by mouth other than water. And I used to be a late night snacker. And I saw this research that showed that it reduced the incidence of breast cancer and breast cancer recurrence in females when they did a 13-hour night fast. But they also understood the mechanism from animal studies that basically at night when you’re asleep, your DNA repair enzymes are switched on. And these are little enzymes that run all the way through your body, checking your cells, looking for cancerous and pre-cancerous cells. And when they find them, they execute them. Which is pretty cool stuff, right? But when we eat late at night, we have these peripheral clocks in our liver and our pancreas that sense the nutrients and switch off the master clock, and these DNA repair enzymes don’t happen.
So their research said that basically people who eat late at night significantly increased their cancer risk. So I think starting off with a 13-hour night fast. And when I first did this, I’m thinking, “God, how am I gonna get through the night?” So I ran an experiment. I didn’t eat, and I woke up in the morning, and I wasn’t dead. I’m like, “Who knew?” So [chuckle] you just repeat the experiment, right? And you find that it’s just, it’s habit really, and appetite is not really hunger. And then you can extend that if you like to a 16/8 protocol. I’m sure you’ve had people talk about this. This is where you compress your eating window into an eight-hour window and you fast for 16, but it doesn’t have to be 16. It can be those 12, 13 hours, and anything above that is useful.
And then, and I only suggest this for people who are over 40, is doing an extended fast, like a four- or five-day water fast. Because what seems to happen then is when we do that, we get system-wide autophagy. So what happens basically is that when there’s nothing coming in, the body uses this as a cellular sprinkling, and it just goes around in it and it recycles cancer cells, pre-cancer cells, and these senescent cells. These are cells that are supposed to have died but they haven’t really done it properly, and they kind of hang around in a zombie state and they release inflammation. So you get that whole cleanup metabolically and cellularly when you do those extended fasts. And maybe do that once or twice a year, particularly if you’ve got poor health. That can be really good. And what it also does is it kills off our autoimmune cells first. So there can be a real cleanse cellular from doing that.
But I also want to caution people around this. I did intermittent fasting for quite a while and I lost a bit of weight and I was getting DEXA scans, but I noticed that I was losing a lot of muscle. And so for me, this is a trade-off. And because I’m now in my 50s, I do not wanna lose muscle. I’m metabolically healthy. So I’m looking at, okay, so what are my goals here? Well, I know I’m metabolically healthy and I want to be maintaining at least in probably building muscle before I go into my 60s. So I’ve taken a break for a while from intermittent fasting. So I always say to people, What are your goals? If it is about improving your metabolic health, then fasting, go and knock yourself out. But as you get into your 40s, 50s, and certainly into your 60s, you need to be aware that you’re not eating into your muscle mass. So it becomes a bit of a trade-off then.
Brett McKay: Okay. So we’ve talked about some different ways we can incorporate more good stress in our life. Exercise, move more, cold showers, heat exposure, eating better foods, and some of these foods have hormetic properties, doing some intermittent fasting maybe. Let’s talk about rest and recovery. What role does rest and recovery play in adding good stress to your life?
Paul Taylor: So the way I would start to answer that question is by telling people that most of the gains in athletic performance in the last 10 years and certainly the last five years, haven’t been through training methods; it’s been through recovery. So recovery is really, really important to have an athlete being a sustainable peak performer and not dipping into over-training syndrome. And we know that the links between over-training syndrome and corporate burnout are just so deep. The ideology of those conditions is pretty much identical. So recovery is the one variable that we can all use in order to make sure that we stay in optimal health, particularly if we have stressful lives. And a little tip here, a little kind of a preview, is that recovery is not sitting with your feet up watching Netflix, drinking a bottle of wine or half a dozen beers. That is relaxation. So they’re very, very different.
So I think recovery here is absolutely fundamental. And with recovery, I’m talking about things like exercise, like the cold and heat that we talked about, but also breath work and sleep hygiene and taking regular, I call them “brain booster breaks” throughout the day. Do a little burst of exercise, and then to do one to two minutes of breath work, drink a bit of water. That is like taking your brain out and then plugging it into the wall to get a recharge. And then when we talk about macro recovery, that’s about sleep. And having good sleep hygiene practices are critical because when you’re asleep, that is when your brain cleans out the toxins. The brain actually doesn’t have a lymphatic system. It’s got a glymphatic system that starts with G, and that happens at night. That’s when we clean our brain out of toxins. And we know that sleep is so important for biological repair.
Brett McKay: I don’t know if you know anything about this, but something I’ve been thinking about when it comes to sleep is, I wonder if there’s any hormetic benefit for occasionally having a crappy night’s sleep or even like pulling an occasional all nighter. ‘Cause when I think back to caveman days, I don’t think people really slept very well. They didn’t have good sleep hygiene, right? You’re sleeping outside, around a lot of people, there’s crying babies. I don’t imagine them having the best sleep compared to where, you know, us, we have… We’re in a dark 60 degree room with the Eight mattress and all this stuff.
So I wondered if there is a benefit of sometimes having a crappy night’s sleep. Maybe we’re made to handle the stress and little doses can be good, maybe.
Paul Taylor: Yeah. And look, we don’t know. So these are the things that there are… That hormesis works in mysterious ways. But what I would say is there may be a small benefit, a small hormetic benefit to a little bit of a lack of sleep ’cause we know that there are some physiological changes that potentially could be beneficial. But again, it would be very intermittent if there was and having consistently good sleep, just because there are so many fundamental biological processes that depend on having good sleep. So yes, having a bad night’s sleep every now and then, certainly not as bad as some people might think. And I would caution people again, we talked about Apple Watches earlier on, that research shows that say, Brett, have me and you in the study, and it was engineered that we both have five hours of sleep a night. If they tell you that you had good sleep, and they tell me that I had bad sleep, but we both had the same, and then we do test of cognition, you will do much better than I would.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Paul Taylor: So a lot of this can be the placebo effect that when you look at your watch and you go, “Oh, I had bad sleep,” you automatically then your mood decreases, your cognitive performance decreases. So just be overly wary about looking at watches because they are guessing. Basically they’re using heart rate and movement to try and guess when you’re asleep and what stage of sleep that you’re actually in. The best indicator is whether or not you wake up feeling refreshed.
Brett McKay: Right. Or even if you don’t wake up feeling refreshed, you could have had like enough sleep for what your body and mind needed. I’ve had those moments where I slept solid seven hours, but I’m just like feeling groggy and not great. And I think, “Oh my gosh, my workout’s gonna suck today. I’m gonna have a bad… ” But I ended up like crushing it in the gym, work was great. I just… Yeah, I never like that word, the opposite of placebo is nocebo.
Paul Taylor: Yes. Correct.
Brett McKay: So you never nocebo yourself. So if you had a bad night’s sleep, just don’t worry about it.
Paul Taylor: That’s right. Just get… And you know a brilliant little hack, Brett? If you have a bad night’s sleep, take some creatine. Because creatine monohydrate… So think of our energy systems. We got ATP-PC, we got the lactic acid and the aerobic energy system. And creatine plays directly into ATP-PC. It’s phosphocreatine. And the research now shows that creatine is really good for the brain. All of your cells use creatine, but I’ve got research papers which I can flick you and you can put them in the show notes, that shows that if you take creatine after a bad night’s sleep, that minimizes the negative effect on brain function.
Brett McKay: That’s cool. I didn’t know that. So you offer some concrete advice on how to put these practices we’ve talked about today into routine action. We were talking about earlier, a lot of the work of a trainer or a coach, it’s behavior modification. So you have to think a lot about this. And one idea that stuck out to me was this idea of the ritual board. What is a ritual board and how can it help someone create healthy habits?
Paul Taylor: Yeah. So a ritual board, I kind of stumbled across this thing. I created it when at the age of 41, I decided to become a professional boxer, which to my wife’s disgust. But I put my goal on the ritual board to be a professional boxer. And I put my Why. So for me, always connecting a goal to a deeply held value is really important. And my Why was authenticity. But then I’m saying, okay, what’s the process that I need to do? And so I put down a whole heap of things that I needed to do. Again, going to a boxing trainer starting three times a week, going up to six; doing my runs, doing my visualization. And then I had a whole heap of little movement snacks on there. And so this is all about the process. So we have goals but then we have a process. What are the habits that we need to do to get it?
And you write these all down on a board. I just use an A41I. I’ve got one right beside my desk. And you have a weekly target for each of those things. Now the key thing is have some hard ones on there. Go and do a workout. Go and do some healthy shopping. And then when you’re highly motivated, do the hard stuff. But you’ve gotta have lots of easy ones there. So put on, I might do a hundred kettlebell swings a week, but you can do them in blocks of 10. So then when you look at your ritual board, you just go, “Hey, I’m just gonna go do 10 kettlebell swings,” and then you tick it off, you write down, “I’ve done 10.” And that creates a feedback.
So what… This is all based on the work of BJ Fogg, Professor BJ Fogg, brilliant guy in terms of behavior change. And you need a trigger to do the behavior and you need a feedback mechanism. And this ritual board acts as both. ‘Cause when I see it sitting beside my desk, it becomes a trigger to do something. And then when you tick it off, that is giving you feedback that actually you are making forwards motion towards your goal. And the big thing I had my epiphany on that was I realized the more I was interacting with it, the more motivated I was getting. And then I’m like, “Oh, you mop it.” The natural rewards for the brain: Food, water, sex, nurturing, and achievement. And so when you achieve something, and especially when you tick it off, that releases a bit of dopamine, and dopamine is the chemical of motivation. So what we now know is that motivation follows action, not the other way around. And lots of people are waiting for the motivation fairy to come along [chuckle] and give them a big doll up of motivation before they get started. The motivation fairy is the ritual board. That’s what I found.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you have a picture of your ritual board in the book, right? So at at the top you’ve got your goal and then the why of that goal. And then you have these rows of these different exercises that you want to do throughout the week. And then each exercise has a numeric goal for the number of times you want to do that exercise during the week. So on yours you have, you got bag work 12 times a week, chin-ups, you’re gonna do 50 reps during the week; sumo squats, 200. And then you have calms for each day of the week where you can write down how many times you did the exercise that day. And the goal is you wanna do enough each day so you hit your weekly goal. So basically with this ritual board, you’re gamifying your goal.
Paul Taylor: Absolutely. And the key thing, Brett, is you gotta have lots of easy ones on there. So you interact with it and have it somewhere where you will see it regularly. So my original one was on my bathroom mirror. I’ve also had times in the kitchen. Now I have it right beside my desk ’cause I spent a fair bit of time at my desk.
Brett McKay: Did you become a professional boxer?
Paul Taylor: I did. And I’ve now retired undefeated, 1 and 0.
Brett McKay: Do you box at all like just sparring, just [0:52:41.0] ____ stuff?
Paul Taylor: I do a bit of but I’m kind of, I was tempted to get back into it, but just there’s so much research about the negative effects of repetitive trauma to the brain. And it doesn’t have to be massive. So it’s something that I love, but I do very, very intermittently. I’ll do plenty of boxing training, but the sparring I’ve kind of backed right off from because I wanna have a healthy brain when I’m in my 80s and 90s.
Brett McKay: Well, that’s cool. You did that when you were 41. That’s really inspiring that even if you’re in midlife, you can still do something big like that.
Paul Taylor: And I think the part of this, Brett, is that we do need to do hard stuff. And so I generally, every decade will go out of my way and do something that is really, really challenging. I’ve also gone to the Amazon and had a three-week trek deep into the Amazon to visit Matis Indians and went through a rite of passage there. So every 10 years or so, I do a really hard challenge just to make… Just really to counter that development of the soft underbelly that we get with modern life.
Brett McKay: What do you got scheduled for your 50s?
Paul Taylor: So my wife has actually thrown one to me, and it’s made me really uncomfortable. And I know, she said to me, “Why does it always have to be physical?” She said, “Why don’t you go and do a five-day or a 10-day silent retreat?” And for an Irish man, we are talkers. That [chuckle] makes me very uncomfortable. So I think that’s gonna be my next one.
Brett McKay: I love that. Well, Paul, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Paul Taylor: So probably my website paultaylor.biz. I also have a podcast, The Paul Taylor Podcast. And Instagram, I’m @paultaylor.biz on Instagram. And then you can find my book. Most of your listeners I think will be in the States, and just on Amazon, Death by Comfort.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Paul Taylor, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Paul Taylor: Thank you very much for having me. And I would like to say just, I have to say this, Brett. I have to give you a thank you from my wife because I listened a few years ago to you interviewing Gregg Krech from the ToDo Institute…
Brett McKay: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Paul Taylor: Right? And I sent it to her and said, “You need to listen to this guy.” ‘Cause my wife’s a coach. And she listened to it, she loved it, and she went and studied with Gregg for a year on Japanese psychology. And she’s been doing that for a couple of years and practicing with our clients and getting brilliant results. So thank you for that. You’ve had a big impact in our household.
Brett McKay: Well, thanks so much for letting me know. That’s great to hear. Gregg, that’s one of my favorite interviews that we’ve done.
Paul Taylor: Oh, he’s awesome. I’ve had him on my podcast twice. I had him on just two weeks ago. He’s just, he’s brilliant.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Paul, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Paul Taylor: Thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Paul Taylor. He’s the author of the book Death by Comfort. It’s available at amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website paultaylor.biz. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/stronger where you can 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 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 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 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 creating the Jack Reacher character, Lee Child launched a series of books that now boast 100 million copies in print and have been turned into movies and a popular Amazon streaming series.
Today on the show, I talk to Lee about what makes Reacher so compelling and much more. We first discuss how Lee didn’t get started with writing until he was almost forty, and what prompted him to change careers. We then unpack the Reacher character, discussing the ancient, archetypal roots of this vigilante, drifter detective, what he has in common with the knight errant, and the enduring appeal of the lone wolf. We also talk about Lee’s writing process, why midlife is the best time to write, and why, after writing more than two dozen Reacher novels, he’s chosen to hand off the series to his brother and fellow writer, Andrew.
Resources Related to the Podcast The latest Reacher novel: In Too Deep * The Reacher* streaming series * Jack Reacher website
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. In creating the Jack Reacher character, Lee Child launched a series of books that now boast 100 million copies in print and have been turned to movies and a popular Amazon streaming series. Today in the show, I talk to Lee about what makes Reacher so compelling and much more. We first discuss why Lee didn’t get started with writing til he’s almost 40 and what prompted him to change careers. We then unpack the Reacher character, discuss the ancient archetypal roots of this vigilante-drifter detective, what he has in common with the knight errant, and the enduring appeal of the lone wolf. We also talk about Lee’s writing process, why mid-life’s the best time to write, and Why, after writing more than two dozen Reacher novels, he’s chosen to hand off the series to his brother and fellow writer, Andrew. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/reacher.
Alright, Lee Child, welcome to the show.
Lee Child: Thank you. Great to be here.
Brett McKay: So you are an international best-selling author, who has created one of the great detective characters in English literature, Jack Reacher. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are fans of your work. They’ve read the books. They’ve maybe even watched these series on Amazon. And I know my dad, Tom McKay, a huge fan of your work. And I hope today in this conversation, we can maybe get to the bottom of why you think Reacher has such a broad appeal. But before we do, before we get to the Reacher character, let’s talk about your background. I’m sure a lot of people don’t realize you didn’t start your writing career until midlife. In fact, a job layoff started your writing career. So how did a layoff from a television network lead you to start writing?
Lee Child: It was really a desperation move in as much as I’d had this intense almost 20 years in TV in a very specialized role in the British Commercial Network, the rival to the BBC. It was a 14-station network, but coordinated and worked together. My job was like an air traffic controller, essentially, to keep the whole broadcast going. There were five of us. We rotated through 24/7 duties. And then it was a complicated job. And back in the day, we had a good union, and we made decent money. And then in the 1990s, we had that thing where shareholder value was suddenly just a burden cost, cutting supporting jobs and getting cheaper people. So all of us, old, expensive veterans, were laid off. I was 39, very nearly 40 years old. And it seemed to me to try and stay in TV would be a very negative experience, because it was clearly on a downward spiral, the fund was gone, the luxury of doing your job properly was gone, and so it was the question of what else? And the problem was, there was nothing else that I was qualified for. I was hyper-qualified for the thing I just got thrown out of and really nothing else.
So I panicked a little bit, and then, I said, “No. Wait a minute. Just take one step back. And what is it fundamentally that you’ve been doing?” And fundamentally, what I’d been doing, obviously, was entertaining an audience, but beyond that, knowing what the audience wanted, having some kind of sense of how they were gonna react. So it seemed to me, I’ll just stay in something that has an audience. And then quite independently of all of that, I had been a reader all my life, just fantastically, enthusiastic reader, just reading all the time, loving it, but strangely, never really thinking, “Where do these books come from?” I’d never really inquired about that. To me, they just existed, sitting there to be consumed.
And I put two and two together. I thought, “Well, look, you love books. You’ve read literally tens of thousands. Why don’t you try writing one? That is, fundamentally, the same proposition. I think modern TV movies, modern entertainment, we all swim in the same river. A book is not that different from a TV show.” So I thought, “I’ll try that.” And I was really wanting to be my own boss. After that very negative corporate experience, I wanted to be my own boss. And writing is something that is entirely down to you.
It’s difficult in TV. If you have a big hit in TV, it’s not really to your credit because there were 100 other people working on it. If it’s a total failure, it’s not really your fault, because there were 100 other people working on it. Whereas writing, yeah, of course, there are editors, there are publicists, there are booksellers, and so on, but fundamentally, this is one-on-one, the author to the reader. It’s a one-on-one communication. It is totally down to you. If it fails, yes, it is totally your fault. If it succeeds, yes, you can take the credit for it. So I thought, “Let’s give it a try. See what happens.” And here we are all these years later.
Brett McKay: You said you read a lot. Was there a genre that you liked to read, or did you just read whatever?
Lee Child: I’d started out… And in principle, I read whatever. Anything at all, that… Just looking around my room here, I’ve got a big stack of books to be read. I got one on the psychology of music. There’s one about fentanyl. There’s… Anything and everything, I’ll read. But as a reader, yeah, you do get in touch with what turns you on personally. And I migrated to the crime and thriller genre. That was the thing that I most enjoyed reading.
Brett McKay: Was there a particular author you enjoyed?
Lee Child: Oh, there were a lot. I’m not one of these pretentious guys who says that, “When I was 7 years old, I was reading Tolstoy or something.” I was reading all the usual kids stuff, and then all the usual thrillers. Your dad has, maybe, got them on the bookshelf. And so I would say there was an English kids author called Enid Blyton. Like everybody, I started out with that and then I migrated… My first real love was a Scottish thriller writer called Alistair MacLean, and that cemented my feel. Yeah, I wanna write adventure stories, I wanna write thrillers, crime stories, things of that nature.
Brett McKay: How did your experience in visual story-telling shape your writing style? Because of the things I love about your writing style is that it’s Spartan. It’s sparse. But it’s really punchy, and it just… It flows.
Lee Child: Yeah, that’s the thing that I felt. There is very little that you can take from TV to writing, because they are fundamentally very different. In as much as TV, the viewer just sits there and it comes at them. It washes over them. With writing, it’s gotta be interrogated by the reader. The book is passive. The book is doing nothing. It’s just sitting there with strange black marks on white paper, and it is the reader’s brain that creates the story inside the reader’s head. So there’s not that much you can transfer directly, but what you do transfer is a very specific understanding. This is not about you. This is about the audience. It doesn’t matter if you’re a cool guy. It doesn’t matter if you smoke French cigarettes and wear a black leather jacket. It’s not about you. “Is the audience having a good time?” That is the only question. And that part, I transferred like stock and barrel. That is really important.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about the Jack Reacher, ’cause he’s got a lot of fans. And it’s a very wide-ranging fan base. You’ve got, men in their ’70s, like my dad, and then there’s also women who are big fans of Jack Reacher. How did you come up with the Jack Reacher character?
Lee Child: Well, it was a kinda two-stage thing. Vaguely, in principle, what I wanted to do was be a success, because I was out of work and I was broke. So this was not a kinda hobby, this was not a kinda like to do it sort of thing, it had to work. So part of it was about a real consciousness that this had to be popular, but completely contradictory to that was what I’d learned in the entertainment business up to that point, which is that you cannot plan anything like that. It is not possible to plan a major popular success, because if you do, you just end up with a limp car body thing that is basically a shopping list of everything that you think you should do.
So I knew enough to know that it was gonna be kind of fortuitous or accidental. So I knew I had to metaphorically close my eyes and just write and just see what came out. And so Reacher was something that just came out. And I didn’t wanna think about it very much. I didn’t wanna interrogate it and think, “Okay, why is this work? And how can I improve it for Book two? How can I improve it for Book three?” I wanted to not burst the bubble. I didn’t wanna look at it that closely, but then much later when I felt safe and secure about it, I could look back. And what makes Reacher popular, I think, is that he represents… Clearly represents something that has always been with us as humans.
You were kind enough to say I invented this character. Well, did I? I think, actually, Reacher is a character that has always existed, going back through the history of storytelling, possibly even thousands of years, the idea of the mysterious stranger who shows up and solves your problem and then rides off into the sunset. That character has been around really forever. All the way back through all our recorded narrative, there’s always have been a character like that. And so I think Reacher is just the modern iteration of that. And you gotta ask yourself, “Why has this character been invented over and over again?” And the only answer to that is because people crave such a person.
They want such a person. We’ve all got problems. Hopefully, they’re only trivial. Some people have real serious problems. Wouldn’t it be great if one night there’s a tap at the door and there’s a strong, silent guy there who fixes your problem, chips his cap and moves on? We crave that. We fantasize about it. And so that’s why people love reading about it. They either wanna know that character, or they wanna be that character.
Brett McKay: Yeah. What’s interesting is that there’s this idea out there that the kind of hero people want is someone who’s broken. They want a vulnerable hero. Reacher is the opposite of that, but he’s still really compelling. Why do you think that is?
Lee Child: Yeah, that is such a great question, because people want an interesting character, people want a memorable character, and there are ways to achieve that. And certainly, yeah, if you go back to, let’s say, Raymond Chandler writing about Philip Marlowe, there is an alienated man, a lonely man, somewhat dysfunctional, we might say by, modern standards, and that was a great paradigm. And then many, many years later, let’s say, there’s James Lee Burke, writes Dave Robicheaux, who was a copper, recovering alcoholic, absolutely tormented by his demons.
That was great. But that was the first time we’d seen that particular trope. And the problem with writing is that authors tend to copy what’s already been done. And in order to stand out, they inflate it. They make it worse. So instead of just an alcoholic cop fighting his demons, we’ve got a divorced alcoholic cop, and then a divorced alcoholic cop, who’s teenage daughter hates him, and then the divorce alcoholic copper’s teenage daughter hates him, accidentally shoots at a fleeing shadow in the dark, and it turns out to be a 12-year-old boy so that life is a tragedy now, and they go and live in the woods by themselves, with a metaphorical, or sometimes literal bullet lodge next to their heart, and the relentless inflation makes that character miserable.
And my view was, people don’t really wanna read about miserable characters. They wanna read about interesting characters. So how do you make somebody interesting without giving them all these problems? And I think what happens with Reacher is that he is profoundly eccentric in all of his lifestyle choices, but the thing is, he does not know that. He thinks he’s perfectly normal. He has none of that navel-gazing going on. He is who he is, and it is the reader who makes up their mind about what he’s like. And that is super important, that an author cannot force the reader to come to a certain conclusion. You cannot make anybody like your character. All you can do is present them in an authentic way and hope for the best. And the more that you try to make a reader like your character, the more embarrassing it gets.
Brett McKay: So talking about those things that make Reacher interesting. First off, he’s larger than life, literally. He’s 6’4″, 250 pounds, just a monster. And what I love about him too, is sometimes there’s that idea like, “Oh, the hero is not sure about his strength of whether he can overcome these bad guys.” Now, Reacher can always take care of the problem. And he doesn’t have a cell phone, and he thinks that’s just normal, to not have a cell phone. And his clothes. He just buys cheap clothes at Academy and jeans and t-shirts, and then doesn’t really carry a wardrobe with him.
Lee Child: Yeah. All of that stuff. Part of that was a reaction against what else was being done. It fit very neatly for me, because like I say, I needed this to be a success, and so why go head-to-head with what other people are doing already so well? And if you looked at every other series, really ever, they’re fundamentally a soap opera, and I say that with the greatest respect. I’m not being disparaging about soap opera at all. It’s an incredibly difficult genre to do. It is incredibly powerful in terms of the narrative engine. Having worked in TV, we all depend on soap operas. They’re fantastic.
But I didn’t want to write one in competition with everybody else who was doing it so well. Everybody else, the hero has got superiors, has got colleagues, juniors, neighbors, they have a house, they have maybe a favorite bar, they have a dog or whatever. I didn’t wanna do that. I thought, “Let’s be different.” So it was a really epic avoidance for me that the idea of the knight errant, the mysterious stranger. He doesn’t have any of that stuff. That’s the whole point of that character. He’s completely mysterious and unexplained. So I felt I could do a different lane, or a different channel, that nobody else is doing.
And so that explained it to a large extent. I just wanted Reacher to be distinctive. And the rest of it was based on logical thoughts of my own. “If I was living like that, what would I do about clothes? Would I wanna carry a backpack around with me all the time, or would I just buy some old stuff at Goodwill every few days and junk the previous stuff and just move through life?” That seemed logical to me. And clearly, it is logical. That’s the way you gotta do it.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned Reacher’s kind of like the knight errant. Did the stories of the knight, like the Arthurian tales, did that… Was that in there? It sounds like you weren’t consciously pulling on that. It was there in your subconscious, ’cause you read these stories as a boy and as a young man, and they just came out in Reacher. Knights had this idea of nobleness. How do you think Reacher has a sense of nobleness?
Lee Child: That’s another good question. Yeah, the idea of the knight errant is that he must have been a knight in the first place. The classic Arthurian tales, he is… Sir. Lancelot, for instance, banished from the court for some indiscretion and sentenced to wander the land, doing good deeds. And that myth replicates everywhere. The Ronin myth in Japan. A samurai who’s been disowned by his master and sentenced to wander the land. It’s a perpetual part of human storytelling. So that’s why it seemed to work well enough that he can be… He needs to be completely unattached. He happens to other people.
And you can trace it right back. A lot of people in America say, “This is really a Western.” It’s like Shane or any Zane Grey story, where you’ve typically got a very isolated homestead and all the men are away on a cattle drive and there’s something going really bad. And at the very last minute, the mysterious rider comes in off the range, and in exchange for a woman-cooked meal, he will unsheathe his rifle, take care of the problems, and then he moves on. But that was not invented by Zane Grey or the Westerns, that is an import from medieval Europe, where the Black Forest was this immense uncharted waste, and a band of pilgrims would be in terrible trouble, and then a mysterious knight rides out of the trees and solves the problem.
This same story has reoccurred over and over again. So it’s really about the community in trouble. Reacher happens to them. It’s not that the community happens to Reacher.
Brett McKay: So Reacher is a lone wolf. And the idea of the lone wolf often gets criticized. We’ve had plenty of podcast episodes where the guests have criticized it. And I understand the criticism. Relationships have been shown to be central to mental and physical health. But I still find the idea of the lone wolf viscerally appealing. And I imagine a lot of other people do. What do you think the appeal is?
Lee Child: Well, I think first of all, Reacher acknowledges that central conundrum there. Yeah, we do. We do crave relationships. We need them for the reasons that you just mentioned. And Reacher does too. The thing about Reacher, he’s constantly balanced between really liking his solitude and also really being worried that he’s lonely. So there’s an acknowledgement of that. But I think the true appeal for Reacher is that people can imagine being him. And so many people, men and women alike, are bogged down with responsibilities and chores and duties. And their week is just an endless slog of working their job, looking after the home, paying the bills, paying the mortgage. All of these things that tie them down. And as a fantasy, they love to, for a day or two while they’re reading a book, they love to live in Reacher’s head. None of those responsibilities, none of those burdens.
If you’re not having a good time, you just move on. You’ll be somewhere else tomorrow. And I think that is a huge fantasy appeal for a lot of people.
Brett McKay: And it sounds like too, you’ve been playing out this tension between connection and autonomy. Like you mentioned earlier, the reason why you went into writing was you wanted to be your own boss. You kind of wanted to be a lone wolf.
Lee Child: I did, and I put a line in the first book. Reacher says it, but it’s really me saying it. He says, I tried it their way, now I’m gonna try it my way.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so I do think there’s something that we shouldn’t just dismiss the lone wolf completely. I think the fact that it holds such an appeal tells us something. Like we shouldn’t literally be lone wolves, but we can adopt some of that ethos, keep part of ourselves that’s comfortable with solitude and self-sufficiency. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Another idea that gets criticized quite a bit is this idea of revenge. And it seems like a lot of Reacher’s missions are ones of revenge. People say we should rise above the need for revenge and that just poisons you. But do you think revenge can be something healthy? What do you think Reacher can teach us about that?
Lee Child: Yeah, it’s a great issue because revenge is fundamentally negative even though it feels great at the time. But the thing about Reacher is he’s not doing it for himself. It’s not a question of somebody has hurt him or insulted him and he’s gonna get revenge on them for that. It’s always a third-party issue. And that takes us back to the Night Heron. It takes us to a kind of noblesse oblige that if you can do something for somebody, you really ought to. From he who has to he who needs. And I think that takes it out of the revenge track just enough to make it super satisfying.
And then, of course, the whole business of fiction is very mysterious in that sense because generally speaking, book readers are the more civilized amongst us, the more thoughtful, the more informed. And of course they understand that you can’t have a guy who just walks into town and starts murdering people like Reacher does. I saw a fantastic online comment once that says the Jack Reacher series, the only series where the detective commits more crimes than he solves. And people understand that’s completely unacceptable. That is not how we should live.
These are not textbooks for how to live. But it is some corner in the back of their brain, the reader finds it so satisfying just to see a bad guy get a punch in the face as opposed to a legal arrest and a trial with rights and with lawyers and with procedure and all that stuff. They know they need that in real life. They want that in real life, of course they do. But it is so satisfying, so consoling just to see brutal justice meted out in the moment. So people lap it up. Like I’m sure your dad, who enjoys the books, loves those scenes, but there’s no way he thinks that’s how society should run. It’s like an escape valve.
Brett McKay: Yeah, no, my dad was in law enforcement. That was his career.
Lee Child: There you go.
Brett McKay: He was a federal game warden. So yeah, he knew the procedures. He respected the rule of law. But I think, yeah, I think he does. It’s fantasy.
Lee Child: It is fantasy, but then a lot of crime fiction is fantasy because the Reacher universe, people might say, it’s fundamentally unrealistic. But then so is all crime fiction, to be honest, because what happens even in a really grounded, so-called realistic type of crime fiction book, you will have a trace of DNA. There’s a droplet of blood. So they rush it to the lab and three hours later they get, yes, this guy. That doesn’t happen. It’s three or four months, possibly even longer if the lab is all backed up. In real life, things take forever. And then probably there’ll be some kind of miserable, unsatisfying outcome to it. There’s a technicality. The guy gets off. People are frustrated by that. And so fiction is to give people what they don’t get in real life. And so that instant visceral type of satisfaction, seeing a bad guy get his just desserts is something that we secretly love, but we’re civilized enough to know that it can’t be real.
Brett McKay: How would you describe Reacher’s moral code? ‘Cause he… Like you said, he has this idea of revenge, but it’s for a third party. But why does he get involved in stuff that doesn’t really have to?
Lee Child: Because he gets annoyed. There are certain things that annoy him. And there’s a line in one of the other books where there’s a flashback to when he’s in the army and one of his friends is asking him, why did you choose the military police? Reacher’s a West Point graduate. He could have done pretty much whatever he wanted. His friend says, why didn’t you go to special forces? Why didn’t you go to the armored divisions? And Reacher says something anodyne like, oh, I wanna take care of the little guy. And his friend says, really, you care about the little guy? And Reacher says, with total honesty, Reacher says, no, I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug guys who think they can get away with something. And so it’s not a pure motivation on Reacher’s part.
His moral code is firm, it’s solid. He basically has a heart of gold. But he’s not just a do-gooder. He is annoyed at certain injustices and he will stop at nothing. Not to put him right, because he knows he can’t put everything right, but just to punish one big smug guy who thinks he’s getting away with something, that’s what Reacher lives for.
Brett McKay: And I’m sure that’s another reason why people find the character appealing. ‘Cause I’m sure we, all of us have big smug guys in our lives that we’d love to bring down a notch.
Lee Child: I’m sure we’ve all got like 10. That’s what I say at a book event. I say, I look out at the crowd who are all book people and I say, you’re lovely, civilized people, but I guarantee every one of you has got a list of 10 people you would cheerfully shoot in the head. And everybody agrees, they can’t deny that.
Brett McKay: You’re British, but you’ve made Reacher an American and set most of his books in the United States. Is there something about America and the American character that allows you to do different things with Reacher that you couldn’t do if he was British?
Lee Child: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s not so much character, although that is distinctive, but it’s the geography. The idea of a nation that inhabits a giant continent, some of which is very densely populated and some of which is virtually uninhabited. And so it is plausible to have secret things going on in a remote town where, you know what it’s like out West where it could be 50 miles or 100 miles before the nearest police department. It is absolutely plausible that you can have secret locations. Whereas in Britain, the dynamic is totally different. It’s crime fiction there tends to be very internal, very psychological, because there is not the physical space or the physical separation between people. The landscape is not the same. Like my second book, Reacher intervenes in a kidnap and gets thrown in a van with the kidnapped victim and they’re driven 2000 miles to a remote Rocky Mountain hideout, which is obviously possible in the US.
But if I had been kidnapped where I lived in England and driven 2000 miles, I’d be in the Sahara desert by that point. So it’s about the scope, the big skies, the big landscapes, the possibility that a wandering man can come across an isolated situation where something bad is happening. That is plausible in America. It’s really not plausible anywhere else.
Brett McKay: You said earlier that an author can’t force people to like a character. Like they have to see what he’s like and then make up their own minds. Do you like Reacher as a person, as a character?
Lee Child: That’s a great question too, because I think the way fiction works with a character-based series is the author needs to like the character less than the reader is gonna like him. The author has got to maintain that critical stance, that slight detachment, so that the character will always appear authentic, warts and all, the bad parts as well as the good parts, an honest portrayal. And if you start to like your character too much, then that falls apart and it becomes, you protect the character. You only show the good parts. It all becomes very idealized and very sugary. And so I worked very hard to like Reacher less than you’re gonna like him. And that’s what keeps him vivid, I think.
Brett McKay: So you’ve written, like you’re about to come out with the latest Reacher novel. There’s like 28 you’re coming up on?
Lee Child: Yeah, is it 28 or is it 29? I’ve lost track. It’s somewhere up there, yeah.
Brett McKay: You’ve written a lot. I’m curious, what’s your writing process like?
Lee Child: It is literally chaotic, other than I always start on the same day, which is the 1st of September. And that was a practical decision because if you’re gonna publish a book a year, you’ve got to write a book a year. And so you’ve got to have some shape and structure to your year. So I would always start on the anniversary of when I started the first book. It seemed not only logical, but also somewhat sentimental. So I would always start on the same day, but with really no firm idea. I would often have a feeling about the temperature or the landscape. Is it a cold, hard book? Is it a hot, sweaty book? I would have that kind of basic idea, but other than that, nothing at all. And so it was a question of just, you sit down on the 1st of September, you write the opening paragraph, you sit back and you think, okay, that’s pretty good. Now what about the 2nd paragraph? And then it carries on like that through the whole book, just inventing it as I go along, which made it, it feels slow day to day.
My word production per day is often less than other writers, but I only do it once. They’ve planned this beforehand. They’ve written an outline. They’ve at least jotted notes on index cards so that they can shuffle around. I don’t do any of that. I just make it up on the spot. So all the thought and all the research is distributed daily rather than being done in a chunk in advance. So overall, I think it’s as efficient as any other system. And for me, it brings total spontaneity. What I want is always based on how I feel as a reader. And what I want is the reader to have that unique sensation that I think we’ve all had from time to time where you’re into a really great book and you’re loving it. And then for some reason, dinner is ready or a visitor comes, you’ve got to stop and you’ve got to put the book down.
And that gives you a kind of flavor of annoyance that you get nowhere else. And so I wanted to feel that as a writer. And the only way you can do that is by not having a plan. I would sit down just desperate to know what was gonna happen. Same as if I was reading it. And I think that really helps, certainly helps my process. I think it helps the quality of the book. And the first time I knew this was gonna work for me was in the first book, I’d written some of it and I was looking forward to writing the scene that I had in mind next. I was gonna do that in the morning. But my wife said, no, we’ve got to go to the store and do this and that. And I remember feeling really annoyed that I couldn’t sit and write that scene in exactly the same way as I would have felt annoyed if I couldn’t sit and read that scene. I thought, yeah, this could work.
Brett McKay: Yeah, we had Beau L’Amour on the podcast a while back ago. He’s the son of Louis L’Amour, famous Western writer. And he said his dad had a similar writing process. It was all just from his subconscious. He just started writing and he just wanted to see where the story went. And it sounds like you have a similar process.
Lee Child: Yeah, very similar. And that kind of relates back to something you said at the very beginning about me starting in midlife. I was 39, almost 40 when I first started that book. And a lot of writers do that. Writing, a successful writing career is almost always a second phase career because it is good to wait till you’re older. Writing is wonderful from that point of view. It’s not only something that you can do when you get older. It’s something that you should do when you get older because by the time you’re 40, you’ve got almost 40 years of reading. You’ve got almost 40 years of experience of meeting people. Your first career, whatever it was, has had all kinds of ins and outs and problems and highs and lows that teaches you something so that by the time you are in the middle of your life, you’re ready. You’ve got gas in the tank. You’ve got ideas stored up.
You’re still young enough to have the energy and stamina to deal with it, but you’ve got something in your head. I think it’s really difficult to write when you’re young. I get asked to go talk to school students or college students and it’s a miserable experience. What can you say to them? All you can really say honestly is don’t do it now. Read for the next 20 years and then do it.
Brett McKay: You said you do some research, but it’s like on the spot. Like you don’t research and then write. When you do research, what’s your research process like?
Lee Child: Well, it’s for small details that need to be right. Like the number of bullets in a gun or, the barrel length of a gun or this or that or what car you could use or the name of a helicopter. And my process is so linear. I remember one book where the first sentence was, the man was named Calvin Franz and the helicopter was a… And I had to stop there. After just a few words of the book, I couldn’t just leave it and go back to it later. I have to know in a linear fashion. So I had to actually go out to the store and buy a book about helicopters and select one and put the correct model number in that sentence. So yeah, research for me is small things like that, but the larger issues, I don’t think you can research, not when you’re on a book a year schedule, because if you think, okay, I’m gonna do this research for this year’s book, that research is gonna be too fresh, not digested.
It needs to percolate. You need to know which parts of it are important and which parts are not. And so for the larger issues, I always depend on what I already know, what I read years ago sometimes, what I experienced two years ago. The big things are always already settled and it’s only the minor details that need checking. And that is, I mean, I’m the perfect example of somebody who has bridged the analog and the digital era. I would do it with gun catalogs, or as I say, a helicopter book or something of that nature. Now, of course, and I was a pretty late adopter, but now it’s mostly internet-based.
Brett McKay: Do you do any revisions on your work?
Lee Child: Sort of, yeah, I mean I do, I write all day and then the beginning of the next day I check what I wrote the previous day and I will smooth it out if necessary, I’ll add a comma, I’ll change a word and then I’ll plow on forward and repeat the same process the following morning. So it’s a constant kind of churning aspect so that every single bit of it has been re-read and smoothed and corrected at least once in a forward-moving momentum. But then when I reach the end, that is the end. It is a strange thing in my head, I mean I’m completely normal, I’m a completely rational person, but while I’m writing the book it’s as if this is really happening for real and I never change anything because that would seem to me dishonest. The editor will say to me, wouldn’t it be better if this happened after that? And I’ll say probably, but it didn’t. It’s real at the time I’m writing it and so to massage it later seems to be cheating to me.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so it sounds like you’re doing like some grammatical stuff, but you’re not making major edits. Once you’re done with the book, you’re done with it. That is not like F. Scott Fitzgerald who was massaging The Great Gatsby, even after it got published, he was still editing the thing.
Lee Child: Sure, and you look at writers and you figure out why they’re doing that. And really, the real reason for endless editing and worrying about it is a kind of fear of letting it out into the world, fear of people’s reactions to it. And so you find ways to procrastinate and delay that. You think you’re polishing it, but what you’re actually doing is you’re showing that you are afraid of the reaction to it. And I can understand that completely. It is a huge thing. A book is so personal. It is your mind just spilled out onto that paper. It is very much who you are that specific year that you wrote it. It’s like a brutal psychological X-ray and you’re gonna show that to the world. It is a little intimidating, but you’ve just got to, as soon as I’m done, I kind of sense when the book is finished. I remember one book sitting there thinking, this is nearly done, another chapter will do it.
And then I suddenly realized, no, the book is done right now. Right where you are is the end of the book. And so I sent it off without giving it another thought because you can end up paralyzing yourself if you go over and over it.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You got to be like Reacher, no navel gazing, just move on.
Lee Child: Exactly. Yeah. Just do it once and do it right. That is Reacher’s motto.
Brett McKay: So you are transitioning Jack Reacher to your brother, Andrew, the transition of a beloved character to a new author is rare in literature. Why did you think the time was right to hand off Reacher?
Lee Child: Well, because going back to my life as a reader, I would get into those series, starting as a kid, continuing as a young person. And I just loved that feeling of you thoroughly enjoyed a book and you knew there were 10 more or 20 more. That was such a gift. It was such a valuable feeling. And I would rush to the library and I would start devouring the series one after the other. And too many series got sagged after a while. You could sense the author getting lazy or running out of energy or running out of gas and beginning to phone it in. It happened time after time. And as a young naive reader, I felt so betrayed by that. Something that I had loved before was now no good. And I promised myself I would never do that. If I ever felt I was running out of gas or running out of energy, I would stop before I found it in. Because I love my readers and I don’t want to give them a substandard product. Now I was probably a little hyper vigilant about it, but it meant a lot to me.
Also what meant a lot to me was as a young person, as a teenager, as a young adult, I hated the way that old geezers just hung on forever. They would not get off the stage. They would not leave room for anybody else. And I thought on a bound to stick to those two feelings, never phone it in and get off the stage, let somebody new take over. And so I felt obliged in a way, morally obliged to stick to those promises I’d made to myself. So I did feel myself running out of energy, running out of gas. I’d been doing it for a quarter century and I felt it was time to bow out. And the idea of my brother taking it over did not occur to me at first. I thought I’ve just got to stop, think of a satisfying final plot and just stop it right there. But I felt people would be so upset to miss Reacher. They’d grown to love him. They’d been so nice about him.
I felt it would be gratuitously cruel just to take it away. And so I started developing these fantasies about, wouldn’t it be great, go down to the crossroads at midnight and sell my soul to the devil in exchange for a potion that would make me 15 years younger, full of the old energy, the old stamina that I used to have. And of course, that’s a fantasy. There are no magic potions like that. But then I suddenly realized, wait a minute, you idiot, you know yourself 15 years younger with all the energy and the stamina, which is my younger brother, who is a lot younger than me, almost 15 years younger. And he was a writer. So I said, would you like to continue it? And to be honest, I thought he’d say no, because he’s a proud, stubborn boy who had his own thing going. I thought he’d want to continue with his own thing. But he’s been involved with Reacher from the beginning.
Lee Child: He was the first person that ever read Reacher, because he was the only person I knew who could give me an informed opinion. He’s a thriller reader, very much in the same genre as me. So I showed him the very first manuscript in pencil and basically asked him, is this any good? Should I continue? And he happily said, yeah. So he’s known the series since day zero, so that there was no learning curve for him. He just stepped right in.
Brett McKay: What do you think is in store for Reacher in the future now that your brother Andrew is taking the baton?
Lee Child: Well, I mean, Andrew’s slightly more of a planner than I am, but I’ve encouraged him just to busk it, just see what happens, just start each book, see what happens. And so neither he nor I have any idea what’s going to happen to Reacher. I’m sure every year he will get into some scrape and he’ll sort it out. And hopefully it’ll last for a good long time.
Brett McKay: And so this next book that’s coming out, In Too Deep, did you both collaborate on it?
Lee Child: No, this is the first one that is entirely his. We collaborated on the last four as a sort of transition period. And now he’s striking out on his own with In Too Deep. And so I was, funnily enough, it was like that feeling a quarter century ago when he read my manuscript. I read his manuscript with the same kind of trepidatious feeling. What was I going to think of it? And it’s actually a great book. It’s a great Reacher book. He’s really nailed it. He’s got exactly the right start to it. The development is just improvised and random, just like I would have done it. And it reads really well. So I’m not only proud of him, but also very happy that the series is in good hands.
Brett McKay: What was that like reading a book that’s based on a character that you created, but you’re going into it like the readers that have been reading your book for the past quarter of a century?
Lee Child: Yeah, I’m going into it like the consumer. It’s like me watching the movie or me watching the TV series. This is something somebody else has done with my character. But fundamentally, it’s a very satisfying feeling because people find it as if it’s difficult. They say, how is it giving your character away? And my answer to that is, that’s the whole point of writing fiction. You’re desperate to give your character away, first and foremost, to the reader. The reader owns the character. Soon as a reader reads the book and enjoys it, they own the story. They own the character. The whole point of writing is to let the ownership of the character migrate outward, to belong to other people. So it wasn’t difficult to give it to the movies or give it to TV or to give it to Andrew. It kind of feels perfect. This is what it’s all about.
Brett McKay: Well, Lee Child, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Lee Child: Really, my pleasure, Brett. It’s great to be with you.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Lee Child. He’s the author of the Jack Reacher series. You can find more information about this series at jackreacher.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/reacher, 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 think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give viewing up a podcast for 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 be something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to AOM Podcasts to put what you’ve heard into action.
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Money can’t buy happiness. It sounds good as a bumper sticker platitude.
But the truth is, money can buy happiness. At least sometimes. In certain circumstances. If we view it and use it in the right ways.
Here to unpack the conditions under which money can buy happiness and facilitate our flourishing is Dr. Daniel Crosby, a psychologist and behavioral finance expert and the author of The Soul of Wealth: 50 Reflections on Money and Meaning. Today on the show, Daniel shares the minimum income level at which money buys happiness, at least in the sense of avoiding pain. We talk about how to purchase material things in a way that increases happiness, while avoiding materialism, and the value of using your money to buy health and freedom. And we discuss the importance of finding an overarching why that guides the way you allocate your money and doing a values audit to see if your purpose and spending habits are aligned.
Resources Related to the Podcast Daniel’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast: + Episode #222: The Laws of Wealth + Episode #511: Mastering the Psychology of Investing * AoM Podcast #659: Do You Want to Be Rich or Wealthy? (And Why the Difference Matters) * AoM Podcast #321: How to Think About Money * “Experiences Won’t Make You Happier Than Possessions” * Die with Zero* by Bill Perkins
Connect With Daniel Crosby* Daniel on X * Daniel’s podcast, Standard Deviations * Daniel on LinkedIn
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Money can’t buy happiness. It sounds good as a bumper sticker platitude, but the truth is money can buy happiness, at least sometimes, in certain circumstances, if we view it and use it in the right ways. Here to unpack the conditions under which money can buy happiness and facilitate our flourishing is Dr. Daniel Crosby, a psychologist and behavioral finance expert and the author of The Soul of Wealth, 50 Reflections on Money and Meaning. Today in the show, Daniel shares the minimum income level at which money buys happiness, at least in the sense of avoiding pain. We talk about how to purchase material things in a way that increases happiness while avoiding materialism and the value of using your money to buy health and freedom. And we discuss the importance of finding an overarching why that guides the way you allocate your money and doing a values audit to see if your purpose and spending habits are aligned. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/soulofwealth. All right, Daniel Crosby, welcome back to the show.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Man, thanks for having me back.
Brett McKay: So you are a behavioral financial expert who’s written books about how to leverage our psychology so we can invest better. We’ve had you on the podcast to discuss those books. But your latest book, you get a bit more philosophical with your approach to money. You’re trying to figure out how our relationship with money fits into the larger picture of the meaning of life. I’m curious, what caused this shift in focus?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah, it’s a great question. There’s really a micro and a macro response to this. At the micro personal level, I’m just getting old. I’m middle-aged now. I’m thinking about mortality. I’m thinking about legacy. And I think my first couple of books, I’m proud of them. I stand by everything I wrote there, but they were written in a very calculated, specific way. They were to get me where I needed to go in my career and to make me a subject matter expert in places where I wanted to be viewed as an expert. And mission accomplished, it did that. But now as I age, I’m sort of surrounded by people who have achieved some level of professional success, and I see that their personal lives aren’t always as successful as their professional lives.
And so yeah, a big piece of it is just getting older, considering my own legacy, my own contributions to the world, and seeing myself and my peers achieve some financial and professional success, but not always have the wellness to go along with it, the soul to go along with it. And then at the macro level, I’m just, this is the thing I think about more than anything. I’m a big Viktor Frankl devotee, and he has this great quote about ever more people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for. And I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a better descriptor of the world we find ourselves in. When the US was founded, 85% of the world was living in poverty, what would today be $2 a day adjusted for inflation. And today that number is about 8.5%, which I don’t wanna be insensitive, is still millions and millions of people too high. But the progress that we have made, there has never been a time of greater worldwide abundance than the time we find ourselves in today. Forever, war and disease and famine and all these things have made human life very hard. And while all those things still exist at some level, and we should remain vigilant in fighting against them, we have never been healthier, more peaceful, more prosperous.
And yet when you look in the US, I’m Gen X, Gen X and younger, every single one of those age cohorts describes themselves as very lonely and isolated and living sort of a meaningless life. And so we’ve got this weird problem where we have the means to live, but no meaning to live for. And I wanted to take that on directly.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that is interesting. It seems like it’s a paradox ’cause that prosperity comes with its own set of curses if you’re not careful.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Certainly.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So what do you do in this book, The Soul of Wealth? You basically, it’s like a compilation of 50 different thoughts, reflections, essays about money and meaning. And in one of them, you talk about how money is a great tool that can fix a lot of problems in life, except for a few. First, let’s talk about the problems that money’s really good at solving. What are those problems that money that, hey, you can throw money at this and it can help you improve your life?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. One of the greatest things about modern life that I don’t know is fully appreciated is just how much free time we have. And I know that we conceptualize of our lives as being full to the brim. And I would say the same thing, work and kids and all this stuff. But we have dramatically more leisure time than any previous generation. Now, what we do with that is a different conversation. All the research shows that all that excess free time has basically been directed at TV. But we have more leisure and more free time than we ever have in human history. And that’s a wonderful thing. Money’s also great at buying you wellness, right. It can buy you nutritious food. It can buy you good health care. It can get you a gym membership or a personal trainer. And all of that stuff has a material positive impact on your life. It can buy you self-improvement in education. College grads make over a million bucks more than people who graduate from high school. And they also enjoy lower rates of divorce and heart disease and sadness. So there’s a lot that money can do to help human flourishing that way.
The final thing that I’ll talk about, and one of the things that sort of buys us a great deal of joy, is novelty. Another thing that we’re uniquely positioned to do is just have new experiences. One of the things that’s true of humankind is that we quickly become habituated to our circumstances. Whatever our day-to-day is, that quickly becomes the norm. But going on a vacation, going to a new place, trying a new dish, all of these things introduce us to novel experiences that bring us a great deal of joy.
Brett McKay: Okay. So money can buy us time. It can help us get novelty. We can get healthcare with it. What are some of the problems that money can’t solve?
Dr. Daniel Crosby:Well, the part where it can’t solve problems, I think, is perhaps the more interesting conversation because it’s riddled with half-truths. Even among the things that I talked about money can buy you access to college, but it can’t take the test for you. Money can buy you a gym membership, but it can’t do the bench press for you. And so the things that it can’t help, there’s a lot of half-truths there as well. I think a lot of people treat money as an indent to itself, but money can’t buy you purpose. What it can do is give you the free time to think about your purpose. Gandhi, I’m misquoting him here, but he effectively said, to a poor man, bread is God. Because if you’re so mired in the struggle for those bottom two rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy, you don’t have a lot of time to think about God or self-actualization or love or friendship. And so money can’t buy us purpose, but it can buy us the bandwidth to think about and pursue purpose. Money can’t buy us love. The Beatles were right about that, but we do know that it can buy you chocolate and roses for a date, and it can make you more attractive to your potential mates, as the research shows.
So I think one of the reasons why people conflate money with just the good life itself is because it certainly facilitates the pursuit of many of these things, but ultimately it leaves off and we’re required to sort of take that first step in the dark.
Brett McKay: Okay. So money doesn’t directly buy us the good life, but it does give us access to the things that can make a good life if we avail ourselves to them. And this gets to the larger question the common question people debate, which is can money buy happiness? And the answer is yes, but as you’ve kind of been saying, it’s nuanced. So what does the research say about money’s ability to buy us happiness?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: The first conversation we have to have is, how are you measuring happiness? Because one measure of happiness is basically about needs reduction and sort of the absence of pain. And so I think animal behaviorists would say that even animals can experience happiness. They may not be able to experience purpose, but they can experience happiness, which is sort of the lack of a negative state. So one of the most famous studies is of course, this Kahneman study that people like me and others sort of shouted from the rooftops because it confirmed all of our prior assumptions, which is that happiness with money plateaus around $75,000 a year at the time of the study, which is almost perfectly $100,000 a year today adjusted for inflation.
And that is true of needs reduction because at about $100,000 per year you have enough food to eat. You have a warm place to lay your head. Your kids can go to a safe school. Sort of the basics of life are met and there’s not a whole lot of negative sort of physical moment to moment pain in terms of your needs. So the need reduction measure of happiness is met at a relatively low level of about $100,000 per year. But there’s a more philosophical, sort of more existential way to measure happiness as well, which is just self-appraisal of life. If I say as we did before we pressed record, just like, hey, Brett, how are you doing? Tell me how your life is. Like, how are you doing? And we find with this more qualitative, this more subjective life appraisal, happiness and money are basically up and to the right as far as the eye can see. I mean, they’ve measured it up to about half a million dollars a year in earning. There’s not a ton of people who make more than half a million dollars a year. And so that’s where they stop. But they find that at every income level, people’s life appraisal improves monotonically.
So in a stepwise fashion from zero to half a million dollars a year. So it really matters. Like, are we talking about moment to moment physical pain or are we talking about happiness with respect to how we sort of account for our lives? Another piece of nuance that I would add to this conversation is depending on the study, about 10 to 15% of folks, money doesn’t move the happiness needle at all. And these people it’s widely assumed are suffering from sort of a clinical depression or sort of an emotional state that keeps money from having any sort of impact. So if you’re making more money and it’s not moving the needle in any respect, I think there’s this idea of wherever you go, there you are. You may need to take a different approach to trying to achieve that happiness. And then the last thing that I would say that that I think is maybe the most interesting point of the whole thing is there’s newer research that shows how you spend money materially impacts your happiness.
My favorite piece of research around this has to do with cars. If I go out tomorrow and buy a Lambo to stunt on my neighbors and show everyone how rich I am, that doesn’t buy much happiness. There’s a very sort of high peak for the first couple of weeks, and then that habituation sets in. Quickly, that Lamborghini that was so nice and new, the door gets dinged you get bird poop on the window, you throw your gym clothes there, and suddenly it’s just not so hot anymore. You just kind of get used to it, and the happiness falls off rather precipitously. But there’s research that shows that people who buy a car to join a car club get massive happiness dividends, because really it’s a relational exercise. What they’ve done is, yeah, you spend a lot of money to get an antique Porsche or whatever you did, but now you’re part of the Atlanta Cars and Coffee Club, and you get to meet with your buddies and look at your engines on Saturdays, and you have a social cohort. So there are definitely examples where if you spend money, even splurge on something that gives you relational access or something that’s consistent with how you wanna be viewed as a human being and your personality, there’s a big happiness dividend there.
Brett McKay: Okay, so if you’re spending the money for those bigger things, it’s gonna bring you happiness.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: That’s right.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I’m sure people have seen that research a lot. It’s like, well, if you wanna be happy, you got to spend your money on experiences to maximize happiness. I think that’s true, but I’ve also, like you said, there’s things that I’ve bought in my life, I’ve splurged on that they brought me happiness and they still bring me happiness. I’ve got a few things in mind. Do you have anything, like some items that you bought that continue to bring joy to your life?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah, there’s a few. For me, I got a nice award from my alma mater last year. And to mark that event, I bought myself a watch. And so when I look at that watch, it’s not crazy, but certainly you could get the time for a lot less. And when I look at that watch though, I’m reminded of my hard work, my accomplishment, the recognition of a university that turned me away when I initially applied there, which was a pretty sweet thing. And I’m very proud of that. My guitars, I have some expensive guitars and I’m a decidedly mediocre guitarist, but having these nice guitars on the wall right here in my office where I’m talking to you encourages me to practice and try and grow and become better and test myself and struggle in new ways.
And then the last thing is something I’m in the midst of right now. You and I were talking before, I’ve lost a lot of weight this year and my clothes were falling off me. I had to get all new clothes. And I’ve really taken the time to try and put together a kind of classic American menswear vibe, really nice fitted stuff, high quality, fewer clothes, higher quality. And every time I see one of those shirts or jackets that wouldn’t have fit me six months ago, I go, Hey, you did it. And it’s a really nice feeling. So I think we have to move towards a more nuanced view of this and spending can really buy you happiness. I’d be curious, what are some of yours?
Brett McKay: First one I can think of, I bought a sauna a couple of years ago, a barrel sauna, and I’d been wanting, I love the sauna at the gym, but then I shifted to a home gym and I would still go, I still paid for like a 10 gym membership, $10. So I could just use their sauna, but it was always crowded. And they’re just gross people in there. They like pick their toenails and the teenagers blasting music while you’re in there trying to like just zone out. So after a couple of years, I finally decided to pull the trigger. I bought a barrel sauna and I love it. My wife loves it. I go in there, right now it’s perfect sauna season. It’s getting cold, starting to get cool at night and just sitting there in the heat for 30 minutes and you go out in the cold and it’s just, it feels good. I’ve had friends over and we’ve had some great conversations in the barrel sauna. So it’s a thing that facilitated relationships.
The other thing, a recent purchase that I made that’s brought a lot of happiness in my life, I bought a wood pellet smoker earlier this summer. And it’s been great ’cause I can grill on it. So do burgers, chicken, things like that. But then I can like smoke brisket, I’ve smoked tenderloins and I’m using that thing all the time. And I think one of the things that does, it facilitates relationships. Like I’ll smoke a brisket or something when I’ve got friends or family coming over. That’s one thing that’s brought me a lot of happiness. And with the cars, we bought a 96 Buick Roadmaster, the wagon a couple of years ago, where it’s got the backward facing seat.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Oh nice.
Brett McKay: And we did that so we could carpool with our kids’ friends. And it’s been, yeah, I love that thing. Every time I get into it, it’s so fun to drive. We’ve made some good memories in there.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: See, I think all the things you just named are perfectly demonstrative of some of the stuff I’m talking about, right. It’s facilitating relationships.
Another thing we know about money and happiness is one reliable path to that is by getting out of stuff we hate. And I was cringing hard over here when you were talking about people picking their toes in the sauna. So if it frees us from people picking at their feet, that’s something you hate. That’s a good use of money. I joke that I will never mow my lawn again. I mean, I live in Georgia. It’s way too hot. I got a big yard. It brings me a great deal of joy to see that high school kid out there sweating it out instead of me. So getting out of stuff you hate is another big one.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And going to that idea that experiences, if you spend on experiences, that will bring you the most happiness. My experience, not necessarily so. There’s some experiences that I’ve gone on like that was actually, I did not enjoy that. And when I think about like, why did I go on this thing? It usually was ’cause like, oh, some person said you should do this thing. It wasn’t because I actually wanted to go there or do the thing. So yeah, I think if you buy the experience or spend money on experiences just because you wanna impress somebody or you saw somebody on the internet said, hey, this is the greatest thing in the world, you should do it too. And it’s not actually something you’re interested in. You’re not gonna get any joy out of that.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Well, I think that’s worth commenting on because we live in a weird time, where it’s kind of become socially okay to brag about experiences in a way that it wouldn’t be okay to brag about more obvious material things. People will post pictures of a $25,000 vacation and it’s just, sort of gets filed under, oh, look how beautiful the world is or something.
Brett McKay: Right.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: And I think there’s a lot of mimetic desire around experiences now. And my family and I were talking about going on a trip in November, and I’m like, I don’t really wanna do this. I’m like, I travel all fall. I’m like, I don’t really wanna do this trip. I think I just wanted to show off. And so I think even experiences have been corrupted somewhat in our social media age.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, buying things can bring you happiness. It’s nuanced, this is not an excuse to go spend your money willy-nilly, but it can if you do it right. But one of the dangers of spending money on stuff to find happiness is that you could become materialistic. And there’s actually, the psychologists have studied this and they’ve actually figured out there’s three characteristics of a materialistic person. So, what are those three characteristics?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. This was news to me. I was really excited to come across this research and happy to share it here, that the three characteristics, the first is possessiveness. So, this is just around an inclination to control both things and people. So, that possessiveness is sort of the first and perhaps the most dangerous of this trifecta. The second, understandably, is non-generosity. Sort of an unwillingness to share back to the happiness conversation. One of the most reliable paths to happiness with money is by giving it away.
And yet people misapprehend that dramatically, like better than 90% of people think they’ll be happier when they buy something for themselves versus give it away. And that’s flipped in terms of actuality. So possessiveness, non-generosity, and then finally, envy, and especially ugly piece of this envy, in addition to sort of the way we use it in everyday language, is anger at others’ success. Being unhappy when others people are successful. So possessiveness, a lack of generosity and envy at other success are the three. And I cited 259 studies in the book that show that it’s associated with lower wellbeing, lower life satisfaction. And this is true, and you can’t say this about many psychological phenomena, but this is true across demographic and cultural lines. So men, women, all over the world, people possessed of this materialistic triad, just don’t have great lives.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So, if you find yourself acting like a scrooge, that’s probably a warning sign. You need to do something…
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah.
Brett McKay: To fix it. So, how do you stave off the materialism?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: You are visited by three ghosts in the night, no. There’s a couple of things you can do. The first is you gotta prioritize community. Community is sort of an antidote for this. Being other-centered is one of the most reliable paths to meaning when it comes to setting goals and measuring your own success. You’ve gotta run your own race and measure your own success. Again, it becomes very, very easy in our time to benchmark to the wrong stuff and to have a bad reference class. A zillion years ago, you would’ve known about 150 people and you would’ve benchmarked your life and your wealth to someone who lived probably within a mile of you. Now we have instant access through Instagram and everything else to the lifestyles of the rich and famous. And it becomes very easy for us to pick a poor reference class. And that is a recipe for misery.
Another tip is to ground yourself in the moment and really work on that presentness. Materialists are often focused on the future and do a lot to let the beauty of a moment slip by always sort of anticipating that next big dopamine hit. And then the final thing, which is just one of these simple but overlooked things, is to practice gratitude. My wife has a bullet journal, literally, two lines where she tries to write down something good that happened that day. And this simple practice has been shown to give about a 10% bump in wellbeing experimentally, which is equivalent to the bump that folks get from taking SSRIs, which is an insane thing, to say that hey, psych meds and writing what you’re thankful for in a journal have about the same sort of impact on happiness, but gratitude cannot be overlooked. It’s big piece.
Brett McKay: That idea of generosity and just spending your money on others. Going back to the Christmas Carol example, like, don’t be a Scrooge. The antithesis of that, I think is Fezziwig. Remember Fezziwig?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: I do, I read that book every year.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So, it’s like one of my favorite parts in the book where it’s the, it’s he’s doing the Ghost of Christmas Past and Scrooge goes back and he sees his old boss Fezziwig, and Fezziwig put on this big party. And it is just a great time. Everyone’s having a great time. It’s something that Kate and I, we do every year. We like, we just, it brings us so much joy is having a big holiday party we invite our friends too. And it’s just, it’s awesome. ’cause we always think we wanna be Fezziwig. Like Fezziwig was a baller. [laughter] We want to be Fezziwig. We want to provide like, those memories that people have when they’re, ’cause we have a lot of kids there. We want them to be like, Hey, we, this is a great thing that I had a lot of good memories.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: So, that’s one way you can counteract the materialism. Be Fezziwig.
I Love that.
Brett McKay: Don’t be Scrooge. Be generous with your hosting and hospitality. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. So, one aspect of our lives that you recommend that we don’t skip on is our health. And you mentioned this earlier, but in this essay, you started off talking about your experience with a toothache, that really brought this principle home of spending money on your health. What happened there with your toothache?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. So I began to have like bad migraines, sensitivity to light, just enormous pain in my head. And I assumed that it was a toothache. I had never had a cavity in my life. I had never had a single dental problem in my life, but I’m like, this feels for the life of me, like a toothache. So I went to my dentist, my dentist looked me over, and he is like, it’s not your teeth. And so the pain persisted. I mean, I could barely get up off the couch. I was like incapacitated by the pain. The headaches were so horrible, sensitivity to light and sound. And so I go on this multi-month, nearly a four month journey of trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with me. And I went to the hospital. I mean, I went to the emergency room once when the pain got so intense.
I went to psychiatrist and sinus doctors and got a CAT scan and got MRIs. I mean, just on and on and on, trying to figure out what this thing was. And it just wouldn’t go away. And the pain got so intense. One day I was just driving with my family and the pain was so bad and I just started crying. I mean, I just started crying in the car. ’cause I’m like, I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. Like I have some mystery illness. And at this time, at that moment when I’m crying in the car, I would have given you every dollar I had for the reassurance that I was gonna be okay. And for relief from that pain. Well, about two weeks later, I was at a client event down in Atlanta, and we were breaking for lunch, and I bit into a sandwich and the whole side of my face swole up.
And sure enough, it had been my tooth the whole time. My dentist had missed it. I had a crack in my tooth. It was, I won’t go into gory details, but it was enormously abscessed once it broke. And the minute… So, I [laughter] my face starts swelling. I’m looking crazy. I excuse myself from my client engagement. I drive straight to an emergency dental place, get that tooth pulled. And immediately I felt incredible. I mean, I felt a relief that I had not felt in months, but it drove home this platitude. We all know that health is wealth, but a sick person only wants one thing. A healthy person has a million desires, but a sick person only wants one thing. And when you dig into the research around health and wellness and money, you see that there’s this incredibly powerful reciprocal relationship.
Brett McKay: Oh yeah. So, the takeaway there; it doesn’t matter how much money you have, if you don’t have your health, it’s all for naught, pretty much. So, how can people use their money to invest in their health?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: I think one of the most powerful things you can do is control the controllable. You find these statistics where people who are taking care of themselves just do a lot better financially than people who don’t. So, frequent exercisers make 10% more than their no exercise peers with similar educational and professional backgrounds. People who had a mentor make way more than people who don’t. Men who go to therapy make some astounding [laughter] some astounding double digit increase in their pay versus their same education peers who don’t go to therapy. So, there’s all these ways that we see that controlling the controllable, taking care of yourself just leads to not only better health, but better financial health as well. And then, just because of the soapbox I’m on right now with sort of this fitness journey that I’ve been on this year, one of the biggest things for me was to get current information.
The thing that really transformed my relationship to my body was just having daily input on what I weighed, how I was doing, what volume of exercise I was doing. We lie to ourselves in some really big ways. People under-report their calorie intake by between 25 and 50% a day. People overestimate their level of exertion and exercise by 47%. So, a lot of times I think just having information, just monitoring these things and keeping an eye on them, that that knowledge is real power that helps us to not sacrifice a replaceable thing like money with an irreplaceable thing like our health.
Brett McKay: So, it sounds like we should be thinking of investing in our health as more than just investing money. You can invest time in tracking things, and when you do invest money, you can motivate yourself to do so by remembering that it’s actually a good financial investment. It’s gonna pay off actual dividends eventually. And it’ll also improve your health. Going back to the material things that we’ve spent money on or splurged on that’s had a lot of ROI, I’d say my home gym, like over the past decade we’ve built up, there’s been a significant ROI on putting money there. Like, first off, I just enjoy exercise and training, but like the health benefits have, I’m sure been phenomenal.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. You have an essay that I really enjoyed, it’s entitled, You don’t really want to Be Rich, you want to Be Free. What do you mean by that?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: So in the book, [laughter] in the book, I don’t name this person by name, but I guess I will, on the podcast I’ll be impolitic and name the person on your podcast. I was reading a story about Elon Musk. And so Elon Musk was talking about this standing 9:00 PM Saturday meeting that he has. And he is like, yeah, I was in my standing 9:00 PM Saturday meeting, and I don’t know why [laughter] that piece of information hit me like a ton of bricks, because in that moment I was like, I am richer than this guy. I know that he has hundreds of billions of dollars, but at 9 o’clock on a Saturday, I’m having fun and he’s not. And that is true wealth. And so I think that’s sort of the point of this chapter. One of the things that I talked about in a previous book of mine, The Behavioral Investor, you can demonstrate this with brain scans and other things, is that people value money for its own sake, independent of what it buys, which is a very goofy, backward stance to take towards money.
Because you don’t want money for its own sake. You want what it can do for you. And one of the things that it can do for you is free you up from having to do things you hate or be around people you don’t wanna be around or do things that you don’t wanna do. So, this chapter is all about making money your servant and not your master, and not getting wrapped up in this idea of just more and more, and more. But what is it that I really want this money to do for me? And I think if we’re honest with ourselves, very often, for most people, the highest and best use of wealth is to buy back your life, to buy back your independence.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen, I’m sure you’ve seen this too with your work, people who’ve gotten richer and richer and they’ve just become less and less free because they build those what gilded bird cages for themselves that they can’t get out of. They say, well, I can’t quit this job, or I can’t stop this business that’s I don’t enjoy. Because if I do, then I’m gonna lose everything that I have.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. I have seen that again and again. That was a big impetus for writing the book. Just by virtue of my day job, I am proximal to lots of people with really, really, really big bank accounts like sent to millionaires, billionaires. And more often than not, I would say that these folks lack a sense of freedom. They are so wrapped up in the pursuit of more, even in cases where they have more money than they could ever serviceably spend in a lifetime, even in those cases, there is an inertia and a lack of freedom that makes them less free with people with a lot less money who’ve been more thoughtful about its deployment.
Brett McKay: All right. So, if you have an opportunity to buy freedom, do it. You’ll be happier. That might mean you take more vacation. You talk about that. A lot of Americans, I think Americans are really bad at vacation.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Oh yeah.
Brett McKay: I think most of us don’t use all of our vacation time, but take it, like, take that. The other things too, if you have the means, buy a lawn care guy, buy an hour of babysitting so that you can go on a date with your wife, there’s all different little ways you can buy back some time.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You also talk about finding a why for your money. This is kinda like the meta meta theme of your book. What does that look like? ’cause I don’t think most people, when they think about their money, they’re not thinking about the purpose of money or like their why. So, how do you go about figuring out your why for money?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. I think you’re right. Most people aren’t thinking about this. And one of the things that I wanna do is encourage them to, because the power of tying your dollars to your purpose is so incredible. It almost sounds like science fiction when you read some of the research, but people who had named their dollars. So, not just, account A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, but Brett’s retired to The Bahamas Fund. Something that simple, just labeling it for purpose. One study found that in tough markets, they were 10 times less likely to bail on their investments and go to cash. Another study out of Canada found that when people looked at a picture of their kids before they logged into their bank account, they were twice as likely to save. Morningstar, big financial firm found that, that accounts that were labeled with a specific purpose had 15% more in them than their peers.
So, one reason to do this is just because it elicits a host of good financial behaviors. I mean, it really takes investing, saving, spending, out of the ether, and it ceases to become a video game, and it becomes this real thing that’s tied to life. But in some research that I’ve done since this book, I really have found that there’s sort of three facets to meaning. If we look back over the research, a life purpose has three legs to that stool. And I think if you apply it here, that the three are believing, belonging, and becoming. So, people with purposeful lives, first of all, believing they have a philosophy, a religion, or a moral framework that guides their life. You see this again and again and again and again. Religious people are reliably happier on average. And this is one of those reasons.
They have a moral framework to help them make sense of the good times and the bad times in life. Doesn’t have to be religion, but you need to have thought through your sort of personal philosophy of why things are the way that they are, and let that guide how you spend money. The second piece, the most powerful piece is belonging. Again, back to relationships. If you say you value relationships, are you spending money like, that’s the case?
And then the third piece that people with meaningful lives have is becoming, which is they are growing, they are learning, they’re progressing. So, you need a moral framework. You need a group of people to love and who love you back, and you need a vision of the kind of person you want to become. And if you’ve got those three things, you are on your way. And each one of those three things has a financial component to it. And if you value those things, it should show up in your budget.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You recommend if to people, I like this idea of doing like a values audit of your bank account. If you don’t know what you value or what’s the why of your money, just take a look at your statement from the last month and see where you’re spending your money. And then you can start kind of putting things in the categories like, oh, I spent a lot of money eating out with friends. Okay, well friends seems like friends are important, and saving time is important. But then you might see, well, I’m spending a lot of money on subscriptions that I don’t use. Maybe I can do something better with that money.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. That’s exactly right. I love this idea. There’s sort of two things at work here. The first is that your money is your vote. And I mean, I had this conversation with my youngest kid the other day. We always go to the local farmer’s market on Saturdays, and we were buying some spaghetti sauce, and she was like, that’s a lot. That’s really expensive. Like, that’s a lot more than it is at the store. And I was like, yeah, that’s right. But I wanna live in a world where local entrepreneurs who are growing tomatoes in their backyard and working hard can make a living. So yes, it is twice as much as the Prego or whatever, but it brings about an outcome that I care about. And it’s just, it’s a powerful way to think about money is am I spending it in a way that brings about the kind of world that I wanna live in? And am I casting my vote wisely? And the flip side of that is, is the ultimate BS detector. We’ll say, oh, I value growth and spirituality and purpose and relationships. And then, I look at my budget and it’s all Netflix and Doritos, then maybe it’s time for a reckoning. And it just, it’s very easy to lie to yourself about what’s important to you. And money shines a very bright light on what you truly value.
Brett McKay: Yeah. What’s that saying on, I tangently very loosely follow like financial Twitter. And then you’ll see every now and then this big blow up when some financial guy gives a bit of advice and then someone will respond like, show us your books. Show us… What are you doing? ’cause they wanna make sure that like they got skin in the game, they’re actually putting into action what they’re encouraging people to do.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. Yeah. And Nassim Taleb wrote about that, Never ask a person their opinion, just ask to see their portfolio. Like, I don’t care about your hypothesis. Like, what are you doing with your money?
Brett McKay: Yeah. Yeah. So, that’s something I do, once a month I go through the bank statement and see what I’m spending my money on. It has a couple purposes. One, it just helps me figure out, okay, my spending my money on anything dumb and can we cut back on that? Or am I spending too much on a certain area? So just you got your eye on the till basically.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Then also the same time I’m saying, well, is my spending matching up with our family’s values?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And if it’s not, then you can do some correction. I think once a month like that, I think that’s plenty of, you don’t have to do it every day or every week, but like, just do it once a month. It doesn’t take a lot of time. So, something else to talk about, and we’ve had conversations about this, there’s a temptation in some people, not everybody. There’s a certain segment of the population where they just want to keep squirreling away money for retirement. Like they’re aggressive, aggressive savers. And there can be some upsides to that. But the downside is like, you just don’t enjoy your life now and you can’t spend money on other people now. Are there any biases that might lead some people to excessive money hoarding?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. There’s a host of them. So, I [laughter] I actually did some research at Orion, my employer, where we interviewed 425 couples. And we asked them, effectively, we did it more delicately than this, but effectively we asked them, what do you fight about when you fight about money? And the number one point of friction among couples was whether money was best used to enjoy today or to secure against an uncertain tomorrow. And it was almost 50/50. And if you think about it, the appropriate response is somewhere in the middle. I mean, both things are important. Like it is both important to use money to seize a moment, because tomorrow tomorrow’s not promised, and we need to be setting aside for that future self and that rainy day. But we found that people tended to be far more decamped into sort of extreme sides of this position.
And so there were a lot of moral judgments around this too. Like if, for folks who find themselves in the ‘save for tomorrow’ camp, they see the other folks as sort of frivolous and unserious. And for people who were in the, “enjoy the moment” camp, they see the savers as sort of fun haters and sticks in the mud. And so the behavioral biases that load onto this are, there’s a few of them. One of them would be loss aversion. We perceive spending as a present loss, and we are two and a half times as upset about a loss as we are happy about a comparably sized gain. So that a hundred dollars hurts worse coming out in retirement than it felt good to save it when we were in the accumulation phase. The other thing is uncertainty aversion. Uncertainty is perhaps the thing which humankind finds most distasteful.
Like we hate not knowing even more than we hate bad news. And then we also engage in anchoring, which is sort of benchmarking to a high watermark. So if we retire with a million dollars, we go, oh, I’m a millionaire. Like I did it. And then when you have to start drawing that down, it’s painful all the way down. So, there’s a couple of ways I think to overcome what is admittedly a pretty thorny problem.
The first is something called bucketing, which is kind of back to this naming it for purpose. There’s a psychological phenomenon known as mental accounting where the way that we label money materially impacts our willingness to save, spend and invest it. So something as simple as saying, here’s my principle, here’s my dividends, here’s my living money, here’s my vacation money, here’s my don’t touch it money, that can give us permission to spend it as we ought to.
Second powerful thing is to just automate the inflows and outflows so we don’t have to think about it. You wanna kind of minimize touches. And so if you can make a good decision once and kind of set it and forget it, that’s powerful. And then finally, kind of ripping off Stephen Covey here, he has this idea that effectively the only way that we can say no to something difficult is to have a bigger yes burning inside of us. And so we need that purpose again. We have to love our grandkids enough to spend that money on them, even though there’s some pain associated with taking it out, whatever the case may be. So, bucketing automation, purpose are all sort of powerful workarounds for what is a very complicated human tendency.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s, I mean, a lot of times the focus is on people who aren’t saving enough, which is a problem. That’s a problem. But then a lot of, I don’t think a lot of attention is given to people who save too much. ’cause that can become a problem. ’cause then you hit retirement or whatever. And like, as you said, there’s some people who have so much money saved away in retirement, they can’t even like draw it down by the time they…
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah.
Brett McKay: So, they’re left over with a big chunk of money that yeah, they can pass on to their kids and grandkids, but then there’s gonna be like, it’s gonna be taxed. And it’s like, there’s all these other problems that come with that. So it’s, yeah, trying to figure out how to manage that nut you may have squirreled away during your working life. That can be tricky.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: It’s very tricky. And in a real sense, like every dollar that you die with, and look, I get it, you can’t probably, none of us knows when we’re gonna go specifically, but every dollar that you die with is a dollar that you weren’t able to spend in life on time with your kids, time with your loved ones, being generous, being kind, blessing the world. I mean, it’s in a real sense, it’s a missed opportunity. And there’s a great book called Die With Zero, which covers this very thing.
Brett McKay: Well, Daniel, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go and learn more about the book and your work?
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. The book is The Soul of Wealth. I hope people will go check it out. I’m active on Twitter at Daniel Crosby. I have my own podcast, Standard Deviations, and yeah, just Daniel Crosby, PhD on LinkedIn as well.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Daniel Crosby, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Daniel Crosby: Thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Dr. Daniel Crosby. He’s the author of the book, the Soul of Wealth. It’s available on amazon.com, at bookstores everywhere. Check out his podcast, standarddeviationspod.com where you get your podcast. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/soulofwealth, 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 while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done this already, I’d appreciate you take one minute to give review of the podcast on 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, is Brett McKay, podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
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Are leaders born or made? Judging by the 50 billion dollar leadership development industry, the answer is definitely the latter. From schools to workplaces, everyone is seen as a potential leader and expected to become one by undergoing leadership training.
My guest questions the assumptions underlying this phenomenon, which he calls “the leadership industrial complex,” and says that the cult of leadership, and its idea that everyone can and should become a leader, can create burnout and unhappiness.
Elias Aboujaoude is a Stanford professor of psychiatry and the author of A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. Today on the show, Elias describes the state of the leadership industrial complex, the mathematical impossibility it forwards that everyone can be a leader and no one is a follower, and the primary presumption it makes that leadership can be taught. Elias argues that, in fact, a lot of what makes for good leadership is innate and potentially unchangeable. We discuss the implications of this fact, and why it’s actually okay not to want to be a leader.
Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Podcast #838: Can Virtue Be Taught? * AoM Article: Don’t Just Lead Well, Follow Well * AoM Article: Are You a Strategist or an Operator? * AoM Article: The Best Kind of Leader to Be
Connect With Elias Aboujaoude* Elias’ website * Elias’ Stanford profile 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.
Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Are leaders born or made? Judging by the $50 billion leadership development industry, the answer is definitely the latter. From schools to workplaces, everyone is seen as a potential leader and expected to become one by undergoing leadership training. My guest questions the assumptions underlying this phenomenon, which he calls the leadership industrial complex, and says that the cult of leadership and its idea that everyone can and should become a leader can create burnout and unhappiness. Elias Aboujaoude is a Stanford professor of psychiatry and the author of A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. Today on the show, Elias describes the state of the leadership industrial complex, mathematical impossibility [0:00:50.9] ____ that everyone can be a leader and known as a follower, and the primary presumption it makes that leadership can be taught.
Elias argues that, in fact, a lot of what makes for good leadership is innate and potentially unchangeable. We discuss the implications of this fact and why it’s actually okay not to want to be a leader. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/leadership. All right, Elias Aboujaoude, welcome to the show.
Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much.
Brett McKay: So you are a psychiatrist, and you’ve taken a deep dive into what could be called the cult of leadership in America. And what kickstarted this exploration of leadership development in the United States is you got a request to write a letter of recommendation for a medical student. So how did that request for a letter of recommendation lead you to exploring our country’s obsession with leadership and developing leaders?
Elias Aboujaoude: Indeed. So one of the best medical students I ever supervised, I’ll call him Tim, approached me for a letter of recommendation in support for his application to get into a skin cancer program. Tim had really shown exemplary performance on the wards where I supervised him.
So I wrote the most, probably the strongest letter of recommendation I had ever written. And in it, I praised his bedside manner, his clinical productivity, his conscientiousness, his research contributions, really the kinds of things that every program wants to see in an application and in a prospective applicant. To sort of make him feel better and hopefully less stressed out about this process, I shared the letter with him and I watched as he read it in my office. And I was surprised to see his facial expression sink into a deep depression and deep sadness. So for a second, I thought I had mistakenly given Tim another student’s evaluation, the evaluation of a student who had been failing the rotation, but it turned out I hadn’t. What was missing apparently from my letter is any mention of leadership qualities and leadership potential. And Tim was convinced that as strong and outstanding as the letter was, he wouldn’t get into any competitive program without a supervisor predicting a brilliant future for him as a leader.
So that got me thinking about how we’ve come to really prioritize leadership over any other quality in our medical field. But also as I started looking and exploring way beyond medicine, I started paying attention, for example, and noticing daycare centers with names like Future Leaders of America or Leadership Academy, the kinds of things that suggest that we’re planting this leadership seed and inculcating people into this cult of leadership, leadership literally with breast milk. And I started noticing also that college applicants now have an entire section where high school students are expected to talk about their leadership experience. Who wants a shy violinist or an introvert when you can get the president of five clubs kind of thing. So all this speaks to a real leadership obsession in our society, and it speaks to very high demand for all things leadership. Now, this demand is being met, met and then some, by what I’m calling in my book, a leadership industrial complex. There’s a $50 billion leadership industry that’s now available to really convince us that leadership is something that’s within reach for practically anyone.
All you have to do is take the right course or sign on the right executive coach. So it’s a very sort of unhealthy combination between this kind of demand and this kind of supply. And as I see it, it may explain the failures of leadership that we see every direction we look and on every front, whether political, corporate, academic, really everywhere and anywhere. We’ve created a system where we have so much product out there that the only way for leaders to stand out and actually make it to leadership positions is to be unscrupulous, to have traits that are closer to sort of the narcissistic or even the antisocial end of the spectrum. And we don’t want that in our leaders, but this is the system that we have created. And this is what this unhealthy balance between exuberant demand and exuberant supply has created.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s one of the big points you make in the book is there’s this paradox that we’re seeing in the past, maybe 50, 60 years, this emphasis on developing leaders. We’re going to develop leaders and very be systematic about it, take courses, but it seems like there’s a dearth of leadership despite all the leadership development we’re doing.
Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. This is the biggest, one of the biggest paradoxes of the leadership industry that there has never been more opportunities to develop and train leaders. And yet leaders have never performed worse than they are today. So, one way to look at this is to think, well, we need more training. We need the industry to be even bigger, but another way to look at it and the position that I take in my book is that the leadership industry and this approach to leadership is actually contributing to leadership failure.
Brett McKay: And another point you make too, is that this emphasis, overemphasis on leadership in college students, in your career, it could be leading to burnout and just feeling inadequate. Tim, he was disappointed that you didn’t talk about his leadership skills, but did Tim want to be a leader like personally?
Elias Aboujaoude: That’s the thing. Tim had no interest in being a leader. All he wanted to be is the best skin cancer doctor he could become. And that’s what he eventually became. But Tim was also convinced that without coming across as having leadership qualities, he had no chance of actually making it. When I touched base subsequently with Tim, a few years down the road, I found out that some leadership opportunities had actually come his way, but he was all too happy to ignore them and turn them down.
And yet in his application process, he felt forced to, if you will, pretend to be interested in leading. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made it into the program that he was eventually accepted into.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve encountered that too with letters of recommendation. So I mentor teenage boys at church and they’ll ask me sometimes to fill out letters of recommendations. And there’s always a thing on there about leadership, like what leadership skills does this person display? And some of these boys, they’re smart, they’re bright, but they’re not really leaders and they’re not really interested in leadership. But I feel like I got to come up with something because if I don’t, it’s not going to look good for them.
Elias Aboujaoude: It’s not going to look good. It’s going to count against them. And it speaks to a bigger problem in academia and in college and university life. Less than one in 10 students now major with a degree in the humanities. We’re shutting down English and history departments left and right. And yet there’s this curious rise of the leadership major and the leadership minor and leadership studies everywhere you look. So it’s a curious development and feeds into this cultural obsession and academic obsession with leadership that I was talking about.
Brett McKay: I want to talk about these courses, but before we do, when you’ve looked at the leadership industrial complex as a whole, what do they mean by leadership exactly? Because leadership can mean lots of different things. There’s lots of different definitions. So how is it described in the leadership industrial complex culture?
Elias Aboujaoude: What goes along with this leadership industrial complex, of course, is intense marketing. And to understand what leadership means to these programs, it’s interesting to look at the messaging and the marketing. So you’ll find words, really buzzwords like transformative, catalyst, a change driver, unleasher. You’ll be empowering people across many verticals and across many tipping points. You’ll almost certainly disrupt.
If I had the nickel for every time I came across the word disrupt in my leadership research, I’d be a very rich man. So these buzzwords add up to the leadership industrial complex’s definition of what a leader means today. And through these courses and through this coaching and through all this “development”, they sell the message that all these qualities and traits are perfectly teachable.
Brett McKay: So I mean, what skills or traits do they purport to teach would-be leaders?
Elias Aboujaoude: I don’t have a problem really with purporting to teach a skill. Where it becomes very problematic for me as a psychiatrist is where they start pretending or communicating that they can teach things like EQ, emotional intelligence, or even charisma, qualities and traits that are linked to personality. And if we know anything as mental health providers, as psychiatrists, as psychologists, is the difficulty changing people’s personalities.
People’s personality tends to be stubborn, not super malleable. If you want to make long lasting personality changes, it’s a long-term commitment that involves potentially years of psychotherapy. It’s not the kind of thing that you can pick up over a bootcamp or a weekend workshop. And yet this is the message that a lot of these trainings are selling. And this is the really misleading, no pun intended, notion that accompanies so much of the leadership industry’s offerings.
Brett McKay: Okay. So leadership in the leadership industrial complex, a lot of buzzwords, you’re a change maker, catalyst, disruptor. So it’s kind of an amorphous thing. It can kind of mean whatever and because it can mean anything you want, like you can create your content that you’re teaching however you want. Let’s dig into the actual content, these courses. I thought this was really interesting. You talk about what colleges and other businesses are doing to make money on leadership courses. You mentioned, I think you said a $50 billion industry overall?
Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah, it’s a $50 billion industry. And it’s an industry that’s been fully embraced by our top business schools, entities and institutions that know a thing or two about making money. And this has helped really transform this leadership development field into a full blown industrial complex. And when you check out something like Harvard’s program for leadership development, for example, you’ll be surprised to see that there’s an 800 number available for applicants to call. There’s an entire program advising team that’s waiting to take your call. You’ll also be, you might be surprised to see that really there’s no formal educational requirements to join. There’s this amorphous sort of leadership potential.
That’s pretty much the only requirement. The program is advertised to people at whatever role or career stage. Again, not really just meant for senior executives or folks already in the C-suite, but marketed as something that’s much more open and accessible than that. So the acceptance rate into it seems much higher than the 4.5% or so that undergraduates applying for Harvard usually face. What’s unquestionably exclusive though about the program is the price tag, $52,000 for the basic four modules of blended teaching. But if you want a lifelong Harvard email address, and if you want alumni status, then you can get that for an additional module and an additional $27,000. So strategies that to me feel very sort of marketing and business oriented in a way that to me fits uncomfortably within the educational model.
Another example that I talk about in the book is Wharton. Wharton is the premier, the oldest business school in the country. And I was checking out a program they have, a nine month, mostly self-based or largely self-based program called Global C-suite. And I read about it and then I wanted to close the window. And I had this very interesting pop-up show up offering me $1000 off the $20,000 tuition if I hurry up and apply in the next nine days. Again, marketing gimmicks and marketing strategies that have no place in education as I see it, yet this is what so much of the leadership industry and the leadership educational opportunities, this is the direction they take.
Brett McKay: Okay. So for $60,000, I could become a Harvard alum. I could put that on my CV. Yeah, that’s crazy. And then it’s not just colleges that are doing this. There’s also many businesses that offer leadership development courses as well.
Elias Aboujaoude: Oh, absolutely. If Harvard and Wharton are offering these kinds of opportunities, then you can imagine the Wild West out there and programs with names like Leadership Express Series or a workshop for $18.99 that promises to teach you how to become a charismatic leader. I mean, any number of such offerings that I review in my book.
Brett McKay: What’s the content of these courses? Like what exactly, when you sit down to through these modules, what are you learning?
Elias Aboujaoude: Well, a lot of the content is not research-based, certainly. There’s very little by way of long-term research results in terms of success that these programs can point to. There’s also a ton of mnemonics that I came across as I was researching. And this heavy reliance on mnemonics suggests that leadership is easy, literally as easy as ABC. One popular mnemonic is the so-called three Rs, three Rs.
But depending on which program or which professor of leadership or which coach you consult, the three Rs stand for different things. It could be reflections, resiliency, and relationships, but it could also be respect, recognize, and reward, and so on and so forth. So all this suggests a very sort of unscientific, make-it-up-as-you-go process that unfortunately takes up a lot of these offerings.
Brett McKay: Is there any research that’s been done on these leadership development programs that they actually work, like that people who go through them come out as better leaders? And how would you even measure that if you did research on that?
Elias Aboujaoude: Well, it’s not easy to measure, which highlights the need for good quality, large-scale, long-term research. And when you look for good quality, large-scale, long-term research that has assessed their success, there’s very, very little indeed that you can point to.
Brett McKay: Okay. And that’s interesting ’cause businesses are probably paying for their employees to go to these things. They don’t even know if it works or not.
Elias Aboujaoude: Oh, to the tune of $50 billion.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And what’s interesting too, you talk about how this is also creeping into middle schools and in high schools. I mean, I grew up in the ’90s, late ’90s. I was in high school then. And I saw that stuff. I was involved in student council, and we did this leadership development stuff. And typically, what it was like the school district was paying some organization to do the teaching.
Elias Aboujaoude: Yes. The leadership bug has fully infected our high school and college systems. And this is manifested in the place that leadership now takes up in college applications, but also it’s manifested in how so many schools seem to be changing their mission statements to emphasize leadership. Everybody wants to teach the future leaders of America. Nobody seems interested in teaching and informing the educated citizenry of the country.
And the downside, of course, of all this is the inferiority complex that it gives those who are not interested in leading, those who have the self-awareness to acknowledge that, so they’re not interested in pursuing leadership, who don’t succeed at leading. But there are real psychological consequences to that and a real inferiority complex that doesn’t get talked about as we send the message that all can be leaders and as we ignore the reality that the world also needs followers. And mathematically speaking, not everyone can be a leader.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. So the idea that everyone can and should be a leader and that everyone can develop into a leader with the right training is everywhere these days. And I think the big thing we need to talk about, and you mentioned this before, is that the whole idea and what the leadership development industry relies on is the assumption that leadership can be taught. And there are certain skills that can be taught and people can improve on a little bit body language, getting a little bit better with public speaking, getting better at strategy, but you talk about, if you actually look at the scientific research that’s been done on leadership, it suggests that a lot of leadership ability just comes down to inborn temperament. So what does the research say there about leadership ability and temperament?
Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah. So I talked earlier about how there’s very little long-term, long-term high quality research in terms of the success of leadership training. But there’s quite a bit long-term, high-quality research when it comes to people’s personalities and how people’s personalities evolve over time. And what this long-term, high quality research tells us is that personality is pretty sticky. I’ll just quickly mention a couple of studies. One involving a cohort of Harvard graduates who are assessed at age 22 and again at age 67, and you can imagine all the ups and downs and all the upheaval that can happen in a person’s life over the course of four decades or so.
And yet when this cohort was reassessed, the fundamental traits and their personalities were essentially unchanged. The fingerprint, their personality fingerprint was essentially the same. Another study looked at an even younger cohort, students aged 6 to 12 and assessed them on 39 personality traits and re-interviewed them again 40 years down the road. And what the researchers found was their personalities were essentially largely stable. So this is what a high quality long-term research from mental health and from psychology teaches us, and yet when you look at a lot of leadership offerings, there is this idea that we can teach you EQ and we can do it pretty easily. Now, nobody would dispute the importance of EQ in how leaders emerge and how leaders succeed. Up to 90% of leaders success has been attributed to EQ when other skills and when IQ is otherwise the same.
So the importance of EQ is pretty fundamental and pretty established. But the notion that you can teach EQ and transform EQ is highly problematic because EQ is pretty tightly linked to personality. And what the studies I mentioned about personality show is that it’s largely fixed over time.
Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, when we typically think of a leader, with this idea, he’s charismatic, they take risk, they’re bold, they know how to manage people, they’re detail-orienting, and that kind of lines up with those big five personality traits, conscientiousness, extraversion, low on neuroticism. And let’s say you’re a person, you’re like, Okay, I’m kind of neurotic, I’m not very conscientious. I’m not a big risk taker. Can a course, a weekend course actually move the needle on that? And the answer looks like it’s probably not.
Elias Aboujaoude: The answer is probably not, because personality, again, is largely fixed and when psychoanalysis try to affect meaningful long-term personality changes, it was a year’s long endeavor, not for the commitment phobic. So to the extent that EQ is linked to personality and we know it is, it is not something that you can easily impart or teach.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And this idea of can leadership be taught, this reminds me, this goes back, this is like a couple of thousand year-old question. Like Plato is asking the same question. He was asking that can virtue be taught?
Elias Aboujaoude: Very interesting. Yes.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And he actually tried to figure it out. He actually had this theory that, yes, virtue can be taught. Like if you teach people about the good and they know the good, they’ll start conforming themselves to the good, then they’ll be good leaders. That was the idea. And then he had the chance to test it out. He got to go to Syracuse and be a teacher to this king guy who was having lots of problems and he was teaching him philosophy and teaching him about the forms and everything. And it ended in complete disaster. The guy did not change at all. And Plato was like, Okay, maybe this idea that I had that if you teach these philosopher kings to be good leaders, it’ll… Teach them the forms, they’ll become good leaders. It’ll work, and he actually had to take a step back and say, all right, that’s actually not gonna work. We have to try something else.
Elias Aboujaoude: Well, this is a vignette that clearly belongs in the book, Brett. Thank you for sharing that. You know what the Greeks were also interested in is charisma. In fact, the word charisma comes from a Greek root, that means a freely given gift like something that God endows you with or the gods endow you with. And again, it’s interesting how many people to this day when they try to define charisma will resort to religious sort of metaphors and religious terms. And yet this hasn’t stopped us from pretending we can easily teach it in a way that makes us look like we’re playing God.
Brett McKay: Okay. So a lot of these leadership attributes that we think of when it comes to a good leader, charisma, high EQ, lot of it is based in personality and a lot of that you can’t change. If you do change it, it’s gonna take a long time to do and you’re probably not gonna change it too much.
Elias Aboujaoude: Yes, indeed.
Brett McKay: So when companies or organizations are thinking about leadership, should it be less about leadership development and you know, this idea that you can develop anyone and everyone into a leader and more about leadership finding? Like is it better to focus on filtering for and selecting good leaders? Should that be the strategy?
Elias Aboujaoude: The subtitle of my book is Why Psychology Personality and Character Make All the Difference. And I think one shift that needs to happen for the health of our leadership culture is for us to start paying more attention to these things and ease up on the development, ease up on the steps and hacks and tips that supposedly guarantee good leadership. Basically go back to the basics and put psychology front and center where it belongs in leadership culture. And remember that there’s only so much planning and prepping and strategizing that one can do. And some of the most meaningful and significant leaderships that the world has seen, leadership found the leader not the other way around. So there’s a humbling message in this for leadership culture and it should be humbling for the leadership industry as well.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s a… Something that I’ve taken away as I’ve studied… I’ve read a lot of biographies of great leaders and one thing I have discovered is what made them great leaders is like, yeah, they rose up to the occasion, the leadership found them and they leaned into their unique personality. They weren’t trying to conform themselves to this ideal leader. That’s charismatic and bold and visionary. And even guys who weren’t that, like they were still good leaders. I mean, here’s an example. Patton and Eisenhower had kind of different personalities. Patton’s very bombastic, led from the front, was very flamboyant and that worked for him. He leaned into that. And Eisenhower was more of a like a people person. Like he did a lot of the, I’m gonna be in the background working on alliances. When you look at football coaches, I love watching how different football… American football coaches coach. You have some coaches who are very just high energy, just on the sidelines. Rah rah rah. And then you have those coaches who just arms folded, never say a word.
Elias Aboujaoude: Yes.
Brett McKay: And they’re winning football coaches.
Elias Aboujaoude: Yes, yes. I think you’re talking about people basically aligning with their psychology and leaning with their psychology and not pretending to be someone they’re not. Winston Churchill is another great example of a transformative, truly transformative and truly disruptive maybe figure who was found by leadership and rose to the occasion as opposed to self-consciously and deliberately in a step-by-step fashion strategized to reach the heights that he reached.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Another one, Abraham Lincoln. Like he was not your stereotypical leader. He had depression, he was severely depressed. He would just lay on the couch and read the book of Job and just be like, I’m the saddest guy in the whole world. But Lincoln was still one of the most eminent and effective leaders in history.
Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. Absolutely. So all this is to say that we lose by limiting the profile of who we support in rising to leadership positions the way we are doing right now.
Brett McKay: Well then, I wanna go back to this point you made that this everyone is a leader culture that we have can contribute to maybe burnout, depression, inferiority complex, amongst particularly young workers, young students. Flesh that out a bit more for them. How have you seen that manifest itself?
Elias Aboujaoude: When we live in a culture that only values leaders and when we are subjected to endless marketing that all that counts is leadership and that leadership is yours to have for just a little bit of training and little bit of development. Then those of us who don’t become leaders, either because they’re not interested or they’re not successful, can be left with an inferiority complex and be left thinking, well what is wrong with me when it should be so easy. Where did I go wrong? And that’s an unhealthy state psychologically speaking, and it’s totally unnecessary because the marketing itself that’s driving it and the leadership obsession that’s driving it are what’s faulty with society, not the individual who doesn’t become a leader or isn’t interested in pursuing leadership.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And it also sets people up if they do pursue leadership because they feel like they have to, to feel like, I actually hate this. I am not suited for this. I am miserable, but I gotta do this because I have to advance my career.
Elias Aboujaoude: Right. I got the position that supposedly is what matters in life, but I’m absolutely miserable leading.
Brett McKay: So I think the takeaways from what we’ve talked about are leadership development, probably not a thing. I mean there are certain skills you can develop a little, but as far as those ineffable qualities that we think of when it comes to leadership, that comes down to personality. And that’s either… It’s kind of either you’re born with it or you’re not. So maybe organizations of all kinds should focus more on leader finding, filtering and selecting instead of leader development. At the same time though, I think we can expand on our idea of what makes a good leader. It doesn’t have to be the stereotype. So maybe you don’t have those qualities of a stereotypical leader, but you can still be a good leader in your own way. But let’s say whether or not you do have potential for leadership, you’re just not interested in it. It’s not something you wanna do. What advice would you give someone who they’ve got the self-awareness to know that they’re not a good fit for leadership positions, but they still feel this pressure to get on that track to advance their career?
Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah. What I would tell them is to do what aligns with their psychology. Don’t tie your self-worth to leadership positions. It’s okay to be a leader, but it’s also okay not to be one. And certainly don’t look down on followers including yourself if you happen to be one.
Brett McKay: Okay. And that could be tough ’cause you’re just told from a young age, you gotta be a leader.
Elias Aboujaoude: It is tough and that’s why the change has to happen on many fronts. It has to happen at the level of parenting. It has to happen at the level of schools and universities and it has to happen at the corporate level. I mean, this is not an easy change to make, but it’s a necessary change to make to the extent that we need good leaders. And our approach to leadership today is almost guaranteed to leave us with unimpressive leaders.
Brett McKay: Yeah. But I feel like it just comes down to being okay with being a follower and that maybe will require reframing what it means to be a follower some, right? ‘Cause it has… The word has a lot of negative connotations and baggage. Being a follower doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you or you’re deficient. You just have a different disposition or maybe you just different kinds of work. And actually this reminds me something we talked about on the site, this goes back to Patton and Eisenhower, is that some people are strategists and some people are operators, right? So like some people like to be the manager where they’re setting the agenda and other people they just like to be on the ground, in the field, doing the work. It’s like some people like to plan the action and some people just want to take the action. So it’s okay not to want to be a leader and just want to be an operator. That’s okay. Maybe you won’t get as much clout and money, but you’ll be happier.
Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. Leadership is not the only path to happiness and self-worth.
Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Elias, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much. They can go to my personal website, eliasaboujaoude.com or find the book on Amazon or any of their favorite venues.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Elias Aboujaoude, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. He’s the author of the book, A Leaders Destiny. It’s available on amazon.com. You learn more information about his work at his website, eliasaboujaoude.com. Also, check out our show notes at AOM.is/leadership 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 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 can 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 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.
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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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Transcript Coming SoonHelp support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!
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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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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Transcript Coming SoonHelp support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!
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
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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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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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Transcript Coming SoonHelp support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!
Self-control, the ability to resolve a conflict between two competing desires, is frequently touted as the golden key to success. But many of the most popular ideas about self-control are actually at odds with how it really operates.
Here to unpack some of the lesser-understood and counterintuitive ideas around discipline and willpower is Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology who has studied the nature of self-regulation in depth. In the first part of our conversation, Michael unpacks the popular ego depletion model of willpower and how it hasn’t held up to scientific scrutiny. We then turn to the surprising fact that the people who seem to exhibit a lot of self-control don’t actually exercise a lot of discipline and restraint in their lives, that the achievement of goals is more a function of having virtuous desires, and what contributes to having those desires.
Resources Related to the Podcast* Related studies: + Perceived Mental Fatigue and Self-Control + A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect + Everyday Temptations: An Experience Sampling Study of Desire, Conflict, and Self-Control + New Zealand Study on Trait Self-Control + The Moralization of Effort + The Mundanity of Excellence + The Identity Model of Self-Regulation + The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued * AoM Podcast #961: The Mundanity of Excellence * AoM Article: Motivation Over Discipline * AoM Article: ¿Tienes Ganas? * Sunday Firesides: What Looks Like Grit, Is Often Fit * AoM Article: What Do You Want to Want?
Connect With Michael Inzlicht* Michael’s website * Michael’s faculty page * Michael on X
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Transcript Coming SoonHelp support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!
For decades, some researchers have argued that the notable human capacity for endurance evolved from the hunting practices of our ancestors, which produced physiological adaptations that make us uniquely well suited for running.
But this theory has always had its detractors.
As my guest explains, a new study addresses these long-standing criticisms and adds evidence that, indeed, we were all born to run.
Alex Hutchinson is a journalist who covers the science of endurance and fitness, and today on the show, he explains what those criticisms were and how this new research counters them. We talk about the role running held amongst peoples of the past, how running is not only primal but cultural and even spiritual, and why we continue to run today, even though we’re not hunting for food. And we discuss how, even if we are born to run, that doesn’t mean everyone will always enjoy running all of the time, and how to get into running if you’re someone who doesn’t feel an innate desire for it.
Resources Related to the Podcast Alex’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast: + Episode #382: How to Lift More, Run Faster, and Endure Longer + Episode #538: Research-Backed Answers to All Your Fitness FAQs * “Why You (Yes, You) Were Born to Run” by Alex Hutchinson * “Ethnography and Ethnohistory Support the Efficiency of Hunting Through Endurance Running in Humans” * Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition by Peter Nabokov * The Hunting Hypothesis by Robert Ardrey * “The Energetic Paradox of Human Running and Hominid Evolution” — 1984 paper by David Carrier * Why We Run by Bernd Heinrich * AoM Podcast #691: What You Can (Really) Learn About Exercise from Your Human Ancestors With Daniel Lieberman * Born to Run by Christopher McDougall * “Reexamining the Mythology of the Tarahumara Runners” by Alex Hutchinson * To the Limit: The Meaning of Endurance from Mexico to the Himalayas* by Michael Crawley
Connect With Alex Hutchinson Alex’s website * Alex at Outside*
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. For decades, some researchers have argued that the notable human capacity for endurance, evolved from the hunting practices of our ancestors, which produced physiological adaptations that make us uniquely well suited for running. But this theory has always had its detractors. As my guest explains, a new study addresses these long standing criticisms, and adds evidence that indeed we were all born to run. Alex Hutchinson is a journalist who covers the signs of endurance at fitness, and today on the show, he explains what those criticisms were and how this new research counters them. We talk about the role running held amongst peoples of the past, how runny is not only primal, but cultural and even spiritual, and why we continue to run today, even though we’re not hunting for food. And we discuss how even if we are born to run, that doesn’t mean everyone will always enjoy running all the time, and how to get into running, if you’re someone who doesn’t feel an innate desire for it. After the show is over check at our show notes at aom.io/borntorun. Alright, Alex Hutchinson, welcome back to the show.
Alex Hutchinson: Thanks a lot Brett. It’s great to be here.
Brett McKay: So you are a sports science writer, you write over there at Outside Online, and you’ve recently written about a study that’s come out on why humans run. So we’re talking jogging, but also just running in general, before we get to the study, let’s just talk about human running, what makes human running different from how other animals run, besides the fact that we’re bipedal?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I think the most obvious thing is that we do it when nobody’s chasing us, and also when we’re not chasing anybody else. So I think that’s the sort of starting point is that we run for the fun of it. And as I say that I’m already thinking, okay, no that’s not quite true, because other animals do play, but we run for long distances just for the heck of it, and so that’s the fundamental riddle that we wanna understand. Why do humans do this? And if we look at, well, what is it about the way humans run? We see all sorts of differences in terms of the way we’re able to cool ourselves, the way we breathe, the way our bodies are structured that suggest that running is something that we are actually surprisingly good at.
Brett McKay: Yeah, we were kind of born for it, so tell us about this, like what is it about our cooling system and our breathing that allows us to be such great runners?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so the two key things are that we cool ourselves by sweating, and if you think about a dog, dogs are much more typical of the Mammal world that they cool themselves by panting, and so there’s only so much you can pant, especially when you start running where you’re also needing to use your breath to get oxygen in. So dogs have to stop and pant and so do a lot of other animals, and we’re also… We’re the hairless ape. So if you’re gonna cool yourself by sweating, it helps not to be wearing a fur coat at all times, so we’re able to lose heat much more efficiently as we run. And then also running on two feet, one of the things that enables us to do is breathe as hard as we want independent of how fast we’re running, we don’t have to time our breaths to our foot strokes, and that’s one of the things where if you’re trying to outrun a deer, they can either trot or they can sprint, but as soon as they sprint, the breathing gets much more constrained by their leg motion. So there’s all these things that conspire to make it harder for other animals to both stay cool and get enough oxygen in.
Brett McKay: Yeah, the sweating aspect, I know horses sweat, but they don’t sweat as much as us humans do.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And they’ve got to… Yeah, sorry, I should clarify, it’s not that no other animal sweat, but we can dump a lot of heat because we are the naked ape, it would be very different if you were trying to cool yourselves and you were covered completely by a layer of fur.
Brett McKay: And then also humans, our muscles, we’ve got lots of efficient and fatigue-resistant slow-twitch muscles in our legs.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, and obviously everyone’s different, but by and large as a species, crucially in the big muscles of the legs that are involved in running, we are unusual in the extent… To the extent that we have… Even the sprinters among us have a lot of slow-twitch fibers that allow them to sustain the running for a longer period of time.
Brett McKay: And I think another thing you mentioned too about our anatomy that makes us great runners is our long achilles tendon. What does that have to do with it?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, and just to back up a second, so there’s a famous paper that came out in 2004 that sort of goes through all the different parts of our anatomy that are fine tuned, that when you look at it carefully, you’re like, oh, if I was designing a runner, this is what I would do, and some of them are very obscure things, it’s like we have a ligament that helps keep our head steady so we can be bouncing around, running and still be able to see the horizon, keep it level. So there’s a lot of very subtle morphological things about our bodies, and one of them is the achilles tendon, this is basically what connects your heal to your lower leg muscles, it’s a spring, with every step that you take, you are loading that spring, and then as you take the next step, it springs back and the estimates vary, but by some estimates, about half the energy you need to take a step is stored and returned from the previous step. So we’re kind of bouncing along with this energy return system, and other animals have achilles tendons, but ours is particularly long and springy and well-suited to be able to conserve energy as we run.
Brett McKay: Okay, so we can cool ourselves off easily, we’ve got tendons and ligaments that allow for better running, we can breathe more efficiently when we run. Have scientists like pitted human beings against animals and running, and when that… If they have, what are the results of that?
Alex Hutchinson: That’s a good question. I don’t think they’ve actually had official races, although there are a number of man versus horse races around the world. In fact, there’s one in… I think it’s in Wales, that’s been going on for at least 30 years. And the deal is, it’s like the prize money each year is £1000, and it’s a 25-mile race across a really rough terrain, and if a horse wins, nobody gets the money, but if… And it just accumulates from year to year until a human wins, and a guy I used to train with 30 years ago eventually won the race after 25 years of no humans winning. So we got £25,000 for beating the horses in this 25-mile race, and it looked like the conditions make a difference, it’s like on a hot day, the humans do better, and there’s other, the Western say its 100 mile race, one of the most famous long distance races in the Western United States started out as a horse race and then someone wanted to run it and they realized, oh, this should be fun, we should have humans do this.
Brett McKay: Okay, so it seems like we’re evolved for running. Was there a period when scientists started actually trying to figure out why humans run, because on the surface, it seems kind of like, why do we run? It seems like it expends a lot of energy. So why would we do this? So when did scientists first start exploring human running?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I think the sort of pop psychology or pop science version of this idea has been out there for a long time, but the major the first paper that people used to talk about was in 1984, a guy named David Carrier, who was a PhD student at the University of Utah, came out with his paper, arguing that, Hey, we are “born to run”, we have this evolutionary incentive to be able to run down other animals for hunting purposes, and that’s why that’s shaped the way both our bodies and our culture. That was 1984, but it didn’t get a ton of attention, it kind of lingered… The paper, people didn’t read it. People didn’t pay attention to it. Then there was this 2004 paper in Nature by another guy, Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah, and Dan Lieberman of Harvard, and that one got a lot of attention. It was on the cover of Nature, and maybe the running culture was more mature at that point. The readers of Runners World for which I wrote for many years, were eager to hear this message that we were born to run, so that really took off.
And then 2009, Chris McDougall wrote his book Born to Run, which made that story essential part of the book. And from then on, it’s been sort of bubbling at the surface of pop culture, almost, it kind of left the scientists behind, and the scientists maybe still had some doubts about this, but in popular culture, the idea that we’re born to run caught on.
Brett McKay: Well the idea is that we evolve to run, to aid in hunting, correct? Is that what it is?
Exactly.
Alex Hutchinson: So the idea is, if I try and chase an antelope, I have no hope, antelopes can blow me away over the short distance, but if I’m patient and persistent, if I can track the antelope and just keep it at a distance… Tortoise and the hare of slow and steady, wins the race. If I just keep running, the antelope might sprint away from me, but every time he sprints away from me, he’s getting even more tired, and if I just keep on coming, by the end of the day by three hours or six hours or eight hours, that antelope’s gonna be so tired. He’s just gonna lie down and I can walk right up to him and stab him in the neck and bring him back home for food. And so that idea of persistence hunting is not the only rationale, ’cause you could also say, Well, maybe if you can run… You see buzzards in the sky, in the distance, 20 miles away or 10 miles away, you can run and get to the carcass of an animal that’s just died before all the other scavengers strip it clean. So there’s been various versions of the theory, but the fundamental one is you run the deer or the antelope or whatever the animal is in that location to exhaustion.
Brett McKay: Okay, and because we can sweat and cool ourselves off and we have these slow-twitch muscles, we can outlast other animals. That’s the idea.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. One of the reasons this thesis took so long to catch on is that it just seems so ludicrous on the surface that every animal you see when you’re out in the woods is faster than you. And so the idea that we could out-run a deer of all things or an antelope, it’s just crazy, but it’s all about setting the parameters right, it’s not in the 100-meter dash, and it’s not in the 400 meter dash and it’s not in the mile. It’s on a hot, sunny day. Or some other circumstances that allow us to leverage our advantages and to leverage our intelligence, our ability to track. So there’s cognitive elements to this too, you have to be able to figure out where… You put yourself in the animal’s mind and say, alright, I see he went here into the water here, which way did this animal go? So the tracking element is essential too, ’cause you can’t keep up with the animal in the short term. So there’s a lot of stuff that goes into it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s interesting, there’s been a lot of research done by evolutionary scientists about how hunting made humans humans in a lot of ways, so I guess you say running, the reason why we run, you say track it back to hunting, other things, our ability to throw like other primates, they can’t throw things like we do, because their shoulder anatomy is different than ours, but the idea is that throwing spears or rocks led to that development in our shoulder anatomy just like our ability to cooperate, humans are very good co-operators, they trace it back to hunting, because typically you’d hunt in a group. Communication, even talking, speaking, might have been influenced by hunting, and there’s a whole book, I think it’s called The Hunting Hypothesis by this guy named Robert Ardrey, it’s interesting, he talks about all these different ideas of how hunting drove human evolution.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And the running hypothesis I think fits right into that. It’s maybe a sub-subset of that.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and I think… And the other thing too they say is that starting to eat meat helped our brains get bigger, maybe. That’s interesting. Okay, so there’s this theory that persistence hunting led to us evolving attributes that allowed us to be better at long distance running, but there were criticisms of this theory for a long time, so what were the key criticisms of this persistence hunting, theory of running?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, the big problem is that running burns calories, it’s just an extremely inefficient way to cover distance, and so if you’re thinking in the crucible of evolution where the small edges determine who’s gonna pass on more genes to their offspring or whatever, or have more offspring that survive, you don’t wanna waste energy. So it’s a neat trick if you can run down an antelope, but think of how many calories that burns compared to maybe if you just hide behind this bush and sit there for eight hours eventually and the antelope’s gonna wonder by. You’re gonna conk it on the head and you’re gonna get just as many calories, so the number one objection was it’s just too energetically costly. And the number two objection is, if this is what made us human, how come there’s only six people in the Kalahari and a few people in the canyons of Mexico who’ve ever been documented to do this.
It can’t be the crucial thing that made us human if it only happened in Southern Africa and in the southwest of United States, or in Mexico.
Brett McKay: Okay, so it expended too many calories, the observation was it wasn’t very wide spread. But then recently a paper came out, and this is the paper you wrote about in your article from these two guys, Morin and Winter Hadler and yeah, this study seems to validate the persistence hunting theory of running, walk us through the study.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so this guy’s Jean Mahler and Bruce Machaulder from Trent University and UC Davis, they published a new analysis that I think does a pretty effective job of countering those two particular objections, so the first one is it burns too many calories. Well, the way they came to this study is that they’ve been doing these analyses, basically return on investment calculations for different ways of getting food, including different types of hunting, so they use big data sets to make estimates of like, okay, let’s say you wanna go, do a persistent hunt. Like how long does it take? How many calories do you burn? How often do you get. Do you succeed? And if you do succeed, how big is the animal you get, how many calories can you use, how many can you carry back? And so you can come up with this calculation that you spend this many calories, you receive this many calories, so you have a return on investment of whatever, 20% or something. And you can do the same for other types of hunting, and they look at different things like community hunts and encounter hunts, so it’s like, okay, you go out in to the forest, you’re gonna try and just carefully, quietly, slowly track an animal or track a group of animals until you can shoot one.
How long does that take? How many calories, how often are you successful, what kinds of animals do you get? Or if you do it with a bunch of people trying to run the Buffalos of a cliff or whatever. How long does that take? Etcetera, etcetera, and the surprising finding they come out with is that persistence hunting is actually pretty similar or in some contexts, better in terms of its return on investment, and they look at various persistence hunting scenarios as like, well, what happens if you go a little faster or a little slower or if it takes two hours or four hours or six hours, and what they find is, for sure, running takes way more calories than walking, but you’re able to end the hunt much more quickly and have a higher success rate, and so it ends up, actually in some ways, the faster you go, the more energetically efficient it is ’cause the sooner you end the hunt. So I guess the caveat I would throw in there is that the numbers all have a lot of estimates and assumptions in terms of, well, based on their reading of the ethnographic literature or whatever, they’re like, well, this is how often a persistent hunt succeeds or whatever, but by their estimate, at the very least, it’s not worse than the other ways of hunting and might even be better. So that’s the calorie one.
Brett McKay: Right, okay. And then they also… There’s paper also countered that, other criticism that, well, persistence hunting is not widespread.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, and this is actually pretty cool. They use machine learning to analyze a big… So this is one of those things where it’s like if you look back at ethnographic records, people who’ve tried to study groups around the world, you find that there are records of persistence hunts, and so in hindsight, you’re like, well, why didn’t someone come up with this theory ages ago, ’cause, yeah, we knew 100 years ago that people, the Tarahumara in Mexico sometimes were able to run down deer, it’s like… But it’s different people looking at different manuscripts, and so the person who’s studying some obscure diary from a trader who visited a group in Borneo in 1750, they may not care about persistence hunting, they may not have noticed that, or realized that that’s significant. So in this case, the research is basically uploaded all the memoirs and travel logs and missionary accounts and stuff that they could find into a big electronic database that I think they found 8,000 of these documents, and then they used content analysis software, not just like word search but it’s like they’re doing things like, okay, anywhere… Is there a passage where a word like run down or tiring or animal, they appear somewhere in the same paragraph. And so this was able to come up with a stunning number of descriptions of persistence hunting between the 1500s and the 1900s.
They had 391 different observations coming from every continent, except Antarctica, huge variety in the environments and society, so not just in hot deserts, but also in Newfoundland in the snow, the people that were able to run down deer and particularly, not just when it’s especially hot, but when there were certain types of snow conditions, if there was a crust on the snow that made it really hard for the deer to run, and so they were able to run them down more easily, remember they’re tiring for the deer to run, and the hunters had snow shoes, so they could follow more effectively. They found examples from Hawaii chasing wild goats to exhaustion, people in Borneo catching deer to exhaustion. So basically everywhere. And so it’s this completely revised view that this wasn’t just something that a few groups in an African Mexico did, but this is something that happened basically everywhere, the one gap is in basically Europe, the main part of Europe. And that’s probably because Europe and the Middle East is where agriculture first got widely established, and so the persistent hunts probably ended before anybody was writing down ethnographic accounts. So that’s why there aren’t any first-hand observations of that.
Brett McKay: Okay. So this paper, it shows that persistence hunting, hunting by running can be calorically efficient. And then two, persistence hunting is more widespread than we previously thought. Have you seen how this paper been received by the scientific community so far?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, you know I haven’t seen any strong pushback to it. And in general, if I write about an article that other people disagree with, I’ll tend to get some messages saying, you idiot, how could you write about this study? Don’t you realize that you know X, Y, and Z? So I haven’t heard any pushback, we’ll see. It’s sometimes the scientific publishing world moves quite slowly, so maybe there’ll be a response in months to come. I think I don’t see any like big factual disagreements. So at a certain point it becomes less about did persistence hunting happen in many places around the world? And the fact that it happens in many places around the world, I think also supports the idea that it’s calorically reasonable, that people aren’t doing these things just to waste calories. So I think that part of the story is getting quite solid. The question is, what do you do with that information? Does this mean that we’re all born to run or does it just mean that, oh, this is a waste, people sometimes got food sometimes, and it’s, but it’s not that fundamental to our existence.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. Well, another question it raises is why do we keep running even though we don’t hunt by running anymore? ‘Cause I mean, it’s interesting you see across cultures, humans even if they gave up persistence hunting, they continued to run. Maybe it might have been for sport, it might have been for religious ritual. Have you seen anything about that? Like why humans continue to run even though we don’t have to?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I mean, this is the question I ask myself every morning before I go for my run. Why am I doing this? Why do we do this? And there’s a lot of discussion about it. There is a biologist named Bernd Heinrich, who wrote a book called Why We Run, about 20 years ago that’s been very influential. And he has this idea or he had that phrase, chasing the antelope, that on some level we’re sort of recapitulating some evolutionary imperative. So I think there’s a lot of effort to understand this, and this goes from like biology to anthropology. And in fact, on that note, I just finished reading an advanced copy of a new book by an anthropologist named Michael Crowley called The Meaning of Endurance from, I think it’s from Mexico to the Himalayas or something like that, is the subtitle.
And he did his PhD by spending a year and a half living with elite Ethiopian runners, trying to understand, trying to go beyond the cliche of, these guys are just born to run and it’s easy, and that’s why they’re so good trying to understand what motivates them to run. And so for this new book, he went around the world and visited groups in, Nepal. He visited the Tarahumara, he talked to people in Sub-Saharan in the Kalahari, trying to understand these questions. Why do we run? And I can’t sum it up in 10 words, but I think to your point, what started out as something that was a way to get calories evolves into something that has meaning for the society evolves into a ritual that has greater meaning that we still seek. So one of the things that he sees is that, in running you can recapitulate or you can get a feeling of connection to the natural world and even particularly to the animal that you’re hunting.
So this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, to hunt, well, you have to be able to track, you have to get in the mind of the animal. And so for a lot of people there’s this sense of connection. By moving to exhaustion, you are ritualizing the chase. And so the Tarahumara who are the, the running people in Mexico who were written about by and born to run when he visits them, what he finds is that it’s not really about running for them, and it’s certainly no longer about persistence hunting, that they actually also do these kind of dance marathons that last for a day or two, and people go nearly too exhaustion. And that serves a very much the same rule for them, and it’s become a ritual in their society. So how does that connect to me going for a run in the morning? I’m not sure, but I think there is some sense of not, of trying to catch an antelope or not that I have to do it, but that there’s some feeling of connection to the world around me that I get out of it.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Listeners are looking for a great anthropology of running. I just finished a book called Indian Running by this guy. He published a book, it was probably published in 1981. He was, I think an anthropologist of native Americans. And basically he tracks running culture in the American southwest. So we’re talking Navajos, Hopis, the Zunis. And it’s just… It’s incredibly fascinating how these tribes ritualized running. In fact, they called them action prayers. So like as they were running, they would pray, and to your point about you were trying to harness the animal, maybe that you were hunting, some of these tribes, they would put on different totems to help them run faster. So if they wanted to run faster, they might like have a deer tail on them. They might have an eagle feather in their hair so they can have keen eyesight so they can see the trail and see the animals.
I think one of the interesting parts was this idea of the Navajo. They had this like ritual of the morning run. I thought this was really interesting. So once you reach a certain age, the elders in the tribe would wake you up before dawn and you’d have to go out for these early runs. And the idea was that when you went out in the morning, the talking God was out there. So it was like the head god for the Navajo. And this guy named Rex Lee Jim, he was a Navajo runner. He said, my grandfather told me that talking God comes around in the morning, knocks on the door and says, get up my grandchildren. It’s time to run, run for health and wealth. And so yeah, they do this like running prayer. And I mean, it’s so interesting. It actually, this book and sort of how this guy explained the spirituality of running, it almost got me into running regularly just for… [laughter] ‘Cause it, it made it sound so cool.
Alex Hutchinson: Almost is almost there. But I think what I would say is, so these sort of culturally defined sources of meaning are created by society. So it’s no longer specific to the action of running. It’s not that like we were born to have that cultural experience. So there are lots of ways to obtain meaning. And some people get that from lifting weights or, climbing rocks or whatever the case may be. But for some people, for many people running is, or for everyone running is one way that we can try to find meaning within our larger society and connect with something that I think it’s not just about, oh, my sweat glands are so good at this, I need to do this. I think for most of us today, the meaning is cultural more than evolutionary.
But our body is well equipped to then step into this task that when we do it all of a sudden that certain brain chemicals that are produced that are probably a legacy of this born to run idea. The running high kind of stuff, which is so that’s an interesting, I guess we haven’t talked about that. It’s like if you look at, when you go for a run or when you do any exercise, your brain produces endocannabinoids, which is the brain’s internal version of cannabis. And it makes people feel good, but it’s the specific production of these endocannabinoids tends to peak at a sort of moderate sustained intensity. You don’t get a ton if you’re just like walking. You don’t get a ton if you’re sprinting. But if you’re at the sort of persistence hunting pace, then there’s this feeling of wellbeing that you may get. And animals that are also well adapted to run long distances like dogs, they also get these endocannabinoids, whereas other animals like in one of the studies it was ferrets that aren’t good at running long distances, they don’t get this endocannabinoid basis. So there are these holdovers from our evolutionary past that conspire to make running and activities like it feel good because we’ve evolved to have that cue to tell us you’re doing the right thing.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And you can make the case that in the west and non-Native American culture, we’ve ritualized running, but it’s in our own way. Instead of putting on eagle feathers, we put on our hokas or whatever.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And future anthropologists will have a field day with it, right? Like the colorful garb of the spandex clad modern runner. It is very ritualized for sure though maybe not as ritualized as cycling.
Brett McKay: And I imagine you’re a runner. Like when you try to explain to people why you run, I think most sort of modern people say, well, I run ’cause it’s for my health. And I’m sure that’s probably why you got into running, but I’m sure what keeps you running is more than just your health. You’re probably not even thinking about your aerobic capacity when you go out on a morning run.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I mean, it’s a helpful motivator because, I think an important point to make is that, to say that we’re born to run or that we’re sort of evolutionary equipped to do it, is not to say that it’s easy or that, it’s just a bundle of smiles that, for people who don’t run, who might think, man, this does not apply to me, I find running hard. The thing is, even people who run every day generally find it hard and wake up in the morning and think, oh man, it’s too hot or it’s too cold, or I’m too tired. So it’s not that it’s not hard, it’s just that there are enough benefits to overwhelm this feeling of hardness and the fact that it’s good for your health is one of them. But it’s, as you said, after a while, if you’ve run running for a long time, it’s often more than that. It’s more that just it in some hard to articulate way. You feel better about the world and about yourself and about your day after you’ve done that run.
Brett McKay: Another point this guy makes in Indian Running is that we might have started running for hunting, but humans have this tendency to take these things, these evolved capacities and turn into something else. So we might ritualize something. So, you see these southwestern tribes in the United States, ritualizing running. Another thing he saw that the tribes used this evol capacity to run for was communication. And so a lot of these southwestern tribes, they developed these elaborate networks of trails so that they could communicate long distances in just a day. And so they would just run, they would just run to share messages. They would actually like be people called in a tribe to be the messenger guy. And that was his job just to run. And they would… Some of the stuff they were like doing ultra marathons this one account a guy ran 156 miles in less than 24 hours just crazy. And no shoes just barefoot. And he knocked it out in less than a day.
Alex Hutchinson: It’s interesting you mentioned that because, another book I recently read is by Roger Robinson, who’s a longtime running writer and but also a historian. And has a book called Running Throughout Time, the greatest running stories ever told, which kind of traces some of the stories of running and tells them in a different way. So I mean, he starts with, Atalanta, who’s like this, a Greek legend, which he casts as this sort of foundation of women’s running, but he has a whole chapter on running messengers. And I knew about Native American messengers and I knew about Pheidippides, who’s the ancient Greek messenger who’s supposedly ran from Marathon to Athens to say, that we won and then died. It turns out that this idea of running messengers was… It was like a profession around the world.
And so there’s these, famous stories about like 300 years ago there was a legendary Welsh messenger named Griffith Morgan, who performed all these feats and was a hero in his time. And so all these societies around the world had like a professionalized group of ultra long distance runners who served as messengers. They were more efficient, more knowledgeable, more able to navigate different circumstances than a horse would’ve been or whatever. And so it’s exactly that. It’s take… We didn’t evolve to be messengers, but we took advantage of the way we were constructed and it’s fascinating reading the stories of things that, naively I would’ve thought it’s like nobody was running 150 miles until, the 1970s when people were trying to figure out, the meaning of life. But it’s like no, they were doing that 2000 years ago. They were doing it 1000 years ago. They were doing it 500 years ago and they were doing it remarkably quickly.
Brett McKay: Yeah. In Indian Running talks about the Spanish when they came to the Western Hemisphere, they finally realized that they could probably just hire the indigenous people to get messages faster. So they said, there’s like this one trip from Lima to Cusco, this is in Peru. If they use their horse mail service, it would take 12 to 13 days to get a message, but if they use the runners, they can cover it in just three days.
Alex Hutchinson: There you go. There’s the race we were looking for, man versus animal. We win.
Brett McKay: Yeah, we win. Okay, so it sounds like we were… I mean, that book Born to Run, there’s something to it. So if we’re Born to Run, why… I mean, I think we kind of talked about this earlier, but why do so few people like to run?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so like I said, I mean, I think that the first thing to acknowledge is that in the moment experience of running is difficult. And that’s true, not just for, let’s say me, but it’s true for the Ethiopian or Kenyan runners who win the Olympics. It’s true for the Tarahumara who were sort of lionized in the Born to Run book. And actually there was a scientific paper that came out maybe two years ago, which was a kind of reexamination of the Tarahumara in Mexico fighting against what they called the myth of the Athletic Savage. This idea that, these people who are closer to our evolutionary origins, they just sort of are born to run. They wake up, they float long distances, and it’s like no, the Tarahumara are capable of… Many of the Tarahumara are capable of, impressive feats of running, but there are some who are terrible at running.
And even the ones who do run after they do one of these ultra marathons, they’re often like unable to walk for two weeks because it’s so hard and so unpleasant. And they struggle with it in the same way that all of us do. So being born to run doesn’t mean that running is easy. So then it just becomes a question of, are the rewards of running in the broadest sense of the word, do they overcome the challenges of running, not just in a global sense, but, or not just over time, but at that moment where you’re sitting at the door or standing at the front door with your running shoes on, deciding whether you wanna go for a run. Because it’s one thing to say, we all are familiar with this idea of like of things that we know we’ll be glad we did once we’ve done them, but we don’t wanna do them anyway.
So I’m rambling a little bit here, but just one other point to make is Dan Lieberman, the Harvard anthropologist who co-authored the 2004 paper, Born to Run. He wrote a book, I don’t know, four or five years ago or something called Exercised. And the basic message of that book was, just being born to do something doesn’t mean we’re gonna wanna do it. And that it’s totally natural for us not to want to go for a run or do other kinds of exercise. Because we’re also evolved to save energy, to be as stingy with wasted energy as we possibly can. So it’s natural that we have a big barrier urging us to be as lazy as possible, and we shouldn’t feel bad about that. We just have to think carefully about how we wanna live, what we wanna do in the context of wanting to be healthy and happy and trying to engineer our living conditions so that it’s easy to take the route that we’ll be happiest as we took. If you see what, so that it’s not every morning you wake up and decide, for me, for someone who runs on a regular basis, the key thing is I don’t leave it to myself to make the decision every morning I decide and then I make it as easy as possible to follow up with that decision.
Brett McKay: Any advice on how to make it easy so you can get over that inertia to start running? Help me out. Like I read Indian Running, I’m man, I should become a runner. But there’s still a part of me ah, I don’t know, so help me out. How can I become a runner?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean the best tricks and tips are different for each person, but one thing that helps me a lot is, let’s say I wanna go for an hour run. That’s a really daunting thing. And so there’ll be times when, because of the weather, ’cause of how I feel, that sounds awful. And so I never sort of impose a minimum distance on my run or a minimum speed. Very often I will wake up and I’ll be like… And I have stuff going on and, I gotta get my kids to school and I have deadlines and I’m stressed out. I don’t have time to run. Well, I do have 10 minutes I’m gonna put on my clothes and I’m gonna go out the door and I’m gonna jog out for five minutes. And then if I’m tired and still feeling overwhelmed, I’m gonna turn around and I’m gonna get back.
And then I’ll have jogged for 10 minutes. Almost always, once I get out there, I’m like well, I can do 20 minutes or, well, now that I’m out here, the marginal cost, an extra five minutes is nothing. And I’m actually starting to enjoy myself. ‘Cause the first 10 minutes of the runner off and the hardest and the most sluggish for me. But I’m absolutely willing to go out, spend seven minutes running and come back in if it’s not, if I just have too much going on. So, ’cause getting out the door is the hard part. So you wanna, if getting out the door involves agreeing to go for an hour, then that makes it harder. So I lower the barrier and I just… I also, this is totally personal, but for me, if I wait till the end of the day, life fills up, I’ve got too much other stuff going on, so I get up and I just go before breakfast for as long or as little time as I have. So I get it outta the way first thing. Other people find that intolerable, they hate morning runs and they do it at the end of the day. And that’s cool too. But figuring out when it fits in your day and won’t get overwhelmed I think is important.
Brett McKay: I like that idea of setting your expectations incredibly low ’cause I think a lot of people when they think about, I wanna take up running, they think, well, I gotta run a 5K, I gotta do a race, no, just run. Just even if it’s just for 10 minutes. I think I can do that ’cause lately I’ve been waking up really early for some reason I think it’s like middle age, my body’s like Hey, you’re gonna wake up at 5:30 now? So I’ve been going for two mile walks early in the morning ’cause I got nothing else to do. Maybe I can just start running, I can start jogging a little bit of that.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. Like look, I’m a very serious runner. I’ve been running my whole life. I’ve competed at a very high level. I make my living writing about running. I do lots of, not lots of, but I definitely do some like 14 minute runs and some 16 minute runs and stuff like that. And it’s still something, it’s still gets my blood flowing and it’s good. But by being open to that, that gets me out there most days and then often I end up running longer and just… Yeah, exactly. Don’t, and as a more general thing, just as a like the standard running advice thing, because the other thing people run into is injuries, right? And things like that. Be patient just because your friend runs 5Ks, if you haven’t been running regularly for a long time, that doesn’t mean you should go out and run 5K right away. And so the programs that start with like a minute of jogging in a minute of walking and stuff, those are great. And your goal should not be, I’m gonna run a 5K or much worse, I’m gonna run a half marathon in three months. Your goal should be in two years I wanna still be running and building up and enjoying it.
Brett McKay: And I imagine if you start with these sort of like low expectations, you’ll eventually, maybe you’ll eventually learn to oh, I like this, this is something I really enjoy. And then maybe you start getting more serious about it.
Alex Hutchinson: Maybe you do. I think a lot of people that happens, maybe you don’t, but you know what, if you establish a habit of going for a 15 minute run three times a week, I guarantee that is dramatically improving your overall fitness and possibly your mental health and happiness.
Brett McKay: Oh. For sure. Well, Alex, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
Alex Hutchinson: Thanks, Brett. Yeah, I write basically roughly once a week for Outside Magazine. So outsideonline.com is a good place to look for my articles. I also, my website is alexhutchinson.net or my, social media accounts are @SweatScience.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Alex Hutchinson, thanks for your time’s. Been a pleasure.
Alex Hutchinson: Thanks a lot, Brett.
Brett McKay: My guest Davis is Alex Hutchinson. He’s a journalist who specializes in exercise science. You can find more information about his work at his website, alexhutchinson.net. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/borntorun, where you can find links to resources where you 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 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 this so already, I’d appreciate it. If you take one minute to give view up a 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 think can get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind you listening to our podcast, put what you’ve heard into action.
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In a family, a lot of the dynamics around devices and screens are reactive in nature. Kids bug for their own smartphones, parents worry they’ll be left out without one, and without weighing the pros and cons, give in to their kids’ requests. Parents let children have a ton of screen time because it lets the parents do what they want; then, they reach a moment where they feel disturbed about how much time their kids are on screens, berate their children for this habit, which they’ve facilitated, and vow that things are going to abruptly turn around.
Rather than basing your policies about kids and screens on mood, fear, and impulse, it would be better to do so based on reason and reflection. Emily Cherkin has some ideas on how to get there. Emily is a former teacher, a screentime consultant who helps parents and educators balance the role of devices in kids’ lives, and the author of The Screentime Solution: A Judgment-Free Guide to Becoming a Tech-Intentional Family. Today on the show, Emily unpacks the state of screentime amongst kids today, how the “displacement hypothesis” explains how its impact extends beyond a decline in mental health, and why parents give their kids smartphones even when they’re not sure it’s good for them. We then turn to how families can become more tech intentional, and how that starts with parents taking a look at their own behavior. We discuss why putting parental controls on devices isn’t the ultimate solution, why a better one is based on your relationship with your kids, why you need to live your digital life out loud, and some considerations to think through before getting your kid their first smartphone.
Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast #300: How to Raise Free Range Kids With Lenore Skenazy * AoM Article: What’s the Right Age to Get a Kid Their First Smartphone? 3 Tech Thinkers Weigh In * AoM Article: The Best Internet Filter for Kids * The Anxious Generation* by Jonathan Haidt * The Light Phone
Connect With Emily Cherkin* Emily’s website
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. In a family, a lot of the dynamics around devices and screens are reactive in nature. Kids bug for their own smartphones. Parents worry they’ll be left out without one, without weighing the pros and cons give in to their kids requests. Parents let children have a ton of screen time because it lets the parents do what they want. Then, they reach a moment where they feel disturbed about how much time their kids are on screens, berate their children for this habit, which they facilitated, and vow that things are going to abruptly turn around. Rather than basing your policies about kids and screens on mood, fear, and impulse, it would be better to do so based on reason and reflection. Emily Cherkin has some ideas on how to get there. Emily is a former teacher, a screen time consultant who helps parents and educators balance the role of devices in kids’ lives, and the author of The Screentime Solution: A Judgment-Free Guide to Becoming a Tech-Intentional Family.
Today on the show, Emily unpacks the state of screen time amongst kids today, how the displacement hypothesis explains how its impact extends beyond a decline in mental health, and why parents give their kids smartphones even when they’re not sure it’s good for them. We then turn to how families can become more tech-intentional, and how that starts with parents taking a look at their own behavior. We discuss why putting parental controls on devices isn’t the ultimate solution, why a better one is based on your relationship with your kids, why you need to live your digital life out loud, and some considerations to think through before getting your kid their first smartphone. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/screentime.
Emily Cherkin, welcome to the show.
Emily Cherkin: Thank you so much for having me.
Brett McKay: So you are a screen time consultant. You help parents help their kids manage their screen time. You also do education with educators. You’re also doing some activism, trying to get some regulations going on to help the tech not be so pernicious in our kids’ lives. So give us an overview about screen time use amongst young people these days. How many hours of screens are kids getting?
Emily Cherkin: Yes, that’s a good question, and it’s a lot. The most recent data that I’ve been using is from the Center for Disease Control, which was just this summer, and they found that on average, kids between 8 and 18 are spending seven and a half hours a day. What really surprises me, well, I guess it’s not surprising, but shocking is that between 11 and 14-year-olds are about nine hours a day, and this is daily average. So some more, some less. So that’s a lot of time, and generally speaking, these numbers do not include the time on screens for school, which is a different problem. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so this is just screen time at home.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah, right. So pre-pandemic, a lot of parents were worried about how much time my kids on screens when they come home from school, and then tech in school was already kind of creeping in, but of course, lockdown and remote learning threw a lot of fuel on that fire, and now it’s screen time at school plus screen time at home. So we’re talking, for some kids, could be 10, 12, 13 hours a day when you combine school screen time plus home screen time. That’s a lot.
Brett McKay: That’s a lot of screen. Yeah, you talk about in your book how the pandemic just accelerated the rise in screen time use.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah, and you know, I think the pandemic did a lot of things to change the world, and it definitely accelerated this problem, but it was a problem before. I think we can’t entirely blame the pandemic for it. Like, there was a two-fold effect to the amount of screen time kids were having at school, both, again, personally and for school, like remote learning, was that parents did get sort of a peek behind the curtain and could see a lot more about what was happening on school devices in terms of the tech for school, and parents were often also stuck between a rock and a hard place with like, well, I have to work, or I have to do this, or I don’t have childcare, and so it was a lot. I do think the good part of this is there’s a lot more awareness of it as a challenge, but the not-so-good part is that the numbers have just gone up so rapidly.
Brett McKay: Do we have any statistics on when kids are being introduced to their first screen? I’m not talking about television. I’m talking about maybe like an iPad or something like that.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah, I mean, what’s crazy is it’s infancy is what we’re again, it’s anecdotal. I think it really depends because it’s not like parents are handing a newborn a phone, but if you imagine that a newborn is being held while a parent holds a phone, you’re having an impact, right? Like, that’s a triangulation experience of a baby, a parent, and a phone, and I’ll be really careful upfront here to say I’m not, I always say it’s not parents’ fault that this has gotten so bad, but it is our responsibility to better understand what we’re doing, and it starts literally pre-birth, pre getting children in our lives, and so a lot of it has to do with parental use of screens as that impact or in those early years.
But we do know that for smartphone ownership, nearly a third of eight-year-olds now have their own smartphone, so it used to be kind of like we were talking about high schoolers and maybe middle schoolers, but we’re now talking about elementary schoolers with phones, and those who don’t have phones often have like an Apple Watch or a smartwatch instead of a phone, and we can talk about that too, but I’m not sure they’re better.
Brett McKay: Yeah, okay, so screens, you’re getting to introduce the screens at infancy. I remember, so I remember my son was born in 2010, and that was around when the iPad came out.
Emily Cherkin: Yep, yep, my daughter’s 2011, so I’m with you.
Brett McKay: And so I got an iPad for me. I didn’t think this was for my kid, and so I used it, and then when he was maybe like a year old, I remember like, oh, well, there’s apps for kids. They can learn letters. So I downloaded an app for him, and he did it, but now you’re seeing parents, like they get a screen, like a pad just for their toddler.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah, and that’s definitely a big difference. I have a 16-year-old as well, and I remember when he was about one or two, he figured out pretty quickly how to swipe on the iPhones, just when we had to originally swipe them on, and I remember being like, wow, that’s so crazy. He learned that so fast, and of course, in hindsight, it’s like, of course he did, ’cause it’s really user-friendly. The idea is that even a toddler can do it, and the problem is, exactly as you say, if you go back and you watch on YouTube the original iPad launch videos, nothing is mentioned about children, right? It was a tool for adults, and I even remember buying my husband one as a gift. It didn’t occur to us to get it for a kid, but of course, now we see the padded cases and little toddlers and strollers walking around with them and all of these different apps, games, platforms that are pitched to kids.
Brett McKay: Right. Or at restaurants. You go into a restaurant, you just see the kid with the iPad, yeah.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah, and again, one of my big mottos is to replace judgment with curiosity, because as I always joke, parenting is the judgiest sport I’ve ever played. It is so fraught with so many opinions about how do you sleep and feed and diaper and all of this stuff from day one. And screen time is a hot topic for judgment. We, as parents, feel a lot of guilt and shame about, I think, our own use. I think about our kids’ use. We sort of, like you and I, we kind of came to the realization at some point, like, oh, well, maybe this isn’t the best thing for young children, but we’re learning this as we go, and I don’t think blaming parents gets us anywhere, and I also think it feeds into the narrative that big tech would like us to buy into, which is that it’s parents’ fault, not their fault, right? It’s a lot easier to say, well, this is a parenting problem, and that’s not my view.
Brett McKay: Okay, so screens, infancy, smartphone, you said it was a third by the age eight?
Emily Cherkin: Yeah, third by eight. We’ve got 71% by age 12, which is sort of middle school. We’ve got almost, depending on, again, it’s probably 90 to 95% by high school.
Brett McKay: And in your book, you do this really interesting compare and contrast to show how screens have just overtaken all areas of our kids’ lives, not just their off-time life, their home life. You do this compare and contrast between what screen use looked like for a Gen X person versus a Gen Z person. So walk us through some of those differences.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah, and I recognize, too, that there is a whole nother parenting generation, like the millennial generation, that might not even recognize the Gen X childhood in this comparison, because I was writing about what I know. And for a lot of us who were Gen Xers, it was growing up and having a lot of freedom in outside play, the sort of come home before the lights come on. Parents didn’t know where we were. We didn’t wear bike helmets. There certainly were things that allowed for a lot of risk-taking and adventuring, and I’m really grateful for that. I think the other thing I see huge differences are with the way in which communication happened, whether that was like if I went to a friend’s house, my parents might know I was there. They might call the house line, but it wouldn’t contact me directly, or even the way schools communicated, right? Sending home a newsletter from the teacher on a piece of paper versus a digital platform, right? So there’s some pretty significant changes. I would say that the single biggest difference, and part of this is I get a lot of responses like, well, I played video games and I watched TV when I was a kid and I turned out fine.
Well, the single biggest difference is something called persuasive design, which I write about in the book and I know is becoming a more mainstream term now. And really what it is is the way in which apps, platforms, technology is designed to hook and hold our attention. And it is not at all the same way of a Gen X childhood, right, where you turn on a TV show and you have to wait a week to watch the next episode. Like that’s sort of a mind boggling concept now for children is like, well, I just watched the whole series all in one day. It’s a very, on demand too. I don’t even have to wait to start it at a certain time. And so that alone has changed the way that we experience, “television” or screen time.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I grew up, I was born in ’82, so I’m like an older millennial. Television for me, we had cable, but there wasn’t really much selection there. Sometimes you go, well, I’m gonna watch Yan Can Cook on the Discovery Channel. That’s all there is. But now kids, they have like personalized feeds in YouTube and it’s constantly, there’s just all this novelty. So there’s no reason for them to go away from their device. When I was a kid, I was like, well, this is really nothing on TV. I’m gonna go outside.
Emily Cherkin: Exactly. And the other thing is too, if you grew up with siblings that like, you had to negotiate what to watch. You fought over the remote control. Like, well, we watched your show last time. Now it’s my turn to pick. And like maybe our parents found that frustrating and annoying, but my view is like, that’s incredibly important skill building and relationship skills stuff that’s happening there. Negotiating and navigating conflict and getting to a point of agreement. But when we hand kids headphones and individual devices, they’re not doing any of that. And again, I always say, I’m not anti-tech, I’m tech intentional. So yeah, I do think sometimes it’s okay that a kid watches something and I can give my two senses that like in general, the bigger the screen, the better. No headphones over headphones, public space versus private space.
Anytime we can do that and make those choices within choices, I think that’s better. But I’m also not an absolutist. I don’t think, it doesn’t affect every kid the same way. And I think that when we get too locked into rules about hard and fast, yes and no, we lose a lot of the nuance. And if you’re a parent, you know that it’s all about nuance.
Brett McKay: So what have been some of the consequences of the increase of screen use among young people?
Emily Cherkin: Well, I mean, if if you’ve been following anything around screen time and youth and social media stuff, the Surgeon General’s warning from last fall is about the dire state of youth mental health. And I do recognize social media platforms are not the same thing as like a smartphone, but that’s the tool on which kids are accessing them. And mental health isn’t only affected by social media platforms. What I see is kids being driven to the technology to escape feelings of discomfort or struggle, whether that’s in the school environment or family communication or social media.
And so as a former teacher, for example, what I saw as soon as we pivoted from I had the paper grade book to the digital one and it really came through the teachers first, not the students in terms of access to platforms. But my seventh grade students stopped coming to ask me for help. They didn’t come and ask me, what happened on my vocab test? How do I study differently to get a different grade? Or I need help on this essay. Instead, what happened is parents started emailing me. Parents were refreshing the portal, like why haven’t you graded this? And so that drove me to spend more time at the computer and then less time with my students. And my very firm belief is that learning happens in the context of human relationships. It doesn’t happen because mom emailed about a vocab test and that was 10 years ago. And what’s happening now is kids are texting their parents from school saying I got a bad grade. And so all of this sort of snowball effect has led us to a group of kids, youth, and not just teenagers, but even younger kids who are just struggling, whether that’s their confidence, their mental health, their skills.
And that to me, if I wanna get a little meta here, no pun intended, is that is a threat to democracy. We are raising children who are not capable of thinking critically, of experiencing a difference of opinion without seeing it or feeling it as a personal attack without the skills to troubleshoot and problem solve that they really need to be a thriving adult. So I see this as a real snowballing problem. It’s not just one thing, it’s multiple things. And the pendulum is swung pretty far.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I thought that was interesting. You have a section about the displacement hypothesis.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah.
Brett McKay: If you’re on a screen, it’s displacing time you could have spent working on a different skill. So if you’re on a screen, you’re not working on learning how to play an instrument.
Emily Cherkin: Exactly.
Brett McKay: But also it displaces skills like you said there, social interaction, how to handle conflict. Because you can just hide behind the screen and not actually have to deal with the conflict.
Emily Cherkin: Right, yeah. And again, it’s easy to dump this all on screens. I think there’s also been a big shift in parenting styles too. You and I are similar age and we were kind of raised in that helicopter parenting generation where yeah, we had a pretty free childhood, but then there was a lot of sort of swooping in, like, oh, you forgot your lunch, let me bring it to school that kind of thing. And now what we’re seeing is this lawnmower, snowplow parenting approach, which is I’m gonna go ahead of my child, mow away obstacles so they don’t ever experience adversity. And I believe those intentions are good. I really believe parents think they are being good and helpful and supportive. But the problem is we actually need our children to have opportunities to experience some friction, some stress, some conflict, because that’s how they learn to cope with it. And the more we take away those experiences, the less opportunities they have to practice that. And I think screens contribute to that in that they provide an escape that we can go to it and watch a video instead of facing a social conflict head on that we might’ve in our childhoods had to deal with.
Brett McKay: Well, going on, kind of continue with that theme, like I’m sure a lot of parents who give their kids iPads and smartphones, they cognitively understand like, okay, I know this is probably not good for my kid. They’ve read the research, they’ve seen the news articles, but they still do it anyway. When you’ve talked to people who’ve come to you for help, what do they tell you? Like, what are the reasons why they give their kids devices, even though they know, like they understand, like this is probably not the best thing for my kid.
Emily Cherkin: Right, yeah. And again, I have a lot of empathy for parents because I think the main reason, I think a lot of the reasons I hear, and again, it’s like, we know this isn’t good. We know what the data say, but a lot of it is fear. And there are sort of several layers to that. I think there is fear about the real world, like what’s safe and what’s not safe. I think there’s a lot of fear about our child being excluded or left out if they don’t have a phone or a social media platform. And I think there’s to be really honest, I think there’s a lot of parental fear about school violence which is awful. I wish it weren’t something that this country had to deal with. But what I see for parents is that we, as parents, are often hijacked ourselves by clickbait news headlines, by sensational social media stories, because that’s how the algorithm works. Certainly once you watch one, you’re gonna get fed a lot more, but they’re not representations of reality.
They are often extremely rare circumstances that are not truly dangerous for the majority of children. And this is a hard thing for parents to hear, but I think we are too often focusing on the scary and not the dangerous. And so what I really try to help parents think about is I think I’m making my kids safe by giving them a phone or preventing them from experiencing exclusion, for example. But really when we hand over unlimited access to the internet, the danger is in the device. And certainly the younger we hand them out and with the less skills in place to cope with it, that’s dangerous. And what’s really interesting is that Pew Research found that the top three parental fears in America are youth mental health, bullying, and kidnapping. And one of the reasons I hear parents give phones out earlier and earlier is this fear of kidnapping, which is this idea of scary versus dangerous, right? Like kidnapping is scary, but it is not dangerous from a statistical perspective.
And somebody actually went and did the math and they found that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped, obviously no one does, you would have to leave them outside every day for 750,000 years to be guaranteed of being kidnapped. And that’s a pretty low statistical chance. And yet when we give our children phones or social media access, we make those top two parental fears so much worse, the bullying and the youth mental health. And so it’s this very paradoxical choice that parents are making. And I understand the instinct, but we need to come from a place of reason rather than fear. And I realize how hard that is to ask parents.
Brett McKay: Yeah we’ve had Lenore Skenazy on the podcast.
Emily Cherkin: Oh I love her. I love her.
Brett McKay: Yeah talking about free-range kids and she talked about… Yeah the chances of your kid getting kidnapped are just… It’s…
Emily Cherkin: It’s nil. Yeah.
Brett McKay: It’s nil pretty much. But yeah I thought it was interesting. We’re trying to make our kids safer but in the process we’re actually putting them more in danger of bullying and the mental health stuff. When parents realize their kids have a problem with screen use, how do they typically go about remedying the situation?
Emily Cherkin: Yeah I get a lot of parents who want me to help them fix their kids. And the way I phrase it is that this is not a kid problem it’s an adult problem that’s impacting children. And a lot of the work I do with parents is to start by actually looking at our own use of screens. And again I replace judgment with curiosity. This is come as you are, we’ve all made mistakes, we all are learning, and then because we know better now we can do better. And a lot of it has to do with how do we as adults engage with digital tech around our children because what they see is what they’re gonna do. And so that’s usually a starting point. But the other thing I also hear is that parents really wanna know what parental controls that they can put on their devices or their kids’ devices to help them decrease screen time. And the problem I have with that is it’s actually asking the wrong question. I think rather than worrying about total number of hours and the way in which we monitor them what I would rather happen and I think is a far more effective way to help manage screen time is two things. One do you know what your child is actually doing online?
Not just because you’ve been watching on an app but because you sat with them because you’ve asked them questions about it. All of that. And the second one is do you have a strong relationship with your child? Because that is actually the best predictor of future mental health for them. It’s not that you’ve managed to block XYZ websites or whatever. And at the end of the day too every parent who comes to me has a story of how my kid found the workaround. My kid disabled the parental controls. I thought I had it all locked down. And so I call it digital whack-a-mole. Because you think you’ve got it here but then the kid finds it there. And it sort of lulls parents into this false sense of security and it is not long-term effective. Now that being said it takes a lot more work to work on that relationship piece and the communication piece than it is to just download an app. And that’s hard. Not all parents are able or willing to go there yet and so I recognize it’s not easy but it matters.
Brett McKay: Yeah the parental controls I’ve experimented with various ones. They’re easy to work around but also even if you get them to work they’re not that great because for one you can’t filter content within an app, right?
Emily Cherkin: Exactly.
Brett McKay: You can block websites. You can say okay…
Emily Cherkin: Exactly.
Brett McKay: I’m gonna block all porn websites or drug websites whatever. You can do that but you can’t filter the content in the Instagram app or the Snapchat app.
Emily Cherkin: Exactly.
Brett McKay: And so your kids could be looking at stuff… Or even the YouTube. You can’t really… It’s hard to like do parental controls on YouTube. So yeah they don’t… And then the other problem I’ve had with them before is that sometimes they work too well. And I have my son he was trying to access espn.com to look at the basketball scores. And it’s like I can’t get it. Oh dad I can’t. It says it’s blocked ’cause it’s not appropriate. And I’m like okay. So it’s more of a hassle.
Emily Cherkin: It is and look I’m always… There’s some families for whom it works and they find it’s a great tool. That’s fine I’m not suggesting you toss it all to the curb. But I also really encourage if you have them and you think they’re working to make sure. Because the ways in which kids get around them to your point they don’t monitor the in-app content but even that like for example parents are often surprised that Pinterest is a problematic app. Because they think of it as a crafting place. That’s what we knew it as. But that’s where kids are watching TikTok ’cause they can see TikTok videos through Pinterest. So kids are way… They’re always one step ahead of us on that. And that is why that relationship piece is so important. We don’t wanna drive kids further underground. We don’t wanna make kids sneaky about it because it isn’t a question of if they see inappropriate content or scary content or something they don’t understand. It’s a question of when. And what we need to do as parents is be the adult that they come to when that happens. And if what we’ve done previously is the digital whack-a-mole or the you get in big trouble, they’re not going to come to you.
And that’s where we get into the really dangerous outcomes is that they go to the internet to find out more information which is almost never a good idea. Or they blame themselves and it takes a serious toll on their mental health. The true antidote to addiction is connection. It is this relationship piece. And it isn’t easy and it’s also our job as parents to look at our own screen addiction or tendencies and look at like well what could I be doing differently? What’s a way that I can help my kid by helping myself? That’s a starting point I would argue.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. Yeah I think that’s an important point that you’ve got to model what appropriate or good digital behavior looks like in your own life ’cause your kids are gonna follow what you do. And you have this great advice for parents. If they have a problem with their screen use, right? They’re constantly checking their phone or whatever is to live your digital life out loud. What does that mean and how can that help?
Emily Cherkin: Yeah so a colleague of mine many years ago used this as a phrase to help kids build executive function skills and she said living your life out loud. And I had this aha moment which was like oh my gosh this is what we should be doing with digital tech. And so living your life out loud is actually one of my number one tips to give parents. It’s like you can start it today. It’s free. It’s easy. You don’t need any special skills. And all it is is narrating what you do as you do it around your technology. So it might be I’m reaching for my phone I’m gonna check and see what time soccer practice starts and then I’m gonna text your friend’s mom and see if she can drive you home. It’s a play-by-play to use a sports metaphor. And is it annoying? Yes. Is it boring? Yes. Will your kids roll their eyes and go why are you telling me all this out loud? Yes. And does that matter? Yes because it means they’re listening. You are showing how you are using this as a tool. I always say that a smartphone isn’t a switchblade it’s a Swiss Army knife. It’s a multi-tool and kids need us to teach them that it is a thing that does more than one platform, one communication tool, one anything and how we use it really matters.
And the added benefit is we’re modeling tech use but we’re also teaching some of that executive function so skills like organizing and planning and communicating. Like we can say oh I’m using this to plan my schedule for the week and this is how it looks. This is all skills stuff kids need. And we can add in that emotional vocabulary too. We can start to talk about like oh my gosh I’m standing in the grocery line and I’m bored and I realize I’m pulling out my phone to look at it and I could be talking to you or it doesn’t make me feel better to scroll through someone else’s Instagram pictures. It just makes me feel like my life is boring. And by starting to articulate the way it impacts us our kids can see that it will also be impactful for them. And again I always just say when the kids roll their eyes it’s good ’cause it means they’re listening. And especially for those teens and tweens that’s developmentally normal. They’re gonna roll their eyes at you and that’s okay.
Brett McKay: Okay so live your digital life out loud. I really like that tip because it just… You know. What I like about it too it just adds more friction into your digital use…
Emily Cherkin: Exactly.
Brett McKay: So you’ll be less likely to pull out the phone. You’re like well I don’t want to narrate what I’m doing to my kids I’ll as well maybe just leave my phone in my pocket.
Emily Cherkin: Exactly. And you start to notice when you do it how many other people don’t do it. My husband said he was doing it with us at home all the time and then he’d go to work and he’s like why is no one saying this? It’s so weird it feels so rude but we’ve sort of slipped into this habit and I would love to see that as a strategy that spreads far and wide.
Brett McKay: And then the other piece of that is instead of relying on parental controls completely just talk to your kids like talk to them about their digital life. Like ask them what are you even checking out on YouTube? What are you watching? You don’t have to do it accusatory like ah you’re probably looking at something you’re not supposed to be looking at. Just like hey no tell me who are the people you follow on YouTube?
Emily Cherkin: Yeah and why do you like that person? What makes their videos interesting to you? And it is very likely your kids are gonna say, “Well, I don’t know.” and that’s where we just have to lean on them a little bit. And to think of this as… Actually it’s a skill building opportunity for them to articulate their opinion and why they like something is a skill. And it’s okay if you don’t agree with it. I think a lot of the judgment we feel about kids’ screen time is very apparent to kids. I think it makes them react more defensively. So I always talk about going backward to go forward. This idea that okay maybe you hate Minecraft and you don’t wanna hear any more about Minecraft today. But if you can engage your child on something they’re interested in, that’s a connection building moment.
You might be like as we’re turning this off would you tell me about the world you build or what you wanna do tomorrow or who are you working with on this world? Any sort of question whether or not you really wanna know the details you’re showing your kid you care about something they’re interested in and that’s solidifying your relationship. And so then the idea would be for something non-digital you can build on that. That’s where I think we go so quickly to defensiveness and accusatory sort of I can’t believe you’re addicted to your phone and why don’t you turn that thing off? And… You know, the kids know. The kids know we don’t like it. So that’s hard.
Brett McKay: Yeah so we… Our family we do use parental… The Apple parental controls ’cause our kids have their own iPad for games and whatever. But the one I think is really useful is they have to ask permission before they download an app. And I think that’s really handy ’cause okay first it prevents them from opening up accounts on social media platforms without us knowing about it. But also the prompt when I get on my phone like, hey Gus wants to download this app. I can have a conversation like what’s up with this? Why are you wanting to do this? It’s a conversation starter.
Emily Cherkin: That’s great yeah I love that too. And we don’t use those controls but we have that rule. And even again anecdotally my daughter last week I saw a screen… She uses a family iPad and we share my phone which is its own creative solution. She’s 13 now so it’s been interesting. She also has access to a light phone which is one of the minimalist options for when she does go out and wants to call about pickup but sharing a phone with a 13 year old is fascinating. That’s a whole different topic. But one of the things that it has allowed us to do is just have these ongoing conversations. And I noticed a screenshot the other day of what looked like an AI chat bot kind of an app. And I was like huh I don’t remember being asked about that one. And so it was an opportunity to revisit the expectation that if you want to download something you have to ask us about it. And just simply downloading it without asking doesn’t work. And because I can see… I have it on my phone but also I can look at the iPad. I was like this doesn’t look like it’s in alignment with what we’ve talked about. And she immediately goes “oh yeah. Okay I’ll delete it.” And I’m sure there are things I’m missing.
Again I wanna put… As much as I am the screen time consultant I don’t want parents to think I don’t fight with my own kids about screen time sometimes. I do. But what I care a lot more about than the are they following my rule? Is are they learning something from this interaction and what is it I want them to take away from it because that’s what’s setting them up for those future skills. And she did a lot of eye-rolling and was annoyed at me for talking to her about it but then I immediately saw a text that she sent to her friends that was like, “I have to delete this my mom made a really good point. It’s not good for kids.” and it was like what she said and what she did were two different things but that’s literally what parenting teens and tweens is like. And so we’ve got to also give them more credit that just ’cause… The gesture I usually give is like they’re both flipping us off and rolling their eyes while beckoning for us to come closer and help them. It’s such a contradictory conflicting message and we have to ignore that middle finger. We have to pay attention to the bid for connection because that’s what they need more than ever even in spite of what they’re saying and doing.
Brett McKay: And besides just checking in regularly on your kid’s digital life and you’re doing this out of curiosity not judgment. You also talked about just having conversations about how technology lines up with your family’s principles or values. Just on an ongoing basis. And you can even talk about it from your own experience. Like oh I was bored and I… Like you said earlier. I’m bored and I wanted to check the screen. Like well I don’t wanna be the kind of person who has to suck on a digital binky anytime I’m bored or upset.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah exactly.
Brett McKay: And you think your kids aren’t listening but they are. They might be rolling their eyes when you talk about it but they’re absorbing it.
Emily Cherkin: Exactly. That’s exactly it. And I think having the conversations just starts to sort of plant those seeds. And so it can be… Like even a couple of days ago at dinner we were just chatting about I was sharing some information a parent shared with me about her teenager having up to 13 hours on his phone a day. And that’s definitely on the high end. And even my 16-year-old son who, I see him pick up his phone more than I would want sometimes and boy do we talk about it. But even he was like huh that’s a lot and inside I’m cheering and excited like oh my gosh he gets it. But I was like yeah yeah it is a lot. And it’s not like they’ll come back to us and it may take five, six, seven, 20 conversations before it clicks in but that again is normal brain development. They’re not always gonna get it that first second or third conversation. And that’s okay that’s why we keep trying.
Brett McKay: Kind of brass tacks here. When do you recommend parents introduce screens to them ’cause there’s different ways you can introduce screens here. The first one I think most kids get introduced to early is an iPad or a tablet of some sort.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah or a parent phone.
Brett McKay: Or a parent phone. Any advice on how to introduce that in a way that it’s more conducive to well-being?
Emily Cherkin: Yeah yeah and again my tech intentional approach is all about the intentionality of introducing it. So my TLDR is later is better less is more relationships and skills first. And so later is better and I realize that’s not helpful because parents often want well like how many years old but the reality is it depends so much on each child and the temperament and the other to what we were talking earlier about displacement like what are the other things that are happening in this child’s life and your family life. So I worry sometimes when we get too hard and fast about age… Number age and number of hours that if you’ve not met that or you’ve gone way past that you feel like you’ve failed. And my goal is to help parents say Oh I guess I missed that. And I want something different. So how can I get there without feeling like I’ve already failed? And you start where you are. And I know parents who have regretted I mean I’ll say this like no parent has ever said to me “I wish I gave my kid a phone sooner” or “I wish I gave them social media access earlier.” Never. It is 100% of the time the opposite. And so if that message can get to the parents of younger kids that’s a powerful thing to take with you.
They’re going to be mad at you if you delay. But the problems that come with giving it too much too soon are much more challenging than them just being mad at you for saying no. And that being said just saying no isn’t enough either. Because it’s one thing to… Here’s a Seinfeld reference, you know how to take the reservation but not hold the reservation. It’s like you can say no and you can have the rule and kids are gonna find it anyway whether it’s on their school computer or their friend’s phone. And so that’s again where that relationship piece has to come into play. And a lot of this is rooted in trust. And it’s hard when we as adults and parents feel distrusting of the world. We’re worried about a lot of different things, but distrust breeds more distrust. And so it is really important that that relationship piece is focused on how do I help my child? How do I teach them about what it means to honor your word and respect your values and your boundaries? And a lot of that’s gonna start with how we model them.
Brett McKay: What about smartphones? What’s a good age for parents to get their kids their first smartphone?
Emily Cherkin: Again later is better less is more. Relationships and skills first. And I would say I mean… And there’s been a lot of press about Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation and his work is wonderful. And I quote him in my book his advice again is like delaying until high school. And again I think that’s great. I think the challenge is parents feel like well my kid’s the only one. And it is true. I mean as we talked about in the beginning the older the kid the more kids have them. And so it does take collective action here. And the metaphor I use is the school of fish in the ocean how do you get it to change direction? Well one fish peels away but the other fish aren’t going to follow until a second and a third fish come too. And so what I talk about is like I need more first fish parents out there and I need also some second and third fish parents because when we get those parents there who are starting to say no or delay or talk about it in the context of values then it will make it easier for the rest of the group to follow. And I see my work very much as a first fish and it’s hard it can be lonely but I really believe it’s the best thing for kids.
We are fighting. When we delay our children’s access or delay or minimize it or limit it we are fighting for their future mental cognitive and emotional health. I firmly believe that. So I believe it matters. And the later we can do that the better in the context of a strong relationship with our children.
Brett McKay: Yeah we’re waiting until high school to get our kids a smartphone. And something that’s helped is my fortunate son he’s at eighth grade so he’ll be in high school soon. But his best friend like we’re really good friends with his best friend’s parents. And we’ve kind of made a compact like none of us are getting them a smartphone.
Emily Cherkin: Great. Great.
Brett McKay: And that’s helped out. Great. ‘Cause now they just communicate with each other via our phones.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah, that’s wonderful. And that makes a huge difference if you can find one other parent to partner with on it. And again, like we use… My daughter is going into 7th grade, we use the Light Phone. So, you know, she can text her friends, she can text us, but she has access at home on the iPad and she uses my phone number. And so that’s a solution that’s worked for us. One thing that has made that much easier is the fact that her school has a phone free policy and has had one for six or seven years, which is pretty, you know, tip of the spear in terms of, you know, that’s not been the norm. And schools are now starting to look at that as an option and it’s great, but that makes my parenting job so much easier. The fact that she isn’t allowed to have a phone at school and so it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t have a smartphone yet. She’s just not allowed to have a phone at school. So that’s another recommendation I would make is to really encourage your child’s school to consider a school-wide policy, because it does help the parents a lot on that side of things.
Brett McKay: Have you had issues with parents where they’re… They say, well, I had to give my kid a smartphone because all their school assignments are managed with a smartphone. Is that an issue?
Emily Cherkin: Yeah. So I get really mad about this one because, you know, first of all, a school should never require a child to use a personal device for school assignments, but they do all the time. And the bigger issue that I’m seeing now, you know, is of course the school issued devices, which present a whole different problem, but there’s a lot of issues with asking kids to rely on their own personal phones for school, right? We can talk about equity, we can talk about privacy, with access, distractions, safety, you know, what happens if your classmate drops and breaks your phone? Who’s responsible? So yes, is the short answer. It’s a huge problem. The bigger issue, you know, the thing that I hear more from parents is like, there’s a lot of, for the, but not for me, kind of thinking like they want other parents to not give their kids phones, but they have a reason why their kid needs a phone.
And that’s a touchy one because I do think there are some exceptions in the sense of like a medical diagnosis or a severe learning disability where that is a required tool. Those are the exceptions. But I don’t think, I feel like giving a kid a phone because they have anxiety is a good reason to give a child a phone, right? And so there’s a lot of that kind of thinking and I need some parents to start realizing that it has to be true for all or most kids in order for things to change. And that’s hard.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I heard you in another interview say that a good age to get your kid a smartphone is when you’re… Yeah. What was it?
Emily Cherkin: Yeah. When you’re ready for them to see porn. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah. And that’s not my line, but it’s something that’s in our world that we hear that a lot, but it’s true. And most parents kind of go, but if you’re not ready to talk about porn, they’re not ready to have access to the internet. Like that’s just… It’s just everywhere. And it’s not because kids are seeking it out. I mean, a few kids probably are, but like it’s ’cause it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere.
Brett McKay: No, yeah. So a couple years ago, I’m the leader of our youth group at church, like the boys, and we had a thing on porn use. And I asked them like, Hey, you know, how do you guys get porn these days? Like, how are kids doing it? And they said, people just send it to you. Like, I’ve got friends who’ll just like, they’ll just message it to me. I didn’t ask for it, I wasn’t looking for it, or I’m on Snapchat and someone will just send it to me. And I asked, what do you do about that? He’s like, I just had to delete it and tell them not to do that anymore. I mean like when I was a kid, like that never happened. Like you had to go look for it if you wanted to see it. Yeah.
Emily Cherkin: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It was like paper form and hard to get and yeah, I mean, again, it’s like, it is pernicious, it’s algorithmically driven and with bots and all of that stuff, and to your point earlier about not monitoring in-app content, kids can get DMs from… There’s a lot of the like phishing kind of scandal things that go on where it’s, it looks like a young hot college girl sending a selfie and being like, oh, you’re cute. Will you send me some inappropriate pictures, right? And you know, a teenage boy’s gonna feel flattered by that. And you know, it can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes. But I think again, knowing that that’s going to happen, we have to talk to our kids about what to do. We have to say like, when that happens, you need to block and delete or screenshot it.
Sometimes that’s actually important for law enforcement, but like, you need to come and let me know immediately. I will never be mad at you for this. Like this is a really important parent message to get through. And we may not know what to do right away, and that’s okay too. We can say, I don’t know what to do and I need to figure out an answer, but thank you for telling me. This is the day and age we live in and it’s just gotta be a part of those conversations. And I mean, as young as four, five, and six, and that’s hard for some parents to think about. But you obviously don’t need to use language of a teenager, but you can say there’s pictures on here that aren’t for kids. There are videos that are made for grownups. Sometimes kids find them, I need you to tell me when you see something you don’t understand. I’ll never be mad at you.
Brett McKay: So a compromise that some parents make when it comes to smartphone. Say they have a kid that’s in middle school or elementary school, they’re like, well, I’m not gonna get my kid a smartphone, but I’ll get them a smart watch. You’re not a big fan of this compromise. Why is that?
Emily Cherkin: Well, because first of all, they’re on their body, right? So at least a phone, in theory, you could leave in a backpack or a locker all day, but like a watch is on your body, so it’s constantly available. If you’ve ever watched a child under 10, they’re fidgety and distracted. They’re just, it’s tappable, right? There’s something they can do with it, whether they’re even doing an app or not. I also think that parents, this is again, going back to that parent anxiety piece, like, we need to stop texting our children at school. And I mean this from kindergarten through college, because I got an email from our daughter’s K-5 principal two years ago that was like, parents, please turn off watches and phones and leave them in backpacks all day because kids’ watches are going off all day long and disrupting the learning. And so again, this is gonna be on us, us as parents, to do the hard thing, which is, except we cannot talk to or hear from our children all day long. It’s to trust that the teachers in the school are going to communicate with us if there’s a problem.
And that really, again, is a shift for us as parents to move out of that anxiety. And I know that parents want to keep tabs on their kids. There’s a lot of, you know, like, well, I wanna track them, I wanna know where they are. I wanna make sure they get to someone’s house. That is living in the fear. That is living in the world of the whole world is dangerous. And really what I’m thinking is, it’s just scary. And I know intentions are good, but parents have to remember that there are benefits to our children having that independence and freedom from surveillance and supervision from us constantly. It’s their chance to go out in the world and practice some pretty critical skills with, you know, in a school environment with an adult who’s trained to do that. I know it’s not a perfect scenario.
I know schools are all over the place, but I think we’ve really misjudged our need to constantly surveil them. And that, you know, what we were just talking about earlier about distrust, you know, surveillance breeds distrust. And if you go back again to that Gen X millennial childhoods, can you imagine when you were in high school, if your parents like literally could track you wherever you went? It sends such a wrong message in my mind about what is healthy for kids and development and independence, which of course directly correlates to that mental health piece. And, you know, feeling surveilled and watched makes us think we’re less capable. And you know, kids think they’re less capable, so they don’t take risks, they don’t put themselves out there and that makes their mental health worse. So it’s this vicious cycle, and that was a long answer to whether or not you should get your kid a smartwatch, but if really what you want is a communication tool, get ’em a flip phone or an old, you know, one of those minimalist phones that don’t have all of those capabilities that they can physically leave in a locker or a backpack. That’s where I am on that one.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that you make an important point. Privacy is where we develop a self.
Emily Cherkin: Exactly.
Brett McKay: And so if you’re constantly being monitored, it’s hard to develop your individuality or just your self concept. And I do like the idea if you wanna stay connected with your kids, just give them the Light Phone or the the flip phone.
Emily Cherkin: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it is true that nothing is private on the internet. You know, I get a lot of parents like, well, should I read my kids’ text? Should I… The reality is you should assume that anything that is being put on a digital platform device tool is visible to everybody in the world. And we have to teach our kids that because it’s hard to understand that, especially for a young child. But I don’t think snooping is ever a good way. You know, that’s, again, we run into sort of that trust and mistrust, but I think communicating constantly about like, Hey, I want you to know that occasionally I will check your phone and I’m just, you know, again, making it part of the conversation. Nothing is private on the internet, you know, if you have a conflict with a friend, it’s always better to pick up the phone and call, you know, no teenager does that anymore, I know that. But we want them to know that there are some unsafe things about putting things in writing on a device and that it’s just a safety thing. Right. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, it’s been a great conversation. Is there one thing that people can start doing today in creating a more tech intentional family? Because like you said, you’re not anti-tech. I think that your husband works for a tech company, correct?
Emily Cherkin: Yes. Full disclosure. Yep.
Brett McKay: Yeah. But you’re all about being tech intentional. So like what’s one thing that parents can start doing today to do that?
Emily Cherkin: Yeah, great question. Well, number one, replace judgment with curiosity and know that this is ridiculously hard and you’re not alone. You know, again, I get so many calls and emails, it’s like, parents are really feeling overwhelmed by this. The second thing is the live your life out loud piece. You know, you don’t need to change anything. In fact, I don’t want you to go home and change everything just from listening to this one conversation. I want you to think about what would it look like to live my life out loud around how I use screens around my family and just start there. See what happens. See what kids say. See what your partner says. You know, like, what do you notice about your own screen use? And if you want a really tangible thing that you can do today is to get your phone out of your bedroom. Because I know, and I survey school groups when I go and talk to parents, and it’s something like 95% of parents admit to keeping their phone in their room at night.
And I know that parents are gonna say, well, what about an emergency? To which I say, just put it in the hallway. Leave the ringer on and put it in the hallway, but like outside your bedroom, because it’s a lot easier to say no to your 16-year-old having a phone in the room at night, which they shouldn’t have than, you know, if you have also put your room, your phone out of the room at night. So that’s one of those just sort of simple, easy to start, being that role model saying, I’ve learned something new. This is gonna help me sleep better, it’s gonna decrease my doom scrolling before bed, you know, I’m gonna do that. And people always say, it’s my alarm clock. And alarm clocks are way cheaper than smartphones.
Brett McKay: No, for sure. Well, Emily, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Emily Cherkin: Yeah. So my website is thescreentimeconsultant.com. I have a section about my book. I actually just also added a toolkit for parents who are interested in looking at an alternative pathway for the screens in schools part, you know, opting out of some of that ed tech. So that’s a downloadable free resource. And I would love it if anyone’s interested in signing up for my newsletter. I send weekly essays about parenting and screen time and education and life in the digital fast lane that we’re all living in. And I find… I get a lot of good feedback about those so I don’t spam people or sell their email addresses either.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Emily Cherkin, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Emily Cherkin: Yes. Thank you so much for having me, Brett.
Brett McKay: My guest today is Emily Cherkin. She’s the author of the book, The Screen Time Solution. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about her work at her website, thescreentimeconsultant.com. Also check at our show notes at aom.is/screentime. You can 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 while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. You have a daily option, a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. 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 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.
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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
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. Although they may call it different things and approaches attainment in different ways, many of the world’s religions and philosophies have a similar goal, achieving the life of virtue peace and flourishing. In his new book, Seriously Happy Ben Aldridge explains how anyone can use the wisdom of ancient traditions to prove themselves and live the good life. Taking the show, Ben offers a thumbnail sketch of Buddhism, cynicism, Taoism, stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelian, along with practices and challenges inspired by these philosophies, including walking a banana, listening to a music performance without music, and taking a woo way adventure that you can use to put ancient wisdom into action and become a better and happier man after the show’s over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/seriouslyhappy. All right, Ben Aldridge, welcome back to the show.
Ben Aldridge: Hey, Brett, thank you so much for having me back. It’s an honor to be here again.
Brett McKay: So we had you on the show a few years ago to talk about your book, How to be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable, and you got a new book out entitled Seriously Happy. So your previous book, How to be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable, you took the Philosophy of Stoicism and try to find actual practices that people can do to put the philosophy into action. And what I love, we got this new book, even though it’s geared towards teenagers, I got a lot out of it. You take a look at different philosophies from around the world and across time and also try to extract actual practices you can do to put that philosophy into action. Let’s start off with the title of the book. It’s called Seriously Happy, how are You Defining Happiness in this book?
Ben Aldridge: So yeah, we look at happiness from a slightly different perspective in this book. So I’m going back to ancient Greece and the ancient Greeks had a fantastic take on happiness and this is really the core driving theme throughout the book. And the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, had this concept called eudaimonia. And this is very different from happiness in the modern world. I find that when we look around, we see a conditional happiness in the modern world. I’ll be happy when, I’ll be happy if, when I get the new house, the new job, the new car, et cetera. And the ancient Greeks had a different take. They wanted to achieve this thing called eudaimonia, which is a life that flows a flourishing life. And it’s a happiness that’s built on essentially building character and learning how to thrive, irrespective of what happens to us. And I think this is a great way to frame happiness because then it’s not external. We don’t need conditions to be happy because whatever happens, we are basically building character. So this is, I think it’s a nice way of framing happiness. And throughout the book we look at different philosophies and how they can help build character and ultimately achieve this elusive but very practical eudaimonia.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I like the idea of happiness being flourishing because yeah, I think a lot of times when we think about happiness in the modern day, we think of happiness is a feeling, but feelings are fleeting. Emotions are fleeting. You can feel good one moment for just random reasons, and then the next moment you’re just feeling like, ah, like crap. And you can’t figure out why it is. And so you’re constantly trying to chase that feeling. And as you said it, because it’s conditional upon your feelings, you’re never feeling like a constant state of happiness.
Ben Aldridge: For sure. And I think trying to achieve that is unrealistic. We can’t do that. We’re going to be feeling lots of different things throughout our lives. We’re gonna have high moments and low moments. And this is why the ancient Greeks had this concept of eudaimonia because it can apply to whatever situation we find ourselves in. And that’s very liberating. And we’re not trapped on just always chasing the next endorphin rush or dopamine hit. So it’s very practical.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that idea. And what’s interesting too, if you look across different philosophies from around the world, they also, they had different names for it, but they were trying to seek the same thing with their philosophies. This sort of state of flourishing where it’s not contingent upon your emotions, it’s contingent upon your character. So let’s dig into some of these philosophies that can help us obtain this state of flourishing, this eudaimonia. And you include Buddhism in your book, and Buddhism is a philosophy/religion. What are the big ideas from Buddhism you highlight in the book?
Ben Aldridge: So yeah, this is a big one and there’s a lot, obviously a lot to say about it. Many different Buddhist sects as well, and so many different types of Buddhism. But generalizing, there’s this foundational concept in Buddhism called the four Noble Truths. And what it’s highlighting is that life is gonna be tough, so life is suffering. So that’s the first noble truth. The second one is that our mind is the reason that we suffer the way that we frame things, causes a lot of problems for us. The third truth is that we can change our relationship to suffering. So good news, we can actually do something about it. And then the fourth noble truth is basically the method and there’s an eightfold path that Buddhism tends to recommend. And it’s things like meditating and living in the right way in alignment with moderation and various things.
So that’s the big take home is knowing the, the mind and the way that we frame things is the cause for a lot of problems in life. And of course, this is very top level and I know that, the lots of Buddhist scholars will have various different interpretations, but the four noble truths are really at the center of a lot of, Buddhist thinking. And actually a lot of modern psychology taps into this and uses this concept. And there’s a fantastic book called Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright. And this really looks at the psychological side of Buddhism and it talks about how these ideas can help us to develop clear thinking. So I think really that’s one of the beautiful things about Buddhism. It’s a way of life. That’s it. Incredibly practical.
Brett McKay: You mentioned there are different sex or, schools of Buddhism, and one of them you talk about specifically in the book is Zen Buddhism. Tell us about zen.
Ben Aldridge: So zen is a lovely philosophy. Now, the little disclaimer before I start, I’m not a Zen Buddhist myself, but I’m a huge fan of these ideas and I deeply appreciate and love what they have put out into the world. So zen is a type of Buddhism and it’s pretty much a Japanese aesthetic type of Buddhism. So when we go to Japan and we look at the Japanese temples, we see minimalism throughout the way that they’ve been constructed with the beautiful zen gardens, which are often very empty with rocks placed in certain locations to help us relax and connect to deeper meanings as well. So it’s a type of Buddhism. And the ultimate goal of Zen is ultimately to help us achieve what they call it enlightenment. And that’s always a tricky word because I think for a lot of people they can get caught up in what does that mean and how do we achieve it?
But really it’s being able to understand the nature of reality and understand the nature of our mind and to be able to work with that. So knowing that suffering is something that we all face, but we can transcend that through training. And in Zen, one of the key things that they encourage is meditation. And that’s a great way to learn to control the minds in a very practical way. And it’s a very helpful tool for a lot of people. And you don’t need to be a zen Buddhist to be able to use this idea.
Brett McKay: Well, and I think a lot of people when they think of meditation, they think of sitting still on a mat and focusing on calming your thoughts and breath. And that is a practice. But you also recommend doing something called a moving meditation. What’s a moving meditation?
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, so in some zen temples, there’s a type of meditation where everyone will walk around the room in like a conga line, really. And they’re essentially trying to stay focused on the present moment, even though they’re moving. And actually this is done as a way to have some relief from long meditation sessions. ’cause often you’re sat down for hours and hours in these zen temples. So actually being able to break away from that and move means that you’re not gonna be in physical pain. And actually then you can focus on the present moment. So it’s something that we can use throughout our lives when we’re driving, when we’re walking to the shops, if we can actually just pay attention to the movement itself and the feeling of moving through space. And I think that can help us to, connect to this idea and this powerful meditation ultimately, which is gonna help us to control our racing thoughts and overthinking minds.
Brett McKay: That reminds me of labyrinths and that’s a form of meditations. You see these some places like I think monasteries might have them, churches might have them. We actually, there’s a labyrinth in a park just down the street from my house. And yeah, it’s just sort of this like maze, you kind of circle through and as you walk along this path, you’re supposed to meditate. And I’ve done it before. It is surprisingly relaxing.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah. And I think the thing is though, is hard at first when you first try and not think about stuff, it’s almost impossible to do that. But its, the repeated use of this skill helps to sharpen the mind and you do get better at it. So that can convert to walking meditation or when you’re just sort of present in your day-to-day life. But it also helps when you are actually practicing meditation when you’re sat down and you’re trying to focus on your breath or just trying to, stay with the moment rather than get caught up in all this overthinking. So yeah, it’s a great one, but I think it does take a little bit of time to feel the benefits and to actually start getting that stillness with the mind. ’cause it’s, our minds are so overactive.
Brett McKay: Another practice you recommend inspired by Zen, you call it the 4′33″ project. What is that?
Ben Aldridge: Oh, yes, I love this. There’s a man called John Cage and he was, an American composer and he loved Zen Buddhism and he used to hang out with Zen masters and he meditated a lot. He wasn’t officially a Zen Buddhist, but he really loved this type of philosophy. And he created a piece of music called Four Minutes 33. And what happens is the whole orchestra will go on stage and they will sit there and play nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds. So the audience literally have to sit there and listen to the ambient sound of the concert hall or wherever it’s being performed. And he was very sneaky because he was encouraging people to meditate, maybe without them realizing that they were doing it. And it’s all done through, your ears and listening very closely to the ambient sound. And this was a huge thing to do, quite revolutionary at the time when you put it out. And we can have a go at doing it very easily by setting a timer for four minutes and 33 seconds. But there are wonderful videos if you search for John Cage, four minutes, 33 on YouTube, you can see big concert halls filled with thousands of people all just listening to silence. And this was his way of connecting to Zen. And I absolutely love this as a concept.
Brett McKay: No, it sounds like a lot of fun. I’m gonna have to give that a try. So set a timer for four minutes and 33 seconds. And you can do this in different places. You can do this at home in nature, downtown, and then just spend that time focusing your thoughts, like letting your mind be still and paying close attention to the sounds and the environment. Okay. So the big thing you took from Zen is meditation and the different variations of it you’ve talked about. Are there any other practices or challenges inspired by Buddhism that you recommend?
Ben Aldridge: Another tool that I think is, really useful from Buddhism, it’s this idea of impermanence. And I really like this idea. So the idea is that everything around us is changing. We know that just by observing the world around us. And this is very helpful because if we’re going through a tough time, we can really hold onto the fact that it will change. Everything is constantly moving and evolving so we can focus on the other side of difficulty. So for instance, if I have to go to the dentist for something to get a filling, whatever, and I know that I’m not gonna enjoy that process. However, I know that it’s a temporary experience and I can try to project my mind to the other side of the experience and know that it’s all changing and I will be through this. And this takes away maybe the, weight of that situation.
It helps to lighten it. So same if you are in traffic, you’re not gonna be in traffic forever. So focus on the fact that things are always changing and always moving. Now the other side of this is very powerful because we can use it when we’re going through something amazing. So say you’re having a beautiful moment with the family or something, you’re doing something that you are really enjoying, you can also remember that this is impermanent and it will change. And that can help us to savor those moments even more. So it’s funny how there’s two sides to this, this coin of impermanence, but I think being able to use that and hold onto that when we’re going through experiences in life can be very helpful.
Brett McKay: Yeah. One practice you recommend is intentionally being bored. Why is that a good way to practice Buddhist ideas of impermanence?
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, so that’s a great way of tapping into this idea of, sitting with the mind. So that’s, I wouldn’t say that boredom is like a practice that Buddhists would do, but it’s one of the challenges in the book that I encourage people to do because it’s a way to train the mind and to sort of sit with the mind itself and try and understand how you think about things. So a great way to do this is to put yourself in a situation where you are doing something that you really will find boring. Like watching a movie that’s just terrible that you really don’t wanna watch or listening to a song you really don’t like, or trying a genre of music that you really hate and just paying attention to the mind when you are doing that. It’s a great way of highlighting what’s going on in between your ears. It’s a nice way of, trying to sort of understand yourself better and putting yourself in these boring situations is good as well because then when you actually have to encounter a boring situation, you’re a little bit trained and you can kind of frame it as training as well.
Brett McKay: Have you heard about this, this trend that’s happening online of dudes? They’ll get on a flight that’s like a seven hour flight and they’ll just stare. They won’t look at their phone, they won’t, they’ll, they’ll stare at like the, maybe there’s a screen in front of them, the flight path. They call it raw dogging, which has that, sexual innuendo. But there’s this whole, it’s, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, it’s kind of funny.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, I have seen it. Yeah, they’re essentially doing a meditation, like quite an extreme Yeah. Version of that where they’re, they’re actually going in for this like, almost like a meditation retreat that just sat there and just focusing on just yeah, being present. I don’t know whether there’s the philosophical intention behind it, whether it’s just supposed to be kind of a funny thing. But actually it’s amazing. Yeah. If you look at it like that, if you see it as a philosophical practice, yeah, that’s this pretty impressive.
Brett McKay: Though I incorporate bored in my life is whenever I’m standing in line for something or waiting at the doctor’s office instead of checking my phone, I’ll just sit there and just be bored. And it’s a challenge ’cause you have that itch to want to check your phone and distract yourself. But I try to exercise my willpower and just be with my board feelings because usually it passes after a few minutes. Another philosophy you look at is cynicism. This is another ancient Greek philosophy. What’s the story of the cynics?
Ben Aldridge: So the cynics are very different. They’re a great bunch of, ancient folk who used to do some wild things in the name of philosophy. Now there aren’t actually that many cynics today, but the word cynic now has a slightly negative connotation, kind of implies someone who’s overly skeptical in a negative way. But it actually, the original cynicism comes from kynikos, this ancient Greek word, which means dog-like, and it was meant as a derogatory thing towards the cynics because they used to live like wild dogs and they would choose to live a life of homelessness out of a way to practice their philosophy. And the philosophy is all about being able to build resilience and also be detached from the state. They were very open about freedom of speech. This was one of the cornerstones of cynic philosophy. In fact, the four cornerstones of cynicism, the first one is freedom of speech.
And the famous cynic Diogenes said that freedom of speech is the most beautiful thing in the world. Now that was really important to them. And the other three cornerstones, we’ve got endurance. So you’ve gotta be tough to be a cynic. There’s, this practice called Asceticis where they would deliberately do difficult things to build resilience. And then finally there’s self-sufficiency, which is where they’re able to look after their selves and not have to rely on the states or rely on anyone else. And this was important to them because they felt that freedom of speech could only really happen if you were not kind of dependent on a state for any money or for worrying about your reputation. So being outside of the system in a way allowed them to sort of criticize it and openly look and, discuss ancient society. So they’re really fascinating philosophers and I’m particularly interested in their practical resilience building that Asceticis training, which they used to do. And they did some very funny things in the name of self-improvement.
Brett McKay: Oh yeah, so this Asceticis training. So Diogenes, he famously lived in like a barrel, basically a tub. Didn’t bathe, urinated, like just defecated in public. Just a weird guy. And like, there’s that famous story of Alexander the Great went to go meet Diogenes and Diogenes told this guy who basically thought he was God on earth, hey, get out of my way, you’re standing in front of my son. And Alexander, he respected that. He was like, man, this guy. This guy’s awesome. He has no master. He’s his own master.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, exactly. And I love that. Someone, I can’t remember who it was, but we were talking about the cynics and they described them as the trolls of ancient Athens. And I thought that was hilarious because a lot of them would do these things to provoke big reactions from society. The theatres would empty at the end of a performance and hundreds of people would go out onto the streets and the cynics would be there deliberately walking in the wrong direction, getting in the way. And that is really what a lot of the cynic philosophy is about. It’s really challenging conventions and really making people question the way that they’re living their lives. So they’re a great bunch.
Brett McKay: So I don’t think you’re not advocating that people stop bathing and start urinating in public, but what can we take away from the cynics and what are some practices we can do to incorporate that into our lives?
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, absolutely not. I think that this is probably why people enjoy stoicism. Maybe it’s a bit more palatable and stoicism actually sort of came from the cynics but yeah in terms of practical application of the cynics what we’re looking for is this Asceticis training so finding things that make us a little bit uncomfortable we don’t have to go too far with it but one of the exercises that I love that’s very ridiculous but it’s inspired by the cynics is called the banana walk and it’s basically embarrassing yourself in public so there was a man called Albert Ellis and he created modern therapy called REBT, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. And this was based on how, well, a lot of the ideas in this therapy were based on how the cynics would deliberately do embarrassing things and do things to challenge society. So he created this thing called the banana walk, which is where you take a banana, you tie a piece of string to it, and then you go for a walk in a busy public place. And people will stare at you and you’ll feel embarrassed. And you have to work through a lot of things going in your head. And I can say, honestly, I’ve done this myself. I’ve walked bananas in London, carrots in Paris, all on string, feeling very silly about the whole situation.
But it’s amazing what happens within the mind. And this is what Albert Ellis was encouraging people to do, to really challenge that internal dialogue. Why are we embarrassed? And the more you do it, the more comfortable you become in your own skin. And Diogenes, this cynic we were talking about, he used to drag a bottle of wine on a piece of string through the Agora, the ancient marketplace in Athens. So there’s a direct tie to this modern practice of walking bananas in public. And you know what, if you go to the Albert Ellis Institute in New York, you’ll often see people walking bananas on string outside the building as a way to basically build resilience and build self-confidence and to not get so caught up in how other people are thinking about us. So it’s a lovely practice. And yeah, I always try and encourage people to connect to this ancient art of doing embarrassing things in the name of self-improvement.
Brett McKay: Yeah. It sounds like it’s a form of exposure therapy. You have this anxiety that people are gonna think of you poorly, but then you just do these things where you put yourself in situations where you think people are gonna be thinking bad about you. And then you kind of get a nerd to it. Any other things besides walking a banana you can do to embarrass yourself?
Ben Aldridge: For sure. Yeah, there’s tons. When I became a dad about three years ago, and someone gave me a book of dad jokes, and they’re all terrible. They’re just awful jokes. So I’ve been testing them out on strangers. And if you stop people in London during rush hour to tell them a bad joke, it’s going to go down like a lead balloon. And it’s honestly so embarrassing for me and for anyone that I stop to tell them this terrible joke. But in the process, is learning to sit with that discomfort, that mental discomfort. So that’s one thing that I’ve been doing. People could announce the next stop on the train out loud. They can sing out loud while they’re walking down the street. It’s all about embarrassing yourself. There’s a great show in the US, actually. It’s called Impractical Jokers.
Brett McKay: Oh, yeah.
Ben Aldridge: I’m not sure if you know.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Ben Aldridge: So basically, this concept is called shame attacking. And Albert Ellis is a big fan of shame attacking. And there’s even a shame attacking championships where people have to try and outdo each other by doing embarrassing things in public. But the key is to make sure it’s about you being embarrassed, not trying to embarrass other people. So it’s a personal development thing, but it’s pretty funny when you unpack it a bit.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So the next philosophy you look at in the book is Daoism. For those who aren’t familiar with Daoism, what are its main ideas?
Ben Aldridge: So this is an ancient Chinese philosophy, and it’s very practical. In a way, it became a religion as it evolved, and it became a semi-official religion for China at one point. And some people view it as a philosophy, others view it as a religion. So there’s a mix. And it’s all down to interpretation. It’s very practical. And the main purpose, again, is to lock into this idea of building a good life and flourishing. And for the Daoists, there’s a real connection to nature and using nature and building that relationship with the natural world around us. In fact, the way that they learnt about the universe was through observation of the natural world and we can see this because the taoists created the hang glider and they created it as a way to understand the natural laws of the world around them in the Chinese mountains. So observing nature connecting to nature there’s also a well-being side of Daoism things like tai chi and qi gong where you are basically performing movements and breath work and all of this can help us to kind of cultivate well-being. So there’s loads of ideas. I’m really simplifying here and hitting the top line, of course, because all of these philosophies are so detailed.
But for me, the key thing that I connect to with Daoism is this relationship with nature and also trying to understand ourselves, our intuition as well. This is a big thing. There’s a lot of talk about one of my favorite ideas in Daoism is this concept called Wuwei, which is where you go with the flow and you kind of emulate nature so when water is confronted by a rock it will go around it will work with the obstacle and if you look at Bruce Lee and how he used to use his opponent’s strength against them it was kind of very sort of yielding in the way that he would work and there’s lots of quotes that are very Daoist in nature that you’ll see if you’re a fan of Bruce Lee’s work so there’s a lot going on with Daoism but yeah for me I love that connection to nature that’s something that I found is very practical getting out into the the natural world.
Brett McKay: Yeah we did a whole podcast a long time ago about Daoism and about wuwei and I think about this book all the time it’s called Trying Not to Try, did you come across that during your…
Ben Aldridge: No I haven’t come across it no.
Brett McKay: Yeah so the guy his name was Edward Slingerland and he wrote it was an introduction to Daoism but yeah that wuwei the translation that he proposed it’s like effortless action. Like you were trying to go in with the flow, like you just do something and you do it awesomely, but it feels effortless. So I think all of us have experienced that moment where we’re in that flow state. And so Daoism was all about trying to get into that wuwei state. And there’s different camps in Daoism, just like there was different camps in Buddhism. And one camp thought that you could achieve wuwei, this effortless action by practicing a lot and like doing things over and over again until it became effortless. And then some people thought, well, no, that’s actually, you’re trying too hard to achieve that effortless state needed to kind of achieve it through this sort of not even trying to try state. But yeah, I think the whole idea is that you wanna achieve this ability to do things without having to exert much effort. And one of the practices you recommend to help you achieve that is going on a wuwei adventure. So what’s a wuwei adventure?
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, I love this as an idea. So basically, it’s just learning to tap into your intuition a little bit and just going with the flow. So a classic example would be, let’s say you rock up to a new city, and you’ve got a general sense of where you are. But it’s almost like not relying on the maps and everything, like the itinerary that you’ve put together. It’s just going with the flow and trying to trust your intuition and explore in a very open way and seeing what happens. When I was younger, I went on a trip around Europe where you can buy these things called interrail tickets, where you basically have a ticket on every train. So you can go wherever you want, whenever you want, and you just float around. And it was just before I went to university and there was something amazing about not knowing where you were going to be the next day and knowing what necessarily where you’re gonna be sleeping and kind of tapping into that, going with the flow, seeing what happens. If you’re enjoying a place, you spend more time there. If not, you move on. And you’re just learning to be a little bit more intuitive in how you’re living. Now, obviously, the disclaimer is, try and do it in a safe manner and don’t do anything silly, but it’s a nice way of connecting to our intuition and learning to just kind of be a bit more open to whatever it is that we might encounter in the real world.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And the other practice you recommend just spending more time out in nature and you can combine a Wuwei adventure with nature time. Maybe you go to a state park or a national park and just see where things take you. And again, you got to be safe about this. You don’t wanna do anything dumb that will get you injured or killed. But yeah, spend time in nature, do things spontaneously, add some serendipity in your life. In your previous book, we mentioned this earlier, How to be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable, it’s inspired by Stoicism. So it’s no surprise that you included Stoicism in Seriously Happy. I think most of our listeners are familiar with Stoic philosophy, but for those who aren’t, give us a thumbnail sketch of its big ideas.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, for sure. So Stoicism is very similar in the sense that it’s trying to achieve eudaimonia. It’s trying to create a life that flows well. And they’re all about tapping into the cardinal virtues, which are these kind of virtues and quality of character that they believed everyone should strive towards. So we’ve got courage, justice, wisdom, and self-discipline or temperance. And if we can lock into those, then the Stoics believe that ultimately we could live a better life. But there’s tons of ideas within Stoic philosophy. And I found it particularly helpful for me when I was in my mid 20s. That’s when I discovered it off the back of really bad anxiety and I found that a lot of the ideas really spoke to me particularly the idea of building resilience by stepping outside of your comfort zone and doing difficult things in the name of self-improvement that really changed my life and it’s interesting because the more I learned so I started with stoicism that’s how I got into philosophy the more I started studying that the more I realized that it was actually the cynics who taught the stoics this idea.
So some of these ideas that Diogenes did sort of filtered down to the Stoics. And I really like where those two philosophies meet, because I think Stoicism is not as extreme as Cynicism and that’s why I think a lot of people have really connected to it and resonated with it, because it’s something that you don’t need to give away all your possessions to be a Stoic. You can still connect to this idea and it’s highly practical. So yeah, I love it and I continue to use it in my life. But obviously I like to dabble in other philosophy as well. It’s nice to pick ideas and use certain bits that resonate with you.
Brett McKay: So what are some practices that people can do to incorporate stoicism into their life?
Ben Aldridge: Yeah. So I think one of the practices that I really like is this idea of sympatheia. And it’s one of these things that there’s a guy called Heracles who created this diagram. It’s basically imagine concentric circles and in the center is you. And then in the next circle is family the next one is friends the next one is neighbors and then it goes on and out towards everyone in the country et cetera and the goal of sympatheia is to be able to bring everyone closer to the center so that you’re treating friends like family and neighbors like friends you’re being very open and kind in society and you’re trying to be a good part of society and help basically make the world a better place. And it was just a nice way of sort of framing it. And when you see the diagram, it’s quite interesting. And the process of this is called oikeiosis, of bringing people closer to you to spread this kindness and this sympatheia. So I really like that idea. And it’s just being nice to people, isn’t it? It’s just spreading kindness. And that’s something that I think the world definitely needs. And small random acts of kindness is a great way of actually practically doing this.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you spend a lot of time talking about how stoicism can help you with your social life. Because the Stoics thought a lot about this. They realized that a lot of our vexations in life are often caused by other people or us thinking it’s being caused by other people. I think Marcus Aurelius had that line where it’s like, hey, just realize that there’s gonna be people today when you go out there. They’re gonna be annoying, but you can’t let that get to you. So, you mentioned the sympatheia thing where you think about everyone could be someone you can help out, but any practices that people can incorporate in their lives so that they’re not as annoyed by people as they typically are?
Ben Aldridge: Yeah. So I think a great thing to do is if someone is challenging, let’s put it that way, or if someone is really horrible to you, the way that you can frame that in a practical way is to switch it around and see it as a test of your character. You’re not trying to control that person. You have to accept that they’re outside of your control what you’re trying to do is focus on your response to them so the key idea in stoicism is it’s not what happens to you but how you respond and this was an epictetus quote but it’s really like the Golden rule in Stoicism. It’s about how we deal with things that are in and outside of our control and how other people are to us when they’re unpleasant. That’s not really within our control. So it’s up to us to respond well to these challenges. And if we see it as a test of our character, this is really tapping back into that eudaimonia vibe where we’re trying to build character and we see it as a test. We frame it as a test and suddenly it’s about us now and how are we gonna deal with it. It’s not about this other person as being horrible. It’s like, okay, we accept that that’s going to happen in life. We’re gonna encounter difficult people. What do we do about it? So flipping it around like this is actually really powerful. I do this all the time when I’m dealing with people who are a little bit challenging.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You can almost make a game out of it. Okay, just how calm and collected can I stay in the face of this annoying person? Because I mean, it’s actually kind of fun to see someone who’s flipping out on you get more worked up because they’re bugged that you’re not affected by their diatribe. And you can do this with your kids too, like make it a game, how unaffected and calm you can stay when they’re having one of their meltdowns. And besides seeing it as a test of character as to how unaffected you can be by other people and circumstances, you also recommend just doing things that make you uncomfortable. So like you said, the Stoics are a less extreme version of cynicism. So they did things like sleep on the ground, wear a shabby looking tunic, take cold baths. So you can do something similar like that to get outside of your comfort zone and build up some stoic resilience. You’ve also included a competing philosophy of stoicism in your book, Epicureanism. What’s its story?
Ben Aldridge: So this is a fascinating philosophy and Epicurus created a school of philosophy in Athens called The Garden. And it was like a community, more like a retirement home, I guess. And the purpose of this was, well, the purpose of Epicurus’philosophy was to enjoy life. That’s what he felt was the important thing. Life is there to be enjoyed. And it’s really interesting because when people hear that, they will often think that that’s hedonistic and that he was this real party guy and everything was just in excess. But that’s the biggest misconception about Epicurus and his philosophy. In reality, he found that too much excess would actually lead to unhappiness or discomfort and his philosophy is all about trying to live a life where it’s not uncomfortable. So if you’re partying all the time it’s gonna catch up with you you’re gonna get the fallout from the partying that’s actually not he sort of valued not feeling like that higher than he felt he didn’t want to feel bad so in a way trying to avoid that made it easier. If that makes sense.
Brett McKay: No, that makes sense. So I think I’ve heard that when they look at pleasure, feeling good, they’re not just looking at it in the short term. They’re looking at it also in the longterm.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, that’s it. Exactly, yeah. So that was really the driving philosophy is how to enjoy life. And he sort of discovered that simple pleasures were really the way to connect with this. And the food in Epicurus’s Garden was very basic, boiled lentils and a lot of their vegetables were homegrown and it was minimal in a way. And I think he’s trying to encourage people to really appreciate the simple things in life because it’s easier to achieve that as well. For instance, on a very hot day when you have a glass of cold water, it’s incredibly satisfying and there’s something really rewarding about that. You don’t need the complexity of different juices and different tastes. Actually appreciating the simple things in life was a great way of learning to be more appreciative of everything. And that’s really what Epicurus talks about. So it’s a great philosophy.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So some of the challenges you have eat simpler food and learn how to savor it. So when you’re eating your lentil soup, it’s like, Hey, I’m gonna just really be with this. It can become a meditative practice almost. How does this feel in my mouth? What does it taste like? And then you also recommend only drinking water for a week or a month. Another way to practice Epicureanism.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, that’s right. So in the garden water was the main drink. That was a big part of it. So yeah, we’re really trying to emulate that. And it’s also just a bit of self-control moderation. Can you handle not having coffee and tea or whatever throughout the day? How does that feel? Are you able to be in control? Is this idea of moderation really comes in. And Epicurus encourages moderation. Because that’s ultimately cuts off these like peaks of dopamine hits and kind of highs and lows. So yeah, it’s trying to find things that help us to appreciate the small things in life.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Another challenge you recommend inspired by Epicureanism is taking a digital fast. What does that look like? And have you done these in the past?
Ben Aldridge: Oh yeah, for sure. Like, I do this a lot. I’ve find I just put the phone away and try and do as long as possible. It normally coincides with being away on holiday because I find that that’s actually a practical time to do it. But it is amazing how connected we are and dependent we are on this tech. I often feel that the first few days are quite challenging, a little bit twitchy and edgy, just thinking, oh, what’s in the inbox? What’s happening? And it takes a little bit of time for the mind to be okay with that. So actually that to me is a real indicator that there’s value in doing this. And interestingly, Epicurus encouraged the people who lived in the garden to not engage with kind of political scandals and the kind of politics of the day. In a way it was a bit head in the sand and it was like, you come to the garden and you’re gonna disconnect a little bit. You don’t have to be up to date, you don’t have to be following what’s going on. You can just disconnect a little bit. So really that’s a modern way of doing that, is by cutting ourselves off from the tech that we are so dependent on. And it also highlights our relationship to that, so there’s definitely value in being able to take some time away from it. I think it’s really useful.
Brett McKay: Yes. Take a break from Twitter, take a break from Reddit, Daily Mail, if that’s your vice, checking the news. Just don’t watch, don’t look at that stuff for a month.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, exactly. And I think you’re not gonna miss anything. It’s almost impossible to miss anything big nowadays because someone’s gonna talk to you about it and you are gonna hear about it. So you don’t need to be following every story, every breaking story. Now every news story is breaking news, really. So there’s value in kind of stepping back from it. I think the same with social media as well. We can get really caught up with social media and it’s hard because it is addictive. It’s designed to be addictive as well. So if adults find it hard, teenagers are gonna find it really hard as well. So I think there’s so much value in trying to understand our relationship with all of this tech and being able to kind of get some kind of control over it. And the digital fasts are a good start towards that. ’cause It highlights our dependence, day one you’re gonna feel it. And actually that’s good because then it makes you realize how dependent you are on this. And obviously not everyone, but I find sort of generally when we look around us, most people are addicted to their phones.
Brett McKay: I’m a big fan of Aristotle, so I was happy to see that he ended up in your book. Aristotle wrote about a lot of different things. What part of Aristotelianism did you focus on for your book Seriously Happy?
Ben Aldridge: Yeah. So I mean, he’s contributed so much to the western thought and philosophy in general, but in Seriously Happy, I wanted a really practical thing that people could connect with and use. So his decision making method, his model for making decisions is absolutely brilliant. And I use this a lot. So I wanted to share this, this is really the main thing that we drill down on in the book, so I’d like to go through it with you.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it’d be great.
Ben Aldridge: And well, I’ll give you the sort of top line, but basically this is good for big decisions in life. Not necessarily when you’re in the coffee shop trying to decide what to drink or what you have in for lunch. This is more of a big life decision. So the first step is to ensure that you have the space to actually process your decision.
Give yourself time to think about what this means. So don’t rush it. The second thing is make sure you are in the right mental state. So obviously if you’re drunk, you’re not gonna be thinking clearly. If you are overly emotional, if you are really stressed, if you are really tired, all of these things can impact your decision. So you want to be in a good mental space when you are making your decision. Then you want to look at all the facts involved. So for some people, they’re gonna use a spreadsheet maybe, and they’ll be very meticulous with it. But it’s really just making sure that you’ve considered everything. Try and get everything in one place so that you can kind of process it. Then you would consult an expert. And I don’t think we should have blind faith in experts, but at the same time, if you wanted to learn the piano, you would probably wanna talk to someone who can play the piano.
So there’s value in speaking to people who have gone through what you’re going through or who can actually advise in a good way. So then you want to think about family and friends and all the people that this decision will impact. Is it going to have an effect on their lives? What’s it gonna do for them? So if you, for instance, if you’re moving, how’s this gonna affect your family and all the people around you in your life? So that’s the next step. Then you want to look at history so you can start mining your own history in your life to see if you’ve had to make a decision like this before, if so, how did it go? What did you learn? But you can also think bigger picture, look historically, see if anyone else has had to make a similar decision and how did it work? What lessons can we learn from that?
And then the final two steps is to be quite mathematical. What’s the probability of the… What kind of outcomes are you gonna get and what’s the probability of each one? So that’s a really important thing to think. Okay, is this gonna happen if I make this decision, what, X, Y, Z, what’s gonna happen? And then finally you can think about how luck would play into that decision. So if you get green lights on everything and it goes really well, what’s gonna happen? What could be at the end of that decision? And also what could happen if everything goes wrong, if you get red lights and it all goes in pet shaped. So considering all of those things, Aristotle believed that you would be fully prepared to make a big life decision. And I love that. I think it’s a really practical tool.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s, I think it goes to his idea of practical wisdom or phronesis, it’s just how to figure out what the right thing to do at the right time for the right reasons. And you have to make these decisions all the time. And the process that you laid out can help people develop that practical wisdom so that whenever, so they can reach a point where they don’t have to actually go through that process, it kind of becomes intuitive. It becomes like almost wuwei like. You just, based on your experience of making these decisions over and over again, going through that process, you fine tune your ability to make decisions.
Ben Aldridge: Absolutely. And I think you will get better at doing it the more you do it, but I think sometimes when you have a big decision, a really big decision, sometimes mulling it over in depth like this and having a system and a method that you can actually work through, I find that is really helpful and you can really just take your time to work through it. And yeah, I think that is very valuable.
Brett McKay: And as you said, this book’s geared towards young people. So young people like teenagers, they’re going through a period of their life where they’re making some really big important decisions where they’re gonna go to college who they should marry, what they should do for a career. So this process can help with that. So if you’re a parent, it’s another tool you can give them to help them make these important decisions.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, for sure. And it’s a tough time, when you’re a teenager, there’s a lot going on and you’ve got powerful emotions and trying to manage all of that, making decisions that are sound. So yeah, it’s hard. And I think having some kind of framework is super useful. So I think this method is good.
Brett McKay: And you also challenge people or recommend people or young people, I think anybody as well is just to make more decisions. A lot of people, they take a very passive approach to life, just like, I just don’t care. Oh, where do you want to go to lunch? Oh, whatever you want. And so because you’re constantly passing the buck, they don’t have the ability to make decisions when it matters. So one recommendation you have is just to start making more decisions, even over like the small dumb things like what you want to eat for lunch or what movie you wanna watch.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, definitely. That’s a great tool as well. And yeah, what do you wanna watch? Rather than just go, I don’t care. You actually just make a decision, just do it. And also don’t worry if it’s the wrong decision. I think people get really hung up on that, oh, I’m, what if I make a mistake? What if I decide something that doesn’t work out? Well that’s the part that we need to get comfortable with and just learn that yes, sometimes our decisions aren’t gonna be perfect, but the more we do it, the more we learn to trust ourselves and just know that everything is all right and we can work through whatever happens. So yeah, just being more decisive, it’s a good thing to do. I think everyone can tap into that.
Brett McKay: And I think also making decisions helps you figure out who you are. I think a lot of young people, I think even you can say adults go through this, like, I don’t know, who am I? Like what am I about? Making decisions forces you to actually think about what you’re about and who you are.
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, exactly. And knowing that, yeah, sometimes the wrong decision is actually great because it’s taught you something about yourself that maybe you didn’t know before and is highlighted. Yeah, that’s not the direction I want to take. So there’s value as long as you find value in everything you do, and always look for the lesson. That’s a really good way of framing decision making.
Brett McKay: Well, Ben, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Ben Aldridge: Yeah, so the Best Places is my website, benaldridge.com. And there’s links to social media. There’s pictures from all the philosophy challenges and bits to my books and stuff. We’ve got an educator’s guide on there. So this Seriously Happy book that’s coming out in September has this PDF that we’ve created with the publishers. And it’s basically starting discussions in classrooms and people who are educators and parents can use this as a way to really drill down on some of the content within the book. So yeah, the website is the best place to go.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Ben Aldridge, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Ben Aldridge: Thank you so much for having me back. Great to be here and chatting to you.
Brett McKay: My guest today is Ben Aldridge. He’s the author of the book, Seriously Happy, it’s available on amazon.com. You find more information about his work at his website, benaldridge.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/seriouslyhappy. We 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 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 take one minute to just read off a 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 family member who you think we get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay reminding to tell our listening AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!
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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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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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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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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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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When we think of rituals, we tend to think of big, inherited, more occasional religious or cultural ceremonies like church services, holidays, weddings, and funerals. But as my guest observes, we also engage in small, self-made, everyday rituals that help us turn life’s more mundane moments into more meaningful ones.
In the The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton explores the way our DIY rituals shape, and enhance, our lives. We take up that survey on today’s show. Michael explains the difference between a habit and a ritual and how individuals and families create unique “ritual signatures” even within more standard rituals like holidays. We discuss the different areas of life in which rituals show up and what they do for us, including how they help us cope with uncertainty, savor life, and connect to the past. We get into the function DIY rituals perform in romantic relationships, from deepening intimacy to facilitating a break-up, the role that “kinkeepers” play in keeping a family together, the tricky business of combining family traditions when people get married, how to know when a family tradition should be retired, and much more.
Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM series on the power of ritual * AoM Article: How to Turn an Ordinary Routine Into a Spirit-Renewing Ritual * AoM Podcast #505: A Man’s Need for Ritual * AoM Podcast #835: The Power of Ritual * “Deja Vu” by Olivia Rodrigo
Connect With Michael Norton* Michael’s website — including the “Habit or Ritual?” quiz
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When we think of rituals, we tend to think of big, inherited, more occasional religious or cultural ceremonies like church services, holidays, weddings, and funerals. But as my guest observes, we also engage in small, self-made, everyday rituals that help us turn life’s more mundane moments into more meaningful ones. In The Ritual Effect, From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton explores the way our DIY rituals shape and enhance our lives. We take up that survey on today’s show. Michael explains the difference between a habit and a ritual, and how individuals and families create unique ritual signatures, even within more standard rituals like holidays. We discuss the different areas of life in which rituals show up and what they do for including how they help us cope with uncertainty, save our life, and connect to the past. We get into the function DIY rituals perform in romantic relationships, from deepening intimacy to facilitating a breakup, the role that kin keepers play in keeping a family together, the tricky business of combining family traditions when people get married, how to know when a family tradition should be retired, and much more. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/everydayrituals. All right, Michael Norton, welcome to the show.
Michael Norton: Thank you, Brett.
Brett McKay: So you are a psychologist who has researched and written about the power of rituals in our lives, but you started off your career as a ritual skeptic. What do you think about rituals before you started researching them?
Michael Norton: I think when I talk to scientists, including myself, I guess, scientists often think of rituals as something like people in robes with candles chanting something or other, but very far removed from their everyday lives. Or maybe new-agey millennials in Santa Fe with crystals or, so that’s the other sagebrush.
Brett McKay: That kind of connotation.
Michael Norton: Exactly. And I think I was a little, I mean, I was studying rituals ’cause I thought they were so fascinating just as a psychologist, but I was a little removed from them as a kind of, yeah, I bet they do things, but not so much for me. And then I had my, of course, epiphany moment, which many people have had, which is I had a daughter and brought her home from the hospital. And if that’s ever happened to you, you realize you’re responsible for this person for the next 80 years or however many years. It’s a little stressful. And they don’t seem to wanna sleep. And so what do you do? And what we started to do naturally was we did this book and then we did this song and then we had these two stuffies and then we needed this special blanket. And over time, it literally hit me over time. Oh my God, I’ve completely developed a very elaborate, specific, repeated ritual that we do every single night in exactly the same way in order to help her to sleep. And then I said, I’ve been a little bit of a hypocrite because I, like many, many people have turned to ritual to try to help me with a problem.
Brett McKay: Right, and With that bedtime ritual with kids, if you’ve had them, you know if you switch anything, if you switch the order, they’re like, no, that’s not how we do it. It’s not gonna work that way.
Michael Norton: Exactly. This isn’t the right copy of Goodnight Moon. It’s the soft cover.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Or Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I still got that book memorized and it’s been 10 years since I read it. Alright. So as a psychologist, how do you define a ritual?
Michael Norton: I think one of the distinctions that comes to mind for lots of people is because they are quite similar is the distinction between a habit and a ritual. Ritual has this feeling of something more than just a habit. Habits are fantastic. I mean, I wish I had better habits. We should all have better habits and exercise and eat healthy and all the other things we’d like to do. But I feel like habits are a bit dry. They’re sort of things that we do in order to get them done. Like I’m eating the food in order to be healthy. There’s nothing wrong with them. But if you had a 40 year stretch of perfect habits, I’m not sure that we’d look back and say, what an interesting, fulfilling life I had. We’d be really, really healthy, like great cholesterol. But I’m not sure we’d say, like, that was really a fantastic and engaging life. And I think sometimes that’s what rituals help us do, is they take otherwise boring, mundane things, including something like going to bed or helping someone go to bed.
All you technically need to do is put the baby in a crib. That would be just fine. But we use rituals, we create more meaning, we create memories, we create emotion. And I think we tend to enrich our lives a little bit. You still remember the words from this book that you use 10 years later. That’s not so much a habit, that’s something deeper and more meaningful than just a habit.
Brett McKay: All right. So a habit or routine, I think you can swap those synonymously. I think you said in the book, it focuses on the what. It’s just like, I got to get this thing done. It doesn’t particularly matter the order I do it or how I do it. As long as it gets done, we’re good. A routine or a habit can become a ritual if the focus shifts to the how. Would that be the distinction?
Michael Norton: That’s right. And even with these seemingly trivial behaviors, like I’ve asked lots of people, when you’re getting ready for bed or getting ready in the morning, do you brush your teeth first and then shower? Or do you shower and then brush your teeth? What’s your answer, by the way, out of curiosity?
Brett McKay: I brush my teeth after I shower.
Michael Norton: After you shower. So then if I ask people, it’s about 50-50 on those two orders. And then if I say, do you mind switching the order of them tonight? Or tomorrow morning, do you mind doing the other one first? And then the usual first one second. How does that make you feel?
Brett McKay: I don’t care.
Michael Norton: Doesn’t care. So this is so interesting. So about half of people are you. They say, I couldn’t care less. I mean, I’m just brushing my teeth and showering. What difference does it make? And about half of people say, I don’t want to. I’d rather not. And I say, why? And they say, I’d feel weird. I’d feel off. I wouldn’t feel ready for the day. These are people who it’s not just the what. The what is the brushing and showering. If it’s just what, it’s a habit. And the order doesn’t matter to you at all. As soon as the order starts to matter, if there’s feeling in it, emotion in it, if you do it right, it feels good. If you do it wrong, you feel off. That’s getting closer to the feeling of a ritual. It’s more than just the what. It’s how you do it that’s creating more meaning for you.
Brett McKay: Okay, so if a routine or habit elicits emotion in you, and you can usually tell that if you change it, then you might think this is probably more of a ritual, not just a habit.
Michael Norton: Especially if you don’t have a good reason. So if you said, well, I have to brush my teeth first because my kid has to brush their teeth at a certain time. Well, then it’s, you’re not being, you know, rigid because it just matters to you. You have a reason for it. But most people say, I don’t actually know why I brush my teeth first and then shower second. I didn’t do an experiment where I did it one way for a year and the other way for a year. I just feel like this is the way I’m gonna do it. That’s when it’s getting a bit more toward a ritual. You can’t quite explain why it’s meaningful to do it the way you do it, but it just feels meaningful.
Brett McKay: Okay, so this definition of a ritual that you have. So it’s a routine that we do where it elicits emotion. There’s no particular logical reason why we do it, but we feel like we need to do it this certain way. This broadens what can be incorporated or what we can think of as a ritual. But when anthropologists or sociologists study rituals, what kind of rituals are they studying?
Michael Norton: This is the typical, and in fact, when I started studying rituals as well, this is the what first comes to mind are cultural rituals, religious rituals, often with a long history and tradition. So you can think of every religious faith has, of course, you know, rituals of when babies are born, when people become adults, when people get married, when people pass away. Religions have these sort of standard rituals that have been passed down through time. And, you know, countries have rituals as well. The United States has Thanksgiving, for example, which isn’t present in other countries, a little bit in Canada, but not in other countries. But it’s important to Americans to have Thanksgiving.
These are the kinds we often think of are these inherited, I guess is one way to think about them. And they can be incredibly important and they play an incredibly valuable role in our lives. When I say that’s not the kind I study, it’s not because they’re not incredibly important for our well-being and our connection with other people. But I got a little bit more interested in the kind that people are freelancing themselves, kind of under the surface, that are littler ones. They’re even kind of everyday ones, but they’re still creating meaning for us. Not like as much meaning probably as a 2000 year history of a religious faith in connecting you to previous generations. I don’t mean to compare them, but even something as seemingly silly as the order in which you brush your teeth and shower, a little tiny bit that’s giving you something a little ritualistic, it’s giving you something in there that’s beyond just merely going through the motions.
Brett McKay: Or it could be a family ritual that you take part in, that just your family does, it’s unique to your family.
Michael Norton: That’s right. And even one of the, when you think about inherited rituals, so Thanksgiving, for example, we’re aware of what Thanksgiving is. If you have people write about what happens on Thanksgiving, they can tell you. There’s a turkey and things like that. But when you go into families, each family is doing it in their own very specific way. They have their own specific foods that they, maybe there’s turkey, but there’s also some pies that are very specific, different kinds of stuffing that are very specific. What time we eat varies from family to family. If you’ve ever gone with a significant other to their family’s Thanksgiving, the number one emotion you have is they’re doing it all wrong. What’s wrong with these people? I don’t think I can be with this person anymore ’cause their family’s insane. Well, that tells us that it’s not even Thanksgiving, which is a tradition inherited all of those features, even their families and individuals are still coming up with their own idiosyncratic ways that reflect something specific about their identity.
Brett McKay: Something you talk about in the book is this idea of a ritual signature. What is that?
Michael Norton: This is exactly this kind of thing where we do have things that we receive That are given to us. A wedding, for example, you can think about is standard. Most religions and most cultures have some form of two people love each other. They come together, their families get together and there’s a ceremony. But only some people would play AC/DC, you know, as the bride and groom come down the aisle because whatever, they met at an AC/DC concert. That’s their ritual signature. Yes, they are using some elements of established ones, but they’re also building into these things that are very idiosyncratic to them. That have special meaning for them. That other people would be horrified to have ACDC playing, you know, as they came down the aisle. But for this couple, it’s kind of their thing. Literally, it’s their ritual signature. It’s what we do that makes us us and not like those other couples.
Brett McKay: And something you talk about in the beginning of the book is there’s this idea that we’ve become a more secular culture. You quoted Charles Taylor. We’ve talked about Charles Taylor on the podcast. We live in a secular age and because of that, we’ve become more rational and we’re engaging in less ritualistic behavior. But you argue that actually, no, if you look at things, we might be taking part in less of those legacy rituals that are associated with church or religion. But if you look closely enough, people today, there are just thousands, millions of different rituals being performed every day by people who aren’t even religious.
Michael Norton: So the biggest counterpoint to the idea that we’re losing ritual in society would be something like Burning Man, which is not religious. There’s no kind of specific faith associated with it. But if you kind of abstract away, you’ve got people going on a pilgrimage to a desert for a period of time. There’s music. There are substances that change how you’re thinking and feeling about the world. At the end, we have a gigantic figure that we burn in a ritualistic way, and then we all retreat back to our lives. Is that secular? Yes, technically, because we don’t have a faith associated with it. But it’s an incredibly ritualistic activity that we engage in.
Brett McKay: Why do we engage in ritualistic behavior? I think people can look at maybe religious rituals and think, well, you know, there’s a reason it’s about tradition and showing piety to God. But if you don’t believe in a higher power, why do we still have this drive to engage in ritualistic behavior?
Michael Norton: It’s one of the reasons I became most interested in studying rituals, honestly, is that across so many domains of life, one of the things that humans turn to is ritual. Funerals and weddings, we use them for grieving and also for love. We use rituals to get amped up and we use rituals sometimes to calm ourselves down. I mean, we’re using them for incredibly different purposes in these different domains of life. And we use many other strategies and things as well. It’s not like we only use rituals, but the fact that we see them across so many domains of life says to me that there is something really fundamental in humans that ritual is doing something for us.
They do lots of things for us but one underlying thing that I think we see is that we use them to solve problems. And in particular, when we have uncertainty or stress or we’re faced with something that’s hard to cope with, that’s when we often see humans turning to ritual as a way to try to manage some of that uncertainty and stress. And the problem, of course, as you know, with being human is, everything is completely uncertain. We can try to convince ourselves that it’s not, but the fact is, of course, that’s the way that life goes. And so it’s not surprising that we’ve developed practices to try to help us in some way or another cope with that level of uncertainty and feel a little bit more sense of control so that we’re not constantly just all over the place and wondering even, you know, is anything I’m doing meaningful or not.
Brett McKay: And you talk about we see the connection of ritualistic behavior and uncertainty very viscerally in sports. What can sports tell us about the connection between uncertainty and ritualistic behavior?
Michael Norton: A super fun way to waste an afternoon is to type in the name of any athlete or any celebrity and then the word ritual and just click search. And you’ll find not every athlete and not every celebrity has rituals, but it’s kind of shocking how often they do have something very idiosyncratic and often quite elaborate. And the question is, well, why them and not the rest of us? And of course, if you think about so Rafael Nadal is famous for his pre-serve ritual, which is very, very elaborate, takes a very long time. It includes him picking his wedgie, which I find extremely amusing. And my daughter actually finds very amusing that he does that. So why is he engaged in these seemingly unusual behaviors that aren’t really related to serving? And it’s of course, ’cause he’s got to do something that’s as hard a physical action as humans can do. Or when Beyonce is about to go out on stage in front of 50,000, 100,000 people, the stress of that is, we can’t even imagine how stressful that is. So celebrities turn to these kinds of rituals. And I think we can see, you know, that we turn to them because we’re trying to get ready and solve the problem of, oh my God, I have to do this enormous thing coming up. The rest of us don’t have the liberty to do those kinds. So if I, Before I taught a class, if I started to do Raphael’s pre-serve ritual, people would say, come on, this isn’t that hard. You’re not allowed to do that.
So we allow celebrities to do these things in a way that we don’t allow ourselves. But if we ask people, what do you do before, when you’re nervous about something, like a meeting at work that’s important, people say, oh no, I do them. It’s just that what I do is I do them in private. Many people say, I go into the bathroom, I check that nobody’s there, then I talk to myself in the mirror. So we’re not Nadal, we’re not Serena Williams, but we are doing these very similar things to deal with our own level of stress. When stress is there, humans seem to have always wanted to bring ritual as a possible solution.
Brett McKay: I want to talk more about how rituals can help our performance. But going back to the connection between uncertainty and ritualistic behavior, you pointed out this really interesting study. When they look at baseball, when they compare hitters and fielders, hitters engage in more ritualistic behavior than fielders do. And it’s probably because hitting a baseball, there’s more uncertainty there. You don’t know what pitch is coming your way. Hitting a baseball that’s going 95 miles an hour or sometimes 100 miles an hour, it’s extremely hard to do. So there’s a lot of uncertainty. So you see batters engaging in more. They’ve got their, before they get in the batter’s box, they got their thing they do. They touch themselves in different ways. They hit the plate. You don’t see that so much with fielders ’cause there’s less uncertainty. You know, well, if the ball’s coming my way, I’m gonna get it. And then I’m gonna throw it to first or second.
Michael Norton: Yeah. There’s a study I love that they filmed baseball players and then they coded at a micro level how many movements they made before each had bat. And the average number was 83, which is a lot of movements to make before every single pitch that is delivered to you. But you’re right. If you think about even if you just think about this base rate of success, the very best hitters ever fail two thirds of the time. Like it is incredible to be successful one out of every three times as a hitter. In the field, the success rate is like 98 or 99% at most positions. So if you purely just think about the uncertainty, you can see how if you’re in the situation where my gosh, it’s probably gonna go wrong. You’d have more stress. You might turn to more ritual. If you’re in a situation where you’re just fine, you probably don’t need to do it quite as much.
Brett McKay: Okay so rituals can help us feel more calm in periods of uncertainty. It can also help reduce stress when we’re feeling anxious about a performance, a big performance. And that’s basically because it gives us a sense that we have a bit of control even though rationally these actions that we take part in might not have any direct effect. Maybe they do maybe we can be metaphysical here and say yeah maybe they do have something but we’re going to keep things rational here and say well they don’t have a direct effect, but it gives us a sense of control. And you were talking about some of these pre-game rituals these pre-performance rituals that musicians do, actors do before they get on the stage. Can these rituals that they take part in or maybe we take part in to get ready for a speech, can the ritualistic behavior get in the way of performance?
Michael Norton: It’s so interesting because we tend to think of rituals as we’re feeling stressed. And so I’m going to do this ritual and it’s going to calm me down. And many people report that that’s how it feels that they are nervous. Then they do their ritual and then they feel calmer before they go on. But the problem is that rituals can get in the way as well right? So in a couple of ways. One is if I always before I go on stage do the exact same ritual and it’ll make me feel like I’m ready to go, well if that gets disrupted then I’m going to feel less ready to go right? So if I’ve set myself up that I need to do this ritual and then I can’t do the ritual I might actually be worse off than if I never had it in the first place.
Brett McKay: You’ve done any research on OCD and rituals when does a ritual become obsessive compulsive? And for people who have a tendency or are prone to obsessive compulsiveness, can rituals do more harm than good?
Michael Norton: So often we’re engaged in a ritual in the service of something else. So if you, think about even something like checking to see if you remembered to lock the door of your house or apartment before you leave for the day you’re checking that in order to feel good about leaving so that you can go and engage in your day and have a good day at work. And sometimes what can happen is that we lose the link between we were doing the ritual in order to accomplish something else. I was doing the pre-show ritual in order to then go out on stage and perform well. And with obsessive compulsive disorder what can happen is the ritual itself becomes the reward. We lose the link between I’m doing this in the service of something else and it becomes I’m doing this in order to do this. So the pre, even with baseball players you can see scouts sometimes say this person’s batting ritual is so elaborate that it’s not helping them get in the zone. It’s actually interfering with them getting in the zone because after a thousand movements it’s like three pitches have gone by and they struck out without even swinging. At the extreme this can be what happens or if you’re checking that locked your door of your house or apartment before you go to work.
If you lose the link between checking and leaving then, you’re just checking in order to check and then again we can see it. Well when that ritual starts to interfere with your goals and interfere with your life that’s when we can start to say you know what? This has gone far beyond being useful and might actually be harmful.
Brett McKay: Have you done any research on how individuals develop these rituals for performance and say like an athlete or a singer they have these different things that they do. They might have to wear certain socks, they put on their socks in a certain way, they got to chalk their hands a certain way. How do these develop and then how do they get imbued with ritualistic meaning?
Michael Norton: What is so fascinating is that often people can’t quite explain it. So sometimes if they use for example a song they can explain the song. And you can even say this song came out in 2007 when I was in college and that’s why I started using it as part of my performance routine. But most of the movements that people have they actually can’t track. They’re not sure why they tap twice instead of three times. Nobody told them at the time to tap two versus three times. They just develop over time and then they just become the way that we do things. I had an undergraduate student at Harvard who was an athlete who had a pre-performance ritual that was very elaborate. And I asked her the question that you asked me which is well does that ever interfere? And she said well no I actually made it very elaborate so that it’s almost impossible to do perfectly correctly so that if I don’t perform well I can blame it on the fact that I didn’t do the ritual perfectly. And if I do perform well I can say well I probably did the ritual perfectly. Now if you think about the psychology…
First off it’s genius but if you think of the psychology of that we’re very carefully constructing our rituals and calibrating them to be exactly what we need right in that moment even sometimes going too far in order to later be able to point to the ritual as the problem. She also couldn’t really point to say and the reason I started this step and then this step was because of this and this. It often just happens in the environment. And as we were saying earlier even with our kids’ bedtime rituals, often it’s just you had the kid and then the book that was close to you was Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. And so that became the book that you use rather than, well we carefully surveyed every children’s book in the world and discovered that this was the optimal book. It’s often a little kind of environmental stimulus that then gets built into things.
Brett McKay: Yeah it’s interesting about that girl with her ritual. She was using the ritual as ego protection and so if she failed it was like ah I don’t feel so bad because it wasn’t my performance it was just my ritual was off.
Michael Norton: It’s amazing right?
Brett McKay: Yeah it’s interesting. But I can see that get in the way though because how do you improve? You think well, it wasn’t because I did this thing wrong in my performance. It was the ritual. That can backfire.
Michael Norton: Yeah. If you don’t take it as a maybe I should also practice more.
Brett McKay: Yeah. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So rituals can help us feel more calm during periods of stress and uncertainty, can help increase our performance but also rituals can hinder our performance if taken to an extreme. You also talk about research you’ve come across and done about how ritual can help us savor life more. Tell us about that.
Michael Norton: I think that a life of perfect habits again you’d be very very healthy. And even if you think about just eating and drinking, what we need are calories and hydration. And so if you may have heard of Soylent as kind of a not very tasty but has all the nutrients that we need to survive kind of food. And if you just have Soylent and probably some water you’d be perfectly healthy. And there’s nothing wrong with… I mean I want everybody to eat whatever they feel like eating but if you think about savoring life it’s… You could just eat the same thing every single day. But we can use food for much much more than that. A cake is not just a cake when it’s a birthday cake. It means something more than that or liquid in a glass isn’t just liquid in a glass when we raise it and clink glasses and say Cheers or sláinte or salud. We’re using ritual to imbue boring, in a sense boring things. It’s just calories and liquid but we’re using ritual to imbue it with something more than that like meaning or connection with other people. Or literally going from age seven to age eight with this birthday cake with this number of candles that signifies that I’m something different than I was before.
So they can help us I think move beyond being very utilitarian towards something that really is much more rich and meaningful than just going through the motions. And otherwise it’s hard to find the time. We’re just very busy and running around all the time. And rituals can serve as a little reminder like my three minutes with my coffee in the morning. It’s just a little reminder that I don’t need to be sprinting everywhere at all times. I can take even just one minute and savor the moment just briefly before I go back into the rat race.
Brett McKay: Right, so if you can use food to create more emotion more connection. I think holiday traditions with food are you see this my kids they are really gung-ho about we got to eat these certain foods on these certain days and they get kind of upset when we don’t. So in my family a couple of years ago I started making corned beef and potatoes and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day because I did that when I was growing up started doing it I did it once and then it became a thing and they’re like yeah they look forward to it and it’s like I get the Walmart corned beef it’s okay. But now we didn’t do this one year and they were like they were really bummed like oh something’s off with the world. We didn’t eat corn beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day.
Michael Norton: I do the same thing with my daughter and my wife. And what’s funny is neither of them like corned beef at all. In fact that has nothing to do with the fact that we’re going to make it every year. In and of itself, it’s like wait what are we doing by making this My daughter this year she’s eight and she tried a little piece of corned beef and then she said very skillfully, she said I really like this. Can I save it and finish it later? Which was just a chef’s kiss of social subtlety there. But again next year we’re definitely going to do it right. I mean for me I’m Irish Catholic so I remember my grandmother making that. All this history and tradition in these things that I can remember my grandmother without. But when you engage in these rituals I mean literally the smell of things can bring you back to memory in a way that is hard to do otherwise. So we also by enacting these rituals over time we literally do connect ourselves more deeply with the past. And my daughter is never going to meet my grandmother who she’s named after but when we make corned beef together she is connected to her in a very different way than if we don’t enact some of those traditions in our family.
Brett McKay: So those food traditions, those food rituals can help us engage in mental time travel and that has positive benefits.
Michael Norton: For sure. And religion does the same. I mean the feeling of being connected to a history of thousands of years that’s a really really powerful feeling. And I could just sit here and try to feel that way but rituals really give me a very different way of doing that of saying people like me have been doing this and this has been important to them for that long. It’s just a very different rich connection that rituals can help us to get.
Brett McKay: What about rituals and romantic relationships? How can rituals strengthen those?
Michael Norton: So we have weddings. That’s a ritual. It’s a big thing. It definitely counts. It’s very very important. But then that’s one day. You have an anniversary so once a year you’re supposed to celebrate and say oh yeah I still like you. I guess Valentine’s Day makes us also do that at least one time a year. But what about all the other days? Can rituals play a role there? And when you ask couples, we rarely ask do you have a ritual? But we’ll ask is there anything that the two of you do that’s special that you make sure you always do it that other couples don’t really do? It’s your special thing. Two thirds three quarters of couples say you know what? We do have something. And there are things like we always kiss in threes. One person that was like we’ve been doing it for 22 years. They could have done two kisses or four but for them it’s three. And this other couple said before we eat we clink our silverware together. Just these little tiny… Forks are boring, but this couple made their silverware into something really meaningful for themselves. Speaking of savoring kind of savoring the moment before they start to eat. And we do see that couples who say they have a relationship ritual tend to report higher relationship satisfaction than couples who say we don’t have anything like that.
Brett McKay: And they have to be exclusive. It has to be just unique for that person. If you find out that I think there’s that Olivia Rodrigo song Deja Vu? Have you ever heard that song?
Michael Norton: Uh-huh.
Brett McKay: It’s about this guy who’s dated one girl broke up with her and now he’s dating a new girl and he’s doing the exact same things that he did with his previous girlfriend. This girl thinks it’s like a neat unique thing to her but she doesn’t realize actually this guy just does it to every girl that he’s in a relationship with. And so it loses its ritualistic meaning.
Michael Norton: One of the fascinating things. So when you break up with somebody you might not like it but they’re definitely allowed to date other people. They’re allowed to get married, they’re allowed to have kids. Again you might not love it but they’re allowed to do that but they are not allowed to reuse your rituals with their new partner. That is simply the rudest thing you could possibly do and people get so even something like your pet nicknames. If we were Schmoopy Bear or whatever it was, you may not call your next partner. You may marry them and spend the rest of your life with them. You may not call them Schmoopy Bear. And it’s exactly as you said because it’s such a violation of what was special about us that you would ever think to use that with somebody else.
Brett McKay: And you also talk about that people have rituals around the breakup itself. So when a relationship ends how do I leave that relationship behind me? And you see people often engaging in ritual to sort of say let me put to bed the person I was with whoever that was so that I can be a new person with this new person. Some of the best, honestly the most entertaining best examples of self-made rituals are the ones that people do especially when they are broken up with. Now it’s like delete the pictures on Instagram or whatever. But in the old world it’s shockingly common that people would take all the pictures of themselves with their ex and burn them. Literally put them in a pile and burn them to say I’m eliminating you from everything of my life. I will never speak with you again. Why do we do that? On the one hand you can say what an odd thing to do. On the other hand it sounds like that’s probably a good idea. I wish I had tried that at least one time because we’re trying to use it to say demarcation. I’m not that person anymore. Now I’m somebody new. Continuing on this idea of relationships and rituals let’s talk about family rituals. We’ve mentioned a few throughout this conversation people have their own unique Thanksgiving rituals they might do, holiday rituals. But you have this idea that there are people and families that are really good about making sure family traditions keep going on and they’re called kin keepers. Tell us about kin keepers.
Michael Norton: You can think of the person in your family. Every extended family typically most nuclear families have someone and then an extended family has someone as well who is the person who is responsible for the family remaining a family. They are the ones who call everyone or email everyone and say what are we going to do for Thanksgiving this year? What are we going to do for this holiday this year? What are we going to do for dad’s birthday? And if you look across time, across decades it’s the same person every single year who’s sending those emails. Their sibling and family members sometimes find them annoying. Why does this person keep bothering us with the birthday thing? And yet without the role that person plays, families start to disintegrate. I mean is a family a collection of random individuals or is a family a family? And just like any relationship including romantic relationships, they require work. Employee relationships require work. Every relationship you have to put something into it to keep it healthy and sustained. And these kin keepers who do this enormous amount of emotional work for families are really the glue in terms of keeping a family a family.
We were talking earlier about people who say I never would’ve seen my aunts and uncles unless we’d had these big family celebrations. Well they should thank whoever the kin keeper was in that generation because they’re the ones that made it happen. They’re the ones that gave you an extended family through doing a huge amount of work on the backend to make sure everybody came together.
Brett McKay: Yeah I know in my family on my mother’s side we got together quite often. Growing up with my cousins it was usually at Thanksgiving it was because my grandfather had this ranch in New Mexico and we would go there for Thanksgiving, but then once my grandpa got too old and he had to sell the ranch the family get togethers got fewer and far between. And really the last time my extended family got together was at his funeral. That was it. He was the kin keeper for sure.
Michael Norton: Yep and you need somebody to replace that person somehow or it’s very very difficult to keep the traditions going. Also by the way genius is when parents are like I never see my kids anymore. They’re 18 they’re out of the house. Vacation home. If you have the cash the best way to make your kids and then your grandkids visit you is to live somewhere awesome so that they feel like visiting you anyway. I don’t have necessarily the cash to buy 10 houses all over the place but it does seem to be pretty effective.
Brett McKay: That does seem like a good idea. I think what helped my grandfather being the kin keeper was that his place in New Mexico it was cool. It was a desirable spot. People wanted to go there. I mean at least the grandkids wanted to go there. It’s harder to entice people to come to a gathering in say the regular suburbs than someplace cool like that. Have you done any research on how people combine family traditions when they get married?
Michael Norton: It is a source of enormous conflict for many many couples. One case of course is when people of different faiths marry and then you need to combine not just family rituals but also religious rituals. What will we keep? What will we discard? But even in the absence of religious differences there’s just cultural differences and there’s just family differences. So on Thanksgiving if my family always ate at 4:00 and yours ate at 2:00, do we eat at 3:00? Is that the compromise? Or do we do 4:00? But we make sure that we do another thing that your family did. And what you see couples doing as they develop is they very very often take some from one family some from another family and then they develop their own over time. That’s the most common pattern which means you’re both honoring the past and keeping things that were important and keeping that connection. And you’re also constantly just like in all these domains of life freelancing and creating your own that have special meaning for you giving them to your kids and then they’re going to do the same thing in the next generation.
Brett McKay: How do you know when it’s time to discard a family tradition?
Michael Norton: For me, it’s if people… As you said if people stop showing up you probably should try something different. I think if there’s too much conflict around it or people are just too resistant to doing it, you can’t force people to do anything. So you have to create things that are going to be meaningful enough that people are going to want to keep coming back for it.
Brett McKay: Yeah we had a family tradition growing up. My hometown puts on this really big 4th of July parade. We went to it every single 4th of July when I was a kid. And then even after I got married my siblings got married we’d still go to it. And the thing is it’s the exact same thing for 30 plus years you see the exact same thing. It’s usually just advertisements for the local businesses on these floats and it’s a big hassle. It’s hot. I live in Oklahoma so it’s like 95 degrees. It’s humid. My brother-in-Law would have to get out there at six o’clock in the morning to get a spot and you had to sit at this thing for two and a half hours, three hours and it was just a given. You did this thing. It’s 4th of July. We got to go to the Liberty Fest 4th of July parade in Edmond Oklahoma. And I remember one year my wife and I were just like yeah we don’t want to do this anymore. How about we just don’t do this? And we stopped going and then everyone else was like yeah actually you know what? We don’t like going either. And so the tradition ended. I mean we still get together on 4th of July but we do other things. But it is just funny because we kept doing this tradition of going to the parade year after year because that’s what the tradition was but no one liked doing it.
Michael Norton: We used too go to when I was a kid to the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Boston and at some point when I was a kid I think my parents realized that mainly what it was was super drunk college students just shouting and throwing stuff around. So they were like you know what? Let’s just put an end to that tradition. We’ll not go to the parade anymore. So yeah things change.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s good. What about rituals in grieving? There’s a lot of rituals around that. What does your research say about that?
Michael Norton: This is a case where if not to overclaim but really if you look at any faith or any culture there is some practice around death and loss. They vary really really widely. Even the color that is used in some cultures you wear black. In other cultures you wear white. In other cultures it’s red and other cultures it’s green. But there is a decided upon color there’s a decided upon ceremony that helps us get through grief. And those ceremonies are incredibly important for people in bringing their family together, giving them social support, connecting them with their faith. These are all key elements of grief. And also what we see is people again are freelancing their own little rituals. So they absolutely go to a funeral. And then if we say what else did you do? They say well actually another thing that I did was I listened to my mom’s favorite song every morning on the way to work for a year. There’s no 2000 year old text that says listen to your mom’s favorite song on your way to work obviously. So what are people doing? Well the funeral is one day and now we’re still grieving. And so people come up with their own little rituals not candles and people in robes rituals but their own little practices to try to honor the person that they lost.
Brett McKay: Again these rituals are helping with the stress of losing somebody. It’s a process. You know if I do these things even though I’m feeling bad I can do these things to keep moving through this process.
Michael Norton: Grief is such a complicated series of emotions. It’s not just one emotion but one of the key predictors of grief is feeling a lack of control because this terrible thing happened that you absolutely did not want to happen and you were powerless to stop it from happening. And that loss of control is in and of itself a predictor of the intensity of your grief because as we discussed earlier, we do not like to feel that we don’t have control especially over the things that are most important to us. And researchers have suggested that rituals in the face of grief, they’re orderly practiced events that we’ve inherited that then might be also part of restoring a little bit of a sense of control in these moments where we really feel out of control.
Brett McKay: So we’ve been talking about people creating their own DIY version of a ritual. Do you have any advice on how people can create their own rituals? When should they create a ritual for something? Any tactics on how to create a ritual or do we just have an intuitive sense on how to do this already?
Michael Norton: I think so. The first step that I always suggest people do is actually to take an inventory of their current rituals, because even if you’re someone who thinks I don’t do these I’m not a new agey millennial or whatever you might think, you absolutely are doing them in various parts of your life and if you don’t think you’re doing them you can ask your significant other. You can ask your kids, you can ask your coworkers, do I do anything and they’ll be happy to tell you all of the quirky things that you’re up to. And I think even before thinking about adding anything, because if I said you know what’s great is to meditate for six hours every day, it’s like well thanks for the advice but I don’t have six hours every day to meditate. That sounds great. I do think actually recognizing where you already have them and then owning them a little bit more, recognizing that these are little practices, recognizing what you and your spouse do when you say goodbye in the morning, that in and of itself can already be a start on seeing the important roles that rituals are playing in your life.
Brett McKay: Well Michael this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Michael Norton: Michaelnorton.com is the easiest and actually we developed a quiz so if you go to the website just click quiz and it’s a very quick quiz but we ask you about rituals in different domains of your life. Speaking of doing an inventory that kind of tells you which domains are you high and low on and where might you think about trying some different things.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well Michael Norton thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Michael Norton: Thank you so much Brett.
Brett McKay: My guest today is Michael Norton. He’s the author of the book The Ritual Effect. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website michaelnorton.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/everydayrituals. You can find links to resources where 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 over 16 years now and the podcast for over 10. And they both 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 an episode with a friend. 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.
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Millions of young adults know what it’s like to graduate from college with student debt. For some, it’s a frustrating annoyance. For others, it’s a worry-inducing burden. For Ken Ilgunas, it was a dragon in need of slaying and a pathway to adventure.
Ken is the author of Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom, and today on the show, he shares the story of how his quest to erase his debt led him to the Arctic Circle and through the peaks and valleys of living a totally unshackled life. Ken explains why he went to Alaska to work as a truckstop burger flipper and park ranger to pay off his student debt, what it’s like to hitchhike across the country, how reading Thoreau’s Walden got him questioning how we live our lives, and how that inspiration led him to living in his van while attending grad school at Duke. Along the way, Ken shares his meditations on nonconformity, engaging in romantic pursuits, and the benefits of both de-institutionalizing and re-institutionalizing your life.
Resources Related to the Podcast Walden* by Henry David Thoreau * AoM Podcast #841: What People Get Wrong About Walden * AoM Podcast #473: The Solitude of a Fire Watcher * AoM Article: How to Hitchhike Around the USA * Sunday Firesides: The Cost of a Thing
Connect With Ken Ilgunas* Ken‘s website
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Millions of young adults know what it’s like to graduate from college with student debt. For some, it’s a frustrating annoyance. For others, it’s a worry inducing burden. For Ken Ilgunas, it was a dragon in need of slaying and a pathway to adventure. Ken is the author of Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom, and today on the show, he shares the story of how his quest to erase his debt led him to the Arctic Circle and through the peaks and valleys of living a totally unshackled life.
Ken explains why he went to Alaska to work as a truck stop burger flipper and park ranger to pay off his student debt, what it’s like to hitchhike across the country, how reading Thoreau’s Walden got him, questioning how we live our lives, and how that inspiration led him to living in his van while attending grad school at Duke. Along the way, Ken shares his meditations on nonconformity, engaging in romantic pursuits, and the benefits of both deinstitutionalizing and re-institutionalizing your life. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/waldenonwheels.
All right, Ken Ilgunas, welcome to the show.
Ken Ilgunas: It’s awesome to be on. Thank you.
Brett McKay: So you had a varied and unique resume after you graduated college. So you moved to Alaska. And then while you were there, you cleaned a motel at a truck stop there near the Arctic Circle. You flipped burgers during the night shift at a diner at this truck stop. You guided cruise tourists. You worked as a backcountry ranger in a national park. Then you hitchhiked from Alaska to New York. So you’re kind of a tramp for a bit. You served in the AmeriCorps in the American south. And the capstone, there’s some other stuff you did, too. We’re going to talk about it. But the capstone of this career that you had after college was you lived in a van on the campus of Duke University from 2009 to 2011 while you pursued your graduate degree.
And what’s crazy, you did all this stuff so you could pay off your student debt. Let’s talk about this. Like, how much debt did you acquire during college? And was there a moment you had in your life when you saw your mounting debt? And you’re like, Oh, my gosh. I got to do something about this.
Ken Ilgunas: It was $32,000, I think, with interest, that climbed up to 35,000 that I had to pay off. For the most part, I did a good job, as so many growing debtors do, in that I just completely put it out of my mind. When I was at college I never really thought about debt. I was just focused on my part time job, writing my essays, getting whatever grades I needed to get. So I just kind of put it out of my mind. And then one day, I think this was maybe after my third year, my mother called me down to the kitchen table. I was commuting to the university at Buffalo in New York, and she had all of these kind of loan bills and papers just kind of piled up on the kitchen table. And she’s just like, you’re going to be in a lot of debt. And at this time, I was pushing carts at the Home Depot for $8 an hour, and she was just like, what are you going to do? Like, how are you going to get out of this situation? And I just kind of said, Mom, don’t worry about it. I’ll deal with it. And I always had fantasies of just like moving to a different continent or faking my death or just weirdly happening upon a well paying job, just stupidly optimistic. And I just kind of joked around about it.
And it was one of the few times in my life where I saw my mom fold her arms and put her head down and weep. She was so scared for me. And that was kind of a wake up moment. I was just like, Wow, I really do need to think about all this debt I need to pay off.
Brett McKay: And a lot of that debt you talk about in your book, Walden on Wheels, a lot of that debt you acquired, it happened during that first year of college because a lot of high school students, you think, well when I’m gonna go to college, I’m gonna go to the best college I can get into, and I’ll worry about how much it costs later. So I guess the first college you went to was kind of an expensive private school, right?
Ken Ilgunas: It was an expensive private school called Alfred University in Southern New York, now, it’s not that expensive to a lot of students who can get grants and scholarships. I was just a lousy, slouchy high school student, so they just charged me as much as they could. So, yeah, I racked up about $18,000 in debt just from that first year alone. And it didn’t take me long to realize I’m probably not going to be someone who makes the big bucks someday. So then I changed schools to University at Buffalo, which is a state of New York school. So that was kind of mistake number one. But when you’re in high school, this is like the first big decision you have to make. What school are you going to go to? And you just don’t want to have a mediocrity frame of mind. This is your first thing. You want to kind of launch yourself into the world and be ambitious and go for the best thing you can. And I was told again and again, don’t worry about the debt. Just go to the best school you can. So that kind of what got me into this problem.
Now, if I was advising other young folks, I try to say go to the best state school you could go to and save yourself a lot of grief if you can.
Brett McKay: So third year, your mom sees the bills and she starts freaking out. And that kind of had you have a come to Jesus moment about your debt, and you got really motivated to pay off your student loans. What was behind that besides your mom crying? Was there something else going on where you’re like, Man, I want to get rid of this stuff as fast as possible?
Ken Ilgunas: There was a couple things. One, I was right on the edge of being a loser, low status man who can’t get a date. So there was just kind of desperation and really wanting to self improve. And getting rid of my debt was kind of the obvious thing. And, oh, man, what I wanted to do was be a journalist. I joined the student newspaper at university, and I loved it. I interned at Alt Weeklies, and I kind of put all my eggs in the journalism basket. So I applied to 25 paid newspaper internships. And over the course of my last semester, I got 25 letters in the mail rejecting my applications. So I was kind of just standing there in my underwear, completely vulnerable, having no idea what to do. Because if you don’t deal with your debt, the interest accrues and swells, and suddenly a $30,000 debt could be a $50,000 debt. So part of it was just desperation. But I don’t know. I guess I had romantic longings.
And by romantic, I’m not talking sexual romantic, I’m talking more of, like a sentimentality. I wanted a life of adventure. I wanted to pursue dreams and goals. I wanted to live my life fully and interestingly and in the way I wanted to. So I saw my debt as this ball and chain, which was going to prevent me from living that life.
Brett McKay: So instead of getting just a regular job so you can pay off that debt as quickly as possible. You decided to go to Alaska and work these odd jobs. Why did you go that route? Was it just because you couldn’t find a regular job? So you’re like, Well, I’ll go to the Arctic Circle and see what happens there?
Ken Ilgunas: Yeah, it was a bit of a little things. One, it was like, if I had a job offer in journalism, I would have taken that. But I didn’t have that. The previous summer, for a couple months, I worked up in Alaska so I had a connection there. So it was just like, if this is my worst case scenario, cleaning beds or flipping burgers or tour guiding visitors up in the Arctic, I’ll take that over getting my old job at the Home Depot, pushing carts and sleeping in my boyhood bedroom. So, yeah.
And when I went up to Alaska, I was a bit depressed because it’s just like, here I am working these, a low wage, low skill job, which I would have been perfectly able to do out of high school, except now I have a college degree, $32,000 in debt. This is not an idealistic career. I don’t feel like I’m launching myself towards anything meaningful. So I was just kind of like, I’m just stuck in this purgatory and I could be here for, who knows, like, 10 years working jobs for low pay. But what I quickly realized was I accidentally landed myself in an almost ideal situation to pay off my student debt. And that’s because a lot of these jobs up in Alaska and out west, they provide room and board, meaning your rent and your food.
So when I was living up there, I had no cost. I had no health insurance. I didn’t have to pay for my food. There was no cell phone service. I didn’t need a car. I had literally no bills at all, except for my student debt. So I just decided I’m just going to put everything I can towards my student debt, making $9 an hour and working a full year. You don’t make much working $9 an hour. I think I accumulated $18,000, which to a lot of your listeners will sound pathetic. It’s like, oh, you worked year round, you made 18,000. But guess what? I saved $18,000.
Now, working kind of a normal job in a normal American town, how much do you need to make to save $18,000? I calculate about $50 to $60,000 living a normal American lifestyle, then you can save 18,000. I did that working up in the Arctic. And that would be really helpful when it came to paying off my debt.
Brett McKay: You, in this book, Walden on Wheels, you do a compare, contrast between you and your friends. You have a really good friend from high school who was having the same problems, had a lot of debt, couldn’t find a job after graduating college. And while he was doing the job search, you were up in Alaska, in the Arctic making $9 an hour. But you were paying down your debt and this guy’s debt was just constantly accruing.
Ken Ilgunas: Yeah, he graduated with something like he thought it was 58,000. And then one day he got a letter in the mail and they’re like, oh, it’s actually 8000 more. So, yeah, it was something like, I don’t know, $65,000 in debt. What he wanted was control. He wanted kind of a stable situation, a decent job where he could begin chipping away at that debt. What I wanted was urgency. I wanted to pay off my debt as fast as humanly possible. And I was a little crazy about it. I call it practical insanity. And what I mean by that is when you take things like, I don’t know, narcissism, delusions of grandeur, megalomania, OCD, just obsessive thinking. And then applying that to a problem to help you get over kind of insurmountable odds. So that’s kind of how I thought about. Of my approach to this. It is just like, be crazy, be obsessive and kind of devote your whole self to this.
Obviously, there’s some drawbacks to that. Mental health drawbacks to that. ‘Cause you don’t feel like you can take a break at all. ‘Cause if you’re just so obsessed with your goal. And I think I also kind of had… And this was all unconscious at the time. I didn’t articulate it this way when I was 22. This is just me, 40, thinking about it. But I was also, as I said earlier, I just kind of had a romantic frame of mind, kind of like a mythopoetic. And I thought of my debt as like a dragon to slay and me, this hero, up against it.
So if you can apply these kind of romantic frame of mind to something like that, it can help you get over something big.
Brett McKay: Well, speaking of this romantic frame of mind, did you go to Alaska also… Was this also there’s some kind of Jack London romanticism going on. You’re thinking, I’m this kid from the suburbs who hasn’t tested himself. And I’m going to go to the wilds, the great north, to see if I can withstand it. Was that going on too?
Ken Ilgunas: I was always drawn to Alaska. I begin my book, Walden on Wheels, with I dreamt of grizzly bears because I had these chronic dreams of grizzly bears. These grizzly bears would be just munching grass in my western New York suburb. And I remember in my dreams, I’d just be in awe of these big brown towers of fat and fur. And I was just like, Why am I dreaming about grizzly bears? And I remember one day it. I looked at an atlas, and I saw Alaska, and it was just like I was drawn straight to that place. And I don’t know why exactly. Looking back, I think it was because I’d been such a suburbanite growing up. I grew up just outside of Buffalo, New York, Niagara Falls, New York, around these boneyard deindustrialized cities where there’s kind of endless cookie cutter suburbs, just landfills. 4 miles from my home was Love Canal, the site of this 1970s environmental disaster.
And I just saw people around me. It was almost like the people living around me. They weren’t living a life that kind of accommodated normal human instincts. They were going to these 9:00 to 5:00 jobs, they hated, paying bills for the rest of their life, cramming vacations in tiny two week windows. And it just seemed crazy to me.
And I think I wanted an escape. And again, this was all kind of unconscious. And I think there was something in my subconscious saying, You need to get out of here. You need to go to somewhere completely wild, and then maybe you’ll kind of escape this surreality of the suburbs. And I’m happy I listened to that inner voice.
Brett McKay: So you were in Alaska. You did a bunch of different stuff at this truck stop. What was life like working at this truck stop in Alaska? What kind of people were you interacting with? Kind of give us a day in the life of… I mean, you’re pretty close. I mean, you’re in the Arctic Circle, right?
Ken Ilgunas: Yeah. I was 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle. This was about 250 miles north of Fairbanks. So the nearest store, stoplight, movie theater, whatever, was 250 miles away. And I’m right in the middle of the Brooks mountain range, which, if any of the listeners haven’t seen it, try to go up to the Brooks Range someday, because it’s one of the most amazing, wildest landscapes left on earth. It’s this 800 miles east to west mountain chain full of grizzly bears and moose and herds of caribou and wolves and… Yeah, so the population of there was 32, not 32,000, 32 people. And half of it, I’d say, were kind of debt ridden college students. And the other half were just kind of working class folks who did this for a living. Kind of bounced around from camp to camp. So there was a good mix of people.
And I just found myself working alongside and living alongside truckers, pipeline workers, carpenters, a lot of weirdos. I mean, if you’re going to go 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle, you’re going to be a bit different. So I remember I lived in a dormitory, and on one side of me was this young man from Utah who was just high all day long.
And this was a big step up for him. He worked at a porn shop where he had to clean up booths every day. And then the other side of me was this half White, half Vietnamese guy who was a schizophrenic. And I’d constantly hear him talking to himself. And every day he would bust open his doors and he’d have two invisible machine guns on his arms, and he’d start to shoot people with this invisible machine gun. And it was very kind of interesting, from a sociological and anthropological perspective to rub elbows with people who were normally outside of my bubble. And it was that way for a few years up there.
Brett McKay: And there was one guy in this town. We can call it a town. It’s Coldfoot, right? It’s the name of this place.
Ken Ilgunas: Yeah.
Brett McKay: There’s this guy who would later serve as the inspiration for your van dwelling phase of your life, which we’re going to talk about. Tell us about this guy.
Ken Ilgunas: Well, there was actually two older gentlemen who really inspired me. The first was this guy named Jack. And he lived in a town 12 miles north, this semi subsistence village called Wiseman, which had, like, 15 people living in it. And he hunted for a living. He fished, he trapped. He grew his own vegetables. This was the most northern vegetable patch in North America, to my knowledge. He had solar panels. He had his own wind turbine. He had this beautiful cabin. And I was just transfixed with his life. This is someone…
There was kind of no division between life and work for him. He went out and hunted and fished. That was his work. And he came home and cooked, like there was just kind of no separation as there was back in kind of contemporary American society. So I was really inspired by that. And then there was this older gentleman, James, he was in his mid 70s. He had this long white kind of mountain goat beard, and he worked for the Bureau of Land Management. And he lived in his 1980 Chevy Suburban truck, this yellow truck. And he did that for six years in the Arctic. Now in Coldfoot, it once got to negative 81 Fahrenheit. I don’t think it that got that cold when he was in living in his truck. But he lived in that thing for six winters. He put a little propane stove that popped out of the roof of his truck. So I kind of looked at these folks up in Alaska, and they were just living lives the way they wanted to. They were living them creatively with imagination, with independence. And I thought I could take this kind of wild style of thinking back with me down into the lower 48.
Brett McKay: What did you do when you were working up there, when you weren’t working, right? So you didn’t have the internet, you didn’t have cell phones. How did you keep yourself entertained and not going crazy, particularly during the long, cold, dark winters?
Ken Ilgunas: Yeah. The winters were tough. That’s when the town went a little bit crazy. [laughter] That’s when people started drinking. They were doing drugs. There was a lot of cliques. I’m talking like 12 people. [laughter] There’s like just tidy cliques.
Brett McKay: Wasn’t there like people crapping on people’s cars or something like that too?
Ken Ilgunas: It got pretty hostile. Yeah. There was some roof defecation happening. One guy poured some water on someone’s husky, which you don’t want to do when it’s negative 20 below. They would go on these drunken joy rides and once they went off a cliff and into a frozen river, and I’m like, Okay, thank God they’re gonna get fired. And they were back at work the next day because you can’t just fire one fourth of your workforce. So I would just kind of hide away and went inward and I was reading a lot. That was the most books I ever read in a year. I think I read 62 books that year despite working long hours and just kind of planning my exit. I didn’t know what was next for me. But yeah, I was studying for the GRE, I was thinking about grad school. I was starting to really crave going back to school.
Brett McKay: So one of the books you read and all that reading you did was Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. What did that book do to you when you’re in Alaska?
Ken Ilgunas: You know one of those books that you read and you’re just like, underlining almost every word in it?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Ken Ilgunas: Or you just find yourself nodding your head and recognition. And he wrote that I think in the 1840s, but it felt like it could have been written apart from the archaic prose. It felt like it could have been written in the 21st century. And I remember reading this passage where he’s talking about shelter, and he would go past the railroad and the railway workers would lock up their tools and this little six foot by three foot shack, which at the time sounded like a coffin to me. And he’s like, for a dollar, anybody could live in one of these. And then he says, if you think I’m jesting I’m not. And I just love that. I love… It reminded me of the folks in Alaska, like they’ll do whatever it takes to make it work.
They’ll use that imagination, they’ll think out of the box. And I admired Thoreau for just being kind of like an artist of life. He thought very deliberately, he wanted to craft his life in a very specific way. The same way an artist, very meticulously put something onto her canvas. And I too wanted to be an artist of my life. I wanted to design my life. I didn’t want my life just to happen to me like it had been happening. I wanted to carefully think it through. So between Jack and James and Alaska and Henry David Thoreau, I was questioning everything. I was questioning how we shelter ourselves, how we work, how we live, and how we transport ourselves, which probably we should probably get into hitchhiking, right?
Brett McKay: Yeah. We’re gonna get to hitchhiking.
Ken Ilgunas: Okay. [laughter]
Brett McKay: But before we do, tell us again how much debt you’re able to pay off thanks to your work in Alaska.
Ken Ilgunas: So that first year I made 18,000. And again, there was some mental health drawbacks to being so obsessed. So the one kind of fix I applied was any tip money I made as a cook or a guide. I was like, Okay, that’s yours. You can do whatever you want to do with it, but everything else goes towards your debt.” So I think I made 22 grand and 18,000 went to my loans and it would take me another year and a half to fully pay them off.
Brett McKay: During your stay in Alaska, this is kind of a detour, you went to go see this Canadian motivational speaker who did 18th century Canadian explorer reenactments. So he would get in a canoe and go down these rivers and then you ended up doing an expedition with this guy. How did that happen and did you get paid for it? Was this part of the plan of paying off your debt or was this something you just thought, Hey, this would be fun to do?
Ken Ilgunas: It had nothing to do with the debt. What had happened was after the tourism season in Alaska died down, my boss invited the tour guides to this tourism convention in Valdez, Alaska. And one of the motivational speakers was this guy named Bob, I forget his last name, but he puts together annual voyages across Canada, kind of replicating some of the historic voyages of the voyageurs who were kind of the fur traders in the 19th and 18th century Canada. So I was listening to him talk about his voyage across Ontario and Quebec, and he said, at the end of this, I’m actually trying to put together a team for the next summer. Let me know if you’re interested.
So at the end of that talk, without thinking about my debt or anything like that, I just walked up to him and put my hand out and I said, Bob, I’m your man. [laughter] And sure enough, I got selected for that summer journey. So for two months across Ontario, Canada, I think it was about a thousand miles. We lived as if we were in the 18th century. So we didn’t have tents, we didn’t have sleeping bags, we didn’t have toilet paper or bug spray. We had two very leaky birchbark canoes. And it was as close as a person can get to living in a different century, I think.
Brett McKay: What did you get from this experience? Just memories? Or did you actually develop any skills that you could say, I could take this and apply it to my life?
Ken Ilgunas: I learned a lot about knot tying [laughter] which helped a lot. I think I learned a couple things. One, I never… So I’ve kind of talked about all these wilderness experiences I had, but I hadn’t been on a hike on a trail until I was 21 years old. That’s just not what you do where I come from in western New York, a lot of us don’t hunt or go camping or hiking. So this was all kind of new to me. And my relationship with nature was changing. I grew up in a hockey rink and on a football field and I thought of the mountains as just another one of those arenas, like something to win, you beat a mountain or something like that. And when I was out in Ontario paddling over Georgian Bay, I began to feel something different.
It was almost like an indifference to nature because I think when you see nature through a windshield, it’s just like, Oh, that sunset is so beautiful and magical and serene. But a sunset when you’re out on the water, like that could mean, Oh man, here comes the mosquitoes, here comes the cold, here come the storms and you don’t have a tent or a sleeping bag. So I felt like I was just kind of becoming nature. That kind of divide that separates man from nature was just kind of dissolving. And as I noticed, nature was indifferent to me. I was kind of indifferent to it. So some of that mesmerization kind of went away a little bit. And I’d also say this, it made me reflect on how Americans were really lacking kind of just that period of no responsibility adventure.
We had this Métis guy on the trip. He was half First Nations, half white, and he would talk about how his tribes would go on these spirit quests where a young man would go off into the woods and starve himself and wait for a vision or something like that. I was like, Does kind of my sort of culture in America, do we have anything like the Native American spirit quest? And I was like, no, we really don’t. And I do think we used to have a legacy of traveling and journeying as young people, whether it was being a tramp in the 1930s or poets going on long road trips in the ’50s, or being a hitchhiker in the 1960s and ’70s. And it’s just like, we kind of don’t have that, we don’t have that thing that serves as a bridge between, school and career, that period of adventure. It’s just kind of been abridged from a young person’s life. And I just began to think, this is what we need. We need 21st century spirit quests.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. Before you did this Canadian reenactment expedition, you had to get back home to New York ’cause Ontario was close to New York. And in order to save money, you decided to hitchhike, and hitchhiking, it used to be a thing in America, but it’s not anymore. First off, what do you know about hitchhiking culture? Do we know why hitchhiking went away?
Ken Ilgunas: We can take a few guesses. One, I’d say the crime rate in the 1980s up to the mid ’90s was pretty bad. And maybe that’s when hitchhiking culture really started to die down. Hitchhiking being represented in movies and whatnot. The hitchhiker was always the homicidal maniac that didn’t help at all. And I think Americans, we were just kind of undergoing this period of reduced social capital and public trust and just general fearfulness and paranoia. So I think that’s why we kind of stopped. But there are pockets in America where it’s still commonly done and not too hard. I think if you’re in the through-hiking community around a big through-hiking trail, the locals there see someone with a backpack and they know it’s just kind of normal and they’ll pick you up and whatever. Alaska, Yukon territories, British Columbia, Washington state, some of these western places, it’s still somewhat easy and practiced a little bit. But yeah, like where I grew up in Western New York, I never once saw a hitchhiker, so it’s just kind of more common in some places than others.
Brett McKay: What did you learn about people being a tramp for thousands of miles?
Ken Ilgunas: It was terrific. I mean, I would have to wait on the side of the road I’d say on average 30 minutes to two hours. I kept some calculations for a while. So you’d have to be on the side of the road for a while, but when you get picked up, you get the feeling of like a Christmas morning, it’s just like, Oh, thank goodness I finally got picked up. And then you have a few seconds to determine, Is this guy gonna kill me [laughter] or not? So you have to have a quick conversation to determine how sketchy they are. And I’d say I turned down less than half a dozen rides and I’ve accumulated probably 10,000 miles of, hitchhiking across North America. So very, very rarely would I turn down a ride. But it was a great time to… It’s like the ideal travel experience because think about any other way we travel, whether it’s cycling or on bus or train or planes.
When we get on a plane and travel 5000 miles, we usually have some earbuds in and watching a movie. We’re not talking to people, we’re not experiencing the culture. But when you’re hitchhiking, you’re thrown right into that person’s culture, like you’re gonna get to know that person really well. And what I found is after two hours of talking with a complete stranger, I’d often hear secrets they probably never told their wife, it was almost like a therapy session. And that’s how I paid for my ride by being a really good active listener. And yeah, you really get to see all sorts of folks. I don’t wanna say I grew up in like a complete liberal suburban bubble, but I sort of did and suddenly I’m getting in the car with ex-cons and people who tell me about their alcohol addictions or their meth addictions and people who had problems that were very different and far more extreme than the problems I grew up around. So in some ways it was very enlightening, but more than anything it just made me feel like we do have this wrongheaded and somewhat unfounded view of our country. I think we are overly fearful, overly paranoid. And when you’re picked up again and again by complete strangers who don’t ask you for money or any favors, you begin to see your country and your culture in a new and much more warm-hearted way. In some ways hitchhiking really renewed my love for being American.
Brett McKay: Any advice for people out there who are listening and thinking, I want to hitchhike. Any tips, tips for the road?
Ken Ilgunas: Well, you probably don’t need to listen to me. ‘Cause one of the the funnest parts about it is, is just learning how to do it on your own. But let me get you started with a few tips. The biggest one is placing yourself in a situation where the driver is probably going less than 30 miles an hour and has a lot of space to pull over. That’s the biggest thing. Also, dress for business, [laughter] you gotta dress nice, wear a nice ball cap, put on a collared shirt, tuck in your shirt into your pants and just look presentable.
Never show any anger or frustration because sometimes people will go past you and then feel guilty and then you’ll see that same person five minutes ago. So don’t kick the gravel in the road or show any frustration ’cause you will be frustrated.
There was times when I’ve just been in pouring rain for 12 hours and you’re so angry. It’s just like, you guys are all heartless. And also take a box of crayons and write a nice sign. Don’t use your thumb. Write a nice colorful sign that’ll make you seem a little bit more family friendly.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. I think that’s awesome. So you did this expedition, after the expedition, you had this period where you’re back at home with your parents. And you talk about how being back in your childhood home in the suburbs, you started falling into this funk and depression and the mountains, the wild started calling you again and this time you decided to go back to Alaska, but this time you were going to be a park ranger in, I think it’s like the most remote national park in the United States. So tell us about that experience.
Ken Ilgunas: Yeah. I remember I went back home and sometimes when you’re away from home for a few years, you can kind of see your milieu, your natural environment more clearly than before. And yeah, I had some really tough conversations with my mom. I remember once she sat me down and she said, Are you trying to kill yourself doing all this? And she told me she’s gonna start to distance herself from me because she just thought I was acting in a very kind of reckless and erratic way. And she once said, when are you gonna grow up and start acting like a human being? And I understood ’cause she was fearful of losing me ’cause I was hitchhiking and all that, but I’d never felt more like a human being. I’d never felt more alive and more charged with life when I was climbing a mountain in the Brooks Range or getting into a car and hitchhiking across Mississippi or something like that.
So I felt this very stark disconnect with the place I grew up and the life I wanted to lead. So yeah, yeah, I got a job with the National Park Service, which paid a lot more than the wages I was getting working at the truck stop. So this would help put me over my student debt and it was just an amazing job. I had this job as a backcountry ranger in the gates of the Arctic National Park where they dropped me off on a little four seater plane in the middle of the wilderness with these big bush tires or landed me on a pond out there. And I’d go on an eight day backpack patrol either on canoe or on foot. And I got paid to go hiking. And honestly that was enough, like having three months living in the wilderness. I didn’t kind of need any more adventure wilderness. That was like an ideal amount of time living in a state of adventure and the wilderness. ‘Cause then I was kind of eager to go back to school and embrace the life of the mind. It was just I… For a couple years I had a really nice balance between the life of the mind and the life of adventure.
Brett McKay: What are you supposed to do when you’re out on these trips? Were you writing tickets? What was your job?
Ken Ilgunas: Oh, no. You have to imagine, gates of the Arctic, it’s over 8 million acres, and it’s I think the second least visited national park, so over the course of eight days, I’d be lucky if I saw one group of people. So, no, I wasn’t that sort of a ranger, but it was more kind of presence to prevent poaching activity, any sort of trash clean-ups. Sometimes we’d be told to go in and take out an old gold mining barrel or a caribou collar or educate folks out there about bear safety and fire safety stuff, stuff like that, it was a great job. And probably one part of me could have just kept doing that for the rest of my life, but there was something missing, I didn’t want to… ‘Cause it kind of felt like a vacation, I felt like I was getting paid to hike and I’m sure there’s some listeners like, Oh, you had it made. But I was seeking something more. I wanted more of an existential spiritual fulfillment from my work and ranger-ing wasn’t that.
Brett McKay: No, if you’re a young person, I think I would have done this if I could do this again, jobs with the National Park Service or the US Forest Service, seem like they’re really cool. You can be doing something like you did, where they just drop you off for a week, you get to backpack in beautiful country and get paid well for it. We had a podcast guest on a long time ago, it’s one of my favorite episodes we did with this guy named Phillip Connors, and he is a fire watcher for the US Forest Service in New Mexico, and he just goes to one of the few remaining these fire towers where they’re looking for smoke, and he just lives there during the fire season, and it seems like a great gig. You’re out in nature you get to hike, and it seems awesome if people wanna listen to that, that is episode number 473, if they wanna check that out. Okay, so you did this backcountry park ranger thing, it was paying a lot. And because of this job, you’re able to pay off your debt, you’re finally able to pay off 32-34,000 dollars worth of debt. How did that feel? How did it feel to finally accomplish this goal that you’ve had for years and were obsessively trying to accomplish?
Ken Ilgunas: I wish I could say there was a celebration with champagne and confetti, but it wasn’t, I don’t even think I barely acknowledged it, ’cause I did the math months before and I kinda knew exactly when the debt was going to die, so it was kind of rehearsed in my mind, well, ahead of time, and I don’t know, sometimes you’re in a relationship that’s kind of bad for a long time, and when it comes to the break-up, you kind of feel nothing and it’s kind of because you’ve rehearsed this so many times in the past, and I think that was kind of the case with my debt.
Honestly, I miss the debt a little bit because… And that’s gonna sound crazy, but I just loved having purpose and a goal and something… A dragon to slay. So you kinda have to be ready to replace that one sense of purpose with another, and luckily I had something lined up as we’ll get to. I was ready to go to grad school. So yeah, there was no really real sense of relief or celebration. I was just happy it was gone.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think it is what happens with most goals that you think a lot about when you finally get it, you might feel good for two seconds, and then it’s like, Okay, I’ve gotta find the next thing to work on, and so for you the next thing to work on was you’re gonna get your graduate degree and you decided to go to Duke University, but you did not wanna go to grad school and take on any more student debt, so to avoid that, you decided to live in a van on the campus of Duke University. So talk about just the van, you bought, what kind of van did you live in? Was it a creeper van? What are we talking about here?
Ken Ilgunas: Well, almost all vans are creeper vans. It was a 1994 Ford Econoline, and I should say this is back in 2009, so this was kind of before the whole #Vanlife movement, and I remember as I was thinking about the for real living in that coffin box, I was like, Oh, I could do that at Duke University, live in a little coffin or something. But a van made more sense, and I did some research online and I couldn’t find one person who’d done this before on a college campus, so I felt like a pioneer in a way, ’cause again, back in 2009, you were either homeless or a pervert, if you were living in your van, so I’m happy to help change the image away from that, so yeah, I thought If I could buy a cheap van and just live in it year round, then maybe I could avoid expensive apartment payments and I do all my cooking in the van and not move it around on campus, and the big thing was I had to keep it a secret, ’cause I did not want campus security or any students finding out because I thought if they found out they’re gonna spread the news on social media, I’m gonna be like the van man on campus, and suddenly I’m gonna get kicked out of my parking lot, so stealth and secrecy were the names of the game.
Brett McKay: Well, and it was technically not against the rules to do this, there wasn’t a rule about this, right?
Ken Ilgunas: It was kind of vaguely worded and I think I just kind of purposefully looked the other way, what’s that saying? It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, and that was kind of a huge approach to almost everything in my mid-20s, so I just decided I’m just gonna secretly live in this van, so the van came with blinds and I put up this big black sheet behind the windshield whenever I was in there, so nobody knew I was in there and Duke, that’s where a lot of affluent young folks go to school, so I didn’t think any locals or campus security were thinking that one of their own was living in a vehicle, so I had that going for me as well.
Brett McKay: Okay, so you did everything on this thing, you cooked, what kind of food were you cooking in a van?
Ken Ilgunas: I’ve learned a lot about nutrition since then, so I was just eating a lot of peanut butter, cereal, oatmeal, I kind of put peanut butter in almost every meal I ate, but some of it wasn’t bad, I had a Whole Foods basically right next to my van, so I’d go there and buy a couple of vegetables, chop them up, put them in a stew, so just kind of like a vegetable stew or rice and bean burrito night, just really simple stuff. And that first semester, I was quite extreme with keeping my budget as low as it could be, I had it down to about $4.34 a day for my food costs and all my other costs, whether it was gas for the van, car insurance, whatever came to about $103 a week. So I lived on a budget of about $400 a month, which I found quite manageable, and it was all possible because of the van.
Brett McKay: Then your bathing, I guess you did at the school gym, the locker room there.
Ken Ilgunas: It was not a life of deprivation at all, I should say. I mean, the Duke gym had a sauna, a swimming pool and a sauna and a basketball court. So it’s not like I was living in complete deprivation. The library was open almost all hours, so if it was too hot or too cold, I always had a place to go. I had a really good sleeping bag. North Carolina winters don’t get too cold. And man, I slept so well there, I have a four-year-old daughter now, so I know what it’s like to be in a state of sleep deprivation for years on end, but I slept so well. One of my favorite parts of that period of my life was just waking up, ’cause I was so time-rich. I would just wake up and just slowly wake up and think and just kind of stare at the roof of my van and listen to all the birds and the bugs outside, I’d just kind of slowly wake up for an hour, that’s the biggest thing I miss about that period of my life.
Brett McKay: You talk about how the hardest thing about living in a van, so it sounds like you were living pretty good, it wasn’t… You weren’t deprived. You’re eating well. You were comfortable you had access to showers to a sauna, to a gym, but the hardest part was the social isolation, but you’re seeing people at your classes and whatnot. Why did you feel so lonely?
Ken Ilgunas: Well, one I’m an introvert, a little bit shy and things like that, so making connections out of nothing doesn’t come as easy to me as it might to others, so there was that, and then there was the whole secrecy factor. I didn’t know who I could trust with my secret of living in a van, so I just found myself telling little white lies with all these new acquaintances I had. They’d always ask me, you never know how quickly the question, Where do you live comes up until you’re secretly living in your van. It’s usually like, question number two, where are you living? And I would say I live on 9th Street, which was true in Durham, North Carolina, but they would always think I lived in the apartment complex there and not the parking lot, so. Yeah, so it was just… And grad school and college in general, can be quite lonely when you lose your neighborhood and your old friends and your family, so I think what I was going through was quite common, it was only exacerbated by the van.
Brett McKay: In Walden, Thoreau talks about the cost of a thing, and thanks to your unconventional life, you’re able to pay down your debt and you’re able to avoid new debt, but were there unintentional cost of your extreme measures that you might see now, thanks to hindsight.
Ken Ilgunas: Well at some point, I would say my 20s was a period of de-institutionalization, and what I mean by that was I was getting rid… I was just shedding off all institutional influences, whether that was your family, your neighborhood, your church, stable work, all of that was kind of being shed in the name of independence, of self-improvement, of adventure, of living your life the way you wanted to. So you’re kind of playing with fire when you shed everything, and when you live in a state of institution-less-ness, there’s a lot of wonderful things that can happen in that period. You can really see your society and your culture around you almost with fresh eyes, because you’re viewing it from the outside, and you’re really able to kind of fashion your own character outside of these institutional influences, but there’s a cost with that, and this was a period in my life where I wasn’t devoted to developing friendships, building that friend network, finding a church or a workplace. When you’re completely adrift like that, sometimes you feel a bit empty and a bit lost. I was living the life of perfect freedom. I had no debt, very few bills, I could kind of do anything I want. And that sounds like the American dream in some ways, but there’s nightmarish qualities to that too.
Brett McKay: Yeah, Aristotle talks about that. People who just live by themselves solitary, he says they are either gods or beasts, there’s a part of humanness, you miss out on when you’re not embedded in a community.
Ken Ilgunas: And I hungered for that and I just… And I didn’t go on that journey, I’d say until my mid-30s.
Brett McKay: Did people eventually find out that you were living in a van on the campus of Duke University, like what happened when they did find out?
Ken Ilgunas: Yes, they did. I kind of outed myself after a year of doing it, I wrote an essay in my… A travel writing class I was in, and my teacher, it was kind of like, I live in a van down by Duke University. And she’s like, Oh, man, you gotta publish this. This article’s gonna go viral, ’cause this was just in the height of the great recession after 2008, so everybody was in debt, there was a lot more awareness about student debt, and she thought the story of someone desperately trying to live within his means would really register and she was right.
So I wrote this article for salon.com, an internet magazine, and it just took off. So overnight, I went from completely anonymous and secretive van dueler to momentary celebrity. The next day I had NPR on the phone, Inside Edition was calling me, Rachel Ray wanted me on her show to pimp out my van, and I remember I was on the phone with a Raleigh newspaper and my hand was just shaking, shaking uncontrollably. It was exciting in a great and terrifying way, so I kinda outed myself, one of the first things, Duke University, their spokesman said, We’re prepared to help Ken find guidance and counseling. As if I was crazy.
And soon after that, a local student complained that they didn’t want to share a parking lot with someone living in it, and that’s when I felt like I was being persecuted. It felt like, Oh, they’re persecuting the van dwellers now. But Duke was kind enough, they just made me sign a contract saying I wouldn’t sue them for anything as long as I parked near the campus police station, so they gave me a new parking lot and let me finish and graduate, and when I did graduate, they passed a new parking law of prohibiting anyone from doing what I did, which is the legacy I left there at Duke University.
Brett McKay: It’s the Ken Ilgunas law.
Ken Ilgunas: They should have named it after me.
Brett McKay: Okay, so this period of your life, you call it the de-institutionalized period of your life, but recently you said in your mid-30s, you’ve gotten married, you had a kid, you’ve put down some roots in a village in Scotland, so you’re starting to re-institutionalize yourself, kind of reintegrate yourself into community life, how do you think people should balance freedom and having institutional attachments like what’s been your experience?
Ken Ilgunas: I wish I had all the answers and it really varies on the person and the culture the person comes from. Whatever it is about my ethnic background or whatever, I kinda glorify this kind of Thoreau individualistic frame of mind, whereas some of my Italian-American friends, they’re just a lot more connected to their families and don’t have those same kind of lonesome longing, so I don’t wanna say don’t do that, but just speaking from my own point of view, I do think it’s good to kind of deinstitutionalize and go on that crazy year-long or two-year-long journey where you’re kind of outside, you take a break from all those institutions, and again, I think it’s great to kind of see them anew from the outside, and to fashion your own individuality and character through experiences that no one has ever had. I think that’s an education in and of itself, and I would advise not trying to rebuild your institutions as late as I did. I remember I was 34 and I was living in a cabin in Alaska, in this park called Lake Clark National Park, and I was surrounded by grizzly bears, I’d see about 30 grizzly bears a day.
And I’m just like, What am I doing? I’m living the dream of my 21-year-old self in my mid-30s, I felt like I should have been dating and trying to find a partner and trying to find a home, and I just keep going back to these really remote, dangerous places in Alaska. So that’s when I kind of unconsciously made the decision so like, Oh, I gotta find a home. I gotta find a partner. I gotta build a family, and stuff like that, so that’s kind of the journey I’ve been on, and my journey is not over with like… I’m not religious, so I don’t have a church, I’m a writer. So I work from home in front of my computer all day, so there’s still things I want to do to kind of rebuild the institutions in my life.
Brett McKay: So maybe have a Rumspringa, like an Amish Rumspringa when you’re young, have an adventure, and as you get older, start adding attachments back into your life, but don’t wait too long. How are you doing the same, do you still have that itch to go off to Alaska go off to the wilds, how are you balancing freedom and roots as a 40-year-old?
Ken Ilgunas: Well, first of all, I think Rumspringa that should be the name of someone’s memoir, that’s an awesome title for a travel memoir or something. Yeah, yeah. I’ve got a four-year-old daughter. I moved into a very shoddy house that needed a lot of work, so I’ve just been living the domestic existence for a few years, and as my wife has a much more stable job than I, I was kind of a primary caretaker for my daughter for a couple of years, and there was an extreme sense of loss. Of course, I gained a lot, I gained a family, but it felt like I almost lost a part of myself, and I remember I had these weird ideas of creating an effigy of myself and burning it over a bonfire just to kind of wish him well and say goodbye. But things get easier as a dad and things are getting a lot easier for me now, and… Yeah, I feel like that kind of wilder half of myself, he’s still there, he’s just in a state of hibernation, and I look forward to the day when I can let him out again, a bit.
Brett McKay: Yeah, maybe you’ll be like that guy who lived in his Subaru he’s in his 70s, and he’s living in a Subaru in the northern… That’s gonna be you when you’re 70.
Ken Ilgunas: That’s gonna be my Rumspringa sequel memoir to Walden on Wheels.
Brett McKay: Exactly. Well, Ken, this has been a great conversation, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Ken Ilgunas: Just go to my website, kenilgunas.com, you can sign up for my free newsletter. I won’t overburden you with that. That’s just kind of a once a month or once every two month thing, and you’ll see all my books on the page.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Ken Ilgunas thanks for you time, it has been a pleasure.
Ken Ilgunas: It’s been my pleasure. Thanks so much, Brett.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Ken Ilgunas, he’s the author of the book Walden on Wheels. It’s available on amazon.com, you can find more information about his work at his website, kenilgunas.com, also check out our show notes at aom.is/waldenonwheels, where you’ll 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 find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, make sure to sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. 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 Spotify 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 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 have heard into action.
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Jake Knapp loves tech. He grew up using Apple II and then Mac computers, browsing bulletin boards, and making his own games. As an adult, he worked at Microsoft on the Encarta CD-ROM, before being hired by Google, where he worked on Gmail, co-founded Google Meet, and created Google Ventures’ Design Sprint process. Today, he’s a venture capitalist and consultant for start-ups, as well as a writer.
But, if Jake was an early adopter and booster of the upsides of technology, he was also early in sensing its not-so-positive side effects. Twelve years ago, unhappy with the pull his smartphone was exerting on him, he decided to curb its distractions. He continues to use this distraction-free phone today.
Today on the show, I talk to Jake about what motivated him to change his relationship with his phone over a decade ago and what steps he took to do so, including how and why he lives life without a web browser or email app on his phone. We get into what realizations about work and life Jake’s gotten from having a distraction-free phone, why he doesn’t think using tools like Screen Time or a dumbphone are always the best solutions to reducing the phone itch, and how he also cuts down on distractions on his desktop computer.
Resources Related to the Podcast Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky * Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days* by Jake Knapp * AoM Podcast #450: How to Make Time for What Really Matters Every Day With John Zeratsky * AoM Podcast #972: Down With Pseudo-Productivity — Why We Need to Transform the Way We Work With Cal Newport * AoM Article: The Complete Guide to Breaking Your Smartphone Habit * AoM Article: 5 Concrete Ways to Develop a Healthier Relationship With Your Phone (No Blocking or Deleting Apps Required!) * AoM Podcast #420: What Makes Your Phone So Addictive & How to Take Back Your Life * Freedom app * How We Feel app * Light Phone II * Time Timer
Connect With Jake Knapp* Jake’s website
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Jake Knapp loves tech. He grew up using Apple II and then Mac computers, browsing bulletin boards, and making his own games. As an adult, he worked at Microsoft on the Encarta CD-ROM before being hired by Google, where he worked on Gmail, co-founded Google Meet, and created Google Ventures’ Design Sprint process. Today, he’s a venture capitalist and consultant for startups, as well as a writer. Today on the show, I talk to Jake about what motivated him to change his relationship with his phone over a decade ago and what steps he took to do so, including how and why he lives life without a web browser or email app on his phone. We get into what realizations about work and life Jake has gotten from having a distraction-free phone, why he doesn’t think using tools like Screen Time or a dumb phone are always the best solutions to reducing the phone itch, and how he also cuts down on distractions on his desktop computer. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/phone.
All right. Jake Knapp, welcome to the show.
Jake Knapp: Hey, thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett McKay: So several years ago, we had your co-author of your book ‘Make Time’, on the podcast to discuss how we can make time for what really matters in our lives. And one aspect that you guys talk about in that book is spending less time on our smartphone. And you’re an expert in this because 12 years ago, you were an early adopter of trying to reduce screen time on your phone, you set out to make your phone, your iPhone, distraction-free. 12 years ago, that’s a long time in internet time, and things have changed a lot since then. There’s a lot more to be distracted by for sure. Back in 2012, what were the biggest distractors on your iPhone?
Jake Knapp: Well, in 2012, there was still a lot of the heavyweights of distraction, existed that early. I think there was Facebook, there was Instagram. And then for me, some of the real killers were email and just Safari. Just the web browser is a big distraction for me. So, all of those big ones existed even back then. There were games on the phone back then. Those distracted me. The news is a big one. So, a whole host of things.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, Facebook, Instagram, just surfing the web on Safari. So, it wasn’t the… Remember the beer app? I remember when the iPhone first came out, it had all those silly apps where you can like pour yourself a glass of beer.
Jake Knapp: [laughter] I don’t remember that one, but I do, I mean, I think there was a proliferation right at the beginning of just, people were trying to figure out like, what’s this thing for? What can we do with this? And so then I think a big thing that happened was that to me was starting off using the iPhone. I didn’t really think about what I wanted to use it for. I didn’t really think about what problem it was gonna solve. I was just like, “Oh man, that thing, looks really cool. Oh, it’s an iPod and it’s a phone. Great.” And then I got one and then I just started anything that came out. I was like, yeah, I wanna try that. Sure, I’ll try that. I’ll put that. Facebook is a new thing, I’ll try that, I’ll put that on there. All these things came out and I would just say yes by default. And so as time went by, we got to 2012, there was a lot on there. There was a lot of things that would catch my attention.
Brett McKay: Was there a moment you realized that your phone was causing problems in your life?
Jake Knapp: There was. There was a very specific moment. I was at home. And I’m a person who for a long time had been interested in being really efficient with my time and trying to get my work done at work if possible or just get through everything so that I could spend time with my kids. So, I have a 20-year-old now. So, if we rewind to 2012, he was, I guess eight or nine. And then we had a baby who was around one at that time. And I really wanted to spend quality time with them. So, I wanted to be really efficient when I was at work and get home before they went to bed, before dinner. And so I can remember being at home and having gotten done with the workday and being on the floor in the living room playing with wooden trains, like BRIO trains with the boys. And we’re playing trains and I hear this voice and I’m kind of like, what? And I realized it’s my son and he’s saying like, “Hey, hey dad, what’s on your phone?” And I was like, oh, I didn’t even realize I’d been holding my phone at the time. I’m just like, by reflex, like Frodo reaching in his pocket to pull out the ring. I had pulled out the phone and I was looking at something and I was like, oh, it’s work stuff.
I was defensive. And I realized that he wasn’t even criticizing me. He’s just like, oh, here we are playing wooden trains together. This is the most fun thing in the world. Why would you… If you’re doing something on your phone, it must be really great. It must be really interesting. Maybe I can see it too. And in that moment, it just kind of occurred to me that I had this memory from when I was a kid of what it was like doing things with my dad, and of course, back then, there were no smartphones. There was no internet. When my dad was home from work, he was just home. I grew up on a farm. We would be out on the farm mending a fence or something. That was like 100% what we were doing. And I had always wanted when I had kids to have moments and times with them. Like I remember having with my dad, it was really just the two of us and maybe we weren’t talking that much, but we were just there. We’re just present. We’re just there. And it just occurred to me in that moment how different the moment I was having with my kids was than what I had grown up with, and I thought, this is crazy.
And in frustration in that moment, I started deleting apps off of the phone. A wiser person might have looked inward and tried to change something about them, but I was just holding the phone, and I got angry at the phone, and I started deleting. And I just started deleting anything that… It just, everything clicked in there. Hey, there’s all these things that they’re pulling at me, even when I’m not actively using the phone. I don’t actively have an idea of something that I wanna do. They’re just kind of pulling me in. And so I went after anything that did that.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, the phone wasn’t allowing you to be present with your kids or with your family, with the things that really matter to you. Besides that, did you notice anything else about the phone and how it was affecting how you were thinking or how you approached life?
Jake Knapp: Yeah, I would describe it as a kind of a tug that the phone creates. And it’s this notion that my co-author, John Zeratsky, he describes this as infinity pools. It’s like anything that has a potentially infinite amount of new stuff in it, anything that at any time of day, there might be a new email at any time of day. Or if you use Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, whatever, there’s something new on there at any time of day. There’s a new news story. There’s like a breaking news at every time of day. Somewhere on the internet, there’s something new at any time of day. So, anything where there’s a bottomless pit of new stuff, there’s always gonna be something new. Those things, they create this tug on my attention. There’s some kind of pull at any time if the threshold of my interest on whatever’s going on in the real world dips below a certain level, then instead of dipping down and getting into like boredom mode, just like chill out mode or whatever, my brain is like, oh man, there’s probably something new on the phone. And I mean, this is not some novel insight. I think lots of people have talked about this.
Everyone probably knows about this, but that tug, I just started to recognize how that tug was affecting my attention at all times, whether I was with my kids or at work or whatever. Like I was just never getting down into that, that more calm, chill brain mode, the boredom, like boredom didn’t have to be an option anymore. There’s always the tug when boredom or quiet started to creep in. And once I had kind of noticed that and realized like, that’s actually an unpleasant feeling, it feels sort of pleasant. It’s sort of an excitement like, oh, maybe there’s this new thing, right? Maybe this new thing is gonna make me feel good. And because sometimes it does. Sometimes there’s an email that makes me feel good. Sometimes there’s some new thing on social media or some news story that’s interesting or whatever. And it makes me feel on top of things or it makes me feel flattered or it makes me feel engaged or important or whatever. But I also recognize that the flip side of that was that, the tug, that feeling was really unpleasant. And I know you had… Cal Newport was on the show a couple episodes ago. Yeah.
And he’s… I mean, I’m a big admirer of his work and he highlighted the work of this researcher from the University of Washington who she phrased this, I think, attention residue. And it’s like when something… You’re working on something or you’re doing something and then you go do another task, but the first thing kind of sticks in your head and distracts you a little bit. And so I realized like, man, if I’m gonna be doing my highest quality work or if I’m gonna be spending the highest quality with my family or my kids, that attention residue, that tug from the phone, it’s in direct opposition to that. It’s hurting my ability to be at my best and whatever definition of my best might be in other venues.
Brett McKay: So, you had that moment 12 years ago, you’re with your kids playing trains and you realized this thing in my pocket is preventing me from being present with them. So, you deleted all these apps. Which apps did you delete from your phone? And then which ones did you keep?
Jake Knapp: Yeah, okay. So I deleted… I started off the easy ones I think to delete. And I think the ones that people… Like most people when… ‘Cause people will talk to me about this and they’re like, what’s wrong with you? What’s your problem? You know, so, but most people will say, okay, like Facebook and Instagram, I get it, right? Like that’s… Lots of people have that feeling that sometimes it’s not a good feeling to use those. So, those were the first ones. And then I had some games on my phone at that time. I think one that I think was from that era, ’cause I’ll admit, since 2012, I’ll sometimes put a game on my phone. It’s not like I’m like I’ve just walked the complete straight and narrow since then. So, I think it was Golden Axe. Do you remember Golden Axe was like a game from the… The late ’80s or ’90s. It was on the Sega Genesis.
Brett McKay: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jake Knapp: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, there was like an emulator game version of that on the iPhone. I think I had that. I think I probably had like, I don’t know, like CNN and ESPN or something like that. It’s a little hard for me to remember in 2012 what was an app versus what was like, you’d go to Safari to see. But ESPN has always been, I’m a football fan. That’s always been a big infinity pool for me. And then Twitter would be another one. But then also things like LinkedIn. That’s another one where, do I really need to access LinkedIn 24 hours a day right in my pocket? Probably not. So, it was things like that. But then the next wave I realized that was a little bit more insidious was like email, especially for me, having worked on the Gmail team for years. And I was like, man, it doesn’t actually do… I could go on for a long time talking about the email on the phone. It’s not a good experience, for me at least, because I will read the emails, I’ll see that there’s new stuff, and then there’s this momentary feeling of like, okay, good, I’m on top of things, I know what’s in the inbox. But the downside is I personally, I can’t really compose a good email on the phone.
Like I might be able to, there’s maybe some category of email that I can answer and I can do an all right job, but I just mentally, like I need a keyboard to write a decent email. And I try to do as little email as I can, but do what I do well. I try to do something that maybe, maybe Cal Newport would be proud of. I can’t do that on the phone. And so what happens is I’m just activating the stress of here’s this open loop and I can’t close it. So, email on the phone to me is a disaster. So, I deleted email. That was a little painful. And then I realized Safari, you can’t delete it. But I realized that it became a problem once I deleted everything else. I can just go to Safari. I can sign into my email there. I can look at the news there, whatever. But I realize you can go into settings and if you like dig through settings, you can disable Safari. So, yeah. And then, I mean, at that point, there was still, the thing is, you take all those away, there’s still some really good stuff on there.
Brett McKay: So, what did you leave on there?
Jake Knapp: Yeah. So, I mean, just like starting with the basics, like imagine you go back to 2007, Steve Jobs is introducing the iPhone. He said, today we’re introducing three devices. It’s a new iPod, a new phone, and a new like internet device. It’s three devices. And he was like, you see what’s going on here? It’s one thing. And the iPod part of that, if you’re old enough to remember, like when iPods existed and smartphones did not exist, iPods were amazing. They were so great. And it sounds very like, I don’t know. Maybe I just sound like an old man to say that now, but like, it was so cool to be able to play any music you wanted on your phone. And then now with like the streaming services to really literally be able to play anything that is magical. I just think that’s so cool. So, that alone is a huge deal. To have a phone that’s also an iPod, I still think that’s fantastic. So of course, music is a keeper. Podcasts is a keeper.
I mean, podcasts is great. And I do think there are times when I’ve noticed that even like listening to podcasts when I’m on a walk or on a run or whatever, there are times when I’m served better by not doing it, by not listening to music, by having quiet, because having that quiet and that time to just let the mind be off is quite valuable. But podcasts also many times like they just they bring great joy and like interesting ideas into my life, so podcast is a good one and not an infinity pool. It’s not a thing where I’m like gonna be playing with my kids or needing to do something important but hard to do at work and I’m gonna be like, oh I’m gonna browse through the podcast app that’s just at least for me that’s not that big of a pull. What else? Maps. Maps is amazing. Whether you use Google Maps, Apple Maps, whatever. Like the maps app is a very magical thing. And we’re starting to talk about like a series of things, the music whatever you use Spotify music whatever podcasts the maps the camera on the phone is amazing.
A category of things where I just think if I was a kid, if I rewind to being a kid in like the ’80s who was really into science fiction and you described this thing that you could hold in your… You just have it in your pocket and it’s got these… It can do these things. I would have been like, oh my God, that’s so futuristic. That’s so cool. I can’t wait to live in that future where that thing exists. And so all of those things meet the bar for like a cool future where this feels like this magical tool from the future.
Brett McKay: Well, you actually keep the apps that you’ve kept on your phone. The ones that seem like magical tools from the future, you keep them in a folder called the Future.
Jake Knapp: Yeah, I do. I do. Now it’s, I used to be really organized about having the new apps would go in the Future folder. And then at some point, I don’t know, two or three years ago, iOS changed and you could just remove an app from the home screen. It would disappear. And then if you want it, you could search for it. So now I still keep like a very small set of apps visible. But rather than filing them in the Future, I just… I’ve gotten a little bit lazy. And I just remove them from the home screen and then I search for them if I want them. I will say that that laziness has cost me something because there was a really nice moment when I would try out an app and then decide, ’cause I only allow myself to have apps on the top row of the phone. I’m sorry, this is like full-on nerdery. But if I open my phone, the home screen has no apps on it at all. It’s just a blank screen. Which is just kind of, I don’t know. It’s just like I take a breath when I see that. Do I really have something I want to do here?
It just sort of, I feel like a little bit less tension and stress than opening the phone and having like a million apps. And then as I swipe through the screens, there’s just like one row of apps on the top. And I have four on the first screen, three on the second, two on the third, and then one on the last one. So, it’s just like there’s fewer and fewer and fewer. And this is all just stuff that I just do to try to make it less stressful and less grabby for me to use the phone.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, the apps you do keep, you’ll keep them if they have a wow factor, it provides a lot of value to your life and it doesn’t have that tug. Like you don’t feel that need to necessarily just constantly check it.
Jake Knapp: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I’ll keep it if there’s a utility to it that’s really powerful. Like 1Password is an app that I think is great and very useful. The Notes app, the Weather app, these are ones that make the cut to be still on the home screen. Like I want to be able to access them that easily. But a lot of things I wanna maybe have to dig for them to find them. But anyway, when I had this Future folder, this folder of things called the Future, there was this really nice moment where if I’ve added something new and I’m like, okay, does it make the cut to be in that top row? And there’s only, let’s see, four plus three is seven plus two plus one. So, there’s only 10 slots there. Does it make it into the top 10? Now, if not, does it make it into the Future? Am I saying like this is one of those kinds of apps that makes me feel like I’ve got this magical futuristic device in my pocket? And that was kind of a helpful little guideline for me for a while. I’d like to think that I’ve kind of internalized it. And so it’s okay for me to just remove it. The reality might be I just got lazy. But that’s my mental framework for what something should do for me on the phone.
Brett McKay: So, like you said getting rid of social media news apps, that’s like a no brainer. I think a lot of people who want to make their phone distraction free, they just don’t have that stuff on their phone. I want to dig more into the email and the web browser, which I think a lot of people might hear that it’s like, “How can you function without having your email or a web browser on your phone?” I am like you. I do not like writing emails on my phone. And I find that I very rarely respond to emails on my phone, but I will say that the email app is useful because it’s a resource of information. Particularly when I’m traveling, it’s extremely useful. So, like when I’m traveling, I can just pull up my airline reservation, the hotel, the car rental reservations and boom, I’m done. How do you handle that? How do you like handle that sort of thing when you’re traveling, for example, an email would be good to have, but you don’t have email on your phone.
Jake Knapp: Totally. I just got back from a trip, so I can speak from experience like yesterday. First of all, I should say if I haven’t made it clear already, like some of this stuff, it may be a Jake problem and not an everybody problem. I know that I have a harder time with getting distracted than some folks. So, for some people I’m certainly open to the idea that if you or a listener is thinking, “Oh, email doesn’t bother me. I really have thought about it. I’m okay with it.” You know that’s… I totally accept that that can be true. But for me, there’s this really unpleasant feeling that I recognized after having it on there for years, I recognize there’s this unpleasant feeling about it being on there.
And so if I’m on a trip, first of all, over time, more and more things you don’t need the email app for I found, which is handy, because basically what I’ll do is I’ll install email and then uninstall it. So, I’ll just like when I need it, I’ll just download it. And it doesn’t take too long. Our internet connections are pretty fast if you’re traveling in cities, like it’s pretty much a snap to download email. I sign in and then I check what I need to check. And sometimes I’ll even keep it on for a day, on my travel day or keep it on. I’ve sometimes put it on ’cause I’m like, I’m going to be on the plane. I have a bunch of email I need to process.
The best way for me to do that is to do it on my phone. I often tell myself that, usually it doesn’t work out that well. I think it’s going to be really efficient, effective way to process email. And then everything I just said earlier happens and I’m like, “Oh yeah, it’s just stressful for me to look at it in this way. I can’t really reply.” But things like the airplane reservations, usually nowadays the airline app is gonna be better than the email app for giving me the information about my flight. Or if I just bookmark where the hotel is on maps, that’s gonna be the best way for me to get there. In the early days of using a smartphone before there was Uber, before every airline had like a decent enough app. Yeah. Like I definitely needed the email thing.
And sometimes what I used to do was collect the relevant stuff and paste it into the notes app. But nowadays, I don’t think I have to be super religious about having things off the phone at all times. I just install it. And then at this point, I’m so familiar with the tone of the negative feeling that I get from having email on the phone that I want to delete it as soon as possible. And as soon as I delete it, there’s this feeling of like just a moment of relaxation. I can feel the release in my brain from that tug.
Brett McKay: So, I like that. So, only install it when you need it, delete it when you don’t need it. I think that’s a really a good idea. I might try that out myself actually. What about the web browser? I think a lot of people who will be listening is like, “Well, web browser can come in handy if you’re out and about and you want to find out if a restaurant is open or what’s a good restaurant to go eat at tonight.” Like how do you manage that without a web browser on your phone?
Jake Knapp: I found that most things that I really need to know that are time sensitive or location sensitive can be discovered with a purpose-built app that doesn’t come along with everything that might distract me. So the web browser itself, like you can do anything with the web browser. You could go anywhere. It’s a news app. It’s an email app. It’s everything. But like in maps, if you have disabled Safari on your phone and you open up Google Maps or Apple Maps and you say, “Hey, okay, I need to go. I’m curious about this restaurant. I’m going to search for restaurants near me or whatever,” whatever tool you use to find those Yelp or whatever. But if you want to go to the restaurant’s actual webpage, because Safari is like built into the OS, it’ll still open up the webpage within the maps app.
You can still see it. I just can’t open up like pure unlocked Safari. I can just get like that one view of the webpage. And that was a really big discovery for me. Like, “Oh man, I can still see things via maps.” because a lot of these things I’m like, I realized I was trying to talk myself into, I need this app. Like a lot of the ways that I buy a gadget or when I first adopted the iPhone, when I get a new iPhone, I’m trying to talk myself into doing it. ‘Cause like I want the new shiny thing. So I’m trying to talk myself into, no, I really need this. And the same thing happens with the app. It’s like I want to talk myself into, I need the web browser on now. I can handle it and it’s really helpful for these situations.
And then I realized like a lot of those arguments don’t hold up because the purpose-built app will solve it for me. It’s another one too though, where when there is a situation where, man, I really do need to know this thing, maybe I’m going to like some kind of a event at a theater, like a concert or whatever. And I got to get something from the venue and I can’t get it through Maps. Maps is, I mean, actually that one, Maps probably would work because it would probably lead me to theater, but let’s just say, well, I can, it’s the same thing as we were talking about with email. I can enable the browser, do the thing, and then disable the browser afterwards.
It’s not that big of a deal. It’s a little bit of a hassle to go through and do it, which is helpful most of the time ’cause it just creates this barrier. So, I’m not gonna do it on autopilot. I’m not gonna do it without thinking to look something up for just to distract myself. So, I don’t feel boredom. I’m going to do it only when I really motivated to do it. And you know, then it takes, maybe it takes 30 seconds to dig through settings and turn it on, do the thing. And then I just, I turn it off again. And the value always comes from turning it off. I’ve had a lot of people make fun of me about this. Some friends make fun of me about having my phone this way. And my wife for the longest time, she was like, “Oh my God.” Rolling her eyes.
And she authorized me to say that she came around, like I’ve had friends who came around and they’re eventually like, “Okay, you know what? Actually, something was going on and it kind of bugged me. I’m going to try it. I’m going to disable the apps. I’m going to disable the browser. I’m going to turn off email.” And then they feel the feeling. The feeling is so powerful when those things are off. It’s so good. It’s just like you’re reading and you can’t quite see and somebody turns the light on and everything gets a little brighter. And once you feel that feeling, you want to feel it again. And so then you want to turn the browser off after you’re done using it.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show, how has your life changed since creating your distraction free phone? Or has it brought you to any realizations?
Jake Knapp: Yeah. The spread of the smartphone and sort of the smartphone ramping up because it wasn’t all that distracting at first. It really kind of took a while for these really sticky apps to be developed. All that happened in the same period of time that I was thinking a lot about how I did my work and recognize that when I was working on Gmail, when I was working on this project that grew and became Google Meet that most of the time at work, essentially like nothing, all that important was happening. So, a lot of meetings, a lot of emails, a lot of chats, a lot of noise that felt like it was productive, but wasn’t really accomplishing anything.
And again, like if people want to listen to your interview with Cal Newport, like they’re going to hear a really more eloquent description of this state of affairs than I can give. But I was starting in my own work to recognize that problem. And my solution had been this design sprint process that I created around 2009, 2010, where it’s like, okay, for a week as a team, we’re gonna clear everything off of our calendars. We’re gonna stop using email. We’re gonna close our laptops. We’re just gonna focus on solving this problem. And when you did that, you got a team of people together, you put some structure around it and you shut off all the work distractions and you just said, we’re just doing one thing, it was amazing what we could accomplish.
We could prototype a new product and test it by the end of the week because we were all focused on the same thing and not changing contexts all the time and not trying to be responsive and not going to all these meetings. And so I had woken up to this idea that I’ve got to have big blocks of time, either as a team or be as an individual. I have to have these big uninterrupted blocks of time and I have to sort of allow myself to get behind on all of this, this sort of endless hamster wheel of email meetings, project requests, all these things. I have to let myself say no. And what that stuff stack up, let the email inbox not be empty let it, let it get full. And that’s just… There’s discomfort there. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but I had to let that happen if the really good stuff was going to happen.
And so this had been going on in my work and in my thought process around the time then that I had this moment of insight with my kids, with the phone. And I recognized that the phone was just a really powerful incarnation of that hamster wheel that was always in my pocket, always with me. And in the… Cal was describing how part of our motivation for trying to respond to every email, trying to say yes to every request, trying to attend every meeting, part of that motivation is that we know on some level, like that’s how we’re being evaluated or judged in our work. And I think that’s true. I also think there’s just a very fundamental desire that we have to be helpful, helpful to our colleagues, helpful to other people.
And the most obvious way to be helpful is to say yes, it’s to say yes, let me respond to you as fast as I can. I want to be helpful. You want to invite me to that email? Yes, I want to be there for you. I want to, I want to help. I want to be a part of things. The most obvious ways to help are everywhere. The email is easy to do. The meetings are easy to go to. It’s easy to say yes to a project before you have to actually do it. And the harder path is clearing the time, digging into hard problems, thinking them through, that stuff it’s a harder way to go. And if there’s easier off ramps from that highway, if I can get off of that highway and go to the fast food restaurant of email, like I’m going to do that, that’s easier.
And so anyway, all of this sort of led to this notion that the phone is this constant off ramp from the things that I ought to be doing if I really want to do high value, high impact work. And that’s something I had realized in my career around the same time that smartphones got super sticky.
Brett McKay: All right. So, getting rid of the distractions in your phone allow you to do more of the important things with your work. How did it affect your personal life? ‘Cause in my experience, when I’ve had… I’ve gone through various… I’m a backslider. Like I’ll have these periods where I’m like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to not be distracted on my phone.” Then I fall off the wagon. But in those periods where I’m not on my phone all the time or constantly connected to social media or whatever, I just noticed in my personal life, I’m less stressed out. And I think it’s because I’m just not… There’s like less to think about. Like I’m not thinking about, “Oh, here’s this dumb tweet I read and I’m angry about it.” And even though I’m not doing anything about it, it’s just, it’s like an impotent anger. When I don’t have that on my bandwidth, I feel much more copacetic.
Jake Knapp: Totally. Totally. There’s just this… We who grew up before social media, before smartphones, I even grew up like it’s definitely a big part of my life that’s really before email. And I remember how much complexity was in my head about the world, about the social scene my friends that I’m really, I’m talking about when I’m in like elementary and middle school, it was like before email, but there was just a limit to how much your brain could really walk onto and be aware of and deal with. It’s just like, it had to be people who were there or like maybe I’d send letters to my grandma who lived in Mississippi, but there wasn’t room in my head for like everything all the time, everyone in the world all the time. And the challenge with email and phones and social media and constantly available news is that now the surface area for what I might potentially be able to keep up on and stay connected with, it’s just way more than my brain is wired for anyway.
I just can’t do a good job. And so that’s a constant stress. If I have this feeling that there’s an expectation that I’m going to be up to speed and really maintaining a good connection with all of these people, all of these topics, all of these things, well, I just can’t do it. It’s overload. And that’s constant stress. When I made this switch, I did it because I just, I felt I couldn’t handle it. This is just too much for me. It’s not serving me well. It’s hurting me at work. It’s definitely hurting my experience with the people I care most about in the world, like my kids, my wife. And so I said, “I’ve got to do it.” And then what happened was there were a bunch of like kind of painful maybe like renegotiations that I had to do. Like I had to say to people at work who had maybe come to expect that I would respond to emails at any time, I had to set my email signature to, “Hey, I’m only checking email twice a day.”
And that was really powerful because then all of a sudden I knew that they knew that I might be slower to reply. And I think this is a… Looking back on it, I’m like, “Yeah, that’s a… ” It was a really powerful thing because I think I actually had much higher expectations for myself about how fast I would reply than other people did. I think in general, I think it’s true that we’re more forgiving of other people than of ourselves, that we hold ourselves to a higher standard for how fast we’re going to reply, how much we’re going to stay up on everything. When somebody else isn’t on top of things all the time, I just think like, “Yeah, of course. I mean, they’ve got things going on, maybe there’s other important stuff going on in their life.” But that was a big one for me.
So, one of the renegotiations was just the email signature that said I’m only checking email twice a day. And then the ones that were a little bit harder to do was saying goodbye to Facebook and Instagram and this notion that I’m gonna keep up with all those people. And so a lot of those… There’s people in my life who like I care about. And if you’re on Facebook or maybe if you’re spending a greater portion of your time on email, maybe you can keep up with those people a bit more. But the quality… I found, the quality of those relationships, those relationships that are maintained via Facebook or those relationships that are maintained via I’m gonna squeeze in a few more emails and get those social emails off, they come at a cost and I was trading a very like low bandwidth connection with somebody for more time to spend on the higher bandwidth connections.
And sometimes you’ll see these findings where they interview people who are at the end of their lives about what do they regret? And I remember reading one that talked about someone who had a terminal cancer diagnosis and they had six months to live. And I think this guy said he made a plan for… He drew circles and like in the inner circle were his wife, his kids and the next circle out were close friends and then the farthest circle out were friends. But and he said, “Okay. Here’s how I’m going to divide up my time over the six months. I’m going to start with the outer circle and then kind of work my way in.” And he realized after a month or two, he was spending way too much time on the outer circle.
He just only wanted to spend as much time as possible on the inner circle. And the lesson I think from that was like, we can always gain so much value from investing more on the inner circle of our relationships. And I think that means the people who we see in person every day, and sometimes there’s a person who’s not in person, but they’re very high value. They’re in the inner circle. And the same, I think is true of our work. Certainly for me, the highest value came from doubling, tripling, quadrupling, quintupling down on the very few, like the one effort that’s at the center of that circle and allowing myself to not do well at the outer circles. And so that shift had to happen as part of not being connected to everything and breaking with the way society was going and everybody else was going. That was hard. There’s a pain to letting those things kind of drift away that are in the outer circles. I can’t tell you there wasn’t pain with that. But for me, the benefit of being able to put more into the inner circles has been worth it.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, if someone wants to make a distraction free phone, delete social media apps, the news apps, any app that has a tug and that might include email and disabling your web browser. And there’s different… So, you can do it on your iPhone. I think there’s a way you can do this on Android, correct? Just get rid of the browser.
Jake Knapp: I think so. I don’t have an Android phone and there certainly was a way to do this a couple of years ago. It’s if you look it up I think, and actually the web browser one is kind of tricky because like right now on my phone, it doesn’t work. And this is I think just evidence that it’s not a priority for Apple. Like they made a big push a few years back to talk about screen time and we’re going to do this stuff to help you pay attention. And now you go into screen time, you go into parental controls, you turn off the browser and on a lot of people’s phones, it won’t actually turn off. It won’t actually go away. And mine for whatever reason does that. I’ve looked this up, I’ve been on the you know, you’re in hell when you’re in those like tech support forums and you’re reading people’s things they’ve tried and they can’t…
Brett McKay: And it is the blind leading the blind. It’s just like yeah.
Jake Knapp: Exactly. Yeah. So, I’ve spent some time on there trying to figure out how to turn it off. I’m just hoping that one of these OS updates it’ll start to work again. So with the browser you might have to just tuck it away, just hide it on a far, far screen on your home screen. That might be the best that you can do, but you can try to turn it off for sure. And at minimum, even just signing out of services that you might be signed in on the browser, it goes a long way. So, if you’re signed into whatever it might be, Twitter, your email or whatever, just like logging out, you can always log back in. It’s just like, the main thing here is to try to create some friction. So, if it’s really important to do a task or a thing, you need to check in on something, on let’s say you’ve got a… For some people Instagram or Facebook is like part of their job, so maybe you’ve gotta do something on there.
Well install it, do the thing, and then uninstall it. And when you… Once you’ve done that a few times, you realize it’s not that big of a deal. You start to delete the app and it says, are you sure you’re gonna delete your data? All the data is on the cloud. It doesn’t cause any problems. So, you just delete it and when you need it again, you reinstall it and you delete it again, ’cause you’ll… I’ve found when I talk to people who do this, they feel that feeling of how good it feels when it’s off. And then you’ll want to, it’s not, you won’t do it ’cause you feel like you have to, you’ll just do it ’cause you want to.
Brett McKay: So, you mentioned Apple screen time and I know a few years ago too, Google with Android, they made this big push on helping people have better healthy relationship with their smart devices. Why not just use that stuff to manage your phone time instead of just deleting everything?
Jake Knapp: I would say, if it works for you, go for it. But keep in mind, this is one of those things where their interests are not aligned with us using our phones less. Apple doesn’t win if we use our phones less and we’re less excited about getting a new iPhone. Google doesn’t win if we’re less excited about using Android. So, even though there are intentions, their intentions may be totally good here. They may want to help but there is no way they are going to be putting their A game effort on solving that problem. They’re gonna wanna give you something that gives you kind of what we all want. If we don’t think too hard about it or work too hard on it, which is we kind of wanna have our cake and eat it too. We wanna have access to everything, ’cause it’s easy and it’s fun and it gives us that little dopamine hit. I just don’t believe they’re really serious about it. So, I don’t believe those tools are like really serious about giving you your attention back. I might be wrong, and you might find… People might find that it works great for them, but the simpler thing to do than configuring some settings on the phone is to just delete it, and install it back when you have to have it.
Brett McKay: No, it’s pretty easy to circumvent. It’s not very useful. So, I’ve tried using Screen Time on my iPhone where I set time limits for certain apps. It’s like, okay, Gmail, I only want 10 minutes a day. And then your time is up and I’m just like, ignore a limit for the rest of the day.
Jake Knapp: Yeah. Right. It’s gotta be a little bit more hardcore than that. Now there is a tool that is really powerful. It’s hard to configure, but it’ll like shut you down in a bigger way called Freedom. And there’s a version for the phone and you can use it on your laptop or your desktop computer as well. And Freedom actually kind of goes in and like shuts things down on the like internet connection level. And so that’s a more powerful tool. You gotta be serious if you want to use that one because it’s a little bit tricky to set up and configure and it’s really gonna shut it down. You can set hours and things like that for different websites or different apps, but that one is the… If you’re just like not messing around. And I use that sometimes on my laptop. I’ll do like a session, like a 90 minute, two hour session so I can write. But for me, even that one is like a little bit scary on the phone.
Brett McKay: Okay. Someone might be listening to this too and think, okay, why not just get a dumb phone if you’re not gonna be connected to the internet? Because why not get a dumb phone?
Jake Knapp: I’ve tried it actually, I got one of those Light Phones and they’re… If folks haven’t heard of this, I think it’s called like Light Phone. Maybe Light Phone II or something.
Brett McKay: Light Phone II.
Jake Knapp: Yeah. And cool device, like a similar E-ink screen like a Kindle would have. And I just found for me that if… I love all of the cool stuff, the cool futuristic stuff that I described on the smartphone, I think that stuff is great. It’s really cool and I feel like it adds to my life. And going back to the simpler time with the Light Phone and the Light Phone is like a really elegantly designed phone for sure. But it just, I missed that other stuff. I do know people who, they’ll use a Light Phone or something like that in specific times. They’ll say like I’m going on a date or I’m doing this certain kind of work, I’m gonna leave the smartphone at home and take the dumb phone with me. And I think that’s a really… It seems like a really smart strategy and it’s just… For me it’s just been like a little too much to figure out like, okay, am I… Is it really okay if I don’t have all this other… The maps and all the other stuff with the music, like the iPod with me, that’s really usually the killer for me is the very first feature they introduced on the iPhone. And like, I wanna have that, I wanna have the music with me. But I do think that, I think it’s a legit approach. It’s just, it hasn’t worked for me.
Brett McKay: So, a lot of new apps have come out since 2012. Do you try new ones out and how do you decide which ones to try out and which ones to keep?
Jake Knapp: I do try new ones out, but with some, there are things where I’m like, there’s no way that’s gonna be a good scene for me Knowing myself. Like TikTok, there’s no way I’m getting into TikTok ’cause I’d love it. That’s the thing with all this stuff, I love it. I love the like, oh man, funny little video clips. God that just sounds great. I would be on that. We wouldn’t have had this call Brett. I would be doing that right now. So TikTok, I’m like, I can’t go, I cannot do that. That’s definitely a bad scene for Jake. There’s some apps that I just started using this app that’s become one that I use several times a day maybe you’ve heard of it ‘How We Feel’. It’s this app, it’s just like an emotion tracker, which sounds like really like why would I wanna track my emotions?
But it’s beautifully designed and what’s cool about it, is you go in it’s really quite fun and fast and to almost like a playful interaction to choose from these four. If I check in, it’s like, are you feeling high energy unpleasant, high energy pleasant, low energy unpleasant, low energy pleasant. And then it gives you all these emotion options and you kind of tag like what was going on at the moment. And it’s just kind of beautiful and fun to go through. And then you start to see, it’s been this really helpful thing to see, oh man, when I’m stressed out or I’m feeling down about this writing project or whatever, you can kinda see how those emotions pass, like what the trends are and how long those things stick. Which I found to feel really good to sort of see the emotions in a different way.
Anyway, that’s a great app that made it onto the home screen. That’s in the top four now on that first screen, that’s a beauty. I use Peloton and I’ve got the Peloton app, it’s on my top 10 that’s one that I added. So, I’ll use it to record like an outdoor run or an outdoor walk ’cause I’m kind of hooked to having these streaks of days that I’ve worked out in a row, which is stupid, but I love that. So, there are things like that… And there are different… I’m a bit of a sneaker head, so I’ve got like the SNKRS app and StockX and those sometimes will veer on like being infinity pools and problems for me. But the nice thing is the stuff doesn’t come out that frequently. So, like the new shoes that I’m interested in. So, I’ve found that it doesn’t really create that tug in the same way. But yeah, I’m definitely open all the time to trying new apps. I just have this parameter of like, does it create… It’s just simple, does it create bad feelings when I use it or does it create bad feelings when I’m not using it? And some apps do both. Some apps create bad feelings just when you’re using it or not using it. But if it creates bad feelings, if it creates that tug or if it makes me feel stressed in the moment when I shouldn’t have it on the phone, I don’t need to carry that around with me. That’s bad. So, then I don’t use it.
Brett McKay: So, you mentioned your desktop browsing, do you do some stuff… It sounds like you do some stuff to avoid mindlessly surfing the web there.
Jake Knapp: Yeah. I’m just like so easily distracted that I have to have a whole bunch of tools to keep me on track. Especially because writing, which is a big part of what I do, is this thing where you like… I’ve gotta… With no social pressure from anyone else, usually I’ve got to like stop everything else and for at least like two hours just sit and do something. So, the tricks and techniques that I use include… I use this thing called a Time Timer. This is a physical timer. You can set the time that you want on it. It’s got a little red like dial almost just like turn this thing out and you see a pie chart of how much time is left and then the time ticks away. And so I can just at a glance see that sitting on my desk and see how long I’ve sort of agreed with myself I’m gonna focus on a thing, that’s a big help.
I use that Freedom software on my desktop if I need to have a session where I just like shut off internet access. I also have an office that I rent where I’ve actually like disconnected the internet from that office. So I leave home, go to that office, there’s no internet there. That’s a really, really helpful place to get writing or focused work done. So, I’ll do all kinds of things to try to create these spaces where it’s like when I think back to creating computer games when I was a kid before the internet existed and it was such a lovely feeling to just focus and just do something that was really an all consuming creative task. And for me now to recreate that, I have to create some walls.
Brett McKay: Well Jake, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
Jake Knapp: They can go to jakeknapp.com. Thesprintbook.com is where we talk about the design sprints and maketime.blog. Or you could just look up my friend John and I wrote this book called Make Time, that’s about focus and attention and how we are trying to keep it working for us. And that book is available everywhere books are available.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well Jake Knapp, thanks for time. It’s been a pleasure.
Jake Knapp: Thanks Brett. Thanks for having me on.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Jake Knapp. He’s the author of several books including ‘Sprint’ and ‘Make Time’. They’re all available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jakeknapp.com. Also check at our show notes at aom.is/phone where you can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check at our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, make sure to sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already I’d appreciate if you’d take one minute to give us a review of our podcast on Spotify 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 it’s Brett McKay, reminding you all to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you have heard into action.
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Happiness and depression can feel like slippery and befuddling things. We can do the things we’ve been told will make us happy, while still not feeling satisfied. Or, on paper, our lives can look great, yet we feel depressed. And the advice that’s out there about these states doesn’t always seem to correspond to our lived experience.
Ryan Bush has created a new map he thinks can help us make better sense of life. Ryan is a systems designer with a long-standing interest in psychology and philosophy, the founder of Designing the Mind, a self-development organization, and an author. His latest book is Become Who You Are: A New Theory of Self-Esteem, Human Greatness, and the Opposite of Depression. Today on the show, Ryan explains the two dimensions along which we usually plot our happiness, and what he thinks is the missing third dimension: virtue or admirability. Ryan then unpacks his “virtue self-signaling theory” which he thinks can heighten happiness and reduce depression, and which is premised on the idea that if you want to live a flourishing life, you have to give yourself reasons to admire yourself. I really think this is a valuable idea that everyone can get something from and recommend listening through.
Resources Related to the Podcast Full and Brief Strengths Tests * AoM Podcast #249: The Benefits of Pride * AoM Article: The 11 Cognitive Distortions That Are Making You a Miserable SOB * Mind Over Mood by Dennis Greenberger * Feeling Good* by David Burns
Connect With Ryan Bush* Designing the Mind website
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Happiness and depression can feel like slippery and befuddling things. We can do the things we’ve been told to make us happy, while still not feeling satisfied. Or on paper, our lives can look great, yet we still feel depressed, and the advice that’s out there about these states doesn’t always seem to correspond to our lived experience. Ryan Bush has created a new map he thinks can help us make better sense of life. Ryan is a systems designer with a long-standing interest in psychology and philosophy, the founder of Designing the Mind, a self-development organization, and an author. His latest book is Become Who You Are, a new theory of self-esteem, human greatness, and the opposite of depression. Today on the show, Ryan explains the two dimensions along which we usually plot our happiness, and what he thinks is the missing third dimension, virtue. Ryan then unpacks his virtue self-signaling theory, which he thinks can heighten happiness and reduce depression, and which is premised on the idea that if you want to live a flourishing life, you have to give yourself reasons to admire yourself. I really think this is a valuable idea that everyone can get something from and recommend listening through. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash become. All right, Ryan Bush, welcome to the show.
Ryan Bush: Thanks for having me, Brett. I’m excited to be here.
Brett McKay: So in your new book, Become Who You Are, you lay out a theory for human happiness, and you start off the book talking about that most ideas or theories of happiness focus on two dimensions. What are these dimensions and how do they interact with each other?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, it’s a sort of spatial visual metaphor that I think could be really useful for navigating our lives. And so if you imagine there’s a chessboard sitting on the table in front of you, you can imagine there’s an x-axis and a y-axis. The sort of left and right on the chessboard is pain and pleasure. So further to the right means more immediate pleasure. Further to the left means pain, discomfort, suffering. Then on the y-axis, sort of moving closer to you or further away on the chessboard, you’ve got loss and gain. And so this one’s all about long-term success and striving and achievement or loss and setbacks and that kind of thing. And so when we’re children, we’re all sort of navigating just using this x-axis. We want more immediate pleasure and less pain. This is what most non-human animals pretty much spend their lives doing. And when we get a little older, we learn how to bring this y-axis in. We learn how to say, okay, I can put my pursuit of pleasure on hold. I can delay gratification. I can go after this long-term success and gain. And so we essentially go back and forth throughout our lives between chasing immediate pleasure and chasing long-term success, at least by default. That’s our innate wiring. That’s the map we’re using to navigate our lives.
The problem with this is that sometimes the map doesn’t really correspond to the territory. Sometimes we will achieve something in our lives that should be good according to this map. It should result in the ultimate happiness, and it doesn’t really work that way. We end up kind of just shrugging and saying, oh, why am I not any happier now? Or we’ll go through a loss and end up saying it’s the best thing that ever happened to us. There’s been a lot of studies of this where Daniel Gilbert writes about a lot of them in a book called Stumbling on Happiness, where he points out that lottery winners and paraplegics have the same levels of happiness a year after their incidents. And that’s just such a like, what’s going on here? When we spend our lives pursuing things that seem good on paper and look like positive external circumstances, and then we achieve them and they don’t actually make us any happier, what’s actually going on? And so I’ve used this dimensional framework to suggest, okay, there’s actually a third dimension, which is actually pulling the strings this whole time.
As we’re running around chasing pleasure and success and gain, actually something else is determining whether we’re happy or not. And it may relate to those things, but it’s not directly pleasure or gain. And I’ve argued in the book, it’s not meaning, it’s not love exactly, even though it relates to all these things. But this is really what’s driving our wellbeing under the surface.
Brett McKay: Okay, so you make the case that there’s a third dimension that’s going on in our lives that determines our happiness or our flourishing that we typically ignore or don’t even know that’s there. And that third dimension is virtue. What do you mean by virtue?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, I tend to introduce it using the term admirability because that connects a little more immediately to the modern listener. I think virtue has this really outdated sort of preachy connotation. And that’s really unfortunate because it’s got this rich philosophical history going back to the ancient Greeks and Confucius and all these brilliant thinkers who have made very similar arguments to the one I’m making now just without this sort of fancy three-dimensional framework, right? And without a lot of the data backing up and explaining why this is actually the case. But the ancient Greeks, the Stoics, for example, they said that virtue and eudaimonia, which was sort of the ultimate happiness, these are fundamentally tied together. The more virtuous you are, the more satisfied you ultimately are in your life. And virtue didn’t just mean the kind of moral purity that we tend to think of. The word arete that it was originally used as can be translated as excellence or strength or greatness. And so there are a lot of different levels that this can play out on, right? We can talk about moral strength and moral virtue, but we can also talk about courage and creativity and charisma, humor even, all these traits that we basically look at other people in our lives and say, I admire this person for this.
And we observe this throughout cultures. There are certain traits that psychologists like Martin Seligman have observed are pretty much valued in every culture around the world. And that tells us something very important about our psychology and what’s deeply embedded in it, which is that we have these deep impulses of admiration around these certain traits. And so there must be some reason why it is so deeply embedded in our minds and why the ancients were right, I argue, in thinking that it is really connected to our happiness. And when we are depressed, we are in some ways not able to see for one reason or another those virtues that we pride ourselves on. And when we’re deeply satisfied, it’s because we are achieving a high level of virtue exercise in our lives, and we are seeing that fact and observing it and admiring ourselves for it.
Brett McKay: Okay, so I like that idea that virtue is being admirable. It’s excellence. And it could be things like, as you said, courage, temperance, wisdom, humor, but even things like your ability in a sport or your ability in designing or your ability in programming, you can be virtuous in those tasks as well. Potentially. I will say some of them, I think, are not as deeply ingrained because they’re not things that our ancestors necessarily had.
Ryan Bush: So my skill at CAD design on the computer doesn’t necessarily translate. Our ancestors would have just been like, what is that? But from an evolutionary standpoint, I think there are reasons why honesty and kindness are things that we really deeply admire, and so those hold a special weight in our minds. I also think that our values can vary from one person to another. And so really, it most requires inquiring into our own values. What do I most admire in other people? Who are the people I admire most, and what are these traits, and how can I incorporate them into my own life and behavior and lifestyle?
Brett McKay: So you have this idea of a virtue portfolio. What’s a virtue portfolio?
Ryan Bush: It’s essentially just a collection of your top signature strengths or virtues that potentially you’ve always been good at since you were a kid. You really pride yourself on them. And if you found yourself in a situation in life where you started to doubt that you had these virtues, you started to think you were no longer good at these things it would really crush you. You can imagine that despair. And if you’ve been depressed, you may have had a period where you really did feel like you lacked those signature strengths. This is very often the case. People who are depressed typically describe themselves as incompetent, worthless, unlovable if they’re severely depressed. And vice versa for those who are deeply satisfied. And so your virtue portfolio is this collection of strengths that you’re constantly trying to balance and bring out in your life. Or at least I argue, you should be. As you look at the different areas of your life, you should be saying, how can I exercise my ingenuity more? How can I exercise my wisdom more in this situation?
And really it’s gonna vary for each person. There’s a test that I recommend that Martin Seligman developed called the Signature Strengths Test or the Brief Strengths Test, which is much quicker if you don’t have as much time, that’ll essentially tell you what your top five virtues are that make up your virtue portfolio. I think it’s really just a starting point because there are a lot of ways you can sort of define what it is that you’re best at and value most. But I think you need to be paying very careful attention to these traits. When you’re navigating your life, when you’re making transitions, you don’t want to allow these to get neglected for long because your brain will notice. And according to this theory that I’m proposing, it’s going to affect your mood, your behavior, your long-term wellbeing.
Brett McKay: You also have this idea of virtue domains. What’s a virtue domain?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, this is essentially just an area in your life, a vessel that allows you to bring out a certain strength. So work for people is often a major virtue domain. There are certain positive traits that we don’t really get other opportunities to exercise in our lives besides through our work, or at least if we’ve designed our career well and allowed ourselves to bring out those traits. Your relationships would be other virtue domains. You may have a particularly important relationship in your life that allows you to bring out your sense of humor or your creativity or your loving affection in ways that you don’t have another outlet for. So these are going to be really important virtue domains for you. You might have a hobby or a nonprofit you volunteer at or something else. These can all potentially be virtue domains. And this is really crucial to crafting that strategy to exercising your virtues and achieving greater happiness or eudaimonia.
Brett McKay: So how does this virtue dimension interact with the pleasure, pain, and loss gain dimensions of happiness?
Ryan Bush: That’s a good question. There are some thinkers who would argue that basically the pleasure and the gain in your life are completely irrelevant. The Stoics would have said, don’t even worry about those, they don’t affect you. And other thinkers like Aristotle and I would say myself have argued that, well, they matter, but not in the direct sense. Your achievements, your career, these things are not going to improve your happiness in themselves, but they can increase or decrease the amount of virtue that you’re able to exercise in your life. So for example, we talked about winning the lottery. I sort of do an exploration of this in the early chapters of the book where I say, okay, so you might win the lottery and you might say, okay, well now I don’t have to work. So I’m going to quit this job that a big part of my self-esteem was previously tied up in. I’m going to just kind of sit around now and do whatever I feel like and kind of adopt this passive, effortless life and spend the money on immediate pleasures. In that case, the lottery’s actually going to be a bad thing for you and your wellbeing because it’s going to decrease the amount that you’re exercising your virtues in your life and your brain is going to notice, so to speak.
You’re going to cease to admire yourself as much as you did before. On the other hand, you might win the lottery and you might say, oh, this is going to be huge. Now I can quit this mindless job that I had and actually create a new opportunity for me to do a lot more creative, interesting things. I’m going to start this organization. I’m going to become an angel investor. I’m going to invest this money responsibly so it doesn’t go to waste. And in that case, it could result in a much better life for you. So it’s not so straightforward that money doesn’t buy happiness, for example. It’s that all of these circumstantial gains or losses in our lives have an indirect relationship. And really, this is best viewed in this sort of three-dimensional model because you can be moving up in the z-axis, that sort of three-dimensional axis, which I didn’t fully flesh out earlier, but essentially, you can imagine that chessboard we mentioned turning into a topographical chessboard where you’ve now got mountains and valleys on top of the chessboard and it’s really the mountains and valleys that determine what’s good for you and what’s going to make you happy.
So you want to navigate your two-dimensional existence so as to increase that third dimension first and foremost. So maybe taking that job with the higher salary or the greater status really will allow you to climb up that mountain that corresponds to that. But it also might mean creating a new kind of passive comfort that might actually hurt you. It might actually move you down into those valleys of depression and make you less happy even though something seemingly good happened to you.
Brett McKay: I have an example from that. I have a friend who sold his business for lots of money, allowed him to retire. So that’s gain, pleasure, it was awesome, didn’t have to work. And for the first couple of months, all he did was sleep in because he hadn’t done that in a long time. Then after a while, he got depressed. He’s like, I got to do something. So he started another business so he could exercise his virtue. He was good at certain things and he needed an outlet for that.
Ryan Bush: Yeah, that’s a very common story. And I talk about my time in high school and how summer breaks were kind of like mini retirements in a way. I would get to the end of the school year and be like, oh, I’m so excited. I’m gonna do nothing. I’m gonna sleep in, play video games all day. And inevitably, I would end up feeling kind of terrible after like three weeks and almost be ready to go back to school by the end of the summer. And at one point, I kind of realized, okay, I can prevent this from happening. Next summer, I’m going to set big goals and ambitions. I’m gonna structure my days so I’m actually doing things that I’m proud of.
And I ended up turning those later summers into some of the best periods of growth in my life and really satisfying. But ultimately, that idea that when we finally are able to just stop doing the things that our self-esteem really is built on, that we’re gonna somehow be thrilled, it often has the opposite effect. So we need to give ourselves reason to admire ourselves and we don’t ever really get to stop. We don’t ever get to ride off into the sunset and stop doing this. It’s a lifelong process of earning your own admiration.
Brett McKay: I wanna dig deeper into this idea of how do we know when we’re being virtuous. When you developed a theory called virtue self-signaling theory, can you walk us through that theory? Because I think it’s like the linchpin of your idea of happiness and even depression.
Ryan Bush: Yeah, so the big question that led me to sort of develop this theory was why? About all this stuff that I was observing, about the connection between virtue and well-being and depression, I was saying why, from an evolutionary and neurological standpoint, would this be the case? It doesn’t naturally make sense that we would, one, that we would get depressed at all because that seems like a genetically kind of crippling state. Two, that our self-esteem and self-evaluations would play such an important role and would be so central to the functioning of our minds. And three, that happiness would work this way and that we would experience these highs of well-being when we’re being virtuous specifically. And so I draw from a lot of different areas.
This is like four chapters of dense research, so I’ll do my best to summarize it here. But I think potentially the best place to start with virtue self-signaling theory is to look at self-esteem and this sort of central role that it plays in our minds. We are constantly sort of evaluating ourselves. We are constantly thinking about our own worth and we’re criticizing ourselves in many cases. It’s kind of a constant stream. And if we look at the neuroscience behind this, there’s a network in the brain called the default mode network that is really lighting up any time we’re not engaged in another activity. That’s why it’s called the default mode network. By default, this is what our brain is doing. And it’s been found to be really closely linked to self-referential thoughts and self-ruminations and social comparison, essentially the evaluation of our own virtues and our social strengths.
It’s been proposed by some evolutionary psychologists that self-esteem is essentially a fuel gauge for the fuel tank that is social esteem. So it’s there as this internal indicator to help us optimize our social standing. If you think about our ancestors, the tribe was everything to you. If you lived 10,000 years ago or more, you really needed to be on your tribe’s good side. You could be ostracized or killed or worse, they could talk shit about you behind your back if you didn’t do well. And that would affect your social status, your mate prospects, your alliances. Ultimately, it has major genetic outcomes. So what I’ve argued in this book is that this system in the brain, the default mode network, the sociometer, whatever you wanna call it, is essentially there to regulate our mood up or down towards eudaimonia or toward depression based on what it sees, based on the virtue that it notices when it’s observing our actions. So our own brains are kind of constantly evaluating us to say, well, are you highly approvable?
Are you someone that your tribe is going to like, that your friends and mate prospects are going to approve of? If so, let’s get out there, let’s be active, right? Let’s display those strengths and put them out there and capitalize on this opportunity. Or your brain is saying, no, I’m not seeing those traits that I approve of. I’m not seeing evidence that I’m the kind of person I would admire and hence that people in my tribe are more likely to admire, right? And that means I need to be in a state where I’m going to withdraw socially. I’m going to be socially risk-averse. I’m going to lie low, essentially, and not damage my social status. And so this mechanism that I’m proposing essentially evolved as a social protection tool, but it has much greater implications for us. And it’s almost kind of cruel to think that this awful, crippling state that we know as depression would just have come about to sort of optimize our social standing. But I think that’s where its origins lie.
And so the question for us is not how can we do what our genes wanted us to do, which was to maximize social outcomes? The question is how can we earn our own respect? How can we appeal to this social simulator in our heads for maximum wellbeing? And so I think that ultimately comes down to trying to signal the most virtue to ourselves. And that’s why the name is Virtue Self signaling theory. We are as happy as the virtue that we signal to our own brains and that we give ourselves evidence to believe that we are exhibiting.
Brett McKay: And what’s interesting about this socio meter in our head, it’s only turned on to things that are important to our identity. So, for example, if you don’t think of yourself as a soccer player, if you’re really bad at soccer and someone makes fun of you, you’re not going to care, right? But like in your example, you’re a designer. That’s a big part of your identity. If someone says, yeah, I don’t think you’re that great of a designer, or you get bad feedback on that, that’s probably going to hurt you more than if someone says you’re a bad soccer player.
Ryan Bush: Exactly. Yeah. It doesn’t affect our self-esteem all that much when someone doubts us on something that isn’t in our portfolio, in our virtue portfolio, right. If we haven’t built those serotonin pathways associated with those particular traits, it’s not that big of a deal. I already didn’t think I was good at that. But when it attacks our identity directly, that’s when it can really affect our self-esteem and our happiness. When we look at people who are depressed, very often they’ve got a broken identity. In fact, I would argue this is the kind of the essence of what depression is. It’s not a chemical imbalance like is often argued. Fundamentally, it’s an identity failure issue. You have a broken identity in some way. Your virtue portfolio has had a market crash, and so you are now in this sort of state of disrepair in your identity. And that sort of calls for a reshaping or re-strategizing of the state and of our general virtue strategies. But yes, it does fundamentally center around our identity or our virtue portfolio.
Brett McKay: I want to talk more about depression because you went in deep on this section. We’ve had a lot of people on the podcast, psychologists, come on, talk about depression. There’s lots of different theories out there for what causes depression, and a lot of research is being spent on it because it’s one of the big mental health issues in America. And in the west, and for a longtime, there’s this idea, you just mentioned it that, well, depression is a brain chemistry problem. If you have low serotonin, low dopamine, you are going to have depression. But what the research shows is that even if you give someone a antidepressant where it increases, serotonin, for example, it might alleviate depression a bit, particularly in people with really severe depression. But for people with mild depression, it doesn’t do much. What’s going on there?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, there are a couple of problems with this sort of view on depression. One is just kind of explaining why it’s there and why it operates the way it does. If we look at normal pathologies and diseases and disorders, there are certain traits that they tend to share, and a big one is getting more common with age. Right? Heart disease gets more common with age. Most of these awful diseases that we experience as our organs get older and start sort of deteriorating, we get more likely to get these conditions. Well, depression. Most people experience their first bout of depression, who have depression at some point in their early adulthood. So it doesn’t operate like a normal pathology. It also, while there are genes that are associated with depression, a greater likelihood of it, ultimately, we all have depression genes in the sense that all minds seem to be capable of getting depressed under certain conditions. So, this is not just something that made it through the sort of filter of natural selection in some people.
This is kind of a staple of human existence. You put people in certain conditions, certain beliefs about themselves, and they’re going to get depressed, and vice versa. The other issue is that this view of depression as a chemical disorder fundamentally really isn’t that well supported. It’s really bleak. When you look at the data on things like antidepressants, people sort of assume and have really been marketed this idea that there are pills you can just take that fix the problem that is depression.
And really, there’s no reason to think that’s the case. I just, sometimes I say to myself, well, I’m not technically like a medical professional, I’m not a psychiatrist. Should I be sharing this with people? But the fact is, like, I have the same data in front of me, and this is really what the experts are saying, too. Like, there is no evidence that antidepressants, at least the ones we have now, actually fix depression. In most cases, they rarely out-perform placebos. And in fact, cognitive behavioral therapy works both, at least as well in the short term and much better in the longterm, and has none of the really awful side effects. Right? So, really, it’s kind of this misleading belief that we ever had these tools and that fundamentally, depression was caused by this weird imbalance in the first place. I think serotonin and many other neurochemicals do play a role in this state, but I think ultimately, the start of this cycle is the low self-esteem that when your belief about yourself, when your identity starts to decline, that’s like the fuel gauge in your car when it’s running low. And that little light that turns on at the end is depression. You get depressed as a way of saying, okay, things are not working. Your identity is broken. You don’t need to be going out and bringing a lot of attention to yourself.
So stay home, stop socializing. It’s the red light, essentially, and it’s a natural mechanism, I think, for doing that. And so it is an adaptation from a genetic standpoint, I believe that doesn’t mean that we want to experience it. And, in fact, if we can avoid it, I think by all means we should. But I think that means attending to our virtues and our identity and making sure that we maintain a positive view of ourselves through our genuine actions, not just through manipulating our views, but actually taking the actions that we would be proud of whenever we can.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So the decreased serotonin, the decreased dopamine, that’s a result of depression. You feel bad about your…
Ryan Bush: A symptom.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s a symptom. And the problem of just treating the symptom, like increasing it artificially with antidepressants, you might feel good a little bit, but then if you’re not doing things that make you admire yourself, create a strong identity, you’re just going to feel bad again right away.
Ryan Bush: Exactly. And that’s why another tactic known as behavioral activation by some studies, works even better than CBT, and it certainly out-performs antidepressants. It seems so simple and so easy that it wouldn’t work, but it actually really does. It essentially is just getting you to go out and do things, even if you don’t feel like it, and specifically doing things that gradually work towards embodying your values, starting small and climbing your way up gradually until you are doing things every day that you’re actually proud of yourself for. This is a really huge, underrated practice, I think, and there’s a lot of data suggesting it works as well as just about anything. There’s reason to think it might even be a big part of why exercise seems to work so well. It’s not just that you’re doing something that’s good for your body, so you’re doing something that’s good for your own self-perception. You are giving yourself a reason to admire your own discipline if you’re going out and working out, or it could be reading a book or going on a walk all these things that give you reason to see, oh, I am an admirable person. I do have these traits that I admire in others. And so, really, wherever you’re at, you need to start from there and then take baby steps and ask, how can I bring out more of my virtues? How can I give myself more evidence of the kind of person that I am?
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So I want to dig more into how we can use this virtue self-signaling theory to create a flourishing life for ourself. And you mentioned some things already, behavior activation, cognitive behavioral therapy. But I think someone could see this thing as, okay, well, look, if depression or our eudaimonia or flourishing is determined by this socio-meter in our head, why can’t we just hack it and just say, why can’t I just tell myself I’m awesome? Just tell your brain, like, I’m awesome, I’m great the Stuart Smalley. I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. Gosh darn it, people like me. Why doesn’t that work?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, it seems like the perfect solution, doesn’t it? But ultimately, your brain is a little smarter than that. I think that’s why it’s really primarily oriented around your behaviors, I think. There’s a great Goethe quote that says, like, if you want to know what kind of person you are, never by thinking, but always by doing, do your duty, and then you’ll know what you’re worth. And so I think our brains really are wired to pay a lot of attention to our actions, and there’s a good reason for it, because everyone else in our tribe is going to judge us based on our actions. If we just evaluate ourselves based on private thoughts that we’re having, then it’s not going to be a good representation of what our tribe thinks about us.
And so, really, our brains are centered primarily around action. Now, there are times when you definitely have to go in and correct distorted beliefs, but I think primarily it does need to be about action. Right? You can tell yourself all day that you accept yourself exactly as you are, that you approve of yourself Unconditionally, you’re perfect, you don’t need to do anything different. And you may be able to sort of influence a certain part of your self-esteem or explicit self-esteem. But the data suggests we can’t really influence our implicit self-esteem. We continue to feel the same way about ourselves even after we add all these superficial affirmations and tell ourselves we’re the best. So our brains, they’re a little better than that.
They’re saying, okay, maybe you are that kind of person. Go out and prove it. Let me see evidence of it. And so I think that’s a big part of why there’s not that much evidence for the effectiveness of affirmations and mantras and just really, inflating your self-esteem. If anything, that’s a recipe for narcissism rather than eudaimonia.
Brett McKay: Okay, so you can’t hack the socio meter in your brain through mantras and affirmations. Another solution to hack this would be like, okay, well, it’s there. How about I just say, it doesn’t matter, I’ll just transcend it. I’ll just meditate and use philosophy to rise above that, where it’s no longer an issue. Does that work?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, I mean, this is one that’s been echoed throughout many ancient philosophies. And now you hear it in pretty much every spiritual and self-help book. It’s all over the place. Transcend your ego, keep your identity small, basically get rid of your sense of self if you can. And I think there’s a lot to like about this approach. I think it actually probably is a viable option. I think it is possible to essentially disable, through gradual practice, this part of your brain until you just don’t have a sense of self anymore. The problem is that the sense of self is essentially the engine behind both depression and eudaimonia. It creates this really negative state of suffering when you don’t approve of yourself, but it also creates this incredible mood state of self-satisfaction when you do approve of yourself. This is what we observe in really the happiest people, according to positive and humanistic psychology, is that they are giving themselves reasons to approve of themselves, and then they’re enjoying the benefits of that.
And this can often be very altruistic endeavors, but ultimately they’re self-serving. At the same time, they give us reason to admire ourselves, and that makes us happier. So if we just try to disable our egos and escape our sense of self, but we’re ultimately taking the batteries out of the happiness unhappiness engine in our brains, we’re not going to be able to experience either of those states. And while this essentially middle ground would certainly be better than the sort of self-critical, depressive state that a lot of people unfortunately find themselves in, I think there’s a better state waiting, and I’ve personally experienced it at many points in my life, where you really do approve of yourself, and most of those self-referential thoughts in your head really are expressing pride and admiration. I don’t think we should treat this like it’s a dirty word and it’s narcissism, and we shouldn’t like and approve of ourselves, because I think fundamentally our view of ourselves is tied to our happiness and we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t try to eliminate it. I don’t think.
Brett McKay: No. We’ve had a podcast about the psychology of healthy pride. There’s bad pride. There’s also a healthy pride that spurs us to do more and more great, good pro-social things.
Ryan Bush: Yeah, and pride, really, it’s really two different things that we just use the same word for. You can have a kind of pride that’s like hubris. That’s always the fatal flaw of people, where they just don’t acknowledge their own limitations. They essentially blind themselves to their weaknesses, and that’s not a good thing. We want to have a very accurate view of our strengths and weaknesses. We want to be able to say, yeah, I’m good at this and I’m proud of that, but also, I’m bad at this and I’m not perfect, and I should get better at this. So ultimately, yes, when you are living in a way that you would admire in someone else, you should feel that pride. You shouldn’t be ashamed of it, but also you shouldn’t let it blind you to your genuine weaknesses, which we all have.
Brett McKay: So you argue, if you want a flourishing life, you need to become who you are. What do you mean by that?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, so that’s a phrase attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche. He talked about becoming who you are in this very vague way that’s hard to interpret. And it seems paradoxical at first, like, I already am who I am. Mission accomplished. But I think really what this comes down to is that there’s a certain way of thinking about yourself as the sort of conglomerate of your highest values and ideals. When you look at the people you most admire, when you look at the impulses of admiration you feel and the values that you hold the most deeply, you could say this template of your ideals is more you than you are like, you haven’t fully become this template yet. And ultimately, if you’re living your life well, you should be sort of saying, how can I come to resemble this template in my actions more and more throughout my life? How can I bring together my strengths so that I gradually become this person? And in some ways, that is becoming who you are? This process of self-becoming is a process of gradually decreasing the distance between your ideal self and your actual self.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned earlier how we can figure out what our strengths are, what our virtues are in our virtue portfolio. There’s quizzes. You can take tests. You can take anything that you’ve seen in your own life that’s been helpful in helping you figure out what your ideal self is.
Ryan Bush: Yeah, taking that test is great. That’s a good way to figure out sort of what your innate strengths already are. And generally doubling down on your strengths is going to be better than trying to mitigate your weaknesses in a lot of cases. But I also think we need to look at the people around us. We need to examine people in our lives, examine people, historical figures, even fictional characters, anywhere that we can go and find someone that we admire something about. We don’t have to admire everything about someone. We can write down specific traits. Like, I admire the way this person handles conflict, even though I don’t like this, that they do. And I admire how this person deals with this situation. And if we write these things down, we sort of gradually can group them together. We can create a kind of a blueprint for who we need to become. And so we can strategize our life according to this. We can say, like, would this change in my life bring me closer to putting myself on this piece of paper, or would it move me further away? I personally, I developed a tool called mine-site introspection cards, which are essentially a deck of cards where you take one every day, you go on a walk, and you write in this little pocket journal. And gradually this is meant to sort of answer a lot of these questions.
I think we have an introspective deficiency in the modern world, and most of us don’t spend enough time alone with our thoughts. And so this is kind of a way of getting a collection of prompts that will gradually reveal more about who you are and who you need to become to you, particularly if you. Yeah, if you don’t spend a lot of time alone with your thoughts. And if you do tend to distract yourself with all the endless supply of entertainment that we have today. Another just great thing to do in general is to ask people in your life, ask your partner, your parents, whoever, people who have known you for a long time, what do you think I’m best at? What do you see as my greatest strengths? And very often, they’ll surprise you. They’ll tell you things you never thought about, and that’ll give you some new insights into what you really need to be focusing on and sort of designing your behavior toward.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Another thing that I’ve done in my life that’s been useful for me is looking back childhood, high school years, college years, and thinking of those moments where I felt the most me, like, the most alive, the most invigorated. And then analyzing those, like, what was it about that thing that made me feel so great? And usually you can figure out what it is. For me, whenever I’m teaching or explaining things to people, I feel really good. And so I like leaning into that. So I think that’s another useful exercise to figure out, like reflect on what makes you feel the most alive and the most flourishing.
Ryan Bush: Absolutely. Yeah. When we were talking about the virtue portfolio, I think going back through those historical charts and saying, yeah, when was I at a high? When was I at the best, sort of most alive, most me, like you said, period. And very often you’ll find it’s when you did having an outlet for those top few strengths. And similarly, the lowest periods in your life, you very likely will find are the times that you really didn’t have that outlet. For one reason or another, those traits were suppressed, or you thought you didn’t have those strengths for one reason or another. So I think, yeah, thinking about that, but also thinking about the times that you really didn’t feel like you. That you look back and you’re like, oh, yeah, I was trying to be someone else during that period, what traits were you exhibiting? What evokes disgust, potentially, in people that you don’t like, and how can you make sure you avoid those traits? I think is an equally effective exercise.
Brett McKay: Okay, so instead of hacking the virtue self signaling theory with mantras or just trying to transcend it, you argue we got to embrace it and figure out how we can make it work for us so that we can put ourselves in situations where we admire ourselves more. So we feel like we’re flourishing and we can avoid that depressive state. And you introduced a tool I think is really useful. It’s the ABC triangle. How can the ABC triangle help us virtue self signal to us more effectively?
Ryan Bush: Yeah. So this is a straight out of cognitive behavioral therapy. Essentially we’ve got our affect, which is our mood. We’ve got behavior, our actions, and then cognition, our thoughts. And these have a sort of a perpetual cycle relationship with one another. So if we look at depression, for example, we see a combination of low mood, low activity and motivation and low self regard or low self esteem. And we can see how these feed into one another because if you’re in a bad mood, you’re not gonna feel like doing anything, which means you’re not going to go out and take a lot of actions that you’re proud of, which means you’re not going to have reason to admire yourself and you’re going to develop these negative beliefs and that’s going to make you feel bad. And so it’s a vicious cycle essentially of negative mood and action and beliefs about yourself. So what can you do to reverse this cycle and create a fitting virtuous cycle essentially?
And a lot of it is what we’ve been talking about here. I mean, if you go into your beliefs, and you identify, oh, I thought I wasn’t a creative person, but actually I was exhibiting this cognitive distortion that was all or nothing thinking. And actually it’s much more accurate to say I’m creative in these ways, but not this way, right? If you go through a cognitive restructuring process, that can be a really valuable way of sort of a leverage point for changing that cycle. But I would advise first and foremost to take the behavioral activation approach. And really this goes all the way up. It’s starts at clinical depression and really no matter where you’re at, even if you’re generally satisfied in your life, you can still apply this principle of behavioral activation. But essentially you want to break that cycle so that no matter how you feel, you make yourself go out and actually do things that at least to some degree show you what kind of person you are and how that aligns with your values.
So if you are severely depressed and you’re struggling to get out of bed each day, you probably feel like there is a million things you need to be doing that you just can’t. Well, replace those million things with one thing or maybe two each day, you’re going to get out of bed, you’re going to take a shower. If you’re a little improved from there, you can say, okay, each day I’m going to get out of bed, take a shower, clean up my room and do some dishes. And then you can start introducing things that bring out more of these admirable behaviors. You can start introducing, okay, I’m going to call a friend for 30 minutes every day, even though I don’t feel like it. I’m going to go on a hike, even though I’d rather stay in bed, I’m going to make myself stick to this schedule every day. And gradually you sort of claw your way out of this vicious cycle and you can create a virtuous cycle in its place. You can get to a place where your positive mood is making you want to go out and do things, which is making you feel great about yourself and so on. The cycle continues. And so really we want to extend this all the way up to the point of asking, okay, I’m already in a great place, I’m in a great mood. But I want to go even higher. How can I bring even more of my virtues together and bring them to a higher level than they’ve ever been before?
Brett McKay: Is that where the idea of virtue convergence comes in?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, that’s exactly it. So essentially building a vessel for yourself where you can not only bring out one or two of your strengths, but concentrate a very high degree of them. And the best example of this that I know is my own designing the mind. Before I had started this organization, I had a few good virtue domains. I had a creative job, I had a healthy relationship, but a lot of my greatest strengths didn’t really have an outlet. My wisdom, my rationality, a big part of my ingenuity. These are things that are really important to me. And a lot of them were sort of relegated to like occasional hobbies that I made time for. Once I built designing the mind, I gradually found ways to bring more and more of these things that I was good at together in one place. And that our virtues really become synergistic when we can do this and really amplifies that virtuous cycle. So now every day I am doing things that are giving me evidence of the kind of person I was. And it’s a total 180 from the period I went through several years ago where I was doubting a lot of these things and living through a lot of the stuff that I’m talking about here with low self-esteem and depression.
Brett McKay: Okay. So to activate our virtue self signaling theory flourishing way, first thing you start off with, just do more things that are virtuous. Do more things that will make yourself admire yourself. And that’s going to vary from person to person. Like you said, if you’re in that really depressed state, it’s going to be really small, just getting out of bed. But as you progress, it can be exercise every day. I’m going to journal every day. I’m going to socialize once a week. You mentioned it briefly, but I want to dig into it a little bit. There’s situations where you could be doing these admirable things, these virtuous things, but it’s not registering because your meter in your head is off. Talk about that. How can you restructure that cognitive restructuring you’ve talked about? What does that look like?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, I think a big part of this is that we live in a very different world than the one our brains evolved in. We’re getting evaluated sometimes based purely on how much we increase profits at the company we work for or we’re getting evaluated socially on social media networks that are totally different from our actual in-person tribes that we had really close knit like lifelong tribes many years ago. And so I think what this results in is our brains aren’t always getting the correct signals. They’re not always able to come to the right conclusions. And we see this in CBT. We see it in the most common distortions that we see in depression. Pretty much everything that I’ve put out there, I’ve included this list from David Burns is feeling good, which is an excellent book. Mind Over Mood is another great one for anyone who wants to dive into this process, but essentially starting to log your own thoughts, starting to write down when you’re in a bad mood and say, what was I thinking just before this? What is the thought that popped into my head that made me go into this really awful mood spiral?
And once you start doing this, once you’ve done it for a few weeks and you’ve written down all of your moods and the thoughts associated with them, you start noticing patterns. You start saying, wow, every time I’ve been in a bad mood this last couple of weeks, it’s been because I had a thought like this where I was feeling like everyone was ignoring me or, it’ll vary from one person to another. But essentially finding those patterns in the thoughts that are triggering your negative moods can be absolutely huge because if you find those major thought patterns and beliefs that are causing most of your bad moods and you identify a flaw, an error, a distortion in those thoughts, which are almost always present, you can just eliminate a huge chunk of your suffering instantly. And so really it comes down to examining those thoughts the way a scientist might and going in and saying, okay, what’s the evidence that this belief about myself is true? What’s the evidence that it’s not true? And when you really take a healthy approach to this, you compile the evidence very often you’ll say, actually, there’s a lot of conflicting evidence with this belief I have about myself. I thought I was totally incompetent, but look at all these examples I have that I am really competent.
Actually, I’m only like really occasionally incompetent. And so by doing this process and particularly by identifying the top cognitive distortions, there’s a list of 10 that I think everyone should look into. You can gradually start catching your brain making these self-critical mistakes. Now, like I’ve said, it’s not always a mistake. I think there are times when our beliefs about ourselves are true and that’s when we have to make sure to change our behavior. But there are also times when, yeah, we have a totally distorted belief and everyone can see it except for us. And cognitive restructuring is the process of getting to where you can see it the way everyone else can.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And that’s what a therapist does. They’re there to act as that scientist, that disinterested person. Let’s look at the evidence here. You say you’re a piece of crap, but let’s look at, are you really a piece of crap? And then they’re going to help you figure out, no, actually, I’m not a piece of crap. I mean, I do some things that aren’t great sometimes, but most of the time I’m a solid guy. But you can also do this on your own. There’s a lot of great books that you mentioned them that can guide you through these exercises where you can do this with yourself and journaling can play a role in that. So what do you hope people walk away with after they finish your book? What’s the big takeaway, you think?
Ryan Bush: There’s a lot, but I think the biggest is that ultimately there are a lot of people sort of trying to tell you how you should live your life, how someone of your group should be living. And ultimately, I think it’s safe to pretty much tune those things out and start trusting your own compass. You’ve got a compass inside your head that points directly toward the things that you admire most, that you value in other people. And that’s telling you how to live and direct and navigate your life. You just need to get better at listening to it and doing those things that will actually take you further in that direction. So I think getting better at listening to and actually trusting that voice of admiration. Ultimately, well-being can be a lot simpler than I think we make it out to be. There’s a million little habits people tell you to do to be optimally happy. But ultimately, I think the big one comes down to doing the things that earn your own admiration and following those ideals that are inscribed in your own brain wherever they lead.
Brett McKay: So we’re taking control of that sociometer in our heads that motivates us to do what the tribe values and really thinking about what we ourselves value and admire and living in accordance with those values. Sounds like Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Ryan Bush: Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of parallels there.
Brett McKay: Well, Ryan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Ryan Bush: Yeah, I really enjoyed it, too. The best place to go is designingthemind.org slash Becoming. If you can put that in the show notes, that will give you the link to get the new book for one. But you can also get a couple of my previous books for free sent right to your inbox if you go there. And you can also get the Psychotech sent to your inbox every Saturday. So, yeah.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Ryan Bush, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Ryan Bush: Thanks so much.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Ryan Bush. He’s the author of the book Become Who You Are. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, designingthemind.org. Also, check out our show notes at AOM.IS slash Become. Where you find links to resources and where you 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 view of our podcast on 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. It’s Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
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In resolving hundreds of kidnap-for-ransom cases involving gang leaders, pirates, and extortionists, Scott Walker, a former Scotland Yard detective, has learned a thing or two about how to negotiate and communicate in a crisis. He shares how to apply those lessons to the difficult conversations we all have in our everyday lives in his book Order Out of Chaos: Win Every Negotiation, Thrive in Adversity, and Become a World-Class Communicator, and we talk about his tips on today’s show.
Scott and I discuss what a “red center” means in a kidnap-for-ransom scenario and how to create one in your personal life, the “immediate action drill” that can help you stay in that red center, the importance of separating the decision-maker from the communicator in a negotiation and having a “battle rhythm,” why you don’t give hostage takers the money they ask for right away and how to structure a negotiation instead, and more.
Resources Related to the Podcast* AoM Article: The 7 Habits — Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood * AoM Podcast #648: Lessons in Building Rapport from Experts in Terrorist Interrogation * AoM Podcast #234: Haggling and Deal Making Advice From a FBI Hostage Negotiator * Box breathing * Physiological sigh
Connect With Scott Walker* Scott‘s website
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In resolving hundreds of kidnapped for ransom cases involving gang leaders, pirates, and extortionists, Scott Walker, a former Scotland Yard detective, has learned a thing or two about how to negotiate and communicate in a crisis. He shares how to apply those lessons to difficult conversations we all have in our everyday lives in his book, ‘Order Out of Chaos’. Win every negotiation, thrive in adversity, and become a world-class communicator. And we talk about his tips on today’s show. Scott and I discuss what a red center means in a kidnap for ransom scenario, and how to create one in your personal life, the immediate action drill that can help you stay in that red center, the importance of separating the decision-maker from the communicator in a negotiation and having a battle rhythm, why you don’t give hostage takers the money they ask for right away, and how to structure a negotiation instead and more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/walker. All right. Scott Walker, welcome to the show.
Scott Walker: Thank you for having me.
Brett McKay: So, you are a hostage negotiator. So, you negotiate with people who have taken other people hostage. You also help organizations who have had ransomware attacks. How’d you end up doing what you’re doing?
Scott Walker: Yes, a great question. I don’t actually recall the conversation at school where you sit down with a careers advisor and they say, so what is it you want to do? Do you want to be a train driver? A teacher? A doctor? Whatever? And at no point do I remember them saying, “Hey, Scott, do you want to negotiate ransoms for people?” Because it’s one of those jobs you kind of fall into, so to speak. I was a cop. I was a detective in London, Scotland Yard, for about 16 years. And towards the end of my career there, I got introduced to the world of kidnap for ransom negotiation and operations to help resolve those and get the hostages back. And I did that for a number of years. And when I left the police, I went to work for a consultancy firm that specialized in crisis response, you could call it, which ultimately was about flying off all over the world, working with families and organizations to get their loved ones and colleagues back who’d been taken hostage, had been kidnapped and a ransom was being demanded.
Brett McKay: Are you still working with that company or are you doing it on your own now as a consultant?
Scott Walker: Yeah. I’m doing it more by myself now. And over the last couple of years particularly, it’s taking all those lessons and themes and patterns and tools and techniques that I learned over hundreds of cases over many years into the business world, into the corporate world, and also into people’s personal lives as well. How can you have really difficult conversations? How can you succeed in those and just have better relationships and communicate better regardless of which area of your life really?
Brett McKay: Oh, so you’re taking the lessons you’ve learned as a hostage negotiator and helping people be better negotiators in everyday aspects of their lives?
Scott Walker: Yeah. It’s how to think, feel, and act differently in a better way, particularly in times of stress, uncertainty, overwhelm, conflict, crisis, a bit like the world we’re living in right now. And in a way, it doesn’t really matter what the circumstances, the principles apply, or at least the underlying principles apply. And then you can just adapt accordingly depending on what your needs and circumstances are.
Brett McKay: So, this is a world that is just new to me. I don’t know anything about it. How often does kidnap for ransom cases happen? Does it happen more often than we’re aware of that you see in the news?
Scott Walker: An accurate figure for how many kidnaps take place each year is not really known. Because if you think about it, the places in the world where these kidnappings take place, the government, the tourist department are not gonna say, “Hey, we’re the kidnapped capital of the world. Come and invest your business and your hard-earned money here or will come and visit us as a tourist.” There are probably 40,000 to 50,000 kidnappings a year worldwide. That’s what we estimate. Probably only about 10,000 of those are actually recorded. But when I was working in London in the police, we had about one a week.
Maybe you about 50-52 kidnappings a year there? And then when I worked in the private sector, we were dealing with over 100 a year, just us as a small team doing that. But the chances of the average Joe walking down the street somewhere becoming a victim of a kidnap is really slim. You have to be unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Usually, they’re targeted ’cause they’re high net worth, or there’s some kind of, we used to call them bad on bad, where a criminal gang would kidnap another criminal or a family member of another criminal for retribution or to pay off some debt or for lack of respect or whatever it may be. But for the average person, you’ve got to be really unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s talk about how people can apply the lessons that you’ve learned as a hostage negotiator to their everyday negotiations or even just difficult conversations you have at work or with family members. You say and you argue that dealing with kidnappers is easy. And I think when most people hear that, they think, are you crazy? That’s the most… Like you’re dealing with irrational people. It’s one of the most stressful situations you could be in because the person who’s kidnapping is often threatening the life of the person they’ve taken hostage. Why do you think dealing with kidnappers is easy?
Scott Walker: At the end of the day, it’s a business transaction nine times out of 10. They have something we want, the hostages, and we have something they want, primarily money. And it’s coming to an agreement about how much that’s gonna be and when. How they’re going to get it and how we’re going to get the hostages back. I appreciate if you’re the family of the hostages, you’re not going to see it like that, but ultimately that’s what it comes down to. And there’s a bit of leverage we can apply there. And ultimately it’s pretty straightforward. Whereas what the challenge is, is on your own side and this applies to the big business world as well. It’s when the egos and the internal politics and the competing demands and the conflicting arguments and priorities all come into play. We call it the crisis within the crisis. And you can see that in a lot of, as I said, business negotiations where a lot of the time will be spent dealing with internal stakeholders who all want to have their say. They all want a piece of the action.
They all want to feel as if they’re in control or they’re dictating the narrative somehow. And I’d say probably 80% of my time on all of my kidnap and other crisis negotiations around the world, 80% of my time was spent managing the client, managing their expectations, their egos, their emotions, their needs, their wants, the challenges that they were going through. And so at times it’s quite a relief to be able to get onto the phone with the kidnappers and come up with a straight forward negotiation, so to speak. But that goes back to the point you made about irrational actors, irrational people, difficult conversations. And I think one of the most effective ways of dealing with those kinds of situations, realizing that actually it’s not about me, so to speak. I need to be able to understand where is the other person coming from? What’s their underlying needs, for example? And it’s that classic saying, first seek to understand before being understood. And by spending the time, bringing more curiosity than assumption to the table and working out, okay, what’s really going on for this person? Then that takes a pressure off you slightly. And it means you can then tailor your communication style, your part of the conversation to actually address that.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, a hostage negotiation is, it’s a business negotiation. And I imagine that’s the value you bring as a crisis negotiator, is you’re a third party. Of course, you care about this person who’s been taken hostage, but you’re detached, like you’re not as invested as the family members who have their loved one. And so they’re thinking, oh, my gosh, I got to do whatever I can to get this person back home safely. They’re going to get angry when the hostage takers don’t cooperate. They might say something irrational, but you as a third party, you’re able to kind of keep it cool and detached.
Scott Walker: Yes. And I think that’s a great way of highlighting that if you can regulate your own emotions, and identify the people’s emotions, you can go some way to bring in about far more calm and equanimity and balance and groundedness to the situation. And yes, by default, my position is coming in as a third party, so to speak, I bring that naturally, because it’s not my loved one that’s been taken. But even dealing with my own kids or in my own personal life, where there’s some that really triggers me or winds me up. Actually, initially, I’ve now over many, many years of getting it wrong, been able to regulate, understand, okay, what is showing up for me now in my body, my emotions, and then by being able to identify it and name it, that can somehow dissipate the impact it’s having on me, which means I can bring around more objective, rational thinking and decision making, rather than some knee jerk reaction.
And really, when you think about it, it’s a skill that we’re all capable of, and we get plenty of opportunities all day, every day. It could be the person who cuts you up in traffic, or is rude to you on the subway, or it could be an ego driven boss. There’s all these moments, all these pockets of time and situations where it gives you this great opportunity to practice this regulation. And if you can do that, it’s a real superpower in that actually less and less things phase you.
Brett McKay: So in your book, ‘Order Out of Chaos’, you walk readers through a process and practices that they can implement in their own lives so that they can be more like a hostage negotiator, that sort of objective, third party negotiator in their own personal negotiations. And one thing you talked about at the very beginning is this idea, as a negotiator, you want to develop what’s called a red center. What’s a red center in hostage negotiation? And then how can people develop their own red center in their own difficult conversations?
Scott Walker: A red center, particularly in law enforcement terms, is the physical location where the telephone calls are being received from the kidnappers. It’s where the family member, for example, is receiving the demands and the threats. So, it could be the family kitchen, it could be a hotel room, it could be an office somewhere. And that is the place where we have to bring order out of chaos, which is why I called the book this. It’s a place that’s high emotion, lots of irrational thinking, understandably, and it’s about bringing this calmness so we can actually come up with a proper negotiation strategy and communicate it in the most effective way possible.
And my job was actually to bring about that calm, was to instill that in what is a really challenging situation. And I realized over time in many, many, many cases in many years was, you know what? We’ve got our own red center within us, each and every one of us. And it’s this place that no matter how challenging, how many problems or issues that get thrown at us in life, personally, professionally, we’ve all got this inner ability, it’s like an inner resilience almost, that we have that ability to overcome whatever is put in front of us. And if we can master that mindset, and tap into those resources that we have, then actually nothing is really gonna knock us off our path again.
And just like anything, it’s like working a muscle, it’s muscle memory. It’s like going to the gym. You don’t just go once and expect to get the body of Adonis. You have to practice it and reinforce it daily, which is why I was saying a while ago that every day life presents you with opportunities to practice emotional regulation, getting your mindset to where it needs to be, and developing this inner resilience, this red center that actually you’re gonna find a way through this no matter how challenging or how stressful the conversation, the negotiation, the business presentation, that difficult phone call with a loved one you’ve been putting off, or whatever it may be.
Brett McKay: This idea of a personal red center. It reminds me of the inner citadel that Marcus Aurelius talked about.
Scott Walker: Yeah. Actually I never thought of it like that, but that’s exactly what it is. And do you know what? It’s the only thing really, now that you’ve mentioned it. It’s the only thing, I guess, that you have complete control over. You can’t control the weather. You can’t control the taxes. You can’t control traffic or what someone is gonna do or not do or say or not say. But what you can control is what goes on between that stimulus, that trigger, and your response. And as you described there, the stoic approach, I guess, of this citadel. I control what goes on within these walls here. And that’s what… You can become the master of that domain, so to speak. So, I like that analogy there. Thanks.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So in any difficult conversation and negotiation, you want to develop this red center, this inner citadel where you’re in control, you’re still gonna feel emotions, but you’re gonna…
Scott Walker: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Control them and manage them effectively.
Scott Walker: That’s it.
Brett McKay: Let’s talk about how we can do that. What are some things that you do to maintain your cool in a hostage negotiation? Especially, in situations where there are threats about killing the hostage, do you have processes that you go through to keep yourself centered and in that personal red center?
Scott Walker: Yeah. And again these have been developed over time, and these are tools and techniques that I know work when the stakes can’t get any higher, when there’s a mock execution on the phone, the family is in bits, the threats are coming in. The negotiation is not really working that well for a whole host of reasons. The money is not becoming available. The hostages are in poor health. So, anything that can go wrong is going wrong. And as the negotiators, the… As the crisis response consultant, so to speak, all eyes are on me or people that are doing my job to resolve this. And so I can’t afford to let my emotions or mindset be anything other than really, really strong and agile in the moment.
And so the techniques I’ve developed and a sense of discovered that they’re grounded in neuroscience and what have you, I call it the immediate action drill. And this is something that I keep in my back pocket, even to this day. The kids know what button to press or, as I said, somebody on the train tube subway or in the traffic. And the first part of the immediate action drill is interrupting the pattern. It’s so important that, what I mean by that is something is said or something happens, or you get the trigger, there’s a danger, you can just stay so focused on, that you get that tunnel vision and then you just get lost in a negative, disempowering story that plays on loop over and over and over again.
And interrupting the pattern could be something as simple as standing up and going outside for a bit of fresh air, or going for a walk, or going to the gym, or having a glass of water, or putting some music, on. Something to… Or it could be some breathing techniques. It could be something to interrupt the pattern, the situation that you’ve just found yourself in. And from that moment, the second stage is about riding the wave. So, for any surfers, or skiers, or skateboarders, listening, is imagine you’ve interrupted the pattern and now we wanna ride the wave. And this is the wave that happens to us biologically, chemically is for about 90 seconds, two minutes maybe tops, we have this rush of cortisol and adrenaline and other chemicals pumping through our bodies when we face the whole fight, flight, and freeze response. And so that 90 seconds, that two minutes, we wanna ride the wave. We want to feel the feeling and drop the story. It doesn’t matter why we’re feeling this, we just need to tune in and allow that to dissipate. And if after about 90 seconds, two minutes, it’s still going, it just means we’re stuck in a story or some trauma pattern there.
But then, so we’ve interrupted the pattern, we’re really tuning into what’s showing up for us, riding the wave for 90 seconds, two minutes. And then the third step is to ask better questions. And you can only do that when you’ve regulated, when you’ve brought the nervous system into balance and better questions such as, okay, what am I missing here? What’s the opportunity? What’s the learning or insight? What else could this mean? What can I be grateful for? Whatever happens to be. And so it’s asking better questions because if you ask better questions, you’re gonna get better answers. But you can only do that from a regulated state. And if for some reason that’s still not quite working, I’ll just go back to do some breathing techniques such as box breathing, which is quite a popular and an effective one where you breathe in for four seconds, you hold it for four, you exhale for four, and then you breathe in again, you hold it, and then you breath in again for four. So you just repeat the cycle.
Or there’s the physiological sigh where you breathe in through your nose and then before you breathe out, you do an extra little in breath as well through the nose. And then there’s a longer exhale. And again, these are just proven ways of regulating a system. And I would do this every time before I walked into the room where the kidnappers were gonna phone, before I sat down with a family or the client, I would do that so I could regulate my emotions. And if we were using a communicator because of a language barrier who was gonna speak to the kidnappers, I would get them to do that as well. Either box breathing or the physiological sigh or whatever technique worked for them so they could regulate, they weren’t stuck in a pattern and that we were able to ask better questions if we need to. And the same applies to people’s personal lives as well. The techniques work.
Brett McKay: Yeah. If you are dealing with a kid who’s frustrating ’cause they’re not wanting to do their homework, you feel triggered, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m getting angry here.” You can just do this really quickly. Interrupt the pattern. That might just be, I’m gonna leave the room and say, “Hey, we’ll talk about this here in a bit.” And then you can do the process of ride the wave, ask better questions like, okay, what am I missing here about what my kid’s point of view is and how can I better understand them? And then maybe do some box breathing and then you can come back and begin the conversation again.
Scott Walker: Yeah, and absolutely. And dealing with your kids, for example, or a loved one, a partner, a friend, a colleague is, you can look at it for… You look at your hands, look at your both hands. You look at your left hand and you go, “Okay, this is the person, this is their true self, this is their identity, them as a person,” you know, they’re inherently a good person. And in the right hand you look at them and go, well actually this is the behavior that’s showing up. These are the unkind, unhelpful, disruptive, so-called bad behavior. And it’s about separating the two. So, then you can deal with the behavior that’s manifesting itself rather than what we generally do. It’s really both together and we attack the person as opposed to the behavior. And I think by separating that as part of that immediate action drill as well, can go some way to avoiding, you know, us jumping in or making the situation even worse by going into a spiral or a tit for tat, arguing back and forth, which isn’t really gonna resolve anything.
Brett McKay: I can see this happening in a business negotiation. Maybe in a business negotiation, there’s multiple issues being discussed. And let’s say there’s one issue where you can sense that there’s a trigger, like people are uncomfortable, there’s some tension there. You can interrupt that pattern there with that issue by saying, “Hey, I sense we’re reaching an impasse here, let’s table this for now and then we can discuss these other issues that are not as pertinent or not as heavy.” And then you can come back to that one issue once you’ve calmed yourself down.
Scott Walker: Absolutely. Which is why you get saying such as, well, okay, well let me sleep on it, or let’s have a coffee break. Let’s, you know, people can, if you have what I call a sensory acuity, if you can walk into a room or you’re sat in a room for a long period of time and sense, actually this is… We need a break and the tension is getting too much, something is not quite right, people are flagging, the air is getting quite irritable. We just need to interrupt what is going on here. So, we’ll go outside for a bit of fresh air. Let’s grab a coffee and we’ll come back in half an hour. And something as simple as that. You’re right, it may sound really, really super simple, but it works.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Scott Walker: And which is why I always recommend clients now in business negotiations, particularly if they’re face to face, is have somebody in the room on your side whose sole job is to observe. They’re not to actually take upon the negotiation itself. Their job is just to pick up on all the nuances and the context and the body language and what is not being said. And the mood. And the energy. Because so often we can get narrow focus, we get tunnel focused onto the specifics of a negotiation. We can sometimes miss the bigger picture. And those people who are the observers, they’re worth their waiting goal, because they’re the ones who can pick up stuff and go, well actually we’re not in alignment here. There’s a mismatch, there’s an incongruency between what’s being said and everything else I’m noticing we need to take 20 minutes out ’cause we need to have a conversation about this.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. That reminds me that idea of having an observer in a negotiation reminds me of another point you make as a hostage negotiator, one of the things you do is you have a team, there’s a big team going on in a hostage negotiation. One thing you do is you separate the people who are the decision makers in the hostage negotiation from the person who’s communicating. Why do you do that?
Scott Walker: Commanders command and negotiators negotiate. Absolutely, because if I’m the key decision maker and I’m jumping on the phone with, it could be anybody, it could be kidnappers, it could be in a business deal. I have nowhere left to go. I can’t put any buffer, any firewall. I can’t store for time ’cause I can’t go, well, let me check with the boss if I am the boss. And not only that, it allows… Even if it’s just you, even if you are buying a car for example, you could still separate the negotiating and the decision making yourself. Which again, it goes back to that point I made just now is, well, let me sleep on it. I wanna think about it. Let me come back to you on that. It’s really important to build that buffer so you don’t get caught up in the whole emotion of it. Because we do make decisions emotionally and then look to justify them rationally afterwards. Whereas, because we know that, well, let’s put a bit of time in so we can make sure they have the right emotions. And we are not making a decision in the moment out of fear, greed or whatever it may be. And so by separating that ideally with two or more people, but even if it’s just you, the same principles apply.
Brett McKay: And while what this does, it just helps you bring in that idea of you being a disinterested objective third party. You’re trying to get to that as close as possible by doing that.
Scott Walker: Yeah. It just brings a bit more space and control and enables you to make better decisions that are gonna be in your interest ultimately, rather than agreeing to something, and then you come off the phone or you walk out the room and going, “Oh, we could have asked for more money. Or do you know what? We’ve been ripped off here.” Which happens to all of us because we make those decisions too quickly because we’re caught up in the emotion and the high drama, the negotiation, rather than having some time to think about it.
Brett McKay: And so the idea is you need to have a plan whenever you reach one of those decision points where you could get caught up in the emotions as the communicator and negotiator, you know, doing it by yourself. Have a plan where, “Okay, I reached this point where I can see my emotions are getting the best of me. That’s when I need to separate the two.” The inner negotiator, the inner communicator, and then take a break and then let the decision maker do the decision making and then come back and let the communicator do the communicating.
Scott Walker: Yeah. And that could even be a five minute gap. It doesn’t have to be five weeks, you know what I mean? It’s just separating it. You bring an intentionality to it, I guess, of right, I’m deliberately, consciously putting a firewall in place now between this negotiation. Okay, well let me, I’m gonna go off for half an hour. I’m gonna come back and then I’ll make a decision.
Brett McKay: What do you do in the situation as a hostage negotiator? ‘Cause I’m sure this happens there, ’cause this happens in regular negotiations. Let’s say you do want to put some space, “Okay, I wanna interrupt the pattern here. I want some time to think about it.” But the other party is like, “No. You gotta make a decision now. It’s do or die.” How do you handle that?
Scott Walker: Okay. Well, we would’ve preempted this ahead of time and we can come onto that later about what we call that and how we do that. But in terms of, it’s just explaining, well, if you want me to get the money, we need time to do that. And all the time I’m on the phone to you, I’m not gonna be able to get the money. It’s a lot of money you’re asking for, we’re a poor company, we’re a poor family, whatever. Actually, I need to go and speak to people. I need to try and get the money from them. I need to raise the funds, whatever it is. So, you’re building in a narrative, you’re building in a story, a credible story as to why you need time. And then you can go, well, “Do you know what? Let’s speak again, same time tomorrow.” And that helps with what we call the battle rhythm of being able to manage this over a long period of time without getting burnt out. And so if we can buy time, if we can separate the negotiation from the decision making, and it just means it’s far more sustainable and everybody stays far more alert and in better shape, and they can make better decisions. And ultimately it’s about the safe and the timely release of the hostages.
Brett McKay: Tell us more about this battle rhythm idea in hostage negotiation.
Scott Walker: Yeah. What it is, is when you don’t have an effective battle rhythm, what that looks like is people on edge 24/7, every phone call notification ping on their phone or computer, they think it’s from the kidnappers. They don’t sleep, they can’t eat, they don’t get any rest. And that’s fine for a couple of days, but after week, two weeks, two months, three months, six months, it’s just not sustainable. And the longer that goes on without an effective battle rhythm, people get burnt out and make poor decisions, and ultimately people can die as a result of that. And so what a battle rhythm really is, it’s about a routine. It’s about a structure. Again, this applies to the business world as well. Is, “Okay, we’re gonna sit down and we’re gonna negotiate between 2:00 and 4:00 PM every day.” And outside of that, each side is gonna work on their side of the deal, you know, their offers and counter offers and dealing with all the demands and threats maybe that are showing up. But it also means people get a chance to sleep, to eat, to rest, to think through things, to work out 4, 5, 6 steps ahead, particularly kidnapping. “Okay. Well, we need to start thinking about how we’re gonna get the money together and who’s gonna transport it, who’s gonna carry it to the kidnappers, for example.” So, that’s really what we mean by a battle rhythm.
Brett McKay: It’s interesting, I didn’t know this about hostage negotiations. You’d think hostage negotiations, they’d be resolved really quick. But the way you describe it, it can be a very long drawn out affair.
Scott Walker: Well, it’s worth emphasizing the different terms here, the hostage taking that people think of when we use that term, they think it’s like a bank robbery gone wrong, or it’s in a domestic situation where usually a disgruntled husband is taking the wife hostage because she’s having an affair with somebody. Or the bank robbers are caught in the bank and they can’t escape. Those situations aren’t that common. So, really what we’re talking about is somebody is on the way to the factory in West Africa or Latin America or Southeast Asia somewhere, and a kidnapping gang want to take them. And then we’re gonna ransom the family or the company for money. And that is what we’re talking about really here. And I said that could take days, weeks, or months to resolve.
Brett McKay: So, the battle rhythm is just establishing structure to the conversation that you’re having?
Scott Walker: Yeah. So, you can have a sustainable negotiation, which ultimately is important because if you don’t have it, it can impact the efficacy of the negotiation, which ultimately can impact the chances of the hostages coming back alive.
Brett McKay: And you can do this in your own personal negotiations where you say, “Hey, we’ll discuss this for 30 minutes and then we’ll take a break if it hasn’t been resolved. And then we’ll come back to it 10 minutes later.”
Scott Walker: Yeah. And as I said, we’ll sit down, we’ll meet up here in the meeting room between 2:00 and 4:00 every day and look to work through this. And then in the time outside of that, each side will have their own challenges and issues as I mentioned at the beginning. They’ll have their own crisis within a crisis, so to speak, where they’ll have to brief upwards. They’ll have to come together and work out what they’re gonna do and all the challenges and all the issues and problems that can come from doing these big negotiations. And so it’s in everybody’s interest to do this.
Brett McKay: Well, another aspect of establishing parameters for the negotiation, not only establishing a rhythm, it’s actually establishing who will be doing the talking and who you will talk to. ‘Cause one thing you talk about in the book is a tactic that hostage takers will often use is they’ll go to multiple parties and try to negotiate with multiple parties. Why do they do that?
Scott Walker: To spread fear, distress, dissent, confusion. Which is why one of my key roles at the very beginning is to try and get some control over those communications. And so we say it’s, we want one number, one voice and one message. We want the kidnappers and us to be speaking on one number. We want one voice on either side, and there’s gonna be a clear message, certainly from our side to them, one clear message. We don’t want four, five, six different people all trying to get involved, all trying to have their say, all in these parallel negotiations because ultimately it confuses the situation. It can lengthen the negotiations and ultimately threaten the ultimate outcome, which is the release of the hostages or in a business context, the deal. But you often see that particularly in the business world is where, well actually in kidnapping where people come out of the woodwork, they all feel as if they should have a say or an involvement. And sometimes they’ll open up these parallel lines of dialogue without each, you know, the other… The partner of negotiation realizing this, and it rarely ends up well.
Brett McKay: You know, who does this tactic very well of causing discord and confusion? Kids do this when they go to their parents, they’re like, “Hey dad, can I go to the amusement park?” And then your dad gives an answer, and then they also go to the mom, “Mom, can I go to the amusement park?” And then, they give different answers, kids are… They know about that.
Scott Walker: Yeah. They’re the best, best negotiators going around. And I’ll tell you what, if anyone listening has got kids that realize actually we wanna watch and learn how they do it. ‘Cause kids are masters at it, it must be an inherent thing that as adults, we lose it over time, perhaps. I don’t know.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So, it’s something you can do when your kids do that and they ask you a question where it’s kind of like, “Oh, I’m not sure.” Just be like, “Well, let’s talk about it with your mom as well.”
Scott Walker: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah [laughter]
Brett McKay: Yeah. You just nip that in the bud. Another aspect of prepping for a hostage negotiation is this idea of bunch of fives. What is that?
Scott Walker: Yeah. This is something I was alluded to a short while ago around as part of the preparation for any form of negotiation, if you can come up with a bunch of fives, and again, just imagine your hand, the palm of your hand, if you can think of, okay, what are the top three, four, five objections, challenges, opticals questions, threats, demands, issues, whatever the other side is likely to levy against you, if you can understand and work out what they’re likely to be ahead of time, that’s a great position to be in because you can then preempt, and you can mitigate against them. You could even introduce them yourself, you know, they’re the elephant in the room, so to speak, and you could just introduce them into the negotiation, and it gets it out the way because if there’s a chance that the other side are gonna levy them against you, it means that it’s gonna be playing on their minds somewhere. Which is why if you can have, and we use this in a kidnapped negotiation. We want a conflict call. We call it the conflict call.
We want that as soon as possible. And this is the phone call with the kidnappers where they’ll ask for, say, I don’t know a million dollars. And the family has got about 20,000. So, there’s a huge, huge disparity between the two. And so that initial conflict call is when we’re looking to manage the kidnapper’s expectations. Our initial offer could I don’t know, $10,000-$15,000. And obviously the kidnappers are not gonna respond too well to that, but it’s far better to have that at the outset than wait till you’re two, three, four, five weeks into the negotiation. And so this bunch of fives allows you to get to that position and have that conversation from a place of strength, because it’s not gonna faze you when the other side suddenly come out with the threat, the demand, the question, the challenge, the obstacle, the objection. And so it’s time spent preparing for that is time well spent in my experience.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, all the things we’ve talked about so far, the immediate action drill where you interrupt the pattern, ride the wave, maybe do some breathing, the separating the decision maker from the negotiator, this bunch of fives, this is all about developing that red center, that mental fortitude that you’ll stay calm when you’re in the process of negotiation. Let’s talk about actually just the negotiation process specifically. You talk about how it’s important to establish empathy with the other party that you’re negotiating with. And I think people can understand that when you’re in a business negotiation, you wanna understand what people’s needs and wants are. Why would you wanna develop empathy with a hostage taker who is threatening the life of somebody?
Scott Walker: I think it’s worth emphasizing what empathy is not at the outset. Empathy is not agreeing with somebody. It’s not acquiescing, it’s not condoning, it’s not even necessarily being particularly pleasant or nice. [laughter] Empathy, it’s a verb, it’s a doing word. It’s what you do to demonstrate you understand where the other person is at or where they’re coming from or what’s going on in their mind or their position. And people have difficulty with that because they bring their own ego to bear in the driving seat. And they allow that to get in the way and they’ll then be judging the other person where again, it’s really worth emphasizing, it doesn’t matter if I disagree with the person. In fact, empathizing with the other side when we do disagree, when we have nothing in common is really, really powerful. But if I can do that, I’ll explain how we can do that in a moment, but if I do that, if I can demonstrate that empathy, it enables them to feel seen, heard, and understood. And this is not some kind of woo-woo, fluffy nonsense.
This is, it’s grounded in neuroscience and it works. I’ve seen it work time and time again, both in situations where high stakes, life or death situations, and in a more benign, let’s say, corporate environment. If people feel as if they’ve been listened to and that the other side gets them, they’re more likely to agree to your terms and suggestions. And actually by empathizing, you’re earning the right, you’re building the trust, you’re earning the right to then look about influencing and persuading the other person to do something that they may not initially wanna do. And the way we can demonstrate that empathy is first of all, remove our judgment and ego out of the way. And it could be something simple as just summarizing where you think that the person is at. It’s like, okay, well, before we go any further, is it okay if I just share with you where I think you’re at with this deal? You think actually this deal, it’s a lot of money. It’s probably more money than you wanna pay right now.
You feel that actually we’re in a stronger position here and you may even feel as if we’re looking to rip you off because we’ve inserted these terms and conditions or clauses in the deal that you probably feel as if they’re not really fair to you. And this isn’t the first time this has happened. This is the third time as two businesses we’ve been in this position. And they’ll go, “Yeah, actually, Scott, yeah, Scott gets me. He understands. Even if I disagree with him thinking, well, actually, this is all above and beyond. It’s a standard contract, standard terms and conditions. And actually you’ve signed this many times before without any problem.” It doesn’t matter about that. I just wander to the side to think, “Ah, they understand me. They get me.” And then you’re almost given an open goal in which you can then start to influence and persuade.
Brett McKay: So yeah, you can do this even when the guy is saying, “I need a million dollars now or I’m killing this person.”
Scott Walker: Yeah. And it’s like, okay, well, “Hey, it sounds like getting a deal here pretty quickly is important to you so you can get back to your family or whatever it is you’re doing. And actually you believe that we’ve got the money at hand to pay you so we can get our loved one back.” And they go, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. You’ve got the money we wanted. Otherwise we’re gonna kill them.” Okay. Well, then we can actually at that point go, “Well, please, the responsibility of the hostages is down to you. I know this is important. I know you want this resolved, but you must look after the hostages. And if you do that, we’re gonna do our best to get you as much money as possible.”
Brett McKay: Another thing you do in a hostage negotiation is this idea of decreasing increase. What is that? And how do you use that in a hostage negotiation?
Scott Walker: Decreasing increases how the offer, counter offer, demand, counter demand, et cetera, how that goes. So, say there’s an initial demand for a million dollars and we, the family or the company, they can maybe get quarter of a million. That’s the maximum amount of money they can get. And so we would make an initial offer of, I don’t know, let’s say 150,000. And then each time we make an offer, we would do slightly less than the previous one. So, each time we offer some money, it’s less than the previous offer, which signals to the kidnappers where this is gonna go. Actually, they’re not gonna get a huge jump, a huge increase anymore. And the longer this goes on, the less and less we offer. The challenge comes when sometimes the kidnappers will say, “Okay, okay, this has gone on long enough. We understand where you’re at. You can’t get this much money. But actually, you know what? We’ll settle first.”
Let’s say we’re at $200,000 so far. They’ve declined that offer. And they’ll go, “Okay, actually, if you can get 220,000 to us by tomorrow, we’ll release the hostages.” If our last couple of offers have been in increments of maybe a 10,000, a 5000, and a 3000, and then all of a sudden we’re gonna find an extra 20,000 overnight, the kidnappers are gonna go, “Well, hang on. You’ve been telling me you could only find 3000 for the last couple of days, and now you’ve suddenly found 20,000 overnight? Well, then they’re gonna hold on for more.” And so it’s a way of bringing some discipline, I guess, and some structure to the negotiations. And again, as I said, it manages expectations. It sets the trajectory of where this is gonna end.
Brett McKay: That seems counterintuitive that you wouldn’t to just give the money that you have available, because I’m sure their loved ones are like, “Geez, I want my son back alive. So, just give them the $250,000.” Why wouldn’t you just wanna give the hostage takers the money they asked for right up front?
Scott Walker: That question probably gets asked on every single case. And the reason we don’t do that, the reason we don’t wanna do that, well, you imagine if we paid what they asked for too quickly, what do you think is likely to happen as a result of that?
Brett McKay: I guess they’ll just ask for more.
Scott Walker: They’ll go, “Thank you for the down payment. Thank you for the deposit. Now we’re ready to negotiate. And not only are we gonna keep that money, the poor courier, the poor person who you’ve managed to persuade to bring us the ransom money, we’re gonna keep him as a hostage as well.” And so what we wanna do, and it’s counterintuitive, I get that. But by bringing about this discipline in the negotiation, it actually shortens the amount of time that the hostages are kept for. And so we want the kidnappers to feel as if there’s no more money left. Because in the business deal as well, if you think there’s more money left on the table, you’re not gonna agree to a deal. And the kidnappers are no different to that. And we call it squeezing the orange. We want them to feel as if they squeezed every last drop of juice out of us so they don’t come back for more, so they don’t release the hostage and then they kidnap them or a family member next week, for example.
Brett McKay: So to come back to the decreasing increases technique, this would be like you’re negotiating for a new car and you throw out a low number and then that’s rejected and with your subsequent offers, what happens?
Scott Walker: The money goes up. My offers to pay more money would increase, but the amount that they would increase would decrease each time.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. Well, Scott, this has been a great conversation. I think the big takeaway is from this conversation, in a negotiation or a difficult conversation, you got to keep that red center, that inner citadel. We talked about some tactics you can do to do that. Is there like one thing you think that if someone started implementing today with difficult conversations they’re having, whether it’s at work or at home, where they’d see immediate return on investment?
Scott Walker: I would say it’s the emotional regulation piece. It’s any conversation or every conversation you have now and you can feel yourself getting a bit riled, it’s just pause even if it’s for a split second and just notice, “Actually, do you know what? I can really feel that tension coming up in my body. Okay, well, let me just focus on that. Let me breathe through it and then I can reengage.” And the more you can practice that, this can be a split second or one or two seconds maximum by the time you’ve practiced this. And I would urge people to then seek out worthy opponents, I call them. Those are those people who always annoy you and frustrate you or the situations you know are likely to be testing because it’s just a great practice to work those emotional regulation muscles. And if you can do that, it means you’re never gonna get fazed again in a negotiation when it really counts.
Brett McKay: Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Scott Walker: Yeah. They can go to the website scottwalkerbooks.co.uk and there’s more details on there. Sign up for the newsletter and get a copy of the book and learn about my negotiation workshops and other good stuff.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Scott Walker, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Scott Walker: Thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Scott Walker. He’s the author of the book ‘Order Out of Chaos’. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, scottwalkerbooks.co.uk. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/walker, you’ll find links to our 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 while you’re there, make sure to sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a weekly option and a daily option, they’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to review our podcast on 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. Until next time it is Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
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In the 19th century, Cerro Gordo, which sits above Death Valley, was the largest silver mine in America, a place where dreamers came to strike it rich. In the 21st century, Brent Underwood used his life savings to buy what had become an abandoned ghost town, and ended up finding a very different kind of wealth there.
Brent has spent four years living in Cerro Gordo and has documented the details of the mines he’s explored, the artifacts he’s found, and how he’s restoring the town on his popular YouTube channel, Ghost Town Living. Now, in a book by the same name, he takes a wider-view lens on his adventures there and shares the big lessons he’s learned from his experiences and from the original residents of Cerro Gordo. We get into some of those lessons on today’s show. We first talk about how and why Brent bought a ghost town as a way of escaping a typical 9-5 life and finding a deeper longer-term purpose. We then discuss what restoring Cerro Gordo has taught him about the necessity of getting started and taking real action, how learning the context of what you do can add greater meaning to it, the importance of understanding the long-term consequences of short-term thinking, the satisfactions that come with being a high-agency person, and more.
Resources Related to the Podcast* Burrow Schmidt Tunnel * Owens Lake * AoM Article: Become a Self-Starter * AoM Article: Meditations on the Wisdom of Action
Connect With Brent Underwood* Ghost Town Living on YouTube * Brent on IG * Brent on X
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In the 19th century, Cerro Gordo, which sits above Death Valley, was the largest silver mine in America, a place where dreamers came to strike it rich. In the 21st century, Brent Underwood used his life savings to buy what had become an abandoned ghost town and ended up finding a very different kind of wealth there. Brent has spent four years living in Cerro Gordo and has documented the details of the mines he’s explored, the artifacts he’s found and how he’s restoring the town on his popular YouTube channel, Ghost Town Living. Now, in a book by the same name, he takes a wider view lens on his adventures there and shares the big lessons he’s learned from his experiences from the original residents of Cerro Gordo.
We get into some of those lessons on today’s show. We first talk about how and why Brent bought a ghost town as a way escaping a typical 9:00 to 5:00 life, and finding a deeper, longer term purpose. We then discuss what restoring Cerro Gordo has taught him about the necessity of getting started and taking real action, how learning the context of what you do can add greater meaning to it, the importance of understanding the long-term consequences of short-term thinking, the satisfactions that come with being a high agency person and more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/ghosttown. All right, Brent Underwood, welcome to the show.
Brent Underwood: Oh, man, thank you for having me.
Brett McKay: So you are the owner of a ghost town that was once a thriving mining town at the edge of Death Valley. How does a guy like you end up owning an abandoned mining town?
Brent Underwood: Yes, that is a question I seem to ask myself a lot, but I think it was about the right project at the right time for me. I have a background in hospitality and marketing and storytelling and for me, I had just hit that age of 30 where I had a comfortable job, a comfortable apartment, I was living in Austin, Texas, working in mostly digital marketing. I just felt like there was something kind of missing, that there must be more out there, that there was this untapped potential that I wasn’t fulfilling and I just wanted to do something real in the real world. I think that’s kind of the driving force behind it to provide a little more context, but the practical of how you get it, I got a hard money loan, which is basically like as close to a loan shark as you can get these days that fronted a lot of the money, called up some friends to get the rest of the money and bought it in 2018.
Brett McKay: And how did you even know that this was on the market? I mean, that’s kind of weird. You never really see towns, entire towns going on the market. How did you figure this out?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, a buddy of mine was living in Los Angeles and he saw this link that said, “Buy your own town for under a million dollars.” And it was just an amazing headline for an article. And he texted it to me in the middle of the night, and I was living in Austin, Texas at the time and I was running a bed and breakfast basically down there. And he said, “Hey, this might be your next project, lol.” He kind of sent it over as a joke. And for me it was, again, just like it struck me at the right moment and I was just enthralled. It was just everything that I could have ever wanted, I thought. And the more I read about it, I learned about the town, I learned that once upon a time, it was the largest silver mine in California, that there used to be 4,000 residents here and there used to just be like a real life, it felt like a real life western kind of playing out in front of me. And so I just fell in love.
Brett McKay: So when you saw it, when you saw the link, you went to the listing, what did you think you were gonna do with this? Like, I’m gonna buy this thing. What were you hoping to do with it?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, I think, the initial thought was hospitality, some type of overnight accommodation. That was kind of what I had been doing a little bit kind of on the side in Austin. So I thought, hey, this is a beautiful property. To set the context a little bit more, there’s about 400 acres here. There’s about 22 buildings and the town was most prevalent in the 1860s and it’s about three and a half hours outside of Los Angeles, three and a half hours outside of Las Vegas up in the mountains. And so I thought, man, this could be like an amazing place to throw up some cabins, maybe have a little Airbnb, have people could come, they could learn about the history and they could take in the natural beauty all around. So that was the initial plans and that was what, six years ago now? And things have changed a little bit.
Brett McKay: Yeah, we’ll talk about how it’s changed. So the town is Cerro Gordo, that’s the… How do you say the American version? Is it just Cerro Gordo?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, Cerro Gordo is usually how I say it, which is fat hill in Spanish.
Brett McKay: So what’s the story? What’s the story behind Cerro Gordo, what’s its history?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, the town was established in 1860s as a mining town. And originally they were mining Galena here and Galena is a silver and lead ore. And so in around 1865 it was set up as a mining camp. By the 1870s it was the boom town, it was the place you wanted to be if you were in California looking to mine silver, this is just after the gold rush. And so a lot of miners were kind of looking for the next thing and Cerro Gordo was it for a lot of them. And they started mining the Galena originally. And that lasted for about 20 years, probably until the mid 1880s I would say. And then as these mining camps do, the vein was lost. And so a lot of these miners packed it up and left.
The town went from a peak of having almost 4,000 residents down to just maybe a skeleton crew of 20 or so. And then in around 1910, there was a guy that came up named L.D Gordon and he realized that while everybody was paying attention to all of the silver, nobody was paying attention to the zinc. And so he, in 1912, reinvigorated the town as a zinc mining town, and they mined zinc all the way into the 1940s. And so as a mining camp, it had an active life from the 1860s to the 1940s, which is really long. A lot of these camps were set up to be, five, six years was a good timeline for ’em. So as far as like mining towns go, Cerro Gordo had a really long history.
Brett McKay: So, but at its peak it had 4,000 people. That’s a lot of people.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, it’s a lot of people. There’s 4,000 people, a couple hundred buildings up here across the 400 acres. And if you adjust it for inflation, they pull something like $500 million worth of minerals out of here. And at the time the closest port city was Los Angeles. And so a fun fact that I like to think about is when Cerro Gordo had 4,000 residents, Los Angeles only had about 6,500 residents. So they’re almost like equal trading partners more than Los Angeles being the behemoth and Cerro Gordo kind of being something behind it. But like the demand of Cerro Gordo and all the people living here and mining here and doing everything necessitated like a port city to get all their supplies ’cause they weren’t growing much up here. And so I think it’s interesting that Cerro Gordo is one of the reasons that Los Angeles is what it is today. And these days almost everybody knows Los Angeles, but almost nobody knows Cerro Gordo. So I feel kind of like one of my goals up here is changing that a little bit.
Brett McKay: So you pulled together, I think it’s like over a million dollars in a loan to buy this thing, got some friends to help you out and kind of become investment partners on this. What did your family and friends think when you told them, “Hey, I just bought an abandoned mining town.”?
Brent Underwood: I mean, my family is kind of used to it. They, both my parents are teachers and so they kind of wanted me to go into one of those traditional paths and they realized pretty quickly after college that that wasn’t happening. And so they kind of had gotten used to my different adventures. Most of my friends were very supportive too. They knew that I just loved doing stuff like this. And a couple friends were like, “Why don’t you stay with a more traditional path?” I had a very comfortable life in Austin. I had a guy come visit the other day too that was still kind of griping that I should have stuck with kind of what I was doing before. But I don’t know, I think that a lot of them resonated with it and they were pretty supportive.
Brett McKay: Okay. So you bought Cerro Gordo in 2018, but then you waited, it was like two years to actually start doing things, to restore it and kind of bring to life this idea you have of turning it into this place that people can go to, sort of a hospitality place. Why did you wait so long? What was the holdup?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, originally it kind of seemed like one of those projects that maybe you could do as a side business that maybe, hey, I could restore this entire town while still living in Austin, Texas. And we did a lot of things that were just, I mean, I would call them like playing business, which setting up the perfect pitch deck, creating the perfect spreadsheet, wining and dining all these different people that could help with the hospitality, with these different things but it’s really just kind of delaying any real action. And so when the pandemic hit in 2020, March of 2020, my business that was in Austin got shut down because of the pandemic.
And so we were all figuring out where we were gonna socially distance and what better place than an abandoned town in the middle of nowhere. And so I packed it up, came out here and really gave it a shot. I think for the first time it went from a back burner project to kind of the main project and it just consumed me in a lot of ways. And I thought maybe, hey, I was gonna come up here for a week, two weeks, something like that, and it’s now four years later and I’m still here and I no longer have a place in Austin, I no longer have a business here or there. And so it’s just all in at Cerro Gordo at this point.
Brett McKay: All right. So the pandemic kind of helped nudge you along to go all in on this thing. And you talk about this, there’s a former resident of Cerro Gordo who inspired you to sometimes you just gotta get started on something, even if you don’t know exactly where it’s gonna go, it’s this guy named Burro Schmidt. Tell us about Burro Schmidt and what did he teach you about just getting started with something?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, there’s a guy named Burro Schmidt and essentially he grew up in Rhode Island and a few of his siblings had died from tuberculosis. And so doctors, as they did back then, they’re like, you need to really get to a dry climate. And so he moved out here and he was a gold miner and he was prospecting all the time and he basically, every day he’d have to take his ore around this mountain that he was working to get it to town to sell it. And so one day he just decided, I’m not gonna take my ore around this mountain anymore, I’m gonna go straight through it. And so he started chipping away every day with his pickax and a wheelbarrow. And he wanted to burrow a tunnel directly through this mountain. And about 19 years into this process, which is just incredible to think about, like in today’s timelines of which we think about businesses, 19 years into trying to chip through this mountain, they built a road around his mountain.
And so basically his tunnel wasn’t good anymore, it was for nothing. And what I kinda love about the stories is he kept going, he kept going, he got to the other side, he finished burrowing through something like a half a mile of solid granite and then after he was done, he packed it up and left. And I think for me, kind of what that taught me is that the idea, if you, from the outset you were like, hey you need to burrow this tunnel through this mountain by hand, it would just be overwhelming. But I think that like for him, he kind of found his rhythm, he found his thing that like brought him purpose day in and day out and he did it. And I think that one, it was just start somewhere, start something, stop planning, stop, like I said, playing business and setting up different Twitter accounts and just doing all these different things that weren’t actually making a difference and just start doing something.
And then two, I mean, he’s just like a testament to finishing what you started. And I think that again, in today’s day and age, like especially in the job I was working before, it’s very rare I guess is the best way to think about that when I think about somebody like sticking with a project for decades even, I think that today it’s very popular to think about what app can you make to then sell to Instagram and have your exit and like, what is your exit plan going into businesses? But like the idea of sticking with something for nearly 40 years was very, it resonated with me. And I think that like when I got here I was like, if I chip away a little bit, to use an analogy to what he was doing, every day, in 40 years what could Cerro Gordo become? And I think that like pretty quickly after starting, there was more progress that had been done here in the two years that we had just been sitting around waiting for something to happen.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Burro Schmidt, he could have played tunnel maker by coming up with some elaborate blueprint and thinking about all the available technology he had at the time to carve this tunnel out. Instead he just, he became a tunnel maker. I’m just gonna start digging. That’s all he did. I love that. And I just love that he finished it and then he just packed up. He’s like, “All right, did what I wanted to do. I’m moving on.”
Brent Underwood: Yeah, I think it’s cool. I just think that a lot of people look at that and they just dismiss it as, oh, this is a crazy guy that did something crazy. And like there’s that term folly that gets thrown around of like a very impressive feat that had, kind of serves no purpose. But I think that like for the people it resonates with, it resonates deeply. Like, I go to his tunnel occasionally and there’s hundreds of tourists that visit it every week and it’s just something that resonates in today’s day and age. And it’s like a lot of serious people that did a lot more “serious things” beforehand, like nobody’s visiting them or drawing inspiration from what they were able to leave behind. And so I just took away from it that, yeah, I think that like he found his purpose, he found what gave his days rhythm and he just stuck with it, which was really important.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and I think the other thing you learned from him, and I think you picked up on, is that a task of carving a tunnel through a half mile of granite can be so overwhelming that you just don’t do anything. The idea of restoring an abandoned mining town can be so overwhelming that you don’t do anything. Sometimes all you gotta do is you gotta pick up a hammer in your case and just start fixing stuff.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, exactly. And I think that there’s also, once you get into it a little bit, even a couple days, there’s a comfort in that commitment or there’s a comfort in that laying out what’s out there. Like for me, before I would think about what project is next, what project is next, even when you’re in the middle of one project, you’re always thinking about what’s coming next. But like with Burro Schmidt, he didn’t have to think about that. Every day he knew exactly what he was doing. And for me, I feel like now four years in, I feel very relaxed, not thinking about when this project is done, what am I gonna do next to bring some purpose or bring some meaning. Like I hope that Cerro Gordo is the project that I get to work on for the rest of my life. And I think that there’s a lot of like relief in that as well.
Brett McKay: Did you have any construction or restoration background before you started this thing?
Brent Underwood: Not a ton. I had owned a bed and breakfast in Austin, so I did like minor tasks, plumbing this and things like that. But it was more just out of necessity. We’re, the town sits at the end of an eight mile dirt road, so it’s not like I’m running to Home Depot two to three times a day, four or five times a day. Like, there has to be a lot of planning and you just can’t get people up here. And so it was kind of learning as I went kind of.
Brett McKay: Okay. But you didn’t let that deter you, because I think that would deter a lot of people.
Brent Underwood: No, I think that like pretty early on I had realized that it was gonna be a necessity and so you kind of just start figuring out things to do. And I think that I kind of like tapped into one of my original desires to come out here. I wanted to like do real things in the real world. My whole life before that was working on all of these digital projects, which are rewarding in some way, but I think that there is this feeling that probably a lot of people can resonate with of wanting to like build something with your hands, something that you can touch, something that you could work on for the rest of your life. And I think that that desire was being fulfilled here and I figured out the magic of that pretty early on. And I think it was just like a reason to keep going.
Brett McKay: And the other thing that you do great in this book is you share your story, but you also shared these stories of former residents like Burro Schmidt of how the town shaped them or how the landscape shaped them. And a common theme you see through all these people is that they show up here and they really don’t know how to do the thing they want to do and they just figure, I’ll figure it out. As I start taking action and start moving, then I’ll be able to figure it out.
Brent Underwood: Yeah. I think that like a lot of people, Cerro Gordo kind of cast a spell onto people I think. Everybody comes here wanting something a little bit more and everybody comes here seeing the town for having a little bit more than anybody else is seeing. And when they all came here for their different reasons, but they all came here ostensibly to kind of live out a dream or to like have a little bit of a better life. And I think that’s what brought the original prospectors here. They’re walking up the wash looking for float, which is ore that’s left in the wash and they set up shop thinking, “Hey, maybe this mountain can bring things to me that I don’t have in my current life.” And I think that when I showed up here in 2018, I was looking for something as well.
I wasn’t looking for silver in the way maybe they were 150 years ago, but I was definitely looking for a change in my life. I thought that there was that untapped potential both in me and in the property. And then if I were just to stick with it, that the skills would come and it would lead me to the life that I was looking for, at least that’s the hope. And obviously the history book here is full of stories of people being ground into dust by this mountain as well. And so that hope and a dream is what most people come to this town with and a few of them are able to see it through to the other side.
Brett McKay: Yeah, this reminds me of a story from my family on my dad’s side. One of my great-great, whatever, grandpas, was from Switzerland. When he was a young man, he heard all these stories of these pamphlets in Switzerland or newspaper ads about all this great farming land in New Mexico, and if you go out there, they’re just pretty much giving it away and you’ll have this lush verdant farming land. So he is like, “All right, I’m going.” And so he packs up from Switzerland, comes to New Mexico, and then he is like, “Oh my gosh, it’s a freaking desert. Like, I’m not gonna be able to be a farmer.” And so he had to adapt and he became a, he started up a mercantile shop and married a nice Spanish American gal. And my family has roots in New Mexico now.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, that’s awesome. I think there’s like, I mean, it reminds me of stories a lot of times when the news of the gold rush hit Europe, a lot of people in Europe would get onto boats, come out west and by the time they got here, the gold rush was done. And so in a similar way they had to figure out what’s next? What am I gonna do? And I think that that adaptability led a lot of them to Cerro Gordo, to be honest, and then to the Comstock Lode after that if they’re thinking about mining specifically. But then a lot became same thing, like merchants like Levi Strauss, Strauss, blue jeans as we know them came out of a merchant who came here and wanted to build better working pants for the miner and now we have all those different brands. So yeah, that western, that allure of the American West is strong. I think it has been bringing people out here for a really long time.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and I think what the desert does too, and you talk about this, the desert is pretty unforgiving and so it forces you to adapt yourself to it.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, nobody’s coming to save you in the desert is kind of what I always think about, and I think that’s another reason, again, that I started developing some of these skills is just that out here there has to be kind of that, a little bit of, not a little bit, there has to be a lot of self-sufficiency ’cause this place can like chew you out and spit you out completely. And then I think once you’re up here you start taking ownerships over situations maybe that you weren’t before and you kind of start developing that sense of purpose and that confidence that hey, I can kind of figure out whatever this place is gonna throw me.
Brett McKay: So you started living in Cerro Gordo, and then while you were there you met your Obi-Wan Kenobi, this mentor who would help you in your quest to restore the town, this guy named Tip. Tell us about this guy.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, Tip is great. Tip is somebody who… I’ve probably made hundreds of videos about my time being up here, and I’ve actually never shown Tip in any of the videos. He wasn’t one that wanted the limelight. His kind of guiding light on all these was pretty pure when I think about it, but he was a guy that had been wandering around these hills for just decades and he knew it like the back of his hand, and I think that in me, he kind of saw somebody to pass along that knowledge. And I was green, I was up here, I didn’t know… Like we talked about already, I didn’t know how to build much, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I felt really fortunate.
I feel like I came up here and with Tip and others, I feel like I was adopted or I adopted just a dozen grandfathers in the first couple of years that I was here, of people just wanting to pass along their knowledge. And Tip was just a mentor in every sense of the word. He would have hated that term, he was not very sentimental, but he was one that wanted to teach me and he kind of showed me that appreciation for figuring things out, for understanding what was around me, for taking ownership over the situation and going forward with it. And I feel that because of him this whole project has been possible. I think it’s, early on in some of these projects, you need somebody like that, and you need to be able to accept somebody like that when they come into your life and Tip kinda changed the whole game for me at Cerro Gordo.
Brett McKay: Yeah. One thing he taught you that helped you learn more about the history of the town and the area is this idea of walking the wash, what is that?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, so the wash is basically… You called it canyon, you could call it basically where the water goes on a mountain when it’s flowing naturally. Like, when the snow melts, where, how does it get to the bottom of the mountain? And I remember one of my early days on here, Tip was like, “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow?” And I said, “I’m not doing much,” lying, even though I had a bunch to do. And he goes, “All right, I’m gonna take you on a hike.” And so we went on a hike, and he brought me into the wash. And basically, his point to me is like we went there looking for different artifacts, ’cause as the snow melts and everything kinda goes into the wash, you can find stuff from the different mining camps that give you a little piece of what life might have been like back in the day here.
And that was kind of his main thing, he was like, “Listen, whenever you need an adventure, just kind of walk the wash. It’s the place of, the path of least resistance, it’s kind of where you’re gonna find a lot of these adventures.” It’s where originally they would have found the ore that led them to the discovery of different mining camps, like Cerro Gordo was in the wash, and I just think that from there, many of my best adventures have sprung, and so it was just like, I don’t know, it kind of accelerated my appreciation for the town a couple of years by him telling me that.
Brett McKay: And something else he was vital in helping you understand were all the mines. So not only is this a ghost town, there’s all these buildings, a hotel, for example, but there’s tons of mine shafts on this thing. And Tip, he knew this stuff like the back of his hand almost.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, he was… So the town’s about 400 acres, like I said, but underneath the town, there’s about 30 miles of mines. And the main mine here goes 900 feet straight down and off of it, there’s branches every 100 feet or so. And so I like to think about it, that there’s almost a city underneath the town here. People come to the town and look around the buildings, that’s where the history is, but none of the buildings would exist unless the things that happened underneath the town happened. And so kind of all the history, all of the origin of this place is under the ground. And when I came up here, Tip was one of the only ones that I’d ever found that actually understood that and had been down there before. And so he kind of sent me on this quest to better understand the mines. I think that whenever you can kind of get that extra context of your setting, whether that’s, if you live in a town and you walk by a park a dozen times, the day that you choose to then look up the history of that park, the next time you walk by that park, it’s going to mean that much more to you.
And Tip showed that to me. He said, “Listen, if you go down to the 86th level, it’s going to come alive. It’s no longer just black and white words on a page, it’s going to suddenly come alive. You’re going to understand the history here. And by understanding the history, you’re going to understand your place within it and it’s just going to become that much more purposeful, that much more meaningful to you.” And Tip very early on has said, “I want you to go and explore. I want you to discover. I want you to live that life of adventure that brought you up here. And by doing so, you’re going to feel so much deeper connection to this town.” And I think that that was a really important lesson to learn early on.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You talk about how learning about the history of the town, it really was fuel to drive your effort to restore the town.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, I just think that context is everything, especially it just brings the world to light, especially your place within it. And again, to use the example of walking by the park, I just think that… For an example, when I… I lived in Manhattan for a while, I was going to school, and I remember pinning up on my wall a map of Manhattan, and every day that I had some free time, I would try to go walk a new street in Manhattan. And I would kind of like highlight in that street when I would get home at night. And I think that for me, it just made my experience much richer. How many times do people just go to work, go home, live in their little bubble, go home, turn on Netflix, and kind of like allow that to be that?
And I think that for me, the history here is very rich, it’s very interesting. It makes me think about the place in a longer term perspective. Instead of just thinking about it as my next project, I think that like, hey, in a 100 years, this decision that I’m making right now is going to impact what people think of this place, what people read about this place. And it’s just like impossible to ignore in a historic place like this. But I think it’s possible to do anywhere. Like I said, in Manhattan, the day I decided to walk every street, suddenly my experience of living in New York was a lot better.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, you can do this in any profession you’re in. So if you’re in, I don’t know, let’s think like insurance, like, learn about the history of insurance in America. I’m sure you’ll be able to find some fascinating characters that’ll give you a deeper appreciation of what you’re doing. Something I try to do with my work with podcasting and writing, I love reading about great broadcasters or great publishers and seeing how they dealt with the issues that they faced when in their profession at varying times in history. And when you look at it, it’s often the same stuff, same problems, they’re just… Things are just slightly different.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, you kind of feel part of a lineage then. You feel like, oh, I’m part of something here. You’re something larger than just yourself. And that’s why I felt like when I dove into the history here, I learned about the different owners over the years from Mortimer Belshaw, that guy who originally created the town. The problems that he ran into with the road, for instance, are similar problems I ran into with the road. Or L.D Gordon, who came up, the guy that discovered zinc, his problems with access in and out of the mine are problems that I still kind of have problems with. And I just feel like once you feel that you’re part of something, and you can, to your point, you’re part of the lineage of broadcasters in a larger sense. And so once you feel part of that, I just think that it enriches your experience day in and day out.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
So another character you write about in the book that was a former resident of Cerro Gordo is a guy named William Mulholland. Who was this guy and what did he teach you about the long-term consequences of short-term thinking?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, Mulholland was actually, he was from LA and he’s a civil engineer who brought water to the city when the city was running out of water. Back in the early 1900s, he was the head of what was then called Los Angeles Water Works, which eventually became the Department of Water and Power. And if you’ve ever seen the movie Chinatown with Jack Nicholson, that movie is kind of about the origins of LA’s Department of Water and Power. And so basically LA was outgrowing its water supply, the town was growing too fast, they had no where to get water. William Mulholland went out into the desert and he landed right below Cerro Gordo in the Owens Valley, where there used to be a place called Owens Lake.
And Owens Lake used to just be this massive lake. Imagine a lake that’s about seven miles across, 70 feet deep. As weather comes off of the ocean, it hits the Sierra Nevada, it kind of dumps all its weather on Mount Whitney and all that place. All that melts and goes into Owens River, which then turns into Owens Lake. And when Mulholland saw Owens Lake, he thought, there it is, the future to this city’s growth. And so Mulholland, through a variety of sketchy backdoor deals, eventually bought up most of the valley. So he bought the water rights from these different cattle ranchers that were living here. He even did things like, would seed to the newspapers that there was a huge drought coming, so these farmers were a little bit more encouraged to sell their property.
And then once he had all the water rights, he actually redirected the entire river to Los Angeles. He built what’s known as the LA Aqueduct. And by about 1918 or so, by redirecting the river, he left Owens Lake, which again, once was this seven mile across, 70 feet deep lake, dry. And a few decades later, he created… That turned into the largest producer of dust for the United States. And so me living above Owens Lake or the shadow of Owens Lake, I kind of see the dust bowl every single day. I see the end result of Mulholland’s wild dream. And I think that it’s impossible to ignore when you’re up here. And so for me, it’s kind of like a constant reminder that these things that I am doing in town, they are going to have long-term consequences outside of my lifetime. And so it’s an interesting story and it’s a place that I look to a lot.
Brett McKay: And you talk about in your experience in marketing, you worked with a lot of entrepreneurs where you saw a lot of that just short-term thinking, and it ended up biting them in the butt and other people in the butt in the long run.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, I just think that that’s kind of been the mentality for the last few decades. I think that like get in, get out, get your money and kind of move on. And I think that when I look at a lot of my friends, we kind of grew up in the era when you saw Mark Zuckerberg start Facebook, you know what I mean? And then cash out for or create a company that’s worth whatever it’s created today. And so that became almost the model for entrepreneurship. But again, kind of the premise there is always going in with the exit in mind, I think, which is kind of a backwards way of thinking about business, at least to me.
I think that what I found in Cerro Gordo, kind of speaking at what I talked about before about commitment, is a project that I want to stick with forever. I think that it’s very backwards to go into a company thinking from that origin how you’re going to sell it or who you’re going to sell it to. I think that there’s kind of like a lack of permanence there, there’s a lack of pride almost to it. And it leads kind of this deep feeling of dissatisfaction. So I think that if you can find that thing that you care about enough to care about the future, that want to work on it for a very long time, it’s just a lot more rewarding.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve had that question popped to me a couple of times throughout my career doing AOM. Like, “What’s your exit?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. When I don’t have anything else to write about, when I die, that’s the exit.”
Brent Underwood: Yeah, I think… One of my buddies told me this once, he goes, “Does the owner of the Yankees have an exit plan?” And I don’t know if they do or not but I understand what he was saying. If you’re building something that you think is like world class, you really care about, why would you be thinking about the exit plan? Then you have to figure out what to do next. I would love to build something that sticks around, that we are proud of, that we are talking about a century from now or something.
Brett McKay: So you admit in the book while you begrudge Mulholland for draining Owens Lake, you kind of have a bit of admiration for him. Why is that?
Brent Underwood: I mean, what he pulled off was just amazing in a word. He was able to redirect a river 200 miles into Los Angeles and allowed Los Angeles to become what it did today. And that takes a certain type of vision, that takes a certain type of person, that takes a certain type of problem solver, that after spending a lot of time out in the desert, I have to have some admiration for. I think that the end result wasn’t ideal. I think it caused a lot of problems for a long time, but I think the scale of the project that he pulled off is admirable and if only for the scale.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, we’re gonna talk about this more, but he had high agency, he saw something and he made it happen.
Brent Underwood: Absolutely. I think that he was able to go out there, he set a goal for himself, and he achieved it. He wasn’t waiting for something to happen in LA to be better. He brought that sense of control into his own life. He wasn’t leaving things up to fate or luck. And I think to your point, that’s kind of what high agency means. It’s somebody that has that belief in their own ability to succeed at whatever they’re setting out to do. Even if it’s something as crazy as, I’m going to redirect a river 200 miles, which is just, it’s crazy to think about, but he was able to figure it out.
Brett McKay: Who were some other high agency people who lived in Cerro Gordo?
Brent Underwood: I think from the very beginning it was everybody here. The original owner of the town, Mortimer Belshaw, had to figure out a way to get a road up here. And again, right now I’m sitting at 8,500 feet in elevation and the valley floor below me is about 3,500 feet in elevation. So you figure there’s a mile of elevation gain to go here. And when he came, it was just a mule trail. But if this town was going to pull out $500 million of the silver, they obviously were going to have to have a lot better infrastructure than that. And so he just believed that he could make it happen, and he did make it happen. And because of that, it became the boom town that it was going to become. And I think that when I think about the different high agency people here, they all had that sense of control over their lives, that they could make things happen.
And during my time here, I remember my first year, we had a big tragedy here where we lost one of our main buildings. And when we were in the rebuilding process, the biggest hurdle that we had was to get concrete up to the town. And again, concrete might not seem like that big a hurdle but when you’re living up an eight mile dirt road that’s very far from everything else, the idea of having to get 10 truckloads full of concrete up here were very difficult. I called around and I asked all the local companies, like, “Hey, can you bring concrete up here?” And everybody was like, “No, road is too dangerous. No, road is too dangerous,” a variety of reasons. And so I kind of felt stuck. I called a helicopter company, they wanted some crazy amount to do it. And then through some of the YouTube videos I was making at the time, I got connected with this guy named Heavy D, who’s a guy named Dave Sparks in Utah.
I remember the very first call to Dave, he was just like, “I know, we’ll figure that out.” There was no like, even sympathy for like the routes I’d gone down so far, almost more of like, come on, man, we’re going to figure this out. And yeah, a couple of months later Dave purchased a concrete truck that we brought up here without any concrete in it. We bought a lot of dry concrete that we were able to bring up the road and we mixed and poured essentially about 10 truckloads worth of concrete in a single day to pour the foundation of the hotel that we’re building right now. And it just kind of like unlocked that feeling within me that, hey, these things are figureoutable. I think that’s a term that I think about a lot up here is that the skill of figuring things out is a muscle almost and it grows the more you use it.
And I think that when I first got up here, maybe it’s, “Hey, can I figure out how to build a little porch on one of the cabins?” And after I did that, I was like, “Oh, maybe I can fix the roof.” And after Dave came, I was like, “Oh, I just poured 10 truckloads of concrete on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. There’s almost nothing that I can’t do then.” And I think that the confidence grows within that, like each time you figured out something a little bit harder and a little bit harder and a little bit harder, that sense of agency that we talked about shines through more and it almost changes your belief about yourself. Now I feel like I am somebody that is going to figure out whatever Cerro Gordo throws at me. And I don’t think that I felt that four years ago before I moved here.
Brett McKay: Yeah, this idea of having a sense of agency, as a dad, that’s the big thing I’m trying to inculcate in my kids. I want them to have that idea or that sense that any problem they have, it’s figureoutable. You can figure it out. You don’t have to be passive, you can do something about it.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, I think that that term passive is almost what I was trying to fight against coming up here. I think that that feeling of helplessness is one that nobody likes to feel. And I think that the answer out of that is trying to figure out different little problems. And again, kind of developing that muscle as you go, figure that figureoutable sense. And I think that at Cerro Gordo it’s kind of like trial by fire, I had to figure that out time and time again. But now I feel that because the agency grew again, like, your confidence grows. And you can see it when you know people. I’m sure everybody out there has like encountered somebody where no matter what problem you tell to them, they’re very calm. They’re usually very pretty quiet and they’re just like, “All right, we’ll figure it out.” It’s almost that feeling you get if you’ve ever been around like special forces people.
And for me, I think about people that I’ve encountered in the desert, a lot of them have that kind of calm, coolness to them. And when I first moved up here, I was very envious of that. I came from the online marketing world where everything was almost like a crisis to solve, that everything was very here now, how could we possibly do this? And up here, I just find that everybody that chooses to live in the desert, chooses to live pretty far away from a traditional support system, has a very high sense of agency. And I feel that living up here, that’s one of the most important things I would say that it developed over the past year past four years.
Brett McKay: So you experienced a lot of setbacks in your pursuit to restore Cerro Gordo. You mentioned a big one. The biggest one probably is the hotel burned down. This was going to be the crown jewel of the town. What were the emotions you went through when you saw this hotel on fire?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, it was the main crux of all the plans here. It was this beautiful hotel from 1871 that was kind of going to be the gathering point for the cabins we were going to put up. This is where everybody was going to experience, take photos, enjoy the place. And the day it burned down, it just felt every feeling all at once almost. It was a, it was seeing your hopes, your dreams, and like the majority of your life savings go up in flames all at once. And it was difficult. I remember after it, I didn’t really want to be here, but I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I felt very sad, I felt disappointed, I felt like I let history down because at that point I was very deep in the history here. And like we talked about, the lineage of things that had happened and this had happened on my watch. And I remember the first day just sitting on the porch still in pretty bad shape when the old owner of Cerro Gordo, the guy that had actually sold it to us, came up because he had heard about the fire.
And I remember when I saw him, I thought he was going to just lay into me for a bunch of different reasons. And I remember in the moment, he kind of put his hand on my shoulder and he said, “Listen, this was bound to happen. You can’t change what happens, but what happens from here is up to you.” And I remember in those moments, you kind of look for something to grab onto. And that was kind of a phrase that I grabbed onto for a long time, like what happens from here is up to you. Because I think it’s true, it seems very basic when you say it out loud, but no matter what the circumstance you’re in, what happens next is up to you. And so for me, I could have gone back to Austin with a tail between my legs, I could have thrown in the towel. It probably would have been the better move financially and everything like that. But then I think about the guys like Burro Schmidt, like finishing what you started, like leaving something behind and we’re here.
I’m looking at my window right now and I’m looking at the hotel and it’s back, there’s a roof on it. We’re doing some of the plumbing right now inside of it and it’ll be open soon. And I think that’s, again, one of those agency things where when I look at that, I think of all the difficulty that went into rebuilding it, but that we finished it, I kind of think back to earlier in my life of like, when didn’t I push myself and what things didn’t I finish that maybe I could have? And how could have those changed the direction of my life earlier on? And so what originally was by far the biggest tragedy here, it kind of turned into the battle cry, the marching orders for a long time. And now that this thing is standing again, I feel like what could Cerro Gordo possibly throw at me that I couldn’t handle?
Brett McKay: So you started rebuilding the hotel and that’s on its way, and again, you had to exercise some agency to do that. You also talk about in the book, you reached a point with this project, so you started working on it in Gusto in 2020, you’re up there non-stop working all the time, and you started experiencing some burnout, what did working on this town teach you about burnout and how to manage it?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, I think that once you find that project that grabs your attention, doesn’t let go, that thing that just captures all of you, it can consume you in some ways. For me, I don’t think I left the town for more than a day for two or three years. And it was just like every day working as hard as we could, rebuild this hotel, rebuild this hotel. What happens next is up to you, what happens next is up to you. And I lost like 30 pounds. I wasn’t a guy that could probably lose any weight to begin with. I just got really bad place mentally. It was just every day kind of waking up and just being consumed by this project to the point where a lot of my friends are calling and are like, “Dude, like you need to relax. This is not going to work.” And I just kind of got to the point where I realized that if I were to flame out, burn out completely, then it would kind of suffer the project in total.
Then I look back again to the lineage of guys that were here before and when I dug deeper into the history of the Mortimer Belshaw or the L.D Gordons that lived and managed this town back in the day, they all had a time away, you know, they were able to go away, kind of reflect on what they were doing and come back to it. And so I think for me, I try to develop a little bit of a rotation these days, you know, where I am here probably a month straight and then I try to take at least three or four days off the mountain every couple of times, because it also provides us perspective where you’re not so stuck in it. And that, originally I felt guilt for that. I thought, every day that I’m not at Cerro Gordo is a day that progress isn’t going to be done. But eventually you get to the point where if you’re so burned out, there’s not progress happening even when you’re there. And so I think that like some healthy retreat is almost necessary when you get into one of these giant projects.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You talk about, you found a book in the Belshaw house in the town. It was about World War II and you flipped through it and you found this section about how they rotated soldiers on the front line so they could avoid battle fatigue.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, it was a requisite. It was prescribed to them that there was going to be a set number of days you could be on the front line, then there’s a set number of days you had to be in the very back, then a set number of days you’re kind of in the middle. And this is the way they’re able to prevent this horrible burnout of these soldiers in war. And I don’t think that any of us are in a situation akin to being soldiers in war, especially me rebuilding a town that I live in, but I do think that there was lessons to pull away from that to where, them, even the kind of the most experienced soldiers out there needed that little break. And that was comforting in its own way for me to take a little bit of time away.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So if you’re working on a big project, make sure you rotate yourself off the front line regularly. You also talk about how this town taught you a lot about humility and developing a sense of awe. Tell us more about that.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, the town’s set in just one of the most beautiful settings I can imagine. If I look out my window right now, I see Mount Whitney, which is the tallest point in the lower 48. I see the Sierra Nevada, I see Owens Lake. And if I turn my head the other way, I see all of Death Valley beyond me, the desert just as far as I could possibly see. And it’s just awe-inspiring. I think awe is one of those terms that’s thrown around far too often these days. Not everything is awesome, even though we say that kind of is almost the knee-jerk response to when somebody texts us something, we’re like, “Oh, that’s awesome.” But true awe, to me, is something that just stops you in your tracks and instinctually tilts your head up. It is that giant mountain that makes you feel small. It’s that desert for as far as you can see. It’s even being in a concert with musicians that are just amazing. You can get that sense. And for me out here, at least in the mountains, it just reminds me of your place in the world.
There’s a Stoic term called sympatheia, which is basically talking about the interconnectedness of it all. And there’s a Marcus Aurelius quote that says, what hurts the hive hurts the bee, basically, what’s bad for the world is bad for you individually as well. And so I think that taking that time and zooming out and understanding how your life, your project, or whatever fits into the world allows you to put your problems into perspective. It kind of allows you a little break from that, oh man, my problems are everything, this, this, and that. And for me, being out here in the nature, it just, it brings me to that place of mine that I haven’t found anywhere else. Living in Austin, I never found those places where it was truly awe-inspiring and it brought that sense of peace to me. And I think that like, it was just a constant reminder to get out in nature as often as I could.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I love going to the desert, that’s my place where I go when I need to restore myself. I just love the emptiness of it. I love seeing big mountains in the distance, I love seeing the mesas. There’s a solace in such a desolate place. I don’t know, it just recharges me. I love… I’m actually planning a trip to get out to the desert now and I’m looking forward to it.
Brent Underwood: Yeah, it’s just, it’s also, for me when I think about the desert I just feel like there’s nowhere to hide, it feels very honest to me is the word I look about when I think of the desert just because like everything’s kind of laid out in front of you and it just goes and goes and it just leaves you that time to think, there’s not a lot of distractions, not even as much color as you’re used to when you look at a hillside or something and so it just like, I don’t know, it’s amazing.
Brett McKay: What’s the future of Cerro Gordo? Where can people learn more about it, what you’re doing?
Brent Underwood: Yeah, so I’m hoping that this year we finish up the hotel. That’s been a big project over the last few years. We’re going to add some cabins over the coming years, maybe some campsites as well. But we’re open to the public every day. If people want to come up and check out the town, we’re open from 9:00 to 5:00. There’s no charge for people to come up. I’ve made a little museum of different artifacts that I found on my hikes or down in the mines that people can check out. So hopefully this year we introduce long-term accommodation or overnight accommodation. And then long-term, who knows? I would love to see this place stick around for a few more generations so people can keep being inspired by the history and the beauty here. And I kind of document all of it on my YouTube channel, which is just called Ghost Town Living, which is the same name as the book, Ghost Town Living, which chronicles the past four years here. So that’d probably be the best place to check out.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Brent Underwood, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Brent Underwood: Of course. Thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Brent Underwood. He’s the author of the book, Ghost Town Living. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his YouTube channel, Ghost Town Living. Check that out. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/ghosttown, 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 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 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 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 […]
The post Podcast #926: The 5 Shifts of Manhood appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
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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.
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, […]
The post Podcast #924: How to Develop Rugged Flexibility appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
Note: This is a rebroadcast.
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.
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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The post Podcast #921: How to Use the Principles of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to Overcome Obstacles in Business and Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 […]
The post Podcast #907: How to Read a Tree appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #906: Stop Being a Complainer appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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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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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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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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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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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.
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.
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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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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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.
The post Podcast #897: Answers to the FAQ of Modern Etiquette appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
Do you feel stuck in life — that you aren’t making progress in a relationship, job, or goal and you don’t know how to fix the problem and move forward? Well, perhaps you can take a little solace in the fact that it’s a universal human experience, even amongst history’s highest achievers. Indeed, when Adam Alter, a social psychologist and professor of marketing, looked at the lives of successful actors, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs, he found that they all had passed through times in their lives and careers when they felt totally stuck.
Today on the show, Adam, who’s the author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most, explains why getting stuck is an inevitability in life, as well as mindset shifts and practices to escape from stuckness. We first talk about what contributes to getting stuck, including the goal gradient effect, and how the illusion of the creative cliff can keep you from seeing that you may end up doing your best work later in life. We then talk about dealing with the emotional angst of feeling stuck, and how it can be better to initially accept your stuckness than kick against the pricks. From there, we turn to some tactics for getting unstuck, including doing a friction audit and copying the work of others. In my favorite part of the conversation, we discuss the importance of recognizing when to move from exploring to exploiting, and vice versa. We end our conversation with why the mantra for getting unstuck is “action over all.”
Resources Related to the Podcast* Adam’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #420: What Makes Your Phone So Addictive & How to Take Back Your Life * a-ha’s video for “Take on Me” * Giannis on whether he considers this season a failure * AoM Article: Meditations on the Wisdom of Action * AoM Article: Want to Become a Better Writer? Copy the Work of Others! * AoM Article: Solvitur Ambulando — It Is Solved By Walking * AoM Podcast #418: How to Get Unstuck * AoM Podcast#432: How to Achieve Creative Success * AoM Podcast #512: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Connect With Adam Alter* Adam on LinkedIn * Adam on Twitter * Adam’s website
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Do you feel stuck in life, that you aren’t making progress in a relationship, job or goal, and you don’t know how to fix the problem and move forward. Well, perhaps you can take a little solace in the fact that it’s a universal human experience, even amongst history’s highest achievers. Indeed, when Adam Altar a social psychologist and professor of Marketing looked in the lives of successful actors, musicians, writers, film makers and entrepreneurs, he found that they had all passed through times in their lives and careers when they felt totally stuck.
Today in the show, Adam, who’s the author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to get unstuck when it matters most. Explains why getting stuck is inevitable in life, as well as mindset shifts and practices to escape from stuckness. We first talk about what contributes to getting stuck, including the Goal Gradient effect, and how the illusion of the Creative cliff can keep you from seeing that you may end up doing your best work later in life. We then talk about dealing with the emotional angst of feeling stuck, and how it could be better to initially accept your stuckness and kick against the prick. From there we turn to some tactics for getting unstuck, including doing a Friction Audit and copying the work of others. In my favorite part of the conversation, we discuss the importance of recognizing, when to move from exploring to exploiting and vice-versa. We end the conversation with why the mantra for getting unstuck is action over all. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.io/unstuck. Alright, Adam Alter welcome back to the show.
Adam Alter: Thanks so much for having me back again, Brett.
Brett McKay: So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, Irresistible. You got a new book out called, Anatomy of a breakthrough: How To Get Unstuck when it matters most. You walk readers through on how to get unstuck, so let’s start with that, what you mean by getting stuck?
Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean it’s a good question because you can get stuck for 10 seconds and you can get stuck for a lifetime, and I’m much more interested in these bigger instances of being stuck across days, weeks, months, years, even decades, and those tend to be fairly common. I’ve been running a survey for a number of years now on thousands of people around the world, asking them about their experiences of being stuck, and everyone in some respect says, Yeah, when I think about it, there’s an area where I do feel stuck and I’d like to make some movement. And so I’m also not just interested in these big instances, but also instances where we have some control so, April 2020, we were all stuck in place because the government had mandated that we couldn’t travel, that’s not psychologically interesting to me, there’s not much you can do about that, you might feel stuck, but that’s just how it is for that period of time, but it turns out that far more common than that are these instances where we do have room to move, and that’s what this book is focused on.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you give three things to define being stuck in life or in work, you’re temporarily unable to make progress in a domain that matters to you, you’ve been fixed in a place for long enough to feel psychological discomfort and your existing habits and strategies aren’t solving the problem, and you said being stuck can be caused by external forces or internal forces. In this book, you’re trying to focus on the internal, correct?
Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean sometimes you’re caused to be stuck by something external, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the power to shape it or change it, so I’m interested in cases where we have some agency where there is room for a better way, and that’s really what this roadmap that I provide in the book is focused on.
Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s talk about why getting stuck is inevitable and you highlight a few factors that contribute to getting stuck, the first one is this idea of the Goal Gradient effect, what is that and why does it contribute to stuckness?
Adam Alter: Yeah, so the basic idea is that when you do something that takes sustained effort across a period of time, there will be a lull in the middle, and if you think about it at the beginning of any goal, you have the energy of the excitement that comes from starting something new, you tend to do things fast and effectively and efficiently, and then as the goal is within sight as you approach it, you speed up again because you can see the finish line, either metaphorically or literally. In the middle though, there’s this long period of lull, a sort of quiet where you are in the middle and you don’t have a sense of that early push and you don’t have the sense of the goal finish line, and so there’s this midpoint lull, which happens in pretty much all goals, whether you’re a charity trying to attract money for a particular campaign, whether you’re an artist trying to create a work, whether you’re a business, it doesn’t really matter what it is, you will find this midpoint lull, and so that’s the Goal Gradient effect.
But it’s also made worse by the fact that in the middle of the goal, you tend to hit a plateau, so if you keep doing things the same way, let’s say you’re trying to become fit, you do the same exercise regime over and over again on your way to losing a certain amount of weight, putting on a certain amount of muscle that will stop working, and it depends on the person if there are some individual differences, but within six to 18 months, most people find that a regime that was working really well for them, stops working, it stops having a beneficial effect. Now humans like things that have worked in the past, they keep doing them until they absolutely can’t do them any longer, and so between this Goal Gradient, this mid-point lull and the fact that everything stops working and stops being effective in time, we really need to be nimble and to figure out ways to head off these instances of stuckness before they become major issues.
Brett McKay: So what are some things you can do to mitigate the goal gradient effect and the plateau effect.
Adam Alter: So with a gaol gradient effect, the best thing you can do is to shrink the middle, think about writing a book, if it’s… I wanna write 100,000 words. The day you start writing, you might have a head of steam, you might be doing fine, but there’ll be a point, and when you listen to writers, they’ll talk about this, and this explains a lot of writer’s block. There’ll be a point very soon thereafter that you say, this is hard, I’m struggling. And the idea of a 100,000 words is just completely overwhelming when you’ve written, say 500 or 1000 or 1500. So the best thing you can do is to shrink the goal, is to bracket it narrowly as they say, it’s about bracketing the goal in a new way, and so one thing you can do is you can break that 100,000 words into a 100 instances of a thousand words each, and if there’s something you like to do, that’s a small reward, you can do that each time you hit a new mark of a 1000 words. Now, the benefit of doing that is that you’ve shrunk the middle, and so when you shrink the middle or eliminate it all together, you don’t have that same lull, because you’ve reframed the way you think of the goal.
And this turns out to be very, very effective for writers. For the plateau effect, the solution is written into the problem. The problem is you keep doing the same thing, it stops working. The solution is to change things. If you’re running a race or training for a marathon, or training for an Iron Man or trying to… Whatever it might be, you hit a plateau because you’re… Learning a language is the same thing, you just need more than one technique, you can’t use the same training program all the time, or the same approach to learning all the time. And there’s just so much evidence of that across so many domains, so whenever you do anything, be prepared that within a few months, there’s a good chance you’re gonna need to do something new, so be on the hunt for another alternative.
Brett McKay: And we’ll talk about ways to hunt for new alternatives, when we talk about this idea of Explore versus Exploit, here in a bit. So you have a chapter about keeping going when you hit that low or that feeling of stuckness, and you use the band, the ’80s synth band, A-ha who wrote, Take On Me. What can they teach us about not quitting when we hit a wall.
Adam Alter: Yeah, I love these stories of colossal successes and you go back and you find out that, Hey, this thing that looks polished and beautiful and it worked exactly the way it should work, when you look back, it turns out it didn’t always look that way, it was much more complicated. And the song Take On Me by A-ha is one of the biggest selling songs of the ’80s, and in fact of all time, but it had several versions and iterations that came before it, and when the band was writing about what it was like to create the song they talked about how for several years they couldn’t get financial backing, once they got financial backing, the version of the song they created was just a little bit rusty, it didn’t have quite the same bounce that it ended up having in its final iteration.
They tried floating and releasing the song several times, and it just didn’t take off commercially, it took three or four bites at the cherry, and eventually the American arm of their recording Agency said, Hey, we gotta make a great video for this, and if you know the song, and you know the video, it’s this classic ’80s video that people will watch, I think it’s been viewed billions of times now on YouTube. That video launched the song and launched the band and made the song, and without that perseverance across a period of many years, that song wouldn’t have succeeded the way it did, and there are so many cultural products like that where what you see at the end is this end product that looks like it just sort of arrive fully formed, but that’s not where it began, there were instances of stuckness that came before it over and over again.
Brett McKay: And you have this idea, that talk about why it’s important to keep going even when things seem like it’s not going anywhere, and one of these ideas is the Serial Order Effect, what is that?
Adam Alter: Yeah, so this is based on the idea of the Creative Cliff, and what happens with the serial order effect is, some pieces of information are really accessible, they come to you really fast. Especially the first pieces of information. And so imagine that I say to you, try to come up with as many creative uses as you can for a paper clip, and what happens is early on, what’s top of mind, tumbles out, it feels like it’s really easy, you can start thinking of some ideas that just come to your mind without much trouble, and eventually what happens is you hit a wall that as you get deeper into the list and into some ideas that are perhaps a little bit further afield, it starts to feel hard and humans interpret that sort of mental difficulty that comes with struggling through a problem like that, as we’re on the verge of failure, we’re not doing a very good job, but it turns out that in the world of creativity, the good stuff happens once it starts getting hard, because the easy stuff everyone can do. There’s nothing interesting about what comes easily to you, because it probably comes easily to everyone else as well. And so the big idea is that you’ve really gotta persevere that those ideas that come later on are often the best ideas, even though we sort of perceive them as being less good, because they come to us with a bit more difficulty and trial.
Brett McKay: Gotcha, so the Creative Cliff is this idea, it’s an illusion that our best ideas come early and then after that, they’re not any good, but it’s actually the opposite, usually the better ideas come after that wall.
Adam Alter: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, that’s exactly right. So if you ask people, imagine that I’m gonna ask you to try to come up with ideas and you’re gonna do 10 ideas now and then we’ll do a second session of 10 ideas after that, when do you think your best ideas will come and almost everyone says my best ideas will come first, and then the ideas, ideas 11 to 20 later on are not gonna be as good, it’s gonna be harder and it’s just probably gonna be a bit stale by that point, but when you actually look, that’s an illusion that we all have or most of us have. The good stuff comes at the end, and that’s the Creative Cliff illusion, we think our creativity is gonna fall off a cliff, but actually it skyrockets, it takes off, and so as things get hard, interesting ideas tend to tumble out if you persevere it’s a mistake to quit at that point.
Brett McKay: So the idea to mitigate that is just to keep, when it feels hard, just you gotta keep going.
Adam Alter: It’s not working until it feels hard basically, so that’s your signal that you’re doing something right, and that doesn’t mean go on forever, right? There is a cottage industry of books now that say, You should quit, we don’t quit often enough, and I think that’s true. I think there are many times when you need to quit, but if you’re in a concerted period of trying to come up with creative ideas or solutions, do not think that because it gets hard, you failed or that you should stop, that’s the moment when you really gotta dig in and keep going for a bit longer.
Brett McKay: And I love this idea of the Creative Cliff ’cause I’m in middle age now, I’ve turned 40, and there’s this popular idea that people have that if you don’t… If you’re not a success in your 20s or 30s, you’ve pretty much… It’s over for you. But no, actually, as you get older, if you keep pushing beyond and keep producing, you can have… And still be prolific even in your 40s, 50s, 60s.
Adam Alter: Exactly, yeah, and actually, what we focus on in the media, in podcasts, in popular culture in general, is these cases of precocious talent, we’re very fascinated by people in their teens and 20s who come up with brilliant ideas and make huge amounts of money, are very successful, and young prodigies, talents like that, precocious talents are fascinating, but they’re also incredibly unusual, when you look at the people who start the most successful businesses in the world, they are on a average, between 40 and 50 years old, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s not surprising, it’s only surprising against the backdrop of assuming that you have to be incredibly young to be a successful entrepreneur, but by 40 or 50, you’ve lived a bit, you’ve got a little bit more experience, you know what works and doesn’t, and you’ve refined your ideas and talents and yeah, using that same Creative Cliff idea across the longer period of decades, things have started to perhaps get hard, maybe your first ideas in your 20s and 30s weren’t perfect, but they came easily and then things might have got a little bit harder in your 30s, 40s, 50s, but that’s when they get good and interesting, and when you use that experience to great effect.
Brett McKay: And you also talk about the impact of luck in creative endeavors or in work endeavors, some businesses, some professions, some things are more prone to luck and that can be demoralizing, right? You put out good stuff and then nothing happens, but you have to keep going because maybe the next one that’ll be the thing that catapults you to success, like every time you do something it’s like buying a lottery ticket, in a sense.
Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly. You sort of see the luck as this kind of mystical thing and it robs you of a sense of control, but the way to really think about luck is that it just is the thing that emerges after enough time, it may come soon, it may come later, but if you have enough attempts at whatever it is that you’re doing, or you do it for long enough, you can manufacture luck, it’s a little unpredictable, but regardless of which career you’re in, regardless of how much luck is attached to that particular career, by continuing on by pushing through, you do tend to stumble on it eventually.
Brett McKay: So in the second half of the book, you talk about how to deal with the depression and angst that can come with getting stuck, and one strategy is Radical Acceptance. What is that?
Adam Alter: Yeah Radical Acceptance, it’s this idea from eastern philosophy from Buddhism, that things kind of suck sometimes, things get hard, and you basically gotta take a couple of deep breaths and accept that that’s the way they are. And it’s more complicated than that. There’s quite a lot written about it and how it works, but the basic idea is the first thing you need to do is just take a pause and kind of accept where you are before you start making strategies to change, and there are sort of versions of this in the book that I talk about, that are much more down to earth than this philosophy, which is a little bit abstract, but when you look at how some of the most talented people in their fields respond to being stuck, a lot of them paradoxically do less, they slow down, they do the kind of Zen thing which is to say they don’t do anything, at least initially, and that turns out to be a tremendously beneficial way of at least initially coping with stuckness. I talk about Lionel Messi and Andre Agassi, and the jazz pianist, Herbie Hancock, there are a whole lot of examples in the book of these people who learned to do less to get more out of themselves.
Brett McKay: Well, yeah, I think this idea of radical acceptance, I think people confuse it with having to… They confuse acceptance with putting a value judgment on it, so just because you accept something, doesn’t mean you think it’s good, you’re accepting the fact that you’re in a crappy situation, the same way you’d accept the fact that the sky is blue.
Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly. And in a lot of the cases that I’m focusing on in the book, you can accept the things are the way they are right now, without having to accept it that they’ll always be like this. And so you accept it. You say, it sucks that I’m in this position, I’m gonna have to do something to get out of it. And very often, there is something you can do, but it’s okay to take a moment to just say, Hey, this is kind of painful, this is not working the way I’d like it to work, some change has been visited upon me in a way that I didn’t anticipate or invite, and now I have to figure out what to do next, but it’s okay to take a minute to strategize, slow things down, turn down the temperature, and that’s what these geniuses from you know Einstein did this, Mozart did this, Claude Monet did this, they all would spend long periods of time just kind of mired in what the situation was, before they tackled it, before they came up with a strategy to move forward.
Brett McKay: And you just said once they do the acceptance, one of the things they do is they take their foot off the gas and they might even start relaxing their definition of success, and it’s interesting ’cause you think when you’re stuck, you wanna push harder and that could be that maybe you need to do that in some situations, but often times if you just take your foot off the gas, that might help you get unstuck, it’s like the same thing when you’re trying to get a car unstuck, alright you wanna kind of rock it back and forth, so you’re gonna push on the gas, take it off, let it rock, push on the gas and that’ll get you unstuck.
Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean that’s exactly right. And the way I think about it is there’s a very big difference between being physically stuck and being stuck metaphorically or emotionally or psychologically, the way I’m interested in this book. Now there are all these cases of hysterical strength, where you read someone lifted a car off another person or something like that, humans are really well designed for instances of being physically entrapped, we have a lot of mechanisms, we have a rush of adrenaline, all of that sort of helps us get unstuck physically, but the same just hurts you when you’re trying to get unstuck mentally ’cause what you really gotta do is, as you said, turn down the temperature, slow things down. Your first instinct to just do anything to get unstuck in that case is just unhelpful, so I think that’s a really important insight that the first thing you gotta do as you say, is turn down the temperature.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and you mentioned Messi, he does this and he’s the greatest soccer player ever but he’s got really bad nerves or anxiety before a game, and the way he counters that, you need to go into detail about it, but basically he just says, I’m gonna take my time before I get going in a game, he’ll spend the first couple of minutes of game, just kinda walking around near the sideline, not being part of the action.
Adam Alter: It’s totally fascinating. Yeah, I agree with you. I think he’s the greatest player today, maybe of all time, and I was very, very surprised to learn this, that he is among the most anxious soccer players on the field, and in fact, in his early days, his coaches said, I don’t know that this guy is gonna make it, ’cause he’s got talent, but he doesn’t have the temperament for the game, and so Messi had to figure out a way to get unstuck, he would start games and sometimes he’d be physically sick, he just really couldn’t play at the beginning of those games, and sometimes he would be debilitated. They’d have to take him off the field. So that’s exactly right. What he does now is he spends the first roughly three or four minutes of the game ambling around the center circle of the field, he doesn’t really move around much, if you plot the movement of all the other players, they’re darting around the field trying to get into the game. And he’s barely moving, he walks, and he’s doing that for two reasons, one of them is because it helps him calm his nerves, gives him a few minutes to kind of get into the game, so he’s more effective for the remaining 85 plus minutes.
But the other thing it does is it makes them incredibly good as a strategic perceiver of the game, because he spends those few minutes saying, Oh, I see there’s an injury over there, that player is limping, these two players are not working particularly well together, I can exploit that later on. On his own team, he’ll see who’s playing well, who’s doing something strange. And so what he does is he kind of compiles this idiosyncratic list of features of that particular game that he can then bank away and use for the remaining time in the game, and so it makes him just unbelievably effective for the rest of the game. Now he’s never scored a goal in the first two minutes of a soccer match, but he scored in every minute from minute three on, which shows you that he really isn’t playing the game until that third minute.
Brett McKay: So another thing we need to learn how to do when we get stuck is learning how to fail well, because often times, we get stuck because we’ve had some sort of failure. We didn’t achieve a goal or something like that had happened, so we’re kind of, we’re stuck in this little plateau trying to figure what to do. So what can we do to fail better because failing doesn’t feel great?
Adam Alter: No, it doesn’t feel great. The first thing to do is to recognize that there is an optimal failure rate in general. There are some studies that have tried to look at this. How do you maximize growth? And how do you minimize getting stuck? And what you find is that about roughly one in six to one in four occasions when you’re practicing or trying something or learning something new, you should be failing. If you fail much less than that, you’re not gonna grow. You’re just gonna be doing the same thing over and over and again, like hitting your head against the wall. If you fail much more than that, you’re gonna become de-motivated and that means that whatever you’ve put in front of yourself is a little bit too advanced for the level that you’re at right now. And so that’s the first thing. Failing well involves, first of all, failing at all, you’ve gotta fail the right amount roughly. And to temper the practice sessions and the learning experiences so that you’re failing roughly the right amount. The second thing is to basically over-train is one thing you can do. That’s very effective. There are a lot of athletes who do this, but to inoculate yourself against the hardship that will come when the real experience arrive.
So there are golfers who will play three rounds of golf on a practice day, so that when they have to play a single round of golf, they are deeply focused for that 72 plus or minus shots. And so if you’re hitting 300 or 250 shots in a day and you can focus for all of those, it’s obviously gonna be easier to focus for 70 shots. And so over-training is a great thing you can do. And then the last thing I would say about failing well, is you wanna make sure that as you fail and you don’t quite reach your goals, the gap is getting smaller across time. So you’re learning to the point where you are converging on the goal, even if you haven’t quite got there yet. And honestly, if you’re not, and you’re not happy with that, and it looks like over time you’re diverging from the goal, you’re moving further away from it, you’re not getting closer, maybe it’s time to try something else.
Brett McKay: Well, it’s interesting, this idea of you need to fail in order to succeed, and failure close the gap to your goal. This reminds me, did you watch that video of Giannis, the basketball player from the Milwaukee Bucks?
Adam Alter: Yeah, I thought it was fantastic.
Brett McKay: He has that the same sort of… He’s had this great response to a reporter who asked him, it’s the season of failure, ’cause the Bucks, they lost to the Miami Heat. And his response was awesome. He just said, you asked me this question last year, it’s a dumb question. He said, Look, every time I fail, it’s a step towards success. He says, Michael Jordan played 15 seasons, he won six championships. He says, were the other nine years of failure? He’s like, No, those failures led to those successes. So I think that’s a great way to think about failures are steps to success.
Adam Alter: Yeah, I agree. And I thought you’ve captured the best parts of the video, that where he talks about Jordan’s 15 year career and says well, nine of the years is failure. I think one of the things that highlights as well is that we see failure as a kind of binary or failure or success as a kind of binary, you’re either failing or you’re succeeding. And the idea that you can break down a career and say, well, fail, fail, fail, success, fail, fail, fail, success. The way this reporter was trying to do with the Giannis telling him that because he hadn’t won a championship that year, it was a failure, is just, it’s, first of all, it’s deeply unproductive. It doesn’t help, it doesn’t make your life better. It doesn’t help you progress or persevere, but also it’s a, it’s just misguided. The world doesn’t operate on that particular binary because failures lead to the next thing. And the next thing is often better than what came before precisely because there was this, what that reporter would call failure.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break. Few words from our more sponsors. And now back to the show. Alright, so we’ve dealt with the emotional aspect of being stuck. So reframe how you think about failure, take your foot off the gas, practice radical acceptance. The next part is to start coming up with a plan to get unstuck. And one of these things you suggest doing is called a friction audit. What is that and how can it help us get unstuck?
Adam Alter: Yeah, so this started, I do a fair amount of business consulting and consulting for charities and non-profit organizations. And the big question a lot of these organizations have is how can we spend less money to make more of an impact? Or how can we spend less money to do better sales or whatever it is they want? And so the technique that I’ve found with a great return on investment is known as a friction audit. And so what you do is, if you think about a company that’s making a product, you essentially have two ways to improve your bottom line. One way is to make the product better. And that’s expensive, sweeten the deal, make the carrot more attractive, get people in the door, get more people in the door, have them stay for longer. You can do that as a business, but it’s not cheap.
It’s hard. You’re gonna have competitors and so that’s not the road to go. The road to go is to say, one of the reasons we are not doing more or doing better is because there are friction points. People are getting stuck in interacting with our company or in the process of completing a sale or whatever it might be. So the best thing we can do is to remove some friction. So the friction audit is this process that I originally used in this business context where you say, where is the friction? How can we intervene on it? How can we sand it down? So we remove it or at least make it a little bit less friction filled. And then let’s confirm that it’s actually done some good. An example of this is I worked with a whole lot of shopping malls. They found that a lot of parents were coming and shopping and abandoning their carts without buying.
They figured out it was ’cause one of the kids they came with had a tantrum and they had to leave. So you put in these very inexpensive little play playgrounds and gyms and things, jungle gyms, they cost a few thousand dollars to install, and over the course of a year, you save a hundred thousand dollars of lost sales. And so that small investment, massive return. But this works in our lives as well. You can run a friction audit. I talk about this process in the book. You can run that process on any aspect of your life. Relationships, work, creativity, athletics, it doesn’t really matter what it is, it applies there as well.
Brett McKay: Oh yeah, imagine you could do this if you’re trying to lose weight, kinda look at your life, okay, what is causing me to maintain the weight that I’m at and preventing me from putting into action my intentions, right? So it could be, well the friction point… You actually, you can actually do this. You can actually increase friction, right? If it’s too easy to get to food that’s not good for you. The friction audit would say, well I can make this harder by just not even buying this stuff and putting in my house.
Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly. My last book on phones and screens and how much time we spend on them was about largely this idea that it is just too easy to start using these products. And so they end up sucking up a huge amount of our lives. Just as you might say, I won’t buy chocolate ’cause I don’t wanna eat chocolate, if you keep your phone far away from you, you create friction, you’re much less likely to use your phone. And so this, it’s an important general insight about humans that the things that are close to us or that are easy to access are the things we spend more time interacting with than doing, the things that are much further away tend to have a smaller impact on our lives. And so you’ve gotta sort of design your, the world around you, the way you design any other thing, the way an architect will design a building or a city, you’ve gotta do that for your own world. And so keep things around you that you wanna have around that’ll do good things for you and the things that you don’t wanna keep around you because you think they’re gonna make your life worse off. Make sure that they’re nowhere near you in physical space.
Brett McKay: So you also suggest when you’re in that stuck place in life or in work is try copying others to help you get unstuck. How can that help you get unstuck?
Adam Alter: Yeah, it’s funny that, we privileged this idea of radical originality. One of the things I teach my MBA students, we talk about innovations and we look at all the greatest products of the last 50 years. We talk about them and I ask my students, tell me a product that’s truly radically original that had no predecessor, there was, it wasn’t built on the ideas of someone else. And it’s very, very, very difficult to do that with products. And it’s just as difficult to do that with things like films or music or art. And the problem with privileging and putting on a pedestal radical originality is that it sets this unrealistic bar. And so I talk about the idea that a better way to go is to recombine old ideas. And actually, almost every instance of something that seems from the outside, like it’s new and radically different is just a new way of thinking of two things or meshing two or more things together.
I talk a little bit about, for example Dave Grohl, Bob Dylan, these musicians who, when people talk about them, they say they’re doing something that’s pretty new and pretty different. And even other musicians say about Bob Dylan in particular, he was a genuinely original voice of the 20th century. But when you go back and you look at where his origins began, he was combining folk, he was combining rock at the time, pop, he was combining blues. He put it all together in a new way. But the building blocks of all of that were not themselves new. And I think that’s, it’s an important insight because it makes the process of coming up with good ideas, with good products, with good whatever things you’re trying to create much more tractable. It means you’re much more likely to succeed.
Brett McKay: When I read this idea of copying others, it made me think of the idea of woodshedding. Do you know about this idea?
Adam Alter: No, I don’t.
Brett McKay: So Woodshedding comes from jazz. You’re supposed to go to the woodshed where it’s kind of far away and no one can hear you and practice. And the idea is you practice where no one can hear you so that you could come back later and then show off what you’ve learned. And I think woodshedding, you can copy the work of others in woodshed at the same time, right? Like you want to do this in private, you wouldn’t want to copy someone out in the public blatantly ’cause that’s just, that’s just copying, that’s like plagiarism. But what you can do is you can take the work of others and practice with it privately, remix it, try things, and then once you got something new, then you can bring it out.
Adam Alter: A 100%. Yeah. So no one would say that Dylan isn’t doing something that’s on some level different. I just think that the idea that these things that seem new are kind of mystical and just appear out of nowhere, that’s the nonsense, right? So I’m sure Dylan did something like woodshedding. He took these ideas that he liked and maybe he didn’t even do it explicitly, but they were infused in his music. And so he went and he practiced and he created the style that became Bob Dylan’s style. But that doesn’t mean that what he was doing was plagiarism or that it wasn’t on some level new and different. It just means that all that other stuff seeped into it. It was like a sort of tea that had been made with all the ideas that had come before. But you need time for it to steep and that’s that process of woodshedding or practicing or honing or whatever you wanna call it.
Brett McKay: So I know… Yeah, I know. What’s the guy’s name? He wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Oh, Hunter S. Thompson.
Adam Alter: Hunter S. Thompson, yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. He supposedly typed out, I think it was The Great Gatsby ’cause he just wanted, he wanted to see what it felt like to write a great novel. Who knows if that did anything, but maybe it did. But I also Austin Cleon has that idea of steal like an artist. All artists are just copying each other, but they’re, it’s not blatant like word exact copy. Like you said, you just kind of, you work with the previous people’s stuff until it seeps into what you do and then you come out with something original. That’s how creativity works. You also have this chapter about when you’re stuck about understanding the idea or the difference between exploring and exploiting. And I really like this chapter. So what’s the difference between exploring and exploiting?
Adam Alter: Yeah, this goes back to evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology that you basically have essentially two ways to look for something new and fruitful and valuable. Let’s say you are hunting and gathering, you’re looking for fruit or food or whatever you’re doing it, you are roaming the Savannah, it’s thousands of years ago. You can roam far and wide, you can cover a lot of terrain, very shallowly. Or you can find an area that seems like it might be fruitful and really dig deeply into that area. But then you’re gonna be leaving a lot of the other pastures without your attention and so you might be missing something. And that’s really how we are as we navigate the world, as we figure out the best way forward. And so there’s a lot of research on these two. Exploring is basically a moment where you say yes to opportunities or options.
So if you think about, I, for me it was like the early days of college, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. So anytime an opportunity came along. I was like, yes, I will try that, see what that’s like. Figure out if that particular career path might work for me. I might meet a person who’s interesting and shows me a new way of doing something. I’ll just say yes to any invitation that comes my way. That’s exploring, it’s being open to different approaches. Jackson Pollock, the Painter for example, before he was doing his drip paintings that he became very famous for, was trying five or six different techniques. Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings films and the Hobbit, before he was this kind of giant fantasy epic film director and producer. He was doing a hundred other things. He wrote horror films, he wrote all sorts of other films.
And so you’ve gotta kind of dance around and figure out what works best. But if you do that forever, you’re never gonna get anywhere. So once you’re done exploring, you basically have to call it and say, okay, I’ve been exploring for a while. Of the five things I explored, this one looks like it’s the most fruitful. And so what I’m gonna do moving forward is say yes only to that thing. I’m gonna put all my time and attention and money towards that thing and say no to everything else. I’m gonna become singularly focused on that thing and make the most of it. And that’s when you see Jackson Pollock with his drip paintings and you see Peter Jackson with his fantasy epics. You just can’t get there if you don’t first explore. And you can’t succeed if you don’t, after exploring exploit, go really deep and make the most of what you’ve got. And so when you look at careers, you look for the period of careers where you find a hot streak, like the best period in someone’s career. It’s almost always after they have explored and then exploited and sometimes multiple times between the two. Explore then exploit, explore then exploit. And that’s when those hot streaks come up.
Brett McKay: I think this is great advice for people. Again, going back, I’m middle-aged. If you feel like you’ve reached a point in middle-aged where you feel stuck, you probably had a period in your 30s, maybe through your 40s where you were exploiting, like you did all this exploration in your 20s, you went to college, tried different classes, tried different careers, you moved to new cities, made new friends. And then you slowly found, here, this is what’s working for me. I’m gonna just, I’m gonna exploit this. And you probably stopped exploring. You might reach a point where you’re like, I’m feeling stuck, I’m feeling stagnant. And that’s where you have to sort of purposely and intentionally shift into exploration mode. And that can be hard because you’re probably comfortable and there’s this, gonna be an inertia not to say yes to things or try new things, but that’s what you gotta do.
Adam Alter: Yeah, you’re right. There is an element of difficulty here, right? Whenever you’re doing something that you’ve been doing for a while and therefore by definition perhaps, you’ve reached a plateau, it’s very comfortable at that point. Part of the plateau is this signal that you are doing something that no longer taxes you and so you’re not improving. And there’s, in some cases, nothing wrong with that. There are these famous cases of people who said, I was overwhelmed with the job I was doing. So every day, I wore the same clothes. I had 10 of the same suit or Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck, Barack Obama in the same suits every day. That’s an attempt to kind of minimize the mental load. And so there’s value in that in just doing things the same way all the time. But as you say, you have to reach a point where you say, I’m gonna pivot back to exploring. You’ve gotta range far and wide again.
Brett McKay: How have you done this in your own career? I mean, you’ve had a long career and varied career. How have you kind of gotten over that inertia to not explore when you needed to explore?
Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean for me, this started really early. I was at university in Australia. I was studying actuarial science, which is this sort of high level financial math course. And I knew I didn’t like it. And I was on a fellowship. And one day the person running the fellowship came in and said, if you keep doing this for another week, you’re gonna thereafter, if you ever quit, have to pay back the money. And that was the signal I needed. So I quit. I said, look, this isn’t working for me. But I had no idea what to do next. I felt profoundly stuck. I was obviously spending a fair amount of money being at the university, amassing a fair amount of debt and I wanted to figure out what was next, but I had no idea where to go. So what I did was I spent six months going to every possible first level class that I could.
I went to English classes, math classes, chemistry classes, engineering classes, psychology classes, law classes, you name it. I went and sat in and tried to get a taste of it, and that was my period of exploration. And from that, I realized that I liked psychology and I liked law, and those are the two degrees I did as an undergrad, psychology and law. And then ended up doing what I do now, which is sort of, in the beginning it was a combination of the two, and then I pursued psychology more heavily and then ultimately ended up in a business school as a marketing professor. But that’s all… I couldn’t have done that without that six month period of exploration. I needed to do that before I exploited the degrees and the courses that made the most sense to me.
Brett McKay: Well I was thinking as you were saying that. Another reason why going back into explore mode could be hard is ’cause it makes you feel dumb, right? ‘Cause you have to be a beginner again. Like you went to those introductory college classes, and it doesn’t feel good to be a beginner. You’re thinking, well I’ve mastered some things. Why am I not sticking to that? But now you gotta feel how bad it feels sometimes to be a complete noob at something.
Adam Alter: Oh, absolutely. It’s not easy on a certain level, you gotta swallow your pride. But also, you can think about this. There are two ways to live in any moment. You’re either stagnant or you’re growing. And one way to grow is to be a beginner. Beginners grow really fast, much more rapidly than experts grow. And so to go from being a beginner to being someone who’s moderately proficient at something or lots of things, that is a true form of growth that I think a lot of us don’t experience and don’t cultivate. There is massive benefit in that. I will say that period of exploration where I didn’t end up becoming an English major or a chemistry major or a math major, I still learned quite a lot about those areas. And I think that was important for me as well. That period of gathering little bits of information about 25 different disciplines had a massive amount of value that I didn’t foresee. So it’s not like this is all going to waste when you’re exploring, it’s all becoming a part of who you are. And David Epstein wrote the book, Range, about exactly that idea that in the course of ultimately flourishing, you’ve gotta kind of spend some time just dancing around different areas and figuring out if they’re worthwhile for you. And that will have a beneficial effect for whatever it is you ultimately specialize in later on.
Brett McKay: Yeah, no failure, just steps to success.
Adam Alter: That’s it.
Brett McKay: How do you know, if you’re in the explore mode, how do you know we need to shift to exploit mode?
Adam Alter: Yeah, so there are a few ways to do this. One is to just say, I am gonna give myself a certain amount of time. So in the example I gave you when I was jumping around from different course to course in college, I knew that the semester was gonna end at a certain date. So I used that as my guide and then I would have to sign up for a new program and that’s what I did. So I had a very clear six month period to do that. If you have objective metrics to pay attention to, if you’re doing something that gives you numerical feedback, you can use that feedback. Like for example, you might say, I’m gonna try these five different techniques. Let’s say you’re trying to work out, which I don’t know, technique of art is the one that you want to pursue if you’re an artist, something like that, you could say to yourself, I’m going to create five artworks in each style and then once I’ve done that, I’ll have my 25 artworks, five styles times five works, and then I’m gonna decide which one to exploit.
So you can use different decision rules to decide. I think also it’s important to pay attention to what it feels like to be in this process ’cause you can get to the point where exploring gets stale. Where you start feeling like, I don’t want to be doing this anymore. I’m ready to really focus on something. And I know that happens with me with books. Between books, I will, this is my third book now. Between books I’ll say I’m interested in 10 different things, but I don’t know when I’m ready to start actually making one of them a book. So I will spend a certain amount of time until I, that the ideas become from 10 to nine to eight to seven, and then I’ll be left with a few that look like good candidates. And eventually, I’ll hit a wall and just say, I can’t keep noodling about with this. I’ve gotta really make a go of it. And that’s when I’ll write the proposal and work on the book.
Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about how to deal with being stuck by changing how we think about being stuck, changing about how we think about failure, thinking of ways we can get unstuck, but then eventually, you gotta start taking action. So what role does action take in helping us get unstuck?
Adam Alter: Yeah, so it’s funny, the last chapter in the book is titled Action Above All. And that’s because all of the discussions about emotions, slowing things down, strategies and so on, none of that would matter for getting unstuck if you didn’t do something, all of that is in the service of action and action is really the main thing that we’re focusing on here. So action is critically important for getting unstuck ’cause it’s the thing that actually un-sticks you. And that’s true in a sort of very obvious sense that you can’t get unstuck if you’re not moving, if you’re static. But it’s also true in a more profound sense, which is that when you do something, when you act, even if the action itself is not dramatically productive, even if it doesn’t produce something that you can then use for the rest of time, the mere fact that you’re acting lubricates the wheels and gets you moving forward.
There’s this great example of this that I love Jeff Tweedy, the front man of Wilco who writes music for the band Wilco, but also is a writer. He writes books. He’s talked a lot about his creative process and he talks about the fact that he wakes up a lot of days, he’s been doing this a long time for decades and he’ll wake up on a lot of days and say, I don’t feel like being creative today. Nothing’s gonna happen. And so what he does is, he says to himself, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna spend say half an hour in the morning pouring out all the bad ideas, like sort of extracting them from my brain, putting them on the page and then that will make way for the good stuff. And so what he does is he says to himself, what’s the worst sentence I could write right now? Or what’s the worst bit of music I could compose? And he does that. Sometimes it’s better than he thinks and it’s valuable, but a lot of the time, it’s not, it’s not actually useful, but it’s, it by definition, by doing that, lowering the bar all the way down to the ground, you’re still acting. And so you show yourself something about your capacity to act rather than sitting around and naval gazing you’re doing something and there’s value in that.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I like that idea that quantity and quality are related because the more stuff you put out, you increase the chances of you actually having a home run. I mean the same thing with baseball, right? I think what everyone famously says, Babe Ruth, he’s the home run King, but yeah, like the most strikeouts, he’s struck out a ton of times.
Adam Alter: Exactly.
Brett McKay: He’s taken action. The same idea that applies to any other domain in life.
Adam Alter: Exactly.
Brett McKay: And then also you talk about besides taking action on the thing that you’re wanting to get unstuck in, you also talk about just physically moving can help you get unstuck. Like actually getting up and moving your body can help you get unstuck from whatever is you’re stuck in.
Adam Alter: Yeah, there’s a lot of research on the value of walking, of moving and so if you’re trying to think of something and you’re sitting on your seat at your desk and it’s not working, walk outside if it’s nice out, get on a treadmill, if it’s not. Move your body pace around, it tends to sort of grease the wheels a little bit and get things moving again. If you are an athlete, do whatever it is that you like doing. There’s this amazing set of videos of Paul Simon who obviously not an athlete but a great musician. And Paul Simon was notoriously shy, but he was on a number of talk shows in the ’70s and ’80s. One of them was the Dick Cavett show and he would get onto the show and Cavett would ask him questions, and he would just absolutely struggle to respond. And it was clear that he wasn’t comfortable being there.
He would even make comments about the microphone and its position. He just felt really uncomfortable. But Cavett very wisely said to him, why don’t you pick up your guitar and show us how you wrote bridge over troubled water or something like that. And Simon did that and the minute he started strumming, he was charming and relaxed and things came to him much more easily. So if there’s something you do, whether it’s lifting weights, going for a run, riding on a bike, it doesn’t matter, rowing, whatever it is, that movement seems to be, it gets you to a comfortable place mentally as well and seems to lubricate whatever gears need to be turning in your head to unstick you.
Brett McKay: Yeah, getting into your body gets you out of your head sometimes, which can be useful.
Adam Alter: A 100%.
Brett McKay: Well Adam, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Adam Alter: Yeah, so I’m on Twitter and LinkedIn and are my main channels, that’s where I post information. I’ve been posting about the book a fair amount there, so there’s quite a lot of information there. I also have a website, AdamAlterauthor that is basically a compilation of all the press material and other things that have been written about the book or that I’ve written about the book. And those are probably the two places. But yeah, the book is available online, it’s available in bookstores and will be available from May 16.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Adam Alter, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Adam Alter: Thanks so much for having me, Brett.
Brett McKay: My guest, it was Adam Alter, he’s the author of the book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, adamalterauthor.com. Also check our show notes at aom.is/unstuck, and 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 @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 join 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’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 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.
The post Podcast #896: The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
America’s national parks are one of the country’s greatest treasures, and many people have it on their bucket list to visit one or more of these gems. But figuring out where to go and how to execute a national park experience can sometimes feel a little overwhelming.
Here to offer some really helpful advice on both visiting and camping in the national parks is Jeremy Puglisi, co-author, along with his wife Stephanie, of Where Should We Camp Next?: National Parks: The Best Campgrounds and Unique Outdoor Accommodations In and Around National Parks, Seashores, Monuments, and More. Today on the show, Jeremy walks us through how to navigate the complex reservation system some of the parks have in place and what it takes to secure a campsite inside the parks. He then shares his best tips for getting the most out of a national park experience in general, as well as when you’re visiting some of the country’s most iconic destinations, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. At the end of our conversation, Jeremy shares the national parks he thinks are underrated, and if you want to avoid the crowds of the national parks, he also shares his picks for the country’s best state parks.
Resources Related to the Podcast* Jeremy’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #711: — How to Plan the Ultimate Road Trip * recreation.gov * nps.gov * KOA campgrounds * AoM Article: Beat the Crowds (And the Fees) With Dispersed Camping
Connect With Jeremy Puglisi* The RV Atlas website * The RV Atlas podcast * RV Atlas on Instagram * RV Atlas on Twitter
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. America’s national parks are one of the country’s greatest treasures, and many people have it on their bucket list to visit one or more of these gems. But figuring out where to go and how to execute a national park experience can sometimes feel a little overwhelming. Here to offer some really helpful advice, on both visiting and camping in the natural parks, with Jeremy Puglisi, co-author along with his wife, Stephanie of Where Should We Camp Next? National Parks: The Best Campgrounds and Unique Outdoor Accommodations In and Around National Parks, Seashores, Monuments, and More. Today in the show Jeremy watches through how to navigate the complex reservation system some of the parks have in place, and what it takes to secure a camp site inside the parks.
He then shares his best tips for getting the most out of a national park experience in general, as well as when you’re visiting some of the country’s most iconic destinations. Including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. At the end of our conversation, Jeremy shares the national parks he thinks are underrated, and if you wanna avoid the crowds of national parks, he also shares his pick for the country’s best state parks. After show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/nationalparks.
Alright, Jeremy Puglisi, welcome back to the show.
Jeremy Puglisi: It’s so great to be here, and thank you so much for always having authors on your show, big, big fan of your podcast. Great to be here.
Brett McKay: Well, thank you so much. So, we had you and your wife Stephanie, on the show a few years ago to talk about how to plan and execute the perfect road trip. And the reason I wanna bring you back on this time is you all have a new book out called Where Should We Camp Next? National Parks. So, I know a lot of people, they’re planning summer vacations, they’re thinking about maybe doing some national parks. And these can be surprisingly tricky to navigate, and I’m hoping we get some advice from you today, but I also wanna talk about camping in national parks. That’s something that a lot of people don’t… You can do, but I think a lot of people just think about visiting national parks, so camping inside of a national park adds another dimension of maybe complexity to this thing, but maybe some high reward there, let’s talk about you and your wife’s experience and your family’s experience with camping in national parks. You guys are big campers, you do a lot of RVing. How many national parks have you all camped in?
Jeremy Puglisi: So, between the two of us, we’ve done about half of the 63 national parks, and then we’ve done a lot of the other national park sites, which are not necessarily national parks. And it’s been about a decade of doing long RV trips with our kids and every summer we definitely hit up a few of our national parks. I would love to get to all of them, I don’t know if that’ll happen, but we’re working hard to do so.
Brett McKay: What’s been your favorite national park you visited so far?
Jeremy Puglisi: So, my favorite, and this surprises people. My favorite is Olympic National Park in Washington State. And I think that’s because it has so many different ecosystems, you’ve got the mountains, you’ve got the ocean, you’ve got rain forest, you’ve got some really hip cool gateway towns. And it’s pretty close to Seattle, so you kinda can fit in a city trip if you want to as well. So, that’s always been my favorite, I think Stephanie would say Glacier National Park was her favorite.
Brett McKay: So, you’re still trying to hit national parks every time you’d go out traveling in the summer?
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, and this is one of our biggest tips is we often do a big national park trip at the very end of August. That’s the time we’ve been really zooming in on, because our kids are still off school here in the Northeast, they go back after Labor Day. And so, what we’ve discovered is most of the country is back to school at that point, so we have hit some of the major national parks at the very end of the summer, and not had the crowding issues that everybody has been talking about.
Brett McKay: So, you mentioned there’s 63 official national parks, but you mentioned that there’s other sites or land governed by the National Park Service. What other sites should people consider when they think National Park Service?
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so there’s 63 national parks, but there’s 424 national park sites, and there’s all different kinds of designations. You’ve got national seashores like Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Cape Cod National Seashore. You’ve got national lake shores like Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan. You’ve got national recreation areas, we have in New Jersey, we have Gateway National Recreation Area, we’ve got national memorials, national parkways. And the thing that we really wanted to get across in the book is that a lot of them have amazing camping experiences. Sometimes there are sites inside those parks, but sometimes you have to camp outside of the parks. But we wanted to sort of re-distribute the balance of how people look at national park camping trips, ’cause we all think of the iconic trips out West, and there are more national parks in the West, but in the East, we have a lot of those other designations. We have a lot of the recreation areas, the seashores, the lake shores, the monuments, and those offer great camping experiences too, and we really wanted the book to give people alternatives from the places that are so, so crowd. Some of which I think we’ll talk about today.
Brett McKay: Oh, the other thing I didn’t think about, but it made sense, the Civil War Sites. That’s National Park Service.
Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. And so Gettysburg, there’s no camp grounds in Gettysburg National Battlefield, but there’s a whole culture of camping right outside of Gettysburg. There’s also a lot of campgrounds outside of Fredericksburg, almost all of those major sites have camping right outside of them, and people love to go on camping trips and make a whole tour out of it.
Brett McKay: So, the big take away there, don’t limit yourself just to the national parks. National parks are great, and we’re gonna talk about some of them today, but also think outside the box, think of other lands or sites governed by the National Park Service. Let’s talk about just visiting national parks in general, maybe someone just planning on going there, they don’t wanna camp, they wanna visit a national park. I’m sure people have heard, or they’ve tried in the past five years to visit a national park, they’ve heard or experienced that getting into a national park can be surprisingly difficult. Why is getting into a national park so hard sometimes?
Jeremy Puglisi: So, my theory here is that during the pandemic interest in national parks, interest in camping exploded for obvious reasons. But then everybody that had been taking other types of vacations like cruises or flying to Europe, I think a lot of them just wanted to go to the same five or six places that they’ve been hearing about their whole lives. They’ve been hearing about Yellowstone, they’ve been hearing about Yosemite, they’ve been hearing about a little place called Zion, and so I think that we had an absolute flood of people that were new to camping and maybe even kinda new to road tripping, all trying to descend on the same places at one time.
So, it is true that there are crowding issues at the most popular national parks, at the most popular times. But shoulder seasons are pretty open, and there’s also so many great national parks that are off people’s radars. Now, I would never tell someone, “Don’t go to Yellowstone, don’t go to Yosemite.” That’s your travel dream, go do that. And we’ve gone to those places too, we just wanted to open up some other options as well, and some of the places that we wanna talk about, I think like Yosemite, it’s near San Francisco. So, that’s gonna be crowded, there’s massive population density nearby. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is within striking distance of massive population density, so a lot of people go to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it’s our most visited Park. But then there are places that are a bit more off the beaten track that people cannot get to quite as easily, and there’s campsites open, there really are.
Brett McKay: Okay, so some national parks, they are very popular, different times they’re gonna be more popular. I imagine Summer, like early Summer is probably the peak time for most of them.
Jeremy Puglisi: That sweet spot where all of the kids in the country are off for school is the worst… It’s the hardest time, the most difficult time to go. ‘Cause you have kids in the country that go back to school after Labor Day, then you have kids in the country that get off earlier in May, so that place in the middle where every kid in America is off, that is definitely, honestly a very tricky time to do these types of trip. So, if you can any way move off to the beginning or end of the Summer as opposed to say July, you’re gonna do better. And then of course, if you’re not traveling with kids and that’s not an issue for you, the shoulder seasons are a really wonderful time to visit almost all of these places that we wanna talk about.
Brett McKay: Okay, so I think something people often don’t realize with the national parks is that sometimes you need a reservation ahead of time just to get into the park, or to do certain things in the park. And we had a nightmare experience with this during the pandemic. So, 2021 my wife was turning 40, and she wanted to go to Yosemite for her 40th, and so I thought, Okay, great, I’ll go to recreation.gov, buy the tickets. But at the time, they were expecting you to reserve your spot into the park three days in advance of your arrival at the park. So, a couple of weeks before the day I needed to buy my permit, I got on there to get familiar with recreation.gov and see how fast things went, and just to practice buying the permit. ‘Cause I heard that things can go fast, and so I got on there and tickets went fast in three minutes, they were all gone. But every time I was able to put a permit in my shopping cart, and delete it. So, I thought, okay, I’m not gonna have a problem with this.
So, on the day of, like this is the day that it counted, I had to get one a permit on this day, because we’d be in Yosemite three days. I had to get it. We had already bought lodging, we already bought plane tickets, so this was now or never. So, I had my friend Grant, him and his wife Mary, were gonna come with this as well, and say, “Hey, you get on too, and you just start refreshing your browser and see if you get one will increase the chances. So, we started doing it, got on 10 o’clock Central Time in the morning, ticked, started refreshing the browser trying to get one, trying to get one, trying to get one. And none of us got one, they were gone in a minute. And I remember I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I just ruined Kate’s 40th birthday. This is devastating.” Luckily, my friend Grant, he was clutch, he got on Reddit right after that happened and started searching about getting permits or whatever. And he found that if you get the app, sometimes they reserve a few permits for the recreation.gov app, so we download the app really quick and he was able to get a permit for us to get in.
So, yeah, he saved the day. So, that’s one tip there if you’re trying to get into a hard to get into park or an attraction at a park. Don’t just use the browser, get the app as well. And what was interesting, I was like, “Why is it? Is this is like an off season? We were in February is like, “This is an off season, why was it so crazy to get in at this time?” And what was going on in Yosemite, around February 20th, there’s this phenomenon and is the fire falls which is like a waterfall. And at sunset, the sun hits this waterfall and it looks like fire is going down the wall of the mountain. And so, there’s photographers from all over the world who are trying to get in to get a picture of this. If you look it up, you can see pictures of this online or videos of it.
Get there and except for people around the waterfall, the park was empty. We had basically at the park to ourselves, we went on these great hikes, didn’t see anybody on the trails at all. So, that was another thing thought that I thought was interesting. Even though a park might be busy or hard to get into, you might have it to yourself, because people are there for a certain attraction. And another thing too is, what we saw when we got to Yosemite was some people didn’t know about the reservations that you needed in advance, you see these people in line. I’m sure they drove hours to get to Yosemite, they get to the gate and they didn’t have the permit, and so they just had to turn around and go back.
So, lessons there, check in advance with the park you plan on visiting months in advance that they have a reservation system, be prepared for some parks or some attractions to have to really be ready and try to refresh the browser to get a permit. Use the app, and yeah, that was the thing, just do a lot of research in advance. But I’m curious, so, that was the pandemic, a lot of people were going to the national parks during this time, so I think a lot of parks put in this permit system. Is that still the case? Do a lot of parks still have this, you need a reservation in advance just to get into the park?
Jeremy Puglisi: Well, it’s only a handful, but actually, I’m guessing that a lot of those people that got turned away that day were not Yosemite rookies. I’m actually thinking a lot of them are probably people that have been going to Yosemite for years and never needed that reservation. Because this whole thing made a lot of news during the pandemic, ’cause it had never happened before, the National Park Service has always required reservations for campsites. But for all of its history, you could just drive up and get into the park. And so, since the pandemic though, they have been targeting really specific parks and some really specific attractions or things like fire fall. This year, there’s only five parks that require a reservation to get into the park, and again, we’re not talking camp sites here, we’re just talking getting in.
So actually, Yosemite doesn’t require a reservation to get in this year, though they do require reservations for fire fall, as you described. But this year Acadia requires a reservation to get in, but that’s not the whole park, that’s like the Park Loop Road. Arches requires a reservation, Glacier requires a reservation, but it’s only for going to the Sun Road, and you need to remember these national parks are gigantic. So, sometimes they’re just pinpointing the busiest part of the park and saying, “You need a reservation to get in.” And in Glacier, from what I understand it’s only from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM that you need that reservation for going to the Sun Road. You can be in other parts of the park and not need a reservation at all. Rocky Mountain National Park, you need reservations for specific things, and then Haleakala in Hawaii, you just need a reservation if you wanna come in super early and do the sunrise, which is a very popular.
So, what the NPS is doing is they’re just targeting things they know they get over crowded, and I think they’re almost keeping people from getting disappointed by showing up and not being able to park or not being able to get in. So, it’s very limited, for the most part, every National Park Service Site, you can pull up and pay the price to get in and not have a problem.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I know at Zion they instituted… You don’t need a reservation to get in to Zion, but to do this hike called Angel Landing, you need a permit or a reservation in advance to do that.
Jeremy Puglisi: And I will admit, I will never do that hike, and I think you did, didn’t you?
Brett McKay: Yeah, I did. And we took her son went up it, and he was like 11 or 10 at the time, I think he was 10 or 9. It was crazy ’cause it’s just like a chain and you’re just going up the sheer cliff. The view is great, but it was pretty crazy going up there, and it was definitely crowded too. You just kinda had to keep inching up this long line of people.
Jeremy Puglisi: I don’t blame the NPS for limiting the number of people doing that hike though, ’cause it’s dangerous. So, there’s been a lot of grumbling about the National Park Service implementing some of these reservations, but they tend to know what they’re doing, and I think that one definitely makes sense. And like Acadia National Park, the Park Loop Road, if you let too many people in, then you can’t park anywhere. So, you literally could just drive around it, but it would be impossible to stop and check out any overlooks. So, for the most part, 99% trust the NPS to make good decisions about this stuff.
Brett McKay: So, I guess the take away there, if there’s a national park you’re gonna visit, I would get on recreation.gov to check out the different reservation policies, if you need one in advance, etcetera.
Jeremy Puglisi: I would do two things, I would go to nps.gov, go to the actual National Park Service website, and then click through to recreation.gov, because what I’ve discovered over the years is sometimes there’s more and better information on the National Park Service website, and then recreation.gov is just where you go to make the reservation and sometimes the information can be different. But if you look at both of them together, you’re gonna get the whole picture of whatever is going on with the reservation system.
Brett McKay: Okay, so always do your research beforehand as to whether you need a reservation to get into the park, or to do a certain hike in the park. And then also be aware that those passes, they can be hard to get sometimes. And that could be especially true when it comes to getting your reservation for a camping site, what does it take to get a camp site inside a national park?
Jeremy Puglisi: So, for Yosemite, it is literally… And we can talk about a few different parks here, but for somewhere like Yosemite, it becomes incredibly, incredibly stressful. There’s 13 campgrounds inside the park, some of them you can reserve five months early, some you can reserve two months early, some you can reserve two weeks early. So, you got to figure all of that out. And again, nps.gov, and then go to Yosemite they lay out everything for you. They have 20 pages worth of information on the reservation system, you need a PhD to book a reservation here. And then they basically tell you. They give you a chart of when you need to get on your laptop and at what time, so basically you need to be on your laptop at 7:00 AM Pacific Time on the day that the camp sites are gonna be released. And then on the national park website, it actually says that thousands and thousands of camp sites disappear in seconds, and the issue has become so stressful that there’s been a lot of complaints from the public about it. The public is saying it’s not equitable, not everybody has access to high-speed internet, and some people are gaming the system. They’ve actually had problems with hackers and bots invading the system and getting camp sites at Yosemite.
And this is a real thing, I actually had somebody direct message me on Facebook and say, “Hey, if you wanna get into Yosemite or Yellowstone in the summer, I’ve got a hacker for you, I’ve got somebody. He’s a little expensive, but I can get you the camp site.” So, the National Park Service has kinda become aware of how stressful and awful this is, particularly at Yosemite, Zion, etcetera, etcetera. So, now they’re experimenting with a lottery system at Yosemite, which could spread to other campgrounds across the country. So basically, you put in the dates you want, you put in when you wanna go, and they sort of pull your name out of a digital hat, and then you get early access to the reservation system. And I kid you not, there are seven pages of instructions just to show you how to get the early access through the lottery system. But I do kind of hope that that kind of lottery system becomes more widespread, because I do think it’s even harder for people to get reservations if they’re not really kind of sophisticated with their laptops as silly as that sounds.
Brett McKay: Okay so getting a campground is gonna vary depending on the national park. Yosemite doesn’t have very many campsites, so there’s an elaborate reservation system. And really, you just have to take the time to walk through the instructions and then basically be at your computer at a certain point and just ready to hit Refresh over and over again until you get a spot, correct?
Jeremy Puglisi: No, you need to be on your laptop, your wife needs to be on a laptop, your three kids need to be on their Chromebooks. That’s what people do. They get the whole family literally trying to do it. And yes, you’re hitting refresh. And I have tried this, and I’ve had my heart broken many times. And the sites disappear quickly. And then a couple of times, I’ve been able to get them at some super popular places. But that is definitely an issue. There’s people that feel like they’re not gonna ever build a camp inside Yosemite during their lifetime.
Brett McKay: Okay, so to get a campsite, you have to look at each national park. It’s gonna be different on how far in advance you have to get a spot. It could be six months, it could be five months, could be two months, could be two weeks. And also, I imagine there are some national parks where you could probably just go to the place and there’s probably a campsite there, ’cause it’s not as popular, for example. Are there any national parks like that?
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, I think you could go to somewhere like Big Bend in Texas. I think there are definitely some parks that are like you could walk in Shenandoah National Park it’s in Virginia. That’s kind of closer to me. I would be willing to bet money I could book a site there this weekend right now. So there’s definitely some places that fly under the radar and there are sites available almost at any time. But summer weekends, almost anywhere are gonna be booked inside the parks. And to kinda emphasize a little bit why that is, it’s dirt cheap to camp inside the national parks. It’s often $10, $20, maybe $30 a night, and those campgrounds are in the most beautiful, spectacular locations right inside the parks. And then also, you don’t have to worry about getting into the park in the morning, as you were describing, because you’ve already gone through that process, you’re already in there. You’re waking up in the park and then able to either take a shuttle or just go on a hike from your campsite. But there’s places that are definitely less crowded, for sure, if you dig around, and our book has a ton of them.
Brett McKay: Okay, so camping inside a national park can be stressful. Are there any other campsites that people should consider that are outside of a national park that can give you easy access to the national park, but avoiding the stress and headaches of camping inside the national park?
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so it does become much easier to move outside of the park and look outside of the park. Those types of campgrounds do not book up as quickly. They’re often two to three times, to four times more expensive. So that’s one of the dynamics at work here, is that a site inside of Yellowstone might be 20 bucks. A site outside of Yellowstone could very easily be 100 bucks a night, because it’s a small business owner trying to make a profit. And many of those campgrounds outside the parks are beautiful, but they’re not gonna be as beautiful as being in the park. So there’s major trade-offs. But if you wanted to do a last second national parks trip right now after listening to this podcast, you’re most likely gonna end up looking outside the parks. A good place to start, which I often recommend is KOA, that’s Campgrounds of America. They have 500 campgrounds to franchisee system, and they tend to have a strong presence outside of most national parks. For instance, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there’s gonna be like 8 KOAs around the perimeter of Great Smoky Mountains.
But it also depends on gateway towns. So somewhere like Yosemite does not have an immediate gateway town. You’re gonna drive an hour away to find other camping options. Now, somewhere like Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there are camping options literally right outside the gates of the park. So it’s gonna vary a bit, but it’s always gonna cost more, and it’s always probably gonna be easier to get sites.
Brett McKay: Are state parks a good option for camping outside a national park? ‘Cause I imagine there’s a lot of state parks close by to some of these national parks.
Jeremy Puglisi: State parks can be. Definitely, for sure. Like I think of Custer State Park in South Dakota is a great place to stay if you wanna go to Mount Rushmore. Also national forests are a really great place to walk where there’s more sites available. So particularly thinking about Yellowstone and Grand Teton, they’re surrounded by national forest campgrounds, and those are often first come first served, which makes it a bit tricky if you’re coming from far away, and there’s often maybe like a dirt road to get in, it’s a little more rugged, there’s not a lot of services. But a lot of people do end up in national forest campgrounds, sometimes state parks. It’s unusual to have a national park and a state park right next to each other, though it does happen. Indiana Dunes, which is now a National Park, also has Indiana Dunes State Park literally right next door. And then one of our favorites, Assateague Island State Park, literally right next door is Assateague National Seashore. So you could play that game there, if you can’t get into the national park, try the state park, but that’s gonna be a little bit the exception to the rule, I think.
Brett McKay: Well, another option to consider is dispersed camping. So dispersed camping is, you can do it on certain national lands. And basically, you drive out there, and you can camp pretty much wherever you want, wherever you can find a spot. There are few regulations about where you can camp, but generally, it’s wherever. But the thing is, you’ve got nothing, like there’s no water, there’s no restrooms, you’re digging a cat hole, but it’s a good way to avoid the crowds, and it’s free. So what about dispersed camping? Where is that an option?
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so you can do dispersed camping on BLM land, which is only in about 13 states in the American West, though. I’m a New Jersey guy, I’m jealous. We don’t have that. Also, you can do dispersed camping in national forests. Like if you go to the National Forest Service website, they have rules for how close or far you can be from the road, if you need a permit, if you don’t. In those situations, if you’re gonna try what I often call boondocking, what you just called dispersed camping, you can often call a field office, whether it’s BLM or National Forest, where there’s a ranger or there’s jurisdiction over the land. And it’s very wise to check in because mother nature’s at work, and sometimes things are flooding, or sometimes trees are down and roads are cut off. So there is often a point of contact that you can make literally by picking up a phone and calling somebody to say, “Hey, look, I wanna do dispersed camping in this national forest.” Is there anything I need to know? Is anything closed?” Etcetera, etcetera. It’s getting much bigger in the American West, not so much a thing in the American East. And one of the reasons it’s getting bigger among RV owners is because RVs are becoming much more equipped with solar to be able to be out in the middle of nowhere without electrical hook-ups.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. What general tips do you have for people for just visiting the national park, whether they’re camping in it or just visiting for a few days? Any tips that you found that are useful to get the most out of the national park experience?
Jeremy Puglisi: The single most important thing that we tell everybody is to get up early. Even if your family does not naturally get up early, if you wanna hike a popular trail or go to a popular overlook, parking lots fill up, and it’s amazing. Parking lots tend to fill up by like 10 o’clock. If you can get to a popular trailhead at 7:00 AM, you’re golden in almost every case. So we’ll go to a trailhead at 7:00 AM to a hike, like Gorham Mountain Trail and Acadia. When we come down the mountain at 10:00, the parking lot’s full and people are circling. So getting up early, even if that’s not your natural thing, is hugely important. We also tell people to kind of take it slow and don’t feel like you have to cram in everything. We would rather take our time and linger in certain places than say we checked off all 12 things that we wanted to do at Yellowstone. My theory is always, I can come back if I want to. And then we also recommend too, if you do a big activity in the morning, we always hike in the morning with our kids, which they’ll grumble about, to be honest, then we tend to, in the afternoon, kinda let them pick, and that often means going back to a campground pool, maybe going into a town and getting some food or something like that, or buying souvenirs. So creating a balance between what Mom and Dad want and what the kids want has been hugely important too.
Brett McKay: And you also highly recommend visiting the office where the rangers are at, ’cause they have lots of useful information. They also, for the kids I thought it was… I didn’t know about this, the junior rangers… It’s like they’re junior rangers? Is that what it’s called?
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, the Junior Ranger Program. So if you go to the visitor center and you ask for the junior ranger booklet, and it’ll be like an activity booklet that kids fill out through their day or through a couple of days at the park, and it’s answering some questions or it’s maybe doing a nature trail. It varies in difficulty from park to park. And then when you complete the booklet, you bring it back to the visitor center, and they will swear you in as a junior ranger. They’ll actually do a little ceremony, which is quite adorable when the kids are little. And then they give them a Junior Ranger badge. So that program was a huge part of my kids national park experience when they were little.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I imagine it keeps your kids from having a meltdown, keep them from complaining or having a bad attitude, because it gives them something to do.
Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. And look, if you wanna do a national parks trip as a mom or dad and you are worried about the kid part of it, because you can burn your kids out on another hike, another hike, another hike, another overlook, then camping outside of the park can be a really cool way to go, because then the campground experience can be really fun for them with pools, playgrounds, bocce ball, volleyball, whatever it might be. That’s always helped us strike a balance.
Brett McKay: And also, if you have kids, don’t forget, if you have a fourth grader, they get to go to the national parks for free. They get a free pass to all the national parks that year. And we took advantage of that during the pandemic. My son was in fourth grade at the time. We had the pass, and so we hit up a lot of national parks during that time.
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, that’s another great program The National Park Service has, for sure. And just in general though, the admission is cheap, the camping is cheap. It’s all supplemented by our tax dollars, etcetera, etcetera, but it is a… A national parks trip can be a very affordable family vacation.
Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s talk about specific national parks. We’ve talked about some general tips about how to navigate the reservation system, how to figure out if you’re gonna camp inside the park, outside the park, how to get the most out of your park experience. Let’s talk about specific parks, ’cause you do a great job in the book, you basically talk about every single national park and the ins and outs, where to camp, attractions to check out, things you need to consider when you’re planning. So let’s talk about some of the really popular national parks. Let’s talk about Yosemite. We’ve already been talking about Yosemite. And when we went, I was… Before we went, I was wondering, “Is this thing gonna live up to the hype?” ‘Cause you hear about it your entire life. So I was afraid it was gonna be overhyped, but it was so incredible. It exceeded expectations. It lived up to the hype and more. But because it’s so incredible, it’s very popular. It’s one of the most popular parks in the country. So are there any problems with overcrowding at Yosemite?
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, Yosemite is the sixth most visited national park. To put it into context, more people visit Yosemite than Yellowstone, and Yellowstone’s three times the size. And Yosemite is day-trip-able, from San Fran, and most people just are gonna do the valley part. And that’s common in most national parks, that most people are going to one spot. Like in Acadia, everybody wants to do a Park Loop Road. In Yosemite, everybody wants to do the valley stuff. So if you are willing to go off the beaten track, there’s often many other options than the ones that people… The people are just kinda driving in, parking, looking around. They don’t know exactly what they wanna do. Maybe they stumble into a little bit of a hike. So look, Yosemite I wish I had some secret answer to doing Yosemite in the summer, but it is a challenge. But we’ve had people that have gone in the shoulder seasons that have really been raving about visiting in the non-summer.
Brett McKay: Yeah, like I mentioned earlier, when we went in February, we hardly saw anyone else on the trails. We had to hike on the snow. There was still snow on the ground. And we did that. That was fine. It was fun, actually. And there was a ton of people there for the fire-fall at the fire-fall spot, but other than that, there was actually a lot of solitude. So I wouldn’t go again during the fire-fall time, but it seems like winter, in general, is a great time to hit Yosemite.
Jeremy Puglisi: What you’re saying about the hiking is incredibly true. I mean, most people are touring in our national parks. They’re driving in, they’re parking. They don’t really quite know what to do. They’re looking around a little bit. Every national park we’ve been to, from Yellowstone to Glacier to Acadia, very, very crowded parks. Once you get out on the trail… I’m not even talking deep back country. Once you just get out on the trail, it tends to not be super, super crowded.
Brett McKay: Have you guys camped in Yosemite?
Jeremy Puglisi: It’s been a long time, but yeah.
Brett McKay: So was Yosemite one, I imagined you would recommend finding a spot outside? ‘Cause it’s probably just too stressful to get a spot inside the park.
Jeremy Puglisi: In the book, we have a couple of recommendations, but they are 45 minutes to an hour outside of the park. And for most people, that’s a bummer. There is a really cool place called Auto Camp Yosemite, and that’s a campground that’s only Airstream rentals. And it’s expensive, it’s kind of boujee, but that’s a really cool option outside of Yosemite. And then there’s some RV resorts that are an hour away that are fine, but it, frankly, doesn’t compare to being in the park. Now, somewhere like Glacier, there are awesome, beautiful campgrounds outside of the park. So it’s gonna vary from park to park.
Brett McKay: Okay. I recommend Yosemite, if you’re gonna visit a national. It’s fantastic. Another iconic summer national park destination is the Grand Canyon. Anything people should consider when planning a road trip or a camping trip to the Grand Canyon?
Jeremy Puglisi: So there’s some similarities with Yosemite. So the gateway town of Williams is over an hour away. So sort of you’re in the park or you’re far away. The reservation system is a little bit simpler, so you can reserve six months in advance there. And on the South Rim, the more popular rim, there are campgrounds that are open year-around, and there’s a few campgrounds that are just in the summer. Now, on the North Rim, it’s seasonal camping. There’s no camping in the winter. So you could do off-season Grand Canyon. And in fact, a lot of people say it’s really, really beautiful to go. I mean, you run the risk of having bad weather, but there’s campgrounds open year-around. You might consider the shoulder seasons there. And Williams is really cool as a gateway town. So I would certainly recommend stopping there, spending a couple of nights there, and then going into the Grand Canyon.
Brett McKay: Okay, so camping, six months advance reservation mostly?
Jeremy Puglisi: I would definitely get on six months if you want that reservation, for sure, ’cause the campgrounds will book in the summer. Shoulder seasons are gonna be a bit more friendly. Grand Canyon too, for me, like you wanna be there for a sunrise and the sunset, but I feel like the average person can go for just a couple of nights and really experience the Grand Canyon, unless you wanna get super adventurous and do some serious hiking. You don’t need a week at the Grand Canyon, I don’t think personally.
Brett McKay: Yeah. No, we went to the Grand Canyon when I was a kid. I think we just did a day. I mean, we were just kind of driving through and we stopped. Probably could have done a little bit longer. We also talked about, inside the Grand Canyon National Park, there are different types of attractions that, besides the camping, are gonna require advance reservation. What are some examples of that?
Jeremy Puglisi: Like if you wanna do a floating trip or something like that, you’re gonna need to hook up with a concessionaire and you’re definitely gonna need tickets or something like that, but all the hiking is… As far as I know right now, there’s no reservations for things like that. But if you’re gonna be doing something with a concessionaire or a deeper hike into the canyon and staying overnight, that’s also something you’re going to definitely be booking in advance.
Brett McKay: Alright, let’s talk about the most popular national park. That’s Great Smoky Mountains, correct?
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited national park. I think they topped. They almost hit 14 million visitors last year, and I think that’s like twice the amount of visitors that other national parks got. And it’s just a population density issue. I mean, I could hop in my car right now from New Jersey. I could be at Great Smoky Mountains in 10 hours. So people all up and down the East Coast can get to the Smokies within a day’s drive. So yeah, it’s super, super popular. It, up to very recently, was completely free to enter the park, which is maybe one of the reasons it gets very crowded, but Great Smokies, to me, is very accessible and much less stressful than some of these other places we’ve been talking about, for sure.
Brett McKay: What’s the camping like inside Great Smoky?
Jeremy Puglisi: Lots of great camping. And when you think of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, you have the Tennessee side, and you have the North Carolina side. So you can approach the park from two different states, which is another reason why it’s so crowded. But there are tons of great NPS campgrounds in and around the park. There’s probably about 15 of them. There’s places like Smokemont and Elkmont that are super popular or harder to get, but much easier than the other places we talked about. And then the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there’s several gateway towns, where we were saying Yosemite doesn’t really have an immediate gateway town, Grand Canyon doesn’t have a gateway town. Great Smoky Mountains National Park has Cherokee on the North Carolina side, it has Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge on the Tennessee side, which is almost like a little mini Las Vegas right outside of the gates of the park, then also Townsend. So there’s a massive… There’s probably 100 camp grounds outside of the park. So you don’t hear about the stressful stories. If you can’t get a site inside the park, you just move to one of the KOAs outside of the park. The last time we went to the Smokies, we stayed at Camp Margaritaville. We stayed at a Jimmy Buffett property, 10 minutes from the gates. And my wife’s drinking Margaritas at night, there’s a pool, there’s a hot tub. It’s a very different type of national parks trip than the ones that last, we’ve talked about.
Brett McKay: It’s also got… It’s got Dollywood too.
Jeremy Puglisi: Dollywood is awesome.
Brett McKay: Is it really that great? ‘Cause I’ve got some family members who go there all the time, and I’m like, “Why would you go to Dollywood over and over again?”
Jeremy Puglisi: I’ll tell you why, I’ll make the case for Dollywood. Lots of live music. So the ticket… You pay your ticket price, which is not cheap. I mean, it’s less than Disney World, but certainly not cheap to go to Dollywood. But there’s live music all day. You could literally not go on a ride and just go from concert to concert to concert. And these are good people. These are high-level talent. But then also, Dollywood has world-class roller coasters. I like roller coasters. I won’t go on super frightening upside down roller coasters, but they have those too. If you want music and you want entertainment, you want food, all that’s there. But if you also want the thrills of the roller coasters, that’s there too. Now, for the national park purist too, somebody who’s into hiking and all that stuff, you might wanna avoid Dollywood. But we’ve gone twice, and we really liked it.
Brett McKay: Alright, so Great Smoky Mountains sounds like camping inside the park, it’s not as stressful as the ones out West, and there’s also great camping outside as well and a lot of other stuff to do outside the national park. And just from reading about it, I’ve never been, but it sounds like a lot of great hiking as well.
Jeremy Puglisi: Hiking there is beautiful. We did a hike this past year where you can actually hike up to a national park lodge and spend the night, the Leconte Lodge. And the only way you can get there is by hiking. But there’s a beautiful hiking there. And the Great Smokies, it’s like rushing rivers, really deep, thickly, green forests, and then you kind of emerge at the end to a view of the mountain. So it is a very good hiking park.
Brett McKay: Alright, so Yellowstone is another popular national park, but it’s also huge. So any tips on getting the most out of your Yellowstone visit?
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, Yellowstone was definitely one of our favorite trips. You need to decide where your base camp is for Yellowstone, ’cause you can enter the park from so many different places. And we decided to use West Yellowstone as our base camp, which is actually in Montana. But Yellowstone is a driving park, to me, more than it is a hiking park. It’s a touring park, where a big part of the experience is gonna be hopping in your car, driving from place to place to place, so planning for those drives and not being shocked, you have to do a lot of driving, is a big part of the experience. We actually love the driving, but we learn to bring snacks into the park, bring water into the park. You often end up pretty far away from concessions. And we did Yellowstone, like I mentioned earlier, in the last week of August. And I could have landed a plane in the Old Faithful parking lot. It was so empty. So I know Yellowstone is definitely crowded in June and July, but end of August would be a really good time to do Yellowstone. And if it’s your first time, a big tip would be to concentrate on the lower loop. Now, there’s awesome things in the upper loop, but the lower loop has so many of the iconic places we think about, like Old Faithful, like Grand Prismatic Springs.
And then if you have more time, you could do the lower loop in, say, two days, three days. Then if you have a longer trip to Yellowstone, then head into the upper loop, do Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. And then Lamar Valley is quite far away from everything, up there on the upper loop, but the wildlife was incredible. We were in, like, five bison jams. If you’re going to Yellowstone for wildlife, go to Lamar valley. Don’t let people tell you to go to Hayden Valley. That was a total bust for us, and I’ve heard that from other people. Lamar Valley is the place to go to see bison.
Brett McKay: What’s camping like in Yellowstone?
Jeremy Puglisi: So many options. There’s a universe of camping inside Yellowstone. In the lower loop, the Madison Campground is one of the more popular options, but then there are campgrounds in all of the different parts of the park. So if it’s your first trip to Yellowstone, look at Madison Campground. That’s relatively close to the gateway town of West Yellowstone. And then as you progress into a second or third Yellowstone trip, you can get deeper into the park, further into the park, into the northern loop and get sites there. And it’s gonna be easier to get sites in the northern loop than the southern loop, ’cause the southern loop’s where everybody goes. And then there’s great gateway towns, KOAs. There’s all that stuff right outside of the park.
Brett McKay: And another nice thing about Yellowstone, depending on where you are in the park, it’s really close by to Grand Teton National Park.
Jeremy Puglisi: I liked Grand Teton more, and I sometimes…
Brett McKay: I did too.
Jeremy Puglisi: I totally liked Grand Teton more. It’s a super short drive from the bottom of Yellowstone into Grand Teton. If I’m remembering correctly, it’s like a 10-minute drive. And personally, for me, I liked Grand Teton more because we’re a hiking family, and Teton is a hiking park to me, where Yellowstone is more of that, like cruising around in your car kinda park. And I just thought the views were more resplendent and awe-inspiring in Teton. I am not saying that Yellowstone is overrated, but my whole life, people have been saying, “Yellowstone, Yellowstone, best park, national park in the country,” and it was maybe not even in my top five. Grand Teton was certainly in my top three. And Grand Tetons are great for camping. So in the center of Grand Teton National Park, there’s an area called Colter Village, and it’s all concessionaire-run, but there’s a RV-specific campground, there’s a tent camping specific campground, there’s a cabin area. We stayed in cabins last time. And cabins can be an option in some of these national parks. The cabins in Teton were adorable. Then they have this area called The Tent City or something like that, where two of the walls are made of wood and two of the walls are canvas, and it’s kind of like rustic glamping. So Teton is pretty easy to figure out the camping thing too.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I would agree Grand Teton is much better than Yellowstone. We went there, I think it was end of 2021, and we did Grand Teton. And what’s amazing about Grand Teton, it seems so out of place in United States. You look up at it and it looks like you’re looking at the Matterhorn, like you’re in Switzerland, but it’s the United… It’s crazy. Views are great. And yeah, then we went to Yellowstone. We just kind of drove around. That was it. But Teton was the highlight.
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, and Jackson’s great too. I’ve not spent much time in my life being jealous of rich people, but when I was in Jackson, I was like, “Man, I wouldn’t mind living here,” right at the base of Grand Teton. To me, to be able just drive from your house and to Grand Teton National Park would be amazing.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned you wouldn’t say Yellowstone is overrated, but it didn’t entirely live up to the hype. Are there any national parks you would say or you think are overrated, even amongst the ones we’ve talked about, like Grand Canyon, etcetera?
Jeremy Puglisi: I very rarely go to one of these parks, and, “Oh, this is overrated.” I just tend to be a guy that’s like, I’m just so happy to be there. I think Olympic is underrated, in Washington state. I think Olympic is one of our most majestic national parks, and it’s certainly not on as many people’s bucket lists as a bunch of these other ones that we’ve talked about. We loved Mount Rushmore. Now, a lot of people say Mount Rushmore is overrated, and we certainly… And there’s the history, Mount Rushmore is very complicated, etcetera, etcetera, politically, but our family really liked Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse. Also, I would say Badlands National Park is underrated. Badlands National Park in South Dakota, you feel like you’re on another planet. It’s not that big, it doesn’t take that many days to see. And a lot of people just kinda skip it on their road trip out west to get to Yellowstone, but I think that one’s underrated as well.
Brett McKay: Yeah, if you go to Badlands, you just hang out where Teddy Roosevelt hung out.
Jeremy Puglisi: Exactly. And Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I would say, underrated, up in North Dakota. It’s just so hard to get to. That’s part of the problem.
Brett McKay: Well, I think too… I mean, maybe you even know more about this, ’cause I think when most people think national parks, they’re thinking the big ones out west. Are there any overlooked national parks in the East that people like, “Man, you should go check that out ’cause it’s actually really cool?”
Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. So like in the East, we have Acadia National Park in Maine, which is one of the most visited. So that one is very popular. But then you have Cape Cod National Seashore, which my family adores Cape Cod National Seashore, it’s not underrated in our region, if that makes sense, everyone knows it around here, but I don’t know many people from out west who are like, “I’ve gotta get to Cape Cod National Seashore.” So I’d say nationally, that one is a little bit off the radar. Then I think Shenandoah National Park in Virginia is definitely underrated. I think it’s overshadowed by Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is somewhat nearby. Shenandoah was beautiful, a beautiful hiking, beautiful views. Only takes a couple of days to see it. And now New River Gorge is our newest national park, so I don’t know if I wanna say it’s overrated or underrated yet, ’cause I think people are just sort of figuring it out and discovering it, but I do think that that will emerge as a really, really popular national park in the East. And I also love Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina. That is astonishing beach camping options, etcetera, etcetera. And everybody on the East Coast knows it, but I don’t think that nationally, people know it.
Brett McKay: And we mentioned too, the civil war sites. That’s also governed by the National Park Service. And you mentioned you can camp, not exactly in the monuments, but nearby, and that could be another cool… You can plan a whole summer vacation around that. We’re just gonna camp along these civil war sites.
Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, ’cause Gettysburg is really close to Hagerstown, and then they’re both really close to Harpers Ferry. So those three… And there’s not campgrounds in those parks, but there’s a culture of camping outside of the parks, that you could do a tour of those three battlefields. You could do a week’s trip camp around those three battlefields, and then maybe also head down to Fredericksburg, Virginia. And that’s cool too, ’cause then you’re getting history. It’s a whole different type of national parks trip than just going hiking out west.
Brett McKay: So you all have done a lot of camping and RVing to national parks, but there’s a lot of great state parks too. Do you guys have a list of your favorite state parks that you think are almost as good as a national park, but don’t have the crowds?
Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. The first one that always comes to mind when people ask about state parks, Custer State Park in South Dakota, if it changed to a national park tomorrow, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. I’m sure the state doesn’t want it to. It is just as a grand as any national park I’ve been to. The wildlife at Custer State Park was better than Yellowstone. And I had people tell me that before. I didn’t believe them. But then we went there, and we saw more bison there than we saw in Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. So Custer is magnificent. There’s like 13 campgrounds in Custer. South Dakota takes a lot of pride in their state park system, and I think that Custer is the crown jewel. And then you could camp in Custer and go right to Mount Rushmore. It’s not very far. South Dakota, most people blow through South Dakota. We always tell people, South Dakota is its own vacation.
Another one to consider, and this is not technically a state park, but the Adirondack Park in New York state, it’s operated separately from the state park system, that is another place that is just as magnificent as any national park, and I feel like it flies way under the radar for people all across the country. Filled with great camping, filled with great hiking, filled with fishing, with waterfalls. Any outdoor activity you want, you can find in the Adirondack Park. And the Adirondack Park is massive, and it’s intertwined with communities and towns. It’s very, very different than a national park. And then my favorite state park in the country, personally, is Assateague State Park in Maryland, where you can camp right on the beach, where you can hear the waves crashing over the dunes from your tent site or RV site. Maybe not as big or as grand as a national park, but it just is beautiful, to me.
Brett McKay: For me, one that sticks out, if you’re going to Zion, in Southern Utah, there’s a state park that’s nine miles from St. George. It’s Snow Canyon State Park. It exceeded my expectations on the hiking and the views. So if you’re going to Zion or you don’t wanna deal with the crowds at Zion, check out Snow Canyon State Park. And then another great state park I like, I don’t know if you can camp in there, but Jack London State Park. It’s by San Francisco kind of. So you got the Redwoods, great hiking, small, like hardly any crowds, and you get to see where Jack London, he built this house out of materials in the area, and the week before he moved in, it burned down to the ground, and the ruins are still there. You can check that out. So that’s cool. Jack London State Park in California.
Jeremy Puglisi: That reminds me of Mark Twain State Park in Missouri, where Mark Twain’s, I think the birthplace home is there in that park as well.
Brett McKay: Well, Jeremy, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Jeremy Puglisi: So the books are ‘Where Should We Camp Next?’ And now the follow-up is ‘Where Should We Camp Next?: National Parks.’ You can get it wherever books are sold, get it at an independent bookstore or from Amazon, obviously. And then everything else we do is at The RV Atlas, The RV Atlas Podcast, @thervatlas on all of the different social media handles.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jeremy Puglisi, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Jeremy Puglisi: Thank you so much. And again, thank you for having all the great authors on the show and letting us talk about our books. Appreciate it so much.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Jeremy Puglisi. He’s the co-author of the book, Where Should We Camp Next? National Parks. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about him and his wife’s work @thervatlas.com. Also check out the podcast, The RV Atlas Podcast on any podcast platform you enjoy. And check out our show notes at aom.is/nationalparks, 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 @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’d think of. And if you’d like 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 checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher Premium 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 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, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
The post Podcast #895: The Essential Guide to Visiting and Camping in the National Parks appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
We don’t often think of work when we think of Henry David Thoreau. We think of Thoreau living with his family, or loafing around at a cabin at Walden, and mostly spending his days walking and enjoying nature. We know he did some writing, sure, but often think of him as being largely the abstract thinker type.
But Thoreau was a man of much practical skill, who lived a life of both thought and action. He did lots of kinds of work — from carpentry to surveying to helping raise Ralph Waldo Emerson’s kids — and thought a lot about the nature of work, both the paid variety and the kind that’s necessary for simply sustaining day-to-day life. Today on the show, John Kaag, a professor of philosophy and the co-author of Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living, shares some of Thoreau’s insights on work with us. We discuss what Thoreau can teach us about the value of resignation, the importance of continuing to work with your hands to maintain what Thoreau called your “vital heat,” what makes for meaningful work, and the trap of working in bad faith. We end our conversation with a call to consider what you’re really being paid for in your job and the true cost of the things you buy.
Resources Related to the Podcast John’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast: + AoM Podcast #480: Hiking With Nietzsche + AoM Podcast #576: A Treasure Trove of American Philosophy * Walden by Henry David Thoreau * Emerson’s eulogy for Thoreau * AoM Article: How to REALLY Avoid Living a Life of Quiet Desperation * Sunday Firesides: The Cost of a Thing * Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work* by Matthew B. Crawford
Connect With John Kaag* John’s faculty page
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Read the TranscriptBrett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. We don’t often think of work when we think of Henry David Thoreau. We think of Thoreau living with his family or loafing around at a cabin at Walden and mostly spending his days walking and enjoying nature. We know he did some writing, sure, but I often think of him as being largely the abstract thinker type. But Thoreau was a man of much practical skill who lived a life of both thought and action. He did all kinds of work from carpentry to surveying, to helping raise Ralph Waldo Emerson’s kids. And thought a lot about the nature of work, but the paid variety and the kind that’s necessary for simply sustaining day-to-day life. Today in the show John Kaag, professor of philosophy, and the co-author of Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living, shares some of Thoreau’s insights on Work With Us. We discuss what Thoreau can teach us about the value of resignation, the importance of continuing to work with your hands to maintain what the Thoreau called, your vital heat. What makes for meaningful work and the trap of working in bad faith. We end the conversation with a call to consider what you’re really being paid for in your job and the true cost of the things you buy. After shows over check out our show notes at aom.io/henryatwork.
Alright, John Kaag, welcome back to the show.
John Kaag: Oh, thanks so much for having me, I really appreciate it.
Brett McKay: So we had you on before and talk about your Hike with Nietzsche, then we also talked about your experience with the pragmatist by this library you found in the middle of the New England Woods. You got a new book out, it’s called Henry at work: Thoreau on Making a Living. It’s about what we can learn from Henry David Thoreau about our work lives. And what’s interesting is, we typically think of Henry David Thoreau as the original drop-out. Alright, the guy that built a shack by a pond, so he could write and look at nature, but you and your co-author, you make the case that Thoreau has a lot to teach us about work. So let’s start off with Thoreau work life. What was his work life like? What did he do to make a living?
John Kaag: Yeah, I mean, we think about Thoreau going off to Walden, we think, Oh, this is just a nice vacation. But really what Thoreau is doing when he goes to Walden is he’s attempting to live deliberately, he says this at the beginning of Walden he says “I went to the woods to live deliberately so that I didn’t get to the end of my life and discovered that I haven’t lived.” But also, what we sometimes forget is that Thoreau worked his butt off at Walden over the last 15 years, some authors have criticized Thoreau for the help that he received while he was at Walden Pond for two years, two months and two days.
But when we really look at Thoreau’s day in and day out life at the pond, what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to sustain himself through his work, he’s trying to build his own house, he’s trying to grow his own crops, grow his own on food, mend his own clothes, and also, write two of the greatest pieces of American letters, Walden and his famous essay called Civil Disobedience. So if you think about Thoreau as a loafer or a Lotus-eater, you’re sort of off base here. I mean Thoreau worked his entire life, you don’t write a 2 million word journal just by sort of sitting on your hands and doing nothing. Sometimes we don’t think about writing as real work, but it was for Thoreau, but he was also a sort of manual laborer in a way that many of us have come to re-appreciate or appreciate once again during the pandemic, and the pandemic is basically a time when we’ve had to re-evaluate our work life and work-life balance, and Thoreau is a really good one to start us on that path.
Brett McKay: And you also highlight his work life before Walden, like the guy had lots of jobs, he tried his hand at teaching school, him and his brother opened up their own sort of alternative country school, he was a surveyor, and then he was also… He was Emerson’s basically was like a babysitter for Emerson and did just sort of general handy work for Emerson when he was out touring the world giving lectures.
John Kaag: That’s right. I mean, if we think of Thoreau’s, early life, it really was a childhood of a working class or middle class family, where he wasn’t the famous author that wrote Walden, he was just a boy who falls off a cow and was a farm hand and who cut his toe off cutting wood and really lived a very straightforward, manual existence for much of his early life, which I think explains in some part why Thoreau disdained the high society and the high intellectual life at Harvard. He believed that the real life, real world lessons of experience were oftentimes far more important than the book learning that we would get from philosophy or from academia.
But you’re right to say, if we think about Thoreau’s life as a worker, he was first and foremost, as we know him today, a writer, that’s true, but he was also a teacher, he was also a nanny, as you say, to Emerson’s children when Emerson went away. In fact, Emerson’s son was so close to Thoreau that when Emerson was away, he asked, he said to Thoreau, Mr. Thoreau can you be my father? I mean, he’s that close to the Emerson kids, and he, in a way that I think comes back to our own present day, we’ve really had to think about what it is to make our homes and the importance of frugality and home economics. Thoreau was very much aware of that and his journey out to Walden and his press for simplicity and frugality was really a function of economic necessity, he lived through the panic of 1837 where lots and lots of people lost their jobs and Thoreau had for one, worked on 75 cents a day for months upon months and even back then, 75 cents a day was not much money.
Brett McKay: This idea of economics, I think to understand Thoreau’s philosophy towards work, you have to understand his philosophy towards Economics in general. When we think of economics today, we think of sort of macroeconomics, the market, business, and that was part of Thoreau’s idea of economics as well, but his was more home-based. He was trying to go back to the original meaning of the word economics from Greek, and he talked about this in a chapter in Walden called economy, so what understanding of economics do we get from Thoreau from this chapter on economy?
John Kaag: So when you open up Walden, sometimes you’re a little surprised to find this chapter called economy, because Thoreau is such a stringent or such a harsh critic of modern consumerism, and you think, What is this chapter economy doing here? But your’re right Brett, I mean he’s thinking about Oikos, the Greek word Oikos, which basically derives from the word to dwell or dwelling. And he’s reminding us, Thoreau’s reminding us that all of the jobs that we have and all the work that we do should really be geared to figuring out how to make the world more livable and how to make a home in the world. And when Emerson encourages us to be self-reliant, his friend Emerson says, “Trust thyself every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Thoreau takes that really practically and really seriously, and he says to himself, What exactly do I need to sustain myself in my everyday life? And that answer, I think if we really are careful about it is a surprising one, we don’t need that much. And what you find in that first chapter of economy is Thoreau’s almost painstaking diary of all of his accounts and all of his accounting of how much it costs to sustain himself, what did he eat, what kind of shelter did he require, what sort of clothing did he have to wear, what actually supported him through life, and I think that if we reorient ourselves to that question, we discover that economy can be a much more humble, modest, but also a much more meaningful word.
So the audience that Thoreau was addressing was one in which they were already beginning to think about the surpluses and the excesses of modern consumerism, and the Thoreau says often times those excesses of our economic life are hindrances to the actual meaningful business of living.
Brett McKay: So that home-based idea of economics that shapes what Thoreau thought about work, and that work is… It’s something you have to do, but make sure you do work that is enriching, that’s life affirming. You start out the book with a chapter on quitting, it’s called resignation, why start with quitting jobs in a book about Henry David Thoreau and work?
John Kaag: Well, one of them is a sort of contemporary issue, and both I have faced and my family have faced, and then a lot of my friends have faced a moment in our US or Contemporary economic scene where many people are losing their jobs and also deciding not to go back to work in the same way. The pandemic sort of changed things for many, many people, and it was a moment that I thought Thoreau could speak to because Thoreau was a very big resigner, in the sense that he resigned to my account six pretty substantial jobs.
The one that sticks out to me is after he graduates from Harvard, he establishes a school with his brother, but also teaches at Concord Academy, and at the academy Thoreau was asked to exact corporal punishment on his students, and he did this for exactly one day and then got completely fed up and quit his job on moral grounds, and I think a lot of people when faced with a pandemic, when faced with sort of existential moments of crisis, have the opportunity to ask if their jobs are in line with their moral lives, their intellectual lives and their passions.
And Thoreau was always adamant that you should never sacrifice your dreams for your dream job, at least in the lucrative sense, and he was very insightful that the next century and then the following century, the one that we’re living in, would see moments in which people confused the size of their bank account with the true riches or wealth of living, and so Thoreau is on to that, and he says, quit your job if you think that it doesn’t fit into the sort of logic of living, deliberately. Ask yourself whether you’re going to get to the end of your life and look back and regret certain things about your life, and that includes your work life, so Thoreau would say or advocate for a certain type of self-examination and then oftentimes a certain type of resignation from jobs that don’t fit our ideal.
Brett McKay: And I think another thing I took away from Thoreau and his willingness to resign himself when he didn’t like a job or wasn’t aligning with his values, he also resigned from himself, from the world, whenever he faced big, I guess we call them, life disruptions or failures, you talk about in the book, you know his brother died. It was devastating to him. I think his brother cut himself with a razor, died from shaving. And then shortly after that, I don’t think a lot of people knows about Thoreau, he actually accidentally burned down a giant forest near Concord, Right?
John Kaag: That’s right. And we oftentimes think about Walden as this almost heroic mission of like self-reliance, but really Thoreau is retreating from a world that seems to have come undone for him. I mean, his brother, John dies in his arms from lockjaw, basically gangrene and then Thoreau, as you say, burns down a chunk of the forest and is the pariah of Concord for several months, if not a year. And we often times think, Oh, Thoreau, he’s just going out to sort commune with nature, he’s also retreating from life in a particular way, but what I will say is that he’s also turning to work or a new version of work, of manual work, of meaningful labor in order to get himself through. So it’s not simply that he went on a vacation to retreat the world, he says, I’m gonna see how much I can rely upon myself in order to sort of sustain myself in life, and I think that that’s a really redemptive move for Thoreau, but also for our understanding of what work can mean for us.
Brett McKay: And what was interesting about Thoreau, he was willing to resign himself from work or projects that were also successful, like Walden, for example, at the end of it, when he writes, why did I leave Walden? Well, just it was time to end it, it was time to move on to something else. He didn’t hang on to it, even though it might have been a good thing, I think that’s another lesson you can take from Thoreau. You might be in a job that’s great, but maybe you need to quit it and move on to something else.
John Kaag: Yeah, I mean I think, if I think about the heroes from American philosophy, the pragmatist William James says that we should do two things every day that are difficult just for the practice of it, and sometimes in Thoreau’s case, just changing your habits of life is both difficult, but also rewarding, we often times get stuck in a rut and we suffer through the sort of fallacy of sunk costs, we put so much into a job in terms of time or resources or ourselves that we can’t imagine doing anything else, and Thoreau says, Oh gosh, everyone, come on, there are so many possibilities to life, you can do something else, and if you fail, at least that failure will be yours in changing careers or changing tax. And I think that that’s something that when we think about the desire for economic security, and when we think about the way that employment sort of draws us in and requires us to invest ourselves, we need to be very careful and self-reflective about knowing when it is time to go or let go, and not allowing the draw of security to actually get in the way of some of our more personal or existential ambitions.
Brett McKay: So Emerson famously said in his eulogy to Thoreau, which is a great… I recommend everyone read this thing, it’s fantastic, willing to it, but in the eulogy to Thoreau, he said that Thoreau lacked ambition, what do you make of Emerson’s critique that Thoreau, you know you kinda just dressed up his willingness to loaf with philosophical pretensions.
John Kaag: Emerson and Thoreau were very good friends through much of their life, but they did have a falling out, and one of the ways that they diverged, I think, is that Emerson became a public intellectual in a way that Thoreau never did. Emerson spent countless hours delivering public lectures, developing public lectures, going on tour and making some serious money doing it, and I think that his comment about Thoreau being less ambitious was a function that Thoreau never achieved the same success on the lecture circuit or in terms of monetary goods, in fact, Emerson oftentimes hired Thoreau to do his household work to plant his gardens, at least impart to the nanny his children.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s one thing that separated in Emerson and Thoreau in their approach to transcendentalism, So Emerson really embraced the life of the mind of transcendentalism. I think, like you said, if he were alive today, I’d imagine he’d be some superstar professor, thought leader going around the world doing TED Talks and writing New York Times best sellers, but he also, he appreciated, he had a romantic appreciation for the sort of the down-to-earth self-reliance that Thoreau embodied. Like he would often imagine himself it would be nice to have some land and do manual labor himself, but he didn’t follow through with that idea ’cause he was busy lecturing and things. So Thoreau, what’s interesting about Thoreau, he continued to write, continued to think about philosophy but he made a point to keep doing manual labor, he had real practical skills, he could build boats, he could build a house, he could do carpentry, he could garden, did surveying. Why did the Thoreau think it was important that we keep working with our hands, even if we are engaging in what we think of as abstract thinking or philosophizing.
John Kaag: That’s such a good question. I mean, we should remember that Thoreau is a contemporary of Marx, that Karl Marx and Marx’s criticism of labor and capitalism turns on the fact that modern industrialism and modern industrialization leads to the alienation of the workforce and how that happens, is that workers no longer have a sense of the control over the means of production. In other words, they lose the sense that their efforts are translating and generating particular products, so you can think about the assembly line in Thoreau’s day in the factory or in the mills, and those workers make only a very small part of a much bigger product, which they don’t particularly own or lay claim to. And Thoreau thought that one way of counteracting modern alienation in the form of economics and in the form of modern economics, was to work with our hands, to go back to sort of older artisan forms of work. And you can think about the maker movement today, or make your own food, make your own clothes, the right to recycle, these are attempts, very Thoreauvian attempts to get back to the products that underlie our lives and also to lay claim to them again. So I think Thoreau more than Emerson said, let’s see what my hands can actually do, and If you…
The front cover of The Book of Henry at Work is Thoreau up on his ladder fixing his cabin at Walden or putting his cabin together at Walden. What’s interesting about the frontispiece, or the first page of Walden is it’s just the cabin already constructed, but Jonathan and I thought that what was most interesting is about Thoreau’s actual attempt, his hands on attempt to put the shingles on the roof, and to think of that as really both an intellectual, philosophical, but also a very personal form of work, Emerson in the American scholar says that a true American scholar needs to draw in a number of resources the past, history, but also nature and action, and the action part was pivotal for Thoreau.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you quote him saying that one of the things you get from working with your hands is you said you get to see immediate feedback, right? Unlike a lot of work today, you do spreadsheets and it goes off to someone and you don’t know what happens to whatever work you did. What he liked about manual work is you got to see right away. So he talks about this in Walden, talking about his bean field. He’s talking about his beans, all the things that went into growing these beans. And he said, it’s just really satisfying to see the things I did weeks before would have an effect on these little beans. But he also had this great line about how manual labor, working with your hands, can give you sort of a spiritual vigor. I’m gonna read it here. It says, it is something to be able to paint a particular picture or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful, but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.
So I mean, I guess for him, when you work with your hands and you’re shaping your environment, And then that in turns shapes you as well. When I read that line, it reminded me of Matthew Crawford’s work that he did in shop classes, Soulcraft. He had that very same idea. You work with your hands because there’s something about it that’s going to give you a satisfaction that you’re not going to get with just abstract work.
John Kaag: I love that. I love that book Shop Class as Soulcraft. I think in terms of Crawford and Thoreau, there’s also a sense that manual labor connects us to the natural world in a way that intellectual labor sometimes does not. What I mean by that is that when you’re working in a garden or when you’re even washing dishes and you’re really, “into it or immersed in your dishes, you’re connected to something radically other than yourself, and you’re connected in this very intimate way. I think oftentimes manual labor can be a form of drudgery and meaningless if it is forced, but I mean, if we choose to use our hands to, as you say, shape the world and let the world shape us in the process, you also come away feeling like you weren’t just alone in the bean fields or weren’t just alone in the garden. Like you actually feel like you were connected. And I think in our modern day, we really crave that connection that’s just beyond our fingertips, that’s right there for us to have if we’re willing to put our hands into it.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
He also talks about in Walden how manual work can also help us retain our vital heat. I’m curious, you’re a professor of philosophy, so you spend a lot of your time reading, writing. What do you do to work with your hands so you can keep your vital heat in a Thoreauvian sense?
John Kaag: Yeah, that’s a good, thanks for that. I mean, I had a cardiac arrest when I was 40, and I was out for three minutes before the EMT shocked me back to life. And that moment when I was 40 was really a moment when I thought, I need to get this vital heat back. And so we moved, and we started a garden, and we have two kids. And I have spent basically the last three years, I’m now 43, really trying to think about the meaning of work in a more sustained way, but also using my hands and having two dogs and raising two dogs and being much more hands-on. And I’ve gotten emails and letters over the last three years from readers, and they said, when’s the next book coming out? What’s happening? Why aren’t you writing more? And the answer is that I was too busy living and I was too busy using my hands. And in part, I’ve toned back my reading and my writing so that I could have a more Thoreauvian existence in some ways.
Brett McKay: So work can sometimes feel meaningless. For Thoreau, what made work meaningless?
John Kaag: So Thoreau, I think, makes a distinction between meaningful work and drudgery. Meaningful work has an objective that is freely chosen and a path to achieve that objective. That’s like the very, very minimum for meaningful work. Meaningless work usually has no objective freely chosen and oftentimes doesn’t have a true means or a path to achieve any sort of objective chosen or not. So it’s not clear to the assembly line worker what the objective is or the end objective of their work. No one ever sees the final product. All they see is the same assembly line moment. That oftentimes is meaningless, according to Thoreau. And meaningful work is utterly personal. It’s the type of work that you feel like when you do it that you are fully suited to that particular task, that the universe has sort of picked it out for you, that you’re not just some sort of fungible part that somebody else could step in and do exactly the same job. It’s personal and it’s unique.
Brett McKay: Well, to that second point, I think that’s one reason why Thoreau is such a great resigner, right? The more he resigned from stuff, he was able to figure out what was the thing that he was suited for. I think oftentimes we just stick with a job because, well, it pays the bills, whatever, but you limit your opportunities to find what you’re actually called to do.
John Kaag: That’s right. And I mean, we use this expression that oftentimes is associated with 20th century existentialism, which is bad faith. But I think that Thoreau is worried about jobs that we work in bad faith. What we mean by that is that, about how often you hear a friend or even hear yourself say the expression, I can’t leave my job. And that expression oftentimes is a reflection of bad faith, saying that you are not free to do something when in fact you are, but perhaps you’re simply not willing to face the consequences of the action. Now, I understand that many individuals, especially those individuals who are in very tight socioeconomic circumstances might feel that they can’t leave their job. And that situation might not necessarily be one where you are living or working in bad faith. It might actually be that you can’t see any other way forward, that you can’t see any other outlet to make ends meet. But Thoreau was also concerned about those individuals who have more than enough, who live on surplus, but they still at the same time say, I couldn’t change my job. I couldn’t take that risk. I couldn’t do without that last zero on my paycheck. And I think that’s a concern that Thoreau is expressing to his readers in Walden.
So meaningful work is one where you definitely don’t work in bad faith or live in bad faith. You say, I am doing this freely. I’m doing it deliberately. And that also means that I’m free to leave it when I choose.
Brett McKay: Thoreau would say, don’t put golden handcuffs on yourself.
John Kaag: Do not. Do not.
Brett McKay: What would Thoreau say to those situations where there’s work you have to do, it feels like drudgery, You can’t escape. It doesn’t have to be work for money. It could be, you talk about this in the book, I think it was either you or your co-author taking care of their mother as she was, her last few years. And caregiving for someone like that, it can take a lot out of you. But you gotta do it, ’cause you have this responsibility and you feel like this filial duty to that person. What do you do in those situations when you gotta do something, but it’s just man, it grinds you down. Does Thoreau have any advice there?
John Kaag: Yeah, yeah, oh gosh. It’s such a both a really good question and very hard answer. So let me try. The issue about doing things that you would rather not do when it comes to work, like modern adult life is full of these moments. Like maybe I don’t want to drive my kids to the extra soccer practice, or maybe I don’t want to take care of, it was my mother that you’re referring to, who’s now in hospice. Like maybe I don’t want to go see her once again for the umpteenth time. And like, how do I get myself to think about this experience differently? So Thoreau would say that you don’t have to be Zen about drudgery all the time. Like we just don’t have that capacity, that sort of Marie Kondo sort of like capacity to see that tidying up is always that tidying up is always this opportunity for growth and beauty. That would be great, but lots of us don’t have that ability.
What Thoreau says is that we can oftentimes try to see the world a little bit differently. And what I see Thoreau doing repeatedly in his work and also in his walks through nature and his reflections on nature is that he’s pointing out that we oftentimes work under the assumption that we are the sole kings of our little imperial realms and that we are going through life doing things and doing things for ourselves. And if we can shift our perspective just a little bit and realize that adult life really has a lot to do with sacrificing to our loved ones and to strangers and to the world at large and not just about yourself but about something else and trying to take that perspective for just a little bit of time that what might seem like drudgery or might seem incredibly boring can be incredibly interesting. And now how does this work? Well, there was this American philosopher by the name of Ella Lyman Cabot and Ella Lyman Cabot basically set up an informal orphanage and she wrote several books about ethics. And one passage I’ll relay here is a passage where she says that a child came up to her and held out three little cherries in her hand and said, look how miraculous these cherries are.
And at first, Ella Lyman Cabot said, I could scarcely imagine what could be so interesting about three little cherries in this child’s hand. But then what she said is, if she really looked carefully and really thought about things carefully, all of a sudden those cherries or something about the external world seem sort of wonderful or imaginative or meaningful in a way that she had not anticipated. And I think that Thoreau’s message at the end of Walden, which is to the effect that we need to be awake to the world and the world dawns on us only if we have eyes to see it has a lot to do with transforming meaningless drudgery or a boring task into something meaningful. And I think that most listeners and most of my students can think about times in in their life where they actually transform something they thought was going to be boring into something very meaningful and maybe even a little bit sacred. And those are the moments that I think, reaching adulthood, I take a little bit of solace in or I find a little bit of hope in. Because gosh, life is going to be so boring sometimes, especially with our work. And if we have the ability to see things a little differently, I think that will make all the difference.
Brett McKay: And it seems like part of what Thoreau teaches us about how to do that is that he shows the importance of having curiosity. There’s a great quote, his friend said that he was alive from top to toe with curiosity. And that curiosity is what allowed him to take the same walks again and again in this small Concord town, but he never got tired of it. He still felt like there was still interesting Explorations to have there and then I get another thing too like you talked about this in the book like he could stand in a pond In the same spot staring in the water for hours and hours Just studying the bullfrog and people would be like, Hey, Henry, what are you doing? He’s like, Well, I’m just looking at the bullfrog and people were like, What a weirdo?
So that’s another thing we forget about Thoreau like he, Thoreau in his work He was a naturalist and he made lots of observations and studies of nature but yeah, I mean, I think he really embodied the art of of looking or noticing that kept everyday, the everyday things fresh to him. You know, he told his friend, he said this, he says, the art of genius is to raise the little into the large, which that can be challenging, but it’s an interesting challenge to try. So turning back to work more generally, we work to pay the bills and Thoreau wasn’t against that. He wasn’t against money-making completely. Even in Walden, he talked about he’d sell things and he made this much money. But how did he think about the relationship between work and money? What was his idea of compensation? Besides the dollar value that we get from our work, what else was he thinking about? Does that make sense?
John Kaag: It does, yeah. I mean, Thoreau would point out that really what’s happening when we get the paycheck for every month is that our employer is paying us for a task that we perform. But more importantly, the employer is always paying us for the time that we’ve spent of our lives on that task. In other words, our employer is compensating us for our life, for our time. And that’s something that we oftentimes forget, that what we’re spending in our work life is our minutes, hours, days, years, and decades. And Thoreau basically says, the whole point of life is to improve my nick of time. And we oftentimes do that on the clock. We do that at work. So first of all, the compensation that we take away in terms of our monetary gain should not mask the fact that we’re actually being paid to give up parts of our lives. And to make sure that the money that we make actually And the way that we then spend that money is in some ways aligned to the way that we want to spend our lives, the way that we want to value things and revere things and pursue ideals. And just ask yourself, like, is the extra paycheck or the bonus really worth it? Am I sacrificing something that I shouldn’t be?
Brett McKay: Well, he has that famous quote in Walden, the cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run. So we’d think, yeah, like what, what opportunities are you giving up by taking this job? What I don’t know, maybe kids activities are you going to miss because of the job? And he also not only think about this with your work, but also the stuff you buy, the stuff you buy has an immediate cost, but some stuff has long-term costs. Well, if I buy this house, how much money am I going to be spending on in the long run to fix it up or pay taxes on it? And he’d say, you need to take that into account too, when you’re thinking about what you’re buying. Because ultimately the more stuff you buy, the more work you’ll have to do in exchange for it. And then the more life you’ll have to exchange to do that work. And for Thoreau, that’s what he was saying. He’s saying that’s the real cost of a thing.
John Kaag: Right. I mean, Thoreau walked around his native Concord and observed that many men and women were tied to their family farms. In other words, these big farms that in fact made a lot of money perhaps, or made a surplus, cost a lot. And what they cost was the time and energy to keep them upright and to keep them going.
Brett McKay: Okay. So I guess Thoreau’s advice about compensation, don’t get myopic and just think about the number on your paycheck. You also have to think about other things that you’ll have to give up for it, your time, and maybe even your values.
John Kaag: I’m reminded a little bit, someone recently, a friend recently asked me, he goes, When were you most happy with your job? And I said to him, Well, it was when I was teaching community college when I was in grad school. And I remember making, you know, $14,000 a year in grad school and thinking that that was a lot of money and that that was more than enough. Granted, I didn’t have kids, but at least those moments of frugality and those sort of moments of forced frugality remind me that I can be happy on less. And I think that that’s really Thoreau’s takeaway on the notion of compensation and modern compensation. We could probably be happy with less or many of us could.
Brett McKay: I love how you end the book, you and your co-author end the book talking about what is kind of sum up, what does it mean to work in a Thoreauvian sense? And you have this great quote from him. He says, I say to myself, do a little more of that work, which you have confessed to be good. So good work. I mean, so what is good work in the Thoreauvian sense? If you were to sum it up, like what does it mean to do good work in a Thoreauvian sense?
John Kaag: So we say in the book, we say that this type of goodness, Thoreauvian goodness, it doesn’t necessarily turn on God’s grace or the permission of some sort of higher power, but on one’s willingness and ability to confess that the task was good. What do I mean by confess? I mean when you think about the work that you do in the course of your life, and we spend so much of our lives at work. If you take a minute and you think about the ways that you’re working and your work life and you say, if this were my last day on this earth, would I be happy with the work that I’ve done? You might say to yourself, Oh gosh, there’s so many times where I’m like, you know, drudging through something or slogging through something. No, I wouldn’t be happy. Well, then think to yourself, first of all, A yeah, you might resign, you might change that course of action, but you might also change your orientation to work on the whole so that you can do it deliberately, which just simply means to say, this is my task. This is what I shall do and I’m doing it freely.
And that allows you to do lots of tasks that oftentimes aren’t that great, but at least those tasks will be yours. You’ll say to yourself, and this is what I mean by confess, it’s basically to say, this is my life. This is my task. I will get to work on it and I’m free to decide to do this or to do otherwise. That I think is what makes a Thoreauvian moment of work a good work. It’s simply to say that I’ve claimed that moment of work or labor in a real way where at the end I’d be satisfied that I had done so.
Brett McKay: So work in good faith, it goes back to that.
John Kaag: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, John, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
John Kaag: The book comes out, June 13th. I would encourage folks to go to Princeton University Press’s website and not necessarily to Amazon, but that’s up to them. And I really, really hope that the book helps a lot of people rethink the way that they approach their work life and also vacations. Also the moments when we don’t necessarily have to work. So that’s my hope.
Brett McKay: Well, John Kaag, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
John Kaag: Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
Brett McKay: My guest today was John Kaag. He’s the co-author of the book, Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living. It’s available for pre-order at Princeton University Press. We’ll put a link to the show notes where you can pre-order it. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/Henryatwork 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’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 to 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 if you take one minute to give us 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 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.
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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
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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
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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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Download this episode.
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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #891: Generations — The Surprising Truths and Persistent Myths appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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Read the TranscriptThe post Podcast #890: Toastmasters, Aristotle, and the Essential Art of Rhetoric appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #889: The Wisdom of Psychopaths appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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
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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.
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
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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.
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
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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.
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.
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
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Read the TranscriptThe post Podcast #882: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in a World That Won’t Stop Talking appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
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Read the TranscriptThe post Podcast #881: A Kantian Guide to Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #880: Finally Follow Through appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #879: Bat Bombs, Truth Serums, and the Masterminds of WWII Secret Warfare appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #878: The Fitness Supplements That Actually Work appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #876: The Essential Framework for Understanding The Art of War appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #876: Why You Like the Music You Do appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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
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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
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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
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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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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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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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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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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
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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.
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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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #865: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the 21st Century appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #864: Advice on Achieving Any Long-Haul Dream appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
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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.
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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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
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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.
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
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Download this episode.
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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.
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.
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.
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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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #859: The Unexpected Origins of Our Christmas Traditions appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #858: The Affectionate, Ambiguous, and Surprisingly Ambivalent Relationship Between Siblings appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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?
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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #857: Why Homer Matters appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
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Transcript Coming SoonThe post Podcast #856: Befriending Winter appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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 […]
The post Podcast #853: The Real Rules of Power appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #852: The Brain Energy Theory of Mental Illness appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #708: Overcome the Comfort Crisis appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #851: The Future Is Analog appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #850: The Infidelity Formula appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #849: Live Life in Crescendo appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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. […]
The post Podcast #848: The 5 Priorities of Short-Term Survival appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #847: Overdoing Democracy appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #847: Bo Jackson, The Last Folk Hero appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #845: Magic, Archetypes, and the Mysteries of the Unconscious appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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, […]
The post Podcast #844: Life Lessons From The Twilight Zone appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #843: 7 Ways to Achieve Tranquility by Tuesday appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
Note: For fall break, the McKays are attempting their first familial backpacking trip. Kate and I have been before, but we’ve never brought the kids, so this will be fun. While we’re out of touch, please enjoy this rebroadcast with Gary Collins about going off the grid for a much longer period of time. Gary […]
The post Podcast #622: A Guide to Getting Off the Grid appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
As long as humans have existed, we’ve had to choose between our lower and higher desires — between what we want in the moment, and what we want in the long-term. As long as humans have existed, we’ve had to exercise self-control. While exercising self-control has always been part of the human condition, our ideas […]
The post Podcast #842: What Happened to the Idea of Self-Control? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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, […]
The post Podcast #841: What People Get Wrong About Walden appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
“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 […]
The post Podcast #840: When to Quit appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #839: The Vagabond Travel Ethos appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #838: Can Virtue Be Taught? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #837: The Cues That Make You Charismatic appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #579: Jack London’s Literary Code appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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, […]
The post Podcast #836: Data-Backed Answers to Personal Finance Controversies appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #835: The Power of Ritual appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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 […]
The post Podcast #833: A World War II Story of Survival, Love, and Redemption appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #832: The Power of Unwavering Focus appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #738: The Character Traits That Drive Optimal Performance appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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 […]
The post Podcast #830: How to Read Minds and Detect Deception appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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.
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 […]
The post Podcast #827: Where You Should Live When You Could Live Anywhere appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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.
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.
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. […]
The post Podcast #824: Lonesome Dove and Life’s Journey Through Uncertainty appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #813: Future-Proof Your Body by Practicing Good Posture appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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 […]
The post Podcast #678: Physical Benchmarks Every Man Should Meet, At Every Age appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #821: Routines Are Overrated appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #820: Escape the Safety Trap appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #819: What Made JFK So Compelling? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #818: The Philosophy of Self-Improvement appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #817: Life Lessons From the World’s Greatest Negotiator appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #816: Building a Second Brain appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #815: What It’s Like to Spend a Year in Space appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #814: How to Make a Good Argument appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #813: The Fascinating Life of America’s Forgotten Founding Father appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #644: How to Develop Greater Self-Awareness appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #812: Chef-Vetted Answers to Your Cooking FAQs appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #811: The Secrets to Booking Cheap Flights appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #810: How to Turn a Boy Into a Man appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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: […]
The post Podcast #809: Why We Like Puzzles, and What We Get From Them appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #808: The Surprising Science Behind Building Stronger Relationships appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #807: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #806: The Humble Heroics of Four of WWII’s Most Decorated Soldiers appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #805: How to Get Your Anger Under Control appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #804: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
During World War II, Henry Beecher, an anesthesiologist serving in the U.S. Army, noticed that 32% of the soldiers he treated for horrific battle wounds felt no pain. A further 44% experienced only slight or mild discomfort, despite the fact they had shrapnel embedded in their bodies. Beecher hypothesized that the euphoria of surviving battle […]
The post Podcast #803: How Your Expectations Can Change Your Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
Teddy Atlas was born to a well-respected doctor in a wealthy part of Staten Island. Most kids like him end up going to an Ivy League school to become some sort of white collar professional. Teddy? Teddy dropped out of high school, went to jail, and ended up becoming a trainer to 18 world champion […]
The post Podcast #524: An Old School Boxing Trainer on What It Means to Be a Man appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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, […]
The post Podcast #802: Stress-Free Small Talk appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #801: The Cold Water Swim Cure appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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, […]
The post Podcast #800: The 5 Allies Every Man Needs appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #799: Getting Along Is Overrated appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
“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 post Podcast #798: The Harrowing Life of a World War II B-17 Pilot appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 — […]
The post Podcast #797: Overcome the Decision Traps Around Diet and Exercise appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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 […]
The post Podcast #796: The Life We’re Looking For appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
If you’re someone who’s a decade or two out from your high school graduation, do you ever find yourself thinking that you’re just not as happy as you were back then? Of course all the positive-thinking self-talk then kicks in and you think, “Well, maybe I actually wasn’t that happy before. I do like my […]
The post Podcast #795: The U-Shaped Curve of Happiness appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
Johnny Cash, “The Man in Black,” said he wore all black on behalf of the poor and hungry, the old who were neglected, “the “prisoner who has long paid for his crime,” and those betrayed by drugs. As a man who had grown up dirt poor, struggled his whole life with addiction, was thrown in […]
The post Podcast #794: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Johnny Cash appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
You hear a lot about metabolism. You probably know it has something to do with weight loss. And even if you don’t go in for those supposed hacks around speeding up your metabolism, you likely figure you can at least increase it by exercising more. This isn’t actually the case, and my guest will sort […]
The post Podcast #793: The New Science of Metabolism and Weight Loss appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
Why do corrupt people end up in power?
By way of an answer, you probably think of that famous quote from Lord Acton, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But my guest today, Brian Klaas, would say that’s only one part of what leads to corrupt individuals and cultures, the other being that people who are already corrupt are more likely to seek power in the first place. Brian argues that if we ever hope to develop better systems, from our national governments to our office hierarchies, we have to work on both prongs of this dynamic, not only preventing people who gain power from going bad, but encouraging good people to seek power as well.
Brian is the author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, and today on the show, he and I discuss how people who possess the so-called “dark triad” of traits are more attracted to positions of power, how the framing around those positions can either amplify or alter this self-selection effect, and what a tyrannical homeowners’ association president and a psychopathic school janitor show us about these dynamics. We also discuss why power does indeed corrupt people and can in fact change their very brain chemistry. Brian explains the importance of accountability in keeping a system clean, and how you can serve in positions of power without becoming corrupted yourself.
Resources Related to the Podcast * AoM Podcast #108: The Upside of Your Dark Side * AoM Podcast #769: The New Science of Narcissism * Michael Nader’s study on social status in monkeys * M.G. Marmot’s Whitehall II study on social status and mortality * AoM series on status * Ultrasociety by Peter Turchin
Connect With Brian Klass * Brian’s Website * Brian’s podcast, Power Corrupts
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Read the Transcript!
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art Of Manliness Podcast. Why do corrupt people end up in power by way of an answer, you probably think of that famous quote from Lord Acton, “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” My guest today, Brian Klaas would say that’s only one part of what tends to corrupt individuals and cultures, the other being that people who are already corrupt are more likely to seek power in the first place. Brian argues that if we ever hope to develop better systems from our national governments to our office hierarchies, we have to work on both prongs, this dynamic not only preventing people who gain power from going bad, but encouraging good people to seek power as well. Brian is the author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. Today on the show, he and I discuss how people who possess the so-called dark triad of traits are more attracted to positions of power, how they’re framing around those positions can either amplify or alter the self-selection effect and what a tyrannical homeowner’s association president and a psychopathic school janitor, show us about these dynamics, we also discuss why Power does indeed corrupt people and can in fact change their very brain chemistry.
Brian explains the importance of accountability and keeping a system clean, and how you can serve in positions of power without being corrupted yourself after the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/powercorrupts.
Alright, Brian Klaas, welcome to the show.
Brian Klaas: Hey, thanks for having me.
Brett McKay: So you have made a career for yourself interviewing despots, cult leaders, corrupt CEOs, tortures, criminals. How did that happen when you were 12, where you’re like, I wanna research human depravity like what was going on there?
Brian Klaas: Now, it’s funny. So I got interested in politics from a young age because my mom ran for the local school board, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later on in the interview, but what ended up happening was I graduated from undergrad. I worked on a political campaign in my home state of Minnesota, of course, I actually was a bartender before that in New Zealand for a little bit, I started trying to find my way in life and decided to study broken systems, ’cause I thought naively, this is more than a decade ago, I thought, “Oh, US politics, it sort of just works, so I’ll try to study somewhere that’s totally, totally broken.” And I went off and started doing field work as part of grad school in sub-saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, etcetera, and found that the most interesting thing to do is to gravitate towards interviewing some of the worst people in the world, and that’s what I ended up doing for the last 10 years and sort of trying to figure out what makes people tick in this sort of depraved world with the hopes that we can eventually stop them from inflicting so much harm in the world.
Brett McKay: And what you’ve done in your recent book, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, is explore this idea after interviewing all these corrupt people, figure out this question I think people have, is does power corrupt us or do corrupt people gain power? Why do corrupt people seem to gain power? Before we get to your findings, what do you think are some of the common ideas that people generally have about power and who ends up with it, and when did you start having a hunch that maybe some of our assumptions about power is corrupting influence were off.
Brian Klaas: Yeah, I… The most famous thing, and this is something that to this day, when I talk about the fact that I’m a political scientist or that I study power, the standard response people say to me is, “Oh yes, I know power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.” It’s the standard thing that you sort of try out as a witty quote when you’re dealing with power at a superficial level, and it is true, there’s an entire chapter of the book that talks about why power corrupts, how it corrupts, how it changes our brain chemistry, our psychology, etcetera. So it’s real. But what occurred to me the more that I started to think about this was that we focus on the powerful and we don’t focus on the people who never seek power. So one of the things that was immediately obvious to me when I was interviewing, say, a war criminal or a former dictator or someone who had wielded power in a highly unjust way, is that they’re not a normal cross-section of the population.
And so what I thought was missing from this conversation is, what about the people who never seek power, and also what’s different about people who are really good at getting power? Because every time that we focus our attention on the sort of tip of the iceberg, the people who actually have power. We’re ignoring a much bigger problem, which is that certain kinds of people are drawn to power in the first place. So the book is trying to sort of do this chicken or egg question, which is, do corruptible people seek power? Or does power corrupt? And the answer is both, but the real problem is that you have to actually diagnose each situation according to actually what’s happening, because otherwise the remedy is totally different, in other words, if an awful person gets power and hasn’t been changed by the power itself, then there’s a different solution to that problem, then if power has turned them bad and they previously were good. So even though both effects are real, figuring out which one is operating in which context is absolutely crucial to making the world a better place.
Brett McKay: Okay, so before we get to this chicken and egg problem, does power corrupt? Do corrupt people seek power? I think it helps to understand, first why humans have a tendency to form societies where there’s either one person or a small group of people who have power over a large group of people going back through human history, was this something our hunter-gatherer ancestors did? What did power look like for them?
Brian Klaas: Yeah, so the sort of standard narrative around hunter and gathers in anthropology and evolutionary biology goes something like this, that for almost all of human history, we lived in small bands of around 80 people, and societies were structured in a way that was ruthlessly egalitarian. I said ruthlessly, because the system was designed to basically cut down anyone who decides… Who tried to seize power for themselves. And this was made possible by the fact that we lived in small groups. So everybody knew each other, 80 people, is not that many. Now, there are some wrinkles in this sort of simplistic narrative that have been emerging in recent years, there’s some evidence that there was a little bit more hierarchy than we expected in the past in some pockets and so on. But this is sort of a general idea of what most of the anthropology evidence suggests, and we know this from a few different forms of evidence, including the fact that like burials, for example, for most of human history, don’t show any sort of elevated status for individuals.
Now… Since the sort of period 10 to 15000 years ago, where a lot of this changed, there’s a few different hypotheses about why powers started to get amassed in individuals, and I call them the war and the Ps hypothesis. War and Ps. And the war hypothesis is basically that as conquest started to take place, it became advantageous to have big groups of people, so if you had more soldiers, you’re gonna win. And as it became better to have bigger societies, you started to sort of conquer other bands, and then absorb them into yours, and all of a sudden you’ve got 5000 people instead of 80, you need some sort of hierarchy.
The Ps hypothesis is about agriculture, and it basically says when the agricultural revolution happened, you no longer had to move around to get your food, you can sort of set up shop in a city, and that allows much larger groups of people to sort of put down roots quite literally, and as a result of that, you end up with larger cities and with larger cities comes inevitably the rise of hierarchy, but the really big point here, I think, is that the way that we experience the world with bosses above bosses above bosses, everything in society status driven is extremely unusual in the grand sweep of human history, and I think that’s something that’s worth keeping in mind because it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way, and of course, when it comes to abusive power holders, it absolutely doesn’t have to be this way, we can make a better system that produces better outcomes, perhaps with less hierarchy or perhaps just with hierarchy that functions better.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s a good point you made, you pointed out that there are advantages of hierarchy ’cause it allows you to get more done. If responsibility is diffused amongst the group, you don’t need issues of freeloader problem, like this guy’s not doing his thing, but if there’s a hierarchy you can get a lot more done. And the trick is, okay, if you’re gonna have a hierarchy, how can you organize in a way so that the hierarchy isn’t abused?
Brian Klaas: Yeah, I mean, there’s a guy named Peter Turchin who I interviewed for the book, he’s one of these sort of genius types, really impressive, impressive guy who wrote this book called the Ultrasociety. And one of the quotes he had that stuck with me was he says, “We’re not ants, we don’t have some pheromone system to regulate our behavior, so in order to organize human society, we probably eventually do need hierarchy, it’s probably unrealistic to imagine some sort of egalitarian collective involving 192 countries and 8 billion people.”
So the more pressing question is, does hierarchy always have to come with abuse? And I think the answer is absolutely not. And that’s why I wrote this book because I think there’s a lot of ways that we can make seeking power something that’s oriented towards service, and also ending up with systems in which those people who do abuse their power get thrust out of power rather than promoted. So it’s all about tinkering with the system and thinking of our world as this sort of grand experiment where instead of being on autopilot, which I think we have been for quite a long time, in how we sort of deal with power in society, we start to actually think about how would we engineer a system that’s actually gonna produce better leaders and hold people to account when they behave badly. And I don’t think that conversation tends to exist, we just tend to gripe about this, it goes back to your question about what people’s attitudes are towards power, the thing is…
And this is something that I think like political scientists and business, psychologists, all sorts of people should be thinking much more about is like pretty much everybody I talk to is unhappy with the powerful class in society. I’ve never really had a situation where I’ve talked about my research and they’re like, “There’s no problem. It’s all going pretty well.” No one says that and that should be a wake-up call, that we just shouldn’t keep doing the same thing over and over, and hope that it turns out better.
Brett McKay: And something you point out in the book, you do a good job, is that these gripes occur not only on the macro level, not on the nation-state level, but you see these gripes occur within businesses, departments in businesses within homeowner’s association, within church congregations, you see people griping about the people in charge.
Brian Klaas: Yeah, it’s a universal problem, and it’s not just… Even though my research began in rooms with former dictators and so on, and people who are at the highest echelons, generals in authoritarian societies and all that. What occurred to me in writing this was that the more I would tell people who had lives back home in the United States or in Britain where I live now, about my experiences and I describe these encounters, they would say that personality that you’re describing sounds just like the guy who was the megalomaniac sports coach, or the guy who, as you say, runs my homeowner’s association. And it sort of gave me a working hypothesis for the book, that there’s like… There’s something about power that’s worth studying, not just about these sort of extremely high echelons that we tend to think of and that make headlines, that actually there’s a sort of syndrome around power that operates even on the small stages of hierarchy and authority, and I think that’s born out…
I did try to find people, and I described a psychopathic janitor, in one of the chapters, I describe a megalomaniac homeowner’s association who’s obsessed with palm trees being trimmed just the right way and the gravel in the area being not imported from out of-state, we all sort of have in our mind’s eye, somebody like this in our life, everybody I’ve talked to about with this book, when I describe my work, they always come up with, “Oh, that’s this guy, is this person, I used to have to deal with, and thank God, I never have to deal with that person again, because I’ve just cut my losses. ”
It’s a universal human experience, and I don’t think… I’m not naive enough to say we can eliminate those sort of universal human experiences of power abusers, it’s just that we can curtail how often we encounter them, and I think that even if we made this 20% better, the scale of human suffering and frustration that it would reduce would be absolutely enormous and transformative. So I think it’s definitely worth doing even if we can only curb the problem rather than eliminating it.
Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s dig in more to why it seems like just bad people end up in power. And the first prong of this idea is that, power or positions of authority attract a certain type of person, so there’s like a selection bias going on, so what does your research say about the type of person that’s attracted to positions of power and authority?
Brian Klaas: Yeah, so I think there’s a few things to say here first off, when we describe someone who’s power-hungry, it’s always a bad thing, but power-hungry by definition is what you’re describing when you’re saying who is seeking power in a competitive environment, somebody who’s ambitious and power-hungry is more likely to throw their hat in the ring to apply for a job, a promotion, to become a dictator.
And I think it’s really easy to understand the sort of selection bias without being a social scientist, I mean you think about. If you go to a high school basketball try out, you would be completely baffled if the average student at that high school basketball try out was of average medium height, there’s a self-selection effect, the tall kids go towards basketball. And the same thing happens with power, you have certain traits that self-select towards these positions more than others, one of them is obviously those people who are power-hungry, but there’s also what I describe in the book is what’s called the dark triad, which is this sort of destructive chemical cocktail of personality traits of Machiavellianism sort of the ends justifies the means types of people, how we’re strategic thinkers. And then secondly, narcissists. And thirdly, psychopathy or being a psychopath.
And those three traits in common form something called the dark triad, and those people are obsessed with power, and they’re very, very good at getting it, so… That’s on the extreme end. These are the people who are disproportionately likely to seek power get it And then wield it with immense destructive potential. There’s also just something about the systems that we inhabit that amplify the self-selection effect in really awful ways. So when you think about those systems that involve public service, and they’re quite clearly are designed to serve the public, like if you’re a librarian, you don’t have people who are power-hungry librarians, because everybody knows that the job is not about sort of being a megalomaniac, it’s about helping people, and so the way you portray positions of power, I think is really, really important.
And there’s a section of the book I talk about this with in terms of policing that I think illustrates the point best of all, and it’s basically looking at how recruitment for policing operates, and I found some quite different examples of this internationally. So in the US, there is an ad that was put up on the door of Georgia Police Department website now taken down, that shows the punisher logo first a vigilante, a guy who basically captures criminals and then tortures them, and then shows these guys in military fatigues in a literal tank screaming interview with death metal on screen, the sort of hatch opens, they throw out a smoke grenade, they’ve got assault weapons, and then the punisher logo comes back on screen and you sort of think What kind of person says, “That’s exactly what job I want.”
Well, militaristic people who like the idea of sort of being viewed as soldiers in an occupying army, not public service police officers. And in New Zealand, they recognize the self-selection problem and deliberately designed advertising recruitment schemes aimed at counteracting it. Not because they didn’t want people with military experience, they just figured they’re gonna sign up anyway, but because they thought, “We can counteract some of the self-selection by making policing look more service oriented.” So they designed this recruitment scheme with videos called, do you care enough to be a cop? And in one set of videos, there’s a hungry boy walking around a city in New Zealand with hidden cameras around to see who stops to help him, and the implication is, if you’re one of the people who would stop to help this boy, you should sign up to be a cop. And lo and behold, what happened was quite predictable, the diversity in terms of people who applied for the police expanded dramatically, the types of personality profiles changed, they were much more public service oriented, the relationship between the police and various communities improve significantly and levels of police violence decreased.
And it’s not rocket science, it’s like if you set up a system of power to… Appearing to be oriented toward service, people who are oriented toward service are going to apply for it. And I think unfortunately, in a lot of the modern world, the trappings of power, the status symbols, the sort of fame, all these things, they put those self-selection effects I described earlier on steroids and make sure that the people who are power-hungry are far more likely to self-select into those positions of power in the first place. And so to me, the thing that we get wrong about power, that we really have to think about is what I said at the beginning of this idea of just focusing on the tip of the iceberg, if we only analyze who the powerful people are and how they behave, and we don’t think about the people who don’t end up trying to become more powerful in our societies, we’re missing like 90% of the problem because the problem isn’t to make bad people behave better, it’s to make good people want to seek power in the first place.
And I think the thing that really alarms me in modern society is that becoming powerful comes with lots of risks, think about running for political office, it’s a vial cesspool, like most people listening to this would never in a million years consider running for office because they’re like, “I don’t wanna destroy my life, I don’t wanna constantly have to raise money, I don’t wanna have to pretend that I believe things that I don’t believe.” And all of those things which now have become part and parcel of being a modern politician, they’re gonna repel exactly the kind of person that we want to be a modern politician, and all the people who love the power, the money, the fame and don’t really care about having to ask for money or pretend that they believe stuff they don’t. Those people are gonna make a beeline to run for office.
And so my big worry about this is that we’ve constructed a society in which public service oriented people just bow out, they just don’t… They don’t think about this, and it goes back to what I was talking about with the school board member mom that I have, she used to be a school board member and she sort of inspired me to get interested in politics, I mean, even today, you see videos of school board members who are getting death threats, who are getting their children sometimes get harassed outside of schools, it’s like, this is totally crazy, and it didn’t use to happen in the 1990s when I was growing up, and there was the sort of the big dramas in the school board locally were about union pay disputes or some parents who’s upset that evolution is being taught in school, but not like death threats. I think we also have to think really carefully about how we can make power attractive to the kinds of people who currently think it would be a terrible burden that they don’t wanna touch with a 10-foot pole.
Brett McKay: Well, yeah, you can see this again on a micro level, I wanna talk about this homeowner’s association guy. Being a homeowner’s association president sounds like the most thankless job ever, ’cause you’re just basically… You’re dealing with neighbors snipping at each other and like, “Well, this guy did this with his fence and I don’t like that, and this guy is putting his garbage cans out at the wrong time and he’s got his RV out,” and then you don’t really get thanked for it. And so you have people, it’s like, “I don’t wanna be homeowner’s association president,” and so there’s a power vacuum, and so it’s gonna attract people with these dark triad personality who are power-hungry, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and this happened, this homeowner’s association in Arizona. Tell us about this guy, ’cause it just sounds… Everyone always loves to complain about their HOA, this is on steroids. What happened with this thing?
Brian Klaas: Yeah. So I talked to a guy who… I had to change all the names for legal reasons in this, but I talked to this guy who went through the saga from hell of homeowner’s association and what you describe is right. It’s worse though than just being thankless, it’s actually actively bad because you have to police your neighbors on things that are totally inconsequential, like when they put their trash bins out and how they’re mowing their grass and all this type of stuff, which attracts a certain type of control freak. So in this specific example, it’s a homeowner’s association in Arizona, a reasonably small community, nobody really wants to do the job, and all of a sudden this guy just emerges out of the woodwork and is really, really excited to do the job, which is like… The alarm bells should be going off at this point, right? And he starts basically consolidating power, purging the homeowner’s association, and all the other people are like, “Yeah, we don’t really wanna be here anyway, so if you want to replace us, that’d be great.”
But unfortunately for them, the people he replaced them with were like his cronies who were like subservient to him, never challenging his power, and he started to target these individuals by name in various newsletters, and I’ve read dozens of these newsletters. They were sent to me so I could verify all this information. And they’re like the craziest, nuttiest thing. It’s all these all caps things insinuating there’s some plot out to not trim their palm fronds to sufficient code and so on. And then when these people start to stand up to him and say, “We’re gonna try to boot you out of the HOA because you’ve become this power-hungry tyrant.” He develops all these new rules that begin to target them specifically, going after the kinds of gravel they have in their yard. A rock at one point gets thrown through their window and they suspect it’s this guy who’s behind it. I mean, it’s utterly bizarre.
And what’s been interesting in writing the book is I found this story and talked to this person and thought, “This is quite a bizarre situation,” it’s actually the thing that I’ve gotten the most emails about, I would say, since my book came out, is like these people unloading their HOA stories on me. And I’m like, “It’s not my professional job to be an HOA chronicler, it’s just part of a book I wrote about power.” But these people are venting because they’re like, “Finally, someone has captured the fact that we have neighborhood tyrants who are ruining our lives.” And I think this is an under-scrutinized world because they actually control a lot of money in the United States. The actual amount of assets controlled by HOAs is mindboggling.
I think the number is something like the equivalent of the State of Florida’s tax revenue. So you’re talking about a lot of really power-hungry, busy bodies controlling a lot of money. Now, if there are any HOA presidents out there listening to this, I’m not saying that you are a power-hungry individual. It’s more that there’s a disproportionate selection effect. Any time that you have a job that is actively policing people on the most trivial stuff, unpaid and voluntary, the self-selection effect, I think, tends to go on steroids in those environments. And that’s why I think modestly, as a proposal I might suggest, if you want better people in HOAs you might wanna pay them a little bit so at least you’re not just getting the person who gets off on the power of policing their neighbors trash cans.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show.
Well, another trait of people who are power-hungry is psychopathy, and you saw this, again, this is a really small school. This is this janitor who basically became Tony Soprano in this school district. What’s that story? What happened there? How was he able to accumulate so much power in the school district?
Brian Klaas: Yeah. So this guy’s name is Steve Raucci, and I don’t have to change his name because he’s been convicted of crimes and is in prison. Steve Raucci was someone who perhaps had modest ambitions by most people’s standards. He was a janitor at the Schenectady New York State High School, and he wanted to be a sort of king pin in the school district maintenance office. So he systematically set about to achieve this through incredibly Machiavellian scheming. One of my favorite stories, and I went through so many court files and so on, in researching this bit of the book because going inside the mind of a psychopath is a very odd thing to do. But one of the plots he hatched in the sort of early days of consolidating power was that the school district wanted to save money by reducing its energy costs, so they appointed an energy Tzar, so to speak, whose job was basically to reduce the school’s energy bill.
And this guy who was put in charge of it just sort of… It’s a standard story, like the district asked you to do this, you have no experience in it, and you just sort of say, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do it.” And so Steve Raucci sort of spotted an opportunity. He said, “Look, I know that you don’t really understand the software that’s been presented to you to manage the school district’s energy supply, I can just sort of manage it for you and you can take the credit.” Now this guy accepts because he’s sort of overwhelmed by the software and doesn’t know what he’s doing. Steve Raucci takes control of the software and starts manipulating it. He starts turning on the stadium lights on public holidays. He starts increasing the amount of time the heating is on and that the lights are on on weekends, just to try to ramp up the energy bill basically.
And lo and behold, his plan works. The guy who was appointed energy Tzar is relieved of that position because the energy usage has actually gone up. And so Raucci is then made into the energy Tzar for the district, and he operated like this throughout his whole time in his pursuit of power. He became a senior official in the union, and ultimately, started making quite a lot of money as he rose through the ranks. But he also did this weird stuff where like when people would cross him, he would make examples of them and then make everybody else around him observe the fact that he had punished them. So at one point, he believes that he knows someone who has whistleblown on him. That he’d been sort of behaving like a tyrant in the district maintenance office and needed to be dealt with.
So all of a sudden these people’s homes the next morning has the word “rat” spray-painted across the house. And Raucci doesn’t admit to it, but basically forces his employees on the clock to make a pilgrimage in school district vehicles to observe that these people have gotten what they deserved. And there’s also stuff about his personality where like, he says stuff in various recordings that were then turned over to the court the wire taps and so on, where he talked about, “I wish I could have had a twin so that I could have had a Steve in my life,” thinking that he was really sad that he didn’t have himself to turn to because he was so great. These sort of delusions of grandeur. Anyway, the reason he ends up in prison is because he starts going over the top with his punishment of people who crossed him, he places explosives on the car of a colleague, he has explosives in his office in the school district itself, and has night vision goggles in his office as well, which is quite an unusual thing for a sort of maintenance official at a public high school to have.
The reason I use him in this story though, is because what’s really interesting about psychopaths is that Raucci is an example of an undisciplined non-functional psychopath, which is to say when he needed to turn down these traits, he couldn’t. It was impossible for him. But for a lot of functional psychopaths as they’re called, they can turn them down at times when they need to. And this is something where the sort of all the psychopath researchers I spoke to said that superficial charm is part of the psychopath modus operandi. And that the functional psychopaths can switch on their empathy when they need to, they can sort of blend in when empathy or being chameleon-like in a certain situation is advantageous. And those people, the functional psychopaths, the point they all make is those are the people in the board rooms and in elected office.
Not universally, obviously, there’s still a small percentage of the overall pool, but the best research that I’ve read places the rate of psychopaths in leadership positions between four times and 100 times higher than the general public, depending on how you define a psychopath, and depending on which research paper you read. But it’s pretty much agreed they’re definitely over-represented in the halls of power.
Brett McKay: Okay. So there’s a certain type of person attracted to power, narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic. So these people are very confident, they got superficial charm and they’re able to manipulate people and things for their ins to gain that power. And you think, “Well, that’s so terrible like, why do we even let these people get into positions of authority and power,” but then you highlight research saying, “Well, actually followers, people who are subordinates, actually like those kind of people and put those people in the power.” So what’s going on there? Why is it that we’re attracted to people with these traits, but at the same time repulsed by it? What’s going on?
Brian Klaas: Yeah, there’s a few things that are worth mentioning here. One of them is how narcissists, for example, make more money. And this has been shown in lots of research. One of the reasons for that is because in sort of modest levels, medium levels, I should say, narcissism can be advantageous for getting people to like you, because part of being a narcissist is an obsession with how other people perceive you, and when you really care about that sort of perception management, it may be good for making money and also advancing in life. Now, it comes at a cost, of course. There are things about narcissists that are highly undesirable, and it’s not a good strategy in general, but perhaps in the workplace in modest doses it might be effective.
And this helps explain why sometimes managers, politicians, etcetera, are so narcissistic and also so successful. They’re good at manipulating other people. Now, I also think it’s worth pointing out a lot of our leadership selection is non-rational, it’s irrational. And the reason that matters is because we like to think that we’re making sort of evidence-based rational assessments when we decide who to cast a ballot for or who we want to be in charge of us in the workplace, but lots of scientific evidence counteracts that notion. So the best example of this, and the one that just sort of… It blew my mind when I read this, but it’s been replicated, it’s a very solid finding published in… I forget if it was in Science or Nature, but one of the top two scientific journals in the world.
What the researchers did is they showed children a series of faces, no other information, just two faces. And they said, “Who do you want to be in charge of your ship in this computer simulation we’re gonna ask you to play?” So all you see is two pictures of human faces and nothing else, and you have to pick one or the other. What the kids didn’t know was that the two faces weren’t random. One of them was the winner of a French parliamentary election in a given district, and the other face they saw was the runner-up in that same district. So the winner and the loser. And overwhelmingly, the overwhelming majority of the time, the kids picked the winner to Captain their ship. And when they did this with adults, they got a similar result, which all it says is that there’s something about face that conveys leader to us.
And if that’s the case, that really causes us to sort of pause for a second and say, “Wait a minute, if you can accurately predict the winner of an election based on faces alone, then we have a real cognitive bias around leadership that we need to understand better because otherwise, we end up making stupid decisions based on superficial characteristics.” And I think the more that I read about this sort of realm of research in psychology and evolutionary anthropology and so on, the more that it became clear to me that this myth of rational leadership selection it’s just a myth. It’s not true, and there are some things that are rational and that are sort of reasoned in terms of how we select our leaders, but a significant chunk of it is down to intuition and other things that are not rooted in sort of a rational assessment.
Brett McKay:Okay. So we’ve discussed, okay, so there’s a certain type of person attracted to power, often times not the best kind of person. Us as followers, we actually are attracted to those people sometimes, but let’s talk about this idea of power corrupts. This Lord Acton, he said, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And you say… Your research says, “Yes, power does corrupt, can corrupt us.” So what happens to us psychologically when we are put in positions of power and authority. How does it change us?
Brian Klaas: Yeah, so it changes us on a few levels, it changes us psychologically, and it changes as physically. There’s a few things I’ll point to. I talk about this at length in the book. So I won’t be able to talk about everything, but there’s just a few things I’d highlight. One is that you start to think about people below you in the hierarchy as abstractions, and there’s sort of this asymmetry that produces this view of being an abstraction. And what I mean by this is that you think about why is it that many of us remember our boss’s birthday and yet we’re disappointed because our boss doesn’t remember our birthday, it’s because there’s an asymmetry there where you have… In order to get ahead, you need to remember these facts, you need to be carefully attuned to the person above you in the hierarchy.
And as soon as you go up in the hierarchy, your success level is not necessarily predicated on what other people below you think as much as people above you. And so there starts to be this sort of discounting effect which leads to abuse because as you become less interested in these sort of granular details of other people’s lives below you, it’s easier to sort of discard them, and there’s lots of psychology research that shows that people in power become more reckless, more willing to believe that they can affect outcomes that they can’t actually affect. It’s a system called illusory control. They become more impulsive, they also skirt the rules more, etcetera.
One of the things that I remember that stood out to me is a very simple explanation of this, when I was talking about the book early on after it came out, I was interviewed by Andrew Yang, who is the former presidential candidate on the Democratic side, and I asked him, I said, “What was this like for you? You all of a sudden got thrust in this position where you didn’t have name recognition, now you’re a household name.” And he says it was super awful to have this sort of recognition that his mind was changing by the basic fact that he walked into a room for a year, everybody stood up and cheered every joke he told, even if it sucked, they would laugh uproariously at.
The people around him wanted to suck up to him, and it just changes your mindset, this isn’t… It’s not rocket science, it makes sense that this would happen, but I think for people who don’t experience that, it’s hard to sort of understand how corrosive it could be in your thoughts and sort of this idea, you start to walk on water. Now, I said before that, it also changes your physical basis, and this I’m specifically talking about your brain chemistry, and one of my favorite studies in the book, it’s a fascinating world of research on Macaque monkeys, is a guy named Michael Nader, who’s a professor and doctor out in Wake Forest, who works with cocaine and addiction, and what he basically does is he takes these monkeys that are initially independently housed, in other words they’re alone in a pen, and then they sort of raise the barriers and put four monkeys together and within 10 minutes, the monkeys have established a hierarchy: One, two, three, four. It’s super easy to tell who’s which.
And then what they do is they put the monkeys in this chair they’ve been trained to use, where they either pull one lever and get banana pellets food, or they pull the other lever and they get cocaine intravenously injected into their bodies, and it’s like pure cut cocaine, right, it’s really top-notch cocaine. So the point is that when they do this, it always happens the same way, the first and the second monkeys in the hierarchy, the top two, always take the banana pellets and the third and fourth who end up in a subordinate position, always self-medicate with the cocaine and when you take the monkeys and re-house them, if you were monkey one in the first housing arrangement and you end up as monkey four in the next one, through bad luck or whatever, you change, you go from banana pellets to cocaine.
And so what they found is that the dopamine receptors in the brain actually shift due to hierarchy and status, they actually have a physical chemical change in their brains as a result of changing place in the hierarchy, and this… Again, it’s one of those hidden aspects where it’s like, “Okay, if we accept this… At least if we accept it’s true in monkeys, it’s very likely to be true in us ’cause we’re primates as well,” that really causes us to maybe think a bit more carefully about what we do when people get immense, immense power, like they become presidents or congress people, because at that point, you sort of think something is actually changing about them, and we don’t do anything. We just sort of say, “Good luck, I hope you make the right decision.” And I think there’s some of this where we need to acknowledge that power does genuinely act like a drug, and we have to find ways to counteract it, to make the world a little bit better place.
Brett McKay: Yeah, the research about monkeys is really interesting because the… It seems like the lower status monkeys, they’re more stressed out, so they’re gonna go for the cocaine to self-medicate while the higher status monkeys, they’ve got power, and then power acts like a natural drug, so they don’t need the cocaine to self-medicate, but the downside is they wanna hold on to that high, so they’re not gonna wanna give up their power. So they’re gonna do what they have to do to stay on top. And you see something similar with humans too, if you look at the research, people who are higher in the social hierarchy, they often live longer than people who are lower in the social hierarchy because they’re feeling good, while people who are lower in the social hierarchy, they’ve got more stress and they’ve got less advantages, so they feel bad, but there are exceptions to this.
Sometimes people who are in positions of power and authority, they live shorter lives, and it has to do with whether that person in power or authority has any control. So basically the finding was, if you’re in a position of authority but you have no control, that’s pretty terrible for you, it can just makes you feel terrible.
Brian Klaas: Yeah, so I’m afraid I’m gonna go back to non-human primates with this example with baboons, but you’re absolutely right. So the finding that you’re talking about is from something with humans called the Whitehall II study and Sir Professor… He’s got both titles, Sir and Professor Michael Marmot is the guy who authored the study, one of my colleagues at University College London, and what he basically found is that if you control for a lot of confounding variables, the actual data shows that being in a position of status that comes with stress but no control is really bad for you, being low on the hierarchy without status and without control is even worse for you, but it’s actually pretty good for you if you have a position of status, money and control. And control meaning that you can sort of dictate how outcomes are happening in your life, so a super stressed CEO during, like an airline CEO during the pandemic. That sucks. That’s really bad.
Being someone who’s in charge of a startup that’s taken off, that’s really good. And so what you find in the baboon research that I think is really, really instructive, is using this technique called DNA methylation, you can actually measure biological aging separately from the aging that happens with a calendar. So maybe six months have passed, but your body has aged nine months or maybe it’s only aged three months, and what they found is that when you look at baboons that rise through the ranks to become the sort of alpha male, the worst most stressed baboons are at the bottom. Totally what you’d expect. No access to good food. No access to mates. It basically sucks to be the worst baboon.
But as you rise through the ranks, it gets better until you become the alpha male, and then your body is super, super stressed, and the reason for that is because you constantly have a target on your back, so all the other baboons are thinking about usurping you, you sort of always have to worry about a plot against you to be overthrown, and so even though you have your pick of mates and even though you have the prime food, your body is actually aging faster because of all that stress. And so the sort of takeaway, the way I put it is, it’s good to be in the court, but maybe not good to be the king, and I think that’s a lesson for all of us that actually it’s different from what we expect. It’s always sort of, you always wanna be the alpha, you always wanna be on top, and the science seems to suggest actually that being close to power, but not dealing with the stress of it might be the optimal thing for our bodies.
Brett McKay: Right. That stress and that paranoia, you see that with that janitor guy, he started putting bombs on people’s cars, ’cause he’s worried that people were going after him. So that’s another downside of being in position of power, it might cause you to lash out and do just terrible things because you wanna maintain your power.
Brian Klaas: Yeah, that’s one of the classic traps that these people fall into, they become so power obsessed that they end up destroying themselves. And I think this is something where we’ve all seen this play out in, whether it’s celebrity culture or politics or sports, whatever it is, where someone sort of just thinks that they get high on their own supply, basically, they start to believe the lies that they tell themselves about how great they are, and when people cross them, they really lash out and undermine their own position. So this is one of those things too, where it’s sort of a red flag when someone views power as an end, to my mind, power is a means, it’s something that can help you accomplish certain goals, it can help you change the world in some way, and the people who view power as the ultimate aim are the exact wrong people to be in power, and at any time that somebody is behaving that way, that’s a major red flag that they need to be removed from that position. [chuckle]
Brett McKay: Okay, so we’ve talked about… Again, we reiterate, we talked about the selection bias that comes with power, how power can corrupt us, can make us wanna break the rules, abstract people below us, de-personalized individuals, but let’s talk to this idea of the system that you find yourself in can actually cause people to be corrupted, it’s not the power itself, it’s just that the way the power is manifested and organized… What does your research say about that?
Brian Klaas: Yeah. So the sort of takeaway, the big takeaway is that rotten systems track rotten people and good systems attract good people, and the evidence, I’ll point to two studies briefly that I think are just… They’re two the most fascinating pieces of research I came across in writing the book. The first one is about the sort of self-selection effect based on the system. So these economists ask these students to roll dice and they say, “Roll a dice 42 times and write down what your score is each time, but every time that you roll a six, we’re gonna give you some cash. Now you’re gonna write down your scores, we’re not gonna check, we’re not gonna watch you do it so you can lie, but we’re gonna do statistical analysis to figure out who lied and who didn’t.” So one student in India, kudos to him for brazenness, he put down 42 6’s in a row trying to get 42 times the cash.
It was pretty easy to spot that he’d lied, but there were different levels of dishonesty in these groups. What was fascinating though, is that because they could figure out using statistical methods, who was likely to have lied and who wasn’t, they then asked the students, “What do you want to do with your careers?” And in India, a place where being a civil servant, being the local cop or the local bureaucrat means you can extract bribes from people. In India, the people who lied about their dice rolls to make more money, were disproportionately keen on becoming civil servants. When they did the exact same study in Denmark, the result was flipped. The people who lied about their dice rolls did not want to go into civil service, and the people who were scrupulously honest did.
And so it’s this classic sort of story of if you have a clean system, people who are more willing to behave in clean uncorrupt ways are going to go for that system. Now, the other study that I think really beautifully illustrates this point, is about United Nations parking tickets, and I know it sounds like a weird realm to explore, but it’s sort of a natural experiment where before 2002, anybody who parked illegally in New York who was a diplomat, had diplomatic immunity and therefore didn’t have to pay their fine, so these diplomats racked up 150,000, believe it or not, parking tickets to the tune of $18 million. And finally, in 2002, the mayor of the time, Mike Bloomberg says, “Enough is enough. This is crazy.” Not only are you annoying because you’re parking illegally all the time, but it’s also a revenue source releasing.
So we can’t force you to pay it, but we can take away your cars, we can impound your cars if you keep doing this. And all of a sudden there’s enforcement, there’s accountability. So what happens? Well, in the pre-enforcement period where they can get away with everything, there’s a cultural explanation for illegal parking, so the people who are from Norway, Japan, Germany, these non-corrupt countries, they don’t really park illegally very much, and the people who are from the corrupt countries, Yemen, Egypt, etcetera, are like parking extremely illegally all the time, like the average number of parking tickets per diplomat in the worst country was I think 190 parking tickets per diplomat. Really, really excessive.
And overnight, when the enforcement kicks in, they basically all become Norway, everybody starts parking legally, and the kicker though, is that the longer the Norwegians and Germans and Japanese diplomats were in New York in the pre-enforcement period, the longer they could get away with it, the more they started to park like the Yemenis and the Egyptians. So the lesson is that cultures of corruption are obviously important in dictating behavior, but accountability is also super, super important in deterring bad behavior, once you have a culture of corruption. And so it’s a mix of the two, you need to attract good people into positions of power, you need to clean up the system to attract better people, and then within that good system, you need to really crack down on the people who behave in corrupt or abusive ways to weed them out. And it’s not…
Again, it’s not rocket science, but most of our systems aren’t designed with this end goal, with this in mind, there’s not a systematic attempt to think very carefully about both recruitment and accountability, and I think if every organization just did sort of an assessment of these aspects, the world will become a much better place quite quickly because as I say, the interventions are not difficult, they just involve serious thought about designing systems to attract and promote better people and to weed out those who are breaking the rules.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s say someone’s listening to this and they’re put in a position of power or authority. Rather it’s at work or homeowner’s association, individually, any insights from your research for that person to be like, “I don’t wanna become a crazy homeowner’s association president or megalomaniac. What can I do to prevent that from happening?” What sort of, I guess, breaks can you put on yourself so that doesn’t happen to you?
Brian Klaas:Yeah, it’s a great question. So first off, I’d say that if you’re one of these good people that’s sort of driven by service, these corrosive effects of power are less likely to be as much of a problem, you’ve already solved half the problem because you’re not a power-hungry megalomaniac, narcissistic psychopath, so that’s half of it, right? The other half, though, is that all of us will succumb to some of the psychological effects of power no matter what. Even the best of us. There’s pretty strong evidence that this does something to you over time, and the best of us can counteract it, but it’s not always a sort of bulletproof thing. So what do you do?
There’s a few things, one is that you need to engineer systems in which you are constantly reminded of the weight of your responsibility. So if you’re dealing with difficult decisions that result in harm for people, if you have to fire people, if you have to make decisions that make people really unhappy or hurt people, you should be well aware of the cost of those decisions. I’m not gonna go into the whole detail of it here, but I briefly talk about this in the book with a guy who was involved in doling out money for the 9/11 victims compensation fund, he went through the excruciating process of meeting with every victim’s family face-to-face when he was trying to decide how much their life was worth financially because he wanted to agonize over it.
He said, “The second that this becomes abstract to me is the second I need to get out of this job, because it has to be a reminder of how important this work is,” and I think that’s true even in the smaller stages of power, you need to be reminded of the effects of your decisions when you are affecting other people’s lives. So that’s part of it. The other is just around systems of power is engaging in a sort of Team of Rivals approach. The Team of Rivals is a term that refers to the way Abraham Lincoln set up his cabinet, where he basically made people who were his rivals, they were genuinely sometimes adversaries of his, debate major subjects in front of him, so that he can make an informed decision, and they would tell him when he was being a moron, and he would encourage this basically because he thought it would cut them down to size, remind him of different viewpoints, etcetera.
You contrast this with the Vladimir Putin approach to leadership of the current age, and you’re surrounded by yes men, and in fact, people who cross you might go to jail or might end up dead, and you can think about, what does that do to you? It’s something where if you proactively try to ensure that you are checked, you’re more likely to behave in a reasonable manner, if you behave in a way where you think, “I am powerful and therefore people should defer to me,” you’re more likely to mis-calculate and abuse people because you never get differing opinions. So some of this is possible to sort of proactively mitigate, but I will say that most of the psychologists who study power argue that all of us would succumb at least to some extent, to some of the corrosive aspects of power, if we were there long enough, which is why you might wanna rotate people around and indeed not have everybody inhabit a position of immense power for decades and decades.
Brett McKay: Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Brian Klaas: Yeah, thank you. It’s been great talking to you. So Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, is the book and anywhere that you can buy books, if you’ve got a local bookshop, by all means, go there. I tweet pretty regularly. It’s just my name, BrianKlaas, and if people are interested, I also have a podcast called Power Corrupts, which is a podcast about all the sort of dark sides of humans and the way we screw up the world and what we can do about it.
Brett McKay: Well, fantastic. Brian Klaas, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Brian Klaas: Thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest was Brian Klaas, he’s the author of the book Corruptible, it’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, brianpklaas.com, that’s K-L-A-A-S, two A’s there. Also check in our show notes, at aom.is/powercorrupts 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 on our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles from over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes, you can do so on Stitcher Premium, head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLINESS at the 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, we would appreciate if you would take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Stitcher, it helps out a lot.
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The post Podcast #792: How Power Corrupts appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
When neurologist and sleep specialist Dr. Chris Winter sees adult patients in his sleep clinic, they often come to him because of a struggle with insomnia, which, as he described in a previous appearance on the AoM podcast, is caused by stressing too much about sleep, so that going to bed becomes an anxious and fear-inducing routine that sabotages the natural needs and rhythms of the sleep cycle.
Chris would see fewer adult patients like this if, when they were kids, their parents set them up to have a healthy relationship with sleep.
How to establish that kind of healthy relationship is something Chris writes about in his latest book, The Rested Child, and is the topic of our conversation today. Chris will take us through what parents should know about their kids’ sleep from the womb through young adulthood, with tips on both how to improve your children’s sleep, and how to avoid messing it up, including his take on co-sleeping, why he let his kids go to bed whenever they wanted, and why he discourages giving children melatonin to help them sleep.
Resources Related to the Podcast * Chris’ last appearance on the show — episode #661: Get Better Sleep By Stressing About It Less * National Sleep Foundation’s graph and write-up of sleep duration recommendations across the lifespan
Connect With Dr. Chris Winter * Chris on Instagram * Chris 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. When urologist and sleep specialist, Dr. Chris Winter sees adult patients in his sleep clinic, they often come to him because of a struggle with insomnia, which as he described in a previous appearance on the AoM podcast, is caused by stressing too much about sleep, so that going to bed becomes an anxious and fear-inducing routine that sabotages the natural needs and rhythms of the sleep cycle. Chris would see fewer adult patients like this if when they were kids, their parents set them up to have a healthy relationship with sleep. How to establish that kind of healthy relationship is something Chris writes about in his latest book, The Rested Child and is the topic for our conversation today. Chris will take us through what parents should know about their kids sleep from the womb to young adulthood, with tips on both how to improve your children’s sleep and how to avoid messing it up, including his take on co-sleeping, why he’d let his kids go to bed whenever they wanted, and why he discourages giving children melatonin to help them sleep. After show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/kidsleep.
Chris Winter, welcome back to the show.
Dr. Chris Winter: Hey Brett. It’s an honor to be back.
Brett McKay: So we had you on the show a few years ago to discuss your book, The Sleep Solution, it’s all about how to manage the most common sleep problems that you see people have. The latest book is called The Rested Child, and it’s all about sleeping kids. So in our conversation, The Sleep Solution, we talked about the health consequences for adults, if they don’t get enough sleep or they have poor sleep, are there unique health consequences for children?
Dr. Chris Winter: It’s interesting, unique. I think they are unique in the sense that maybe the difference between a child sleep problem and an adult has to do with kids are laying foundations. In other words, I was talking to a patient today who was a good sleeper, now he is 58, he is struggling, versus somebody who deals with something or develops something when they’re young, and that almost gets incorporated into who they are. In fact, one of the chapters in my book, I write about good sleepers, bad sleepers. What does that mean? If you meet somebody at dinner parties, well, I’ve always been a bad sleeper, what exactly are they saying? And where did that label come from, which I find to be really fascinating. I was talking to somebody the other day, I said, “I’ve never had a parent in my clinic who’s brought their children and said, ‘Well, there’s Keith. He’s my smart child. And that’s Daryl over there. He’s dumb as dirt’, in front of the kid,” you would never do that. And if I said, well, “Is Daryl your stupid child or your smart child?” that parent would probably get very upset with me and maybe never come back.
What’s interesting is the way they talk about sleep with their kids, they’ll often say, “Oh, Daryl’s my great sleeper, but Keith, he’s the worst sleeper God ever put on this earth,” right in front of the child who’s sitting there playing with Lego. So it’s interesting, I think that the consequences sometimes with children’s sleep is that they develop identities and behaviors about sleep that are very rooted developmentally. It’s like learning to swim when you’re little versus learning to swim when you’re in your 40s, it’s really a different thing, or acquiring a language. And the other thing that I think tends to happen is that because children are developing and the things that are happening in their lives are pushing them in directions, they’re accelerating in school, they’re going to college, you’ve decided not to go to college. Maybe do something different. How much of that decision is being made because of problems related to their sleep, so it always concerns me when I see children who are excessively sleepy and struggling in school because forces beyond their control are making determinations about them.
And one of the things I want to avoid is dealing with a 31-year-old who says, “I probably have had narcolepsy ever since I was a kid, I can’t believe it’s taking 20 years to figure this out,” and they often have this look like, “If I had known that when I was in high school, I think my life would be very different than it is now.” And so, I want disorders of sleep to be addressed quickly and efficiently, so that that child can lead their best, happiest life, frankly. And I think sometimes with adults, it’s a little bit different.
Brett McKay: So you want the child to have a great sleeping life all of their life, there’s also health issues, I think we’ll get into this a little bit, the role of sleep in growth, particularly for teenagers. But also, a lot of parents are concerned about their child’s sleep because they’re concerned about their own sleep. If their child’s not sleeping well, then the parent… I imagine a lot of the patients you see with sleeping problems, it’s like, “Well, my kid he just keeps waking up and he’s not a good sleeper,” so helping your kids sleep also helps your sleep as well.
Dr. Chris Winter: Absolutely. I was just in Nashville last night giving a lecture about narcolepsy, which is a disorder where individuals are excessively sleepy, they have a very unique relationship with sleep and that they want it all the time. And I was talking to another doctor and he said that one of the patients that he had diagnosed with narcolepsy, it was a 20-year-old somewhere mid-college age years, the parents had come with her to the doctor’s visit, and when he said, “I think you’re child has narcolepsy,” the mother said, it was kind of emotional and said, “Oh, my God, I always thought she was our great sleeper.” And it’s interesting because my guess is it would look that way to a parent of a young child who when you say, “Okay kids, it’s time for bed,” this child is already there. They put themselves to bed and every time you put that child down to nap, they went to sleep immediately. Again, you’re back to that good sleeper, bad sleeper, I think to your point, Brett, part of that evaluation has to do with how much is the sleep affecting or not affecting the parent, so in that metric, the child was great. I diagnosed narcolepsy in a major league baseball player.
And I talked, I said, “Do you mind if I call your mom?” And he’s like, “No, I don’t mind at all.” And so I called his mom, and the mother said, “It’s funny, when he was a high school student, he would play baseball, and then in between innings would come off the field, go to the dug out, put his glove on the bench and go right to sleep. And then his teammates would wake him up if it was he’s turn to bat or if he had to go back out on the field again.” I said, “What’d you think about that?” And she said, “I don’t know, I just thought he was working really hard,” so it’s amazing what we will tolerate, what we will make an excuse for particularly if it’s not affecting her own sleep.
Brett McKay: Okay, so I think it’d be useful to structure this conversation so that we go through the different stages of a child’s sleep development and unique needs of each other’s perks. I imagine we got listeners who are parents who’ve got a kid at these different stages, but the first question to ask, When do we start sleeping as a fetus, do we have an idea when that happens?
Dr. Chris Winter: Yeah, we do. And I write about that. Sleep in a fetus does look different than it does in an older child or a child obviously that’s been born. Both the timing of it, but also the brain activity is just inherently different. Now, this is a very difficult thing to study because it’s difficult to get a kid to wear a Fitbit when they’re inside of a mother’s uterus, but we can look at these types of things and relatively early on in the child’s development, these stages of arousal and less arousal start to emerge. And that’s important, because if you are a parent or you’re expecting to be a parent one day, you can influence that sleep based upon your own activity, so the mother’s schedule, the mother’s exercise, is it regular? Is it sporadic? Is she a shift worker, is she somebody who works 9-5 everyday, exercises every day for 30 minutes at noon, has a very routine eating schedule, movement schedule? They’ve done studies that looked at how rocking, talking to a child, even driving influences a child’s rhythm. So I always tell parents, you’re going to start to create and help your child organize his sleep before you meet him or her, which is just absolutely fascinating to me. And that’s why in the book I write, that this process of sleep is happening well before the child is born. And what’s cool is you can influence it.
Brett McKay: Okay, so the mother, her actions can influence the child’s sleep before it’s even born. What about genetics, what role does genetics play in our sleep habits?
Dr. Chris Winter: Absolutely. So genetically, I like to think about a few things. Genetics could be potentially endless in terms of its influence on the sleep, but the things that I think that are most relevant to a parent and maybe to a child are three things, number one, how much sleep does your child need as an individual? We talk a lot about eight hours, but it’s really a lot more unique to your own child. And unfortunately is rapidly changing during those childhood years, so nobody would be shocked if I told them, “You know what? Regardless of what your child needs genetically, it will probably be more when they’re 6-months-old than when they’re 6-years-old or 16-years-old.” I included in the book a chart that you can look up in the National Sleep Foundation, if you type in National Sleep Foundation sleep need by age, there’s this really cool chart that they’ve put out there that kind of shows that bell curve distribution of sleep, the average, but what the outliers are that are considered normal for a child who’s just been born all the way up to their senior citizen discount at the movie theater. And what you see is, slowly as we mature in age, we lose sleep, so grandma and grandpa tend to need a lot less sleep than their grandchildren. And so it’s not only just a matter of figuring how much you need, it’s how much do you need in this point in your life because it can change.
So sleep need is highly genetically determined, so if you’re somebody who’s a trauma surgeon and you work, you feel pretty good getting six hours of sleep at night, you could very well pass that on to your daughter and she’ll be an amazing trauma surgeon like her mom. The other genetic pieces are, when do you prefer your sleep, and so there’s this idea of chronotype meaning, are you a night owl? Are you a morning person? The idea of chronotype has been around for decades, even though it’s gotten a little bit more attention of late, and so it doesn’t mean that you can’t do something in the morning if you’re a night owl or vice versa, but when you think about children, it’s extremely important because by and large, most kids tend to be what we call phase delayed. They’re more on the night owl part of the spectrum than the morning part of the spectrum, and I think that has a lot of relevance. If your child maybe struggles in math and you know that they’re very night-oriented, they may struggle with a school start time that’s early, in fact, there’s a whole movement wanting to make school start times later to facilitate most children’s circadian rhythm.
But one of the things I talk about in the book is there are assessments that you can do for your children, and if you do an assessment on your child and determine that he is extremely night-oriented, that might be a tool that you could use with the school to say, “Look, he cannot take trigonometry at 8:00 AM, we really need him in that 3 o’clock trigonometry block, or we would like help making arrangements for him to take this at a community college or something. So I think that that understanding of timing is extremely important. The third genetic variable I call horsepower, ’cause I’ve never really heard it referred to anything meaningful. What it is, is if you deprive a child of sleep, a teenager, you have three teenage kids, and you make them stay up all night studying art history, and then you give them a test the next day on Renaissance painters. Which of your children are able to do that and which are not, meaning that, how do we deal with inadequate sleep? And it’s a very double-edged sword. I think that a lot of people that I went to medical school with had that horsepower gene, we could stay up all night and run around the hospital and put needles in people’s necks and function pretty well the next day, or at least we thought we were.
Versus there are some people I’ve met might even be married to one that after 11, 12 o’clock, they’re not going to be particularly helpful getting your hemorrhaging under control if you came in their emergency room. So we find that individuals who possess that ability to go without sleep, can become quite successful, they just kind of outwork everybody, but the other edge of that sword is they can often die when they’re 55 because they’re able to not get an adequate amount of sleep and do okay, so we always want to be encouraging people to get the right amount of sleep, don’t be scared about not getting it, but don’t be cavalier about the fact that I’ve got a daughter who’s like, “Look, as long as I get two or three hours off sleep, I’m good the next day.” Well, being good, however you define that, and being healthy and living a long life might be mutually exclusive, so we always want to watch out for those types of kids that live in our household, the high achievers, straight As, stay up all night studying Latin, played two different sports and a musical instrument, just because you can do it may not mean you should.
Brett McKay: Okay, so a child’s sleep patterns, they’re influenced by genetics. The mother is also playing a role. That child is born. You bring the baby home. A lot of parents probably notice first off that your baby just, it eats and sleeps, why do you do newborns sleep so much? What’s going on there?
Dr. Chris Winter: Yeah, so it’s an interesting question. You’re being sneaky, Brett, ’cause what you’re essentially asking me is, why do we sleep? And I think it’s always fun to say to people that we really don’t know why exactly. Now, what’s interesting about kids is that during this period of massive growth, that’s what distinguishes a child from an adult in some ways that they’re very busy growing, and we know that the majority of growth hormone, what makes an individual essentially grow is produced during deep sleep, and so when you actually look at a chart… There’s a wonderful chart that you can find if you look it up, that looks at how much light sleep, deep sleep, dreaming and wakefulness during the night we have over the course of our lives, and what you notice when you look at that is the diminishment in our sleep over time seems to be most tied to a lack of deep sleep. In other words, the amount of dreaming we do seems about the same, the amount of light sleep is about the same, deep sleep is about the… I’m sorry, dream sleep’s about the same, light sleep’s about the same, wakefulness might get a little bit more as you get older, but deep sleep rapidly decreases as we age, so kids are getting tons of deep sleep. And we know this as parents, you can wake him up in the car seat and pick him up, take him into their bedroom, they just out cold, you can put their pajamas on, they never wake up.
That’s deep sleep. You can’t even wake them up to bring them in the car and put their pjs on. So, that deep sleep is when the child is making growth hormone, so I think the big thing that’s happening there with children is their bodies are exceptionally focused on this deep sleep because it’s the necessary component of growth that makes these kids get bigger. In fact, sometimes when you have children who are falling off their growth curve, and I give a couple of examples of real patients that we’ve seen where they’re chugging along 80% height and weight, when they go to the pediatrician, they plot that out on the chart and you get real proud when your kid’s in the 80th percentile or 90th percentile for height or whatever, then all of a sudden, the next time you visit, they’re in the 60th percentile and then maybe even less the next time, so that trajectory they were on is starting to fall off. A lot of times that can be a subtle indication that there is something going on with their sleep because their sleep disturbance is affecting their deep sleep, their deep sleep is affecting growth and now they’re not growing, so the most common one you see is something like sleep apnea. Kid has big tonsils, they’re not breathing well during the night, and what’s crazy is you take the kids tonsils out and all of a sudden their growth just surges.
And one of the things I predict will come out of COVID, and this is my own prediction, this is not being supported by any scientific study that I’m aware of at this point, is that a lot of kids were basically told during COVID, do not come to swim practice, do not come to your early morning prayer group, everything’s cancelled. And in fact, we’re not even gonna start school until 9:30, and that’s gonna be a Zoom school, so you could log in, turn your camera and microphone off and keep on sleeping if you wanted to. So a lot of kids during COVID, we did this kind of accidental massive experiment on what happens if we almost force kids to get more sleep, and I’ve anecdotally sort of collected a lot of experiences from people that said, “Wow, my kids really grew a lot, they had growth surges during COVID.” I have two boys that were high school students at the time, and one of them, a senior had kind of stopped growing, the other one had not, but they both had huge surges in their growth during this time. Now, my senior was a swimmer, so he was used to getting up at 4:30, 5 o’clock every morning, seven days a week, and suddenly was told, “No, you can sleep till 9:00 or 10:00 now if you want to. So it’ll be really interesting to see that, but that growth hormone is really tied to that infant sleep experience, and it’s probably essential for developing a healthy body and mind.
Brett McKay: Alright, so newborns are sleeping a lot ’cause they’re growing a lot, not only physically, but their brain, there’s a lot going on with their brain, and a lot happens with our brain while we sleep. When a parent comes to you with a newborn that’s having sleeping problems, what are the most common problems and what are parents doing maybe unintentionally to exacerbate the problem?
Dr. Chris Winter: Yeah, so I think if we’re looking at newborns, young children, probably the biggest problem that they have is, and I don’t mean to sound flip about this, it’s a lack of maturity in the sense that that brain has not really started to organize itself into a period of wakefulness and a period or periods of sleep. And I think that for most parents, what they’re dealing with… And we get parents all the time who bring us very young children and what they’ll say is, I get a little note, “Here’s your patient, you’re seeing him at 3 o’clock, and here’s the complaint, can’t sleep or their baby won’t sleep.” I’m approaching 50. I have never seen a child that won’t sleep. I’ve never heard of one, never seen more with my own eyes. Maybe they exist, but I’m not privy to it. So what the parent is basically saying is the child’s not sleeping in a predictable or efficient way. And parents can get a lot done if they know what’s going to happen, even if they’re not sleeping that much. If they know, “Okay, well, that’s fine. When are they gonna sleep? If you can tell me that.” It really makes the difference.
So I think a lot of parents just need a plan, but the plan that your book is reading might not be the plan that’s perfect for your child, it’s awesome that Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds post, “This is the schedule we have for our perfect little child, and here’s how he or she is sleeping.” And you think, “Well, great, this is the person that helped Blake Lively and Ryan Reynold’s baby sleep, is gonna help my baby sleep. I’m gonna put my child on that schedule, which could very well work, it might not, because again, your child has very different genes than that other child. So it’s really about understanding how much sleep does your kid need? And so one thing I tell parents all the time to do is, for the next week or two, I want you to write down every minute that they’re sleeping, so you put them down at 8 o’clock, they slept until 10:00 and woke up and they were up until 11:30, and then they fell back to sleep again, they took a 20-minute nap during the day on the ride to Whole Foods, and then they fell asleep in this little bouncy chair that your grandmother got you.
You track every little bit of it, and then over two weeks, when that’s done, add up all that time divided by 14 days and you’ll get a sleep time for 24 hours, so essentially how much sleep is your child getting right now, on average, every 24 hours. And when that number is calculated, now you can split that up and arrange the schedule in the way that you would like it, or watch your other child. But what I often find parents doing is they’ve got a child who’s sleeping a relatively small amount, but they’re trying to get the child to sleep for 17 hours. And one of the things I want you to pay attention to when you look at that National Sleep Foundation chart is the tremendous variance when you look at young kids in terms of how much sleep they need, and what I mean by that is a newborn, zero to three months could be sleeping anywhere from 11-19 hours every 24. So that means when you’re sitting in a park with your friend who both of you have babies that are somewhere in that zero to three-month range, what your friend is telling you to do, what you’re telling your friend to do could be very wrong if you’ve got an 11-hour baby and they’ve got a 19-hour baby. And once again, the 19-hour baby is always the good sleeper and the 11-hour baby is the bad sleeper, but it’s not. They’re both fine, there just needs to be an understanding of what that child needs, and I sometimes think that that’s sometimes lost.
Brett McKay: So figure out how much sleep your newborn needs and your child needs and then from there, do you recommend establishing a schedule saying, “Okay, we’re gonna get one nap at this time, and then you’re gonna go to bed at this time to get most of your sleep”?
Dr. Chris Winter: So my answer to that is yes, but it’s qualified in the sense that if a parent… I ran into a parent in a dinner party, and they said, “You know what? We don’t really have a schedule for our child, we just let him or her be awake and sleep whenever they want to.” My first question would be, “How is that working out for you?” If the answer is “Lovely, well, we are so happy,” then I don’t really have a problem with it, this is your child. You’re fully qualified to make those decisions. Now, if you ask me how many parents have come to my clinic asking for help getting their kids off of a schedule and sleeping whenever they want to, that number as of today is zero. So I wanna be very clear, I wrote this book for individuals who are struggling to make something happen that they want to have happen with their kid’s sleep. If you have a child who kind of sleeps whenever her or she wants to and it’s working out well for you, you can keep doing that. I’ve got personal beliefs about that, in terms of a kid who eats whenever he wants to, goes to school whenever he wants to, and sleeps whenever he wants to, that can create problems.
Brain is like a schedule. Our brains do nothing accidentally, we don’t release hormones accidentally, we don’t create digestive tides accidentally, our brain is like a schedule and it’s kind of tied to the sun. So if the parent is saying, “Look, we would like our child on a more of a predictable sleep schedule, then, yes, I think that once you’ve determined how much sleep you need, it’s time to start sort of divvying out into sort of sleep periods that make sense for your child and your family’s lives.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So a lot of parents, when the child’s a newborn, they’ll do things like swaddling or co-sleeping. What are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Chris Winter: Swaddling is interesting. Why do we hug people, isn’t it? If you think about it like, Okay, you see your friend and your friend is pretty upset about something and you get this idea in your head, “I’m gonna walk over, I’m gonna put my arms around him, and I’m gonna squeeze him, and that’s gonna make him feel better.” And it does. Hugging does make us feel better. And the reason for it is that we’ve got sensors at the end of some nerves that respond to pressure and that pressure is comforting, and that’s why weighted blankets, that’s why swaddling is helpful for some people, they like that feeling of pressure. I always ask people when you go to dentist and they put that lead apron on you before they do x-rays, how does that make you feel? And if the answer is, “Well, I kinda like it,” ’cause personally, I do, I think it’s lovely, then you might really respond well to a weighted blanket or something of that nature. So swaddling to me is fine. It’s kind of natural, it’s a great little technique for getting a kid to kind of relax and settle down, who just popped out of a womb.
In terms of co-sleeping, I wanna be careful about this one too. I don’t have a problem with co-sleeping, if that’s something you’ve decided to do with your child or children. I do think we have to be careful when children are young. The American Academy of Pediatrics just came out with more definitive guidelines about that, which were always sort of reluctant to do and that I don’t think a child should be in bed with a parent until they’re at least a year old, and now they can be in a bassinet right next to your bed. But I just think that idea of you sleeping with the child, it can be problematic, and I write about this in the book that I have been privy to several episodes where parents have inadvertently killed children. And one of them was a family member of somebody who works for me, so a very close relationship, and it was absolutely devastating. The mother got up for work, picked up the child, took care of it, put it in bed with the husband, which they did frequently, but in this point, the husband just kind of rolled over a little bit too close to the baby and suffocated it.
Now, this is only been, what? Five or six times in my career have I been sort of a part of this, so I can’t make big definitive statements, but in all five, the parents said, “We will never do this again.” It was, I think in the book I wrote, it was like a bomb went off in the family, the family I’m talking about, who gave me permission to talk about this, they are now divorced, significant, significant grief that I don’t think will ever end. I just don’t see it as something that’s really worth it. I think you can snuggle with your kid, you can cradle them, you can put them in baby bjorns and do stuff, but when it comes to that early sleeping as a one-year-old, I just think safety is so important, even though it can be rare. I put the statistics of crib death and things like that in there, it’s a leading cause of little ones dying. I’ve just never seen it like, when you talk to these Cliff jumpers or people who climb mountains, they’ll tell you, “I can’t imagine a world where I’m not doing this dangerous activity, so if unfortunately, I pass away doing it, it’s okay because I’m sort of dead if I’m not doing it.”
I’ve never met anybody who’s sort of talked about sleeping with children like that. Maybe they exist, but it’s somebody else’s life, it’s this beautiful, innocent little person next to you, and I just think put him in a bassinet and be safe. Let’s eliminate this risk, and when they get old enough to protect themselves and move their head around and whatnot, then really that’s your choice to make, I think.
Brett McKay: Alright, so the newborn period, babies are gonna sleep a lot, the big problem there for parents is like maybe the baby is not sleeping when the parent would like the baby to sleep. He has his own schedule, but I think the key there is like babies probably get enough sleep, you gotta figure out how much sleep it needs in a 24-hour period, and then kinda nudge the baby into a schedule that fits. And again, there’s qualifications of that, but moving on to toddler and school age years, I imagine the amount of sleep they need starts to slowly reduce with these kids, you know, five, six, seven, eight-year-olds. Like what are the big problems you see with parents that parents have there?
Dr. Chris Winter: Yeah, part of it is, once you’ve figured it out, it starts to change. It’s called COVID. Okay, we figured it out. Oh no, there’s a new variant, so you’re constantly having variables change in your algorithm, so with toddlers, you run into the problems of, they’re starting to maybe need less sleep, so when do you drop that particular nap and when does it stay? The other thing with toddlers are they can do stuff like get out of their crib, so when you put the baby in the bed, he can cry and fuss and make little whipping sounds, but he can’t really go anywhere. I write about one of my children, really at a very young age, figured out how to get out of his crib, he could climb out, and we heard it one night when we were watching television this thump and we walked up and he’s just walking around in his room. And literally, once that cat’s out of the bag, it’s very difficult to… You can’t reason with them. Everybody was like, “Oh my gosh, it’s so great, your child is walking so early,” and what in the world is great about this, he can walk, but he has absolutely no sense. I’m worried he’s gonna get out of his crib and stick his finger in a socket or something, so that starts to become a problem.
The idea of you’re waking up at 3 o’clock in the morning, your child is standing over, or has crawled into bed with you, that’s a whole new issue of, You can’t really lock them in their bedroom, for heaven sake, so what are you going to do to convince the child to be in that bedroom? And then I also think at that same time, they’re interested in what you’re doing. And so the idea of a nap time or something, they’re constantly coming out and what people call curtain calls, “I need some water, and my blue crayon is dull and Can you sharpen that? And I can’t find my blanket,” so you’re constantly trying to convince them to stay in your room and do this and do that, so I think that’s sort of the toddler year problem that a lot of people deal with. And I wrote in the book, one of the things that we did when our kids were pretty young was we told them, “We don’t need you to sleep, we just want you to be in your bedroom and we’re all gonna have a rest period,” we never talked about sleep, we didn’t talk about napping, that Okay, at 10 o’clock or 1 o’clock, everybody has a rest time, so I need you to color or you can play with your cars, you can dress your dolls up, you can write Mommy a picture or write daddy a letter or whatever you wanna do.
And you can sleep if you want to, but you don’t have to, just rest, resting is good for your body, and if you just lie in your bed and think about things and imagine what your dream tree house would look like or draw a picture of it. All this resting is very good for your body.” One of the things we start to do in the toddler years is determine the child’s relationship to sleep. So when the kid comes out of the bedroom, when they don’t take a nap, they’re up the entire time, is, Are you excited about that? Are you angry with them, is there stress in your voice when you’re dealing with them? Because a lot of the times we start to create a performance pressure. It’s like that overbearing parent that every time the kid strikes out, “You gotta keep her elbow up, you gotta do this, you go do that,” and you’re yelling from the stands, and now the kid is so freaked out about striking out or disappointing mom or dad at the baseball game that they really approach the plate very differently than another kid who’s like, “I don’t know, I’ll just go there and swing the bat, if I hit it, great, if I don’t, it’s no big deal. I still get dinner no matter what.”
So creating that relationship and those ideas and that emotion around sleep is really important in those toddler years, ’cause I think that that’s where we create the 31-year-old who says, “You know, I’ve been a bad sleeper all my life,” that I still don’t know what that necessarily means, but we can kind of create that [0:34:11.7] ____ in kids.
Brett McKay: Oh, yeah. That’s interesting, especially for school-aged children, like when they’re nine, you actually don’t set a strict time to go to sleep schedule, you have a time to wake up schedule that’s strict, but you don’t have a time to go to sleep, but there is a go-to bed time?
Dr. Chris Winter: Yeah. And I think that one of the problems that we’ve created, or one of the mistakes that we make is we focus a lot on bedtime, but not as much as maybe we should on wake times. You’re absolutely right. And when you say strict, meaning our kids are going to wake up in our house somewhere around 7:00 or 8:00 every day. Now, there are exceptions, you were at some travel soccer game or something, or a swim meet and they didn’t get in until whatever, then sure you can sleep a little bit later if you want to, but by and large, we want that day to start and be extremely stereotyped. It’s gonna be the same every day. You’re gonna get up, I’m gonna open up your blinds, I’m gonna sing a goofy song in the morning, I’m gonna scratch your back. I’m gonna say it’s gonna be a great day, I’m so excited to share it with you or whatever. It’s positive, it’s not punitive, and I’m not a drill… I got a son at the Naval Academy, it’s not what we’re talking about here, blowing a bugle and screaming at you to get up and do push-ups, it’s just, “Hey, it’s time to get up and get going.”
And you’re going to have kids who say things like, “Oh, I’m too tired, and can I go to school late? And I don’t do anything in my first three periods, so could you just take me to school at lunch and… ” “No, we don’t want to do that, not because we’re mean, but it’s because we’re, Hey, this is the da, y we’re gonna start it and it’s gonna be great and you’re gonna feel better in 30 minutes once you get up and shower, and it’s not gonna be a big deal.” So yes, we always wanna focus on that. Now, the flip side is the bedtime, I think what we did was we had a time where I needed you to be in your bedroom, “Hey, it’s 8 o’clock for you young one, it’s 10 o’clock for you older kid, whatever, it’s time to be in your bedroom.” Now, we have a very strict rule that there’s no phones or electronics in the bedroom. Now, that’s harder as they get older, and they’re like, “Look, dad, all my homework is on my computer,” so it becomes a little bit more of a challenge, but by and large, be in your bedroom, read your books, color, look at your toys, do whatever you wanna do, just no electronics, Snapchat, Instagram, nothing like that.
You go to bed when you want to. If you’re sleepy, go to bed, if you’re not, oh, by all means, stay up, read another comic book. I really want you to. I don’t really want you trying to go to bed when you’re not sleepy. And we really instilled that idea in our kids at a young age, sort of welcoming it, “Hey, if you wanna stay up, it’s okay, now we’re gonna wake up at the same time every morning, we’re not gonna let you take a three hour nap on Saturday, but if you don’t feel the need to go to sleep at this point, that’s fine. Now, remember all the kids give you this look like, “Are you kidding me? I can just stay and read more comic books.” And it fades. It was like the study they did many years ago, where they brought kids into cafeterias, and said, “Eat whatever you want,” and there’s vegetables on this table, desserts on this table. And for the first three days they ate nothing but dessert, but check in with them a month later and they’re actually balancing their meal quite lovely. And without being told to do so.
So what you’re trying to do is with every child and really with every adult, is, I want you to have a healthy relationship with sleep, and that means that you respect it, that you work on getting enough, but you’re not fearful if things don’t work out perfectly. I want you right there in the middle, I don’t want you to be the person who’s terrified and taking tons of sleeping pills, ’cause you’re worried that if you get in bed and it takes you more [0:37:38.5] ____ to fall asleep, all this lost. I also don’t want you to be the 28-year-old trauma surgeon who’s like, “Yeah, as long as they get three hours of sleep, I’m fine because she’s not.” She’s fooling herself, just because she can take your spleen out on three hours of sleep, and maybe that should be applauded, but she is headed for some problem in the future, even though she seems to be functioning quite well right now, I want somebody in the middle of those two people.
Brett McKay: So something I’ve seen an increase in with parents is, parents who give their toddlers or school age children melatonin gummies before they go to bed each night. You discouraged that. Why is that?
Dr. Chris Winter: Yeah, so I’ll be clear, I don’t think you’re gonna harm your kid giving the melatonin gummies, although there are some melatonin products that also have seratonin, and then that can be kind of an issue. But by and large, first and foremost, it’s unclear when you give your child a melatonin gummy, what you’re actually giving them. There was a recent study not too long ago that looked at melatonin products we give adults and kids and the variance even within the same brand or the same bottle can be tremendous, so the idea that we know we’re giving our kids three milligrams of melatonin every night with the gummy bear is not true, God knows what you’re giving them. I will also say that there was a study that was done, it basically said, Look, it’d be pretty difficult to hurt yourself with melatonin, so I don’t like it, but I’m not trying to fearmonger here, we’re hurting our children. I give you the melatonin. No, I don’t think chemically we are, but I do think we’re hurting them in different way, we’re hurting them in that, we’re not really addressing the problem.
You’re giving your child a melatonin gummy bear every night. Why? I’ve never met a parent says, “Oh, it’s because my kids sleeps wonderfully, but we just thought this would even enhance that even more.” I’ve never met that person, like a supplement, they’re giving it to them because their kid can’t sleep, and chances are, they’ve gone to a pediatrician, gotten that advice from a doctor who probably has gotten very little, if any training whatsoever, so melatonin gummy bears are a pediatrician’s best friend, because they’re harmless and they allow the pediatrician to do something quickly for a problem that often doesn’t have a quick solution. My child won’t sleep. A pediatrician does not have time, amidst his flu shots and asthma treatments, the school physicals to sit down for an hour, talk to you about what is going on with your child that makes you feel like you can’t sleep. So here’s the [0:40:06.7] ____ trust the melatonin gummy bears. Next patient, I don’t fault the pediatrician. I think there was a study that was done that said 25% of pediatricians have never gotten any sleep training, even though sleep problems are some of the most common things that they’re forced to deal with, and the average pediatrician’s gotten, what? Two to four hours, something like that. I think the average employee at Mattress firm has gotten 200 hours.
So it’s a real problem in terms of the education gap here, so to me, the problem with the melatonin gummy bear is sort of like, I’ve taken my child to the doctor because there’s some blood trickling out of their nose, and the doctor keeps shoving a melatonin gummy bear up their nose and says, “See, the problem, you don’t see it anymore, it’s gone.” No, the problem is not gone, it’s just hidden now. So we haven’t fixed anything or he’s gonna take melatonin gummy bears for the rest of their life? We’re really missing an opportunity to sit down and talk to that child or the parent and say, Let’s figure out where the sleeplessness is coming from. And I say that sort of in quotations in that again, I’ve never met a child that can’t sleep. So it’s better define the problem so we can better solve it, because when we don’t we go down the Michael Jackson pathway, which is Michael Jackson couldn’t sleep. So let’s give him a melatonin gummy bear, that didn’t work, let’s give him some stronger pills, well those don’t work either.
Let’s send a surgeon to his house to anesthetize him every night. Well, that killed him. So again, we’re not killing kids with melatonin gummy bears, but we are setting them down this pathway of, I’ve got a brain that doesn’t sleep, so I have to take this great flavor Chewy in order to be able to sleep. Which really isn’t true, and I don’t want any child believing that. So if there is a sleep problem, let’s diagnose it and fix it and move forward and not just simply cover it up.
Brett McKay: Alright, so don’t default to giving kids melatonin because you think they got a sleeping problem, I mean, they might have a sleeping disorder that’s stopping them from sleeping, but those are rare, the more likely scenario is that the kids just not sleeping when the parent wants them to go to sleep or it’s convenient for the parent, and so instead of giving them melatonin maybe the parent just needs to try that thing you were talking about, where you tell the kid, you gotta be in your bedroom at a certain time, but they can go to sleep whenever they want, and then regardless of what time they go to sleep, you wake them up at the same time, and hopefully that will just naturally get things on track. So that’s school age kids. What about high school kids? What are the big issues you see with sleep in this period?
Dr. Chris Winter: High school? Technology in school. And I’m married to a teacher, both my parents are school teachers, I love teachers, I’m not bashing school at all. I do get to places sometimes where I think this algorithm does not work, I remember one time I was asked by the NCAA to come out with a group of doctors and talk to them about the sleep in their athletes, and I thought, “Well, I’m a good sleep doctor and I’ve worked all these pro athletes, I’m gonna arrive in Indianapolis and I’m gonna tell them exactly what to do, I’m gonna solve the problem.” And I remember sitting there listening to an NCAA swimmer from Indiana, a school in Indiana, talk to me about his schedule, and then this was dear to me because I’ve got a collegiate swimmer too, and when I was done listening to his schedule of mandatory workouts, well, these workouts are mandatory, but you have to go. And we have mandatory study hall, we cannot miss or be late to a class, I remember thinking, “Well, this doesn’t add up to the number of hours in a week. Like, how are you doing this?” And to be blunt, my son, who was a swimmer, collegiate swimmer, so I was spending 27 hours a week doing my sport and I just couldn’t do it, I’m not strong enough academically to be able to lose an entire day and be able to keep my grades where I want them to be.
So he decided after his first year of swimming that he was done. So to me, I think that school can be that for some people, I think every child has the right to go to school, play an instrument, and play a sport, and be able to fit all that into a 24-hour day or a regular work week, and when I look at my own children, sometimes I’m like, “My God, why do you have four tests tomorrow, do your teachers not discuss that, and when were you made aware of this project?” And I just feel like sometimes schools… And I’ve gotten letters and communications from parents that are just… They’re not the experience I had in high school, what they’re experiencing in high school is kind of what I experienced in medical school, like the math doesn’t work out and it’s dangerous, but hey, it’s only for a few years and it’ll be okay after that’s done. So school is a big problem, I think technology is a massive problem, and I don’t have the answer for that, so if you’re looking for the answer to technology, I might provide some guidance here and there, but I’m gonna tell you right now, save your money, do not buy my book, I do not have the answer to how to get technology under control with your child, it’s just everywhere and everything’s working against us.
We have strict rules about technology in our family. I follow them as well. I do not bring a cell phone into my bedroom, we plugged them all up in the kitchen at night, but I had one child build a phone out of a piece of wood, and he would plug the wood up every night ’cause I thought it was a phone, as it was an iPhone case, and he had his phone up in his bedroom and it’s like a little drug for kids, and it always upsets me when the parent brings the child in, I’m talking to the eight-year-old and the five-year-olds rummaging around in the purse, grabs the cell phone out and sitting there the entire time we’re talking on that phone like it’s begun, it’s happening. They’re getting that little dopamine hit in their brain and to wrestle that phone out of their hand is gonna be tough. I was talking to a professional football player who said, “I get home… ” Because I’ve got a problem with my phone, I’m addicted to it, and it’s hurting me professionally. He said, “I get home and I put the phone in a drawer.” And he goes, “An hour later, I’m sitting on the couch with the phone in my hand”, he goes, “I’m not entirely sure how it got there.” I mean, that’s the kind of dialogue you would hear with a drug addict.
And so I think that those two things within the teenage years or something, parents have to be extremely organized and thoughtful about as to how they’re gonna deal with technology, cell phones, streaming services, computers in your bedroom, whatever, as well as schools that can sometimes, I think, overstep what they should be doing from a work perspective with our kids. And again, I’m not a snowflake, I don’t know what the word would be for it. I mean, work the kids, make them work and you make them organize, but it sometimes I’m just kind of like, “What on earth were they thinking when they gave you this five-page paper to do today when you’ve got these two other exams going on? And so it just seems mean to me.” Like make them write the paper because they do it next week when they’ve got nothing going on, and so anyway, I just think those are two things we have to be very organized about.
Brett McKay: And I think with the school thing to him or just in the high school years, you may as a parent have to subtly encourage or discourage your kids from taking on too much, so they’re like, “Well, I wanna do this third sport.” Well, maybe not.
Dr. Chris Winter: Yes. And I think that there are kids out there and schedules out there that they can do it, and if you’re saying, “Well, my kids sleeping a ton and is playing three sports and others 10, great, I don’t have a problem with it. I think that, like you said, they’re entitled to one sport, if they wanna play two concurrently or I wanna do a sport doing Quiz Team, Model UN and this other thing, they might have to cut things out a little bit, I think beyond, What’s a right and a privilege? And what’s a privilege? I think you have a right to one sport and maybe one other activity, I think everything beyond that becomes a privilege, so yeah, I think we as parents do have to step in because it’s kind of an arms race, is it. “Well, Susie’s taking three APs and two”, they say, and I wanna get into a great college, and I think that that’s a very difficult thing for parents to know when to be like, “Hey look, just take the standard level this or the honors level this. It’s gonna be okay. [chuckle] You’re gonna be fine.”
I don’t meet a lot of adults who are drinking in bars because they didn’t do AP Psychology their junior year, they instead took just regular biology, and all was lost when that happened, but it’s hard in the moment, like dealing with kids in schools was definitely the most unexpectedly hard thing for me personally, as a parent, I just had no idea the kinds of pressures and things that they would be exposed to because it just wasn’t what I was exposed to as a high school student.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like the overarching goal as a parent when you’re trying to help your kid sleep is, Okay, your kids are sleeping.
Dr. Chris Winter: Yes, they are.
Brett McKay: Yeah, absolutely. Most kids don’t have a serious sleep disorder, usually if the problem is there, maybe they’re not sleeping when you’d like them to. So I think the goal is as a parent throughout from crib to college is to, I don’t know, just help your kids develop good sleeping habits, and have a good relationship with sleep.
Dr. Chris Winter: Yeah. And to be on the look out when you feel like there might be something wrong with sleep, and the problem there, particularly in the teenage years, is I think we’re as a medical community much more likely to jump to the idea of depression or anxiety or ADHD before we actually consider, Oh, maybe his concentration is okay, there’s just something going on with his sleep. So if you as a parent think, my child sleeps a lot and always just seems tired. Like when my mother-in-law comes to town, she always says, “Jonathan always look so tired.” I think that that’s where you want to sort of exercise that parental radar that you have, because you know that child better than anybody in the world, particularly the doctor, and say, You know what? Yeah, he is struggling with some attention and he has been a bit moody or more depressed lately, but I’d like to explore more about his sleep because I don’t think that it’s as healthy as it could be. To me, it’s always disappointing when we figure out a sleep problem of somebody who’s been dealing with those symptoms for years, it’s all that lost time and energy, and so to me, I think a sleep evaluation so that they can sort of make the proper arrangements to figuring out what they need to do to get help and be that advocate because it can be life-changing for a kid.
Brett McKay: Well, Chris, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Dr. Chris Winter: Yeah, so the book is available wherever books are sold, it’s called ‘The Rested Child: Why Your Tired, Wired Or Irritable Child May Have a Sleep Disorder And How To Help’, and you can buy it on Amazon. And then my social media is drchriswinter, like Dr. Chris Winter, D-R-C-H-R-I-S W-I-N-T-E-R, Twitter and Instagram, and I try to put good stuff about adults and kids sleep on those feeds as well too, and yeah, so I really appreciate the time and the spotlight, this is a book that I think would be very helpful to parents and really look forward to it being in their hands.
Brett McKay: Well, Chris Winter, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Chris Winter: Hey, Brett, I really appreciate your time too. Thank you so much.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Chris Winter, he’s the author of the book, The Rested Child, it’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at our show notes at aom.is/kidsleep 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 on our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousand articles or interviews about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d 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” to check out for a free month trial. Once you 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, I appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review of our podcast or Spotify. It helps us out a lot. Done that already. Thank you, please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think we get something out of it. As I always thanks for the continued support and until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding to our listening of our podcast, put what you’ve heard into action.
The post Podcast #791: Set Your Kids Up for a Lifetime of Healthy Sleep appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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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The post Podcast #789: Become a Backyard Adventurer appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
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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.
The post Podcast #788: The Dangers of “Concept Creep” appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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
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Transcript Coming Soon! The post Podcast #786: The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
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Transcript Coming Soon! The post Podcast #785: The Dreams That Precede Death appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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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.
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. 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 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.
The personal uniform is a look that you’ve settled on as your regular get-up. Today on the show I talk to two style writers, David Coggins and Michael Williams, about all things concerning this stylish-yet-bandwidth-saving approach to dressing. We discuss what a personal uniform is, how to develop one and why that development comes with age, and how to find inspiration for yours. We also talk about establishing the base pieces of your personal uniform, buying multiples of its fundamental components, and refining your look over time.
Resources Related to the Podcast * Photo of David and Michael at the Masters * AoM Podcast #398: Should a Man Care About How He Dresses? * AoM article on tailoring * AoM Article: 10 Things Your Father Should Have Taught You About Style * AoM Article: 3 Steps to Building Your Individual Style * Sid Mashburn * Drake’s * A guide to the Barbour coat * Crockett & Jones * The chore coat * Uniqlo * Die, Workwear! * Nick Wooster * William Brown Project * David Coggins’ previous appearances on the podcast: + #282: How a Man Develops His Sense of Style + #422: Men and Manners + #706: The (Non-Cliche) Life Lessons of Fly Fishing
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- David’s site The Contender and The Contender newsletter
- Michael’s site A Continuous Lean and the ACL newsletter
- You can access their podcast, Central Division, by subscribing to either of their newsletters
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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. The personal uniform is a look that you’ve settled on as your regular get-up. Today on the show, I talk to two style writers, David Coggins and Michael Williams, about all things concerning this stylish-yet-bandwidth-saving approach to dressing. We discuss what a personal uniform is, how to develop one and why that development comes with age, and how to find inspiration for yours. We also talk about establishing the base pieces of your personal uniform, buying multiples of its fundamental components, and refining your look over time. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/personaluniform.
David Coggins, Michael Williams, welcome to the show.
David Coggins: Hey, Brett. Good to be here.
Michael Williams: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Brett McKay: Well, David, long-time listeners are likely familiar with you and your background, because this is your fourth time on the podcast. This is a rare… You’re a four-peater. This is a rarefied group you’re… You joined. But for newer listeners, can you briefly tell us about your background in the world of menswear and style, and you’ve… I mean, why have you spent so many years writing about it?
David Coggins: Yeah, I don’t like to do the math on these things and look back at how long I’ve been writing about this stuff, but it’s great to be back on the show. Great to talk to you. I started out because I was just interested in clothes, and why we like them, and how they’re made, and the people who make them, and people who wear them in an interesting way. And as I… Get older, I… My views evolved the same way we… The way we dress evolves over time. And so… And also, half the magazines I wrote for have gone out of business, the way print magazines tend to do these days. So, as a matter of fact, I even wrote a lot of my early style stories for A Continuous Lean, a site Michael knows a lot about. So that was a good starting point for me, and it’s nice to be talking with you guys today.
Brett McKay: Yeah, Michael, let’s introduce you to our listeners. What’s your background in the world of men’s clothing and menswear?
Michael Williams:Yeah, so, I started a website called A Continuous Lean, back when websites like that were called blogs. Now, I started a men’s style blog; I was randomly one of the first people to do that. And it’s even kind of funny, because I… If you meet me, you’d kinda think like, “Wow, this is the guy that started the men’s style blog.” I… Maybe you wouldn’t have guessed that. But it’s all in here; it’s in here somewhere, but… I basically was interested in all these things, was, you know, reading about menswear online, and a lot of what was out in the magazine, it’s not what Coggins was doing per se, but just what was out in general kinda wasn’t exactly the aesthetic or the point of view that I was looking for, and I thought, “Well, I should just do this for fun as a creative outlet,” and started that site, and it became this…
You know, I sort of was in the right place at the right time with the right point of view, and it sorta just kinda became this popular thing, and then that sorta propelled me along to… You know, just my career has sort of followed, you know, the growth of ACL, and then, you know, I do marketing work and write about other stuff on… You know, my whole career has sort of evolved around that, but… And I sorta just fell into it. But I’m still very interested in… You know, much of what Coggins was saying too. It’s like the people that make these things, or how things are made, or what goes into the things we wear everyday, and that’s something I’m still pretty passionate about.
Brett McKay: Yeah, A Continuous Lean; I remember finding some way upon that back in 2008 or 9. And I’m sure if a guy is listening to this podcast and they own a pair of Wolverine 1000 Mile boots, or a pair of selvedge jeans from… What’s that North… That North Carolina mill… They probably have you to thank.
Michael Williams: Yeah. That stuff was coming sort of mainstream when I was championing it, so, I don’t know if I… If they had me to thank, but I definitely helped sorta propel that, you know, for better or worse. And, yeah, the denim factory, which is no longer… Is called the White Oak factory. But yeah, that stuff… You know, I think part of my idea behind doing what I was doing with ACL was, this stuff isn’t gonna be around forever, and especially if people don’t start to appreciate some of these things, and a lot of the stuff sort of has come and gone, but then other things have gained incredible popularity, so it’s kinda been interesting to see on both sides.
Brett McKay: So, you guys… A while back ago, David, you did a newsletter on your Substack about finding your personal uniform. And this is something you and Michael talk about on your podcast that you have; it’s a recurring topic. Let’s start there; like, what do you guys mean by a personal uniform? Is this something that you’re supposed to wear everyday, like Steve Jobs and his black turtleneck and jeans and New Balance shoes?
David Coggins: Well, I think the uniform is fascinating to me, because it combines sort of self-expression and ease, and that’s a lot of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about how to dress; it’s something that reflects who you are, but also something that makes your life easier, especially in the morning, when you don’t wanna make major decisions about how to present yourself to people you work with or people you’re meeting with. And so, I’m fascinated with… Especially as we get older, it seems like we arrive more clearly at a sense of kind of who we are, and the clothes we need to reflect what we’re doing in the world, and so a uniform… I think, for some people, it might intimidate them, ’cause it seems like you’re committing to something, but I find it really liberating in a way, because it just takes another thing out of your… You’ve resolved something very important and easy on a daily basis. So, I think that’s what we talk about when we talk about uniforms.
Michael Williams: Yeah, I mean, I think the reason Steve Jobs was doing it is maybe a little bit different than why David and I champion it. I think he was trying to just eliminate the effort in, you know, choosing what to wear everyday, and it was… It’s almost like if you… You could not eat and just have soylent if you just needed the nutrition, and you couldn’t get rid of eating as a time… You know, as something that you spend time doing, or energy on thinking about, and just get the nutrition from something else. You know, there… You could do that, but it wouldn’t really be much fun. I mean, I think that… A lotta times, I think about Steve Jobs, and I think he was doing it maybe for a little bit of a different reason.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think you guys… I mean, you guys aren’t approaching the personal uniform as a chance to not care about aesthetics, or how you look. And you know, it’s also… It’s not like a Star Trek thing, where everyone’s wearing the same uniform because of it’s… You know, it’s functionality. But you guys do care about aesthetics, and you do care about how you look, and… You know, you’ve dialed in into your own unique aesthetic, and what you think looks good on you, and what looks best on you. And then you replicate it. So you’re not just being utilitarian about it. But I mean, it does save bandwidth in figuring out how to dress. Beyond that, are there other benefits to having a personal uniform?
Michael Williams: Well, I mean, dressing, to me, still reflects some sort of self-knowledge. So if I see someone who’s… Has arrived at a uniform, I know that he knows himself, which is always gonna be appealing and reassuring, and also that he’s at ease with himself. It communicates something that puts other people at ease. And so we’re not talking about a uniform in some way that all men wearing the gray flannel suit. It’s like someone can wear a gray flannel suit and look like himself, someone can wear a chore jacket and khakis, and look like himself, but you kind of wanted… You do have to make decisions to arrive at the point of not making decisions, right? It’s sort of like if you master a meal that you can cook when you have company, it took you a long time to arrive at that, but now that your friends are coming over, you know exactly what to do and how to prepare it.
Brett McKay: I guess, I may need to be clear here; when you’re talking about the uniform, I think a lot of guys would say, “Well, I’ve got a uniform. I wear a t-shirt and jeans and flip-flops everyday.” It seems like that’s not what you guys are talking about. It’s not like a default… You’re trying to be intentional about it. Am I right about that?
David Coggins: I mean, I would have encouraged anyone to avoid something that involves other people seeing their toes. I don’t think that’s gonna win any awards, unless you’re a lifeguard. But… I think that we’re talking about something that you go out in the world, and it’s not because you ran out of ideas. It’s because you have a really good idea, and then that is… That’s specific to you. I mean, maybe uniform is even… I don’t know if it’s giving the right connotation, but when I see… And I know when you meet certain people, like a certain creative director, you’re like, “Oh, I get it. This is what he does.” He’s got a very specific t-shirt, a very specific pair of sneakers, and maybe a fancy watch, and jeans, that I don’t know what they are, but I know they probably cost a lot. I’m not saying that’s for everybody, but I was like, “That guy has arrived at that point of view, and that… And it… And he’s at ease in it, and it works for him almost everyday,” and that… You know, that communicates even a certain sort of power in a way, or at least a resolve, that he knows what makes sense for him.
Michael Williams: I think it’s interesting. Everyone can have a different opinion about this, and there’s no right or wrong. And the way Coggins sees this could be very different than the way I see it, and it still could work. So there’s… You know, there’s no… There’s no right or wrong answer with this stuff. I see the uniform as like a refinement of your personal style. Say, you took your music collection that you’ve accumulated your whole life, and you had to strip it down to the top 25 records or whatever, and you’re kinda like, “Alright, this is the stuff I enjoy the most and I wanna sort of like continue to have in rotation.” So, for me, it’s like, if I feel like, “Oh, I look good in unstructured sport coats, and they’re casual enough for me, and they’re comfortable enough, and they work for meetings, and they work for travel, and they work for all this other stuff, and I feel confident in them,” then I’m gonna keep that in my… My sort of rotation, or… And make that part of my uniform.
And so, everything I wear is kind of like… It has… It has that sort of basis where you know you look good, and you feel confident in it, and it feels like you are representing yourself, and so, every… Your uniform is made up of all the things that you’ve sorta tried over the years and feel like you look good in, and give you confidence, and present you in a way that you feel is accurate to how you see yourself. And that, to me, is like… Is the uniform. That’s… You know, it’s an evolutionary process, in a way. I don’t think you could do it if you’re very young. You can’t just be like, “Alright, this is my uniform,” ’cause you kinda haven’t tried everything. You need to know… You know, sort of go through that process and figure out what… What works best for you, and what you… What makes you feel the best, and it’s sort of like stripping away all of the noise and just keeping the important things that serve you sorta the best, or make you feel the best.
Brett McKay: Yeah, David, I’ve… I follow you on Instagram, and my parasocial relationship that I have with you… I sense like every time I see pictures of you, it doesn’t… You have… There’s a continuity of what you wear. It doesn’t matter if you’re fly fishing, or at a book signing, or you’re with Michael watching the PGA Tour. It’s… And it’s kinda where it’s all those situations, they’re… They call for varying degrees of formality. And you do change the formality, but there’s an overall… Yeah, like there’s… That’s David’s uniform. How would you guys describe your respective personal uniforms these days?
David Coggins: Well… I mean, I should say, I’ve spent a lotta time thinking about this, more than most people should ever do. If you’re writing about it, stories, and books, and newsletters, you’re gonna be spending too much time, and also, if you’re… Slightly tend toward… To be self-absorbed, which maybe someone has said about me at one point in my life, or more than one person, then you have some sense of who you are, and what you wanna… How you wanna communicate yourself, and I think… I generally like traditional tailoring, and… But then, loosened up slightly. And I think there’s a way to be comfortable. I like things that are old that I’ve had for a while. I don’t like to look like I’m just wearing new clothes, and I don’t generally think people look their best in new clothes, ’cause it’s just a little squeaky. And that… I would say that about things in general.
And so, to me, if you have a… An easygoing sport coat that you’ve had for a while, and an Oxford shirt that… Not a dress shirt, just an Oxford collar shirt and a knit tie, that will get you looking pretty good in most places, at least, and I feel comfortable in those clothes, and I can kinda ratchet it up slightly into more kind of flannel in a suit, if I’m going somewhere that I think requires that, and if I’m in the countryside, I can kinda loosen that up with chinos, and something like a chore coat or something, and that kinda makes sense for me, and I still feel relaxed in those situations, and I think…
I mean, I’ll just put a word in for tailored clothing; I think a lotta guys try to wear a suit or a sport coat, and it often doesn’t fit well, and they get… Which isn’t even their fault, they just get it from a place that doesn’t specialize in those things, or doesn’t have a person who helps them get to a point where they feel more comfortable. I mean, most people get a suit, it doesn’t feel good, and they reject it, and they never feel comfortable in it, or they don’t ever wanna wear it. But if you get one that does fit well, and that you are comfortable in, and you just literally wear it four or five times, you get to a point where you’re like, “Oh, I can do this. I can be myself in this,” and then kind of evolve from there. So, I will put a word… Quick word in for tailoring there, ’cause I think so many men look good in it, and they often don’t get to the point where they… It would be like driving a manual transmission car, and you stall once, and you’re like, “Forget this, I’m sticking with an automatic.”
Michael Williams: Yeah, I think… I have a similar view to David, but I think it’s a little… My approach, I think, was formed a little differently than his was. So, part of what I have always strived to do is… Like, I always thought about, if I look back… If I took a photo of myself now and what I’m wearing, and I looked back at it in 10 years or 15 years, how am I gonna feel about that, right? And what I’m wearing, is it gonna be relevant to that time in 15 years, or am I gonna look like a clown? And… You know, I think… So part of what I’ve been always trying to do with my personal style is think about that; you know, trying to be sort of neutral in a way, but still representative of my personality. The other thing I’ve tried to do, which I think Coggins does really well, and I think… You know, if you talk about the two of us going to the Masters together and what we’re wearing versus what everyone else is wearing, I really try not to give in to the sort of social pressure of wearing a certain thing in a certain place.
And I really try to stay with who I am and what my personal style is, and not feel like I need to go into some other zone because I’m going to an event or because something’s happening. I really try to keep it focused on, you know, what I feel comfortable in, what I feel like represents me, and, you know, try to stay in that zone in a way and not sort of give in to the social pressure of, you know, dressing a certain way, which I think there’s actually a lot of in the world. There’s a lotta pressure to look a certain way, and I think, you know, I’m always just trying to look like myself, and that’s kinda my goal, and those two things together have sort of, you know, driven me into this place where… Wow, I, you know, have a pretty defined uniform which I feel great about.
Brett McKay: So like, okay, the Masters example. Alright, most people there… I mean, is there a dress code at Masters?
David Coggins: I mean, they…
Brett McKay: Or is it just like you wear Nike Golf clothes? Is that what it is?
David Coggins: It’s a very funny situation, ’cause it looks like they’re gonna… These guys think they’re gonna get handed an emergency golf situation, and they’re gonna have to run on to the course and hit it on the par three.
Michael Williams: I was thinking about this; I was at a golf tournament this weekend. I think people also don’t know what to wear there, because of… It’s, you know, Augusta National or whatever. And so, I think they just think, “Well, it’ll be really safe if I just wear golf clothes.” You know, and they just… So a lotta people wearing golf clothes, I think it’s just based on that, but then there’s also just people wearing golf clothes, which doesn’t make any sense. And then there were Coggins and I. We did not… We were not fitting in to anyone else, but it was… You know, I think we perfectly looked like ourselves.
Brett McKay: So what would you guys wear? Would you be easy to spot?
David Coggins: I think we would be. I mean, I’ve been reminded of those photos that were taken of us, so, I mean, just the age of social media, people sent this picture to me and asked what coat I was wearing, or where the… I was… I had a Masters hat, for one thing; they have a rope hat… Different one every year, and so, that’s always what we look for together, or at least what I look for. And I was wearing it, I think, some sorta sunglasses and a… Just a chore coat. But I was wearing a knit tie. And so, I don’t know. It had a particular look to it, and I thought it looked like we were having fun. I mean, I love the Masters, but I’m not really a golf person, I’m just a Masters person, if such a thing exists. And so, we were out there enjoying ourselves. And… [chuckle] That photo… I mean, I guess we did stand out, but that’s only if you care about these types of rarefied exercises anyway.
Brett McKay: Michael, what were you wearing?
Michael Williams: I was wearing khakis and an Oxford button-down, you know? Like, I wasn’t wearing… I was just wearing something really simple, which I wear most days, you know? I was very much in the zone of what I typically wear. I think we would have stood out a little bit, but I also don’t think anyone walking by us would be like, “What are those guys wearing?” I think if you really stopped and said like, “Who’s different here?”, it would have been… You know, we might have stood out in that way, but I don’t think we were sort of raising any eyebrows walking around the place, you know?
Brett McKay: Yeah, I know the picture you’re talking about. And what’s… Yeah, you’re right, you guys didn’t look like weirdos. You actually looked… You know, David was wearing a tie, it’s like, he looks comfortable. Like, that looks appropriate for the Masters, with the ball cap, and then, you know, Michael is like… Yeah, he looks… He looks well-put, and he looks put-together, and he looks comfortable as well, and you didn’t look like you were wearing that weird synthetic golf stuff that everyone… Every attorney… Dad wears these days. And so, David, your general… When I describe your uniform, it’s like… I think of country gentlemen; that’s what I see. Yeah, he just looked relaxed, doesn’t look overly… You just… You look comfortable. It looks well-worn and comfortable. Would that be a good description? Like, you’re ready… It’s like you’re ready to go out for a fly fish…
David Coggins: I think… [chuckle]
Brett McKay: At any moment.
David Coggins: I mean, it’s funny when you put… When you start to put words on these things, ’cause then it sounds like… I think one of the points of what we’re talking about is trying to be relaxed, and when we dial it in, what the recipe is, and it sounds more contrived, but that’s what we’re doing. So, I would like to think that it’s like a… Maybe a country person who comes into the city, so you’ve got a little bit of a foot in both worlds, so… But you can handle being… Having kind of a serious lunch, or you could handle going outside and, you know, looking at birds or something, or fly fishing, like you mentioned. And so, I think you wanna have… Like, you… I always like people who are interested in kind of two different worlds. Like, I like English guys who love Italian tailoring, ’cause they try to dress like Italians, but they end up just looking more English, but I love that. And Italian guys who love the traditions of being English. You know, these Italians revere the English traditions, and when they try to dress like them… I mean, they can’t look English; they’re just gonna look more Italian, which… I love that.
So I’m into all of those worlds kinda coming together, and with a certain amount of ease. I mean, I used to like things that were fancier, maybe, or I thought I had to get really serious dress shirts, or really serious tailored clothing, especially when I worked more in Midtown. But I don’t… It’s too hard to keep that stuff up for me. I don’t wanna get all that stuff laundered and pressed, and so, I found… Or even if I’m traveling, it doesn’t travel so well, so I like fabrics that can kind of absorb heavy wear, and I just… I like to have, you know, nice enough things, but I like to wear them and live in them, and if the elbows start to get a little thin, that’s fine with me.
Brett McKay: Alright, so, Michael, how would you describe yours… Uniform? David’s is like “Country mouse goes to the city.” What would be yours?
Michael Williams: I don’t know that I have a setting. I really love well-made classic American things; like I, a lotta times, wear jeans and an Oxford cloth button-down and a, you know, navy merino sweater, and… You know, that’s kinda like my zone. You know, I have a couple jackets that I figured out that I love; like, I’ll wear a Barbour coat, or I’ll wear a chore coat, or I’ll wear, you know… Unstructured sport coat, but I don’t really… I’m not as tailored, maybe, as David, but I do love these sort of tried-and-true classic things: The shirt on sweater, and… You know, leather… You know, leather brogues, and things like that. So, that’s kind of my zone. Canvas sneakers; I have one canvas sneaker I wear, and one pair of leather shoes that I wear, and one pair of boots, and, you know, one type of jeans, and one khaki, and so, I just kind of figured out all those classic items. I mean, I like really well-made things, so I like to think about value in a different way, where you maybe spend a little bit more upfront and buy something of better quality that’ll last you a long time, and… Like David, I love to wear my things a lot. So, you know, I love to, you know, wear things over and over, and really… You know, spend time with them and live in them, and that’s, to me, very comforting.
Brett McKay: So you guys are in your 40s, and you mentioned earlier, this is like, a uniform isn’t something you can really establish in your 20s. So how did you kinda decide like, “I’ve arrived. This is it. This is the look I’m gonna have until I’m buried in the ground.”?
David Coggins: [chuckle] Well, it evolves, you know, and I think one thing that’s interesting when you look at this is that you can tell different times in your life and different things you’re trying to do. And so, when I… I think when I really had to… When I was working in advertising and was in Midtown a lot, I… And I had to get up [chuckle] and get dressed for serious people, I was looking for making the fewest decisions, but with a rough core of what I was trying to do, so for me, that was like gray flannel trousers, a blue shirt… A light blue shirt, and a solid tie or a knit tie, and then the only decision I had to make was what sport coat I wanted; what pattern sport coat, so that pattern was the… Was a kind of variable, and everything else was set, and I really started to think a lot about it at that time; I was about in my mid-30s then. And then as I evolved, I… That was a little more tailored than I wanted to be. I like to not worry so much about taking care of the clothes. I just wanna be able to toss them in the washer. I don’t even wanna iron them, I just want them…
So then, I got into more like corduroys, and moleskin trousers, and Oxford cloth shirts, like Michael was saying, and that started to make sense. Sometimes, you don’t realize it until you’ve worn it for a while. I mean, I talk a lot about how much we can learn about our clothing and dressing when we travel, because we have a limited number of things, and so sometimes, that sets you off towards a uniform, because you just have one sport coat, or a couple pairs of whatever it is, and you start to wear them on most days, you know, like, “Oh, wait a minute, this is something. I can do this.” You get back to New York, or wherever you’re living, you’re like, “Oh, I just wanna stick with this. This is very reassuring. I don’t want all the clothes that are sitting in my closet, I wanna just stick with what I had,” and that’s… That can be a good way to know how little you need, or to learn about what suits you.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Here’s a question. A thing that I’ve noticed in the past… I wouldn’t say like five years, like my… Second half of my 30s… 40s. One thing I’ve noticed personally is, I’m starting to pick up stuff that my dad… Part of my dad’s uniform that I remember. I’ll pick it like, “This looks good.” Then I’ll put it on, and I’m like, “I look like my dad when he was my age,” ’cause my dad had a uniform. His uniform… He was a federal game warden, so he had to go to the office. It was pretty casual; it was like Wrangler bootcut jeans with a pair of cowboy boots, and a peak polo shirt from Lands’ End with this awesome looking belt, and it just looks solid, like I… [0:23:25.6] ____. That’s just a… It’s just… It’s a solid, solid look. And sometimes, every now and then, I’ll pick up a polo shirt, like, “This looks awesome.” Then I look at it, I figure, “Oh, this is why I think it looks awesome; my dad had a shirt just like this.” I’m curious, did your dads have personal uniforms, and do you think they’ve influenced your own personal uniform?
Michael Williams: Coggins, I think you can… My… I didn’t really… I’m not very influenced by what my father wore, although he definitely wore, you know, very much the same thing all the time, but my dad was in a very different sorta line of work and career, and… Basically did… You know, owned a construction company, and so, for me, it was like… It was a very different thing than what… My life and whatever now, so it doesn’t… I don’t feel like I’m gravitating in that direction, but… You know, I think a lot of these things… You know, because I never learned any of it from my father, I feel like it’s… A lot of it’s just inherent in people, right? You’re sort of… You just have it or you don’t, in a way. Right? Coggins, I’ll throw that to you. I’m sure you have a good…
David Coggins: Well, my… I mean, it’s funny; my dad is very stylish and a great dresser, but he’s much more adventuresome than I am. Often, it’s the other way around, where the child is more adventuresome, but he loves color and pattern, and he’ll wear all sorts of things that are way too bold for me, and he kinda gives me a hard time. He thinks I’m too conservative; he thinks I’m overdressed, which, again, is not the way these things generally are, and I think… I like the fact, though, that as a young man, he… As a boy, really, he took me to, you know, the polo store in Minneapolis where I grew up, and there was a man who worked there that I know, a guy named Paul. And you know, they taught me things and put me into clothes that I didn’t know if I was ready for, and I have this old herringbone sport coat that was union-made in America. Thing is crazy now if you see it; huge shoulder pads, but it was… And I didn’t like it as a kid, and now I see it, I actually had a friend take the shoulder pads out, and I’m still, you know, wearing it now, you know, 35 years later.
And I think it’s good to learn… I mean, what I learned from my dad is a lotta lessons, and the importance of knowing lessons, even if, ultimately, you react against those kinda guard rails, and I think… Now, we don’t take the time to learn. Sometimes, we don’t take the time to learn those lessons and to know what we’re reacting against. I feel like people… It’s sort of a free-for-all out there, and it helps to kinda know… The history of some of these things, and often, when we do, like you’re saying, when we come back to stuff our fathers did or something you’d see, where you’re like, “Oh, right, I liked this from that movie or that era. Maybe it’s time to look at this more clearly.” And then you know, you go on eBay for a few hours, and you try to get to the bottom of it.
Michael Williams: You know, there… It is interesting, and we’re saying, you know, you… Theoretically, you can’t have a uniform if you’re young, but it’s… Like anything else, you can; it is possible. And a lotta times… And especially if you look at… You know, the people that I know that grew up in Italy, and the culture of dressing in Italy, and fathers and sons, and the way that… That education happens between fathers and sons… It can, you know, really shape someone’s personal style to the point of like, they are very young, and they know exactly what they like, and they have sort of a lot of perspective, and… You know, that’s a big cultural thing that happens in Italy. So, it can happen, and it can happen here in America; it can happen anywhere. And someone could figure it out very young and just be like, “This is what I’m gonna wear,” and they have it. So, you know, I think it’s… It’s… Anything is possible; it doesn’t… There’s no perfect path to any of this stuff, or right or wrong way to do it.
Brett McKay: And I think something too, I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older. So when I was younger, I was more willing to take risks with things I’d buy, so I’m like, “That looks cool, and it’s kinda… It’s flashy or whatever,” but now, I’m not drawn to that. I’m not… I’m not about blending in, but I don’t wanna stand out too much. Does that make sense?
David Coggins: Oh, of course! I mean, that’s a huge… You know, there’s a time in your… Your life when you experiment more, when you try to discover more things, which is really exciting. I mean, I think about… You know, if you live in New York, and you start to… You go to a lotta concerts and clubs, and you try movies that you don’t… You haven’t given a lot of thought to, because maybe there was a good review, but you didn’t even think much about it, and now it’s like, “Wait minute. If I’m doing something, I’m researching a way to do it, am I gonna commit to watching this TV show, or to buying this thing, or… ” And that’s just part of, I think, how we… How we invite new things into our lives. We just have so much already there that you’re not gonna start reading a biography on someone that’s gonna take you three weeks unless you really are ready for it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, when I was in high school, I went through the neo-swing movement thing, and I was… I just had Aberdeen, you know, camp shirts and bowling shirts, and I had a pair of… I got these things… They were hideous, really, I thought they were pretty cool at the time. It was a pair of black and white wingtip Doc Martens, but the white part was black and white check. And I thought… I thought it looked awesome; I think I wore ’em to a prom.
David Coggins: [laughter] Well, I mean, the classic situation is when someone looks like they’ve got it all figured out, and they’re like 17, and they’re walking out, and you can tell they feel like they are the coolest person, you know, in the zip code. And you’re just like, “Wait till you see the photos of this in five years, or ten.”
Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah.
Michael Williams: Yeah… Wait, can I just say that… I… I was looking at… I found some… Some profile on TikTok, and this kid, he’s… He talks a lot about fashion, he’s got a fairly significant amount of followers, and his videos get a lotta likes, and… He… You know, I was kind of interested, as, you know, someone that feels fairly well-versed in… In this stuff he’s covering, you know, what he was saying, and… And he… You know, he’s confident in what he’s talking about, and again, he’s got a good following. And then there’s one thing where he does a tour of my room, and I think it’s his dorm room. And it’s… You know, in a way, it’s cute, and it’s cool that he’s doing it, but also, it’s very much like a college kid’s room, and… You know, he’s trying really hard to have this, you know, sensibility and personal style and… You know, with furniture and all this stuff, and design. And, you know, I can’t help but to sort of think it’s… You know, he… I’m using in a way because he’s so young, he doesn’t really know. But he’s speaking with so much conviction, and he feels so strongly about what he’s… What he’s saying in the world, and it’s not a judgment on anyone; it’s… You know, that’s… I feel like part of youth is, you do feel very confident in the things you’re doing, and then when you look back at them, you’re like, “Wow, Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Like, I don’t know if that was the aesthetic that I should have been going for.”
Brett McKay: No, I like that, Micheal. I like that heuristic you use in trying to figure out your uniform is like, will this… If I look at a picture of this 10, 20 years from now, what’s my reaction gonna be? Am I gonna be like, “That looks good,” or am I gonna be like, “Oh, man, that’s embarrassing”? And I think my choices, when I was in high school… Oh my god, that was… That was dumb. But I mean, it made sense at the time.
David Coggins: But… So that’s the famous thing though, but as soon as you’re explaining to a young person, you have to be like, “Actually, it wasn’t just me, everybody was doing this,” or then you know you’re in trouble, right? Because then, it’s like you’re swept up in something and you couldn’t pull yourself outside of it, or see yourself outside of it, where you’re like, “No, that’s just the… The lapel with at the time,” or “This band was huge,” or “You should have seen Michael Caine, everyone was doing it.” And that’s usually a… I mean, but it’s human, you know, and I think that’s what’s so great about these conversations. I mean, I always love when someone gets really obsessed with something, because even if it’s… I mean, I remember my friend telling me earnestly in high school, he was like, “I only listen to Pearl Jam. That’s the only thing I listen to.” Of course, that lasted for six months, but that’s what it means to be 16, you know? You have these strong feelings. And it doesn’t stop there, by the way, because, you know, guys are saving all their money to buy some watch or car or whatever else it is, or sneakers, that then they either just sit in their, you know, closet, or they kind of resell them.
Brett McKay: So okay, let’s talk about how guys can establish their own personal uniform. It sounds like it’s an organic evolutionary process, but where do you start? Say you wanna be a little more intentional about this; alright, you’re 35, 40, you wanna establish your look. Where would you guys recommend starting?
David Coggins: Well, I mean, these are good questions. I think… I mean, I love certain stores and certain types of clothes, and I think it’s important that you have kind of a few basic things that look good on most men, and I think Michael alluded to the unstructured sport code, and I think that’s really a good place to start. And I think every… Every man looks good in… You know, it can be washed cotton, it can be a little more… A little… It can be tweed; it can be whatever you like, but I think an unstructured sport coat is something you can wear with… With, you know, dress trousers. It’s something you can wear with chinos, it’s something you can wear with jeans. And so I would… I would look for that, and you can… You can… You can go to Drake’s, you can go to J.Crew, you can go to Ralph Lauren, but you can… Or just start the process and find… See one that you like and start looking on eBay for cheaper ones if you want, but I think that that’s a really good place to start, because that… That’s something that can… You know, kinda be part of your arsenal in a really useful way, and I think… People will like how it looks on you. I mean, there’s a reason these clothes have been… Men have been wearing them for 100 years. It works. It’s effective. It’s like, you know, why does the martini exist? It’s a good equation. These things make sense, way before we’ve been around, and I hope way after we’re around. And so… I mean, get a good sport coat.
Brett McKay: Alright, so start off with a sport coat, is your recommendation?
David Coggins: Yeah, absolutely, and… But one that you can… You know, when I say unstructured, I mean like not a lot of padding in the shoulders and in the chest, and so that means you can even sometimes roll it up, if you’re in the south. I mean, look at Sid Mashburn’s site. I mean, these guys live for that sort of thing. Not just a formal suiting, but an actual sport coat, I think, is really… Really something that can… That can go with you wherever you go.
Brett McKay: Michael, how about you? Where would be your starting point?
Michael Williams: Well, I just wanna say, David’s starting point is like personal uniform 301, and I would start at… I would start at 101. I think the sport coat’s like… Maybe advanced lesson… You know, a couple… A couple courses down the line. But, you know, I think the Sid Mashburn reference is a great one. There are places that you can go to. There’s a lotta great men’s stores left in the United States that you can go into and talk to them about what you feel comfortable in and what you like, and they can help guide you. Like, it’s pretty difficult to go too astray at Sid Mashburn. They’re gonna help you. My personal recommendation is, there’s a lotta things out in the world that have been fundamentally the same for a long time, or very consistent over a long period of time, like the Barbour coat, like the 501, like certain, you know… Certain brands, like, my favorite shoe company is Crockett and Jones; their shoes have sort of never changed. And to me, that’s like a good bet. It’s like, find those companies, and wear those things that are pretty classic; it’s hard to mess that up, in a way. The other thing is, you know, I think you wanna think about when you feel the best, and what you, you know… It’s like, figure the mental images of yourself where you look the best, or what were the scenarios where you felt like you looked really good, and try to build on that and replicate that and expand that; I think that’s a good place to start.
Brett McKay: I think that’s a good idea. So, you’re not trying to play dress-up when you’re trying to establish a uniform. You don’t wanna feel like you’re going to prom, or you’re going to a black tie wedding.
Michael Williams: I think it’s the opposite of that. You wanna feel like you are yourself, you know?
David Coggins: One thing that… That’s a really good point that Michael makes about enduring design that have been mostly unchanged, and if you’re feeling less kind of formal than a sport coat, I think that the chore jacket is really a useful thing. Almost every company makes a good one now, and that’s something that you can wear most days, and you can even dress that up or down. I mean, I wore it with a knit tie to the Masters, but I think most of the people are not gonna do that, but that’s a really nice everyday piece, if we’re speaking in, you know, style terms, that you can get a lotta use out of and that will go a lotta places.
And I think you also wanna… When you’re thinking about a uniform, you’re thinking about something that’s repeatable, so that’s like the old Brooks Brothers Oxford cloth shirt, and you buy a stack of them, but you’re also thinking about an investment that might go with the two earlier that you have for a long time, so if you get a pair of Crockett and Jones Chelsea boots, that’s an incredible thing. It’s a fair amount of money, and then you have ’em for a decade, and that’s great, or Aldens, or whatever it is. And so, you kinda wanna pick your spots about… Something like a Lacoste shirt, that’s great. Get a stack of them if they go on sale or whatever. And then you’re also getting, you know, the best… The jeans you really love. I feel like when you get something that you talk yourself out of or you save a little money, then it just ends up unused, and you really wanna believe in what you’re wearing and care about it, and then you’re gonna… Then you’re gonna wear it more.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so David, in the newsletter you had about establishing a uniform, you talk about base pieces. I guess you… For you, an unstructured sport coat or a chore coat could be a base piece. And Michael, for you, a base piece could be that Oxford button-down. It could be a base piece that you can add on to; a thing that’s consistent, and you can add on to it or take away from it to vary the look, depending on your situation.
Michael Williams: Yeah. I would say, you know, even if you wanna go to UNIQLO and buy button-down shirts and khakis from UNIQLO, and socks and underwear and whatever else, and then you maybe spend a little bit more money, you know, to David’s point, like buying a shirt jacket, or buying a nice sweater, or buying a nice pair of shoes, or an accessory or a bag… You know, those things where you can… I think you can sorta step up and then… You know, I think then, your uniform becomes the base; it’s like the… A couple types of pair of pants that you like, and then you mix them with a couple shirt jackets, a sport coat, a… You know, a sweater, all these things, and that’s how you sort of like build the variety of your uniform. That’s my take on it.
David Coggins: I have to say, when I was a young guy and moved to New York, I was living in men’s stores, even though I wasn’t… Couldn’t afford those clothes. And I think there’s something to be said for that, now that we’ve got the, you know, Instagram in our pocket, but I liked to go to Barneys, and I liked to go to Bergdorf Goodman, and I would talk to the guys who worked there. And they understood what… My stage in life, and they didn’t put pressure on me, and at a good store, they won’t put pressure on you, and if you… If you go into Ralph Lauren and look at the way they have the kinda mannequins rigged up, or what’s in the windows, it gives you a sense of kind of how they view things, and… And you can see what you like from that. You can see how much it costs, you can see what you think is… Makes sense for you or what doesn’t make sense.
But it’s good to do those things. I mean, I go on the Sid Mashburn website… Site, even at this stage in my life, and look at how… They have a clever way that they show each kind of sport coat. If you scroll over it, it’s got a shirt and tie, and then if you scroll over it again, it’s like with no tie, so you can kinda see it worn two different ways. And I still get ideas about that or see what I like and ask myself, “Well, why do I like that so much?”, or “That’s interesting, and I’d never thought about doing something that way,” and I think that’s a good thing that you can still learn and see and even surprise yourself. I mean, you’d probably look better in a light pink shirt than you think. I mean, a lotta guys do, and I… I didn’t wear pink for a long time, and then I did, and then that sort of changed my life, or I didn’t wear brown, and now I wear brown almost exclusively.
Like, you do wanna give yourself room to evolve, and I think that’s what we’re talking about. It isn’t like once you set your… Your uniform, you can never change. Of course these things can rotate, or you can wear something and just make a little change. I think when I was talking about… Like if you have a corduroy suit or… Cords are good. Like, that’s a good fabric. And I recommend finding cords that you like, and maybe a corduroy sport coat that you like, and then you just… It’s not something you have to be delicate with, or… Depending on where you live, a Harris tweed coat. Like, these are things that are great, and you can get cheap ones on eBay, and really kinda live in it for a while, and get it dirty; throw it in the laundry. I’ve… I do all sorts of weird stuff. I’ve put Sirocco coats that seem too kinda precious, I just threw it in the laundry, and then they were twice as wrinkly, and then I was… I felt better about it, oddly.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned getting inspiration, like, going into men’s stores, and for me, early on, like, you know, late 20s or early 30s, I would go to blogs. I’d go to A Continuous Lean. I’d take Ivy, Dyework, where dye… I mean all… And that’s where I would get my style inspiration. I feel like that… Is it… Has it all moved to Instagram now? Where’s your guys? Like, where do you recommend guys going to get solid inspiration, ’cause even… I feel like a lot of the magazines… They’re not… Like, the style advice or… It’s just… It’s not very good. I don’t… That’s my… It’s just like, “Here are the 20 boots you need this winter,” and it’s like, this is not useful for me, because… It’s too much.
Michael Williams: I think it’s kind of all over. There’s… There are still sites like Dyework, where… That are interesting, and there are still sites out there that have a much more edited point of view, which I think is more helpful, if you identify with that. And then it’s like a mix of Instagram and all these other things that will help serve as an inspiration point. I think it’s… The mainstream fashion media is a little bit different now than it was, and it’s driven by different things, and part of that’s commerce, and part of it’s much more Fashion with a capital F than maybe it used to be. It used to be much more about service, and educating guys, and… Sort of classic style, and now, it’s much more fashion-driven. So I think… But you need to find the people that you can identify with, and if that’s like Matt Hranek and William Brown Project, or whatever it is, and then you sort of figure out, “Alright, these are the people that I feel like I wanna model my personal style after,” you can sort of go from there.
David Coggins: I think that’s a really good point that Michael makes, and I also think the danger of Instagram… Like, I really love the original photos, and when I say original, like 15 or 20 twenty years ago, photos from Pitti Uomo, where it was actual Italian men and what they were wearing, or Japanese buyers and what they were wearing. Now, with social media kind of accelerated to such a… Speed, those things feel, often, very mannered, very theatrical, very self-aware, and very ridiculous to me. So I think you have to be careful. Like, you don’t wanna dress like you were expecting to be photographed. Like, that’s craziness. You know, that’s not a way to live in the world, unless you’re really, you know, Nick Wooster, and there’s only one Nick Wooster.
So, you can look at these places, but you… It’s sort of like, you look at them, and then you pour a little milk on it to mellow out the coffee, because it’s just too… And some of these things are very intense, and these guys are getting close and experiencing them in a way that isn’t really… You know, it’s like they’re living in a photoshoot, and if you’re in a photoshoot, some things make sense, and then when you’re out in the world, they make a lot less sense, you know, and I think you wanna… I think… One of the things we’re talking about is like where… Where you’re comfortable and what your life requires, like are you going to meetings? Are you… You know, physically active the way your dad was bred, if he’s, you know, going out as… You’re working in the forest service, or whatever it is that people need to use. Are they gonna be walking in mud? Are they gonna be in a boardroom? Are they gonna be reassuring investors? And then, they’re gonna be doing things very differently. And that’s… I mean if people say that things don’t matter, that clothes don’t matter, just think about the people that you want working for you, and how you would want your lawyer or accountant to dress. If you’re getting your… Your… [chuckle] Your… Your taxes done, do you want the guy to be wearing a Metallica shirt? I’m not sure.
Michael Williams: I think it’s like the… If you have good personal style, it’s a bonus for you. If… You know, I think it’s not… It’s not about losing points or… You know, it’s about… You have an opportunity to present yourself as unique, or special, or different, or whatever that is. That, to me, is the big win with having good personal style. It’s not about conformity and fitting in and making sure you’re dressed appropriately for your role.
Brett McKay: When you guys find a piece of clothing that you think is gonna be a part of your uniform for a while, do you buy multiples of it?
David Coggins: Of course! I mean, that’s a huge deal. Like, when it… Or if something seems like it’s gonna be shut down, or, I mean, if you just know something is great, like when they were still making Brooks Brothers Oxford cloth button-down shirts in America, and you knew that, and maybe there… That was a delicate balance there, I got a stack of them. I mean, it has to do with where you are in your life, and what your priorities are, and your budget, but if you find a bottle of wine you like, man, get some, and if you find… If you’re traveling and you see espadrilles, or if you… Even Masters hats, it’s… Yeah, get on that.
Michael Williams: I like the wine reference; that’s pretty interesting. I mean, you’ll be happy if you buy a few cases of some wine that you love; you’ll be happy in five years that you did it. For me, buying a couple… Or buying things in my uniform all depends on the brand, and what it is, and what it costs, but I know that… You know, brands like Patagonia; if you love something from Patagonia, they phase out things all the time. So, if you… If there’s a jacket you love and you wear it all the time, it’s worth buying a few, because they probably won’t carry it through. The other time I’m buying multiples is, you know, I wear these canvas sneakers from Muji, and their website, they rarely have them in stock. And the stores are… It’s always sporadic if I can find them, so when I do find them, I buy five pairs at the same time, and they’re not expensive, but I’m like, I don’t wanna risk… You know, I don’t trust them enough, almost, to be able to always have them, you know?
So… And I… I used to buy this sweater every year from this store in Alabama that I love called Harrison Limited. And they would sell this super, super soft lambswool Shetland sweater, and I would buy… Every fall, I would buy one; it was like my annual thing, and I would sorta call the shop and be like, “What colors do you have?”, and then I’d say, “Alright, send me the green one,” and they’d mail it to me. And then they stopped carrying the sweater, and I’m like, “Alright, now I need to figure out who made the sweater, where else can I find it, and… ” You know, I would have been better off just buying a few and, you know, not just dragging it out.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I had a pair… There’s a pair of runners or sneakers that I got; they’re like a replica of some vintage French army sneaker. And I love it, and they stopped making… Whoever decided to make it stopped making it, and I can’t… I need a new pair, and I’m out of luck. It’s… It was a good look.
David Coggins: That’s like a classic situation, where you… You think something like… For me, even fishing gear, like certain waders that, when I was younger, they seemed too expensive, and then ever since then, the waders have been getting crazy, so now I’m on a mad hunt to find these 20-year-old waders, which of course doesn’t work, or fish wading boots, and… If you see something you like… I mean, it’s actually interesting, because Michael was talking earlier about these companies that continue to have the same product; that’s a good barometer of the values of a place. If they do something well, and they… You know that they’re gonna continue to have that, it’s the same way if you go to some beloved restaurant and you know you can get this great dish, that they’re gonna keep doing that, and that that… That that’s a sign of what they… How they want you to interact with them, that you… They want you to trust them, that they want you to come back, and that you can always get this Barbour jacket, these Red Wing boots, these 501s. That tells you a lot about those places.
Brett McKay: How do you know if your personal uniform should change? Is it something intentional, or does it just kinda happen naturally; you just find that “I’m wearing this thing a lot this year. This is part of my uniform now.”? Is that how it happens?
Michael Williams: Yeah, I think it’s part… I think part of that is recognizing the winds when they’re happening and saying, “You know, I feel good wearing this. You know, I should just… I should stop thinking about… I should stop spending time thinking about, you know, what I’m gonna wear all the time and stick with the things I feel good about.” I think you just start to sort of be… It’s a very liberating sense in a way, where you’re like, “I’ve arrived at this, and I know I like it. I don’t have to worry about… It’s one less thing I need to worry about from now on,” and you start… Start to just drop things away, and then, you know, repeat the things that work really well for you.
David Coggins: Yeah, I mean, sometimes, I’d notice that my clothes are shrunk. Now, I know it’s just… Like, your body changes, right? It’s not the clothes, obviously. And you make some change about what makes sense for what you’re doing. I mean, if you have a kid, or you’re traveling to a… And you’re in a hot place, and something works or something doesn’t. I mean, some of what we’re talking about is like… Where design and function converge, and when something makes sense, because it… I don’t know, you’re carrying a camera in your pocket, so you need bigger pockets. I mean, that’s literally how some of these things happen. A lot of the clothes we’re talking about have existed for a long time, and that’s why… You know, a safari jacket or a chore jacket or something that the army developed was to solve certain problems, and you might have those problems; you’re carrying certain things, and you need clothes that meet your purposes. And maybe your… You know, your coloration changes, like my beard is gray now. [chuckle] It’s gray, and that changes things like what colors I should wear. I don’t look the same as I used to in those… And you wanna… And that’s alright. You want to evolve that way, and I think it’s natural that your clothes change as you get… You know, get older, and your kind of place in the world changes, and that’s something to be embraced, I think.
Brett McKay: So let’s say some guy’s listening to this, and he goes, “Okay, I wanna start developing my personal uniform and refine it.” Parting advice; where’s one thing they can start doing today to start making that happen for themselves?
David Coggins: [chuckle] Well, I think you gotta think about what you… Like, your comfort level and what you’re trying to do. I mean, I always encourage guys to dress up a little bit. I just think… It’s nice to try harder than to try less hard, and if you try a little harder, then in the long run, all that will become easier; you set a higher bar for yourself. And so, I think it’s nice to dress up a little bit. I mean, I… I think it’s… You know, it doesn’t mean you have to live with it forever. I think one of the things we’re talking about is a little bit of experimentation, which is natural, and then finding a new level for yourself.
Michael Williams: Yeah, I think a big part of this is… You know, what you could do today is be open-minded to looking better, and to putting in a little bit more effort, and dressing a little bit better, and starting to do it and making it a ritual, and I think once you do, you’ll appreciate that you have put in that effort. And I think that goes a long way, and just being maybe a little bit more introspective about who you wanna be and how you wanna project yourself, I think, would be a great place to start.
Brett McKay: Well, guys, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn more about your respective work?
David Coggins: Well, yeah. I mean, my book, The Optimist: A Case for the Fly Fishing Life, which we discussed on a previous episode, that’s…
Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve gotten a lotta good feedback about that from people…
David Coggins: Oh. Oh, that’s sweet. I’m glad to hear that, thank you. That’s out now, still out, and the paperback is coming soon. And then my newsletter, The Contender, comes out every week, and then I have the podcast with Michael, Central Division, our conversation every week too, which you can get from either subscribing to The Contender or his newsletter, A Continuous Lean. Michael, I’ll lead you right into it.
Michael Williams: Yeah. Oh, thank you, David, that was very, very well done. I wish I had a book to say that I had written, but all I have is a newsletter, and it’s just acl.news, is my newsletter.
Brett McKay: Well, Michael Williams, David Coggins, thanks for this time. It’s been a pleasure.
David Coggins: Thanks.
Michael Williams: Thanks, Brett.
Brett McKay: My guests today were David Coggins and Michael Williams. Check out their respective newsletters. David’s can be found at thecontender.substack.com, and Michael’s can be found at acl.news. If you subscribe to either of their newsletters, you can get access to their podcast, Central Division, where they talk about style, fly fishing, golf… You name it, they discuss it. And make sure to check at our show notes at aom.is/personaluniform, where we’ve linked to some of the brands and clothing pieces mentioned in this show, as well as that iconic picture of David and Michael at the Masters we discussed. Check it out at aom.is/personaluniform.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check at 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 in 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 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 this 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 you all to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
The post Podcast #783: Developing Your Personal Uniform appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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
Connect With Dr. Jud * Dr. Jud’s Website
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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. 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.
The OODA Loop — the OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — is a strategic tool designed to help people make better decisions when facing any kind of competitor or opponent.
My guest today says that when that opponent is a seasoned criminal, the Orient component of OODA — a person’s mindset — is the most underestimated and critical part of the model to understand.
His name is Varg Freeborn and he’s the author of Violence of Mind: Training and Preparation for Extreme Violence, and Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict, and Violence. We begin with how Varg’s life story has uniquely positioned him to understand the dynamics of violence from the perspectives of both the perpetrators of crime, and the would-be preventers of that crime. Varg shares how he went from being a convicted felon to a self-defense and firearms instructor who’s worked with both civilians and law enforcement.
We then turn to why it’s so important to understand the difference between the orientation of an average person and the orientation of a violent criminal, and why, when the two collide, the latter has a real advantage over the former. We end our conversation with what you can do in terms of mindset and training to close that gap, and be better prepared to handle a violent encounter.
Resources Related to the Podcast * AoM article on the OODA Loop * AoM Podcast #198: Turning Yourself Into a Human Weapon * AoM Podcast #334: When Violence Is the Answer * AoM Podcast #688: Protection for and From Humanity * AoM Podcast #513: Be Your Own Bodyguard
Connect With Varg Freeborn * Varg’s Website
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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. The OODA loop, the OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It’s a strategic tool designed to help people make better decisions when facing any kind of competitor or opponent. My guest today says that opponent is a season criminal. The Orient component of OODA, a person’s mindset is the most underestimated and critical part of the model to understand. His name is Varg Freeborn, and he’s the author of Violence of Mind: Training in Preparation for Extreme Violence and Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict, Violence. We begin with how Varg’s life story has uniquely positioned him to understand the dynamics and violence from the perspectives of both perpetrators of crime and the would-be preventers of that crime. Varg shares how he went from being a convicted felon to a self-defense and firearms instructor who’s worked with the civilians and law enforcement. We then turn to why it’s so important to understand the difference between the orientation of an average person and the orientation of a violent criminal and why when the two collide, the latter has a real advantage over the former. We enter into a conversation with what you can do in terms of mindset and training to close that gap and be better prepared to handle a violent encounter. After the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/orientation. Varg joins me now via clearcast.io.
Varg Freeborn, welcome to the show.
Varg Freeborn: Hi, thanks for having me on.
Brett McKay: So you are a strength coach, and you’re also a firearms and self-defense instructor who trains both civilians and law enforcement. And you’ve got two books out that are really good, you got Violence of Mind and then Beyond OODA Loop, and I hope we can discuss some of your ideas there. Before we do, I think it would be helpful to talk about your background because you got to your career as a strength coach, as a self-defense instructor, a firearms instructor differently than a lot of other firearms instructors, and I think it’ll help… Understanding your background will help readers understand your approach to self-defense and violence. So, what was your upbringing like? Tell us a story.
Varg Freeborn: I grew up very, very rough. I was basically raised up in a dope house, and my mother was 16 when she had me, so a single teenage mom. She had probably seven or eight brothers and sisters, and they were all drug addicts, alcoholics, gang members, drug dealers. So the house I grew up in was very violent, I experienced very violent things at a very early age. Nearly became the victim of a stabbing when I was seven, someone was loose in the house and stabbing my family members and came after us and my mother and aunt were able to get us barricaded in my grandfather’s bedroom with a tool box, and basically the attacker was stabbing through the hollow core door. That was a very memorable moment for me as a young kid. I was, again, like seven years old, so it’s pretty dramatic. That was an example of that… Things like that happened quite often. Had a cousin murdered, best friend was murdered, one of my uncles was murdered. So it was a pretty rough upbringing.
Brett McKay: And so from a very young age, you saw violence firsthand, you experienced it. And I think at one point, your mother re-married and your step-father, very violent, strangled you and I think you took a baseball bat to his head and he stopped messing with you after that. So your teenage years, same thing, continue on. Just getting more intense. And then there’s this moment, you ended up in prison. What’s the story there?
Varg Freeborn: Yeah, so I was 17 and obviously there was a catalyst for this event, and the beginning of it was a relationship with a girl. And so, out of that came a guy that was angry with me over who I had dated, and he just pushed this thing over and it went on for six, seven months. He was much older than me, outweighed me by about 100 pounds, and he relentlessly pursued me for about six months. And I really tried to avoid him, I was trying to kinda get my life on track and pursue things that I wanted to do and get away from the nonsense that the beginning of my life had been marked up by. So I was trying to avoid this situation as much as I could, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to, and one night he found me at a house party, and this was like 1:00 in the morning, and he had two his friends with him, and he was incredibly drunk and high, just really out of his mind, intoxicated. And he initially had tried to get me to leave with him and his buddies, and it was one of those things where someone’s incredibly drunk and they think they’re making sense, but they’re not making any sense at all, and that’s kind of what it was like.
He really thought that maybe he could convince me that we were friends and that I could leave with him safely. As I said, this was a time when my best friend was shot in the head and thrown in a lake, one of my cousins was murdered, so when someone like this guy had been… Is telling you that they’re gonna kill you, it’s something that you take serious back then. In that environment, that day and time, it was something that you would take serious, so I didn’t take it lightly when he said that. And that night basically, he ended up cornering me, and I told him a bunch of times, I was even to the point of witness coaching by this point where I’m saying things for people to hear it because I know something bad’s gonna happen and I’m trying to at least lay the ground work that I’m trying to avoid this situation, I want people to remember that. Of course, they didn’t.
But he comes and corners me in a back room, and I see that his friends had went outside and pulled the car back to the back door, which is where the back room was also. So I’m thinking to myself, this is about to go really bad. Because if these three guys that outweigh me and outnumber me get a hold of me and put me in that car, who knows what’s gonna happen next. So I just made my mind up that I wasn’t going into the car, and he reached up and I told him several, several times, “Leave me alone, don’t touch me.” And of course, he was just persistent in doing what he thought he was gonna do. So when he reached for me, he grabbed me and began to choke me, and that’s when I pulled a blade and I went to work on him and I stabbed him a couple dozen times and he didn’t draw up until the last one. So it was very eye-opening to the resilience of the human body and how much it takes to actually stop someone who’s determined, whether they’re intoxicated or not. And during that situation, he had a lacerated internal artery in his neck, lacerated jugular and a collapsed lung and he was in pneumothorax, and he still survived.
However that comes out, he survived those injuries, and then when we went to court, he wasn’t the tough gangster anymore that was gonna kill me, he was the afflicted victim of a vicious attack and on and on, and this type of thing was just… It was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever experienced in my life, to see how the story shift and all of a sudden you become a villain in a way that’s like, it’s getting ready to take your life away. And so I ended up being convicted, and I started out with an attempted aggravated murder charge, which was 25 years, and I was able to plea that down with some help from some family members who scraped together some money, and I was able to play that down to a two to five year sentence, and I ended up serving the entire five, probably due to be in such a model prisoner. But yeah. So that was basically how that went down.
Brett McKay: And then when you were in prison, you continued to see violence firsthand. What was prison life like?
Varg Freeborn: Oh, for sure. Now, this is something that… And I don’t claim to be hardcore or be an expert on anything, and I don’t claim to be an amazing fighter or anything like that. But I can tell you that I was in prison during one of the most violent times to be in prison, because if you look at the violent crime statistics and the murder rates, which it’s going back up now for reasons that’ll be another discussion. But before 2020, violence was way down and used to be able to say, “Well, the murder rate is down 50%.” And it was true, because if you look back to between ’85 and ’95, the violent crime and murder was up to 50% higher during that time. Well, by the early ’90s, and ’94 was when I got convicted and locked up, most of those people had been locked up, the ones that weren’t dead. So it was a time where you had the most violent street criminals in the longest time that we had seen for a while and they were all locked up and the prisons were overflowing.
And so when I first got there, it was so overflowed that we ended up being put in a gymnasium that was converted to a bunk room that had probably 400 bunks in it, so you got 600 to 800 people shoved in this gymnasium that was a basketball court, and this is an intake prison. So an intake prison is… They bring in everyone to this initial facility and decide where you’re going to go as a parent facility from there, and they’ll ship you to wherever in the state they want to. And so, the problem with an intake facility is that you’re in there with everyone. You’re not… If you’re minimum security, your’re bunking with a maximum security guy. I remember I had one cellmate that had murdered five prostitutes with a claw hammer, and so you have to go to sleep at night with these people. And this is the type of thing that was your introduction to prison, like 19 years old and I’m like 135 pounds. And I was a pretty violent kid, for sure. But this was like the big leagues, so your introduction is a paradigm shifting experience, for sure.
Brett McKay: I wanna talk more, maybe there’s some insights we can take that you’ve learned about violence from your experience in prison, and we can talk about that later. But you serve your time, you do five and you get out, you’re a felon. And mostly, when you’re a felon you can’t vote, you can’t have a gun, you can’t work at a government job, etcetera. But you were able to do all those things. What happened there?
Varg Freeborn: Well, I was fortunate enough to have been locked up in Ohio. So Ohio has an automatic restoration of the right to vote, the right to sit on a jury and to right to hold public office when you’re released from prison. The thing that they don’t have is an automatic restoration of firearms rights, and that’s obvious. Most states, you can’t even get it back, but Ohio did have a restoration process. I had continued to fight my case while I was in prison, and I continued to fight my case when I got out of prison because I always believed that I acted in self-defence and I had no choice. And basically what happened after I got out is I finally got them to sit down with me and they said, “Look, we’re not gonna open this case up, because if you cause us to open his case up again, we’re gonna take you right back to the original 25 years and we’re gonna disregard the five that you served.” Which is a tactic that the state will use any time they don’t wanna do something.
So what they did do is they said, “We will give you a restoration of your rights and give you all of your rights back.” And so, I thought, Okay, that’s a pretty good deal. So they gave me a restoration of all of my rights to vote, sit on a jury, hold a public office and own and possess firearms as allowed by state and federal law. And then they issued me a concealed carry license, but they never removed the felony, so I have a very unique situation of being a felon that also is allowed to carry a gun. The felony was never expunged, it was never removed from my record. And if you pull up my record, I get pulled over, they pull it up, they’re going to see the felony and they’re going to see the restoration, and then they’ll see the concealed carry license. So it’s a very interesting thing, but I was able to fight that enough to get at least that back and that took quite a few years for that to happen, for sure.
Brett McKay: So you got your rights restored and now you are an instructor, you teach police officers and military guys about self-defense and firearms, right?
Varg Freeborn: I do. I am semi-retired from the active training part of it here in the recent time since COVID, actually, that kind of pushed me into a slow down for sure, and then I just never kicked it back up because I just never intended on retiring in that business anyway. And so, it was a good time to kind of semi retire. But I still work with… I’ll be at Ohio Tactical Officers Conference this year, and I’ll be at maybe one other conference and it’ll be working with civilians and law enforcement and military guys. And I do like to train, I do like to teach. And the way that I accomplished that was after I had gotten my restoration, I started to see the boom that was happening in self-defense training. And one thing that I seen was this huge gap in information between reality and what was being taught in the mainstream of that industry. And so, all that I wanted to do was fill some gaps in for people and say, “Hey, based on my very real experience, this is not how that typically goes, and you’re going to need to prioritize things differently than what you’re being taught here.”
And I was pretty early on, grabbed by law enforcement guys and pulled into the law enforcement training world. I was sent through a lot of closed enrollment training on the LE side. So I’ve been to breaching school, ballistic, thermal, mechanical, explosive breaching, I’ve been to just hundreds and hundreds of hours of CQB training from different angles and different disciplines and different agencies. I was certified all the way up to a full team CQB instructor, which I will never do, but it added to my knowledge base for their benefit as well as mine. And I’ve done law enforcement executive protection training and just on and on to the things that I got fortunate enough to get pulled into, so I was able to train at a very high level on that side of the fence after having a very real experience on the other side of the fence with violence. I’ve been involved in multiple stabbings, I was involved in stabbings in prison. I’ve been stabbed multiple times, myself, I have at least one body part missing from the stabbing. And so, this was something that really rounded out my experience and my perspective. To be able to see these things from both sides of the door, basically.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk about, how does your personal experience with violence change the way you approach or think about training people in self-defense? I mean, what are you… Like you said, there’s gaps. What gaps do you see in traditional self-defense training that your experience can fill it? What’s the difference between the way you approach it and most other self-defense instructors approach training?
Varg Freeborn: I think that it didn’t change anything for me, it was more cultivated from a very young age, so I didn’t have a change moment for myself. But what I do see in the difference between myself and what’s taught by most of the instructors, especially when I started this business, is the prioritization of decision-making and the components that go into decision-making over weapons and techniques and things like that. So I think that your least experienced instructors will always be weapons-focused, technique-focused, speed-focused, always thinking about those types of things. And your more experienced instructors tend to be more decision-making focused and cultivating the ability to make good decisions when faced with very dire consequences and fast moving situations. So I think that’s probably the biggest marker between the two that I see.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve noticed in my own experience, I’ve taken firearms training, you go and it’s just… You’re just kind of doing like a choreo… Like a kata, almost. Just like, “Here you can do this draw and then you’re gonna take a step… ” And I mean, it was fun. But after the experience, I don’t know if this is actually gonna be useful in a real life situation.
Varg Freeborn: Yeah, it’s kinda like, if we remember the times of the McDojo age, in the late ’70s into the ’80s when everybody wanted to learn karate, because Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris were the main things on the big screen and everybody wanted to do that. And then, when reality hit that whole movement in the face with MMA, and you don’t see Karate and Kimpel black belts dominating anything anywhere in any ring, that was like a wake-up call for that. And I think the firearms industry has had that coming and is experiencing it now to a certain extent, but when you have guys coming back from… And not necessarily like 11B’s or something, but special operations. Guys that have been in very heavy situations, heavy fights with very small numbers, very up close and personal, you’ll see more and more the decision-making process is almost all that they will focus on. The weapon skills are very professional to a standard, and that’s it. Like you just… Here’s your standard, work until you can achieve the standard and then work to maintain it, and that’s the simplicity of the weapons part of it. The rest of it is all being able to make the decision, being able to see the situation for what it is.
Analyze the information, synthesize it with what you already know, and then move forward with good decisions that’ll keep you and your people safe, and that’s the difference that I see that… That you really need to focus on if you’re going to really think about getting into a fight. Like you say, the kata… Is it gonna help you? It might. It might because it may be there when you need it and you’ll do this perfect move, and it was the thing you needed at the time, but the likelihood of those circumstances lining up like that is very low.
Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s shift gears to your book. So there’s Violence of Mind, and your most recent one is Beyond OODA. And OODA loop was developed by a guy named John Boyd, military strategist. It is a decision-making model, and you hear it used a lot in the tactical self-defense world. But you have a different emphasis that a lot of guys miss so I wanna talk about that, but before that, for those who aren’t familiar with OODA loop, can you give us a big picture overview of what it is and how it’s used in the tactical world?
Varg Freeborn: Yes, so John Boyd, who retired a full colonel from the Air Force, was the developer of OODA loop, and it’s not really a loop, and it really grew and developed beyond that first conception that he had as an OODA loop, which was very much like… Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, which is what the acronym stands for, and it became a very complex series of loops, and there’s bypasses and there’s different mechanisms within this process that change how a person makes decisions, how quickly they make decisions, and how quickly they can act on it. And so, I’ve never been a big OODA loop guy, I’ve never used OODA in my training, I’ve never used it as a model in the lectures I do or any of the classes that I’ve taught, but I do focus on the orientation part, and one of the things that I think people miss the most about the Observe Orient Decide Act concept is there were many, many…
There was 30 years of development that went into that with Boyd, and for most of that time, Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney were working very closely with him, so there were actually three people involved in the development of that concept. Boyd gets full credit because it was his idea, and he was the main driver, but it couldn’t have been what it became without the other two guys helping him and being very close friends with him. And as the stories go, they would get these crazy phone calls from Boyd at 2:00 AM and he’d have this breakthrough idea and they’d have to get out of bed and listen to, is this the type of person that Boyd was.
And without those guys there, this would have never became what it did, and some guys will get stuck on the simple loop that it began as and think that’s what it is, and I’ve even heard it so incorrectly put us to say that orienting was physically facing yourself towards the threat, which couldn’t be more farther from what it really is. And I think that the other guys will consider themselves guru of the concept, but they’ll point towards things like the Aerial Attack Study, which was Boyd’s work in the ’60s and completely disregard what he did in the next 30 years of his work life. So what I think that is most important to understand about OODA is basically your orientation is what drives your decision-making and your actions, and your orientation is made, as he put it, a repository of your genetics, your cultural inputs, your value systems, your experiences, your confidence, all of those things are what actually drive and influence your decision-making process, and I think that’s really, for me, the most key takeaway from OODA that you can have.
Brett McKay: Yeah, even Boyd said, orientation was the most important part, is that orientation is based, this is the kind of way I summarize, your mental models of how you see the world or perceive the world, and again, like you said, like Boyd says, your genetics, your culture, your upbringing, your personal experience with violence, all color how you see the world, so orientation will influence how you observe. Right?
Varg Freeborn: Yes.
Brett McKay: And then orientation will also determine how you’d make a decision, and orientation will also determine how you’re going to act. So I think like you said, I’ve read a lot of articles and I’ve heard… I’ve gone to the gun range and had some guy tell me about OODA loop, they just kind of glance over orientation. They just focus on the observe part and then decide and act, but then if you look into it, like you guys did it, like orientation, that is everything. I’d be better just to focus on that when you think about the OODA loop.
Varg Freeborn: Yes, yes. And actually, of the two guys that worked with Boyd, Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney, I actually was able to develop somewhat of a relationship with Chet Richards during the writing of this book, and he obviously wrote a review for the book, and he also really advised me on the first part of the book where I’m talking about the OODA loop so this is not something I just flew by the seat of my pants. I took this to the source and I was like, “Hey, here’s my perspective. What do you think?” And I had no idea what would… I didn’t know if he’d come back and say, “You’re a full of shit guy and you’re way off base.” And so I threw this at him and he came back and was super excited about it, and he said, you know, this is exactly… He’s like, “You’ve got Boyd figured out here.”
He said this is exactly what Boyd would get excited about and would wanna talk about and would wanna work on when he was still alive. And he said this is a very important book, and I felt great about that when he said that, and I said, okay. And then he even took the time to dig into personal letters that Boyd wrote him and gave me access to quote some of those and things like that, stuff that people have never even seen. So it was a very cool experience, but the validation encoded in that was extremely powerful, and with the orientation part of it being the central… Obviously, the central focus on the book, and orientation also being the central focus of a lot of Boyd’s work, especially in his last 15 to 20 years, I think that we can safely say that if you focus on the orientation components, that is what drives decision making.
Now, can a person’s culture be changed? Yes, but it’s not an easy thing to do. And at some level, it requires what might even resemble brainwashing, where… And the military does a good job of this sometimes, where they take young men and completely change their culture to one of brotherhood and camaraderie, and you’ll fall for the guy next to you and all this type of thing, and that’s what they send them effectively into war with, is that new culture, this new paradigm, this new system of values that they’ve instilled in them. And if they genetically receive that, that’s great. The problem that I see with it is the big difference between the good guy and the bad guy. There’s an initiation process that happens in an orientation to violence, and it’s gonna be probably your first big event, you’re first killing, your first lethal force level event that is going to initiate you into the experience.
And for someone who’s been prepared for that or someone who seeks that initiation, then it’s a very different experience than for someone who does not seek the initiation and gets it. And I think that there’s such a violent shift in their mind, and psychologically, their paradigm has shifted so quickly and so violently that there’s moral injury and other things that cause severe PTSD to happen after a violent shift like that. And I’m no expert, but from my own experiences and from talking to several of my friends who’ve experienced war first-hand, these are conclusions I come to, and I think that the initiation process with the orientation is probably the most important thing to look at and try to simulate or try to achieve at that point.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I wanna dig more on that initiation process and how it can shape orientation, but before we do, let’s talk about this. One of the things that Boyd talked about so generally with the OODA loop, is if you wanna beat the other guy. So in any competition, he’s basically saying there’s a OODA loop going on in every competitor, right? If you’re the guy defending yourself, you have a OODA loop going on, and then the guy who’s trying to do something to you has an OODA loop going on, and whoever can cycle through their OODA loop first is gonna win, but how fast that OODA loop goes depends on things like orientation, for example…
And you argue that if you really wanna make better decisions when it comes to self-defense, you need to understand the orientation of the person who’s attacking you. And I think a lot of people who are just sort of regular dudes who grew up in the suburbs, they don’t really understand the mind or the orientation of a criminal. You’ve been in prison, where you’ve seen criminal life firsthand, what’s their orientation? What is the orientation of a violent criminal and what’s contributed to that orientation?
Varg Freeborn: So we can’t speak just generally about every criminal, because just like every other profession or sub-culture, there’s the whole spectrum of human beings and they’re from idiots to experts, but I think that the biggest difference when we’re talking about serious violent criminals that are going to do very high levels of damage or become lethal, that… Again, we go back to experience, confidence, and initiation. The thing that’s going to be lacked the most in the good guy group, whether it’s law enforcement or civilian and self-defense, is initiation experience and confidence that comes from both of those things. Now, when a criminal… Let’s say, for example, when you look at a young gang-banger who grew up very rough, didn’t have anybody who really cared about them, had a really rough way to go, was treated like trash at school and by the establishment and looked at very suspiciously if they went anywhere and just was just rejected by the world, now, I’m not condoning or anything like that, I’m just saying, this is their experience, this is their paradigm, this is what they see around them.
And so they become angry, they become violent. Violent tendencies begin to grow, and then they glorify that lifestyle, and then they wanna think about bucking somebody in the chest and putting their enemies down like dogs and being a soldier and things of this nature start to become important to them. They start to prioritize that very highly. At this point, it’s still a story that they’re telling himself about who they are, and they may be like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll buck somebody to the ground,” and they’re telling themselves this, but they haven’t acted it out yet.
Now, the second that they act that out, there’s going to be a very dramatic paradigm shift that happens inside of their brain, and they’re going to become a part of the story they’ve been telling themselves, a part of the story that they’ve been glorifying. So if they come home, they’ve got Tony Montana on their wall and they wanna be a big time dope dealer and have the cars and the women, and the pitbulls and all this stuff, so they start to live that story. They start to make that story real, and so when the story becomes real, the confidence level goes way up, because now, they’ve actually done the thing that they said they were going to do. They’ve experienced it, they’ve proven it to the world, they’ve run it to themselves, and there’s no questions anymore. It’s a very real thing, and it’s known. It’s not an unknown.
And so the difference is for the good guy, so the so-called good guy, doesn’t have that initial sociopathic tendency towards violence that glorifies it, and the initiation is gonna be a very different experience when he gets it. And if he’s not properly prepared for it, then when it happens, it’s gonna be a violent shift that might tear his psychological world apart. And then there’s gonna be that whole thing to deal with, and we see this when we see aftermath videos of officer-involved shootings, where the officer just break down and just uncontrollably go into trembling, crying and things like that, and it’s male and female both.
It’s not just one, and we’ve seen this, it’s not a lot, but there are times where we have had the opportunity to watch that happen, and that’s that violent shift tearing their world apart, and that’s going to cause major problems for them down the road, whereas, their counterpart glorified it, looked forward to it and now has benefited from it because it has completed a story. It has completed a mission for them, and I think that that’s the big difference between the criminal thought process and the good guy when it comes to lethal level of violence.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for words from our sponsors. And now, back to the show.
Okay, so the criminal has this predator orientation. It’s influenced by their past experience with violence, maybe growing up around it, experienced it first-hand. It’s shaped by the stories they tell themselves, like you talked about, sometimes these guys tell them stories, like they’re like the mob boss, or you talk about in prison, a lot of these guys would kinda harness this sort of warrior ethos, so you had the white guys getting rune Viking tattoos and the Mexicans getting a Aztec warriors and the black guys getting Zulu tattoos, so that’s a story they’re telling, like they’re a warrior. Then you say a really powerful thing that shapes a criminal’s orientation, this idea of initiation… Let’s go back to this like, what is an initiation? For a criminal, what does that look like?
Varg Freeborn: So it can be very literally, an initiation into a gang where you have to shoot someone to get in or you have to commit some kind of a beatdown or some type of a violent act to prove yourself and also incriminate yourself in front of the group, because there’s a type of leverage there that comes with that. And so that, an initiation could be something as simple as that, or it could be more esoteric in nature, that it’s not specifically called an initiation to them or their culture, but when it happens, it has the effect of making the story they’ve been telling themselves about this violent soldier, that they’re a warrior and they’re down for the cause, they’ll go down with their crew, and they actually do it. They back it up and they survive. That is an initiation from a story that was not founded on anything true, to now living a story that’s founded on truth. I do these things. I’ve done these things and I’ll do them again, and I know how to do ’em. I know how it feels. It actually feels good, and I will go it when I need to go for it, and I don’t care at that point.
And there’s also a memento mori aspect to that too. I think at the highest levels where people are accepting to live by the sword, die by the sword philosophy in their life, where they accept it, they’re like, someday I’m gonna get bucked to the pavement, but until that day, I’m the one doing the bucking. And so that’s something that comes at a time when the actual transfer to real action from thought takes place, that’s when those thoughts become really powerful and they’re backed up by experience. So you can have a guy that gets tatted out and runs around and is jacked, and he’s on TRT and he’s doing all this stuff, but he doesn’t have any real experience to back it up, so if he’s called out on the carpet and the bell rings for him on any given day and he’s gotta prove it, is he gonna have what it takes to do it? You don’t know.
I’ve seen some really tough looking guys that talk tough, act tough and lived a really tough life that hadn’t actually done anything, and when I see them get called out, they crumble, just absolutely crumble. And so there’s that moment when you’re facing someone who has had those moments and they’ve passed it with flying colors, and maybe they’ve done it multiple times. I tell stories in the book and about people I’ve met that have been shot 11 times in four different shootings. Like, you go up against that guy, you’re not going up against an amateur, not at least psychologically. He might not be a great shooter, but he’s a killer, and he’s not afraid to die. And he probably thinks he’s pretty damn hard to kill, and he’s proven that that’s true so far. So when you’re facing that type of orientation, it’s a deficit. It’s a deficit for the good guy.
Brett McKay: Okay, so with criminal orientation, the criminal tells himself stories, he’s initiated into violence, either literally or just through experience, and the more he experiences violence, the more confidence he gains in its power. He’s able to use… He’s more comfortable with using violence as an answer to situations and he’s more… I don’t know, he’s more comfortable operating outside standard societal moral values, so that’s the criminal orientation. Let’s talk about the orientation of the non-criminal. What stories do they tell themselves about themselves, and what parts of the average guy’s orientation can become deficits when he encounters a criminal?
Varg Freeborn: Yeah, so one of the most dangerous things you can do as a good guy is develop the notion of righteousness, and I’ve seen this very, very often, where they have what’s also known as good guy syndrome, where you just think, automatically, you’re the good guy, so you can just act and everybody’s going to clearly see you’re the good guy, and that’s honestly not how that goes. It’s not at all how that situation goes, and if one thing goes sideways, you’re going to be called out into the court system, and then you’re in for a long, hard haul, and it is not an experience that anybody should want to go through. There’s a very, very high chance of being convicted at some level. Most over 95% of cases in the country end in a plea bargain of some sort, based on independent study done for the Department of Justice some years ago, and that I think is very accurate from what I’ve experienced in the system. They over-charge you, they’ll hit you super hard, they’ll throw everything at you, and then that leaves room for them to strike a deal.
It’s just the same as you go for a car, you wanna buy a car and you decide, “I want $10,000 for this car,” and you’re like, “Man, I was thinking more like 7000.” Really in his head he wants 7800. So he’s shooting you the 10,000, you come at 7000, you get to 7800, you get the deal. You wanted it for less, but he gets what he wants. Courts are the same way, they shoot high, because they wanna hit you low and boom, now you’re going to prison or you have a felony on your record and you’re disarmed for rest of your life. So it’s something that you have to really consider very deeply. And I think that another problem about it, for the good guy is understanding the selective valuation of life and selective or the sliding scale of morals. And I’d like to correct you on saying that, you know, the criminal has no morals and they just do whatever they want. They do have morals, they have a selective valuation of human life, a lot of them would not… They might shoot your mother, but they wouldn’t shoot their own mother, so there’s definitely a selective-ness there, and it can change too, because one day they might not shoot the mother of their children, but another day that might change it.
So it’s very selective and it’s a sliding moral scale, and there’s also a justification built within that, and so the justification part of a sliding moral scale is the problem, that’s the hardest part to solve, once you develop a sliding moral scale, you are vulnerable to justifications like righteousness. So you feel like you’re the good guy, you’re on the side of good fighting evil, and you go too far in a defense case and you anchor shot somebody once they’re down, anchor shot them a couple of times, meaning that they go, they hit the ground, they stop doing what they were doing that was bad, and you put a couple in them just for good measure. That’s illegal. That’s not allowed. You’re going to go to prison for that in almost every case, but in your mind, at that moment, if you’ve slid your moral scale too far to one side and justified that by saying, I’m doing the world a favor here and I’m saving people’s lives, you’re gonna get yourself in trouble.
So most good people keep themselves in line by having a very static valuation of human life and a very static moral compass, whereas the criminal and the higher level military guy, sometimes even the law enforcement, have to have the sliding moral scale there because you have to be able to change the valuation of human life in the moment according to what’s being called for. If someone is in front of you that is an innocent person and they should be saved, you have to be willing to step into harms way to save them if that’s your job or if that’s what you’ve chosen as your mission. If there’s someone in front of you who is a bad actor and they’re going to hurt you or other people, you have to conversely, be able to make the decision to possibly end their life. And that’s a very tricky situation to be into morally. And so the criminal develops that very easily because they have a lot of justifications in their mind and society often backs that up, and I can attest to that because even after getting out of prison and having my rights restored, there’s several times that I’ve been road blocked even recently, in my life, 25 years after being out of prison, almost 30 years after being convicted, I still get roadblocks from things, I was just denied admittance into a technical school because of my felony.
And so these are justifications for some people to be like, “You know what, screw society, you don’t want me, you don’t want me to succeed, you don’t want me to try to do things right, so now I just move my scale and this is where I put you on the valuation of human life.” And it’s that simple, but the good good doesn’t have that, they have to be more… They’re raised in a culture that’s more static about things like, Violence is bad, don’t do violence, or things like that, and that has to change into an adjustable, manually adjustable situation, but it has to be backed up by professionalism, because if there’s not a professional structure behind it, then you can lose control of that very easily, and then you become not such a great person.
Brett McKay: Okay, so one potential problem with the non-criminal orientation is having too inflexible of a sliding scale for your decisions, you wanna be able to adjust your approach based on the circumstances, but at the same time, you can’t overly tip into justifications that seem justified at the time, but actually push you to go too far like into illegal territory. So you have to have a sliding scale, but have hard limits on it, you have to be a professional about your approach, and you described being a professional as being able to meet a minimal requirement of safety and accuracy with your weapon, if you decide to carry a weapon and conducting yourself with self-control and discretion under pressure, so you’re… You’re only gonna apply your skills and capabilities when they’re appropriate or where they’re appropriate to apply and under the confines of the law. So another deficit, you talk about an orientation for someone who sees themselves as the good guy is an over-confidence about their ability to handle violence, like they think, Okay, I’ve done the training, and if I encounter violence, I’ll just do steps one, two, and three, and it’ll work out like I expect. Can you talk about that, that over confidence?
Varg Freeborn: I think that anybody that’s been in real violence knows… We used to have a saying in prison that all the badasses were in the graveyard, and that there’s a very deep meaning to that, and it applies to soldiers, special operations guys that know that some of the best of the best have went in and died and they’ve been killed by goat herders and guys in sandals, so it doesn’t matter how much you train and how hard you go at it, there is also the factors of good days and bad days. And that’s it. And sometimes it’s just a bad day. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve seen the best fighters in the world go into the ring and catch a left hook and go to sleep, because it’s just that day, and so that’s how violence goes. You’re never prepared enough to be untouchable. Untouchable is not achievable. And I think that there’s a glorification of if I train hard, I do Jiu-Jitsu, I carry a gun, a train at the range, I’m doing all this stuff, I’m just harder to kill, harder to kill, harder to kill to the point to where they really over-glorify their capabilities, and they underestimate the very negative effects and probabilities within violence, and I think the violence is a very nasty, unpredictable thing, and you could wake up on any given day and it’s gonna be a bad day, and that’s the truth of violence that I think most people miss.
Brett McKay: Alright, so the orientation of a typical non-criminal can be a disadvantage when he goes up against a criminal because he’s not familiar with the realities of violence, he’s got an inflexible moral scale when it comes to making decisions. And then he can also get caught up in his own sense of righteousness. Are there any other potential deficits in the average person’s orientation?
Varg Freeborn: We also have the exploitation of social courtesies that work against us, which is a deficit where we’re not the aggressors were not the offensive actors in any situation, we have to respond, we have to defend. That means there has to be an initial action that takes place before we can go into action as good guys. You can’t just smoke somebody because you think they’re about to do something, they have to actually begin the process of doing it for the justification, legal justification to be reached for them to be dealt with at a certain level, lethally. So there’s a huge problem with deficit of orientation, deficit of experience, and also a deficit of social courtesy, and those are gigantic problems to overcome as a good person trying to learn self-defense at a highly violent level and try to match what’s gonna come at them some day. Those are the problems that I think instructors should be trying to solve, not just getting people to shoot fast, I think that’s the last thing that they should learn, the first thing they should learn is the decision to shoot and then learn how to shoot well.
So I prioritize decision-making. In the last several years, my class is devolved into very concentrated force-on-force simulation UTM training away from a broad scope of square range skills and live fire skills and this and that, and some combative and all this, and I’m like, Alright, let’s go down to the very basics of making decisions in tough situations and putting people in hard situations, and one of the unique things about my classes that I would do when I did the force-on-force training was I would make… I didn’t bring professional role players in, I would make the students play all of the roles, so at any point in a class, you could be a good guy, you could be an armed bystander, an unarmed bystander, you could be an observer or you could also be the bad guy. And one of the things I wanted them to do was be able to see the perspective of the bad guy entering the situation trying to accomplish a goal, and look at all the problems he has to solve because he has problems too, he has an orientation problem, he has confidence problems, he has analysis and synthesis that has to take place.
It’s not just as simple as walking in and robbing somebody. I think that people have pushed this narrative that the wolf is at the door and he’s vicious, and they don’t think like you and it couldn’t be further from the truth. We all have the same exact processes that take place and being able to see it from that other side, that other perspective gives you that insight to how to get into that, like how they like to say, Get into their loop and disrupt it. Right. So you’re getting into that mindset and seeing the problems he has to solve so that you can create those problems or manipulate those problems to your benefit and against his. I think that’s the biggest thing that we can accomplish there.
Brett McKay: Okay, yeah, so you’re big on simulation training, so at least you’re getting a little bit of a feel of what an actual violent encounter is like rather than just doing more of a kind of scripted training, and I’d like to talk more about the kind of training you recommend in a bit, but you mentioned earlier the idea of having a mission, can you talk about what it means to have a mission, and what part does that play in creating an effective orientation?
Varg Freeborn: Mission is the most important thing. It needs to be established when you embark on a journey of self-defense and carrying a weapon and things like that. If you’re not clear with yourself about what your actual mission is, then you will not be able to train properly, equip properly or conduct yourself properly in stressful situations because you don’t have the proper boundaries and parameters defined. The mission defines your boundaries parameters, it defines what you’re willing to fight and die for, it defines what is legal, what you’re allowed to do, who you’re allowed to do it to, for example, a civilian that’s carrying a gun needs to understand the state they live in, the laws for self-defense in the state they live in, is there a duty to retreat, is there not a duty to retreat, is there a stand your ground, is there castle doctrine. Like all these things need to be understood in the mission, because if your mission is not in line with the external boundaries, with the laws and where you live, or the use of force policies with the agency that you work in then your actions and your training and your equipment are gonna vary outside of those allowed parameters, and you’re gonna get yourself in trouble there.
So I think that understanding how that works and where your mission is at first puts you in line with the rest of the things that come after that, and that is… That is the most important thing to really consider if you don’t have… A lot of times I would start classes, when I used to do live fire classes, I’d say, “You know, you’re carrying a gun, you wanna defend yourself, your family, so what’s your mission?” And most people would say it’s because I want to make sure I make it home and my family makes it home so we can live our life together, and that’s a good mission. I like it. And then I put up a scenario where you walk into a gas station and the guy’s got… A bad guy’s got a gun to the clerk’s face and he hasn’t seen you yet, you can make the decision to take the shot, or you could step outside and call the police and go home. And a lot of people will say, I’m taking a shot, and I say, Alright, let’s examine that for a minute. If you got out of there and got in your car and call a place and went home, would you accomplish your mission of getting yourself home and making sure you and your family make it home safe? Yes, you would have accomplished your mission.
If you went in and got into that fight and you got shot by the clerk because your gun jammed or you slipped on some water or whatever could happen in violence and you die, did you fail at that mission of making home and taking care of your family? Yes, you failed. So what is your real mission? Now, I’m not downing people, if they say they wanna jump into fights and protect people wherever they go, that’s fine, but just state that mission clearly to yourself and to your family, and then train for that mission, like don’t tell yourself you’re only in it for yourself and your family, if you’re gonna jump in and defend whoever else is out there around you and vice versa. Don’t say that you’re gonna jump in wherever you can, and then you don’t protect your own family when you need to, so having your mission stated is the way to get all that squared away. And I think that’s gonna attack the root of that initial problem.
Brett McKay: Understanding the orientation of a criminal, understanding the orientation of just a regular good guy who just wants to get home to their family, take care of their family, how do you think that should change their approach to self-defense, once they have that understanding?
Varg Freeborn: I think it’s gonna give them a more realistic perspective of who they might be dealing with, and that’s very, very important because I don’t think that a lot of people have a realistic sense of who their opponent might be. And one of the things that I encourage people to do is spend some time watching death row interviews, and there’s just countless shows on criminals and talking to especially murderers and serial murderers and things like that, and just get a glimpse of what the mindset is in some of these people and their philosophies and their viewpoints, and how they just have zero valuation of human life for certain people, and certain people meaning innocent people that they don’t know, they just do not value your life at all, they don’t value your kid’s life, they don’t value your parents life, they do not value you. And so understanding that is going to give you a better realistic viewpoint of the level of threat you could be facing. Also understanding the level of violence these people have experienced and how many times they’ve been involved in violence, and you may never have been in a real fight in your life.
And so you’re going up against… It’s like going into an MMA ring with someone who has not only trained but has 100 fights under their belt and you went to a couple of eight-hour classes, it’s just ridiculous to think that, right? So it’s the same thing, you have to get a realistic view of this to understand, Okay, this is what I’m up against, and then establish your mission, and with those two pieces of information, now you can go and put together a proper gear and equipment acquisition protocol and a proper training protocol that are going to help you address that problem better, because if you don’t do those two things first, then everything you do after that is just you are winging it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, let’s talk more about that training protocol, basically, what we talked about today is that when your OODA loop is going up against the OODA loop of a criminal, the criminal has certain advantages while you, the non-criminal has certain disadvantages. So I guess the question is, what can the average guy do to close that gap, you’ve talked about the importance of simulated training and role play, which can give you a closer approximation of what actual real world violence is like, but beyond that, what do you recommend training wise?
Varg Freeborn:0:55:13.1 VF: Personally, I think that your individual strength and fitness is your most important component, if that’s available to you, now, if you’re handicapped or you have some type of a disability that prohibits that, then you have to recognize that deficit and go harder on the other elements like weaponry, things like that, because that’s a fall back, that’s not to go-to, but most people put that as a go-to first, and I’m telling you that, for example, we referenced me being a strength coach, I run an online coaching program, and I have several clients that are either competitive in some sport or another, or they wanna… They’re training self-defense, they just wanna be stronger and better, and for me, that’s also something that was born out of prison, I was fortunate enough to land in prison during a time when they still had free weights and we still had weight piles, amazing experience. I’m certainly glad I got to experience it. There’s nothing in the world like the aggression of a prison weight pile. It’s very, very unique experience that you cannot duplicate, and I lived on that pile for the whole time that the weights were still in there, and that’s where I learned…
And this was at a time when… This was the early ’90s, and I was probably about 30 miles away from where Louis Simmons was, Westside Barbell. And so at that time, Louis had a lot of very questionable characters coming through that gym, and some of those same guys were coming through the prisons and stuff, and the information was just filtering out, and so I learned very quickly. I went from being a 130-pound kid going into prison to hiting about… I peaked out about 200 pounds within the first two years, and I was very significantly different, I was different psychologically, and I was different physically, and I found life to be much easier, be it both in fighting and in avoiding fights when I became strong like that, and it taught me a very, very important lesson about strength and its importance to survival. Also, there was a difference between training in an atmosphere like that and training out here on the streets, most people go to the gym here, they’re trying to look good to attract a mate, or they just wanna be jacked and intimidate people or just wanna look cool on Instagram or whatever their motivation is, and some people is for health, but in there, it’s purely motivated by survival, like I need to get big, I need to get big fast, and I need to be able to fight. I just can’t be a big dude just lunking around.
I have to be able to run, I have to have some cardio, I have to have some endurance, and so the motivation for training is very different, and that was ingrained in my mind, and today I have my own gym at home, and there’s not a day that I step into my gym that I don’t slap back into that mindset that I was in 27 years ago on the prison yard weight pile. And I’m right back to where I was then. And this is, it’s ingrained. And so I think that if a person is going to train for this, if they’re going to set themselves up to be prepared to deal with a self-defense situation, your first and most important thing has to be your strength and fitness. Not only will it help you avoid fights because you’ll look more formidable and that’s not always a deterrent, but it does work in some cases, but if you do actually have to fight, you’re gonna be mentally tougher because being willfully uncomfortable under weights and pushing yourself in a training program is a very difficult thing to do, and it’s going to cultivate mental toughness, no matter how you do it, you’ll also be physically stronger, and so you’ll be much more capable of handling someone when they get a hold of you.
And also too the biggest threat to your life is heart failure and the multiple diabetes and multiple diseases and things that happen that are killing people by the hundreds of thousands because they’re obese or out of shape or out to weight, are overweight, they get older and their muscles atrophy, their skeleton begins to droop and sag and their joints become disaligned and everything is just based on the degradation of their strength and integrity, and so in today’s world where we have this virus, and it’s already been proven that viruses of this nature, lean muscle mass is generally an indicator of how well you will handle it, the higher lean muscle mass you have, the less severe the symptoms typically are, and that’s been found in studies in the last two years and before. So it’s just a general good idea And it cultivates the foundation for everything else.
A lot of guys will jump straight into BJJ, and the problem I have with that is that you’re getting off the couch and you’re going to do something that’s great, but you’re going and putting loads on your joints and you haven’t done anything to prepare those joints to handle those loads and that’s physiologically bad, it just does not make sense from that from that standpoint. As a barbell and strength coach, I like to say, Okay, let’s do some body building, let’s do some volume work to build up the connective tissues, the ligaments tendons, the small musculature around the joints, gets you strong in those areas before we start one rep maxing, before we start BJJ, before we start all of those things. And that’s just the approach I like to take with it, and then weapon skills, of course, it’s a good step if you’re so inclined to use weapons or carry weapons, make sure that they are the type that are approved for use in justified self-defense in your area, in your state, and also take instructors who emphasize decision-making over flash. That’s the biggest piece of advice I could give you for weaponry, but those would be the order I would put things in, so you have your strength and your health and fitness, your comparatives and then your weaponry.
Brett McKay: Okay, I like that. That’s a good rubric to follow. Well, Varg, it’s been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn more about your work?
Varg Freeborn: Right now my main website is just vargfreeborn.com, and I don’t have… Like I said, I’m semi-retired from classes, so I’m doing one-on-one work and I’m doing some strength coaching and some lectures, some lectures here and there, but if someone wants to do some work or they’re interested in something, they can contact me through that website and we could probably work something out for sure.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Varg Freeborn, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.
Varg Freeborn: Alright, thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Varg Freeborn, he’s the author of Violence of Mind and Beyond OODA. They’re both available on amazon.com, you can find more information at his website, vargfreeborn.com, also check out our show at aom.is/orientation 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 find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles, there’s 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 stitcherpremium.com, sign up using code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher App Android, iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, and if you ever done so already, I’d appreciate 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 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.
The post Podcast #781: Beyond OODA — Developing the Orientation for Conflict and Violence appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
You want to declutter. You want to downsize. You want to live more simply. So what’s been holding you back from getting closer to those ideals?
My guest today sorts through both the psychological and practical roadblocks that can get in the way of living more minimally, and more in the present. His name is Matt Paxton, and he’s a downsizing and decluttering expert, a featured cleaner on the television show Hoarders, the host of the Emmy-nominated show Legacy List With Matt Paxton which showcases people’s heirlooms and treasures, and the author of Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff: Declutter, Downsize, and Move Forward with Your Life.
We begin our conversation with how Matt got into cleaning out houses and working with hoarders, and some of the worst cases of hoarding Matt’s seen. We then get into both the mindset and brass tacks tips he’s learned from the most extreme cases of clutter that can be used by regular people who just want to pare down their stuff. We talk about why we can feel so attached to our possessions, and how to let them go, while still preserving your and your family’s memories. Matt recommends how and where to get started with your decluttering, and offers tools, including creating a “maybe pile” and a “legacy list,” for deciding what to keep and what to chuck, whether you’re dealing with big items like furniture or small stuff like documents and pictures. Matt explains what to do with your stuff whether trashing, donating, upcycling, or selling, and how much you can reasonably expect to get when you do the latter (spoiler alert: it’s a lot less than you think). We end our conversation with how, after you’ve decluttered your place, to keep it from getting clogged up again.
Oh, and we also discuss where to find hidden stashes of money when you’re cleaning out the house of an older person who’s died.
This is a really fun and interesting conversation that definitely motivated me to clean out our house.
Resources Related to the Podcast * Website for My Legacy List * Hoarders television show * Matt’s TEDx talk on “The Unintended Result of Our Attachment to Personal Belongings” * Podcast #699: The No-Nonsense Guide to Simplifying Every Aspect of Your Life * AoM article on decluttering * Podcast #626: How to Declutter Your Work Life
Connect With Matt Paxton * Matt’s Website
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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. Do you wanna declutter? Do you wanna downsize? Do you wanna live more simply? So what’s been holding you back from getting closer to those ideals? My guest today sorts through both the psychological and practical roadblocks that can get in the way of living more minimally and more in the present. His name is Matt Paxton, and he’s a downsizing and decluttering expert, a featured cleaner on the television show Hoarders, the host of the Emmy nominated show Legacy List With Matt Paxton, which showcases people’s heirlooms and treasures, and the author of Keep The Memories, Lose The Stuff: Declutter, Downsize And Move Forward With Your Life.
We begin our conversation with how Matt got into cleaning out houses and working with hoarders and some of the worst cases of hoarding Matt has seen. We then get into both the mindset and brass tacks tips he’s learned for the most extreme cases of clutter that can be used by regular people who just wanna pare down their stuff. We talk about why we can feel so attached to our possessions, and how to let them go, while still preserving your and your family’s memories. Matt recommends how and where to get started with your decluttering and offers tools, including creating a maybe pile and a legacy list for deciding what to keep and what to chuck, whether you’re dealing with big items like furniture, or small stuff like documents and pictures.
Matt explains what to do with your stuff, whether trashing, donating, upcycling or selling, and how much you can reasonably expect to get when you do the latter. Spoiler alert: It’s a lot less than you think. We end our conversation with how, after you declutter your place, to keep it from getting clogged up again. Oh, and we also discuss where to find the hidden stashes of money when you’re cleaning out a house of an older person who’s died. This is a really fun, interesting conversation that definitely motivated me to clean out our house. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/clutter.
Alright, Matt Paxton, welcome to the show.
Matt Paxton: Thanks for having me, man.
Brett McKay: So you are a downsizing, decluttering and hoarding expert. You host a show on PBS called The Legacy List. You’ve also been on A&E’s Hoarders. I’m curious, how did you get in this business? ‘Cause I don’t think there is a lot of 12-year-old kids out there thinking, “When I grow up, I wanna help hoarders clean out their house,” so how did you get into this biz?
Matt Paxton: No. I mean, I’d jokingly say, “You failed at everything else, and this is what’s left.” And the truth of it is, I was an Economist coming out of college, worked for the Federal Reserve, and I wanted to be a banker, I really wanted to be a banker, badly, and got all of the accolades to do it. I mean, great Economics degree, got into Federal Reserve, it was awesome. And then the second day I was like, “Oh, I don’t wanna do this.” [laughter] You drain your whole children [0:02:37.1] ____ of life to do it. And basically, I left after six months, went to Caesar’s Palace Casinos, and I became an Economist for Caesar’s Palace Casinos.
And as a 23-year-old kid, I didn’t have the maturity to live in that city, to be really blunt. And it was just… It was wild. Wildness. And got addicted to everything that you could get addicted to, so I came home. And at 23 I had to start over. And I had always cleaned old ladies garages and stuff just for extra money. That year, after I came away from Vegas, my dad and my stepdad and both my grandfathers, all died, and that’s when it kinda happened, I was just this young kid, depressed, sad, and I was tasked with cleaning out all their houses. And I did it for a year and it was just awful. I was sad, I was alone, I was lost, I didn’t know to do, and all the men that had raised me had died, so I couldn’t ask them for help.
And one time my grandpa told me, early in my life, he said, “Hey, if something sucks, do it as a career ’cause people will pay you to do it, ’cause they don’t wanna do it.” And he was totally right. [chuckle] So here we are, 22 years later, I’m talking to you and I’m still doing it. I honestly just… I didn’t hate it, so that’s why I kept doing it, and then when I cleared out those four houses, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I just kept cleaning little old ladies at church. I’d clean their attics and their basements, and then I stopped helping them move out, and then I realized these hoarding houses, nobody wanted to touch them. And so, I could charge more. And I loved it. And I did it for five years before I got on TV. I’d just clean hoarded houses, just one after another.
Brett McKay: Alright, so you’ve been doing it for what, 20 plus years?
Matt Paxton: 21 years now, yeah.
Brett McKay: 21 years. Alright, so you’ve been doing this for 20 plus years. I mean, give us an idea. I think people have probably seen Hoarders, but what’s the biggest… Give us an idea of how extreme hoarding can be like, what’s the biggest project you’ve worked on?
Matt Paxton: Alright, so I do the physical part of the cleaning and the harder part is the mental lifting, right? And we’ll talk about this more, but people hoard for a reason, something bad’s happened to them. And so, it’s important to know when you walk in all these houses, the bigger the mess, the more extreme it is, the more insane it looks to you, that’s how damaged and hurt that hoarder is. So I always have some preface… ‘Cause this is the number one question, “What’s the grossest thing you ever seen?”
Brett McKay: Right.
Matt Paxton: I mean, oh man, I had 300 cats in one house one time, like alive, they were running, we had to catch them, 300 cats. And that first cat, that’s easy, like he’s fat and lazy and hungry. You just put some treats out and grab him. But the next hundred, they’re pretty wild, and the last hundred are wild animals, they’re not gonna be caught. And you have to take out drywall. That last cat, the 300th cat, that dude has survived for years and has every disease. I mean, it’s the toughest animal in there. And those are the ones who are really hard to catch. So like that… I mean, the smell on that was horrific, I had… I don’t wanna get too gross, but there’s just been some incredible masses of… Volume-wise, we had a mansion in North Carolina one time. If you know the traditional 30 yard dumpster that you see on the side of the road at a construction site.
Brett McKay: Right.
Matt Paxton: And so my business is in cubic yard, so that’s a 30 yard dumpster and a cubic yard is basically the equivalent of like a dishwasher. And we were moving out 10 dumpsters an hour out of that house, so I’m talking three… The equivalent of 300 dishwashers, we were picking up and pulling out of that house, every hour, for four days.
Brett McKay: Wow.
Matt Paxton: And we pulled over a million pounds of trash out of that house. And I mean, volume… I mean, that was 30 guys for four days, 12 hours a day. We’ve cleaned out… We had a 18-storey building in Detroit that we had to clear out and people had just kinda taken it over and hoarded out each floor. And the developers had us come clean it out. I mean, there’s just… Your average home, think of everything you have in your house, and we look at it and the floor is full. And so we think, “Oh, our house is full,” right? The walls and the floor, but really that’s a 2D look at it and a hoarder looks at it three-dimensionally. And they can fill it all the way up to the top.
Brett McKay: Well, so you mentioned hoarders hoard for different reasons, and usually it’s because they’ve got some sort of… They’ve had some sort of trauma or they’ve got some sort of… They’re hurt somehow. I mean, what are the common… Are there common issues you’ve seen with people who hoard?
Matt Paxton: Yeah. Oh yeah. So it’s pretty common. So it’s trauma. It’s always trauma. Something bad has happened to them. They’re looking for their… Something good in stuff. A lot of us look for it in gambling, or faith, or drugs, or alcohol, or working out. And I know I’m putting lots of different things in the same pocket there, but we all look for happiness and self-worth in something. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. For the hoarders, they look for it in stuff. It’s usually divorce, or abuse, or death. A common one lately is, believe it or not, just an empty nest where people have dedicated their whole life to raising their children, and we’re at that pocket where there were some really young moms.
And so these women are now 50, and their kids are out of college, and they’re looking for their self-worth, their value, ’cause their husbands are out working and they didn’t get a career. They gave that up for their family, and they successfully raised a really good family, and they did a great job. And now they’re gone, and they’re 50, and they don’t know what to do. And they go on Amazon and start shopping, and all of a sudden the house just fills. And so… I mean, that’s not a horrible abuse thing, it’s just a loss. They’ve gone without their kids.
Brett McKay: Well, another trauma you talk about that you see with people, and these people are… They’re not… They’re leaving us now, is people who grew up during the Great Depression, they love to hold on to stuff. And it’s because they grew up in a time of scarcity. It’s like, “You could probably use that salt and pepper shaker one day, so we’re gonna hold on to that.”
Matt Paxton: Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of clients… And I’m glad you brought that up. I have a lot of clients that remember not having food, right? They remember. I mean, I was in Oklahoma one time and she was like, “Oh yeah, no, my dad had to leave for three years. He had to go to California to try to find work, so we didn’t see our dad for 10 years.” I mean that’s… I mean, could you imagine that nowadays? Your dad just taking off for 10 years and sending money, and he did it to support the family. And the kids stayed home and she’s like, you know… I talked about it in the book, actually. One lady I remember telling me, she’s like, “Oh yeah, one year I got an orange for Christmas and my brother got a peppermint stick.”
And we would… And they would jam the peppermint stick in the orange and suck the orange juice, and that was their treat. And I was like, “Yeah, like stocking stuffers?” She’s like, “No, that was our whole gift and we were proud to have it, man.” We as a society don’t really know that type of sacrifice they had, and this is the last kids of the war, the last kids of the Depression. They didn’t trust banks for a reason, right? That’s why we find money in a lot of these houses. It all make… Any hoarder makes sense, believe it or not. If know their story, no matter how extreme it looks, it always makes sense.
Brett McKay: Yeah, the money thing was interesting. You talk about that where you’ve learned over the years that especially when you go to a house where it’s some “greatest generation” person that’s passed away…
Matt Paxton: 80 and over. 80 and over.
Brett McKay: 80 and over. You go to specific places to look for cash because you know it’s gonna be there.
Matt Paxton: Yeah, I got a top 10 in the book that tells you the top places. My favorite one is the freezer, man. We always find ice blocks full of money. And I actually had one client, a younger client, that she would freeze her credit card, because she didn’t wanna be able to use it. [laughter] I thought that was kinda brilliant. It put a two-hour thaw period on her purchase desires, and she didn’t remember the numbers, she didn’t write it down. This was before they were all saved online, and so she literally would freeze her card so that she couldn’t get to it, and I thought that was actually brilliant.
Brett McKay: Yeah, the toilet tank is another place you look, right?
Matt Paxton: Yeah, top of the toilet tank. Obviously not the part where you poop, but you pull the top part out, they would put it in a Ziploc and tape it, we’d find it. Books is obviously the number one place. I mean, we shake every… If you’re over 80, we shake every book in the house. We grab it by the binder and shake it, ’cause I guarantee we’ll find a thousand bucks, easy.
Brett McKay: Yeah, in a Bible or something like that.
Matt Paxton: Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Yeah, I remember when my grandfather passed away a few years ago. My mom and her siblings were going through his apartment to clean it out, they’d find just coins in medicine bottles like all over the place.
Matt Paxton: Oh, yes. Oh man, the… To your listeners, it would be the red Folgers coffee can. It’s either filled with pennies, nails, or buttons, and it’s an old tin coffee tin. And we often we find money in there. The old orange prescription bottles filled with quarters, and a lot of those were actually silver, so you know, don’t negate those. One thing we find a lot nowadays… I got my started on the east coast near Washington, DC. A lot of our clients were government employees. And in the ’80s, they would all get savings bonds with their paycheck each week, US savings bonds.
So I can see the color from across the room of that little mustard yellow envelope. And I mean, we would find a hundred $50 savings bonds. And I remember one lady, she goes, “Oh, those are expired.” I was like, “No ma’am, they’re matured.” [laughter] It’s like a big difference. A lot of times we’re just not aware. I mean, we find… This is the sexy part, what we didn’t, we find old stock certificates that has not been converted to digital, they’re old paper certificates, which is live money. And I’ve had to train a lot of my employees to understand what all those things are.
I mean, we found $2 million… I’m not exaggerating. We found $2 million in old stocks, and the lady… The guy actually had put them in a big manila envelope that said, “Trash,” and sealed them. And just because of my work with hoarders, I knew there was something else going on. No one’s gonna seal something and write “Trash” on it. So I open it up, $2 million in stocks. And he put them in there so that when the robbers came, they wouldn’t know that it was important. And so, in his mind, it was a safe. [chuckle] But to the untrained eye, who would clean out it’s trash, ’cause it says trash.
Brett McKay: So you say your job is the physical part of the clean-up part. When you work with a hoarder, are there therapists that come in and also help with the underlying issues?
Matt Paxton: Yeah. So on the TV show, we have a therapist 24/7 on set, and in real life, we require them to go to therapy beforehand, because… Look, I was an economist, so I lean heavily on math. Yes, I’m a trash man, but the numbers don’t lie. And at the end of the day, if the hoarder goes to therapy, it’s a 60% success rate. They will keep their house clean. But if they don’t go to therapy of some kind, and therapy might be… It may not be like CBT, sitting on the couch and talking to a therapist about your feelings, there’s a lot of new different kinds of therapies, it might just be volunteering, but they have to have something to deal with the emotion part. And if they don’t do that, it’s a 0% success rate. Let me repeat that. If they don’t do some type of therapy, I guarantee they will repeat, and so, we don’t think it’s ethical to clean the house and take their money from the family, if they’re not gonna do something to fix the mental.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. Well, let’s say someone’s not a hoarder, but they have a lot of clutter around the house. When you work with these people, do you… Are they just less extreme versions of hoarders?
Matt Paxton: Yeah, so let’s put… Again, let’s put the math behind that: 5% of the country hoards. That’s 19 million people struggle with hoarding. That’s still a really big number, but that means 95% of the country just has too much stuff, and that’s the majority of us. They just have a problem with too much stuff. They bought too much, or they saved too much, and they just want a different life, and so they want less things. And so, it’s not that… Not everybody’s a hoarder, they just wanna have a better life with less stuff. And I married a minimalist, so I’ve gotten really onto the vibe of less is more, [chuckle] and I’ve really embraced it and I love it, and I think a lot of people are getting to that life of simplicity. They just want a little less, which is totally normal.
Brett McKay: Why do you think we get attached to something? Why do you think we just collect stuff and then we have a hard time getting rid… ‘Cause sometimes you’ll notice like,”Oh man, I got a lot of stuff here,” but you don’t do anything about it.
Matt Paxton: Yeah. So I did just write a book about this, so we’ll talk about it.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Matt Paxton: I mean, to me, I really wanna stress this, the stuff is stepping stones, and I really want people to buy into this mentality. We got it at a certain point in our life to get to the next point. So we needed it then, it served a purpose now, and it may not serve us a purpose now at this phase of our life, and that’s okay. I think about my skis and my snow shoes and my… Oh man, frisbee golf was huge for me in my 20s. It’s where I had my most social life. I’d hang out with my buddies, we’d get a beer, we’d walk in the woods, we’d throw frisbee golfs, we’d play for hours. Did it every weekend. I’ve been raising a bunch of kids for the last 10 years. I didn’t touch them and I gave them away and… When I moved ’cause I hadn’t played them in eight years. We moved to Georgia. Just the other day, my boys and I were walking, we came across a beautiful new frisbee golf course. They’re like, “Dad, I always wanted to do that. Let’s go play.” Now, I had given them away, so I had to go get new ones. Is that okay? Yeah, because technology changed anyway, right?
And there are a lot better ones now. So what I mean by that is it did serve me a purpose at one point in my life, it didn’t at another point, and now it does again, so I went out and bought some more. That’s okay. We hold on to stuff because we think we need it, or it was expensive. And the bottom line is, I can give you 20 excuses, we hold on to things because we have a positive memory attached to them. It’s really just stuff, it’s really just atoms, like it doesn’t matter, we’re not in a… If you live in the US, you don’t have a scarcity of stuff. Even though we didn’t have food and stuff during the pandemic, you still… You weren’t gonna go hungry. We don’t live in a time that our grandparents did. So really why we’re holding onto stuff is we wanna prove that we have value, either to ourselves and to other people. And it’s gonna get real deep here. We wanna prove that we’re successful, that we’ve made it, that we’ve done well, or we just really wanna… We think it brings us happiness.
I mean, I did a TED Talk on this concept of, as a young dad, I wanted to buy my kids a lot of stuff, ’cause I didn’t have a lot of stuff growing up. And I was raised by a single mom and she worked really hard to give us what she could, and so, I wanted to provide for my kids as much as I could, so I worked super hard to buy them all this stuff, right? And then I would have to work harder to make more money to buy more stuff, and I would start giving excuses like, “Oh man, I’m doing this for you.” Like, I started telling them I was doing it for them, and I started telling them that it was all about trying to make them happy, and I was not around. And so, I was working harder for more money and spending less time with my kids, and so it was a lie, like, it was a trap that I was just working harder for more stuff, and so, I’d miss my kids more. And I’d miss my kids more, I’d feel bad, so what would I do? I’d work harder to buy them more stuff. It’s a vicious cycle.
And at the end of day, I was like, “This is dumb. How about I just spend more time with my kids and buy them less stuff?” And so I did. And so I’ve really settled down on, we keep stuff because we think it makes us happy, or the items are associated with someone that did bring us happiness and joy, so that’s why we hold on to a lot of stuff from the past because it reminds us of great people and great times.
Brett McKay: And that’s why the title of your book is, Keep The Memories, Lose The Stuff. Like, understand that the thing is attached to a memory, you can keep the memory of that…
Matt Paxton: Yup.
Brett McKay: Attached to that but while getting rid of it at the same time.
Matt Paxton: Yeah, I’ve tried to really dumb it down, tell the… The stories live on forever. Like, I’ve been lucky enough that… And I’ll say that again, I’ve been lucky enough that my dad and my stepdad and my grandpa, they died early and it gave me a career, and my dad… Now, none of my kids were alive when any of those men were alive, but my kids can tell you 10 stories about each one of those men, because I tell the stories all the time. And I have a few items, I call them legacy list items, we’ll get to that in a little bit, but I keep those items and I continue to tell the stories about those men. So my sons will come and be like, “Oh Dad, tell us the story about that time that grandpa and you guys went fishing with a bear. That’s awesome.” And then they hear the story, and they like, “Let’s go fishing.”
To me, you tell these stories, I’m not saying it’s gonna cure everything, but it does get you started, and if you tell the stories, you pick a few good items, you tell the stories, what it does is it really puts the top tier of your items that truly matter, and the people in your past, the people they’re attached to, those memories, they live on forever. My kids will have never met my father, which is insane to me, but they are… Man, my oldest is my father. It’s crazy, it’s scary how much alike he is. And so my kids will even be like, “Oh, that sounds like what your dad used to be like,” and I’m like, “Yeah.” And so I’m constantly talking about people from the past because they’re part… They’re still… Just because they’re not here, that don’t mean they are not part of our family. But they’re attached to the items we have in our house. And so, we have less items, because we’re able to tell… We tell the stories of them. So we have less stuff, but the people stay alive forever.
Brett McKay: Okay, so I think that’s a good… It’s an overarching philosophy of how you approach people… It’s like, tell stories about the items, keep those stories alive, but you can get rid of it, you don’t need that thing anymore. Let’s get into more like brass tacks.
Matt Paxton: Yeah, how do we get started, man?
Brett McKay: How do you get started. So let’s say, someone comes to you, you go to their house, they’re feeling overwhelmed by the clutter in their home, they don’t know how to get going, what’s the first thing you do with this person?
Matt Paxton: Alright, so define the finish line. You gotta really know where you’re going. And the reason I do this is, so many clients come to me, “Man, I’m ready to declutter. How do I start?” Great, well, “What do you need it for?” “Oh, well, I don’t know… Thinking about moving.” “Great, where are you gonna move to” “Oh, I don’t know. My mom might move in with us or we might move in with her, we haven’t decided.” And I’m like, well, how can you decide what… How do you decide what you’re wearing on vacation, if you don’t know where you’re going, right? That’s really what it bears down to.
And decluttering, there’s two things that are really easy to quit: Working out and decluttering. And they bathe very similar, and so all these tools are really meant to keep you from quitting. And so, defining your finish line is really important, and then your why. And the why is where it still gets pretty sentimental. And then, we’ll get into really deep stuff here. But on the why, it’s like, Well, why am I cleaning? What… A lot of my clients are downsizing, and so they’re seniors, and they’re gonna get out of a house of 50 years. And I’ll say, “Great, where are you moving?” “Well, I’m gonna move down to be closer to my grandkids. So I’m gonna move to a smaller apartment in Florida.” Great. I got my destination, which is my finish line.
I’m going here, specifically. I know the floor plan. And two, I wanna be closer to my kids, that’s my why. And I tell this story all the time, about my son. I’ve struggled with weight my entire life, adult life. I’ve gone up and down 20 to 30lbs. And it bothers me. And I’ve been working on it, and my 12-year-old son said to me the other night, and this was like in October, and he said, “Hey, dad, are you gonna die at the same age that your dad did?” “Yo, what do you mean, man?” He goes, “Well, your Dad was 52, and you’re 46, Dad, so that means you’re gonna die when I’m 18.” And he goes, “Dad, I’ve been watching you and it looks like being a dad is really hard, and I’m gonna need help. So I kinda want you to be here.” This is at night, right? I’m trying to put my kid to bed. I’m like, “Buddy, do you think about this?” He goes, “All the time, dad.”
I go, “Buddy, I promise you, I’m gonna be here.” And he goes, “Well, then, why do you eat all those bad foods that you know are bad for you?” And I started to diet the next day, [chuckle] because I wanna be a grandpa. That’s my why. So get real clear on your why and where you’re going, ’cause that keeps you from quitting, that keeps you focused, that keeps you going, ’cause it is really easy to quit. But when I realize, “Oh man, I gotta be here for my son, then I do it”. Same thing on decluttering. Alright, step two is, take it really slow. So many of us, it’s taken us 10, 20, 30 years to fill these spaces, let’s just take… Let’s not make it a big house cleanse, let’s just make it a garage. You got no cars in your garage, and you want one car in the garage. That’s awesome, but it’s taken you 10 years to fill that garage. So, don’t try to do it in one Saturday. That’s not realistic, ’cause you haven’t been doing this in a long time, you gotta get the skill set back up. So I always say what I call the 10-minute sweep, which is really, really almost nothing. You pick a one-foot by one-foot area, half a bookshelf, an individual shelf, maybe your car’s trunk, maybe… A one-foot by one-foot area. I just say the junk mail is a good place to start, even that junk drawer in the kitchen on the top left, wherever you have yours filled with the old Bed Bath & Beyond coupons.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Matt Paxton: That are expired, by the way. [chuckle] Everyone has one of those. Start in that small area and go for 10 minutes, that’s it. Do 10 minutes a night for a couple of weeks. And it’s not about what you got accomplished, it’s that you got something accomplished, that you got started, that you’re getting used to it. And that’s what matters. And then once you’re used to it, then you can expand it to an hour, hour and a half, two. But I really wouldn’t do more than two. You really gotta get used to just doing it, doing it slow, because otherwise it becomes a job and it becomes overwhelming, and it becomes easier to quit. And once you quit, you stop.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word with my sponsors. And now back to the show. No, I think that’s a good point, start small, because I know when I’ve done decluttering projects in my own life, I’ll try to do it all in a weekend and…
Matt Paxton: Never works.
Brett McKay: It never works. You just get tired and you’re like, I’m done… And I’m not done.
Matt Paxton: Well, and our life doesn’t suit that, right? Like, I gotta take the kids to the game. If you have children at all, or a grandkid, to cut off 10 hours on a Saturday is a thing. That’s hard now. It’s our one day off, really off, and so you have to just do an hour, man. If you try to… I hate closets, because you can shut the door, and you can walk away from it and avoid it for a very long time. We actually don’t have any closets in my house. My wife is a minimalist designer, so we actually don’t have any closets, because guess what? If you don’t have any closets, you can’t store a bunch of crap that you don’t need. [chuckle] And so to me, closets are symbolism of, it’s just easier to quit, ’cause you can shut the door.
Brett McKay: Do you have any recommendations on where to start your decluttering project? Let’s say, your entire house is just… It needs a clean, where would you start? What’s the best place to start?
Matt Paxton: And I’m different on this one. I say, don’t start with the pictures, I’ll say that, because pictures can really wear you down. But pretty much anywhere that’s not heavily emotional. Like if you just lost your partner, don’t start in the bedroom, right? I don’t mind doing the garage, ’cause it gives you a clean empty space to work in, that’s dry and inside. So sometimes, I will start in the garage, but I’ll set my expectations really low, ’cause the garage also has a lot of boxes that you can break down and make a lot of space. And so I would say where you should start is somewhere you can see a lot of success, immediately. So if your dining room table is filled with mail, that’s a great place to start.
Brett McKay: Gotcha.
Matt Paxton: I actually love… I think dining room’s a great place to start, ’cause it’s a big table that you can use later for sorting, and quite honestly, none of us are really using our dining room anymore. For a lot of us, it’s become an office or it’s become a place for the kids to have school during the pandemic. Rarely do we sit at the… We don’t sit at the Sunday dinner anymore, the dining room table, that’s not something that happens as much as it used to so that’s an easier place to start. Now, there is some emotion there, because a lot of times, if you’re… Like if you’re a grandma downsizing to leave the house, actually, that’s the last place you wanna start, the dining room table. If you’re a younger generation that you don’t use that room that much, then it’s a good place to start. For a grandma, that was the most important room, and that china and that crystal and the silver, that’s really important. And the reality is, the majority of your kids don’t want that stuff.
Brett McKay: Yeah. That’s gonna be a problem, I imagine, coming up where…
Matt Paxton: Oh, it’s now. We’re in it right now.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Now, yeah, ’cause I…
Matt Paxton: Brown furniture.
Brett McKay: Yeah. My mother, she’s got a china cabinet full of china that was her mother’s and grandmother’s, and I don’t… We don’t have a dining room. I wouldn’t have any… There’s gonna be a lot of china cabinets and china on the Goodwill market here pretty soon.
Matt Paxton: So, I work… Yeah, I work with Goodwill. [chuckle] I’m actually Goodwill’s ambassador for downsizing and decluttering, and this is something we’re working on now, a series. It’s not that… And this is really important, this is for grandma. It’s not that no one wants your stuff, it’s not that they don’t love you. They just don’t want that stuff, the dining room, because we don’t have a use for it. Our family memories are made at the ski slopes or at the beach or at the river, they’re often at vacation spots or somewhere else. And so we want those great memories, we just don’t need them from the same place that you had those memories. Goodwill is filled with china, silver, crystal and brown furniture and they can’t sell it because nobody wants it.
Brett McKay: Maybe there’ll be a revival here in 50 years.
Matt Paxton: Nope.
Brett McKay: You don’t think so?
Matt Paxton: No, it’s a room that doesn’t even need to be in the house anymore. And so, I will say… Well, look, mid-modern furniture is huge right now, and that’s beautiful. I don’t think we’re gonna see a bunch of brown furniture from… The colonial dining room furniture, we just don’t need it anymore. I’ll say this, if you love your china, if you love your silver, use it every day. I saw an old Meme the other day that said, “Every day is a special day, don’t save anything for a special day.” And as cheesy as that is, I think it’s true. So if you like that stuff, start using it, man. I have seen families start displaying their legacy list items in their china cabinet, they got rid of their china. Beautiful china cabinet with the glass windows, you can see everything. Start putting items that actually matter, things you actually care about, that tell the story of your family. Start putting those items in there and showcase them and tell the stories and let people see what matters in your house, that’s a good way to re-upcycle and reuse it. And donate. By the way, donate, donate, donate, donate. Like, the more you donate… You will not be happy with what you get money-wise for the stuff in your house. Here’s a stat that’ll blow your mind. I’ve emptied thousands of houses. And when you empty a house, after the kids have taken the stuff they want, guess what the average household value is of all the items inside your house?
Brett McKay: No clue.
Matt Paxton: $8,000.
Brett McKay: That’s it?
Matt Paxton: That’s it, man. You spent a lifetime and probably a couple hundred grand filling it. Now, good, you’ve taken the stuff you care about out, the important stuff. But all that extra junk? And it’s funny, I just did this last year, I moved. And I’ve been saying that stat for five years now, and I sold all the stuff in my house on Facebook marketplace, and I made $8,000.
It was like within $200 of what I always say. It’s about 10% financial value of what you paid for it, so if you think you should list it for 1,000 bucks, you’re gonna be lucky to get $100. Now, I’m summing, I’m averaging. This is not every single item, but just set expectations extremely low. So like that dining room set. “My mom paid five grand for it.” Dude, if you get $500, you’ll be lucky. You’d be real lucky. If someone picks it up for free, you’d be lucky, to be honest, on a lot of that stuff. Pianos is a real challenge, nobody wants big pianos anymore. Your mom might have spent $75,000 on it in 1950, and that’s a ton of money, right? But good luck even getting it donated right now, ’cause people just don’t have… That’s not for common life right now, those things. But yeah, it’s… Donation is where you see the most value. There’s always someone that needs more than you, there’s always a group of people that have less. And I found that, man, the more you donate, the more you give to a family, the happier you will be and the cleaning goes faster.
Brett McKay: I imagine that’s another reason that people hold on to stuff, ’cause they think it’s really valuable. In their head, it’s valuable. It’s like, “Well, this is a grandfather clock that’s been in our family for three generations, it’s worth $90,000.” It might be… Maybe there’s a market, but probably not. Most people aren’t gonna put a grandfather clock in their house.
Matt Paxton: Now let’s do minds… A lot of this book’s about mindset, and so emotional value and financial value. Emotional value, it’s worth $100,000 ’cause it was your grandpa’s. Tell me about your grandpa. It’s why I talk about the story so much. Your grandpa was awesome, but that financial value is not actually equated to how awesome your grandpa was. He might have worked his butt off to get that clock for you guys, he probably did. He was an amazing man, and you really miss him, I’m sorry he’s dead. This is the kind of conversations that happen in the houses that I’m working in. I go, “That’s great, but I got two bidders on this clock and the highest bid right now is $500.” And you only need two bidders, ’cause that’s… Basically whatever an independent third party’s gonna pay you for it, that’s what something’s worth.
And what I’ve found is, when we start hanging on to that, “Well, it’s worth so much more.” What that is, is that’s procrastination. That’s your brain trying to slow down, ’cause you’re just not… You’re sad. It’s hard to let go of stuff. ‘Cause at one point like, “What if I need that again someday, what if someone really wants that or what if my kids want it?” Your kid’s eight, I don’t think he wants that clock. Are you gonna haul that thing around for another 20 years? And so, we start to procrastinate. What I remind people is, “You’ve already decided you didn’t want that item, you’ve already made the decision it’s not going with you. You just didn’t like the price that was attached to it, financially.”
And then I start to say, “Start to look at the value of your time. Are you really gonna haul this thing around and spend 100, 200 bucks every time you gotta move it, and you’re gonna spend hours trying to squeeze another $200 out from someone else? Your time is worth so much more.” Your time is your biggest currency in life, I believe. And so you gotta put a value on your time. I’ve seen families fight over $100 on a table, and I’m like, “Dude, if there’s 10 people here arguing for three hours on text over $100, really? [chuckle] This is ridiculous, guys.” I really encourage people, man, put a financial value on your time, and that really starts to tell you how much something is actually financially worth. But what we’re arguing is over the emotional value, not the financial value.
Brett McKay: Well, related to this, you talk about the issue that comes up with storage, where people will take that furniture that belonged to grandma or grandpa and put it into storage. That costs up to $300, $400 a month, and if it’s there for 25 years, you’ve what? Spent maybe $100,000?
Matt Paxton: Dude, I had a lady, she was paying $225 a month. I got my calculator, I’m gonna do it right now. And it was her nice stuff. This was her best stuff, and it was in there for $225 a month for 20 years. So that was $54,000 she spent storing her nice furniture that we sold for about five grand when we got it out.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay.
Matt Paxton: So, negative $49,000. I told you earlier, let the math figure it out. I talk a lot in the book about a spreadsheet decision. A spreadsheet will take the emotion out of it. And I’m gonna put that math right again, $54,000, it sold for $5000, it was $49,000. If having it there brought you security and made you feel better, then it was worth the $49,000. It might not have been though. And so I remind people, everybody, it’s again, back to the stepping stones. Like, you had it at some point in your life ’cause you needed it. Now, you don’t need it. It’s okay to let it go. But man, 49 grand. Think what you could do. Think of the opportunity cost with that 49 grand. Let’s think that was in a bond, right? What if that 49 grand had earned 5% a year? That’s a whole… And now you’re looking at 200,000 grand over 20 years, when you think about it that way. And it’s just stuff. Don’t get me wrong, stuff has given me a career and I love… I have some nice stuff too. I have a Air Jordan collection. I love Air Jordans, and I have a very expensive Jordan collection. My wife hates it, but it’s the one thing I enjoy. So, that’s okay. But by having less stuff, it allows me to have fewer nice things.
Brett McKay: Okay, so again, the reminder there, separate emotional value with financial value.
Matt Paxton: Always.
Brett McKay: And then start off small, 10-minute sweep, work your way up, don’t try to do this all in one day, start in a room that’s whatever you…
Matt Paxton: Gives your success, yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Gives you success. So when you’re talking with a person, or they’re going through their stuff and they’re looking at each item, how do you help them decide whether they should keep it or get rid of it?
Matt Paxton: So I have a lot of exercises. One, when’s the last time you used it? And in my book, I say, if you haven’t used it in a month, do you really need it? Now, that was a trick for the readers. Is a month long enough? No, of course it’s not. And everyone gets mad at me. “The month’s not a lot… It should be six months. It should be 12 months. It should be 18 months.” And people argue. Great. I just wanted you to pick the time. [chuckle] That’s all. I put the lowest time possible to make people decide when it is. It’s usually a year. If you haven’t used it in a year, do you really need it? I talk about skis all the time. I mean, where I grew up, we used to get snow and we’d all go skiing every Friday night. Man, we haven’t had snow in like five years. The world is just changing, and I don’t have the time to go skiing every week. Like, that’s not realistic, and skis have changed. Start getting realistic about that, and what I call that is your fantasy life versus your reality. A lot of us live in a fantasy life. We keep all these great clothes, we keep all these amazing items. Even with hobbies, like people have kept all these hobbies during the pandemic. Are you really gonna make that many more blankets? Are you really gonna make that much more sourdough bread? How much stuff do we need for these hobbies?
And it was the fantasy life that we had at that time, and I say, let’s get real focused on your reality life. That also goes with clothes. Do I need my size 28 jeans? And I’m a snug 36, guys. I think I can get rid of my 28s and my 30s and my 32s. I still got a chance on my 34s. I had to get… The reality in my closet is that that stuff doesn’t fit me anymore. It’s easy to… I tell people to do with… You have grandkids, do a fashion show. Put on the clothes. Well, one, if they don’t fit right away, you know right away. If you can’t even get them on, then come on, donate them. If they were just ridiculous looking and the kids laughed at you, probably time to get rid of those too. And then really focus on the donation.
Again, think of how many people could use that. On my TV show, Legacy List, we just had a show last week that aired where this guy was a retired NBA coach. He had coached for 20 years in the NBA… 25 years in the NBA. He had 10 NBA championship rings. He’d won one as a player and nine as a coach. And he had two whole closets filled with suits, and he’s a tall guy, he’s like 6’10”, 6’9″, and we were able to find a group that took those suits, and they refurbished them to men that were coming out of prison that needed nicer clothes, and they were ecstatic because they were tall, they were extra long suits and they don’t get those. And so there were a bunch of young men that got really nice suits. Now, they could get back into the workforce and try to get a job.
And it was through donation, and that was a way we were able to clear out his house. He had to get real about his reality. He’s not wearing suits anymore. He’s not coaching anymore, he’s retired, and so he was able to get rid of that stuff, but that was really hard for him because those suits were who he was. That was his armor that he wore every day, and it was really hard when he finally… He said, “Okay, I’m giving someone else a chance at a job, so it’s worth it.” He said, “And they’re gonna look good.” And so again, again, that finding out what you’re doing for donating is really important. That’s a tool. It’s not just an easy place to drop stuff off. You gotta believe that you’re making someone’s life better, and that’ll make you happier to let go of things.
Brett McKay: Okay. So first tool of heuristic: If you haven’t used it in over a year, get rid of it, you don’t need it anymore. You also have this other tool you use when someone’s sort of on the fence with something, like, “I don’t know.” ‘Cause maybe they’ve got a lot of emotional attachment. It’s the maybe pile.
Matt Paxton: Maybe pile. I love the maybe pile. So your piles are keep, sell, donate, trash, and maybe. Maybe is really powerful because in the beginning, you’re gonna have a lot more maybe ’cause you’re just not there yet, and a lot of times you’ll be like, “Man, I love this item, gotta have it,” on day one, and you’re like, “Okay, fine, keep… ” And then you say, “Alright, well, wait a minute, maybe, I don’t know, maybe, maybe put it maybe… ” And what happened at the end of each day, you come back to the maybe pile and you realize, “I’m not sure yet.” And if you’re not sure yet, that’s fine, ’cause if you get rid of the maybe pile, then you’re never gonna move forward, ’cause keep is definite, trash is definite, no question on either one of these, sell is pretty clear, if you can’t sell it or you don’t wanna donate it, you put it in the maybe.
And then what happens is you come back to the end of the job and you’re like, “Man, why did I keep this teddy bear from my girlfriend in eighth grade? This is ridiculous.” But at the beginning you thought that was important, but then you’ve gone through all the other emotions on this journey and cleaning out and on day 10, it’s not that important, and so it’s easier to let go of things on day 10, then it was on day one. So you’ll find that, and this isn’t a full safe, full proof tool, but maybe pile really does help you keep going faster through the process and then helps you. You’re not punting the decisions, you’re just putting them later down the line when you’re more warmed up.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. So you mentioned earlier this thing called the Legacy List, what’s that?
Matt Paxton: So legacy list, it’s the title of my show, and a legacy list is just a list of five or six items that mean the most to tell your family story. For me, I got a ring of my dad’s, I’ve got a poker chip, I’ve got a cookbook from my mom that she actually made for my dad, and my parents got divorced when I was six, but later in life, my mom went out and talked to my every woman in my dad’s family, and every woman in my family, and even the old ladies at church and got all their recipes that we grew up on, and she gave this book to my dad, and… Later in life. And then when he passed away, I got the book, but it’s all the recipes I grew up in, and it’s in all of their handwritings, so it’s my mom, my grandma, my great grandma, my other great grandma. All these great recipes, all in their handwriting.
And now I have this one book with all the in one place, that is an incredible legacy. So why I want you to tell, to really create a five or six items that tell your family story, it sets the pace on what’s important to you guys. And again, it gets you in the habit of telling the stories, and so what it does is when you have these five or six items, you gotta share them too, you gotta show them off. They’re not meant to be in storage. If it’s so important to you, why would it be in storage? That makes no sense to me. And I see so many families, “Oh, this is really important. It was my great grandfather’s. I love it. You gotta see it.” Great, show it to me. “Well, it’s in storage, I gotta go get it.” Well, then I’m gonna say, it’s not important. It’s not there. So that’s something I’ve started to say, put that in your china cabinet, put that on your mantel, put that in your book shelf. Start putting those legacy list items out there, but what they do is it gets people used to telling the story, and then it sets the pace of what’s actually important.
Brett McKay: So these are typically items that belong to a parent, grandparent, right?
Matt Paxton: And maybe even you, maybe even you. I had one lady that I found an Olympic medal. It was like she was like, an Olympic… She was a piano teacher and I’d never forget her. And I was a kid, I was… This is before I was a cleaner. But it’s funny, I look back in life, I cleaned a lot of houses, even as a kid, I was just trying to hustle, make extra money, but my piano teacher, she was from Czech Slovakia, and I don’t think that’s a country anymore, but at the time it was. And she won an Olympic medal in the javelin and… Female Olympic metal, silver medal, and we found it. And I was like, “Why is this in the drawer?” She’s like, “It’s just from my past. It’s who I was. It’s not who I am.”
And I always thought that was fascinating, even my grandma used to win all these county fairs, she would win these blue ribbons for her garden, and right before she passed, I was cleaning her house and I said, “What are all these ribbons?” She said, “Oh, that… ” “Your trophies should not be found when you’re alive, they should be found when you’re dead.” And she goes, “Otherwise, you’re bragging.” And although I know she believed that, I think she’s wrong. Man, we should see your trophies now. Put those ribbons… You don’t have to put them all out, but put one out, but I think it’s okay to brag about what you’ve done, put these items out. It’s for your family or for you. But again, it gets you in the practice to telling the stories and being proud of your family, and what that does is it separates the memories from the stuff, and you’ll find that you’re able to let go of a lot of other stuff just because you’re already telling the stories of people.
You can only tell so many stories, and every item has a story, that’s why I put a limit on the number, ’cause if you’re keeping every item and telling every story, no story is ever gonna get told, and your kids are gonna hire me to throw all your stuff away, ’cause they don’t even know what the stories are.
Brett McKay: One tip, so say you got your legacy list and there’s items you wanna keep intact and display, but one of the tips I liked a lot was when you’re going through maybe your parent stuff or a grandparent stuff, upcycle it, somehow use it, incorporate it into your life. So I think you gave the example, you had some rings owned by some grandparents, you melted them down and made a ring for yourself.
Matt Paxton: Yeah. So my wedding band is old rings from all the men and women in my family. I’ve shipped it in and they melted me a wedding band. It’s jewelry that would have just sat in a drawer somewhere, it’s not particularly fancy jewelry, it’s just gold, it’s neat. And then in fact, when I was going through that drawer to find that… And I love upcycling, I can tell you 100 stories of upcycling. It takes, an upcycling is taking old items and re-purposing them for modern living, but still allowing you to celebrate the past. I love that I have my great uncle stuff, I found my grandfather’s old ring from Alaska, he went during the war, he got placed in Alaska, and I didn’t put this in the book, but the coolest thing I found was…
And my grandfather was a farmer, hard-working guy, never saw him cuss or take a day off, he worked every day of his life, hardest working dude. He was a preacher, like everything, but he’s just a wonderful man, and I found… With this Alaska ring, I found a telegram from him to his sister and just said, “Alaska is great. Send more money.” [chuckle] That was it. And I never heard my grandfather ask for money ever. He just didn’t do it, and he worked really hard, but I love that telegram, so I actually kept the telegram. So I’m not saying get rid of everything, but get rid of the 80% that doesn’t really matter, that lets you keep the ones that really do. So I did keep the Alaska ring and the telegram ’cause I think it’s hilarious, and I have a feeling one of my sons will like it. It’s also smaller than a bread box, so it’s easy to keep.
Brett McKay: You could turn that telegram into a piece of art, like frame it, put it on your wall…
Matt Paxton: I know. I should. I don’t have any… So my house is a minimalist house. We have no walls, man. It’s all windows. So I’ve even had to… My wife took this to the extreme… I should say fiancee, we’re not married yet, but we have seven kids and we just haven’t gotten to it, believe it or not. We have six boys under 13, so we’re deep in it right now, but yeah, some days some of these items will get… We will get them… I guess why I’m saying this is like a lot of people who are listening are like, “Well, you do this professionally, man, your house is probably perfect.” No way, man. My life is as crazy as yours is. My life is crazy, and we’re just surviving just like you are, but a lot of these rules will help you keep it in mind and slowly progress to where you wanna be.
Brett McKay: So we talked about big stuff, china cabinets, jewelry, things like that, physical, tangible things. A lot of clutter is just documents and pictures. Any advice there in helping people sort through that stuff? ‘Cause I imagine you walk into a home and there’s just piles all over the place. I’m sure everyone’s got their pile in their kitchen where they just put everything. How do you sort through that stuff?
Matt Paxton: Alright. So junk mail, get through the mail first. Junk mail is exactly that, it’s junk mail. Shred it, rip it up. If you owe somebody money, they’re gonna find you, so don’t worry about that. If you find a bill you owe, pay it obviously, but 90% of your junk mail, it’s just that, junk mail. Go through it quickly. I get into a habit of keeping it clean, which is my mail, I do that over the recycling bin. I don’t even take it to a table. The minute you put your mail down, you’re not gonna touch it for a week, so I take it right to the recycling bin and I look at it and I shred it up. If I don’t need it, I shred it right away, and so it never even makes it on to… Because you put that bag down, it’s gonna stay.
And that’s a habit. That’s how a lot of my hoarder houses started. It started with one bag. They went to Target to get something, and they got tired, it was hot, they sat down on the chair, put the bag down, and then they didn’t empty it. And then like a week later, “Man, I need mustard.” They go to the store again, get mustard. When you empty a hoarder’s house, you’ll find 10 cans of the same stuff or like 20 hammers, ’cause they go to get it and they forget it. They put it down and they forget. So on paper, get back to the paper, get really, really focused on your bank statements. You only need the end of the year, 12/31, that’s the only one you need. Your taxes, you do need seven years, but you can digitize all of this paper. I mean, honestly, there’s apps on your phone now, you just take a picture of it.
Genius Scan’s a wonderful app. Take a picture of it, email it to yourself, you’re good. You really don’t need to keep most of your paperwork. You can scan it all, digitize it. Now, here’s the kicker on this. Have two copies of your digital downloads. Have one on your computer and then save one on a hard drive and put that hard drive in a safe, a fireproof safe. You wanna back up your backup on that. So the paper… And in the book, I list all the paperwork you need, like all of it and how long you need to keep it. Medical records, legal records, taxes, all of it. All your documentation. Where it gets hard is genealogy and pictures. Genealogy is something that comes up a lot in my career. I didn’t know a whole lot about it early on, and I went out to this conference in Salt Lake City called Roots Tech. Have you ever heard about it?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Matt Paxton: Man, it’s the Woodstock of genealogy. It’s unbelievable, and the amount of technology that’s out there to help you find the information about your family. It’s new to me, and I just love it and I’m fascinated by it, so I’m even finding myself holding on to a little more of the genealogy side of it, and so I always wanna say be respectful of that. If that’s who you are in your family and you’re the person in charge of that, then make a space for that in your home and respect it and make the space for it. And that’s awesome. But on the pictures, man, that’s when we get into trouble because we keep doubles of everything. We have doubles from the ’80s and ’90s and early 2000s. So the ones I tell you to get rid of… And when you’re going through the pictures get really, really… This is where I want you to do the 10 minute sweep.
Don’t spend more than 30 minutes a night on pictures, otherwise it’s just… You get lost in there. But go through the whole pile at a time and say, “Okay, I’m gonna get rid of the doubles, I’m gonna get rid of the negatives,” ’cause you haven’t used them yet. It’s 30 years, by the way, so you haven’t used them yet, just to put math in there. If you got it in 1990, it’s 30 years ago. We don’t need them. Get rid of the negatives. Get rid of the doubles, get rid of the generic landscapes, which is just, “Oh, that’s a mountain,” or, “That’s a beach.” You don’t know which one it is, and there’s no people that identify it and no landmarks in it. It’s just a landscape. Get rid of the generic landscapes. Get rid of the people that you do not know who they are, or honestly care to know. You don’t like them. And that’s a new one I’ve added. The people you don’t like. I can’t tell you how many families I’ve… “Oh, that’s my ex-husband’s family. I don’t like this.”
“Well, why are you holding them?” “Well, someone might want ’em some day.” “When’s the last time you talked to them?” “It’s been 15 years.” They’re not gonna call. You can get rid of the stuff for the people you don’t like and don’t want. Now, be careful in the genealogy, I wanna say this. When I say pictures of the people you don’t know who they are, and this is not the old 10-type genealogical pictures, okay, this is just a picture you took on your phone and you don’t remember anybody in the picture. It was at a party in college and they don’t mind… Get rid of those. The old, really important family heirloom pictures, I still put those to the side. And so just those tips alone right there, like just the duplicates, the negatives, the generic landscapes, and the people you don’t like or don’t know, that will knock out more than half your pictures right there.
Brett McKay: And then utilize digitization.
Matt Paxton: Digitization. There are so many good companies out there that will do that for you. I’m a big believer in your time is worth more than the cost of that, so get it down to a reasonable number and then have it digitized, and I’ll say this… A stack of pictures one inch high is actually 100 pictures. 100 pictures. How many thousands and ten thousands of pictures that you have in shoeboxes or in buckets? I’ve had families that have like, “That whole room is dedicated to pictures now.” And we just don’t have enough time or bandwidth or space to go through them all and tell the stories of all of them. So get focused on them. Get it down to… I think 500 isn’t reasonable, so a shoebox should be reasonable. You should totally save at the end.
Brett McKay: Another tip I’ve found useful… I’m kind of getting out of this stage, but I’m at the stage in life where my kids make me art and you’re like, “Oh, this is great.” And then you throw it in the trash and they find it in the trash. “Dad, why did you throw this away? I made this for you.” And then you take it out and it just sits on your desk. One thing I’ve been doing is I’ll take pictures of it and then chunk it.
Matt Paxton: Digitize the pictures. I have a folder on the phone for each kid and I take the pictures of it. Now with seven kids, we’re pretty ruthless. We’re like, “Oh, great, look at your folder.” And we’re like, “Great picture,” and we rip it up and put it in recycling right in front of them.
And I’ve made my kids a little harder on that, but they’re like… Just the other day my eight-year-old was like, “Dad, I made that for you.” So we do have a frame, that’s one of those foldable frames that opens up and so each week the kid will pick… And the younger kids… Your kids, it sounds like they’re getting older.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Matt Paxton: This is really important for the younger kids ’cause I’ve seen families that they kept every single picture, every picture their kid made. And let’s be really honest here. It’s mediocre art at best, at best. We’re keeping it because we love our kids and we don’t want them to get upset. We’re not keeping it ’cause it’s great artwork. But once a year they make a good piece and so that’s what I’m trying to set you for. There’s one a year you really want, so don’t keep them all. And what we do is we take the picture each week, whichever one they love, keep that one they love, get rid of the rest. And at the end of the month, decide which one they love and it goes in that frame that opens up. It has a latch door on it that opens up. You can get them in any hobby store.
And so you’re switching out the pictures each month and they get to see the art that they choose, not you, them. And then at the end of the year, you’ve got one that you keep and you put that in a bin. And so I have a bin for each kid and literally we keep one a year. That’s it, but they’ve displayed up to 12 a year. And we’ve kept a couple of them digitally for each one. But I promise you on the back end, we moved last year and I had kept every… I had kept pretty much every painting of my kid’s and I threw away all but like four or five because… And they haven’t asked for them, I promise you.
Brett McKay: Okay. So you’ve done all this stuff, you’ve sorted piles, you got your pile for donate, sell, trash. That’s pretty much it. And you’re big heavy on donating, cause selling it, it’s gonna take a lot of time, even money, and you’re not gonna make that much from it, so…
Matt Paxton: Well, let’s talk about sell real quick. It’s not that you can’t ever sell and I don’t wanna press a lot of… But the reality is a lot of the stuff isn’t worth anything, but there’s two ways I do encourage selling. One is they’re just mass, sell it all on an online auction. Get an online auction company to come in. They do all the posting for you, they market it, they sell it, they have people that… They have buyers. If you’re doing a yard sale or an estate sale at your house, it will not go well. That’s not your job. That’s not what you do. You want a company that has lots of buyers to do it. And quite honestly, you don’t want that in your house, you want it at the estate auction house where people come and get it. It’s gotta be online or there won’t be a lot of traffic.
If you’re selling items one-off, I’m really big on Facebook Marketplace. It’s the easiest thing and it’s local. Oftentimes it’s people that you know. So you can put stuff on Facebook Marketplace for whatever price you’re willing to get for it. People will haggle, so be ready for that. But if it doesn’t sell in a day, then just take it over to the Buy Nothing groups and donate it. But there is… You can quickly find out if there’s a market for something. If 50 people immediately ask you for it…
Brett McKay: There’s a market.
Matt Paxton: There’s a market. And tools you should always sell. Try the furniture at a low price because it’s still better than hiring someone to come pick it up ’cause that will cost you money. Even if someone buys it for $100 bucks or $50 bucks, but they come get it themselves, then that’s still cheaper for you ’cause you’re not paying $100 for someone to take it away. And so the key here is don’t waste your time. Put time limits on it. I would say a day. Put it on Facebook Marketplace. If it doesn’t sell, then just give it away.
Brett McKay: Any tips on… So you’ve cleaned your house out. How do you prevent the clutter from accumulating again?
Matt Paxton: So the key is you spent the last 20 years filling your house up, then we spent the last six months cleaning it out. Let’s get back to the 10-minutes sweep clean every night. 10 minutes maintenance. Just like weight loss. You can’t do a diet, work out and then lose all the weight and then go back to eating the worst food in the world. You gotta stay with it. So the same thing with the cluttering. Just stay with it. Don’t let it get away. Never put the bags down, always empty the bag. Always empty the bag when you come back from the store. Equal in, equal out. When you buy something new, get something of the same size out of the house. Go donate it. On the paper, I keep a shred box in my trunk and I keep a donate box in my trunk. Why in the trunk of my car? ‘Cause if I put it in the garage, it’ll overflow and fall all over the floor and I’ll never take it in. If it’s in my trunk, once it’s full, I drive by somewhere and the kid at Goodwill takes it out of the back of my car.
I don’t even have to take it out of my car anymore at Goodwill. That’s how crazy that is. They literally come, they say, “Pop your trunk,” and they grab it for you. So just keep those boxes ready and take your donation stuff right to your trunk ’cause the minute you put it down, it’s not gonna move. All you did was transfer it from Point A of your house to Point B. You didn’t get it out of your house. So I put those boxes in my car. I think that’s the easiest way to do it. Stay on top of it. Everything has a place, put it… Do that extra two minutes of work every night. When you get back from the store, put the stuff back where it goes. When you’re working on your tools, you go to do something, you use the hammer and the nails, take it right back to the garage, put it in its place. Don’t put it down on the kitchen room table ’cause then you’re not gonna touch until next weekend.
Brett McKay: Well, Matt, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Matt Paxton: So the book you can buy anywhere, ‘Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff.’ It’s on sale now. If you can’t afford it, go to the library and check it out. And if you can, go to Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Target, any independent bookstore. My website for the TV show is mylegacylist, mylegacylist.com. You can watch all three seasons on there now or on PBS anywhere in the country, public television. It’s a great show. It’s a positive show about aging community Americans telling their stories. Super fun. We find a lot of awesome history there. But check that show out and we have tons of tips all over mylegacylist.com, lots of videos. And then we do have a resource section from our book is on that website, mylegacylist.com. So every company I’ve ever worked with that I recommend you using, it’s all on that website, and then there’s a chart of the first 100 items people ask me about, “What should I do with it?” Everything from pianos to stamps. “Do I donate, do I sell?” And it gives you all the resources. All that’s on the website at mylegacylist.com.
And then of course, my social media is I Am Matt Paxton. Any handle, anywhere you wanna go, we got lots of quotes, inspirational quotes and helpful tips from the book and from my career and we’d love to hear from you. And if you wanna feature your family on our show, we are casting right now for Season 4. If you got a cool grandma that’s awesome and wonderfully weird and you wanna feature her story, go to mylegacylist.com. We are accepting casting right now for filming later this year.
Brett McKay: Well, fantastic. Well, Matt Paxton, thanks for this time. It’s been a pleasure.
Matt Paxton: Hey, thank you, man. I really appreciate it.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Matt Paxton. He’s the author of the book, ‘Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff.’ It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about Legacy List at mylegacylist.com. Also check out our shownotes at aom.is/declutter 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 you 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 think of. 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 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 if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. 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 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.
The post Podcast #780: Declutter, Downsize, and Move Forward With Your Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
The town of Concord, Massachusetts has been famous twice in history. First as the location of the “shot heard round the world” which kickstarted the American Revolution in the 18th century, and second, as the home of several famous writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in the 19th.
My guest today, professor of history Robert A. Gross, has written landmark books on both of these periods in Concord’s history. The first, called The Minutemen and Their World, was published in 1976. Now, nearly 50 years later, he’s published a new volume called The Transcendentalists and Their World.
In both books, Bob delves into the details of everyday life in Concord in order to illuminate broader trends and forces in American culture. In the case of his second book, he does so to explore how the communal, hierarchical nature of life in America during the Revolutionary period shifted to a more autonomous and bottom-up ethos during the time of transcendentalism — a movement which prized individuality over conformity and intuition over logic, believed divinity existed in each person and throughout nature, and celebrated the authority of the individual over the authority of institutions.
In today’s episode, Bob and I discuss how changing forces in commerce and religion, as well as a fervent, emerging interest in self-improvement, led to this shift, and how thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau set a new course for what it means to live a life of integrity. We end our conversation with what the world of the transcendentalists has to tell us in our own time period, which, like theirs, is marked by the widespread rejection of top-down gatekeepers.
Resources Related to the Podcast * Bob’s 1976 book The Minutemen and Their World * Ezra Ripley * The Lyceum movement * AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Self-Reliance * AoM Podcast #324: What It Really Means to Be Self-Reliant * AoM Podcast: #417: The Mystical Life of Henry David Thoreau * AoM Podcast #575: A Treasure Trove of American Philosophy * AoM Article: How to REALLY Avoid Living a Life of Quiet Desperation
Connect With Bob Gross * Bob’s Faculty Page
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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The town of Concord, Massachusetts has been famous twice in history. First, as the location of the shot heard around the world which kick-started the American Revolution in the 18th century. And second as the home of several famous writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the 19th. My guest today professor of history, Robert A. Gross, has written landmark books on both these periods in Concord’s history. The first called the “Minutemen and Their World” was published in 1976. Now nearly 50 years later, he’s published a new volume called the “Transcendentalists and Their World.” In both books, Bob delves into the details of everyday life in Concord in order to illuminate broader trends and forces in American culture.
In the case of his second book, he does so to explore how the communal hierarchical nature of life in America during the Revolutionary Period shifted to a more autonomous and bottom-up ethos during the time of Transcendentalism, a movement which prized individuality over conformity and intuition over logic, believed divinity exists in each person and throughout nature, and celebrated the authority of the individual over the authority of institutions. In today’s episode, Bob and I discuss how changing forces in commerce and religion, as well as a fervent emerging interest in self-improvement led to this shift, and how thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau set a new course for what it means to living life of integrity. We end our conversation with what the world of the transcendentalist has to tell us in our own time period, which like theirs is marked by the widespread rejection of top-down gatekeepers. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/concord.
Bob Gross, welcome to the show.
Robert A. Gross: Oh, thank you.
Brett McKay: So back in 1976, you wrote a book called the “Minutemen and Their World” which focused on life, the details of life in Concord, Massachusetts as a way to help people understand the forces that created the American Revolution. You spent the next 50 years continuing to research about Concord, and you’ve written another book about Concord. It’s called the “Transcendentalists and Their World” which uses the same town as a way of understanding how American culture shifted from being about duty and interdependence in the 18th century to being more individualistic and self-reliant in the 19th century. And we’re gonna talk about the Transcendentalists today. But I think to understand the Transcendentalists and their world, you need to have a basic understanding of what the Minutemen and their world was like. What was it like before the Transcendentalists were born and came of age? So broadly speaking, what was the cultural ethos of colonial and revolutionary Concord and the rest of New England, too, in the late 18th century?
Robert A. Gross: It’s a way of life that’s centered on families and shaped by communal values. Fathers aspired in the 17th and 18th century to maintain their families on the land and pass on the homestead to their sons, and to place your daughters with husbands who also would be local and would be land owners. There was an idea of the family as a line that should persist over time. Parents named children for themselves. And if a child died, they frequently gave the name to the next one of the same sex to arrive. Now, imagine if your child got to age 5 years old and sadly died, and you had another child of the same sex come along, and you said, “Oh, let’s give the same name to the child.” How do you think that would go over today?
Brett McKay: Yeah, “That’s weird, what are you doing?” Yeah.
Robert A. Gross: Yeah. People would say, “How could you ruin the memory of your unique child by taking their name? Are you trying to replace that child?” Well, in fact, in a sense, they were. The child was not viewed so much as unique. And the really stunning thing is that the older the child was before dying, the more likely they were to replace the name. And now take this, when they worshipped in the meeting house, which was established by law and funded by taxes, they didn’t sit wherever they wanted. People took assigned seats and the seating plan was actually designed by a committee of the town which presented the plan to the entire town meeting which had to vote on it. And the seating was done according to hierarchical rules, by age and then public service and wealth, Men on one side, women on the other. If you were under 30, you had to climb up the stairs to the galleries. If you were Black, you didn’t have an assigned seating or assigned seat, but you were on the margins of the galleries. This is a world that’s both homogeneous in large part, but also hierarchical. People had a place, but they were expecting to know their place.
Brett McKay: There is that hierarchy, but I imagine it gave people a sense of… They knew where they belonged in the world. They weren’t having anxiety about, “What am I supposed to do with my life.” It was just like, “You’re born in this world… ” And you didn’t think about that, you just… That wasn’t even on the table.
Robert A. Gross: Your father’s a farmer, you’re gonna be a farmer.
Brett McKay: Right.
Robert A. Gross: Your father’s a merchant, you’ll be put out to a county house. It was a very small set of institutions that made up the New England way: Town government, which was a combination of the town meeting, and then they elected selectmen and other officers in the town. You’ve got the church, and the idea is one town, one church. You’ve got the militia, where most able-bodied men were expected to train a few times a year. And you’ve got this common… The schools paid for by local taxes, combining the districts that elementary literacy and then the grammar school that trained a select few to go on, a few men to be students at Harvard and enter the ministry. While Boston and other port towns had a variety of voluntary associations, Concord really had very few organizations. In that sense, it was not pluralistic.
Brett McKay: Okay, so the Concord before the Transcendentalists, so in the late 18th century: Very communal, very hierarchal, other people’s business was often your business. What they were doing, you might have a say in that, like, “Well, you can’t do that, ’cause that’s not what we do around here.” But then you start seeing after the revolution, the start of the 19th century, you start to see fissures in this communal ethos manifest themselves in different parts of Concord life. How did that start happening?
Robert A. Gross: ‘Cause the ideals of the 18th century Concord were communal, they were familial, they were inclusive, but they were also increasingly not being achieved.
Brett McKay: Why weren’t they being achieved?
Robert A. Gross: Well, for one thing, Concord founded in 1635 had lots of land to provide for family, but by the 1720s, there were so many sons and daughters and such a fixed amount of land that a good many of Concord’s young were having to go settle elsewhere if they wanted to be farmers. But even the revolution, that was accelerating, and the exodus of the young from the town, put real strains in familial relationships. A father had been accustomed to keep his son on the farm, you know, until mid to late 20s, and you can imagine that there could be real tensions. Here’s a young man, reaches physical maturity, is ready to go out into the world, to marry, and the father says, “Well, I’ll give you land, but I need you here one more season or one more year.” And what you see before the revolution, and then it continued after, is increasing difficulty in passing on this older way of life to the young. Now we jump to the 19th century, and we find that pretty much the expectation of immigration has now built into local life. It’s gonna be the case that at best one son is gonna be able to take over the family farm.
And that son will not only have to take over the family farm, but probably if that son is the eldest, have to post bond to provide for younger brothers and sisters. This is when if the parent is now gone and the will has stated that this is gonna happen. So sons who inherit the farms are often doing so with a burden of debt to take care of their siblings. Or it’s the youngest child who takes over the farm, and is now gonna have to care for the aging parents.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like there’s some generational conflict driven by economics because of how they did things in Concord at the time.
Robert A. Gross: Yeah, there’s a considerable tension now. I mean it’s not as if… Well, in the revolutionary period, the tension was about young people who wanted to reproduce the way of life in which they’ve been raised, and not able to do so in Concord, and so they move away. In the 19th century, it’s increasingly the case that the young people are pressing not to be like their parents, but to do something different.
Brett McKay: So you have Concord, it’s becoming increasingly connected to the wider world, to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. You see an increase in consumerism in Concord; people buying goods just because they want something, not necessarily out of necessity, but because well, they wanna wanna… They want a dress that looks nice, they want a clock that looks nice in their house. How did this increasing consumerism change Concord or at least its communal ethos that it had before the Revolutionary War?
Robert A. Gross: Well, it leads people to deepen their engagement in market transactions ever more than they had done in the colonial period. It’s certainly the case that in the 18th century, people were buying imported goods from England and via England from lots of parts of the world. We wouldn’t have had a controversy over the Tea Act if people hadn’t been importing tea. And they were importing a lot of other fine goods and textiles and the like. The difference is that people were importing fine textiles, and this could be true in the early 19th century, from Europe, for going to visit in the parlor or going to Sunday meeting for worship. Their every day clothes were the mixture of linen and wool, known as linsey-woolsey. So your everyday work clothes you could make on the farm, your fancy clothes you would buy at the store. But once the Industrial Revolution and textiles got going, and once Concord had its own mills, and then you had a Waltham and the Lowell mills, it made ever less sense to make even your work clothes at home.
But if you’re not gonna be making your work clothes at home, then your daughters and your wives and widows are not gonna be spending so much of their time by spinning wheels and looms, coming up with clothing. What’s gonna fill their time? And how are you gonna pay for the goods? So you’re a farmer, you’re gonna deepen your involvement in the marketplace in order to pay for your imported goods. But in addition, as part of the involvement in the market, we need to emphasize that commercial incentives were coming, particularly in the form of merchants and banks, to induce people to engage ever more deeply in market production. A new set of merchants running what were called Cheap Stores, what were maybe the Dollars Stores of the early 19th century, were opening up in the countryside selling goods at a discount for cash. Typically, stores in the 18th and early 19th century had operated on a credit basis, in which you went in and you bought imported goods, and you paid your bills by bringing in commodities that you raised on your farm.
And you didn’t have to settle your accounts often for long periods of time. Only if you did a formal acknowledgement in a note would you have to pay interest if you didn’t pay your bills on time. Once you move to a cash basis in sales, you can eliminate the need for credit and for possibilities of paying interest. So you got a discount, you’re paying cash. And here’s the key thing. Buying and selling at the country store in the 18th and early 19th century could be as much a social occasion as an economic one. There were not necessarily fixed prices, and people would haggle over what they would get in payment for the butter they brought into the store or other goods. When they finally got done with all the haggling, the merchant would typically provide a free glass of toddy or another rum drink. So, sociability and sales were linked together, but once you move to a cash basis, you don’t need that. A lot less haggling, but a lot less social connection.
Brett McKay: And that carried over to just the ethos. People became more individualistic. They weren’t… Yeah, like you were saying, before the Revolutionary War and the shortly after, the way you traded, it was very communal-based. Your reputation was on the line ’cause you bought on credit, and so you had to know everyone in the town, whether they were creditworthy or not. And as you said, there’s that haggling, there’s that social aspect, but as soon as you bring in cash, that stuff stopped mattering. Like you didn’t really… “Well, if you’ve got cash, I’ll take it. That’s all we need. I don’t really care about your reputation as a man.” Another area you explore is the world of religion. What was going on in the world of religion in Concord at the start of the 19th century that you saw more of these fissures in the communal ethos that they once had?
Robert A. Gross: Yeah, so in the 17th century, you will recall, Massachusetts, they expected there to be an established religion, and that was not unusual in most of the colonies. In every town, locals would get together and choose their Protestant faith. It was invariably Congregationalist. By the early 19th century, Massachusetts continued to have a religious establishment that most of the other states of the New Republic had abandoned. Massachusetts’ constitution of 1780 provides that every town should support a public Protestant teacher of piety, religion and morality. The minister is being supported here, not so much ’cause he has a sacred role, but he has a kind of… He is a higher school master, who’s teaching the rules of piety and morality.
So Ezra Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s step-grandfather, comes to Concord in 1778, succeeding William Emerson, the actual blood grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a patriot preacher in the Revolution and died in 1776 as chaplain on an expedition to Ticonderoga. Ripley comes in, becomes minister of the town, and he not only succeeds Emerson in the pulpit, he also succeeds him as the new husband of Emerson’s widow, who’s 10 years older than he. And he comes to occupy and then to own the old manse that was built by Reverend William Emerson. And from Ripley’s point in view, he stands for continuity, ’cause through Emerson, he is linked all the way back to the founding ministers of Concord, founding minister, Peter Buckley.
His greatest desire, Ezra Ripley, was to view the entire community as his parish. He always referred to them as “my people.” Ripley’s sermons and his practices of church government really emphasized people’s behavior socially and ethnically towards one another. He preached what I call in the book an ethic of interdependence. They were all really bound to one another. “Who could live alone and independent?” he once asked. “Who but some bitter hermit or some half-crazed enthusiast would say to society, ‘I have no need of thee’?” In his view, religion was about community, and I think his idea was really… It would be something like an English country vicar, where when people came to the Sunday meeting, they embodied community, but it came at a great cost. And the cost was many people that there was little in the way of spiritual intensity in his faith, and people who grew up in the Calvinist, in New England Congregationalist tradition, also inherited desire for an intense relation to divinity, and some of them were not happy with Ripley’s endless preaching of morality and the rational way to be in the world.
Brett McKay: Ripley’s own step-daughter, Mary Moody Emerson, the aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson and muse of Transcendentalism, she used to parody Ripley as “Dr. Reason.” He had no sense of the divine and the intensity in his faith. He also used the church to uphold not just interdependency, but hierarchy. And there are two key things to mention here: One is that in the church membership, men were infrequently seen. 70% to 75% of church members in Concord in the 18th and first part of the 19th century were women. Men didn’t join typically ’til their mid-40s or even later. By the early… Period before 1820, they were not joined ’til about age 50. And Ripley was having a hard time drawing young people into his congregation. One reason, and we learned this from young people who left, is that he seemed to convey the impression that, “You’re too young to have any independent thoughts of your own about religion. Nobody really cares what you think. Follow your elders.” And by the mid-1820s young people, especially young people who’d come to Concord as newcomers and who weren’t going to be in Concord for all that long, they could see no reason why to join a congregation dominated by old folks, maybe “old fogies” would have been their term, that had little to offer them other than moral lessons in behaving ethically and deferring to your elders.
Also, you made the point that another reason that young people were leaving the Ripley’s church was that, again, is that, his lack of religious fervor or sentiment. There wasn’t that intensity. What was going on? Why were the young people attracted to that in a church?
Robert A. Gross: Well, in 1825-26, there’s a break away, from Ezra Ripley’s Parish and people interested in a much more intense, but also more Calvinistic, form of congregational space, start a congregation of their own. They’re led by Henry David Thoreau’s aunts, who are in the forefront of demanding a new way of worshipping. They view themselves as a little band of poor, but faithful Christians, who start out on their own. And it may be that they wanted both greater Calvinist orthodoxy as well as greater spiritual intensity. Henry David Thoreau’s step-grandmother had actually, in 1810, helped to play a role in creating a mini-revival in Concord. And in her home, Rebecca Thoreau hosted her neighbors who engaged in their own prayer services.
Ezra Ripley was quite alarmed by this. He worried that it would be a repeat of the great awakening of the mid-18th century when people were rejecting established ministers and claiming that you could be born again in a minute, when they were having profoundly emotional experiences of conversion. And to those who look on that great awakening with distrust, they were aghast at the sense that the social order was collapsing when learned authorities were being set aside for someone who came off the farm, was a sinner one day and the next day he said, “Oh, I’m born again. I can now judge you.” So you have a combination of people wanting to break away from learned authority, from the rule by the elders, and a desire for a more intense spiritual experience. I don’t think it was the case that the majority of young people went to the evangelical church, but more went to the evangelical church than ever chose voluntarily to worship with Ezra Ripley.
Brett McKay: So we’ve got… We’re talking about there’s changes going on in religious life, that’s in flux, there’s changes going on in trade and farming and economic life, everything is kind of… We’re seeing a transition from the old way to something else. We’re kind of in a liminal period right now. The other thing you start seeing around the same time, the beginning of the 19th century, is this really fervent interest in self-improvement or cultural improvement in Concord. So you’re seeing these voluntary associations forming, like lyceums, libraries, debating clubs. What was going on, why were young people in particular interested in self-improvement at the time?
Robert A. Gross: Not just young people, but their elders were eager to see the progress of commerce, of manufacturing, and the expansion of minds and spirits throughout the New Republic. You had the start of agricultural societies in the 1820s. Concord was the host for the Society of Middlesex Husbandmen and Manufacturing, and their aim was to promote improved farming through scientific methods by tending to the best practices of the day. And their endless message to farmers was, “Don’t do what your fathers did, just out of unthinking inheritance. Don’t follow superstitions, like timing your farming operations by the phases of the moon. Pay attention to science, be empirical. Reject the past when it’s not useful. And do so in order to make more money off your farm and be able to stay on the homestead that you might otherwise have to give up.” That message, “Pay attention to the best practices of the day. Keep up with current knowledge,” is also being promoted for the schools of Concord. Don’t just use the school books nor Webster’s speller and Jedediah Morse geography that your parents used in 1790, use the new textbooks of the day that are incorporating the latest knowledge.
So when you have the promotion of this break with the past, you then have the central question: So what are the young people to learn and to do? And what are they gonna do if you ask them to find their own way in the world and not just inherit the farm or be in an apprenticeship and do what your father did as a master mechanic and you’ll do the same? Everything is changing. And you have a couple of movements for social and cultural improvement, some of which originate in England. Like the Lyceum Movement, which grows out of efforts by reform-minded manufacturers in Britain to reach their workers. Some in Britain, the deeply conservative, thought the working class never needed an education. If you educate the working class, all you do is make them unhappy. They won’t get any richer, they’ll just know that they could have lived better but don’t. And that would be politically dangerous and invite radicalism and revolution. The reformers in Britain and then their counterpart in America said, “No, let’s educate the working man, so that the working men can learn about science and technology and come to be a participant with his boss in the Industrial Revolution.”
That idea makes its way over to the United States. A man named Josiah Holbrook in Derby, Connecticut outside New Haven, a graduate of Yale, who is trying to run an agricultural school on his family’s farm for young men, when he learns about the British movement and he gets really excited. And he thinks, “I’ll start the American Lyceum where young people can learn and educate one another by getting scientific apparatus to participate, to do experiments, and learn new science by hearing lectures, by studying up themselves, and giving lectures to their neighbors, and by buying a certain number of books to take themselves as reference work.” Why would young men wanna do this? Well, he thinks he can appeal to young men in their 20s to join the Lyceum and improve their lives. He also recommends the sponsorship at Lyceum by their bosses by arguing that young people left on their own in cities are gonna be prone to doing a lot of drinking, and hanging out, and going to places of amusement, then who knows what trouble they’ll get into.
Lyceums could serve as an instrument of temperance and abstinence. Get the young people to improve their minds, not release and relax their spirits. Go to lectures and the likes, go to debating clubs, then do this under the sponsorship of their elders, the merchants and manufacturers who employ them. Concord starts the Lyceum in 1829, and very quickly the Lyceum becomes less of a place to offer improvement, and if you will, moral discipline for young men, but rather a community institution where young women, as well as their mothers and wives of merchants and manufacturers, all come together for shared education. A lot of lectures are given by locals in Concord. I should add that a lot of young people go to Lyceum less for the so called learning lectures, but more for young men, some of whom I quote in the book, who wanna, “I’ll go and meet young women at the lectures.” It’ll look as if they wanna improve themselves and maybe they’ll be good prospects.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from my sponsors. And now back to the show. So this is in the 1820s. Did any of the Transcendentalists go? Like, did Emerson go to Lyceum or debate clubs or things like that?
Robert A. Gross: When I’m describing the lyceum, it’s from 1820 through the 1840s, and Emerson starting in the early 1830s, he witnesses the movement and says, “Hey, I’d like to make my career as a lecturer.” This is as he’s feeling ever more discontent with his position as the Minister of Boston Second Church, a really prestigious pulpit to occupy. And here he is, his father, the Reverend William Emerson, who died when he was a boy, had been the Minister of Boston’s first congregational church, the most prestigious in town. His grandfather, Reverend William Emerson the senior, had been the Minister of Concord, and there’s Waldo. Everybody in his family had been proud and counting on him to carry on the clerical lineage of the family. He doesn’t wanna do that, and he’s feeling increasingly unhappy with his role as the Minister representing the entire community and presiding over rituals that are essential to congregationalist worship, in particular the communal service.
And he feels like it’s a ritual that has become empty for him. And if he can’t perform it, the communion service for the members, he can’t with any integrity remain the Minister of the town. So he resigns, goes to Europe, and then comes back to the United States with the view to being a freelance preacher, someone who won’t have to represent any community, but can give sermons, and become a lecturer. And he can lecture at lyceums, and that’s what he sets out to do. He used the lyceum as his secular pulpit, and he vows that he will not say anything to an audience at a lyceum that he hasn’t thought about, and felt deeply about, and considered not just to please an audience, but to express the truths as he knows them most deeply. And in particular, those truths will be the truths of what comes to be known as Transcendentalism.
Brett McKay: Yeah, this feels like this is one of those shifts in an individual’s life that points to a larger cultural trend because previously, if you wanted to talk about self-improvement, you had to do it over the pulpit at church through the lens of faith, but now you have this emerging possibility of lecturing about self-improvement outside of church. So there’s an emerging culture, and message of self-improvement that’s not attached to religion, and Emerson saw that and he started taking that on. But do we know why Emerson felt he had to resign from being a pastor? What was it? Why didn’t he feel committed to congregationalism. And was there anything going on in his personal life or maybe the wider world that was influencing his ideas of what it meant to have a religious life?
Robert A. Gross: Well, one thing, he’s married, and his wife dies in 1832. And then here he is a widower after having a relatively short marriage of a year and a half. And as now a widower in the pulpit, he’s feeling increasingly rested. He’s been reading thanks to the tutelage of his aunt Mary Moody Emerson. He’s been reading Coleridge, and he’s read Wordsworth, and he’s aware of new views of religion that are coming from German thinkers. And those views of religion cast considerable doubt on the inherited faith, whether it’s Orthodox, Calvinism, or the liberal form of Protestantism that comes to be known as Unitarianism. The higher criticism of the Bible in Germany suggests that neither the Old nor the New Testament are the revealed Word of God, but text written by human beings maybe through some kind of revelation to prophets, but they’re texts that should be studied like any other text.
In addition, as Emerson comes to understand the currency of Romanticism from Germany, he comes to realize that religion is not a creed, it’s not a form of church discipline, it’s not a subjection to community, it’s something else. And he comes to believe, as do other Unitarian ministers in the Boston area in the early to mid 1830s, religion is really a spirit that runs through all things and especially through nature, and that human beings are part and parcel of that. We all have within us, we all incarnate some part of divinity. We might say today that we all share a common human nature. We would say back with… If we were going along with Emerson, that we all share a common divine nature. Common humanity becomes a common divinity.
And that spirit of divinity runs through all things, and it means that you can worship God on a hilltop as well as in a cathedral. It doesn’t really matter whether you believe in total immersion as baptism or a sprinkling of a little bit of water on an infant. It doesn’t matter whether you subject yourself to church discipline and scrutiny or whether you just in private say, “I have faith in God.” All of Emerson’s faith in this new version, now what we call Transcendentalism, means essentially that religion is an individual experience and a profession. And religion then will shift from the communal dimensions and framework that I’ve described to a far more individualistic one. In this sense, Emerson and other Transcendentalists are challenging the authority and the institutions of the New England way. The church, Emerson says, is not gonna reach anyone unless it really conveys an intense spiritual experience from the pulpit by the Minister in sermons to the members of the congregation. And the institutions of authority don’t matter so much as the authority or the individual experiencing faith through experiences in nature.
Brett McKay: So again, you’re seeing this theme of a transition from communal way of life to a more independent individualistic way of life?
Robert A. Gross: Right. And Emerson comes to see that when you take this vision of religion and you merge it with the currents that are going on in politics and in society, you can come up with a faith that is egalitarian, as well as freeing individuals and democratic. There are a couple of things to say first: This vision of religion that I’ve described provides a strategy that Unitarian reformers have in mind for what to do in a world when there’s no longer a religious establishment. 1825 in Concord, the Trinitarians set off in ’26, form their own congregation and worship on their own, build their own meeting house, and you have a collapse of the idea of one town, one church. In 1834, Massachusetts gets rid of the establishment altogether, and it’s the last State in the union to do so. And now all these different religious sects, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Universalists, Baptists, Methodists and still others, are gonna have to compete with one another for members.
Emerson, I think, and the other early Transcendentalists have a mind that this new view of faith, that it’s a spirit that runs through everything, it’s the strategy by which you can compete for souls and members. But in addition, this will broaden into a way of viewing life in America and judging its practices and its institutions. In Emerson’s mind, the highest form of nature is not the discovery of the laws of nature to come up with technological improvements that will advance trade and commerce and promote materialism and consumerism. The highest uses of nature are through… As a conduit to the spirit that runs through all things. And two, the experience of divinity, and the experience, the aesthetic beauty of nature. So that for Emerson this vision of the world anew, through the spirit running through everything, becomes the basis for a critique of the institutions and way of life in New England and Concord as a whole. And from this perspective, Emerson comes to see himself as a spokesman for all the young people, and particularly young men, who can feel within themselves a universal soul, a connection to something higher, to a larger purpose. And yet when they look out in the world that they’re about to enter, what do they find? They find demands to a conformity, demands to harness yourself to the demands of the marketplace, to the counting house, to your boss as the manufacturer.
And from Emerson’s point of view, he looks out and he finds young college graduates, like Henry David Thoreau, who say, “Am I really gonna give up my divine spirit, my potential for perfectibility, just to make a living?” “I can’t do that,” said as Emerson views young man at the time saying, “I have to do something higher or I will wait to join the society as a whole.” That becomes the radicalism of Transcendentalism, to provide a space for young men and young women to say, “I’m not gonna conform, I’m gonna discover myself. I will serve society, but not through the answering to Ezra Ripley, but by answering to my inner potential, cultivating that. And when I do that, then I will serve the community.”
Brett McKay: So what you’re seeing, it’s almost anti-institutional. So you see them rejecting church, not joining churches, ’cause they feel like you don’t need a church, you can just go and be a part of nature and you experience God that way individually. But then also another institution you saw a lot of young men reject, that their fathers and grandfathers were a part of, was Freemasonry. During this time in the 1820s Freemasons are having a hard time getting young men to join. Was it for that same reason, they just didn’t wanna conform to another institution?
Robert A. Gross: Well, I think it’s a little more complicated. So, remember, I first described colonial Concord as not having much in the way of voluntary association. Well, Concord does start to get voluntary associations in the 1790s, but they were a particular sort, like the masonic lodges. They’re top-down institution, in which if you’re gonna start a lodge, you have to get permission from a higher lodge. The masons were offering feisty young men in the mid to late 20s, who would go for… In an increasingly fluid world needed to build attachments as they moved from one place to another. And so to join a masonic lodge, if you were an inspiring young merchant or a mechanic, or a lawyer, or a doctor, and you knew that you might grow up in one place, get trained in another, and try to make a living in another place. If you were a mason, you could, in a sense, carry a letter of recommendation from one town to another, show it to the new lodge and people would welcome you.
What does the masons have to offer? Well, the Freemasons, as they took shape in the mid-18th century and after, claimed to be in possession of the secrets of nature, which could be rationally understood as they’d been passed on from architects of King Solomon’s temple all the way down to the present. In fact, it was a group organized in the late 17th century, whose knowledge didn’t descend from time immemorial, but was relatively recent. But that knowledge would be passed on to the members through secret ceremonies of initiation. The masons actually professed to embody reason and science, but their reason and science wasn’t simply transparent to all readers. It had been passed on as a secret knowledge within rituals that nobody else could know, and once you were initiated into Freemasonry, you were duty-bound, sworn to never, ever reveal those secrets to anyone else. And there were various levels of Masonry that you could take. You can become a master Mason and then pursue your knowledge to ever higher levels, so there’s a kind of curious contradiction in Freemasonry. It’s an inner circle that you’re admitted to, and I should add, one black ball could kill your application for membership.
And so, you could apply, if you were accepted, you could have access to this, a recondite knowledge that nobody else had. And yet, as a Mason you would frequently participate in public ceremony; the Masons had rituals to dedicate and consecrate cornerstones and buildings and monuments when they were laid in the early American republic. So they’re conducting public ceremonies and they’re suggesting that their knowledge will foster virtue in the public good in the new American republic. But they’ll do so through private meetings and initiations that nobody has access. By the mid-1820s, what you have is an institution that’s growing in influence and power in the New Republic, but in fact, invisible and un-transparent to people who aren’t members. When in the 1826 a man named William Morgan in Western New York reveals the secrets of masonry, he’s a disgruntled mason who wants to get even with his former fraternity brothers. When he reveals the secret of masonry with a friendly printer, he’s whisked away by hostile members of the masonic fraternity and never seen again ’til his body washes up in Western New York. That sets off what’s called the anti-masonic crusade.
That doesn’t come to Concord until 1833 and I won’t go into the reasons why the delayed response, but, what you now have is an attack on an institution that claims to be operating in the name of virtue, that’s top down and undemocratic and utterly un-transparent. And yet, exercising exceedingly extraordinary influence over the course of town and county and state and nation. It’s not that it promotes the rebellion, but just something else… Masonry reclaims to offer knowledge of science and nature. Well, you don’t have to join the Masons to get that. The Lyceum Movement will now make that available either for free or for maybe a quarter to go to a lecture. Whereas it can cost you some $20 to join the Masons. So you don’t need to get knowledge from the Masons. If you’re worried about your virtue and you need to be careful and not drink too much, well, join a temperance society. So you don’t have to be a Mason for that. And what if, it turns out, you want to make your way as a future husband and father? Well, Masons come under a large suspicion for their all-male ceremonies, where it’s rumored there is rivalry and obscenity and too much drinking. Instead, stay at home with your wife and your children. There’s a new ideal of domesticity now that is at odds with your earlier practices of heavy drinking, not just in the Masons but in the town, and practices of all male groups, where a new ideal of domesticity is taking shape, Freemasonry goes into abeyance.
Brett McKay: Okay, so you’re seeing here again, you’re… This not, I’m gonna say a rebellion, it’s kind of a rebellion, against older institutions, these older institutions, whether it’s church, Freemasonry, they have competition now in the form of lyceums, debate clubs, libraries. Family life is becoming a source of competition for attention. And then you also have Transcendentalism saying, “Yeah, you could just do this stuff on your own because you are connected to nature and you’re connected to the divine on your own, you don’t need to belong to another institution to do this stuff.”
Robert A. Gross: Exactly, so that Transcendentalism becomes the most radical of the rejections of the older institutional world. Remember Emerson is famous for once saying, “An institution is just the lengthened shadow of the man.” Institutions in effect are transient and insubstantial. The only thing that’s enduring and substantial is spirit and soul of the individual.
Brett McKay: We also, at this time, Emerson is… He’s doing the lyceum circuit, he’s becoming influential outside of Concord. Transcendentalism is spreading. Emerson takes on a student, we call him, he’s a friend, Henry David Thoreau. They have an interesting relationship because on the one hand, Emerson saw a lot of potential in Thoreau and admired him, but there’s also a tension between the two because they both embrace Transcendentalism, but it was different. How would you describe the difference between Thoreau’s approach Transcendentalism from Emerson’s?
Robert A. Gross: Emerson is the theorist and philosopher. Thoreau is a guy who insists on how do you put it in practice. So Thoreau and Emerson don’t meet until the fall of 1837, when Thoreau, having graduated from Harvard at the end of August, takes over as the master of the village grammar school in the center of town, the very school that he had attended for a time before going to the private academy in Concord. Emerson has now been living in Concord, married and starting to have children in 1835, so he’s new to the town. The two of them meet. Emerson has been aware of Thoreau as a really talented young man. They meet and they become fast friends. And Emerson begins to refer in his journal and letters to his Scottish friend, Thomas Carlyle, refers to Thoreau as “My Henry Thoreau.” So Thoreau is the protege of Emerson, and Emerson is just thrilled at the way in which he says “My ideas are given expression by Thoreau in incredibly sharp and clever ways.” And Thoreau has, in 1836, read Emerson’s little book, Nature, and being quite taken with Waldo’s ideas.
They’re evermore closely connected to each other in the next few years. Thoreau will come to live in Emerson’s house, be a babysitter for the kids, be a handyman who helps around the house. He’s incredibly adept at all kinds of physical tasks from farming to fixing things in the house. Tasks at which Emerson’s pretty incompetent. So Thoreau is close to Emerson, so much so that when some of Thoreau’s classmates from Harvard come out to visit Concord they see him and Emerson together and one says, “If I close my eyes I could not tell which one was speaking.” Who was Emerson and who was Thoreau. That Thoreau had taken to imitating Emerson so closely, not just in the tone of voice, but the way he spoke, in the measured-ness of his speech. And so much so that James Russell Lowell parodied Thoreau as basically stealing his apples from Emerson’s orchard. No one wants to be lambasted and satirized as imitator, but think about what it’s like, when what you’re implicating is the philosophy of authentic individuality, and the person who is coming to be identified with that philosophy is Ralph Waldo Emerson.
You’re depending on Emerson, who’s hiring you, he’s giving you literary opportunities, he’s giving you access to his friends in his library, and you are seen by people as less the genius in your own right than the knock-off, the imitative knock-off of Ralph Waldo Emerson. And you’re trying to build your own career, you decide you’re gonna make letters your profession, literature your way of earning a living. How do you do that when every time you’re introduced, you’re introduced on terms that are already set by Emerson. That’s gonna be the case when Emerson finds Thoreau an opportunity to live near Manhattan and be a tutor for Emerson’s nephews on Staten Island where Emerson’s brother, William, is a lawyer. And it’ll be the case even when you live at Walden ’cause you’re squatting rent free on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. So Thoreau is having to feel acutely the tension between his own authentic individual genius and the dependence upon someone who essentially needs to wish away that dependence as Emerson, by saying, “Everyone has to be an individual, even though I’m encouraging you to be an individual dependent on me.”
Brett McKay: And as you said, Emerson was… He’s the more theoretical guy, he was the guy out there describing the big idea of Transcendentalism. And Thoreau decided, “You know what, I’m actually gonna do this.” And the way he did it, his famous experiment at Walden where he built this little house. And you make the point that a lot of people make fun of Thoreau’s Walden experiment because like, well, you know, he was still by his family, he’d go visit his family. But you point out the fact, the reason why it was so weird for Thoreau to do that was that no one lived by themselves in Concord, except for maybe a few widows who were doing really poorly economically. Everyone else lived with somebody, and that’s what made Thoreau’s experiment of building the house just so he can live in it, such a radical expression of Transcendentalism.
Robert A. Gross: Yeah, when I taught my courses that dealt with Concord in the first part of the 19th century, I would always come into class and say, “You know we talk about this period from 1800 to 1850 as a period where so many Americans are going west, going to the so-called Frontier and carving out farmsteads for themselves.” And I always ask the question, “So how unusual was it to say, ‘man lives alone in woods.’ That must have been a common phenomenon.” But not in Eastern long settled New England. Maybe it was true on the frontier of the west, but in Concord in 1837, no more than a dozen people lived alone. And as you said, they were almost all widows and one or two solitary men. In 1850, there were only about three or four people who lived alone, nobody lived alone. And I quoted a passage from Ezra Ripley, that grew out of his ethic of inter-dependence, “We need society, we need one another to get by.”
But Thoreau is doing something different, Thoreau’s experiment at Walden is an attempt to provide an answer to the question of how you can get a living in this society and cultivate and express your higher self in the very process. Let’s analogize to the present: An awful lot of people hold jobs Monday through Friday in which they don’t like what they’re doing, but can’t wait ’til the weekend or vacations, when they take them, to really express themselves. Thoreau means to challenge that dichotomy, to say you ought to be able to express your higher self through the very way you get a living. So Thoreau wants to live a life of integrity, even as he’s working. And the experiment at Walden is an attempt to show that you can live with integrity, realize your higher self in the very course of making a living.
His emphasis is always practical. It’s whatever you believe, how do you put it into practice and make it authentic? That’s why the apocryphal story is, that when Thoreau went to jail for a night to protest the Mexican War, Emerson supposedly came, looked through the jail door and say, “Henry, what are you doing inside?” And supposedly Thoreau says, “Waldo, why are you outside?” That is probably apocryphal, but it brings out the fundamental difference that Thoreau is always about how do we lead a life of integrity in a society that opposes us at every turn.
Brett McKay: So as I was reading your book, I couldn’t help but to make connections between the world of the Transcendentalist and our own day. So the way… The world that you’ve described here in our conversation and in the book is a world in flux for the Transcendentalists. You have people rejecting institutions, leaving churches, organizations that were once a staple of life are no longer… They no longer have sway. And I think you can see that today. I mean, your churches, like mainline Protestantism is on the decline, but you’re seeing the rise of different evangelical non-denominational churches. You’re seeing old organizations that had a prominent part in American life wither away and not have that influence. I’m curious, do you think there are any lessons we can take from the Transcendentalists in navigating our own time of flux and transition?
Robert A. Gross: Well, I think one will be to acknowledge our condition. I mean the decline of the mainline Protestant churches, as well as a falling attendance in Catholic Churches, points to this distrust of inherited institution. Whether people are on the right politically or on the left, look at how much Americans have been rejecting the gatekeepers of all the authorities of the past, the institutions that once had so much influence in guiding our lives. But think also of Thoreau’s fundamental question: How do we lead a life of integrity in a world where the economic choices seem to militate against it? Thoreau talked about the curse of trade. Lots and lots of young people today are talking about the curse of conformity and trade and the way in which technology dominates their lives.
We need two things at once: We need to get renewal from the Transcendentalists, the faith in individual possibility. And we need to also renew from Ezra Ripley, the faith that we’re all bound together in this work as fellow human beings and fellow Americans. That it seems to me fundamental challenges that in the world of the 18th and early 19th century, interdependence went along with hierarchy and homogeneity. We’ve gotta find a way toward interdependence that goes with democracy, pluralism and equality.
Brett McKay: Well Bob, is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work?
Robert A. Gross: Well, they can find The Transcendentalists and Their World for sale at bookshop org I think it is, at the Thoreau Society’s online bookstore, and obviously, at all the major bookstores that distribute through the internet.
Brett McKay: Well, Bob Gross, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Robert A. Gross: Well, thank you so much, it’s really been fun to answer your great questions.
Brett McKay: My guest there is Bob Gross, he’s the author of the book “The Transcendentalists and Their World.” It’s available on Amazon.com and book stores everywhere, make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/concord 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 on 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 take one minute to give us 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 for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brent McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.
The post Podcast #779: The World of the Transcendentalists and the Rise of Modern Individualism appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
Dating is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. Given that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many people aren’t sure of the best way to go about it, especially since the rise of modern technology and dating apps has made an already murky landscape even more confusing.
If you feel like you could use some expert, research-backed guidance to navigating this world, enter today’s guest, Logan Ury. Logan is a behavioral scientist turned dating coach, the Director of Relationship Science for the Hinge dating app, and the author of How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love. Today on the show, Logan explains the three dating tendencies and the three types of attachment styles that can influence, and potentially sabotage, your ability to get into a healthy relationship. She shares the easiest thing you can do to be more successful in making connections on the dating apps, and the criteria to use for figuring out how to best meet people in person. Logan then gets into how to design a good first date, and what to tell the other person if the date doesn’t go well, rather than ghosting them. She also makes the case for why you shouldn’t be over reliant on feeling the proverbial spark when deciding whether to see someone again. We end our conversation with tips on breaking up with someone you’ve been dating for awhile.
Resources Related to the Podcast * Logan’s 3 dating tendencies quiz * Optimal stopping * Peak-end rule * AoM Podcast #707: Did You Pick the Right Partner? * AoM Podcast #584: How to Avoid Falling in Love With the Wrong Person * AoM Podcast #474: The Surprises of Romantic Attraction * AoM Podcast #559: How to Handle Difficult Conversations * AoM Article: How to Make a Great Last Impression * AoM Article: How to Ask Better Questions on a First Date
Connect With Logan Ury * Logan’s Website * Logan on Instagram * Logan on Twitter
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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Dating is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. Given that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many people aren’t sure of the best way to go about it, especially since the rise of modern technology and dating apps has made an already murky landscape even more confusing. If you feel like you can use an expert research-backed guidance to navigate this world, enter today’s guest, Logan Ury. Logan is a behavioral scientist turned dating coach, the Director of relationship science for the Hinge dating app, and the author of How Not to Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love.
Today on the show, Logan explains the three dating tendencies and the three types of attachment styles that can influence and potentially sabotage your ability to get to healthy relationships. Logan then gets into how to design a good first date, what to tell the other person if the date doesn’t go well, rather than ghosting them. She also makes the case for why you shouldn’t be over-reliant on feeling the proverbial spark when deciding whether to see someone again. We end our conversation with tips on breaking up with someone you’ve been dating for a while. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/dating.
Alright, Logan Ury, welcome to the show.
Logan Ury: Thank you so much for having me.
Brett McKay: So you got a book called How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Signs that will help you find love. So, you are a behavioral scientist who became a dating coach. I think you’re the first behavioral scientist/dating coach I’ve met. How did that happen?
Logan Ury: Oh, thank you. Yes, I like to defy expectations. Well, I’ve always had these two interests, I’ve had this interest in psychology, behavioral science, which is the study of how we make decisions, and then I’ve had this second interest in sex, dating, love, relationships. And so, at different points in my life, I’ve been able to pursue them in different ways, but I had the opportunity to take what I’ve done in the field of behavioral science and apply it to love and dating, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last, I don’t know, almost a decade, approaching a decade. And so, it’s basically like, why are people not getting into relationships? It’s because they’re making poor decisions along the way, they’re not putting themselves out there, they’re dating the wrong people, they’re prioritizing the wrong things, they are not going on the second date when they should, they’re marrying the wrong person.
And so, how can I break relationships down into these tiny decisions… Well, they’re not tiny, but these decisions that occur over a lifetime, and then how can I actually help people make better decisions by telling them what their blind spots are, what’s affecting their decision-making and how they should consider that decision instead?
Brett McKay: Fantastic. So you started the book talking about the fact that a lot of people today are lamenting that dating is harder than ever. I’ve got friends… Or I talk to kids who are in their 20s, they’re in college, they’re out of college, and they describe the dating scene, and I’m like, Wow, that’s… I don’t know anything about that, that sounds terrible. Why does dating feel harder than ever? I mean, what’s changed in the past, say, 20 years that makes it more difficult?
Logan Ury: Yeah, so dating as we know it is actually a pretty new concept. So dating in terms of I as an individual find the person who I wanna be with, that concept has only been around since around the 1890s. Before that, either there was a match maker or your parents would arrange your marriage, you know, you would marry the person with the land next door, so that your parcels of land could be connected. And so, my first thought I really wanna leave people with is, if you feel like dating is unnatural, that’s because it is. We are not born knowing how to date. Yes, we are born knowing how to love, yes, love is natural, but dating is relatively new in the span of human history. Then you think about online dating and online dating, even just using a basic website, started around 1994 and 1995, and then the swiping apps started about 10 years ago. And so, everything that we’re experiencing is really a seismic shift in the span of human history.
So, some things about dating right now are easier. If you are in what’s called a thin market, where it’s hard for you to find someone… So this could be over 50 LGBTQ+ community, or living in a rural area, online dating has definitely helped you, because you don’t have to go to a bar and say, Who here is looking for someone like me, you just know who those people are. But in other ways, dating has become really hard, one of the reasons is this idea of the paradox of choice. And this is a concept from the professor Barry Schwartz, who says that while we’re drawn to choice, many times having too many options is actually really stressful for us, because we don’t know what to choose, we fear we’re making the wrong choice, and then even when we choose, we feel regret, Oh, did I mess that one up?
And so there are many options in modern dating. There’s also a lot of pressure on us to get it right. I wonder if this is what you hear with your listeners, but there’s this feeling of, this is the most important decision I’ll ever make. I really only get one shot at choosing the right partner. I don’t get support from a religious figure or a matchmaker or my family, this is something that falls on me, and so we have more freedom, we have more chance to express ourselves as individuals, but that also means that when you’re writing your own story and you don’t like that story, you only have yourself to blame.
Brett McKay: Okay, so it sounds like the… Why dating is hard? It all comes down to choice. And this is where Behavioral Science comes in, ’cause behavioral science is all about making choices.
Logan Ury: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Alright, so when you first sit down with a client, dating coach client, the first step you do is you help them figure out what their dating tendency is, and there’s three types, you list out in the book, what are these dating tendencies, and how can knowing your dating tendency help you become more effective in your romantic life?
Logan Ury: This is something that I developed through working with clients where I was like, Okay, I’m having all these clients from different countries, different walks of life, different ages, but they have this thing in common, they all have these unrealistic expectations. And so, I took that knowledge of working with clients, I developed it into this framework, which is also a quiz called The Three Dating Tendencies, and now I use that to help people who read my book, and I still use it with clients. So the first tendency is the romanticizer, and they have unrealistic expectations of relationships. So, this is the friend of yours, or maybe it’s you, who says, I love love, I really want that romantic how we met story. I don’t wanna meet someone online, that’s not romantic. And they have this view in their head that there’s a soulmate, one person out there for them, when they meet them, they’ll just know if it clicks, and if it’s the right person, then the relationship will be easy. And if the relationship is hard, well then, clearly it’s not the right person.
And so for the romanticizer, the work is really around demystifying relationships. Look, I don’t believe there’s one person out there for you, I think there’s a lot of different person… Different people who you can have a great relationship with. Some have certain pros and cons, others have certain pros and cons, you get to decide what matters to you, and you can make different good choices with a number of people. And so for them, it’s about getting rid of this idea of the one or the soul mate and helping them understand, who cares how you met, that’s not what makes a relationship romantic. What makes a relationship romantic is putting in the work, seeing results, growing with someone, building a family, designing the life you like, learning how to have hard conversations, continuing to have sex with a person, and hopefully the sex gets better. All of that is what’s romantic.
So the next one is the maximizer, and I have to say this is many of the clients that I have, and I bet it’s many of the people who listen to the show. So, the maximizer is the person who has unrealistic expectations of their partner. And so, they have this idea in their head that they can find the perfect person, they just have to keep looking. And so, this person is obsessed with research, if they’re going on a trip, they’re gonna read the Yelp reviews and the Trip Advisor reviews. If they’re buying camping gear, they’re gonna go to Wirecutter and find the perfect ultralight tent that can fit one person or 10 person, whatever it is. And so, when they apply that concept to dating, they feel like, Oh, I just haven’t met the perfect person yet, I have to keep looking.
And so my work with the Maximizer is helping them understand that it’s not about finding the perfect person. It’s about finding a great person and then building a relationship with them. And that this story in their head that if they just keep looking one day that person will appear isn’t true, they likely have already dated someone who would make a great partner, and the work is actually finding that person, committing to them and building something, not waiting around for someone who could be 5% hotter or 5% more ambitious.
Brett McKay: And a point you make with a maximizer is the solution isn’t to settle. A lot of people think why he’s gotta settle, you’re not saying that, you don’t need to settle and just kind of just accept whatever. It’s just don’t try to over-optimize, ’cause then you’ll never find somebody.
Logan Ury: Yeah, that’s said really well. It’s not about settling. I feel like settling has become this toxic word in our society where if you’re somebody who cares or someone who’s passionate or someone with goals, settling is the opposite of what you wanna do. And no, I don’t like settling either. So there’s this really great word called satisficing, and this is also coined by Barry Schwartz, the professor that I mentioned before. And what I love about this word is, I think, it does something really smart to shift our mindset from, Oh, settling equals bad to satisficing equals good. And so, what satisficing is it’s, I set a bar, I set a benchmark, and it can be a high bar, but when I achieve that bar, I stop looking. And so, for example, if you’re looking for a car, you could say, I wanna find a used hybrid with no more than 20,000 miles, that doesn’t cost more than $20,000, and I wanna be able to get it in the next month.
And then, you look, and when you find that car, you say, Great, I found it, now I’m gonna buy it. You don’t sit around maximizing, saying, well, 20,000 miles might be too much, or well, should I just wait until the 2023 models are out here? You said, I had a standard, I met it, now I’m going to take this opportunity and move forward with it. And so, satisficers do have high bars, but when they achieve that high bar, they commit to it, whereas maximizers, even when they make a choice, they’re always wondering, what else could I have done? And so, how this applies to dating is that you can have high standards, but when you meet someone like that, invest in the relationship, commit to them, don’t find that person and then say, You know, I really like trail running, and she’s just not into it. Could I find someone just like her except… Plus trail running?
Brett McKay: Well, you also… You’re bringing this idea of optimal stopping theory to help you overcome maximizing.
Logan Ury: There’s a concept called the secretary problem, and I learned about this through the book Algorithms to Live By. The secretary problem is based on this line of mathematical inquiry called optimal stop theory. And so, basically that’s a fancy way of saying, when you’re making a decision, what’s the right point where you should actually choose and stop looking? And so, the example that they give is, imagine that you’re hiring a secretary and you have 100 possible candidates, and you have to go through them one at a time, and after each one, say yes or no. And you don’t wanna go through all 100, because what if the last person isn’t very good and that’s the only person you can hire? And it takes time, every person that you interview is, you not having that admin who starts working for you. But you also don’t wanna choose too early because you haven’t seen what’s out there.
And so, there is a mathematically correct answer to this, which is that you should interview one-third of the candidates, so 33 of the candidates. Then you say, who was the single best person from this first third? That person is now your benchmark. The next time that you find someone who’s as good or better than that first best candidate from the first third, you hire that person. And so you go through a third, you see who’s out there, create a benchmark, and then you hire the next person who’s like that. And with dating, you can say, Alright, well, I definitely don’t know how many people in my life I’m gonna date, there’s nothing like a hundred candidates, but you might say, I think I’m gonna date from the age of 18 to 40, and so, what would be a third of my way through that age range? And you would say, it’s about 26.1 years old.
So you say by the time I’m 26, I would have already met someone who’s my meaningful benchmark. The next time I find someone who’s as good or better than that person in terms of how much I like them, I will commit to that person. And so, when people hear me say this, they get stressed because they say, I’m older than 26 and have I missed out and should I go tell my ex-girlfriend that I love her and it’s… No, it’s not so literal. It’s a concept that says, You’ve likely already met someone great, and the next time you find someone great, invest in them, don’t keep looking, because there are so many people that knock on my door at 43, 44, or 45, who are like, I just kept looking and I thought the person person would appear, but it turns out I did date a lot of great people, I just didn’t commit to them, and now it’s even harder to find someone.
Brett McKay: Alright, so we talked about romanticizer, maximizer, what’s the third one?
Logan Ury: Sure, the third one is a hesitater, and there are many hesitaters right now during the pandemic. And hesitaters are people who say, I’m just not ready to date. They have unrealistic expectations of themselves, they think I’ll be eligible to date, I’ll be lovable when, you know, I lose 10 pounds, I get a better job, I clean up my apartment, I finally move cities. And so, they’re always creating this excuse why they’re just not datable yet. When the truth is that no one’s ever 100% ready for anything including dating. And so for the hesitater, it’s about the idea of stop waiting and start dating. Set a deadline for when you’re gonna start dating, maybe three weeks from now and hold yourself accountable to it or get a friend to do that. Take some pictures for your online dating profile, get some feedback, think of some good first date questions, some first date activities, and just get out there. And there’s really two reasons why it’s so critical to start this. One is, the only way to get better at dating is by dating, and two, the only way to figure out who you wanna be with, what kinda person makes you happiest long-term is by actually dating different people and seeing what side of you they bring out.
Brett McKay: And you can also see hesitaters within a relationship, there’s like, couples who have been dating for years, and they’ve been talking about marriage, but then it’s like, Well, we gotta wait until we both have jobs and we can have a house, and then they end up never getting married even though that is something they want.
Logan Ury: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I think the concept of a hesitater can really apply in many places. I’ve done some interviews with entrepreneurs where I apply the three dating tendencies to business, and the hesitater is the person who says, Well, I wanna start a clean energy startup, but first, I have to get a Master’s degree in Energy, then I have to interview a hundred people who work in the space. Then I have to network with this, and it’s like, instead of just starting and learning by going and being willing to make mistakes, they create this perfect future scenario in which they’ll be ready, and it’s much better to be the person who’s in the arena practicing, making mistakes and learning, than the person who’s always creating an excuse about why doing something in the future will be better.
Brett McKay: So those are the three dating tendencies, another thing you do with your clients is you try to figure… Help them figure out their attachment style. And this is from the world of psychology or social psychology, how can understanding your attachment style help you in your relationships?
Logan Ury: So, this is something that’s really, really based in research, this is not something that somebody made up. This is based on years of developmental psychology research, going back to a professor named John Bowlby. And the idea here is that in our childhood we develop different attachment styles to our primary caregiver, and they’ve been able to trace those attachment styles to actually adult romantic relationships, and that’s what I’ll focus on right now. And so, there’s three styles. One of them is the anxiously attached dater. This is the person who fears that they’re going to be abandoned. So, they feel like, if you go to a bar and you don’t text them, you must have met someone else and you’re not interested, and they get very triggered and they get very worried that you’re going to leave them. And so, they go into this kind of danger zone, and once they’re in that danger zone, they do something called protest behavior. So they might call you a hundred times, send you 15 angry texts, they might threaten to leave.
They are basically acting out because they feel activated or triggered, and they want you to make them feel better and say, No, no, no, no, I was just… There was bad Wi-Fi or bad service at the bar and da-da-da-da. This person always wants to be in touch, because they’re afraid that you’re gonna leave them. Then there’s somebody called the avoidant attachment style. These are people who are afraid that they’re gonna be smothered, they feel like whenever they’re dating someone, that person takes up all their free time, takes up their space, they don’t have time to be an individual. And so the avoidant attached person is constantly concerned with pushing people away, this is the person who says, I just don’t have time to date, I need to focus on work, and she slept over, but she wouldn’t leave in the morning, and I just wanted her out of my apartment, right? It’s like they are just… Feel constricted and they wanna push that person away.
And then a securely attached person, they’re sort of the heroes of this, they are the best of both, so they’re comfortable with intimacy, but they’re also comfortable with independence. And they know how to have boundaries, but they also know how to get close to someone. And so, when you look at the numbers, around 50% of daters are securely attached, but when you’re out there dating, it doesn’t feel like that. And the reason is that securely attached people are really good at getting into partnerships, and so, they’re actually out of the dating pool, and they’re in relationships. And what you have are the anxious and avoidant people dating each other.
And this is really problematic because they reinforce each other’s worst habits. The anxiously attached person thinks whenever I date someone, they pull away, and the avoidant attached person thinks whenever I date someone, they smother me. And so they are actually doing those exact things to each other, in what we call the anxious-avoidant loop, and often the work that I do with people is help them understand, Oh, you are anxiously attached, you are obsessed with the chase, you get angry when someone’s not in touch, and you worry that they’re going to abandon you. Once you decide you like someone, you put them on a pedestal and you think that they’re perfect and you avoid red flags, and by helping them understand these habits, they can stop dating avoidant people, they can start looking for a securely attached partner, and they can work on their own triggers, so that next time something like this happens, they can actually help themselves before they go into that danger zone and start with all that protest behavior.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Just, yeah, it’s good to know your attachment style, ’cause then you can figure out if I need to go to therapy to help me be less neurotic about people I’m connected with, or to be less avoidant. That can go a long way.
Logan Ury: Yeah. I mean, I’m talking about a lot of frameworks here, but the whole point is know who you are, know where you thrive, know where you tend to get caught up, understand the premise, it’s helpful to have a term for it and then do something about it, so if you know that you’re an anxiously attached dater who loves the chase, who tends to date avoidant people, then learn what an avoidant person looks like, and next time that happens, say No, I’m not going down this path again, I am not making the same decision. I know where this ends, I am going to make a different choice, which is hanging up that relationship and pursuing somebody who’s more securely attached.
Brett McKay: Okay, so one of the problems that people have when they’re dating is that they think they know what they want in a partner, and I think this applies to other domains too, Oftentimes, we think we know what we want in a job or even a car or a house, but when we find that partner that has those qualities that we think we want, sometimes we still feel dissatisfied with the relationship, so the question is like, Do we really know what we want, and how do we figure out what we actually will like in a partner or in a relationship?
Logan Ury: Yeah, so I love the way you explained that premise, which is that, in general, people think that their preferences are consistent, so they think if you showed me any number of menus that had the same items on them, even if they were displayed in different ways, I would choose the same thing, or I would always get this bottle of wine, or I would always prefer this movie, and we just know from behavioral science research that that’s not true. Our decisions are heavily impacted by the environment in which we make them, and so what that means is you could make a different choice about food, if the menu present it differently, you can make a different choice about wine if you’re in a different type of grocery store, and when it comes to dating, you make different choices based on how the app presents the person how the person presents themselves, etcetera.
And so when people come to me for dating coaching, sometimes they say, Oh, I actually don’t need help figuring out what I want. I know exactly what I want, I just need your help finding this person. And then they tell me about their spreadsheets of all the different people they have dated, and they figured out exactly what they want, and it’s usually some combination of height, weight, certain type of graduate degree, certain income, it depends on who I’m talking to, but they have this very precise image of their head, and they feel like the only thing holding them back is that they haven’t met that person yet, and so I really like to switch things up and say it’s possible that the kind of person who’s going to make you happiest long-term is not like this person, and you could meet someone exactly like this, and it wouldn’t work out because they could bring out a sad side of you, they could not be that supportive.
They could make you feel self-conscious because they’re so accomplished. You have this image in your head of who you should be with, but it doesn’t mean that that’s actually who will make you happy long-term, and so I try to encourage people to really be more open-minded and date like a scientist, and that means dating different types of people, seeing what side of you that person brings out and actually be willing to embrace a different type of person.
Brett McKay: No, you make the point that I like how you describe it, is like you wanna look for a life partner not a prom date, but typically when we we’re asked, what do we want in a potential romantic partner, we describe the prom date. So they’re good looking, they’re popular, they’ve got a lot of status, they have a lot of money, but that might give you some satisfaction in the short term, might be a great date, but it might not be a great long-term partner. Instead, you should be looking at things like, do you get along well? Are they kind? Are they emotionally stable? Can you have the discussion about hard things? Those are the things that will give you long-term satisfaction in a relationship.
Logan Ury: Exactly, and I feel like somebody listening could be like, Yeah, that’s obvious. Of course, you should do that, but no, I’m telling you, when I work with people and they bring relationships to me or tell me about people they’ve dated in the past, they really are prioritizing the wrong thing. And so this is the idea that a lot of us are dating the “prom date” and think back to who you went to prom with, or who you wanted to go to prom with, and I can tell you for myself, it’s somebody who’s attractive, would be fun, would dance the night away with, and maybe you wanna hook up with them at the end of the night. You’re not thinking about are they reliable, are they gonna pick our kids up from the dentist? Can I depend on them? No, you’re just thinking about fun in the moment, and it’s fine to go to the prom with someone like that, but when you’re 35 years old and you’re dating, you need to move past the prom date and you need to move to what I call the life partner, and this is someone who’s going to be reliable, who you can make hard decisions with, who you trust, who you can take turns having issues and the other person is going to take care of you. And so if you are listening to this and you’re still dating the prom date, it’s time to make a conscious shift towards finding a long-term partner and not just a person who you wanna dance the night away with.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for words from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. And along the lines of this idea that you think you know what you want in a romantic partner in the abstract versus who you actually pick and end up with, you highlight research in your book from Paul Eastwick, and we’ve had him on the podcast before, and he did this study with students, where on the first day of class, they all gave each other ratings as to attractiveness, and those scores are really consistent, pretty much everyone said the same people were the most attractive or the least attractive, but then he re-did the survey at the end of the semester. And people’s scores had changed, and it really varied, it was all over the place. So someone who so someone who thought one person was not attractive at the beginning of the semester, now they found them more attractive, and then someone they thought that was attractive at the beginning of the semester, now they found them less attractive, so I was like their classmates attractiveness had risen and fallen as they had gotten to know them more throughout the semester.
Logan Ury: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought up that research, and one way that I would explain it is, one of my favorite ways to spend time pre-pandemic, etcetera, is going to these retreat weekends. So one of my friends organizes 50 people, you stay in this amazing house in Lake Tahoe, you cook meals together, you eat together. You have presentations. It’s kind of an un-conference. And if you lined up all 50 people the first day of the conference and you had to rank them in order of attractiveness, people would probably have similar answers. We all would say, this type of person is more attractive than that. Luckily, we don’t do anything like this, but theoretically, by the end of the weekend, if I said to you, Who did you find the most attractive or who did you like the most, the answers would differ because it would be based on, Oh, did we cook a meal together and talk about how actually both of our fathers passed away and we have that in common, or did you lead a hike with that person? And do did you admire them? And so, yes, there’s generally agreement on attractiveness, but that’s just based on first impressions of physical attractiveness. As you get to know people over time, different people stand out to you, and so the idea there is it’s not consistent, and it’s super impacted by the experience of being around a person.
And so this is a good thing to keep in mind. There’s a concept called relationshipping, which is the process of dating and getting into a relationship. Unfortunately, many of us are now doing what’s called relation-shopping, which is shopping for someone as if they were a Bluetooth headset that you’re getting on Amazon. But the truth is that humans are not searchable goods, they are not items that you can put into the specs and say, Well, this Bluetooth speaker is a little lighter, but this one’s a little cheaper, but this one has higher volume, no, humans are what’s called experiential goods. You have to be around us to see what it’s really like, and experiential goods are things like movies or wine where one person could love it, the other person could hate it. So if you actually think about, Oh, people are different, they have to be experienced to be understood, and I can’t just look at one image of them and decide if I like them or not, I actually have to spend time with them and see what side of me they bring out.
Brett McKay: And this is the problem of dating apps, because whenever you download a dating app, you… First thing you’re asked are is like what are your preferences and potential matches, and it’s typically focused on those really superficial things, height, weight, attractiveness, college, degree, job, etcetera. And so as soon as you set those preferences, you are immediately just eliminating potentially thousands or tens of thousands of what could have been great romantic matches.
Logan Ury: Yeah, so I work at Hinge, my title is the Director of relationship science, and I am constantly doing research into dating trends, understanding what works, what doesn’t, giving tips about dating to the press and to users, and it’s so interesting that I get to do this work because with my dating coaching clients, I say I’ve worked with hundreds of people. Now, at Hinge, I’m getting to look at millions of people’s dating habits and really seeing what the trends are, and so one of the things that I push is expanding your filters, and so that might mean, if you have really strict age filters, maybe you don’t wanna turn it off and have any age, but could you make the maximum a little higher and the minimum, a little bit lower. If your geography is set for one mile or five miles, could you make it a little broader? And it’s sort of metaphorical, but it’s also literal, it’s, can you be more open-minded and can you also open up the gates a little bit so that more people will show up on your app?
Brett McKay: And Then how can people use the apps more effectively? So Okay, first off, broaden your filters a little more, but how can you make sure you’re not just eternally swiping?
Logan Ury: So my first tip is just to really invest in your profile. I know that that sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised. People create a dating app profile, and they’re like, Okay, I’m gonna do it, I’m finally doing the apps, and they just rush through the profile, and they might just use the last six photos on their phone, even though they’re not very good. This is a huge mistake. Imagine that your profile is like a billboard in Times Square, and it’s your first impression, and it’s really what people are gonna judge you on, you would spend time on that, and so when people make changes and improve their profiles, they see immediate results, and so those are things like having a really good first photo, something that’s clear, we can see your face, the lighting is good, you’re not wearing sunglasses or using a filter, this is just a clear picture of your face, having photos that show what your body is like, so some sort of full body photo, and then using your photos to tell a story, Oh, this is me with my family or me with my friends. I have an active social life. This is me cooking; I love it. This is me speaking in front of an audience, that’s what I do for a living, whatever it is. It’s storytelling and having variety, and so really spending time investing in your profile, that’s the first major tip that I would give.
Brett McKay: Okay, so be picky with your pics, and you also give great advice, like get good friends involved, you wanna pick your six best pics to put on there, and then also write a thoughtful profile. Let’s say you do get a match, how do you get the conversation going, so you actually get on a date with this person? I know a lot of people, at least what I’ve heard… Again, this is all new to me because I dated… I met my wife in 2001. So this is complete… This is all new territory. I’m trying to learn about this. My kids, they’re 11, 8, and so in a couple of 10 years, gonna be dating, I have no advice for them really, I have some, but let’s say you get into a conversation going, I know a lot of people they just get stuck in the app, just talking to someone, never actually going on a date. How do you go from app to in-person date?
Logan Ury: Yeah, so one big thing that I wanna leave our listeners with is this idea of asking questions. It sounds so obvious, it’s like… Yeah, of course, but so many people that I speak to about dating tell me about people who are ZQ, zero questions. And so one person, oftentimes in a heterosexual coupling, the woman feels like she’s asking all the questions. Oh, you have an interesting job. How did you choose it? Oh, how did you wind up living in Michigan? What did you do? And the guy’s answering the questions, but he’s not asking them questions back, and they’re just like, What is this, this isn’t therapy, this isn’t a job interview, like Why are you not asking me questions back? And then when I talk to guys who are ZQ, they say, Oh, I just thought if she had something to say, she would say it, or… She must have found me so interesting because she just kept asking me questions, and it’s like, No, everybody wants to talk about themselves and everybody wants to be asked questions, and this is the number one easiest thing that you can do, is whoever you are, whatever kind of person you’re interested in, ask questions. And so on a dating app, I would say the goal of chatting is to gut-check the person, make sure they’re someone you wanna meet, and then actually get to the date as soon as possible.
And so you don’t wanna get into what I call pen-palling, which is when you’re going back and forth, texting a bunch, but then when you try to meet up, the person is… It’s not about the date, it’s just about texting back and forth, and so you wanna chat for a while, maybe you wanna do a phone call or a video chat, just to get a sense of who they are, the sound of their voice, can you banter back and forth, and then you wanna move to a date, and so I would ask questions, I would say to them, Hey, I’m really enjoying getting to know you. Do you wanna meet up in person or… I’m really getting… Enjoying getting to know you. Do you wanna talk on the phone tonight? Something like that. You wanna create momentum, escalate it, and move off of the app and onto texting, and then onto in-person dating, really, as quickly as you can.
Brett McKay: Okay. And I wanna talk to you… You have some great tips on how to craft a good date, first date, based on behavioral science, but you’re also… Besides, even though you work at Hinge, you’re a big fan of people in meeting potential romantic partners in real life. In your research, what are the best places to meet potential mates in real life?
Logan Ury: Yeah, I think the best combination is for people to be on an app and also be looking for people out and about. There’s no reason why doing one of those doesn’t mean that you can’t do the other. So one of the ideas in my book is called The events decision matrix, and this is basically a way of saying what event should you go to and how do you prioritize them, how do you figure out what’s a good use of your time? And so you basically think about any potential events and you plot them on two dimensions. So one dimension is how much would you enjoy this event, and the other one is, how likely are you to interact with someone at this event? And so you want to really prioritize events that fall in this corner of high likelihood of interacting with someone and high likelihood you’ll enjoy it, and here’s why. If you really like horror movies and you go to a horror movie marathon, high likelihood you’ll enjoy it, low likelihood of interaction. People don’t usually talk at the movies, or at least they probably shouldn’t. If you think about a workshop of learning how to bake, but you don’t like baking, low likelihood of you enjoying it, but high likelihood of interaction, people usually talk at workshops.
And so you really wanna find one that you’ll enjoy because even if you don’t meet someone, it won’t feel like a waste and interaction, because that’s what these events are for, you either are meeting someone and talking to them or you’re not. And so that’s why first big tip, is meeting people at events strategically. The next ones are getting people to set you up by asking them explicitly, making it easy for them and maybe even offering an incentive, like If they introduce you to someone and you go on a few dates with them, you’re gonna take them up for dinner, whatever it is.
Then other ones are looking around your friend group, is there someone that you’re friends with who actually could be a great partner, how can you approach that topic, just meeting people when you’re out and about, meeting people at an airport in a coffee shop, really just thinking about the world as having a lot of opportunities to interact and not just saying, Oh, dating is something that only happens on my phone.
Brett McKay: No, I think it’s a good point, ’cause when I talk to a lot of young people, it seems like they only do dating on the phone, and I’m like, man, you’re in college, you’re in… In a class, there’s gotta be people in there that you could talk to, that could be a potential date, why don’t you… Oh, I can’t believe. I would never do that. It’s like, Oh no, you should do that, it would totally just broaden your choices or broaden your potential romantic partners.
Logan Ury: Yeah, totally. I like to read a lot of the dating subreddits, and I saw one this weekend that was talking about, this guy went to a meet-up and it was a bonfire and he met all these people and he was like… It was amazing, like I could tell right away if someone was interested in me, if I like their smile, if I like the sound of their voice, I ended up making out with this girl at the end of the night, and this person was talking as if he’d never been to an event in person where you could potentially meet someone and people in the comments were like, Where is this event? How do I do more meet-ups? It was seen as so revelatory and it’s like no meeting in-person is a great strategy because it’s basically solving a lot of problems that you have to solve more slowly on the app, which is, do we have good chemistry? Do we feel attracted to each other, can we make conversation? It’s almost like that meeting is the first date or the half of a first date, and so I think strategically, people should be doing a combination of everything, you should be on a dating app because it helps you meet more people, it helps you get practice, you could meet someone great there. You should also be looking around you and seeing, who am I in the same room with, and how can I find a way to talk to them?
Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s say you meet someone, there’s a spark, there’s chemistry, you wanna ask them on a date, you ask them on the date, any tips on your experience as a coach and also from behavioral science to craft a really good first date?
Logan Ury: Yes. So, I will tell you that, but then you also mentioned the park, which I hope you’ll ask me about.
Brett McKay: Yeah, okay, sure.
Logan Ury: Yeah, a few quick tips for designing a great date. So one is you really wanna show the person that you’re putting effort in, so asking them, Oh, where do you live? Is there a certain place you wanna go or finding a place near them, just showing that you’re really prioritizing them and putting effort in. Another big one is skipping the small talk, so people have these first date conversations that are like job interviews, where are you from? Where did you go to school? What did you study? How many siblings do you have? And it’s like collecting information, but it’s not really having an experience. And look, you have plenty of time to get that information from them later, but that’s not actually what creates connection or helps you have a good time, instead you should be focusing on being in the moment with them, maybe being playful, can you go to a certain part of your city and try five different taco stands and get a little silly and you have salsa dripping down your face, how can you actually just be more playful and more open, more into being present and having an experience with them versus sitting across from somebody in a coffee shop, just exchanging information.
That’s not what leads to connection. And then another tip is be interested, not interesting. So, so often my clients are like, oh, I need to tell this story on a date, ’cause it makes me look cool, and I want them to know that I have this fancy job, blah, blah, blah, but having a fancy job is not what’s gonna make that person have fun with you. What’s gonna make that person have fun with you is you asking them questions, you being curious, you making them feel interesting, and so instead of focusing on being interesting and how you’re coming across, focus on being a good listener and a good question asker and making them feel interesting.
Brett McKay: One way I’ve heard of that put is interesting people are interested.
Logan Ury: Oh, I like that. That’s really great. Yeah, interesting people are interested, and I totally agree with that from my experience. And then the last one is this idea of ending on a high note, so there’s really great research from the behavioral economist, Daniel Kahneman, that looks at people getting colonoscopies. And so, of course, the colonoscopy is an uncomfortable situation, but what he found is that people would actually rather have a colonoscopy that’s slightly longer, but ends in a less painful way than a shorter colonoscopy that’s consistently painful throughout, and that’s because our brains disproportionately remember things based on the peak moment, and based on the ending, and this is called the peak end rule, and so you can take advantage of it by saving a bad or mediocre date by really ending on a high note, and so you can order dessert, you can give someone a meaningful compliment, you can say, oh, I actually have one more surprise for you and take them to a cool secret bar that they’ve never heard about, because people remember the ends of things more, you can save the moment with the great ending.
Brett McKay: What happen, let’s say you go on the date and you didn’t think it was great, and then it’s just like you just… There’s no match there for whatever reason. How do you handle that? Because the typical response a lot people do is ghost, but you make people take a, I will never ghost pledge in your book. [chuckle]
Logan Ury: Yeah. It’s funny…
Brett McKay: So, Why shouldn’t people ghost and then what do you do I think… I think a lot of people ghost ’cause they just don’t know what to say when they think of potential… When a date just didn’t go well, and they don’t think there is a match.
Logan Ury: Yeah, I’ve done tons of research on this thing, and I think there’s a big disconnect around ghosting, so when you ask people who ghost why they ghost, they say it’s really awkward to reject someone, and I don’t wanna hurt their feelings, and then when you ask people who’ve been ghosted they say, I would rather that you tell me I’ll feel a moment of pain and rejection, but then I can move on. And so it’s like somebody doesn’t wanna pull off the band-aid and hurt the person, but that person is saying, please do that. I want clarity. I don’t wanna swim in this ambiguous sea of not knowing if you’re gonna ever text me again. And so if two people go on a day, they don’t like each other, they never text each other again, I don’t think that’s a big deal. I call that a mutual opt-out, but if we go on a date, and I text you, and I say, hey, I loved meeting you, when do you wanna hang out again? And you never respond. I just think that’s hurtful and unnecessary, and why not take two minutes to send a kind but firm text, and so that could sound like, hey, I also enjoyed meeting you. Thanks for introducing me to that cool place, I don’t think we’re a good romantic match, but I enjoyed spending time with you, and I wish you the best of luck with dating. Look, you’re not promising that you’re gonna become friends, you’re not saying, hey, let’s hang out again, in a platonic capacity you’re just saying, I liked meeting you. Thank you. I’m not interested.
Brett McKay: And I think most people will accept and be like okay, yeah, fine, what happens if people continue to escalate, why, what can I do? What can I change? How can we make this work? I think that’s what people worry about with ghosting, its like I don’t… They might be able to do that initial text, but then they don’t know to do the potentially awkward rare follow-up.
Logan Ury: Yeah, I have done studies on this, and I would just say what you owe the person is clarity around how you feel about them, you don’t know them anything else, you don’t owe them a phone call to explain what they did wrong, you don’t owe them feedback, that’s just likely not gonna work out well, and I am talking about early dating. Obviously, if you’re in a relationship with someone, it should be a more intense sort of decoupling, but I don’t think you have to get into it with them. If someone’s like, What did I do wrong? And was it when I said this, I just kind of think that’s a no-win situation, and so in that case I would just not write back or… I don’t know, I don’t have the exact language, which is something about like… I don’t feel comfortable getting into it, but that’s how I feel about seeing each other again, something like that. And so I think the most important thing is to not leave someone hanging, but I think beyond that, you don’t owe them deep feedback or an explanation, and that usually doesn’t work out well.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned the spark thing, what would you wanna say about the spark thing?
Logan Ury: My philosophy is that our society is way too anchored on initial chemistry, fireworks feeling like you show up to a date and you love this person, you feel like you’ve known them your whole life, and people say to me, Oh, I went on a date, she was great, I really liked her. She was fun. She was interesting, I’m not gonna see her again. I’m like, what are you talking about? And the person says, Oh, I just didn’t feel the spark. And so it’s become this all-encompassing word that means I didn’t feel instant chemistry. And so I have this concept of the three myths of the spark, and so the first one is, this spark can’t grow over time, and that’s just absolutely not true, a lot of people develop feelings for each other after a while. That’s why you might end up marrying someone you work with or someone who lives in your apartment building. The more you see someone, the more you appreciate them, and so this part can definitely grow over time. The second myth is that if you have the spark, it’s definitely a good thing. That’s also not true. Some people are just very sparky, they might be charismatic, and are super good-looking, magnetic, and so you think, Oh, there’s a special spark between the two of us, but the truth is that they give many people the spark and it doesn’t mean anything about the two of you.
In fact, a lot of people who give the spark or are sparky are actually sort of narcissistic, and then the third one is that if you have a spark, the relationship is viable. That’s also not true. Many couples that are now divorced or unhappily married once had the spark, and so it’s enough to maybe get into a relationship, but it’s not enough to keep the relationship going.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. Okay, so the spark is nice, but don’t be misled by it, ’cause it could take you down bad paths.
Logan Ury: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Or misguided paths. So we mentioned how to end a relationship early on, the first date, second date, you decide this is not a good fit. You mentioned if you’re in a more intense relationship, a long-term relationship, that conversation you have in ending the relationship needs to be a little more intense. Any advice from behavioral science on how to end the relationship that you just think is not going anywhere?
Logan Ury: Yeah, it’s been a very unexpected and surprising part of my job over the last few years to do what I call break up consulting, which is just… People come to me and they say, I have this huge decision to make, something doesn’t feel right, should I stay with this person or not, and it’s a huge responsibility, it’s advising someone on a big decision, and it’s not just them, it’s also the person that they’re with, and I have an impact on that. And so I have a series of questions that I ask them. We have this thing, are you a hitcher or a ditcher? A hitcher tends to stay in relationships too long, a ditcher tends to stay in relationships too short. I ask people if your partner were a piece of clothing in your closet, what would they be. And that helps me gauge, do you admire this person? Do you like being around them? Are you actually sort of sick of them and taking them for granted. When it comes to actually breaking up, a big part is just holding yourself accountable and so setting a deadline, being clear about when and where you’re gonna do it.
Thinking in advance about what you’re gonna say. Not having sex with that person because that can really make things regress and make it hard to leave, and then not communicating with them after the break-up, because so many people try to be “the nice break up guy” and be in touch, but that actually makes it harder for either person to move on.
Brett McKay: So you give, yeah… You give a script, you can… It’s sort of like the ghosting script, but you can continue to have that conversation when people ask, what’s going on, what happens? Is there anything I… You owe that person some explanation or some conversation, but at the same thing, you gotta be loving but firm with the break up.
Logan Ury: Absolutely, yes. And yeah, I like how you called it a script. I think that’s really true because so often we don’t have hard conversations because we don’t know how to start, or we don’t know how to end, or we don’t know what to say. But if you can get some basic templates or practice with a friend or role play, it becomes way less scary, and I would really recommend that people keep a copy of that anti-ghosting, I’m not interested text on their phone and their notes folder, and they can just copy and paste it, or in my book, I have something called the Conversation planning document, and this is something I use all the time, not just in relationship conversations. And so the more that we can demystify Crucial Conversations and instead of avoiding them, actually tackle them head-on, the better.
Brett McKay: In your experience working with people, is it good to get right back into the dating scene after a break-up?
Logan Ury: It depends. So, some people have actually been over their relationship for a long time while they were in it, and so then the relationship ends, and they’re like, I don’t feel that sad. Am I a monster? Why am I not sadder? And it’s like, no, you actually mourn the relationship while you were in it, and so they might be ready to get out there. Some people are not ready for a while, and so I’d say give yourself some time to grieve, figure out how you feel, put yourself back out there, and you’ll see how you feel on that first date, and that will give you a sense of whether or not you’re ready.
Brett McKay: Well, Logan this has been a great conversation. Is there any place else people can go to learn more about the book and the work and your work?
Logan Ury: Yes, absolutely. So I teach a class, it’s a six-week interactive workshop called Date Smarter, and people can find out about that on my website. I also send out a weekly newsletter with research and tips on dating, and people can find that on my website. And people can follow me on Instagram and Twitter @LoganUry.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Logan Ury, thanks for the time. It’s been a pleasure.
Logan Ury: Thank you so much.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Logan Ury. She’s the author of the book, How Not To Die alone. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure you check at her website, loganury.com, where you can learn more information about her work. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/dating, 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, artofmanlinesss.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 of the AOM podcast, you could 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 are 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’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps that a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, who you would 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 this podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
The post Podcast #778: A Playbook for Modern Dating appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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.
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
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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.
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.
There is seemingly more collaboration going on in the workplace than ever before. People are working and talking across teams, and within teams, using a wide array of communication channels. As a result, employees, managers, and CEOs alike can feel pulled in a ton of different directions, by a ton of different asks, and find their actual productivity shot to pieces as a result.
My guest figured there had to be a better way for folks to work together, and interviewed the most efficient collaborators to find out what they did differently to get back up to a quarter of their collaborative time. His name is Rob Cross, and he’s a professor of leadership, a business consultant, and the author of Collaboration Overload. Rob and I begin our conversation with a big picture overview of the organizational and individual factors that are driving the problem of collaboration overload. We then shift to talking about the concrete tactics he learned from efficient collaborators that can help others avoid getting pulled into every conversation and project. We discuss how to limit the productivity-sapping power of meetings by scheduling reflective time, and ways to put more buffer between you and those who ask you to collaborate, including creating a transparent clearinghouse of priorities. We then discuss how to reduce collaboration overload in communication, manage people’s expectations for response times, and identify the microstressors that may be contributing to your burnout.
Resources Related to the Podcast * AoM Podcast #689: Email Is Making Us Miserable — Here’s What to Do About It * AoM Podcast #768: Become a Focused Monotasker * AoM Podcast #743: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor
Connect With Rob Cross * Rob’s Website * The Connected Commons
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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 is seemingly more collaboration going on in the workplace than ever before. People are working and talking across teams and within teams, using a wide array of communication channels. As a result, employees, managers, and CEOs alike can feel pulled in a ton of different directions by a ton of different requests and find their actual productivity shot to pieces as a result. My guest figured there had to be a better way for folks to work together and interviewed the most efficient collaborators to find out what they did differently to get back up to a quarter of the collaborative time. His name is Rob Cross, he’s a professor of leadership, a business consultant, and the author of “Collaboration Overload.”
Rob and I begin our conversation with a big-picture overview of the organizational and individual factors that are driving the problem of collaboration overload. We then shift to talking about the concrete tactics he learned from efficient collaborators, like help others avoid getting pulled into every conversation and project. We discuss how to limit of productivity-zapping power of meetings by scheduling a reflective time and ways to put more buffer between you and those who ask you to collaborate, including creating a transparent clearinghouse of priorities. We then discuss how to reduce collaboration overload in communication, manage people’s expectations for response times, and to identify the microstructures that may be contributing to your burnout. After the show’s over, check out our show notes aom.io/collaboration.
Rob Cross, welcome to the show.
Rob Cross: Alright, thank you so much for having me here, Brett.
Brett McKay: You had a book out called, “Beyond collaboration overload: How to work smarter, get ahead and restore your well-being.” So you are a network scientist but you’ve spent a lot of time studying the effects of collaboration at work on, not only our productivity, but also our quality of life outside of work. How did that happen? How did a network scientist end up studying collaboration?
Rob Cross: Yeah, great question, and it started about 23, 24 years ago, actually. I was running a research group and we were focused on how do you help organizations better share knowledge and expertise. And of course, a lot of people are treating it as a database issue but what I got really interested in is nobody used the technologies that much. Most people, when they had problems or opportunities or decisions they needed to get done, they would reach out into their network to various others to get a sense of what information could help or things like that. And so we started mapping patterns of collaboration in large groups to understand how these groups were getting things done.
And then what we started to see over the course of the past really decade-and-a-half is all the restructurings that organizations are going through, right now, are putting more and more collaborative demands on employees. We’ve been through de-layerings, we’ve been through Agile work. We’ve adopted all sorts of these collaboration technologies, like Slack or email or video channels or things like that, that help us instantaneously connect. And they all sound great in isolation, they’re all appealing, that we wanna be one firm or we wanna be able to reach out and get to others instantaneously. But incrementally over about a 10 or 15 year period, we could see that the collaborative demands placed on people today were rising 50%, 60% in that timeframe and nobody was paying any attention to it. We have this big kind of invisible component of work that had really driven up and required people to be working earlier into the morning, deeper into the night. It was affecting quality-of-work life, yet nobody was really seeing it and thinking about how do you help people survive today, so that was really the starting point of it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and not only were people weren’t seeing it, they were just encouraging more collaboration. It’s like, “Well, we gotta have an open office. We’re gonna flatten our hierarchy.”
Rob Cross: Completely.
Brett McKay: And it just made it worse. So when you…
Rob Cross: And then if you go into a place and you as a leader if you’re thinking about de-layering or open space or a new technology. If you look them in the eye and say, “Well, do you really want another email, meeting, or phone call in your life?” And the answer is never yes but it’s very quick to force all these things onto other people without really recognizing the effect of that, as you were saying.
Brett McKay: When you’re studying an organization, you’re looking for collaboration overload, are there signs that an organization or a leader might be suffering from too much collaboration?
Rob Cross: Yeah, so what we see… We use the network analytics to understand how many people, how frequently the amount of time that’s being consumed in collaborative work. And so of course, I’m all for the kind of collaboration that we all want, those 4, 6, 8, 10-person teams that are integrating, bringing diverse perspectives, and producing a new innovation. That’s what you’re trying to preserve time for. What we’re worried about is all the other stuff, the amount of time on the team collaborative spaces, the Slack, the IM, the emails that are drifting earlier into the morning, deeper into the night. And what we’ve seen in here that’s troubling are the signals that I tend to look for in leaders, is the degree to which their calendar is completely overloaded through the day and they’re finding their interactions drifting earlier into the morning, deeper into the night, deeper into the weekend, and they’re just solving the problem by trying to schedule or jam more meetings in rather than saying, “How do I collaborate differently?”
So as an example of that, pre-pandemic, people would come to me and they’d complain that, “Oh, my gosh. I have eight one-hour meetings and I can’t get anything done until the end of the day,” and then somebody through the pandemic, had the great idea that let’s jam shorter meetings in and so now, most people have 16 30-minute meetings, instead of 8 1-hour meetings, and it’s exhausting. We’re more intense in those 30 minutes, we’re switching across those meetings which is cognitively draining, and then we end the day with a to-do list based on 16 meetings, not eight. And it’s just no wonder we’ve seen the spike in collaboration through the pandemic go up five data hours. And again, people are working earlier and later each night just trying to keep up.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like collaboration, or too much collaboration, causes a decrease in productivity which is interesting because we think collaborating, we’ll be able to get more done. That’s why you do it, two heads are better than one but it sounds like the way that people typically collaborate is… It actually causes a decrease in what they get done.
Rob Cross: Right. When they fall into reactive postures and that’s, I think, one of the biggest challenges that I found out of this is that we could use the analytics to see that there were some people that were providing the greatest collaborative impact in their organizations and far more efficient than others, and they tended to be about 18% to 24% more efficient than their peers and so they were buying back almost a day a week of time and that’s who we really studied initially for the book to understand how they do it. And at the heart of it, one of the really core notions is that they’re not giving up control. I think one of the fantastic things about today is we have more ability to choose who we work with and what we’re doing than ever before in history. It’s when we give up the control of the situation and allow all the emails to flood in on us and feel like we have to answer them all or we become somebody else’s idea of fun and all the demands. That’s where we tend to get in trouble.
Brett McKay: Why does collaboration overload happen? What sort of decisions are leaders making or mindsets that leaders have that allow that to take place or take root in an organization, or in their own lives?
Rob Cross: What we can see is collaboration overload is driven really in two very different ways. One is as the collaborative intensity of work is risen, we have very little ability to understand the collaborative footprint of the asks that leaders are making of other people. So for a super simple example, task A and task B may look the same, but if task A requires you to coordinate with six people that are in the same geography and working for the same leader, that’s an entirely different effort than task B, if you’re required to work across two time zones with two groups that have misaligned incentives and two leaders that don’t like each other. That’s weeks of time in terms of the collaborative effort that’s required and yet we have no real way to see that anymore. People haven’t invested in understanding how we’re actually collaborating to get work done which is crazy to me. People are spending about 85% of their week in collaborative activities and yet we don’t have the ability to understand what we’re asking of people when we think about just work allocation, how we’re designing roles, how we’re taking layers out of the hierarchy, and so that’s got to be one thing that changes. And I think it’ll evolve. We can track meal expense receipts down to two decimal places today and I think these network analytics will come in in ways that start to help inform decisions on that basis.
But then the second thing that really surprised me as I went through all these interviews was the degree to which we are our own worst enemy in this game. I came in thinking gosh collaborative overload is external. It’s the emails, meetings, nasty clients, demanding bosses. Those are the things that are killing us all and it’s kind of out of our control and as I went through all the interviews, what I found is that we tend to be about 50% of the problem in the way that we tend to jump in. We all hold these kind of beliefs, or what I call triggers, that lead us to jump into situations sometimes when we shouldn’t. For some, it’s a servant-based mindset so that they see leadership and being a good colleague is helping others quickly, and that’s a great thing but if you do it in a certain way and you do too much of it, you get overrun today. You become the path of least resistance and everybody comes back to you and it becomes overwhelming or…
For me, the trigger is accomplishment. If I see a five-minute window, I’m gonna always try to jam 60 minutes of stuff in that and then ignore the two to three hours of coordination I have to do to get other people on board, to coordinate different contributions, and four, six weeks in, I’ll be grumbling about, “Why am I overloaded again?” And I’m the one that started it with that initial kinda jump in that five-minute window. And so a really important piece that we see in this is people have different triggers. For some, it’s a desire to help, for some it’s accomplishment, status, fear of what colleagues think, fear of missing out, inability to live with ambiguity.
There’s different triggers that lead people to jump in but one of the most important things is becoming aware of when you’re doing it to yourself and kinda guarding against. If it’s a desire to help, what I would hear in some of my interviews is people would say the life-changing moment for them came when they started to kind of have this rubric in their mind that’s saying yes means saying no. Every time I jump in with this well-intentioned desire to help, it’s taking me away from other things and that that really matters to be able to break the grip of overload.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I can see that. I’ve seen that happen in my own life. It’s like I just wanna be helpful. I wanna be the helpful guy.
Rob Cross: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And it comes from a good place but then you create a pattern where people just keep coming to you for things that they could probably solve on their own. They don’t need to come to you all the time.
Rob Cross: Yeah, it’s crazy. When we run the analytics, and I go back into organizations and I say, “Gosh, it’s this 7%, 8%, 9% of your population that’s absorbing 40% of the collaborative demands. They’re overwhelmed and that’s gonna hurt you from an innovation standpoint, a burnout standpoint, etcetera. The knee-jerk reaction everybody has is, “Oh, they’re controlling. They need to delegate more,” and that’s actually very rarely the case. People today get into these positions for really good, intents, a desire to help’s a great thing. But it’s in the excess that it causes problems and it’s really insidious in that if you’re fulfilling that desire to help, or me with accomplishment, it feels good right up until it doesn’t. You’re in the thick of things, you’re helping people in ways that you think are important, right up until you hit this threshold and your significant other says no more or you lose a key employee because you haven’t been able to focus on them as much so it’s a real kind of insidious game really today.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and the other trigger, too, is that fear of being seen as not a team player or not necessary. You go to the meetings so you’re just… Your presence is known, that you’re like, “Okay, I’m here. My job is important because I’m here,” and that might not be the case. You don’t need to be there, but you have this belief that you need to be there in order to show you still have value at the office.
Rob Cross: Right, right. And that’s hard, the culture of inclusion. And again, this is a little bit of what we were talking about earlier, is there’s not a single company out there that I’m bumping into that doesn’t say they wanna be one firm, or you’re kind of one enterprise and delivering the very best of that enterprise to the market, or are all these shifts towards Agile ways of working, and it all sounds good in theory, but it starts to… We create that belief, the, “Gosh, I’ve got to be involved in everything. I’ve gotta be there, I’ve gotta be present,” that people have to find ways to kinda separate from. I can’t tell you the number of people that I talked to through all these interviews that said, “You know, I just stopped going to a meetings,” and half the time nobody even noticed, and they didn’t hear anything about it. And only if they got two or three emails, did they come back to say, “Okay, here’s the way I can participate in this meeting, or possibly the person I need to send this meeting, for me to be able to manage today.” But that’s one of the real key things to be thinking about is how to fight that belief.
Brett McKay: Well, how do you do that? Any tips that you’ve seen that work? Those triggers can be really ingrained in you from a decade or two of work so how do you overcome that? Those [0:13:37.7] ____ model?
Rob Cross: Yeah, yeah. I think, for me, what I would see about… What I studied with Beyond Collaboration Overload, or what I call the “successful people,” so they were the high performers, but they were also scoring high on measures of life satisfaction, thriving, career happiness, things like that. The idea is were they successful and were they also sustainable and how they were doing it and one of the really core ideas I could see is they had far greater clarity on aspiration. I call them “north star aspirations,” but they were more grounded than a typical just high-level idea of, “Okay, I wanna be in this role in five years or in this neighborhood in eight years.” They were really precise and able to say, “Okay, here’s the capabilities I wanna be using in the next three to five years, the way that I wanna build analytical skills, market awareness, leadership capabilities.” They’re real precise on that, what it was that they wanted to be using or known for in their work, and then they were also really precise on what values do I wanna be experiencing. Is it mentoring and helping others? Is it creativity that I wanna build into my work more?
And with that clarity, then people were much better at structuring their worlds toward it. The more efficient collaborators tend to strategically calendar Friday night or Sunday night with a one -week and typically about a three-month interval in mind and they’re plotting, as they do that, interactions that kinda pull them in directions that they thrive in and start to build a reputation around and they do better over time. What I find with the people that struggle to say no, is that they don’t have those anchors in their mind. They don’t have clarity around what’s really important to me and so they get swept up in other people’s ideas of fun and on the margin, they give their time away. One thing at a very high level is just to be really clear on what path are you trying to chart and then have the courage to pass on some things and not get boiled up into everything.
And then there are also tactics. One of my favorite interviews was a very fiery young lady that said, “I have a crazy boss. He comes to me with all this ridiculous stuff and half the time he doesn’t even know what he’s asking, and I was just bringing it back into the team, and I was over leading the team because I was just saying, ‘yes’ constantly.” And so for her, what she started doing was this grid. She would create this little impact-to-effort grid where one axis was, okay here’s the impact of this ask you have of me, and another axis was here’s the effort it’s gonna take to get it done. And she’d plot this crazy leader’s ask on that grid and if it was low-impact, high-effort, they would talk about do they really need to do it or could they combine it with something else? And she said, number one, that helped stop some of the work that was coming in or the things that she felt she had to say yes to, the meetings, the work, and other things like that. But most importantly, she said within a couple of weeks, her crazy boss knew that he was gonna face the impact-to-effort grid whenever he came with an ask and so suddenly he more thoughtful about what am I actually… Gonna actually go and face the impact-to-effort grid on?
And so there’s all these little devices like that. When I say that people give up control of the situation, what I would see in this work is people that were really successful at it, they’d fought for the time on the margin, and they used all sorts of things like that to create the ability to say no in a situation or to restructure the work in a way that made it more doable.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. Okay, so big picture. It’s important to have clarity on what you call your “north star aspirations.” Be grounded and clear on what your big priorities are so you can set your schedule according to them and avoid getting pulled into collaborative work that just totally sucks up your bandwidth. But then there’s also concrete tactics that you can use to avoid collaboration overload and I wanna talk more about those. An area where people spend a lot of time collaborating, like we talked at the very beginning, is meetings. Meetings have long been a problem, they’re the bane of people’s existence. They’re a time suck and as you mentioned, since the pandemic started, the problem has just gotten worse. It’s worse than ever. What are some tactics for reducing the amount of time you have to spend in meetings and then also making sure meetings don’t totally sabotage your focus and your ability to work on important stuff?
Rob Cross: Yeah. One is to question, to have people post the objective or what the agenda is or specifically what your role is in it. I hear a lot of people make the decision that, “Okay, if I can’t see the specific need or how I’m contributing, I’m not gonna go.” Another is, that’s really important, and it’s not directly around the meetings, but one thing we know that the more successful people do is they block reflective time really well. Or really, to me, they manage to a rhythm of work that’s optimal to them. Why that matters is we know that… And everybody will say, “Yes, I block time in my calendar,” and we know, statistically, the ideal interval is typically about 90 minutes, 90 minutes to two hours, depending on which study you’re looking for but just space to be able to get work done from that onslaught of 16 30-minute meetings. And sometimes people even have to hide it, they hide it under other meetings if their calendar is open. But the reason that matters is we know that from the cognitive psychologist, that the act of just looking down to the text and back up can be as much as a 64-second recovery.
Mentally, you try to get yourself back on track with where you were, if the disruption that you have is so great that you lose your train of thought that what they call a schemer, right? You go back and forth on Slack channel enough so that you forgotten what you were just doing, for example, then that can be as much as a 20-23 minute recovery to get fully back up to speed. Now, we don’t experience it, we kinda tell ourselves a story that we’re just catching back up and getting our head where it was before, but you take any given day and how you’re allowing those disruptions to happen.
60 of the small ones and maybe two of the big ones. And again, it’s no wonder we’re working deeper into the night and earlier into the morning, so being intentional about blocking time, it seems like a small thing, but it’s a really big deal to buy back time, but also have the creative space in there, and I would hear people do it in really different ways, some people would say the first thing I do in the morning is email, and then I have a reflective time later, and that’s how I structure my day.
And the next person I talk to, if I suggested that, they would say, “Are you crazy? If I start with the email, I’ll never get off email.” And so for them, they would be to start with a reflective time and they would block email and third, maybe three, 30-minute intervals through the day, they’d communicate to others when they would expect to hear from them, but that structure, again, gave them the space and allowed them to work at a rhythm that kind of matched up with their own productivity, and that’s probably the biggest lever that almost anybody can pull is to really be thinking about how am I putting structure into the calendar that way.
Brett McKay: Right. So treat your own personal reflection time as a meeting. And then the other tactic too is reducing meetings, I like, just stop going to meetings and see what happens.
Rob Cross: Yeah, it’s amazing how much of life evolves fun, or when people apply this idea of, I’m gonna do email on 30-minute intervals three times a day, and they communicated to others. I can’t tell you the number of people that come back to me and said, “Wow, all I had to do was tell others when to expect from me, and suddenly I wasn’t getting bombarded and feeling the urgency and the stress of needing to answer immediately,” but we fall into these patterns, when we’re not putting structure into the situation where we’re just responding to everybody else, and that’s when people get over run and get in trouble.
Brett McKay: Yeah, benign neglect. Can go a long way.
Rob Cross: Right, right, right.
Brett McKay: So you talk about another thing too, you mentioned earlier, adding buffer, and I like the tactic that one lady used with the chart, so any time the boss came with an ask, she made him go through this chart and that was a way… Is a pretty slick way to add some buffer and cause the boss to reconsider his collaboration ask, any other tactics you found like that to add some buffer between you and other individuals asking for your collaboration?
Rob Cross: Yeah, and I’ll answer… I’ll give you two. One is a very similar kind of thing where the leaders, the people would agree to rate this next ask on a scale of one to 10, and not just treat the ask in isolation, but have a little slide rule on their phone that shows all the asks that have been made and they’re kind of moving things around, it was a really cool little app that they’d created so that there would be a visibility to, okay, here’s the competing asks, and then how do we place this one in the context of the others very, very quickly. And so that stops both sometimes the leaders from asking, but also it’s individuals from jumping in, because most of us wanna do good work and our tendency a lot of times it’s to jump without understanding that collaborative footprint that I was alluding to earlier. And that’s what gets us into a lot of trouble when we get into something that’s far bigger than we realized, because in the moment, we were trying to do that, so anything like that, that starts to create transparency with competing demands, so that somebody coming to you with an ask and say, “Okay, I’m not the only one, but there are six of these things, and I’d forgotten about three of them that I’d asked about earlier,” and you start moving away from…
What I would hear from a lot of people was saying that the day they figured out that the word no didn’t have to be binary, it didn’t have to be yes or no, but it could be, let me communicate to you what I have on my plate. How do we figure this out in the context of all that work and how much of it needs to get done, can we shift the timing, those conversations and suddenly start to happen more fluidly and people don’t feel pressured to take on too much.
The second thing is, and it’s a bigger problem today than I’ve ever seen before, it’s when you have too many different kinds of stakeholders coming to you with too many demands, and so that’s when I call it priority overload, that where these disparate stakeholders are coming in and saying, “My thing is important. My thing is important. My thing is important,” and they’re not recognizing the aggregate burden that they’re placing on people and it’s happening a tremendous amount in agile work, and so what I’d heard in different variants of this, but one that seemed to work really well is the people would just say they would schedule a meeting 30-60 minutes, either face-to-face or online, and they would have four stakeholders come in that are overloading the team, and they would say, “Okay, stakeholder one, here’s the five asks you have of me and put them in post-it notes or a flip card, if it’s virtual, underneath there and stakeholder two here’s what you’ve asked of us and stakeholder three, etcetera,” and then they would draw a line around, here’s the capacity of the team, right through the middle of those cards or post-it notes, and say, “How do we solve this?”
And so suddenly again, it’s putting the conversation back to the stakeholders to say, “Gosh, my need isn’t as important as I thought or actually, my need pairs up a stakeholder three’s needs and we can coordinate and actually get a lot more done with and take less effort. So that kind of idea of creating a clearing as is something that’s worked really well for a lot of people, just tactically to help buffer a little bit.
Brett McKay: So where a lot of people spin their wheels with collaboration overload is communication. Digital communication, specifically email, Slack, Instant Message, etcetera. Any tactics that you found high level performers use to structure their communication channels so they reduce the amount of collaboration overload?
Rob Cross: Yeah. So for me, what I see in this game is it’s not the technology, so they’re killing us, typically it’s the norms of use that we fall into, so real simple tactic with your team is to sit down and say, okay, what I would see with the more efficient collaborators is, most people would look at email, to your point and say, “Gosh, I can’t control all the emails, so I’m not even gonna try,” whereas the efficient collaborators would have a tendency to come in and say, “My team generates 40% of it, and I can control that and actually probably make their lives better too, if we just establish some ways that we’re using it.” So very simple activity is to take a blank piece of paper and put two lines down as you have three columns or do it on a virtual piece, if you’re doing this virtually, and in the first column, you list out all the modalities that you’re using to collaborate with the team, and it’s usually more than people think, it’s obviously meetings, video calls, phone, email, but then you start throwing in IM, Slack, the team collaborative space may be a gratitude application.
Most teams start to realize they have six or seven ways that they’re collaborating and just immediately. And so list them out, and then in the second column for each of those ways of modalities, say, “Here’s three things we wanna start doing,” so if it’s email, for example, we’re gonna start using bullets and we’re gonna state what we want in the subject line, and we’re not gonna try to write 10 paragraph emails and hide what we want in the night so the people are overwhelmed, but you just kind of agree on three or four norms of use on positively, what we wanna start doing. And then on the last column it’s three or four norms of use, so what do we wanna stop? So as an example for me it’s if you have to do email at 10 o’clock at night because that’s the only time you have, don’t send it then, send it on a delay the next morning, so you’re not starting this always on culture of 10:02 response, 10:05 et cetera. You’d be amazed how just kind of listing the ways you’re collaborating, then establishing three or four norms that you wanna follow for each, three or four that you wanna stop doing for each…
It takes no more than an hour team meeting, but it buys back a tremendous amount of time for people, not just the individual, but for the whole team, just by getting consistent on norms, if you will, around that, so that would be probably my highest leverage recommendation for people listening.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I like that. So the first one say what you’re not gonna do to say, you’re not gonna send emails past a certain amount of time, certain times at 10 o’clock or can even be earlier than that. What’s interesting, we talked about other guests who brought up research where companies have instituted, basically, they shut off email after work, so after 6:00 PM, and they end up be more productive than the companies who can email at all hours. If there’s that fear, I’m gonna be less productive. I can’t answer the email at 9 O’clock at night, it’s like, “Well, probably not, you’ll be just… Or even more productive.”
Rob Cross: Right, right. It’s an interesting question, and one of the other interesting things for me to see is people will call me up and say, “Gosh, we got our email volumes going down,” and because they’ve focused on the book or whatever, but then you’ll ask them a few questions and you’ll find that they’re killing people with Slack channels, they’ve kind of shifted the burden basically, and Slack is a great thing, I’m not picking on Slack or any of the IMs, they’re great things to connect instantaneously, but the switching costs that I was just talking about, where you’re constantly on your switching across that number of channels, that carries a cost too, and so to me, the question is always, does the benefit outweigh the cost? Are we kind of reflecting on this is in the right way versus just assuming collaboration is always good.
Brett McKay: Any insights there on how you can structure Slack communication so that it’s more effective?
Rob Cross: To me, it’s more around the usage. You know what I mean? The way people feel that they have to respond. How they respond and the timing of that, where I see places get in trouble with those kinds of technologies is when there’s an expectation of instantaneous response or other things like that. So to me, again, it more often than not comes back to the norms that have the greatest impact.
Brett McKay: Gotcha, a special norms or effective norms you’ve seen, so just basically, you just create the expectation if you put something on there on Slack, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get a response right away. So don’t expect that. Yeah, okay.
Rob Cross: Right. And it doesn’t create an expectation for others to feel like they have to respond immediately, that’s typically more of what I say.
Brett McKay: So let’s say you start doing this stuff. I imagine some people are gonna be put off by it. They’re like, Who… What’s Rob? Rob thinks he’s really cool, you can just not answer my email, how do you manage people’s expectations about that?
Rob Cross: It is just a game, ’cause I think this is where a lot of people have struggled in the past with time management ideas, right, is that they’re… Especially today in the hyper-connected world, it’s not just that I can make a decision that I’m gonna act in certain ways, because like you say, I start to upset other people, so I’m not responding in the right timeliness or at the right quality or level or things like that, but I’ve been amazed the number, and I have tons of stories with this, where people went out to their teams and just said, “Look, for me to be able to do what I need to do and to help us as a team. I need to do this idea of blocking email into 30-minute chunks.” And they communicate to their team. They set the notice on their email so that it indicated when they were gonna be responding to emails today, and people respected that. Once they know what and why you’re trying to work differently, they tend to kind of adapt to what you’re up to. Another great story for me is somebody, a super high performer that I bumped into that he sat down with his team and said, “Well, how much of my time do you need to be in these meetings and answering emails and responding to you and being helpful to you?” And he actually had the foresight to survey them and the team came back on average, it was like 81%, and we need 81% of your time internally with our team.
And he looked at it and he said, “There’s no way I can do what I need to do for this group,” in terms of managing the ecosystem in which is set to get the resources, the projects to get everything he had to do to create a sponsorship for the team. And he told them, he said, “I think the best I can do is 35% in a meeting.” And they all kind of then agreed and said, “You know what, you’re right, we hadn’t been thinking about all these other things you have to do, and here’s how we can consume your time differently.” consume, restructure our asks of you or time that you have. So to me, that’s kind of the approach is you do the best job to communicate what you’re up to and why and what you can contribute much you can’t contribute, and that tends to work out in the long run.
Brett McKay: So manage expectations, communicating expectations is one way to mitigate the burnout of collaboration overload, you also talk about shielding yourself from other micro-stressors, what are micro-stressors and how can you get a handle on them?
Rob Cross: So the micro-stress idea is one that we’ve been really leaning into over the last couple of years, and for me, as I went through these interviews, it just became apparent to me that people are struggling with a form of stress that we’re not really conventionally thinking about, so it’s not the real nasty boss or client, those can exist for sure, but it’s the fact that we’re getting hit with all these small stressful moments through the day, so we get an email from a colleague and we can sense we’re out of alignment with what we need to get done on a project. And you’re wondering, “Well, how am I gonna pull this back together, how am I gonna find the time even to coordinate?” And we get another email that shows us that we need to coach a team member for the second or third time, and you start wondering about, well, how am I gonna do that and preserve their engagement and not worry about them leaving or you get a text from a child where it’s something that they’re just ranting about for five minutes and they get over five minutes later and you worry about it for three hours, but it’s this interconnected world that we live in where we get hit with these things, all of them seem easy in a small moment, things we just work through, but we’re getting hit with 20, 25 or 30 through the day, and we do them exhausted and we can’t quite put our finger on what happened anymore.
And it’s not just bad news, it’s not just kind of the news feeds we see and being primarily negative, it’s magnified by the fact that most of these people we care about. So if you get one of these things from somebody you don’t like, it carries a big effect, but if you get one of these things from somebody you do like and you’re worried about them, it carries a big effect. So what we focus on in the book is this grid that just has people go through 12 of these things that help us to understand where these stressors, how have they become a bigger deal than I realized ’cause I’m fighting through day-to-day, and I haven’t really thought about which one of these are more systemic and things I should be addressing, and then where are they coming from, isolating out, is it things that are driven by colleagues, by a boss or other things, and we find that handling those well, people tend to be able to usually isolate three or four places that these micro-stresses are coming from, that they can adjust the interaction, they either reframe how they’re working with those people, they communicate and reset expectations on how to collaborate, etcetera. And then a second approach, and it is also focused on how do you just rise above it and not get too far down into the minutiae.
Brett McKay: Rob, this has been a great conversation, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Rob Cross: Yeah, great, thank you. One initial place would be to look at my website, it’s robcross.org and it’s got not just the book, but a whole suite of resources that we’ve built through the commons and the consortium that I work on with other people. The second place I’d recommend is looking at a site called the Connected commons, and that’s going to a group of about 150 organizations that sponsor different forms of research in this area, but it really is a wonderful community of organizations helping each other out and kind of talking about how they’re applying these ideas in different ways.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Rob Cross, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Rob Cross: Yeah, awesome, thank you, Brett.
Brett McKay: My guest today is Rob Cross, he’s the author of the book Beyond Collaboration Overload, it’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere, you can find more information about his work at his website, robcross.org, also check in our show notes at aom.is/collaboration where you can 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 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 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 if you could take one minute to go us a review on Apple podcast or Stitcher. It helps a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you would think will 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 the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
The post Podcast #773: Get on Top of Collaboration Overload appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
How long does it take to make friends — for someone you meet who’s a potential friend, to turn into an actual friend? If you’re out of college and not a young adult anymore, you know that it sure feels like it’s a process that takes an awfully long time.
Well my guest has actually crunched the numbers on this question and has the numerical figures to answer it. As well as a whole lot of insight into the dynamics of friendship that are harder to quantify. His name is Jeffrey Hall and he’s a professor of communication studies who counts friendship among the topics of his research. Today on the show, Jeff explains the three levels of friends that make up the sort of friendship hierarchy, how many hours it takes for someone to move from one level to the next, and why it’s hard to accumulate these needed hours as an adult. We also talk about how sheer time isn’t the only factor that’s needed to transform an acquaintance into a close or best friend, and the other factors that need to be in play as well. We then shift into discussing another element that influences the friendship-making process: the expectations each friend has for friendship. We discuss how expectations for friendship differ according to sex and personality, and what happens when two people have differing expectations for what it means to be friends.
Resources Related to the Podcast * Jeffrey’s study on friendship hours * Jeffrey’s study on friendship expectations * Related AoM articles on friendship: + 3 Things No One Ever Told You About Making Friends in Adulthood + How to Invite People to Do Things Without Being Awkward About It + Sunday Firesides: The 3 Types of Friendship + Sunday Firesides: How Not to Be Disappointed in Your Friends + The 3 Reasons Friendships End * Related AoM podcasts on friendship: + #567: Understanding the Wonderful, Frustrating Dynamic of Friendship + #702: One Man’s Impossible Quest — To Make Friends in Adulthood + #726: What’s Causing the Male Friendship Recession?
Connect with Jeffrey Hall * KU’s Relationships and Technology Lab
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Read the Transcript! Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. How long does it take to make friends? For someone you meet who’s a potential friend to turn into an actual friend? If you’re out of college and not a young adult anymore, you know that it sure feels like it’s a process that takes an awfully long time. Well, my guest has actually crunched the numbers on this question, has the numerical figures to answer it, as well as a whole lot of insight on the dynamics of friendship that are harder to quantify. His name is Jeffrey Hall, he is a Professor of Communication Studies who counts friendship among the topics of his research. Today on the show Jeff explains the three levels of friends that makeup this sort of friendship hierarchy, how many hours it takes for someone to move from one level to the next, and why it’s hard to accumulate these needed hours as an adult? We all talk about how sheer time isn’t the only factor that’s needed to transform an acquaintance to a closer best friend and the other factors that need to be in play as well.
We then shift in discussing another element that influences the friendship-making process, the expectations each friend has for friendship. We discuss how expectations for friendship differ according to sex and personality, and what happens when two people have different expectations for what it means to be friends. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/friendshiptime.
Jeffrey Hall, welcome to the show.
Jeffrey Hall: It’s good to be here. Thank you.
Brett McKay: So you are a Professor of Communication Studies who has spent a lot of your career researching and writing about friendship, how did you end up on that track?
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, I actually, I kind of remember where I started, long time ago when I was an undergraduate student, I realized that one of the things that was really motivating for me as I was trying to understand big questions, like a lot of undergraduate students do like, what’s the best use of your time? How do you really wanna spend your time on this life? And I remember at that time having some really, really excellent friends, you know, people who I wanted to spend time doing road trips with or exploring Los Angeles with, or just spending hours just talking. And I said to a friend of mine at that time, something to the effect of, you know, I think that the feeling of really having a wonderful conversation with somebody and spending time with them that way is almost as good as sex. And they looked at me like this look on their face like, no way, that’s not even possibly true. But at that point in my life, this feeling of what it meant to really connect with people and feeling like people understood you, became a motivator that’s been with me my whole life.
Brett McKay: And so from there on, you just decided, I’m gonna study friendship?
Jeffrey Hall: Well, that was actually a little bit… Took a little more time to get there. And my very first project that I did in graduate school that was about friendship was actually specifically on men’s friendship. I was in a fraternity, I was actually fraternity president when I was an undergraduate student, and one of the things that I experienced there was that men had these really deep friendships, they spent unbelievable amount of time together doing all manner of different things. And one of the things that was really odd though, is that they were also very concerned with what other men thought that they were gay, they were very cautious about that, and they also used a lot of slang at that time to kind of derogate feminine behaviors. And so, my very first project I did in graduate school about men’s friendship, started looking at this idea of men using those kinda language to defend themselves against intimacy. So as they felt greater intimacy with other men, they also use that to kind of as a shield to say, Look, at least you know I’m not attracted to you, I just really, really like you as a person, and that kind of tension for masculinity with men and how all that came about was really kind of the origin point of my academic work on friendship.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. Alright, so you’ve written some papers recently where you’ve studied the amount of time and bandwidth investment it takes to make and maintain friendships. But before we get to that, I think it’d be useful to break down the types of friends that we all have, and I think all of us intuitively understand that not all friends are equal, some friends are closer than others, so how do sociologists break down the hierarchy of friendship?
Jeffrey Hall: That’s right. So they actually look at three different categories of friendship that they have pretty well secured and say, these are definitely ones that we would call friendship. One is that you might reserve for a best friend, close friends or best friends is categories that people use often interchangeably. Really kind of referring to people who you’re very close to emotionally, and also find your preference over all other people that you know. The second kinda category is ones that would be broadly just you know, as friends, right? So these are people who you would definitely call a friend if you are asked. They may be old friends that were once very close to you, but aren’t as close to you now. And then the third category would be casual friends and casual friends are kind of a curious category, and one that I think that people kind of know in the sense that they’re not quite acquaintances, ’cause you kinda know them and you would say that they are a friend, but they’re not necessarily people who you would really kind of be as part of your choice of who you might hang out with if you had a lot of time to spend with people.
So these would be people who would be part of larger organizations you’re at, so teammates or work mates. These would also be people who long ago were closer to you, but not as much anymore, kinda ceremonial friends, is what they’re called. And they’re all this kind of collection of people who you come out in different sort of places in your life and are your friends, but you wouldn’t really spend time with them exclusive necessarily.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So, I think of a casual friend, like the guy you see at the gym all the time, and you might…
Jeffrey Hall: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Talk about something, you’re not really friends… I mean, you’re friends, but you’re not.
Jeffrey Hall: That’s right. And I would say one thing to kinda difference the guy you talk at a gym and all the other people at the gym, is all… The other people at the gym you wouldn’t even call a friend and you wouldn’t even bother talking to them. Similarly with people at work, right? There are people who are my work friends, and then there are people who I work with, and they’re not necessarily the same group of people.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. Okay, so in the depth of friendship, whether it’s a casual friend, a friend, close friend, it depends on the time you spend with that person, we’ll talk about that here in a bit, but sheer time isn’t the only factor. I mean, if it was then, like you said, all your co-workers who you see pretty much… You probably spend more time with your co-workers and your family, they would be friends, but like you just said, some of them are friends, but most of them aren’t. So what… Is there a certain type of interaction that needs to happen between people so that you can move from acquaintance to casual friend and then casual friend of friend?
Jeffrey Hall: It’s very interesting is that people tend to judge others really fast. Before I did research on friendships, kind of at the same time I was doing research on what’s called person perception, and it’s the ability that people have to judge a person’s personality or make estimations about characteristics about them with just a small bit of information, just a single conversation. And recent research that I was really impressed by argued that this kind of ability of person perception also guides our friendship choice in a way that we almost immediately have a sense of whether or not this person has potential. So, in the same way that when you’re interested in someone romantically, you have a pretty quick estimation of whether or not you’re interested in them pretty quickly. With friends it’s very similar in the sense that we know how similar they are to us, we know what kind of personality that they have, we know whether they respond well to what we have to say.
And this is something that happens swiftly, and then something clicks. The click that happens is not only… The funny thing is, the click is actually even something people have used to describe the process academically, but it’s basically a process of two people mutually recognizing, liking, right? Two people at the same time, or roughly the same time, realize, I like this person and the other person likes them in return, and we see that verbally and non-verbally in conversation. We see that when people make jokes and other people get our jokes. And we see that when a person says something that’s kinda sly or cynical or even something kinda quirky and you totally get it, you know where they’re coming from. And all of those little clues, we suss up very swiftly, and then we say, this person has a friend potential.
So what’s interesting is is that it seems that our ability to judge whether or not we want to be friends with people happens fast, but the process of developing that relationship takes a lot more time.
Brett McKay: Okay, and so, Okay, you have that first recognition, so let’s say you’re talking to some guy at work and he throws out a joke that’s kinda quirky and you got it, and you’re like, Wow, this is a potential friend here. What sorta thing… Like, how do you… What do you have to do to… Besides time, what do you have to do to move that from acquaintance to casual friend?
Jeffrey Hall: So a lot of people, what they do is they change kinda their routines at work. So if you were somebody at work, you might stop by their office more often. You might see if they wanna have lunch together during work hours. You see whether or not they’re going to the same kinda training or otherwise. You sit by them during a meeting. What’s interesting is we do a lot of behaviors that are simpler than what you might do like in middle school to show, these are the kinda people who I wanna spend time with. So that kind of workplace is the first kind of place in which the people develop that friendship. It usually doesn’t happen that people meet at work and then immediately say, Hey, do you wanna come to my house, or do you wanna have a drink after work, or do you wanna join my softball team? That’s a little unusual. And part of it is, is that we are not normative-ly accustomed to the idea that friendship should be something that develop through a process of invitation, although I would argue that that invitation act is critical in moving a friendship forward.
Another project I did at the University of Kansas with a graduate student, I focused on this idea of turning points, and we need this moment in our friendship to signal that you’re open to having kind of a deeper relationship with another person. So although immediately after clicking with somebody, you start kind of redirecting your behavior to spend more time with them at work, at some point, if you want that friendship to develop into something more significant, you have to actually take some risks. And those risks require spending time outside of work.
Brett McKay: Right. And inviting them to go get drinks, go to a ball game or something like that, whatever.
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, exactly. So I’ve made friends through people who were part of a softball team when I first got to the University of Kansas. I’ve made friends with people who… We had a similar interest in things that were going on around town or wanted to go to a basketball game together. And so there are a lot of possibilities of what you might invite people to, but there’s a lot of social awkwardness that comes along with that invitation as well, which is I think why people are so reticent to try.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s say you’ve made that move, there’s that turning point, you’ve turned an acquaintance to a casual friend, you spend time and you get closer, like, what has to happen, what sort of interaction has to happen to move from, say, friend to best friend or good friend?
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, so what’s interesting here is my study that I did on friendship hours basically took three processes into account. One of them is just time and time alone. So this study got really popular because that it provides some sort of estimates that people can think about in terms of what it requires to get there. And I think that those estimates are important, because what they seem to suggest is if you have less than that amount of time, then you probably haven’t spent enough time on that person to call them this type of relationship. So it’s kind of more of the idea of, this is kind of the range of where things start to change. The second thing we looked at is, how do you spend your time together? And what my study found was the more time you spend hanging out with somebody, the greater chance that’s going to develop into a more intimate friendship. But the more time you spend just at work or school, it decreases the likelihood of that developing into a more intimate friendship.
And the third is, how you talk to someone. So there’s a long, long history of doing research on relationship development focused on something that’s called self-disclosure, and self-disclosures come as a huge body of literature that says that if I talk about myself or reveal more intimate details of myself, that this develops liking. Well, I broaden that description quite a bit in my study to say that it doesn’t require self-disclosure necessarily, but it does require doing things like joking around, having catch-up conversations, being like, so what have you been up to? Or, how did that thing go that you went to? Or what’s been going on in your life? And then also meaningful talk, and meaningful talk doesn’t have to necessarily be like, your personal trials and tribulations, although it could. Meaningful talk could also be talking about things that you really care about, you know? Things that you’re concerned about in politics or things that you’re concerned about at work that really matter to you personally, and having another person listen.
So the idea that I’m working with is that there’s kinda like three separate factors that are all going on in that relationship development. In order to develop a really best or a very close friend, you kinda have to have all three.
Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s do a quick recap here. So the time you spend together counts, but it can’t just be time you see someone at school or work, because… I mean, you see people every day at school and work and you don’t become friends with those people. It also matters how you spend your time together and how you talk with someone. And there are three types of interactions that increase your intimacy and can increase your chances of becoming friends with someone, the first one is self-disclosure, then there’s having meaningful conversations, and then there is just catching up on the every day stuff as well, like, what’s going on with work, kids, etcetera? And if you wanna move from friend to best friend or close friend, you wanna have all three of those conversations.
Okay, so even though time isn’t the only factor, I wanna focus on that a little bit, because you’ve done some research as to how long it takes to move up the friendship hierarchy. So let’s talk about that for a bit. Let’s say you meet some guy, you hit it off, you have a lot in common, you get along great, how long is it gonna take to move from acquaintance to a casual friend?
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, so according to my study, that range happens somewhere between 40 and 60 hours of time together. So the study that I did actually had two parts to it, one was focused on adults who geographically relocated, and they typically relocated for work or for family. And then the other one was on college freshman, and I caught them three weeks right after they had arrived at the University of Kansas and looked at who they had been spending time with in those three weeks before the start of the semester. And in combination kind of that first estimate of casual friend from acquaintance came from the idea that probably for adults it took… According to my study, it took longer for adults to develop friends, but what’s tricky about that is because there was a retroactive study, it could be that they had already developed a casual friendship and were just spending more and more time afterwards.
Because the one done on students was done prospectively, meaning, we caught them so early on, we were actually able to see changes of different time windows. So that estimate is really the 40 to 60 hours is meant to accommodate the idea that it depends kind of on whether or not more and more hours are accumulating with this person. And you can imagine how that would do that in a school setting or in a work setting. The next kinda level of change happens between 80 and 100 hours of time, and between 80 and 100 hours of time, you kinda go from the casual friend to the friend category, and this happens really sort of in a development of a greater amount of time spending time away from the place that you met, spending time hanging out, spending time playing, you know, whether you play video games or watching TV or going to events together. So it kind of diversifies the kind of ways in which you’re experiencing the other person.
And the third level is over 200 hours it takes to make a close or a best friend. And I actually think that might be a conservative estimate, meaning, I think it might actually take longer than that. And part of the reason that it takes so long to develop that level of intimacy with another person is, you have to get to the point where your guard is dropped, you have to get to the point where you’re feeling comfortable being yourself around this other person, and I think for a lot of people, they don’t get to that level of comfort with another person to allow for a best friendship to develop.
Brett McKay: Okay, so it takes about 200 hours or more to make a closer best friend. So to clarify, do these hours include both times spent at school or work and outside of it, or is that just time spent together outside of the school or work?
Jeffrey Hall: No, both. So that estimate came from time spent in both places.
Brett McKay: Okay. And is there a certain timeframe that you need to accumulate these hours within? Something like in high school or college, when you’re seeing your friends every day, all day, and then you might be spending every weekend together, so you might accumulate those 200 hours within a matter of months. I mean, that’s why when you’re young, it feels like you can meet someone one day and then in a few months later, you guys are best friends, but when you’re an adult and you’ve got a job and you’ve got a family, and you might see a friend just like a few hours every month. So it could take possibly several years to accumulate 200 hours. So do you need to accumulate all those hours within a certain window of time or can it be spread out over several years?
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, I think they absolutely can. One thing you’re pointing out that I think is very important is that when you have the luxury of time and you’re open to developing relationships, such as when you’re in school or a young adult, studies actually suggest that people build really strong friendships, usually within the next, about three or four months. And the reason that it’s such a short interval of time is people kind of make a choice because they have so much luxury of time and different people to make friends with, that by the time that four months elapse, you’re kind of where you’re going to be with that person. I think that you’re right, that for adults, there is some evidence to think that this is not only a more gradual process, but remember when we’re talking about 200 hours, we’re talking about someone who becomes your best friend. And I think that that standard is actually quite high.
To develop a brand new best friend is quite a hefty endeavor. It’s not something that you can do simply or it’s not something you can do the process if you’re just really liking someone or spending a little bit of time together. So I think that you’re correct that as an adult to develop a best friend, probably it takes many, many more months, and maybe even years in the process of slowly, gradually accumulating kind of that level of closeness and intimacy, which can be done in a lot of different ways as you kind of progress through that process.
Brett McKay: Okay. So the lesson there is that adults need to be patient with making friends. I mean, if you’re expecting to make a new best friend or a good friend in a matter of months, like you did in high school or college, you’re probably gonna be disappointed.
Jeffrey Hall: Absolutely, I actually would find it hard to believe that there’d be a context in which that you would be able to do so as an adult, unless you found someone who is just in the exact same stage where you’re at, where you’re really open to meeting someone new.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s another interesting hard thing about adult friendships is that you’re in different stages with different people, so like, you might be newly married, no kids, you have a lot of time, and then you meet some guy who’s married and has three kids and is coaching football or whatever, you guys… You might have a lot in common, but it might not turn into friendship ’cause you’re out of sync.
Jeffrey Hall: That’s exactly right. Being ready to actually invest time in friendship is, I think that’s something that people imagine that’s only on them, and sometimes they find it really frustrating because they can’t make the other person be available in the way they might like. But it’s probably more common than not that two people are on different pages, and that’s why I think also circumstantial-y, when you are a young adult, it’s so much easier is that many, many people are open to the process of developing friendships and having a longer time to spend together with their friends.
Brett McKay: Okay, so one of the obstacles to making friends as an adult is that not everyone’s at the same stage in life, or some people just aren’t open to friendship at the same time. Besides that, are there any other obstacles to making friends as an adult and accumulating those hours and hours it requires to make a friend?
Jeffrey Hall: There are, I think, three kind of key parts to this, one is that we really value work in the [chuckle] United States. We work more than any industrialized country in the world. We work longer hours, and what’s weird is, is that in other countries as people get more education or they have more access to resources, they actually work less, but the United States, if you make more money, you just keep working harder, and a lot of that is due to a broader cultural value that we put on that, the second I think factor, which I think is really difficult is geographic kind of mobility, we move from place to place to place, so we actually lose out on all of that basis of friendship that we’ve built with another person. We pick up and go to another place.
Now, you don’t lose all of your friends, when you move, but study after study has confirmed that moving is a huge threat to being able to maintain friendship over time, and I think the third probably has less to do with just United States, but if you ask both men and women, people throughout the world having kids and getting married are huge killers to friendship, and both of them is because that they’re a huge amount of emotional time and also physical time with two people, basically all of that time is being invested in your most important relationships, and so you don’t make time with friends.
What’s interesting is in the past, there’s good reason to believe that, due partly to gender segregation, where men and women had different activities, due in part to also kind of a more open culture in the sense that people were more likely to do things like join bowling leagues and be part of the Elks Club and all that kind of thing. They spend a lot more time out of their house with people who are not their family, and so there was more of an understanding that if you left your home during the week to go do things, it wasn’t an insult to the people in your home, it was just kind of how you were in the society that you lived in, but I find that in our culture, those forces of work, the forces of geographic mobility and the forces that have really said people and men particularly, should be spending more time with their kids and with their loved ones at home means that that time that they would spend outside of their home developing friendships has really been very much curtailed and in some ways minimized as a value.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like if you wanna make friends, you have to make it a priority, you to put it on your schedule. Or it’s not gonna happen.
Jeffrey Hall: Bingo. And I feel strongly about that. I’ll just tell anyone out there who’s interested, I actually have it on my list of things to do sometimes, and I’m not even kidding, if I wanna keep in touch with my friends, I put it on my… Make us an appointment, and I have a standing conversation with my best man from my wedding who lives in Los Angeles and I live in Kansas, and we talk once a month, sometimes we only get to talk for 15 minutes, sometimes we talk for longer, but we make it a priority. And so what’s odd as that even someone like myself, who you’d think I’ve cared about friendship along time I study it. It would just come naturally. You really have to make it a priority in life, otherwise it won’t happen.
Brett McKay: Now, I think that’s a good point. I think a lot of people don’t do that because they think, Well, it’s friendship you don’t have to make it like this sort of, it’s not a to do, but you kinda have to make it that way or it’s not gonna happen.
Jeffrey Hall: I think so, you know what’s funny about things about the to do concept is that a lot of people actually think that the process of having to organize something makes it less pleasurable, but then a lot of research suggests also that when you have something to look forward to it’s actually really nice, like being able to anticipate the lunch that you’re gonna have with a friend or being able to anticipate hanging out with the guys or anticipate that phone call, a friend from long ago also has its own rewards. And so people have this kind of interesting characteristic where they call it negative forecasting bias, where they imagine something is in the future, they don’t wanna put on their calendar, ’cause like, God, making friendship into a chore that’s like the worst thing ever? But oddly, by rendering it into something to look forward to and it’s something that you can actually plan for, it actually makes the experience of having it that much more fun.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. So we’ve talked about how much time you get to spend with someone so they’d become a friend, do we have any research on how long it takes for a friend to descend down the hierarchy of friendship? Right, so for example, if you don’t invest regularly in your best friendship, how long does it take for that best friend to become a casual friend into sort of an acquaintance?
Jeffrey Hall: What’s very funny about that is that there are two thoughts, schools have thought about this, there is pretty consistent information and evidence that says that people in the casual friend realm are turning in and out of that all of the time, different stages of your life from middle school to high school, to college, to young adulthood. To the time with your family. Places you change to go to different places in the country of the world to live, that these people who are your casual friends there will go away, and some of them will maintain through things like social media or Facebook or otherwise, but many of them are just people who will disappear, and interestingly, there’s good evidence to say that those people… The loss of those people isn’t necessarily a bad thing, people don’t feel particularly sad about having lost their casual friends, but what I would say is that having that kind of group of casual friends to reconnect with is a useful thing to have if you move back to the place where you met them. So if I move back to Los Angeles, for example, I would have a whole set of casual friends I’ve kept in touch with a little bit that I might re-enact a friendship with, if I live there.
However, when it comes to best friendship, that’s where the school thought kinda differs. What’s interesting is, is there are these several studies, one that was done in the early 90s that I really like, it was called Just Friends, and this researcher or a sociologist interviewed men and women about their best friendships, and then they would interview the best friend about the friendship as well, and what they found was that there were people who basically said, this person is my best friend, the researcher would reach to the best friend, the best friend would be like, I’m their best friend. I had no idea. That’s fantastic, I haven’t seen them in years.
So you can keep this best friend in your life and your emotional sense of who I am, and even in a relational sense, even if you don’t communicate with them very often, and I think what’s interesting about that to me is that we do have the value of feeling like we’re connected with someone, but if we don’t enact that, then we don’t know about the benefits of it. So what I’m getting at is that there seems to be two different processes going on in my own research looks a lot at this one is the relational process, are there people in my life? And the second is the communication process, which is how often do I talk to them and both contribute to your well-being, so if you wanna have the best possible, best friendship experience, you actually have to do both the communication part and the having part.
Brett McKay: And so, yeah, this means you could still maintain a best friendship, even if that person moves you just like you make it a priority to talk to your best man, at your wedding at least once a week.
Jeffrey Hall: Once a month, yeah. Craig and I talk once a month. And I love it, I look forward to that conversation. We just dive right in. And even if we only get 20 minutes. He’ll be like, Okay, I got 20 minutes. I’m like, Okay, let’s work. Let’s take it. And you gotta make it a priority absolutely.
Brett McKay: And I think it’s interesting too. If you ask a lot of people like, Oh, who’s your best friend? They’ll often mention someone from high school or from college, even though they haven’t seen them in decades, and I’ve noticed that like, Oh, who’s your best friend? I’ll include in that list my best friend from high school. And we haven’t talked in a while, but if we got together, I feel like we would pick up right where we left off.
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, that’s a definitional characteristic of a best friend. The thing that makes best friends or close friends, close friends, is that they are people who we can stop having the relationship with, and then when we see them again, we still get to have that sense of closeness and that sense of camaraderie. I too had an experience like that, or a close friend of mine from college, I saw in New York a couple of years ago, ’cause I was going up there, work, and we just spent a long afternoon evening together, and I had just a fantastic time of catching back up again, but neither one of us do a very good job of keeping intention in the meantime, so I think what’s lovely about these things is that the kind of concern or the worry, Well, if I reconnect with my old friends or otherwise, it may not be as much fun. Typically speaking, if you’re as close to that person as you were, then chances are, it will be a very good experience.
Brett McKay: Another component that influences making and maintaining friendships that you researched are the expectations each person in the friendship has for the friendship. So what are the factors that you found that shape a person’s expectations for friendship?
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, when I did that expectations project, and that was where my interest began to go away from just looking at men’s friendships and look at differences between men and women’s friendships. People have a set of expectations for what it means to be a friend, what does it require minimally for someone to become a friend or to be a friend, and those projects really focused on the ideas, how does our concept of what friendship is differ between men and women and other wise. One of the things that about that Friendship of expectations project that I looked at and I find really fascinating still, is that I argued something that I call cultivated complexity, which is essentially the idea that you cultivate a level of expectations and complexity of those expectations with another person, so that for some friends, you can have very simple expectations of what it means for you and them to be together as friends for other people, the friendship list of things you expect from them may be very, very big.
What’s fascinating is that if you expect too much of your friends, you’re often disappointed, but if you expect nothing from your friends, a lot of times they don’t even meet that minimum standard. So there’s just kind of this middle ground, which seems to be the people who are functioning the best in friendship is they’re able to expect enough from their friends to be able to get those relationship factors out, but they’re not expecting so much to be disappointed when their friends aren’t there for them every single time and in every single circumstance, and not so… Expecting nothing, is that basically that relationship goes nowhere. So those kind of expectations really play a role in being able to set the stage for what you want that friendship to look like.
Brett McKay: And so what are some things when we’re looking at, what kind of expectations we have for the friendship, what are we looking for? Is it just a matter of how much you’re gonna invest, interest… What are the factors we look at?
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, so the main factor, the one that’s actually the most important in many ways is the one that we… Is kind of a trust, a sense that that person is gonna be there for you when you need them? A sense in which that they value you as a person, the idea that their concern for you is genuine, so these kind of four issues that you can trust them, that they’ll be for you, that they truly like you for who you are, and that you can count on them, or they genuinely believe the things that they are, they’re not fake, or they’re not just kind of fair weather friends, that’s kind of the core expectation of friendship and the most important one. Then other ones we’ve talked about already, one is things like having somebody who’s similar to you is a set of friendship expectation, similar value, similar hobbies, one of them is things around self-disclosure, so self-disclosure expectations, one of them is about having fun with another person, spending time together, the expectation that they’re gonna include you in things and invite you to do things, and then there’s a final set of expectations, which are pretty small, the big picture, but also things like…
It’s nice to have friends who know people or nice to have friends who are well-connected in business, or it’s nice to have friends who are athletic, or it’s nice to have friends who are kinda of socially popular or otherwise. And so these are also things we like to have in our friends, but are ancillary to friendship, but my project on expectations was saying, these are the kinda six sets of expectations we can have for our friends.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like you can have different levels of friendships, and listening to you, it sounds like it tracks really nicely with Aristotle’s idea of having three different levels of friendship, in the first level of friendship, it’s instrumental or utilitarian friendship, and this is where it’s a friendship where you just get some kind of use out of the guy, maybe he can help you with your network. Help you with your business. Maybe the second level of friendship is a friendship of enjoyment, so this is where you just have a good time with this guy, but you wouldn’t expect him to visit you in the hospital if you were there, and then the third level of friendship is a friendship of virtue and this is where you help each other become better people, and where you’re just friends for the sake of friendship, and so as a consequence, you’d expect more from this type of friendship.
Jeffrey Hall: You got it.
Brett McKay: So how do we develop these expectations we have towards friendships?
Jeffrey Hall: So this is actually something that starts very early, research on child development says that the process of being able to develop an understanding of what other people can do for us and who they are to us is something that maps on to a developmental process and children, that starts early on. And this is like in our kindergarten age where kids begin to prefer certain playmates, people that they like to spend time with over others, and then a lot of time, it’s because they can jointly play together, they can actually do things at the same time, and they share nice with each other, so they begin to look at their friends as somebody who is sharing their blocks or their cars or whatever, rather than somebody who’s being selfish, those developed expectations get a little bit farther when their play gets more complicated and kind of get even more complex when the social issues become more complicated. So think like middle school, where it becomes super important that you have a friend who’s genuine, super important to have a friend that you can trust to kinda defend your character if another person is being harsh on you.
A lot of this comes from the idea that adolescents actually go through a period of time where they’re really sensitive to both inclusion signals like, Do people like me and want me to be here? But are also very, very concerned with exclusion signals, so the feeling that if anyone slights them or looks down on them, they get really aroused and upset by that kind of thing, so as a consequence, your friendship expectations come from that developmental process, what I think is really interesting is that the developmental process maps on to the three levels of friendship we talked about earlier, so as you said, at that lowest level of, I like this guy is a good guy. Shares nice he shares his toys, that’s a casual friend, or Aristotelian model of a instrumental friend or a utilitarian one.
And then as you move up from friend to close, or best friend, at the very top of our best friend, that’s also the most emotionally developed relationship and friendship. The one that we would only be able to have when we developed a more secure sense of self and other. And that only happens after 15, 16, 17 years old. So what I find really fascinating is this process that your emotional development as a person maps onto your strength of relationship and these three different categories of friendship.
Brett McKay: How do friendship expectations differ by gender, do men and women generally have different expectations for their friends?
Jeffrey Hall: Men and women do have different expectations based on gender, in the case of women, as you might suppose and guess that women tend to have a higher expectation of emotional intimacy, self-disclosure kind of talk, that’s really based upon a high level of sort of emotional talk and also sharing, men and women both share two similar expectations for different categories, they both want their friends to be someone who they can hang out with and share a laugh and enjoy themselves. The other quality that men and women are quite similar on is this idea of kind of genuineness, like this person really likes me for who I am, and men and women are quite similar on their expectations that their friend should be trustworthy and genuine in that regard, all though women do tend to have slightly higher expectations for that than do men. But the last category where men actually have higher expectations than do women, is this category that’s kind of curious, it has all of the different characteristics of what we might want in a friend that’s not about the relationship. So for example, this category included friends who were intelligent and athletic and successful and had good business connections and were attractive and were people who had access to high-paying jobs, and the idea was, is that men more so than women and even young boys and young men. All evaluated friends who had those characteristics as being more valuable friends than did women.
Brett McKay: So status is an important part in male friendship.
Jeffrey Hall: Exactly. And you can kinda see how that changes, and so for boys, for example, status might be somebody who’s popular and athletic but as a young adult, it might be somebody who has access to jobs or comes from a family with income as you’re young adult, you also might find someone who’s well connected, so the idea of these status indicators actually are motivations for men to maintain same-sex friendships in a way that they’re not for women.
Brett McKay: Does personality play a role in our expectations?
Jeffrey Hall: Absolutely, so probably the one that makes the biggest difference of all personality characteristics has to do with this issue of attachment, so people who have very secure attachment have an easier time being able to evaluate others as being a safe place to develop closeness with. They get less anxious if there are these signals of exclusion or otherwise, however, there… The one that people talk about the most and I get this question the most often is, well, what about introversion and extraversion? And what I find fascinating is that there is good reason to think that introverts and extroverts are different on two key phenomena, one is extroverts are comfortable talking to a whole heck of a lot more people and kinda a lot more people as friends than introverts do, but the other one is, is that introverts also tend to find friends and really dedicate themselves, so they have fewer friends, but really work on developing friends, but introversion and extroversion both value friends in a very similar way, they just define and what it means to be a friend, a little bit differently.
Brett McKay: So if you have an extrovert, and an introvert, being friends, the extrovert might have like, you know, Hey, you know, my expectation for you is that you’re just around whenever, if you can’t make it, no big deal. The introvert would be like, Hey, where were you? You were supposed to be here.
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, those kind of miscommunications could come up, one thing that I’m actually thinking in my own experience too, is that I’m probably a little more extroverted in terms of comfortable, certainly talking to different people and making different types of relationships, and one of my friends from college that is much more introverted, one of the things about having a relationship with her is that she’s really like, These are my people. So what’s need is, is that when we’re able to hang out, which doesn’t happen nearly as often as it did when were in college, we were actually going to more depth of conversation and all the things that a more introverted friendship looks like, so I was able to enact those in my relationship with her.
And in a way, I wasn’t really necessarily able to do with a lot of my more casual friendships. So what I think is important to keep in mind here is that, yeah, there can be conflict between different kind of personality styles or attachment styles when it comes to friendship, but part of the beauty of friendship is you can have friends for different reasons, right, you can have a friend that you talk to about really important stuff, but you can also have friends that you’re always having a great time ’cause everyone’s laughing about everything, you can have a friend who’s fantastic for being in a softball team together, or someone that you like to go out and have a drink and shoot pool with, but can you have another friend who is somebody who would be more likely to invite to a social gathering or someone who you might like to work with, so what’s neat about friendships is that because they’re not exclusive, we can find different parts of ourselves being developed through these relationships we cultivate with others.
Brett McKay: So what happens when there’s two friends, their expectations of the friendship differ. What typically happens?
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah what’s most likely to happen is friends very rarely actually have conflict that leads them to go down different paths, and you might be able to guess what are the types of conflict that really break friends up, and this is things like. You cheating on me with my partner, you really let me down, I expected you to be there and you totally blew it, or you’re just downright mean. What’s weird is that friendships can even recover if people like fight or scream at each other or come to blows even, and some research actually suggest that, that can actually even be bonding because you care enough about that other person to argue with them.
So what’s weird is, is when people have different expectations, they’re much more likely to just sort of back off, they spend less time with the person, they don’t say anything, they ignore their texts, they don’t respond, they prioritize other people, and all of these way of disentangling oneself from that friendship usually happens as a matter of course, rather than a matter of intent, so people aren’t going, I need to break up with this person. Instead they’re like, Man, I’m just not feeling it.
Or, you know what, they’re always expecting me to do this and I don’t really want to. Or they’re just not meeting the other person’s expectations for the frequency of communication or type of communication, so the other person stops inviting them. And I think that that’s one of the things about that kind of tension that plays out is we are generally speaking, not going to talk to our friends about the process of relationship disengagement in the way that we would in romantic partnership, where there’s a clear expectation that if things are falling apart, you try to talk it through.
Brett McKay: So when friends have different expectations for a friendship, they typically don’t discuss it, and then they just disengage and the friendship dissolves, but even if it’s not common to talk about the relationship, the friendship, is it possible to have a successful or fruitful discussion about different expectations for the friendship?
Jeffrey Hall: That is a very, very hard thing to do. I think that friends are actually poorly equipped to figure out even how to broach the topic, usually what happens is, is if there is some sort of disconnect, that disconnect happens more because of the sense of reciprocity, I’m providing a lot more to you than you’re providing to me, I’m having to be the one who reaches out more, I’m having to be the one who carries the work and scheduling time together.
And I think those kind of things on a more fundamental level can be managed quite well in the sense that you can actually say… One person, if you are the person on the receiving end of those invitations but not, are not great, at initiating, be thankful and grateful for what the person offers and make sure that the other person knows I really appreciate you keeping in touch, even though I’m not great at it. We’re gonna be self-deprecating about it, I’m terrible at this, but you’re so great and I really appreciate it. So I think there are ways to smooth those edges over, but research on fundamental disagreements of expectations around trust… Violations of trust or violations of intimacy or violations of sense that the other person just isn’t there for you, those are very hard to repair and generally speaking, we do not have a good cultural dialogue or any kind of sense of how to approach when someone actually does something, that’s pretty off.
Brett McKay: Alright, so people are gonna have a hard time discussing deeper expectations in friendship or for friendships, but it is possible to communicate about the more concrete ways there may be some missed signals going on, for example, I know my experience is that most people are either initiators invitors by nature and some people aren’t, and I think it’s just a personality thing. So the people who are natural initiators, they often just need some reassurance from their friend saying, Hey, you know what, just… ’cause I don’t reach out as much. It doesn’t mean I don’t like you, I’m just not very good at. It’s not my inclination.
Jeffrey Hall: But I think that we can misinterpret a lack of equity and friendship as a lack of desire to be in the relationship, and I have had that happen personally, so many times where in just recently I’m back in touch with a friend of mine from undergraduate at least back in more routine touch with a friend of mine, and I had thought all the times that he didn’t return my text or otherwise was just that he had other priorities, and now that we’re back in touch again, he says, I really appreciate all that time that you spent trying to get me to respond, I just did not have my shit together, I did not have my life organized in a way where I could respond, and I’m sorry I wasn’t a good friend, but I’m really glad we’re back in touch now and that is so deeply reassuring to me, ’cause I did have some anxieties like Why isn’t returning my stuff… I don’t get it.
Brett McKay: Yeah and some people are just are bad texters, they just… They don’t do that, but… They probably appreciate it. I think so. So what do you think the big takeaway is about friendship and adulthood that you think people should take away from or they can get from your research?
Jeffrey Hall: Absolutely, I would say the number one is, do not be a flake. Do not be flake if people invite you to do stuff, show up. If you say, Hey, we should hang out together. Hang out, like follow through is key, and follow through doesn’t have to mean like tomorrow, it doesn’t have to mean be next week, it means that you make it something that you… If someone makes a promise or invitation to you to do things, you help make it happen, and one of the things that I think that in our contemporary culture, you hear a lot is that men will… Or, and women for that matter, we’ll say they met somebody really interesting, they like to be friends, like, Hey, we should hang out and do that thing together some time. And then nothing. Nothing happens. That is to me the biggest key indicator of something that has potential, if another person says I want to spend time with you, take ’em up on it and spend time with them. The second big takeaway that I would say is something we’ve already talked about is be intentional, be intentional about spending time with your friends, keeping in touch with your friends.
And then the third thing that I would take away, is support your partner in doing the same. If you’re in a romantic relationship, recognize that you will be happier if your partner also has better relationships with other people, and that goes both ways for both men and women in a heterosexual relationship, and so I think that the takeaways here is that in order to enjoy the great parts about being friends with people, you actually have to enact it, and so I wanna encourage people as much as I possibly can to take those steps to do so.
Brett McKay: Well, Jeff this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about your work?
Jeffrey Hall: Yeah, so at the University of Kansas, we have the relationships and technology lab. I invite everybody to check it out and learn a little more about my work, I do stuff that has to do with social media and how that affects our lives, we do work on friendship, and we do work on kind of all of those issues of this intersection between relationships and technology and friendship is one part of that, so I welcome everybody to kinda learn more about it.
Brett McKay: Well Jeff Hall Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Jeffrey Hall: It has been my pleasure. Thank you.
Brett McKay: My, I guest here is Jefferey Hall, He’s a Professor of Communication Studies who specializes in friendship, make sure to check out his show notes at aom.is/friendshiptime where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast, make sure to check on our website at artofmanliness.com or you find our podcast archive, as well as thousands articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. 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 to check out for a free month trial once you signed up, download this to drop on Android iOS, you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you have done it already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us 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 if you think you got something out of it, as I 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 #772: How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
In a period of only about 100 years, Athens went from relative obscurity, to becoming an influential empire, to collapsing into ruin.
My guest today will guide us through the dramatic arc of this city-state and the larger-than-life characters that contributed to it. His name is David Stuttard, and he’s a classicist and the author of Phoenix: A Father, a Son, and the Rise of Athens, and Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens.
We begin our conversation with the rise of Athens and why its aristocratic families decided to institute a radically democratic form of government. David then walks us through how the Persian invasion catapulted Athens to power in Greece. Along the way, David explains how a father and son named Miltiades and Cimon led Athens to power. We then shift our attention to the fall of Athens and how it was precipitated by the Peloppensian War with their one-time ally, Sparta. David introduces us to the made-for-Hollywood character that would play a pivotal role in Athens’ fall — the handsome and charismatic aristocrat and serial traitor, Alcibiades. We end our conversation with the lessons we moderns can take from the rise and fall of Athens.
Resources Related to the Podcast * AoM Podcast #461: The Spartan Regime * AoM Podcast #710: The Spartans at Thermopylae * Miltiades * Battle of Marathon * Cimon * Alcibiades
Connect With David Studdard * David’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. In a period of only about 100 years, Athens went from relative obscurity, to becoming an influential empire, to collapsing into ruin. My guest today will guide us through the dramatic arc of the city state and the larger than life characters that contributed to it. His name is David Stuttard, he’s a classicist, and the author of Phoenix: A Father, a Son, and the Rise of Athens, and Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens. We began our conversation with the rise of Athens and why its aristocratic families decided to institute a radically democratic form of government. David then walks us through how the Persian invasion catapulted Athens to power in Greece. Along the way, David explains how a father and son named Miltiades and Cimon led Athens to power. We then shift our attention to the fall of Athens and how it was precipitated by the Peloponnesian War with their one-time ally, Sparta. David introduces us to the made-for-Hollywood character that would play a pivotal role in Athens’ fall, the handsome and charismatic aristocrat and serial traitor, Alcibiades. We end our conversation with the lessons we moderns can take from the rise and fall of Athens. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/athens.
Alright, David Stuttard, welcome to the show.
David Stuttard: Thank you very much, lovely to be here.
Brett McKay: And so you’ve written a pair of books about the period that covers about 500 BC to a little after 400 BC. The first book is called Phoenix, which is about the rise of Athens and sort of its zenith of power where we think of Athens today, we think of temples and philosophy and the Greek tragedies. And then the second book part of this series is called Nemesis, which is about the fall of Athens, and you look at the fall of Athens through a really… You can’t make this guy up, Alcibiades and we’ll talk about him.
David Stuttard: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Well let’s talk about what you cover in Phoenix. So like I said earlier, we typically think of Athens at its zenith of power when it’s commanding the seas, it’s making great art, producing philosophy, commerce. But before the Persian War, Athens was really just one of many Greek city states, kind of existing in the shadows of Sparta. Sparta was sort of the big dog, but then it kinda started growing in influence. Can you give us a big picture overview of the state of Athens before the Persian War? Where did the Athenians come from? What was their government like, etcetera?
David Stuttard: Sure. Well, what’s very interesting is in the 100 years before the Persian Wars, really, a huge amount of stuff happens. Up until, let’s say, 20 years before the Persian Wars, Athens is ruled by aristocrats. It’s ruled by one particularly aristocratic powerful family. But because of one thing and partly because those aristocrats had other aristocratic rivals, and we’ll be talking about that, I’m sure, quite a lot in this podcast, one of that family was assassinated, a chap called Hipparchus, which left his brother, Hippias in control of Athens. He became very unpopular indeed and there was a popular uprising. Well, when I say popular uprising, it was an uprising which was really spearheaded by a rival aristocratic family called the Alcmaeonids. And they enlisted the help of the Spartans to drive Hippias out of Athens. But then what the main Alcmaeonid leader really realized was that in order for him and his cohorts to retain power in Athens, they needed to enlist the support of the ordinary people. So this chap called the Cleisthenes, introduced a system of a government called isonomia, which effectively means equality under the law.
But he also sort of reorganized the way in which Athens was administrated. He organized the way in which each individual belonged to sort of a geographical group, so that the power of the ancestral families became gradually diluted and the influence of the state as a whole became greater. And this was the system which eventually… We don’t know how eventually, we don’t know how rapidly this happened, but translated itself into something which the Greeks called people power demokratia and we call democracy, of course. So this democratic situation had really only been in place for around about 15 years before the Persians invaded, first of all. But the democratic constitution, the fact that it is a democracy seems really to have caused the Athenians to coalesce under this new cause. And almost immediately, Attica, which is the region of which Athens is the main sort of conurbation. Attica was attacked by the Spartans and by other neighbors. And within a period of a very short while, Athens has managed to beat off these invaders. So she’s proving herself to be militarily extremely strong, as well as politically innovative.
Brett McKay: Well, I think an interesting point there is that the democratic government that Athens got was started by aristocrats. There was just basically a beef between the aristocrats.
David Stuttard: Exactly, exactly. And it’s a way, [chuckle] in fact, that those aristocrats very cleverly realized that they could, as I say, hold on to power without necessarily all the problems which had been there in the hundred years before. Because previously, there had been a lot of fighting between these aristocratic families, as each of them thought that they should be the ones in control of Athens. Somehow involving the people allowed that to be… The people having the power, those individual strong families become much more sort of subsumed into the government as a whole. They still remain important as we will see.
Brett McKay: And before the Persian War, there’s a lot of contention between the Greek city states themselves. There’s a lot of just infighting amongst Greeks and the big one, like Sparta seemed to be like they were invading everyone all the time. They invaded Athens around 506. What was the nature of the contention? And I think this is important to talk about, because this contention, it’s still there under the radar, even during the Persian War when Spartan-Athens were allies.
David Stuttard: You’re absolutely right. I mean, they were very… I think they were very anxious about what was happening politically in Athens. They saw this isonomia, this proto-democracy, as a little bit of a threat. And also a few of those Ionian aristocrats, including Hippias, the guy who’d been expelled by the Spartans, were asking the Spartans to help them. So, you have people from Athens, who aren’t happy with this new political regime, who are trying to have it sort of overturned almost immediately. And they call on the Spartans for help; Spartans being the most powerful, militarily, at that period.
Brett McKay: Were the Spartans threatened by democracy, because their whole government or their whole way of life depended on keeping the helots…
David Stuttard: Yes.
Brett McKay: In check? So they thought it would spread like, “Well, man, if these Athenians think their rabble can control things, maybe the helots will start thinking that, too.”
David Stuttard: I think what we’ve got to remember is that when the Spartans did invade Attica, democracy was very much in its infancy. It had only been around for about 18 months, I suppose. So, I don’t suppose the Spartans or anybody had any idea what it would become. So, perhaps what they’re more interested in is really putting a puppet into Athens that they themselves can control. But I’m absolutely certain that they are also looking at, as you say, at this idea of people power very suspiciously. The Spartans are your ultimate oligarchs, your ultimate aristocrats, I guess. In that, in order to be a Spartan, you have to own a certain amount of land, you have to have X amount of money as well. And simply to allow anyone to take part in political debates and political decisions, I’m sure that even at that early stage, they could see that this posed a threat.
Brett McKay: So, you had one group of Athenians, one group of aristocrats, who went to Sparta for help, but then you also had another group that they went to Persia looking for help for their side, on their side.
David Stuttard: Well, these are… And we don’t actually know who these people were, but we do know that the Athenians as a whole, the people of Athens, sent an embassy off to Persia. I think because they were so aware that the Spartans were there, they could invade at any time, they had other hostile states all around them, and because the Persians were beginning to be the most powerful horse in the East, yeah, you had an embassy, which went off to the Persians to ask them if they would help them militarily; if they could have an alliance with them. And the Persians said, “Yes, of course you can, as long as you give us amphoras with attic earth and attic water.” The embassy, the ambassadors, evidently… And I can’t believe this is true, but they agreed, without necessarily realizing that to agree to offer earth and water, was to agree to be part of the Persian Empire. And so according to Herodotus, the historian who records all these things, those ambassadors somehow agreed that Athens should become part of the Persian Empire. Of course, when they returned to Athens, the people of Athens were horrified. They’d only just created this new political regime of people power, democracy, and now they were agreeing to be part of the Persian Empire. So, very rapidly, this was kind of ignored. It was just swept under the carpet as if it had never happened.
Brett McKay: And did this deal that these emissaries did, did that, in any way, contribute to the Persians eventually invading Greece?
David Stuttard: Well, I think it made the people of Athens very aware that they didn’t… That they valued their freedom and their independence. And so when a string of Greek cities in the western coastline of Asia Minor, these Ionian cities, the people of Athens are Ionians as well, it’s a kind of an ethnic division of the Greeks. And when these Ionian cities in Asia Minor, that had been taken over by the Persians, had become part of the Persians’ Empire rebelled, they asked Athens if they would help, and Athens did indeed help. And it was really because of that. In the end, the rebellion was unsuccessful, but it was because the Athenians had helped that Ionian revolt, the Persians were reminded of their existence and were determined to bring Athens to heel.
Brett McKay: And who was the Persian king at this time? I can’t remember. Was it Darius or Cyrus?
David Stuttard: It is. Yes, it’s Darius the first. And according to Herodotus, when he heard about the involvement of Athens in this rebellion, he had a slave say to him every day, in the morning and at night, “Remember the Athenians,” and he vowed his revenge.
Brett McKay: Well, yeah, I thought that was interesting. You talked about the Persians, their form of religion, Zoroastrianism, is that right? Is that what it is?
David Stuttard: That’s right.
Brett McKay: Yeah, the world was black and white. And one of the things the Persians thought was the most evil thing you could do was lie or backtrack. And you had Darius thinking, “Yeah, these… You gotta remember these Athenians, they’re evil. They’re one of the bad guys, ’cause they went… They went back on their word.”
David Stuttard: Against their oath.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
David Stuttard: Yeah, exactly.
Brett McKay: Okay, so the Persians invade Greece, that kick-starts the Persian War. Early on, and this is where your book, Phoenix, really starts picking up, you’re talking about some of the men who played a pivotal role in the Persian War on the Athenian side. There was a guy name Miltiades. This guy became, rose to prominence in the Persian War. Tell us about him. What role did he play in the rise of Athenian power during the Persian War?
David Stuttard: Well, he’s a very interesting person, really, because he had been appointed by the old regime by Hippias, the guy who’s kicked out of Athens. But he’d been appointed by Hippias to look after Athenian interests in the Eastern Aegean. And while he’s there, the area that he is in charge of comes under the power of the Persian Empire. Miltiades initially seems to have sort of been quite happy to help the Persians, and we hear about him on a military expedition as part of the Persian army. But then relationships with Persia become sort of hostile, and so he has to return to Athens. When he is in Athens, of course, he has enemies there. All these other aristocrats are not very happy to see Miltiades returning home, this very powerful man with a power base in Athens as well. But they do realize that he’s actually quite an important person, because he’s the only real power figure in Athens who has any real experience of the Persians and the Persian Army. So, he becomes one of the military commanders who lead the army out when the Persian Army arrives in Attica.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and so he played a pivotal role in the Battle of Marathon, which we typically think of the Battle of Marathon, “Oh that’s the guy… It’s where the marathon was invented, right?”
The guy who runs, and then keels over and dies.
David Stuttard: That’s it.
Brett McKay: So what was his role at Marathon? What did he do there?
David Stuttard: Well, as I say, he was one of the Athenian military commanders, that they had this very strange arrangement whereby because they didn’t want to put the power into the hands of one person, the military command actually rotated, every day, a new commander took over. But a few of his fellow commanders realized that he was the one who knew all about the Persians and Persian way of battle and so on. And so evidently, they allowed him to take command on the days on which they were supposed to take command. And then, for days, the Persians and the Athenians are just holding off, neither of them is prepared to commit their army onto the field. And they’re just eyeballing each other over about a mile of empty, empty space. Now, we don’t know exactly what happened, ’cause even Herodotus, the historian who records it, and who evidently spoke to eyewitnesses of the battle, is quite vague. But it appears that early one day, early one morning when the Athenians woke up, they realized that the Persians were embarking their army onto their ships, probably with the intention of voyaging round the coast of Attica and attacking Athens, obviously because the army isn’t in Athens, the army is in the east of Attica.
And so, the Persian horses, we believe, have already been embarked. Now this is crucial, because the Persian infantry is therefore on its own. And when the Greeks, when Miltiades and the Athenians realized that the army was embarking, that the horses were on board, the horses were out of play, he seems to have ordered the attack. And according to Herodotus, they attacked at a run across this long empty mile of No Man’s Land. During that period, of course, the Persian archers are able to get into play, arrows are coming, raining down on the Athenians as they make contact with the Persian Army. The Athenians are outnumbered, massively outnumbered. But because of the element of surprise, I suppose to an extent, although, [chuckle] the Persians as they say, had quite a while when the Athenians advanced to realize what was happening. But the Athenians had their homeland, I suppose, on their side. They were really fighting for Athens and for their families back in Athens itself.
And very, very quickly, the Persian resistance collapsed and the Athenians, as you say, won a phenomenal and quite unexpected victory at Marathon. Around 5000 at least Persians are slaughtered, 192 Athenians fell at the Battle of Marathon. We know that it was a 192, because they became heroized, they became this great elite in memory of Athens. Their bodies were buried all together under a funeral mound at Marathon and honors were paid to them every year. They became heroized. Because this is a very important event. The Persian fleet returns to Asia Minor and for 10 years, the threat of invasion is hanging over them, but it hasn’t materialized again for another, as I say, for another 10 years.
Brett McKay: Alright, so yeah, The Battle of Marathon held off the Persians. Miltiades, he’s the hero of the Battle of Marathon, but then he eventually is put on trial for treason by the Athenians.
David Stuttard: Yes.
Brett McKay: What happened?
David Stuttard: He… About a year after Marathon, he says that he can… He’d like to take out the army of Athens on a military campaign, but he refuses to say where and why. He does take them on a campaign, the campaign is not successful. And when he returns home, his enemies, of whom he has quite a few, as I said earlier, put him on trial, because they say that he squandered the resources of Athens. They fined him a massive amount of money. In fact, he has been injured on campaign, he’s put in jail, he’s incredibly ill, he doesn’t survive, and the money which is owed… This great sort of fine, which is owed, is inherited by his family, who have to pay it off. And I think really part of what Miltiades’s enemies are trying to do is to actually cripple his family politically. They have to pay off this huge amount of money so because of that, they’re not… They’re not able to engage so easily in the political life of Athens.
Brett McKay: So again, you see this theme… Just aristocrats fighting aristocrats going on in Athens. We’ll talk about Miltiades’ son here in a bit, but at this point in the Peloponnesian War, is this when Athens started really developing their sea power like the trireme? Was that… Was this when this started happening?
David Stuttard: This is happening right now, you’re quite right. There’s a populist politician, a man called Themistocles, and for a long time, he’s been really saying that Athens needs to take control of the ocean, of the sea. The way to do this is to build these new ships, this new design of ships, the trireme. And the trireme is basically a boat with a very strong reinforced ram. The idea is that the oarsmen all row as fast as they can against the enemy ship. They hole it if they can, they hole its hull so that the water pours into the enemy ship. Then of course, they themselves have to disengage, as quickly as they are able to, so that they’re not sort of involved with his enemy ship anymore, they’re not actually pulled down along with it. And that is what the trireme is all about. It’s almost like a spear on the sea, a spear which is being manipulated by all these oarsmen.
So, it just rushes head, smashes into the enemy ship, pulls back. And the people of Athens were very, very lucky indeed, because in around 483, a massive… They had these silver mines in Attica, and around about 483, as I say, a massive bedrock of silver was discovered in Attica. And the politician Themistocles, said, “Well, look, either we can allow every man in Athens to have a part of the revenue of this, or we can all club together and with it build as many triremes as possible.” And this was a remarkable idea, and it was an idea, which he was able to persuade the Athenians to accept. And so, just in two or three years, the people of Athens were able to build a couple of hundred of these new triremes, and they would prove very, very important in the years to come.
Brett McKay: And what’s interesting you make this point, trireme warfare was very suited to the democratic government of Athens, ’cause basically when you’re in the trireme, like every… The oarsmen, right? They’re sort of these anonymous… It’s like the people who are making this happen. And so for some reason, I guess they took a lot of pride in trireme warfare, because it kind of… It was like a corollary to their democratic or everyone’s equal government.
David Stuttard: You’re absolutely right, because up until then, hot plate warfare had been the great thing. And hot plates are these… When you think of an ancient Athenian army it’s the hot plates, you think of with their helmets and their big shields and the… And it’s only those people with a certain income who are able to afford all this. But anyone without any income at all is able to be an oarsman. This is the ultimate in sort of the equality. You didn’t have to be a wealthy Athenian to be able to fight and or protect Athens.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so we got trireme warfare going on, they’re having a lot of success with that. Miltiades, he fends off the Persians at the Battle of Marathon, but his political enemies within Athens, another aristocratic family, basically fined him for, I don’t, it kinda sounded like almost trumped-up charges almost… And the debt passed on to his family. Then you had Miltiades son… Cimon, he picks up where Miltiades left off. Like what happened? What did he do after his father died?
David Stuttard: Well, he is a very… He’s an extraordinary man, because really because of his energy and charisma. He’s able to attract allies from other aristocratic families in Athens. He really seems to be a man who is able make important friends. And one of the things he does, he makes a friend who really helps him to pay off his, everything he owes. And he also realizes that when the Persians invade again in 480 BC, with the Persian army coming, marching overland, the Persian fleet hugging the coast down toward Athens, the aristocrats are very keen to take the hot plates out, and meet them in battle in a hot plate battle, ’cause they say that this is how it’s always been and how it ought to be again. But Themistocles, he says, No, no, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to put everybody into the triremes and we’ve got… And the fleet… We’ve got to evacuate Athens and, if necessary, allow the Persians to overrun Athens as long as we can defeat them with our triremes, we will be alright. Because, of course, the Persians relied on the triremes to bring in supplies, bring in, control the Aegean so that they could eat while they’re on campaign.
And Cimon is able to really see that this is a very good idea. And so there’s a pivotal moment, which we hear about, there are some historians who say the actual event never happened, but I don’t really see any reason why it shouldn’t have happened. In which Cimon and his aristocratic friends make a procession through Athens and up onto the Acropolis and into the Shrine of Athena, where Cimon presents to the great statue of Athena, his horse’s bridle.
And the point which he’s making here is that he, this elite cavalryman, is handing over that element of himself, of his aristocracy, of his eliteness, of his horsemanship to Athena, because what he then does, he comes out to the temple and with his friends, walks down to the harbor and onto the ships. And he’s making this point, I may be an aristocrat, but I know that our future lies in the ships at sea. And because of that, the tide turned among the aristocrats, everybody decided “Yes, we must evacuate Athens,” and that is indeed what they did. A few sort of very old schooled people remained on the Acropolis and when the Persians did indeed overrun Athens, they were all slaughtered, but the rest, as they say, went down to the sea. A few days after Athens had been overrun, the Greek Navy hit the Persian Navy and defeated them, and the Persian threat again, although the Persian land army remained for another year, it also was beaten, and the Persian threat again is removed from the mainland of Greece. And the Persians thereafter, they don’t ever come back again.
Brett McKay: Alright, so Cimon was there and he decided, I’m gonna go all in on this democratic, trireme warfare, and that…
David Stuttard: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Turned the tide. But okay, so people looked to him as a leader, but then eventually he’s ostracized. So, what happened? How did he go from “I’m gonna do whatever this guy does” to persona non-grata?
David Stuttard: Well, again, we’re having to race now through quite a lot of history, because just to condense all this, after the Persians have been removed from Greece, Cimon really leads an alliance based in Athens, Athens under allies, and that is really constituted in order to remove the Persian threat all together. So they get the Persians out of any Aegean island, any other Greek owned, if you like, areas of the world there, and they begin to take the battle to the Persians as well. This alliance, by the way, very, very quickly turns… Everyone in the alliance is supposed to be equal, but Athens is more equal than the rest, and what begins as an Athenian alliance turns into an Athenian empire, pretty, pretty quickly.
Cimon is phenomenally successful. He wages many campaigns, he defeats the Persians, and of course, because of this, a lot of Persian money and booty comes into Athens, but there’s one thing that the Athenians wouldn’t forgive Cimon for, and that is that he rather admires the Spartans. Cimon is an old aristocrat at heart, and he does rather like the way in which the Spartans do things, and so when in… There was an earthquake in Sparta, and the Spartans asked everyone they knew for help because they were very afraid that the helots slaves would rebel, which indeed they did, Cimon leads an army from Athens to Sparta to help them against the helots, but something goes wrong. Again, we don’t really know what, it may be that members of Cimon’s army behave in a way that the Spartans don’t approve of, it could be anything, we just don’t know, but the Athenians are asked to leave and go back to Athens, and this is really seen as a great disgrace in Athens and Cimon is blamed for this, and because of that, again, his enemies are able to rise up against him in Athens and they resort to this mechanism called ostracism, whereby the people can vote on whether they’d like to expel someone from Athens for a set length of time to remove his political power from Athens, and this is what they do, and Cimon is ostracized.
And in his absence, Pericles begins to rise to power, and he really taps into the mood of Athens, which is very anti-Spartan, very bellicose as well, and he sort of proposes and leads a large number of campaigns, Athens and Sparta face off one another militarily, the Athens is badly defeated by the Spartans and things don’t go terribly well, it’s not until Cimon returns from ostracism, that peace is made with Sparta. Cimon himself then goes off on campaign again against the Persians and wins victories again then, but he passes away while on campaign, but just about a year after that, another Athenian embassy goes to Persia. It’s very different from the embassy which had gone earlier that we spoke about, because on this occasion, the Athenians seem to make peace with the Persians and the Persians agreed that they won’t be involved in any more hostilities against the Greeks, and it’s this peace which allows Pericles in the middle of the fifth century BC to begin his great building project in Athens. It’s now that the Parthenon is built and all this other… And Athens really does become this great hub that we were speaking about earlier.
Brett McKay: Yes, this is like, where it was about 460-450 BC?
David Stuttard: Yeah, 450ish lets really say.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so Pericles begins this big public works project, builds all these temples, basically, this is when Athens becomes the Athens that we know…
David Stuttard: Exactly.
Brett McKay: That we think of. But… So they are the zenith of their success, the zenith of their power, but what’s going on? Is there still all that just aristocratic contention within Athens that’s gonna eventually sow the seeds of its downfall?
David Stuttard: There is, I think there is always that. The Greeks as a whole, and aristocrats in particular, lived by the idea, which is really raised in Homer’s Iliad, he has a line in Tiernan… [0:32:06.8] ____ Always to be the best and to surpass all others. Now, the Greeks as a whole, believe that that was what they should do, and individually they believe that as well, that’s why they have all of this competitiveness and things like the Olympic games, they have competitiveness in the arts, they are battling against one another all the time to be supreme, and it isn’t a way to create harmony really, and in fact, just at that very period that we’re talking about just as peace is being made with the Persians, and to think that everything could really turn out quite harmoniously in the end, a child is born in Athens who I think we’ll be speaking about possibly for the rest of this interview, Alcibiades, and he really encapsulates that idea, that Homeric idea, always to be the best because that’s what he wants to be, and he will do everything to achieve it.
Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s talk about Alcibiades. He’s… I don’t think you make this guy up, you read a story is like… This is like some sort of HBO Game of Thrones succession drama going on. So he’s born around 452 BC, sort of the zenith of Athenian cultural power and influence and economic might. What’s his story? Like who were Alcibiades’ parents? Was he from an aristocratic family, what was he like as a kid?
David Stuttard: Yes, he is. He is from the Alcmaeonid family, the family we heard about, the family who introduced Isonomia or democracy into Athens; he’s from this very powerful family. He’s incredibly well off. He’s orphaned as a child and his father had already made this arrangement that if he should be killed, Alcibiades should be looked after by Pericles, the most important man, the leading man in Athens. So, Alcibiades, his childhood is spent in the household of Pericles, so he can really get an idea of what power is all about. Pericles’ household we hear from ancient sources, it’s quite austere though… Pericles likes to think of himself as aloof from human emotions and human failings and so on, he is… It’s a household where there’s a lot of philosophy, arts, and so on there. But young Alcibiades proves himself to be a bit of a rebel, even at an early age, there are lots of anecdotes about how he behaved when he was young. There’s an anecdote about how he and his friends were playing a game in the streets, which involved throwing the bones of animals on the ground to see how they land and just exactly how they land, you get points, depending on how the bones land.
As they’re playing this, Alcibiades has just thrown his hand and an ox cart comes trundling down the street that the driver of the ox cart says “out of my way, out of my way,” but Alcibiades refuses cause he wants to see how these bones that he’s been playing with landed in the street, and so he lies down in front of the ox cart and says, “Drive on if you like, but you’ll have to drive over me,” and of course, the driver reins in the oxen and Alcibiades proves his power. But he’s also his love of competitiveness at that early age, at some stage in his adolescence, he comes under the auspices of one of the most influential people in Athens, the Great Philosopher Socrates, and this was a relationship which puzzled a lot of people. ‘Cause here was Alcibiades… Very handsome. This also has to be said, he’s supposed to be the handsomest man in Athens, and the philosopher Socrates who was notoriously ugly, also though notoriously into leading a life of virtue contemplation, if you like, as well, and Alcibiades is completely the opposite. And how are these two sort of attracted one another was really something which interested the ancients, very, very much.
We know that Socrates and Alcibiades were on campaign with one another, as soon as Alcibiades became an adult, Athens and Sparta come really into a major conflict with one another, this is when the Peloponnesian War breaks out; just before the Peloponnesian War, there’s a little sort of overture, hostilities up in a place called [0:36:43.1] ____ Tide, up in the Chalkidiki right up in the highest part up there in the Aegean, and Alcibiades and Socrates are on campaign with one another. We hear that Socrates was able to save Alcibiades in when he was being attacked by the enemy, rescued from the battlefield and looked after him, supposedly Alcibiades a few years later, returned the favor when they were on another campaign, and Socrates was being harassed by the enemy, Alcibiades on his horse rides down and protects his old friend Socrates as they are being removed from the battle field, and they head off to the Athenian camp, so that there is a real relationship between those two.
Brett McKay: So yeah, and it seems like the way you describe it, Socrates, likely saw the potential for Alcibiades, potential to be either a really great, great man, but it had to be tempered with philosophy, tempered with virtue, or he could just end up being just a terrible, like you said, nemesis, just bring the downfall of Athens.
David Stuttard: Yes. Yes.
Brett McKay: So Alcibiades, he’s this good-looking, cocky, confident man of great will in Athens, he eventually steps into public life, this is it right before kind of in the lead up to the Peloponnesian War. Did he play any role in the lead up to the Peloponnesian war between Sparta?
David Stuttard: Well, this is now when he becomes old enough to take public office, we’re actually right in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, that episode, which I was talking about, in fact both of those episodes which involved Alcibiades and Socrates happened in the earlier stages of the Peloponnesian War. But when Alcibiades was reaching, as I say, an age to be appointed a military commander, at the age of 30, peace all of a sudden breaks between Athens and Sparta, which, for Alcibiades, is not a good thing at all, because he wants to make his mark as a general. And so, he frets during this peace period, and he does his best to involve Sparta’s enemies in a proxy war with Sparta…
Places like Argos, which is in the Peloponnese and has been an old enemy of Sparta. So, Alcibiades gets the people of Argos to get their army together and go out and fight the Spartans, and he’s doing everything he can to poke away at the Spartans and to try to foment hostilities again. He eventually does, but in another theater of war entirely. Again, envoys arrive from Italy, who are being attacked or being treated badly, they say, by the citizens of Syracuse. And they asked the people of Athens if they could possibly send small army and a small fleet to help them to counter the threat of the Syracusans. Alcibiades is all for this, and when he addresses the popular assembly at Athens, they’re all for it as well, ’cause they think it’s gonna be a great adventure.
Again, however, personal animosities come in the way, because there’s an older politician an older general at Athens who hates Alcibiades, and he says, Gosh, this is a totally stupid idea, we couldn’t possibly do it. In order to be able to conduct such a military campaign, we’d need twice as big an army as Alcibiades is proposing. And the people of Athens, in an assembly, is so excited about the idea and say, Yes alright, well we’ll send twice the size. And because of this, because this great armada then is designated to go off in its campaign against Syracusans, the whole flavor of the military engagement changes. And what could have been quite a successful enterprise, eventually turned out… Because Athens’ allies in the field there, when they saw the size of the army that Athens was actually sending, believed that what they were aiming to do was actually annex the whole of the island of Sicily, and the whole of the south of Italy as well, and so they became very anxious about it and they refused to help. And so it was a disaster.
But before it was a disaster, Alcibiades himself had ended up in pretty hot water too, because before the expedition was allowed to set sail, something happened in Athens, which would really impinge on his career from then on in. Because outside every house, the major buildings in Athens, there were things called Hermes. And these are statues of the god Hermes, which were supposed to, well believed to, protect the houses and protect the whole of the city of Athens. And one morning before the fleet actually set sail, it was discovered that the majority of these Hermes had been smashed. Now nobody knew who was responsible… To this day, we have no way of telling who was responsible for smashing the Hermes. But Alcibiades’ enemies claimed that he was behind it. And they claimed he’d also done something else, which was very impious, and that was to page a pastiche of The Eleusinian Mysteries, which were the most, or one of the most, sacred initiation rites in Athens. And because Alcibiades is implicated in this, his enemies organized that once the fleet had sailed, and of course, the army, which was Alcibiades’ main support base was out of Athens, Alcibiades should be recalled to Athens and put on trial. And he knew that if he was to return to Athens, he would be in grave trouble indeed. So, instead of accompanying the people who have been sent to arrest him back to Athens, Alcibiades gave them the slip.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and he goes to the enemy. He goes to Sparta and convinces the Spartans to take him in. He was fomenting war against the Spartans. Like he wanted to fight these guys. So, how did he convince… How did he convince the Spartans, “Yeah. Take me in, I wanna be on your guys’ side now”?
David Stuttard: I don’t think he had [0:43:28.3] ____ in Sparta. There were people there he knew and that he had an old ancestral relationship with. But we also know that one of the things which he said to the Spartans was, If you take me in, I will help you to defeat the Athenians. Again, I think this is really something which he has learned from the Iliad. Because when Achilles is slighted by Agamemnon, he goes off and refuses to take part in the Trojan war anymore, Homer says that Achilles was hoping that the Greeks would do so badly that they would ask Achilles back again to their army. And I think this is partly what Alcibiades is hoping, that if the Spartans appear to be doing really well, the Athenians will ask him back again, and all of these things about the Hermes and The Eleusinian Mysteries… We can forget all that, we want you back. And I think that’s what he’s sort of campaigning for for quite a long time now. So, he offers to help the Spartans. He gives them advice, which they’d already been thinking of anyway.
Here’s another thing, we hear all about what Alcibiades offers the Spartans and later offers the Persians when he goes over to them, but how do we know about this? Who is it that we hear it from? Well, we hear it from the historian Thucydides, who’s the great historian of the Peloponnesian War. But who does Thucydides get this information from? I think he probably got the information from Alcibiades himself, because we know that Thucydides interviewed all the key players in the Peloponnesian War. And there are quite a few times when we get slants on, we get little insights on the story, which presented as if Alcibiades is able to trick people, is able to… Is a lot smarter than anybody else.
And I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as I say, if the person that originated this version of the story was indeed Alcibiades. So we hear that he arrives in Sparta, though for a little while he does quite well and he manages to persuade the Spartans who were thinking as I say about it anyway of sending a fleet of their own to the eastern Aegean to open up a new front in what has now re-emerged as the new phase of the Peloponnesian War to try to attack Athens allies in Ionia in the eastern Aegean. Alcibiades is able to take control of this expedition, he actually leads the Spartans out to the eastern Aegean and it’s just as well he’s left Sparta at the time he does ’cause one of the Queens of Sparta, there are two royal families in Sparta, and one of the Queens has had a child whom her household slaves overhear her calling Alcibiades.
Brett McKay: Oh, oh.
David Stuttard: And when the Queen’s husband, a chap called Aegeus begins to do his arithmetic, he realizes that he’s not actually slept with his wife for quite a long time, certainly longer than would appear that it was his own child, so he thinks that the child is Alcibiades’ child and so he becomes very angry with him, he manages to persuade the Spartans to put a sentence of execution on Alcibiades. And so here Alcibiades is out in the eastern Aegean with the Spartan army, the people of Athens are his enemies, the Spartans are now his enemies, so what can he do? Who can he go to? Well, there’s only one powerhouse that he can now go to and that is the Persians, they’re the old enemies of Greece, and Alcibiades does precisely that. He goes over to the Persians he does the same thing there, he offers to help them to defeat not only Athens but Sparta as well, to play one side off against the other, to exhaust Greece and eventually he says, with Greece exhausted the Persians can come in and take over the mainland of Greece which is what they tried to do all those years before.
There’s a lot of political toing and froing going on. In Athens, the people, the aristocrats, particularly, are so disillusioned by the way that the war is going that for a little while they take over the running of Athens so that the constitution, the democratic constitution, is actually suspended for a little while. But the fleet, the Athenian fleet, remember the fleet is powered by the common people, the fleet, which is out in the eastern Aegean is looking for really someone to inspire them and to take over and to lead them, to help them, not only against Spartans, but against these oligarchs at home in Athens, and so, who do they turn to? They turn to the man who is just a few miles away in Asia Minor, Alcibiades. And so we get this bizzare situation whereby the fleet asks Alcibiades to return as their commander, and Alcibiades of course is delighted, this is what he’s been trying for for quite a long time.
He returns to the fleet, he leads the fleet to a string of amazing victories over the Persians, and eventually, once the oligarchs in Athens have been overthrown, democracy is returned to Athens, Alcibiades returns in triumph to Athens and is welcomed as a great hero. This is his highest point and after a month or so in Athens, again he decides to take the army, the fleet back to the Eastern Mediterranean to do battle with the Spartans, and then it all goes horribly wrong again ’cause he leaves the fleet in charge of a friend of his who engages with the enemy when Alcibiades has told him not to. It’s a disaster, the Athenian fleet is defeated, Alcibiades realizes that if he hangs around any longer, he’ll be in great trouble, so he takes himself off. He’s already built himself some stronghold right up in the northern Aegean and that kind of area there, and he lives for the rest of the Peloponnesian War as a kind of a bandit king, a bandit warlord, offering his advice when he thinks it’s going to be useful, but his advice is ignored and within a very short while without him there, Athens’ fleet is completely destroyed.
Without the fleet, Athens can’t survive, Athens is besieged, its people have nothing to eat, they hold out for about a year and a bit and eventually because they’re so hungry and starved, they offer to sue for terms, and Spartans defeat the Athenians. Alcibiades is ill, alive however but not for long, because the Spartans are just as keen to really see the end of him as anyone else is and some kind of a hit squad, I think, is really sent out against Alcibiades. He tries to curry favor again with his old friends in Persia, he offers to go and help the Persian king, if only he can go all the way inland to see the Persian king, he says he’s got very important information for him but the permissions that he’s looking for, which will allow him to travel through Persia don’t come in and he discovers himself one night in a cottage house of some sort in the hills in the west of the Persian empire and he hears people all around the house.
He realized the house has been completely surrounded, burning arrows are fired into the walls and the roof of the house which begins to catch alight. He and his comrades try to put out the fire, but they realize that there’s nothing really they can do, so Alcibiades we hear, wraps a cloak around his left arm, holds a sword in his right, opens the door of the house and rushes out into the blackness, and it’s like the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It all ends there in a hail of arrows, and this is a very romantic and sort of Hollywood ending for a very romantic and Hollywood individual.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I read the story of Alcibiades, he just seemed like, yeah, he was a guy who had that Homeric ideal of “Be the best of the best”, but he was in a democratic society, so he would use democracy to serve that purpose. I don’t think… He might have not really cared much about democracy, but as long as it’ll help me be the best of the best, then I’ll go along with it, sure.
David Stuttard: I think he would use anybody to serve his purpose.
Anybody and anything.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
David Stuttard: Yeah.
Brett McKay: So, after your readers read these books, Phoenix and Nemesis, are there any big lessons about life, or politics, or warfare that you hope people walk away with after reading them?
David Stuttard: Well, I think, one of the things, obviously, is that things and people have not changed in two and a half thousand years, and we shouldn’t underestimate the fact that Athens… One of the reasons that it ended up by being defeated in the Peloponnesian War, was that it began to believe its own propaganda, Athens became complacent. Every year in Athens, they had this big military event where the bodies or the remains of those who’d fallen in battle the year before, were buried in a public burial place, and the most powerful politician of the year or the leading general made a speech. And that speech appears have been pretty much the same every year in that it remembered Athens’ history and it stretched its history back into mythological period, and everything that the people of Athens were reminded about was, Athenian military success, how the Athenians were the best of all the people in Greece, how they were really the ones who were chosen to lead Greece, to spread freedom, democracy, all these great ideas.
And the more the Athenians heard this, the more that they believed it, I think, the more they believed that they were invincible. And this is really a very salutary story for us all, that we can’t rely on our past glories, our past successes, we can’t rely just because we tell ourselves that everything’s great, we’re wonderful [chuckle], we can’t really believe everybody else to believe that too. This idea of hubris, that, as I say, you believe your own propaganda, and it generally ends in tears, I’m afraid.
Brett McKay: Another way I’ve heard, don’t believe your own propaganda is, don’t like the smell of your own farts.
You gotta be careful of that. And the other take away too, as I was reading this is a reminder of how quickly things can change. Like this conversation we’ve had just covered about 100 years, and all this stuff happened, and I think for us in the modern world, we’re so accustomed to things being relatively stable for us, history kind of has been… Everything’s kind of been the same since World War II, and we think, well, this is normal. If you look at most of human history, the norm is constant change and constant turmoil.
David Stuttard: This is absolutely right. And we only need to see how unprepared we’ve been for the pandemic as well. As if that was the thing which could not possibly impact on us because we were so scientifically advanced, and this is again, it’s like the Athenian thing. And of course, what we didn’t speak about was that right at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, there was… A plague hit Athens and a third of the population of Athens was annihilated by this plague. Again, the Athenians believe that if they behave in a pious way, they would be above such things, because they thought that things like the plagues was sent by Apollo to punish people for behaving in an impious way, so they thought, I suppose, that their sort of exemplary way of life would protect them from plague and disease. Just as we, I think, were slightly alled into believing that our medical advances, so on, would be so strong that anything like a pandemic would not affect us in the way it has, and the economic impact of these things too. If history teaches us anything, it really teaches us how vulnerable we are.
Brett McKay: No, for sure. Well, David, this has been a great conversation, where can people go to learn more about your work?
David Stuttard: Well, they can go on to my website, which is www.davidstuttard.com. They can read any of my books as well, I have an email, if anybody would like to get in touch also, and that’s on my website.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, David Stuttard, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.
David Stuttard: Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Brett McKay: My guest today was David Stuttard, we talked about two of his books today, Phoenix and Nemesis, they’re both available on Amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, Davidstuttard.com, also check in our show notes at aom.is/Athens 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, 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 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 if you could take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Stitcher, it helps 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 would think will 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 the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
The post Podcast #771: The Rise and Fall of Athens appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
Most everyone wants to live a good, meaningful life, though we don’t always know what that means and how to do it. Plenty of modern self-improvement programs claim to point people in the right direction, but many of the best answers were already offered more than two thousand years ago.
My guests have gleaned the cream of this orienting, ancient-yet-evergreen advice from history’s philosophers and shared it in their new book, The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. Their names are Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, and they’re professors of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Today on the show Meghan and Paul introduce us to the world of virtue ethics — an approach to philosophy that examines the nature of the good life, the values and habits that lead to excellence, and how to find and fulfill your purpose as a human being. We discuss how to seek truth with other people by asking them three levels of what they call “strong questions” and engaging in civil and fruitful dialogue. We then delve into why your intentions matter and why you should use “morally thick” language. We also examine the role that work and love has to play in pursuing the good life, and how the latter is very much about attention. We end our conversation with how a life of eudaimonia — full human flourishing — requires balancing action with contemplation.
Resources Related to the Podcast * AoM article and podcast on phronesis or practical wisdom * Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics * After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre * AoM Article: Why Are Modern Debates on Morality So Shrill? * Sunday Firesides: Virtue Isn’t Virtue Til It’s Tested * Iris Murdoch * AoM Article: Why Men Should Read More Fiction * The Road by Cormac McCarthy * AoM podcast on The Road * AoM article on contemplative self-examination, including instructions on how to do the examen of St. Ignatius
Connect With Meghan and Paul * Meghan’s Faculty Page * Paul’s Faculty Page
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Read the Transcript! Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Now, most everyone wants to live a good and meaningful life but we don’t always know what that means and how to do it. Plenty of modern self-improvement programs claim to point people in the right direction but many of the best answers were already offered more than 2000 years ago. My guests have gleaned the cream of this orienting, ancient yet evergreen advice from history’s philosophers and shared it in the new book, “The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith and Meaning.” Their names are Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko and they’re professors of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Today in the show, Meghan and Paul introduced us to the world of virtue ethics and their approach to philosophy that examines the nature of the good life, the values and habits that lead to excellence and how to find and fulfill your purpose as a human being. We discuss how to seek truth in other people by asking them three levels of what they call strong questions and engaging in civil and fruitful dialogue. We then delve into why your intentions matter and why you should use morally thick language.
We also examine the role that work and love has to play in pursuing the good life and how the latter is very much about attention. We end our conversation with how a life of eudaimonia, full human flourishing, requires balancing action with contemplation. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/goodlife. Alright, Meghan Sullivan, Paul Blaschko, welcome to the show.
Meghan Sullivan: So happy to be here.
Paul Blaschko: Thank you so much.
Brett McKay: So you two are philosophy professors at the University of Notre Dame, go Irish, and you got a book out “The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith and Meaning,” and in this book, you use virtue ethics to help people think about big life issues like Love, work, meaning, purpose, but before we get to those topics today, can you give us a big picture idea of what virtue ethics is for those who aren’t familiar with it.
Meghan Sullivan: So I think a lot of people, when they first hear about virtue ethics, what comes to mind, or the Victorian British people who had this very rigid set of rules for developing and protecting virtue, especially maybe the virtue of vulnerable women. And you think about it as this kind of prim and outdated philosophy, but in fact, what virtue ethics is, is this 2500-year-old philosophical self-improvement system that a lot of people have thought are at the core of why we care about philosophy and why we care about ethics. And the way I like to explain it to students or to people who I’m just trying to get excited about these ideas to, is first understanding what the two terms mean. So when we talk about the ethics and virtue ethics, we’re not talking about a system of rules like, always raise your pinky when you drink coffee, or always drive on the left-hand side of the road. Instead, we’re using ethics more like a work ethic, like a set of goals and principles and values that drive you, and the ethics part of that is trying to identify what those goals are that you have in your sights that you find really motivating and also explain your action in the world.
And virtue doesn’t necessarily mean a system of social mores and customs. Really the virtues are meant to be the traits and drives and dimensions of your personality that are helping you fulfill your function as a human being, that are helping you be the kind of person that you are aspiring to be or an excellent example of a person. And these will oftentimes be pretty demanding, but really interesting virtues that people can have in many different kinds of lives. Virtues like courage and generosity, deep concern for the truth, a deep concern for love and justice, and the ability to see and notice it in situations where it might be hard to find with the just or loving action is. And so one of the big things that we try to do in our class and in the book is remind people that they already think of like a virtue ethicist. We all struggle with these kinds of questions about what sort of person we wanna be and whether we’re living a good life every day, we just don’t know that there’s a name for this kind of philosophy and that there might be a more systematic way to approach it.
Paul Blaschko: Just to add really briefly onto Meghan’s answer, I totally agree with. The way I explain it to my students is virtue ethics, at least as Aristotle presents it, and he’s sort of the spirit animal of our course and the book… He shows up all over the place. So virtue ethics on the Aristotelian model takes the function or the purpose of human life, and it makes it central in asking these questions about how we should live and what makes a good life and what kind of goals that we should have, and so an easy analogy and one that I think a lot of intro philosophy classes we use is, think about a knife. What’s the purpose of a knife? Well, it’s to cut things. To chop up carrots and I don’t know whatever knives do. Okay, and so what makes a knife excellent? We’ll think about that function and think about what it would take for it to do that well. It’s gotta be sharp, it’s gotta sort of be solid, it’s gotta be built out of a certain kind of material, so we take that kind of structure and then we apply it to human life. We ask, What’s the purpose of human life? What’s our function? And then given that purpose, given that function, what would make us excellent beings of the sort that we actually are excellent human beings.
Brett McKay: Then I think that’s a good description that there’s not any hard or fast rules with virtue ethics. I think a lot of people want that with the philosophy, but I think as you said, Meghan, people are doing virtue ethics all the time. Life is sort of messy and they don’t know what’s the right thing to do here, and when you’re thinking like that, you are being a virtue ethicist.
Meghan Sullivan: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the really exciting things about coming to study virtue ethics is realizing in a really empowering way, how many ethical questions permeate your life. This idea of what’s the most generous or kind way to craft this email that I’m about to send at work, or what is a really just way of running a meeting? Ethics isn’t just this domain of should I launch the nuclear missiles, or only concerning issues of life and death or things that are in the headlines of the New York Times, but in fact, this realizing the day-to-day habits and activities that we spend time thinking about how we wanna do them and what our style is gonna be, these can be questions that also are influencing the kind of person that we’re becoming in ways that are really the heart of all of ethics.
Brett McKay: Okay, so for Aristotle, living the good life for humans meant living a life… What he you called… Eudaimonia or flourishing. So it’s like figuring out what the purpose of humans are and then you’re trying to achieve that. So for Aristotle, what did human flourishing look like?
Paul Blaschko: Yeah, so one of the really important places to start for Aristotle is this question that you’ve identified, what is our function, what is our purpose? And one way that the Greeks and the ancient philosophers liked to approach this question is to ask and what sets us apart from every other kind of creature? Every other kind of being? And even just sort of reflecting on this question, I think one property that comes to mind immediately is well, we can reason, we can reflect on things, we can use that to guide our lives and to shape the decisions that we’re making. So for Aristotle, really crucially, a life of flourishing, a life where you’re achieving what he calls eudaimonia, which is sometimes just translated happiness, sometimes translated flourishing. But a life that looks like that is gonna be one where you’re using that distinctively human capacity to reflect on and make decisions about what you think constitutes a good life.
Brett McKay: So there’s no… He doesn’t have a set thing like, well, you are living a flourishing life if you do X X X. As long as you’re just thinking and reasoning about your life is that for Aristotle a good life?
Paul Blaschko: Yeah, I think this is tricky, and Meghan, maybe you’ve got thoughts here. It’s tricky in the sense that Aristotle certainly thinks there are essential goods, there are elements that every good life is gonna share, right? He says in the Nicomachean Ethics, “A man would not choose to live if he didn’t have friends, even if he had every other good thing in life.” So friendship, companionship, this is essential to our flourishing, right and it’s something that we can discover through reason, and he gives us arguments as to why this is the case. And there are other things like this. So there are certain things that he thinks every good life is gonna have, but he’s not really prescriptive about exactly what that’ll look like, it’s not like a good life is gonna follow a template, or there’s a rule that you can use to just say like, “Okay, in this situation, here are the considerations,” and boom like here’s the output. Is that fair, Meghan?
Meghan Sullivan: Yeah, I think this is one of the things that philosophers love and hate about, Aristotle as the founder of virtue ethics. On the love side, he spends a lot of time in his book about happiness and human flourishing, the Nicomachean Ethics, going through specific virtues like courage or prudence and telling you, Here’s how to determine whether or not you’re acting courageously when you get confused. Courage is gonna be the mean, for instance, between being a coward and being reckless. He tries to give you guidance, but he also keeps reiterating that how courage manifests in your particular life, and whether or not you’re truly being courageous, or being reckless or being cowardly is gonna depend on really specific features of your situation and who you are, and this should make sense to us, right? Courage for a Spartan Helot is gonna look so different than courage for a 2022 American philosophy professor. For the Helot it might mean like rushing into battle to save his brother. For a 2022 philosophy professor, courage might mean going on a national podcast and trying to answer philosophy questions. It’s just the kinds of situations that we’re in are gonna manifest what’s really excellent about human lives in really different ways.
One of the really frustrating parts of Aristotle for a lot of philosophers and philosophy students is he faces this question about how you can know whether you’ve got the right kind of courage for your particular situation or the right kind of generosity for your really particular situation, if there’s no hard and fast rule book. And the best he can tell us on this is that in the course of trying to develop a good life, you develop this other virtue called phronesis or practical wisdom, which is basically the virtue of knowing what to do and people find this really frustrating because it just seems to not answer any of our questions anymore. What would a good person do at this faculty meeting tomorrow? Or how would a good person parent their child when the new iPhone comes online? And the best the Aristotelian can say is hopefully you’ve gotten to this point in your life where you also have this virtue of discernment and judgment, which can tell you what all the other virtues are gonna look like in your own particular circumstances, and then the Aristotle and The Virtue ethicist tend to get this question of like, “Well, how do I know if I’ve got bad virtue?” And why that’s why this debate has raged on and on.
Brett McKay: Now, we’ve had Barry Schwartz on the podcast, talk about his book “Practical Wisdom” where he talks about phronesis. And yeah it is frustrating ’cause it’s like, “Well, how do you know what you’re doing?” Well, you just… Aristotle says, “Well, you develop it like a carpenter learns how to do carpentry. You have to do it.” And by doing it, you learn it. And there’s nothing, there’s no rules. Well, this is… You follow this and you are actualizing phronesis like, “Well, no, you just kind of, you kinda know.”
Paul Blaschko: I found it very frustrating as an undergraduate learning Aristotle, I just kept thinking, yeah but what’s the answer? Just tell me, how do I figure out what to do? I find as I sort of go through life and go through different changes, like having kids or trying to figure out a job, I find that the picture actually makes a lot more sense to me. So one thing that Aristotle cares a lot about is that we’re comparing our theory that we’re reflecting and sort of coming up with theories about the world, but they were constantly comparing that with the experience of living, and that we use that experience sometimes to falsify the theory to say, “You know what, I really thought I had a good grasp on theoretically how to make these decisions, but turns out I don’t.”
In my case, as a parent, having kids, I read all the books about like how do you raise your kids and what are the one, two, three rule, all these things, and then the minute that you actually have kids and you find yourself in that situation, it’s a lot more like the kind of activities we are referencing a second ago, like carpentry or some complex activity that you’re just kind of sorting through and figuring out as you go. And it doesn’t mean that there’s no better or worse way to do it, it just means that the activity itself is more complex than we can boil down into a simple kind of two or three part rule-based theory. So I don’t know, I find this as I get older, I’m not that old, but as I get older, this sort of picture makes more and more sense to me.
Brett McKay: One criticism I’ve seen levied at virtue ethics, is that it can be relativistic. You were saying, Meghan, what’s courage for a Spartan Helot? It’s gonna be different for a philosophy professor in 2022, it’s gonna change depending on the person. So what would be the response to that?
Meghan Sullivan: It depends a little bit on what you mean by relativism. This is a live scholarly nerdy philosophy debate right now, is how much Aristotle fits into our current categories of relativism or absolutism. When I think of moral relativist or relativist about the good life. I think about folks who think that whatever view you currently have about your particular life right now has gotta be… That’s all there is to the truth about the good life. So you ask me, Meghan, do you think that you are a happy philosopher in the year 2022? If I say, “Yes, I am,” then that’s the correct answer. If I say, “No, I’m not,” that’s also the correct answer. Whatever kind of… However I judge my particular situation is all there is to the truth of the matter. If that’s how we understand relativism… And likewise for Paul, It just…
Totally the truth about whether or not you are doing well or living the good life, just depends on your particular perspective. That’s what I mean by relativism. Aristotle is definitely not a relativist, because Aristotle and most virtue ethicist think that you could be mistaken about whether or not you are living the good life. It’s not just a matter of how you feel or how you judge your particular life at a particular moment. In fact, we know on reflection that there are periods of our life when we thought things were going really well, and in fact, objectively speaking, they weren’t. We thought we were being courageous, but in fact we were making a really reckless decision.
And so if you think that, believing that there are some objective standards for happiness or goals that we really have to be working intellectually to get in our sights and questions we should be asking ourselves about whether or not we’re doing it right, then virtue ethicist says, “Absolutely.” Aristotle uses this metaphor that I really love in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he says, “We’re like archers when it comes to happiness, and we’re always trying to get the goal in our sites, and it would be so much easier to make all of these other decisions in our lives, if we could finally just to like nail down what the goal is that we’re shooting at.” But in fact, we spend so much of our lives really just trying to figure out what the goal is and wondering what it is. If you take that kind of goal like shooting an arrow at a target metaphor seriously, you gotta believe that there’s a target out there that’s outside of you, that you could get your head around. And so for these reasons, I think that at least the modern idea of relativism doesn’t really capture the kind of advice that somebody like Aristotle’s giving us.
Brett McKay: Let’s dig into how do you figure out what a flourishing life is for you? ‘Cause you have a whole chapter to that and you both argue that in order to figure that out, you have to start asking yourself and other people, too, what you call strong questions. What are strong questions?
Paul Blaschko: Yeah, so I think one of the key features of strong questions is that they’re genuinely questions. So in the book, one of the distinctions that we make is between what we call it prosecutor questions and dinner party questions, so I can certainly ask somebody what looks like a question but really in an attempt just to get them on the record. This happens sometimes, unfortunately with my family at holidays, I’ll say like, “Mom, you sent me this article about vaccines, do you really think… ” And it sounds like I’m a prosecutor, it sounds like I’m putting on the stand, and for the record, I wanted to say something so I can be outraged or so that other people can jump in and then argue.
On the other hand, there’s a way of questioning and inquiring where you’re genuinely curious, where your motivation is a pursuit of the truth and a pursuit of the truth with somebody else. We can think all day and bang our heads against the wall, but there’s something really powerful about drawing on the experience and expertise of someone else. So if you find yourself in this scenario where you’re tempted to ask one of these prosecutorial questions, one of the bits of advice that we have in the book is see if you can back up and ask a question that comes out of some genuine curiosity. And it’s not always possible, like you might just find that the topic is too sort of psychologically hot, like you just can’t get yourself into that mode. But oftentimes you can ask questions like, “Look, in your experience, what are the sort of things that have shaped your thinking” on whatever the topic is.
And when you’re motivated by that genuine pursuit of the truth, that genuine curiosity, we find the results are better, not just because the relationships are preserved and are better and this is a more virtuous way of proceeding, but you’re surprised. You get answers that can unseat assumptions that you held and they can actually push you in the direction of the truth about some issue that you might genuinely care about. Might change the way that you think about some practical issue in your life.
Brett McKay: No, I like how you break down… There’s three types of questions, level of questions you can go through when you’re trying to do this type of strong questioning. The first one is a starting point question, where you’re having a discussion with somebody or even with yourself, right? When you’re trying to figure out what you believe about something? Yes. Well, when did you first start thinking this way about that topic, was there a moment? It’s completely neutral, ’cause you’re just genuinely curious. The next one is a philosophical goal question. What would that look like? What’s the philosophical goal question, after you’ve done that starting point question?
Paul Blaschko: I think picking a topic might be helpful here, so with respect to work, say, you can ask somebody, what role do you want work to play in your life? Is work a source of meaning for you? Is it a source of ultimate meaning? Or is it good because it gets you something else? Is your work something that you do because you’ve got a family to feed and you really want your focus and attention to be on your family? So what is it that you’re really aiming at? What is it that provides that more ultimate meaning versus the sort of instrumental value in your life, so that’s the question that leaps to my mind immediately.
Brett McKay: Okay, and so you’re just trying to figure what is the goal you’re trying to achieve with that? And then the next question to ask is the means question. What’s a means question?
Paul Blaschko: Yeah, so how are you gonna get from here to there? Right? So from your starting point, I suppose your starting point is, I feel like I work too much, or I feel like I work too little, and I’m not sure what to do about that. Okay, now given that my goal is to make sure that my work is not becoming the source of ultimate meaning, rather it’s sort of serving this greater good in my life, what’s gonna take me from that starting point to that goal? Does it mean shifting the kind of work that I’m doing or shifting the way that I think about the work that I’m doing? Yeah, it’s just an intermediate, what are the steps that I have to take to make sure that my philosophical life is well-aligned.
Brett McKay: And how do you have these discussions particularly with someone else without it delving into emotive shouting. So this is something your colleague, Allister MacIntyre, wrote about in “After Virtue” and he talked about, makes his diagnosis. Why does moral debate seems so shrill in the modern age? And he makes this case, well, people are on different pages, they see the world differently, and so the only thing they turn to is this shouting, and I think everyone’s experienced particularly online. So how can you have these really important discussions without it devolving to that?
Meghan Sullivan: Here’s where I think that if you’re concerned with living a philosophical life, and we argue in the book that one of the first virtues you should develop a concern for in your proceed of the good life is concerned for the truth, just wanting to be somebody that actually cares about the truth, including the truth about other people. It’s really important when you decide you’re gonna have a hard conversation about politics or religion, or about whether you should be a vegetarian, or whether somebody is making a mistake to quit their job. Before you get into this with somebody who you are likely to disagree with, first you have to check your own intentions. So are you intending to have an argument with them? In which case, you might be really effective at provoking the argument, and I suspect a lot of “ethicists” find themselves constantly in arguments because they go looking for them. But if you really come into it with a spirit of humility and thinking, I really just wanna know the truth about how we should be living together in, insert, the office, our school system right now, our country. I wanna know the truth about this question. First, you’ve kinda checked your intentions, and then the next thing you need to do is make sure you’ve got enough of the other virtues growing in your life and in this relationship to be able to signal that you care about the truth.
One thing that’s interesting about the Greek virtue ethicist like Plato and Aristotle, they think you can’t just have one virtue in isolation. If I wanna have a hard conversation with Paul or with my neighbor about a political question, but I really wanna demonstrate concern for the truth, I also have to show Karen concern for Paul, I have to show a willingness to listen to him, I have to be able to register a certain amount of humility and self-understanding about my own political views, but also courage to defend things that might be very controversial. It requires a great deal of skill and sophistication really fast, and I think just chalking this up to saying, Well, the fact that we’re having debates on Facebook is the reason we can’t talk to each other anymore, or the fact that the political parties have this really, really contingent way that they’re set up right now means that we just can’t talk to each other anymore.
I think that doesn’t do justice to the fact that we know from 2500 years of philosophy that folks have always had a somewhat difficult time having philosophical conversations, have thought that they had to work on it a little bit, but if they were willing to put in the effort and try to develop those antecedent virtues in themselves and in their relationships, it results in magic. You get the enlightenment out of those kinds of relationships, you get the platonic dialogues out of Socrates’s friendships and pursuit of virtue.
Brett McKay: Okay, so you check yourself and then I guess you just have to… When you’re chilling with someone else, you’re kind of filling them out and maybe if they’re putting up… They’ve got that, they’re just kinda putting up a fight, they’re putting up that shield, do you just disengage or just keep trying to show, through example, I’m not trying to attack you. How do you deal with that? Again, this is a virtue you have to develop, a skill you have to develop. Your experience, how do you help other people kind of play catch with you with this debate?
Meghan Sullivan: I’ve been thinking about this a lot because obviously we live in a time of many fraught philosophical conversations. I was having one just yesterday with a colleague who really disagrees with me politically, and I was reminded of another thing Aristotle says, One swallow does not make a spring. Developing and showing virtue, showing that you really care about somebody else, wanting to pursue the truth on a question with somebody else, it’s probably not gonna happen over a single coffee or a single well-executed social media encounter. It’s the kind of thing that if we’re gonna make a difference in each other’s lives, if we’re gonna help guide each other out of our various caves, it’s gonna happen over time, the way all virtues are built up and manifest over time. It’s gonna be a repeated investment though there’s probably gonna be a little period of frustration when we feel like we’re not making any progress. And what a virtuous person will do is play a long game in these kinds of discussions and modes of inquiry. Whereas somebody who’s like a Sophist or somebody who only cares about immediate results might do whatever it takes to get somebody to change their mind. I think probably virtuous people don’t change their minds super quickly, because a lot of times their beliefs and philosophical attitudes are the sorts of things that have grown up along with the kind of person that they’ve been trying to make themselves into.
Brett McKay: Okay, so I guess so the take-away there, be open to the truth, be curious, and again, keep using your reasoning, Aristotle says as long as you’re using your reasoning to figure that out, you’re on the right track.
Paul Blaschko: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s right. I think there are also a lot of opportunities in dialogue with people to demonstrate virtues, and some of the key virtues you’re just manifesting a genuine concern for the truth, it’s gonna lead you to sometimes admit that you don’t know everything in a particular conversation, I found that this is one of the most powerful tools in my conversations with my Mom. This is an example we use in the book, but it’s just a real life example for me. My mom and I we agree about some things, we disagree about a ton of things and we love debating, we love dialoguing, we love talking about this stuff because it means a lot to us. And I notice a difference in the conversations that involve each of us taking a step back and saying, You know, I hadn’t actually thought about that. I’m not sure. Or you might be right about that. And when one person is able to do that and just sort of demonstrate, Look, I care more about the truth, and I care more about both of us getting to the truth than I do about defeating you or about protecting some part of my identity. I find that’s a really powerful thing. Like Meghan mentions, this is something that really is most likely to happen, most natural in the context of a personal relationship.
Yeah, I’ve become more selective over time in the kind of engagement that I’m willing to do on the Internet, just arguing with people on Facebook or comments or whatever, but I don’t think it’s impossible. I think, especially if you have some pre-existing relationship or if you’re able to build that up over time with friends online or whatever, just being willing to say, Yeah, I don’t know about that, or that’s a really interesting perspective that you’re bringing. I’ve never heard anybody say something like that. Tell me where it comes from. Give me some background here, give me some context. I think this can really defuse some of the tension and some of the sort of defensiveness that we bring to a lot of these conversations.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word with my sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so one other part of living a flourishing life is doing the morally right thing, and that can be hard to figure out what the morally right thing to do in certain situations is, and you look at other schools of philosophy to figure out how do other philosophies determine what’s the morally right thing to do, and you look at one school called consequentialism to figure out what the morally right thing to do. So how does consequentialism determine morality? And then why do you think it’s lacking?
Paul Blaschko: Yeah, so really broadly consequentialists focus on the consequences of your action and trying to figure out whether or not that action is good. It’s a really simplistic way to put it, but if you’re making a decision about whether it’s okay in war to bomb a certain city, you’re asking, Well, okay, what are the consequences? Are they overall gonna be better or worse if we do this versus if we don’t do it, or if we do it in a more targeted way or something like that. So again, a real emphasis on the consequences versus paying a lot of attention to the intentions and the motivation behind a particular action, why is it that you’re performing an action? Now, we have a couple of chapters where we take consequentialism and compare it to virtue ethics, and where we think virtue ethics really has an advantage, gives us thinking about our lives, our inner lives, our intentions that are really important. So let me just give you one example. In the chapter on responsibility, there’s a really famous case that you’ve probably come across if you’ve read about philosophy or if you’ve seen “The Good Place” or any of these sort of things.
It’s called the trolley problem. And the idea is, you’re standing next to a trolley track, the trolley is hurtling down the track and there are several people who are on the track. You can flip a switch and change it so that it hits one person rather than say five people. The question is, should you flip this switch? And one thing that’s really interesting is that as you change the details in the trolley problem, people’s moral intuitions change whether or not they think you should flip the switch changes. In the classic example, a lot of people say, “Yeah, of course, I flip the switch, one person dead is a better consequence than five people. Of course, you should flip this witch.” But then researchers will ask people, “Okay, well, what if you have to push a person onto the track to stop the trolley in order to prevent five people from being killed. Now, far fewer people will say, “Yeah, you should definitely do that.” And if you’re a consequentialist, this is just manifest bias and irrationality. You think the consequences are exactly the same. It’s just that when you get into the messy details, people aren’t always willing to do what they reflectively know is the morally right thing to do. Virtue ethicists see things differently, right? They think, Look, a lot of times the personal details, the really particular facts of a situation are gonna make a huge difference as to whether or not your action is right or wrong.
Brett McKay: But it’s not that consequences don’t matter in virtue ethics, right, ’cause it’s not just intention, ’cause if it was that it could be like, well, people intend to do helpful things all the time, then ended up hurting people. I don’t think Aristotle would be like, Well, he was virtuous ’cause he had great intentions. Am I correct on that?
Paul Blaschko: Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. The consequences have to come in both because a reasonable person is gonna be able to foresee characteristic consequences of certain kinds of actions, and so, yeah, you’ve certainly gotta take those into account. You can’t just say, “Well, my intention is good. I’m gonna throw this baseball at somebody’s face. My intention is just to give them a baseball.” It doesn’t work that way, right? So there’s this kind of give and take where figuring out the accurate description of your action, it’s actually a really complex process. It involves this kind of phronesis or this practical wisdom that we were talking about earlier. So absolutely, the consequences are gonna matter, it’s just that they’re not the only thing that matters, or they’re not the primary thing that matters for the virtue ethicist.
Meghan Sullivan: And there’s a certain kind of consequence that the virtue ethicists are aiming at, that the consequentialists are not. So the consequentialists wanna pump good consequences out into the world, lives saved or happiness maximized. The virtue ethicist has a goal in mind, something that they’re targeting with their decisions and intentions and actions, namely caring for their soul and developing, finding new eudaimonia. So we can absolutely criticize people for not intending good enough things. If I’m talking to my youngest brother who’s home from college and I ask him what he plans to do with his degree next year, and he says, Eh, I’m really just intending to play video games for the next decade, it’s not a malicious intention, but it’s not a good enough intention for him to be living a good life or to be living up to his moral potential, and it’s totally the kind of intention that could come in for criticism for just being unambitious.
Brett McKay: And the section on responsibility and agency really got me thinking about how I think about myself as a moral agent because it forces you to think, Am I as good as I really think I am? And it could be, I do the things I do because… Not ’cause I intended it, but it just sort of like… It just happened that way. It’s like moral luck. I haven’t had to face any really big moral ethical dilemmas, but I say, Well, you know, I’m a good person, but I’ve never really had to do… You know what I’m saying? I didn’t have to, there was no decision on my part to be a good person, if that makes sense.
Paul Blaschko: Yeah, at least two really important issues that you’re raising here, one is having the self-knowledge, knowing whether you actually have the virtues, that’s really hard. And a lot of times, we don’t know or we can’t know unless our virtues have been tested in some significant way, and I don’t know, I think there’s a lot of literature, there are a lot of great movies or novels written about this question. Somebody’s tested and their whole life is upended because they realize like, “Gosh I thought I was a courageous person. And when the moment came to act, I couldn’t do it, and so how do I reconcile my view of myself?” Another really important issue that you bring up, and that we talk a little bit about in the book in our class that the book is based on is this question of how our environment and how our situation impacts our actions, the things that we do. There’s a whole field now in philosophy devoted to asking this question. It’s often called situationism.
And there’s empirical evidence that our situation, the environment that we partly create and help create around ourselves, but also that we just find ourselves in, it has a huge impact on what we end up doing. Now that’s… I don’t know, I think an interesting wrinkle for the virtue ethicist and one that Aristotle cared a lot about, he thought a lot about the importance of community, making sure that you’re not in a sort of morally corrupt environment was really important, but also just creating the kind of community that enables virtue and enables people to act virtuously was really important. But I think both those issues are super important, and if you’re coming from the virtue ethics point of view, there are things that merit a lot of reflection.
Brett McKay: It reminded me of a quote from Nietzsche, who I’ve heard, I think Robert Solomon is like a Nietzsche expert, described Nietzsche as sort of kind of a virtue ethicist in some ways.
Meghan Sullivan: Oh, yeah.
Brett McKay: And he said this, he said, Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.
Meghan Sullivan: Nietzsche was so mean. My god.
Brett McKay: It’s mean but it really can be convicting, it’s like, I think I’m a really good person, but is it because I just kinda go with the flow and I’m a laid back guy, is that why I’m a good guy? And this gets to the point you make the argument, you challenge people to do is to come up develop some morally thick stories about yourself, like ethically thick stories about yourself. What do you mean by that?
Meghan Sullivan: I’ll share it here. We try really hard to show in this book something that Paul and I both believe, which is that this high level philosophical advice can also be deeply practical and can affect our 21st Century lives. And over the last year, I’ve thought a lot about this responsibility chapter and what it means to try to share your moral intentions and your moral stories with other people, and have really tried to make it a practice when I think I screwed something up, or I’ve hurt somebody, which only happens in small clawless ways in my own boring life. But try to make a practice of being really explicit of saying like, Here’s where I’m taking responsibility, this is where I think I did something cruel and using the morally thick terms like, This was cruel or that was a bit cowardly or that was rash, in an apology that are like verbally or in an email. And one thing I’ve noticed is starting to talk about myself using more morally rich vocabulary is disarming to other people.
We’re just not used to hearing other people… We’re used to people saying like, I’m sorry. And we’re used to people saying, They’re good and I’m bad, or I’m good at they’re bad, is much more likely, really thin moral concepts to just try to judge like thumbs up, thumbs down. People, I’ve found, especially as I’ve tried to build out this practice in my day-to-day life, get a little bit more freaked-out when you send them an email being like, I think it was unjust for me to not call on you when you had a question at that meeting last week. Notice they don’t quite know what to do with you. And I think maybe that is a good thing. Learning how to talk about ourselves and our moral lives in new ways, opens up new kinds of conversations that might weird people out in our social lives right now, but also open up new opportunities for us to talk about things that don’t seem like they’re right or that we wanna improve.
Brett McKay: That’s a good point. I think one of the points that Alasdair MacIntyre makes in “After Virtue” is that, yeah, you’re right, people, they don’t know how to speak in a moral language, so it weirds them out when people do. And so I guess one way to counter that is just start doing it with yourself and people will be like… It’ll scratch an itch that people didn’t know they had.
Paul Blaschko: I think that’s right. I think one other thing that I love on this point from the MacIntyre book is the importance of stories like Meghan’s talking about, and making sure that those stories are accurate. So we tell stories all the time that either excuse or empower us. I use the simple example with my students, I show up late at a meeting and I say, “Ah gosh, the traffic was so terrible,” and in doing that, I’m excusing myself. I’m refusing to take responsibility. Maybe rightly so. Maybe the traffic was terrible and it was unpredictable. But another way I could go is, I could say, “Look, I didn’t care enough to predict how bad the traffic was gonna be.” I didn’t sort of get up early enough or whatever it might be. And if that’s the true story, it’s really important that we’re able to tell it, and that we’re able to tell it about ourselves. And it requires all kinds of virtues and self-knowledge and vulnerability. So I think that’s another way in which the advice that we even get from “After Virtue”, which is that we’ve gotta be able to tell these narratives about our lives and big picture narratives about our life stories, but also these kind of small interpersonal stories that we tell to each other. I think that’s absolutely crucial for the moral life.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So take Richard Feynman’s advice, “Don’t fool yourself, but always be on the lookout. Always be aware that you’re probably trying to fool yourself. So you always have to be on guard of that.” Okay, so I try to go for an accurate representation of your moral life. Maybe in some instances, you have to take less credit for your vices, and I think some people are just really hard on themselves, but I think the thing that’s probably the hardest is taking less credit maybe for the good you do. I think a lot of people think they’re better than they really are. But not always, but I think it’s always asking yourself those questions. You also devote a chapter to our relationship with work. What can virtue ethics teach us about our work life or help us have a better work life?
Paul Blaschko: This is a great question and one that I’m thinking about a ton right now. So let me just give one example in which I think philosophers can really help in a practical way with the way that we think about work in our life. So Aristotle, he talks about how action, just doing things in the world, producing things, how that is a source of meaning. We go out and we sort of choose our ends and we act toward those ends, and so we can get really caught up in this active life, in making sure that we’re busy and investing a lot in our achievements at work. But one thing that Aristotle really encourages us to do is to think about the why behind any particular action that we’re doing, because he thinks the more you think about the reasoning, the more you’re gonna realize everything you do ultimately aims…
This goes all the way back to the beginning of the conversation, it ultimately aims at eudaimonia, it aims at flourishing. And sometimes in the moment, if you’re working really hard on a bunch of projects, you can lose sight of that. And so here’s a quick example that I ask my students, I say, “Look, why are you in college right now?” And they say, “Well, because we wanna get jobs.” And you say, “Well, why do you wanna get a job?” You say, “Well, because I want money.” And you say, “Well, why do you want money?” You can go back all the way with this chain of reasoning, and there are several things, if you end up at a place where you can point out, “Well, this is the good thing that all of those efforts are gonna serve,” then you’re in a good way, right?
And this happens to me all the time. If you realize like, “Gosh, I’m really just doing all of these things because it feels meaningful, it sort of fulfills this kind of desire, this need that I have, but it’s coming at the expense of these other good things in my life that I really should be paying more attention to.” Then he thinks, “Okay, that chain of reasoning, it’s sort of vain and empty.” And you’ve gotta make sure that you’re not being distracted by this life of action from what really matters, from what really counts. So that’s just one sort of way in which this distinction, I think, can help us sort out what’s actually essential in the work that we’re doing from what just feels essential or feels really meaningful. But I think there’s a lot of philosophers who help us think about these exact kind of issues.
Meghan Sullivan: We talk about this in the book, and I’ve thought about it a lot as we’ve brought all these new stories recently about people changing jobs and the Great Resignation. We live in a version of capitalism where a lot of really well-meaning workplaces claim to satisfy our deepest philosophical needs. The case study we use in the book is Airbnb really selling their employees on this idea that they’re a family, and it turns out that when the first wave of the pandemic hit and Airbnb had to lay off a bunch of workers, they felt really alienated as a result because family members usually don’t fire other family members, and so they had this like whiplash. They had this one goal and kind of identity in mind but it didn’t feel like, at the end of the day, it was real or sustainable.
We all wanna be part of wonderful workplaces, but understanding the distinctive kinds of common goods that a workplace can promote or not, which kinds of work maybe will never have a common good behind it, or which kinds of goods a workplace can supply, and which other goods we need to get elsewhere in our lives, those are really live questions, especially for folks who are just in the middle, or at the beginnings of their careers right now. So one of the things we try to do in the book, is show how these questions about good work are, at their root, questions about how we pursue the good life in common and what the limits of it are based on the kind of organization that we’re finding ourselves a part of.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like, and correct me if I’m wrong, Aristotle would say, “Work is a means, so don’t confuse the means for an end.” And a lot of people do that. They think, “Well, work is the thing that’s supposed to give me meaning.” And Aristotle, “Well, it could be part of that, but it’s not the thing.”
Meghan Sullivan: I think that’s part of it, though. I don’t know. It depends probably on what you mean by “work.” But if you think of your work as a place where you have some of your most important relationships, like, with your co-workers, if you’re a teacher, with some of your students, and it’s a place where you allocate a certain amount of your time. It might be that you do it in order to get money, like for totally instrumental ends, to get money in order to support other aspects of your good life. But for most people… And Paul and I talk about this in the book, it’s more mixed up. There’s a dimension of friendship and personal development that’s really important at work, alongside earning money, and some of those same virtues are gonna be really important in family life, and spending money, and consumerism might be a really important part of your family life, as well. The lines get blurred really quickly, which means that you’ve got to ask the same questions about happiness, and personal development, and ethics in all of the different worlds. There’s never gonna be this just clean break between your life life and your work life.
Brett McKay: So how do you navigate? Let’s say someone is listening and they’re like, “Man, my job is burning me out. It’s just grinding me down. But there’s parts of it that I like. There’s co-workers I like, and I like that it allows me to live near my family.” How do you untangle all that?
Meghan Sullivan: I think one question… There’s gonna be a bunch of questions here. First is just empathizing with folks oftentimes, not just in our work communities, but in our families and in our political communities, it’s not always kumbaya, and we know that working on the common good together in the different places we find ourselves is sometimes gonna be a real slog. And a lot of people, I think, are discovering that as they’ve gone back to work. But I think one question to ask folks is, if they can take a step back and realize how they’re feeling about their work right now, which is almost certainly influenced by the very weird conditions in which a lot of us are working right now.
But that’s the question of how you feel about happiness. What about the philosophical question, what kind of person is this investment making you into? Are you developing virtues in your workplace? Are you developing capacities, or forms of agency that are enabling you in other parts of your life to grow and to pursue eudaimonia? If the answer to those questions are no, probably you need to really rethink how you’re making this huge investment in your life. But if the answers to those questions are, yes, kind of, which I think for a lot of us, it is, they realize… I’ll take a concrete case study, my Mom, she’s a receptionist in a dental office. Her job is super hard. She’s yelling at people to wear face masks all day, she’s filling out healthcare billing reports. She does not have the kind of job that causes her to feel happiness every single minute of the work day, but she loves her job and finds it quite meaningful, and if you ask her why, it’s because she has this morally thick story that’s true in her mind about how when she does her job really well, it helps people get dental care that they really need, and that’s meaningful for her.
She really loves her co-workers and she likes celebrating their birthdays and observing life with them. When they have babies, the whole family gets together in the office and celebrates that life together. Work is a place where she develops and expresses these really important social virtues. At the end of the day, you know, does she think that her particular work would be irreplaceable by really smart dental billing AI 20 years from now? No, definitely not, but she doesn’t need that kind of permanence or all-encompassing nature of work for it to be meaningful. All she needs is those two true stories about helping people get their cavities filled, and the particular people in her office that she loves and gets to care for when she’s on her game at work.
Brett McKay: Okay, so another section you devote to is about love. And you all make the case that… We often think of love as a verb, or it’s action, and Aristotle would say, “Yeah, there is a part of that where it’s action-oriented.” But you also say that the love is about attention. What do you mean by that?
Meghan Sullivan: We haven’t talked about this guy so much, but he’s really important to us both in our teaching and in the book is Plato, who thinks that there is a very important part of the good life that involves just seeing things the right way. He thinks about it like seeing the sunlight when you get out of the cave, seeing the form of the good, and really understanding it. It’s very visual, perceptual but of the human aspiration that we get from Plato. And in “The Love Book” we introduce readers to a neo-Platonist philosopher, Iris Murdoch, who thinks that the essence of love in the good life, is not what we oftentimes think it is. We oftentimes think that loving other people is doing things to them or for them, so giving them hugs, or throwing them birthday parties, or marrying them, building our entire lives around, these are all actions. Murdoch thinks that that’s an important part of the ways that we care for other people, but that’s not all of it. A really important part and dimension of love is just how we see other people in our mind’s eye. And she gives some really interesting cases about the kind of work that we can do in our inner lives, to become more loving and to become more attentive to other people and their good lives.
And this is an ancient idea. So the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers talk about our friends and the people that we love as our second selves, as people whose good lives, and stories, and intentions are so important to us that we feel as though their lives are joined with our own, even if we can’t make decisions and direct their lives. One of the things we try to do in the book is, one, just introduce these ideas, which can seem a little mystical at first, this is totally true of Plato’s philosophy. It can seem a little mystic, but actually once you start to think about it in terms of practices for how you think about people in your life, you realize that it’s deepening how you appreciate them and how you’re able to access some of the goods of love and friendship in your life.
Brett McKay: Okay, so how do you develop that attention? That sort of loving attention.
Meghan Sullivan: One thing I love that Iris Murdoch, is she gives this really simple habit that, at least strikes me as being very effective. She talks about this example of a mother whose son has just gotten married to this woman. And this mother doesn’t like her daughter-in-law. She doesn’t know what it is, there’s just something about this young woman that her son married that she just like doesn’t find her attractive, or compelling, or interesting at all. But this mother also really cares about her relationship with her son, so she’s always super polite to this daughter-in-law. She is very kind, and tries very, very hard to welcome her into family life. The mother-in-law realizes that this isn’t enough. And so Iris Murdoch says, “She develops this practice where she causes herself to keep looking again at this woman.”
Basically, every time she starts to have this thought of like, “Ugh, Sheila, Sheila is so awful, I can’t believe we have to have dinner with Sheila again.” She hits pause and says, “I see her that way. I know I see her that way, but maybe the problem is with me, maybe I’m petty and small-minded. And in fact, I should look at her again, and try again to see what’s really beautiful about her and the way that my son sees her.” And Murdoch says over time, this woman, as a result of this practice, might come to see her daughter-in-law in a new way, to pay attention to her and appreciate her in a new way. And Murdoch thinks, “That’s growing in love.” Like, she’s done this really important thing in her mental life to help her grow as a kind of person who’s able to love this daughter-in-law. Somebody that’s gonna become an important relationship to her going forward. And so that simple, even that simple practice of just being able to notice the maybe short-sighted or false stories that internally we tell ourselves about other people, and then trying really hard to look and find the deeper truth, or find the deeper value in there, I think that that’s a very important virtue for love.
Brett McKay: And so this goes back to the idea that intentions matter in virtue ethics. You don’t just treat your daughter-in-law well because you’re duty-bound. ‘Cause you can do that and be like, “ugh geez, I hate this. Whatever.” But virtue ethics says, “No, you also have to… The intention behind that act also has to be loving, as well.”
Paul Blaschko: Yeah, and it also is a way of seeing how the intentions of the other person, like the inner life, the richness of that inner life can really impact how you relate to them. So another practice that we recommend in that chapter for cultivating loving attention is reading literature, like reading great novels, and watching great films, or reading great poems. And I think one of the reasons why that’s really powerful is because, we’re often trying to reconstruct the inner lives of other people, but we do it in a very haphazard way. We think like, “They just did this thing, and this is how it impacts me, and this must be sort of the reason.” We have this very sort of, simplistic theory. But in literature, you’re presented with the external actions of a person, but also their entire inner life, the richness of their inner life often, and this can help you get outside of the way that you see the world, and really have access to other people’s experience in deep and important ways. One of the books, the novels that we talk about in that chapter, and that has had a huge impact on both Meghan’s life and my life, but in very different ways is, “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy.
In my case, I read “The Road” when I was in college, and I was kinda just trying to sort out life and think like, “Which direction do I wanna sort of go in my career, in my life,” and that sort of thing. And the depiction of fatherhood, the access to the sort of characteristic feelings that a father has for his child, his son in this case, especially in the extreme circumstances, that kind of apocalyptic end of the world circumstances that are depicted in that novel, just struck something in me, and really made it, sort of, an ideal. It was an exemplary kind of way of living and approaching the world that it was that moment as I was reading this, I thought like, “Gosh, that is the kind of inner life that I would absolutely love to have with my own children. I would love to be a father.” So I think reading literature, just picking up novels, especially if the protagonists of the characters are very different from you and have very different life experiences. It’s just another way that you can cultivate this attentiveness to the way that different people approach the world.
Brett McKay: No, I love “The Road.” I read it once a year. Destroys me every time. I sob like a baby, and I’m like, “How do… ”
Paul Blaschko: Yeah.
Meghan Sullivan: You read it on Christmas Eve?
Paul Blaschko: Yeah.
Meghan Sullivan: Gather around children.
Brett McKay: Gather around children. No, I start like hugging my kids, and they’re like, “What’s wrong with you, Dad?” And they’re like… “Nothing.” We just did an episode with a Cormac McCarthy scholar. We talked about “The Road” And I…
Meghan Sullivan: Oh, nice.
Brett McKay: I broke down. I started crying when it… The last scene about carrying the fire. Oh, geez.
Paul Blaschko: Oh, gosh.
Brett McKay: I’m getting choked up now. To have this, cultivating this loving attention, this goes back to how can you have these, these really live debates, moral philosophical debates without them descending into acrimony. If you bring that loving attention to the conversation, people can sense that, and it disarms them. Maybe not right away. A lot of people think, “Well, if I just do this and people… ” Like Meghan was saying, it’s something that happens over time, people can get that you really care about them, and you care about the relationship, and because you care about the relationship, you can have these really hard discussions without worrying about the relationship deteriorating.
Paul Blaschko: Absolutely.
Meghan Sullivan: I think that’s right. If you want a good reputation for being, I think good at this form of philosophical attention, you want people to think you’re a little bit weird. Socrates is our great like mascot for this, because every time people… People are always commenting when they’re in conversations with Socrates, like, “Man, this got weird, or This is surprising.” And I think if you care about this dimension of your philosophical life with your family members, or your friends, your co-workers. You want them to be thinking, “Huh, I didn’t know exactly where that was gonna go.”
Brett McKay: Alright, so be weird. You wanna throw people off. So the final part you discuss in the book is, How do you balance action and contemplation? And one of the things I’m drawn to Nicomachean, you know, Aristotelean virtue ethics, is, it’s very practical. It can help you answer questions about what to do and just sort of a workaday. Like it answers those Tuesday morning questions. It’s like, “What am I supposed to do at work? And when the kids are getting kicked out of school… ” I mean, virtue ethics can help with that, but Aristotle also thought, “Okay, that’s important.” But he doesn’t think action is the most important. He thought contemplation was really important. So how do you balance the two? What did Aristotle have to say about that?
Meghan Sullivan: Aristotle, he’s really perplexed by this question. You read “The Nicomachean Ethics”, like you said, Brad, and the first eight chapters of the book that we’ve got are pretty practical, and he builds it as a practical guide to happiness through philosophy. But he gets to the end and he’s like, “I don’t think I’ve captured what happiness is for humans.” And he thinks back to his teacher Plato, who thought that attention and contemplation and understanding the world are really important dimensions of what it is for creatures like us to be who we are. And Aristotle kinda is like, he’s thinking about how we can reconcile that with everything he said about developing courage and generosity and friendships.
The way we think about this really age-old problem in virtue ethics is, if you think that action alone is gonna help you achieve eudaimonia, there are gonna be three kinds of problems that are gonna be very hard for you to solve. First, if you only pursue a life of the action, you face this problem of sometimes your best played, most intentional, well-reasoned projects are still gonna fail. You’re gonna have this really awesome idea for a project at work, and then a global pandemic is gonna come around and you’re never gonna be able to complete that project. So if you tie your happiness entirely to the life of action, there’s gonna be parts of it that are extraordinarily vulnerable to things outside of your control, which sucks, if it’s something as important as the meaning of your life on the line.
The second thing that the life of action is gonna fall short on is, if you succeed in all of your projects. So you think that developing courage and generosity and friendships are the crux of the good life, what happens when your friends die? What happens when you’ve invested yourself thoroughly in raising children and family life, but then you’ve succeeded, and your children move away, and start their own families? Or you’ve invested yourself so thoroughly in finding the common good at work, but then you retire? What’s gonna backstop or be your goal that you’re searching for after that, if you’ve only ever been pursuing the life of action?
And then finally, and something Aristotle spends a lot of time on at the end of the book, is this idea that there’s something special about humans, in the fact that we ask these philosophical questions to begin with. We wonder about things, we analyze things, we notice metaphors or similarities in things. And a lot of that noticing and thinking sometimes has nothing to do with what we’re gonna plan next. That part of us needs to be fed and nurtured. That’s our contemplative part. So the challenge, and there’s a reason why we save this till near the end of the book, the challenge for somebody who feels like they’re really starting to get eudaimonia, the good life, in their sights, is to try to figure out how they’re gonna incorporate this continuous, strange, distinctively human thinking, attending activity, into all of the really cool and other people-focused good life practices that they’ve learned to pursue.
Brett McKay: And one of the ways you suggest adding some more contemplation into your day is doing The Examen of St. Ignatius. And there’s a lot of different ways you can do it. It can work for you if you’re a theist or not a theist, and we actually have an article about that on our site that we’ll link to in the show notes. Well, Meghan, Paul, this has been a great conversation. There’s so much more we could talk about. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Meghan Sullivan: So our book comes out on January 4th and you can buy it on the Penguin website, or Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, Target. There’s also an audio book, if you like to do your philosophy when you’re in the car. And for your podcast listeners, they very well might like to listen to philosophy. And then of course, you can Google us. Look at “God and the Good Life”, the University of Notre Dame, if you wanna see what we teach here. And we’re just so excited to hear from people who are trying to build some more intentional philosophical practices into their lives this year.
Brett McKay: Well, Meghan Sullivan, Paul Blaschko, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Paul Blaschko: Thank you so much, Brett.
Meghan Sullivan: Thanks, Brett.
Brett McKay: My guests here were Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko. They’re the co-authors of the book, “The Good Life Method.” It’s available at amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure you check our shows at aom.is/goodlife, where you can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. Make sure you check out our website artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives with thousands of articles 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 manly at the checkout for a free month trial. Once you signed up, download the Stitcher app on android or ios and you start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you have done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us 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 who you think would something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding all listening to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
The post Podcast #770: Philosophical Tools for Living the Good Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
Editor’s Note: This is a rebroadcast. It originally aired July 2020.
War is a violent and bloody business, but it’s rarely a no-holds barred free-for-all. Instead, codes of conduct that determine what is and isn’t honorable behavior on the battlefield have existed since ancient times.
My guest today explored these various codes in a book she wrote during the decade she spent teaching at the United States Naval Academy. Her name is Shannon French, she’s a professor of ethics and philosophy, and her book is The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present. Shannon and I begin our conversation with the pointed questions she used to pose to the cadets she taught as to how being a warrior was different than being a killer or murderer, and when killing is and isn’t ethical. She then explains how the warrior codes which developed all around the world arose organically from warriors themselves for their own protection, and how these codes are more about identity than rules. Shannon and I then take a tour of warrior codes across time and culture, starting with the code in Homer’s Iliad, and then moving into the strengths and weaknesses of the Stoic philosophy which undergirded the code of the Romans. From there we unpack the code of the medieval knights of Arthurian legend, what American Indians can teach soldiers about the need to make clear transitions between the homefront and the warfront, and how the Bushido code of the samurais sought to balance the influence of four different religions. We end our conversation with the role warrior codes play today in an age of increasingly technologized combat.
If reading this in an email, click the title of the post to listen to the show.
Resources Related to the Podcast * Why You Need a Philosophical Survival Kit * The Warrior’s Manifesto * The Way of the Monastic Warrior * The Way of the Stoic Warrior * The Warrior Ethos * The Warrior Archetype * AoM series of Sioux guides * Aristotle’s Wisdom on Living the Good Life * Hector and Achilles: Two Paths to Manliness * What Homer’s Odyssey Can Teach Us Today * How Soldiers Die in Battle * What Plato’s Republic Has to Say About Being a Man * How to Think Like a Roman Emperor * The Fall of the Roman Republic * Lessons From the Roman Art of War * Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot * Le Morte Darthur * Achilles in Vietnam * The Bushido Code * Everything You Know About Ninjas is Wrong
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Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. War is a violent and bloody business, but it’s rarely a no-holds-barred free-for-all. Instead, codes of conduct that determine what is and isn’t honorable behavior on the battlefield have existed since ancient times. My guest today explored these various codes in a book she wrote during the decade she spent teaching at the United States Naval Academy. Her name is Shannon French, she’s a professor of ethics and philosophy, and her book is The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present. Shannon and I begin our conversation with the pointed questions she used to pose to the cadets she taught as to how being a warrior was different from being a killer or murderer, and when killing is and isn’t ethical. She then explains how the warrior codes which developed all around the world arose organically from the warriors themselves for their own protection and how these codes are more about identity than rules.
Shannon and I then take a tour of warrior codes across time and culture, starting with the code in Homer’s Iliad and then moving into the strengths of weaknesses of the Stoic philosophy, which undergirded the code of the Romans. From there, we unpack the code of the medieval knights of Arthurian legend, what American Indians can teach soldiers about the need to make clear transitions between the home front and the war front, and how the Bushido code of the samurais sought to balance the influence of four different religions. We end our conversation on the role warrior codes play today in an age when artificial intelligence and drones are having a bigger role in combat. After the show’s over, check out the show notes at aom.is/warriorcode. Shannon joins me now via clearcast.io.
All right, Shannon French, welcome to the show.
Shannon French: Thank you for having me.
Brett McKay: So you are a professor of philosophy who specializes in ethics, particularly ethics in warfare. How did that happen?
Shannon French: I get that question a lot. Well, first of all, I had always had a fascination for military history. In fact, that goes so far back that I ran into someone I hadn’t seen since I was eight years old a few years ago, and he said that he saw that I had written a book on code of the warrior, and he said, “Well, that makes sense.” So apparently, even as an eight-year-old child, I had shown an interest in this area. But going forward, when I got into graduate school, my work was focused around the very difficult issues where self-interest and ethics seem to conflict, and in looking at that area, of course the stakes are never higher than when it’s life and death. That led me into military ethics, and what ultimately changed my life was getting the position to teach that at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about that. So you taught ethics at the Naval Academy, and you had one class called Code of the Warrior, which you turned into a book that we’re gonna talk about today. What was the response in to that class to this idea of the code of the warrior?
Shannon French: Well, I have to say I have so many wonderful memories of that time in my life and that experience of teaching code of the warrior to the midshipmen. Essentially, this was an opportunity for them to really look at the issues that they would be facing very soon after their graduation and commissioning, and to look at them from this background of not being the first people on Earth to face the kind of problems that were in their future, to feel part of something longer, a legacy that they were joining. And so there was actually quite a lot of enthusiasm around that course.
And I will say we also had a lot of fun with it. And it sounds strange perhaps to talk about having fun with a military ethics course, but what we were doing was trying to, as much as possible, let ourselves get into the mindset of these different warrior cultures and individual warriors and really try to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine what they faced and what we could learn from them going forward. And that of course is something that could not have been more relevant, and unfortunately, while I was at the Naval Academy, in the time that I was there, in the 11 years that I was there, we went from a force that was largely focused on things like humanitarian interventions to 911 happening, and Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and my students were going off to war. So it went from being a course that they enjoyed to almost having an urgency to it.
Brett McKay: It became extremely relevant very fast.
Shannon French: It did.
Brett McKay: And you talk about in your book The Code of the Warrior, on the first day of this class, you’d often ask your students, you’d just give them a thought problem, and it was this, it was, explain the difference between words like warrior, killer, murderer, fighter, etcetera. First off, how do they typically answer that question, and then what were you hoping you would get your students to see going through this problem?
Shannon French: Yes, absolutely. That exercise was critical to getting to the core of the point of the course and really also the point of the book. What I wanted them to think about is that the act of killing is usually taboo. In fact, it’s one of the strongest taboos that we have as humans. The idea that you would take another life is not taken lightly. So what is the difference that could be found in killing in war, and how do we identify where those lines are? So when I ask them that question… It was interesting, sometimes the responses were almost angry, like, “How dare you even think to compare what people do as war fighters to murderers, or even just killer,” which sounded cold and purposeless to them, for example, and murderer sounded definitely immoral, unethical.
And looking at the different choices though, and analyzing them, they were able to identify why it mattered so much to them, they did not want to be correctly labeled any of those other labels, they wanted to know, and they wanted to believe that what they were doing was distinct in an important way, and not a way that would fall apart in the stress of actually having to make these decisions in real time.
Brett McKay: And then I think it also shows even when you’re engaging in warfare and you think, “Okay, it’s… My killing is legitimized.” There’s still a line there that you can cross eventually, and some of these students picked up on that as well.
Shannon French: They absolutely did, and I think that’s one of the most important things, is that they recognized that you can commit murder during a war, that there is still an understanding that some types of killing in war fall under the heading of still being a war fighter, being a warrior, but others do cross that line and they become personal, and they have to do with rage or vengeance or despair in some cases, and even hatred, and certainly large helping of dehumanizing the people on the other side that you’re fighting against. And that if you do cross that line into those kinds of understandings of what the killing is that you’re doing, it’s really hard to get back out of that place that you go, and that’s something we talked a lot about, that if you cross the line and you kill out of one of these emotions that is not in any way linked to just doing your job, but is that deeply personal kind of killing, then it’s really hard even to find your way back to the person you were before.
Brett McKay: And what is so great about this book is you explore warrior codes from throughout history and throughout cultures, and I think the big point is that this is… Warrior codes are ubiquitous in humanity, we often think that 21st century westerners or whatever that we have had sort of moral superiority over people who lived thousands of years ago. But as you point out, even the ancient Greeks grappled with this issue in their way, it wasn’t as maybe how we do it, but they were grappling this between this line, between being a murderer and being a warrior. Why do you think that is? Why do you think humanity has come up with codes of warrior throughout time and culture?
Shannon French: Well, I think, first of all, that it’s good to point out as you just did, that this isn’t a new invention, and occasionally I will get folks who think that even worrying about having limits or concepts of restraint for those who fight wars is some kind of… Even like fuzzy, touchy-feely, new agey kind of thing that came up recently, and that’s simply not the case. And one of the main reasons that it’s not the case is that all of these different codes throughout history were not imposed from the outside, they came up organically within these warrior cultures, primarily as a way to protect the warriors themselves, that is the absolutely central point that I want people to grasp in the book, and that I used to teach in the course, is that while of course, we do need to care, and all of us do care about restraining actions in war in order to protect innocents innocence, that’s how these laws of war are written in the first place. But at the end of the day, the codes that the warriors embrace are there to protect them, to protect their humanity.
They’re being asked to do something that puts them at great risk for moral injury, and moral injury is connected to PTSD, it’s connected to suffering, it’s connected to a sense of losing your connection to the rest of your society, being isolated from them, being even driven out. We don’t wanna do that to those that we’ve already asked so much of, that we’re asking to fight and sacrifice on our behalf, and the best protection we can give them is to give them these lines that they can rely on that help them see what they’re doing has meaning, has limits, and is within that kind of structure, and that is absolutely crucial to preserving really the well-being of warriors themselves.
Brett McKay: And a lot of these codes, some of them do have very specific rules and regulation, most of all. Today, there’s laws that govern warfare, there’s rules of engagement, but for the most part, the code, this is a little bit of more amorphous, it’s almost Aristotelian and in its ethics where it’s just like, just be a good person, and it doesn’t say exactly what you have to do to be a good soldier or be an ethical warrior, but people, I think inherently understand it.
Shannon French: Yeah, I think that’s a really good insight actually, because what you’re looking at with most of these warrior codes is not so much a list of rules, but an identity that you’re assuming. You’re taking on the mantle, you’re taking on an identity that actually requires you to for example, be honorable, not act dishonorably, and that is gonna be vague, and it is going to depend in part on how it’s defined through action within your own group. But a lot of why it’s vague is that rules by themselves are perhaps too vulnerable. Once you create just a set of rules, there’s always the chance, the situation that you find yourself in doesn’t match the rules, and then if you have nothing else to fall back on, you’re lost with no guidance. Assuming an identity that… And you mentioned Aristotle, which is a perfect connection here, an identity that requires you to embody certain virtues, gives you something still to rely on in those complicated situations. You can still say, “Okay, there’s nothing in the rule book about this, but if I still want to be a just person, if I want to be an honorable person, if I want to be a fair person, and so on and so forth, then I need to figure out how to still embody those virtues in this situation, through my actions. I need to wrestle through it myself, but with those as my guide posts.”
The other worry with just having a list is that people will also take that as just a the minimum. This happens a lot. I so often have to clarify the difference between ethics and mere compliance. And compliance with the law doesn’t make you a good person. Just think of it this way. If at the end of your days, the only good thing someone could say about you is, “They weren’t arrested,” that wouldn’t be great. Just managing to stay out of trouble isn’t the bar we’re setting. And so these codes try with that intentional vagueness to set the bar higher and to say, “I want you to be excellent, I want you to try to embody all these virtues at once, I want you to try to find that balance point, even though it’s hard.”
Brett McKay: A modern example you gave of that in the book was the Marines. You talk about there was this commander whose whole thing was just, “Marines don’t do that.” That was it. And it was very vague, but that as soon as someone came across something that seemed kind of like squidgy, it’s like, “Yeah, and Marines don’t do that. It’s not what we do.”
Shannon French: Yeah, there’s a wonderful story about that in Mark Osiel’s book on obeying orders, which I love because it’s from the Vietnam War, and it’s a true story, and it explains how those simple four words actually stopped someone from effectively committing a war crime, but what it brings across for us is this point that the identity there is stronger also than the rules in the sense that you’ve chosen to be, for example, in that case, a marine. You chose that identity, you’ve embraced it, you’ve gone through all of the rights of passage and so forth to make you feel part of that community.
And so betraying that is a big deal, and it’s a big enough deal that psychologically, it can overcome the other pressures you’re gonna feel, because certainly, you can’t have these conversations without talking about how incredibly hard it is to hold this kind of restraint in some of these circumstances. That you are in fact going to be tempted to do the wrong thing. That’s something that I always tried to talk about in my class, that I didn’t want them to give me pat answers. If I said something like, “Would you ever shoot an unarmed POW?” If I just asked it like that, the students would of course say, “Why no ma’am, that’s wrong, I would not do that.” But that’s unhelpful, that it’s just a pat response to a straightforward question.
What you have to do instead is actually construct a scenario in your mind where you might really be tempted, where the person you’ve been dealing with has been picking off members of your platoon and you’ve had to see them die in your arms. You finally confront, say, the sniper who’s been picking off these folks that matter to you, who are like brothers and sisters to you, and they are smug and surrender in a way that says, “What are you gonna do now?” Wouldn’t you, on some level, wanna shoot him? You have to admit that you would want to before you can talk about why you shouldn’t. And so getting them there is so important to have the conversation around, why does that identity matter? Why would you want it to be true that even when sorely tempted, there would be lines you would never cross.
Brett McKay: So it seems like warrior codes are about really about identity. It’s really trying to get the soldier to think about their identity as a warrior, and warriors behave in a certain way, in an a ethical way.
Shannon French: Yes, that’s absolutely true. And I feel like I should mention at this point, because there is a conversation that’s happening even as we speak in the US military, probably and in others as well, around that word ‘warrior’. For some, that word is uncomfortable. They don’t like that as the choice to define themselves because, for example, they associate it with media portrayals of or even potentially video game portrayals of people fighting and killing who don’t have restraint, who don’t have limits. And so they don’t like that word ‘warrior’, it sounds like a sort of Conan the Barbarian sort of thing to them.
And so I don’t wanna get completely… Even though my book is called The Code of the Warrior, I don’t wanna make it all about that word exactly, but instead, to make it about the word you use, that identity. If your identity is as a soldier, a sailor, an airman, a marine, maybe warrior doesn’t work for you, maybe your unit-specific identity works for you, but the key is it has to be something to which you have fully committed yourself. And it has to be something that is linked to these ideas of different virtues and lines that you won’t cross, because it isn’t a meaningful identity if you can hold on to that identity regardless of how you behave. It has to have those kind of limits. It has to be that, “But if you do X, you’re not one of us anymore,” and that sounds harsh, but that’s a really important part of all of this.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about some of these warrior codes that you highlight in the book. And you go all the way back to the ancient Greeks or even pre-Greek. This is like… This is, we’re talking about Homer’s Iliad, Achilles and Hector and there. What was the code that governed them that you found looking at the texts that we have from there?
Shannon French: Well, first of all, that is a helpful example of where you can talk about these issues using fiction. Because while we think that Homer was inspired by real events, we still classify his epics as some kind of fictional works, it’s embellished, there’s a lot of Greek gods that come in and have cameos and so forth. But the point of them is very realistic because what it does is it examines, again, the internal experience of being at war. And those two figures that you mentioned, Achilles and Hector in Homer’s Iliad, are particularly relevant today. You might think that’s odd, but it is true, because for example, Achilles, from the very beginning, the first word of The Iliad is “rage” or “wrath.” We sing about the rage of Achilles. Sing, Goddess, the rage of Achilles. And the rage that he feels is in large part incredibly relatable to our modern troops, because it’s the fact that he’s been stuck in a seemingly unending conflict, he feels so far away from home, he’s not sure if anyone back home cares anymore or if anything he does there really affects them at all or matters to them, and he is doubtful of the leadership that he’s under and he’s not confident that he’s being led well, and all of that plays into his growing despair about his experience.
And that’s how we meet the great Achilles, is him really struggling with these psychological concepts that are very familiar to troops today in the forever wars. And then later we meet Prince Hector, who has a clearer sense of what he’s fighting for because the Greeks are literally attacking his home, so he knows what’s at stake, but he is also close to despair because he knows he’s outmatched, he knows that he can’t ultimately defeat the God-like Achilles. And he would, quite frankly, love to just run away and not have to deal with any of this, but he feels the pressure and responsibility to continue. And then when these two men clash one against another, you also see these issues of honor and dishonor. Because for Hector, even in the midst of everything that… All the pressure he’s under and everything that he’s enduring, he does maintain his code and his internal sense of honor and even judged against an external sense of honor in his community.
Whereas Achilles, having lost his best friend and in some ways the last person he really deeply cared about in that situation, having lost him, he cracks in a way, he loses himself, he loses that identity. And he ends up going into this one-on-one battle with Hector, having thrown off any of the restraint, having no longer embraced his warrior’s code, but instead acting almost just on pure instinct like an animal, and he is prepared to destroy Hector and it is very personal, and it is more like a murder than a killing in war.
Brett McKay: Yeah, even then, the ancient Greeks had a… There was a line that you did not cross, and Achilles crossed that line.
Shannon French: He does, and he, in a sense, the point that is so poignant in the story is that while you understand his grief and his pain, because we’ve gotten to know Hector too, there’s a sense that Hector you know does not deserve what Achilles does to him. And Achilles actually strips the body naked and drags behind his chariot. This is desecration of a corpse, and this is something that most cultures, even today, of course, consider to be a gross violation. And when he does that, the horror of it strikes everyone on both sides of the conflict, and again, I mentioned they had… The story has the Greek gods in it, and the gods are horrified, that’s how far he’s gone over the line. And at that point, it no longer matters that Achilles is objectively the best fighter, ’cause he still is, there’s… Nobody doubts that, nobody questions that. But he’s lost this essential quality. He’s no longer honorable, having done that to the corpse.
Brett McKay: And he even realizes he crossed a line when Hector’s father Priam comes to Achilles to get his body, get Hector’s body back.
Shannon French: Oh, yes, and I love that scene. It’s an incredibly powerful scene in the epic, because what you end up seeing is an old warrior near the end of his life who knows that there’s not much left for him. So this is the king who has seen so many of his sons die and now his favorite son and heir Hector has died, and he knows his city’s going to fall, it’s just… There’s no good news on the horizon for him, and he has to swallow his pride and go beg for his son’s body back from the man who killed him and the man who desecrated that body. But when they actually confront on one another, Achilles looks at the older version of himself, in a sense, and he’s incredibly moved, and he… The two of them weep together, and they talk about, in a sense, the horror of war, but they also talked specifically about basically the unfairness of life and how, from their perspective, the gods dole out good things and bad things, but they never give anyone just good. They only give a mix at best, and for some people nothing but sorrow. And so they see themselves as equal sufferers in this experience.
And Achilles relents and essentially gets his soul back, gets some of his soul back from that experience, and he does return the body, because he has seen that what he did was wrong and that he wants to be worthy again, and he does make that ultimate decision. Now, I will say, in the way that the Homeric cycle proceeds, it happens outside the bounds of the Iliad, but the God still punished Achilles, and his punishment is significant too, in that he’s ultimately killed by someone who isn’t worthy. So the gods actually help Prince Paris shoot that arrow that famously hits Achilles in his heel, his one week spot, and that is shameful under their culture to be killed by someone who is less than you are. And so there too, the punishment does still come to Achilles.
Brett McKay: Alright, it sounds like from the Iliad, we can learn that the ancient Greeks did had a Code of Ethics in war that it could cross the line, and Achilles is a manifestation of that. And I think Hector also just a great example of an ideal soldier that you’d want to embody, he knew he was gonna lose, but he still felt duty-bound to defend his own, defend his country.
Shannon French: Absolutely, and he’s another example of someone who is very relatable even in modern times, because he is honorable, but it’s not in a kind of empty reflex way, he thinks deeply about what he’s facing, and he admits privately, we get a glimpse inside his mind, and he admits that he wishes he could run away from it all. And there even is a moment before he has his ultimate, almost wanna call it a duel with Achilles where he actually does run away, so he has a moment of weakness that is so human that it kind of just makes him a little bit more lovable.
Brett McKay: Right.
Shannon French: He sees Achilles with armor made by the gods and recognizes that he has no chance of surviving, and for a moment, his will cracks and he runs away from him. But then what brings him back is also relatable, he believes that he sees one of his brothers, so imagine that in kind of a band of brothers sense, and that reminds him again, if this identity. He’s reminded of who he is and what he owes others, and it’s actually that love that he feels for Troy and for his fellow Trojans that makes him stop running and turn and face his inevitable death at the hands of Achilles. And that is, again, I think a moment where people really recognize that this experience is timeless, that you can put yourself in this character shoes from millennia ago and recognize things that we could see in any modern conflict.
Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s fast-forward to the ancient Romans. And you say the Romans had sort of a Janus-faced view towards military ethics, what do you mean by that?
Shannon French: Well, on the one hand, the influences on the Romans were partly from the existing religion that was there at the time, which was a follow-on in many ways to the one that we saw in the Iliad, the Greek religion, polytheistic with many gods. And they had philosophies that were dominant at the time that the Roman legion was at its height, and they influenced the troops certainly at the time, and probably the one that is most relevant for that is Stoicism, and that has absolutely survived until the present day and has helped many people in trying to reconcile themselves to their fates, in war and other conflicts. But there was also a thread of what we would today call sort of hedonism, but the idea that if there is no after life, which many of the Romans believe there was not, or there wasn’t a meaningful one, there wasn’t one where you would be sorted based on your behavior, that all there is is this life, and so you probably heard the old saying, “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.”
So there’s a bit of a being torn between a almost devil may care attitude on the one hand, and the stoic philosophy, which is incredibly demanding. In fact, Stoicism is so demanding that it does not allow any wavering from honorable behavior, even if you are tortured, even if you are put under extreme duress, there’s just no excuses in that original tradition. The idea is that you must always do the right thing, kind of to use another expression, “Though the heavens fall.” And so all of which is to say that Roman legions going off into far corners of the empire, had to decide which of these inspired them and which of these got them through, all in the context of fighting in disciplined units, where you had to be able to rely on the man next to you, and you had to know that that man was going to keep his shield where it needed to be to protect your flank, and if they weren’t there, then you were dead. So it’s an interesting, I think, tradition to study, because you have to look at how all those things played together and how people found their way with all these different influences.
Brett McKay: On that Stoicism side, for a soldier or a military leader, Marcus Aurelius is the most famous military leader who is also a Stoic philosopher. What did it mean to be a virtuous warrior? If you took that stoic idea?
Shannon French: Well, it was the ultimate no complaints, no excuses philosophy. So for Marcus Aurelius, and you’re quite right, he was someone who led troops into combat and was himself right there with them in a lot of cases, so he wasn’t leading from back at the capital. He had the belief that everything was pre-determined, that you had a role to play. And whether we wanna play that out as fate or however you wanna think of that, but the important thing was you were assigned a role, and if your role was a soldier in the Roman legions, then it was your entire purpose in life to do that role as well as you could. So whatever task you were given, every one of those tasks had that same point of pressure on it. So what I mean by that is that you couldn’t slack off anywhere. If you were told to clear a forest, then by God, you needed to clear that forest the best way a forest has ever been cleared. You were meant to take everything as absolutely defining you.
So maybe you think of it in this term, in these terms, it would be to imagine that if you were told to guard a particular point, then imagining that that would be the entire story that could ever be told of you, whether or not you guarded that point was the way you needed to approach that. And so that actually carried on. And I mentioned this with the torture analogy, that you should not sacrifice those tasks and those assignments, you shouldn’t fail those roles regardless of what happens to you. So Marcus Aurelius made the point that the one thing you have control over is your response to external events. The external events are gonna do whatever they’re gonna do, and the people around you are gonna do whatever they’re going to do. But the one thing you have control over is your response, how you react. And so it was absolutely imperative for a stoic warrior to always react honorably with literally no regard for the consequences to themselves. So it’s a very, very high bar. And I don’t think there’s many that are much higher that you can find.
Brett McKay: And as you said, the stoic deal still lives on today. Many soldiers across the world go to stoicism as a way to help them manage their role as a soldier.
Shannon French: It still speaks to a lot of people, in part because their lives, they know are going to be filled with things they can’t control. And as I mentioned at the very outset, a lot of those things are going to be incredibly high stakes, they are gonna be life and death. So when you’re faced with a lot of awful things, including the losses that you’re going to experience and the harms that you yourself have to cause in your job, then having this very strict philosophy to fall back on has its comforting elements because you can tell yourself that “I have to do these things, I have to lose these people, but the only thing I can control is whether or not I do the absolute best that I can, and as long as I do that, I am fulfilling my role, and that is all that I have charge of,” and so it is something that makes you feel a bit more empowered in an otherwise helpless situation. And unfortunately, troops find themselves in those kind of situations a lot.
Brett McKay: Right. Well, James Stockdale, a famous prisoner of war in Vietnam, who went on to become a professor, I think the War College, he famously, he used stoicism to get through his years in Vietnam as a prisoner of war.
Shannon French: Absolutely, and he made it completely clear that he does not think he could have survived without that philosophy. Because if you talk about feeling helpless, there is no more helplessness than being in that kind of prisoner situation where everything you experience is being controlled by others, with the aim of breaking you down, with the intentional aim of trying to make you give up those ideals, make you violate the trust that you’ve established, make you betray your friends. And the only way he found to resist that was to say that these things are happening to my body. These things are happening externally to me, but the me that I control is untouchable. And that’s the part of me that responds to it. And that’s what got Stockdale through, was clinging onto that idea that he wasn’t powerless as much as he appeared powerless. He wasn’t. Because he could control his reactions, and his writings on that are wonderful to read. And I will say his legacy lives on in many ways, including that there is a Stockdale Chair in Ethics that’s currently held by my very good friend, Pauline Shanks Kaurin up at Navy war college. And at the Naval Academy where I used to work, there is a Stockdale Center for Ethics. So we have not forgotten Admiral Stockdale.
Brett McKay: Do you think there are any downsides to using stoicism as an ethical framework for a soldier or warrior?
Shannon French: The part that I struggle with, and I think I say this with the understanding that not everyone will struggle with it, and so I don’t wanna discourage anyone from embracing stoicism if it is helpful. They need what they need. But for myself, I think what I struggle with is that it does require you to have a certain kind of emotional detachment from suffering and loss, not only in the moment, but permanently. And that, I’m not sure is sustainable for everyone. I think that depends a lot on individual psychology. And what I mean by that is, it’s one thing to say that you can’t unfortunately take time to mourn your losses in the middle of ongoing combat. If you did, more people may die. You have to, to some extent, embrace stoicism to get through that moment with any hope of seeing future moments.
But I like better the idea that then when you are finally allowed out of that urgent moment and allowed a moment to breathe, that you can also fully mourn and remember those you’ve lost and feel that pain and experience it, maybe even weep the way that Achilles wept with King Priam. And I think that to suggest that there’s any weakness to that is a bad idea. And I’m not sure stoicism necessarily does accuse anyone of weakness, but it certainly does discourage taking those moments later. And for myself, I believe that it’s really important to give people the time and the space to mourn and fully feel what they’ve gone through. And in fact, other warrior cultures that I studied have more about that and more about how that can help with the transitions.
Brett McKay: Alright. Let’s fast forward to medieval era and particularly the Round Table, the Knights of the Round Table, which is probably the most famous code in the west, because this is especially when you in Malory’s Arthurian Tales, you actually see a code sort of explicitly laid out, ’cause the knights have to take this oath. So for those who aren’t familiar, what was the oath? Sort of the general tenants of it?
Shannon French: Well, what’s wonderful about this idea and the way that Malory wrote it. I mean, again, we have to note that this is someone writing a work of fiction and trying to create an ideal and that ideal has inspired many people. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think that sometimes in fact, these fictional works because they allow us inside the minds of these different people experiencing war are more helpful than any other source in allowing us to work through what is needed for a good code. So in Malory’s work, what we’re looking at an idealized code of chivalry, and it includes things like never to do outragosity, I love that word [chuckle] or murder. It requires you to always do sucker for those who are in need and particularly damsels in distress. Basically the broad strokes of it are to require the knights to be servant leaders.
And I like talk about this particularly now, because I think this is a concept that a lot of people who work in the space of leadership are familiar with, but that doesn’t always make it into the public conversation around what leaders should be. And in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and in other works about King Arthur, one of the things that really does come through is the idea that knights, while they had the power, while they were the best armed, they had the equipment, they had the skills to just be bullies, to just be tyrants. They voluntarily took an oath to use that power to help those who were weaker than themselves and to not abuse that power. So the whole outragosity point is that you are not to use this strength that you have as a way to take advantage of others, but instead to advance what’s right.
And that’s really relatable again, because it fits nicely with the idea that, and I saw this with my midshipman and I still see this with the troops that I get to work with today, the people who sign up for the military in this country, they don’t want to be the bad guys. They don’t… They’re not joining for the most part to simply be able to take people out. They actually have more of a guardian role in mind. And that is this chivalry ideal in a lot of ways, it’s this concept that you take the strength and you use it as a force for good in the world and you use it to protect the weak. And I think a lot of that does come in the west from this concept of the Knights of the Round Table and what that ideal represents for people.
Brett McKay: So you devote a section to Native American warrior codes and Native American culture, every tribe is different, has its own unique warrior culture. For your book, what tribes did you focus on?
Shannon French: Well, I absolutely could not do justice to the incredible wide range of tribes of Native Americans. And that’s, again, only looking at Native Americans is there’s so many other indigenous groups around the world. So what I ended up doing was to focus on the plains tribes. And I did that largely because I wanted to bring in particular points of wisdom that I didn’t think were necessarily captured in the other cultures that I’d looked at yet, and that I think again, have great relevance for modern troops. And in particular, what I wanted to bring out that I thought the plains tribes were really quite brilliant at was the understanding of these transitions that people who fight need to make. And what I mean by that is when you have to cross that line of taking a human life, even if you do it within the boundaries of a warrior’s code, it still does something to you. Even if you have no doubt in the moment that you had to do it, that it was you or him, even if it falls even in a square place of self-defense in your mind, or if you were defending someone else, you still took a human life and that has a cost. And you also simply participated in a level of violence that doesn’t fit anywhere else, that if you did the same behavior in another context in your society, it would horrify everyone.
So you need some help transitioning from that experience and even from the structure and living with other warriors that you have been in, in order to do whatever mission you’re on, to transition from that back to being with your family, being with your tribe, in this case. So, what they put in place, and it does differ for different tribes, but to give you the gist of it, were different transition rituals that really acknowledged this need to feel that you were setting aside that part of you that was the warrior and returning to the peaceful part of you that could be with your family and that would not commit what we would call today acts of domestic violence, for example. They would do things that would mark the point where you have stepped away from your combat role and you were stepping back into your peaceful role within the tribe. They would allow you to purge yourself, whether it’s, for example, a sweat lodge ceremony where you’re literally sort of sweating out that experience, but also talking about it. One of the things that isn’t always understood is that there’s an element of group therapy in a lot of these rituals where you and others who have seen what you’ve seen and done what you’ve done are in it together, and you’re all letting it go, and you’re all taking this moment to acknowledge it and process it before you return to your families so you can change modes. I just think that’s something that we have lost sight of.
There’s been tremendous work by folks who work in the space of moral injury, I particularly admire the work of Jonathan Shay, who’s done just marvelous things, he wrote the book Achilles in Vietnam and also Odysseus in America, and others who have understood this importance of transitions. But it hasn’t made it all the way, again, through the culture, and it hasn’t made it into policy and practice to the degree I would like to see it.
Brett McKay: That idea of rituals for transitioning into warrior mode and then transitioning out of warrior mode is something that we could… An insight we can get from Native American culture.
Shannon French: Absolutely.
Brett McKay: Okay, let’s move on to an Eastern warrior culture, and probably the most famous that people know about here in the west is the Bushido code of the Samurai. First, can you give us a little bit of background on the samurai because I think it’ll help us understand why they developed this code that they did.
Shannon French: Oh yes, it’s just absolutely fascinating, it’s no surprise that people have heard of it because it draws you in. Once you start studying and learning about the Samurai and Bushido, it does definitely draw you in. The starting point is already incredibly complex because they’re influenced by four different religions, and finding the balance point there amongst four different influences is quite the trick. They’re influenced by the indigenous religion of Japan, Shinto, but also Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, and all of those are woven into this fabric of a Warrior’s Code, where you are to balance things that aren’t necessarily, at least on the face of it, all that compatible, and what I mean by that is… So on the one hand, Shinto requires you to honor your ancestors and act in a way that reflects on or on them, and that is a kind of an attachment that you have to the past and to a legacy and to a tradition. And you can understand that being very powerful in warrior’s code, but when you blend that with Buddhism, the core tenant of which is non-attachment, it’s hard to know how you find again the balance point for that.
But Buddhism, amongst many other things, teaches another point that you can imagine being very helpful to warriors, and that is this idea that as you go through life, you are trying to find the middle path between extremes, and that if you allow your experiences in war to drive you to one of these extremes then you are pushing yourself further from Enlightenment and you have to keep bringing yourself back and trying to find that middle path, that middle way. It also has these defined limits around right action and trying to find how you can behave correctly as a warrior in that role and still be moving towards a better understanding of your place in the universe. And it helps deal with death as well, because ultimately the goal for a Buddhist is not any kind of individual survival, but to really merge with the infinite, to be one with the universe. And the piece that is meant to come from that is an end of all suffering. So you could see that as something held out as hope for warriors who are seeing a lot of suffering and having to endure a lot of pain and discomfort. But then they’re also balancing those two influences with Daoism, which is something that, what I emphasize in the book is that really, when you have to go into a combat situation, the level of focus that you’re required to maintain…
We often talk about people having their head on a swivel and having to be on a level of alert that is incredibly much of a strain to maintain for a long period of time, that that wears you out in a unique way and throws you out of balance. And Daoism is all about balance, and it’s about balancing things like the yin and the yang, and finding your other side to put yourself back at peace. So it is helpful for the Warriors, and actually the Samurai played this out in a fascinating way, because they thought of, “Well, if I’m going to be fighting and the combat side of me is going to be bringing out all of that violence then in my downtime, I need to intentionally choose to do things that are the opposite of that.” So they would do things like water color painting and origami and flower ranging and being out in nature. And I find it fascinating that modern work in neurology and neuroscience, neuro-ethics even, all of this area, it’s in emerging fields that are fascinating. Bear this out, that it is really helpful for a healthy and stable brain to cycle in this way, that if you’re experiencing too much of one kind of stimulation, you need to intentionally balance it with these others.
So they had an intuitive sense of that. And then last but not least, this confusion influence has a lot to do with your relationships with other people, in particular power relationships. And that’s something that a lot of people think of when they think of the samurai, because they had a tremendously strong sense of duty to those in leadership roles and the idea that you would always help those above you save face and that you would do everything in your power to not embarrass them and to make them look good, even at your own expense. And so all of these play into how the samurai tried to shape their code.
Brett McKay: And this code, I mean, it influenced Japanese soldiers all the way into world war II.
Shannon French: It absolutely did. And one could even argue that it still influences a lot of Japanese business tactics today. There’s still this idea that saving face is important and that that can work both ways. What I mean by that is, on the positive side, it is selfless, it is putting the interests of the mission or the unit above yourself, but it can be bad if it’s around simply covering up bad things, covering up negativity or bad news from people who actually need to know it in order to make sure that no one is embarrassed. And you can see those struggles even today in Japanese politics and other elements of their culture, that on the one hand tremendous loyalty and some selflessness that that can be astounding. But on the other hand, sometimes covering up bad things or bad news in a way that delays proper responses.
Brett McKay: So with all these codes, I mean, I think even today we can see the influence of these ancient warrior codes that we’ve talked about even today, even with our rules of engagements, laws of warfare that we have, I think most soldiers go in understanding that there’s a higher code, a more and more vague code that they’re called to fill. Do you think with the way that war’s changing today, let’s say with asymmetric warfare, drones, cyberwarfare, do code need to change or are they gonna stay the same?
Shannon French: The need for the code is not gonna change. And in fact, arguably it’s more important than ever. The details of any one code, and we’ve talked about them being vague to start with, but the identities that are developed will have to match what jobs they have. But I think it’s a huge mistake to imagine that warrior codes will ever be a thing of the past long as there is war and conflict, as long as people are dying. And an example I can give is when we first started using UAVs and so forth, drones, there was a mistaken belief. And I even fell into this briefly at the beginning, just when I first heard about them before I had a chance to reflect on it further or talk to folks about it, there was a sense that people thought maybe those fighting from so far away with video screens in front of them would be immune from things like moral injury, that they would be… It would feel to them like a video game.
That was the concern that people had. And also for some, even a positive that, “Oh, well maybe we will have fewer incidents of trauma amongst these folks.” But as things played out, we realized that sadly, that was not the case. And in fact there were high incidents of, for example, PTS and other trauma responses among drone operators. And one of the reasons was that they were not detached, although they were physically away from the moment of the impact, for example, of what they’re doing, they could see it and they could see it in Hi-Rez. They could see a highly pixelated details of the people they were watching, the people they were effectively stalking and then ultimately killing and then see the effects of those deaths on the family members nearby and so forth. So it actually was more important than ever that they understand where their lines were, and when those killings were justified and when they were not. Because to the degree that they couldn’t see a difference between what they were doing and murdering someone with a sniper rifle, if they couldn’t see that difference, then they felt themselves that they had done something vile.
And so we have to, again, for the sake of the warriors themselves, we have to make sure that these lines are clear and that they exist. And a lot of that pressure is also on policymakers, because it is a betrayal of our troops to ask them to do things that cross too many lines. And that is in fact, undermining them, not making life easier for them. It always drives me nuts when people who have a distanced perspective to all of this will say, “Why should you have any rules for our troops? Just let them take the gloves off and fight any way they want.” That’s not doing our troops a favor. That’s actually making life worse for them. You don’t help them by removing the code. The code is there for their protection. It’s there to allow them to hold onto their humanity and to know that what they’re doing has honor to it. And if you strip that away from them, you’re harming them more than any bullet ever could.
Brett McKay: Well, Shannon, this has been a great conversation. Is there someplace people can go to learn more about the book and your work?
Shannon French: Well, absolutely. I mean, we’re quite proud of the fact that at my university, at Case Western Reserve University, we’ve actually started the first military ethics master’s degree program in the country. And so you can go to military ethics at case.edu and learn about that program there and my work. And we have some videos and things there that you can watch. And also of course the book itself, but this work is ongoing and we are always trying to recruit more people into military ethics to help us wrestle with the problems of the past and the future.
Brett McKay: Well, Shannon French, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Shannon French: Thank you so much.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Shannon French. She’s the author of the book, The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present. It’s available amazon.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/warriorcode where you find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition to the AoM Podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. Well, it’s thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the podcast, you can do so at Stitcher premium. Head over to Sticherpremium.com, sign up, use code Manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android, iOS, and you start enjoying ad-free episodes of AoM Podcast. 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 with 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 not only listen to AoM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
The post Podcast #625: The Code of the Warrior appeared first on The Art of Manliness.
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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